A WOMAN AND HER MONEY.
ONE of the commonest forms of male conceit is its utter disbelief in the existence of any female capacity for the care of property. " A woman," says this bland superiority, " is essentially nnbusinesslike. She cannot calculate, and is in- capable of the simplest addition. She habitually confounds interest with principal, and is ignorant of the commonest terms that relate to the handling of money. So careless is she of that latter commodity, that she can hardly be trusted
even with the custody of her own purse. Sooner or later she is sure to lose it with all its contents." The reproach is a very old one, so old that it has come to be accepted even by women
themselves without question or demur. But is it a well- founded one P We should doubt it very much. Indeed, we
believe that, in the matter of thrift, if it were possible to weigh the rival claims of men and women, the latter would be found to be the more saving and the more careful. Still, legend will have them otherwise, and in support of that legend man triumphantly points to the fact that women lose their purses. They do lose their purses,—the fact must be admitted ; but it is just possible That, did man carry his own money after so perilous a fashon, he might lose it also. These reflections are suggested to us by a story that found its way into the columns of a daily paper a few days ago. A lady, it was said, went to Scotland Yard to recover an umbrella which she had lost, or, rather, which she had left behind her in a cab. The um- brella was duly identified and presented to her, and she departed with it, but left behind her another umbrella with which she had arrived, and a brown-paper parcel which she had been carrying. " So like a woman," was the general comment ; but why was it any more like a woman than a man ? Even the wisest of men are subject to an occasional absence of mind, which blots out from their memory their immediate sur- roundings and purposes. No doubt the good lady who left more property behind her than she had recovered, was deeply engaged in debating some question relative to the comfort of an unworthy husband, who had allowed her to go by herself to Scotland Yard in search of her lost property. However that might have been, the story was immediately followed up by several similar tales from other correspondents, who all averred that a woman and her purse, her umbrella, her parcels, and everything that is hers, are continually being parted through want of common care on the part of the former. Indeed, one gentleman went so far as to assert that he himself had picked up in the streets of London five feminine purses in the course of as many years, some of them containing quite considerable sums : surely a very exceptional run of luck, for this witness says nothing of having returned the treasure- trove to its original owners.
Well, it would be useless to deny that women lose their purses, for probably there has hardly lived a woman who has not lost at least two or three in the course of her life-time ; but these small losses are occasioned, as a rule, not by want of care, but by excess of care. A man does not lose his purse, because he rarely carries one. He prefers to have his money loose in his waistcoat-pockets, where he can get at it with less trouble, and where, he will assure you, it is infinitely more safe than in any separate receptacle. Notwithstanding this assurance, he does lose it—perhaps not unfrequently ; but when he loses it, he wisely holds his tongue, and no one but himself knows of his own carelessness. Hence it is that even though men lost the contents of their pockets as frequently as women did, they would still appear, by reason of their silence, more fortunate. Still, as we have already said, we must confess the women do lose their money in this way more frequently than men do, and the reason is not far to seek. Consider the case of a fashionably dressed lady of the day. She has no waistcoat-pockets such as her husband delights in ; the fit of her dress does not admit of them. Even if she had such pockets, she would still cling to the use of a purse, for she considers the loose carriage of gold and silver to be almost criminally careless. She will not be satisfied until she has put it in a purse—which already contains, perhaps, her latch-key, sundry postage-stamps, and some tightly-folded letters—and when she has put it in her purse, she has nowhere to pat the purse itself. The exigencies of her dress and her own prudence cause her to carry it in her hand, so that her sense of touch may always assure or remind her of its possession. Unfortunately, she cannot always devote a hand entirely to that service, and the moment must come, sooner or later, when she is obliged to ease it of its burden while she turns it to some other use. Then it is that forgetfulness comes between, and causes her to leave her charge behind her, or that dishonesty steps in and carries off the unguarded treasure. While engaged in shopping, for instance, and intent upon examining with both hands the goods submitted to her inspection, she is obliged to lay all her belongings on the counter—her umbrella, her purse, her card-case, and her parcels—and it can hardly be wondered at that she sometimes leaves some of them behind her. Hence
