“Etta! Is that you?”
“Yes,—it’s me, Aunt Jan.”
“Say ‘it’s I,’ dear. What brings you to the city, Sunday?”
“I stayed in town last night. There was a dance at Marjorie Bowen’s cousin’s house and Moth’ said I could go. We had a perfectly divine time! Her aunt chaperoned us and I slept with Marj. I thought maybe you’d be going down to Cohasset Beach this morning, and we’d go together. So I got up, left the girls in bed, had my breakfast, and took a ’bus to come down to see you. I want to talk to you about something.”
“But, dear,—I wasn’t going to the country to-day. I promised an old friend of mine who lives at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, I’d go to see her this afternoon.”
Etta’s face fell and she frowned disconsolately at the carpet. Her aunt suspected something was troubling her.
“Couldn’t you tell me what’s on your mind, now?”
“Oh, it wasn’t anything particular; I wanted to ask your advice, and I thought we’d have a talk as we went down in the train.”
A bright light suddenly came into the girl’s face.
“Is it Miss Holland you’re going to see, Aunt Janny? Won’t you let me go with you? Remember I met her that day she was here to lunch? She’s perfectly sweet! I’d just love to visit the Navy Yard!”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll find many ensigns or lieutenants hanging about on Sunday.”
“Oh, but it would be lots of fun, just the same! I’ll ‘phone Moth’ I’m with you and take a late train this aft! Please say yes, Aunt Janny,—please say yes!”
The girl was jumping up and down in eagerness.
“Well-l,” her aunt said with an amused but doubtful smile, “I don’t see what you’d get out of it, particularly.”
“I’d just love the trip, and I’d like being with you, Aunt Janny,—really I would!”
Jeannette narrowed her lids and eyed her skeptically. She was pleased, nevertheless. Her niece’s excessive ebullition and high spirits never failed to divert her; she liked the child’s company; the girl had a great respect for her worldly judgment, much more than she had for her mother’s or father’s, and the older woman found it an engaging business to expound her theories of life and her views of affairs to the younger one.
“I’m not going until after lunch,” she said, still with a vague hesitancy in her manner.
“I don’t mind waiting a bit.”
“Can you amuse yourself until noon? I have some office work to do that will take me about an hour. Miss Alexander’s gone to church but she’ll be back directly.”
“Could I make some egg muffins? We could have ’em for lunch, an’ they’re awfully nice and I’m really good at them.”
Jeannette noted the child’s palpitant eagerness again with mild amusement.
“I think that would be lovely,” she consented, her fine eyes twinkling. “But don’t get things out there in a mess; Miss Alexander won’t like it if she comes home and finds everything upset.”
“I’ll be ever and ever so careful,” agreed Etta, already skipping toward the kitchen.
Jeannette took herself back to the cold front room, seldom used by either herself or Beatrice, and brought her thoughts once more to the construction of the half-finished circular letter which must be ready for the composing room early Monday morning.
She heard Beatrice come in presently, and an hour later, as she was completing the last revision of her work, Etta appeared breathlessly to announce lunch.
The egg muffins were excellent and received enthusiastic praise. Jeannette ate them with the heated canned tamales, and sipped her tea, one eye on the clock, for she was anxious to make an early start if Etta was to catch, at any seemly hour, a train back to Cohasset Beach.
It was after two before she and her niece found themselves seated in the thundering subway.
“Well, now, tell me your troubles, my dear,” Jeannette began; “I want to hear all about them.”
But Etta had to be coaxed before she would become communicative.
“Oh, it’s this!” she finally burst out, striking her skirt with disdainful fingers. “It’s my clothes, Aunt Jan! I was horribly ashamed last night. There wasn’t a girl there at Marjorie’s cousin’s party who wasn’t a lot better dressed than I! I felt awful and was so embarrassed! One of the girls’ older sister was there and I saw her taking an inventory of everything I had on! I just wanted to sink through the floor! Moth’ does everything she possibly can to see that I look decent, and I know better than anyone else what she does without so that I can have things! But I don’t want that! I don’t want Moth’ and Dad denying themselves on my account. I want to be able to take care of myself and buy my own clothes, earn my own living and be independent! ... Aunt Jan, won’t you get me a job at your office? Won’t you back me up with Moth’ and Dad, and urge them to let me go to work? I don’t want to stay at home and just help Moth’ here and there with the housework and do nothing else but go to the movies and dance jazz! They call me a ‘flapper,’ and I suppose I am one,—but what else is there for me to be? I hate it, Aunt Jan,—I hate being a flapper! I want to be something different and better; I want to make my own way in the world and not be obliged to stick round home until a man with enough money comes along and asks me to marry!”
