And in the meantime enlightened authors and politicians write articles,
and make speeches, holding forth upon the charm and beauty of the Home
Woman, and drawing unflattering comparisons between her and the worker.

Comfortable elderly gentlemen, who have had successful careers and can
now afford to dine unwisely every night, and keep their daughters in
well-dressed indolence, self-satisfied, self-aggrandising,
self-advertising young politicians, who, having obtained an attentive
public, delight to cant about the rights of the citizen and the good of
the Empire, clever, intuitive, charming novelists, who apparently
possess an unaccountable vein of dense non-comprehension on some points
- all harp upon this theme of the Home Woman, and the Home Sphere, and
the infinite superiority, in their own lordly eyes, of the gentle,
domesticated scion of the family hearth.

As if one-fourth of the women wage-earners, gentle or otherwise, in
England to-day had any choice in the matter whatever. The rapidity
with which a vacant place in the ranks is filled and the numbers
waiting for it is surely sufficient proof of that; to say nothing of
the pitiful conditions under which many, gentle and otherwise, cling to
their posts long after a merciful fate should have given them the
opportunity to save the remnants of their shattered health amidst
country breezes.

It is useless to cry out to the woman that work and competition with
men is unbecoming to her. She _must_ work, and she _must_ compete, and
seeing this, it is surely time the British Government accepted the fact
magnanimously, and took more definite steps to assure her welfare.