Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/September 9, 1907

WHAT on earth has become of all the aunts and cousins and sisters und grandmothers?” said a woman to me the other day. “I’ve been trying to get some employment for a well-educated, competent, middle-aged woman. I’ve tramped the town from one end to the other. I’ve run up a telephone bill that I’m afraid to look at.

“I bored all my friends to death, and now, just as I’m ready to give up in despair, I find that the woman I’m trying to help has a sister in good circumstances, a prosperous business man for a nephew and two comfortably married nieces. Now, twenty years ago, that woman would have had the choice of half a dozen homes where she could have been a comfort and a help. What’s the reason she hasn’t got even one now?”

Now, I don’t know a thing about the well-educated, competent, middle-aged woman or her relatives who are not offering her a home, but I’ll warrant that she’s the new kind of woman, and that she would rather starve in a tenement house than to live with her relatives. The new kind of woman is made that way.

She isn’t an aunt or a sister, or even a grandmother. She’s herself, with her own life, her own likes and dislikes, and her own way of living. She’d rather die than go into somebody else’s home and help take care of the children or mend the socks, or keep the maids in order. She lives for herself, thank you, and she has been doing it for so many years that she couldn’t possibly get out of the habit of it. The woman with a family of her own and her own home to live in doesn’t live for herself a single minute in the day. She can’t.

There is Johnny’s finger to be tied up, Kittie’s dress to be mended, husband’s things to be sent to the laundry, the nurse to coax into good humor, the cook to boss and the garden to see to.

Never for one single day does the real mother of a real family have one single instant to call her own. She doesn’t expect it. She doesn’t want it, and if she did want it she couldn’t get it.

So she learns to find her joy in other people’s happiness. When you meet the mother of a family looking particularly radiant, don’t imagine she’s going on a pleasure trip or has bought a new dress or found a new book to her liking.

Kittie has been invited to the house party, or Johnny’s teacher says he’s the brightest boy in the class, or there is a new dish for husband’s dinner on the way.

The new woman is a great success—till she is thirty. After that she’s a dismal failure. She is so selfish and so set in her ways that you couldn’t pay people enough to take her into the family, with her whims, her headaches and her tired spells.

What’s become of all the aunts and the sisters and the grandmothers? There aren’t any. They committed suicide at twenty, when they made up their minds to live their own lives after their own fashion, no matter who liked it and who didn’t.