NOTEBOOK OF A FEMINIST

Their dear health

Men have, once again, shown women this concern that we know so well. They are auctioneers. The law now allows women to practice this profession, and one of our colleagues questioned some of these gentlemen about the joy they certainly felt as a result.

But they do not feel joy; they are sad; not that they fear additional competition, they are too generous; but they tremble for the health of dear weak women, in this profession where they will be exposed to drafts and some fatigue.

I read this interview and tears of gratitude came to my eyes. Ah! how good men are!

Then the bell rang and I saw the washerwoman enter who had climbed our six floors, her bundle of laundry across her back; I heard the four-season sellers shouting in the street, it was raining! I saw again, in memory, on the steep slopes of Mount Baron, old Savoyard women tumbling down the dry bed of the torrents with their heads and torsos bent under enormous bundles of branches which trailed behind them like a court coat; and, at the foot of the Meige, Dauphinoises of all ages, having mowed their steep meadows, pull, from top to bottom, the bales of hay weighing sixty to eighty kilos which they had just tied and which they loaded onto their mules. I thought of the factory workers and even of your cook, sir, caught between the fire of the stove and the icy air from the window.

I felt very angry with all these reckless people. To tire, to expose oneself thus, when there are beings in the world revolted by the lightest punishment imposed on women! What unconsciousness! what ingratitude! And why ? For nothing, small savings, miserable earnings. We have no more malice!

Strange thing, however: not only do fearless knights not relieve them, even by force, of these chores, but everyone seems to find it natural.

So are these auctioneers and others, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, so worried when female colleagues come to them, just crocodiles? Not at all. But, by a mysterious phenomenon, the concern that so many men take for women's health only begins with work that brings honor and money.

Someone protests: “Look, I am told, the street sweepers, recently removed out of the kindness of your heart. Yes... precisely... this hard job is becoming very lucrative. Fortunately, not all men are so sensitive and are more human. It is thanks to them that the daughters of the Revolution, like its sons, gradually acquired the freedom of work, a sacred freedom if ever there was one. -

JANE MISME.