"Mediæval? Say that some other way, Sylvia."
"I mean that we're still crippled—we women—by the long years in which nothing was expected of us but to sit in ivy-mantled casements and work embroidery while our lords went out to fight, or thrummed the lute under our windows."
"Well, there was Joan of Arc: she delivered the goods."
"To be sure; she does rather light up her time, doesn't she?" laughed Sylvia.
"Sylvia, the day I first saw a woman hammer a typewriter in a man's office, I thought the end had come. It seemed, as the saying is, 'agin nater'; and I reckon it was. Nowadays these buildings downtown are full of women. At noontime Washington Street is crowded with girls who work in offices and shops. They don't get much pay for it either. Most of those girls would a lot rather work in an office or stand behind a counter than stay at home and help their mothers bake and scrub and wash and iron. These same girls used to do just that,—help their mothers,—coming downtown about once a month, or when there was a circus procession, and having for company some young engine-wiper who took them to church or to a Thanksgiving matinée and who probably married them some day. A girl who didn't marry took in sewing for the neighbors, and as like as not went to live with her married sister and looked after her babies. I've seen all these things change. Nowadays girls have got to have excitement. They like spending their days in the big buildings; the men in the offices jolly them, the men bookkeepers and clerks seem a lot nicer than the mechanics that live out in their neighborhood. When they ain't busy they loaf in the halls of the buildings flirting, or reading novels and talking to their bosses' callers. They don't have to soil their hands, and you can dress a girl up in a skirt and shirt-waist so she looks pretty decent for about two weeks of her wages. They don't care much about getting married unless they can strike some fellow with an automobile who can buy them better clothes than they can buy themselves. What they hanker for is a flat or boarding-house where they won't have any housekeeping to do. Housekeeping! Their notions of housekeeping don't go beyond boiling an egg on a gas range and opening up a sofa to sleep on. You're an educated woman, Sylvia; what's going to come of all this?"
"It isn't just the fault of the girls that they do this, is it? Near my school-house there are girls who stay at home with their mothers, and many of them are without any ambition of any kind. I'm a good deal for the girl who wants to strike out for herself. The household arts as you knew them in your youth can't be practised in the home any more on the income of the average man. Most women of the kind we're talking about wear ready-made clothes—not because they're lazy, but because the tailor-made suits which life in a city demands can't be made by any amateur sempstress. They're turned out by the carload in great factories from designs of experts. There's no bread to bake in the modern mechanic's home, for better bread and cake are made more cheaply in the modern bakeshop. Wasn't there really a good deal of nonsense about the pies that mother used to make—I wonder? There were perhaps in every community women who were natural cooks, but our Mary used to drive grandfather crazy with her saleratus biscuits and greasy doughnuts. A good cook in the old times was famous all over the community because the general level of cooking was so low. Women used to take great pride in their preservings and jellyings, but at the present prices of fruit and sugar a city woman would lose money making such things. It's largely because this work can't be done at home that girls such as we have at Elizabeth House have no sort of manual dexterity and have to earn a poor living doing something badly that they're not interested in or fitted for. Women have one terrible handicap in going out into the world to earn their living; it's the eternal romance that's in all of us," said Sylvia a little dreamily. "I don't believe any woman ever gets beyond that." It was a note she rarely struck and Mrs. Owen looked at her quickly. "I mean, the man who may be always waiting just around the corner."
"You mean every girl has that chance before her? Well, a happy marriage is a great thing—the greatest thing that can happen to a woman. My married life was a happy one—very happy; but it didn't last long. It was my misfortune to lose my husband and the little girl when I was still young. They think I'm hard—yes, a good many people do—because I've been making money. But I had to do something; I couldn't sit with my hands folded; and what I've done I've tried to do right. I hope you won't leave love and marriage out of your life, Sylvia. In this new condition of things that we've talked about there's no reason why a woman shouldn't work—do things, climb up high, and be a woman, too. He'll be a lucky man who gets you to stand by him and work for him and with him."
"Oh," sighed Sylvia, "there are so many things to do! I want to know so much and do so much!"
"You'll know them and do them; but I don't want you to have a one-sided life. Dear Sylvia," and Mrs. Owen bent toward the girl and touched her hand gently, "I don't want you to leave love out of your life."
There was an interval of silence and then Mrs. Owen opened a drawer and drew out a faded morocco case. "Here's a daguerreotype of my mother and me, when I was about four years old. Notice how cute I look in those pantalets—ever see those things before? Well, I've been thinking that I'm a kind of left-over from daguerreotype times, and you belong to the day of the kodak. I'm a dingy old shadow in a daguerreotype picture, in pantalets, cuddled up against my mother's hoopskirt. You, Sylvia, can take a suit-case and a kodak and travel alone to Siam; and you can teach in a college alongside of men and do any number of things my mother would have dropped dead to think about. And," she added quizzically, "it gives me heart failure myself sometimes, just thinking about it all. I can't make you throw your kodak away, and I wouldn't if I could, any more than I'd want you to sit up all night sewing clothes to wear to your school-teaching when you can buy better ones already made that have real style. It tickles me that some women have learned that it's weak-minded to massage and paraffine their wrinkles out—those things, Sylvia, strike me as downright immoral. What I've been wondering is whether I can do anything for the kind of girls we have at Elizabeth House beyond giving them a place to sleep, and I guess you've struck the idea with that word efficiency. No girl born to-day, particularly in a town like this, is going back to make her own soap out of grease and lye in her back yard. But she's got to learn to do something well or she'll starve or go to the bad; or if she doesn't have to work she'll fool her life away doing nothing. Now you poke a few holes in my ideas, Sylvia."