WATCHES.
Let us speak first of watch-cleaning. What are the qualifications of a good watch-cleaner? Nimble, sensitive fingers, neatness, and carefulness.
Now put your finger there, and let me show you a watch-cleaner. He works in a window only two squares from my Boston residence. He weighs about two hundred and twenty pounds, and has a fist big enough to knock down an ox. The whole thing looked so comical to me, I thought one day I would go in and plague him a little. So, after a little chat about watches in general, I said:—
"By the way, it has occurred to me that women might work at watch- cleaning.
"Women," said he, "why, they couldn't clean watches. They haven't the skill, they haven't the mechanical genius for it, sir. I don't go in for none of your 'woman's rights,' sir; I think women should attend to their own business."
"And, pray, what do you regard as their business?"
"Why, staying at home in their own sphere, and attending to their domestic concerns; taking care of their children, and keeping their husband's clothes mended."
I saw at once that the case was altogether too deep for me, and so I simply remarked:—
"Yes, to be sure, of course; and is it not strange, that they should not be willing to stay at home, and rock their babies, especially the seventy thousand in the state of Massachusetts who can never expect to have husbands?"
Cleaning watches is a business that should at once pass into the hands of women. The opinion that they have not the requisite mechanical capacity to take a watch to pieces and put it together again, is the opinion of a goose. They can do the work quicker and better than men. It is an employment that naturally belongs to them.