Open Doors IV — Jan. 1870

The first among living wood-engravers gave me his testimony as to the suitability of his art for women—testimony more valuable because he has been for many years both sanguine and active in devising ways for their help, and is now teaching engraving to a large class of women. He speaks of it as an art peculiarily suited to a woman, because it requires taste, delicacy of touch, and patience; and because, especially, it can be pursued at home. In respect to cleanliness, it is preferable to any other kind of engraving. Etching on steel or copper is more easily learned by an artist; but then etching is comparatively little used, and is worthless unless of very high excellence. In a word, a poorer artist may succeed to a certain point in wood-engraving; a moderately good artist be sure of employment. If there is great natural talent (which is very rare), much time is saved in study; but a born artist would probably find drawing on wood more profitable than engraving. Engraving on wood is the most tedious and difficult of all kinds of engraving; but then it is most in use. With regard to prices, the scale he gives for coarse or common work is the same as that of the women who work here—fifteen to twenty dollars per week. Twenty dollars a day, however, would be poor pay for a great artist in the craft. It is a question of individual talent and industry, as well as the state of the market. Pupils with ordinary talent, in two years’ instruction, ought to make twenty dollars per week.

“The great mistake, he adds, “I find made by women in this, as in all other branches of art, is the supposition that a half-dozen lessons or some few weeks’ easy attention will produce efficiency. I know of no branch of art, not even lithography (perhaps the lowest and easiest of them all), which is to be mastered without severe study and the close application of years, if any great result is to be attained. Men submit to this in every branch; but women”—(are we to be wounded again in the house of our friends?)—“women think they can find a readier way. My experience in their work is to this effect: that given equal intelligence with men, they want the self-reliance and the exactitude (the feeling of the importance of punctuality and perfectness) which men have. I do not know if this is natural or the result of education. In fact, except this, I see no reason why women should not equal or exceed men in all the imitative arts at least. But they do not.”

It is the same despondent story which meets one at every turn. “They have no ambition,” cries Professor B--------. “They are content with poor work and poor wages.”

Is bread and butter then, and that of the poorest kind, all that we are fit to earn? Suppose my unknown friend, Sarah Johns, turns out to be a swan instead of an ugly duck, as I have pictured her, and gifted with genius, what is this obstacle in the straight and narrow road to success for her?

She will not submit to severe patient drudgery—but why?

“Why did they not succeed?” I asked once of a lady who had given the best years of her life to help women to help themselves, and who was giving me her experience in educating girls as type-setters. “Why did they fail?”

“My dear, because of the ‘the coming man.’ Mr. Greeley[1] wrote to me: ‘You can try the experiment but unless you find women too young or too old to think of marriage, you will not succeed.’ I found he was right. Work with the majority of women, is a mere makeshift, a something to fill up the gap between them and the heaven of a home, husband, and children.”

What is to be done? “It is nature asserting herself,” one side cries out. “It is the revolt of instinct against the false position in which you would place women. Let her go back to the needle, and wait patiently for the husband God has given her.”

In other words, starve; and starving patiently is the most unwomanly work I know of, unless it is searching for that husband who is late, and sometimes never comes.

“There is no nature about it,” declares the other side; “it is nothing but education. Teach a girl that her mission into the world is work. Marriage and maternity are only adjuncts to the great business of life, and should weigh no more with the woman than the man.”

Yet “that gude wife,” as the old Scotchwoman says, “wha brings her callants to Heaven’s gate, a braw and bonnie, and reared in the fear of the Lord, has weel earned her right to go in, and no questions speered at her!”

Some of us who ourselves know well how wholesome and noble a thing it is to work are yet old-fashioned enough to agree with the old wife, and to feel that while we would give to every woman a trade or profession to rise, if need were, yet if she should be nothing more than wife and mother, she might be sure, on its last day, that her life had fulfilled its highest purpose, if she could say, without fear: “Here am I, Lord, and the children thou hast given me.”

Surely two eyes were given to us a hint to look on both sides of a question.

If the unknown Sarah Johns proves as exceptional case, and is punctual and thorough as a man, or loves art for the sake of art, we will be glad; but I, for one, will not be too hard with her if, like nine tenths of the men, she works simply for the sake of money; or if her heart is with her baby rather than her burin.[2] “We can’t all be artists.” and most women were made to do something better than artists; let her do the coarse work for common wages then without blame, so long as the part she plays to husband and child is neither coarse nor common.

Some such feeling as this induced me to leave all pursuits of art behind me in my next search, and turn to such quiet, ordinary, humble ways of earning a living as would be open to any woman who had children, for whom a home must be kept. The ordinary course for such a one (apart from sewing) is to buy a few jars of candy and a box of coal, and open a cent shop in some back street, in no wise differing from the thousands of other cent shops which gape at us with their lean and hungry jaws at every corner.

