The Living Present

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

I

The world is willing and eager to buy what it wants. If you have goods to sell you soon find your place at the counter, unless owing to some fault of character your fellow barterers and their patrons will have none of you. Of course there is always the meanest of all passions, jealousy, waiting to thwart you at every turn, but no woman with a modicum of any one of those wares the world wants and must have need fear any enemy but her own loss of courage.

The pity is that so many women with no particular gift and only minor energies are thrust into the economic world without either natural or deliberate equipment. All that saves them in nine cases out of ten is conserved energies, and if they are thrust out too young they are doubly at a disadvantage.

A good deal has been written about the fresh enthusiasm of the young worker, as contrasted with the slackened energies and disillusioned viewpoint of middle life. But I think most honest employers will testify that a young girl worker's enthusiasm is for closing time, and her dreams are not so much of the higher skilfulness as of the inevitable man. Nature is inexorable. She means that the young things shall reproduce. If they will not or cannot that is not her fault; she is always there with the urge. Even when girls think they sell themselves for the adornments so dear to youth they are merely the victims of the race, driven toward the goal by devious ways. Nature, of course, when she fashioned the world reckoned without science. I sometimes suspect her of being of German origin, for so methodical and mechanical is her kultur that she will go on repeating "two and two make four" until the final cataclysm.

I think that American women are beginning to realize that American men are played out at forty-five; or fifty, at the most. There are exceptions, of course, but with the vast majority the strain is too great and the rewards are too small. They cannot retire in time. I have a friend who, after a brilliant and active career, has withdrawn to the communion of nature and become a philosopher. He insists that all men should be retired by law at forty-five and condemned to spend the rest of their days tilling the soil gratis for women and the rising generation. The outdoor life would restore a measure of their dissipated vitality and prolong their lives.

This may come to pass in time: stranger things have happened. But, as I remarked before, it is the present we have to consider. It seems to me it would be a good idea if every woman who is both protected and untrained but whose husband is approaching forty should, if not financially independent, begin seriously to think of fitting herself for self-support. The time to prepare for possible disaster is not after the torpedo has struck the ship.

A thousand avenues are open to women, and fresh ones open yearly. She can prepare secretly, or try her hand at first one and then another (if she begins by being indeterminate) of such congenial occupations as are open to women of her class, beyond cooking, teaching, clerking. Those engaged in reforms, economic improvements, church work, and above all, to-day, war relief work, should not be long discovering their natural bent as well as its marketable value, and the particular rung of the ladder upon which to start.

Many women whose energies have long been absorbed by the home are capable of flying leaps. These women still in their thirties, far from neglecting their children when looking beyond the home, are merely ensuring their proper nourishment and education.

Why do not some of the public spirited women, whose own fortunes are secure, form bureaus where all sorts of women, apprehensive of the future, may be examined, advised, steered on their way? In this they would merely be taking a leaf from the present volume of French history its women are writing. It is the women of independent means over there who have devised so many methods by which widows and girls and older spinsters tossed about in the breakers of war may support themselves and those dependent upon them. There is Mlle. Thompson's École Feminine, for instance, and Madame Goujon's hundred and one practical schemes which I will not reiterate here.

Women of the industrial class in the United States need new laws, but little advice how to support themselves. They fall into their natural place almost automatically, for they are the creatures of circumstances, which are set in motion early enough to determine their fate. If they do hesitate their minds are quickly made up for them by either their parents or their social unit. The great problem to-day is for the women of education, fastidiousness, a certain degree of ease, threatened with a loss of that male support upon which ancient custom bred them to rely. Their children will be specialized; they will see to that. But their own problem is acute and it behooves trained and successful women to take it up, unless the war lasts so long that every woman will find her place as inevitably as the working girl.