The Denison review. [volume] (Denison, Iowa) 1867-current, 1910-12-14
CITY AND COUNTRY GIRLS.
The Two Compared-AIso Servant
Maids With the Female
Stenographer.

Stenographer.
In any large city daily that one
picks up there are always two want
ad departments that tell story as
plainly as printed page can talk. One
is the Help Wanted-Female" depart
ment and the other is the Situation
Wanted" department. In the first are
many advertisements for ''Good Cir
wanted for general homework; only
two in family; Sc per week, steady
employment" In the other one finds
many ads that read: Young lady
bookkeeper, experienced, wants situa
ton in office; wages S.; can operate
typewriter" Others tell about steno
graphic ability. ability to meet peo
pie" and other accomplishments sup
posed to be necessary to an office
girl.
The wages run about the same. The
wages which are offered the girl for
general homework include board and
room and usually very fair bath and
toilet privileges and two afternoons
OUT each week. The wages which
the office girl offers her services for
do not include anything except a
chance to work and make good"
She must board herself and provide
her own room. Very often it is in a
cheap rooming house and her neigh
bors are people of all classes, each
struggling for existence just like her.
self. Her bath privileges are not at
all select. Many of them are abso-
lutely filthy. There is'a mingling of
the sexes and general air of cheap
bohemianism that one cannot find in a
private home. Both these girls get
up at about the same time in the
morning, the ''hired girl" to prepare
breakfast for her employers, the "of-
fee girl" to make hurried toilet,
rush to the street, fight her way into
a car, grab a strap, land down town,
eat poor breakfast in q cheap res
taurant and frantically endeavor to get
to the office in time, If she doesn't
She is "docked'' and also gets cold
look from the boss in the bargain.
She has a bare hour for her noon
lunch, which is either eaten from
lunch box or bolted in the cheap res
taurant with nondescript crowd, each
like a timed machine that will stop
only on the night of pay day. The
'hired girl" gets her three square
meals day under one roof, and she
doesn't have to rub elbows with every
Tom, Dick and Harry, either. After
dinner she can put on her hobble skirt
and her dishpan hat and go shopping
or calling. She isn't afraid of any
cold looks from the boss, for she is
the boss herself.
And all the while that the "hired
girl'' and the "office lady" are work
ing away in the crowded, dirty, noisy,
unwholesome cities, there are hun
dreds of bright eyed, intelligent,
healthy, happy girls and women walk
ing down country lanes from COM
Portable farm houses to little country
schoolhouses, where they teach the
little ones and enjoy life where life
is as pure as the air itself. There is
vigor and vim and health in the air
they breathe, there is Gods sweetest
music in the songs of the birds that
come around the schoolhouses, there
are the best lessons in nature and hui
mainly in the little ones that cluster
around them for instruction. But even
at that there are many schoolhouses
In which there is mo school, because
a teacher cannot be hired. It is an
impossibility to get teachers enough
at any price. The girls have gone to
the cities to be "hired girls" and "of-
flee adies."-MansOn Democrat.