"How to be efficient though incompetent" is the title suggested by a
distinguished psychologist for the vocational appeals of the moment. Among
these raucous calls none is more annoying to the ear of experience than
the one which summons the college girl away from the bounty of the
sciences and the humanities to the grudging concreteness of a domestic
science, a household economy, from which stars and sonnets must perforce
be excluded. We have, indeed, no quarrel with the conspicuous place now
given to the word "home" in all discussions of women's vocations.
Suffragists and anti-suffragists, feminists and anti-feminists have united
to clear a noble term from the mists of sentimentality and to reinstate it
in the vocabulary of sincere and candid speakers. More frankly than a
quarter of a century ago, educated women may now glory in the work
allotted to their sex. The most radical feminist writer of the day has
given perfect expression to the home's demand. Husband and children, she
says, have been able to count on a woman "as they could count on the fire
on the hearth, the cool shade under the tree, the water in the well, the
bread in the sacrament." We may go farther and say that our high emprise
does not depend upon husband and children. Married or unmarried, fruitful
or barren, with a vocation or without, we must make of the world a home
for the race. So far from quarrelling with the hypothesis of the domestic
scientists, we turn it into a confession of faith. It is their conclusions
that will not bear the test of experience. Because women students can
anticipate no more important career than home-making, it is argued that
within their four undergraduate years training should be given in the
practical details of house-keeping. Any woman who has been both a student
and a housekeeper knows that this argument is fallacious.
Before examining it, however, we must clear away possible
misunderstandings. Our discussion concerns colleges and not elementary
schools. Those who are loudest in denouncing the aristocratic theory of a
college education must admit that colleges contain, even today, incredible
as it sometimes seems, a selected group of young women. It is also true
that the High Schools contain selected groups. Below them are the people's
schools. The girls who do not go beyond these are to be the wives of
working men, in many cases can learn nothing from their mothers, and
before marriage may themselves be caught in the treadmill of daily labor.
It is probable that to these children of impoverished future we should
give the chance to learn in school facts which may make directly for
national health and well-being. But the girls in the most democratic state
university in this country are selected by their own ambition, if by
nothing else, for a higher level of life. Their power and their
opportunities to learn do not end on Commencement Day. The higher we go in
the scale of education, until we reach the graduate professional schools,
the less are we able and the less need we be concerned to anticipate the
specific activities of the future.
Furthermore, we are discussing colleges of "liberal" studies, not
technical schools. Into the former have strayed many students who belong
in the latter. The tragic thing about their errantry is that presidents
and faculties, instead of setting them in the right path, try to make the
college over to suit them. The rightful heirs to the knowledge of the ages
are despoiled. The most down-trodden students are those who cherish a
passion for the intellectual life. Among these are as many women as men.
If domestic science were confined to separate schools, as all applied
sciences ought to be, we should have nothing but praise for a subject
admirably conceived, and often admirably taught. In these schools it may
be studied by such High School graduates as prefer to deal with practical
rather than with pure science, and, in a larger way, by such college
graduates as wish to supplement theory with practice for professional
purposes. But in liberal colleges domestic science is but dross handed out
to seekers after gold. Against its intrusion into the curriculum no
protest can be too stern.
Faith in this study seems to rest upon the belief that the actual
experiences of life can be anticipated. This is a fallacy. There is no
dress rehearsal for the rôle of "wife and mother." It is a question of
experience piled on experience, life piled on life. The only way to
perform the tasks, understand the duties, accept the joys and sorrows of
any given stage of existence is to have performed the tasks, learned the
duties, fought out the joys and sorrows of earlier stages. In so far as
"housekeeping" means the application of principles of nutrition and
sanitation, these principles can be acquired at the proper time by an
active, well-trained mind. The preparation needed is not to have learned
facts three or five or ten years in advance, when theories and appliances
may have been very different, but to have taken up one subject after
another, finding how to master principles and details. This new subject is
not recondite nor are we unconquerably stupid. To learn as we go--_discere
ambulando_--need not turn the home into an experiment station.
But "every woman knows" that housekeeping, when it is a labor of love and
not a paid profession, goes far deeper than ordering meals or keeping
refrigerators clean, or making an invalid's bed with hospital precision.
We are more than cooks. We furnish power for the day's work of men, and
for the growth of children's souls. We are more than parlor maids. We are
artists, informing material objects with a living spirit. We are more even
than trained nurses. We are companions along the roads of pain, comrades,
it may be, at the gates of death. Back of our willingness to do our full
work must lie something profounder than lectures on bacteria, or interior
decoration, or an invalid's diet or a baby's bath. Specific knowledge can
be obtained in a hurry by a trained student. What cannot be obtained by
any sudden action of the mind is _the habit_ of projecting a task against
the background of human experience as that experience has been revealed in
history and literature, and of throwing into details the enthusiasm born
of this larger vision. She is fortunate who comes to the task of making a
home with this habit already formed. Her student life may have cast no
shadow of the future. When she was reading Æschylus or Berkeley, or
writing reports on the Italian despots, or counting the segments of a
beetle's antennæ, she may not have foreseen the hours when the manner of
life and the manner of death of human beings would depend upon her. She
was merely sanely absorbed in the tasks of her present. But in later life
she comes to see that in performing them, she learned to disentangle the
momentary from the permanent, to prefer courage to cowardice, to pay the
price of hard work for values received. Age may bring what youth
withholds, a sense of humor, a mellow sympathy. But only youth can begin
that habitual discipline of mind and will which is the root, if not of all
success, at least of that which blooms in the comfort of other people.
