The Girl of Commerce.
You find her everywhere almost nowadays. She is not a natural production. She is got up. She is forced and artificial. She cannot be healthy, and has no more heart than a hen, no more stamina or staying power than a stalk of hemp. She is a resultant of the inflexible law of supply and demand. Made for the matrimonial market, grown to be sold, and if—like a choice standard rose—she is labelled with a title, she will go all the sooner. Money will purchase a wife like this, and, though marriage may change her and love may come after, the man who has her has speculated on the off-chance. And now that wax dolls can be manufactured that can both talk and walk, it seems to me that the man might have done better with his money. But, thank goodness, the majority of men prefer the genuine, well-reared, healthy girl, and the girl that has a heart.
But love is still a great factor—nay, the very greatest—in this life, and, if that love be real, oh, there is nothing it cannot do!
I must, as a medical man, go a little farther, and tell the mater something that no scientist will venture to deny. It is this: a loveless or commercial marriage is not only followed by a senseless and dreary monotonous life, but children born in such wedlock are never truly healthy in body, and very often they are defective in mental qualifications, that is, in brain power. Many a case of epilepsy is congenital, and a child that is nerveless is liable to future degeneracy, and apt to fall into any kind of temptation. Doctors have proofs of this every day.
But though ambitious parents may try to alter Nature’s law, she herself is inexorable and tells us sternly that the fittest shall survive.
But, harking back to our poet’s lines—
“From work she wins her spirits light,
From busy day, the peaceful night,”
I must give my medical testimony to the truth herein conveyed. Work does give exhilaration of spirits and enables a girl truly to enjoy recreation and outdoor exercise, and, moreover, the busy day results in calm refreshing sleep at night.
Without sleep, without perfect exercise, ventilation of rooms and fresh air everywhere, no girl can grow up happy and healthful.
Coddling children and keeping them too warm causes them to become fragile and delicate, with no nerves worth mentioning, except when they give rise to the tortures of toothache and neuralgia, and no lungs good enough to last.
There is, mother, but a sad future for that girl who is ashamed to soil her fingers by doing honest work, or ashamed to wear a thimble and wield woman’s real weapon—the needle.
But it is not natural for girls to hate work. Do they not make the best of nurses, for instance, and the most gentle-handed? It is Scott who says—
“Oh, woman, in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light and quivering aspen made,
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!”
And after many more years than I care to recall—for fear of making me feel old—of camp life and sea life, I can testify that girls make the best of all gipsy folks. Amateur, of course, I mean. But even in the management of a picnic their abilities shine forth; and in camp or on board ship, if one only gives them credit for common sense, they can do wonders.
The young lady who would not demean herself—there is really no demeanment about it—by doing cookery or kitchen work in her own house often comes out strong in wayside camp or caravan. She gets up to things as if guided by instinct, can light fires, cook plain nutritious meals, lay them out prettily, and clear up afterwards with most amiable and sweet-tempered dexterity, and, when all is over, will take guitar or mandoline and accompany your violin as if to the gipsy-manner born.
However, I have no doubt that a good deal of a girl’s willingness to work in this way, depends upon the novelty and romance of her surroundings, and very much also on the fact that she is breathing the purest air that can blow through dell or den, or balmy forest of pine, or from the mountains themselves that God built long before he made the poor puny microbe man.