ment apprehend that the conflagration will extinguish
the complete glory of the male any more than it will cause a revulsion
of nature in the born mother.
But may there not be a shuffling of the cards? Take the question of
servant-girls for instance. Where there are two or more servants in a
family their lot is far better than that of the factory girl. But it
is quite a different matter with the maid-of-all-work, the household
drudge, who is increasingly hard to find, partly because she, quite
naturally, prefers the department store, or the factory, with its
definite hours and better social status, partly because there is
nothing in the "home" to offset her terrible loneliness but
interminable hours of work. In England, where many people live in
lodgings, fashionable and otherwise, and have all meals served in
their rooms, it is a painful sight to see a slavey toiling up two or
three flights of stairs--and four times a day. In the United States,
the girls who come over from Scandinavia or Germany with roseate hopes
soon lose their fresh color and look heavy and sullen if they find
their level in the household where economy reigns.
Now, why has no one ever thought of men as "maids" of all work? On
ocean liners it is the stewards that take care of the state-rooms, and
they keep them like wax, and make the best bed known to civilization.
The stewardesses in heavy weather attend to the prostrate of their
sex, but otherwise do nothing but bring the morning tea, hook up, and
receive tips. Men wait in the diningroom (as they do in all
first-class hotels), and look out for the passengers on deck. Not the
most militant suffragette but would be intensely annoyed to have
stewardesses scurrying about on a heaving deck with the morning broth
and rugs, or dancing attendance in a nauseous sea.
The truth of the matter is that there is a vast number of men of all
races who are fit to be nothing but servants, and are so misplaced in
other positions where habit or vanity has put them, that they fail far
more constantly than women. All "men" are not real men by any means.
They are not fitted to play a man's part in life, and many of the
things they attempt are far better done by strong determined women,
who have had the necessary advantages, and the character to ignore the
handicap of sex.
I can conceive of a household where a well-trained man cooks, does the
"wash," waits on the table, sweeps, and if the mistress has a young
chil
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