Ii ^i y,!...!.! *. . » ■' » 
 
 HE WAYS OF 
 
 WOMAN 
 
 DA M.TARBELL 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 HQ 1221.T17 
 
 The ways of woman. 
 
 3 1924 021 464 023 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924021464023 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK ■ BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE 
 
 WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 BY 
 
 IDA M. TARBELL 
 
 AUTHOR OP " THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN " 
 
 "MADAME KOLAND," "NAPOLEON 
 
 AND JOSEPHINE," ETC. 
 
 Nrfn gorfe 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1915 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
CorYBIGHT, 1914 AMD 1915, 
 
 By THE CEOWELL PUBLISHING COMPANY. 
 
 COPYBIGHT, 1915, 
 
 Bt THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 Set up and elcctrotyped. Published October, 1915. 
 
 /- s /"v/" ^ / C ' & 
 
 <\ 
 
 Norirort tytat 
 
 J. 8. Cashing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 The little essays gathered in this 
 volume are an attempt to interpret 
 informally certain activities and respon- 
 sibilities of the average normal woman. 
 It is not surprising that in an age in- 
 toxicated as ours is by changes in its 
 outward habits and conduct, there should 
 come a certain contempt for the great 
 slow currents with which mankind has 
 moved since the world began. 
 
 The old currents are lost we say in 
 electrified, self-directing eddies, pools, 
 streams. We have a new world of 
 machines and systems — the world of 
 Kultur. But this is to study only the 
 surface. The few great currents of life 
 persist as do the tides of the oceans. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 They carry with them the human life of 
 the world. There persists, too, as an 
 inevitable, unescapable result of the cur- 
 rents, certain obligations and activities. 
 
 What is the relation to society and to 
 the future of these old and common pur- 
 suits of the woman ? 
 
 This question suggests the subject of 
 this little book. The opinions and ideas 
 in it have grown naturally out of the 
 every-day life and observations of the 
 writer. They are not offered as a "solu- 
 tion of the woman problem" or as final 
 in matter or form. They supplement 
 the author's earlier book, "The Business 
 of Being a Woman." 
 
 All of these essays have appeared in 
 the Woman's Home Companion. 
 
 vi 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. What Women abe Doing 
 
 
 
 PASE 
 1 
 
 H. Give the Girl a Chance 
 
 
 
 19 
 
 HI. That's Her Business 
 
 
 
 41 
 
 IV. The Talkative Woman . 
 
 
 
 61 
 
 V. The Culture Chasers . 
 
 
 
 79 
 
 VI. The Twenty-cent Dinner 
 
 
 
 97 
 
 VII. A Young Girl's Thoughts 
 
 
 
 . 115 
 
 vu 
 
WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING 
 
 There is no more effective medicine 
 to apply to feverish public sentiments 
 than figures. To be sure, they must be 
 properly prepared, must cover the case, 
 not confine themselves to a corner of it, 
 and they must be gathered for their own 
 sake, not for the sake of a theory. Such 
 preparation we get in a national census. 
 The last census, particularly, is a trust- 
 worthy and sweeping survey of ourselves. 
 It has already had a cooling effect on 
 several overheated popular notions. In 
 time it ought to be able to steady and 
 strengthen even the pulse of the Woman 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 Question. There are certain phases of 
 that question that need a liberal dose of 
 figures, particularly those concerned with 
 what women are doing. 
 
 What are women doing? Last year 
 a young foreign professor went up and 
 down the country lecturing on the family. 
 He had a clever trick of introducing his 
 remarks by an earnest assurance of his 
 belief in the institution, and then proceed- 
 ing to wipe it off the surface of the earth 
 with a neatness and dispatch which set 
 everybody to applauding. He said he 
 felt it his duty, as a student of facts, to 
 warn society that the family was doomed. 
 His conclusions were based entirely on a 
 series of assertions, for he offered no 
 proofs. Briefly, they were that things 
 had become so hard for the masses that 
 women were being driven into shops and 
 factories in order to support themselves 
 and their children; women were not 
 4 
 
WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING 
 
 marrying as freely as formerly — they 
 were bearing fewer children; they were 
 losing their taste for home-making and 
 were finding careers in trades and pro- 
 fessions more satisfying. 
 
 Through all of our social and economic 
 discussions, particularly in the more radi- 
 cally inclined groups, these views run: 
 women are changing; the home is going; 
 industry is slowly smothering them both. 
 
 It requires no eye of a lynx to see that 
 the ways of women the world over are 
 very different from their ways a hundred 
 years ago; and so are the ways of men. 
 Being parts of human society, it is inevi- 
 table that this should be so. The world is 
 actively reshaping itself, and everybody 
 in it feels the pull and the drive. But do 
 these changes affect the fundamental 
 tastes and relations that nature and so- 
 ciety have set for men and women ? Is the 
 family going ? What do the figures say ? 
 5 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 Begin with the class of women of whom 
 we have heard most through the last 
 decade, the class which has served as a 
 fulcrum for much of the agitation and 
 argument — the woman in industry, by 
 which is meant usually the woman in 
 shops and factories. Does the Thirteenth 
 Census support the assumption that this 
 woman forms a class so large and so per- 
 manent that society must reorganize its 
 educational and social institutions on her 
 account? "There are several million 
 young girls in our factories and shops" 
 ("several" being usually translated as 
 seven or eight millions). This statement 
 we see and hear continually in print and 
 from platforms. It is made by able 
 people who carry weight with the public 
 and whose only object in making it is to 
 arouse interest in legislation, and reform 
 which they genuinely believe will help 
 the working- woman. But there are only 
 6 
 
WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING 
 
 about nine million young girls , (ten to 
 nineteen years of age) in the country. 
 If "several millions" of these are in 
 factories and shops, our outlook is serious 
 indeed. But how about it ? 
 
 As a matter of fact, far from there 
 being "several" million young girls in 
 industries, there are only about eight 
 millions (8,075,772) girls and women of 
 all ages, from ten to one hundred, em- 
 ployed a part or all of the time in the land, 
 in money-earning work of all kinds — 
 professions, agriculture, dressmaking, 
 clerking, business, domestic science. 
 Less than a fourth of these eight millions 
 are in "shops and factories," and, more- 
 over, probably not over half of this one 
 fourth can be called "young girls," 
 that is, are under twenty-one years of 
 age. k There are something like 111,000 
 women employed in making suits, coats, 
 cloaks and overalls in the country; 
 7 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 66,000, or one half of them, are over 
 twenty-one years of age. There are 
 68,000 women in our shoe factories, and 
 41,000 of them are over twenty -one 
 years of age. There are something over 
 148,000 in cotton mills, and 77,000 of 
 them are over twenty-one years old. 
 There are around 250,000 saleswomen 
 in the country, and 165,000 are over 
 twenty-one. 
 
 Not only are these "young girls in 
 shops and factories" fewer in number 
 than we are told, they are far from a 
 permanent class. There is no class of 
 workers in the country so transient. 
 In scores of places employing girls the 
 entire force will change in a year. The 
 man who is able to hold fifty per cent of 
 his force more than a year achieves 
 wonders. An inventory recently taken 
 in one of the largest shops in New York 
 City, and one of the most satisfactory 
 
 8 
 
WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING 
 
 working places for girls in this country, 
 showed that only twenty -three per cent 
 of the girls had been there as long as 
 seven years. The average girl in shops 
 and factories probably does not work 
 over three years. 
 
 What does she do ? Let the Thirteenth 
 Census tell us. Eight times out of 
 ten she marries. 
 
 But she is not marrying, the platform 
 cries to us. The platform is wrong. 
 It quotes misleading figures. "Less than 
 half of the forty-five million women of 
 the country marry," it says. If we con- 
 sider the sex as a whole, regardless of 
 age, this is true. We have in the United 
 States now 44,639,989 "females," in- 
 cluding all from one year and under to 
 one hundred years and over. Fifty- 
 two and seven tenths per cent of these 
 — babes, maids, and women — are single, 
 that is, literally less than half of the sex 
 9 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 are married. But drop out those not 
 yet of marriageable age, and you have 
 a different story. There will, of course, 
 be a difference of opinion about what is 
 a marriageable age; but let us call it 
 nineteen or over. If we settle on that, 
 we must drop at once from our estimate 
 something over twenty millions of the 
 sex. It puts a different complexion at 
 once on the marriage percentage. As a 
 fact, seventy per cent of those who are 
 fifteen years or more old marry; and 
 if you raise the age to twenty, eighty 
 and one half per cent marry ; to twenty- 
 five, eighty-six and seven tenths per 
 cent marry. 
 
 But, grant these figures to be correct 
 — it is hard, even for an orator, to defy 
 a census — and still the platform cries 
 that "women don't marry as they once 
 did." The truth is they marry more 
 freely than they did in 1900 or in 1890. 
 10 
 
WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING 
 
 There has been a gain of nearly two per 
 cent in the number of marriages of women 
 over fifteen in the last twenty years ; 
 and two per cent, when dealing with 
 nearly twenty -one millions, is a consid- 
 erable number. 
 
 But, grant that they marry; they do not 
 "stay married." They separate, are di- 
 vorced; so that the result is even more dis- 
 astrous for the present social system than 
 single life. There has been an increase 
 in divorce. In the twenty-one million 
 married women whom the census takers 
 of 1910 reported, they found 185,065 
 who had been divorced. Considering the 
 difficulties of married life, the number 
 does not appall. It rather gives one a 
 greater respect for human beings to 
 see that they can handle such a compli- 
 cated relation with such a small percent- 
 age of disaster. There is no other human 
 relation that can show anything like' so 
 11 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 large a statistical proof of success. The 
 number of divorces found in 1910 is 
 greater, proportionately, than the census 
 takers unearthed in 1900, still larger 
 than they found in 1890. In each of 
 these ten-year periods there has been 
 an increase of one tenth of one per cent. 
 It is doubtful if this be due to loss of 
 faith in marriage. A proportion of it 
 is due to a higher ideal of marriage, an 
 unwillingness to see the relation prosti- 
 tuted by a dissolute, cruel, or unfaithful 
 partner, in which public opinion is cer- 
 tainly back of the person, as in the main 
 is the law. 
 
 A percentage is due, too, to the greater 
 carelessness with which marriages are 
 made under our changing social practices. 
 We have removed largely from boys and 
 girls the protecting social devices by 
 which we once guided their relations and 
 choices. They go and come freely and, 
 12 
 
WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING 
 
 as might be expected, marry with less 
 sense of the seriousness of their under- 
 taking. More mistakes are probably 
 made, and where they turn out to be 
 very bad mistakes there is nothing for 
 it but divorce. When we have learned 
 to add to the freedom, which we have 
 thrust on the young, the sobriety and 
 knowledge with which they need to use 
 it, there will be fewer divorces from 
 careless marriages. 
 
 But grant that marriages are increas- 
 ing and that the increase in divorce is 
 neither great nor of direful meaning, 
 the alarmist platform has still another 
 proof that marriage is a failure; that 
 economic conditions are driving women 
 out of the home into industry; that 
 the home is doomed, and that hence- 
 forth girls must be educated for industrial 
 and not for domestic activities. This 
 last foothold of the theory is that children 
 13 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 are decreasing. Women are not bearing 
 children as they once did. 
 
 It is pretty difficult, even with the best 
 of censuses before us, to find out just 
 what has happened in the last one hun- 
 dred years to the population of the 
 United States. It has suffered serious 
 vicissitudes, such as the Civil War, 
 making it impossible for twenty years 
 at least to find out what was happening 
 in a large section of the country. It 
 has had a continual but uneven stream 
 of immigration pouring into it. That it 
 has increased is true. "But it is the 
 immigrant, the including of the Indian, 
 the fecundity of the negro and of the 
 'lower races' which has caused the 
 increase. The true American is not 
 increasing." Thus the platform. But 
 the Thirteenth Census speaks better of 
 the true American. According to it 
 our native white population, those whose 
 14 
 
WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING 
 
 parents were both born in this country, 
 not only is keeping up the birth rate but 
 in the last decade has increased it by over 
 two per cent. He makes a better show- 
 ing than since 1870. 
 
