Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
If woman would be a student, a scientist, a lecturer, a
physician; if she would be a pioneer in a wilderness of scoffers
to make fair roads up which her sex might easily travel to equal
educational and legal rights, equal privileges and pay in fields
of labor, equal suffrage--she must divide her eager energies and
give the larger half to superior homekeeping, wifehood and
motherhood, in order that her new gospel shall be received with
any respect or acceptance. And probably no class of women have
been such sticklers for the cultivation of all woman's modest,
unassuming home duties as have been the great, ambitious teachers
on this suffrage platform....
But this will not be the training of the girl of the future. It
is not the sort of preparation to which the boy of the present is
urged. "Jack of all trades, good at none" is the old epithet
bestowed upon a man who thus diffuses his energies. You do not
expect a distinguished lawyer to clean his own clothes, a doctor
to groom his horse, a teacher to take care of the schoolhouse
furnace, a preacher to half-sole his shoes. This would be
illogical, and men are nothing if not logical. Yet a woman who
enters upon any line of achievement is invariably hampered, for
at least the early years, with the inbred desire to add to the
labor of her profession all the so-called feminine duties, which,
fulfilled to-day, are yet to be done to-morrow, which bring to
her neither comfort, gain nor reputation, and which by their
perpetual demand diminish her powers for a higher quality of
work....
Everywhere there is too much housekeeping. It is not economy of
time or money for every little family of moderate means to
undertake alone the expensive and wearing routine. The married
woman of the future will be set free by co-operative methods,
half the families on a square, perhaps, enjoying one luxurious,
well-appointed dining-room with expenses divided _pro rata_. In
many other ways housekeeping will be simplified. Homes have no
longer room for people--they are consecrated to things. Parlors
and bedrooms are full of the cheap and incongruous or expensive
and harmonious belongings of a junk shop. Plush gods hold the
fort. All the average house needs to make it a museum is the
sign, "Hands off." ...
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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