Part 12

Of course I know, when I urge you girls to fit yourselves to learn some gainful occupation by which you can support yourselves, that you smile and say to yourselves that you do not expect to earn your own living long. You are going to marry and follow woman’s oldest profession, that of wife and mother. That is as may be. In the past the great majority of women have been able to count, with a fair degree of safety, on being able to marry, but it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the girl of to-day will get a husband.

There has been a most decided decline and falloff in matrimony and home life, and it is foolish for girls to think that they have the same chance of marrying that their mothers and grandmothers had. Now, for the girl who is sitting around and waiting for some man to come along and marry her, it is a catastrophe to be passed by. She becomes the sour and disgruntled old maid, eating the bitter bread of dependence, the fringe on some family that doesn’t want her. Or else she has to take any sort of a poor stick of a man as a prop to lean upon.

Far different is it with the girl who has fitted herself for some definite work and is competently doing it. She has a profession in which she is vitally interested. She has an occupation which fills her time. She makes enough money to indulge herself in the luxuries that women love, and so marriage becomes to her merely an incident of life, not the whole thing. If the right man comes along, well and good. If not, also well and good. She has her pleasant, independent, interesting life as a girl bachelor. The world to her is full of such a number of things besides wedding rings.

Furthermore, girls, even if you do marry, you may still need to keep on being a bread-winner instead of becoming a breadmaker. The high cost of living has to be reckoned with, and not every man under present economic conditions is able to support a family alone and unaided. In the past the good wife helped her husband by doing the housework, and turning, and mending, and pinching the pennies. In the future the good wife will doubtless help her husband by keeping on with her well-paid job and assisting in making the money to give her family the living conditions, and her children the education that the man alone could not afford to give them. So, except among the rich, marriage is going to mean a retirement from business no more for women than it is for men.

Another reason why I urge you, girls, to learn some gainful occupation and perfect yourself in it is because it will do more than any other one thing to make you happy. It will keep you from being bored, and boredom is at the root of all fretful discontent. People who are busy, who have a definite object in view and are striving to attain it, find the day all too short, are always content and cheerful. And talk about thrills! You never really know one until you hold your first pay envelope in your hand and it surges over you that the money in it represents your own work that was good enough for somebody to pay for.

Being able to make your own living sets you free. Economic independence is the only independence in the world. As long as you must look to another for your food and clothes you are a slave to that person. You must obey him. You must defer to him. You must bend your will to his.

But when you can stand on your own feet you can snap your fingers in the face of the world and tell it where it gets off. You do not have to endure tyrannical parents. You do not have to put up with a cruel husband. You can support yourself, and you are free.

So I urge you, girls, never to rest until you have fitted yourselves to earn your own bread, and butter, and cake. And remember, the better your work the more you earn. It is efficiency that pulls down the big pay envelope.

It doesn’t make a bit of difference what you do, my dear. It is the way you do it that counts. You can make a success or a failure of any occupation under the sun. The fat pay envelope is the reward of superexcellent work. It isn’t the perquisite of any particular trade or profession.

We do best those things that we enjoy doing, and so I urge you to sit down quietly and study yourself and try to find out what nature intended you to be.

Probably you have no very decided talent, no cosmic urge that makes you feel that you must paint, or sing, or dance, or cook, or keep books, or else life will be dust and ashes in your mouth.

But you are sure to find that there is something that you like to do better than other things. It may be trimming hats. It may be messing around the kitchen. It may be that you are quick at figures and can always remember dates. It may be that you write a good hand, or always got a hundred in spelling at school.

There is always some one thing for which you have a turn, as the phrase goes, and that points the road for you to follow.

If you have no mechanical skill, don’t do anything that requires deftness of the hands. If you can’t spell, don’t waste any time trying to be a stenographer. If you cannot add up a column of figures three times without getting four different results, pass up bookkeeping. You will never make a success of anything for which you have no aptitude. You will always hate it and be bored by it.

The successful people are those who love their work so well that it is a sheer joy to do it; who never count the labor that they put into it, and who are so interested in it that it is perpetually in their thoughts.

Therefore choose the thing that you like to do and get fun out of doing, and don’t just blunder into taking the first job that presents itself or make the mistake of taking up some profession to which you are not called because some other girls are doing so or because it seems to you romantic or elegant.

