We are
fortunate in the meantime if their unused members do not weaken
and disappear. They do sometimes. There are a few girls who, by
the time they are "educated", forget their old childish desires
to help the world and to play with poor little girls "who haven't
playthings". Parents are often inconsistent: they deliberately
expose their daughters to knowledge of the distress in the world;
they send them to hear missionary addresses on famines in India
and China; they accompany them to lectures on the suffering in
Siberia; they agitate together over the forgotten region of East
London. In addition to this, from babyhood the altruistic
tendencies of these daughters are persistently cultivated. They
are taught to be self-forgetting and self-sacrificing, to
consider the good of the whole before the good of the ego. But
when all this information and culture show results, when the
daughter comes back from college and begins to recognize her
social claim to the "submerged tenth", and to evince a
disposition to fulfill it, the family claim is strenuously
asserted; she is told that she is unjustified, ill-advised in her
efforts. If she persists, the family too often are injured and
unhappy unless the efforts are called missionary and the
religious zeal of the family carry them over their sense of
abuse.
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