has arisen the theory that woman is a pocketless creature, destined by Nature to carry her purse in her hand, and only sometimes to remember it. And as one theory attracts others, there have arisen about her quite a host of beliefs in her innate imprudence and negligence of her belongings. Even as she loses her purse, so she is supposed to lose her fortune, and to be absolutely incapable, by herself, of devising any safeguard for it. And yet we should still be disposed to say that the average woman can be better trusted with the care of property than can the average man,—always excepting such cases as those in which she is betrayed into throwing it away through goodness of heart. A woman's affection is, of course, her weakest point, and when attacked upon that side, it is not difficult to rob her ; attacked upon any other side, she may be trusted to make as good a defence as the man who finds it so easy to laugh at her. In the first place, she is naturally more cautious than her male critic ; her very timidity adds to her prudence, and she is far more likely to err on the side of caution than of temerity, being painfully anxious-minded and long-sighted in the matter of possible consequences. Left to herself, she would rather invest all her money in Consols, and live a pinched life of security, than enjoy an interest of 6 per cent., with precarious luxury. She is quick to imagine disaster, and slow to recognise any mean between absolute safety and reckless speculation. And if she can be trusted to be more careful than man in the guardianship of her capital, she is in- finitely more careful in the expenditure of her income. It may be true that she is weak in arithmetic, and rarely can add up a line of figures three times without bringing out three different results ; still, for all that, she will keep a care- ful account of her expenditure long after her husband has given up his own private account in despair. Really, when one comes to consider the question, the ingratitude of man in this matter is almost insolent. In nine cases out of ten, he leaves the whole expenditure of his household in his wife's hands ; it is the woman who has the responsibility of spending or saving, and whom he delegates as sole guardian of the fortune which he has made, or is making ; and yet he has the calm pretension to sneer at her want of businesslike qualities. He eats his dinner, without the least idea of its cost; is waited upon by servants, whose wages are unknown to him ; and lights his candle without caring to ask himself whether that illumination will cost him twopence or a shilling. If he has to save money, he is dependent upon a woman to tell him where it can best be saved, for the simple reason that he knows nothing of the details of his expenditure, and she does. One would not find fault with this arrangement, which, after all is but a very fair division of labour ; one would only wish to remind the man that it is unfair to put all the responsibility upon the woman's shoulders, and then ignore the weight. A man's account of his domestic exchequer is generally to this effect : "I make all the money, my wife spends it all ; if it were not for me, she would probably spend more than all ; but then, poor thing, she is so unbusinesslike." And with this view of the case he is quite content, and—what is more curious—his wife seems to be quite content too. Really, the magnanimity of woman is sometimes as great as it is unex- pected.
In the mere matter of thrift, there is not a shadow of doubt as to which of the two sexes is the more saving and more anxious to get a fair value for expenditure. It is the women who are the chief supporters of co-operative stores and other wholesale institutions, and the most resolute opponents of the "middleman." They will travel from one end of London to the other in order to get some article at a cheaper rate than that at which it is sold in their neighbourhood ; and will sternly deny to the cabman the extra sixpence which weak man so easily bestows upon him. All to no purpose ; for though a woman may save him hundreds a year in the strict manage- ment of his household, and render to him the most exact and faithful account of her stewardship, it counts for nothing in the sight of man beside the one fact—that she loses her purse. She loses her purse ; she cannot add up a column of figures without inking her fingers and giving herself a headache ; and the jargon of the Stock Exchange is simply ,Greek to her From the height of his superiority man contemplates these weaknesses with scorn ; scorn which is very often accentuated by the uncomfortable suspicion that he is not very much better versed in such matters than she is. Is it not almost
time that man should abandon this attitude of patronising contempt, and seek for some other and more certain basis upon which to found his claim to superiority P In the narrow sphere of domestic economy it is only too obvious upon which side the business-like qualities lie; even in the wider field of commercial enterprise, woman has, before now, been known to hold her own. It is certain that she occasionally loses her purse and drops her parcels, it is possible that she may some- times be so ignorant of finance as to imagine a balance at her bankers as long as there are blank cheques in her cheque- book ; but with all that, we would take the light and constant bold of a woman's fingers as a better guard upon the money- bags than the tight, but easily relaxed, grasp of a man's fist.
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