"Well, what will you do with her?" said I to my wife.
My wife had just come down from an interview with a pale, faded-looking
young woman in rusty black attire, who had called upon me on the very
common supposition that I was an editor of the "Atlantic Monthly."
By the by, this is a mistake that brings me, Christopher Crowfield,
many letters that do not belong to me, and which might with equal
pertinency be addressed, "To the Man in the Moon." Yet these letters
often make my heart ache,--they speak so of people who strive and
sorrow and want help; and it is hard to be called on in plaintive
tones for help which you know it is perfectly impossible for you to
give.
For instance, you get a letter in a delicate hand, setting forth the
old distress,--she is poor, and she has looking to her for support
those that are poorer and more helpless than herself: she has tried
sewing, but can make little at it; tried teaching, but cannot now get
a school,--all places being filled, and more than filled; at last has
tried literature, and written some little things, of which she sends
you a modest specimen, and wants your opinion whether she can gain her
living by writing. You run over the articles, and perceive at a glance
that there is no kind of hope or use in her trying to do anything at
literature; and then you ask yourself mentally, "What is to be done
with her? What can she do?"
Such was the application that had come to me this morning,--only,
instead of by note, it came, as I have said, in the person of the
applicant, a thin, delicate, consumptive-looking being, wearing that
rusty mourning which speaks sadly at once of heart bereavement and
material poverty.
My usual course is to turn such cases over to Mrs. Crowfield; and it
is to be confessed that this worthy woman spends a large portion of
her time, and wears out an extraordinary amount of shoe-leather, in
performing the duties of a self-constituted intelligence office. Talk
of giving money to the poor! what is that, compared to giving
sympathy, thought, time, taking their burdens upon you, sharing their
perplexities? They who are able to buy off every application at the
door of their heart with a five or ten dollar bill are those who free
themselves at least expense.
My wife had communicated to our friend, in the gentlest tones and in
the blandest manner, that her poor little pieces, however interesting
to her own household circle, had nothing in them wherewith to enable
her to make her way in the thronged and crowded thoroughfare of
letters,--that they had no more strength or adaptation to win bread
for her than a broken-winged butterfly to draw a plough; and it took
some resolution in the background of her tenderness to make the poor
applicant entirely certain of this. In cases like this, absolute
certainty is the very greatest, the only true kindness.
It was grievous, my wife said, to see the discouraged shade which
passed over her thin, tremulous features when this certainty forced
itself upon her. It is hard, when sinking in the waves, to see the
frail bush at which the hand clutches uprooted; hard, when alone in
the crowded thoroughfare of travel, to have one's last bank-note
declared a counterfeit. I knew I should not be able to see her face,
under the shade of this disappointment; and so, coward that I was, I
turned this trouble, where I have turned so many others, upon my
wife.
"Well, what shall we do with her?" said I.
"I really don't know," said my wife musingly.
"Do you think we could get that school in Taunton for her?"
"Impossible; Mr. Herbert told me he had already twelve applicants for
it."
"Couldn't you get her plain sewing? Is she handy with her needle?"
"She has tried that, but it brings on a pain in her side, and cough;
and the doctor has told her it will not do for her to confine
herself."
"How is her handwriting? Does she write a good hand?"
"Only passable."
"Because," said I, "I was thinking if I could get Steele and Simpson
to give her law papers to copy."
"They have more copyists than they need now; and, in fact, this woman
does not write the sort of hand at all that would enable her to get on
as a copyist."
"Well," said I, turning uneasily in my chair, and at last hitting on a
bright masculine expedient, "I'll tell you what must be done. She must
get married."
"My dear," said my wife, "marrying for a living is the very hardest
way a woman can take to get it. Even marrying for love often turns out
badly enough. Witness poor Jane."
Jane was one of the large number of people whom it seemed my wife's
fortune to carry through life on her back. She was a pretty, smiling,
pleasing daughter of Erin, who had been in our family originally as
nursery-maid. I had been greatly pleased in watching a little idyllic
affair growing up between her and a joyous, good-natured young
Irishman, to whom at last we married her. Mike soon after, however,
took to drinking and unsteady courses; and the result has been to Jane
only a yearly baby, with poor health and no money.
"In fact," said my wife, "if Jane had only kept single, she could have
made her own way well enough, and might have now been in good health
and had a pretty sum in the savings bank. As it is, I must carry not
only her, but her three children, on my back."
"You ought to drop her, my dear. You really ought not to burden
yourself with other people's affairs as you do," said I inconsistently.
