Men Who Have Won Their Way With Their Brains Now Give Their Hands a
Chance.
Men of standing are more willing to work with their hands than they used
to be. The new love for outdoor life may be in part responsible; as also
the growing interest in art-craft, and a steady reaction against the
“machine-made.” In any event manual work has been acquiring new dignity.
The Saint Paul _Dispatch_ says that until within a few years we were so
bent on emphasizing the intellectual that the manual had no honor.
To a certain appreciable extent this is changing. Men are interested
to-day in seeing how much they can do for themselves. It is not alone
that the art-craft movement has been inaugurated. We speak of a very
much more intimate and amateurish thing than that.
It is that men are resuming the ax and hammer for the little common
duties. They are making things for the house instead of calling in the
casual carpenter. Younger men still in school are employing their
vacation with carpenter work.
It is no longer quite so respectable to spend a college long-vacation
canvassing for books. It is now entirely respectable to offer one’s
services to a carpenter and be employed in some concrete service which
shall at the summer’s end have a visible aspect.
This is a genuine triumph, and will work toward the accomplishment of
that balancing of functions which has been much disturbed of late.
Now that men have reformed, we wonder if a similar development can be
expected of women. There has been the drift in woman work away from
the work of the hand to that of the mind.
School teaching has been a pervading ambition, and housework has been
an evil from which only the most skilled failed of escape. In essence,
one is no less worthy an employment than the other; each has certain
philanthropic aspects which should appeal equally to women. But one
has been exalted and the other debased because of the manual work, the
esteem of the work of the hands.
There is a slightly detectable drift back toward manual labor,
although much less apparent than in men’s work. But at least there has
been discovered a science of household economics, and concrete
exemplification of this science may secure recognition.
It will probably be long before women of colleges during the summer
vacations may with impunity, social impunity, go into the hotels or
the private kitchens, to work, as college men are going into the
carpenter shop.
Why there should be this invidious distinction we do not know, since,
so far as we can judge, it is quite as noble to feed mankind as to
provide shelter. But the evolution will be worth watching and
assisting.