It was the old familiar cry, the cry of youth calling for self-expression, the cry of budding life eager for experience, the cry of young womanhood demanding independence, emancipation.
The words rang familiarly in the older woman’s ears, and she smiled sadly with a sorry head-shake.
“Why, what’s the matter, Aunt Jan?” asked the girl after a troubled scrutiny of her companion’s face. “Don’t you think I have a right to earn my own living if I want to?” She renewed her arguments with characteristic vehemence. There was nothing new in them for Jeannette; she had voiced them all herself twenty-five years ago. A memory of her patient, hard-working little mother came to her, and she saw her once again with the comforter over her knees, the knitted red shawl pinned across her shoulders, thin of hair, with trembling pendent cheeks, bending over the canvas-covered ledger, figuring—figuring—figuring. And she saw herself, the impatient eighteen-year-old, striking her faded velvet dress with angry fingers, protesting against the humiliation her shabby attire occasioned her, asking to be allowed to work, to earn the money that would permit her to dress as other girls dressed, and be her own mistress, self-supporting. How well, she, Jeannette, could now sympathize with that earnest, tearful, little mother!
She looked at Etta and, in her mind, saw her anxiously taking dictation from some frowning business man, saw her white flying fingers busy at some switch-board disentangling telephone cords, pictured her perched on a tall stool, bending over a great tome, making careful entries, saw her folding circulars, writing cards, filing letters, giving her youth, her eagerness and beauty to the grim treadmill of business life, and her heart filled with pain.
“... and there’s no reason on earth,” Etta was saying, “why I shouldn’t help out at home. Dad and Moth’ have given all their lives to us children; they’ve denied themselves and denied themselves just so we can have clothes for our backs, enough to eat and go to school! It isn’t fair. It’s time I helped. I could go to business college, take a course, and in three months, I could learn to be a stenographer and earn fifteen or twenty dollars a week....”
“Hush, child,—hush! You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Jeannette broke in, suddenly stirred to speech. “I threw away my life, talking just that kind of nonsense. To learn to earn her own living is a dangerous thing for a young girl.”
“Why, how do you mean, Aunt Jan?”
“Its effect is poison; it’s like a drug, a disease! I’ve paid bitterly for my financial independence. I sacrificed everything that was precious to me because I wanted to be self-supporting. Etta dear, life is a hard game for women at best, but waiting within the shelter of her own home for the man she’ll some day come to love and who will love her is the best and wisest course for a girl to follow.”
“But I hate the kind of life I’m living! There’s nothing ahead of me but marriage, unless I go to work! You wouldn’t want me to marry just because I was bored at home,—and I’ve known lots of girls to do that! I never meet any attractive men,—only High School kids and rah-rah boys out of college. Wouldn’t I have a much better chance to meet a finer class of young men around business offices,—I mean serious-minded, ambitious young men? It seems to me I’d have much more opportunity to meet a man I’d admire, and who might want me to marry him if I went to work than I ever will waiting stupidly at home.”