"How can I drop her? Can I help knowing that she is poor and
suffering? And if I drop her, who will take her up?"
Now there is a way of getting rid of cases of this kind, spoken of in
a quaint old book, which occurred strongly to me at this moment:--
"If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one
of you say unto them, 'Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled,'
notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the
body, what doth it profit?"
I must confess, notwithstanding the strong point of the closing
question, I looked with an evil eye of longing on this very easy way
of disposing of such cases. A few sympathizing words, a few
expressions of hope that I did not feel, a line written to turn the
case into somebody else's hands,--any expedient, in fact, to hide the
longing eyes and imploring hands from my sight,--was what my carnal
nature at this moment greatly craved.
"Besides," said my wife, resuming the thread of her thoughts in regard
to the subject just now before us, "as to marriage, it's out of the
question at present for this poor child; for the man she loved and
would have married lies low in one of the graves before Richmond. It's
a sad story,--one of a thousand like it. She brightened for a few
moments, and looked almost handsome, when she spoke of his bravery and
goodness. Her father and lover have both died in this war. Her only
brother has returned from it a broken-down cripple, and she has him
and her poor old mother to care for, and so she seeks work. I told her
to come again to-morrow, and I would look about for her a little
to-day."
"Let me see, how many are now down on your list to be looked about
for, Mrs. Crowfield?--some twelve or thirteen, are there not? You've
got Tom's sister disposed of finally, I hope,--that's a comfort!"
"Well, I'm sorry to say she came back on my hands yesterday," said my
wife patiently. "She is a foolish young thing, and said she didn't
like living out in the country. I'm sorry, because the Morrises are an
excellent family, and she might have had a life home there, if she had
only been steady, and chosen to behave herself properly. But yesterday
I found her back on her mother's hands again; and the poor woman told
me that the dear child never could bear to be separated from her, and
that she hadn't the heart to send her back."
"And in short," said I, "she gave you notice that you must provide for
Miss O'Connor in some more agreeable way. Cross that name off your
list, at any rate. That woman and girl need a few hard raps in the
school of experience before you can do anything for them."
"I think I shall," said my long-suffering wife; "but it's a pity to
see a young thing put in the direct road to ruin."
"It is one of the inevitables," said I, "and we must save our strength
for those that are willing to help themselves."
"What's all this talk about?" said Bob, coming in upon us rather
brusquely.
"Oh, as usual, the old question," said I,--"'What's to be done with
her?'"
"Well," said Bob, "it's exactly what I've come to talk with mother
about. Since she keeps a distressed women's agency office, I've come
to consult her about Marianne. That woman will die before six months
are out, a victim to high civilization and the Paddies. There we are,
twelve miles out from Boston, in a country villa so convenient that
every part of it might almost do its own work,--everything arranged in
the most convenient, contiguous, self-adjusting, self-acting,
patent-right, perfective manner,--and yet I tell you Marianne will die
of that house. It will yet be recorded on her tombstone, 'Died of
conveniences.' For myself, what I languish for is a log-cabin, with a
bed in one corner, a trundle-bed underneath for the children, a
fireplace only six feet off, a table, four chairs, one kettle, a
coffee-pot, and a tin baker,--that's all. I lived deliciously in an
establishment of this kind last summer, when I was up at Lake
Superior; and I am convinced, if I could move Marianne into it at
once, that she would become a healthy and a happy woman. Her life is
smothered out of her with comforts; we have too many rooms, too many
carpets, too many vases and knick-knacks, too much china and silver;
she has too many laces and dresses and bonnets; the children all have
too many clothes: in fact, to put it scripturally, our riches are
corrupted, our garments are moth-eaten, our gold and our silver is
cankered, and, in short, Marianne is sick in bed, and I have come to
the agency office for distressed women to take you out to attend to
her.
