The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1902-12-20
MILE. DE LUssAN's MISTAKE.

Mile. zelie de Lussan, who sings at
the Auditorium next week. said in an
interview in a Chicago newspaper last
week: 1.-The stage is no place for a
married woman. The home is her proper
place. and it is in the home that most
women find their greatest happiness as
well as their greatest usefulness. A
career on the stage is essentially antag-
onistic to the natural domesticity of the
normal womanly woman
Let's see. Haven't we heard some
thing like that before? Unless memory
be greatly at fault, Totty Footlights, the
variety actress, and Edward Box, of the
Ladies' Home Journal. are of the same
opinion Whenever an actress or singer
gives an interview she seems to wish to
pose as a Lovely Character and tells
how naturally domestic she is, and how
much she would prefer having a. coy
little home of her own and nothing to
do but care for it and her Loved Ones
to facing the cruel world in public life.
But almost every actress who marries
and retires from the stage sickens of the
monotony of private life and returns
to the theater, and half the women wfe
live in the shelter of their own homes
envy the lot of the women of the stage
The fact is that Mile. de Lussan's the
DRY of the limited sphere of womans
greatest usefulness and happiness.e
while still good in a newspaper inter-
view. is somewhat behind the newest
thought in regard to the woman ques-
ton. Woman's political rights is no
longer popular subject Public inter-
est in this once momentous problem has
died down and activity in this direction
q ffa
organizations. But although women are
no longer talking about their rights as
they were fifteen years or more ago,
and the question of their enfranchise-
ment now seems to be the least of their
troubles. their freedom increases with
every day-their economical and social
freedom, which are so much more impors
tant than their political rights The
right to work, the right to act, the right
to know. the right to dO-these are the
rights that women have been assuming
during the past twenty years, and when
the right comes to be considered a duty
so that women of all classes, like men.
shall be expected to be of some use II,
the world, and cease to be the parasites
| which custom now makes perfectly re-
| specta able, woman's day of emancipation
will be here, whether she casts her bal
lot for the president of the United States
or not.
/ The day has passed when we NAV
cho9Se woman's path for her and say
that her life and her duties shall consist
of certain things and none others The
world is accepting, finally, and without
| any evidences of a social or moral cat
astrophe the eminently sane and reason
able theory that a woman is a human
4 being first and a woman afterwards
that If she has talents. ambitions. as
pirations it is as much her right and as
much her duty to develop and use them
as 1t is for a man TO do So
Mile. de Lussan and other high auth
critics to the contrary Notwithstanding
it depends largely upon circumstances
in individual cases whether or NOT a
woman is better and happier in a home
of her own than in any other position
In life What are we to say of the thou
sands of women who are prevented bv
any of the accidents of fate from such
career? Time was when there was
nothing left for them in life, but we
| have changed all that. Women like men
now have their work outside as well as
within their homes, and some, like some
men, have only their work Who can
define with one word the boundaries of
woman's greatest happiness as well as
her greatest usefulness?" A woInan's
greatest usefulness is in the faithful
performance of her highest duty wheth-
er it be within or without the home. as
it was in the beginning, is now and ever
shall be, world without end
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