 The truth is, there is no reason what- 
 ever for believing that revolutionary 
 changes are going on in those relations 
 and activities which have been regarded 
 as basic in woman's life. She is no larger 
 factor in industrial life than she has 
 always been, but the form of industry 
 has changed. It draws her into great 
 groups, and those groups collect in cities 
 and manufacturing towns. We see her 
 of tener than we did when she canned and 
 wove and sewed in small and isolated 
 groups. She is more obvious. She 
 marries, makes her home, bears her 
 children. That which disconcerts those 
 who observe her, compare her with her 
 predecessor, and conclude she is some- 
 15 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 thing new in the world, is mainly that 
 she talks, thinks, and wants things that 
 apparently never interested her before. 
 But this is true of men as of women. 
 She, like him, is reacting to the new vision 
 of the possibilities in human life. 
 
 Under the quickening power of this 
 vision women are casting off old forms 
 of restraint which the belief that the mass 
 of human beings could not be trusted to 
 look out for themselves had spun. They 
 are putting their hands to new tasks, 
 their heads to new thoughts. That they 
 may give time to things which are not 
 worth having, may doubt the significance 
 of old things which are essential in all 
 life, is but the human way in periods of 
 change. When you come down to the 
 actual facts in the case as shown in a 
 searching document like the census, you 
 find that whatever the stir on the sur- 
 face, below, the same great occupation, 
 16 
 
WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING 
 
 the woman's profession, claims her as 
 it always has. 
 
 Let us not be deceived. The human 
 heart does not change. It demands its 
 mate, always has, always will; and the 
 mated will find a corner to themselves 
 where they can sit by their own fire 
 and rear their own brood. 
 
 Their corner may be a flat and not a 
 cottage, their fire may be a gas log and 
 not a bundle of sticks, their dinner may 
 come in from the corner in cans and be 
 heated and not cooked, the wife may 
 vote and the husband may give himself 
 a score of liberties an earlier generation 
 would have frowned on, but what has 
 all that to do with the foundations of 
 life? These are but the fluctuations in 
 ways and expressions which each suc- 
 ceeding generation surely brings. They 
 may give a different setting, add a new 
 color, or a strangely sounding note — 
 c 17 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 but they do not alter the nature, the 
 meaning, the essential character of their 
 undertaking. Of this the Thirteenth 
 Census offers us the proof of figures. 
 Nor can it be doubted that each succes- 
 sive census will show, as this does, an 
 increasing belief in the undertaking and 
 an ambition to develop it to the fullest 
 strength and beauty. 
 
 18 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 19 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 GIVE THE' GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 Should a girl be trained for what she 
 will probably do in the world? Of 
 every one hundred American girls who 
 live to be twenty-five years old eighty- 
 seven marry (eighty-six and sevenUenths 
 to be exact). One can form a fairly ac- 
 curate judgment of the proportion of 
 these eighty-seven who have been pre- 
 pared for their adventure by considering 
 the training of the marriageable girls he 
 knows in various classes. Probably not 
 over ten per cent have had? systematic 
 and well-considered education in the 
 technique, relations, and significance of 
 the varied tasks which will be thrown 
 upon them. It is not to the needs of 
 the eighty-seven that modern industrial 
 21 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 and technical education looks. It is 
 to that of the thirteen out of the one 
 hundred who will presumably be thrown 
 on their own resources. Parents very 
 generally encourage this. They want 
 their daughters prepared to take care 
 of themselves "if anything happens." 
 The girl encourages it : she wants to be 
 independent "if anything happens." 
 Generally speaking, both parents and 
 girls look to the High School and in 
 fewer cases the college to do the fitting. 
 If she has "graduated," she can be ex- 
 pected to earn her living without further 
 expense. The expectation is out of all 
 proportion to the realization. 
 
 It is not the business of schools and 
 colleges to fit young people to earn a 
 living. They teach us to read that 
 we may know what the world is think- 
 ing, feeling, and doing, that we may 
 enlarge our budget of "information," 
 22 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 correct and refine our ideas. They teach 
 us to write, that we may pass on our 
 thoughts, feelings, and ideas; mathe- 
 matics, that we may understand the terms 
 in which the world measures, weighs, 
 computes, and handles all the exact 
 sciences. It is to enable us to live with 
 our fellows on more understanding terms 
 that we go to school; that all of this 
 contributes to the problem of earning 
 our living is of course true; but that is 
 not its object. 
 
 In the case of a boy this is understood. 
 We do not expect the High School to 
 fit him for business or the college for a 
 profession. We know that he must be- 
 gin at the bottom on four, five, or six 
 dollars a week and learn his business 
 or trade. Or he must spend three years 
 at his medicine or law and then five to 
 ten of uncertainty and waiting building 
 up his position. 
 
 23 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 We ask the girl from High School or 
 college to step at once into a self-support- 
 ing position — and she is entirely un- 
 prepared. Like the boy, she must learn 
 to do the work asked of her — and 
 neither she nor her parents as a rule are 
 willing to take the time and go to the 
 expense of an apprenticeship. Is it 
 strange that this should be so when the 
 chances are eighty-seven to thirteen in 
 every hundred that she will not stick to 
 the trade or profession? 
 
 We have then this unsatisfactory sit- 
 uation. The average girl's time and 
 strength is spent on school until she is 
 fourteen to sixteen or twenty according 
 to the circumstances and position of her 
 family. At the end of the time she is 
 expected to look after herself. She is 
 unprepared, and neither she nor her 
 parents are particularly enthusiastic 
 about preparation, since the balance of 
 24 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 probability is so overwhelmingly for 
 marriage. Work then is for a period 
 more or less of a stop gap. 
 
 But the school no more prepares girls 
 for marriage than it does for self-support. 
 And in probably twenty-four out of 
 twenty-five cases nothing else prepares 
 her. The opinion of teachers, parents, 
 and the girls seems to be that when 
 marriage comes she'll rise to the occasion 
 — she'll pick up all that is necessary. 
 She does, just as she "picks up" teaching, 
 journalism, or accounting. She learns 
 in doing — at large risk of discourage- 
 ment and failure on her own part and 
 irritation and exhaustion on the part of 
 those dependent on her services. All 
 ihe preliminary training that one can 
 get is none too much with which to begin 
 a serious enterprise. Nobody denies that 
 marriage entails for the girl tasks serious 
 enough — the most serious in fact asked 
 
 25 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 of any individual in all the varied re- 
 lations of life. In spite of this even 
 educators throw up their hands at the 
 demand that some scheme of training 
 be devised that will give a girl a sense of 
 the meaning of her new position and 
 some idea of the qualities she needs to 
 wrestle with its problems. 
 
 The writer has never found herself 
 more unpopular than in talking on the 
 need of regarding domestic science as 
 a vocation to a Congress interested in 
 industrial training for girls. Stenog- 
 raphy, box-making, book-binding, book- 
 keeping, salesmanship, journalism — 
 anything but that which eighty-seven 
 out of a hundred must do ! But the 
 educators are no more indifferent than 
 parents or girls. The truth is few see 
 domestic work as a vocation for which 
 it is possible to give systematic and 
 scientific training. Probably it is too 
 26 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 complicated for the quality and quantity 
 of thought that has been given it by the 
 average mind. It is easy enough to 
 "see" box-making or accounting, but who 
 shall say where the business of keeping 
 a house for a family shall begin or end ? 
 Certainly few mothers or teachers are 
 able to arouse the imagination of girls 
 to consider housekeeping as a vocation. 
 The average girl in a well-to-do family 
 has no comprehensive idea of the mean- 
 ing of any of its operations. Take the 
 matter of getting a meal. If she has 
 set the table attractively and prepared 
 the dessert, she is inclined to feel that she 
 has done a substantial part of the work. 
 That is, she does the part that pleases 
 her to do and which "shows," — the 
 part which in a crowded household is 
 oftenest neglected and which she misses 
 most. The ability and desire to look 
 after these details satisfies her. That a 
 27 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 meal means linen and silver and china — 
 food not only appetizing but nourishing 
 and at the same time within the limits 
 of the family income — a complicated 
 problem of various elements she has 
 never been forced to see. 
 
 She has the same limited outlook when 
 it comes to keeping the house. She is 
 perfectly willing to take upon herself 
 "fixing the flowers" and keeping the 
 living room tidy — but of that foresight 
 which not only keeps things in perpetual 
 order but in perpetual repair, which 
 knows not only what it is to have a 
 guest room complete but complete on a 
 small income, which looks not only to 
 appearances, but to health, amusement, 
 and the needs and tastes of the various 
 members of the family, — there is no 
 teaching of this, and yet this and not 
 "looks" is the meaning behind the opera- 
 tions and processes of housekeeping. 
 28 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 The bulk of instruction a girl gets 
 both at home and in the domestic train- 
 ing classes of the schools only emphasizes 
 her idea that if she knows how to make 
 chicken terrapin and what kind of cur- 
 tains are suitable for casement and what 
 for French windows, she "knows her 
 business." That is, the training she 
 gets is almost entirely in manipulations 
 and processes, in receipts and formulae 
 and "ways." It is rule-of -thumb in- 
 struction. It concerns itself very little 
 with principles. It does not aim to 
 arouse the imagination or to set the mind 
 to work on the succession of problems 
 each day turns up ; yet nothing is more 
 certain than that thinking on domestic 
 subjects must be the end of domestic 
 training before we get very far in making 
 it a vocation. The old plaints about 
 housework — the "hot cook stove," the 
 "back-breaking sweeping," are oftener 
 29 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 than not the plaints of inefficiency. 
 The women whose backs have been bent 
 because they did not know how to think 
 far enough to fit the height of their 
 dish pans and the lengths of their broom 
 handle to their own stature are more than 
 those whom the operations themselves 
 have killed. 
 
 Going into a country kitchen to make 
 a cup of coffee from the bean, the writer 
 found that the coffee mill was taken 
 down after each grinding and its two parts 
 kept in different rooms — twenty steps 
 apart. The coffee was twenty-five steps 
 from the mill. The coffee pot ten steps 
 from the pot, and when the coffee was 
 ready for the stove, the stove was in an- 
 other room ! One crossed and recrossed, 
 traced and retraced, his steps in a 
 preparing which could easily have been 
 done without moving from his position ! 
 Yet for at least three years that kitchen 
 30 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 had been under the orders of an excep- 
 tionally good self-trained housekeeper 
 and it had been used by at least three 
 excellent cooks. 
 
 ■ Nothing is more difficult in households 
 than to break up established methods 
 of doing things although as foolish and 
 wearing as the above. This has been a 
 complaint of all history — women would 
 not change their "ways"! "They dip 
 their wool into hot water according to 
 the ancient plan, all of them without 
 exception and never made the slightest 
 innovation. They sit and cook as of 
 old. They carry upon their heads as of 
 old." Thus, Aristophanes, 2500 years 
 ago. Take the laundrying of clothes. 
 There is a good part of the world where 
 the women still wash their linen in a 
 wayside pool or brook, as they did in 
 Aristophanes' time. You see it all over 
 Europe ; you see it in Kentucky to-day. 
 31 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 It was not this practice which brought 
 the business of washing to its low estate. 
 The common washing pool has the merit 
 of being open-air work and as social 
 institution it rivals any club ever or- 
 ganized. It was the taking the clothes 
 from the outside to the inside, and creat- 
 ing washday that damp, smelly, dis- 
 organized weekly event which the average 
 American remembers with resentment 
 and pain. Washday had its own code; 
 its own customs. It began Sunday night 
 with the operation known as "putting 
 the clothes to soak." The work was 
 continued before daybreak on Monday, 
 the housewife's ambition being to get 
 her clothes out before breakfast or, 
 at least, before her next door neighbor. 
 It meant warmed-over meals ; justifiable 
 bad temper; tired-out women at night. 
 As life grew more complicated and things 
 multiplied, the comparatively simple 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 wash of fifty years ago became unmanage- 
 able in one day. 
 
 Manifold efforts have been made to 
 ease the burden. One of the perennial 
 inventions for generations has been the 
 washing machine. The records of the 
 patent office show some 5000 different 
 patents for them. There is no well- 
 equipped garret in the country that 
 does not contain one or more, for gener- 
 ally while the woman buys them, her 
 aversion to change keeps her from mas- 
 tering them. The outfit for washing at 
 home continues as it was in the begin- 
 ning, — a tub, a board and a boiler. 
 The wringer is the only invention gener- 
 ally accepted. It would seem as if the 
 miserable conviction that washing can 
 never be anything but a hard and un- 
 happy business aroused resentment at 
 anything that promised to make it easier ! 
 
