The Radical Defense of Sweat Equity
In an 1876 editorial, a fierce local voice challenges the city’s idle wealthy to stop 'illustrating fashion's caprices' and embrace the dignity of physical labor.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Don't be afraid to work. It was never known to kill any permanent injury upon any person. To be sure, if you haven't been used to it, you'll be sore, and feel a smart ache when you first join the ranks of the working class. But work is the best doctor in the world. It will cure you of being sickly, and it will give you a complexion of health. Work is our best friend. It brings bread to the hungry and health to the rich, although they will not believe it. Strange that women prefer to be annoyed by faithless servants and shut their eyes to their wasteful, and sometimes duty, habits. I wonder if God made you for the express purpose of carrying about dry goods and illustrating fashion's caprices. I'll own up to any quantity of female folly and fashionable sin, but, as heaven hears me, I'm not guilty of the sin of laziness, and I rely on that to cover a multitude of other sins. I admire industrious folk; I love them, and, what is more, I love them.
“I wonder if God made you for the express purpose of carrying about dry goods and illustrating fashion's caprices.”
While this 1876 column reflects the rugged individualism and class-conscious moralizing of the Gilded Age, its critique of idle wealth and the 'fashionable sin' of consumption echoes modern anxieties about housing affordability and the widening chasm between the working class and the monied elite in Seattle.
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