social significance of the history
of the present. We read in _Once a Week_ of sixty years ago (10th August,
1861), the very period when the domestic conditions of girls were the most
oppressive in the sense here understood, that these same critics were
about at that time, and as shocked as they are now at "the young ladies
who talk of 'awful swells' and 'deuced bores,' who smoke and venture upon
free discourse, and try to be like men." The writer of this anonymous
article, who was really (I judge from internal evidence) so distinguished
and so serious a woman as Harriet Martineau, duly snubs these critics,
pointing out that such accusations are at least as old as Addison and
Horace Walpole; she remarks that there have no doubt been so-called "fast
young ladies" in every age, "varying their doings and sayings according to
the fopperies of the time." The question, as she pertinently concludes is,
as indeed it still remains to-day: "Have we more than the average
proportion? I do not know." Nor to-day do we know.

But while to-day, as ever before, we have a certain proportion of these
emancipated girls, and while to-day, as perhaps never before, we are able
to understand that they have an element of reason on their side, it would
be a mistake to suppose that they are more than exceptions. The majority
are unable, and not even anxious, to attain this light-hearted social
emancipation. For the majority, even though they are workers, the
anciently subtle ties of the home are still, as they should be, an element
of natural piety, and, also, as they should not be, clinging fetters which
impede individuality and destroy personal initiative.

We all know so many happy homes beneath whose calm surface this process
is working out. The parents are deeply attached to their children, who
still remain children to them even when they are grown up. They wish to
guide them and mould them and cherish them, to protect them from the
world, to enjoy their society and their aid, and they expect that their
children shall continue indefinitely to remain children. The children, on
their side, remain and always will remain, tenderly attached to their
parents, and it would really pain them to feel that they are harbouring
any unwillingness to stay in the home even after they have grown up, so
long as their parents need their attention. It is, of course, the
daughters who are thus expected to remain in the home and who feel this
compunction about l