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Show WOMEN'S WORK. Looking at the past through our grandmother's spectacles we are led to believe that women's tasks fifty years ago were little less than Herculean; and by inference that the race is rapidly degenerating in physical ability and endurance. But a careful comparison of the present with the past will show that woman's work and woman's energy differ only in quality and not in quantity.<br><br> Grandmother says "My dear, you know nothing about work! In my day we used to shear our sheep and break and "scutch" our flax, and spin and color and weave; and make our spreads and blankets and clothing, and our table and bed linen and underwear out of the materials we prepared ourselves; and did it all by hand. We cooked and baked and brewed and made garden and dug potatoes, and tapped the maple trees for sugar, and if need be went into the fields to help rake and bind up the grain; and thought nothing of ordinary housework and bringing up a large family of children into the bargain."<br><br> Such an array of facts in any old lady's reminiscence almost staggers our credibility; at least we are conscious of an utter lack of physical power to go through with so formidable a programme ourselves. Why?<br><br> When the spirit of modern invention began to lift its mighty arm the first thing it did was to relieve the working men and women of their heaviest tasks. It took away the crude implements of hard, physical labor and substituted its own magnificent strength and power.<br><br> The sickle and the loom and the spinning-wheel were set aside and are beginning to be regarded as relics of an almost barbarous time.<br><br> But work was not by any means abandoned! Can that be so long as Adam's curse rests upon the race?<br><br> Human activities were simply forced into new channels. The strain upon the muscles was relaxed but the burdens of life were taken up by the nerves and the brain. A great moral responsibility began to awaken, and women as well as men inquired into life's higher purposes. An unquenchable desire for education and culture sprang up, the aesthetic sense was stirred, and thought was busy.<br><br> The dawn of new ideas necessitates labor of some kind to bring them out, for ideas as well as people "feel the strong necessity of living," and cannot be retarded.<br><br> Every well-appointed home in the land to-day is the careful study and untiring occupation of some woman's life. She does not spin, or dig, or weave, or hoe - perhaps does not wash or scrub, or twice a year turn her house inside out, and the household out of doors, for the celebrated renovations that used to be the dread of husbands and children. <br><br> But every day there is house cleaning - careful, painstaking picking up and dusting off and setting to rights; a system so quiet and unobtrusive as to effect very little the comfort of the family, and so constant and thorough as to preclude the necessity of those half-yearly bug-bears of old.<br><br> The care of children is ten-fold what it used to be when hardworking mothers could not snatch five minutes in the day to teach or amuse the little ones, and considered all moral obligation discharged if they found time to hear them lisp "Now I lay me," as they tucked them up with a hurried goodnight kiss into the trundle-beds.<br><br> Modern education demands of mothers the constant supervision of the intellectual, moral and physical life and growth of children. Even their little plays and amusements must be superintended by a watchful eye, and loving, sympathetic hand. The raising of a family - once the incidental care of women - is now the recognized field par excellence, of a mother's work; and its breadth and scope and possibilities transcend the conceptions of half a century ago.<br><br> Modern culture also demands a high development of the beautiful and the artistic in modern homes. Nimble fingers must find time for ornamentation, for music, for whatever graces come within their scope.<br><br> Added to all, are the growing responsibilities of woman's life. Formerly woman's work resembled the narrow charity which begins at home and ends there. Now there is a strong feeling of universal sisterhood. Women organize societies for benevolent purposes and mutual improvement, as men do for political and financial schemes, all entering into the broad economy of the State and Nation. - Alice Ilgenfritz, in the Hawkeye. |