LEARN TO SEW by Alice Field

Pacific Press Publishing Company · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · May 3, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 18.

LEARN TO SEW.

By Alice Field

Addressed to "Advanced Young Girls."

YES, it is old, old advice, but it is advice that needs to be given to girls with more and more insistence at the present time, when the tendency seems to be for women to shirk the "quiet crafts."

Learn to sew; learn to sew quickly and beautifully; learn how to cut out clothes; learn how to put them together in the nicest way; learn some of the general principles of millinery. Regularly learn, and if you can not get the instruction at home, take lessons. And why? Not by any means to make yourselves drudges, but to save yourselves time, days and days of discouragement and unhappiness, should it ever be necessary for you to make your own clothes or help in making them, and to save yourselves from being misjudged. (This rather enigmatical close to my sentence I will explain later on.)

The tendency seems to be growing to call a girl of twenty or even twenty-five a clever girl because she can put a silk waist together passably well. As for a skirt—"Well, Isabel is really remarkable; do you know, she has made a skirt, and it really looks pretty well!"

It is not an unfrequent sight nowadays to see a girl laboriously sewing the wrong way, while an anxious mother regards her offspring with anxiety and just a mere bit of contempt. The mother appreciates that her daughter has more "advantages" educationally than she had in that simple age now past, and hesitates to insist, against a so ready resistance, that perhaps in some respects her ways as a young girl were best. Adele, Alice, and May know Latin and Greek, German and French; they can play and sing as Mary, Elizabeth, and Amanda never could, but how the hands of the last go up in horror as they see the first clotting hems with knots like little upturned radishes, taking hours to do some gathering because they do not know how to hold their needles, holding their work in the wrong way, proceeding in the wrong direction! Ah, that is where Amanda is glad she belonged to the simpler times, and she whispers to Elizabeth:—

"After all, it is our gifts that make peaceful homes. No home can be as happy as it should be without a deft woman to manage it. Why are Adele, Alice, and May so foolish? Why don't they cultivate deftness in handiwork; for they are so clever they must see it is of great importance?"

It is of prime importance. Don't be blind, girls. Can't you see that study, heights of thinking, art, true pleasure, can not exist where the foundation of "just living" is not secure? Never mind whether you think it should be different or not. Do you know of a single instance where it would not be better for a woman to be skilled in the quiet household arts that are expected of her and always will be as long as normal society lasts?

Strawberry Canyon and Grizzly Peak, Near Oakland, Cal.

What is the use of saying, "We shall never have to sew"? Every woman, with the rarest exceptions, has had to sew the minute it has been necessary for her personally to economize. When it comes to saying, "If I get a hat, I can not do this thing I long to do, or should do," eight women out of ten will say, "I'll trim my own hat."

No, women can not get away from the possibility of having to sew.

At the beginning of my article I said something that may have sounded enigmatical—namely, in suggesting that you learn to sew to save yourselves from being misjudged. By that I meant that you do not want people to think that you are not thoroughly womanly; and they will think so if you disdain woman's special work.

It is hard to forgive the "new woman" for her attempts to rob life of poetry. And it is robbing life of poetry to resist what I have called the "quiet crafts."

Let us consider the simplest home. It is that for which the man lovingly works, providing food and clothing for his family, and in which the woman lovingly adds ingenious comforts, prepares the food, and fashions the clothing. You can not get away from this picture, can you? And why should you? It is the essence of poetry. Now this does not mean that when the husband gains enough to give his wife more freedom from care she should continue laboring as hard as when she had little. Then it is right that she should, to a reasonable extent, employ people to do the labor for her, and so she becomes the head of a number who are paid to serve. Naturally her children will have more advantages of a certain kind than she had. This is the way the development continues—until reverses come to the family.

Now the point I wish to make is this: women and men should always be capable of living in the simplest way. Whether they have to or not, they should be able to live so, for it is then really that man as a rule is the best man, and woman the best woman.

It matters not how much you study, how "advanced" you are, if you will first remember to be womanly. Knowing how to sew is indicative of womanliness; not knowing how to sew does rob a woman of something. We can not have as much confidence in her. We think of her as a bit maimed, a bit dependent on other women. But every woman should be able to live independently of other women, if necessary, else she is no home-maker.

Be noble women, and then add every accomplishment. Become as "advanced" as you will, provided you are constantly giving proofs positive of possessing the deftness of the lovely pioneer woman.—Alice Field, in the Examiner.