City and town life -- Fiction; Didactic fiction; Indiana -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction
"I mean all of us quit using eggs, dealers become frightened, eggs soar
higher. Economize on meat, packers buy less, meat goes up. All of us
discharge our help, army of unemployed swells by millions. It works two
ways and every friend I've got is economizing for herself, and with
every stroke for herself she is weakening her nation's financial
position and putting a bigger burden on the man she is trying to help."
"Well Leslie--" cried her father.
"The time has come for women to find out what it is all about, then put
their shoulders to the wheel of life and push. But before we gain
enough force to start with any momentum, women must get together and
decide what they want, what they are pushing for."
"Have you decided what you are pushing for?"
"Unalterably!" cried the girl.
"And what is it?" asked her father.
"My happiness! My joy in life!" she exclaimed.
"And exactly in what do you feel your happiness consists, Leslie?" he
asked.
"You and Douglas! My home and my men and what they imply!" she answered
instantly. "As I figure it, it's _homes_ that count, Daddy. If the
nation prospers, the birth rate of Americans has got to keep up, or
soon the immigrants will be in control everywhere, as they are in
places, right now. Births imply homes. Homes suggest men to support
them, women to control them. If the present unrest resolves itself into
a personal question, so far as the women are concerned at least, if you
are going to get to primal things, whether she realizes it or no, what
each woman really _wants_ she learns, as Nellie Minturn learned when
she took her naked soul into the swamp and showed it to her God--what
each woman _wants_ is her man, her cave, and her baby. If the world is
to prosper, _that_ is woman's work, why don't you men who are doing big
things _realize_ it, and do yourselves what women are going to be
forced from home to _do_, mighty soon now, if you don't!"
"Well Leslie!" cried Mr. Winton.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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