BY FRANCES E. WILLARD,
President National W. C. T. U.
CHAPTER I.
Long ago, and long ago it was, in the days when I used proudly to write “School Teacher” after my name, I bought a certain book for the express purpose of reading it to “the girls I’ve left behind me.” The book is one beloved by train boys, of which they and other venders have sold so many that the latest “dodgers” read, “Twentieth thousand now in press.” It is sensible in matter, attractive in style, and goes by the enticing name of “Getting on in the World.” Naturally enough it was written in Chicago, and like most “Garden City” notions, is “a success.” But the trouble with this volume was that it didn’t fill the bill. I wanted to read it to “my girls,” to stir up their pure minds by way of remembrance that “life is real, life is earnest,” and the rest of it. But as I scanned its bright and pleasant pages I found out—what do you think I found? Why, that with the light of a new dispensation blazing in upon him, and the soprano voices of several million “superfluous women,” crying, “Have you no work for me to do?” this honored author had written never a word about creation’s gentler half! His book contained 365 pages, but if you had read a page each day, all the year round, you wouldn’t have found out at last that such a being as a woman was trying to “get on” in this or any other world. Not a bread-winning weapon had he put into the hand of the neediest among us, nor had he, even in a stray chapter or “appendix,” taken us off by ourselves and drawn us a diagram of “our sphere.”
I was so pained by this that I wrote Prof. Matthews (the gifted author, and my personal friend), asking him why he had thus counted out the women folks in his book upon success in life. I even ventured to hypothecate his reason, saying to him:
“Dear Sir:—I do not think you did this with malice aforethought, or from lack of interest in our fate, but simply and only because, like so many of our excellent brethren, you ‘done forgot all about us,’ as Topsey would say.”
Whereupon came a prompt and gracious reply, with the frank and manly admission:
“You guessed aright. I simply forgot to speak of women.”
Now, you perceive, it set me thinking—this obliquity of mental vision, which had led a writer so talented and wise to squint thus at the human race, seeing but half of it. I recalled the fact that, into most families, are born girls as well as boys; nay, as many an over-burdened pater familias can testify, they come not unfrequently in largely superior, if not exclusive numbers. Having, also, at a remote period of my history, belonged to the same helpless fraternity, I was haunted by the wish that I might write a sequel to the Professor’s excellent book, talking therein to girls and women about success in life. Perhaps my time has come; perhaps, in the generous pages of The Chautauquan, whose editor is so tolerant of the “strong minded” sisterhood, I have the largest audience that has yet consented to listen to my “views.” Anyhow, I mean, in these newly acquired pages to talk to girls of “How to Win” in something besides the sense treated of in books of etiquette and fashion magazines, or systematically taught in dancing schools.