Transcriber's note: The few spelling mistakes found in this text were left intact. 

THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN

by

IDA M. TARBELL

Associate Editor of the "American Magazine"Author of "Life of Abraham Lincoln""History of the Standard Oil Co. ""He Knew Lincoln, " etc. 

New YorkThe MacMillan CompanyNew York · Boston · ChicagoDallas · San FranciscoMacmillan & Co. , LimitedLondon · Bombay · CalcuttaMelbourneThe Macmillan Co. Of Canada, Ltd. TorontoNorwood PressJ. S. Cushing Co. --Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass. , U. S. A. 

1921

TO

E. I. T. AND C. C. T. 

INTRODUCTION

The object of this little volume is to call attention to a certaindistrust, which the author feels in the modern woman, of thesignificance and dignity of the work laid upon her by Nature and bysociety. Its ideas are the result of a long, if somewhat desultory, observation of the professional, political, and domestic activities ofwomen in this country and in France. These observations have led tocertain definite opinions as to those phases of the woman questionmost in need of emphasis to-day. 

A great problem of human life is to preserve faith in and zest foreveryday activities. The universal easily becomes the vulgar and theburdensome. The highest civilization is that in which the largestnumber sense, and are so placed as to realize, the dignity and thebeauty of the common experiences and obligations. 

 * * * * *

The courtesy of the publishers of the _American Magazine_, inpermitting the use here of chapters which have appeared in thatperiodical, is gratefully acknowledged. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

 I. THE UNEASY WOMAN 1

 II. ON THE IMITATION OF MAN 30

 III. THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN 53

 IV. THE SOCIALIZATION OF THE HOME 84

 V. THE WOMAN AND HER RAIMENT 109

 VI. THE WOMAN AND DEMOCRACY 142

 VII. THE HOMELESS DAUGHTER 164

VIII. THE CHILDLESS WOMAN AND THE FRIENDLESS CHILD 190

 IX. ON THE ENNOBLING OF THE WOMAN'S BUSINESS 216

THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN

CHAPTER I

The Uneasy Woman

The most conspicuous occupation of the American woman of to-day, dressing herself aside, is self-discussion. It is a disquietingphenomenon. Chronic self-discussion argues chronic ferment of mind, and ferment of mind is a serious handicap to both happiness andefficiency. Nor is self-discussion the only exhibit of restlessnessthe American woman gives. To an unaccustomed observer she seems alwaysto be running about on the face of things with no other purpose thanto put in her time. He points to the triviality of the things in whichshe can immerse herself--her fantastic and ever-changing raiment, thewelter of lectures and other culture schemes which she supports, theeagerness with which she transports herself to the ends of theearth--as marks of a spirit not at home with itself, and certainly notconvinced that it is going in any particular direction or that it iscommitted to any particular worth-while task. 

Perhaps the most disturbing side of the phenomenon is that it iscoincident with the emancipation of woman. At a time when she is freerthan at any other period of the world's history--save perhaps at oneperiod in ancient Egypt--she is apparently more uneasy. 

Those who do not like the exhibit are inclined to treat her as if shewere a new historical type. The reassuring fact is, that ferment ofmind is no newer thing in woman than in man. It is a human ailment. Its attacks, however, have always been unwelcome. Society distrustsuneasiness in sacred quarters; that is, in her established andprivileged works. They are the best mankind has to show for itself. Atleast they are the things for which the race has slaved longest andwhich so far have best resisted attack. We would like to prideourselves that they were permanent, that we had settled some things. And hence society resents a restless woman. And this is logicalenough. 

Embroiled as man is in an eternal effort to conquer, understand, andreduce to order both nature and his fellows, it is imperative that hehave some secure spot where his head is not in danger, his heart isnot harassed. Woman, by virtue of the business nature assigns her, has always been theoretically the maker and keeper of this necessaryplace of peace. But she has rarely made it and kept it with fullcontent. Eve was a revoltée, so was Medea. In every century they haveappeared, restless Amazons, protesting and remolding. Out of theiruneasy souls have come the varying changes in the woman's world whichdistinguish the ages. 

Society has not liked it--was there to be no quiet anywhere? It ispoor understanding that does not appreciate John Adams' parry of hiswife Abigail's list of grievances, which she declared the ContinentalCongress must relieve if it would avoid a woman's rebellion. Under thestress of the Revolution children, apprentices, schools, colleges, Indians, and negroes had all become insolent and turbulent, he toldher. What was to become of the country if women, "the most numerousand powerful tribe in the world, " grew discontented?

Now this world-old restlessness of the women has a sound and a tragiccause. Nature lays a compelling hand on her. Unless she obeys freelyand fully she must pay in unrest and vagaries. For the normal womanthe fulfillment of life is the making of the thing we best describe asa home--which means a mate, children, friends, with all the radiatingobligations, joys, burdens, these relations imply. 

This is nature's plan for her; but the home has got to be foundedinside the imperfect thing we call society. And these two, nature andsociety, are continually getting into each other's way, wrecking eachother's plans, frustrating each other's schemes. The woman almostnever is able to adjust her life so as fully to satisfy both. She isbetween two fires. Euripides understood this when he put into Medea'smouth a cry as modern as any that Ibsen has conceived:--

 Of all things upon earth that grow, A herb most bruised is woman. We must pay Our store of gold, hoarded for that one day, To buy us some man's love; and lo, they bring A master of our flesh! There comes the sting Of the whole shame. And then the jeopardy, For good or ill, what shall that master be; 'Tis magic she must have or prophecy-- Home never taught her that--how best to guide Toward peace this thing that sleepeth at her side. And she who, laboring long, shall find some way Whereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray His yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath That woman draws!

Medea's difficulty was that which is oftenest in the way of a womancarrying her business in life to a satisfactory completion--falsemating. It is not a difficulty peculiar to woman. Man knows it asoften. It is the heaviest curse society brings on human beings--themost fertile cause of apathy, agony, and failure. If the woman's cryis more poignant under it than the man's, it is because the machinewhich holds them both allows him a wider sweep, more interests outsideof their immediate alliance. "A man, when he is vexed at home, "complains Medea, "can go out and find relief among his friends oracquaintances, but we women have none to look at but him. "

And when it is impossible longer to "look" at him, what shall she do!Tell her woe to the world, seek a soporific, repudiate the scheme ofthings, or from the vantage point of her failure turn to the untriedrelations of her life, call upon her unused powers?

From the beginning of time she has tried each and all of these methodsof meeting her purely human woe. At times the women of whole peopleshave sunk into apathy, their business reduced to its dullest, grossest forms. Again, whole groups have taken themselves out of thepartnership which both Nature and Society have ordered. The Amazonsrefused to recognize man as an equal and mated simply that they mightrear more women like themselves. Here the tables were turned and theboy baby turned out--not to the wolves, but to man! The convent hasalways been a favorite way of escape. 

It has never been a majority of women who for a great length of timehave shirked this problem by any one of these methods. By individualsand by groups woman has always been seeking to develop the business oflife to such proportions, to so diversify, refine, and broaden it thatno half failure or utter failure of its fundamental relations wouldswamp her, leave her comfortless, or prevent her working out thatfamily which she knew to be her part in the scheme of things. It isfrom her conscious attempt to make the best of things when they areproved bad, that there has come the uneasiness which trails along herpath from Eve to Mrs. Pankhurst. 

When great changes have come in the social system, her quest hasresponded to them, taken its color and direction from them. Thepeculiar forms of uneasiness in the American woman of to-day comenaturally enough from the Revolution of 1776. That movement upsettheoretically everything which had been expected of her before. Theoretically, it broke down the division fences which had kept her insets and groups. She was no longer to be a woman of class; she was awoman of the people. This was striking at the very underpinning offemininity, as the world knew it. Theoretically, too, her ears were nolonger to be closed to all ideas save those of her church orparty, --a new thing, freedom of speech, was abroad, --her lips wereopened with man's. Moreover, her business of family building wasmodified, as well as her attitude towards life. The necessity of allwomen educating themselves that they might be able to educate theirchildren was an obligation on the face of the new undertaking. Anotherrevolutionary duty put upon her was--_paying her way_. There can be noreal democracy where there is parasitism. She must achieve consciousindependence whether in or out of the family. Unquestionably therecame with the Revolution a vision of a new woman--a woman from whomall of the willfulness and frivolity and helplessness of the "Lady" ofthe old régime should be stripped, while all her qualities ofgentleness and charm should be preserved. The old-world lady was tobe merged into a woman strong, capable, severely beautiful, a creaturewho had all of the virtues and none of the follies of femininity. 

It was strong yeast they put into the pot in '76. 

A fresh leaven in a people can never be distributed evenly. Moreover, the mass to which it is applied is never homogeneous. There are spotsso hard no yeast can move them; there are others so light the yeastburns them out. Taken as a whole, the change is labored and painful. So our new notions worked on women. There were groups which resentedand refused them, became reactionary at the stating of them. Therewere those which grew grave and troubled under them, shrinking fromthe portentous upheaval they felt in their touch, yet sensing thatthey must be accepted. There were still others where the notionfrothed and foamed, turning up unexpected ideas, revealing depths ofdissatisfaction, of desire, of unsuspected powers in woman thatstartled the staid old world. It was in these quarters that there wasproduced the uneasy woman typical of the day. 

Her ferment went to the bottom of things this time. Not since the ageof the Amazon had a body of women broken more utterly with things asthey are. And like the Amazon, the revolt was against man and hispretensions. 

It was no unorganized revolt. It was deliberate. It presented her casein a carefully prepared List of Grievances, and an eloquentDeclaration of Sentiments[1] both adopted in a strictly parliamentaryway, and made the basis of an organized revolt, which has gone onsystematically ever since. The essence of her complaint, as embodiedin the above expression, is that man is a conscious tyrant holdingwoman an unwilling captive--cutting her off from the things in lifewhich really matter: education, freedom of speech, the ballot; thatshe can never be his equal until she does the same things her tyrantdoes, studies the book he studies, practices the trades andprofessions he practices, works with him in government. 

The inference from all this is that the Business of Being a Woman, asit has been conducted heretofore by society, is of less importancethan the Business of Being a Man, and that the time has come to enterhis world and prove her equality. 

There are certain assumptions in her program which will bearexamination. Is man the calculating tyrant the modern uneasy womancharges? Are her fetters due only to his unfair domination? Or is shesuffering from the generally bungling way things go in the world? Andis not man a victim as well as she--caught in the same trap?Moreover, is woman never a tyrant? One of the first answers to heroriginal revolt came from the most eminent woman of the day, HarrietBeecher Stowe, and it was called "_Pink and White_ Tyranny!" "I haveseen a collection of medieval English poems, " says Chesterton, "inwhich the section headed 'Poems of Domestic Life' consisted entirely(literally entirely) of the complaints of husbands bullied by theirwives. "

Again, will doing the same things a man does work as well in stiflingher unrest as she fancies it has in man's case? If a woman'stemperamental and intellectual operations were identical with a man's, there would be hope of success, --but they are not. She is a differentbeing. Whether she is better or worse, stronger or weaker, primary orsecondary, is not the question. She is different. 

And she tries to ease a world-old human curse by imitating theoccupations, points of views, and methods of a radically differentbeing. Can she realize her quest in this way? Generally speaking, nothing is more wasteful in human operations than following a coursewhich is not native and spontaneous, not according to the law of thebeing. 

If she demonstrates her points, successfully copies man's activities, can she impress her program on any great body of women? The mass ofwomen believe in their task. Its importance is not capable of argumentin their minds. Nor do they see themselves dwarfed by their business. They know instinctively that under no other circumstances can suchripeness and such wisdom be developed, that nowhere else is the fullnature called upon, nowhere else are there such intricate, delicate, and intimate forces in play, calling and testing them. 

To bear and to rear, to feel the dependence of man and child--thenecessity for themselves--to know that upon them depend the health, the character, the happiness, the future of certain human beings--tosee themselves laying and preserving the foundations of so imposing athing as a family--to build so that this family shall become a strongstone in the state--to feel themselves through this familyperpetuating and perfecting church, society, republic, --this is theirdestiny, --this is worth while. They may not be able to state it, butall their instincts and experiences convince them of the supreme andeternal value of their place in the world. They dare not tamper withit. Their opposition to the militant program badly and even cruellyexpressed at times has at bottom, as an opposition always has, theprinciple of preservation. It is not bigotry or vanity or a pettynotion of their own spheres which has kept the majority of women fromlending themselves to the radical wing of the woman's movement. It isfear to destroy a greater thing which they possess. The fear of changeis not an irrational thing--the fear of change is founded on the riskof losing what you have, on the certainty of losing much temporarilyat least. It sees the cost, the ugly and long period of transition. 

Moreover, respect for your calling brings patience with its burden andits limitations. The change you desire you work for conservatively, ifat all. The women who opposed the first movement for women's rights inthis country might deplore the laws that gave a man the power to beathis wife--but as a matter of fact few men did beat their wives, andpopular opinion was a powerful weapon. They might deplore the laws ofproperty--but few of them were deeply touched by them. The husband, the child, the home, the social circle, the church, these things wereinfinitely more interesting and important to them than diplomas, rights to work, rights to property, rights to vote. All the sentimentsin the revolting women's program seemed trivial, cold, profitlessbeside the realities of life as they dreamed them and struggled torealize them. 

It is this same intuitive loyalty to her Business of Being a Woman, her unwillingness to have it tampered with, that is to-day the greatobstacle to our Uneasy Woman putting her program of relief into force. And it is the effort to move this mass which she derides as inert thatleads to much of the overemphasis in her program and her methods. Ifshe is to attract attention, she must be extreme. The campaigner islike the actor--he must exaggerate to get his effect over thefootlights. Moreover, there are natures like that of the actor whocould not play Othello unless his whole body was blackened. Nor is theextravagance of the methods, which the militant lady follows to putover her program, so foreign to her nature as it may seem. Thesuffragette adapts to her needs a form of feminine coquetry as old asthe world. To defy and denounce the male has always been one ofwoman's most successful provocative ways!

However much certain of the assumptions in her program may seem to beagainst its success, there is much for it. It gives her ascapegoat--an outside, personal, attackable cause for the limitationsand defeats she suffers. And there is no greater consolation thanfixing blame. It is half a cure in itself to know or to think you knowthe cause of your difficulties. Moreover, it gives her a scapegoatagainst whom it is easy to make up a case. She knows him too well, much better than he knows her, much better than she knows herself; atleast her knowledge of him is better formulated. And she has thisadvantage: custom makes it cowardly for a man to attempt todemonstrate that woman is a tyrant--it laughs and applauds woman'sattempt to fix the charge on man. 

It gives her a definite program of relief. To attack life as man does:to secure the same kind of training, enter a trade or profession whereshe can support herself, mingle with the crowd as he does, get intopolitics--that she assumes to be the practical way of curing theinferiority of position and of powers which she is willing to admit, even willing to demonstrate. That a man's life may not be altogethersatisfactory, she declines to believe. The uneasy woman has alwaystaken it for granted that man is happier than woman. It is anassumption which is at least discussible. 

Her program, too, has the immense advantage of including all that thenew order of things in this country, instituted by the Revolution, made imperative for women--the schooling, the liberty of action, theindependent pocket book. Because she has formulated these notions sodefinitely and has hammered on them so hard, the militant womanfrequently claims that they originated with her, that she is the_cause_ of the great development in educational opportunities, infreedom to work and to circulate, in the increasing willingness toface the facts of life and speak the truth. This claim she shoulddrop. She is rather the logical result of these notions, their extremeexpression. She has, however, had an enormous influence in keepingthem alive in the great slow-moving mass of women, where the fate ofnew ideas rests and where they are always tried out with extremecaution. Without her the vision of enlarging and liberalizing theirown particular business to meet the needs of the New Democracy whichso exalted the women of the Revolution, would not to-day be as nearlyrealized as it is. To speak slightingly of her part in the women'smovement is uncomprehending. She was then, and always has been, atragic figure, this woman in the front of the woman's movement--drivenby a great unrest, sacrificing old ideals to attain new, losingherself in a frantic and frequently blind struggle, often putting backher cause by the sad illustration she was of the price that must bepaid to attain a result. Certainly no woman who to-day takes it as amatter of course that she should study what she chooses, go and comeas she will, support herself unquestioned by trade, profession, orart, work in public or private, handle her own property, share herchildren on equal terms with her husband, receive a respectfulattention on platform or before legislature, live freely in the world, should think with anything but reverence particularly of the earlydisturbers of convention and peace, for they were an essential elementin the achievement. 

The great strength of the radical program is now, as it has alwaysbeen, the powerful appeal it makes to the serious young woman. Man andmarriage are a trap--that is the essence the young woman draws fromthe campaign for woman's rights. All the vague terror which at timesruns through a girl's dream of marriage, the sudden vision of probableagonies, of possible failure and death, become under the teachings ofthe militant woman so many realities. She sees herself a "slave, " asthe jargon has it, putting all her eggs into one basket with thecertainty that some, perhaps all, will be broken. 

The new gospel offers an escape from all that. She will be a "free"individual, not one "tied" to a man. The "drudgery" of the householdshe will exchange for what she conceives to be the broad and inspiringwork which men are doing. For the narrow life of the family she willescape to the excitement and triumph of a "career. " The Business ofBeing a Woman becomes something to be apologized for. All over theland there are women with children clamoring about them, apologizingfor never having _done_ anything! Women whose days are spent in tradeand professions complacently congratulate themselves that they atleast have _lived_. There were girls in the early days of themovement, as there no doubt are to-day, who prayed on their knees thatthey might escape the frightful isolation of marriage, might be freeto "live" and to "work, " to "know" and to "do. "

What it was really all about they never knew until it was too late. That is, they examined neither the accusations nor the premises. Theyaccepted them. Strong young natures are quick to accept charges ofinjustice. To them it is unnatural that life should be hampered, thatit should be anything but radiant. Curing injustice, too, seemsparticularly easy to the young. It is simply a matter of finding aremedy and putting it into force! The young American woman ofmilitant cast finds it is easy to believe that the Business of Being aWoman is slavery. She has her mother's pains and sacrifices and tearsbefore her, and she resents them. She meets the theory on every handthat the distress she loathes is of man's doing, that it is for her torevolt, to enter his business, and so doing escape his tyranny, find aworth-while life for herself, and at the same time help "liberate" hersex. 

And so for sixty years she has been working on this thesis. That shehas not demonstrated it sufficiently to satisfy even herself is shownby the fact that she is still the most conspicuous of Uneasy Women. But that she has produced a type and an influential one is certain. Indeed, she may be said to have demonstrated sufficiently forpractical purposes what there is for her in imitating the activitiesof man. 

FOOTNOTES:

 [1] DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS

 When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course. 

 We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they were accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled. 

 The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. 

 He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. 

 He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she has no voice. 

 He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners. 

 Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. 

 He has made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead. 

 He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. 

 He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master--the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. 

 He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women--the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands. 

 After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it. 

 He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known. 

 He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her. 

 He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exception, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church. 

 He has created a false sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man. 

 He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God. 

 He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life. 

