Motherhood is a career for which especial talents are required. Very few women know how to bring up children properly. If you don’t believe it, look at the difference between our angelic offspring, and the little imps next door! It is as unreasonable to suppose that all women can be good mothers as it is to suppose that all women can sing in grand opera.
And yet, let us hug to our weary hearts, in our most discouraged moments, the great soul-satisfying truth that men, no matter what they say or write, think that we are smarter than they are. Otherwise, they would not expect of us so much more than they can possibly do themselves.
In every field of woman’s work outside the house, the same illustration applies. They also think that we possess greater physical strength. They chivalrously shield us from the exhausting effort of voting, but allow us to stand in the street-cars, wash dishes, push a baby carriage, and scrub the kitchen floor. Should we not be proud because they consider us so much stronger and wiser than they? Interruptions are fatal to their work, as the wife of even a business man will testify.
What would have become of Spencer’s Data of Ethics if, while he was writing it, he had two dressmakers in the house? Should we have had Hamlet, if at the completion of the first act Mr. Shakespeare had given birth to twins, when he had made clothes for only one?
The great charm of marriage, as of life itself, is its unexpectedness. The only way to test a man is to marry him. If you live, it’s a mushroom; if you die, it’s a toadstool!
Or, as another saying goes: “Happiness after marriage is like the soap in the bath-tub; you knew it was there when you got in.”
Man’s clothes are ugly, but the styles change gradually. A judge on the bench may try a case lasting two weeks, and his hat will not be hopelessly behind the times when it is finished. A man can stoop to pick up a fallen magazine without pausing to remember that his front steels are not so flexible this year as they were last.
He is not distressed by the fear that some other man may have a suit just like his, or that the neighbours will think it is his last year’s suit dyed.
We women fritter ourselves away upon a thousand unnecessary things. We waste our creative energies and our inspired moments upon pursuits so ephemeral that they are forgotten to-morrow. Our day’s work counts for nothing when tested by the standards of eternity. We are unjust, not only to ourselves, but to the men who strive for us, for civilisation must progress very slowly when half of us are dragged by pots and pans.
A house is a material fact, but a home is a fine spiritual essence which may pervade even the humblest abode. If love means harmony, why not try a little of it in the kitchen? Better a perfect salad than a poor poem; better a fine picture than an immaculate house.