How to Observe: Morals and MannersMartineau, Harriet
Science
How to Observe: Morals and Manners
Martineau, Harriet
Manners and customs; Observation (Psychology); Social psychology -- Methodology
In America, women can earn a maintenance only by teaching, sewing,
employment in factories, keeping boarding-houses, and domestic service.
Some governesses are tolerably well paid,--comparing their earnings with
those of men. Employment in factories, and domestic service, are well
paid. Sewing is so wretched an occupation everywhere, that it is to be
hoped that machinery will soon supersede the use of human fingers in a
labour so unprofitable. In Boston, Massachusetts, a woman is paid
ninepence (sixpence English) for making a shirt.--In England, besides
these occupations, others are opening; and, what is of yet greater
consequence, the public mind is awakening to the necessity of enlarging
the sphere of female industry. Some of the inferior branches of the fine
arts have lately offered profitable employment to many women. The
commercial adversity to which the country has been exposed from time to
time, has been of service to the sex, by throwing hundreds and thousands
of them upon their own resources, and thus impelling them to urge claims
and show powers which are more respected every day.--In France this is
yet more conspicuously the case. There, women are shopkeepers,
merchants, professional accountants, editors of newspapers, and employed
in many other ways, unexampled elsewhere, but natural and respectable
enough on the spot.
Domestic morals are affected in two principal respects by these
differences. Where feminine occupations of a profitable nature are few,
and therefore overstocked, and therefore yielding a scanty maintenance
with difficulty, there is the strongest temptation to prefer luxury with
infamy to hardship with unrecognized honour. Hence arises much of the
corruption of cities,--less in the United States than in Europe, from
the prevalence of marriage,--but awful in extent everywhere. Where vice
is made to appear the interest of large classes of women, the observer
may be quite sure that domestic morals will be found impure. If he can
meet with any society where the objects of life are as various and as
freely open to women as to men, there he may be sure of finding the
greatest amount of domestic purity and peace; for, if women were not
helpless, men would find it far less easy to be vicious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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