Carry the logic of the vocation-mongers to its extreme. Grant that every
girl in college ought someday to marry, and that we must train her, while
we have her, for this profession. Then let the college insist on honest
work, clear thinking and bright imagination in those great fields in which
successive generations reap their intellectual harvest. Captain Rostron of
the Carpathia once spoke to a body of college students who were on fire
with enthusiasm for the rescuer of the Titanic's survivors. He ended with
some such words as these: "Go back to your classes and work hard. I
scarcely knew that night what orders were coming out when I opened my
mouth to speak, but I can tell you that I had been preparing to give those
orders ever since I was a boy in school." Many a home may be saved from
shipwreck in the future because today girls are doing their duty in their
Greek class rooms and Physics laboratories.
But this fallacy of domesticity probes deeper than we have yet indicated.
It is, in the last analysis, superficial to ticket ourselves off as
house-keepers or even as women. What are these unplumbed wastes between
housekeepers and teachers, mothers and scholars, civil engineers and
professors of Greek, senators and journalists, bankers and poets, men and
women? A philosopher has pointed out that what we share is vastly greater
than what separates us. We walk upon and must know the same earth. We live
under the same sun and stars. In our bodies we are subject to the same
laws of physics, biology and chemistry. We speak the same language, and
must shape it to our use. We are products of the same past, and must
understand it in order to understand the present. We are vexed by the same
questions about Good and Evil, Will and Destiny. We all bury our dead. We
shall all die ourselves. Back of our vocations lies human life. Back of
the streams in which we dabble is that immortal sea which brought us
hither. To sport upon its shore and hear the roll of its mighty waters is
the divine privilege of youth.
If any difference is to be made in the education of boys and girls, it
must be with the purpose of giving to future women more that is
"unvocational," "unapplied," "unpractical." As it happens, such studies as
these are the ones which the mother of a family, as well as a teacher or
writer, is most sure to apply practically in her vocation. The last word
on this aspect of the subject was said by a woman in a small Maine town.
Her father had been a day laborer, her husband was a mechanic. She had
five children, and, of course, did all the house-work. She also belonged
to a club which studied French history. To a foolish expression of
surprise that with all her little children she could find time to write a
paper on Louis XVI she retorted angrily: "With all my children! It is for
my children that I do it. I do not mean that they shall have to go out of
their home, as I have had to, for everything interesting." But the larger
truth is that the value of a woman as a mother depends precisely upon her
value as a human being. And it is for that reason that in her youth we
must lead one who is truly thirsty only to fountains pouring from the
heaven's brink. It might seem cruel if it did not merely illustrate the
law of risk involved in any creative process, that the more generously
women fulfil the "function of their sex" the more they are in danger of
losing their souls to furnish a mess of pottage. The risk of life for life
at a child's birth is more dramatic but no truer than the risk of soul for
body as the child grows. In the midst of petty household cares the nervous
system may become a master instead of a servant, a breeder of distempers
rather than a feeder of the imagination. The unhappiness of homes, the
failure of marriage, are due as often to the poverty-stricken minds, the
narrowed vision of women as to the vice of men.
Their sense is with their senses all mix'd in,
Destroyed by subtleties these women are.
George Meredith's prayer for us, "more brain, O Lord, more brain!" we
shall still need when "votes for women" has become an outworn slogan.
No one claims that character is produced only by college training or any
other form of education. There are illiterate women whose wills are so
steady, whose hearts are so generous, and whose spirits seem to be so
continuously refreshed that we look up to them with reverence. They have
their own fountains. It would be a mistake to suppose that because they
are "open at the outlet" they are "closed at the reservoir." But there is
a class of women who are impelled toward knowledge (as still others are
impelled toward music or art) and whose success in anything they do will
depend upon their state of mind. We ought to assume that the girls who go
to college belong to this class, however far from the springs of Helicon
they mean to march in the future. It is a terrible thing that we should
think of taking one hour of their time while they are in college for any
course that does not enrich the intellect and add to the treasury of
thoughts and ideas upon which the woman with a mind will always be
drawing. Spirit is greater than intellect, and may survive it in the
course of a long life. But in the active years, for this kind of woman,
the mental life becomes one with the spiritual. A lusty serviceableness
will issue from their union. If mental interests seem sterile, the cure,
as far as the college is concerned with it, is to deepen, not to lessen
the love of learning. The renewal of sincerity, humility and enthusiasm in
the age-old search for truth is more necessary than the introduction of
new courses, which must be applied to be of value, and which at this time
in a girl's experience, and under these conditions, can give only partial
and superficial data.
Our lives are subject to a thousand changes. In the home as well as out of
it, we shall meet, face to face, fruition and disappointment, rapture and
pain, hope and despair. In these tests of the soul's health what good will
_domestic_ science do us? Not by sanitation is sanity brought forth. Women
do not gather courage from calories, nor faith from refrigerators. But
every added milestone along the road from youth to age shows us the truth
of Cicero's claim, made after he had borne public care and known private
grief, for the faithful, homely companionship of intellectual studies:
"For other things belong neither to all times and ages nor all places; but
these pursuits feed our growing years, bring charm to ripened age, adorn
prosperity, offer a refuge and solace to adversity, delight us at home, do
not handicap us abroad, abide with us through the watches of the night, go
with us on our travels, make holiday with us in the country."
Upon women, in crucial hours, may depend the peace of the old, the fortune
of the middle-aged, the hopefulness of the young. In such an hour we do
not wish to be dismissed as were the women of Socrates's family, who had
had no part in the bright life of the Athens of which he was taking leave.
Shall we become the bread in the sacrament of life, ourselves unfed? the
fire on the hearth, ourselves unkindled?