CHAPTER II

ON THE IMITATION OF MAN

Fresh attacks on life, like chemical experiments, turn up unexpectedby-products. The Uneasy Woman, driven by the thirst for greaterfreedom, and believing man's way of life will assuage it, lays siegeto his kingdom. Some of the unexpected loot she has carried away stillembarrasses her. Not a little, however, is of such undeniableadvantage that she may fairly contend that its capture alone justifiesher campaign. 

Go to-day into many a woman's club house, into many a drawing-room orstudio at, let us say, the afternoon tea hour, and what will you see?One or probably more women in mannish suits and boots calmly smokingcigarettes while they talk, and talk well, about things in which womenare not supposed to be interested, but which it is apparent theyunderstand. 

Look the exhibit over. It is made, you at once recognize, by women ofcharacter, position, and sense. They have simply found certainmasculine ways to their liking and adopted them. The probability isthat if anybody should object to their habits, many of them would beas bewildered as are the great majority of Americans by thedemonstration that "nice" women can smoke and think nothing of it!

The cigarette, the boot, and much of the talk are only by-products ofthe woman's invasion of the man's world. She did not set out to winthese spoils. They came to her in the campaign!

The objects of her attack were things she considered morefundamental. She was dissatisfied with the way her brain was beingtrained, her time employed, her influence directed. "Give us the man'sway, " was her demand, "then we shall understand real things, can fillour days with important tasks, will count as human beings. "

There was no uncertainty in her notion of how this was to beaccomplished. A woman rarely feels uncertainty about methods. Sheinstinctively sees a way and follows it with assurance. Half herirritation against man has always been that he is a spendthrift withtime and talk. Madame Roland, sitting at her sewing table listening tothe excited debate of the Revolutionists in her salon, mourned thatthough the ideas were many, the resulting measures were few. It is thewoman's eternal complaint against discussion--nothing comes of it. Ina country like our own, where reflection usually follows action, thewoman's natural mental attitude is exaggerated. It is one reason why wehave so few houses where there is anything like conversation, why withus the salon as an institution is out of question. The woman wantsimmediately to incorporate her ideas. She is not interested in turningthem over, letting her mind play with them. She has no patience withother points of view than her own. They are _wrong_--therefore whyconsider them? She detests uncertainties--questions which cannot besettled. Only by man and the rare woman is it accepted that talk is agood enough end in itself. 

The strength of woman's attack on man's life, apart from the essentialsoundness of the impulse which drove her to make it, lay then in itsdirectness and practicality. She began by asking to be educated inthe same way that man educated himself. Preferably she would enter hisclassroom, or if that was denied her, she would follow the"just-as-good" curriculum of the college founded for her. In the lastsixty or seventy years tens of thousands of women have been studentsin American universities, colleges, and technical schools, takingthere the same training as men. In the last twenty years the annualcrescendo of numbers has been amazing; over ten thousand at thebeginning of the period, over fifty-two thousand at the end. Overeight thousand degrees were given to women in 1910, nearly half asmany as were given to men. Fully four fifths of these women studentsand graduates have worked side by side with men in schools whichserved both equally. 

Here, then, is a great mass of experience from which it would seemthat we ought to be able to say precisely how the intellects of thetwo sexes act and react under the stimulus of serious study, to decidedefinitely whether their attack on problems is the same, whether theycome out the same. Nevertheless, he would be a rash observer who wouldpretend to lay down hard-and-fast generalizations. Assert whatever youwill as to the mind of woman at work and some unimpeachable authoritywill rise up with experience that contradicts you. But the same may besaid of the mind of man. The mind--_per se_--is a variable anddisconcerting organ. 

But admitting all this--certain generalizations, on the whole correct, may be made from our experience with coeducation. 

One of the first of these is that at the start the woman takes herwork more seriously than her masculine competitor. Fifty years agothere was special reason for this. The few who in those early dayssought a man's education had something of the spirit of pioneers. Theyhad set themselves a lofty task: to prove themselves the equal ofman--to win privileges which they believed were maliciously deniedtheir sex. The spirit with which they attacked their studies wasillumined by the loftiness of their aim. The girl who enters collegenowadays has rarely the opportunity to be either pioneer or martyr. She is doing what has come to be regarded as a matter of course. Nevertheless, to-day as then, in the coeducational institution she ismore consciously on her mettle than the man. 

Her attention, interest, respectfulness, docility, will be ahead ofhis. It will at once be apparent that she carries the larger stock of_untaught_ knowledge. In the classroom she will usually outstep him inmathematics. It is an ideal subject for her, satisfying her talentfor order, for making things "come out right. " Her memory will serveher better. She can depend upon it to carry more exceptions to rules, more fantastic irregular verbs, more dates, more lists of kings andqueens, battles and generals, and on the whole she will treat thissort of impedimenta with more respect. She will know less of abstractideas, of philosophies and speculations. They will interest her less. The chances are that she will be less skillful with microscope andscalpel, though this is not certain. She will show less enthusiasm fortechnical problems, for machinery and engineering; more for socialproblems, particularly when it is a question of meeting them withpreventives or remedies. In the first two or three years afterentering college, she will almost invariably appear superior to themen of her age, more grown up, more interested, surer of herself, readier. Later you will find her on the whole less inclined toexperiment with her gifts, to feel her wings, to make unexpecteddashes into life. It begins to look as if he were the experimenter, she the conservator. And by the time she is a senior, look out! Thechances are she will have less interest from now on with man'sbusiness and more with her own! In any case she will rarely develop asrapidly in his field from this point as he is doing. 

He becomes assertive, confident, dominating; the male taking a male'splace. He discovers that his intellectual processes are morescientific than hers, therefore he concludes they are superior. Hefinds he can outargue her, draw logical conclusions as she cannot. Hecan do anything with her but convince her, for she jumps the process, lands on her conclusion, and there she sits. Things are so becausethey are so. And the chances are she is right, in spite of theirregular way she got there. Something superior to reason enters intoher operations--an intuition of truth akin to inspiration. In earlyages women unusually endowed with this quality of perception werehonored as seers. To-day they are recognized as counselors ofprophetic wisdom. "If I had taken my wife's advice!" How often onehears it!

One most important fact has come out of our great coeducationalexperiment: The college cannot entirely rub feminity out andmasculinity into a woman's brain. The woman's mind is still thewoman's mind, although she is usually the last to recognize it. It isanother proof of the eternal fact that Nature looks after her own goodworks!

But it takes more than a college course to make an efficient, flexible, and trustworthy organ from a mind, masculine or feminine. It must be applied to productive labor in competition with othertrained minds, before you can decide what it is worth. Set theman-trained woman's mind at what is called man's business, let it bewhat you will--keeping a shop, practicing medicine or law, editing, running a factory--let her do it in what she considers to be a man'sway, and with fidelity to her original theory that his way is moredesirable than hers; that is, let her succeed in the task of making aman of herself--what about her?--what kind of a man does she become?

Here again there is ample experience to go on. For seventy years wehave had them with us--the stern disciples of the militant program. Greater fidelity to a task than they show it would be impossible tofind--a fidelity so unwavering that it is often painful. Their carefor detail, for order, for exactness, is endless. Dignity, respect fortheir undertaking, devotion to professional etiquette they may becounted on to show in the highest degree. These are admirablequalities. They have led hundreds of women into independence and goodservice. Almost never, however, have they led one to the top. In freefields such as merchandising, editing, and manufacturing we have yetto produce a woman of the first caliber; that is, daring, experimenting, free from prejudice, with a vision of the future greatenough to lead her to embody something of the future in her task. 

In every profession we have scores of successful women--almost never a_great_ woman, and yet the world is full of great women! That is, ofwomen who understand, are familiar with the big sacrifices, appreciative of the fine things, far-seeing, prophetic. Why does thisgreatness so rarely find expression in their professionalundertakings?

The answer is no doubt complex, but one factor is the general notionof the woman that if she succeeds she must suppress her naturalemotions and meet the world with a surface as non-resilient as sheconceives that of man to be in his dealings with the world. She isstrengthened in this notion by hard necessity. No woman could live andrespond as freely as her nature prompts to the calls on her sympathywhich come in the contact with all conditions of life involved inpracticing a trade or a profession. She must save herself. To do itshe incases herself in an unnatural armor. For the normal, healthywoman this means the suppression of what is strongest in her nature, that power which differentiates her chiefly from man, her power ofemotion, her "affectability" as the scientists call it. She mustovercome her own nature, put it in bonds, cripple it, if she is to doher work. Here is a fundamental reason for the failure of woman toreach the first rank. She has sacrificed the most wonderful part ofher endowment, that which when trained gives her vision, sharpens herintuitions, reveals the need and the true course. This superioraffectability crushed, leaves her atrophied. 

The common characterization of this atrophied woman is that she is"cold. " It is the exact word. She _is_ cold, also she is self-centeredand intensely personal. Let a woman make success in a trade orprofession her exclusive and sufficient ambition, and the result, though it may be brilliant, is repellent. 

She gives to her task an altogether disproportionate place in herscheme of things. Life is not made by work, important as is work inlife. Human nature has varied needs. It calls imperatively for a task, something to do with brain and hands--a productive something whichfits the common good, without which the world would not be as orderlyand as happy. Say what we will, it matters very little what the taskis--if it contributes in some fashion to this superior orderliness andhappiness. But it means more. It means leisure, pleasure, excitements;it means feeding of the taste, the curiosity, the emotions, thereflective powers; and it means love, love of the mate, the child, thefriend, and neighbor. It means reverence for the scheme of things andone's place in it; worship of the author of it, religion. 

But the woman sternly set to do a man's business, believing it betterthan the woman's, too often views life as made up of business. Shethrows her whole nature to the task. Her work is her child. She givesit the same exclusive passionate attention. She is as fiercely jealousof interference in it as she would be if it were a child. She resentssuggestions and change. It is hers, a personal thing to which sheclings as if it were a living being. That attitude is the chief reasonwhy working with women in the development of great undertakings is asdifficult as coöperating with them in the rearing of a family. It isalso a reason why they rarely rise to the first rank. They cannot getaway from their undertakings sufficiently to see the big truths andmovements which are always impersonal. 

Brilliant and satisfying as her triumph may be to her personally, shefrequently finds that it is resented by nature and by society. Shefinds that nature lays pitfalls for her, cracks the ice of her heartand sets it aflame, often for absurd and unworthy causes. She findsthat the great mass of unconscious women commiserate or scorn her asone who has missed the fullness of life. She finds that societyregards her as one who shirked the task of life, and who, therefore, should not be honored as the woman who has stood up to the commonburden. When she senses this--which is not always--she treats it asprejudice. As a matter of fact, the antagonism of Nature and Societyto the militant woman is less prejudice than self-defense. It is aprotest against the wastefulness and sacrifice of her career. It is aright saving impulse to prevent perversion of the qualities and powersof women which are most needed in the world, those qualities andpowers which differentiate her from man, which make for the variety, the fullness, the charm, and interest of life. 

Moreover, Nature and Society must not permit her triumph to appeardesirable to the young. They must be made to understand what herwinnings have cost in lovely and desirable things. They must know thatthe unrest which drove her to the attempt is not necessarily satisfiedby her triumph, that it is merely stifled and may break out at anytime in vagaries and follies. They must be made to realize theessential barrenness of her triumph, its lack of the savor and tang oflife, the multitude of makeshifts she must practice to recompense herfor the lack of the great adventure of natural living. 

And they see it, many of them, before they are out of college, andtheir militancy falls off like the cloak it generally is. The girlabandons her quest. In the early days she was likely to be treated asan apostate if, instead of following the "life work" she had pickedout, she slipped back into matrimony. I can remember the dismay amongcertain militant friends when Alice Freeman married. "Our firstcollege president, " they groaned. "A woman who so vindicated the sex. "It was like the grieving of Miss Anthony that Mrs. Stanton wasted somuch time having babies!

The militant theory, as originally conceived, instead of increasing infavor, has declined. There is little likelihood now that any greatnumber of women will ever regard it as a desirable working formula formore than a short period of their lives. But I am not saying that thistheory is no longer influential. It is probable that in a modifiedform it was never more influential than it is to-day. For, while theUneasy Woman has practically demonstrated that "making a man ofherself" does not solve her problem, she has by no means given up thenotion that the Business of Being a Woman is narrowing andunsatisfying. Nor has she ceased to consider man's life more desirablethan woman's. 

The present effort of the serious-minded to meet the case takes twogeneral directions, natural enough outgrowths of the originalmilitancy. The first of these is a frank advocacy of celibacy. "_Celibacy is the aristocracy of the future_, " is the preaching of oneEuropean feminist. It is a modification of the scheme by which themedieval woman sought to escape unrest. Four hundred years ago a womansought celibacy as an escape from sin; service and righteousness wereher aim. To-day she adopts it to escape inferiority and servitude;superiority and freedom her aim. 

The ranks of the woman celibates are not full. Many a candidate fallsout by the way, confronted by something she had not reckoned with--theeternal command that she be a woman. She compromises--grudgingly. Shewill be a woman on condition that she is guaranteed economic freedom, opportunity for self-expressive work, political recognition. What thisamounts to is that she does not see in the woman's life a satisfyingand permanent end. There are various points at which she claims itfails. It is antagonistic to personal ambition. It makes a dependentof her. It leaves her in middle life without an occupation. It keepsher out of the great movements of her day--gives her no part in thesolution of the ethical and economical problems which affect her andher children. She declares that she wants fuller participation inlife, and by life she seems to mean the elaborate machinery by whichhuman wants are supplied and human beings kept in something likeorder; the movements of the market place, of politics, and ofgovernment. 

Now if there were not something in her contention, the Uneasy Womanwould not be with us as she is to-day, more vociferous, more insistentthan ever in the world's history. What is there in her case?

If the cultivation of individual tastes and talents to a useful, productive point is out of question in the woman's business, if it isnot a part of it, something is weak in the scheme. Something is weakif the woman is or feels that she is not paying her way. Both are notonly individual rights; they are individual duties. 

Moreover, she is certainly right to be dissatisfied, if, afterspending twenty-five years, more or less, she is to be left in middlelife, her forces spent, without interests and obligations which willoccupy brain and heart to the full, without important tasks which arethe logical outcome of her experience and which she must carry on inorder to complete that experience. 

But what is the truth about it? What is the Business of Being a Woman?Is it something incompatible with free and joyous development of one'stalents? Is there no place in it for economic independence? Has it noessential relation to the world's movements? Is it an episode whichdrains the forces and leaves a dreary wreck behind? Is it somethingthat cannot be organized into a profession of dignity, and opportunityfor service and for happiness?

CHAPTER III

THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN

Respect for the Creator of this world is basic among all civilizedpeople. The longer one lives, the more thoroughly one realizes thesoundness of this respect. The earth and its works _are_ good. Mosthuman conceptions are barred by strange inconsistencies. The man whopraises the works of the Creator as all wise not infrequently treatsHis arrangement for carrying on the race as if it were unfit to bespoken of in polite society. Nowhere does the modern God-fearing mancome nearer to sacrilege than in his attitude toward the divine planfor renewing life. 

A strange mixture of sincerity and hypocrisy, self-flagellation andlust, aspiration and superstition, has gone into the making of thisattitude. With the development of it we have nothing to do here. Whatdoes concern us is the effect of this profanity on the Business ofBeing a Woman. 

The central fact of the woman's life--Nature's reason for her--is thechild, his bearing and rearing. There is no escape from the divineorder that her life must be built around this constraint, duty, orprivilege, as she may please to consider it. But from the beginning tothe end of life she is never permitted to treat it naturally andfrankly. As a child accepting all that opens to her as a matter ofcourse, she is steered away from it as if it were something evil. Herfirst essays at evasion and spying often come to her in connectionwith facts which are sacred and beautiful and which she is perfectlywilling to accept as such if they were treated intelligently andreverently. If she could be kept from all knowledge of the processionof new life except as Nature reveals it to her, there would be reasonin her treatment. But this is impossible. From babyhood she breathesthe atmosphere of unnatural prejudices and misconceptions whichenvelop the fact. 

Throughout her girlhood the atmosphere grows thicker. She finallyfaces the most perilous and beautiful of experiences with little morethan the ideas which have come to her from the confidences ofevil-minded servants, inquisitive and imaginative playmates, or thegossip she overhears in her mother's society. Every other matter ofher life, serious and commonplace, has received careful attention, buthere she has been obliged to feel her way and, worst of abominations, to feel it with an inner fear that she ought not to know or seek toknow. 

If there were no other reason for the modern woman's revolt againstmarriage, the usual attitude toward its central facts would besufficient. The idea that celibacy for woman is "the aristocracy ofthe future" is soundly based if the Business of Being a Woman rests ona mystery so questionable that it cannot be frankly and truthfullyexplained by a girl's mother at the moment her interest and curiosityseeks satisfaction. That she gets on as well as she does, results, ofcourse, from the essential soundness of the girl's nature, the armorof modesty, right instinct, and reverence with which she is endowed. 

The direst result of ignorance or of distorted ideas of thistremendous matter of carrying on human life is that it leaves the girlunconscious of the supreme importance of her mate. So heedlessly andignorantly is our mating done to-day that the huge machinery of Churchand State and the tremendous power of public opinion combined havebeen insufficient to preserve to the institution of marriage anythinglike the stability it once had, or that it is desirable that it shouldhave, if its full possibilities are to be realized. The immorality andinhumanity of compelling the obviously mismated to live together, growon society. Divorce and separation are more and more tolerated. Yetlittle is done to prevent the hasty and ill-considered mating which isat the source of the trouble. 

Rarely has a girl a sound and informed sense to guide her in acceptingher companion. The corollary of this bad proposition is that she hasno sufficient idea of the seriousness of her undertaking. She startsout as if on a lifelong joyous holiday, primarily devised for herpersonal happiness. And what is happiness in her mind? Certainly it isnot a good to be conquered--a state of mind wrested from life bytackling and mastering its varied experiences, the _end_, not thebeginning, of a great journey. Too often it is that of the modernUneasy Woman--the attainment of something _outside_ of herself. Shevisualizes it, as possessions, as ease, a "good time, " opportunitiesfor self-culture, the exclusive devotion of the mate to her. Rarelydoes she understand that happiness in her undertaking depends upon thewisdom and sense with which she conquers a succession of hardplaces--calling for readjustment of her ideas and sacrifice of herdesires. All this she must discover for herself. She is like a voyagerwho starts out on a great sea with no other chart than a sailor'syarns, no other compass than curiosity. 

The budget of axioms she brings to her guidance she has picked uphelter-skelter. They are the crumbs gathered from the table of theUneasy Woman, or worse, of the pharisaical and satisfied woman, fromgood and bad books, from newspaper exploitations of divorce andscandal, from sly gossip with girls whose budget of marital wisdom isas higgledy-piggledy as her own. 

And a pathetically trivial budget it is:--

"He must _tell_ her everything. " "He must always pick up what shedrops. " "He must dress for dinner. " "He must remember her birthday. "That is, she begins her adventure with a set of hard-and-fastrules, --and nothing in this life causes more mischief than the effortto force upon another one's own rules!