"The fact is," continued Bob, "that since our cook married, and Alice
went to California, there seems to be no possibility of putting our
domestic cabinet upon any permanent basis. The number of female
persons that have been through our house, and the ravages they have
wrought on it for the last six months, pass belief. I had yesterday a
bill of sixty dollars' plumbing to pay for damages of various kinds
which had had to be repaired in our very convenient water-works; and
the blame of each particular one had been bandied like a shuttlecock
among our three household divinities. Biddy privately assured my wife
that Kate was in the habit of emptying dustpans of rubbish into the
main drain from the chambers, and washing any little extra bits down
through the bowls; and, in fact, when one of the bathing-room bowls
had overflowed so as to damage the frescoes below, my wife, with great
delicacy and precaution, interrogated Kate as to whether she had
followed her instructions in the care of the water-pipes. Of course
she protested the most immaculate care and circumspection. 'Sure, and
she knew how careful one ought to be, and wasn't of the likes of thim
as wouldn't mind what throuble they made,--like Biddy, who would throw
trash and hair in the pipes, and niver listen to her tellin'; sure,
and hadn't she broken the pipes in the kitchen, and lost the stoppers,
as it was a shame to see in a Christian house?' Ann, the third girl,
being privately questioned, blamed Biddy on Monday, and Kate on
Tuesday; on Wednesday, however, she exonerated both; but on Thursday,
being in a high quarrel with both, she departed, accusing them
severally, not only of all the evil practices aforesaid, but of lying
and stealing, and all other miscellaneous wickednesses that came to
hand. Whereat the two thus accused rushed in, bewailing themselves and
cursing Ann in alternate strophes, averring that she had given the
baby laudanum, and, taking it out riding, had stopped for hours with
it in a filthy lane where the scarlet fever was said to be rife,--in
short, made so fearful a picture that Marianne gave up the child's
life at once, and has taken to her bed. I have endeavored all I could
to quiet her, by telling her that the scarlet fever story was probably
an extemporaneous work of fiction, got up to gratify the Hibernian
anger at Ann; and that it wasn't in the least worth while to believe
one thing more than another from the fact that any of the tribe said
it. But she refuses to be comforted, and is so Utopian as to lie there
crying, 'Oh, if I only could get one that I could trust,--one that
would really speak the truth to me,--one that I might know really went
where she said she went, and really did as she said she did!' To have
to live so, she says, and bring up little children with those she
can't trust out of her sight, whose word is good for nothing,--to feel
that her beautiful house and her lovely things are all going to rack
and ruin, and she can't take care of them, and can't see where or when
or how the mischief is done,--in short, the poor child talks as women
do who are violently attacked with housekeeping fever tending to
congestion of the brain. She actually yesterday told me that she
wished, on the whole, she never had got married, which I take to be
the most positive indication of mental alienation."
"Here," said I, "we behold at this moment two women dying for the want
of what they can mutually give one another,--each having a supply of
what the other needs, but held back by certain invisible cobwebs,
slight but strong, from coming to each other's assistance. Marianne
has money enough, but she wants a helper in her family, such as all
her money has been hitherto unable to buy; and here, close at hand, is
a woman who wants home shelter, healthy, varied, active, cheerful
labor, with nourishing food, kind care, and good wages. What hinders
these women from rushing to the help of one another, just as two drops
of water on a leaf rush together and make one? Nothing but a miserable
prejudice,--but a prejudice so strong that women will starve in any
other mode of life rather than accept competency and comfort in
this."
"You don't mean," said my wife, "to propose that our protegee should
go to Marianne as a servant?"
"I do say it would be the best thing for her to do,--the only opening
that I see, and a very good one, too, it is. Just look at it. Her bare
living at this moment cannot cost her less than five or six dollars a
week,--everything at the present time is so very dear in the city. Now
by what possible calling open to her capacity can she pay her board
and washing, fuel and lights, and clear a hundred and some odd dollars
a year? She could not do it as a district school teacher; she
certainly cannot, with her feeble health, do it by plain sewing; she
could not do it as a copyist. A robust woman might go into a factory
and earn more; but factory work is unintermitted, twelve hours daily,
week in and out, in the same movement, in close air, amid the clatter
of machinery; and a person delicately organized soon sinks under it.
It takes a stolid, enduring temperament to bear factory labor. Now
look at Marianne's house and family, and see what is insured to your
protegee there.
"In the first place, a home,--a neat, quiet chamber, quite as good as
she has probably been accustomed to,--the very best of food, served in
a pleasant, light, airy kitchen, which is one of the most agreeable
rooms in the house, and the table and table service quite equal to
those of most farmers and mechanics. Then her daily tasks would be
light and varied,--some sweeping, some dusting, the washing and
dressing of children, the care of their rooms and the nursery,--all of
it the most healthful, the most natural work of a woman,--work
alternating with rest, and diverting thought from painful subjects by
its variety, and, what is more, a kind of work in which a good
Christian woman might have satisfaction, as feeling herself useful in
the highest and best way; for the child's nurse, if she be a pious,
well-educated woman, may make the whole course of nursery life an
education in goodness. Then, what is far different from any other
modes of gaining a livelihood, a woman in this capacity can make and
feel herself really and truly beloved. The hearts of little children
are easily gained, and their love is real and warm, and no true woman
can become the object of it without feeling her own life made
brighter. Again, she would have in Marianne a sincere, warm-hearted
friend, who would care for her tenderly, respect her sorrows, shelter
her feelings, be considerate of her wants, and in every way aid her in
the cause she has most at heart,--the succor of her family. There are
many ways besides her wages in which she would infallibly be assisted
by Marianne, so that the probability would be that she could send her
little salary almost untouched to those for whose support she was
toiling,--all this on her part."
