A Future for Women.
From the last report of the Bureau of Education it appears that twice as
many girls as boys enter high schools in the United States, and that
three times as many complete the four years' course. "Nature," in
commenting upon this fact, attributes it to the great attractiveness of
commercial pursuits in this country, and the consequent eagerness of
boys to enter upon them at as early an age as possible. This is
doubtless the true reason, and the disproportion is more likely to
increase than to diminish, even though the actual number of boys who
rush into a money-making career as soon as they have mastered the
arithmetic necessary for it may be growing smaller. It is beginning,
moreover, to be an every-day matter for women to receive a college
education. There are already three well-filled colleges of high rank
exclusively their own, and the new Bryn Mawr bids fair to be a powerful
rival to Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley. Many of the colleges for men are
open to them; now, and the capitulation of those strongholds of
conservatism. Cambridge. New Haven, and Baltimore, is only a question of
time. Great colleges are ravenous for fresh endowments, and the offer of
a large sum of money may at any moment procure from them the full
admission of women. It is not impossible that before many years have
passed there will be as many women as men receiving a college education.
How is this army of educated women going to occupy itself?
There is another aspect to the question. Not only is the mass of women
better fitted than ever before for worthy occupation, there has never
been a time nor a country in which their traditionary sphere has shrunk
to so small dimensions. Nowhere else are there so many women of such a
station that they are not obliged to toil and spin, nor to sleep all day
to make up for nights of dissipation. For all those who do not have to
concern themselves with the wherewithal of living, the art of living
easily has been brought to a state of great perfection. The general care
of the house and of the children is still the duty of the woman, but the
labor involved in acquitting herself of that duty is a very different
matter from what it was a generation ago. Then all her energies were
needed to bring up a family well. Brewing and baking and soap- and
candle-making were all carried on in the house, and there were a dozen
children to be kept neatly dressed with the aid of no needle but her
own. Now the purchase of the day's supplies is the only important demand
upon her time; well-trained servants, the descendants of the raw Irish
girl her mother struggled with, are capable of carrying on the cooking
and the scrubbing by themselves. Sewing it is hardly worth her while to
do in the house. Stitching her linen collars was once an important item
in her year's work; now it is safe to say that there is not a single
woman who does not buy her collars ready made. Making cotton cloth into
undergarments has become a manufacture in the unetymological sense of
the word. The Viscount de Campo-Grande, in addressing the Royal Academy
of Moral and Political Sciences at Madrid, two years ago, admitted that
sewing was no longer an economy, but urged women to practise it still
for the purpose of quieting their nerves. But the modern American woman
who has had a healthy bringing up, who has divided her girlhood between
vigorous study and active out-door exercise, who can row and skate and
play ball and tennis with her brothers, has no unquiet nerves. She does
not ask for sedatives, but for some high stimulus to call into play her
strong and well-trained faculties. Money-making, the natural sphere of
man, has become a more and more absorbing pursuit, while the usual
feminine occupations have become more than ever trivial and unimportant
at the very moment when the feminine mind has taken a new start in its
development. The woman who is fresh from reading Gauss and Pindar, and
who has taken sides in the discussion between the adherents of Roscher
and of Mill, cannot easily content herself with the petty economies that
result from doing her own cutting and fitting and dusting and
table-setting. Still less, if she has not married, is she satisfied to
look forward to the position of nursery governess to her sister-in-law's
children. Her education has fitted her for something better than to save
the wages of an upper servant. Again the question is forced upon her,
where can she find a fitting field for the exercise of her powers?
To many people, who have all the means of existence they care for
without a struggle, it seems that the only thing that can give a
thorough interest and zest to life is to devote themselves to the
elevation of the degraded classes of society. They find such monotony in
their own comfortable ways of living, and the misery of the very poor
seems so appalling to them, that they cannot escape from the passionate
desire to spend themselves in their service. The problems connected with
the relief and the prevention of the wretchedness by which they are
surrounded have all the interest of a scientific experiment, and are
capable of calling out all the fervor of a religion. But for the few
people here and there who have now the passion of the reformer it is not
impossible that another generation may see many thousands. A second
christianization of the world may convert all the happy into the
consolers of the unhappy, instead of leading people to absorb themselves
in the question of their own salvation. No one can say how great a
change might be made in the fair face of the earth if the effort to
remove the causes of poverty and of disease should become the serious
occupation of half mankind. In the lower stages of existence the
extermination of evil has been the work of a slow and gradual process.
Millions of individuals have been sacrificed in order to produce the few
who were fitted to their surroundings. But at last a creature has been
produced of so much intelligence that he is able to undertake his own
further development. He can speculate upon the causes of his failures in
the search for happiness, and he can apply remedies. It is true that
those remedies have often been productive of more harm than good, it is
true that it would be hard to calculate the evil effects of the English
poor-laws, for instance, but all the experiments that have hitherto
worked badly are but so much material from which to draw a knowledge of
better methods. When the Wlllimantic Thread Company has found a way to
make its girls come singing from their work as they go to it, and to
make better thread at the same time, no one can say that great changes
may not be brought about when once scientific methods shall have been
discovered for the extermination of disease and crime. What more
interesting field for investigation, for theory, for active work, can
women find than that large kind of charity which is to supersede in the
future the indiscriminate alms-giving of the past? The unselfishness
that is demanded by the life of a reformer they have already in large
abundance. There is no limit to the devotion which many women show their
families, but such devotion has in these days become so unnecessary as
to be little more than a higher form of selfishness. Perhaps it only
needs a leader to turn this store of energy into wider channels and to
make it subservient to larger ends. Perhaps the labor and patience and
self-renunciation that are necessary to the regeneration of the world
are to come from women. Such an absolute disregard of self as they are
capable of, if it were once allowed to overflow the narrow limits of the
home, might in no long time turn a goodly portion of the world into a
garden of roses. There are still men who wish to appropriate to
themselves all the high qualities of their women, but they belong to a
race that is destined to rapid extinction, and to most rapid extinction
in this country. That American men are more thoroughly chivalrous than
English is a common belief. It was curiously confirmed by the English
clergyman who wrote to the "Nation," some years ago, to describe the
qualities which an English clergyman ought to have in order to be
successful in this country, and who said that he had found it necessary
not to let it be known that his wife warmed his slippers for him. The
theory that woman exists solely for the purpose of smoothing the
wrinkles from the brow of man is one that seldom finds expression now,
except in the Lenten sermons of men who are content to drop out of the
ranks of those who influence opinion. But the great freedom that the
modern woman has gained for herself, the thorough education that is for
the first time within her reach, the strong sympathies that are her
inheritance,--these are grounds of a responsibility that she cannot but
feel to be a heavy one. What better outlet can she find for her
activities than to carry forward that slow process of fitting together
the human race and its surroundings which it is no longer necessary to
leave to chance?