 The very first essential in any efficient 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 system of domestic training must be to 
 break up this idea that it is a collection 
 of fixed ways of doing things — to train 
 the mind of the girl to attack it openly 
 
 — to rouse interest in experimenting — 
 in fitting work to her needs and ways to 
 her particular situation. 
 
 As things now are I am inclined to 
 think that the most effective training 
 that thousands of girls get for housekeep- 
 ing is from a period of service in a modern 
 scientifically managed factory, shop or 
 office. She goes to the work room care- 
 less, inexact, inattentive, uninterested, 
 
 — employers are recognizing quite gen- 
 erally the bad social as well as economic 
 results of such labor, and they are work- 
 ing out a system of education which in 
 many places is probably more funda- 
 mental and useful than anything the 
 girl receives from family, school, church, 
 or social agencies. Tasks are graded 
 
 34 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 and the girl taught the operations re- 
 quired. She is given opportunities for 
 exercise, amusement 'and study. She is 
 instructed in the laws of health, courtesy, 
 neatness. The improvements are strik- 
 ing in thousands of cases. 
 
 This experience in the modern factory 
 or shop develops certain qualities and 
 drives in certain ideas much needed in 
 housekeeping. It demonstrates that 
 order is not an external, artificial condi- 
 tion cultivated because of a fear of what 
 people will think if you are disorderly, 
 but that it is a law on which results de- 
 pend and without which neither utility 
 nor beauty are possible. It drives home 
 the reasons for promptness, exactness, 
 consideration of others. A girl who has 
 become a desirable operative under our 
 new industrial code has had a training 
 which will serve her in anything she 
 undertakes and without which nothing 
 35 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 she would ever undertake could properly 
 succeed. But what a reflection on the 
 trainers of the young in and out of 
 school that a girl must go into a factory 
 or shop to learn to be prompt, exact, 
 attentive, how to become interested in 
 the thing to be done and to sense its 
 relation to other things. 
 
 Our great grandmothers, not all of 
 them, to be sure, but the better class, did 
 for their daughters what these modern 
 factories do. They trained for character 
 and for what they regarded as good 
 habits and sound ideas. The child was 
 set at sewing or knitting at three or four 
 — not that she might produce a sampler 
 or a stocking or a quilt, but that she 
 might learn how to use her fingers and 
 to use them regularly. She was required 
 to listen to the reading of severe and 
 pious books while she worked, — the 
 "Lives of the Saints," or "Goldsmith's 
 36 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 Animated Nature, " — that she might ac- 
 quire the habit of using her mind as she 
 used her fingers, — one of the most valu- 
 able aids to useful living a woman can 
 have and something which our present 
 training rarely takes into account. It 
 was this sort of discipline that made it 
 possible for Harriet Beecher Stowe to 
 do housekeeping and care for her babes 
 while she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
 She had been required as a child to 
 listen to good stiff literature while she 
 worked — her thoughts had been taught 
 to keep time to her fingers. It is neither 
 sensible nor useful to complain because 
 things are not done now as our grand- 
 mothers did them. The only point is 
 that our grandmothers succeeded in doing 
 something which we would like to see 
 done for our girls and which through the 
 machinery of a universal compulsory edu- 
 cation we feel ought to be worked out. 
 37 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 It is highly improbable that the school 
 alone can ever give as good a training as 
 our grandmothers gave. It will lack the 
 regularity and it will not be driven in 
 by the constant practical application in 
 the child's own home. It will not go 
 on from one stage to another in the logi- 
 cal way that did. Whatever the school 
 does, it should have the cooperation of 
 the home ; that is, what is taught in the 
 one place should be applied in the other. 
 The teacher and the mother should work 
 together as in our industrial and techni- 
 cal schools teacher and employers are 
 learning to work together to fit boys for 
 trades. The boy spends a portion of 
 his time allotted to industrial training in 
 a shop where at lathe or bench he ap- 
 plies what he has been learning in the 
 classroom. 
 
 If from kindergarten days to gradua- 
 tion we could have our girls regularly 
 
GIVE THE GIRL A CHANCE 
 
 performing tasks at home which had been 
 taught at school we would have results 
 — not in making beds and cooking 
 meals merely, but in the science of the 
 business. There would be no question 
 in the mind of a girl who had had such a 
 course for ten years under an intelligent 
 teacher and mother but that she had 
 a vocation. Moreover, there is not a 
 shadow of doubt but that this training 
 would be of the greatest assistance in 
 any work she might undertake in shop 
 or factory or office. It would teach 
 her to use her hands, give her sense of 
 the qualities that work of all kind 
 demands, give her habits, the lack of 
 which now makes the average girl when 
 she starts such an exasperating and dis- 
 couraging problem. 
 
 But the great reason, of course, for 
 insisting that some adequate system be 
 developed and applied universally is 
 39 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 that only in this way will the eighty- 
 seven out of a hundred girls ever have 
 a fair chance to succeed in that which 
 they are to do. 
 
 It is generally accepted that a man has 
 no right to marry until he "can support 
 a wife." From the start his training is 
 devoted to making him productive in 
 order that he may marry and rear a 
 family. He is more or less a skilled 
 person. But the girl who must handle 
 his skilled earnings — and no intelligent 
 person will deny that her function is 
 every whit as important economically 
 as his — is unskilled. It is unfair to 
 both of them, — as unfair as when two 
 men — one a skilled manufacturer — the 
 other an unskilled buyer and salesman 
 — try to run a plant on equal terms. 
 Give the girl a chance — not to learn 
 box making, or typewriting or book- 
 keeping, but to do the thing she must do. 
 40 
 
"THAT'S HER BUSINESS" 
 
 41 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 "that's her business" 
 
 In these latter years the world has 
 picked up a fashion of estimating at a 
 very low value the contributions which 
 women have made in the past to its 
 activities and progress. The fashion 
 would have been gone out long ago if, 
 for campaign purposes, a group of women 
 had not clung to it. But this is no in- 
 quiry into the reason of its persisting. 
 
 One of the by-products of this fashion 
 is the surprise which greets reports of 
 women doing well things which ordinarily 
 have been done by men. Let a woman 
 establish a shop, and the news travels 
 across the continent; as if one of the 
 greatest shops on earth had not been 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 built up and managed by a woman! 
 Let a woman win a lawsuit, and there is 
 wonder, as if there had never been a 
 Portia ! Ever since the war began there 
 has been almost a world-wide chorus of 
 amazement over the exhibits of women 
 in the countries involved. It began back 
 in August of 1914, when travelers sud- 
 denly discovered the subways, the tram- 
 ways, and the taxis of Paris to be run by 
 women. 
 
 The change was made in a night, with- 
 out fuss or feathers or exclamation, 
 but the observers who had lived in 
 the belief of the general unfitness of 
 women stared in astonishment — a rev- 
 olution! It's always a revolution, you 
 know, when things occur of which you 
 have never happened to hear! There 
 was no revolution about the appearance 
 of the women in Paris transportation; 
 nor was it a revolution which led women 
 
"THAT'S HER BUSINESS" 
 
 to take up the street cleaning of pro- 
 vincial French towns, or which set them 
 to acting as trolley conductors in Eng- 
 land, or acting as bank clerks and a 
 hundred other unusual things in Germany; 
 and doing many things so well that their 
 employers are talking of keeping them 
 after the war — if they can. 
 
 In taking up these tasks they were 
 doing what they had been doing all their 
 lives — turning their hands to the next 
 thing ; meeting emergencies ; filling sud- 
 den gaps; stepping into vacant places. 
 The ordinary daily life of women fits, 
 as no other school on earth, for rising 
 to occasions. To bear children and to 
 direct them into cheerful, self-controlled 
 manhood and womanhood, and so to hold 
 one man that he reverts neither into 
 savagery nor sloth — one state or the 
 other being his natural condition — is 
 the greatest school on earth. It develops 
 45 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 more unexpected situations and turns 
 up more emergencies in a week than any 
 trade or profession does in six months, 
 situations and emergencies of every va- 
 riety — physical, economic, social and 
 moral. 
 
 A woman turns from binding "up the 
 broken head of a dare-devil boy to 
 cheering a husband whose affairs are going 
 to smash. She turns from entertaining 
 her daughter's friends to meeting the 
 crisis of her son's first cigar, or drink, or 
 questionable companion. She does it 
 regularly, steadily, naturally : and under 
 the necessity she develops until she is 
 ready for anything. If the house burns, 
 five times out of ten she saves the baby 
 and the family records, while nine times 
 out of ten the husband saves the coal 
 pail and the looking glass ! If there's a 
 crash and lacerated bodies and bleeding 
 wounds, she knows what to do, and she 
 46 
 
"THAT'S HER BUSINESS" 
 
 does it. That's her business. If she 
 falters, it is only to pull herself together 
 for a fresh effort. "You dare not faint; 
 there is nobody knows but you," a 
 quivering man told his wife when she 
 staggered after an hour and a half of 
 relief work over a horribly burned man 
 with the scanty improvised remedies of 
 a pioneer home. She did not faint, she 
 knew, too, that she dared not. It was 
 her business to stick. It was what life 
 had fitted her for, what her mother 
 and grandmothers had done before her. 
 It was in her blood. 
 
 American women should be the last 
 to wonder at the promptness and ease 
 with which European women have ad- 
 justed themselves to the unusual de- 
 mands the war has made upon them. 
 Throughout our history we have done 
 the same — carrying a rifle or planting 
 corn in pioneer days, supporting the 
 47 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 family, organizing commissions, carrying 
 help to battlefields in our wars. 
 
 When in 1776 loyalty demanded that 
 we give up not only our tea but our silks 
 and linens and feathers and furs — 
 everything, in fact, that we imported — 
 we invented a half dozen good drinks 
 to stay us : Aunt Susan's tea, Labrador 
 tea, New Jersey tea; and many a hand 
 that had rarely lifted anything heavier 
 than a fan learned to spin and weave 
 and cut and fit an honest homespun. 
 
 From Maine to the Carolinas in those 
 days women managed the farms and plan- 
 tations, often with no other help than that 
 of their children. They performed a 
 self-appointed commissary service, with- 
 out which the soldiers at many a point 
 would have practically starved. Travel- 
 ing on horseback, often alone, probably 
 almost always in peril, they carried to the 
 armies food they had raised, cloth they 
 48 
 
"THAT'S HER BUSINESS" 
 
 had spun, bullets they had made from 
 treasured pewter; and they did it as 
 naturally as they had performed services 
 in times of peace. 
 
 No adequate tribute has ever been 
 paid to the valiant readjustment to con- 
 ditions made by the women of both 
 North and South in the Civil War. 
 It would be difficult to point to any kind 
 of labor or business carried on in that 
 period that was not somewhere assumed 
 by women as a matter of course. On 
 both sides they were a great rear guard, 
 preserving the activities necessary to 
 life. In the North women developed on 
 two lines which were really much more 
 revolutionary and noteworthy than any- 
 thing we have seen in the present Euro- 
 pean struggle: they took up the cause 
 of the North on the platform and in 
 the press in a way at once more general 
 and more distinguished than had been 
 
 e 49 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 heard of in the world up to that time. 
 The work they did, common enough 
 now, was most uncommon then. Anna 
 Dickinson and Gail Hamilton, and others 
 of their kind, were war developments, 
 women springing to a need they felt. 
 The backing they had from the adminis- 
 tration and the political party in power 
 is substantial proof of the service they 
 rendered. 
 
 The first nation-wide organization of 
 women free from class and dogmatic 
 prejudice — a truly democratic body — 
 developed in their country, the women 
 of the North established in the Civil 
 War, the Sanitary Commission. It mar- 
 shaled the hosts of every interest and 
 kind from sea to sea, and laid the foun- 
 dation for our present splendid system of 
 public and private nursing, and of Red 
 Cross activities. It was the sense of 
 an emergency, the instinct to spring to 
 50 
 
"THAT'S HER BUSINESS" 
 
 fill it, which developed such women as 
 Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, and the 
 scores they led. 
 
