“Why, yes, as I see it it might be done,” I replied. “Burn all the public libraries and turn the country over to the Catholic Church.”
Miss Stafford, being a Catholic, I knew this reply would tease her, cause her to dispute my assertion. Defending myself I felt sure we would hit on a more interesting subject of conversation. Furthermore, I knew that though she had been earning her living for years, practically ever since she reached maturity, she belonged to a class that steadily refuses to consider themselves as working people, a class that always takes side with capital.
For work has become so disgraceful in our country that no woman with any claims to being gently born cares to be classed with working people. That is one reason why there are so many childless married women, and discontented women, married and single. Nine cases out of ten the one and only aim of a girl is to marry as soon as possible—be she working girl or human cootie. And nine cases out of ten instead of trying to fit herself for intelligent wifehood and motherhood she only aims at catching a husband, a good husband if she can get him, but a husband she must have.
This eagerness to secure a provider is not caused primarily by laziness, but to remove the stigma of working for their living. Most women who do not marry have to work for a living. Working for her living in our country puts a woman on a lower plane.
An amusing evidence of this difference came to my attention while I was doing social service work. At committee meetings, when the members of various committees met to hear the reports of the social workers on the staff of the Bellevue social service department, the workers used to sit on one side of a long table and the committee members on the other. Under no circumstances must a worker attend one of these meetings with her hat on—only the members of the committee wore hats.
At one of these meetings when reporting a case I happened to refer to the committee as “you women.” The expression of consternation that sprang into the face of the individual obsessed by the possibilities of Hog Island! Realizing my mistake, I made a little bow, including all the members of the committee, and corrected myself by saying “you ladies.”
How the Hog Island “lady” beamed on me!
“My dear madam, if the good God made a lady he forgot to mention it,” was on the tip of my tongue. What might have happened had I put that statement into words is a matter of speculation, though I have always felt quite sure that I would not have kept that job another two months.
Yet those social workers were a picked group of women; every one refined and well-appearing; all of them women of unblemished character, as well educated as a majority of the women on the other side of the table, and with a few exceptions all graduated nurses. Because they worked for their living the committee members objected to being so much as mentioned in the same class—women.
“I don’t know but what I should marry,” the woman who loved much said to me one day. I was sitting on her door-sill in the Thirty-second Street tenement, with my feet on her little piazza. “My sister keeps after me to.” She paused; as I could not see her face I waited. “She never told me, but I know she don’t like having me at her house so much—not when she has company. She says it shames her, having folks find out that she’s got a sister working.”