Thanks to the discoveries of science and the openings of new markets, opportunities for work increase every day, but men and women are like children in a room full of toys—they all make a rush for those which tempt them most, and fight and die in order to obtain them. In the presence of all the careers open to them, they rush toward the most easy to follow or the most brilliant.
Agriculture is forsaken by men who prefer swaggering in towns with top-hats and frock-coats, instead of imitating in their own country the virile, valiant men of the new worlds who fell forests, reclaim the land, and are the advanced pioneers of civilization. They prefer being clerks or shop assistants.
Instead of taking a pickaxe, working a piece of land and making it their own, they prefer taking a pen and adding from 9 a.m. till 5 or 6 p.m. pounds and shillings which do not belong to them. The result is that they overcrowd the cities, and women can often obtain no work except on condition that they accept it for a smaller remuneration than would be offered to men, or, in other words, submit to being sweated.
Is it a manly occupation to be assistant in a draper's store, to be a hairdresser, copyist, to make women's dresses, hats, corsets? When I see in dry goods stores a great big man over six feet high measure ribbons or lace, instead of tilling the soil or doing any other kind of manly work, I want to say to him, 'Aren't you a man?'
Europe is full of men doing such work. I know America is not, although I have many times seen in the United States positions filled by men which would be filled equally well by women, and often better.
Many writers maintain that woman was intended to tread on a path of roses, to be tended, petted—I may have been myself guilty of holding views somewhat in this direction—but women are not all born in 'society'; millionaires are very few, and people whom you may call rich form after all but a very small minority in the whole community. The path of roses can only exist for the very few, and, besides, there are women whose aim in life is not to be petted. In fact, some absolutely object to being petted.
I tell you the time is coming, and coming at giant strides, when every child—boy or girl—will be made early to choose the kind of work he or she best feels ready to undertake to make a living. The time is coming when no poverty will stare in the face the woman who can and is willing to work.
Maybe the time is coming when a woman who bravely earns a good living will be considered not only most respectable—she is that now—but will be envied for her 'social standard' by the frivolous, useless women who, from morning to night, yawn and wonder how they could invent anything to make them spend an hour usefully for their good or the good of their fellow-creatures.