Nowhere does a human being escape compulsion. Even were he alone in the
world he would be forced to obey the physical laws governing gravity,
heat, cold, hunger and disease. No matter what his desires might be, he
would find himself limited and constrained by fixed laws, the inexorable
penalties of which he could escape only by obedience. If the man were
not alone, then each one of his companions would limit his freedom, and
he would limit each one in the group, if they were to live together in
peace and efficiency; and yet each of the man's companions would help to
free him from the tyranny of physical forces, from the social pressure
of others, and even from the bondage of his own nature.
Independence is thus an ideal to be achieved only through obedience. It
begins in self-subordination and reaches its finest realization in
social subordination. Since the beginning of time men who thought have
always dreamed of freedom; and for two hundred years now independence
has been a word to conjure with. But in so far as independence means
freedom to follow one's own unregulated desires, it is a fantastic and
dangerous dream; and yet this dream of impossible independence has been
among the greatest influences in furthering human development in the
past.
The old-time dependence of one individual on the immediate caprices of
another largely disappeared with the passing of slavery. But in place of
this personal subjection has come a more complex and in some ways more
compelling and crushing control through the monopoly of wealth. Property
has become the medium through which the most binding of human relations
are organized. Accumulated wealth has become a great reservoir of power
to which some individuals gain access through rights of birth, others
through carefully guarded privileges, and still others through cunning
devices or through force; but the masses of the people must gain their
fragments of this wealth through arduous lifelong labor. Even the earth,
the original source of all wealth, is parceled out, and all of it is now
owned by individuals or groups who control it in their own interests.
One man may thus have thousands of acres which he cannot use, and which
he will not allow others to use, while another has not where to lay his
head. Laws jealously guard this wealth, which is the key to all
opportunity; and public opinion, that most subtle, pervasive and
compelling of all forms of law, gathers a thousand sacred initiations,
rites, ceremonies, prohibitions and ex-communications around it. A man
who has killed his neighbor, or ruined his friend's family, may be less
punished by society than one who cheats at cards.
In primitive life a man may be a man by virtue of what he is; to-day he
may have all the rights and privileges of any man by virtue of what he
possesses. In any community can be found strong men, honest, though
misplaced or unfortunate, begging bread, wasting their lives for want of
money to live decently. And beside these one sees other men of weak
physique and feeble minds, who have lived as parasites on society all
their lives, but who are handsomely dressed, well fed, and possessed of
power to do as they will, simply because they have access to wealth. It
is no wonder that if one would seek freedom to-day in America he must
look for her image on a gold coin.
It is not difficult to see why property has become such a powerful
instrument in civilization. Anything which a person really owns, in a
psychological sense, is a home for his soul. Really owning an object, a
toy, a garment, a watch or a home, means infusing one's personality into
it. A man who possesses significant things has a new body through which
his soul can work; this body trains his powers; and it should give him
life more abundantly. A landless man must become a soulless man. Of
course, we are not here speaking of legal ownership. Many people own
legally things into which they have never infused themselves; sometimes
they have so many things that no individual could possibly infuse
himself into them.
These conditions may prevail even in primitive life, but to-day they
have been vastly increased through the fact that with advancing
civilization money was devised. This is a system of counters, generally
coin or paper, not really valuable in themselves, but always resting
back for value on the earth, or on something derived from it. In the
past it was supposed that there were some things which, because of their
nature, were not marketable, while others were beyond price. To-day we
set values on everything, even on men's bodies; eyes, ears, legs and
lives can be priced. There are, in fact, insurance companies and
factories that have regular schedules of value for various parts of the
body. Our courts set prices on blighted affections, damaged reputations,
social advancements, impaired digestions, damaged complexions, nervous
shocks and extreme humiliations. Even a woman's honor may have a price
in dollars.
These property rights, like the rights of the person, have always been
subject to violence. Powerful individuals and groups have always been
able to overstep legal restrictions and public opinion, and seize what
they desired. The land grabbing going on in North Africa and Persia
to-day and the activity of great industrial monopolies at home, show us
that some property rights still need to be secured by force. In this
struggle, it has come about naturally that men, being stronger, freer
and less scrupulous than women, have outstripped them and have so far
had a pretty complete monopoly of wealth. In fact women themselves have
at times become property. In such times a man who stole or bought a
woman, naturally took over with her all her rights in real estate and
personal property as well as her person and her services.
