What’s that you say?--Oh, but surely not before she has had a hearing!--the worst criminal deserves that much consideration. I beg of you to let me speak one moment in her behalf.--Ah, thank you, my friends.
(Sister, you had a tight squeak just then! If it hadn’t been for my presence of mind and my habitual coolness in the presence of infuriated mobs, I hate to think what would have happened.--And now let me see: what _can_ I say in your behalf? H’m.... H’m....)
My friends, this unhappy woman (for we shall centre our attention on the female of the species) is more sinned against than sinning. Reflect! The status of women in the United States has changed in the last fifty years. Modern industry has almost utterly destroyed the old pioneer home with its partnership-marriage; ambitious young men no longer have an economic need for capable women-partners; women have lost their wonted economic value as potential helpers, and their capacity for motherhood appears to the largest section of young manhood in the aspect of a danger rather than a blessing. Women have, to be sure, acquired a new value, in the eyes of a smaller class of economically “arrived” men, as a sign of their “arrival”--that is, they are desired as advertisements of their husbands’ economic status. In one sense, the task of demonstrating the extent of a husband’s income is easier than the pioneer task of helping take care of a farm and raising a houseful of babies; but, after all, such a career does require either natural talent or a high degree of training in the graceful habits of conspicuous idleness and honorific extravagance. And, whether it is that the vast majority of women spurned such a career as an essentially immoral one, or whether they were not really up to its requirements, or whether the demand was found to be more than met by the hordes of candidates turned out yearly by the boarding-schools--whatever the reason, the fact remains that a large number of women began to see the necessity and to conceive the desirability of some career other than marriage. But industrial evolution, which had destroyed their former opportunities, had failed to make any considerable or at least any decent room for them in the industrial scheme. Most particularly was this true for the young women of the middle class. They were unable to go into the professions or the respectable trades, and unwilling (for excellent reasons) to enter the factories; they were given no opportunity to learn how to do anything--they were (quite against their will, but inevitably) condemned to profound ignorance of the most important things in the world--work and love; and so, naturally, they became Teachers.