"But," added my wife, "on the other hand, she would be obliged to
associate and be ranked with common Irish servants."
"Well," I answered, "is there any occupation, by which any of us gain
our living, which has not its disagreeable side? Does not the lawyer
spend all his days either in a dusty office or in the foul air of a
court-room? Is he not brought into much disagreeable contact with the
lowest class of society? Are not his labors dry and hard and
exhausting? Does not the blacksmith spend half his life in soot and
grime, that he may gain a competence for the other half? If this woman
were to work in a factory, would she not often be brought into
associations distasteful to her? Might it not be the same in any of
the arts and trades in which a living is to be got? There must be
unpleasant circumstances about earning a living in any way, only I
maintain that those which a woman would be likely to meet with as a
servant in a refined, well-bred Christian family would be less than in
almost any other calling. Are there no trials to a woman, I beg to
know, in teaching a district school, where all the boys, big and
little, of a neighborhood congregate? For my part, were it my daughter
or sister who was in necessitous circumstances, I would choose for
her a position such as I name, in a kind, intelligent, Christian
family, before many of those to which women do devote themselves."
"Well," said Bob, "all this has a good sound enough, but it's quite
impossible. It's true, I verily believe, that such a kind of servant
in our family would really prolong Marianne's life years,--that it
would improve her health, and be an unspeakable blessing to her, to
me, and the children,--and I would almost go down on my knees to a
really well-educated, good American woman who would come into our
family and take that place; but I know it's perfectly vain and useless
to expect it. You know we have tried the experiment two or three times
of having a person in our family who should be on the footing of a
friend, yet do the duties of a servant, and that we never could make
it work well. These half-and-half people are so sensitive, so exacting
in their demands, so hard to please, that we have come to the firm
determination that we will have no sliding-scale in our family, and
that whoever we are to depend on must come with bona fide willingness
to take the position of a servant, such as that position is in our
house; and that, I suppose, your protegee would never do, even if she
could thereby live easier, have less hard work, better health, and
quite as much money as she could earn in any other way."
"She would consider it a personal degradation, I suppose," said my
wife.
"And yet, if she only knew it," said Bob, "I should respect her far
more profoundly for her willingness to take that position, when
adverse fortune has shut other doors."
"Well, now," said I, "this woman is, as I understand, the daughter of
a respectable stone-mason, and the domestic habits of her early life
have probably been economical and simple. Like most of our mechanics'
daughters, she has received in one of our high schools an education
which has cultivated and developed her mind far beyond those of her
parents and the associates of her childhood. This is a common fact in
our American life. By our high schools the daughters of plain
workingmen are raised to a state of intellectual culture which seems
to make the disposition of them in any kind of industrial calling a
difficult one. They all want to teach school,--and schoolteaching,
consequently, is an overcrowded profession,--and, failing that, there
is only millinery and dressmaking. Of late, it is true, efforts have
been made in various directions to widen their sphere. Typesetting and
bookkeeping are in some instances beginning to be open to them.
"All this time there is lying, neglected and despised, a calling to
which womanly talents and instincts are peculiarly fitted,--a calling
full of opportunities of the most lasting usefulness; a calling which
insures a settled home, respectable protection, healthful exercise,
good air, good food, and good wages; a calling in which a woman may
make real friends, and secure to herself warm affection: and yet this
calling is the one always refused, shunned, contemned, left to the
alien and the stranger, and that simply and solely because it bears
the name of _servant_. A Christian woman, who holds the name of Christ
in her heart in true devotion, would think it the greatest possible
misfortune and degradation to become like him in taking upon her 'the
form of a servant.' The founder of Christianity says: 'Whether is
greater, he that sitteth at meat or he that serveth? But _I_ am among
you as he that serveth.' But notwithstanding these so plain
declarations of Jesus, we find that scarce any one in a Christian land
will accept real advantages of position and employment that come with
that name and condition."
