For me, as a working mother forced by circumstances, living a choice I would not have made voluntarily, it is easy for me to envy those who have actually chosen one or the other. I imagine it is similar for those who would have chosen career, but chose motherhood or who would have chosen motherhood, but whose circumstances in life or bodies have betrayed them.

But the truth is that it has little to do with what path you choose, and everything to do with what you hold as valuable.

If you value possessions over family relationships, you are putting your value in that which “moth and rust doth corrupt” and not in the things that have eternal value. That goes equally for those who value family only as symbols of “doing the right thing”.

What I like about these stories as I type them up, repetitive as they are, and as lacking in literary merit as many of them are, is what the authors say about their world without being aware that they’re saying it. Look at the details of laundry in this one, for instance — Ellen turns her washer off to answer the phone; her hands are wet, her hands are reddened, both from doing her laundry. The labor involved in doing laundry in the 1930s, even from these few hints at one part of the process, is amazing, yet Ellen and the women reading the story wouldn’t even have noticed. These details are not included to make a point, but only to set a very familiar stage.

No wonder housekeeping was a full-time occupation, even in a day of electricity and gas and technical advancements over the washboard and tub and heating your water on a coal stove! No wonder “worldly” occupations for women seemed so glamorous — Ellen’s three school friends weren’t just sharing smart conversation, they were free of the daily world of laborious housekeeping necessities.

In other words, I think “be happy with what we’ve got” means something different for us today than it would have meant in 1937, and I like thinkin’ ’bout it.

I can see why this rang bells in your memory — the two stories do have a few visual props in common (a woman with a little money that could have been spent on her family’s unending needs, maybe the reference to eating lunch, and of course the finding of beautiful — and marked down! — silk stockings), but as you say, the stories have little else in common, especially in the way in which KC’s heroine wishes her day of fantasy could never end, while our Ellen turns her back on that fantasy and ends up “humming a happy little tune” after remembering the worth of what she is doing. Thanks for the referral — it was fun to consider the differences, especially in resolution.

Maybe there’s a paper there for some literature student, comparing and contrasting the two stories.