Now, “women have no luck in trade” is an old saying; which means they drudge on in a beaten path, with no tact or shrewdness to push this business. The first step to success is to identify themselves with some specialty in their business and make themselves known through that. No matter if it be small as pop-corn balls, if the pop-corn be the best of its kinds. Men understand this. One restaurant is known for its chops, another for its terrapin: the peculiar feature thrusts the whole face into notice. It is curious how quickly success follows this plan. There are very few women who have not some secret of cookery (or the ability to learn one), which could be turned into money.

I remember an old black woman who made a comfortable living by selling pickles which she had learned to make from her old Virginia mistress—real home-made, delicious pickles, innocent of verdigris or vitriol.

“Home-made;” there is a charm in the idea of city people who are forced to live from shops, worth a mint to any body who knows how to work it.

One of the most comfortable farms in Delaware belongs to a woman who was left a widow in Philadelphia, with five children to support by sewing. She had been a good cook in the blessed days gone by, when she had something to cook. One lucky day, she remembered the pies she used to make—light, flaky, the fruit in crystal slices within. A different pie from those of the shops! Why should she not sell her pies as well as they?

The idea came to her with as quick a flash of revelation as the bells that rang out “Turn again” to Whittington,[3] long ago. With the week’s savings she bought a pound of butter, pastry-flour, and golden pippins. The pies were made, and offered to a lady for whom she sewed. They proved a success; an order came in—more orders. She always bought the best butter, the best sugar, the finest fruit, and did not spare her own labor; sold the pies to people who could afford to pay, and charged high for them. The result, after ten years, was the farm in Delaware.

A good many years ago, a woman began business in one of our large cities with a side of beef, some brooms, and molasses-toffy. One morning, by accident, she stirred a certain kind of nuts into her toffy. It pleased the palates of her youthful patrons. The business tact of the woman showed itself just here; she dropped the beef and brooms, and devoted herself to the toffee. She knew her opportunity. The indigestible mess grew famous. She gave it her name. Very soon she removed into a more fashionable locality; used hogsheads instead of pounds of sugar in her manufacture, and furnished all the retail shops in town with it. She has retired from business now, a wealthy woman; has planted, I am told, with a woman’s whimsical notion of gratitude, the nut tree to which she owed her fortune in her grounds, used the wood of it exclusively in her house, and painted it for a coat-of-arms upon her carriage.

The wholesale manufacture of candy is not, however, fit work for women. It is too heavy for them to carry on without the aid of men. The employment of men and women together has been tried by a woman largely engaged in the business, but has answered as badly as it always does in factories where the employees are coarse and uneducated. In most of the large manufactories of confectionery, however, there are separate rooms where women are employed to make the starch moulds, fold bon-bons, and pack candy. The amount made depends on their industry, some of them earning as high as seven or eight dollars a week; others only three and four. I give Philadelphia prices, as I have done through-out. They do not, I think, differ materially from those of New York (although they are lower), when we take into account the cheaper rates of living in the comfortable Quaker city.

My search in Sarah John’s behalf ended here.

I have given only a few of the openings which suggest themselves for industrious women, in the course of a morning’s walk in a large city. They are employed in the great fur-houses as sewers and dressers; in different factories as burnishers, book-binders, flower and feather makers, workers in hair, as type-founders and setters, photographers, etc., etc. But I only purposed to give a few of the most easily accessible means of support.

We are all aware of the difficulties which lie in Sarah John’s way. But she should not be too ready to cry out, “There are lions in the path,” and sit down again to whimper over seam and gusset and band. It is true that she is little fitted by education for any trade or profession; that there is a growing conviction in the minds of business men that she will necessarily prove unreliable and unable in office or shop; that men have already possession of the fields of labor, and will do their best to keep her out.

Let her be sure that the more like them she becomes in thoroughness, and the more unlike them in her modest womanliness, the easier will be her access to any field.

There are already many ways open and if she is only true to her best self, patience, hard work, and gentleness will soon set wide every door that is now closed against her.

Notes

1. Horace Greeley (February 3, 1811- November 29, 1872) was an American newspaper editor, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, a politician, and an outspoken opponent of slavery.

2. Steel cutting tool essential for engraving.

3. In 19th century a pantomime called "Dick Whittington and His Cat,", very loosely based on Richard Whittington (c. 1354-1423) a medieval merchant, politician, and philanthropist, became very popular. There are several versions of the traditional story, which tells how Dick, a boy from a poor Gloucestershire family, sets out for London to make his fortune, accompanied by, or later acquiring, his cat. At first he meets with little success, and is tempted to return home. However, on his way out of the city, he hears the Bow Bells of London ringing, and believes they are sending him a message to stay. He stays and eventually becomes prosperous and powerful.

Key Words

"Dick Whittington and His Cat" (pantomime), African Americans, businesswoman, Horace Greeley, women's work, wood-engraver

Creator

Emily Dolan