When I asked how they liked this country the prettiest of the four shook her head, the tallest one made a face, the shortest looked indifferent, and the stout one replied. She assured me that had they known that Prohibition would so soon become a law they would never have come to the United States. That was the reason they had left Russia. The Russians, most of them, had stopped drinking because they couldn’t get liquor.
It was then that the tall girl vouchsafed that the Czar should have known better than to have stopped his soldiers drinking. He should have known, she insisted, that so soon as the people got sober enough to think they would kill him and put an end to their oppressors.
“It’ll be just as bad over here in America,” she added. “If working people don’t have liquor to keep them half-soaked they blow things up.”
Months before this conversation took place Miss Stafford had asked me what, if anything, could be done to stop the social unrest in our country.
“Why, yes, as I see it it might be done,” I replied. “Burn all the public libraries and turn the country over to the Catholic Church.”
Miss Stafford, being a Catholic, I knew this reply would tease her, cause her to dispute my assertion. Defending myself I felt sure we would hit on a more interesting subject of conversation. Furthermore, I knew that though she had been earning her living for years, practically ever since she reached maturity, she belonged to a class that steadily refuses to consider themselves as working people, a class that always takes side with capital.
For work has become so disgraceful in our country that no woman with any claims to being gently born cares to be classed with working people. That is one reason why there are so many childless married women, and discontented women, married and single. Nine cases out of ten the one and only aim of a girl is to marry as soon as possible—be she working girl or human cootie. And nine cases out of ten instead of trying to fit herself for intelligent wifehood and motherhood she only aims at catching a husband, a good husband if she can get him, but a husband she must have.
This eagerness to secure a provider is not caused primarily by laziness, but to remove the stigma of working for their living. Most women who do not marry have to work for a living. Working for her living in our country puts a woman on a lower plane.