Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
History
Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
I have seen a young American woman, one of a large family of daughters,
who, some years since, migrated from her meagre country home to one of
the northern cities, to gain her own support. She soon became an expert
seamstress, but finding the employment too confining for health and
comfort, she went boldly to work for others, to house-keep, cook, clean,
&c. After trying several places, she fell upon one where she was suited.
She has told me that she finds nothing degrading in her position; it is
not inconsistent with personal dignity, self-respect, and the respect of
others. She confers benefits and receives them. She has good health; her
presence itself is healthy and bracing; her character is unstain'd; she
has made herself understood, and preserves her independence, and has
been able to help her parents, and educate and get places for her
sisters; and her course of life is not without opportunities for mental
improvement, and of much quiet, uncosting happiness and love.
I have seen another woman who, from taste and necessity conjoin'd, has
gone into practical affairs, carries on a mechanical business, partly
works at it herself, dashes out more and more into real hardy life, is
not abash'd by the coarseness of the contact, knows how to be firm
and silent at the same time, holds her own with unvarying coolness and
decorum, and will compare, any day, with superior carpenters, farmers,
and even boatmen and drivers. For all that, she has not lost the charm
of the womanly nature, but preserves and bears it fully, though through
such rugged presentation.
Then there is the wife of a mechanic, mother of two children, a woman of
merely passable English education, but of fine wit, with all her
sex's grace and intuitions, who exhibits, indeed, such a noble female
personality, that I am fain to record it here. Never abnegating her own
proper independence, but always genially preserving it, and what
belongs to it--cooking, washing, child-nursing, house-tending--she
beams sunshine out of all these duties, and makes them illustrious.
Physiologically sweet and sound, loving work, practical, she yet knows
that there are intervals, however few, devoted to recreation, music,
leisure, hospitality--and affords such intervals. Whatever she does,
and wherever she is, that charm, that indescribable perfume of genuine
womanhood attends her, goes with her, exhales from her, which belongs of
right to all the sex, and is, or ought to be, the invariable atmosphere
and common aureola of old as well as young.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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