All this is probably right. I am not finding fault with the world's attitude toward its young men. I am not intimating that there is no difference between men and women, or that it is right or desirable that the average young woman should aspire to a "career." I should like, however, to point out some of the obstacles that often lie in the way of her growth. How frequent are the comments upon the apparently aimless and purposeless life of some young woman who once was eager for growth and useful activity! I want to inquire what the world has done to make her life purposeful. Indeed, the probability is that if she has desired to engage in some definite work that she loved and believed worth while, a chorus of voices has gone up in protest.
Not all girls meet the same problems after graduation. In this respect there are to my mind three distinct classes. First, there is the girl who is well satisfied to settle down at home and to whom after a brief period there comes an early and a happy marriage. So far as we are concerned here, her problems are settled, and settled in an eminently satisfactory way. To such a girl one only wants to give the warning that to ensconce one's self snugly in a happy home with one's loved ones and forget the rest of the world is ignoble. There are too many bad homes in the world that need your touch, there are too many homeless people who need your hospitality. While the first and best service you can render is to create an ideal home, yet that home should be shared. One thing which all of us, from the greatest to the least, can do is to work for the betterment of the community in which we live. So long as there are bad laws or unenforced good laws, harmful sanitary conditions, wrong social influences, we should prove our good citizenship by making sacrifices for the public welfare. The woman without a business or profession is in a peculiarly advantageous position for giving the service those with less time at their disposal cannot render.
The second class of girls I have in mind consists of those who do not wish or need to settle down at home with little or nothing to do, but who crave a larger activity. I am not speaking of those who are genuinely needed at home. No girl with right instincts can be so cowardly as to desert in their need--and for her own happiness or supposed welfare--those to whom she owes most. Yet the need for her often seems to exist when it really does not. There is no family that would not be the happier for the presence of an affectionate and helpful daughter in the home. Increase in the family happiness alone, however, is not a sufficient excuse for stifling the desires of an eager and aspiring daughter. The family should make sure that her highest welfare, as well as their own, is being guarded. When the parents decided to give that daughter an education, they took an irrevocable step. Is it strange that now, with all her mental faculties developed and her heart awakened to the needs of humanity, those things which once filled her life can do so no longer? Parents who do not want to see in their daughter the development of new interests and new longings should not educate her.