Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
The girl of the future will select her own avocation and take her
own training for it. If she be a houseworker, and many will
prefer to be, she will be so valuable in that line as to command
much respect and good wages. If she be an architect, a jeweler,
an electrical engineer, she will not rob a cook by mutilating a
dinner, or a dressmaker by amateur cutting and sewing, or a
milliner by creating her own bonnet. The house helper will not be
incompetent, because the development and training of woman for
her best and truest work will have extended to her also, and she
will do housework because she loves it and is better adapted to
it than to any other employment. She will preside in the kitchen
with skill and science.
The service girl of the future will be paid perhaps double or
treble her present wages, with wholesome food, a cheerful room,
an opportunity to see an occasional cousin and some leisure for
recreation. At present this would be ruinous, and why? Because
too frequently the family has but one producer. The wife, herself
a consumer, produces more consumers. Daughters grow up around a
man like lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they
spin. Every member of every family in the future will be a
producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will
have the right of exemption will be the mother, for a child can
hardly be born with cheerful views of living whose mother's life
has been, for its sake, a double burden. From this root spring
melancholy, insanity, suicide. The production of human souls is
the highest production of all, the one which requires most
preparation, truest worth, gravest care and holiest consecration.
If the girl of the future recognizes this truth, she will have
made an advance indeed. But apart from the mother every member of
the family should be a material producer; and then there will be
means sufficient for the producer in the kitchen to get such
remuneration for her skill as will eliminate the incompetent,
shirking, migratory creature of today....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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