That marriage gives the finest opportunity that life affords forpracticing, not rules, but principles, she has never been taught. Flexibility, adaptation, fair-mindedness, the habit of supplementingthe weakness of the one by the strength of the other, all the finethings upon which the beauty, durability, and growth of humanrelations depend, --these are what decide the future of her marriage. These she misses while she insists on her rules; and ruin is often theend. Study the causes back of divorces and separations, the brutalcriminal causes aside, and one finds that usually they begin intrivial things, --an irritating habit or an offensive opinion persistedin on the one side and not endured philosophically on the other; apetty selfishness indulged on the one side and not accepted humorouslyon the other, --that is, the marriage is made or unmade by small, notgreat, things. 

It is a lack of any serious consideration of the nature of theundertaking she is going into which permits her at the start to accepta false notion of her economic position. She agrees that she is being"supported"; she consents to accept what is given her; she evenconsents to ask for money. Men and society at large take her at herown valuation. Loose thinking by those who seek to influence publicopinion has aggravated the trouble. They start with the idea that sheis a parasite--does not pay her way. "Men hunt, fish, keep the cattle, or raise corn, " says a popular writer, "for women to eat the game, thefish, the meat, and the corn. " The inference is that the men alonerender useful service. But neither man nor woman eats of these thingsuntil the woman has prepared them. The theory that the man who raisescorn does a more important piece of work than the woman who makes itinto bread is absurd. The theory that she does something moredifficult and less interesting is equally absurd. 

The practice of handing over the pay envelope at the end of the weekto the woman, so common among laboring people, is a recognition of herequal economic function. It is a recognition that the venture of thetwo is common and that its success depends as much on the care andintelligence with which she spends the money as it does on the energyand steadiness with which he earns it. Whenever one or the otherfails, trouble begins. The failure to understand this business side ofthe marriage relation almost inevitably produces humiliation andirritation. So serious has the strain become because of this falsestart that various devices have been suggested to repair it--Mr. Wells' "Paid Motherhood" is one; weekly wages as for a servant isanother. Both notions encourage the primary mistake that the woman hasnot an equal economic place with the man in the marriage. 

Marriage is a business as well as a sentimental partnership. But abusiness partnership brings grave practical responsibilities, andthis, under our present system, the girl is rarely trained to face. She becomes a partner in an undertaking where her function isspending. The probability is she does not know a credit from a debit, has to learn to make out a check correctly, and has no conscienceabout the fundamental matter of living within the allowance which canbe set aside for the family expenses. When this is true of her, she atonce puts herself into the rank of an incompetent--she becomes aneconomic dependent. She has laid the foundation for becoming an UneasyWoman. 

It is common enough to hear women arguing that this close grapplingwith household economy is narrowing, not worthy of them. Why keepingtrack of the cost of eggs and butter and calculating how much yourincome will allow you to buy is any more narrowing than keeping trackof the cost and quality of cotton or wool or iron and calculating howmuch a mill requires, it is hard to see. It is the same kind of aproblem. Moreover, it has the added interest of being always anindependent _personal_ problem. Most men work under the deadeningeffect of impersonal routine. They do that which others have plannedand for results in which they have no permanent share. 

But the woman argues that her task has no relation to the state. Herfailure to see that relation costs this country heavily. Her concernis with retail prices. If she does her work intelligently, shefollows and studies every fluctuation of price in standards. She alsoknows whether she is receiving the proper quality and quantity; andyet so poorly have women discharged these obligations that dealers foryears have been able to manipulate prices practically to pleasethemselves, and as for quality and quantity we have the scandal ofAmerican woolen goods, of food adulteration, of false weights andmeasures. No one of these things could have come about in this countryif woman had taken her business as a consumer with anything like theseriousness with which man takes his as a producer. 

Her ignorance in handling the products of industry has helped themonopolistically inclined trust enormously. I can remember the daywhen the Beef Trust invaded a certain Middle Western town. The war onthe old-time butchers of the village was open. "Buy of us, " was theorder, "or we'll fill the storage house so full that the legs of thesteers will hang out of the windows, and we'll give away the meat. "The women of the town had a prosperous club which might have resistedthe tyranny which the members all deplored, but the club was busy thatwinter with the study of the Greek drama! They deplored the tyranny, but they bought the cut-rate meat--the old butchers fought to afinish, and the housekeepers are now paying higher prices for poorermeat and railing at the impotency of man in breaking up the BeefTrust!

If two years ago when the question of a higher duty on hosiery wasbefore Congress any woman or club of women had come forward withcarefully tabulated experiments, showing exactly the changes whichhave gone on of late years in the shape, color, and wearing quality ofthe 15-, 25-, and 50-cent stockings, the stockings of the poor, shewould have rendered a genuine economic service. The women held massmeetings and prepared petitions instead, using on the one side theinformation the shopkeepers furnished, on the other that which thestocking manufacturers furnished. Agitation based upon anything butpersonal knowlledge is not a public service. It may be easily a gravepublic danger. The facts needed for fixing the hosiery duty the womenshould have furnished, for they buy the stockings. 

If the Uneasy American Woman were really fulfilling her economicfunctions to-day, she would never allow a short pound of butter, ayard of adulterated woolen goods, to come into her home. She wouldnever buy a ready-made garment which did not bear the label of theConsumer's League. She would recognize that she is a guardian ofquality, honesty, and humanity in industry. 

A persistent misconception of the nature and the possibilities of thispractical side of the Business of Being a Woman runs through allpresent-day discussions of the changes in household economy. The womanno longer has a chance to pay her way, we are told, because it isreally cheaper to buy bread than to bake it, to buy jam than to put itup. Of course, this is a part of the vicious notion that a woman onlymakes an economic return by the manual labor she does. The UneasyWoman takes up the point and complains that she has nothing to do. Butthis release from certain kinds of labor once necessary, merely putsupon her the obligation to apply the ingenuity and imaginationnecessary to make her business meet the changes of an ever changingworld. Because the conditions under which a household must be run noware not what they were fifty years ago is no proof that the woman nolonger has here an important field of labor. There is more to thepractical side of her business than preparing food for the family! Itmeans, for one thing, the directing of its wants. The success of ahousehold lies largely in its power of selection. To-day selection hasgiven way to accumulation. The family becomes too often anincorporated company for getting things--with frightful results. Thewoman holds the only strong strategic position from which to war onthis tendency, as well as on the habits of wastefulness which aremaking our national life increasingly hard and ugly. She is sopositioned that she can cultivate and enforce simplicity and thrift, the two habits which make most for elegance and for satisfaction inthe material things of life. 

Whenever a woman does master this economic side of her business in amanner worthy of its importance, she establishes the most effectiveschool for teaching thrift, quality, management, selection--all thefactors in the economic problem. Such scientific household managementis the rarest kind of a training school. And here we touch the mostvital part in the Woman's Business--that of education. 

Every home is perforce a good or bad educational center. It does itswork in spite of every effort to shirk or supplement it. No teachercan entirely undo what it does, be that good or bad. The naturaljoyous opening of a child's mind depends on its first intimaterelations. These are, as a rule, with the mother. It is the motherwho "takes an interest, " who oftenest decides whether the new mindshall open frankly and fearlessly. How she does her work, depends lessupon her ability to answer questions than her effort not to discouragethem; less upon her ability to lead authoritatively into great fieldsthan her efforts to push the child ahead into those which attract him. To be responsive to his interests is the woman's greatest contributionto the child's development. 

I remember a call once made on me by two little girls when our timewas spent in an excited discussion of the parts of speech. They wereliving facts to them, as real as if their discovery had been printedthat morning for the first time in the newspaper. I was interested tofind who it was that had been able to keep their minds so naturallyalive. I found that it came from the family habit of treating withrespect whatever each child turned up. Nothing was slurred over as ifit had no relation to life--not even the parts of speech! They werenot asked or forced to load themselves up with baggage in which theysoon discovered their parents had no interest. Everything was treatedas if it had a permanent place in the scheme to which they were beingintroduced. It is only in some such relation that the natural bent ofmost children can flower, that they can come early to themselves. Where this warming, nourishing intimacy is wanting, where the child isturned over to schools to be put through the mass drill which numbersmake imperative--it is impossible for the most intelligent teacher todo a great deal to help the child to his own. What the Uneasy Womanforgets is that no two children born were ever alike, and no twochildren who grow to manhood and womanhood will ever live the samelife. The effort to make one child like another, to make him what hisparents want, not what he is born to be, is one of the most cruel andwasteful in society. It is the woman's business to prevent this. 

The Uneasy Woman tells you that this close attention to the child istoo confining, too narrowing. "I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugenessof her task, " says Chesterton; "I will never pity her for itssmallness. " A woman never lived who did all she might have done toopen the mind of her child for its great adventure. It is anexhaustless task. The woman who sees it knows she has need of all theeducation the college can give, all the experience and culture she cangather. She knows that the fuller her individual life, the broader herinterests, the better for the child. She should be a person in hiseyes. The real service of the "higher education, " the freedom to takea part in whatever interests or stimulates her--lies in the fact thatit fits her intellectually to be a companion worthy of a child. Sheshould know that unless she does this thing for him he goes forth withhis mind still in swaddling clothes, with the chances that it will notbe released until relentless life tears off the bands. 

The progress of society depends upon getting out of men and women anincreasing amount of the powers with which they are born and which badsurroundings at the start blunt or stupefy. This is what all systemsof education try to do, but the result of all systems of educationdepends upon the material that comes to the educator. Opening the mindof the child, that is the delicate task the state asks of the mother, and the quality of the future state depends upon the way shedischarges this part of her business. 

I think it is historically correct to say that the reason of thesudden and revolutionary change in the education of American women, which began with the nineteenth century and continued through it, wasthe realization that if we were to make real democrats, we must beginwith the child, and if we began with the child, we must begin with themother!

Everybody saw that unless the child learned by example and precept thegreat principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he was going toremain what by nature we all are, --imperious, demanding, andself-seeking. The whole scheme must fail if his education failed. Itis not too much to say that the success of the Declaration ofIndependence and the Constitution depended, in the minds of certainearly Democrats, upon the woman. The doctrines of these greatinstruments would be worked out according to the way she played herpart. Her serious responsibility came in the fact that her work wasone that nobody could take off her hands. This responsibility requireda preparation entirely different from that which had been hers. Shemust be given education and liberty. The woman saw this, and the storyof her efforts to secure both, that she might meet the requirements, is one of the noblest in history. There was no doubt, then, as to thevalue of the tasks, no question as to their being worthy nationalobligations. It was a question of fitting herself for them. 

But what has happened? In the process of preparing herself todischarge more adequately her task as a woman in a republic, herrespect for the task has been weakened. In this process, which we callemancipation, she has in a sense lost sight of the purposes ofemancipation. Interested in acquiring new tools, she has come tobelieve the tools more important than the thing for which she was touse them. She has found out that with education and freedom, pursuitsof all sorts are open to her, and by following these pursuits she canpreserve her personal liberty, avoid the grave responsibility, thealmost inevitable sorrows and anxieties, which belong to family life. She can choose her friends and change them. She can travel, andgratify her tastes, satisfy her personal ambitions. The snare has beentoo great; the beauty and joy of free individual life have dulled thesober sense of national obligation. The result is that she isfrequently failing to discharge satisfactorily some of the mostimperative demands the nation makes upon her. 

Take as an illustration the moral training of the child. The mostessential obligation in a Woman's Business is establishing herhousehold on a sound moral basis. If a child is anchored to basicprinciples, it is because his home is built on them. If he understandsintegrity as a man, it is usually because a woman has done her workwell. If she has not done it well, it is probable that he will be adisturbance and a menace when he is turned over to society. Sendingdefective steel to a gunmaker is no more certain to result in unsafeguns than turning out boys who are shifty and tricky is to result in acorrupt and unhappy community. 

Appalled by the seriousness of the task, or lured from it by the joysof liberty and education, the woman has too generally shifted it toother shoulders--shoulders which were waiting to help her work out theproblem, but which could never be a substitute. She has turned overthe child to the teacher, secular and religious, and fancied that hemight be made a man of integrity by an elaborate system of teaching ina mass. Has this shifting of responsibility no relation to the generallowering of our commercial and political morality?

For years we have been bombarded with evidence of an appallingindifference to the moral quality of our commercial and politicaltransactions. It is not too much to say that the revelations ofcorruption in our American cities, the use of town councils, Statelegislatures, and even of the Federal Government in the interests ofprivate business, have discredited the democratic system throughoutthe world. It has given more material for those of other lands whodespise democracy to sneer at us than anything that has yet happenedin this land. And _this has come about under the régime of theemancipated woman_. Is she in no way responsible for it? If she hadkept the early ideals of the woman's part in democracy as clearlybefore her eyes as she has kept some of her personal wants and needs, could there have been so disastrous a condition? Would she be theUneasy Woman she is if she had kept faith with the ideals that forcedher emancipation?--if she had not substituted for them dreams ofpersonal ambition, happiness, and freedom!

The failure to fulfill your function in the scheme under which youlive always produces unrest. Content of mind is usually in proportionto the service one renders in an undertaking he believes worth while. If our Uneasy Woman could grasp the full meaning of her place in thisdemocracy, a place so essential that democracy must be overthrownunless she rises to it--a part which man is not equipped to play andwhich he ought not to be asked to play, would she not cease toapologize for herself--cease to look with envy on man's occupations?Would she not rise to her part and we not have at last the "new woman"of whom we have talked so long?

Learning, business careers, political and industrial activities--noneof these things is more than incidental in the national task of woman. Her great task is to prepare the citizen. The citizen is not preparedby a training in practical politics. Something more fundamental isrequired. The meaning of honor and of the sanctity of one's word, theunderstanding of the principles of democracy and of the society inwhich we live, the love of humanity, and the desire to serve, --theseare what make a good citizen. The tools for preparing herself to givethis training are in the woman's hands. It calls for education, andthe nation has provided it. It calls for freedom of movement andexpression, and she has them. It calls for ability to organize, todiscuss problems, to work for whatever changes are essential. She isdeveloping this ability. It may be that it calls for the vote. I donot myself see this, but it is certain that she will have the vote assoon as not a majority, but an approximate half, not of men--but ofwomen--feel the need of it. 

What she has partially at least lost sight of is that education, freedom, organization, agitation, the suffrage, are but tools to anend. What she now needs is to formulate that end so nobly and clearlythat the most ignorant woman may understand it. The failure to dothis is leading her deeper and deeper into fruitless unrest. It isalso dulling her sense of the necessity of keeping her businessabreast with the times. At one particular and vital point this showspainfully, and that is her slowness in socializing her home. 

CHAPTER IV

THE SOCIALIZATION OF THE HOME

It is only by much junketing about that one comes to the fullrealization of what men and women in the main are doing in thiscountry. One learns as he passes from town to town, through cities andacross plains, that the general reason for industry everywhere is toget the means to build and support a home. Row upon row, street uponstreet, they run in every village you traverse. They dot the hills andvalleys, they break up the mountain side. 

Every night they draw to their shelter millions of men who have toiledsince morning to earn the money to build and keep them running. Allday they shelter millions of women who toil from dawn to dark to putmeaning into them. To shelter two people and the children that come tothem, to provide them a place in which to eat and sleep, is that theonly function of these homes? If that were all, few homes would bebuilt. When that becomes all, the home is no more! To furnish a bodyfor a soul, that is the physical function of the home. 

There are certain people who cry out that for a woman this undertakinghas no meaning--that for her it is a cook stove and a dustpan, achildbed, and a man who regards her as his servant. One might withequal justice say that for the man it is made up of ten, twelve, ormore hours, at the plow, the engine, the counter, or the pen for thesake of supporting a woman and children whom he rarely sees!Unhappily, there are such combinations; they are not homes! They aredeplorable failures of people who have tried to make homes. To insistthat they are anything else is to overlook the facts of life, to doubtthe sanity of mankind which hopefully and courageously goes onbuilding, building, building, sacrificing, binding itself forever andever to what?--a shell? No, to the institution which its observationand experience tell it, is the one out of which men and women havegotten the most hope, dignity, and joy, --the place through which, whatever its failures and illusions, they get the fullest developmentand the opportunity to render the most useful social service. 

It is this grounded conviction that the home takes first rank amongsocial institutions which gives its tremendous seriousness to theBusiness of Being a Woman. She is the one who must sit always at itscenter, the one who holds a strategic position for dealing directlywith its problems. Far from these problems being purely of a menialnature, as some would have us believe, they are of the most delicatesocial and spiritual import. A woman in reality is at the head of asocial laboratory where all the problems are of primary, notsecondary, importance, since they all deal directly with human life. 

One of the most illuminating experiences of travel is visiting thegreat chateaux of France. One goes to see "historical monuments, " thescenes of strange and tragic human experiences; he finds he is insomebody's private house, which by order of the government is openedto the public one day of the week! He probably will not realize thisfully unless he suddenly opens a door, not intended to be opened, behind which he finds a mass of children's toys--go-carts and dolls, balls and tennis rackets--or stumbles into a room supposed to belocked where framed photographs, sofa cushions, and sewing tablesabound!

To the average American it comes almost as a shock that these openhomes are the _logic of democracy_. It is almost sure to set himthinking that after all the home, anybody's home, even one in such bigcontrast to this chateau as a two-story frame house, on Avenue A, inB-ville, has a relation to the public. He has touched a great socialtruth. 

To socialize her home, that is the high undertaking a woman has on herhands if she is to get at the heart of her Business. And what do wemean by socialization? Is it other than to put the stamp ofaffectionate, intelligent human interest upon all the operations andthe intercourse of the center she directs? To make a place in whichthe various members can live freely and draw to themselves those withwhom they are sympathetic--a place in which there is spiritual andintellectual room for all to grow and be happy each in his own way?

I doubt if there is any problem in the Woman's Business which requiresa higher grade of intelligence, and certainly none that requiresbroader sympathies, than this of giving to her home that quality ofstimulation and joyousness which makes young and old seek it gladlyand freely. 

To do this requires money, freedom, time, and strength? No, what Imean does not depend upon these things. It is the notion that it doesthat often prevents its growth. For it is a spirit, an attitude ofmind, and not a formula or a piece of machinery. As far as myobservation goes it is quite, if not more likely, to be found in athree-room apartment, where a family is living on fifteen dollars aweek, as in an East Central Park mansion! In these little familieswhere love prevails--it usually does exist. It is the kind of anatmosphere in which a man prefers to smoke his pipe rather than go tothe saloon; where the girl brings her young man home rather than walkwith him. Mutual interest and affection is its note. Such homes doexist by the tens of thousands; even in New York City. It is not fromthem that girls go to brothels or boys to the Tombs. 

Externally, these homes are often pretty bad to look at--overcrowded, disorderly, and noisy. Cleanliness, order, and space are good things, but it is a mistake to think that there is no virtue without them. There are more primary and essential things; things to which theyshould be added, but without which they are lifeless virtues. In oneof Miss Loane's reports on the life of the English poor, she makesthese truthful observations:--

 One learns to understand how it is that the dirty, untidy young wife, who, when her husband returns hungry and tired from a long day's work, holds up a smilingly assured face to be kissed, exclaiming, "Gracious! if I hadn't forgot all about your tea!" and clatters together an extravagant and ill-chosen meal while she pours out a stream of cheerful and inconsequent chatter, is more loved, and dealt with more patiently, tenderly, and faithfully, than her clean and frugal neighbor, who has prepared a meal that ought to turn the author of Twenty Satisfying Suppers for Sixpence green with envy, but who expects her husband to be eternally grateful because "he could eat his dinner off the boards, "--when all that the poor man asks is to be allowed to walk over them unreproached. 

