Therefore, if the income dies with the husband and there are children, a certain amount of money must be put aside annually for insurance; it ought to be enough to bring in 100_l._ a year to insure the wife from starvation when she is too old, too worn with all she has had to do to attempt to keep herself; and there should also be no false pride about the manner in which the children are educated; they should go to Board schools, where the teaching is excellent and far better than one can procure at ordinary small schools, which may be much more ‘genteel’ but will not be half as useful; for the Board schools are far and away better than anything that could be obtained from the wretchedly underpaid teachers who would be the girls’ portion. The necessary companionship with wretchedly poor and dirty children, which is the great drawback to a Board school education, could be mitigated if all those who are really worthy of the Board school education were to share it; and surely a good mother could tell her boys exactly what to avoid, and the lads could come straight home and simply be taught in the school. The girls would not need so much looking after, for they are far more conservative naturally than boys: boys will play with and talk to anyone; a girl very soon discriminates for herself, and will not play with another if she suspects her to be in the very smallest degree below her in the social scale.
It will be observed that I do not in the least take a sentimental view of life, for I feel that when one contemplates the terrible army of martyrs, the girls who have been ‘genteelly’ brought up and are ‘genteelly’ starving or living on their most unwilling and hard-working relations, one cannot say too much or write too much on this subject, and I cannot also but think that when there is the cry in the land that there undoubtedly is for more servants, more good and trustworthy lassies to help us with our domestic duties, and that when ladies in Australia are so pressed by their troubles and by the fact that they cannot get ‘help’ for love or money that they are actually driven to write to their papers to suggest that men may marry more wives than one, because no one but a wife is found to do house work, and that one wife is not sufficient for the purpose, it is quite time that the surplus maidens should consider whether it is quite as impossible to become a servant as it appears to be now. As decorators, governesses, and spoilers of canvas, they are undoubtedly not wanted, but they are required badly for simple domestic work, which is, none of it, half as hard as unlimited tennis, dancing all night, or rowing: not any of it half as unpleasant as is living on the begrudged charity of some relation, who wants all his hard-earned savings for his own children, or as degrading as is marrying the first man who asks them, and who can give them some sort of a home, for whom they have not the smallest respect--the very smallest amount of affection.