SOCIAL CLEARING-HOUSE

The Drawer would like to emphasize the noble, self-sacrificing spirit of American women.  There are none like them in the world.  They take up all the burdens of artificial foreign usage, where social caste prevails, and bear them with a heroism worthy of a worse cause.  They indeed represent these usages to be a burden almost intolerable, and yet they submit to them with a grace and endurance all their own.  Probably there is no harder-worked person than a lady in the season, let us say in Washington, where the etiquette of visiting is carried to a perfection that it does not reach even in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, and where woman’s effort to keep the social fabric together requires more expenditure of intellect and of physical force than was needed to protect the capital in its peril a quarter of a century ago.  When this cruel war is over, the monument to the women who perished in it will need to be higher than that to the Father of his Country.  Merely in the item of keeping an account of the visits paid and due, a woman needs a bookkeeper.  Only to know the etiquette of how and when and to whom and in what order the visits are to be paid is to be well educated in a matter that assumes the first importance in her life.  This is, however, only a detail of bookkeeping and of memory; to pay and receive, or evade, these visits of ceremony is a work which men can admire without the power to imitate; even on the supposition that a woman has nothing else to do, it calls for our humble gratitude and a recognition of the largeness of nature that can put aside any duties to husband or children in devotion to the public welfare.  The futile round of society life while it lasts admits of no rival.  It seems as important as the affairs of the government.  The Drawer is far from saying that it is not.  Perhaps no one can tell what confusion would fall into all the political relations if the social relations of the capital were not kept oiled by the system of exchange of fictitious courtesies among the women; and it may be true that society at large—­men are so apt, when left alone, to relapse—­would fall into barbarism if our pasteboard conventions were neglected.  All honor to the self-sacrifice of woman!

What a beautiful civilization ours is, supposed to be growing in intelligence and simplicity, and yet voluntarily taking upon itself this artificial burden in an already overtaxed life!  The angels in heaven must admire and wonder.  The cynic wants to know what is gained for any rational being when a city-full of women undertake to make and receive formal visits with persons whom for the most part they do not wish to see.  What is gained, he asks, by leaving cards with all these people and receiving their cards?  When a woman makes her tedious rounds, why is she always relieved to find people not in?  When she can count upon her ten fingers the people she wants