Peace and good will may go with disorder and carelessness! They mayfly order and thrift. They will fly them when order and thrift areheld as the more desirable. A woman is often slow to learn that goodhousekeeping alone cannot produce a milieu in which family happinessthrives and to which people naturally gravitate. She looks at it asthe fulfillment of the law--the end of her Business. It is theexaggerated place she gives it in the scheme of things, which bringsdisaster to her happiness and gives substance to the argument thatwoman's lot in life is fatal to her development. Housekeeping is onlythe shell of a Woman's Business. Women lose themselves in it as menlose themselves in shopkeeping, farming, editing. Knowing nothing butyour work is one of the commonest human mistakes. Pitifully enough itis often a deliberate mistake--the only way or the easiest way onefinds to quiet an unsatisfied heart. The undue place given goodhousekeeping in many a woman's scheme of life is the more tragicbecause it is a distortion of one of the finest things in the humanexperience--the satisfaction of doing a thing well. It is asatisfaction which the worker must have if he is to get joy from hislabor. But labor is not for the sake of itself. It must have its humanreason. You rejoice in a "deep-driven plow"--but if there was to be noharvest, your straight, full furrows would be little comfort. Yourejoice to build a stanch and beautiful house, but if you knew it wasto stand forever vacant, joy would go from your task. An end work musthave. One does not keep house for its own sake. It is absorption inthe process--the refusal to allow it to be forgotten or utilizedfreely, that makes the work barren. It is like becoming so absorbed ina beautiful frame that you are unconscious of the picture--unconsciousthat there is a picture. Things must serve their purpose if they areto convince of their beauty. Try living in a room with a wonderfullyfitted fireplace; its mantel of exquisite design and workmanship, itsfire irons masterpieces of art--and no heat from it! Note how utterlydistasteful it all becomes. It is no longer beautiful because it doesnot do the work it was made beautiful to do. 

One of the most repellent houses in which I have ever visited was onein which there was, from garret to cellar, so far as I discovered, notone article which was not of the period imitated, not one streak ofcolor which was not "right. " It was a masterpiece of correctfurnishing, but it gave one a curious sense of limitation. One couldnot escape the scheme. The inelasticity of it hampered sociability--andthere grew on one, too, a sense of unfitness. His clothes were ananachronism! They were the only thing which did not belong!

There is an old-fashioned adjective which describes better than anyother this preoccupation with things, which so often prevents awoman's coming to an understanding of the heart of her Business. It is_old maidish_. It has often been the pathetic fate of single women tolive alone. To minister to themselves becomes their occupation. Theforce of their natures turns to their belongings. If in straitenedcircumstances they give their souls to spotless floors; if rich, toflawless mahogany and china, to perfect household machinery. Whereveryou find in woman this perversion--old maidish is perhaps the mostaccurate word for her--it is a sacrifice of the human to the material. A house without sweet human litter, without the trace of many varyingtastes and occupations, without the trail of friends who perhaps haveno sense of beauty but who love to give, without the scars of use, and the dust of running feet--what is it but a meatless shell!

This devotion to "things" may easily become a ghoulish passion. It issuch that Ibsen hints at in the _Master Builder_, when he makes AlineSolness attribute her perpetual black, her somber eyes and smilelesslips, not to the death of her two little boys which has come aboutthrough the burning of her home, _that_ was a "dispensation ofProvidence" to which she "bows in submission, " but to the destructionof the _things_ which were "mine"--"All the old portraits were burntupon the walls, and all the old silk dresses were burnt that hadbelonged to the family for generations and generations. And allmother's and grandmother's lace--that was burnt, too, and only think, the jewels too. "

One of the most disastrous effects of this preocccupation with thethings and the labors of the household is the killing of conversation. There is perhaps no more general weakness in the average Americanfamily than glumness! The silent newspaper-reading father, the worriedwatchful mother, the surly boy, the fretful girl, these are characterstypical in both town and country. In one of Mrs. Daskam Bacon's livelytales, "Ardelia in Arcadia, " the little heroine is transplanted from alively, chattering, sweltering New York street to the maddeningsilence of an overworked farmer's table. She stands it as long as shecan, then cries out, "For Gawd's sake, _talk_!"

One secret of the attraction for the young of the city over thecountry or small town is contact with those who talk. They areconscious of the exercise of a freedom they have never known--thefreedom to say what rises to the lips. They experience the unknown joyof play of mind. According to their observation the tongue and mindare used only when needed for serious service: to keep them active, toallow them to perform whatever nimble feats their owners fancy--thisis a revelation!

Free family talk is sometimes ruined by a mistaken effort to direct itaccording to some artificial notions of what conversation means. Conversation means free giving of what is uppermost in the mind. Themore spontaneous it is the more interesting and genuine it is. It isthis freedom which gives to the talk of the child its surprises andoften its startling power to set one thinking. Holding talk to somesevere standard of consistency, dignity, or subject is sure to stiffenand hamper it. There could have been nothing very free or joyfulabout talking according to a program as the ladies of theeighteenth-century salons were more or less inclined. Goodconversation runs like water; nothing is foreign to it. "Farming issuch an unintellectual subject, " I heard a critical young woman say toher husband, whose tastes were bucolic. The young woman did notrealize that one of the masterpieces of the greatest of the world'swriters was on farming--most practical farming, too! That whichrelates to the life of each, interests each, concerns each--that isthe material for conversation, if it is to be enjoyable or productive. 

One of a woman's real difficulties in creating a free-speakinghousehold is her natural tendency to regard opinions as personal. Todiffer is something she finds it difficult to tolerate. To her mind itis to be unfriendly. This propensity to give a personal turn tothings is an expression of that intensity of nature which makes her, as Mr. Kipling has truthfully put it, "more deadly than the male!" She_must_ be that--were she not, the race would dwindle. _He_ would neversacrifice himself as she does for the preservation of the young! Thisnecessity of concentrating her whole being on a little group makes herpersonal. The wise woman is she who recognizes that like all greatforces this, too, has its weakness. Because a woman must be "moredeadly than the male" in watching her offspring is no reason sheshould be so in guarding an opinion. Certainly if she is so, conversation is cut off at the root. 

Not infrequently she is loath to encourage free expression because itseems to her to disturb the peace. Certainly it does disturb fixity ofviews. It does prevent things becoming settled in the way that thewoman, as a rule, loves to have them, but this disturbance preventsthe rigid intellectual and spiritual atmosphere which often drives theyoung from home. Peace which comes from submission and restraint is apoor thing. In the long run it turns to revolt. The woman, if sheexamines her own soul, knows the effect upon it of habitual submissionto a husband's opinion. She knows it is a habit fatal to her owndevelopment. While at the beginning she may have been willing enoughto sacrifice her ideas, later she makes the painful discovery thatthis hostage to love, as she considered it, has only made her lessinteresting, less important, both to herself and to him. It has madeit the more difficult, also, to work out that socialization of herhome which, as her children grow older, she realizes, if she thinks, is one of her most imperative duties. 

A woman is very prone to look on marriage as a merger ofpersonalities, but there can be no great union where an individualitypermits itself to be ruined. The notion that a woman's happinessdepends on the man--that he must "make her happy"--is a basic untruth. Life is an individual problem, and consequently happiness must be. Others may hamper it, but in the final summing up it is you, notanother, who gives or takes it--no two people can work out a highrelation if the precious inner self of either is sacrificed. 

Emerson has said the great word:--

 Leave all for love; _Yet, hear me, yet, Keep thee to-day, To-morrow, forever, Free as an Arab! Of thy beloved_. 

The "open house, " that is, the socialized house, depends upon thisfree mind to a degree only second to that spirit of "good will toman, " upon which it certainly must, like all institutions in ademocratic Christian nation, be based. This good will is only anothername for neighborliness--the spirit of friendly recognition of allthose who come within one's radius. Neighborliness is based upon theChristian and democratic proposition that all men are brothers--aproposition with which the sects and parties of Christianity anddemocracy often play havoc. In their zeal for an interpretation orsystem they sacrifice the very things they were devised to perpetuateand extend among men. A sectarian or partisan household cannot be agenuinely neighborly household. It has cut off too large a part of itssource of supply. 

The most perfect type of this spirit of neighborliness which we haveworked out in this country, outside of the thousands of little homeswhere it exists and of which, in the nature of the case, only thosewho have felt their influence can know, is undoubtedly Hull House, theChicago Settlement under the direction of Jane Addams. Hull House isan "open house" for its neighborhood. It is a place where men andwomen of all ages, conditions, and points of view are welcome. So faras I have been able to discover, genuine freedom of mind andfriendliness of spirit are what have made Hull House possible and arewhat will decide its future after the day of the great woman who hasmothered it and about whom it revolves. There is no formula forbuilding a Hull House--any more than there is a home. Both are theflorescence of a spirit and a mind. Each will form itself according tothe ideas, the tastes, and the cultivation of the individuality atits center. Its activities will follow the peculiar needs which shehas the brains and heart to discover, the ingenuity and energy tomeet. 

Hull House serves its neighborhood, and in so doing it serves mostfully its own household. Its own members are the ones whose minds getthe most illumination from its activities. Moreover, Hull House fromits first-hand sympathetic dealing with men and women in itsneighborhood learns the needs of the neighborhood. It is and for yearshas been a constant source of suggestion and of agitation for thebetterment of the conditions under which its neighbors--and indirectlythe whole city, even nation--live and work. Health, mind, morals, allare in its care. It is practical in the plans it offers. It can backup its demands with knowledge founded on actual contact. It can rallyall of the enlightened and decent forces of the city to its help. HullHouse, indeed, is a very source of pure life in the great city whereit belongs. 

So far as attitude of mind and spirit go, the home should be to thelittle neighborhood in which it works what Hull House is to its greatfield. In its essential structure it is the same thing; _i. E. _ HullHouse is really modeled after the home. Most interesting is theparallel between its organization and its activities and those of manya great home which we know through the lives of their mistresses, thatof Margaret Winthrop, of Eliza Pinckney, of Mrs. John Adams. 

The social significance of Hull House is in its relative degree thepossible social significance of every home in this land. Therealization depends entirely upon the conception the woman in aparticular house has of this side of her Business--whether or no shesees neighborliness in this big sense. That she does not see it is toooften due to the fact that even though she may have "gone throughcollege, " she has no notion of society as a living structure made upof various interdependent institutions, the first and foremost ofwhich is a family or home. 

Absurd as it is, Society, which is founded on the family, is to-daygiving only perfunctory and half-hearted attention to the family. Thewhole vocabulary of the institution has taken on such a quality ofcant, that one almost hesitates to use the words "home" and "mother"!A girl's education should contain at least as much serious instructionon the relation of the family to Society as it does on the relation ofthe Carboniferous Age to the making of the globe. At present, itusually has less. It is but another evidence of the pressing needthere is of giving to the Woman's Business a more scientifictreatment--of revitalizing its vocabulary, reformulating its problems, of giving it the dignity it deserves, that of a great profession. Itis the failure to do this which is at the bottom of woman's presentdisorderly and antisocial handling of three of the leading occupationsof her life--her clothes, her domestics, and her daughter. 

CHAPTER V

A WOMAN AND HER RAIMENT

One of the most domineering impulses in men and women is that biddingthem to make themselves beautiful. In the normal girl-child it comesout, as does her craving for a doll. Nature is telling her what herwork in the world is to be. It stays with her to the end, its flameoften flickering long after her arms have ceased their desire tocradle a child. Scorn it, ridicule it, deny it, it is nature's will, and as such must be obeyed, and in the obeying should be honored. 

But this instinct, which has led men and women from strings of shellsto modern clothes, like every other human instinct, has itsdistortions. It is in the failure to see the relative importance ofthings, to keep the proportions, that human beings lose control oftheir endowment. Give an instinct an inch, and it invariably takes itsell! The instinct for clothes, from which we have learned so much inour climb from savagery, has more than once had the upper hand of us. So dangerous to the prosperity and the seriousness of peoples has itstyranny been, that laws have again and again been passed to check it;punishments have been devised to frighten off men from indulging it;whole classes have been put into dull and formless costumes to crucifyit. 

Man gradually and in the main has conquered his passion for ornament. To-day, in the leading nations of the world, he clothes rather thanarrays himself. Woman has not harnessed the instinct. She still allowsit to drive her, and often to her own grave prejudice. Even in ademocracy like our own, woman has not been able to master this problemof clothes. In fact, democracy has complicated the problem seriously. 

Under the old régime costumes had been worked out for the variousclasses. They were adapted both to the purse and to the pursuit. Theywere fitting--that is, silk was not worn in huts or homespun inpalaces; slippers were for carriages and _sabots_ for streets. Thegarments of a class were founded on good sound principles on thewhole--but they marked the class. Democracy sought to destroy outwarddistinctions. The proscribed costumes went into the pot withproscribed positions. Under democracy we can cook in silk petticoatsand go to the White House in a cap and apron, if we will. And we oftenwill, that being a way to advertise our equality!

Class costumes destroyed, the principles back of them, that is, fitness, quality, responsibility, were forgotten. The old instinct forornament broke loose. Its tyranny was strengthened by the eternaldesire of the individual to prove himself superior to his fellows. Wealth is the generally accepted standard of measurement of value inthis country to-day, and there is no way in which the average man canshow wealth so clearly as in encouraging his women folk to arraythemselves. Thus we have the anomaly in a democracy of a primitiveinstinct let loose, and the adoption of discarded aristocratic devicesfor proving you are better than your neighbor, at least in the onerevered particular of having more money to spend!

The complication of the woman's life by this domination of clothes isextremely serious. In many cases it becomes not one of the sides ofher business, but _the_ business of her life. Such undue proportionhas the matter taken in the American Woman's life under democracy thatone is sometimes inclined to wonder if it is not the real "womanquestion. " Certainly in numbers of cases it is the rock upon which afamily's happiness splits. The point is not at all that women shouldnot occupy themselves seriously with dress, that they should not lookon it as an art, as legitimate as any other. The difficulty comes innot mastering the art, in the entirely disproportionate amount ofattention which is given to the subject, in the disregard of soundprinciples. 

The economic side of the matter presses hard on the whole country. Itis not too much to say that the chief economic concern of a great bodyof women is how to get money to dress, not as they should, but as theywant to. It is to get money for clothes that drives many, though ofcourse not the majority, of girls, into shops, factories, and offices. It is because they are using all they earn on themselves that they areable to make the brave showing that they do. Many a girl is misjudgedby the well-meaning observer or investigator because of thisfact--"She could never dress like that on $6, $8, or $15 a week andsupport herself, " they tell you. She does not support herself. Sheworks for clothes, and clothes alone. Moreover, the girl who has thepluck to do hard regular work that she may dress better has interestenough to work at night to make her earnings go farther. No one whohas been thrown much with office girls but knows case after case ofgirls who with the aid of some older member of the family cut and maketheir gowns, plan and trim their hats. Moreover, this relieving thefamily budget of dressing the girl is a boon to fathers and mothers. 

It is hard on industry, however, for the wage earner who can afford totake $6 or $8 helps pull down the wages of other thousands who supportnot only themselves, but others. 

Moreover, to put in one's days in hard labor simply to dress well, forthat is the amount of it, is demoralizing. It is this emphasis on thematter which impels a reckless girl sometimes to sell herself formoney to buy clothes. "I wanted the money, " I heard a girl, arrestedfor her first street soliciting, tell the judge. "Had you no home?""Yes. " "A good home?" "Yes. " "For what did you want money?" "Clothes. "

"Gee, but I felt as if I would give anything for one of them willowplumes, " a pretty sixteen-year-old girl told the police matron who hadrescued her from a man with whom she had left home, because hepromised her silk gowns and hats with feathers. 

This ugly preoccupation with dress does not begin with the bottom ofsociety. It exists there because it exists at the top and filtersdown. In each successive layer there are women to whom dress is asmuch of a vice as it was for the poor little girls I quote above. Itis a vice curiously parallel to that of gambling among men. Women ofgreat wealth not infrequently spend princely allowances and then runaccounts which come into the courts by their inability orunwillingness to pay them. It is curious comment on women in ademocracy that it should be possible to mention them in the samebreath with Josephine, Empress of the French. Napoleon at thebeginning of the Empire allowed Josephine $72, 000 a year for hertoilet; later he made it $90, 000. But there was never a year she didnot far outstrip the allowance. Masson declares that on an average shespent $220, 000 a year, and the itemized accounts of the articles inher wardrobe give authority for the amount. 

Josephine's case is of course exceptional in history. She was anuntrained woman, generous and pleasure-loving, utterly without a senseof responsibility. She had all the instincts and habits of ademi-mondaine; moreover, she had been thrust into a position where shewas expected to live up to traditions of great magnificence. Herpassion for ornament had every temptation and excuse, for it wasconstantly excited by the hoards of greedy tradesmen and of no lessgreedy ladies-in-waiting who hung about her urging her to buy andgive. It is hard to believe that Josephine's case could be evenremotely suggested in our democracy; yet one woman in Americansociety bought last summer in Europe a half-dozen nightgowns for whichshe paid a thousand dollars apiece. There are women who will start ona journey with a hundred or a hundred and fifty pairs of shoes. Thereare others who bring back from Europe forty or fifty new gowns for aseason! What can one think of a bill of $500 for stockings in oneseason, of $20, 000 for a season's gowns, coats and hats from one shopand as much more in the aggregate for the same articles in the sameperiod from other shops; this showing was made in a recent divorcecase. 

What can one think of duties of over $30, 000 paid on personal articlesby one woman who yearly brings back similar quantities of jewelry andclothes. This $30, 000 in duties meant an expenditure of probably about$100, 000. It included over $1200 for hats, over $3000 for corsets andlingerie. This was undoubtedly exceptional; that is, few women of evengreat wealth buy so lavishly. Yet good round sums, even if they aresmall in comparison, are spent by many women in their Europeanoutings. They will bring from six to twelve gowns which will averageat least $150 apiece, and an occasional woman will have a half-dozenaveraging from $450 to $500 apiece. One might say that eight to twelvehats, costing $25 to $50 apiece, was a fair average, though $800 to$1200 worth is not so rare as to cause a panic at the customhouse. 

The comparative amounts which men and women spend affords aninteresting comment on the relative importance which men and womenattach to clothes. In one case of which I happen to know Mr. A. Brought in $840 worth of wearing apparel: Mrs. A. Nearly $10, 000worth, of which $7000 was for gowns. A man may have eight to ten suitsof pajamas which cost him $10 apiece, a dozen or two waistcoats, adozen or two shirts, a few dozen handkerchiefs and gloves, a dozen orso ties, eight or ten suits of clothes, but from $500 to $1000 willcover his wardrobe; his wife will often spend as much for hats aloneas he does for an entire outfit!

The difficulty in these great expenditures is that they set a pace. Tomany women of wealth they are no doubt revolting. They recognize thatthere are only two classes of women who can justify them--the actressand the demi-mondaine. Yet insensibly many of these women yield to thepressure of temptation. The influence is subtle, often unconscious, and for this reason spreads the more widely. Women all over thecountry find that the pressure is to spend more for clothes each year. The standard changes. Occasions multiply. Fantasies entice. Beforethey know it their clothes are costing them a disproportionatesum--more than they can afford if their budget is to balance. 

