Dorothy Dix—her book

These few lines are addressed to the thousands of girls who have finished school and who are now standing, as the poet puts it, “where the brook and river meet” wondering “where do we go from here?”

I want to urge you, girls, with all the earnestness of which I am capable, to psychoanalyze yourselves and try to find out what talents and aptitudes nature bestowed upon you, and then to go to some school where you can develop your gift and fit yourself to be self-supporting.

I give this advice to the rich girl no less than to the poor girl, for in these days of shifting fortunes we have the new poor as well as the new rich, and no woman knows how soon she may be called upon to earn her own bread and butter or starve. If she has been taught how to do this, losing her money is merely an inconvenience to her; but if she does not know how to earn a dollar, it is a tragedy.

No women in the world are so pitiful as those who have, as the saying goes, “seen better days” and, with their money gone, are suddenly flung out into the world to make their own living, with no trade, no profession, no skill in any line, no knowledge of how to make a penny. They can only eke out an existence by doing the most ill-paid work, or else they become parasites, or are forced by hunger, and shabbiness, and need into the sad sisterhood of the streets.

Don’t risk such a fate befalling you. Prepare yourself in time against it. Have that within yourself which will not be affected by the fall in stocks or the depreciation of real estate. Many things may rob you of your fortune, but you cannot lose your trained brain and skilful hand. They will be a resource that you can always fall back upon in any emergency.

Of course I know, when I urge you girls to fit yourselves to learn some gainful occupation by which you can support yourselves, that you smile and say to yourselves that you do not expect to earn your own living long. You are going to marry and follow woman’s oldest profession, that of wife and mother. That is as may be. In the past the great majority of women have been able to count, with a fair degree of safety, on being able to marry, but it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the girl of to-day will get a husband.

There has been a most decided decline and falloff in matrimony and home life, and it is foolish for girls to think that they have the same chance of marrying that their mothers and grandmothers had. Now, for the girl who is sitting around and waiting for some man to come along and marry her, it is a catastrophe to be passed by. She becomes the sour and disgruntled old maid, eating the bitter bread of dependence, the fringe on some family that doesn’t want her. Or else she has to take any sort of a poor stick of a man as a prop to lean upon.

Far different is it with the girl who has fitted herself for some definite work and is competently doing it. She has a profession in which she is vitally interested. She has an occupation which fills her time. She makes enough money to indulge herself in the luxuries that women love, and so marriage becomes to her merely an incident of life, not the whole thing. If the right man comes along, well and good. If not, also well and good. She has her pleasant, independent, interesting life as a girl bachelor. The world to her is full of such a number of things besides wedding rings.

Furthermore, girls, even if you do marry, you may still need to keep on being a bread-winner instead of becoming a breadmaker. The high cost of living has to be reckoned with, and not every man under present economic conditions is able to support a family alone and unaided. In the past the good wife helped her husband by doing the housework, and turning, and mending, and pinching the pennies. In the future the good wife will doubtless help her husband by keeping on with her well-paid job and assisting in making the money to give her family the living conditions, and her children the education that the man alone could not afford to give them. So, except among the rich, marriage is going to mean a retirement from business no more for women than it is for men.

Another reason why I urge you, girls, to learn some gainful occupation and perfect yourself in it is because it will do more than any other one thing to make you happy. It will keep you from being bored, and boredom is at the root of all fretful discontent. People who are busy, who have a definite object in view and are striving to attain it, find the day all too short, are always content and cheerful. And talk about thrills! You never really know one until you hold your first pay envelope in your hand and it surges over you that the money in it represents your own work that was good enough for somebody to pay for.

Being able to make your own living sets you free. Economic independence is the only independence in the world. As long as you must look to another for your food and clothes you are a slave to that person. You must obey him. You must defer to him. You must bend your will to his.

But when you can stand on your own feet you can snap your fingers in the face of the world and tell it where it gets off. You do not have to endure tyrannical parents. You do not have to put up with a cruel husband. You can support yourself, and you are free.

So I urge you, girls, never to rest until you have fitted yourselves to earn your own bread, and butter, and cake. And remember, the better your work the more you earn. It is efficiency that pulls down the big pay envelope.

