espread. They were imperative in
their instant demands; they must be satisfied; but how?

Only one answer met the necessities of the case; the women must work.
For themselves, and often for their households, they must win support;
the young girls, just verging upon womanhood, must go out from the homes
where they had been so carefully and tenderly nurtured and face the
battle for independence. It is difficult for us in these days of broader
thought to understand the horror with which the women of the South
contemplated this necessity. For a woman of the "upper classes"--and it
must be remembered that, in the South, there was practically no middle
class at that period--to labor for money was, in the eyes of the
Southern lady, reared in all the prejudices and traditions of affluence,
a real degradation. For herself she might have borne it uncomplainingly,
as she had borne so many other hardships; but for her daughters it was
terrible in her thought. To guard them from the rough touch of the world
had been one of her first duties; now she must learn to fit them, if
possible, for that contact, she must send them out to fight for their
hands in the strife of existence. Elder as well as younger women were
thus forced to fight; but it was for the latter, not for themselves,
that the elders felt the stress. They had learned in hard schools to
endure; but their daughters had been shielded as well as might be even
in the nearest coming of hardship and peril, and they could not bear the
thought of removing from those daughters their watchful and tender care.

The younger women themselves faced the situation with more courage; but
that they were daunted by the prospect cannot be denied. They were eager
to contribute to the support of those who had thus far cherished them;
they grudged no pain of labor to effect this end; but they recoiled from
the actual going out into the world, alone and unaided, to meet its
coarseness and lack of sympathy. Yet, the need once acknowledged and
proved, they met it firmly. They still retained some prejudices as to
the limits within which it was possible for a lady to labor and retain
her claim to the title she valued; they had not at a bound attained to
the independence of thought and action which is a mark of womanhood in
the days in which we of the present live; but they were ready to do all
that within those limits fell to their hands, if so they might relieve
their parents of part of the burden