This does not apply to one class, it creeps steadily down to the verypoor. Investigators of small household budgets lay it down as a rulethat as the income increases the percentage spent for clothingincreases more rapidly than for any other item. It is true in theprofessional classes, and especially burdensome there; for the incomeis usually small, but the social demand great. 

There are certain industrial and ethical results from thispreoccupation with clothes which should not be overlooked, particularly the indifference to quality which it has engendered. Thevery heart of the question of clothes of the American woman isimitation. That is, we are not engaged in an effort to work outindividuality. We are not engaged in an effort to find costumes whichby their expression of the taste and the spirit of this people can befixed upon as appropriate American costumes, something of our own. From top to bottom we are copying. The woman of wealth goes to Parisand Vienna for the real masterpieces in a season's wardrobe. The greatdressmakers and milliners go to the same cities for their models. Those who cannot go abroad to seek inspiration and ideas copy thosewho have gone or the fashion plates they import. The French orViennese mode, started on upper Fifth Avenue, spreads to 23d St. , from23d St. To 14th St. , from 14th St. To Grand and Canal. Each move seesit reproduced in materials a little less elegant and durable, itscolors a trifle vulgarized, its ornaments cheapened, its laces poorer. By the time it reaches Grand Street the $400 gown in brocaded velvetfrom the best looms in Europe has become a cotton velvet from Lawrenceor Fall River, decorated with mercerized lace and glass ornaments fromRhode Island! A travesty--and yet a recognizable travesty. The EastSide hovers over it as Fifth Avenue has done over the original. Thevery shop window, where it is displayed, is dressed and painted andlighted in imitation of the uptown shop. The same process goes oninland. This same gown will travel its downward path from New Yorkwestward, until the Grand St. Creation arrives in some cheap and gaymining or factory town. From start to finish it is imitation, and onthis imitation vast industries are built--imitations of silk, ofvelvet, of lace, of jewels. 

These imitations, cheap as they are, are a far greater extravagance, for their buyers, than the original model was for its buyer, for thelatter came from that class where money does not count--while theformer is of a class where every penny counts. The pity of it is thatthe young girls, who put all that they earn into elaborate lingerie atseventy-nine cents a set (the original model probably sold at $50 or$100), into open-work hose at twenty-five cents a pair (the original$10 a pair), into willow plumes at $1. 19 (the original sold at $50), never have a durable or suitable garment. They are bravely ornamented, but never properly clothed. Moreover, they are brave but for a day. Their purchases have no goodness in them; they tear, grow rusty, fallto pieces with the first few wearings, and the poor little victims areshabby and bedraggled often before they have paid for theirbelongings, for many of these things are bought on the installmentplan, particularly hats and gowns. Under these circumstances, it islittle wonder that one hears, often and often among their class, thebitter cry, "Gee, but it's hell to be poor!"--that one finds so oftenassigned by a girl as the cause of her downfall, the naturalreason--"Wanted to dress like other girls"--"Wanted pretty clothes. "

This habit of buying poor imitations does not end in the girl's lifewith her clothes. When she marries, she carries it into her home. Decoration, not furnishing, is the keynote of all she touches. It isshe who is the best patron of the elaborate and monstrous cheapfurniture, rugs, draperies, crockery, bric-a-brac, which fill theshops of the cheaper quarters of the great cities, and usually allquarters of the newer inland towns. 

Has all this no relation to national prosperity--to the cost ofliving? The effect on the victim's personal budget is clear--theeffect it has on the family budget, which it dominates, is clear. Inboth cases nothing of permanent value is acquired. The good linenundergarments, the "all wool" gown, the broadcloth cape or coat, thosestandard garments which the thrifty once acquired and cherished, onlyawaken the mirth of the pretty little spendthrift on $8 a week. Solidpieces of furniture such as often dignify even the huts of Europeanpeasants and are passed down from mother to daughter forgenerations--are objects of contempt by the younger generation here. Even the daughters of good old New England farmers are found to-dayglad to exchange mahogany for quartered oak and English pewter forpressed glass and stamped crockery. True, another generation may comein and buy it all back at fabulous prices, but the waste of it!

This production of shoddy cloth, cotton laces, cheap furniture, whatis it but waste! Waste of labor and material! Time and money andstrength which might have been turned to producing things of permanentvalues, have been spent in things which have no goodness in them, things which because of their lack of integrity and soundness must beforever duplicated, instead of freeing industry to go ahead, producingother good and permanent things. 

What it all amounts to is that the instinct for ornament has gottenthe upper hand of a great body of American women. We have failed sofar to develop standards of taste, fitness, and quality, strong, sure, and good enough effectually to impose themselves. There is nonational taste in dress; there is only admirable skill in adaptingfashions made in other countries. There is no national sense ofrestraint and proportion. It is pretty generally agreed that gettingall you can is entirely justifiable. There is no national sense ofquality; even the rich to-day in this country wear imitation laces. The effect of all this is a bewildering restlessness in costume--asheeplike willingness to follow to the extreme the grotesque and thefantastic. The very general adoption of the ugly and meaninglessfashions of the last few years--peach-basket hats, hobble skirts, slippers for the street--is a case in point. From every side this isbad--defeating its own purpose--corrupting national taste and wastingnational substance. 

Moreover, the false standard it sets up socially is intolerable. Itsounds fantastic to say that whole bodies of women place their chiefreliance for social advancement on dress, but it is true. They are, orare not, as they are gowned! The worst of this fantasy is not onlythat it forces too much attention from useful women, but that it givessuch poise and assurance to the ignorant and useless! If you look likethe women of a set, you are as "good" as they, is the democraticstandard of many a young woman. If for any reason she is not able toproduce this effect, she shrinks from contact, whatever her talent orcharm! And she is often not altogether wrong in thinking she will notbe welcome if her dress is not that of the circle to which sheaspires. Many a woman indifferently gowned has been made to feel herdifference from the elegant she found herself among. If she is sure ofherself and has a sense of humor, this may be an amusing experience. To many, however, it is an embittering one!

Now these observations are not presented as discoveries! They weretrue, at least, as far back as the Greeks. In fact, there is nothingin the so-called woman's movement, which in its essence did not existthen. The stream of human aspirations, with its stretches of wisdomand of folly, has flowed steadily through the ages, and on itstroubled surface men and women have always struggled together as theyare struggling to-day. These little comments simply seem to the writerworth making because for the moment the truths behind them are notgetting as much attention as they deserve. Certainly the tyranny dressexercises over the woman in this American democracy is an old enoughtheme. Indeed, it has always formed a part of her program ofemancipation. Out of her revolt against its absurdities has come themost definite development in American costume which we have had, andthat is the sensible street costume, which in spite of efforts todistort and displace it, a woman still may wear withoutdifferentiating herself from her fellows. 

The short skirt and jacket, the shirt waist and stout boots, a womanis allowed to-day, are among the good things which the Woman's Rightsmovement of the 40's and 50's helped secure for us. When those ableleaders made their attack on man, demanding that the world in which hemoved be opened to them, they were quick enough to see that if theysucceeded in their undertaking they would be hampered by theirclothes. They revolted! True, they did not voice this revolt in theirhistoric list of "injuries and usurpations on the part of man towardwoman. " They did not say, "He has compelled her to hamper herselfwith skirts and stays, to decorate her head with rats and puffs, topaint her face with poisonous compounds, to walk the street infootwear which is neither suitable nor comfortable!"

This statement, however, would have had the same quality of truth asseveral which were included in the "List of Grievances"; the same asthe declaration: "He has compelled her to submit to laws in theformation of which she has had no voice, " or, "He has denied her thefacilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges beingclosed against her. "

Dress reformers were admitted to the ranks of the agitators. Theinitial revolt was thoroughgoing. They discarded the corset, discardedit when it was still improper to speak the word! They cut off theirhair, cut it off in a day when every woman owned a chignon. Theydiscarded the corset, cut off their hair, and adopted bloomers!

The story of the bloomer is piquant. It was launched and worn. Itbecame the subject of platform oratory and had its organ. Why is itnot worn to-day? No woman who has ever masqueraded in man's dress ordonned it for climbing will ever forget the freedom of it. Yet theonly woman in the Christian world who ever wore it at once naturallyand with that touch of coquetry which is necessary to carry it off, asfar as this writer's personal observation goes, was Madame Dieulafoy, and Madame Dieulafoy was protected by the French government and anexclusive circle. 

Bloomers proved too much for even the courage of dear Miss Anthony. For two years she wore them, and then with tears and lamentationsresigned them. In that resignation Miss Anthony paid tribute, unconsciously no doubt, to something deeper than she ever grasped inthe woman question. Her valiant soul met its master in her own nature, but she did not recognize it. She abandoned her convenient andbecoming costume because of prejudice, she said. What other prejudiceever dismayed her! She thrived on fighting them; she met her woman'ssoul, and did not know it!

But from the experiments and blunders and travail of some of thesenoble and early militants over the dress question, has come, as I havesaid, our present useful, and probably permanent type of street suit. In this particular the American woman has achieved a genuinedemocratization of her clothes. The experience of the last twoyears--fashion's open attempt to make the walking suit useless bytightening the skirts, and bizarre by elaborate decorations, has inthe main failed. Here, then, is a standard established, andestablished on one of the great principles of sensible clothing, andthat is fitness. It shows that the true attack on the tyranny andcorruption of clothes lies in the establishment of principles. 

These principles are, briefly:--

The fitness of dress depends upon the occasion. 

The beauty of dress depends upon line and color. 

The ethics of dress depends upon quality and the relation of cost toone's means. 

In time we may get into the heads of all women, rich and poor, that anopen-work stocking and low shoe for winter street wear are as unfit asthey all concede a trailing skirt to be. In time we may even hope totrain the eye until it recognizes the difference between a beautifuland a grotesque form, between a flowing and a jagged line. In time wemay restore the sense of quality, which our grandmothers certainlyhad, and which almost every European peasant brings with her to thiscountry. 

These principles are teachable things. Let her once grasp them and thevagaries of style will become as distasteful as poor drawing does toone whose eye has learned what is correct, as lying is to one who hascultivated the taste for the truth. 

Martha Berry tells of an illuminating experience in her school ofSouthern mountain girls. She had taken great pains to teach themcorrect standards and principles of dress. She had been careful to seethat simplicity and quality and fitness were all that they saw in thedress of their teachers. Then one day they had visitors, fashionablevisitors, in hobble skirts and strange hats and jingling with manyornaments. They were good and interesting women, and they talkedsympathetically and well to the girls. Miss Berry was crushed. "Whatwill the girls think of my teachings?" she asked herself. "They willbelieve I do not know. " But that night one of her assistants said toher: "I have just overheard the girls discussing our visitors. Theyliked them so much, but they are saying that it is such a pity thatthey could not have had you to _teach them how to dress_. "

As a method of education, instruction in the principles of dress isadmirable for a girl. Through it she can be made to grasp the truthwhich women so generally suspect to-day; that is, the _importance ofthe common and universal things of life_; the fact that all theseeveryday processes are the expressions of the great underlying truthsof life. A girl can be taught, too, through this matter of dress, asdirectly perhaps as through anything that concerns her, the importanceof studying human follies! Follies grow out of powerful humaninstincts, ineradicable elements of human nature. They would not existif there were not at the bottom of them some impulse of nature, rightand beautiful and essential. The folly of woman's dress lies not inher instinct to make herself beautiful, it lies in her ignorance ofthe principles of beauty, of the intimate and essential connectionbetween utility and beauty. It lies in the pitiful assumption that shecan achieve her end by imitation, that she can be the thing she enviesif she look like that thing. 

The matter of dress is the more important, because bound up with it isa whole grist of social and economic problems. It is part and parcelof the problem of the cost of living, of woman's wages, of wastefulindustries, of the social evil itself. It is a woman's most directweapon against industrial abuses, her all-powerful weapon as aconsumer. At the time of the Lawrence strike, Miss Vida Scudder, ofWellesley College, is reported to have said in a talk to a group ofwomen citizens in Lawrence:--

"I speak for thousands besides myself when I say that I would rathernever again wear a thread of woolen than know my garments had beenwoven at the cost of such misery as I have seen and known, past theshadow of a doubt, to have existed in this town. "

Miss Scudder might have been more emphatic and still have beenentirely within the limit of plain obligation; she might have said, "Iwill never again wear a thread of woolen woven at the cost of suchmisery as exists in this town. " Women will not be doing their duty, as citizens in this country, until they recognize fully theobligations laid upon them by their control of consumption. 

The very heart of the question of the dress is, then, economic andsocial. It is one of those great everyday matters on which the moraland physical well-being of society rests. One of those matters, which, rightly understood, fill the everyday life with big meanings, show itrelated to every great movement for the betterment of man. 

Like all of the great interests in the Business of Being a Woman, itis primarily an individual problem, and every woman who solves it forherself, that is, arrives at what may be called a sound mode of dress, makes a real contribution to society. There is a tendency to overlookthe value of the individual solution of the problems of life, and yet, the successful individual solution is perhaps the most genuine andfundamental contribution a man or woman can make. The end of living isa life--fair, sound, sweet, complete. The vast machinery of life towhich we give so much attention, our governments and societies, ourpolitics and wrangling, is nothing in itself. It is only a series ofcontrivances to insure the chance to grow a life. He who proves thathe can conquer his conditions, can adjust himself to the machinery inwhich he finds himself, he is the most genuine of social servants. Herealizes the thing for which we talk and scheme, and so proves thatour dreams are not vain!

CHAPTER VI

THE WOMAN AND DEMOCRACY

The one notion that democracy has succeeded in planting firmly in themind of the average American citizen is his right and duty to rise inthe world. Tested by this conception the American woman is an idealdemocrat. Give her a ghost of a chance and she almost never fails tobetter herself materially and socially. Nor can she be said to do itby the clumsy methods we describe as "pushing. " She does it by alegitimate, if rather literal, application of the national formula forrising, --get schooling and get money. 

The average American man reverses the order of the terms in theformula. He believes more in money. The time that boys and girls arekept in school after the fourteen-or sixteen-year-age limit isgenerally due to the insistence of the mother, her confidence that themore education, the better the life chance. What it amounts to is thatthe man has more faith in life as a teacher, the woman more faith inschools. Both, however, seek the same goal, pin their faith to thesame tools. Both take it for granted that if they work out theformulas, they thereby earn and will receive letters patent to thearistocracy of the democracy!

The weakness of this popular conception of the democratic scheme isthat it gives too much attention to what a man gets and too little towhat he gives. Democracy more than any other scheme under which menhave tried to live together depends on what each returns--returns notin material but in spiritual things. Democracy is not a shelter, agarment, a cash account; it is a spirit. The real test of itsfollowers must be sought in their attitude of mind toward life, labor, and their fellows. 

Where does the average American woman come out in applying this test?Take her attitude toward labor, --where does it place her? Laboraccording to democracy is a badge of respectability. You cannot poachor sponge in a democracy; if you do, you violate the fundamental rightof the other man. You cannot ask him to help support you by indirector concealed devices; if you do, you are hampering the freeopportunity the scheme promises him. 

Moreover, the kind of work you do must not demean you. Nothing usefulis menial. It is in the quality of the work and the spirit you give itthat the test lies. Poor work brings disrespect and so hurts not onlyyou but the whole mass. Contempt for a task violates the principlebecause it is contempt for a thing which the system recognizes asuseful. Classification based on tasks falls down in a democracy. Apoor lawyer falls below a good clerk, a poor teacher below a goodhousemaid, since one renders a sound and the other an unsound service. 

Now this ideal of labor it was for the woman to work out in thehousehold. To do this she must reconstruct the ideas to which she andall her society had been trained. In the nature of the task therecould be no rules for it. It could be accomplished only by creating inthe household a genuine democratic spirit. This meant that she mustbring herself to look upon domestic service as a dignified employmentin no way demeaning the person who performed it. Quite as difficult, she must infuse into those who performed the labor of the householdrespect and pride in their service. 

What has happened? Has the woman democratized the department of laborshe controls? If we are to measure her understanding of the systemunder which she lives by what she has done with her own particularlabor problem, we must set her down as a poor enough democrat. Thisgreat department of national activity is generally (though by no meansuniversally) in a poorer estate to-day than ever before in the historyof the country; that is, tested by the ideals of labor toward which weare supposed to be working, it shows less progress. 

Instead of being dignified, it has been demeaned. No other honest workin the country so belittles a woman socially as housework performedfor money. It is the only field of labor which has scarcely felt thetouch of the modern labor movement; the only one where the hours, conditions, and wages are not being attacked generally; the only onein which there is no organization or standardization, no training, noregular road of progress. It is the only field of labor in which thereseems to be a general tendency to abandon the democratic notion andreturn frankly to the standards of the aristocratic régime. Themultiplication of livery, the tipping system, the terms of address, all show an increasing imitation of the old world's methods. Unhappilyenough, they are used with little or none of the old world's ease. Being imitations and not natural growths, they, of course, cannot be. 

More serious still is the relation which has been shown to existbetween criminality and household occupations. Nothing, indeed, whichrecent investigation has established ought to startle the Americanwoman more. Contrary to public opinion, it is not the factory andshop which are making the greatest number of women offenders of allkinds; it is the household. In a recent careful study of over 3000women criminals, the Bureau of Labor found that 80 per cent camedirectly from their own homes or from the traditional pursuits ofwomen![2]

The anomaly is the more painful because women are so active in tryingto better the conditions in trades which men control. Feminine circleseverywhere have been convulsed with sympathy for shop and factorygirls. Intelligent and persistent efforts are making to reach and aidthem. This is, of course, right, and it would be a national calamityif such organizations as the Woman's Trade Union League and theConsumer's League should lose anything of their vigor. But the needof the classes they reach is really less than the need of householdworkers. In the first place, the number affected is far less. 

It is customary, in presenting the case of the shop and factory girl, to speak of them as "an army 7, 000, 000 strong. " It is a misleadingexaggeration. The whole number of American women and girls over tenyears of age earning their living wholly or partially is about7, 000, 000. [3] Of this number from 20 per cent to 25 per cent belongto the "army" in shops and factories; moreover, a goodly percentage ofthis proportion are accountants, bookkeepers, and stenographers, --aclass which on the whole may be said to be able to look after its ownneeds. The number in domestic service is nearly twice as great, something like 40 per cent of the 7, 000, 000. 

There are almost as many dressmakers, milliners, and seamstresses asthere are factory operators in this 7, 000, 000. There are nearly twiceas many earning their living in dairies, greenhouses, and gardens asthere are in shops and offices. 

The greater number in domestic service is not what gives this classits greater importance. Its chief importance comes from the fact thatit is in a _permanent_ woman's employment; that is, the householdworker becomes on marriage a housekeeper and in this countryfrequently an employer of labor. The intelligence and the ideals whichshe will give to her homemaking will depend almost entirely on whatshe has seen in the houses where she has worked; that is, our domesticservice is _self-perpetuating_, and upon it American homes are ingreat numbers being annually founded. In sharp contrast to thispermanent character of housework is the transientness of factory andshop work. The average period which a girl gives to this kind of laboris probably less than five years. What she learns has little or norelation to her future as a housekeeper--indeed, the tendency israther to unfit than to fit her for a home. 

