September 4, 1911 — Washington Post

+++++“The Ideal Marriage as a Woman Lawyer Sees It”

+++++“Aptly illustrating woman’s mental attitude toward life today, and her place in the field of activities, is the career and the views of Mrs. Greeley, of New York.
+++++Mrs. Greeley is a lawyer and has been practicing in the courts of New York for some eight years. A woman lawyer is no longer a phenomenon, as she was considered when women first entered the profession. Many can remember the hue and cry raised when women undertook the study of law and endeavored to practice. This has all died down, and now women are practicing in all parts of the country. In the same way criticism will die out at other work women undertake, only it seems extremely puerile that we must go on criticising. For time simply proves our criticisms worthless. As Galileo said many centuries ago, ‘The world moves.’
+++++Mrs. Greeley is one of those in the advance guard of women who are opening up new fields of work for their sisters. She is a successful lawyer, using her abilities in the field in which they cry for expression, and consequently happy in her work. She is no less a woman because of this. She is happily married, and is just as fond of her home life, when her professional duties are over, as though she cooked and baked and swept and cleaned all day in her home. She doesn’t happen to care for this end of it, so she doesn’t do it. But that doesn’t prevent her from caring for her home and her home life.
+++++A woman of this sort has wide horizons in regard to life, and likewise very practical ideas. And, of course, she is a woman who thinks. She has looked carefully at the traditional conceptions of woman’s work and place in the world, and where she has seen there was neither justice nor sense in them, she has brushed them aside for the flimsiness they are.
+++++She looks at marriage as one of the very beautiful relations of life, but she also knows it is a very practical matter, and she looks at it practically.
+++++She has studied the world with keen, shrewd, sensible eyes, and she sees three kinds of marriages: the one founded upon congeniality and comradeship, where each preserves his individual interests, and is not dependent economically upon the other; the one where the wife’s interests are merged into the husband’s, and the one where the wife really is not much more than a housekeeper without pay. This third kind, Mrs. Greeley scarcely thinks worth considering. It is so sordid that it is humiliating. And with woman’s awakening it is gradually diminishing. In the second class she considers that the wife should be looked upon as a partner and receive half of the husband’s income. But to her the first class is the ideal marriage, and the one bound to work out the most happily. Each finds in the other the ideal comrade, and they meet on the common ground of home, to which each equally contributes.
+++++Mrs. Greeley is thus not only a pioneer in a comparatively new field of work for women, but she is breaking ground in new fields of thought, which will bring about better and happier ideals of living for many of her sisters.
+++++Barbara Boyd”