The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-12-18

her single person, If her courage is indomit-
able and her determination sublime, she per-
haps manages by strain of mind and body
which il would be impossible to continue
long, to make up half of the ground she has
lost; when 10 another interruption comes,
and she has to step aside again and bear her
feminine burden, and see her competitors,
light and unladen, stride past once more.
This Is the inevitable course, known only too
well to every woman who has endeavored TO
combine professional exertions with the or
dinary duties of mans wife. Other comph-
cations such as we shrink from mentioning
probably come in 10 take oil the elias
ticity out of mind so burdened. Her chill
dren, born amid these cares, and in iured before
their birth by the undue activity Of brain which
weakens their mothers physical powers, come
into the world feeble or die in her arms,
quenching out her courage in the bitterest
waves Of personal suffering. This is no fancy
picture. At every step in her career it be-
comes less possible to maintain the unequal
conflict. Her competitors have marched far
before her, while she tolls and strives midway
on the steep ascent. They have gone on with
out intermission; she has had to stop short
again and again in her course. With what
sickness of heart with what a weary, hope
less sense of the unattainable, and desperate
consciousness Of the mistake she maintains
the struggle, only they can tell who have done
it, and happily the number is not great. Such
is all that woman has to expect who at
tempts to combine the work of man to
which she has been trained with the common
duties of female life
ANOTHER VIEW.
On the other hand, let us suppose that she
puts aside the profession she has acquired
and gives herself up to domesticity and wife
hood until the period of child-bearing is over,
and her special responsibilities SO far accom-
plished. This period cannot be estimated at
less than twenty years. 1t may be consider
ably shorter; it is sometimes longer; but we
are not undertaking the possibilities if we
grant that at forty she may consider herself
emancipated from woman's natural disabili-
ties, and may stretch out her hands towards
the tools which she put from her all new and
shining at one -and-twenty. Will these tools
have improved or will they have deteriorated
in the meantime? Will her training Of twenty
years ago come back all fresh to her memory
as if it had been but twenty
days? Will the world be SO good as
to stand still in the meantime, and keep
everything just as 1t was in the days of her
apprenticeship, that she may begin again with
some chance of success Alas no this is
precisely what the world will not do. She
will find her fellow-students hundred miles
ahead of her, and their sons ready to tread
on her heels and gibe at her old-world princi-
Piles. She will be of the old scoool before
she has even begun to put in practice her
| rusty knowledge. She will feel in herself the
| painful consciousness of faculties blunted for
| want of use, and powers numbed by long in
| action. Ii she is a wonderful woman, with
| the energy of half-a-dozen men, she will per-
| haps make desperate effort, and force her
| way alongside of some plodding bungler
whose incidence or stupidity has left him
| out of the race. This is the best that can
| befall her if she adopts this second course,
| and waits until she can give to her profession
the matured and steady powers of middle age.
| AN ALTERNATIVE.
There is, however, an alternative open to
| her. She can take vow Of celibacy. She
| can throw off altogether the yoke of nature,
| and fit herself to compete with man by con-
| sciously and voluntarily rejecting the life of
woman. This is possibility which is not to
be ected with disdain as out of the ques-
ton. If all is true that we continually read
about the number of women who cannot
marry, it is no unfit question for the more reso-
lutte souls among them, whether they should
not make up their minds that they will not
marry, and thus qualify themselves by one
severe yet etfectual effort for an existence re.
sembling that of man. BY this means alone
can they procure for themselves fair play il
in any profession But this is a penalty
which perhaps not one of all their male fel
low-students would undertake to pay; and il
is the most cruel renunciation which
can be exacted from a human crea
ture Thus success in a profession
nay, the mere initiatory possibility of success
requires from a woman not equality witt
man, but an amount of intellectual and mora
superiority over him which can only bC
found in the rarest and most isolated cases
To him the prospect of marriage is the
strongest incentive to industry and exertion
TO her it is simple ruin, so far as her work il
concerned. If, then, she has the magma
nimity and self-devotion to cut herself of
from all that is popul0rly considered happi
ness in life-from all that youth most dream
| of and the heart most cares for-she is fret
to enter into and pursue, and very likely will
succeed in, profession which men, with al
solaces Of love and help Of companionship
: | pursue by her side at not half the cost. Per
} haps even then, after she has made this sacri
fee. she will find that she is the pot Of eartl
making her way among their pots of iron
and that their superior physical powers AM
bolder temperament will carry them beyont
} | her. notwithstanding the superior devotion
! she has shown and the price she has paid
| But this is the best we can promise her wheI
all is done-to (perhaps) succeed as well, a
: the cost of everything, as her competitor
who 90 into it with the commonest of me
tiyes and at no cost at all.