But why is the American woman not stirred by these facts? Why does shenot recognize their meaning and grapple with her labor problem? It iscertain that at the beginning of the republic she did have a prettyclear idea of the kind of household revolution the country needed. Ourgreat-grandmothers, that is, the serious ones among them, made a bravedash at it. There is no family, at least of New England tradition, whodoes not know the methods they adopted. They changed the nomenclature. There were to be no more "servants"--we were to have helpers. Therewere to be no divisions in the household. The helper was to sit at thetable, at the fireside. (They thought to change the nature of arelation as old as the world by changing its name and form. ) It waslike the French Revolutionists' attempt to make a patriot by takingaway his ruffles and shoe buckles and calling him "citizen"!

Of course it failed. The family meal, the fireside hour, are personaland private institutions in a home. Much of the success of the familyin building up an intimate comradeship depends upon preserving them. We admit friends to them as a proof of affection, strangers as a proofof our regard. The notion that those who come into a household solelyto aid in its labor should be admitted into personal relations whichdepend for their life upon privacy and affection, was alwaysfantastic. It could not endure, because it violated something asimportant as the dignity of labor, and that was the sacredness ofpersonal privacy. Moreover, it was bound to fail because it made thedignity of labor depend on artificial things--such as the name bywhich one is called, the place where one sits. 

The good sense of the country might very well have regulated whateverwas artificial in the attempt, if it had not been for the crushinginterference of slavery. In the South all service was performed byslaves. In many parts of the North, at the founding of the republic, in Connecticut, in New York, New Jersey, slaves were held. It waspractically impossible to work out a democratic system of domesticservice side by side with this institution. 

Slavery passed, but we were impeded by the fact that, liberated, theslave was still a slave in spirit and that his employer, North andSouth, was still an aristocrat in her treatment of him. With thissituation to cope with, the woman's labor problem was still furthercomplicated by immigration. 

For years we have been overrun by thousands of untrained girls who areprobably to be heads of American homes and mothers of Americancitizens. Most of them are of good, healthy, honest, industriousstock, but they are ignorant of our ways and ideas. The natural placefor these girls to get their initiation into American democracy is inthe American household. The duty of American women toward theseforeign girls is plainly to help them understand our ideals. Thedifficulty of this is apparent; but the failure to accomplish it hasbeen due less to its difficulty than to the fact that not one woman ina thousand has recognized that she has an obligation to make a fitcitizen of the girl who comes into her home. 

Generally speaking, the foreign servant girl has been exploited inthis country almost if not quite as ruthlessly and unintelligently asthe foreign factory girl and the foreign steel mill worker. Domesticservice, which ought to be the best school for the newcomer, hasbecome the worst; exploited, she learns to exploit; suspected, shelearns to suspect. The result has been that the girl has soonacquired a confused and grotesque notion of her place. She soonbecomes insolent and dissatisfied, grows more and more indifferent tothe quality of her work and to the cultivation of right relations. 

What we have lost in our treatment of the immigrant women can never beregained. We forget that almost invariably these girls have the habitof thrift. They have never known anything else. Thrift as a principleis ingrained in them. But the American household is notoriouslythriftless. As a rule it destroys the quality in the untrainedimmigrant girl. It is American not to care for expense--and sheaccepts the method--as far as her mistress' goods are concerned--ifnot her own. 

The general stupid assumption that because the immigrant girl does notknow our ways she knows nothing, has deprived us of much that shemight have contributed to our domestic arts and sciences. It is withher as it is with any newcomer in a strange land of strangetongue--she is shy, dreads ridicule. Instead of encouraging her topreserve and develop that which she has learned at home, we drive herto abandon it by our ignorant assumption that she knows nothing worthour learning. The case of peasant handicraft is in point. It is onlyrecently that we have begun to realize that most women immigrants knowsome kind of beautiful handicraft which they have entirely dropped forfear of being laughed at. 

A very frequent excuse for the lack of pains that the average womangives to the training of the raw girl is that she marries as soon asshe becomes useful. But is it not part of the woman's business in thisdemocracy to help the newcomer to an independent position? Is it notpart of her business to help settle her servants in matrimony?Certainly any large and serious conception of her business mustinclude this obligation. 

It is the failure to recognize opportunities for public service ofthis kind that makes the woman say her life is narrow. It is parallelto her failure to understand the relation of household economy tonational economy. She seems to lack the imagination to relate herproblem to the whole problem. She will read books and follow lecturecourses on Labor and come home to resent the narrowness of her life, unconscious that she personally has the labor problem on her own handsand that her failure to see that fact is complicating daily theproblems of the nation. It is the old false idea that the interestingand important thing is somewhere else--never at home--while the truthis that the only interesting and important thing for any one of us isin mastering our own particular situation, --moreover, the only realcontribution we ever make comes in doing that. 

The failure to dignify and professionalize household labor isparticularly hard on the unskilled girl of little education whorespects herself, has pretty clear ideas of her "rights" under oursystem of government, and who expects to make something of herself. There are tens of thousands of such in the country; very many of themrealize clearly the many advantages of household labor. They know thatit _ought_ to be more healthful, is better paid, is more interestingbecause more varied. They see its logical relation to the future towhich they look forward. 

But such a girl feels keenly the cost to herself of undertaking whatshe instinctively feels ought to be for her the better task. Sheknows the standards and conditions are a matter of chance; that, whileshe may receive considerate treatment in one place, in another therewill be no apparent consciousness that she is a human being. She knowsand dreads the loneliness of the average "place. " "It's breaking myheart I was, " sobbed an intelligent Irish girl, serving a term fordrunkenness begun in the kitchen, "alone all day long with never a oneto pass a good word. " She finds herself cut off from most of thebenefits which are provided for other wage-earning girls. She findsgirls' clubhouses generally are closed to her. She is the pariah amongworkers. 

What is there for this girl but the factory or the shop? Yet herpresence there is a disaster for the whole labor system, for she is a_cheap laborer_--cheap not because she is a poor laborer--she is not;generally she is an admirable one--quick to learn, faithful todischarge. Her weakness in trade is that she is a transient who takesno interest in fitting herself for an advanced position. Thedemonstration of this statement is found in a town like Fall River, where the admirable textile school has only a rare woman student, although boys and men tax its capacity. There is no object for theaverage girl to take the training. She looks forward to a differentlife. The working girl has still to be convinced of the "aristocracyof celibacy"!

No more difficult or important undertaking awaits the American womanthan to accept the challenge to democratize her own special field oflabor. It is in doing this that she is going to make her chiefcontribution to solving the problem of woman in industry. It is indoing this that she is going to learn the meaning of democracy. It isan undertaking in which every woman has a direct individual part--justas every man has a direct part in the democratization of public life. 

Individual effort aside, though it is the most fundamental, she hasvarious special channels of power through which she can work--herclubs, for instance. If the vast machinery of the Federation ofWoman's Clubs could be turned to this problem of the democratizationof domestic service, what an awakening might we not hope for! Yet itis doubtful if it will be through the trained woman's organizationsthat the needed revolution will come. It will come, as always, fromthe ranks of the workers. 

Already there are signs that the woman's labor organizations arewilling to recognize the inherent dignity of household service. Andthis is as it should be. The woman who labors should be the one torecognize that all labor is _per se_ equally honorable--that there isno stigma in any honestly performed, useful service. If she is tobring to the labor world the regeneration she dreams, she must beginnot by saying that the shop girl, the clerk, the teacher, are in ahigher class than the cook, the waitress, the maid, but that we areall laborers alike, sisters by virtue of the service we are renderingsociety. That is, labor should be the last to recognize the canker ofcaste. [4]

FOOTNOTES:

 [2] Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners in the United States, Vol. XV. Relation between Occupation and Criminality of Women. 1911. 

 [3] The number of people in 1910 in what is called "gainful occupations" has not as yet been compiled by the Census Bureau. This figure of 7, 000, 000 is arrived at by the following method, suggested to the writer by Director Durand. It is known that there are about 44, 500, 000 females in the present population. Now in 1900 there were about 14½ per cent of all the girls and women in the country over ten years of age at work a part or all of the time. Apply to the new figure this proportion, and you have between six and seven millions, which is called 7, 000, 000 here, on the supposition that the proportion may have increased. The percentage of women in each of the various occupations in 1900 is assumed still to exist. 

 [4] The National Women's Trades Union League has domestic workers among its members, though not as yet, I believe, in any large numbers. Its officials are strong believers in a Domestic Workers' Union. There are several such unions in New Zealand, and they have done much to regulate hours, conditions, and wages. 

CHAPTER VII

THE HOMELESS DAUGHTER

One of the severest strains society makes on human life is that ofadapting itself to ever changing conditions: yesterday it dragged usin a stagecoach; to-day it hurls us across country in limitedexpresses; to-morrow we shall fly! Once twilight and darkness werewithout, shadows and dim recesses within; now, wherever men gatherthere is one continuous blazing day. He who would keep his taskabreast with the day must accept speed and light; for the law is, think, feel, do in the terms of your day, if you would keep your holdon your day. 

It is a law often resented as if it were an immorality, but those whorefuse the new way on principle, confuse form with principle. It isthe form which changes, not the essence. The few great underlyingelements from which character and happiness are evolved arepermanent--their mutations are endless. Dull-minded, we take themutations to mean shifting of principle. That is, we do not square upby truth, but by the forms of truth. 

The Woman's Business has always suffered from lack of facility inadapting itself to new forms of expression. The natural task found, amethod of handling it in a fashion sufficiently acceptable to preventfamily revolts mastered, and the woman usually is as fixed as a starin its orbit. She resents changes of method, new interpretations, andfresh expressions. It is she, not man, who stands an immovablemountain in the path of militant feminism. 

In this course she is following her nature. An instinct more powerfulthan logic tells her that she must preserve the thing she is making, that center for which she is responsible, that place where her childis born and reared, where her mate retreats, to be reassured that theeffort to which he has committed himself is worth while, where all thecommunity to which she belongs is served and strengthened. If thisplace is preserved, she must do it. Man, an experimenter andadventurer, cannot. 

Changes she fears. She sees them as disturbers of her plans and herideals. But the changes will not stay. They gather about her retreat, beat at the doors, creep in at the windows, win her husband andchildren from her very arms. The home on which she depended to keepthem becomes impotent. While she stands an implacable guardian of aform of truth, truth has moved on, broadened its outlook, and clotheditself in new expressions. 

It is entirely understandable that the woman who sees herself leftbehind with her dead gods should cry out against change as the ruin ofher hopes. It is equally understandable that those who find themselvesadrift should doubt the home as an institution. At the bottom of therevolt of thousands of our "uneasy women" of to-day lies this doubt. The home failed them, and with the logic of limited experience theycast it out of their calculations. 

But the home is one of the unescapable facts of nature andsociety--unescapable because the child demands it. One of the earliestconvictions of the child is that he has a _right_ to a home. To him itappears as the great necessity. He cannot see himself outside of it. To be at large in the world throws him into panic. The sacrifices andpains very young children suffer uncomplainingly, particularly ingreat cities and factory towns, is a pathetic enough demonstration ofwhat the word means to them. Mere children by the hundreds supportfamilies terrified by the thought of their collapse. The orphanforever dreams of the day when a home will be found for him. The childwhose parents seek freedom, leaving him to school or servants, neverfails to nourish a sense of injustice. Whatever one generation maydecide as to the futility or burdensomeness of the home, the oncomingchild will force its return. 

To keep this permanent place abreast with growing truth, that is theobligation of the woman. It is the failure to do this that produceswhat we may call the homeless daughter; that girl who loved and oftenserved to the point of folly, finds herself in a group where none ofthe imperative needs the day has awakened in her are met. 

One of the first of these needs is for what we call "economicindependence. " The spirit of our day and of our system of governmentis personal, material independence for all. Under the old régime thegirl had her economic place. The family was a small community. Itprovided for most of its own wants, hence the girl must be taughthousehold arts and science, all of the fine traditional knowledge andskill which made, not drudges, but skilled managers, skilled cooks andneedlewomen, skilled hostesses and nurses. She had a _business_ tolearn under the old régime, and there was an authority, often severelyenforced no doubt, which made her learn it well. There was the sameappraising of the efficiency of the girl for her business there wasof the boy for his. 

The girl of to-day rarely has any such systematic training for thematerial side of her business, nor is a dignified place provided forher in well-to-do families. Her place is parasitical and demoralizing. Take the young girl who has been what we call "educated"; that is, onewho has gone through college and has not found a talent which she iseager to develop. The spirit of the times makes her less keen formarriage, puts no feeling of obligation of marriage upon her. Shefinds herself in a home which is not regarded as a serious industrialundertaking. Things go on more or less accidentally, according totraditions or conventions. Her ideas of scientific management, if shehas any, are treated as revolutionary. Her help is not needed. Thereis no place for her. 

The daughters of the very poor often have better fortune than she inthis respect. They, from very early years, have known that they werenecessary to the family. Almost invariably they accept heavy andsometimes cruel burdens cheerfully, even proudly. It is the pride ofknowing themselves important to those whom they love. One of thedifficult things to combat in enforcing the laws which forbid childrenunder fourteen working, is the child's desire to help. He may hate thehardship, but at least there is in his lot none of that hopeless senseof futility which comes over the girl of high spirit when she realizesshe has no practical value in the group to which she belongs. "Notneeded"--that is one of the tragic experiences of the young girl inthe well-to-do family. To save herself, to meet the truth of her daywhich has taken hold of her, she must seek a productive place; thatis, leave home, seek work. If she has some special talent, knows whatshe wants to do, she is fortunate indeed. With the majority it iswork, something to do, a place where they can be independentlyproductive, that is sought. 

The girl of the family in moderate circumstances is no better off. Shemust contribute in some way, and there is no scientific management inher home--no study of ways and means which enables her to contributeand remain at home. She is driven outside in order to support herself. I cannot but believe that here is one of the gravest weaknesses in oureducational machinery, this failure to give the girl inclined toremain at home a training which would enable her to help make more ofa limited income. Nothing is so rare to-day as the fine habit ofmaking much of little. A dollar mixed with brains is worth five inevery place where dollars are used. Particularly is this true in thehousehold. The failure to teach how to mix brains and dollars, and toinspire respect for the undertaking, annually drives thousands ofgirls into our already overburdened industrial system who would behealthier and happier at home and who would render there a muchgreater economic service. Such work as is being done in certainWestern agricultural colleges for girls, in the Carnegie School forWomen in Pittsburg, in Miss Kittridge's Household Centers in New YorkCity, is a recognition of this need of making scientificmanagers--trained household workers--of young women. There is no morepractical way of relieving the industrial strain. 

It is not always the dependent and so humiliating position a girlfinds herself in that drives her from home. It is frequently thediscovery that she is a member of a group that has no responsibleplace in the community; that regards itself as a purely isolated, unrelated, irresponsible unit, --an atom without affinities! The homecan be, if it will, the most antisocial force in existence, for itcan, if it will, exist practically for itself. That excessiveindividualism, which is responsible for so many evils in our country, has encouraged this isolation. The girl who finds herself without aproductive place at home at the same time finds none of the fineinspiration which comes from fitting herself into a social scheme andhelping to do its work. The spirit of the age is social. She feels itscall, she sees how unresponsive, even antipathetic, to it her home is. She concludes that if she is to serve she must seek something to do insome remote city. The attraction the Social Settlement has for thegirl finds its base here. The loss to communities of their educatedyoung women, who find no response to their need, no place to serve intheir own society, is incalculable. 

It is not infrequent that a girl who may have by some chance offortune a sufficient sense of independence in her home, who knowsherself needed there, and is ready to perform the service, is drivenout by the persistence of that spirit of parental authority, whichlooks upon it as a duty to rule the life, particularly of thedaughter, as long as she is at home. There is nothing clearer thanthat the old domination of one person by another is a thing of thepast. A new spirit of coöperation and friendly direction has come intothe world. The home which it does not pervade cannot keep its young. 

The most essential thing for a woman to understand is that herbusiness is _not to order_ her daughter's life, but to assist thatdaughter to shape it herself. She should be prepared to say to her:"The most interesting and important thing in the world for you is towork out your own particular life. You must build it from the placewhere you stand and with the materials in your hands. Nobody else everstood in your particular place or ever will stand in one identical;nobody ever has or can possess the same materials. You alone can fusethe elements. Hold your place; do not try to shift into the place thatanother occupies. Keep your eye on what you have to work with, not onwhat somebody else has. The ultimate result, the originality, flavor, distinction, usefulness of your life, depend on the care, thereverence, and the intelligence with which you work up and out fromwhere you are and with what you have. "

It is only the woman who is prepared to say something like that to herdaughter, to help her to see it, and to rise to it that has broughtinto her home the spirit of to-day. 

Where there is failure at any one of these points, and if one fails, all probably will, since they are obvious elements in the liberal viewof life, the girl must go forth if her life is to go progressively on. She must seek work, less for the sake of work than for the sake oflife. To remain where she is, unproductive in a group which does notrecognize the calls of the present world and where _anotherperson_--for the mother who tries to force the individuality becomesanother person--insists on shaping her course, --to do this is toquench the spirit, stop the very breath of life. 

The girl goes forth to seek work. She has almost invariably the ideathat work outside the home has less of drudgery in it, _i. E. _ lessroutine and meanness, more excitement. She is unprepared for the yearsof steady grinding labor which she must go through to earn her breadin any trade or profession. She learns that work is work whether donein kitchen, sewing room, countinghouse, studio, or editor's sanctum, and all that keeps the operations which consume the bulk of theworker's time in any of these places from being drudgery is that hekeeps before him the end for which they are performed. The firstdisillusionment comes, then, when she faces the necessity of a longsteady pull for years if she is to "arrive. "

A second comes when she finds she must prove to a busy, driven worldthat she is worth its attention; she must do more than simply knockfor admission and declare her fealty to its ideals. She realizessooner or later that she is an outsider and must delve her way in. Nosapper works harder to make his trench than most young women do tomake stable places for themselves in strange communities. 

The gnawing loneliness of the girl who has left home to make her wayis one of the most fruitful causes of the questionable relations whichwell-born girls form more often than society realizes. The girl seizeseagerly every chance for companionship or pleasure. Her keen need ofit makes her overappreciative and undercritical. Moreover, she has theconfidence of ignorance. Most American girls are brought up as ifwrongdoing were impossible to them. Nobody has ever suggested to themthat they have the possibility of all crimes in their makeup! Parentsand teachers ordinarily have extraordinary skill in evading, butlittle in facing, the facts of life. 

Disarmed by her ignorance, the girl goes out to a freedom such as nocountry has ever before believed it safe to allow the young, eithergirl or boy. This freedom is of course the logical result of what wecall the "emancipation of women. " It is the swinging of the pendulumfrom the old system of chaperonage and authority. The weak point is inthe fact that the girl has not knowledge enough for her freedom. It isnot a return of the old system of guarded girls which is needed. Thatis impossible under modern conditions, out of harmony with modernideas. The great need is that the women of the country realize thatfreedom unaccompanied by knowledge is one of the most dangerous toolsthat can be put into a human being's hands. The reluctance of womento face this fact is the most discouraging side of the woman question. 

