The woman of to-morrow

by Helen M. Winslow

“No, you don’t have to,” I answered. “If we were to die to-night the waters would close right over our heads, and after saying the conventional things about us, and passing suitable votes of condolence, somebody else would take up our particular line of work; these things we think nobody else could possibly do so well would get done just as quickly and possibly a great deal better than if you and I kept wearing ourselves out with them. You just try it and see.”

She thought a moment and said: “You are right. I know you are right, and I am going to stop now.”

But she didn’t. And I suppose she will keep on, strong in the belief that the work she is doing could not possibly be done if she did not wear herself out with it, until she lands in a sanitarium again with nervous prostration. I see her now and then, always daintily dressed, always refined and delicate-looking, but with a wild air, a restless, hunted look, when she might be so pretty and attractive.

Are we not all overdoing this matter of public work? I have done my share of burning the candle at both ends—yes, and in the middle, too—and have had to “give myself pause.” And I have come to see that there is nothing to be gained by hurrying through life without a moment’s stop to consider the real meaning of it. It is sometimes a difficult thing to be in the midst of much work without overdoing. There is scarcely time enough to accomplish half what one sets out to do, is there? Then do not map out so much, but try to do your “stint” more leisurely. What is to be gained by rushing through life as though a whirlwind were on our path?

We get to a point where we feel ourselves so necessary. We find so many things that need to be done, and we are sure nobody else can do them so well as we. And so we go on straining every nerve until the tension becomes too great, and we either go under—and discover that the world can and does move just as well without us—or we become so arbitrary that our usefulness is ended. And then we discover that we are only one of many just as capable as ourselves.

I know of no one who has given better advice on this subject than Caroline Bartlett Crane, who also “speaks whereof she knows.” In talking once on the subject of overwork, she said:

“If we will not be forewarned against overwork, let us at least be certain that what goes by that name is the real thing. Above all, dear ladies, let us not make our lives vain, vainglorious and in vain, by fancying that all busyness is business; by hugging a merely cluttered existence with ecstatic and debilitating self-consciousness, which is one of the deadliest banes to be guarded against as long as ‘woman’s work,’ ‘woman’s mission,’ ‘woman’s institutions’ and the ‘woman question’ agitate the air. Let us strive for more of that poise which experience and a stable nervous organization has given men; let us remember that there are absolutely no safeguards against fussing and worry; and let us question whether, if the deeps of nervous prostration could give up its half dead, it would not thereby appear that lack of system and synthesis in what we do, apprehensions for what we are about to do, regrets for what we did or did not do, omnivorous yearning for what we have no call to do, fretting distaste for what fate ordains we shall do, doing all the little unimportant things first under the delusion that then we will get unencumbered leisure for the things really worth while, doing things a hundred times in imagination before they are done, and doing them as many times again in retrospect, with carking concern for how the doer appears in the doing—let us ask ourselves if such travesties upon the dignity and simplicity, the singleness and wholesomeness of real work are not responsible for a very considerable share of the evils we commonly lay at the door of overwork; and are not such things unworthy of us?

“Let us strive to realize that we influence more by what we are than by what we do or what we say; and that what we say and do derives its quality from our quality. And quality is felt in toto, while of quantity a census and appraisal must needs be made.

“And let us remember, too, that when we rob a day of order, beauty, peace, we rob life of these things. How can we live our days one way and talk of living our lives another way? ‘As thy days so shall thy strength be.’ We must live so as to praise God all the days of our lives, if we would praise Him. Let us find some time in every day to lift unencumbered hands and heart, and exclaim with the psalmist, ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.’”