 Wherever you pick up the life of a 
 woman whose activities or relations have 
 taken the particular turn that makes her 
 known to the public, you will find this 
 faculty of taking hold of whatever is 
 necessary to be done. In those delight- 
 ful letters of Abigail Adams written late 
 in the eighteenth century from France 
 and England, when her husband was our 
 representative in Paris and in London, 
 and later written from the White House 
 and from Massachusetts, as the wife of 
 a President and ex-President, there are 
 many glimpses of this ability. 
 
 An entertaining episode and one en- 
 tirely characteristic of women's ways is 
 in a letter describing her first sea voy- 
 age. She was bound for London by a 
 sailing vessel. The voyage took a full 
 51 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 month, and for the first ten days poor 
 Mrs. Adams was desperately ill. When 
 she finally got her sea-legs, she found a 
 ship utterly demoralized by the seasick- 
 ness of the passengers and the unfitness 
 of the crew. Dirt, disorder, discomfort 
 and irritation prevailed. The reviving 
 lady took a few glances around and 
 demanded — mops ! Under a grateful 
 captain's eyes she taught stewards and 
 sailors how to "clean up," and then she 
 proceeded to organize them to keep 
 clean. She looked into the kitchen, and 
 the food improved ; she visited the sick, 
 and they improved. In a little time 
 the Active was a changed boat ! 
 
 If Mrs. Adams had been the wife of 
 an American diplomat of 1914 on her 
 way to Europe, she would have had a 
 hospital organized and the money sub- 
 scribed by the time she landed. Many 
 an American woman in Europe sprang to 
 52 
 
"THAT'S HER BUSINESS" 
 
 meet the "instant need of things" as 
 she saw them. Here it was a voluntary 
 automobile service, and she and her 
 machine traveled night and day. Here it 
 was a home for convalescents, for Belgian 
 babies, or refugee women, and her villa or 
 chateau or Paris apartment was at their 
 service, and she, in cap and apron, at work. 
 They were following their instinct, as 
 surely as the French, German, English or 
 Russian women who went into the under- 
 ground or the harvest field or the banks. 
 Nothing unusual happens in the world 
 that does not turn up these cases. A 
 few years ago, when the Island of Sicily 
 was shaken by earthquake, an American 
 woman whose recent public career has 
 been unusually picturesque and impor- 
 tant showed her ability in emergencies 
 in a fashion to attract international 
 attention. This was Doctor, or Com- 
 missioner, or Miss (as you prefer) 
 53 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 Katherine Davis. She was in Palermo 
 when the earthquake came, and she made 
 her way to Syracuse as straight as a 
 string. There was something to do 
 there; and I doubt if she ever missed 
 a thing she saw to do in her life, save 
 through the inability to be in two places 
 at once and do two things at once. So 
 she went to Syracuse — and soon after 
 she entered the racked and broken town 
 she found herself in a great room of the 
 Cathedral, left intact. On the floor were 
 stretched scores of the victims. A dis- 
 tressing feature of their suffering was 
 the white dust settled over them, caking 
 their wounds. Miss Davis leaned over 
 one old woman and gently wiped her 
 face. Immediately a neighbor pled for 
 a like service — the handkerchief was 
 like a magic balm. Instantly she saw 
 a need. Handkerchiefs, linen, to wipe 
 their caked eyes and lips and wounds ! 
 54 
 
"THAT'S HER BUSINESS" 
 
 Without ado she marched into the 
 disrupted town, searching until she found 
 what she wanted, a shop still standing. 
 Without ado she entered, and with the 
 help of friends drafted into service, she 
 raided it : handkerchiefs, linen, cotton, 
 anything that would serve her purpose 
 she took, and used, to the infinite relief 
 of hundreds. It was the beginning of 
 a relief campaign conducted on purely 
 personal and independent lines. What 
 she saw to do she found ways to do or 
 have done. One particularly sensible 
 undertaking was the organizing of a shoe 
 shop. Nobody had shoes, she found. 
 At the same time hundreds had nothing 
 to do; so she started a cobbler's shop 
 to cover the feet and save the reason. 
 
 There were other self-imposed tasks 
 
 to meet, the extraordinary and unheard 
 
 of demands a great catastrophe creates. 
 
 She stayed on for weeks, and won a 
 
 55 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 decoration — incidentally it might be 
 said, for the Italians were not ungrateful, 
 a decoration and an interview with the 
 Pope ! When it was reported by cable 
 that she had been appointed to her pres- 
 ent position she received congratulations 
 from the mayor of Syracuse. 
 
 But Katherine Davis at Syracuse was 
 the Katherine Davis of Bedford Re- 
 formatory, meeting wayward and vicious 
 girls on their own terms, and dealing out 
 to them that which so fitted their needs 
 that the most incorrigible came in time 
 to believe her a friend. 
 
 She was the Katherine Davis of the 
 Department of Charities and Corrections, 
 who, threatened with a hunger strike 
 of the sort that had for years baffled 
 the Government and the prison authori- 
 ties of Great Britain, answered that she 
 would roll would-be martyrs in blankets 
 and feed them safely and quietly through 
 56 
 
"THAT'S HER BUSINESS" 
 
 the nostrils. Simple ! Simple as genius, 
 and so obvious that it set the country 
 to laughing. Quick wit they called it. 
 Woman's wit, a woman's way, they 
 should have called it, the way that life 
 as she has practiced it through the ages 
 has taught her. 
 
 It is oftener than not the ability to 
 meet emergencies which places one man 
 or woman above another in the affairs 
 of the world. It is one of the fine fruits 
 of human training. It demands more 
 than one well-trained faculty. It de- 
 mands that all the faculties be in working 
 order and acting in harmony. It de- 
 mands such a control over them that they 
 spring instantly and naturally to the task. 
 Emergencies give no time for consulta- 
 tion, for "studying the case," for getting 
 ready. If they are to be met, they must 
 be met on the spot ; they require supple- 
 ness of mind and steadiness of nerve, 
 57 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 instant command of resources, and in- 
 stant invention of substitutes if resources 
 are wanting. 
 
 There is necessary, too, a philosophy of 
 life which is too sound and too broad to 
 be knocked into a cocked hat if one's 
 "ways" and tastes and habits are dis- 
 turbed. One of the surprises which 
 await many of us who have had things 
 pretty much our own way in life is the 
 suddenness with which our philosophy 
 goes to pieces if that to which we are 
 accustomed, which we like and want, is 
 taken away. All the serenity and steadi- 
 ness on which we pride ourselves dis- 
 appears. If we take an inventory of our 
 state we shall find we are shaken because 
 things — and usually material things — 
 have not stayed "fixed." We are philos- 
 ophers only when we have what we want. 
 
 Now this command of faculties and 
 this steady philosophy are not gifts of 
 
 *«r 58 
 
"THAT'S HER BUSINESS" 
 
 nature, they are the result of training, 
 and it is a training of which one gets 
 but little in those orderly operations 
 which men have devised, such as schools 
 and trades and professions. They go 
 into the making, of course, but are only 
 one element. It comes from the mixture 
 of gifts and withholdings, of efforts 
 and indulgences, of gains and of losses, 
 which make what we call our life — that 
 surprising thing which comes to us, and 
 out of which we get, or do not get, what- 
 ever of knowledge we have of ourselves, 
 whatever control we have of our powers, 
 whatever appreciation we have of values, 
 and whatever vision we have of finer 
 and worthier things, possible to men, but 
 as yet unrealized. 
 
 It is a training which demands intimate 
 
 contact with other lives. There is no 
 
 human experience which offers greater 
 
 opportunities for it than that of women 
 
 59 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 in their family relations. That numbers 
 of them do not recognize the value of the 
 demands on them, that a few resent them 
 rather vociferously, has but little to do 
 with the case. The great fact, backed 
 by all human experience in the past and 
 present, remains, that the mass of women 
 can be depended upon, when the crisis 
 arises, to do whatever is needed, whether 
 it is to shoulder a gun or run a street 
 car. They are trained for it, trained by 
 life, and, whatever the experiments they 
 make, they will never find a substitute 
 for their ancient school. 
 
 60 
 
THE TALKATIVE WOMAN 
 
 61 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE TALKATIVE WOMAN 
 
 Talkativeness is a hallmark of fem- 
 ininity. A silent woman may be ad- 
 mirable, but she stirs uneasiness. She 
 is like a moon in eclipse, mysterious 
 and fascinating, but not for daily life. 
 The new woman bent on making over 
 the sex is contemptuous of talkative- 
 ness. To allow the simple interests of 
 daily life to run unconsciously and 
 merrily off the tongue does not har- 
 monize with the strenuous career she 
 has planned for womankind. Not that 
 she would shut her mouth. Far from 
 it. She would make her a conversa- 
 tionalist, not a talker. There is the 
 same distinction between the two that 
 there is between the agriculturist and 
 63 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 the farmer. There is the same term of 
 life, for while the agriculturist is an ex- 
 periment for a day, the farmer goes on 
 forever. 
 
 For a habit which persists through 
 the ages, in the face of censure and 
 ridicule, as woman's talkativeness has, 
 there is a reason. Generally it lies in 
 the depths of life, where critics do not 
 always explore. May \t not be that 
 woman's persisting habit of chattering 
 has its reason? 
 
 One morning I found myself side- 
 tracked in a Pullman sleeper. The train 
 stood in a lovely wooded spot where 
 birds sang and early flowers bloomed. 
 The car was perfectly silent until there 
 came in from breakfast a late pair — a 
 young mother and a child possibly two 
 years old. 
 
 Scarcely were they seated when the 
 chattering began. It was the subject 
 
 64 
 
THE TALKATIVE WOMAN 
 
 matter of it which quickly caught my 
 ear. "Wobin, wobin," shouted the 
 child suddenly, "see, see!" "Yes," the 
 mother said, "Robin, Robin what?" 
 "Wobin wed-best," promptly said the 
 youngster. "Sing, wobin, sing," he 
 ordered. "What's that?" asked the 
 mother, pointing to a bluebird swinging 
 gayly on a limb near the car. " Gosbick," 
 he replied hesitatingly. "No, bluebird" 
 — and so it went on, an excited watching 
 and chattering over the birds that filled 
 the trees. 
 
 How a child so young could have 
 learned to distinguish form and color 
 in birds as this one had, how it had 
 acquired so lively and genuine an interest 
 in them, excited my curiosity to such a 
 point that I sought an interview. 
 
 "Is he as young as he looks, and how 
 did you do it?" was the burden of my 
 questions. 
 
 r 65 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 "Twenty months," the mother said, 
 "and as to how it started, it was my 
 chattering to him as I tried to amuse him 
 with a picture book of birds. When 
 I saw he was trying to speak the names, 
 that he caught the colors and forms, I 
 led him on. Last winter I took him to 
 the Natural History Museum, and found 
 he was able to distinguish several of 
 the birds in the cases. So we've gone on. 
 He knows a few notes. He's learning 
 many words, but of course what I prize 
 is the habit of observation and of com- 
 parison he's acquiring. He is really 
 becoming quite an attentive child." 
 
 I did not find in my brief talks with 
 the woman whether or not she had ever 
 studied psychology. It did not matter, 
 she was doing better, for she was dis- 
 covering the stuff from which that science 
 is made. She had found that in the 
 education of children, interest is at the 
 66 
 
THE TALKATIVE WOMAN 
 
 bottom of learning, and that interest 
 comes from going over and over all the 
 various features of the thing — letting 
 one lead to another. Perhaps she knew 
 already James's rule for cultivating atten- 
 tion: "The conditio sine qua non of sus- 
 tained attention to a given topic of 
 thought is that we should roll it over 
 and over incessantly and consider differ- 
 ent aspects and relations of it in turn." 
 Perhaps she knew that James had de- 
 clared that "an education which should 
 improve this faculty" [that of "sustained 
 attention"] "would be the education 
 par excellence." 
 
 But, as I say, she had something better 
 — something that many who learn the 
 laws and rules never know — she had 
 discovered the truth on which the laws 
 are framed. 
 
