You reduce salaries, you press into an already overcrowded field, you injure even your own sex by making it impossible for men to marry, who, if they earned enough, would be supporting a wife.’  To-day, continued Miss Barfoot, it was not her purpose to debate the economic aspects of the question.  She would consider it from another point of view, repeating, perhaps, much that she had already said to them on other occasions, but doing so because these thoughts had just now very strong possession of her mind.

This abusive correspondent, who declared that he was supplanted by a young woman who did his work for smaller payment, doubtless had a grievance.  But, in the miserable disorder of our social state, one grievance had to be weighed against another, and Miss Barfoot held that there was much more to be urged on behalf of women who invaded what had been exclusively the men’s sphere. than on behalf of the men who began to complain of this invasion.

’They point to half a dozen occupations which are deemed strictly suitable for women.  Why don’t we confine ourselves to this ground?  Why don’t I encourage girls to become governesses, hospital nurses, and so on?  You think I ought to reply that already there are too many applicants for such places.  It would be true, but I don’t care to make use of the argument, which at once involves us in a debate with the out-crowded clerk.  No; to put the truth in a few words, I am not chiefly anxious that you should earn money, but that women in general shall become rational and responsible human beings.

’Follow me carefully.  A governess, a nurse, may be the most admirable of women.  I will dissuade no one from following those careers who is distinctly fitted for them.  But these are only a few out of the vast number of girls who must, if they are not to be despicable persons, somehow find serious work.  Because I myself have had an education in clerkship, and have most capacity for such employment, I look about for girls of like mind, and do my best to prepare them for work in offices.  And (here I must become emphatic once more) I am glad to have entered on this course.  I am glad that I can show girls the way to a career which my opponents call unwomanly.

’Now see why.  Womanly and womanish are two very different words; but the latter, as the world uses it, has become practically synonymous with the former.  A womanly occupation means, practically, an occupation that a man disdains.  And here is the root of the matter.  I repeat that I am not first of all anxious to keep you supplied with daily bread.  I am a troublesome, aggressive, revolutionary person.  I want to do away with that common confusion of the words womanly and womanish, and I see very clearly that this can only be effected by an armed movement, an invasion by women of the spheres which men have always forbidden us to enter.  I am strenuously opposed to that view of us set forth in such charming