AFTER SCHOOL AT THE COLLEGE SETTLEMENT.
The mental attitude of the wage-earners toward their income is confusing and yet interesting. In reply to any question of wages, the maximum sum is always given. The question of idle time does not enter into computations of the year's possible income and necessary outlays. This holds good before as well as after marriage. Work may last for only forty weeks of the year, but the other twelve, even among intelligent wage-earners, sometimes are not counted in their relation to income. This perhaps explains much that is counted as thriftlessness. It is, in fact, a failure to apply arithmetic to daily life.
After all is said, no one who is familiar with the income of the wage-earning class can fail to see that the results obtained prove conclusively that the use of money in the well-regulated home is a fine art; that many working-men's wives could give post-graduate courses in the use of money to women who consider they have the right to teach them. Even waste and misuse are regulated by education and experience where there is even a modicum of intelligence. The second conclusion is that thrift under certain conditions is a vice that causes distinct deterioration of character. It should be combated as vigorously as thriftlessness. It can only be done by raising the standards of living; by creating other standards of value than money.
But everywhere among the wage-earning people the independence of the wife in money matters is apparent.
There are men who are niggardly and who hand out small sums daily, and never recognize that the wife has a right to anything beyond food and shelter, who grudgingly buy clothes when they must. These men are despised, spoken of with contempt as not being good fathers or husbands, and their wives are openly pitied. But the mass of working men place their wives in a perfectly independent position by making them the absolute disbursers of their incomes. The small shopkeepers, to all intents and purposes, treat their wives as partners. The wives work with them, sharing their knowledge, their responsibilities, and appear as joint owner in the bank account. The wife usually is the safe until the money goes to the bank account.
When a wife is a good financial manager, she is the head of the house, whose reign is never questioned. "Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her," though the Book of Proverbs may be unknown. This financial independence of the wives of working men develops the spirit of independence and aggressiveness that so often disturbs and upsets the plans of the woman who would do them good, and is the cause of the charge of ingratitude that is often made against the women of the tenement-house regions. It is scarcely natural to develop gratitude for efforts made in the wrong direction. Poverty has its degrees, as has wealth. There are families living in tenements whose conditions represent wealth when contrasted with that of their neighbors. One fact remains. Both women do not need the same opportunities, the same help. The student of the management of wages in a tenement-house home rapidly acquires a spirit of humility. While everywhere there is waste, there are times when money seems to buy double the amount that the student thought possible. With the wage-earners' families, as with all others, the income buys that which is most desired by those spending it. Choice is the master of decision, even in necessities. What is needed in the wage-earner's family is that education, that opportunity for development that will make a choice of the highest things, those that will mean a body and mind so nourished and cared for that moral resistance is the available capital of every member of the family in time of need.