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*The Metropolitan Magazine, October, November, December, 1912.

I

THE EDUCATED WOMAN

What I shall try to say in the following pages is in the nature of a composite reply to letters I receive from young women who ask my advice about the education they should strive for, and the use of the education they have. The prevailing spirit of these correspondents is an eager desire to be of service. Their letters are at once delightful and appalling; they fill me with mingled pride and timidity. They reveal an immeasurable will-to-serve, an incalculable soul-power waiting, like a mountain reservoir, to be released in irresistible floods of righteousness, capable, too, of devastating misdirection. All this power says to me in so many words: "Tell us what to do."

My sense of responsibility is lightened by the consideration that people do not take one's advice, even when it is good, and when they seek it. Human actions are shaped by a thousand forces stronger than the written wisdom of the wisest guide that ever lived. The best that the seers of the race discovered centuries ago has not, it seems, become a controlling motive even in the lives of their followers. If the counsel of the ages is not regarded, an ordinary modern cannot hope that his words will have much influence for good. But a sincere request demands a sincere compliance. Since my correspondents think that my advice may be of use to them, I will suggest some problems for them to study, that they may be better fitted for humanitarian work.

Because I am known to be interested in bettering the condition of the blind, many of my correspondents, whose hearts are stirred by the thought of blindness, offer to help their brothers in the dark, and they ask me how to begin. Of late I have found that my letters, in reply to those who wish to help the blind, contain a paragraph about the sightless, and then pass to other things. I have sometimes wondered if my friends were not puzzled rather than helped by what I wrote. A class of college girls in an institution near great manufacturing cities and coal-mines asked me to initiate them into philanthropic endeavour for the sightless. I told them to study the life that swarms at their very doors -- the mill-hands and the miners. I wonder if they understood. I tried to tell them what has been said many times, that the best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed, that the blind man, however poignantly his individual suffering appeals to our hearts, is not a single, separate person whose problem can be solved by itself, but a symptom of social maladjustment.

That sounds discouragingly vague and cosmic. It may have perplexed the girls to whom I wrote it. They asked me how to help the blind, how to educate themselves so that they might be of use to their unfortunate fellowmen, and I offered them the universe -- I gravely recommended that they study Industrial Economics. My advice to them to study the life that surrounds them was perhaps the only part of my prescription that was not paradoxical. For the whole situation is paradoxical and confused. Society is a unit; the parts depend on one another; one part of the world suffers because the rest is not right. And yet we can each know only a very little about the whole of society. Moreover, these college girls, living in a life that I do not know, send their questions to me across a thousand miles -- to me who must grope about a library of a few hundred books, whereas they have all the books of the world open to them. They can visit and talk with ten human beings while I am spelling out my intercourse with one.

Education? How can any one who has eyes to see and ears to hear and leisure to read and study remain uneducated? Are the "educators" at fault? Is there something lacking in those who administer the schools and colleges? I wonder about these things and puzzle out the details of my message with increasing perplexity.

The unfortunate are not only those whose infirmity appeals to our sympathies by its visible, palpable terror -- the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the halt, the crooked, the feebleminded, the morally diseased. The unfortunate include the vast number of those who are destitute of the means and comforts that promote right living and self-development. The way to help the blind or any other defective class is to understand, correct, remove the incapacities and inequalities of our entire civilization. We are striving to prevent blindness. Technically we know how to prevent it, as technically we know how to have clean houses, pure food, and safe railways. Socially we do not know how, socially we are still ignorant. Social ignorance is at the bottom of our miseries, and if the function of education is to correct ignorance, social education is at this hour the most important kind of education.

The educated woman, then, is she who knows the social basis of her life, and of the lives of those whom she would help, her children, her employers, her employees, the beggar at her door, and her congressman at Washington. When Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet," or whether he wrote it or not, seems relatively unimportant compared with the question whether the workingwomen in your town receive a living wage and bear their children amid proper surroundings. The history of our Civil War is incomplete, as taught in the schools, if fifty years afterward the daughters and granddaughters of veterans do not understand such a simple proposition as this: "The woman who bears a child risks her life for her country."