Working With the Working Woman

by Cornelia Stratton Parker

Before a week is gone Minnie will be telling in an awed voice that she knows what happened. She told me not to go out with that chauffeur. I went, anyhow, and they found my mangled body in the gutter in Yonkers.

III

195 Irons “Family”

How long, I wonder, does one study or work at anything before one feels justified in generalizing?

I have been re-reading of late some of the writings of some of the women who at one time or another essayed to experience first hand the life of the working girl. They have a bit dismayed me. Is it exactly fair, what they do? They thought, because they changed their names and wore cheap clothes, that, presto! they were as workers and could pass on to an uninformed reading public the trials of the worker. (Incidentally they were all trials.) I had read in the past those heartrending books and articles and found it ever difficult to hold back the tears. Sometimes they were written by an immigrant, a bona-fide worker. The tragedy of such a life in this business-ridden land of ours tore one's soul.

An educated, cultured individual, used to a life of ease, or easier, if she had wished to make it that, would find the life of the factory worker well-nigh unbearable. An emotional girl longing for the higher things of life would find factory life galling beyond words. It is to be regretted that there are not more educated and cultured people—that more folk do not long for the higher things of life—that factory work is not galling to everybody. But the fact seems to be, if we dare generalize, that there are a very great many persons in this world who are neither educated nor “cultured” nor filled with spiritual longings. The observation might be made that all such are not confined to the working classes; that the country at large, from Fifth Avenue, New York, to Main Street, Gopher Prairie, to Market Street, San Francisco, is considerably made up of folk who are not educated or “cultured” or of necessity filled with unsatiable longings of the soul.

It is partly due to the fact that only recently—as geologic time is reckoned—we were swinging in trees, yearning probably for little else than a nut to crack, a mate, a shelter of sorts, something of ape company, and now and then a chance for a bit of a scrap. It is partly due to the fact that for the great majority of people, the life they live from the cradle up is not the sort that matures them with a growing ambition or opportunity to experience the “finer” things of life. One point of view would allow that the reason we have so few educated, cultured, and aspiring people is due to a combination of unfortunate circumstances to do with heredity and environment. They would be cultured and spiritual if only....

The other viewpoint argues that the only reason we have as many cultured and spiritual people as we have is due to a fortunate—“lucky”—combination of circumstances to do with heredity and environment. These more advanced folk would be far fewer in number if it had not happened that....

It is mostly the “educated and cultured” persons who write the more serious books we read and who tell us what they and the rest of the world think and feel and do—or ought to do. The rest of the world never read what they ought to think and feel and do, and go blithely—or otherwise—on their way thinking and feeling and doing—what they please, or as circumstances force them.

After all, the world is a very subjective thing, and what makes life worth living to one person is not necessarily what makes it worth living to another. Certain fundamental things everybody is apt to want: enough to eat (but what a gamut that “enough” can run!); a mate (the range and variety of mates who do seem amply to satisfy one another!); a shelter to retire to nights (what a bore if we all had to live complacently on the Avenue!); children to love and fuss over—but one child does some parents and ten children do others, and some mothers go into a decline if everything is not sterilized twice a day and everybody clean behind the ears, and other mothers get just as much satisfaction out of their young when there is only one toothbrush, if that, for everybody (we are writing from the mother's viewpoint and not the welfare of the offspring); some possessions of one's own, but not all stocks and bonds and a box of jewels in the bank, or a library, or an automobile, or even a house and lot, before peace reigns.