Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 August 1876 — Women’s Work. [ARTICLE]

Women’s Work.

If women ask men for work, remarks Miss Emily Faitkfull, they will get what they have always got—that kind men do not want to do themselves. They will get hard work, rough work, coarse work, poorly paid work, hopeless work, all tlie cant about sex notwithstanding. But if they really want to be independent, if they want to make a home for themselves, if they want to help others, let Ilium be neither afraid nor ashamed, but begin with any honest labor for which they are paid, and work up. The difficulty with women is not that they are idle, but that their habits are so desultory and their work so objectless. If the wretched little child’s play which women call “ fancy work” could at once be blotted out of tlieir existence it would be an incalculable blessing. What would be thought of a man or a grown boy who could deliberately sit down day after day and be content to kill time by working ridiculous little pen-wipers, bead napkinrings and the like, which no one dreams of ever using ? He would be considered, and rightly, as either a fool or crazy. If women claim intellectual equality with man, they must be content to be judged by the same standard. As for work the majority have not begun to know what it means. They have of it asr s~ necessity from Which they hoped some time to escape ; or they have thought of it as a degradation which the poor for wise purposes have to endtjre, but which is" not proper for the delicate or refined to come in con act with.— Fat Century for Women.