Of course, in these days of the emancipation of women, every road is as free for a girl to follow as it is to a boy, but you will find that those women make the greatest successes who stick to purely feminine lines. There is just as much need for woman’s work in the world as there is for man’s, and when it is equally well done it is equally well paid. In some occupations it is a little better paid because there are fewer women experts than there are men.

There are very few women who have risen from the ranks to become presidents of banks, or trust magnates, or big manufacturers; but every community has in it women who have made tidy fortunes as dressmakers, or milliners, or boarding-house keepers.

Teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing; home-making in all its ramifications and branches; buying and selling pretty things; the building and furnishing of houses; the healing of the sick, all of these are strictly within the feminine province, and you will not make a mistake if you choose whichever one of these occupations appeals to your fancy. Women have been unconsciously trained along these lines for centuries and have for them an inherited aptitude. It takes the average man years of profound study to acquire the sense of color that a girl baby is born with. And any dub of a woman can give an architect points on lights, and kitchen sinks, and the heights of shelves and about closets. So stick to your last and capitalize your feminine intuitions instead of trying to invade masculine fields. Even women writers and women artists are more successful when their work is most womanly. And great actresses will be remembered for the feminine rôles they portrayed, not for the masculine parts they essayed and in which they were grotesque failures.

Having selected your occupation, perfect yourself in it. Master its technique. Don’t be satisfied to be an also-ran. Make of yourself a blue-ribbon winner. You will have to work longer hours and harder doing ill-paid work than you will doing highly paid work. The difference between a $15 cook and a $10,000 chef is just a matter of skill. One woman gets $5 for a hat, another $50. It is just the touch to a bow or ribbon or a twist to a bit of velvet that does it. Whether you get a thin pay envelope or a thick one as a stenographer, or bookkeeper, or clerk, depends upon how expert you are. So make up your mind that you are not going to work for a pittance, and go after the big salary by making yourself worth it. Employers are just pining to pay the price of good work.

Then tackle your job as if you meant to make a life-work of it. Don’t look upon it as a bridge of sighs that you have to travel over with reluctant feet from the schoolroom to the altar. Think of it as something you are going to do as long as you live; something that is going to be your friend, and comforter, and stay, and to which you will give the best that is in you. That won’t keep you from marrying if the right man comes along, and it will be a powerful stay if no man comes. Not many girls do this. They regard their work as only a makeshift until they can marry, and so they never take the trouble to learn how to do it properly. That is why they fail, and why they are ill-paid. Don’t be one of them. Choose a congenial occupation and put your heart and your back into it, and your success will be assured.

XIII

TRIAL DIVORCE

I believe the one thing that would do more than anything else to stop the utter wrecking of homes and the half-orphaning of children, in the case of unhappy marriages, would be the institution of trial divorce and the refusal of the courts to make any divorce decree absolute under two years. For so many husbands and wives think they have ceased to love each other, when they are only too much fed up with each other’s society. So many persons think they long for freedom, when they only need a rest. So many persons think divorce a panacea for every ill, who find out, when they try it, that the remedy is worse than the disease.

The great majority of men and women are romantically in love when they get married, and they expect to live ever afterward in a state of storybook bliss. Then comes the inevitable disillusionment, when they find out that they have married ordinary human beings instead of angels and motion-picture heroes. Comes the clash of personalities. The fight of the selfish to get the best for one’s self. The rebellion at the sacrifices that matrimony demands.

The woman begins to nag. The man gets grouchy and surly. Each magnifies every fault of the other. Resentment and disappointment blot out every memory of love and tenderness, of goodness and nobility. They come to the point where they feel that they cannot stand each other a minute longer and rush off to the divorce courts.

But the ink is hardly dry on their decrees before they begin to view each other in a kindlier light. The man, living in his club or at a boarding house, wandering from restaurant to restaurant, hating the cooking and getting his digestion upset, begins to think of his ex-wife’s good points. How true and loyal and devoted she was! What a good cook and housekeeper! And he wonders that he didn’t have enough sense of humor to laugh at her nagging instead of letting it get on his nerves.

The woman, trying to make a home for herself with less money than she is accustomed to, bewildered and terrified at having to face life for herself, with no man to depend on, begins to recall her husband’s virtues instead of his faults, and to reflect that it is better to have even a husband who is short on compliments, and shy on attentions, and long on knocks, than to have no husband at all.