On the other hand, the woman who has servants and rears no children should be pushed by public opinion into some outside occupation; women have no more right to idle than men.  All unmarried women, when past the years that may properly be devoted to education, should certainly enter upon some useful vocation; and there is no reason why (with a few obvious exceptions) any occupation save the more physically arduous should be closed to such.  Every girl should be prepared for some remunerative work, in case she does not marry or her husband dies leaving her childless.  Such economic independence would, further, have the inestimable value that she would be under no pressure to marry in order to be supported and have an honorable place in the world; if she is trained to earn her living she will be free to marry only for love.  If she does marry, and gives up her prior vocation to be housekeeper and child-rearer, she should be legally entitled to half her husband’s earnings.  The grave difficulty is that a woman needs to prepare herself both for her probable duties as housekeeper and mother, and also for her possible need of earning a living otherwise.  Education in the former duties, that must fall to the great majority of women, cannot safely be neglected, as it is so largely today; the only general solution will be for unmarried women to adopt, as a class, the vocations for which less careful preparation is necessary.

The question of the ballot is not practically of great importance, first, because equal suffrage is coming very fast, whatever we may say, and, secondly, because it will make no great difference when it comes.  There is no natural right in the matter; the decision in political affairs might well be left to half the population-when that half cuts so completely through all classes and sections-if the saving in expense or trouble seemed to make it expedient.  The interests of women are identical with those of men.  Women are, in most parts of this country, as well off before the law as men; they do not need the ballot to remedy any unjust discriminations.  Moreover, the ballot will mean the necessity of sharing the burden of political responsibility.  The women who look upon the right to vote as a plum to be grasped for, a something which they want because men have it, with no conception of the training necessary to exercise that right responsibly, are not fit to be trusted with it.  It often seems that it were better to restrict our present trustful and generous right of suffrage to those who can show evidence of intelligence and responsibility, rather than to double the number of shallow and untrained voters.