That “Higher Life.”

They have nothing to do now all day long, these soaring wives of whom I am speaking.  They would scorn to sew on a shirt-button even.  Are there not other women—of an inferior breed—specially fashioned by Providence for the doing of such slavish tasks?  They have no more bothers of any kind.  They are free to lead the higher life.  What I am waiting for is a glimpse of the higher life.  One of them, it is true, has taken up the violin.  Another of them is devoting her emancipation to poker work.  A third is learning skirt-dancing.  Are these the “higher things” for which women are claiming freedom from all duty?  And, if so, is there not danger that the closing of our homes may lead to the crowding up of the world with too much higher things?

May there not, by the time all bothers have been removed from woman’s path, be too many amateur violinists in the world, too many skirt-dancers, too much poker work?  If not, what are they? these “higher things,” for which so many women are demanding twenty-four hours a day leisure.  I want to know.

One lady of my acquaintance is a Poor Law Guardian and secretary to a labour bureau.  But then she runs a house with two servants, four children, and a husband, and appears to be so used to bothers that she would feel herself lost without them.  You can do this kind of work apparently even when you are bothered with a home.  It is the skirt-dancing and the poker work that cannot brook rivalry.  The modern woman has begun to find children a nuisance; they interfere with her development.  The mere man, who has written his poems, painted his pictures, composed his melodies, fashioned his philosophies, in the midst of life’s troubles and bothers, grows nervous thinking what this new woman must be whose mind is so tremendous that the whole world must be shut up, so to speak, sent to do its business out of her sight and hearing, lest her attention should be distracted.

An optimistic friend of mine tells me not to worry myself; tells me that it is going to come out all right in the end.  Woman just now, he contends, is passing through her college period.  The school life of strict surveillance is for ever done with.  She is now the young Freshwoman.  The bothering lessons are over, the bothering schoolmaster she has said good-bye to.  She has her latchkey and is “on her own.”  There are still some bothering rules about being in at twelve o’clock, and so many attendances each term at chapel.  She is indignant.  This interferes with her idea that life is to be one long orgie of self-indulgence, of pleasure.  The college period will pass—is passing.  Woman will go out into the world, take her place there, discover that bothers were not left behind in the old schoolhouse, will learn that life has duties, responsibilities, will take up her burden side by side with man, will accomplish her destiny.