Fanny Fern - Ginger-Snaps

Female clerks, it always seemed to me, must necessarily give out first in their feet . That incessant standing, from morning to night, must be more trying to them than to men. Many women, I know, can walk miles more easily than they could stand for half an hour.

After making a purchase at a store quite late in the afternoon, I said to the young girl who waited upon me, —

"How very tired you must get of us women, day after day!"

"There is a great difference in them," she civilly replied.

"But don't your feet ache sadly?" I asked. "That always seemed to me the most trying part of it."

She smiled as she pulled from under the seat, behind the counter, a stool.

"I thought that mitigation of weariness was against all regulations in stores," I replied.

"Not in this ," was her answer. "Mr. – has always allowed his female clerks to sit down when they were tired."

Now, I was so pleased at this that I should like to give that employer's name in full on this page. Here was a man who was wise enough, and, above all, humane enough, to look on their side of the question. In doing so, of course, he did not overlook his own. In doing so, he may also have known that there is a point when even a woman's india-rubber patience, may be stretched too far. He may have known that, when soul and body gave out, and a customer came in at that trying moment, and the "last ounce" having been "laid on the camel's back," the article inquired for they " did not keep !" I say he might have been keen enough to have known this. I prefer to believe, that being a good, kind-hearted man, he tried to make service for these young girls as light as he would wish it made for his own young daughters, were they in that position. It is very certain that, which way soever we look at it, it is an example which other employers would do well to follow.

It wont do the male clerks any harm to stand still; but I would be very glad to have inaugurated this humane consideration for the young women. I heard one of them tell a friend, the other day, that she had to go directly to bed each evening on her return home, because her feet and back ached so intolerably.

Another suggestion: When employers have any occasion to reprove these young women, if they would not mortify them by doing it in the presence and in the hearing of customers, it would not only be more pleasant for the latter, but would be more likely to have its proper effect on the offender. I have sometimes heard such brutal things said by employers to a blushing young girl, whose eyes filled with tears at her helplessness to avert it, or to reply to it, that I never could enter the store again, for fear of a repetition of the distressing scene, although, so far as I personally was concerned, I had nothing to complain of.

The moral of all this is, that men in the family, and in the store too, must look upon women in a different light from that to which they are accustomed; before, to use a detestable phrase, but one which will appeal most strongly to the majority, they "can get the most work out of them." Physicians understand this. Every man is not a physician, but he ought at least to know that backaches and headaches, and heartaches too, are not confined to his own sex.

" BLUEMonday." By this name clergymen designate the day. Preaching as they do, two sermons on the Sabbath, sometimes three – not to mention Sunday-school exhortations, and possible funerals and marriages; of course, I take no account of what may have happened, on Sunday, in their own families, no more than does the outside world. "The minister" must, like a conductor of a railroad train, be "up to time," – hence "Blue Monday." Flesh and blood is flesh and blood, although covered by a surplice or a cassock, and will get tired , even in a good cause. Therefore the worn-out clergyman takes Monday for a day of rest, for truly the Sabbath is none. He wanders about and tries to give his brains a holiday – I say tries , because he often misses it by wandering into the book-stores, or going to see a publisher, instead of taking a drive, or a ramble in the fields, or wooing nature, who never fails to lay a healing hand on her children.

But Blue Monday does not belong exclusively to clergymen – oh, mother of many children! as you can testify. True, you call it by another name – "Washing-day," – but it is all one, as far as exhaustion is its characteristic. May the gods grant that on that day, when your assistant in nursery-labor must often make up the deficiencies involved in the terrible "family-wash," that no "plumber" or "gas-fitter" send in his bill, to "rile" the good man of the house, to exclaim against the "expenses of housekeeping," and send you into your Babel of a nursery, with moist eyes and a heavy heart? It is poor comfort, after you have cried it out, to try to pacify yourself by saying, Well, he didn't mean to say I'm sorry I ever was married, yet it hurts me all the same; men are so thoughtless about such things, and they go out after hurling such a poisoned arrow, and forget, even if they ever knew it, that they have left it there to rankle all day; and are quite astonished, and, perhaps, disgusted when they come back that the good lady is not in excellent spirits, as they are, and wonder what she , with a comfortable home, and nothing but house matters to attend to, can find to worry her. Now, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Jenkins, and Mrs. Smith, I'll lay a wager with each of you, that your husbands have done that very thing, more times than you can count, and on "Blue Monday" too.

Ah! these "chance words," and the thick -skinned utterers of them. Ah! the pity that the needle is no hindrance to the bitter thoughts they bring; but that over the little torn apron or frock, the tears of discouragement fall; the bitterest of all – that he hasn't the least idea "he has said anything," but is, very likely, inviting some fellow that very minute to "take a drink" with him, or to smoke a dozen cigars more or less, spite the "expense." My dears, wipe your eyes. If you look for consistency in the male creature, you'll need a microscope to find it. Your expenses hurt him dreadfully; when I say yours, I mean not only your personal expenses, but the house expenses; for don't you see, had he staid a bachelor, he wouldn't have had a plumber's bill to pay – and that's all your fault, because you said "yes," when he got on his knees to implore you that he might have the felicity of paying your mutual plumber's bill.

But that was then , and this is now !

But isn't it perfectly delicious when those men come home, after making some such blundering speech, the innocent way, after hanging up their hats, that they'll walk into your presence, rubbing their hands, and fetch up standing in the middle of the room with, "Why! what's the matter?" as they catch sight of their wives' lugubrious faces. I tell you, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jenkins, whatsoever else you do, don't hold your wives responsible for that which they are no more to blame for than yourselves. Or if you will insist upon going over their hearts with a cart-wheel, in this manner, have the manliness when you come home, not to pooh-pooh the resentful tears you have caused.

The fact is, you are but blunderers as far as women are concerned. You are elephants trying with your huge paws to pat humming-birds. Nine out of every ten you demolish. Only physicians understand a woman; and they don't always act up to the light they have.

I would like to write a book on some kinds of legal murder; that is if really good people had not such moonshine notions about "delicacy." This class are really the drags on the wheel of reform. I don't say that sometimes it is not necessary, and even right, to drive rough-shod right over them, if they will persist in walking in such a narrow path; but one does it after all with regret, because they so sincerely believe themselves to be in the "path of duty," as they call it. Dear me! if there ever was a perverted phrase, this is one! It makes me sick to hear it.