"I suppose," said my wife, "I could prevail upon this woman to do all
the duties of the situation, if she could be, as they phrase it,
'treated as one of the family.'"
"That is to say," said Bob, "if she could sit with us at the same
table, be introduced to our friends, and be in all respects as one
of us. Now, as to this, I am free to say that I have no false
aristocratic scruples. I consider every well-educated woman as fully
my equal, not to say my superior; but it does not follow from this
that she would be one whom I should wish to make a third party with me
and my wife at meal-times. Our meals are often our seasons of
privacy,--the times when we wish in perfect unreserve to speak of
matters that concern ourselves and our family alone. Even invited
guests and family friends would not be always welcome, however
agreeable at times. Now a woman may be perfectly worthy of respect,
and we may be perfectly respectful to her, whom nevertheless we do
not wish to take into the circle of intimate friendship. I regard
the position of a woman who comes to perform domestic service as I
do any other business relation. We have a very respectable young lady
in our employ who does legal copying for us, and all is perfectly
pleasant and agreeable in our mutual relations; but the case would be
far otherwise were she to take it into her head that we treated her
with contempt, because my wife did not call on her, and because she
was not occasionally invited to tea. Besides, I apprehend that a
woman of quick sensibilities, employed in domestic service, and who
was so far treated as a member of the family as to share our table,
would find her position even more painful and embarrassing than if
she took once for all the position of a servant. We could not
control the feelings of our friends; we could not always insure
that they would be free from aristocratic prejudice, even were we so
ourselves. We could not force her upon their acquaintance, and she
might feel far more slighted than she would in a position where no
attentions of any kind were to be expected. Besides which, I have
always noticed that persons standing in this uncertain position are
objects of peculiar antipathy to the servants in full; that they
are the cause of constant and secret cabals and discontents; and that
a family where the two orders exist has always raked up in it the
smouldering embers of a quarrel ready at any time to burst out
into open feud."
"Well," said I, "here lies the problem of American life. Half our
women, like Marianne, are being faded and made old before their time
by exhausting endeavors to lead a life of high civilization and
refinement with only such untrained help as is washed up on our shores
by the tide of emigration. Our houses are built upon a plan that
precludes the necessity of much hard labor, but requires rather
careful and nice handling. A well-trained, intelligent woman, who had
vitalized her finger-ends by means of a well-developed brain, could do
all the work of such a house with comparatively little physical
fatigue. So stands the case as regards our houses. Now, over against
the women that are perishing in them from too much care, there is
another class of American women that are wandering up and down,
perishing for lack of some remunerating employment. That class of
women, whose developed brains and less developed muscles mark them as
peculiarly fitted for the performance of the labors of a high
civilization, stand utterly aloof from paid domestic service. Sooner
beg, sooner starve, sooner marry for money, sooner hang on as
dependents in families where they know they are not wanted, than
accept of a quiet home, easy, healthful work, and certain wages, in
these refined and pleasant modern dwellings of ours."
"What is the reason of this?" said Bob.
"The reason is, that we have not yet come to the full development of
Christian democracy. The taint of old aristocracies is yet pervading
all parts of our society. We have not yet realized fully the true
dignity of labor, and the surpassing dignity of domestic labor. And I
must say that the valuable and courageous women who have agitated the
doctrines of Woman's Rights among us have not in all things seen their
way clear in this matter."
"Don't talk to me of those creatures," said Bob, "those men-women,
those anomalies, neither flesh nor fish, with their conventions, and
their cracked woman-voices strained in what they call public speaking,
but which I call public squeaking! No man reverences true women more
than I do. I hold a real, true, thoroughly good _woman_, whether in my
parlor or my kitchen, as my superior. She can always teach me
something that I need to know. She has always in her somewhat of the
divine gift of prophecy; but in order to keep it, she must remain a
woman. When she crops her hair, puts on pantaloons, and strides about
in conventions, she is an abortion, and not a woman."
"Come! come!" said I, "after all, speak with deference. We that choose
to wear soft clothing and dwell in kings' houses must respect the
Baptists, who wear leathern girdles, and eat locusts and wild honey.
