The Treasure

"[...] "There's no such thing," her mother assured her positively, "as getting one who knows her business! And why? Why, because all the smart girls prefer to go into factories, and slave away for three or four dollars a week, instead of coming into good homes! Do Pearsall and Thompson ever have any difficulty in getting girls for the glove factory? Never! There's a line of them waiting, a block long, every time they advertise. But you may make up your mind to it, dear, if you get a good cook, she's wasteful or she's lazy, or she's irritable, or dirty, or she won't wait on table, or she slips out at night, and laughs under street lamps with some man or other! She's always on your mind, and she's always an irritation." "It just shows what a hopelessly stupid class you have to deal with, Mother," the younger Sandy had said. But at eighteen, she was not so sure. Alexandra frankly hated housework, and she did not know how to cook. She did not think it strange that it was hard to find a clever and well-trained young woman who would gladly spend all her time in housework and cooking for something less than three hundred dollars a year. Her eyes were beginning to be opened to the immense moral and social questions that lie behind the simple preference of American girls to work for men rather than for women. Household work was women's sphere, Sandy reasoned, and they had made it a sphere insufferable to other women. Something was wrong. Sandy was too young, and too mentally independent, to enter very sympathetically into her mother's side of the matter. The younger woman's attitude was tinged with affectionate contempt, and when the stupidity of the maid, or the inconvenience of having[...]."