Women Should Have Money to Spend
By Susan H. Martin
Having the bills paid is all very well. It's much better than not having them paid. But women like the handling of money as well as do men. They like to pay for their own purchases, and open their own parcels. If you men can not sympathize with this eccentricity, consider how well you like to open your own mail. Consider how well you'd have liked going through college with all your bills paid, but not a cent in your pocket. Consider, while you are considering, how you would like being asked to a banquet, and having somebody else eat for you. I have known women whose fathers were millionaires, and whose bills were paid without question, who were compelled to wait for the carriage, whatever their errand or its distance, because they never had car fare. Invariably these women were reckless in extravagance. They rarely asked the price of things ordered, as it was a matter of no concern to them. Yet with the rare and precious cash dollars that came their way, they were economical to the verge of stinginess. The moral whereof is plain. If you would have your womenfolk economical, let them handle money, and learn to respect its value. When a father gives his son an allowance, he should do the same for his daughter; not as a matter of material favor,—for the daughter's bills might double the son's allowance,—but as a matter of discipline, of financial experience and education. The girls who dress and keep themselves within the limits of a stipulated allowance are usually the best dressed; yet their bills are invariably smaller. It is to their interest to get all they can for their money, and their dollars go twice as far as do those of the girls whose bills are paid. And these are the girls whose training is fitting them to be good wives and helpmates of men, provided the men they marry have sufficient shrewdness to share their confidences and their incomes, and to trust their wives to aid in making the family fortunes solid. In the humbler walks of life, where the husband's earnings are so scant it is incredible that they can cover the mean necessities of life, those households are uniformly more thrifty where the husband turns over his entire earnings to the wife. Somehow she always manages to supply the wants, and keep the bills paid; and somewhere, though he can not see just how she does it, there's a nest-egg growing by hard-saved dimes and dollars for the inevitable “rainy day.”— Susan H. Martin.