Light Reading...

The Woman Who Works

Which is of greater profit to married life: that the woman devote herself to her home, performing the work it requires, or that she take up work outside, from which she earns a salary with which she contributes to the household expenses?

Perhaps this question faces every educated girl who is able to work outside her home. And perhaps it also faces every man whose wife works in public life, leaving the duties of the home for a servant to perform.

But experience has proved that, from the material standpoint, it is more profitable for the woman to devote herself to the performance of her household duty — unless she earns from her outside work a very large profit.

Mrs. "Frances Perkins," one of the leaders of the labor movement in America and one of those demanding complete equality between man and woman in work and in salary, says:

"If a woman cannot earn a salary of four thousand dollars a year... indeed, five thousand dollars... then I advise her to give up working and stay at home. Otherwise her loss at home will be greater than her salary at work."

Lasting Slenderness

The finest quality in the European woman is that her body keeps its slenderness and its proportion over a long stretch of her life... After she has married and had children, it scarcely differs from what it was when she was a young girl who fairly skipped along whenever she walked!...

The Eastern woman, on the other hand, changes completely after her marriage... As a girl she is slender, slim, willowy... Then she marries... and no one knows what it is that happens to turn her into a mass of flesh, fat, and grease, with no kinship to slenderness, near or distant.

Ladies' dressmakers know this well. The European woman keeps the measurements of her dress for years on end without change, while the Eastern woman's measurements for her dresses and coats change once every few months.

In Paris now there are dressmakers who make the loveliest dresses and coats by telephone, without taking a measurement or holding a fitting... For they keep models of cardboard

which represent their clients' figures with precision... If a lady wants a dress or a coat made, she has only to tell the dressmaker by telephone, and her order comes to her a few days later, fitting her perfectly.

And this model remains with the dressmaker for years and years. For the lady's figure keeps its slenderness: it neither spreads out with stoutness nor shrivels with thinness all that while.