duty done is solace for each woe,
And every modest tool that hangs in view
Is fitted for the work it has to do.

_Helen Coale Crew._

CHAPTER IX

THE DAUGHTER'S SHARE OF THE WORK

There is a doctrine held by some theorists that a people really needs
now and then to be plunged into the struggle and stress of actual war in
order to become inured to hardship, toughened and strengthened in nerve
and fiber. In a memorable essay Professor William James proposed a
"moral equivalent" for this discipline that he thought would afford a
like toughening training. His suggestion was that there should be a
military conscription of the whole youthful population; that they should
for a certain number of years form part of an army enlisted in the fight
for the conquest of nature, a campaign for compelling the forces of the
material world to become subject to the needs of mankind. Definitely,
Professor James' suggestion was that "our gilded youths" should be made
to go to work in coal mines, on freight-trains, in fishing fleets in
December, at dishwashing, clothes-washing, road-building and
tunnel-making, in foundries and stoke-holes, and on the frames of
skyscrapers, in order that they may get the "childishness knocked out of
them" and come back into society with "healthier sympathies and soberer
ideas."

When the word "youths" was used in the last sentence it probably was not
held to include, as it sometimes does, the young women as well as the
young men. But the work of girls and women must have been in the mind of
the writer when he said "dishwashing and window-washing," for these have
been feminine specialties from time immemorial or at least ever since
the days of the Amerinds when women were the bricklayers, builders and
architects, and men were the weavers. Therefore by admitting these
occupations it is avowed that the women may come in for some of the
benefits of discipline that the struggle for the conquest of nature is
to bring to those that take part in it. Does it not make the
down-trodden woman feel more grand, does she not hold her head higher
and stiffen her neck proudly, when she thinks that her melancholy and
sickening work of dishwashing will stand for her in the place of that
grandeur of the army going out to battle, that her humble employment may
be invested with some of the heroism of the flag-bearer for his
country's sake, that she may take to herself a little of the glory of
the battle-scarred