Domestic science is domestic sense, and domestic sense is common sense. Women should have the best and highest education they can obtain, and more especially if their lives are to be rounded out in the limited bounds of a four-room cottage; and while she may have caught the spirit of the times and become an expansionist by invading new territories, and may have been masquerading as the “eternal feminine” or the “new woman,” these little excursions and diversions only make her prize the more her old dominion, and the complexities of her nature find full play in the evolutions in the American home.
Statistics have already proved that the college-bred woman marries in the same proportion and infinitely better than the simpering sister who cares nothing for education. And she not only has as many children, but is manifestly better fitted to train them up to good citizenship. It is also evident that woman’s experience in the business world—while it makes her more cautious about marriage—renders her a more sympathetic, appreciative and sensible wife than the girl who waits at home for a husband, who, she has been taught to believe, must ever after be her body-slave. And although modern conditions make it possible for a woman to be self-supporting, and therefore not to marry unless she does it for that greatest reason in the world—love—the business of marrying and having children is going right on, age after age, generation after generation, long after you and I are forgotten. So there is no real cause for worry. Even the rankest pessimist may take heart if he will. And to all I commend the lamented Frank Norris’ definition of a “womanly woman,” a term we all love to use:
“To be womanly? It’s to be kind and well-bred and gentle mostly, and never to be bold or conspicuous; and to love one’s home and take care of it, and to love and believe in one’s husband, or parents, or children, or even one’s sister, above any one else in the world.”
XVI
ON GROWING OLD
It is often said that we have no old women nowadays, that modern conditions and modern dress keep us young until we drop into our graves. And when we look at women, marvelous women, indeed, like Julia Ward Howe and Susan B. Anthony, and Mary A. Livermore[1] and others whose activities and beneficences have kept them young, we are inclined to believe all this. But how is it with the most of us? Have we learned the true art of “growing old gracefully”? In this age of hurry-scurry let us give ourselves pause, once in awhile, long enough to remember that we owe ourselves something, and also those around us. I know a woman who broke down under the strain of club life a few years ago; she was one of those willing creatures who do everything anybody asks of them, and she finally had to withdraw from everything and remain in quiet seclusion for some years. I thought she had learned her lesson, but no. I met her again, almost breathless in her chase about the city on some mission or other.
“Why do you do it?” I asked. “You have broken down once under the strain of all this excitement. Why don’t you keep out of it now? Or, if you must be in the midst of things again, why not let others do the hard work?”
“Oh,” she replied, “I must do it. It has got to be done, and who else will do it?”
“My dear, good friend,” I asked her, “did you ever stop to ask yourself what would happen if you and I were to die?”
“Oh,” she exclaimed hurriedly, “nobody else will do my work; and it is very important—I really have to do it.”