“It doesn’t make any difference where you meet him, whether it is in business or at a High School dance,” Jeannette answered. “He’s bound to find you, and you him.... I hate to see you go to work. You pay a fearful penalty in doing so. It makes you regard marriage lightly, and prejudices you against having children——”
“Oh, I shall want children!” exclaimed Etta, promptly. She proceeded to outline just what were her requirements in a husband, and to give her views on the subject of having children. Her aunt was somewhat disconcerted to discover that she had these matters, as far as they concerned herself, entirely settled in her own mind. “Oh, yes, indeed,” Etta repeated, “I shall want children. Perhaps not such a lot of them as Moth’ and Dad have. They would have had a much easier time of it, if they’d had only one or two. Instead of always being poor and having to struggle, they could have lived in considerable comfort, and now there would be no question about their being able to send me to Bryn Mawr or Vassar. I think two children are enough for any couple. Now, my idea, Aunt Janny,——”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sakes, Etta!” Jeannette interrupted with impatience; “you don’t know what you’re talking about! What does your education or Ralph’s education amount to in comparison with the lives of Frank, Nettie, and Baby Roy? You’ll have a great deal more worth-while education pounded into you by having brothers and sisters and by having to help your mother take care of them, than you would ever get at Bryn Mawr. More than that, just living in the same house with them, being brought up with them and learning to deny yourself, now and then, for their sake has taught you unselfishness, forbearance that will make you a far better wife and mother than ten years’ of college education! ... Your father and mother with you children about them, with the hard problems you present, with the ever-pressing question of ways and means before them, with the solving of these problems,—for there is always a solution,—are among the most enviable people in the world. There was a time when I used to feel sorry for your mother, but now I look at her with only admiration and jealousy. You think of her as poor! Well, I think of her as rich! And I attribute much of the happiness she has had out of life to the fact that she never went into business.... Stay out of it, Etta my dear, whatever you do! It’s an unnatural environment for a girl, and in it her mind and soul as surely become contaminated as if she deliberately went to live in a smallpox camp.... Look at me, my dear! I’ve given twenty years of my life to business and what have I to show for it? Nothing but a very lonely and selfish old age!”
“Oh, Aunt Jan!” cried the girl, shocked into protesting. “How can you say such things! Why I think you’re one of the handsomest, happiest, most enviable, smartest-dressed women in the world!”
Jeannette laughed.
“Well, I didn’t mean to deliver a ‘curtain’ lecture! I just hated the thought of your following in my footsteps. It makes me actually shudder even to think of it. But I didn’t mean to get started the way I did——
“Here,” she suddenly cried, gathering her things together and hurriedly getting to her feet, “this is the Bridge! We have to get off here and change cars.”
The house just inside the high iron fence of the Navy Yard in which Commander Jerome Sedgwick lived was a three-story, square, dirty cream-painted cement affair, which bore his name in a small, neat sign on the third step of the front stairs. Across the street from it, children racketed upon a city play-ground, and in its rear some green-painted hot-houses leaned haphazardly against one another, their backs turned upon a quadrangle where several orderly tennis courts were located. Jeannette had visited Miss Holland here many times, and one summer a few years ago, had spent her two weeks’ vacation keeping her old friend company, while the nephew, Jerry, was enjoying a month’s leave with his family, fishing among the Maine lakes.
A little girl of five, just tall enough to reach the knob, opened the door a few inches and stared up unsmilingly at the visitors.
“How do you do, Sarah?” said Jeannette, recognizing the child. “Is your mama at home?”
Sarah continued to stare stolidly a moment, then turned and disappeared, leaving the door hardly more than ajar. Jeannette and Etta could hear the sound of her shrill, piping voice, and her small running feet within.
Mrs. Sedgwick came rustling to greet the callers promptly, and in her wake limped Miss Holland.
“Oh, you dear!” exclaimed the latter, catching sight of Jeannette. “I’m so glad you came; I’ve been hungering for a sight of you for weeks.” She kissed her friend warmly on both cheeks. Etta was presented.
“The child begged to be allowed to come,” explained her aunt. “She wanted a glimpse of the Yard.”
“Why, certainly,” exclaimed Mrs. Sedgwick cordially. “I’m delighted you brought her. Jerry unfortunately isn’t home but I have to take Sarah and Junior out shortly, and I’ll be charmed to show your niece about, and leave you two to gossip by yourselves.”
Miss Holland, her thin, knuckly, white hand on Jeannette’s forearm, drew her into the sitting-room.
“Take off your things down here, my dear; I can’t climb stairs very well on account of my knees, and no one’s coming in.”
“How is your rheumatism?” inquired Jeannette.
“’Bout the same; it keeps me rather helpless, and the doctor is actually starving me to death. What with the things he says I can’t eat and the things I don’t like, my menus are rather limited.”
The two women settled themselves before the small, glowing coal fire in an old-fashioned grate, and began talking in low tones. Mrs. Sedgwick excused herself to make the children ready to go out, while Etta stood at the window, gazing with absorbed interest at any evidence of Navy life that came within the range of her vision.
