Thinking over everything, then, considering carefully what the nurseries have been and what they may be, I do most seriously beg all my contemporaries to pause a very long time before they lay a ruthless hand on what was once as sacred as a shrine. No amount of decoration can embellish walls decorated with the hopes and joys of our youth, and one’s first playing at Motherhood; no other paper and paint give us the idea, or remind us as do the old papers and paint, of a thousand and one things no one can possibly want to forget; not even the miseries endured during serious illness, the anxieties turned into joy, or may be deepened into dreadful gloom by death itself, should be forgotten; aye, a thousand times should they be remembered if this be the case, and, though this is an impatient age when no one wants to think, and when death is treated so lightly that people are in society and deepest black at the same time, and when all are so impatient of the sorrow death brings with it, that ‘no one stays at home except the corpse,’ I trust I shall not number many of them among my readers, or indeed anyone who cannot and will not thankfully remember their past, and as they grow old, Darby and Joan together, will not spare time to look back gladly and happily to days which were better, perhaps, than the present days of feeble steps and darkened lights, but which are no less happy if Edwin and Angelina are still hand int hand and heart to heart, and have proved for themselves the absolute truth that where marriage is begun in love, continued in love, and ended in love, it can never be anything save success, and that anyone who calls it a failure must know absolutely nothing whatever about it. To such a couple as this, the nurseries must always be sacred places, and they will be as reluctant as I am to do away with them. I think, therefore, I may take it for granted that unless absolutely pressed for room we shall retain our nurseries, keeping them fresh and bright and nice in case we are ill, or in case we have our grandchildren to see us, or in case we have small visitors, who, being provided with suitable rooms, are nothing but a pleasure to us, when otherwise they might be nothing except a trouble and a nuisance.
CHAPTER VI.
THE GIRLS’ ROOM.
In writing about the girls’ room, I mean to consider a great deal more than decoration, though naturally that will not be neglected, for I am more and more convinced as years go by that something definite must be done in the way of providing for the women who flood the market and struggle—alas! that it should be so—in the open streets with men for their living, instead of contenting themselves with being the helpmeets of those with whom they wage this unseemly warfare. I have a very strong opinion that people should not bring into the world any more children than they can reasonably hope to equip in some measure for the fight. Boys can always make their way, women cannot; and though I do not agree with Mr. Besant, who declares that women hate work and do not wish ever to do anything, I do think that no woman should be obliged to work for mere food and clothes—at all events in the ranks above the lower middle classes; and that no woman’s constitution can stand the anxiety of providing her own sustenance, and at the same time doing work to procure this sustenance; for anxiety paralyses a woman, and the more she is obliged to take thought for the morrow the less able is she to ensure the morrow’s being provided for by her work. She should, therefore, never be placed in a position in which she is literally forced out into public strife, unless from her very earliest days she has been brought up among workers and taught that her future can be nothing but severe toil.
Can one speak too strongly of the wicked selfishness of people who bring ten or eleven children into the world, knowing that, were they to die to-morrow, the unhappy creatures would either starve, or do worse than starve in the workhouse or in one of those excellent and stony-hearted institutions where the child becomes a unit among hundreds of uniformed units, with never a pretty frock or sash among them, and never a chance of anything save work outside the walls and of an ultimate grave?—of the insensate and odious conduct of those parents who bring up their children to have every single thing they require, and then, when the girls do not marry and grow old at home, leave them penniless when totally unable to work, because they have never known they must—never have learned a single thing worth knowing, and that they must either starve genteelly or live on their overburdened relations, or add to the already fearful number of people who paint dreadful little tables and tambourines, sew infamously, or try the thousand and one ways of making a little money, which cheapen the market and bring institutions for the sale of work done by ladies into the profoundest contempt? I say that the State should interfere, and force a man to lay by for his daughters, at least so much that will keep them from such an end, or to give them such an education that at any moment they could work—could do the work that from their earliest days they should learn is waiting for them in the near future; and that if a man’s own sense will not teach him that he has no right to make helpless women suffer (as women must suffer who find themselves destitute in middle age), he should be treated like a criminal and punished by a jury, which should be composed of women who have suffered in their turn through their parents’ selfishness. Naturally this would be impossible, but I do wish men’s consciences could be awakened, and every successful man who is working hard, spending all he makes, and adding yearly to the frocked darlings in the nursery with scarcely an arrière pensée, would remember in the dead of the night, when one’s sins generally find one out, that the day of reckoning will come—that some day the children brought up in luxury and accustomed to think the world their own will be faded spinsters (for out of a large family some are sure to remain unmarried in these days), and that all the sweetness and light of the early life will be forgotten, and the father will be cursed when these faded, sorrowful women have to look forward to nothing but patient starvation or a corner grudged to them by their more successful relations, to whom they can never be anything save incumbrances; for these disappointed ones of the earth always resent prosperity in anyone else, and are apt to snarl and snap at those who dole them out the bread they so unwillingly take.