Only gradually did women gain power to hold property themselves. Mainly
because fathers wished to preserve property in their families, the right
of women to inherit became slowly established as civilization advanced.
In Judea, Greece and Rome, certain rights of a woman to hold property
were clearly settled. In the reversion to force under feudalism, woman's
rights to outside property suffered; but they have been gradually
restored during the last few centuries. To-day, in civilized lands, a
woman's rights to property, inherited or definitely given her or
purchased by her, are everywhere recognized, if she does not marry. In
France, and other Latin countries, she may still lose control of her
property if she takes a husband; but in northern and western lands, even
a married woman may retain her possessions.
Woman's body, too, is increasingly looked upon as her personal property.
With the raising of the age of consent; with increasing severity in laws
punishing rape, and with the abrogation of judicial orders for the
restitution of marital rights, it is now quite generally recognized that
a woman should have the right to control her own person. Still, in many
lands there is much to be done before this right is fully safeguarded.
The place where a woman has not yet achieved economic freedom is in the
disposal of her labor. One must remember, however, in this connection,
that not only is there no fixed standard of values in human service as
yet, but that many indispensable forms of service have not even been
legally recognized as valuable. In early forms of civilization, fighting
and praying were considered the most important work the community
received, and warriors and priests gained the big rewards. They
received lands, gold, servants and dignities, while industrial workers,
even the directors, were despised. To-day we have reversed all this and
we may pay a general only five thousand dollars a year, and a priest
eight hundred dollars, while a man who develops a big industry may
receive a hundred thousand dollars annually. Again, a man who invents a
new gun may be given a fortune, like that of Herr Krupp, while a man who
invents a surgical instrument is prevented by the ethics of his
profession from even patenting it. If Pasteur had been paid for his
services to France and to humanity, he would have ranked in the
financial world with Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Schwab. We pay a State
superintendent of public instruction ten thousand dollars a year; but
Miss Jane Addams, as instructor in ethics to the United States, receives
no salary, and she must even beg the money to maintain her laboratory at
Hull House. The whole question of payment for services is in a chaotic
condition. Those who serve mankind most faithfully are rewarded on the
principle, "From each according to his ability;" but nowhere is the
remainder of the principle, "To each according to his needs,"
recognized. Hence our greatest servants must still beg support from our
cleverest exploiters.
Domestic service is indispensable to society, but so far it has remained
in the field of semi-slavery and uncertain barter; in a word, it is
still in the feudal stage. The woman gives what she is and has, and
nominally she gets protection and support. Sometimes these fail and, on
the other hand, she occasionally receives the unearned gifts supposed to
befit a potentate or a shrine. As women become educated they find this
condition of uncertainty and instability unbearable. They are willing to
work, but they must have a chance to think and to plan their lives
according to their individual needs. Some degree of economic
independence is necessary to intelligent thinking and orderly living. It
is not that women are demanding more property; they are demanding some
definite individual property as a home for their souls; and they are
coming to realize that if this property rests on some one else's
feelings and caprices it is no home for the soul; it is only a tavern.
This conception is well illustrated by the case of a woman in western
New York, who married about 1850, and went to live on a farm with her
husband. They had small means, but she brought seven hundred dollars to
the altar, which was more than he possessed in ready capital. Her part
was, however, soon swallowed up in the general business, and while there
was a tacit agreement, voiced at long intervals, that she had put
something into the business, her part never increased, though the man
with whom she worked grew well-to-do. Certain feudal rights in the
butter the woman made and in the chickens she raised, yielded her small
sums, which often escaped her, but which she sometimes secured and put
into a few silver spoons and dishes for her table, a square of Brussels
carpet, three lace curtains, a marble topped stand, and six horsehair
covered chairs for her parlor. These articles were considered in a very
special sense her own. The man might have sold them and used the money,
but public opinion would have condemned him had he done so.
Meantime the woman cooked for the family and the hired men, scrubbed
and washed and mended. She strained and skimmed the milk from a dozen
cows, and churned the butter; she fed the calves; cared for the hens;
dug in the garden; gathered the vegetables; did the family sewing; and
stole fragments of time for her flower-beds. Her hours were from five in
the morning until nine at night, three hundred and sixty-five days in
the year, with no half-days or Sundays off.
