The college woman can do much by way of discussion. The love of
study fostered by her college course shows itself after graduation
in the formation of clubs and societies for literary work. There
is scarcely a town that has not from one to a dozen, and there are
few college women who have not belonged to one or more. There is
a tendency, too, for college women to organize among themselves
select classes for the pursuit of favorite studies. All of these
clubs are valuable up to a certain point in giving help through
association, but in too many cases they seem examples of misdirected
effort. Their great numbers show that women have time and interest
to give to intellectual matters. Cannot college women divert a part
of this zeal from the discussion, for example, of the tulip mania
in Holland, into the channels of social and domestic science? No
company of political economists will ever work out for women “the
servant-girl problem,” or make possible for women to learn systematic
housekeeping. The college woman can do something--not everything--by
showing that these subjects deserve consideration; that their proper
place on the programme of the women’s club is not the closing
half-hour of informal conversation, but the post of honor as one
of the chief subjects of thought and study. But she need not wait
for the movements of the literary club; she can herself organize a
society whose sole purpose shall be the discussion of ways and means
to lessen the friction in the ordinary household between mistress
and maid, to remedy the scarcity of competent help, to relieve the
overburdened housewife, a society which shall attempt to understand
the “saleslady” situation, and to study the causes of the prejudice
that still clings to household service as well as the means of
removing it. She can help to show women that it is a matter of more
vital interest to themselves and to society as a whole to discuss
these topics than to seek after information that may not be worth the
acquisition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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