“’Xcuse me, Miss Holland,” she interrupted presently with her usual breathlessness, “do you happen to know, or did you ever hear Commander Sedgwick mention a young ensign named White?”
Miss Holland looked doubtful.
“My friend, Marjorie Bowen, knew him, or knew his sister, I think, while he was at Annapolis.”
“Well, I’m afraid ...” began Miss Holland.
Etta proceeded hastily to another observation.
“There was a destroyer in Cohasset Bay last summer,—anchored right off the Yacht Club,—and I saw two of the officers on shore one day.... I don’t know what their names were, of course, but during the war I knew several of the boys in the reserves. Asa Pulitzer was a boatswain’s mate; ... I think that’s what he was.”
Jeannette turned an indulgent smile upon Miss Holland.
“Asa Pulitzer is the local grocer’s son.”
“Well, I don’t care if he is!” protested Etta. “He made good——”
Mrs. Sedgwick rustled downstairs at this moment, making a timely entrance. She carried Etta off, with assurance of returning in time for tea.
“Well-l,” said Jeannette comfortably, as the pleasant hour of companionship and confidences began. “You don’t look as if you’d been ill!”
“Not ill exactly; it’s this wretched rheumatism that will not get better.”
Miss Holland’s tone was not complaining; indeed she always spoke with remarkable placidity. Jeannette regarded her with all her old admiration. There was an unusual aristocratic quality about Miss Holland that never failed to stir her. She was white-haired, now, fragile and thin looking, and there was an uncertainty about her movements, but she still bore herself with distinction,—a gentlewoman to her finger-tips. Even more than the air of gentility that surrounded her, Jeannette esteemed the shrewd brain, nimble wit and judgment of this woman. It seemed a sad and sorry thing to her that so splendid a personality, so fine an intellect should have had so little opportunity for self-expression in the world, and that at sixty, Miss Holland should be no more than what she seemed: an old maid, growing yearly more and more crippled, passing what days remained to her with her nephew and her nephew’s family, somewhat of a problem, somewhat in the way! Of course they loved her; Jeannette knew that Commander Sedgwick was devoted to his aunt and treated her with as much respect and affection as ever son did his mother, but, after all, on the brink of old age, Miss Holland’s course was run, and how little she had to show for all her years of toil and faithfulness! She had spent her life at an underling’s desk and given her wisdom and her strength to a business that had paid her barely enough to support herself and make it possible for her to give her nephew his profession!
“Miss Holland,” Jeannette asked impulsively, “what did the Corey Company pay you towards the end of your employment there?”
“Fifty dollars a week for the last five years I was with them.”
“And altogether, you were there?”
“Twenty-five years.... Why do you ask?”
“I was thinking how little they appreciated you.”
“Mr. Kipps told me,” Miss Holland said with a reminiscent smile, “that it would never do to pay women employees more than fifty a week; they wouldn’t know what to do with the money.”
“He didn’t!”
“Oh, yes! He claimed it would demoralize them. He used to say they would be sure to throw it away on ‘fripperies.’ ‘Fripperies,’ you remember, was a great word of his.”
“It still is!”
“Mr. Kipps’ attitude is typical, I think, of the average employer of women. This is a man-made world, as perhaps you’ve noticed, my dear. Did you ever stop to consider the injustice to which working women are subjected? Do you realize there are about twelve million working women on pay-rolls in the United States, that twenty dollars a week is a very high wage for any one of them to receive, and six million of them, or half of the entire number, earn between ten and twelve a week? ... I happen to have the statistics issued by the woman’s bureau of the Department of Labor.”
Miss Holland pushed herself up erect from her chair, and her face showed the pain the effort cost her.
“Can’t I get it for you?” offered Jeannette hastily.
“No—no; thanks very much; it’s right here. I can put my hand on it in just a minute.” From a desk near at hand she produced a government report.
“I came across this the other day, and I saved it because it proves what I have always felt about the unfairness with which women are treated in business. They may perform equal work with men but very few of them are paid as well. The average annual earning power of the male industrial worker now is at the rate of a thousand dollars a year; that of the woman industrial worker five to six hundred. Among office workers the disparity is much greater. When I was getting fifty dollars a week as Mr. Kipps’ chief assistant, there was a youth helping me who was being paid sixty.”
