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Show ! i Dorothy Dix Talksi 4 j j THE TWO POINTS OF VIEW j 5 A By "nOROTH V DL. The World's Highos: Pnul Woman Wr:.e: 1 !" perhaps there never has been a time when youth and age looked at 1 t 'the problems of life from the same I standpoint. Certainly they do not ; AVhen each generation makes for i ! P. ei'f a now world with a new lookout, ' ' ind this is particularly true as rc- ! J cards the feminine sex, and all that - i nertains thereto. 1 ' 1 The girt of today is no more like S'j he girl that her mother was than if l " uc Werc an inhabitant of the planet M ' Mars, who had accidentiy been drop- V ' ncd down on New Toftc, or Boston or r I sciuccdunk. The things that mother Vi found Ihrillingly interesting simply '1 I bore daughter stiff. The hopes and ' i ambitions that fired mother's breast j d0 not interest daughter. The things ;l '! that daughter finds interesting, and ; ; Wants to do, and is determined to do, f wild horses couldn't have dragged ''i mother into doing, when she was ! sweet and -twenty. In consequence ' 1 ' of all of which mother and daughter ' ' cannot understand each other, and are ' , 1 'I a mutual disappointment. .0, ,'j in talking of her daughter the other ,i ! dy, a woman said: ,-' "I don't know what the young girls ji are coming to. It used to be one's ' ; boys that one worried over. You felt I so safe with your girls for you knew -' 1 just exactly how to bring them up. and ' i how they would turn out, and all the I ' rMt of it. "You would tic blue ribbons on ' their curls when they were little tots, ' i and when they got bigger you would j j ' send them to a nice school where they ' would meet the right sort of girls, and i when they graduated you would give ) '. them a big coming out tea, and you j vould have lots of fun for two or three years in dressing them up in j party frocks and trotting around to j j parties with them, and then you would fix them up with a lovely trousseau, 1 and have a big church wedding, and : hand them over to a husband, and pretty soon you would begin the samo j round over again with a little grand-x grand-x " daughter. "I know that is the way I planned j life out with my daughter, and I had expected to renew my youth in hers In gadding about in society with her. I I fully counted on being just as much 1 interested in her beaux and love affairs af-fairs as I used to be in my own. I never doubted that when she left i school we would enjoy the most per-i per-i feet companionship together, and I never had any more idea that I would t find an insoluble problem in Ellen ,; than I did that she would develop into a two-headed lady, or sprout a beard. j "But that is what she is. A prob-! prob-! lem. A conundrum. And I don't ! guess the answer. She doesn't care j a rap for clothes. She hates parties. ; She doesn't yearn for beaux, and hasn't : the rudiment of nn Idea of how to ,' mako herself attractive to men. And ; she frankly says that the idea of mar-', mar-', riage does not appeal to her. J 'She wants to go to work. She j says that she considers it as disgrace-j disgrace-j ful for a woman to be a loafer, an man to be one, and that she simply ' cannot look herself in the face unless &h-i is engaged in some productive labor la-bor that is of use in the world, and she is begging her father to let her take a course at a commercial college col-lege and go into his office on the same plane that he would take on any other oth-er girl and especially, on the same plane that he would take his son into his business. "What do you think of that? And J all these years I have been so thank-ii thank-ii ful to think that we would be able to give our littjo girl ease and luxury, and protect her from the hardships of life. Why, I have never seen a girl standing behind a counter, or bending bend-ing over a typewriter that I didn't j have a littlo throb of gladness that my Ellen would be safe from that, and now that is the very thing that ebe ,3 pining to do. r "And J could weep with disappointment disappoint-ment for myself. I thought we woulci have such fun going out together in ' society, a d the- only p"co she wants to go (o is a business offuv. 1 thougi t 1 ruM 1 ve curb jny in dieting lur up, and all he clothes she will have re plain little tailor made things. I thought" Ave would have such good times in gossiping together, and tho only things she is interested in discussing dis-cussing are heavy weight topics, about the betterment of social conditions, or the future of the steel trade, or the price of stocks. "Yes, Ellen is a pretty girl, and a good girl, and a clever girl, but she is a problem, and believe me, the problem daughter is a million times moro of a problem, than the problem sou." And the girl says: "I am awfully sorry that I am such a disappointment to mother.. I know how she feels about me. She feels like a swan who has hatched out an ugly duckling and she wonders how she came to do it. "What mother would like would be for me to be Just the same sort of a girl that I was. I would if I could, just to please her, but you can't turn back the hands of the clock. When mother was my age, she had nice dainty little tootsie wootsies and wore a number two shoe. I have played golf and tennis and taken hikes all of my life, and I wear a number four shoe. Mother had worn a tight corset cor-set since she was thirteen, and had an eighteen inch belt measure. I have a natural waist line. "All of that goes mentally as well into mother's point of view about what a girl should be and do, than I could get into the clothes she wore when she was a girl. They don't meet on me by six inches. Poor mother, mo-ther, and poor me! "Mother can't understand why I want to go to work and do something worth while in the world, some real work that counts, and that shows results re-sults in dollars and cents. I can't make her see why It seems to me utterly ut-terly silly for a human- being, who has a brain, and has spent ten years in cultivating it at a good school, to spend her time in doing what is called woman's work, in embroidering dinky little dollies, or crocheting miles of silly little edging, or fussing over putting in miles of hand work on underclothes un-derclothes that nobody sees. "A criminal waste" of time, I call about nine-tenths of the work that women do, but mother thinks it is the refined and proper thing for a gentle gen-tle woman to do, and that there is something abnormal in a girl who can't feel that it is her great mission mis-sion in life to run pink and blue ribbon rib-bon in her lingerie. "And as for trotting around in society, so-ciety, and going from party to party, and lunch to lunch, and dinner to dinner, din-ner, meeting the people who have never done anything else all of their lives, and to whom the most important import-ant question in the world Is what sort of an entre Is going to be served, to whom the greatest discovery of the age is a new cocktail, and the most vital issue of the times, whether the Jones' have a new car, or the Smiths can afford the style in which they are living, why I simply haven't the Strength to do it. nnt ovin tn nlpnsn mother, for I am not the stuff of which martyrs are made. I would perish per-ish of softening of the brain in a year if I had to listen to that twaddle. "I know people consider those of us girls who don't have to work, and yet insist upon working, as freaks. They say we are career mad if wo go in for professions, and that wo are notoriety no-toriety hunters if we get Jobs as stenographers ste-nographers or clerks, but because wo don't need money is no indication that wo don't need something that money can't buy. And one of these things that money can't purchase is a real, vital interest in life. We have to find that through our own efforts by work. "I am sorry for mother. I wish I could go back and get her point of view, that woman is a parlor ornament orna-ment instead of a cog in the machine of life, but I can't. I belong to my day and she belongs to hera and there is a gulf of thirty years between! us, that neither of us can cross. That! is all there is to it." |