The girl who goes forth should go armed with knowledge. Moreover, inmoments of loneliness, when she is ready to slip, she should beliterally jerked back by the pull of the home. This hold of the homeis no chimerical thing. It is a positive, living reality. The home hasa power of projecting itself into the lives of those who go out fromit. It is where the girl does not carry away a sense of anuninterrupted relation--a certainty that she is a part of that groupand that achievement, that she is only carrying on, enlarging, helpingto extend, beautify, and ripen its work, that she is not homeless. Nothing can so hold her in her isolation as that sense. 

The Uneasy Woman of to-day who has fulfilled to the letter, as sheunderstands it, the Woman's Business, is frequently heard to say: "Myboys are in college; they do not need me. My girls are married or atwork, and they do not need me. I have nothing to do. My business iscomplete, I am retired, sidetracked. It is for this reason that I aska part in politics. " But her argument proves that she does notunderstand her business. She may want and need some outside occupationfor the very health of her business, politics perhaps, but certainlynot because her business is done. 

There is no more critical time for her than when her young people goout to try themselves in the world. The girl particularly needs thispull of the home, not only to keep her on a straight path, but to keepher from the narrowness and selfishness which overtake so manyself-supporting women who have no close family responsibilities. Thefetich which has been made, for many years now, of work for women, that is, of work outside of the home, frequently leads the woman totake some particular virtue to herself for self-support. She feelsthat it entitles her to special consideration, releases her fromobligations which she does not voluntarily assume. The attitude isenough to narrow and harden her life. The great preventive of thisdisaster is a responsible home relation. If she must share herearnings, it is a blessed thing for her. If not, she should share itsburdens and its hopes, in order to have a continued source of outsideinterest to broaden and soften her, to keep her out of the ranks ofthe charmless, self-centered, single women, whose only occupations areself-support and self-care. 

The problems involved in keeping the girl who has a home from beinghomeless are not simple. They are as intricate as anything a womancan face. They call for the highest understanding, responsiveness, andactivity. No futile devices will meet them. "My daughter is not cominghome to be idle, " I heard a fine-intentioned woman say recently. "Iinsist that she take all the care of her room, save the weeklycleaning, and that she keep the living-room tidy. " But what anoccupation for a young woman with a college degree, who for four yearshas led a busy, well-organized life in which each task was directedtoward some definite purpose! What a commentary on the mother'sunderstanding of "economic independence, " a matter of which she talkseloquently at her club! All that it proved was that the woman hadnever realized the girl's case, had never given consecutive, seriousthought to its handling. 

How little chance there will probably be for this same girl to do athome any serious work in case she develops a talent for it. The homeof the prosperous, energetic American woman is pervaded by a spirit ofeager and generally happy excitement. Good works and gay pleasuresfill its days in a wild jumble. There is little or no order, selection, or discretion discernible in the result. "Something doing"all the time seems to be the motto, and to take part in this headlessprocession of unrelated events becomes the first law of the household. The daughter has been living an organized life in college. She wantsto study or write, or do regular work of some kind. But there is noorder in the spirit of the place, no respect for order, no respect fora regular occupation. "I cannot work at home"--one hears the cry oftenenough. It is not always because of this atmosphere of helter-skelteractivity. It is often because of something worse, --an atmosphere ofslothful, pleasure-loving indifference to activities of all kinds, orone of tacit or expressed discontent with the burdens and thelimitations which are an inescapable part of the Business of Being aWoman. 

The problems connected with a girl's desire to be of social serviceare even more difficult. There is a curious blindness or indifferencein our town and country districts to social needs. There is stillalive the notion that sending flowers and jellies to the hospital, distributing old clothes wisely, and packing generous Christmasbaskets meet all obligations. Social service--of which one may, andgenerally does, hear a great deal in the women's clubs--is vaguelysupposed to be something which has to do with great cities and factorytowns, not with the small community. Yet one reason that socialproblems are so acute in great groups of men and women is that theyare so poorly met in small and scattered groups. There is the sameneed of industrial training, of efficient schools, of books, ofneighborliness, of innocent amusements, of finding opportunities forthe exceptional child, of looking after the adenoids and teeth, ofsegregating the tubercular, of doing all the scores of social servicesin the small town as in the great. Work is really more hopeful therebecause there is some possibility of knowing approximately _all_ thecases, which is never possible in the city. And yet how far fromgeneral it is to find anything like organized efforts at real socialservice in the small community. If a girl serves in such a community, it is because she has the parts of a pioneer--and few have. 

It is not the girl who, having a home, yet is homeless, who isresponsible for her situation. Her necessity is to see herself actingas a responsible and useful factor in an intelligent plan. If thefamily does not present itself to her as a grave, dignifiedundertaking on which several persons dear to her have embarked, howcan she be expected to tie to it? The old phrases which she may hearnow and then--"the honor of the family"--"duty to parents"--only savorof cant to her. They have no pricking vitality in them. She gets noacute reaction from them. She sees herself merely as an accident in anaccidental group, headed nowhere in particular. 

What it all amounts to is that the greatest art in the Woman'sBusiness is _using_ youth. It is no easy matter. Youth is a terribleforce, confident, selfish, unknowing. Rarely has it real courage, real interest in aught but itself. It has all to learn, but it isyouth, the most beautiful and hopeful thing in life. And it is thething upon which the full development of life for a woman depends. Shemust have it always at her side, if she is to know her own fullmeaning in the scheme of things. It is part of her tragedy that shefails so often to understand how essential is youth to her as anindividual, her happiness and her growth. 

The fact that a woman is childless is no reason in the present worldwhy she should be cut off from the developing and ennoblingassociation. Indeed, the childless woman of to-day, in addition to herobligation to herself, has a peculiar obligation to society in thematter of the friendless child. 

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHILDLESS WOMAN AND THE FRIENDLESS CHILD

One of the first conclusions forced on a thoughtful unprejudicedobserver of society is that the major percentage of its pains and itsvices result from a failure to make good connections. Children pineand even die for fruit in the cities, while a hundred miles awaythousands of barrels of apples are rotting on the ground. Faminedevastates one country, while the granaries of another are burstingwith food. Men and women drink themselves into the gutter from sheerloneliness, while other men and women shrivel up in isolated comfort. One of the most pitiful examples of this failure to connect is thatof the childless woman and the friendless, uncared-for child. 

There never at any time in any country in the world's history existedso large a group of women with whom responsibility and effort were amatter of choice, as exists to-day in the United States. While a largenumber of these free women are devoting themselves whole-heartedly topublic service of the most intelligent and ingenious kind, the greatmajority recognize no obligation to make any substantial return tosociety for its benefits. A small percentage of these areself-supporting, but the majority are purely parasitical. Indeed, theheaviest burden to-day on productive America, aside from the burdenimposed by a vicious industrial system, is that of its nonproductivewomen. They are the most demanding portion of our society. They spendmore money than any other group, are more insistent in their cry foramusement, are more resentful of interruptions of their pleasures andexcitements; they go to greater extremes of indolence and ofuneasiness. 

The really serious side to the existence of this parasitical group isthat great numbers of other women, not free, forced to produce, accepttheir standards of life. We hear women, useful women, everywheretalking about the desirability of not being obliged to do anything, commiserating women who must work, commiserating those who have heavyhousehold responsibilities, and by the whole gist of their words andacts influencing those younger and less experienced than themselves tobelieve that happiness lies in irresponsible living. 

Various gradations of the theory of which this is the extremeexpression show themselves. Thus there are great numbers of women ofmoderate means, who by a little daily effort can keep comfortable andattractive homes for themselves and their husbands, and yet who areutterly regardless of outside responsibilities, who are practicallyisolated in the community. They pass their lives in a little round ofhousehold activities, sunning and preening themselves in their longhours of leisure like so many sleek cats. 

There is still another division of this irresponsible class, who buildup frenzied existences for themselves in all sorts of outsideactivities. They plunge headlong into each new proposition forpleasure or social service only to desert it as something more noveland exciting and, for the instant, popular, appears. Steady, intelligent standing by an undertaking through its ups and downs, itsdull seasons and its unpopular phases, they are incapable of. Theirefforts have no relation to an intelligently conceived purpose. Withthem may be grouped those women who, by their canonization of theunimportant, construct heavily burdened but utterly fruitless lives. They laboriously pad out their days with trivial things, vanities, shams, and shadows, to which they give the serious undivided attentionwhich should be bestowed only on real enterprises. 

There are others who seek soporifics, release from a hearty tacklingof their individual situations, in absorbing work, a work whichperhaps fills their minds, but which is mere occupation--something tomake them forget--not an art for art's sake, not labor for its usefulfruits, but a protective, separating shield to shut out the insistentdemands of life in the place where they find themselves. 

All of these women are rightfully classed as irresponsible, whetherthey are moved by vanity, indolence, purposelessness, socialblindness, or, most pitiful, a sense of the emptiness of lifeunattended by the imagination which reveals the sources from whichlife is filled. No one of them is building a "House of Life" forherself. They are building gimcrack palaces, gingerbread cottages, structures which the first full blast of life will level to theground. 

These women are not peculiar to city or to country. They are scatterednation-wide. You find them on farms and in mansions, in offices and inacademic halls. In startling contrast there exists almost under thevery eaves of the roofs which shelter them a vast and pitiful group offriendless children, --the deserted babe, the "little mother, " the boysand girls running wild on side streets in every village in our landand in every slum in the cities, the factory child, the shop girl whohas no home. Let us remember that a goodly percentage of those at workhave homes and that they are engaged in a stimulating, if hard, effortto "help, " that they have the steadying consciousness that they areneeded. Nevertheless, this mass of youth is on the whole in anunnatural position--an antisocial relation. 

Society can never run rightfully until all its members are performingtheir natural functions. No woman, whatever her condition, can escapeher obligation to youth without youth suffering, and without sufferingherself. One of the crying needs of to-day is a crusade, a jar, whichwill force upon our free women the friendless children of the country, give them some sense of the undeniable relation they bear to them, show them that they are in a sense the cause of this pathetic groupand that it is their work to relieve it. 

True, for a woman there is nothing more painful than putting herselfface to face with the suffering of children. Yet for many years now wehave had in this country a large and increasing number who were goingthrough the daily pain of grappling with every phase of thedistressing problems which come from the poverty, friendlessness, andoverwork of the young. Out of their heartbreaking scrutinies therehave come certain determinations which are being adopted rapidlywherever the social sense is aroused. We may roughly sum up theseconclusions or determinations to be these:--

It is not necessary or endurable that children grow up starved andoverworked, that boys and girls be submitted to vicious surroundings, that talent be crushed, that young men and young women be devoured bycrime and greed. Youth, its nurturing and developing, has become thepassion of the day. This is the meaning of our bureaus of Child Labor, of our Children's Courts, our Houses of Correction, our Fresh-AirFunds and Vacation Homes, our laws regulating hours and conditions, our Social Settlements. 

At its very best, however, legislation, organization, work in groups, only indirectly reach the base of the trouble. These homeless babesand children, these neglected boys and girls, these reckless shop andfactory girls, are generally the pain and menace that they are becausethey have not had, as individuals, that guidance and affection ofwomen to which each has a natural right. No collective work, howevergood it may be, can protect or guide these children properly. Rightfully they should be the charge of that body of women who areunhampered, "free. " These women have more, or less, intelligence, time, and means. They owe society a return for their freedom, theirmeans, and their education. Nature has made them the guardians ofchildhood. Can they decently shirk the obligation any more than a mancan decently shirk his duty as a citizen? Indeed, the case of thewoman unresponsive to her duty toward youth is parallel to that of theman unresponsive to his duty toward public affairs. One is asprofitless and parasitical as the other. 

The man who has no notion of what is doing politically in his ownward, who does not sense the malign influences which may be working inhis neighborhood, in his very street, perhaps in the next house, whohas not his eye on the unscrupulous small politician who leads theward by the nose, who knows nothing of the records of the localcandidates, never goes to the primaries, --this man is one of the mostdangerous citizens we have. It is he who makes the machine possible. If he did his work, the governmental machine, which starts there withhim, would be sound. It would be begun by honest men interested inserving the country to the best of their ability, and on such afoundation no future solidarity of corruption would be possible. 

The individual woman's obligation toward the children and young peoplein her neighborhood is very like this obligation of the man to publicaffairs. It is for her to know the conditions under which thechildren, the boys and girls, young men and maids, in her vicinity areactually living. It is for her to be alert to their health, amusements, and general education. It is for her to find the one--andthere always is one--that actually needs her. It is for her tocorrelate her personal discoveries and experiences with the generalefforts of the community. 

This is no work for an occasional morning. It does not mean sporadicor even regular "neighborhood visiting. " It means observation, reflection, and study. It has nothing to do save indirectly withsocieties, or groups, or laws. It is a personal work, something nobodyelse can do, and something which, if it is neglected, adds just somuch more to the stream of uncared-for youth. How is it to be done?Have you ever watched a woman interested in birds making herobservations? She will get up at daylight to catch a note of a newsinger. She will study in detail the little family that is making itshome on her veranda. From the hour that the birds arrive in the springuntil the hour that they leave in the fall she misses nothing of theirdoings. It is a beautiful and profitable study, and it is a type ofwhat is required of a woman who would fulfill her obligation towardthe youth of her neighborhood. 

Could we have such study everywhere in country and town, whattragedies and shames we might be spared! A few months ago the wholenation was horrified by a riot in a prosperous small city of theMiddle West which ended in the lynching of a young man, a mere boy, who in trying to discharge his duty as a public official had killed aman. Some thirty persons, _over half of them boys under twenty yearsof age_, are to-day serving terms of from fifteen to twenty years inthe penitentiary for their part in this lynching. 

Their terrible work was no insane outbreak. Analyzed, it was a logicalconsequence of the social and political conditions under which theboys had been brought up. In a pretty, rich, busy town of 30, 000people proud of its churches and its schools, _eighty saloons_industriously plied their business--and part of their business, as italways is, was to train youths to become their patrons. 

What were the women doing in the town? I asked the question of one whoknew it. "Why, " he said, "they were doing just what women doeverywhere, no better, no worse. They had their clubs; I suppose adozen literary clubs, several sewing clubs, several bridge clubs, anda number of dancing clubs. I think they cared a little more for bridgethan for literature, many of them at least. They took little part incivic work, though they had done much for the city library and cityhospital. Many girls went to college, to the State Institute, toVassar and Smith. They came back to teach and to marry. It was just asit is everywhere. "

Another to whom I put the same question, answered me in a sympatheticletter full of understanding comment. The mingled devotion, energy, and blindness of the women the letter described, spoke in its everyline. They built charming homes, reared healthy, active children whomthey educated at any personal sacrifice--all within a circle of eightysaloons! To offset the saloons they built churches--a church for eachsect--each more gorgeous than its neighbor. It was in buildingchurches that they showed the "greatest tenacity of purpose. " They hada large temperance organization. It supported a rest room and metfortnightly to pray "ardently and sincerely. " How little this body ofgood women sensed their problem, how little they were fitted to dealwith it, my informant's comment reveals. "You doubtless remember thestory, " the letter runs, "of the old lady who deplored the shootingof craps because, though she didn't know what they were, 'life wasprobably as dear to them as to anybody. '"

"It was just as it is everywhere. " Busy with self and their immediatecircles, they went their daily ways unseeing, though these ways werehedged with a corruption whose rank and horrible offshoots at everystep clutched the feet of the children for whom they were responsible. 

Perhaps there is nothing to-day needed in this country more thandriving into the minds of women this personal obligation to do whatmay be called intensive gardening in youth. Whether a woman wishes tosee it or not, she is the center of a whirl of life. The health, thehappiness, and the future of those that are in this whirl are affectedvitally by what she is and does. To know all of the elements whichare circulating about her as a man knows, if he does his work, thepolitical and business elements in his own group, this is heressential task. That she should adjust her discoveries to theorganizations, political, educational, and religious, which are abouther, goes without saying, but these organizations are not the heart ofher matter. The heart of her matter lies in what she does for thosewho come into immediate contact with her. 

Her business firmly established in her immediate group should grow asa man's business does in the outer circle where he naturally operates. It will become stable or unstable exactly as trade or professionbecomes stable or unstable. Every year it should take on new elements, ramify, turn up new obligations, knit itself more firmly into the lifeof the community. With every year it should become necessarily morecomplicated, broader in interests, more demanding on her intellectualand spiritual qualities. Each one of the original members of her groupgathers others about himself. In the nature of the case she willbecome one of the strongest influences in these new groups. As amember goes out she will project herself into other communities orperhaps other lands, into all sorts of industries, professions, andarts. Her growth is absolutely natural. It is, too, one of the mosteconomical growths the world knows. Nothing is lost in it. She spreadsliterally like the banyan tree. 

Yet in spite of this perfectly obvious fact, there are people to-dayasking, with all appearance of sincerity, what a woman of fifty ormore can _do_! Their confining work in the home, say these observers, is done. A common suggestion is that they be utilized in politics. This suggestion has its comical side. A person who has nothing to doafter fifty years of life in a business as many-sided and demanding asthat of a woman, can hardly be expected to be worth much in a businessas complicated and uncertain as politics, and for which she has had notraining. The notion that the woman's business is ended at fifty orsixty is fantastic. It only ends there if she has been blind to themeaning of her own experiences; if she has never gone below thesurface of her task--never seen in it anything but physical relationsand duties; has sensed none of its intimate relations to thecommunity, none of its obligations toward those who have left her, none of those toward the oncoming generations. If it ends there, shehas failed to realize, too, the tremendous importance to all thosewho belong in her circle or who touch it _of what she makes ofherself_, of her personal achievement. 

A woman of fifty or sixty who has succeeded, has come to a point ofsound philosophy and serenity which is of the utmost value in themental and spiritual development of the group to which she belongs. Life at every one of its seven stages has its peculiar harrowingexperiences; hope mingles with uncertainty in youth; fear and strugglecharacterize early manhood; disillusionment, the question whether itis worth while, fill the years from forty to fifty, --but resolutegrappling with each period brings one out almost inevitably into afine serene certainty which cannot but have its effect on those whoare younger. Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is oneof the finest influences in the world. We hang Rembrandt's orWhistler's picture of his mother on our walls that we may feel itsquieting hand, the sense of peace and achievement which the picturecarries. We have no better illustration of the meaning of old age. 

Family and social groups should be a blend of all ages. One of thepresent weaknesses of our society is that we herd each age together. The young do not have enough of the stimulating intellectual influenceof their elders. The elders do not have enough of the vitalizinginfluence of the young. We make up our dinner party according to age, with the result that we lose the full, fine blend of life. 