“I know,” agreed Jeannette. “When Tommy Livingston followed me as Mr. Corey’s secretary, he did not do the work half as competently as I had done,—Mr. Corey often told me so,—and yet he was paid more at the very start, and asked for and received one raise after another, until Mr. Corey was paying him nearly twice what he formerly had paid me; but when I went back to work after I left Martin, Mr. Corey started me in again at the old salary of thirty-five, and never suggested a higher rate. Walt Chase was getting eighty-five dollars weekly as head of the Mail Order Department, and when I took charge, I received only forty. Although I have doubled the amount of business the Corey Publishing Company does by mail, I am to-day being paid but fifty a week. Mr. Allister told me when I asked for my last raise, that it was the last he would ever give me.”
“Almost all employers underpay their women workers,” affirmed Miss Holland. “In general women are receiving to-day from a half to two-thirds what men are who do identically the same kind of work. I was discussing this question once with Mr. Kipps, and he defended himself by stating that the majority of girls who fill office positions only work for ‘pin money.’ ... ‘Pin money?’ What is ‘pin money’? Dollars and cents, I take it, with which to buy clothes and some amusement. Don’t men need ‘pin money,’ too? Doesn’t everyone? When the Corey Publishing Company employs a young man,—a High School or College graduate,—what he is paid per week is never spoken of as ‘pin money,’ yet he spends it for exactly the same things as girls do.... I’ve often wondered if Mr. Kipps considered the salaries he paid you and me, Mrs. O’Brien, and Miss Travers, Miss Whaley, Miss Foster, Miss Bixby, Miss Kate Smith, old Mrs. Jewitt, Mrs. M’Ardle, and Miss Stenicke as ‘pin money!’ Most of those women not only supported themselves but their old mothers and fathers, their younger brothers and sisters or some helpless relative. Mrs. O’Brien had two daughters she kept at Ladycliff for nine years; Miss Travers has a bed-ridden sister; Miss Whaley, her mother; Mrs. Jewitt, a tubercular husband; and Kate Smith is putting her young brother through dental college——”
“Yes,” interrupted Jeannette, “Mrs. M’Ardle has two children of her own she is taking care of, and one of her sister’s, and she’s getting only forty dollars a week.”
“How does she do it!” exclaimed Miss Holland.
“I’m sure I don’t know.... Beatrice Alexander has been sending thirty dollars a month to her helpless old aunt in Albany for the past fifteen years.”
“That’s where the ‘pin money’ goes!” declared Miss Holland with a note of scorn in her voice. “These silent, uncomplaining, hard-working women who give their lives to the grind of business! I feel keenly the rank injustice that is being done them!”
There was a moment’s silence, and Miss Holland continued:
“Mr. Kipps’ great argument was always that girls who came seeking employment did so with the intention of working only a year or two, and then getting married. He argued that a concern could not regard these women as permanent employees to be trained to fill important positions; they could not be depended upon to remain with a business and grow up with it——”
“I must say,” broke in Jeannette with fine sarcasm, “that great inducements are offered them to do so! At the end of twenty and twenty-five years’ faithful and efficient work in such positions as you filled and as I fill to-day, they are paid fifty dollars a week!”
“I answered him,” Miss Holland went on, after an appreciative nod, “that neither could the men he employed be considered as fixtures. I reminded him of Van Alstyne, Max Oppenheim, Humphrey Stubbs, Walt Chase, Tommy Livingston and Francis Holm. There are a hundred others. How many boys starting in to business, do you suppose, stick for the balance of their lives with the concern for which they first began to work?”
“Not many.”
“Few indeed! It’s to keep and hold these same boys and young men that the large corporations to-day are offering to sell them stock at advantageous rates.”
“Of course, it is the girls living at home,” observed Jeannette, “partially supported by their fathers and mothers or some relative, willing to work for small salaries to buy themselves a few extra clothes and a measure of amusement, that are keeping down the salaries paid to women entirely dependent on their earnings.”