 In this little experience is wrapped up 
 the chief reason why talkativeness has 
 67 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 persisted among women. One of their 
 chief obligations has always been teach- 
 ing the child to talk. It could only be 
 done by incessant repetition, going over 
 and over the names of things until his 
 ear caught the sound, his tongue framed 
 it. It is not difficult to sustain the thesis 
 that if it were not for the chattering of 
 women, the child would never learn to 
 talk. It has been done with grace and 
 wit by one of the most brilliant French 
 contemporary writers, Remy de Gour- 
 mont. He even goes so far as to declare 
 that this chattering of women is a more 
 important literary service than the writ- 
 ing of poems or philosophies. 
 
 There is no one, probably, that will 
 deny that the first words a child attempts 
 to speak are mere imitations of sounds — 
 that they mean no more to him than 
 sounds do to a parrot. When he begins 
 to imitate there is always, or should be, 
 
 68 
 
THE TALKATIVE WOMAN 
 
 a woman beside him, repeating, smiling, 
 encouraging him. The play goes on, 
 month in and month out. With infinite 
 patience she chatters to him until con- 
 sciousness is aroused. Then rapidly his 
 education goes on, as it was doing in 
 the case of my pair in the sleeper : 
 Words are attached to objects; facts 
 about objects are perceived ; their form, 
 their color, their odor, their relations to 
 the little learner. The words for all 
 these perceptions are slowly gathered in. 
 Then the child learns to compare, to 
 distinguish values, to remember not 
 merely the sounds he learns but the 
 meanings of those sounds. His mind is 
 opened to the world, and through a 
 woman's chattering ! 
 
 "When he leaves her hands at six or 
 
 seven," says M. de Gourmont, "he is a 
 
 man, that is, he talks, which is what 
 
 makes a man." "The great intellectual 
 
 69 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 work of women," he goes on, "is teaching 
 language. The grammarians claim that 
 they do it, which is absurd. Children 
 know how to talk before they go to school. 
 They already use all the forms of the 
 verb; all the shades of syntax, easily 
 and correctly. The schoolmaster teaches 
 them that a certain form which they use 
 is the imperfect of the subjunctive, 
 but that is not teaching them language. 
 Language is a function, grammar is the 
 analysis of that function. It is as use- 
 less to know grammar in order to speak 
 a language as it is to understand physiol- 
 ogy in order to breathe with the lungs or 
 walk with the legs. This power of lan- 
 guage the child gets from the woman. 
 It is to her honor that later he will use it 
 as a poet, novelist, philosopher or 
 moralist, or, to use Nietzsche's strong 
 phrase, as a 'creator of values." 
 
 Take this view of it — and who shall 
 70 
 
THE TALKATIVE WOMAN 
 
 or can dispute its truth ? — and how in- 
 finitely more valuable to the world is 
 the chatter of women than all the books 
 they ever wrote or orations they ever 
 delivered. It is of that fundamental 
 order of things, without which cultiva- 
 tion, even civilization, could not go on. 
 But feminine talkativeness plays 
 another r61e almost as important as this 
 of teacher and preserver of human speech. 
 It is that of entertainer and consoler. 
 There is none other so universal, and so on 
 the whole so sure of its mark — story- 
 telling, song-singing, sports and dancing 
 combined have not done more in the 
 world to break the dismal strain of 
 fatigue, of pain, of discouragement than 
 the gay talk of women. Here is what 
 I mean, picked up in a hospital : A 
 young woman was facing a dangerous 
 operation and revolting bitterly against 
 the situation. Her mother was sent 
 71 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 for. She came, full of dread and anguish. 
 Without a sign of what was in her own 
 heart, she established herself by the 
 bed, chattering for hours of things at 
 home : the amusing sayings of the new 
 Scotch cook, the tricks of the last puppy, 
 the gayeties of the neighborhood. 
 Chatter? Yes, God-sent chatter, based 
 on a profound, if instinctive, sense of 
 the human heart and its needs ; it 
 broke the revolt. This sort of service 
 is part of the daily life of women. The 
 old are warmed and enlivened by it; 
 the discouraged forget themselves in 
 it; the strenuous relax under its in- 
 fluence. It is one of the great con- 
 soling forces of society. It makes the 
 daily hardships and efforts of millions of 
 people endurable, not for any knowledge 
 it shows, not for brilliance or wisdom or 
 importance, but purely as a natural 
 expression of the devotion, the sympathy, 
 
 72 
 
THE TALKATIVE WOMAN 
 
 the affection that the chatterer feels for 
 another. 
 
 But it is so idle, so silly, this chatter ! 
 Nothing is idle or silly which is born of an 
 unselfish impulse to amuse, to arouse, or 
 console another. ,\ Talk becomes silly only 
 when it is selfish, vain, pretentious. No 
 matter what the subject, it is tedious 
 and uninteresting when it springs from 
 one of these roots. There never yet 
 was a satirist so cruel that he found 
 material in the talk of a woman directed 
 to teaching her child to speak, to the 
 amusing of a worn-out husband, the 
 consoling of a suffering friend. Their 
 efforts become beautiful and sacred be- 
 cause of their intent. One sees only 
 that, and thinks not at all of the things 
 said. 
 
 It is not these women who have 
 made talkativeness a reproach. It is 
 those who are contemptuous of such 
 73 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 common services, those who consider 
 no talk worth while unless the subject 
 matter is what they call "intellectual" 
 — that is, as a rule, outside of the matter 
 of which they know much, or in which 
 they have more than the superficial inter- 
 est they feel in anything which for the 
 moment commands society's attention. 
 The satirist never had fairer game than 
 the woman who, convinced that con- 
 versation depends for quality on subjects, 
 sets out deliberately to gather up facts 
 and^ideas in order that she may talk 
 about them. It has become an activity, 
 this of feeding for talk. There are 
 teachers who weekly tell women what has 
 gone on in the world, in order that these 
 women may appear to be familiar with 
 current events. There are other teachers 
 who make digests of books and articles 
 for them to speak of, others who tell 
 them what to think of new music, new 
 74 
 
THE TALKATIVE WOMAN 
 
 movements, new plays. They use their 
 conscientiously gleaned information with 
 confidence and fluency, convinced that 
 they are elevating society. 
 
 There is plenty of material in our 
 American cities and towns to justify 
 Don Marquis in his lively conversations 
 of Hermione and her "Little Group of 
 Advanced Thinkers." These serious 
 young women feel themselves "forced 
 to take up many things to keep abreast 
 of modern thought." They find it hard 
 work, but reflect that it is a duty they 
 "owe the race, . . . which makes the 
 sacrifice easier." They feel it important 
 to understand the French Revolution — 
 the Caillaux trial led them to this con- 
 clusion ! " So," says Hermione, "we took 
 it up one evening and studied it thor- 
 oughly." Heredity they heard of, and 
 to understand it spent an evening on 
 sea urchins, — at least Hermione thinks 
 15 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 it is heredity, — in connection with which 
 they studied the sea urchin, "though it 
 may have been in connection with biology 
 — or — or — " 
 
 Possibly Hermione is less trying than 
 the young woman who talks without 
 ever having taken up any subject 
 seriously for even one evening. It de- 
 pends upon which of the two you are 
 listening to. But all this is not saying 
 that the woman who uses her tongue for 
 another's benefit has no need of intellec- 
 tual equipment. There is nobody needs 
 it more. But she must have the real 
 thing, not the superficial — she cannot 
 teach her child or console her friend with 
 faked interests, themes hastily picked 
 up between luncheon and tea time from 
 the lips of a purveyor of facts. She 
 must know and feel and delight in what 
 she talks about. Her purposes are so 
 deep in the heart of things they cannot be 
 76 
 
THE TALKATIVE WOMAN 
 
 reached by light plummets. The more 
 she really knows and sees and appreciates, 
 the better she can do her work. All 
 the education and cultivation she can 
 get is none too much for one who leads 
 a little child to consciousness, who lifts 
 the heavy burdens of life from the 
 shoulders of friends or mate. 
 
 It is as natural for the normal woman 
 to talk as for the bird to sing. It is the 
 spontaneous expression and giving of 
 herself. It is this naturalness which 
 gives to her talkativeness its perennial 
 charm as well as its incalculable value 
 in the scheme of things. The woman in 
 the human group is much like the Mon- 
 arch in Pierre Mille's delightful tale of 
 that name. "Why do people call me 
 the Monarch ? Why am I loved ? Why 
 always happy? Because," he explains, 
 "I always have time to talk. Without 
 me the people around here would be 
 77 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 bored to death. I go and come, laugh 
 and sing, I cost nothing but a glass of 
 wine, and a bit of supper. What do I 
 give? I give myself ." 
 The woman gives herself. 
 
 78 
 
THE CULTURE CHASERS 
 
 79 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CULTURE CHASERS 
 
 About forty years ago there was 
 started in connection with the summer 
 assembly on Chautauqua Lake in the 
 state of New York an organization known 
 as the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific 
 Circle. It offered a four-years' reading 
 course, designed by its founders to give 
 the college outlook. This reading course 
 became enormously popular. At one 
 time as many as one hundred thousand 
 readers were enrolled. While many of 
 those who enrolled never finished the 
 course, thousands did and received a 
 diploma recognizing their achievement. 
 Hundreds of these graduates continued 
 the work, taking up course after course of 
 G 81 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 advanced reading offered by the insti- 
 tution. 
 
 It was my fortune to begin my 
 journalistic career on the magazine which 
 served the Chautauqua reading courses. 
 Through my hands there passed for 
 several years a continuous stream of 
 letters revealing much of the lives and 
 aspirations of the readers, at least ninety- 
 five per cent of whom were women. 
 One vivid impression of this vast corre- 
 spondence remains with me. It is the 
 genuine, even poignant, longing of many 
 of the writers to be reckoned among 
 those whom the world called cultured. 
 They wanted this with as much intensity 
 as their men folks probably wanted 
 money, though I doubt if they could 
 have explained the reason for their am- 
 bition as concisely. 
 
 The painful and discouraging feature 
 of the case was the idea many of our 
 
THE CULTURE CHASERS 
 
 correspondents had of culture. They did 
 not understand it to be ripeness and 
 sureness of mind, it was not taste, dis- 
 crimination, judgment; it was an ac- 
 quisition — something which came with 
 diplomas and degrees and only with them. 
 Many of them obviously believed that 
 by finishing the reading course they 
 would automatically be classed with 
 cultivated people. Their argument was 
 that since a college course meant culture, 
 one giving a college outlook must mean 
 culture. Our efforts to set the course 
 for what it was worth, — and that was 
 considerable, — to forestall false notions 
 and false hopes, seemed as a rule only to 
 bewilder our readers, so fixed were they 
 in their belief that culture came with 
 diplomas and degrees. They plainly re- 
 garded it as treason to suggest that this 
 was not a necessary result. 
 I have always believed that the de- 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 dining popularity of the Chautauqua 
 reading courses was partly due to the 
 discovery that there was no magic in it. 
 Like the college course, its worth de- 
 pended upon the powers it loosened, 
 the tastes and interests it awakened, 
 the capacity it developed to go on after 
 the diploma was earned. If none of 
 these things happened — and so often 
 they did not — then all that the reader 
 of the course, like many a student in 
 the college, carried away was a budget 
 of facts and the discipline and self- 
 control which result from sticking to a 
 set task. He soon discovered this meant 
 precious little among people — certainly 
 it gave no particular distinction. 
 
 The theory that culture follows a 
 diploma is less popular than it was twenty 
 years ago. It has been succeeded by 
 another, which women are applying in 
 all our large towns and cities with as 
 
 84 
 
THE CULTURE CHASERS 
 
 much enthusiasm and confidence as ever 
 possessed a Chautauqua Circle. The 
 present theory is that culture results 
 from seeing — hearing — sampling 
 everything new in ideas, in movements, 
 in music, in the drama and literature. 
 All over the country the exponents of 
 this theory chase culture from morning 
 until night. It is they who can be de- 
 pended upon to fill a theater at ten or 
 eleven in the morning to listen to a 
 lecture on Peace or the Cancer Cure, 
 Suffrage or Tagore, Radium or the 
 Panama Canal. It is they who are the 
 instant ally of any cause which is new 
 and it is they who will stay by as long 
 as the campaign is exciting — or until 
 something more exciting looms in sight. 
 Many things which thrive for a time 
 would die of inattention without them. 
 A horde of lecturers, entertainers, and 
 promoters support themselves through 
 85 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 the power of these groups to exercise 
 unlimited and heterogeneous interest, to 
 keep up speed and temperature through 
 a succession of entirely unrelated ideas 
 and activities. Without their theory of 
 culture to sustain them, they could 
 never endure the aches and pains and 
 the awful, dull spots which are inevitable 
 in a program thrown together as theirs 
 is. They believe too that in supporting 
 this theory of culture they are serving 
 the community. If they go to bed many 
 a night half hysterical with fatigue and 
 wholly muddled in brain they still have 
 a sense of duty well done to sustain 
 them. That for which they apologize is 
 not following their crazy program but 
 for cutting out a lecture — a benefit — a 
 committee. That is a failure to do your 
 whole duty. 
 
