young children,
but with neither trade nor money, and how both she and he had to
struggle for a mere subsistence, she at keeping boarders, and he as
apprentice to a mean man, who gave him only the smallest weekly
pittance. He says that we shall never go out into the world as destitute
of resources as his mother was, and so we all have what may really be
called trades. My brother is in the counting-house, keeping the books,
and is provided for. But you don't know how we have all been laughed at
by our acquaintances, and sneered at by impudent people, who, though not
at all acquainted with us, undertake to prescribe what we should and
what we should not do. They call us work-women! With them, work of any
kind is regarded as degrading, especially if done by a woman, and more
especially if she is to be paid for it."

"Ah, Miss Effie, you have touched the weak spot of our national
character," I responded.

"Yes," she resumed, "it is the misfortune of American women to entertain
the idea that working for a living is dishonorable, and never to be
done, unless one be driven to it by actual want. Why, even when
positively suffering for want of food and fuel, I have known some to
conceal or disguise the fact of their working for others by all sorts of
artifice. To suffer in secret was genteel enough, but to work openly was
disgraceful! A girl of my acquaintance was accidentally discovered to be
selling her work at a public depository, and forthwith went to
apologizing for doing so, as if she had been guilty of a crime, instead
of having nobly striven to earn a living. The ridiculous pride of
another seduced her into a falsehood: she declared that the work she had
been selling for her own support was for the benefit of a church. This
senseless pride exists in all classes. From the sham gentility it
spreads to the daughters of workingmen. They are educated to consider
work as a disgrace, and hence the idle lives so many of them lead. It is
the strangest thing imaginable, that parents who rose from poverty to
independence by the hardest kind of bodily labor should thus bring up
their children. No such teaching was ever given to me. I can sit here at
my machine, and look the finest lady of my acquaintance in the face. She
may some day wish that she had been my fellow-apprentice."

"Where do our girls learn this notion of its being disgraceful for a
woman to support herself?" I inquired.

"Learn it? It is taught them everywhere,"