They are the voices crying in the wilderness, preparing the way for a
coming good. They go down on their knees in the mire of life to lift
up and brighten and restore a neglected truth; and we that have not
the energy to share their struggle should at least refrain from
criticising their soiled garments and ungraceful action. There have
been excrescences, eccentricities, peculiarities, about the camp of
these reformers; but the body of them have been true and noble women,
and worthy of all the reverence due to such. They have already in many
of our States reformed the laws relating to woman's position, and
placed her on a more just and Christian basis. It is through their
movements that in many of our States a woman can hold the fruits of
her own earnings, if it be her ill luck to have a worthless, drunken
spendthrift for a husband. It is owing to their exertions that new
trades and professions are opening to woman; and all that I have to
say to them is, that in the suddenness of their zeal for opening new
paths for her feet, they have not sufficiently considered the
propriety of straightening, widening, and mending the one broad, good
old path of domestic labor, established by God himself. It does appear
to me, that, if at least a portion of their zeal could be spent in
removing the stones out of this highway of domestic life, and making
it pleasant and honorable, they would effect even more. I would not
have them leave undone what they are doing; but I would, were I worthy
to be considered, humbly suggest to their prophetic wisdom and
enthusiasm, whether, in this new future of women which they wish to
introduce, women's natural, God-given employment of _domestic service_
is not to receive a new character, and rise in a new form.
"'To love and serve' is a motto worn with pride on some aristocratic
family shields in England. It ought to be graven on the Christian
shield. _Servant_ is the name which Christ gives to the _Christian_;
and in speaking of his kingdom as distinguished from earthly kingdoms,
he distinctly said, that rank there should be conditioned, not upon
desire to command, but on willingness to serve.
"'Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over
them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it
shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let
him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him
be your _servant_.'
"Why is it, that this name of servant, which Christ says is the
highest in the kingdom of heaven, is so dishonored among us professing
Christians, that good women will beg or starve, will suffer almost any
extreme of poverty and privation, rather than accept home, competence,
security, with this honored name?"
"The fault with many of our friends of the Woman's Rights order," said
my wife, "is the depreciatory tone in which they have spoken of the
domestic labors of a family as being altogether below the scope of
the faculties of woman. '_Domestic drudgery_' they call it,--an
expression that has done more harm than any two words that ever were
put together.
"Think of a woman's calling clear-starching and ironing domestic
drudgery, and to better the matter turning to typesetting in a grimy
printing office! Call the care of china and silver, the sweeping of
carpets, the arrangement of parlors and sitting-rooms, drudgery; and
go into a factory and spend the day amid the whir and clatter and
thunder of machinery, inhaling an atmosphere loaded with wool and
machine grease, and keeping on the feet for twelve hours, nearly
continuously! Think of its being called drudgery to take care of a
clean, light, airy nursery, to wash and dress and care for two or
three children, to mend their clothes, tell them stories, make them
playthings, take them out walking or driving; and rather than this, to
wear out the whole livelong day, extending often deep into the night,
in endless sewing, in a close room of a dressmaking establishment! Is
it any less drudgery to stand all day behind a counter, serving
customers, than to tend a doorbell and wait on a table? For my part,"
said my wife, "I have often thought the matter over, and concluded,
that, if I were left in straitened circumstances, as many are in a
great city, I would seek a position as a servant in one of our good
families."
"I envy the family that you even think of in that connection," said I.
"I fancy the amazement which would take possession of them as you
began to develop among them."
"I have always held," said my wife, "that family work, in many of its
branches, can be better performed by an educated woman than an
uneducated one. Just as an army where even the bayonets think is
superior to one of mere brute force and mechanical training, so, I
have heard it said, some of our distinguished modern female reformers
show an equal superiority in the domestic sphere,--and I do not doubt
it. Family work was never meant to be the special province of untaught
brains. I have sometimes thought I should like to show what I could do
as a servant."
"Well," said Bob, "to return from all this to the question, What's to
be done with her? Are you going to _my_ distressed woman? If you are,
suppose you take _your_ distressed woman along, and ask her to try it.
I can promise her a pleasant house, a quiet room by herself, healthful
and not too hard work, a kind friend, and some leisure for reading,
writing, or whatever other pursuit of her own she may choose for her
recreation. We are always quite willing to lend books to any who
appreciate them. Our house is surrounded by pleasant grounds, which
are open to our servants as to ourselves. So let her come and try us.
I am quite sure that country air, quiet security, and moderate
exercise in a good home, will bring up her health; and if she is
willing to take the one or two disagreeables which may come with all
this, let her try us."
"Well," said I, "so be it; and would that all the women seeking homes
and employment could thus fall in with women who have homes and are
perishing in them for want of educated helpers!"
On this question of woman's work I have yet more to say, but must
defer it till another time.