Josiah Allen on the Woman QuestionHolley, Marietta
General
Josiah Allen on the Woman Question
Holley, Marietta
Feminism -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Sex role -- Fiction; Women's rights -- Fiction
Sez she, "So many avenues of pleasant lucrative employment are open
now to wimmen, and the epithet, Old Maid, is not as of old a badge of
contumely, that wimmen won't take a ticket for the lottery of marriage,
for but one reason, the only reason that ever made marriage honorable
and respectable, and that is true love, not a light mental fancy,
nor a short lived physical attraction, but the love that in spite of
earthly shadows illuminates hovel and palace, and makes both on 'em
the ante-room of Paradise. The love that upholds, inspires, overlooks
faults, is constant in sun and shade, and lasts down to the dark
valley, and throws its light acrost it into the very Land of Light."
Them words sounded good to me, they sounded some like what I had writ
more formerly on the subject, and I jined in fervently. "Yes, indeed,
and why can't females settle down in matrimony and stay to home with
their famblys, and take care of their children?" and I quoted a few
words from the dear chapter I had writ first. "There woman is a queen,
the poorest female in the slummiest slum is a monark in that sacred
place."
"Yes," sez Samantha, "sometimes a good man makes a wife supremely
happy. But too often nowdays a bright healthy young woman finds in the
life she has pictured as the dooryard of Eden a worse serpent than Eve
found there, a loathsome souvenir of her husband's old gay life which
destroys her own health and happiness, and which she has to hand down
to her children's children, makin' 'em invalids and idiots.
"The poor workin' mother you speak on if she is well enough can stay at
home if she has a home to stay in, and doesn't have to labor outside to
sustain it. She can breathe the filthy tenement air, be frozen by its
winter, choked by its summer atmosphere, she can guide and guard the
youthful steps of her children as far as the doorstep and then she must
drop the helpless hand, and if she is inteligent and loving hearted she
can wet her pillow with vain tears thinking how her pretty innocent
young girl has got to pass vile saloons full of evil men on her way
to and from store and factory. The factory filled with gant childish
forms, with all the care-free happiness of childhood ground from their
faces by the brutal hand of Incessant Toil. Unguarded machinery on
every side that one false careless move of her girl may maim or kill.
Her pretty girl alone strugglin' with ontold dangers. Youth's wild
blood urging her to indiscreet acts, Wolves of Prey on one side, Grim
Want on the other. If the mother has a mother's heart, her body may be
at home where she is so eloquently urged to be, but her heart will be
abroad, in the greater home wimmen want to make safer; the home where
her children spend their days. It will be hantin' the factory, the
grog shop, the vile picture show, the white slaver's abode, watchin',
waitin', for what may happen, what has happened so often to other
mothers' children."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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