Guide for Catholic Young Women

Fr. George Deshon, C.S.P., wrote this guide in 1868 for the young women he had met on his missions who earned their own living, the cooks and housemaids and the girls in the mills and the shops. He opens with the girl who wishes she had been born rich and tells her she has the better lot. The hands are busy and the mind is left to itself, so a working day can be filled with God in a way an idle one never is. The rest of the book shows her how.

He asks for five minutes of prayer before breakfast and a word to God when the temper rises, and he wants her in bed at a regular hour with the visitors sent home. He explains how to ask about Sunday Mass when she takes a place, what to do when the employer is cross or the wages are small, how to report a thief without turning spy, how to dress well on a quarter of what other girls spend, and what to say when a young man gets fresh. The last chapters take up whether to marry at all, how to spot a drunkard before the wedding, and what the novels get wrong about married life.

The eighty-three chapters run two or three pages each, and many of them bring in a saint to make the point: St. Zita, nearly fifty years in service to one family, or St. Catherine of Siena, loaded with her family’s housework to cure her of praying. By 1892 the book had sold more than twenty thousand copies and a bishop had preached it from cover to cover to his young women’s sodality. It is a good gift for a daughter or goddaughter starting her first job, and it still reads as if it had been written for her.