You cannot do all your book-keeping in just the hour before
the evening train starts: some one's account will be incorrect.
Regularity achieves what intensity never can. It is not the amount of
work that hurts, so much as spasmodic attempts to work. Girls are not as
strong as formerly. Irregular work, fast work, fast living, are largely
at fault. Girls scorn work: it is too humble, or too little appreciated.
Now, the fact is, girls, there is highest worth and dignity in precisely
those kinds of labor that seem the lowliest and count for the least.
Kinds of work differ, not so much in worth as in the use they make
of our faculties to do to our utmost what lies before us. The monotony
of housekeeping, or the daily repetition of work immediately to be
undone, is, after all, the most essential labor. Without it, especially
in America, the home would be destroyed. "If a woman is not fit to
manage the internal matters of a house, she is fit for nothing, and
should never be put in a house or over a house, any way. Good
housekeeping lies at the root of all the real ease and satisfaction in
existence." [Footnote: Harriet Prescott Spofford.]
It is an offence to women everywhere that in summing up women's work,
the census will carefully enumerate those employed in professions,--
doctors, lawyers, ministers, teachers, authors,--those who work in
factories and clothing establishments; those who are accountants,
manufacturers, servants, farmer's, and fish-women, even; but contains
not one word about the home-keepers.
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