Working With the Working WomanParker, Cornelia Stratton
History
Working With the Working Woman
Parker, Cornelia Stratton
United States -- Social conditions; Women -- Employment -- United States; Working class -- United States
“Can't hardly sleep nights, got so much on my mind,” the seventy-sixer
would say.
One night she just got nervous fidgets something awful, worrying lest
her brother might not get to the Baptist chicken dinner after all,
when he'd gone and paid seventy-five cents for his ticket.
Sunday there was church to attend, the Catholics flourishing, the
Episcopalians next, four other denominations tottering this way and
that. I heard the Baptist minister preach that every word in the Bible
was inspired by God, ending with a plea for the family altar.
“Christian brethren, I'm a man who has seen both sides of life. I
could have gone one way. It is by the grace of God and the family
altar that I stand before you the man I am.”
There were thirty-one people in the congregation who heard his young
though quavering words, eight of them children, two the organist and
her husband, nine of the remainder women over sixty.
The Methodist, that morning, preached on the need of a revival at the
Falls, and Mr. Welsh, the electrician, whose wife was resting up in
Pennsylvania, thought he was right. Sunday baseball—that day our
bleachery team played the Keen Kutters—pained Mr. Welsh. The
Methodist minister before this one had been a thorn in the flesh of
his congregation. He frankly believed in amusements, disgraced them by
saying out loud at a union service that he favored Sunday baseball.
Another minister got up and “sure made a fool of him,” thank goodness.
Where was the renegade now? Called to a church in a large Middle West
city where they have no more sense than to pay him twice what he was
getting at the Falls.
That night I heard a visiting brother at the Methodist church plead
for support for foreign missions, that we might bring the light of the
ideal Christian civilization under which we live to the thirsty
savages in dark places. He poured his message to an audience of
twenty-one, ten of them gray-haired women, one a child.
All the ministers prayed long for Harding and were thankful he was a
child of God.
Three of us girls rowed up the lake one night and cooked our supper
and talked about intimate things. It was a lake worth traveling miles
to see. It was one block from the post office. Mamie had been to the
lake twice in all her life. It was good for canoeing, rowing, fishing,
swimming, and, best of all, just for the eyesight. Yet to the great
majority it did not exist.
The bleachery, through its Partnership Plan, ran a village club house
on Main Street. The younger boys, allowing only for school hours,
worked the piano player from morn till night. There was a gymnasium.
Suppers were given now and then. It was supposed to be for the use of
the girls certain days, but they took little or no advantage of it.
Otherwise, and mostly, when the weather permitted, up and down the
street folk sat on their front porches and rocked or went inside and
played the victrola.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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