The Champagne Standard

by Mrs. John Lane

Now we modern women are the descendants, more or less remote, of Rebecca, Guinevere, and Scheherazade, and our greatest resemblance to our fair ancestresses is that most of us have no money to spend, and those of us who have do not know how to spend it. Heredity is an excuse for being what might be called the stingy sex.

What would the world have been like had the purse-strings of time been held by women? More comfortable, possibly, but, probably, much less beautiful. It takes the great, splendid masculine spendthrifts in high places to glorify the world with treasures of priceless art. But it was an immortal maiden queen who inspired the greatest poet of all time, and as the production of poetry has always been cheap, so poetry was the splendid and inexpensive contribution to the glory of her reign made by a not too extravagant queen. It is the men who keep alive the extravagance, the beauty, and the ideality of life. But little credit to them who have always been able to put their hands in their trousers pockets and jingle the pennies.

Now time may mean money for men, but who ever heard that time meant money for women? No one, for the simple reason that it does not. Time and trouble are of so little value to the average woman that she squanders the one and is prodigal of the other in the most appalling way. And by the average woman, are meant all such who do not earn their own living, no matter how modestly; nor those who have some serious purpose in life, though without the object of earning; nor those who, as wives and mothers, may estimate their time as of the value of a general servant's. But apart from these the rank and file of women, consist of the aimless ones—and there are all sorts of aimless ones: rich and poor, high and low,—who potter vaguely through life, through shops, through streets, through joy, through sorrow; think feebly, talk feebly, and feel feebly, and finally fade away, and cease to exist. Now think of the majority of men frittering away life like that!

For ten years I lived opposite an able-bodied, middle-aged woman who sat in a rocking-chair by the window, crocheting from luncheon time until dark, four mortal hours, and this for ten long years! Then she moved or died, I don't remember which. And yet, after all, how many of us sit with our hands folded, doing nothing, thinking nothing, but just mentally and physically limp, weighed down by empty, useless time, which we try to kill with yawning desperation.

We are adepts of the idle industries because our time is of no earthly consequence. Think of the miles of lace we crochet, the impossible embroideries we make, the countless odds and ends we construct, of no earthly use except to catch dust. Think of the hours we waste at the piano which no one wants to hear and which we never learn to play; think of the awful pictures we make, which no one wants to see; the innumerable things we do that are so much better done by some one else. There may be male loafers, superabundant male loafers, but it seems to me as if their united numbers are as nothing compared to those worthy lady loafers who are perfectly respectable and perfectly idle. Why should a woman be permitted to loaf unreproved? Is idleness a feminine privilege?

The average man is trained to do some one thing as well as his intelligence and his industry will permit, but the average woman is trained to do nothing, at least nothing well—she cannot even keep house well. Her only object is to fill her aimless existence with something, anything, just to kill time.

In other days girls were carefully taught all domestic employments; they had to learn to keep house, to sew delicately, to cook, and, indeed, to do all those innumerable minor things which are of such vast importance. The modern girl is only taught not to be illiterate, that is all. With this negative quality as a dowry, a pretty face and nice clothes, and some empty chatter, she is bestowed on a perfectly innocent young man in search of a helpmate.

Perhaps for the first time she has a little money—I speak, of course, of the respectable middle-class woman, for the lowest and highest are of no account, meeting, as they often do, on the dead level of extravagance. Now what can we expect of a young middle-class wife who has some money for the first time? That she wastes it when it should be saved, and saves it when it should be spent. She buys cheap food, but she decorates her baby with that white plush cloak and that awful plush cap which her middle-class soul loves, and which bear witness to her prosperity. So her olive branch is carried about in plush while her husband has dismal retrospects of other days, hardly appreciated, when he took his luscious supper at a third-rate restaurant, which in remembrance seems a banquet fit for the gods.

To spend money in just proportion to one's income, however small, and not to spend too little—for there is such a thing!—requires a higher degree of intelligence than the aimless and the inexperienced possess, and the woman who earns money has a keener, juster knowledge of its value than the woman who gets it from the masculine head of the family under whose thumb she languishes. Also, as I have said before, she has to learn the value of time in the process of evolution from the harem to the ballot-box.

I have a dear friend, a woman with a massive intellect, who is, however, not above economy. She has been in search of an ideal greengrocer, and, after much tribulation of spirit and waste of precious hours that mean literally pounds to her, she found him in Shepherd's Bush. Lured by the bucolic name, tempted by a vision of sprouts at "tuppence" per pound instead of "tuppence ha'penny," she made a pilgrimage there, wasted a whole precious morning, and joined a phalanx of other mistaken female economists who stood on wet flags in Indian file, each waiting her turn to be served. My intelligent friend waited twenty-five minutes, until she was finally rescued by a serving young man, and had the rapture of saving sevenpence.