Why should not the State compel every working man with two or more daughters (after two the case should be legislated for) to pay in a part of his income to some fund for providing for the women? And by working men I mean those who have no capital except their brains—the artists, lawyers, clergymen, professional men of all kinds, who have nothing but themselves to depend upon. The man making and spending his 1,500l. a year should be forced to put by at least 200l. a year for the poor girls who come into the world without their own consent, and who are left absolutely destitute, save of a certain amount of distaste for anything save enjoyment, and an absolute dislike of doing anything save just what it pleases them to do at the moment; while at the same time a properly mapped-out education should be provided that will enable them to earn something in addition to the pittance the State would be keeping for them against a rainy day, but which would be something on which they could rely with certainty, and which would allow them to contemplate possible illness without the deadly sinking that fills the breast of any woman who has absolutely nothing but her own self to rely upon, and who knows she must starve or seek the cold comfort of the corner mentioned before if she cannot continue her labour.
I cannot put the case too strongly before the fathers and mothers who may read this book; for, after all, they must be their own State, and do their own legislating. They must not have enormous families that they cannot feed, clothe, or educate respectably; and they must so manage their affairs that the girls can rely on the 100l. a year, which is all I ask for—all that is absolutely necessary to keep a single woman in comfort, but not luxury; the luxuries must be earned or gone without. They must do this, I say, unless they wish to look down from whence they may go after death, and have their hearts lacerated and torn by the sight of the women they have left to starve and to curse those who have entailed so much misery on them. There surely would be some insurance company who would undertake to do for all what the Edinburgh Life Assurance Company, 11 King William Street, E.C., does for schoolmistresses who like to pay in a certain amount yearly—viz. pay them a pension at a certain age, or else a sum of money, whichever they prefer; and the parents could, as soon as they added another daughter to the household, begin providing for her. If they cannot do this, I maintain they are absolutely wicked in adding that little life to the overwhelming population already here.
There is no misery to be compared to the misery of a woman who, never having imagined her future can be aught but a sheltered one, finds herself at middle age absolutely destitute and at the mercy of her relations. She has no claim on anyone but her parents, and she knows this, and suffers infinitely. Therefore those parents must contemplate this: must understand that marriage does not come to the lot of everyone, and that, even if it does, the woman should not go penniless to her husband, but should have some small allowance to enable her to feel independent, and to add to her house, or her children’s pleasures, out of her own resources. Here, again, I mention the 100l. a year. Each girl in an upper middle-class family—the professional man’s family—cannot possibly cost any amount less than that; in the case, of course, of some, 50l. would be amply sufficient, and this sum should be allowed yearly as long as the father lived; after which, insurance money should be forthcoming that would insure something at all events, if not quite as much as they have been having.
If, however, it is absolutely impossible for a man to give his daughters anything—in which case they ought most distinctly never to have been born—he is bound to tell them so honestly from their earliest days, and he is equally bound to give them such an education that at any moment they can earn something, either as domestic servants—and, for my part, I would, and far rather, be a parlourmaid than a nursery governess—or as Board school teachers, designers, or as members of such of the home branches of toil as are open to women who cannot aspire to the higher education and the advantages of Girton and similar establishments.
Of course the subject of woman’s work is one on which volumes have been written, and volumes might still be compiled from the same source, and I could not naturally go into all the pros and cons of each occupation in this chapter, even if I knew them all, which I do not; but I do strongly beg my readers to dissuade their girls from competing with the men; they only lower prices, and, finally, prevent the men from marrying them by giving themselves one less chance of fulfilling the proper end of their sex—viz. to make a home in the fullest sense of the word. There is plenty for women to do without scratching and fighting with the men. If only they can realise that fact I shall not have written in vain.