Are girls worth educating? Apparently not, as their parents do not think them worth paying for. The expectation that marriage will in a few years after a girl leaves school solve all difficulties and provide for her is at the root of all the confusion. Fathers who know they can make no provision for their daughters make no attempt to train them for really lucrative employment, because they think the money will be thrown away if their daughters marry; they let them work full time for half or less than half the cost of living, out of a mistaken kindness, of which employers get all the benefit. The girls in many cases accept low salaries under the same impression, in others because they are not strong enough to hold out where so many are willing to undersell them. Those who only take up employment as a stopgap until marriage never become really efficient, and when later on they find that there is no prospect of release, they become positively inefficient. Those who have faced facts from the first can throw their whole heart into their work, but they are heavily handicapped in their efforts towards progress by the bad pay which is the result of the thoughtlessness and folly of those around them. If only the relatives of these girls could realise that at least one-half of them will never be married, and that of the others many will not marry for several years after leaving school, that there is no means of predicting which of them will be married, and that any of them may have to support, not only themselves all their lives, but a nurse as well in old age, the tangle would soon be unravelled. Two things only I would venture to suggest: one, that instead of supplementing salaries and so lowering them, parents should help their daughters to hold out for salaries sufficient to support them, should assist them in making themselves more efficient, and should help them to make provision for themselves in later life, instead of making self-support impossible; the other, that manufacturers and business men should train their daughters as they train their sons. The better organisation of labour should open a wide field for women, if they will only consent to go through the routine drudgery and hardship that men have to undergo. An educated girl who goes from the high school to the technological college will find full scope for any talents she may possess. As designer, chemist, or foreign correspondent in her father’s factory she could be more helpful and trustworthy than anyone not so closely interested in his success. As forewoman in any factory, if she understood her work, she would be far superior to the uneducated man or woman, and some of the worst abuses in our factory system would be swept away.