"Yes," she resumed, "it is the misfortune of American women to entertain the idea that working for a living is dishonorable, and never to be done, unless one be driven to it by actual want. Why, even when positively suffering for want of food and fuel, I have known some to conceal or disguise the fact of their working for others by all sorts of artifice. To suffer in secret was genteel enough, but to work openly was disgraceful! A girl of my acquaintance was accidentally discovered to be selling her work at a public depository, and forthwith went to apologizing for doing so, as if she had been guilty of a crime, instead of having nobly striven to earn a living. The ridiculous pride of another seduced her into a falsehood: she declared that the work she had been selling for her own support was for the benefit of a church. This senseless pride exists in all classes. From the sham gentility it spreads to the daughters of workingmen. They are educated to consider work as a disgrace, and hence the idle lives so many of them lead. It is the strangest thing imaginable, that parents who rose from poverty to independence by the hardest kind of bodily labor should thus bring up their children. No such teaching was ever given to me. I can sit here at my machine, and look the finest lady of my acquaintance in the face. She may some day wish that she had been my fellow-apprentice."
"Where do our girls learn this notion of its being disgraceful for a woman to support herself?" I inquired.
"Learn it? It is taught them everywhere," she responded. "I sometimes think it is born with them. They drink it in with their mother's milk. They grow up with it as a daily lesson,—the lesson of avoiding work, and of considering it delicate and genteel and refined to say that they never cooked a meal, or swept the parlor, or took a stitch with the needle, actually priding themselves upon the amount of ignorance of useful things that they can exhibit. They make the grand mistake of assuming that sensible men will admire them for this display of folly. So they drag on until there occurs a prospect of marriage, when they suddenly wake up to a consciousness of their utter unfitness to become the head of a family. Why, I know at this moment a young lady of this description, who expects in a few months to become a wife, and whose cultivated ignorance of household duties is now the ridicule of her mother's cook and chambermaid. The prospect of marriage alarmed her for her total ignorance of domestic duties. She had never made her own bed, or dusted the furniture; and as to getting up a dinner, she knew even less than a squaw. She is now vainly seeking to acquire, within a few months, those branches of domestic knowledge which she has been a whole life neglecting and despising. She hated work: it was not genteel. Yet she is eagerly plunging into marriage with the first man who has offered himself, foolish enough, no doubt, to suppose that in her new position she will have even less to look after. Formerly, she did nothing: now, she expects to do even less.
"But what," continued Miss Effie, "is this poor creature to do, if death or poverty or vice should overtake her husband, and she should be thrown on her own slender resources? She is driven, to seek employment of some kind,—to attend in a shop, (for somehow that is considered rather more genteel than, most other occupations,) or to sew, or to fold books, or do something else. But she knows nothing of these several arts; and employers want skilled labor, not novices. She once boasted that she had never been obliged to work, and now she realizes how much such absurd boasting is worth. What then? Why, greater privation and suffering, because of her total unfitness for any station in which she might otherwise, obtain a living,—the extremity of this destitution being sometimes such that she is driven to the last shame to which female virtue can be made to submit."
"You say, Miss Effie, that these foolish lessons are taught by the mothers; but do the fathers inculcate no wiser ones? Have they nothing to say as to the proper training of their daughters?" I inquired, deeply interested in all she said. She knew a great deal more than I did. And why should she not know more? Was she not full two years older?
"The fathers do, in many cases, teach better lessons than these; but their good effects are too commonly neutralized by the persistent vanity and pride of the mothers. Even the fathers are too neglectful of the future welfare of their daughters. The sons are suitably cared for, because of the generally accepted understanding that every man must support himself. They are therefore trained to a profession, or to some useful branch of business. But the daughters are expected to be supported by their future husbands, hence are taught to wait and do nothing until the husbands come along. If these conveniences should offer within a reasonable time, and do well and prosper, the result is agreeable enough. But no sort of provision is made for the husband's not showing himself, or, if he does, for his subsequent loss by death, or for his turning out either unfortunate or a vagabond. Even the daughter's natural gifts, often very brilliant ones, are left uncultivated. If she has a talent for music, she receives only a superficial knowledge of the piano, instead of such an education as would qualify her to teach. No one expects her to work, it is true; but why not fit her for it, nevertheless? Another develops a talent for nursing, the rare and priceless qualification of being efficient in the sick-room. Why not cultivate this talent, and enlarge its value by the study of medicine? The parents are rich enough to give to these talents the fullest development. They do so with those of their sons; why refuse in the case of their daughters? Our sex renders us comparatively helpless, excluding us from many avenues to profitable employment where we should be at all times welcome, if the unaccountable pride of parents did not shut us out by refusing to have us so taught that we could enter them. The prejudice against female labor begins with parents; and the unreflecting vanity and rashness of youth give it a fatal hold on us. My parents have never entertained it. They have taught us that there is more to be proud of in being dependent solely on our own exertions than in living idle lives on either their means or those of any husband who may happen to have enough of his own."
"It is very odd, Miss Effie," I replied, "for you to entertain these opinions, they are so different from those of rich people; and it is very encouraging to me to hear you express them. But I should have expected nothing less noble from you, you are so good and generous."
"Why, Lizzie, what do you mean?" she exclaimed. "It is not goodness, but merely common sense. What brought me here to be a pupil in this school? Not the desire to do good to others, but to improve myself,—a little selfishness, after all."
"But," I inquired, "will this unnatural prejudice against the respectability of female labor ever die out? You know that I am to be a sewing-girl, not from choice, like you, but from necessity. You learn the use of a machine only as a prop to lean upon in a very remote contingency; I, to make it the staff for all my future life. You will continue to be a lady,—indeed, Miss Effie, you never can be anything else,—but I shall be only a sewing-girl. The prejudice will never attach to you, but it will always cling to me. How cruel it seems that the world should consider as ladies all who can afford to be idle, and all working-women as belonging to a lower class, because God compels them to labor for the life He has given them!"
"Dear Lizzie," she exclaimed, in tones so modulated to extreme softness as to show that her feelings had been deeply touched both by the matter and the manner of my inquiry, "you must banish all such thoughts from your mind. For His own wise purposes, God has placed you in a position in which you have a mission of some kind to fulfil. That position is an honorable one, because it requires you to labor, and it is none the less honorable because others are not required to do so. They also have their several missions, which we cannot understand. If it be regarded as mean for women to work, it is in the pride of man that so false a standard of respectability has been set up, not in the word or wisdom of God. To which shall we pay the most respect? The former, we know, brings constant bitterness; the latter, we know equally well, is unchangeably good. As it is our duty to submit to it here, so, through the Saviour, is it our only trust hereafter. It is not labor that degrades us, but temper, behavior, character. If all these be vicious, can mere money or exemption from labor make them respectable? You know it cannot.