XXII
TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY?
A young woman once said to me:
“I am, as you know, the private secretary of the head of a very big business concern. I get a generous salary. My hours are easy. My employer, who is an elderly man, is one of the finest men in the world, and treats me with every courtesy, kindness and consideration. I feel it a privilege to be in daily contact with such a brilliant mind as he has. I love my work. I have what they call in men a business head. To me there is no other romance so fascinating as the romance of commerce; no game so absorbing as the business game. And it thrills me to the finger tips to know that I have a part, even if it is a small one, in this great adventure that sends men and ships to the uttermost parts of the earth and that gambles for fortunes.
“It gratifies my vanity to know that I have worked up from the bottom to my present fine position, and it pleases my ambition to know that I can climb still higher, and that every year I will be more efficient and more valuable to my employer. I enjoy the money I make, and the luxuries it brings me, as only a woman can who comes of a poor family, and whose girlhood has been barren of all the pretty things that girls crave. I find a lot of solid satisfaction in watching my bank account grow, knowing that, if I keep on with my job for a few years, I will have put by enough to safeguard my old age.
“So far, so good. If I were going to remain perpetually on the sunny side of forty, I would ask no life better than that of the successful business woman. But the dread hour will strike for me, as it does for all other women, and I am wondering if, when it does, I will not find myself a lonely old woman, and wish that I had married and had children.
“I am thirty now, and I have got to decide the question in the next year or two. Shall I give up my mahogany desk for a gas range? Shall I forfeit my fat pay envelope for a job where I shall have to toil ten times as hard for only my board and clothes? Shall I give up the occupation for which I spent years in preparing myself, for which I have talent and which is a joy for me to perform, for domestic service which I loathe, for which I have no aptitude and in which I am utterly unskilled?
“When I see my sister shabby, bedraggled, overworked, with her crying babies and grouchy husband I feel like clinging to my good, soft, easy office position with both hands. Then rises that specter of the future in my pathway, and I wonder if in staying single I will miss the best that life has to give to a woman, and if I will regret it if I refuse to follow the traditional career of my sex.
“Of course, I know that there are women who try to have their cake, and eat it, too; who grab matrimony with one hand, and hold on to their jobs with the other, but my observation is that they always fall between the stools. They are failures both as business women and as wives and mothers, for to succeed in anything you have to give everything that is in you to it.
“No woman is of much use in an office when nine-tenths of her brain and all of her interest are back home in a cradle and she is worrying over whether a hired nurse is giving the baby its milk. Nor can any woman who comes back home at night, with a worn-out body and jangled nerves, be anybody’s ideal of a wife and mother.
“So as far as I am concerned I have to decide the question which I am going to be, a business woman or a domestic woman, before I take the fatal step, and for the life of me I can’t make up my mind which to do. To marry or not to marry, that is the problem that I am acquiring gray hairs and wrinkles debating.
“Of course, if a fairy prince should come along and say, ‘Come and be my queen, and ride beside me in my limousine and tour the world with me on my yacht,’ I should doff my Cinderella working suit and put on my glass slippers, and step out with him.
“But it is only in novels that millionaires espouse poor working girls. The men who come a-courting me are just ordinary young chaps on small salaries, whose wives will have to do their own cooking, and wear hand-me-downs.
“Nor would there be any difficulty in settling the question if I had an overwhelming passion for some man. Then I would cry, ‘All for love and my job well lost!’ and a two-by-four flat would look better to me than to be president of the greatest corporation in the world. But I am not really in love. I have merely an affection for a certain chap that I might possibly cultivate into a warmer emotion if I decided that it was better, after all, to marry.
“But it is cruel, isn’t it, that a woman has to choose between marriage and her career? When a man marries he merely annexes a home and wife and children to the pleasures and interests of his work, but a woman has to sacrifice one or the other. And I don’t know which one to choose.”
“And whichever way you decide, you will be apt to regret it,” I replied consolingly.