Violets and Other Tales

								

and the lighter amusements of social affairs among her associates, are
open to her, and there she can go, see, and be seen, admire and be
admired, enjoy and be enjoyed, without a single harrowing thought of the
baby's milk or the husband's coffee.
Her earnings are her own, indisputably, unreservedly, undividedly. She
knows to a certainty just how much she can spend, how well she can
dress, how far her earnings will go. If there is a dress, a book, a bit
of music, a bunch of flowers, or a bit of furniture that she wants, she
can get it, and there is no need of asking anyone's advice, or gently
hinting to John that Mrs. So and So has a lovely new hat, and there is
one ever so much prettier and cheaper down at Thus & Co.'s. To an
independent spirit there is a certain sense of humiliation and wounded
pride in asking for money, be it five cents or five hundred dollars. The
working woman knows no such pang; she has but to question her account
and all is over. In the summer she takes her savings of the winter,
packs her trunk and takes a trip more or less extensive, and there is
none to say her nay,--nothing to bother her save the accumulation of her
own baggage. There is an independent, happy, free-and-easy swing about
the motion of her life. Her mind is constantly being broadened by
contact with the world in its working clothes; in her leisure moments by
the better thoughts of dead and living men which she meets in her
applications to books and periodicals; in her vacations, by her studies
of nature, or it may be other communities than her own. The freedom
which she enjoys she does not trespass upon, for if she did not learn at
school she has acquired since habits of strong self-reliance,
self-support, earnest thinking, deep discriminations, and firmly
believes that the most perfect liberty is that state in which humanity
conforms itself to and obeys strictly, without deviation, those laws
which are best fitted for their mutual self-advancement.
And so your independent working woman of to day comes as near being
ideal in her equable self poise as can be imagined. So why should she
hasten to give this liberty up in exchange for a serfdom, sweet
sometimes, it is true, but which too often becomes galling and
unendurable.
It is not marriage that I decry, for I don't think any really sane
person would do this, but it is this wholesale marrying of girls in
their teens, this rushing into an unknown plane of life to avoid work.
Avoid work! What housewife dares call a moment her own?
Marriages might be made in Heaven, but too often they are consummated
right here on earth, based on a desire to possess the physical
attractions of the woman by the man, pretty much as a child desires a
toy, and an innate love of man, a wild desire not to be ridiculed by the
foolish as an "old maid," and a certain delicate shrinking from the work
of the world--laziness is a good name for it--by the woman. The