“I feel such an aching in me to do or be something uncommon, and yet a kind of awful assurance that I never shall.”
Nor do I here refer to that general knowledge of household arts which forms the sole acquirement set forth in the regulation “Women’s Department” of the bygone age newspaper, which in many localities remains in this like the boulder of a past epoch.
It was once thought to be a high virtue for women, no matter how lofty in station or how ample of fortune, to do their own work with the needle. Homer represents Penelope spinning, surrounded by her maids, and classic art abounds with illustrations of like character. But the virtues of one age often become the mistakes of the next. When loom, needle and broom were woman’s only weapons, she did well to handle them deftly, no matter what her rank, for they were her bread-winning implements, and fortune has been proverbially fickle in all ages. But men, by their “witty inventions,” have perpetually encroached on “woman’s sphere.”
Eli Whitney, with his cotton gin, Elias Howe, with his sewing machine, and a hundred other intricate-brained mechanics who have set steel fingers to do in an hour what women’s fingers could not accomplish in a year; all these have combined to revolutionize the daily cares of the gentler sex. With former occupations gone, and the world’s welcome ready when they succeed in special vocations new to them, it becomes not only the privilege but the sacred duty of every woman to cultivate and utilize her highest gift. There is no more practical form of philanthropy than this, for every one who makes a place for herself “higher up” leaves one lower down for some other woman who, but for the vacancy thus afforded her in the world’s close crowded ranks, might be tempted into paths of sin. There is an army of poor girls wholly dependent, for a livelihood, upon the doing of house work. They have no other earthly resource between them and the poor house or haunt of infamy. There is another class to whom an honorable support can come only by sewing or millinery work. Whoever then fits herself for some employment involving better pay and higher social recognition, graduates out of these lower grades and leaves them to those who can not so advance, has helped the world along in a substantial way, because she has added to the sum of humanity’s well being.
To young women in wealthy homes, these considerations should come with even greater convincing force. As David Swing has wisely said to his own rich congregation:
“The rhetoric thrown at women of property for not doing ‘their own work’ could only be useful in an age of fashionable idleness, but in a busy age it is a part of nature’s law that what are called the ‘better classes’ shall leave for the poorer classes some labor to be done, just as the Mosaic law left some sheaves in the field for the gleaner. The world’s work is to be apportioned according to the need and capability of its workers, and the higher order of power must not encroach upon the task which nature seems to have set apart for the employment and support of the less capable.”
Let it not be concluded that I have meant to speak lightly of the intricate, skilled labor involved in making healthful and attractive that bright, consummate flower of a Christian civilization—the home. I have felt that this theme has been so often treated that it needed no amplification at my hands, but I will add that, having been entertained in scores of homes belonging to “exceptional women,” “women with a career,” etc., my testimony is that for wholesomeness, heartsomeness, and every quality that superadds home-making to housekeeping, I have never seen their superiors, and seldom, take them all in all, their peers. But as a rule, these women have earned the “wherewithal” to make a home, by the exercise of some good gift of brain or hand, and thus having been enabled to put a proxy in the kitchen, they direct, but do not attend to the minutiæ of their daily household cares.
Cultivate, then, your specialty, because the independence thus involved will lift you above the world’s pity to the level of its respect, perchance its honor. Understand this first, last, and always: The world wants the best thing. It wants your best. It needs you as a significant figure to give its ciphers value; to designate as an example; to serve up in a eulogy, perchance to shine in the galaxy by whose light alone its centuries maintain their places in the firmament of history. I know this may strike you as contradiction, for the paradox of paradoxes is this crotchety but kind, narrow-minded but just old world in which you and I are cast away, like Æneas in the domain of Dido. The effrontery of “Madame Grundy” passes all comprehension, and would be laughable if it were not so sad. She tells us women distinctly that we positively shall not do for society the thing we can do best; she declares that if we attempt it we shall be frowned down, and practically ostracised, if not utterly made away with, and then, if we go right on and succeed, she trumpets our names from sea to shore, showers us with greenbacks, and nods her conventional old head with a knowing “I told you so.” And per contra, while on one hand this same unreasonable old lady cripples our attempts to succeed, on the other she snubs us for not doing so. In fact, she is so poor a mathematician that she has never yet so much as tried to learn the value of the “unknown quantity.” The mute Milton is, to her, indeed “inglorious.” Her code of ethics recognizes just one crime (not mentioned in the Decalogue), and it is Failure. Her law is written on a single table—it is a table of stone—and it reads thus: “Succeed and live; make shipwreck of success, and die.”
And so, young friends, fold away your talents in a napkin if you choose; the world will not openly reprove you. She will never urge you to bring out your hidden treasure, but she knows right well when you defraud her, and the relentless old tyrant will punish you, with tireless lash, because you did not bring all your tithes into the storehouse of the common good, because you lived “beneath your privilege;” because, for yourself (which means for her), you did not “covet earnestly the best gifts.” She will cut you on the public street when she would have shown you all her teeth in smiles. She will send poverty on your track, when you might have sat down at her banquet an honored guest. Yes, the world wants the best thing; your best, and she will smite you stealthily if you do not hand over your gift. Now last, but not least (under the head of reasons for seeking to know your true vocation as a human being), let me bring forward the rationale of the bread-and-butter argument. In sooth, no writer or speaker may omit it with impunity, if he would retire in good order from an American audience. Briefly, then, your specialty, well trained, is your best bread-winning implement, and she who earliest grasps this, and who firmest holds it, comes off best in the race. “Be not simply good, be good for something,” said Henry D. Thoreau. A bright eyed girl of eighteen used to come to me on Friday evenings to give me German lessons. To be sure, I have lived in Germany, and she has never been out of Illinois, but then that language is not my specialty, while it is hers. “How is it that though so young, you have made yourself independent?” I inquired of her one day. Listen to the reply: “My mother was always quoting this saying of Carlyle: ‘The man who has a sixpence commands the world—to the extent of that sixpence.’ I early laid this sentiment to heart. Besides, when I was fifteen years old, I heard a sermon on the text: ‘This one thing I do.’ Being of a practical turn of mind, I made an application of which the preacher, perhaps, had no intention. I thought, why not in everyday affairs as well as in religion do one thing well, rather than many things indifferently, and in that way secure the magic sixpence of Carlyle! My father was a rich man then, but I resolved to prepare myself to teach the German language, of which I was very fond, by way of a profession. When the Chicago fire came we lost our property, but I discovered that I could not only support myself, but help my father to many a convenient sixpence, because, in prosperous days I had forearmed myself with a cultivated specialty.”
As she told me this, I thought how, from widely different premises and conditions in life young people may reach similar conclusions. For instance, on the top of the great St. Bernard, I said to the “Hospitable Father,” a noble young monk, “How is it that you, so gifted and well taught, are spending your life away up here among eternal snows?” And I shall never forget his look of exaltation as he simply answered, “’Tis my vocation.”