Women's Ways of Earning Money.
[Labor]. Alden, Cynthia Westover. Women’s Ways of Earning Money. The Woman’s Home Library. Edited by Margaret E. Sangster. Illustrated. New York: A.S. Barnes & Company, 1904.
8vo.; library stamp on title page; 7 pp. of ads in the rear; butterscotch cloth, stamped in black.
First edition; part of the Woman’s Home Library collection, whose goal it is to provide women with “helpful advice” to “cover every phase of woman’s need in the home environment.” With an introduction by the editor of the Woman’s Home Library, Margaret E. Sangster, that boasts, “every household where there are women, and a household without women is not in any sense a home, will need this excellent book.” In the rousing preface, Alden calls on women of all backgrounds and skill levels to learn how to make a living wage:
If you can make the prettiest patchwork quilts, the finest jellies, the most luscious pies, the most delicious cake, the best bread, the daintiest tidies and sofa cushions, for miles around, why, you mustn’t be buried; the world wants you and will have you. Perhaps you are on a farm far from any city. Never mind. In the village where you get your supplies there is a general store. It is your open sesame to success. Use it….Don’t assume you should be treated differently because you are a woman. In the great factory of the economic system, sex ought not to enter at all. (pp. 19-21)
Alden’s guide to earning money is broken down into chapters detailing the wide range of activities in which women might find fiscal success, including stenography, teaching, and nursing.
In 1904, Alden was the acting President-General of the International Sunshine Society, an organization dedicated to spreading kindness and compassion around the globe, whose membership included many prominent American women who traveled to various schools and churches promoting their non-sectarian message of universal benevolence towards others. In her lifetime, Alden also worked as a journalist and social worker, and spent the latter part of her life focusing on the problems of blind infants and children.
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