Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems

What Shall They Do?

155 What Shall They Do? The tale not long ago unfolded by “a weak-minded woman”to the “Easy Chair” has fallen upon sympathetic ears.¹ We wish that she knew—we should like to sit down beside her in her kitchen and tell her—how our sorrowful thought has followed her through the hopeless waking, the hopeless work, the hopeless dreaming , through the whole dull, drudging day. We should like to have been there to slip the clothes upon the children, and run for the spoons and the water; we wished that we could have helped her skim the milk and make the fire—we will not offer to do the cooking, for our prophetic soul tells us that the result would be extraordinary; we make it a principle to let cooking alone, on condition that people shall let us alone, and not remind us of the typical woman who “talks French and plays the piano.”But we would have gladly helped about the dusting and the dish-washing, and have planned a little that her golden hour in “the other room,” in the “muslin dress,” might grow into two, and the sunset find her with braver eyes and send her “strengthened on her way.” How to spend the treasured minutes, though, that is the question; we might have read to her, or we might have chatted with her; we might not, perhaps, have advised her to take the pen and paper down from the pantry-shelf.Then, perhaps, we might. And this brings us to the point. “A weak-minded woman” is one of many, and their name is legion. Consumed with little wearing cares, their girlish dreams ended in a struggle for bread-and-butter—a steady disquiet aching through the days and nights, and a steady, baffled, disappointing effort to write it away—is not that about it? To be sure they have not asked our advice, and may think that we don’t know any more about the matter than they do, and very likely we don’t; but if we think we do it answers the purpose. Perhaps the “Easy 156 Essays Chair” may be right in saying: “When the feeling is so strong, yield to it.”² Yet we venture to doubt whether this is always a safe rule. As a general thing, it is next to impossible for a woman with the care of a family on her hands to be a successful writer. The majority of the exceptions made their literary reputation before marriage, and if they choose, may lie on their oars and drift on it. We assume that a woman at the head of a home proposes to take care of that home to begin with. If the husband and children have the go-by, and the magazine editors have the stories, we have nothing to say to her. She has no right to a place in the ranks of authorship. She has not come in by the door into the sheepfold, but has climbed up some other way.³ Away down in some inner chamber of her heart she will find, if she make diligent search, a handwriting on the wall, but it is not our business to stop and translate it to her just now.4 It is no easy matter to keep the “holy fire burning in the holy place,”5 yet never be out of kindlings for the kitchen stove, nor forget to tell Bridget about the furnace dampers, nor let the baby have the matchbox to play with. It is worse than a “Conflict of Ages.”6 Women whose consciences would not let them be any thing but generous wives, and mothers faithful unto death, have had to give it up and lay by the pen forever. Women have died, too, in the struggle to bring the opposing forces into thorough, symmetrical union. It can be done, to be sure; but it needs one or both of two things: the physical strength of an Amazon and talent of the highest order.7 They are the geniuses of the world, as a rule, who “make it pay”in any sense. “Le jeu ne vaut pas la chaudelle,”8 for ordinary women. If the magazines will not publish your stories it is a natural inference that you are not exactly a genius, is it not? It is of no use to suggest Keats, or talk about “mute, inglorious Miltons,”or cast glances up at Wordsworth, “knowing that he should...