But this means work, persistent, intelligent work. First of all, in the matter of self-education, and, secondly, in that of carrying on an aggressive campaign for the education of our own sex, and, if possible, of the other sex as well.
I am beginning to get deeply concerned, not about the lack of adequate opportunities for service on the part of women, but about our failure, so far, to measure up to the incomparable opportunities which are already ours. If there is any subject in which we, as women, ought to be intensely and intelligently interested, it is in this subject of education—not in the academic sense alone, but in the broader view of character-building—upon a proper understanding and handling of which depends the very future of civilization.
This, I take it, is truly Conservation work and when thoroughly grasped, will as truly mark milestones of progress in our lifetime, as those we may leave behind in material form.
The third of these brilliant avenues of possible social service, which open before us in beautiful vistas of alluring opportunity, is one which is involved in the purchasing power of women. As a general thing, men are the wage-earners and women are the wage-spenders for the home. Nearly all of the household expenditures of the family are made by the wives and mothers of the race. It is a sad commentary upon our business ability, and our rudimentary sense of social solidarity, that so few of us have any realizing sense of the potential power over the business and industrial world, which is inherent in this our position as buyer, or spender, for the family.
I call your attention to the fact that if the women of America would pool their purchasing power, and, resisting all the blandishments of the “bargain counter” and the “sale”—based on sweat-shop labor—would demand pure goods, made and sold under sanitary and salutary conditions—more could be accomplished for the moral and material uplift of the factory-worker and the saleswoman than by the enactment of a volume of restrictive statute, the breaking of which we thoughtlessly connive at, and practically become a party to, in our mad scramble for cheapness at any cost of human degradation and wreckage.
A superb organization, known as the “Consumers’ League,” has come into being, for the express purpose of enabling men, as well as women, to utilize their purchasing power in the great work of raising the standards of the business and industrial worlds, both as to the purity of the product offered to the public and the fairness of the treatment accorded to employes.
Of all the splendid “movements” and “causes” which today invite our co-operation and support, this is one of many, which seem to me to fall naturally within our province, as wives, mothers and home-makers. It is the principle underlying this great crusade of the “Consumers’ League” and like organizations which appeal to us. As a matter of fact, this is a work for the betterment of women in the business and industrial worlds, and as a consequence improvement in the home, which we women cannot avoid doing, without definitely and publicly shirking our heavy economic and moral responsibilities, as family purveyors and budget makers. Or, in other words, as domestic chancellors of the exchequer.
Far be it from me to say that the members of our sex may not some day decide to undertake, in addition to their other duties, the heavy responsibilities of the voter and political worker. Perhaps it may transpire, that upon our planet the true super-man is woman, and that she is entirely capable of doing the man’s work as well as her own. But, in the interim, until this fact has been satisfactorily demonstrated, let us devote ourselves whole-heartedly to what is more particularly woman’s work; to those delicate and difficult tasks for which man’s clumsy fingers and prosaic processes of reasoning are unfitted and wholly inadequate. And, above all, let us be quite sure that we do our especial work—at least as well as he does his—before we insist upon taking a hand in his activities and improving upon his methods of performing his highly useful, if somewhat less exalted, functions.
It may seem in these lines of work—somewhat unique—and hitherto undefined as belonging to the realm of Conservation, that I am departing a long way from the usual addresses on that subject. But I ask your careful consideration of this subconscious knowledge of every woman’s breast, that at least every issue and question I have referred to has its foundation, in the broadest and deepest sense, in the life and action which center in the home.
In the ways which I have so hastily outlined and in other, and perhaps better ways, that may not yet have occurred to us, our great work of Conservation is destined to continue its triumphal march upward and on—in the name of the great principles upon which it is founded, and in the name of patriots, living and dead, who have labored and sacrificed to make of this, our fatherland, what, under God, it is, has been, and ever must remain—the greatest nation on earth. Because, beneath the ample folds of its unconquered flag, there live more free, happy and God-fearing people than upon any other part of the habitable globe. (Applause.)