The notion that a woman has no worthy place or occupation after she isfifty or sixty, and that she can be utilized in public affairs, couldonly be entertained by one who has no clear conception of eitherprivate or public affairs--no vision of the infinite reaches of theone or the infinite complexities of the other. Human society may belikened to two great circles, one revolving within the other. In theinner circle rules the woman. Here she breeds and trains the materialfor the outer circle, which exists only by and for her. That accidentmay throw her into this outer circle is of course true, but it is nother natural habitat, nor is she fitted by nature to live and circulatefreely there. We underestimate, too, the kind of experience which isessential for intelligent citizenship in this outer circle. To knowwhat is wise and needed there one should circulate in it. The man athis labor in the street, in the meeting places of men, learnsunconsciously, as a rule, the code, the meaning, the need of publicaffairs as woman learns those of private affairs. What it all amountsto is that the labor of the world is naturally divided between thetwo different beings that people the world. It is unfair to the womanthat she be asked to do the work of the outer circle. The man can dothat satisfactorily if she does her part; that is, if she prepares himthe material. Certainly, he can never come into the inner circle anddo her work. 

The idea that there is a kind of inequality for a woman in minding herown business and letting man do the same, comes from our confused andrather stupid notion of the meaning of equality. Popularly we havecome to regard being alike as being equal. We prove equality bywearing the same kind of clothes, studying the same books, regardlessof nature or capacity or future life. Insisting that women do the samethings that men do, may make the two exteriorly more alike--it doesnot make them more equal. Men and women are widely apart in functionsand in possibilities. They cannot be made equal by exterior deviceslike trousers, ballots, the study of Greek. The effort to make them sois much more likely to make them unequal. One only comes to hishighest power by following unconsciously and joyfully his own nature. We run the risk of destroying the capacity for equality when weattempt to make one human being like another human being. 

The theory that the class of free women considered here would be firedto unselfish interest in uncared-for youth if they were included inthe electorate of the nation is hardly sustainable. The ballot has notprevented the growth of a similar class of men. Something more bitingthan a new tool is needed to arouse men and women who are absorbed inself--some poignant experience which thrusts upon their indolentminds and into their restricted visions the actualities of life. 

It should be said, however, that the recent agitation for the ballothas served as such an experience for a good many women, particularlyin the East. Perhaps for the first time they have heard from thesuffrage platform of the "little mother, " the factory child, the girlliving on $6 a week. They have done more than espouse the suffragecause for the sake of the child; they have gone out to find where theycould serve. 

It is a new knowledge of that tide of life which breaks at her verygate that the childless and the free American woman needs, if she isto discharge her obligation to the uncared-for child. To force thesefacts upon her, to cry to her, "You are the woman, --you cannot escapethe guilt of the woe and crime which must come from the neglect ofchildhood in your radius, "--this is the business of every man andwoman who has had the pain and the privilege of seeing something ofthe actual life of the people of this world. 

CHAPTER IX

ON THE ENNOBLING OF THE WOMAN'S BUSINESS

That the varied, delicate, and difficult problems which crowd theattention of the woman in her social laboratory should ever beconsidered unworthy of first-class brains and training is but proof ofthe difficulty the human mind has in distinguishing values when in thethroes of social change. We rightly believe to-day that the world isnot nearly so well run as it would be if we could--or would--applyunselfishly what we already know. Each of us advocates his own pettheory of betterment, often to the exclusion of everybody else'stheory. 

One of the most disconcerting characteristics of advocates, conservative and radical, is their conscienceless treatment of facts. Rarely do they allow full value to that which qualifies or contradictstheir theories. The ardent and single-minded reformer is notinfrequently the worst sinner in this respect. To stir indignationagainst conditions, he paints them without a background and with utterdisregard of proportion. 

He wins, but he loses, by this method. He makes converts of those ofhis own kind, those who like him have rare powers for indignation andsacrifice, but little capacity or liking for the exact truth or forself-restraint. He turns from him many who are as zealous as he tochange conditions, but who demand that they be painted as they are andthat justice be rendered both to those who have fought against them inthe past and to those who are in different ways doing so to-day. 

The movement for a fuller life for American women has always sufferedfrom the disregard of some of its noblest followers, both for thingsas they are and for things as they have been. The persistentbelittling for campaign purposes of the Business of Being a Woman Ihave repeatedly referred to in this little series of essays; indeed, it has been founded on the proposition that the Uneasy Woman of to-dayis to a large degree the result of the belittlement of her naturaltask and that her chief need is to dignify, make scientific, professionalize, that task. 

I doubt if there is to-day a more disintegrating influence atwork--one more fatal to sound social development--than that whichbelittles the home and the position of the woman in it. As a socialinstitution nothing so far devised by man approaches the home in itsopportunity, nor equals it in its successes. 

The woman's position at its head is hard. The result of her pains andstruggles are rarely what she hopes, either for herself or for any oneconnected with her, but this is true of all human achievement. Thereis nothing done that does not mean self-denial, routine, disillusionment, and half realization. Even the superman goes the sameroad, coming out at the same halfway-up house! It is the meaning ofthe effort, not the half result, that counts. 

The pain and struggle of an enterprise are not what takes the heartout of a soldier; it is telling him his cause is mean, his fight invain. Show him a reason, and he dies exultant. The woman is theworld's one permanent soldier. After all war ceases she must go dailyto her fight with death. To tell her this giving of her life for lifeis merely a "female function, " not a human part, is to talk nonsenseand sacrilege. It is the clear conviction of even the most thoughtlessgirl that this way lies meaning and fulfillment of life, that givesher courage to go to her battle as a man-in-line to his, and like himshe comes out with a new understanding. The endless details of herlife, its routine and its restraints, have a reason now, as routineand discipline have for a soldier. She sees as he does that they arethe only means of securing the victory bought so dearly--of winningothers. 

From this high conviction the great mass of women never have and nevercan be turned. What does happen constantly, however, is loss of joyand courage in their undertaking. When these go, the vision goes. Thewoman feels only her burdens, not the big meaning in them. Sheremembers her daily grind, not the possibilities of her position. Shefalls an easy victim now to that underestimation of her business whichis so popular. If she is of gentle nature, she becomes apologetic, shehas "never done anything. " If she is aggressive, she becomes amilitant. In either case, she charges her dissatisfaction to thenature of her business. What has come to her is a common humanexperience, the discovery that nothing is quite what you expected itto be, that if hope is to be even halfway realized, it will be bycourage and persistency. It is not the woman's business that is atfault; it is the faulty handling of it and the human difficulty inkeeping heart when things grow hard. What she needs is a strengtheningof her wavering faith in her natural place in the world, to see herbusiness as a profession, its problems formulated and its relationsto the work of society, as a whole, clearly stated. 

Quite as great an injustice to her as the belittling of her businesshas been the practice, also for campaigning purposes, of denying her apart in the upbuilding of civilization. There was a time "back ofhistory, " says one of the popular leaders in the Woman's movement, "when men and women were friends and comrades--but from that time tothis she (woman) has held a subsidiary and exclusively feminineposition. The world has been wholly in the hands of men, and they havebelieved that men alone had the ability, felt the necessity, fordeveloping civilization, the business, education, and religion of theworld. "

Women's present aim she declares to be the "reassumption of theirshare in human life. " This is, of course, a modern putting of theList of Grievances with which the militant campaign started in thiscountry in the 40's, reënforced by the important point that women"back of history" enjoyed the privileges which the earlier militantsdeclared that man, "having in direct object the establishment of anabsolute tyranny over her, " had always usurped. 

Just how the lady knows that "back of history" women and men were moreperfect comrades than to-day, I do not know. Her proofs would beinteresting. If this is true, it reverses the laws which have governedall other human relations. Certainly, since history began, the onlyperiod where I can pretend to judge what has happened, the recordsshow that comradeship between men and women has risen and fallen withthe rise and fall of cultivation and of virtue. The general level isprobably higher to-day than ever before. 

Moreover, from these same records one might support as plausibly--andas falsely--the theory of a Woman-made World as the popular one of aMan-made World. There has been many a teacher and philosopher who hassustained some form of this former thesis, disclaiming against theexcessive power of women in shaping human affairs. The teachings ofthe Christian Church in regard to women, the charge that she keepsilent, that she obey, that she be meek and lowly--all grew out of thefear of the power she exercised at the period these teachings weregiven--a power which the saints believed prejudicial to good order andgood morals. There is more than one profound thinker of our own periodwho has arraigned her influence--Strindberg and Nietzsche among them. You cannot turn a page of history that the woman is not on it orbehind it. She is the most subtle and binding thread in the patternof Human Life!

For the American Woman of to-day to allow woman's part in the makingof this nation to be belittled is particularly unjust and cowardly. The American nation in its good and evil is what it is, as muchbecause of its women as because of its men. The truth of the matteris, there has never been any country, at any time, whatever may havebeen their social limitations or political disbarments, that womenhave not ranked with the men in actual capacity and achievement; thatis, men and women have risen and fallen together, whatever theapparent conditions. The failure to recognize this is due either toignorance of facts or to a willful disregard of them; usually it isthe former. For instance, one constantly hears to-day the exultant crythat women finally are beginning to take an interest and a part inpolitical and radical discussions. But there has never been a time inthis country's history when they were not active factors in suchdiscussion. The women of the American Revolutionary Period certainlychallenge sharply the women of to-day, both by their intelligentunderstanding of political issues and by their sympathetic coöperationin the struggle. It was the letters of women which led to that mostimportant factor in centralizing and instructing pre-revolutionaryopinion in New England, the Committee of Correspondence. There werefew more powerful political pamphleteers in that period than MercyWarren. We might very well learn a lesson which we need very much tolearn from the way women aided the Revolutionary cause through theirpower as consumers. As for sacrifice and devotion, that of the womanloses nothing in nobility when contrasted with that of the man. 

If we jump fifty years in the nation's history to the beginning of theagitation against slavery, we find women among the first and mostdaring of the protestants against the institution. It was for the sakeof shattering slavery that they broke the silence in public which byorder of the Christian Church they had so long kept--an order made, not for the sake of belittling women, but for the sake of establishingorder in churches and better insuring the new Christian code ofmorality. The courage and the radicalism of women of the 30's, 40's, and 50's in this country compare favorably with that of the men andwomen in any revolutionary period in any country that we may select. 

The American woman has played an honorable part in the making of ourcountry, and for this part she should have full credit. If she hadbeen as poor a stick, as downtrodden and ineffective as sometimespainted, she would not be a fit mate for the man beside whom she hasstruggled, and she would be as utterly unfit for the larger life shedesires as the most bigoted misogynist pictures her to be. 

Moreover, all things considered, she has been no greater sufferer frominjustice than man. I do not mean in saying this that she has not hadgrave and unjust handicaps, legal and social; I mean that when youcome to study the comparative situations of men and women as a mass atany time and in any country you will find them more nearly equal thanunequal, all things considered. Women have suffered injustice, butparallel have been the injustices men were enduring. It was not thefact that she was a woman that put her at a disadvantage so much asthe fact that might made right, and the physically weaker everywherebore the burden of the day. Go back no further than the beginnings ofthis Republic and admit all that can be said of the wrong in the lawswhich prevented a woman controlling the property she had inherited oraccumulated by her own efforts, which took from her a proper share inthe control of her child, --we must admit, too, the equal enormity ofthe laws which permitted man to exploit labor in the outrageous way hehas. It was not because he was a man that the labor was exploited--itwas because he was the weaker in the prevailing system. Woman's casewas parallel--she was the weaker in the system. It had always been thecase with men and women in the world that he who could took and thedevil got the hindermost. The way the laborer's cause has gone handin hand in this country the last hundred years with the woman's causeis a proof of the point. In the 30's of the nineteenth century, forillustration, the country was torn by a workingman's party whichcarried on a fierce agitation against banks and monopolies. Many ofits leaders were equally ardent in their support of Women's Rights asthey were then understood. The slavery agitation was coupled from thestart with the question of Women's Rights. It was injustice that wasbeing challenged--the right of the stronger to put the weaker at adisadvantage for any reason--because he was poor, not rich; black, notwhite; female, not male, --that is, there has been nothing special towomen in the injustice she has suffered except its particular form. Moreover, it was not man alone who was responsible for this injustice. Stronger women have often imposed upon the weak--men and women--asstrong men have done. In its essence, it is a human, not a sex, question--this of injustice. 

The hesitation of this country in the earlier part of the nineteenthcentury to accord to women the same educational facilities as to menis often cited as a proof of a deliberate effort to disparage women. But it should not be forgotten that the wisdom of universal maleeducation was hotly in debate. One of the ideals of radical reformersfor centuries had been to give to all the illumination of knowledge. But to teach those who did the labor of the world, its peasants andits serfs, was regarded by both Church and State as a folly and amenace. It was the establishment of a pure democracy that forced theexperiment of universal free instruction in this country. It has metwith opposition at every stage, and there is to-day a Mr. WorldlyWiseman at every corner bewailing the evils it has wrought. He must, too, be a hopeless Candide who can look on our experiment, wonderfuland inspiring as it is, and say its results have been the bestpossible. 

It was entirely logical, things beings as they were, that there shouldhave been strong opposition to giving girls the same training inschools as boys. That objection holds good to-day in many reflectiveminds. He again must be a hopeless optimist who believes that we haveworked out the best possible system of education for women. But thatthere was opposition to giving women the same educational facilitiesas men was not saying that there was or ever had been a conspiracy onfoot to keep her in intellectual limbo because she was a woman. Thehistory of learning shows clearly enough that women have alwaysshared in its rise. In the great revival of the sixteenth centurythey took an honorable part. "I see the robbers, hangmen, adventurers, hostlers of to-day more learned than the doctors and preacher of myyouth, " wrote Rabelais, and he added, "why, women and girls haveaspired to the heavenly manna of good learning. " Whenever aspirationhas been in the air, women have responded to it as men have, and havefound, as men have found, a way to satisfy their thirst. 

To come down to the period which concerns us chiefly, that of our ownRepublic, it is an utter misrepresentation of the women of theRevolution to claim that they were uneducated. All things considered, they were quite as well educated as the men. The actual achievementsof the eminent women produced by the system of training then in vogueis proof enough of the statement. Far and away the best letters by awoman, which have found their way into print in this country, arethose of Mrs. John Adams, written late in the eighteenth century andearly in the nineteenth. They deserve the permanent place in ourliterature which they have. But it was a period of good letter writingby women--if weak spelling and feminine spelling was, on the whole, quite as strong as masculine!

Out of that early system of education came the woman who was to writethe book which did more to stir the country against slavery than allthat ever had been written, Harriet Beecher Stowe. That systemproduced the scientist, who still represents American women in themind of the world, Maria Mitchell, the only American woman whose nameappears among the names of the world's great scholars inscribed on theBoston Public Library. It produced Dorothea Dix, who for twenty yearsbefore the Civil War carried on perhaps the most remarkableinvestigation of conditions that has ever been made in this country byman or woman, --the one which required the most courage, endurance, andpersistency, --her investigation of the then barbaric system forcaring--or not caring--for the insane. State after state enacted newlaws and instituted new methods solely on the showing of this onewoman. If there were no other case to offer to the frequent cry thatwomen have never had an influence on legislation, this would beenough. Moreover, this is but the most brilliant example of the kindof work women had been doing from the beginning of the Republic. 

To my mind there is no phase of their activities which reveals betterthe genuineness of their training than the initiative they took infounding schools of advanced grades for girls, and in organizingprimary and secondary schools on something like a national scale. MaryLyon's work for Mt. Holyoke College and Catherine Beecher's for theAmerican Woman's Education Association are the most substantialindividual achievements, though they are but types of what many womenwere doing and what women in general were backing up. It was work ofthe highest constructive type--original in its conception, full ofimagination and idealism, rich in its capacity for growth--a work tofit the aspiration of its day and so full of the future!

Now, when conditions are such that a few rise to great eminence fromthe ordinary ranks of life, it means a good general average. Themultitude of women of rare achievements, distinguishing theRevolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods of American history arethe best evidences of the seriousness, idealism, and intelligence ofthe women in general. Their services in the war are part of thetraditions of every family whose line runs back to those days. Loyal, spirited, ingenious, and uncomplaining, they are one of the finestproofs in history of the capacity of the women of the mass to respondwhole-heartedly to noble ideals, --one of the finest illustrations, too, of the type of service needed from women in great crises. But therank and file which conducted itself so honorably in the Revolutionwas not a whit more noble and intelligent than the rank and file ofthe succeeding period. It would have been impossible ever to haveestablished as promptly as was done the higher and the general schoolsfor girls if women had not given them the support they did, had notbeen willing, as one great educator of the early part of thenineteenth century has recorded--"to rise up early, to sit up late, toeat the bread of the most rigid economy, that their daughters might befavored with means of improvement superior to what they themselvespossessed. " And back of this self-denial was what? A desire that lifebe made easier for the daughter? Not at all--a desire that thedaughter be better equipped to "form the character of the futurecitizen of the Republic. "

It is not alone that justice is wounded by denying women a part in themaking of the civilized world--a more immediate wrong is the way themovement for a fuller, freer life for all human beings is hampered. Awoman with a masculine chip on her shoulder gives a divided attentionto the cause she serves. She complicates her human fight with a sexfight. However good tactics this may have been in the past, and I amfar from denying that there were periods it may have been goodpolitics, however poor morals, surely in this country to-day there isno sound reason for introducing such complications into our struggles. The American woman's life is the fullest in its opportunity, allthings considered, that any human beings harnessed into a complicatedsociety have ever enjoyed. To keep up the fight against man as thechief hindrance to the realization of her aspiration is merely toperpetuate in the intellectual world that instinct of the femaleanimal to be ever on guard against the male, save in those periodswhen she is in pursuit of him!

But complicating her problem is not the only injury she does her causeby this ignoring or belittling of woman's part in civilization. Shestrips herself of suggestion and inspiration--a loss that cannot bereckoned. The past is a wise teacher. There is none that can stir theheart more deeply or give to human affairs such dignity andsignificance. The meaning of woman's natural business in theworld--the part it has played in civilizing humanity--in forcing goodmorals and good manners, in giving a reason and so a desire forpeaceful arts and industries, the place it has had in persuading menand women that only self-restraint, courage, good cheer, and reverenceproduce the highest types of manhood and womanhood, --this is writtenon every page of history. 

Women need the ennobling influence of the past. They need tounderstand their integral part in human progress. To slur this over, ignore, or deny it, cripples their powers. It sets them at the foolisheffort of enlarging their lives by doing the things man does--notbecause they are certain that as human beings with a definite taskthey need--or society needs--these particular services or operationsfrom them, but because they conceive that this alone will prove themequal. The efforts of woman to prove herself equal to man is a work ofsupererogation. There is nothing he has ever done that she has notproved herself able to do equally well. But rarely is society wellserved by her undertaking his activities. Moreover, if man is toremain a civilized being, he must be held to his business of producerand protector. She cannot overlook her obligation to keep him up tohis part in the partnership, and she cannot wisely interfere too muchwith that part. The fate of the meddler is common knowledge!

A few women in every country have always and probably always will findwork and usefulness and happiness in exceptional tasks. They aresometimes women who are born with what we call "bachelor's souls"--aninteresting and sometimes even charming, though always an incomplete, possession! More often they are women who by the bungling machinery ofsociety have been cast aside. There is no reason why these womenshould be idle, miserable, selfish, or antisocial. There are richlives for them to work out and endless needs for them to meet. Butthey are not the women upon whom society depends; they are not theones who build the nation. The women who count are those who outnumberthem a hundred to one--the women who are at the great business offounding and filling those natural social centers which we call homes. Humanity will rise or fall as that center is strong or weak. It is thehuman core.