 How sound is this theory of culture? 
 Test it by certain mental and spiritual 
 86 
 
THE CULTURE CHASERS 
 
 results which we have a right to expect 
 from genuine cultivation, and where do 
 we come out? What kind of a lecture 
 audience, for instance, do they make? 
 This is the occupation to which they 
 probably give most serious attention. 
 Do they experience fresh, acute reactions ? 
 Do they discriminate? A lecturer has 
 a right to ask that from a cultivated 
 mind. Try a subject on them in which 
 you as a speaker are truly interested and 
 of which you know something; you will 
 get the most unfailing attention — and no 
 sense of rebound. The attention is fixed 
 to the point of staring but the mind 
 simply is not there; is at least not at 
 work. One can almost see it trying to 
 unhook itself from the committee which 
 preceded the lecture or running ahead 
 to get a peek at what the next hour offers. 
 Give the same talk to a group of men 
 — you'll not be able to get them together 
 87 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 unless they think you have something 
 they ought to listen to — and the effect 
 is entirely different. It is real interest — 
 or an exodus. 
 
 Try the same talk on a group of work- 
 ing women and you will get living atten- 
 tion. They follow with eagerness and 
 appreciation. To them it is a relaxa- 
 tion — a change of ideas. They take 
 what you have to offer gratefully and for 
 what it is worth — no more or less. 
 There is no duty about it. They are 
 not following a profession in listening 
 to you. They are doing what they are 
 pleased to do for the most natural of 
 reasons — the desire for a taste of some- 
 thing different. 
 
 The power quickly to know a real 
 thing, to recognize the "ring" of truth, 
 the "feel" of quality, is the result of 
 cultivation and a sound test of it; and 
 here is a point at which the group gener- 
 
 88 
 
THE CULTURE CHASERS 
 
 ally fails. They expect others to do 
 their judging for them. They get them- 
 selves and others into funny muddles, 
 frequently by their indiscriminate en- 
 thusiasms and curiosities. Plausible and 
 attractive pretenders and swindlers of 
 the intellectual world find an easy prey 
 in this group. Hardly a winter goes by 
 that they are not "taken in" by some 
 clever imitator. A momentary confusion 
 and the episode is forgotten. While the 
 sober-minded are still bewailing their 
 gullibility, they are out of sight and the 
 shock out of mind. A new excitement 
 has claimed them. 
 
 A lack of fidelity to causes and interests 
 which they have taken up characterizes 
 the advocates of this school of culture. 
 A mind which really lays hold of a sub- 
 ject is not easily detached from it. It 
 wants to finish it and there is irritation 
 on being called off from it too soon. It 
 
 89 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 is like an unpaid debt — a half -furnished 
 room. The mind goes back to finish up 
 when it can — but there is no such need 
 awakened in the members of this group. 
 They are neither ashamed of temporary 
 interests nor even conscious of them. 
 They have no conception that culture 
 demands anything so plodding and un- 
 exciting as a permanent interest. A 
 permanent interest means refusing many 
 things in order to carry through a selected 
 one. That is not culture according to 
 their theory. 
 
 Apply another test — the power to 
 report intelligently and clearly the thing 
 taken up. A mind truly cultivated never 
 feels that the intellectual process is 
 complete until it can reproduce in some 
 medium the thing which it has absorbed. 
 That is, a cultivated mind must give 
 out — else its inner springs sour of in- 
 action; and it must give out a sound 
 90 
 
THE CULTURE CHASERS 
 
 thing, something as good as it got — 
 at least the bones of the thing must be 
 whole. What sort of reporters do these 
 culture chasers make ? 
 
 A recent experience of the writer in 
 concentrating on a subject which was 
 entirely out of her field may illustrate 
 the point. It was brought back sharply 
 to her by a passage in Neil Lyons's 
 pungent story "Clara." There is a 
 gentleman in the tale, Mr. Cozenza, 
 accounted rich in the world of street 
 vendors, singers and beggars where Clara 
 moves. He seems to have made his 
 money on the race course, but there is a 
 suspicion it may have had less conven- 
 tional sources. He is rich and retired 
 and friendly. His chief interest is Science. 
 He gets his science much as our group 
 gets its culture, by sundry and various 
 lectures at settlements, night schools, 
 and the like. He is repeating what he 
 91 
 
THE WAYS OP WOMAN 
 
 has learned of the latest theory of life and 
 the universe to his friends in the saloon. 
 
 "It is all very simple, really, only it's 
 difficult to put it plainly. I meantersay 
 it's plain really, only it's entangled with 
 itself, like. Ya see that light over ther? 
 Well that light is Electricity. And 
 Electricity is Life. See? Only what 
 we call Life is not Life. Have you ever 
 heard of a new mixture, which goes by 
 the name of Radium?" 
 
 "Worth a million pounds an ounce, 
 ain't it?" said a listener. 
 
 "That^s the stuff ! Well, this Radium 
 is really life. But life is really jelly, which 
 you find in the sea. So this jelly is the 
 same as Radium, ya see. Only they 
 can't find any of the jelly. And Radium 
 is scarce. So they invented Electricity. 
 And there is Radium in Electricity if they 
 could find the way to get it out. At the 
 same time, there's no jelly there. 
 
 "It's all absurdly simple, really. 
 What I want ya to understand is that 
 you, and your children, and that light 
 over there, and the jelly in the sea, are 
 all related, one to another. You've got 
 the same life. See? You've got Elec- 
 92 
 
THE CULTURE CHASERS 
 
 tricity. You've got it all over you. 
 And Electricity is Radium and Radium 
 is jelly. But they can't find the jelly. 
 And Life is jelly, and — but you can see 
 it ! Now, can't you ?" '* 
 
 Some three or four years ago the writer 
 was asked by the program committee of 
 a club to which she belonged to write a 
 digest of a book which treated the same 
 subject as that which interested Mr. 
 Cozenza. She did the best she could — 
 conscientiously boning its unfamiliar 
 terms and arguments until she had what 
 she believed to be an understandable 
 statement. A scientific friend looked it 
 over to see if she had used the words 
 right and the performance was solemnly 
 made. Now what startled the writer 
 was the fact that when after reading 
 Mr. Cozenza she tried to put down 
 off-hand a short statement on " elec- 
 tricity, radium, life and jelly" she found 
 93 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 she was no clearer than he and not half 
 so entertaining. That is, the thing had 
 not become a part of her equipment of 
 ideas. 
 
 There is a perfectly sound reason for 
 Mr. Cozenza and the writer dabbling 
 in the New Knowledge. Mental dis- 
 traction is its own justification, but one 
 should no more call these distractions 
 culture than he should set down a day 
 in the country to a travel account. 
 
 To dip into the varied interests of life 
 as we find them in towns and cities and 
 country gives real distraction to hard- 
 working people. This is the solid basis 
 for women's clubs. It is the sound justi- 
 fication for reading courses like those 
 Chautauqua offers. It changes the ideas 
 of women absorbed in home and social 
 cares. It gives them refreshing glimpses 
 of outside things. It is of high value as 
 a stimulus and distraction, but it does 
 94 
 
THE CULTURE CHASERS 
 
 not necessarily mean culture. It is too 
 superficial, too varied, too hasty to serve 
 so serious a purpose. 
 
 Culture is a slow process. It comes 
 from long and close contacts. It is the 
 fruit of reflection, of travail of soul and of 
 mind. Grappling with something until 
 the very essence of it has been extracted 
 is a first step. Thus the taste of es- 
 sences is learned, and once learned lesser 
 distillations do not satisfy. Then fol- 
 lows a growing power to discriminate, to 
 distinguish nice values, to judge of 
 quality, to answer to beauty, to feel the 
 need, that what you have — though it 
 may be little — may still be the real 
 thing. This is culture. It is not 
 baggage, like diplomas and degrees — 
 it is not things seen and heard, miles 
 traveled or books read. These are the 
 materials for culture; they contribute 
 to it only when they are absorbed by 
 95 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 the mind and as really lost in it as 
 water and lime, phosphates and ammonia, 
 must be lost in the soil if they are to 
 enrich it and enable it to increase its 
 yield. 
 
THE TWENTY-CENT DINNER 
 
 97 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE TWENTY-CENT DINNER 
 
 There is a strong inclination among 
 men to believe that you can mark by 'a 
 dollar sign the point on the highway of 
 life where it is excusable to break the 
 traffic regulations, tear up the roadbed, 
 or take to the woods. It is an inclination 
 born of that passionate revolt against 
 misery and sin which is the strongest 
 force in some natures. The idea of 
 human suffering is so intolerable to 
 them that they must have laws against 
 it — quick, sure laws. "Do this!" they 
 cry to us. "Come this way, and all 
 will be well." 
 
 Would that it were so easy ! 
 
 A few months ago a young working 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 girl in Chicago attempted to take her 
 own life. "Why did you do this?" 
 asked the doctor who was making what 
 proved to be a useless attempt to save 
 her. "Doctor," said the girl, "did you 
 ever eat twenty -cent dinners?" 
 
 The story was widely quoted as an 
 argument for various schemes looking 
 to higher wages, better working condi- 
 tions and more amusement. The matter 
 resolves itself into a discussion of whether 
 the twenty-cent dinner is an acceptable 
 reason for suicide and, if it is, whether 
 there are no quicker and surer ways 
 of circumventing it than legislation. 
 These queries are no sooner voiced than 
 another pertinent one follows : If it is a 
 sound reason, why is the earth so well- 
 filled as it is to-day? A little figuring 
 on wages and incomes will show that half, 
 and more, of its people never have had 
 dinners that cost even twenty cents. 
 
 100 
 
THE TWENTY-CENT DINNER 
 
 Take your man on a thousand dollars 
 a year — and a thousand dollars is a 
 handsome wage as things are in the 
 world — what can he pay for the dinner 
 of himself and his wife and his three 
 children? Studies of budgets of wage 
 earners show that in this country from 
 forty to forty-five per cent of incomes 
 averaging $1000 to $1200 a year must 
 go for food. Put it at forty-five per 
 cent, or $450 — $90 a year per person, 
 or 25 cents a day. Evidently there 
 will be few twenty-cent dinners eaten 
 in that household, yet there will be 
 thousands of such homes where there is 
 health, gayety and thanksgiving. 
 
 Moreover, if you study the conditions 
 under which much of the most brilliant 
 work of the world has been carried on, 
 you will find that the twenty-cent dinner 
 was often the feast for holidays. Mary 
 Lyon educated herself, and built Mount 
 101 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 Holyoke College, on dinners that rarely 
 averaged anything like twenty cents, 
 the difference in the purchasing power of 
 money strictly considered. 
 
 Professor Palmer says that Alice Free- 
 man used to say that in her childhood 
 she associated luxury with a keg of salt 
 mackerel! Susan B. Anthony did some 
 of the most spirited campaigning we've 
 ever had in these states from man or 
 woman, and there were days when it 
 looked doubtful if she would have any 
 dinner. If any one of the three ever 
 considered suicide it was certainly not 
 because of what she had had to eat. 
 Poets and philosophers have gone even 
 farther — for they have not only done 
 their work on frugal fare, they have 
 celebrated its virtues. 
 
 How have vast multitudes not only 
 found life livable on plain food, but in 
 spite of it achieved happiness, success, 
 102 
 
THE TWENTY-CENT DINNER 
 
 and honors? When does the meal be- 
 come impotent ? What is the magic that 
 makes it a curse for one, a blessing for 
 another? Or is it the dinner that is 
 curse or blessing? 
 
