Los Angeles herald., 1905-10-30
WOMAN CRUcIFIED
ON A GOLDEN CROSS
GIRLS NO LONGER CONTENT TO
WE'D POOR MEN
Plain Talk From an Orator at conven-
ton of illinois State Federation of
Women's CIubs-Joy of Living
Reduced to a Minimum

Special to The Herald.
JOLIET, ILL.,, Oct. ga little wo-
man from Kansas took the platform
at the convention of the State Fedora
tion of the Women's club and
painted word picture of "the
woman of today that made 400 femi-
nine faces flush. She was Margaret
M. Mather of the College Of Agricul-
ture at Manhattan, Kas.
When the little woman had retired
she had projected upon the mind of
every mother and every daughter in
the audience an image of a woman
with heart shrunk by lack of whole
some nourishment and with soul soiled
by the stain of tainted money. An6
this, she said, was an image Of the
woman of today"
In the making of her picture, Miss
Mather declared that femininity had
been crucified upon a cross of gold.
No longer, said she, is young woman
willing to marry man with a modest
income. The love in a cottage ideal,
she declared, ruthlessly has been de-
stroyed by the onrush toward social
ambitions.
Character, ability and intellectual
ity no longer weigh much in the social
scales" said the speaker: land when
one mother asks another If her daugh-
ter married well, the usual answer is
affirmative or negative, according to
the size of the check the happy BRIDE
groom can sign. Our ideals have been
powdered with gold dust. Woman's
measure is taken in diamonds and
jewels, instead of worth, womanliness
and culture.
"The complexity of modern life has
reduced the joy of living to a mini
mum. There would be fewer embezzle-
ments and defalcations if the house
wife understood the value of a dollar.
Few women know how much their
husbands can afford to have them
spend, and most women on the top
most rung of the social ladder are liv-
ing beyond their income.
Not long ago a girl would have felt
she was doing well financially If she
married man with an income of $1,000
or $4,000 a year. Nowadays girls ex-
pect their husbands to begin at the
place their parents left off. 1 have
heard men with large incomes say they
had not the nerve to ask a girl to
marry them until they could give them
as much as their parents had given
them. They forget that possibly it
took the girls father half century
to accumulate his wealth.
Miss Mather urged that every wife,
son and daughter be given an allow
ance, no matter how small, to teach
them the principles or economy and
the value of money. She said that out
of hundreds of families with whom she
had come in contact she had failed to
find a single one in which the daugh-
ters and sons were given allowances,
and only one in which the wife had an
income.
GAS many women do not know what
their income is, so thousands of them
are living way beyond their incomes.
We women need more of a business ed
ucation and we need to put our homes
on a business basis, instead of trust
ing their management to incompetent
servants.
"Take up home making and home
keeping as a business and society will
be revolutionized.
mo power Is so great as that of wo-
man in the home. She is greater than
the Politician; greater than the voter"
Miss Mather urged that children be
given work in the home and be paid
for it in order to give them an appre-
citation of the difficulty of making
money. Let your children earn some
thing by working for it and they soon
will learn the value of money" she
said. "Then they will not grow up to
be spendthrifts."
The speaker characterized the pop
ularity of hotels and boarding houses
as a peril to American family life.
Every child has a right to a home,
she said, and the cramped existence
forced upon children in apartment
houses hotels and boarding houses is
a menace to their future. When the
speaker sat down she was cheered.