[WOMEN ON THE PLATFORM.]
MISS MARIANNA THOMPSON, now a student at the Theological school, received, during her summer vacation two invitations to settle with good societies, each of which offered her twelve hundred dollars per year. Pretty good for a school-girl, I think."
Yes, that is very good; and we trust Miss Thompson will accept one of these (or a better) and do great good to her hearers. And, should some excellent young man ask her to "settle" with him as wife, at no salary at all, we advise her to heed that "call" as well.—N. Y. Tribune.
Well, now, Mr. Tribune, I don't. I have seen too many women, quite as capable as Miss Thompson of being self-supporting individuals, exhausting the last remnant of their strength in the family, and carefully saving every penny for a husband, who never doled out twenty-five cents, without asking the purpose for which it was needed, and reiterating the stale advice to spend it judiciously. I have seen such women, too proud to complain or remonstrate, turn away with a crimson cheek, and a moist eye, to dicker, and haggle, and contrive for this end, when the husband who gave this advice, had effectually blotted out the word self-denial from his own dictionary.
No, Mr. Tribune, I differ from you entirely. I advise no woman to refuse twelve hundred independent dollars a year for good, honest labor, to become such a serf as this.
And while we are on this subject, I would like to air the disgust with which I am nauseated, at the idea of any decent, intelligent, self-respecting, capable wife, ever being obliged to ask for that which she so laboriously earns, and which is just as much hers by right, as the money that her husband receives from his customers is his, instead of his next-door—dry-goods—neighbor's.
No man should thus humiliate a woman; no woman should permit herself to be thus humiliated. I am not now speaking of those foolish women, to whom a ribbon, or a necklace, is dearer than their husband's strength, life, or mercantile honor. I put such women entirely out of the question; only remarking, that if a man marries a fool in the hope of her being pliant, and easily ruled by him, he will find too late that he is mistaken. But that's his affair. Men always have, and always will keep on admiring their own perspicacity in reading female character, when not one in ten knows any more what his wife is spiritually made of, than what sheep furnished the coat for his own back.
Sary Gamp advised her comrade—nurse—to put the mutual bottle on the shelf, and "look the other way!"
That's just what I would advise the husbands of intelligent wives to do with regard to the money which they "allow" them, and which one would imagine was rightly theirs, by virtue of risking their lives every Friday to become the mother of twins; by virtue of, when lying faint and weak beside them, giving out orders for the comfort and well-being of the family down-stairs before they are able to get about; by virtue of never being able for one moment, day or night, sick or well, to drop, or to shake, off the responsibility which a good wife and mother must always feel, whether present or absent from her family.