Page:The Business of being a Woman by Ida Tarbell.djvu/195

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THE HOMELESS DAUGHTER

The reluctance of women to face this fact is the most discouraging side of the woman question.

The girl who goes forth should go armed with knowledge. Moreover, in moments of loneliness, when she is ready to slip, she should be literally jerked back by the pull of the home. This hold of the home is no chimerical thing. It is a positive, living reality. The home has a power of projecting itself into the lives of those who go out from it. It is where the girl does not carry away a sense of an uninterrupted relation—a certainty that she is a part of that group and that achievement, that she is only carrying on, enlarging, helping to extend, beautify, and ripen its work, that she is not homeless. Nothing can so hold her in her isolation as that sense.

The Uneasy Woman of to-day who has fulfilled to the letter, as she understands

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