Is there anything left for her to learn?

Meanwhile, however, she is having a good time—some people think too good a time.  She wants the best of both.  She demands the joys of independence together with freedom from all work—slavery she calls it.  The servants are not to be allowed to bother her, the children are not to be allowed to bother her, her husband is not to be allowed to bother her.  She is to be free to lead the higher life.  My dear lady, we all want to lead the higher life.  I don’t want to write these articles.  I want somebody else to bother about my rates and taxes, my children’s boots, while I sit in an easy-chair and dream about the wonderful books I am going to write, if only a stupid public would let me.  Tommy Smith of Brixton feels that he was intended for higher things.  He does not want to be wasting his time in an office from nine to six adding up figures.  His proper place in life is that of Prime Minister or Field Marshal: he feels it.  Do you think the man has no yearning for higher things?  Do you think we like the office, the shop, the factory?  We ought to be writing poetry, painting pictures, the whole world admiring us.  You seem to imagine your man goes off every morning to a sort of City picnic, has eight hours’ fun—which he calls work—and then comes home to annoy you with chatter about dinner.

It is the old fable reversed; man said woman had nothing to do all day but to enjoy herself.  Making a potato pie!  What sort of work was that?  Making a potato pie was a lark; anybody could make a potato pie.

So the woman said, “Try it,” and took the man’s spade and went out into the field, and left him at home to make that pie.

The man discovered that potato pies took a bit more making than he had reckoned—found that running the house and looking after the children was not quite the merry pastime he had argued.  Man was a fool.

Now it is the woman who talks without thinking.  How did she like hoeing the potato patch?  Hard work, was it not, my dear lady?  Made your back ache?  It came on to rain and you got wet.

I don’t see that it very much matters which of you hoes the potato patch, which of you makes the potato pie.  Maybe the hoeing of the patch demands more muscle—is more suited to the man.  Maybe the making of the pie may be more in your department.  But, as I have said, I cannot see that this matter is of importance.  The patch has to be hoed, the pie to be cooked; the one cannot do the both.  Settle it between you, and, having settled it, agree to do each your own work free from this everlasting nagging.

I know, personally, three ladies who have exchanged the woman’s work for the man’s.  One was deserted by her husband, and left with two young children.  She hired a capable woman to look after the house, and joined a ladies’ orchestra as pianist at two pounds a week.  She now earns four, and works twelve hours a day.  The husband of the second fell ill.  She set him to write letters and run errands, which was light work that he could do, and started a dressmaker’s business.  The third was left a widow without means.  She sent her three children to boarding-school, and opened a tea-room.  I don’t know how they talked before, but I know that they do not talk now as though earning the income was a sort of round game.