SIR,—Work of some kind is the greatest joy on earth.
Married women generally have less need to earn a living wage than their unmarried sisters, but surely their need to satisfy the creative longing is as great ? Because they have love and children and domestic duties is no reason to conclude that other aspirations are dead. All dignified work must be work that is loved for its own sake—work that you do not only because it is paid for, but because you find joy in striving to do it a little better each day—work that lifts through the drudgery of doing to the rarefied atmosphere where you seem to float in an absurd ecstasy out of all proportion to the importance of the thing done.
You have a hatshop. Your hats must not be mere copies of other women's inspirations. The joy comes in creating. And there is the financial gamble that thrills and the delight —if one happens to be happily married—of helping to pay the household accounts. You write, you draw or paint. The writing or drawing may be commercial rubbish at first— not the kind of work you long to do. You do it because it happens to be your only opening. Or because you need the money to satisfy other creative longings : to restore an old house, to make a garden, to buy a library.
The point is, it puts your foot on the first rung of the crea- tive ladder you would wish to climb. But these are arts. There are other kinds of routine work. And there are all kinds of married women. It is impossible to generalize about this as it is impossible to generalize about any other subject on earth without promptly remembering a dozen exceptions to every rule you may have attempted to lay down.
Women do not change their natures with their names at the altar. Women who are born with a need to discover for themselves wings will not be satisfied with either a Rolls-Royce or a Ford. The fact that so few realize their big ambitions does not matter. What does matter is that those who want to work should be allowed to do the thing they think they can do well. It is not a question of sex any more than our learning to read and write was a question of sex.
A husband with a career to make needs certainly a peaceful home, but there is no reason why a woman doing the work she loves to do should not be as satisfying in the house as the mere lover of spring-cleaning and mothers' meetings.
A woman who works sees life in the large from her hus- band's point of view. She has a commercial value, so she knows how to economize. A man's business partner becomes his friend as well as his wife. She was born his mother in any ease—the right kind of woman, I mean—and was there ever yet a true mother whose work interfered with the welfare of her child ?
As for the other kind of woman, the hard, unlovely, managing, masculine type, she would be all that whether she worked or played, and so she might as well invent business excuses for not being too much about the house, where she has a habit anyhow of keeping things from ever being very cosy or comfortable.—I am, Sir, &c., ANITA DUDLEY.
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