 There is a way of attacking life which 
 we call practical. Multitudes of men 
 and women have adopted it. One of 
 its most interesting manifestations is 
 circumventing by art and skill the thing 
 we don't like until it becomes the thing 
 we do like. When it comes to twenty- 
 cent dinners, the practical man before 
 committing suicide investigates the pos- 
 sibilities of the situation. Must such a 
 meal be meager, monotonous, savorless? 
 Is there no way to redeem it? What a 
 throng of men and women, since time 
 began, have tasted and experimented 
 and combined everything above, below, 
 and upon the earth, in their efforts to 
 find abundant, cheap, palatable food. 
 103 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 What testing of roots and twigs, of 
 crawling and flying things ! What dry- 
 ing of fruits and canning of vegetables ! 
 It was in the effort to escape the twenty- 
 cent dinner — by which is meant any 
 savorless meal — that the Chinaman 
 found his chop suey, the Hungarian his 
 goulash, the Frenchman his bouillabaisse, 
 the Irishman his stew and the Yankee 
 his boiled dinner. They would not be 
 beaten by poverty — they would not 
 only fill their stomachs but satisfy their 
 appetites, please their palates. The stub- 
 born fight with the twenty-cent dinner 
 has given us some of our choicest deli- 
 cacies, discoveries forced by hunger, and 
 determination not to succumb. Was it 
 anything else that toasted the first snail 
 or stewed the first bird's nest? 
 
 Every generation has carried on the 
 fight for the good and satisfying meal 
 which was also the cheap. What 
 104 
 
THE TWENTY-CENT DINNEE 
 
 victories the fighters can relate ! They 
 are written in thousands of volumes, 
 and they dispute the space in a thousand 
 journals with law, adventure, and poli- 
 tics. 
 
 All over this and other lands we find 
 their successes standing out in contem- 
 porary annals. Feats of efficiency, of 
 ingenuity, of culinary art ! A year ago 
 I found myself the guest of the girls of a 
 Western college — fine, gay, hard-work- 
 ing girls — who waited by turn on the 
 well-spread tables. It was good food, 
 and I inquired as to cost. "We allow 
 $2.15 a week, but we haven't been able 
 to spend over $2.07 this term — usually 
 we run about $1.98." "Allowed $2.15 
 a week and not able to spend over 
 $2.07 ! " Where, oh, where is the twenty- 
 cent dinner in that budget? It couldn't 
 live, save as a holiday treat. What 
 terrors had it for these young women? 
 105 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 They had defeated it. It was one of 
 the slain foes which dog life's foot- 
 steps. 
 
 But here you say is cooperation, whole- 
 sale buying, trained minds devoting them- 
 selves to the problem. The one who 
 works, and must cater to one cannot do 
 this. Having done it for the major part 
 of three happy and profitable years in a 
 great city, the writer flatly disputes the 
 assertion. 
 
 Brains, then, conquer the twenty- 
 cent dinner, brains, mixed with deter- 
 mination. 
 
 But there are multitudes of dingers on 
 frugal foods that seek no substitutes, no 
 variety, no sauce or spice. They eat 
 their bread and cheese with rejoicing, 
 or in blissful unconsciousness that it is 
 not caviare or ortolan. These are those 
 happiest of all eaters, those with a healthy 
 hunger. Of the two meals which linger 
 106 
 
THE TWENTY-CENT DINNER 
 
 in my mind as the most delicious I ever 
 ate — the sweetness of which I shall 
 never forget — one was made up of black 
 bread and coarse cheese, only discovered 
 after a long hunt at a wayside station in 
 France, the other of two battered sand- 
 wiches rescued from the bottom of a 
 Swiss bag after six hours of fighting in a 
 blinding snow storm across a glacier and 
 down a mountain side. Twenty-cent 
 dinners ! A two-cent crust is sweeter 
 than honey cake with such an appetite 
 as cold and struggle give. 
 
 Hunger turns the coarsest food to 
 ambrosia. Work in hot pursuit of an 
 end thrusts the poor meal so far out of 
 mind that it has no chance to irritate 
 and depress. Where there are great 
 things doing in the mind — love, ambi- 
 tion, a clear purpose — there is no place 
 for self-pity or repining over meager 
 living. 
 
 107 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 In the great city where lived the poor 
 child who killed herself because of 
 twenty-cent dinners, hundreds of girls 
 who eat no better, possibly much worse, 
 rush gayly from work to night classed, 
 to neighborhood gatherings, to amuse- 
 ments, and to efforts at self-improve- 
 ment. The girl who after a long day 
 behind the counter or at the desk makes 
 herself brave for a suitor is little con- 
 cerned with the kind of a dinner she 
 ate. She had one, and has forgotten it. 
 The girl who sees just ahead of her a 
 promotion which hard extra work has 
 won for her thinks as little of her dinner. 
 She is on the high road to better and 
 better things, and meager living, if neces- 
 sary to furthering her ambition, is looked 
 on as a part of the game. It is the spirit 
 of battle which carries her over rough 
 places, that, and the vision of achieve- 
 ment, which leads her on. 
 108 
 
THE TWENTY-CENT DINNER 
 
 The world is full of spirited people who 
 insist on making a game of their small 
 opportunities, of finding fun and satis- 
 faction in what they get. It may be 
 little, but with little they make a whole. 
 Did it never occur to anybody to envy 
 O. Henry's clerk who rushed nightly 
 up to his hall bedroom to lose himself 
 ecstatically in the glow of warmth and 
 excitement coming from sitting with 
 his shoeless feet on the steam radiator 
 reading the thrilling yarns he picked up 
 for next to nothing at the second-hand 
 book store? Do any of us realize how 
 many thousands of men and women 
 who might want to commit suicide if 
 they had nothing but their dinner to 
 think of are spending enthralling evenings 
 because of the free circulation of books 
 which every city and town in the country 
 encourages? The country is full of op- 
 portunities for rounded living for the 
 109 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 poorest, if they are willing and know how 
 to tackle their lives as sporting proposi- 
 tions. 
 
 Even dinner becomes for many a man 
 or woman a sporting proposition, par- 
 ticularly at those times when it is not 
 twenty cents for one meal but twenty 
 cents for three. 
 
 The columns of "Letters from the 
 People" which the great city dailies 
 print not unfrequently contain pictures 
 of brave and cheerful wrestling with 
 fate. Here is a fragment from such a 
 letter. The writer was reduced to seek- 
 ing employment, feeding himself, and 
 getting amusement, all on thirty-three 
 cents a day : "It's interesting," he wrote, 
 "and to tell how it's done may be helpful 
 to some forlorn brother." And then 
 follows a really practical description of 
 what may be done with what he calls 
 "that wonder-working bit of currency, 
 110 
 
THE TWENTY-CENT DINNER 
 
 the nickel. ... I just enjoy juggling 
 those nickels' worth !" 
 
 This is true sportsmanship, high 
 courage; moreover, it is not nearly so 
 rare as those people think who look for it 
 only among those who go into battle, 
 who sail the seas, or hunt big game. 
 Certainly, whatever misery there is in 
 the twenty-cent dinner has no surer or 
 more common antidote than the human 
 propensity to be a good sport. 
 
 These are some of the ways in which 
 men and women have met the ogre and 
 reformed him, or made him powerless' for 
 ill. They are much more effective 
 methods than any legislation can devise, 
 and they are vastly more self-respecting 
 and interesting. They are teachable, 
 too, — things that every sympathetic 
 heart can spread with the certainty 
 that they will work, that every man or 
 woman that lays his hand to one of them 
 ill 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 will never again let his dinner be his 
 moral undoing. They are the only- 
 guarantees, too, that thirty-cent dinners, 
 fifty-cent, and dollar dinners may not 
 some day be as reasonably taken as 
 an excuse for suicide as the twenty-cent 
 dinner. It was not the commonplace, 
 flavorless meal that forced the girl to 
 take her life, it was her ignorance of the 
 fact that by mixing brains with it she 
 might have made it interesting and 
 savory; it was her failure to seek new 
 interests, to find new friends, to develop 
 and pursue a purpose; it was the un- 
 developed sporting quality in her make- 
 up, the inability to see life as a game to 
 be played with the cards in hand. 
 
 The wrong that society did her was not 
 in giving her so little money but in 
 depriving her of the moral and mental 
 training necessary to use effectively what 
 she had. Somehow, out of the medley 
 112 
 
THE TWENTY-CENT DINNER 
 
 of unrelated ideas which had found their 
 way into her brain to be brooded over 
 in hours of fatigue and disappointment, 
 she had developed overwhelming self- 
 pity, a detestation of a life which was 
 meager and struggling. Her revolt was 
 balanced and directed by no knowledge 
 of the means by which vast numbers of 
 men and women are meeting and con- 
 quering situations like hers — and worse. 
 No one had taught her to take life gal- 
 lantly, had pointed out the good things 
 within her means, had held out reason- 
 able hopes of what effort and interest 
 and good sportsmanship might do. She 
 had never been taught the meaning of 
 courage — she knew it only as endur- 
 ance, submission, spiritless acceptance. 
 Of that courage whose very essence is 
 faith in the silver lining to all clouds, 
 in the morning after the darkest hours, 
 no sufficient idea had been given her. 
 i 113 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 Here is the gravest wrong, the most 
 desperate deprivation for which those 
 of us who influence the lives of others 
 
 — and no one escapes that grave liability 
 
 — are responsible. It is not a minimum 
 wage, an eight-hour day, a social center 
 
 — good and necessary measures as they 
 all are — which will take the sting and 
 bitterness from life. No one, or all, 
 could have saved the girl if she had 
 never learned to fight what she did not 
 like, to care for something more than 
 for her dinner, to feel a zest for struggle 
 and adjustment. It is active brains, 
 working hearts, an eye for the passing 
 panorama, and courage — more courage 
 and still more courage — which alone 
 make life endurable. It is never the 
 price of your dinner. 
 
 114 
 
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 115 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 There is a singular obtuseness as to 
 the double life young girls lead, among 
 those who are supposed to guide and 
 guard them. The guardian takes it for 
 granted that the girl is what he sees. 
 That with her whom he knows there 
 walks one of whom he knows nothing, 
 he has hardly a suspicion. And yet this 
 unseen life is often much more intense, 
 much more precious to the girl herself 
 than her visible life. It is the "real 
 self," at which she sometimes hints 
 mysteriously. It is the thing which 
 convinces her that she is "not like other 
 girls" — is misunderstood, unappre- 
 ciated. 
 
 117 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 So far as she can make out, those who 
 direct her know nothing of this world of 
 singular sensations, moods, ideas, she 
 finds breaking in upon her. With the 
 sensitiveness of the fresh young mind to 
 the unspoken thoughts of others she 
 feels that these obscure but real ex- 
 periences of hers, if suspected, are de- 
 liberately ignored, because "disap- 
 proved"; at least they are not to be 
 talked about frankly and naturally like 
 food and clothes, and books, and play. 
 Often she concludes that they are classed 
 with those things which are to be "over- 
 come," that is, put out of existence. 
 
 Strange doings go on secretly in this 
 life of her mind. What wonderful things 
 she constructs in her attempt to realize 
 the meaning of the things she is taught ! 
 Her mind is full of reconstructions, like 
 those of Anatole France's little boy, 
 who, needing to vizualize the Garden of 
 118 
 
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 Eden, accepted the Jardin des Plantes 
 as its true self, and the gendarme in red 
 trousers at the gate as the angel with the 
 sword. 
 
 Her mind is full of splendid ladies and 
 gentlemen, — the rich, the great, the no- 
 ble, — and she has the most definite no- 
 tions of what they look like ; what they 
 do; what they say. Her first meeting 
 with the "millionaire's daughter" is 
 a sickening blow, for the girl is like 
 herself, even to her white shirtwaist 
 and stout boots. 
 
 No one can tell how early these dreams 
 of the grandeur of men and women 
 begin. Marie Bashkirtsev says that from 
 the time she was three years old she had 
 these strange and wonderful dreams. 
 Her very dolls in the nursery were to 
 her always kings and queens, knights 
 and fine ladies; and her own thoughts, 
 and all the conversation of those about 
 119 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 her, seemed to her to refer to a time 
 when she herself would be of the magnifi- 
 cent company of which she so vividly 
 dreamed. 
 
