THE NATIONAL AMERICAN CONVENTION OF 1903
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in New Orleans. Her address, quaintly entitled The Woman with the Broom, filled more than four columns of the Woman's Journal and an adequate idea of its wise philosophy illuminated with the sparkling wit for which she was renowned cannot be conveyed by quotations. "A few years ago," she said, "a famous poet roused the compassion of the world by portraying the tragedy of hopeless toil by the Man with the Hoe. He might have found nearer home a better illustration of the work that is never done, that has no inspiration to lighten it and looks for no appreciation to glorify it, in the Woman with a Broom." "She is understudy to a perpetual motion machine," was one of her epigrams. She referred to the many successful business and professional women at the convention and said:
But I am not here to speak for the wage-earning woman, she can speak for herself. My plea is not for justice for her but for the domestic woman—the woman who is the mainstay of the world, who is back of every great enterprise and who makes possible the achievements of men—the woman behind the broom, who is the hardest-worked and worst-paid laborer on the face of the earth.
....
Of the housekeeper we demand a universal genius. We don't expect that our doctor shall be a good lawyer or our lawyer understand medicine; we don't expect a preacher to know about stocks or a stockbroker to have a soul; but we think the woman who is at the head of a family is a rank failure unless she is a pretty good doctor and trained nurse and dressmaker and financier. She must be able to settle disputes among the children with the inflexible impartiality of a Supreme Justice; she must be a
Spurgeon in expounding the Bible to simple souls and leading them to heaven; she must be a greater surgeon than Dr. Lorenz, for she must know how to kiss a hurt and make it well; she must be a Russell Sage in petticoats, who can make $1 do the work of $2, and when she gets through combining all of these nerve-wrecking professions we don't think that she has done a thing but enjoy herself. It is only when something happens to the housekeeper we realize that she is the kingpin who holds the universe together.
"Every injustice is the prolific mother of wrongs," said Mrs. Gilmer, "and the fact that the woman with the broom is neither sufficiently appreciated nor decently paid brings its own train of evils. It is at the bottom of the distaste girls have for domestic pursuits and the frantic mania of women for seeking some kind of a 'career.'" She thus concluded:
