For ten years I lived opposite an able-bodied, middle-aged woman who sat in a rocking-chair by the window, crocheting from luncheon time until dark, four mortal hours, and this for ten long years! Then she moved or died, I don't remember which. And yet, after all, how many of us sit with our hands folded, doing nothing, thinking nothing, but just mentally and physically limp, weighed down by empty, useless time, which we try to kill with yawning desperation.
We are adepts of the idle industries because our time is of no earthly consequence. Think of the miles of lace we crochet, the impossible embroideries we make, the countless odds and ends we construct, of no earthly use except to catch dust. Think of the hours we waste at the piano which no one wants to hear and which we never learn to play; think of the awful pictures we make, which no one wants to see; the innumerable things we do that are so much better done by some one else. There may be male loafers, superabundant male loafers, but it seems to me as if their united numbers are as nothing compared to those worthy lady loafers who are perfectly respectable and perfectly idle. Why should a woman be permitted to loaf unreproved? Is idleness a feminine privilege?
The average man is trained to do some one thing as well as his intelligence and his industry will permit, but the average woman is trained to do nothing, at least nothing well--she cannot even keep house well. Her only object is to fill her aimless existence with something, anything, just to kill time.
In other days girls were carefully taught all domestic employments; they had to learn to keep house, to sew delicately, to cook, and, indeed, to do all those innumerable minor things which are of such vast importance. The modern girl is only taught not to be illiterate, that is all. With this negative quality as a dowry, a pretty face and nice clothes, and some empty chatter, she is bestowed on a perfectly innocent young man in search of a helpmate.
Perhaps for the first time she has a little money--I speak, of course, of the respectable middle-class woman, for the lowest and highest are of no account, meeting, as they often do, on the dead level of extravagance. Now what can we expect of a young middle-class wife who has some money for the first time? That she wastes it when it should be saved, and saves it when it should be spent. She buys cheap food, but she decorates her baby with that white plush cloak and that awful plush cap which her middle-class soul loves, and which bear witness to her prosperity. So her olive branch is carried about in plush while her husband has dismal retrospects of other days, hardly appreciated, when he took his luscious supper at a third-rate restaurant, which in remembrance seems a banquet fit for the gods.