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be. The woman who labors should be the one to recognize that all labor is per se equally honorable that there is no stigma in any honestly performed, useful service. If she is to bring to the labor world the regeneration she dreams, she must begin not by saying that the shop girl, the clerk, the teacher, are in a higher class than the cook, the waitress, the maid, but that we are all laborers alike, sisters by virtue of the service we are rendering society. That is, labor should be the last to recognize the canker of caste.1

1 The National Women's Trades Union League has domes. tic workers among its members, though not as yet, I believe, in any large numbers. Its officials are strong believers in a Domestic Workers' Union. There are several such unions in New Zealand, and they have done much to regulate hours, conditions, and wages.

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CHAPTER VII

THE HOMELESS DAUGHTER

ONE of the severest strains society makes on human life is that of adapting itself to ever changing conditions: yesterday it dragged us in a stagecoach; to-day it hurls us across country in limited expresses; to-morrow we shall fly! Once twilight and darkness were without, shadows and dim recesses within; now, wherever men gather there is one continuous blazing day. He who would keep his task abreast with the day must accept speed and light; for the law is, think, feel, do in the terms of your day, if you would keep your hold on your day.

It is a law often resented as if it were an immorality, but those who refuse the

new way on principle, confuse form with principle. It is the form which changes, not the essence. The few great underlying elements from which character and happiness are evolved are permanent their mutations are endless. Dullminded, we take the mutations to mean shifting of principle. That is, we do not square up by truth, but by the forms of truth.

The Woman's Business has always suffered from lack of facility in adapting itself to new forms of expression. The natural task found, a method of handling it in a fashion sufficiently acceptable to prevent family revolts mastered, and the woman usually is as fixed as a star in its orbit. She resents changes of method, new interpretations, and fresh expressions. It is she, not man, who stands an immovable mountain in the / path of militant feminism.

In this course she is following her nature. An instinct more powerful than logic tells her that she must preserve the thing she is making, that center for which she is responsible, that place where her child is born and reared, where her mate retreats, to be reassured that the effort to which he has committed himself is worth while, where all the community to which she belongs is served and strengthened. If this place is preserved, she must do it. Man, an experimenter and adventurer, cannot.

Changes she fears. She sees them as disturbers of her plans and her ideals. But the changes will not stay. They gather about her retreat, beat at the doors, creep in at the windows, win her husband and children from her very arms. The home on which she depended to keep them becomes impotent. While she stands an implacable guardian of a

form of truth, truth has moved on, broadened its outlook, and clothed itself in new expressions.

It is entirely understandable that the woman who sees herself left behind with her dead gods should cry out against change as the ruin of her hopes. It is equally understandable that those who find themselves adrift should doubt the home as an institution. At the bottom of the revolt of thousands of our "uneasy women of to-day lies this doubt. The home failed them, and with the logic of limited experience they cast it out of their calculations.

But the home is one of the unescapable facts of nature and society

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able because the child demands it.

of the earliest convictions of the child is that he has a right to a home. To him it appears as the great necessity. He cannot see himself outside of it. To be

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