From the point of view of society as a whole, it is waste that any one who has had such a long and arduous training as that required for the medical profession should not use it in service to the community.  There is a form of selfishness not sufficiently recognised, which consists not in acquiring goods but in acquiring knowledge without rendering it again in service to one’s fellow men and women.

Should the doctor decide (c) to enter the public service, the question will probably not be in her own control as there is an ever-increasing tendency on the part of public authorities to insist on single women or widows only among the medical women whom they employ.  There is a big fight to be waged here—­one of the many that our pioneers have left for us and our successors.  The lack of social instinct which lies behind this edict is amazing.  What can be more anti-social than that a young, healthy, and highly-trained woman should have to decide between marriage and executing that public work for which she has with great labour fitted herself?  In at least some cases of which the writer is aware, the demand that a doctor shall retire on marriage, has led to a decision against matrimony, and this is not surprising, although very serious as a general problem.  The great need of society at the present day is that the most healthy and well-trained young men and women should be induced to found families, and public authorities by this bar put on the trained woman, are doing their best to hinder marriage.

Medical women have, for their protection, societies of registered medical women in London and in the north of England and also in Scotland, these working more or less in touch with one another.  In common with other medical societies they have meetings at which the advances in medical science are discussed, and they also act in a modified way as Trade Unions, Members of these societies can always gain information from them as to the recognised rate of pay in any particular branch of the work which they may wish to undertake.

Reference has already been made to the excellent work which has been done by the British Medical Association in uniting the men and women of the profession and helping both to keep up the salary rate.  Without this aid the women’s associations would have been comparatively helpless, as they would have erred in ignorance, though certainly not by intention.  The gratitude of medical women to this association cannot therefore be overstated, and I think I am justified in saying that the same is true with regard to medical men.  If their chief “Union” had not admitted women we might unwittingly have become a danger to our medical colleagues as black-leg labour.  This has been almost universally the case in other work which women have taken up, and one cannot help wishing that men in other branches of labour might speedily realise the fact that women cannot be stopped from working, and that the only wise thing, from the men’s point of view as well as from the women’s, is to admit all to their unions that they may fight shoulder to shoulder for better labour conditions, and not against each other.  An example of a case where this was realised has already been quoted under Example 2, page 144.