Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/438

422

HERE are in England absolutely but two occupations open to the gentlewoman who mud work and who is neither artistic, musical, nor literary, but merely a poor but well-educated lady. She must be a companion or a governess. This is what her people expect of her if she must work.

If she elects to be a companion, she ties herself to the most trying duties. Few people want a companion unless they are old, or are losing their faculties, or else are lonely: very few happy persons want companions.

The young lady, then, ties herself down to cheering some doleful house, or becoming the slave of some person's caprice, and sacrifices youth, health, and spirits—for what? For the immense sum of two hundred and fifty dollars a year! Fifty pounds and her board. Not quite as much as we pay a general servant.

What a sacrifice to the Moloch of gentility!

If one does not want to be a companion, she can be a governess: and if she is a graduate of the College of Preceptors, and has diplomas for every known language, and can teach as much as the Encyclopædia Britannica, she can earn one hundred pounds, or five hundred dollars, a year, and her board,—and is passing rich. If, on the other hand, she is merely a fairly-educated girl, and tries to teach because she does not know what else to do, she can earn as little as twenty pounds, or one hundred dollars, a year, and as much as forty pounds, or two hundred dollars.

These badly-paid occupations are the only two open to gentlewomen in England; and woe betide the girl who steps outside them! she ostracizes herself as completely as if she voluntarily herded with lepers.

Under all circumstances a woman is terribly harassed by conventionalities and proprieties; but it is almost impossible to imagine the obstacles and difficulties that are thrown across the path of an English girl. "Men must work, and women must weep," wrote Kingsley, with that sublime impracticability that characterizes most men; and his sentiments seem to be but the echo of those of his countrymen. Englishmen don't want their women to work: they would like to keep them in a state of mediæval submission, with no soul above a tambour-frame, and have them fritter away their lives over some hideous piece of tapestry that might adorn their lord's castle when finished, and therefore they refuse to recognize the fact that there arc nearly as many women workers as men nowadays, and determine that if a woman will be so annoying as to disgrace her family by working she shall find the path of her wrong-doing a thorny one.

It is absolutely impossible for an ordinarily-endowed woman to make money in England. She can earn enough to live on, but never