VII
HAVE A GOAL
The great trouble with the majority of women is that they have no plan of life, no real objective. They are the victims of fads. They wobble about from interest to interest. The thing they were crazy about yesterday they throw into the discard to-day. They waste their time, and energy, and ability in pursuing will-o’-the-wisps. Like the hero of the popular song, they are on their way, but they don’t know where they are going.
This is why so many women fail, as is abundantly proved by the fact that when a woman does make up her mind about what she wants to do, when she has one settled ambition instead of a lot of vague desires, she is almost invariably successful. Let her once determine to tread a definite path and she not only arrives, but she arrives with bells on.
Of course, the reason that women tackle the business of existence in this hit-or-miss fashion is not really their fault, poor dears. It is because of the idiotic way in which we bring up girls on the assumption that each one has a regiment of fairy godmothers and guardian angels looking after her and taking care of her, so that she doesn’t need to bother her pretty little head about learning how to take care of herself. So we don’t teach a girl, as we do a boy, that our lives are just what we make them, that we are the architects of our own fate, and that whether our lives are ugly, and botchy, and of little worth, or beautiful, and well-rounded, and valuable, depends upon our having some plan of life in our heads and working to it.
We tell the boy that he who is jack-of-all-trades is good at none, and that if he wishes to be a carpenter, or a master plumber, or a bank president, or a surgeon, he must serve his apprenticeship in his chosen trade or profession and concentrate on the study of it if he means to succeed. He will never get anywhere as long as he goes from job to job and dabbles first at one thing and then at another. But we don’t teach girls that it is just as important for them to have some definite plan of life and prepare themselves to do some particular work as it is for their brothers. Most girls in these days have to earn their own living until they are married. But most of them do just as little work as they can get by with, and they do this little aimlessly.
Here and there is a stenographer who works by a plan. She has set herself to become a highly paid private secretary. Here and there is a shop-girl who has her eye on a buyer’s job and trips to Europe. Here and there is a milliner or a dressmaker whose dream is of her own shop. Here and there is a boarding-house keeper whose ambition it is to run a hotel. Very seldom do these women fail to attain their desires. They know what they are trying to do and they make every lick of work count. They bend every energy to one end instead of wasting it on a hundred ineffectual endeavors. They put their backs, their hearts, their brains into their work and that combination invariably spells success.
But the great majority of working women simply potter purposelessly along. They don’t expect to do what they are doing very long, and so they don’t take the trouble to try to learn how to do it well. They have no interest in their work, no ambition. They haven’t even bothered to pick out the thing to do for which they have a natural aptitude. They have taken up the occupation they follow just because they happened to do so. They don’t give a single lobe of their brain to studying it or trying to fit themselves to be competent. They take life as casually as that. Yet they may have to do this same work for thirty or forty years, for it is by no means certain that every girl will get a husband or that the husband will be able to support her if she does get him.
Women do not even have any plan about following the great career of wifehood and motherhood to which they all look forward. Probably every girl who goes to the altar desires to be a good wife and mother. But she does not crystallize these vague intentions into any concrete plan of action. Not one woman in a thousand sits down in her bridal bungalow or apartment and works out a scheme for handling her husband without friction, for running her house economically and for making her marriage a success. On the contrary, she trusts it all to luck. If she is a good housekeeper, she feeds her husband well. If she doesn’t like to cook, she gives him dyspepsia by sitting him down to dinners of underdone meat and overdone bread and watery vegetables. If she is amiable and good-natured, she gets along with him. If she is high tempered, she rows with him. If she is thrifty, she saves his money and they prosper. If she is extravagant, she runs him into debt.
It is because wives have no plan about what they do as wives that matrimony is such a gamble. And it is the same way about motherhood. There is no other thought in the world so terrible as that mothers bring up their children without any plan about what they are trying to make them. They are shaping an immortal soul, and they don’t even know what they are trying to make of it. That is the capital crime of aimlessness. Women will never succeed until they conquer this weakness and learn how to plan their lives. You cannot do anything effectively unless you know what you are trying to do.