emand a universal genius. We don't expect
that our doctor shall be a good lawyer or our lawyer understand
medicine; we don't expect a preacher to know about stocks or a
stockbroker to have a soul; but we think the woman who is at the
head of a family is a rank failure unless she is a pretty good
doctor and trained nurse and dressmaker and financier. She must
be able to settle disputes among the children with the inflexible
impartiality of a Supreme Justice; she must be a Spurgeon in
expounding the Bible to simple souls and leading them to heaven;
she must be a greater surgeon than Dr. Lorenz, for she must know
how to kiss a hurt and make it well; she must be a Russell Sage
in petticoats, who can make $1 do the work of $2, and when she
gets through combining all of these nerve-wrecking professions we
don't think that she has done a thing but enjoy herself. It is
only when something happens to the housekeeper we realize that
she is the kingpin who holds the universe together.

"Every injustice is the prolific mother of wrongs," said Mrs. Gilmer,
"and the fact that the woman with the broom is neither sufficiently
appreciated nor decently paid brings its own train of evils. It is at
the bottom of the distaste girls have for domestic pursuits and the
frantic mania of women for seeking some kind of a 'career.'" She thus
concluded:

Always, always it is the frantic cry for financial independence,
the demand of the worker for her wage; the futile, bitter protest
of the woman with the broom against the injustice of taking her
work without pay. Men will say that in supporting their wives, in
furnishing them with houses and food and clothes, they are giving
the women as much money as they could ever hope to earn by any
other profession. I grant it; but between the independent
wage-earner and the one who is given his keep for his services is
the difference between the free-born and the chattel.... The
present state of affairs brings about a disastrous condition in
the woman's world of labor, so that the woman wage-earner must
not only compete with the man worker but with the domestic woman
who has her home and clothes supplied her and who does things on
the side in order to get a little money that she may spend as she
pleases.... When men grow just enough to abandon the idea that