The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-08-28
TIE BUSINESS WOMAN AND HER DISAPPOINTMENTS A Successful Wage Earner Warns the Gentler
 Sex. A SENSATIONAL PROBE. The Business Woman Can not Serve Employer
 and Husband.
A SENSATIONAL PROBE.

The woman wage-earner has sudden ly developed into a national figure perhaps, it might be said, a national problem. For the past decade, She has been going her quiet, unpretentious way unnoticed and unsung. To-day, she finds herself occupying a position very close to the center of. the national stage Essayists have discussed her so- cial position, novelists have made her prominent on their pages, and dram- atists are featuring her on the stage The woman in business has begun to think herself not only an important but most romantic and enviable fig ure,
 It remained for woman wage-earn- CT, and western woman at that, to make a special study of her own class, and to tell the uncompromising truth abcut it. This is Anna Steese Richard son, formerly of Council Bluffs, la, and now of New York City. AS the editor of the Woman's Home Companion in announcing the series of articles inau- gurated by Mrs richardson in the cur- rent issue of the Companion, says:
 Tn her Investigations, Mrs, Richard son discovered that all over the coun- try, farms, hamlets and small towns are being deserted by young women who flock to cities on wage-earning bent, This leads to an independent, in- dividual life, which sunders all family ties. The parents on the farm and in the small town are left alone in their old age, and the girl in the city, her eyes open to the bitterness of wage earning, is equally lonesome and un- happy, yet, having put her hand to the blow, she is unwilling to turn back. "The business woman cannot serve two masters, her employer and her husband, hence the woman in business is a menace to America's home life, and a most potent ally of race suicide. All this and more does Mrs. Richard son, after eleven years of wage-earn- ing and active business life, set forth in her article, "The Influence of Busi- ness Life on women" in the Septem- Der Womans Home Companion. And that she handles her topic without gloves is evident from the following examples from the September Com panion:
 Not until the wage-earning women of the present generation have mar ried and reckoned the full measure of their loss. will a second, or perhaps third generation of daughters be taught to choose intelligently between the domestic and the business life. Not until thousands of women have scored either failure or deadening mediocry in the wage-earning, will girls be taught that there is drudgery, in the factory store or office as well as in the kitchen
 Men who employ women because the latter will accept smaller salaries than men, and men who shift the re- sponsibility of family support from their own shoulders to those of wives and daughters are developing new race of American women. To this fact future generations will owe a form oi race suicide which President Roosevelt in his sternest moments has not pic tured, or race of men so spineless Irresponsible and effeminate that the first chapter in the degeneration ot Anerlca snail nave DeeH WTllleH pS the hand of greed and avarice.
 "It brings us back to the origina statement that business success for the woman does not mean domestic or in dividual happiness, and that on thu whole a business life makes for rest lessness, selfishness and discontent You cannot measure the influence o business on the woman by figures O statistics. You cannot count wrecked lives among women wage-earners a you can tally off divorce cases ol court calendars, and trace them to cer tain causes, such as incompatibility desertion, cruelty, etc. You cannot sa. that a woman in business is a failur or success according to the salary sh eraws. You cannot expect the trim self-contained girl at your elbow to ad init that her perfectly appointed littl apartment, her perfectly trained maid her perfectly ordered life of dinners clubs, theatres and opera parties spe failure. She says she is a success. 1 her heart she knows that when tn last guest has gone, and the trim lit tie maid has been dismissed, the ex quisite little apartment becomes whited sepulchre in which the starve soul of the woman sits alone weepin for heart mate
 In 'sNormal woman finds her ihappines
 tta 1n1iItinlicitv of small things tha