For good or for evil a good many millions of us have been forced out of the environment which we once believed to be proper to our sex; and to our new environment we have to adapt ourselves—if we are to survive. Work in the factory or in the office, work which brings us into contact with the outside world, calls for the exercise of qualities and attainments which we had no need of before, for the abandonment of habits and ideas which can only hamper our progress in our changed surroundings. Our forefathers—those, at any rate, of the upper and middle class—admired fragility of health in woman; and, in order to please them, our foremothers fell in with the idea and appealed to the masculine sense of chivalry by habitual indulgence in complaints known as swoons and vapours. Persons subject to these tiresome and inconvenient diseases would stand a very poor chance of regular and well-paid employment as teachers, sanitary inspectors, journalists and typists; so teachers, sanitary inspectors, journalists and typists have repressed the tendency to swoons and vapours. In these classes an actual uncertainty prevails as to the nature of vapours, and swooning is practically a lost art. Instead of applying their energies to the cultivation of these attractive complaints, working and professional women are inclined to encourage a condition of rude bodily health which stands them in good stead in their work, and is, therefore, a valuable commercial asset.
Just as we have been forced by contact with the outside world to cultivate not weakness but health, so by the same contact we have been forced to cultivate not folly but intelligence. The silly angel may be a success in the home; she is not a success in trade or business. Man may desire to clasp her and kiss her and call her his own; but there are moments when he tires of seeing her make hay of his accounts and correspondence. His natural predilection for her type may, and often does, induce him to give her the preference over her fellows in business matters; but he usually ends by admitting that, for certain purposes at least, the human being with brains is preferable to the seraph without them. It has been borne in upon the modern woman that it pays her to have brains—even although they must be handled very cautiously for fear of wounding the susceptibilities of her master. She learned that lesson not in her own sphere, but in the world outside it; and it is a lesson that has already had far-reaching consequences. Having, in the first instance, acquired a modicum of intelligence because she had to, she is now acquiring it in larger quantities because she likes it. The trades which do not require the qualification of stupidity are counteracting the effect upon her of the trade which did—the compulsory trade of marriage.