The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
While the distress was greatest in our city, some one advertised for two
men, to be employed in a millinery establishment, who were acquainted
with trimmings, and before the day had passed, sixty applicants had
presented themselves for the situation: the men had not become scarcer.
Another shop, which advertised for three girls, at a dollar and a half a
week, "intelligent, genteel girls," as the advertisement read, was so
overrun before night with applications for even that pitiful
compensation, that the proprietor lost his temper under the annoyance,
and drove many away with insult and abuse. If the war gives employment
to women in the fields, it affords an insufficient amount of it in the
cities.
There are more female beggars in our streets, with infants in their
arms, than ever before. The saloons and beer-shops, stripped of their
male bar-tenders, have adopted female substitutes, driven by necessity
to take up with an employment that always demoralizes a woman. The
surgical records of the army show, that, among the wounded brought into
the hospitals, many women have thus been discovered as soldiers. Others
have been detected and sent home, Many of these heroines declared that
they entered the army because they could find no other employment. The
incognito they had preserved was strongly confirmatory of their
truthfulness. These are some of the minor effects of the war upon our
sex. Many have been sadly demoralizing, while probably very few have
been in any way beneficial.
It is one of the curiosities of the study how to improve the condition
of women, that the most eccentric plans have originated with their own
sex. The deportation of girls from England to Australia and other
colonies, where the majority of settlers are single men, is patronized
and presided over by ladies. It has been so extensive as to confer the
utmost benefit on distant settlements, equalizing the disparity of the
sexes, promoting a higher civilization by a proper infusion of female
society, and providing homes for thousands of virtuous, but friendless
and dependent girls, who had found the utmost difficulty in obtaining
even a precarious living. The exodus of American girls from New England
to California, as teachers first and wives afterwards, which some years
ago took place, originated with an American lady, who personally
superintended the enterprise. All through the West there are families
whose mothers are of the same enterprising class, while the South is not
without its representatives. There is a tribe of writers whose study it
is to ridicule and sneer at these humane and truly noble efforts to make
dependent women comfortable; but happily their sarcasm has been
unavailing.
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