Violets and Other Tales | Page 4

unreservedly, undividedly. She
knows to a certainty just how much she can spend, how well she can
dress, how far her earnings will go. If there is a dress, a book, a bit of
music, a bunch of flowers, or a bit of furniture that she wants, she can
get it, and there is no need of asking anyone's advice, or gently hinting
to John that Mrs. So and So has a lovely new hat, and there is one ever
so much prettier and cheaper down at Thus & Co.'s. To an independent
spirit there is a certain sense of humiliation and wounded pride in
asking for money, be it five cents or five hundred dollars. The working
woman knows no such pang; she has but to question her account and
all is over. In the summer she takes her savings of the winter, packs her
trunk and takes a trip more or less extensive, and there is none to say
her nay,--nothing to bother her save the accumulation of her own
baggage. There is an independent, happy, free-and-easy swing about
the motion of her life. Her mind is constantly being broadened by
contact with the world in its working clothes; in her leisure moments by
the better thoughts of dead and living men which she meets in her
applications to books and periodicals; in her vacations, by her studies
of nature, or it may be other communities than her own. The freedom
which she enjoys she does not trespass upon, for if she did not learn at
school she has acquired since habits of strong self-reliance, self-support,
earnest thinking, deep discriminations, and firmly believes that the
most perfect liberty is that state in which humanity conforms itself to
and obeys strictly, without deviation, those laws which are best fitted
for their mutual self-advancement.
And so your independent working woman of to day comes as near
being ideal in her equable self poise as can be imagined. So why should
she hasten to give this liberty up in exchange for a serfdom, sweet
sometimes, it is true, but which too often becomes galling and
unendurable.
It is not marriage that I decry, for I don't think any really sane person
would do this, but it is this wholesale marrying of girls in their teens,
this rushing into an unknown plane of life to avoid work. Avoid work!
What housewife dares call a moment her own?

Marriages might be made in Heaven, but too often they are
consummated right here on earth, based on a desire to possess the
physical attractions of the woman by the man, pretty much as a child
desires a toy, and an innate love of man, a wild desire not to be
ridiculed by the foolish as an "old maid," and a certain delicate
shrinking from the work of the world--laziness is a good name for
it--by the woman. The attraction of mind to mind, the ability of one to
compliment the lights and shadows in the other, the capacity of either
to fulfil the duties of wife or husband--these do not enter into the
contract. That is why we have divorce courts.
And so our independent woman in every year of her full, rich,
well-rounded life, gaining fresh knowledge and experience, learning
humanity, and particularly that portion of it which is the other gender,
so well as to avoid clay-footed idols, and finally when she does consent
to bear the yoke upon her shoulders, does so with perhaps less romance
and glamor than her younger scoffing sisters, but with an assurance of
solid and more lasting happiness. Why should she have hastened this;
was aught lost by the delay?
"They say" that men don't admire this type of woman, that they prefer
the soft, dainty, winning, mindless creature who cuddles into men's
arms, agrees to everything they say, and looks upon them as a race of
gods turned loose upon this earth for the edification of womankind.
Well, may be so, but there is one thing positive, they certainly respect
the independent one, and admire her, too, even if it is at a distance, and
that in itself is something. As to the other part, no matter how sensible a
woman is on other questions, when she falls in love she is fool enough
to believe her adored one a veritable Solomon. Cuddling? Well, she
may preside over conventions, brandish her umbrella at board meetings,
tramp the streets soliciting subscriptions, wield the blue pencil in an
editorial sanctum, hammer a type-writer, smear her nose with ink from
a galley full of pied type, lead infant ideas through the tortuous mazes
of c-a-t and r-a-t, plead at the bar, or wield the scalpel in a dissecting
room, yet when the right moment comes, she will sink as