It doesn’t make a bit of difference what you do, my dear. It is the way you do it that counts. You can make a success or a failure of any occupation under the sun. The fat pay envelope is the reward of superexcellent work. It isn’t the perquisite of any particular trade or profession.

We do best those things that we enjoy doing, and so I urge you to sit down quietly and study yourself and try to find out what nature intended you to be.

Probably you have no very decided talent, no cosmic urge that makes you feel that you must paint, or sing, or dance, or cook, or keep books, or else life will be dust and ashes in your mouth.

But you are sure to find that there is something that you like to do better than other things. It may be trimming hats. It may be messing around the kitchen. It may be that you are quick at figures and can always remember dates. It may be that you write a good hand, or always got a hundred in spelling at school.

There is always some one thing for which you have a turn, as the phrase goes, and that points the road for you to follow.

If you have no mechanical skill, don’t do anything that requires deftness of the hands. If you can’t spell, don’t waste any time trying to be a stenographer. If you cannot add up a column of figures three times without getting four different results, pass up bookkeeping. You will never make a success of anything for which you have no aptitude. You will always hate it and be bored by it.

The successful people are those who love their work so well that it is a sheer joy to do it; who never count the labor that they put into it, and who are so interested in it that it is perpetually in their thoughts.

Therefore choose the thing that you like to do and get fun out of doing, and don’t just blunder into taking the first job that presents itself or make the mistake of taking up some profession to which you are not called because some other girls are doing so or because it seems to you romantic or elegant.

Of course, in these days of the emancipation of women, every road is as free for a girl to follow as it is to a boy, but you will find that those women make the greatest successes who stick to purely feminine lines. There is just as much need for woman’s work in the world as there is for man’s, and when it is equally well done it is equally well paid. In some occupations it is a little better paid because there are fewer women experts than there are men.

There are very few women who have risen from the ranks to become presidents of banks, or trust magnates, or big manufacturers; but every community has in it women who have made tidy fortunes as dressmakers, or milliners, or boarding-house keepers.

Teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing; home-making in all its ramifications and branches; buying and selling pretty things; the building and furnishing of houses; the healing of the sick, all of these are strictly within the feminine province, and you will not make a mistake if you choose whichever one of these occupations appeals to your fancy. Women have been unconsciously trained along these lines for centuries and have for them an inherited aptitude. It takes the average man years of profound study to acquire the sense of color that a girl baby is born with. And any dub of a woman can give an architect points on lights, and kitchen sinks, and the heights of shelves and about closets. So stick to your last and capitalize your feminine intuitions instead of trying to invade masculine fields. Even women writers and women artists are more successful when their work is most womanly. And great actresses will be remembered for the feminine rôles they portrayed, not for the masculine parts they essayed and in which they were grotesque failures.

Having selected your occupation, perfect yourself in it. Master its technique. Don’t be satisfied to be an also-ran. Make of yourself a blue-ribbon winner. You will have to work longer hours and harder doing ill-paid work than you will doing highly paid work. The difference between a $15 cook and a $10,000 chef is just a matter of skill. One woman gets $5 for a hat, another $50. It is just the touch to a bow or ribbon or a twist to a bit of velvet that does it. Whether you get a thin pay envelope or a thick one as a stenographer, or bookkeeper, or clerk, depends upon how expert you are. So make up your mind that you are not going to work for a pittance, and go after the big salary by making yourself worth it. Employers are just pining to pay the price of good work.

Then tackle your job as if you meant to make a life-work of it. Don’t look upon it as a bridge of sighs that you have to travel over with reluctant feet from the schoolroom to the altar. Think of it as something you are going to do as long as you live; something that is going to be your friend, and comforter, and stay, and to which you will give the best that is in you. That won’t keep you from marrying if the right man comes along, and it will be a powerful stay if no man comes. Not many girls do this. They regard their work as only a makeshift until they can marry, and so they never take the trouble to learn how to do it properly. That is why they fail, and why they are ill-paid. Don’t be one of them. Choose a congenial occupation and put your heart and your back into it, and your success will be assured.