“During the war,” observed Miss Holland, “a hundred thousand women were employed by the railroads to perform the work which the men formerly did before they went into the army. Women cleaned locomotives, tended stock-rooms of repair shops, sold tickets, took charge of signal stations, worked as carpenters, machinists, and electricians; women took the places of men in the steel mills, in the munition plants, in the foundries and even in coal mines. The National War Labor Board, headed by William H. Taft, undertook to protect the women workers, and laid down the principle that women doing the work formerly performed by men should receive the same pay. In other words, the pay was to be fixed by the job and not by the sex of the employee. Employers throughout the nation followed the ruling of the Labor Board.”
“But that was a war-time measure,” said Jeannette, “and we all did things, then, that were altruistic and patriotic.”
“If women had the physical strength of men,” Miss Holland asserted, “and could defend their principles by force, there would be a speedy end of injustices. Why do male waiters in our restaurants get higher wages than waitresses? Certainly they don’t work any harder, or give better service. Suppose all the women workers in New York City formed unions, and struck for what they decided adequate pay, a uniform scale of salaries, and could use the same methods that men would use in preventing women who had not joined the ranks from taking their places! Think what would happen! The work in every office, every bank, every corporation in this city would come promptly to a standstill; the strike would last forty-eight, seventy-two hours, and then the demands of the women would be conceded.... You want to remember one thing, my dear: women never banded together since history began, and asked anything that was unfair or unjust!”
“I was having a very interesting talk with my niece as we were coming here,” broke in Jeannette; “Etta wants to go to work, wants a position as stenographer in some office, not only to earn extra money with which to help out at home, but to acquire an interest in life that will fill her days. There are a hundred thousand young girls like her in this city to-day. Consider what effect a job would have on an immature character like Etta’s! I’ve been all through the bitter mill, and I speak from experience. Financial independence is a dangerous thing for such young girls. It makes them regard marriage with indifference. There is many a girl who has declined to marry a young man to whom she undoubtedly would have made a good wife merely because his income, which would have to do for both of them, was no more, or perhaps only a little more, than what she was earning herself.”
Jeannette’s lips closed firmly a moment and she stared out of the window at the bleak prospect of the Yard’s quadrangle bordered by closed and silent brick warehouses.
“But suppose the girl office-worker decides to give matrimony a trial,” she continued, “as I did, her mind has been distorted by having known what it means to be financially her own mistress. Instead of bringing to her job of wifehood the resolute determination to make a success of it, from the first she is critical, and on the constant lookout for hardships in her new life, comparing them with the freedom of her old. I should have made Martin a much better wife, Miss Holland, if I had brought to my problem of being his partner the passionate determination that was mine in wanting to make good as Mr. Corey’s secretary. I always hugged to myself the thought that if the time came when I wouldn’t like Martin any more or like being a wife, I could go back to my job,—and that is exactly what this thought led me to do. Making any marriage a success is the hardest work I know about both for men and women, and there should be no avenue of easy escape from it for either of them. I’d never have left Martin, I’d have endured his unkindness and lack of consideration,—or at least what seemed his unkindness and lack of consideration to me then,—if there hadn’t been an easy way out for me, and we’d have gone on together and made a home for ourselves and our children. All I had to do was to walk out of Martin’s house and go back to my job. That’s what every wife who has once been a self-supporting wage-earner says to herself from the day she marries. She doesn’t even have the trouble of getting a divorce to deter her.... It’s wrong, I tell you, Miss Holland! It’s all wrong! The more I live, the more I am convinced that women have no place in business. No,—please let me finish,” she said earnestly as her friend started to interrupt. “There’s one other angle to this question: the girl who has once tasted independence but who decides to give matrimony a trial may go so far as to consent to be a wife, but she stops at becoming a mother! She dreads children. And why? Because she realizes that once a baby is at her breast, she’s bound hand and foot to her husband and her home. She can’t leave her child with the nonchalance she can her husband. In the homes of women who have achieved economic independence before they marry, you will find few children, and in the majority of cases, none at all. I know a score of girls, at one time in office jobs, who quit them to be married, but have drawn the line at babies.
“It seems to me this is of national significance. The country is being deprived of homes and children because of this great invasion of women into business during the last twenty or thirty years. When I went to work twenty-four years ago, it was the exception f