The gnawing loneliness of the girl who has left home to make her way is one of the most fruitful causes of the questionable relations which well-born girls form more often than society realizes.  The girl seizes eagerly every chance for companionship or pleasure.  Her keen need of it makes her overappreciative and undercritical.  Moreover, she has the confidence of ignorance.  Most American girls are brought up as if wrongdoing were impossible to them.  Nobody has ever suggested to them that they have the possibility of all crimes in their makeup!  Parents and teachers ordinarily have extraordinary skill in evading, but little in facing, the facts of life.

Disarmed by her ignorance, the girl goes out to a freedom such as no country has ever before believed it safe to allow the young, either girl or boy.  This freedom is of course the logical result of what we call the “emancipation of women.”  It is the swinging of the pendulum from the old system of chaperonage and authority.  The weak point is in the fact that the girl has not knowledge enough for her freedom.  It is not a return of the old system of guarded girls which is needed.  That is impossible under modern conditions, out of harmony with modern ideas.  The great need is that the women of the country realize that freedom unaccompanied by knowledge is one of the most dangerous tools that can be put into a human being’s hands.  The reluctance of women to face this fact is the most discouraging side of the woman question.

The girl who goes forth should go armed with knowledge.  Moreover, in moments of loneliness, when she is ready to slip, she should be literally jerked back by the pull of the home.  This hold of the home is no chimerical thing.  It is a positive, living reality.  The home has a power of projecting itself into the lives of those who go out from it.  It is where the girl does not carry away a sense of an uninterrupted relation—­a certainty that she is a part of that group and that achievement, that she is only carrying on, enlarging, helping to extend, beautify, and ripen its work, that she is not homeless.  Nothing can so hold her in her isolation as that sense.

The Uneasy Woman of to-day who has fulfilled to the letter, as she understands it, the Woman’s Business, is frequently heard to say:  “My boys are in college; they do not need me.  My girls are married or at work, and they do not need me.  I have nothing to do.  My business is complete, I am retired, sidetracked.  It is for this reason that I ask a part in politics.”  But her argument proves that she does not understand her business.  She may want and need some outside occupation for the very health of her business, politics perhaps, but certainly not because her business is done.