The Iola register. [volume] (Iola, Allen County, Kansas) 1875-1902, 1881-08-26
The Coming Woman and Her Money.
Making.

Inc Society papers ouu SOMo OIuolS
are commenting on the circumstance
that the daughter of q New York clergy
man of q family with wealth and posi-
ton and all its women schooled to hab-
itual idleness, has opened boarding
house for the season on Lake George,
filled it with boarders and made sue
cess of the enterprise. To busy people,
who have always rather wondered
how an idle woman could endure her
idleness, there is nothing very astonish.
ing in this except the fact that the en-.
terprise has been successful commercial
ly; but the Lake George experiment
scores another advance in the growing
sentiment that q woman ought to do
something, and is as much called on to
earn money and make living place for
herself as man.
Idleness in a man over twenty or thir-
ty, American public opinion has pretty
well settled, is disgraceful; but the
average sentiment of the community has
generally held that a woman ought not
to ply any gainful calling, save keeping
house for kin or husband, unless ne
cessity is laid upon her. An idle life for
a woman, with money of her own or
some one to support her, has been
treated as natural and inevitable, and
the corollary of this belief has been the
feeling that it was a disgrace, more or
less deep, for a woman with home to
turn her hand to gain. Farmers wives
and daughters have always been wiser;
but in cities and villages to do work for
pay has been avoided by many woman
as if it were crime, and concealed as if
it were dishonor. The absurd conven-
ton which shuts off members of an ar
istocratic class abroad from work and
trade, blighting life and character, has
survived here only for women, and
Swallowed their lives with enforced idle
ness.
Fortunately the cloud is lifting, and
items like that just quoted in society
papers are proof of it. There are other
like facts of more importance in the
scores of art associations which make
money by selling the work of their own
members or the members of other asso-
Citations, in cooking exchanges, out of
which every woman with skill and
kitchen makes all the money she can,
and in the steady and increasing prac-
tice of trades and professions by women.
Steps in the last direction are often ia
ken of necessity; but nine-tenths of the
work in cooking exchange is done by
women who twenty-five years ago would
have hesitated long before selling the
work of their hands. The change is a
desirable one. An idle woman is as de-
plorable as an idle man. For we'll
educated young woman to waste her
days doing odd bits of homework which
need no education, as scores of young
women do, is as much a waste as it
would be for their well-educated BROTH
ers to spend their time doing chores
about the barn. The time is coming,
and is altogether nearer than parents
imagine, when young woman of
twenty-five, with brains, health and an
education, will consider her life as much
wasted with no work to do as any man,
and the women who act upon this belief
will be spared the mental rust or the
unhappy marriages which idleness in
flicts on so many admirable women.
Marriage will come to such women, as it
comes to men, as an incident in life, not
as its one chance, and such women will
find, as men do, that there is no happi-
ness like the happiness of constant
work; no misery like the misery of idle
ness, and society will gain by q vast
amount of brain, nerve force and muscle
now hopelessly fretting itself away on
the empty life of busily idle women
Springfield (Mass.) Republican.