The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎636r] (162/239)

THE EXTRAVAGANT ECONOMY OF WOMEN.
131
Perhaps for the first time she has a little money—I speak, of
course, of the respectable middle-class woman, for the lowest and
highest are of no account, meeting, as they often do, on the dead
level of extravagance. Now what can we expect of a young
middle-class wife who has some money for the first time? That
she wastes it w T hen it should be saved, and saves it when it
should be spent. She buys cheap food, but she decorates her
baby with that white plush cloak and that awful plush cap
which her middle-class soul loves, and which bear witness to her
prosperity. So her olive branch is carried about in plush while
her husband has dismal retrospects of other days, hardly appre
ciated, when he took his luscious supper at a third-rate restaurant,
which in remembrance seems a banquet fit for the gods.
To spend money in just proportion to one’s income, however
small, and not to spend too little—for there is such a thing!—
requires a higher degree of intelligence than the aimless and the
inexperienced possess, and the woman who earns money has a
keener, juster knowledge of its value than the woman w T ho gets
it from the masculine head of the family under whose thumb she
languishes. Also, as I have said before, she has to learn the
value of time in the process of evolution from the harem to the
ballot-box. I have a dear friend, a woman with a massive
intellect, who is, however, not above economy. She has been in
search of an ideal greengrocer, and, after much tribulation of
spirit and waste of precious hours that mean literally pounds to
her, she found him in Shepherd’s Bush. Lured by the bucolic
name, tempted by a vision of sprouts at tuppence per pound
instead of tuppence ha’penny, she made a pilgrimage there,
wasted a whole precious morning, and joined a phalanx
of other mistaken female economists who stood on wet
flags in Indian file, each waiting their turn to be served.
My intelligent friend waited twenty-five minutes, until
she was finally rescued by a serving young man, and
had the rapture of saving sevenpence. She, naturally, re
turned home in triumph and in a ’bus, but she was so used up
by her economy that it would have been flattery to call her a
wreck. That night she had a chill, the doctor was summoned
in hot haste, and he proceeded to attend her with that assiduity
which only adds another terror to illness. When to this is added
the bills for a protracted visit to the seaside, my intelligent friend
confessed that it hardly paid to save sevenpence.
Now is it not also the extravagance of pure economy that takes
the women to the “sales,” where they buy all the things the-v
do not want? Would there be sales days if there were only men
in the world? Did you ever see a man go from one shop to
another to get a necktie tuppence cheaper? To be penny wise is
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