A CONTINUATION OF THE LAST CHAPTER, WITH AN ATTEMPT TO SUGGEST A REMEDY
“With fear and trembling take care of the heart of the people; that is the root of the matter in education—that is the highest in education.”—K’UNG FU ’TZU.
It is, of course, easy to write of these evils, the difficult thing is to find the remedy. And the question I now wish to put squarely is this: Where is the real root of the evil, what is wrong in our educational ideals that accounts for our failure to develop the best and happiest type of women? You may, of course, deny this, and assert that we do not fail, but that will not alter facts. I say we are creating a race of work-efficient and highly educated, but unsatisfied women, whose very independence betrays their sorrow. This is a very serious matter. It would seem that our young women have now for the first time realised their power in outside things. War has acted quickly in facilitating their economic emancipation. But I find it hard not to think that this may involve a cost which their womanhood will not bear without injury more or less profound. Women are being sold to work in the same way that formerly men were sold. And though no one can know the results, I am very far from sharing the sense of satisfaction expressed by so many to-day: I fear for the girls I see in such numbers in every place of work a deadening of response to life—a further clog and degradation of womanly feeling and instincts. And as I have said again and again, my fear is much deeper, because this externalisation of life is no new thing. I could add more, much more; but words—what are they in the face of facts! Last week I was in conversation with a young and comely tram conductress. She was married: I asked her if she had children. She answered me: “My goodness, No!” and then added, “One doesn’t want babies on this job.” One dares not generalise too largely, yet for so long women, in this industrially blinded land, have been struggling to gain the world at the payment of losing themselves.
The young women of the new generation are full of distrust, the most demoralising of influences. By this I do not mean that they distrust themselves; they do not. What they do distrust is instinct and emotion, with a corresponding over-valuation of intellectualism and of marketable work-power; and from this distrust there has followed necessarily a breaking away from fixed standards, with a loss of any steadying ideal. This, I think, is the essential trouble, sending them very far astray from the facts of life.