If only those idle women would find some good work to do the Eighth
Year would lose its terrors. And there is so much good work to do if
they would only lay their hands to it! If they cannot get in touch with
God, they can at least get in touch with humanity. At their very doors
there is a welter of suffering, struggling humanity craving for a little
help, needing helping hands, on the very edge of the abyss of misery,
and slipping down unless they get rescued in the nick of time. In the
mean streets of life, in the hospitals, at the prison gates, in the
reformatories, in the dark haunts of poverty, there are social workers
striving and toiling and moiling in the service of all these seething
masses of human beings. But there are too few of them, and the appeals
for volunteers in the ranks of the unpaid helpers are not often
answered. They are hardly ever answered from the class of women who have
least in the world to do, and most need of such kinds of work. Many
of these women have good voices. They sing little drawing-room ballads
quite well, until they get sick of the sound of their own singing in
their lonely little drawing-rooms. But they do not think of singing in
the hospitals, and the workhouse wards, where their voices would give
joy to suffering people, or miserable people who do not often hear the
music of life. These women have no children. They have shirked the
pains of childbirth. But they might help to give a little comfort and
happiness to other mothers’ children, to shepherd a small flock for a
day’s outing in the country, to organize the children’s playtime, to
nurse the sick baby now and then. These idle women remember their own
girlhood and its dreams. They remember their own innocence, the shelter
of their home-life. It would be good for them if they gave a little
loving service to the girls in the working-quarters of the great cities,
and went down into the girl-clubs to play their dance tunes, to keep
them out of the streets, to give them a little innocent fun in
the evenings. These lazy women cry out that they are prisoners in
upholstered cages. But there are many prisoners in stone cells, who at
the prison gates, on their release, stand looking out into the cold gray
world, with blank, despairing eyes, with no prospect but that of crime
and vice, unless some unknown friend comes with a little warmth of human
love, with a quick sympathy and a ready helpfulness. Here is work for
workless women who are well-to-do. They are unhappy in their own
homes, because they are tired of its trivialities, tired of its little
luxuries, bored to death with themselves because they have no purpose
in life. But in the mean streets round the corner they would find women
still clinging with extraordinary courage to homes that have no stick
of furniture in them, amazingly cheerful, although instead of little
luxuries they have not even the barest necessities of life, unwearied,
indefatigable, heroic in endurance, though they toil on sweated wages.
The women of the well-to-do middle-classes drift apart from their
husbands because perhaps they have irritable little habits, because they
do not understand all the yearnings in their wives’ hearts, because they
have fallen below the old ideals of their courting days. But here in the
slums these women with a grievance would find other women loyal to their
husbands who come home drunk at nights, loyal through thick and thin
to husbands who “bash” them when they speak a sharp word, loyal to the
death to husbands who are untamed brutes with only the love of the brute
for its mate. There is no problem of the Eighth Year in Poverty Court,
only the great problems of life and death, of hunger and thirst and
cold, of labor and want of work. Here in the mean streets of the world
is the great lesson that want of work is the greatest disaster, the
greatest moral tragedy, that may happen to men and women.
If the idle women of the little snobdoms would come forth from their
houses and flats, they would see that lesson staring them in the face,
with a great warning to themselves. And if they would thrust aside their
selfishness and learn the love of humanity, it would light a flame in
their hearts which would kindle the dead ashes of their disillusionment
and burn up their grievances, and make a bonfire of all their petty
little troubles, and make such a light in their lives as would enable
them to see the heroic qualities of ordinary duties bravely done, and of
ordinary lives bravely led. Here they would find another way of escape
from the perils of the Eighth Year, and a new moral health for their
hearts and brains.
It is only now and then that some woman is lucky enough to find this way
out, for snobbishness enchains them, and it is difficult to break its
fetters.