But this fallacy of domesticity probes deeper than we have yet indicated. It is, in the last analysis, superficial to ticket ourselves off as house-keepers or even as women. What are these unplumbed wastes between housekeepers and teachers, mothers and scholars, civil engineers and professors of Greek, senators and journalists, bankers and poets, men and women? A philosopher has pointed out that what we share is vastly greater than what separates us. We walk upon and must know the same earth. We live under the same sun and stars. In our bodies we are subject to the same laws of physics, biology and chemistry. We speak the same language, and must shape it to our use. We are products of the same past, and must understand it in order to understand the present. We are vexed by the same questions about Good and Evil, Will and Destiny. We all bury our dead. We shall all die ourselves. Back of our vocations lies human life. Back of the streams in which we dabble is that immortal sea which brought us hither. To sport upon its shore and hear the roll of its mighty waters is the divine privilege of youth.
If any difference is to be made in the education of boys and girls, it must be with the purpose of giving to future women more that is "unvocational," "unapplied," "unpractical." As it happens, such studies as these are the ones which the mother of a family, as well as a teacher or writer, is most sure to apply practically in her vocation. The last word on this aspect of the subject was said by a woman in a small Maine town. Her father had been a day laborer, her husband was a mechanic. She had five children, and, of course, did all the house-work. She also belonged to a club which studied French history. To a foolish expression of surprise that with all her little children she could find time to write a paper on Louis XVI she retorted angrily: "With all my children! It is for my children that I do it. I do not mean that they shall have to go out of their home, as I have had to, for everything interesting." But the larger truth is that the value of a woman as a mother depends precisely upon her value as a human being. And it is for that reason that in her youth we must lead one who is truly thirsty only to fountains pouring from the heaven's brink. It might seem cruel if it did not merely illustrate the law of risk involved in any creative process, that the more generously women fulfil the "function of their sex" the more they are in danger of losing their souls to furnish a mess of pottage. The risk of life for life at a child's birth is more dramatic but no truer than the risk of soul for body as the child grows. In the midst of petty household cares the nervous system may become a master instead of a servant, a breeder of distempers rather than a feeder of the imagination. The unhappiness of homes, the failure of marriage, are due as often to the poverty-stricken minds, the narrowed vision of women as to the vice of men.