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    342 THE BALANCE OP PUBLIC OPINION

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    » I Should Not This Year Have Brought Be...

    When I brought up this question nearly three years ago at BradfordI confined my observations to the surplus in the

    profession of the , teacher . I took the statistics of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution in Harley Streetand urged as remedies for the

    terrible destitution endured by aged , ladies , that parents of the middle class _shoLild either train their daughters to some useful art ,

    however humbleor consider it their primary duty to insure their lives if they could , not afford to lay by money for their female

    children . I showed that in a country like England , whose wealth i _& chieflderived from commercethe fluctuations of trade fall with _,

    peculiar y hardship upon the defenceless , sex . That not only do merchants failbut banks also breakand that a horrible amount

    of real hunger , and cold is undergone by , many who have been ladies born and bredwhile a larger proportionthough they may never

    know actual p ; hysical want , are forced into , one overcrowded and perhaps distasteful profession , in which they spend their lives

    working for small salaries . But I never wished or contemplated the mass of women becoming

    breadwinners . So far from being willing to see such a system encouraged , I think it is actually obtaining among us , through the

    erations of modern tradeto an _inJLirious extent . "With the greatest esteem op for , and even gratitude , to , many masters for the pains which _,

    I they do not take b for elieve the our instruction English factory and _moralization system to be of their natural workwomen and more ,

    , homes especiall . y I the know emp all loyment that of be m said arried -women the other away side from I know their may upon ;

    that any legislation on this topic would result in practical cruelty ; that even rules imposed bthe master of the factory would bear

    with harshness on the woman y who may have a family to support , and a drunken or incapable husband . I believe that it is a point

    upon which we must allow free trade or that we shall fall into worse evils than those from which we now suffer . Nevertheless ,

    the fact remains clear to my niind , that we are passing through a stage and It not is of not the civi possible factory lization is to which a treat woman is a subject to ' s happy be regretted like and this healthful , and in a th scientific sp at here her . house way .

    Philosophers who argue upon the laws which govern the development of men are almost always destined to see their theories pass

    away or fade into comparative oblivion before the century which Economists Fourier gave them exists no birth onl longer y is as gone rei the . prop over Rousseau het the of intellectual a is school seldom ; even world hear the d as of Political they now did ;

    thirty years ago , when the gn Poor Law achieved the practical experiment of some of their principles . If , then , theories respecting masses of

    men are continually being broken to pieces , how much more impossible is it to from abstractions the nature of women ; for

    a woman ' s life argue is certainly more individual upon , more centered in one

    house and one circle ; and so it raust be until the constitution of

    342 The Balance Op Public Opinion

    342 THE BALANCE OP PUBLIC OPINION

• Citation
  • English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), July 1, 1862, page 342, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01071862/page/54/