Incidentally she read her Bible, maintained religious exercises in the
village, provided the church with a carpet by methods of indirection and
kept the church clean. She upheld a moral standard toward which men only
weakly struggled; hunted down and drove away all other women who refused
equal service to their lords; ministered to the neighboring sick; and
doled out alms in winter-time. Her home was a social and industrial
microcosm which she conducted as a feudal holding under the protection
of her lord. It would be an interesting study to work out the rules of
this feudal relation between husband and wife in any agricultural
community. They would be found as varied, as unjust and arbitrary, and
as generous, as those of the old régime in France.
A woman in a home is supposed to furnish three kinds of service. She
must be a housekeeper, a wife and a mother. As housekeeper, her services
can be estimated in current values running from three to twenty-five
dollars a week with board and lodging. The other two kinds of service
have never been reduced to monetary values.
As a wife, a woman is supposed to give her love, her person, her
sympathy and inspiration; the personal care of a husband, including his
clothes, attention to his relations and friends and general management
of his social position and reputation. If she fills this position well,
she is mistress, valet, confidential adviser and public entertainer.
Possibly these services can be rated except the first, and even here the
divorce courts scale alienated affections all the way from five hundred
to twenty-five thousand dollars, according to the appearance of the
woman and the skill of contending lawyers.
As a mother, the woman is supposed to give children a good heritage,
nurse them, care for them, doctor them and train them. We have
established values for these services as wet-nurse, nurse-maid,
governess, doctor and teacher, but who can estimate a woman's value in
giving a child a good heritage?
It is no wonder that such a difficult problem has remained thus far
unsolved. Here and there a man gives his wife a household allowance,
from the money they earn in common, and she struggles to save from it
some fragments for her individual needs; others put their wives on a
salary; and some others divide the income on a fractional basis. But the
slightest study of existing conditions must convince any one that women
are everywhere deeply dissatisfied with their economic relations to the
family. On referring recently to this fact before an audience almost
equally divided between suffragists and anti-suffragists, I found every
woman present applauding the statement. Another time when I asked more
than sixty of the wealthiest women in one of our cities how many were
dissatisfied with their relations to the family property, explaining
that I was not asking how many wanted more money but how many wanted a
different relation to the family money, all the women raised their
hands except three and they all had private property.
Meantime, economic changes, to be described in the next chapter, have
transformed our homes and nearly eight million women have gone outside
to earn money. The gladness with which they have gone shows that they
were not afraid to work, though at first the money did not belong to
them, but to their families. Almost everywhere in the United States the
money women now earn is their own; only in Louisiana can the husband
collect his wife's wages. Any one who reads Mrs. Gilman's masterly study
of the evil effects accompanying woman's economic independence must feel
how far-reaching are not only the discontent but also the evil
influences of our present system through over-emphasizing sex and
through corrupting the public thinking and feeling concerning services
and wages in general.[32]
[32] CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, _Woman and Economics_, Boston: Small,
Maynard & Co., 1898. See, also, _Woman and Labor_, by OLIVE SCHREINER,
New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.
Yet no one can seriously approach this problem in his own person
without feeling that the relations of husband and wife contain elements
that not only make it impossible to resolve the woman's service into
money values, but that would make it useless to do so even if it could
be done. The most distinctive quality of love is its desire to give.
Love that seeks to get is not love. If when a woman gives herself she
tries to secure individual property it will be only that she may give it
to the man she loves. Marriage is a partnership of soul and body, and
this includes property. It still remains true, however, that each must
have in order that he may give. Besides this, there are always outside
obligations, and special needs within the group, that require individual
property for their realization.
In the past, the partnership of marriage has been incomplete on the
property side; why not complete it? Why not reorganize our laws and our
public opinion so that two people who establish a family, putting into
it all they have, should pay out of the income the necessary family
expenses and divide all else equally between the parties? Property
acquired before marriage, and all inherited property, might well be held
in individual right since it should never be a prize for prostitution,
not even when it is euphemistically termed "a good home."
Under equal suffrage Idaho has passed such a law, and all property
gained after marriage belongs equally to husband and wife. If the wife
dies, her heirs, in absence of a will, inherit half of the family
property. If the two separate, the court, in absence of an outside
agreement, settles the property as it does the children. The judge may
order that it be divided equally, or he may give it all to either party,
according to conditions; but the woman has identical rights with the
man. Surely some such solution is demanded by our present unrest. No one
will ever be economically independent; but husband and wife should be
economically equal.