 There is a wonderful and beautiful 
 land in which the girl wanders by the 
 hour; she does not know its name, but 
 she'll learn some day; it is called Ro- 
 mance. Here she, a girl of six or seven, 
 dreams of lovers and unspeakable happi- 
 ness. And always in the streets of the 
 town, in the church to which she is taken, 
 is some handsome youth who is the prince, 
 and whom, while she demurely kneels, 
 she is watching adoringly from the cor- 
 ners of her eyes. 
 
 Then there is the Vale of Secrecy, 
 where the grown-ups move but never 
 admit her — whispering sometimes in 
 her presence things she cannot under- 
 stand, but which, she senses, concern 
 her. These things she feels she must 
 120 
 
A YOUNG GIEL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 know. The impression they make on 
 her is that, though they themselves 
 walk in this Vale, they still think it 
 somehow wrong — "bad." And there 
 are moments when she weeps because 
 these guardians and friends are smirched 
 in her eyes by their concealments and 
 winkings. She hates them at moments 
 — they who talk so much of goodness 
 and "doing right." Why, why are they 
 not fair with her? Nothing is "bad" 
 to her — nothing but concealment and 
 lying. That is the way she is made. 
 But she will know ; and she finds out, 
 and builds up strange, distorted images 
 of things — unclean, false notions. A few 
 years later when she is in the high school 
 the grown-ups will attempt to teach her 
 something of the Vale of Secrecy. It is 
 too late. She knows a score of things 
 they have forgotten, for they are old 
 and she is young. She senses that the 
 121 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 flame gone out of them is alive in her. 
 Moreover, they shock her by the lateness 
 and the indirectness, and the humorless 
 solemnity of their teachings. Her mind 
 is full of misconceptions, her body full 
 of flame, but her spirit, in spite of all, 
 is great with reverence, and the tardy, 
 fleshless skeleton they put up outrages 
 her. She is great in the knowledge of 
 her youth and its immense possibilities. 
 They are too late and too public. 
 
 What does the mother see in the girl 
 who is leading this intense concealed 
 life of thought? Why, generally, an 
 obedient creature who loves a pretty 
 frock, wheedles her father, frisks, dances, 
 sleeps twelve hours out of twenty-four 
 — "a perfectly normal child, save for 
 now and then a tantrum, which is to be 
 expected, you know." And yet this girl 
 of hers feigns sleep on the couch to listen 
 to strange conversations she knows not 
 122 
 
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 to be for her ears. She reads every book 
 "kept out of the children's sight;" 
 she lies awake at night to plan an elope- 
 ment with a down-town bank cashier, 
 whose name she does not even know; 
 and if her ideas of the processes of life 
 could be put down on paper they would 
 throw her elders into fits. 
 
 There is no telling how long she will 
 preserve her inner life. She does not 
 want to yield it. Why should she? 
 It is more enticing, far lovelier, than 
 the life of work and play "they" provide 
 for her. Moreover, it is "hers"; she 
 discovered it, owns it. And so she goes 
 on with this double existence, and lays 
 the foundation for that troubling, sphinx- 
 like trait that will make her forever a 
 riddle to herself and to the one whom 
 she will finally love the best, and to 
 whom she would gladly give her full 
 mind — a baffling enigma. 
 123 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 Lucky will she be if the pressure of 
 these concealed thoughts and fancies 
 does not lead her into fantastic experi- 
 ments. Actuality, truth, has never had 
 a place in this world of hers. She has 
 admitted there, in the form which pleased 
 her most, anything that added to the 
 excitement, mystery, enthrallment. The 
 day sometimes comes, however, when the 
 ideas become tyrannical — they want 
 to be put to the test, to be acted on. 
 She accepts as a matter of fact the impos- 
 sible "poisoned needle," and constructs 
 a tragedy of which she is the victim. 
 But this time the idea stalks out of her 
 concealed life into the unconcealed, and 
 she announces herself with cunning de- 
 tail and every sign of sincerity as having 
 absolutely been pierced by this im- 
 aginary weapon. That was recently the 
 case with more than one girl in New 
 York City who found her way into 
 124 
 
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 the hospital, the victim of a "poisoned 
 needle," which existed only in her own 
 mind. 
 
 Case after case of girls who run away, 
 if traced to its source, would be found to 
 come from the desire finally to realize 
 the bizarre adventures they have lived 
 for years in their minds. "Why should 
 she have done this?" a mother wails. 
 "We thought her happy. We gave her 
 everything she wanted." Before the dis- 
 concerting discovery that this girl she 
 believed or took for granted was one 
 thing, is quite another, her feeling of 
 abused confidence is keen. She believes 
 herself the wronged party ; but is she ? 
 If the girl had developed tuberculosis, 
 or typhoid, or dyspepsia, the mother 
 would not have been so confident of her 
 guiltlessness. But this: "How could 
 I know what she was thinking?" And 
 the world repeats: "How could you?" 
 
 125 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 But why should any mother suppose 
 that her girl will not go through the same 
 mental, physical and spiritual experiences 
 that she did ? Why should she not be as 
 watchful for them as for signs of croup 
 or fever ? 
 
 Generally she is not, because of one or 
 the other of two habits of mind which 
 have come to control her own life. 
 Often she has never been able to infuse 
 into her own inner life the wholesome 
 air of truth. She has never opened it 
 frankly to the real world of beauty, 
 and poetry, and idealism. It still is a 
 closed, secret life of more or less distorted 
 imagination. Here, as when a girl, the 
 mother broods over the notion that she is 
 "different." She is so isolated in her 
 grotesque egotism that the last thing she 
 realizes is that her own little girl is being 
 forced to create a similar unreal world to 
 satisfy her dawning consciousness. 
 
 126 
 
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 One woman fails because she has saved 
 her world of unrealities. Another fails 
 because she has destroyed it ! This 
 second mother has made a world of out- 
 side things — a stirring, energetic world 
 of work, play, people, movement. By 
 giving herself never a moment for dream- 
 ing and reflecting she comes to believe the 
 only world which is satisfactory is one 
 made up of an endless chain of things to 
 do — one quite stripped of anything 
 like thinking. Having put an end to 
 thought and dreams in herself she is not 
 sensitive to the signs of them in others. 
 "Keep the child occupied" is the sum 
 total of her maternal wisdom. The child 
 goes obediently through the paces, but 
 behind her innocent eyes thoughts are 
 coming and going which would make her 
 energetic mother's hair stand on end if 
 she could conceive of them. 
 
 That the hands may be busy with one 
 127 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 thing and the thoughts with one quite 
 different is no news. It is the com- 
 monest of experiences. It is the salva- 
 tion of monotonous toil. There is an 
 old story of a factory girl, who, when 
 asked if the unending feeding of her 
 machine did not weary her, said: "Oh, 
 no ! In the morning I play I am a 
 duchess, and the rest of the day is 
 short." "Keeping a child busy" is no 
 sure guarantee that her mind is not 
 vagabonding in forbidden places. 
 
 It may be that the processes of their 
 own minds are the last that women are 
 going to study and control. They hide, 
 deny, shrink from them. The fiction 
 of the badness of little boys and the 
 goodness of little girls is treasured. They 
 want to believe it. If in their hearts they 
 know they were in their own feminine 
 way as natural little reprobates as their 
 brothers, they are careful to forget it as 
 128 
 
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 they grow up. "I did queer things 
 when I was a child, but I was different. 
 My little girl is perfectly normal." She 
 probably is, which proves that she will 
 do "queer things." 
 
 It takes enormous experience to make 
 a man or woman believe that in spite of 
 varieties there is only one species ; that 
 we are alike in all essentials. What 
 the mother goes through the girl goes 
 through. The mother's business is to 
 chart and light the road with all the 
 knowledge she can command — knowl- 
 edge gathered first from a study of her 
 own mental experiences. None other 
 will be so sound and communicable. 
 But to the interpretation of her experience 
 let her bring all that the most enlightened 
 psychology can give. 
 
 We often shy at the word psychology. 
 It does not seem a thing for practical 
 life. We treat it as if it were a specula- 
 k 129 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 tive and not a natural science. But the 
 woman who would guard her daughter 
 must grasp the fact that psychology is 
 just as much her business as physiology. 
 The one deals with known laws of the 
 mind, the other of the body. These 
 must be obeyed if the mind is to develop 
 harmoniously and naturally. Wonder- 
 ful as it all is, it is no land of utter 
 mystery. Grant, as James says, that 
 the breaches between your thoughts and 
 my thoughts are "the most absolute 
 breaches in nature," the process, the 
 reactions, the laws of your mind and my 
 mind are the same, and have been re- 
 duced to indisputable order. 
 
 The mother must recognize that self- 
 consciousness is developing; that it is 
 an utterly distinct thing; that every- 
 thing that causes sensation will act on 
 that mind, and that gradually concep- 
 tions will be formed, reflections inces- 
 
 130 
 
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 santly will go on, explanations will be 
 sought and accepted. Her first task 
 is to recognize this developing self-con- 
 sciousness ; to realize that the child is 
 not merely a stomach to be fed and a 
 body to be kept clean and warm. 
 
 She must recognize that everything 
 — everything without exception — that 
 falls under her girl's eye or on her ear 
 may produce a reaction, and that it is 
 utterly impossible to have an idea which 
 one of these reactions will be a determin- 
 ing cause in that child's life. 
 
 Sonya Kovalevsky, in her autobiog- 
 raphy, says that one of the first causes 
 of her interest in the science of mathe- 
 matics, where she so distinguished her- 
 self, was the purest accident. The family 
 had gone to the country to live. The 
 paper for one of the rooms which the 
 children occupied was long in coming 
 from St. Petersburg. Now, by chance, 
 
 131 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 a lining paper had been put in this room 
 made up of sheets of lithographed lec- 
 tures on differential and integral calcu- 
 lus. Fascinated by the queer figures 
 the child spent hours trying to decipher 
 them. She never arrived at any sort of 
 meaning, but the formulae became en- 
 graved on her brain. When she was 
 fifteen years old she took her first les- 
 son in calculus, and her teachers were 
 amazed at the quickness with which 
 she grasped the terms; it was, they 
 said, as if "she had known them all 
 her life." 
 
 The part in this awakening of con- 
 sciousness which the imagination plays, 
 no one can ever know. But that it is 
 forever playing on every perception and 
 sensation is undoubted. Openly recog- 
 nized, fully fed, it will do much to keep 
 the mind sweet, the impulses right, the 
 passions in check. 
 
 132 
 
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 Bernard Shaw, the playwright, never 
 said a wiser thing than recently, when 
 he told an English congress, discussing 
 sex education, that they were "fright- 
 fully wrong" in expecting athletics to 
 solve the problem. It was "keeping 
 the imagination at work" by arousing a 
 real interest in the fine arts, in music, in 
 painting and poetry, that would do most 
 to keep the "cruder passions" under 
 control. 
 
 To think that you can stifle or control 
 one legitimate function of the human 
 being by an over-exercising of another is 
 the most stupid of educational tricks. 
 Athletics, yes, for making normal bodies. 
 And beauty and romance and mystery 
 for the imagination. Where the whole- 
 some and the enthralling are both rec- 
 ognized as needs, and every effort to 
 supply them made, you have provided the 
 surest guards there are. The young girl 
 133 
 
THE WAYS OF WOMAN 
 
 can be trusted "to pick her way through 
 the tremendous things of life." 
 
 What does she know ? More than you 
 can tell her. She knows what she wants ; 
 what she must have. There are two 
 great studies of the young girl face to 
 face with evil, which those who pretend 
 to guide the girl should know : they 
 are Henry James's "What Mazie Knew," 
 and Meredith's "One of Our Con- 
 querors." When the girl knows evil, she 
 is not afraid to face it — she is capable 
 of deciding. 
 
 And this instinctive profound sense in 
 her cries for recognition and illumina- 
 tion. She is so truly a pure thing at the 
 start that the plain facts of things can 
 be put to her, and forgotten. No lies; 
 no evasion. Recognition and respect 
 for her growing consciousness; watch- 
 fulness over the impressions she receives ; 
 recognition of her need of romance and 
 134 
 
A YOUNG GIRL'S THOUGHTS 
 
 beauty and sensation; encouragement 
 in getting them. 
 
 This the woman can give the girl. It 
 is the strongest armor; the armor of 
 right and beautiful thoughts. 
 
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