THE OLD AND THE NEW
Germany stands midway between France and England in its care for its
womenfolk. French parents consider marriage the proper career for a
woman, and with logical good sense set themselves from the day of a
girl's birth to provide a dowry for her. When she is of a marriageable
age they provide the husband. They will make great sacrifices to
establish a daughter in prosperity, and they leave nothing to chance.
We leave everything to chance, and the idea of marriage made by
bargain and without love offends us. Such marriages are often enough
made in England, but they are never admitted. Some gloss of sentiment
or of personal respect is considered decent. But on the whole in this
country a girl shifts for herself. If she marries, well and good; if
she remains single, well and good too, provided she can earn her
living or has means. When she has neither means nor craft and fails to
marry, she is one of the most tragic figures in our confused social
hierarchy, difficult to help, superfluous. She sets her hand to this
and that, but she has no grip on life. To think of her is to invoke
the very image of failure and incompetence. She flocks into every
opening, blocking and depressing it; as a "help" she becomes a byword,
for she has grown up without learning to help herself or anybody
else. If she is a Protestant she has no haven. Only people who have
set themselves to help poor ladies know the difficulties of the
undertaking, and the miseries their protégées endure.
Even in the Middle Ages the conscientious German was doing more for
this helpless element of his population than England and America are
doing to-day. He saw that some of his daughters would remain
unmarried, and that if they were gently bred he must provide for their
future, and he did this by founding _Stifte_. The old _Stift_ was
established by the gentlemen of some one district, who built a house
and contributed land and money for its maintenance, so that when they
died their unmarried daughters should still have a suitable home. Some
of these old _Stifte_ are very wealthy now, and have buildings of
great dignity and beauty; they still admit none but the descendants of
the men who founded them, and when they have more money than they need
to support the _Stift_ itself, they use it to pension the widows and
endow the brides belonging to their group or families. In
Hesse-Cassel, for instance, there is an ancient _Stift_ formed by the
_Ritterschaft_ of the Duchy and it is so well off that it can afford
to pension every widow and fatherless child, and buy an outfit for
every bride whose name either by marriage or descent entitles her to
its protection. The example set by the noble families of the Middle
Ages was followed in time by other classes, and _Stifte_ were
established all over Germany for the daughters of the bourgeoisie.
They grew in number and variety; some had a school attached to their
endowment and some an orphanage. In some the rule was elastic, in
others binding. There are _Stifte_ from which a woman may absent
herself for the greater part of the year, and yet draw an income from
its funds and have a room or rooms appointed to her use; there are
others where residence is compulsory. Some are only open to
descendants of the founders; some sell vacancies. A woman may have to
wait year after year for a chance of getting in; or she may belong to
one that will admit her at a certain age. In many there is a presiding
lady, the Domina or Abbess; and when the present Emperor visited a
well-known _Stift_ lately he gave the Abbess a shepherd's crook with
which to rule her flock. Some are just sets of rooms with certain
privileges of light and firing attached. Their constitution varies
greatly, according to the class provided for and the means available.
But you cannot be much amongst Germans without meeting women who have
been educated, endowed, helped in sickness, or supported in old age by
one of these organisations. You come across girls of gentle birth but
with no means who have been brought up in a _Stift_, or you hear of
well-to-do girls whose parents have paid high for their schooling in
one. You know the elderly unmarried daughter of an official living on
his pension, and you find that though she has never been taught to
earn her bread she looks forward to old age with serenity, because
when she was a child her relations bought her into a _Stift_ that will
give her at the age of fifty free quarters, fire, light, and an income
on which, with her habits of thrift, she can live comfortably. Another
woman engaged in private teaching and a good deal battered by the
struggle for life, comes to you some day more radiant than you have
ever seen her, and you find that influential friends have put her case
before a _Stift_, and that it has granted her two charming rooms with
free fire and light. I heard of a cook the other day who, after many
years of faithful service, left her employers to spend her old age in
a _Stift_. No social stigma attaches to the women living in one, and
they are as free, in some cases as well placed and well born, as the
English women living at Hampton Court. Some friction and some gossip
is presumably inevitable wherever women herd together in an unnatural
segregation from men and children. But at any rate the German _Stift_
saves many a woman from the tragic struggle with old age and poverty
to which the penniless incapable spinster is condemned in our country.
It may not be a paradise, but it is a haven. As I said at the
beginning, the Frenchman dowers and marries his girl, the German buys
her a refuge, the Englishman leaves her to fate.
On the whole, the German believes that the woman's province is within
the limits of the household. He wants her to be a home-maker, and in
Germany what "he" wants her to be still fixes the standard. But as the
census reveals the existence of large numbers of single women, and as
"he" often has a thoughtful and benevolent mind, more and more is done
there every year to prepare those women who must earn their living to
earn it capably. It has been understood for some time past that Herr
Riehl's plan of finding a family roof for every woman without one
presents difficulties where there are 400,000-odd women to provide for
in this way. One of the people who first saw this clearly, and
supported every sensible undertaking that came to the assistance of
women, was the Empress Frederick; and one of the institutions that she
encouraged and esteemed from the beginning was the _Lette-Verein_ in
Berlin.
The _Lette-Verein_, named after its originator, Dr. A. Lette, was
founded, says its prospectus, to further the education of women and to
increase the efficiency of women dependent on themselves for support.
What it actually does is to train for housekeeping and office work,
and for some trades. Its interest lies in the ordered and thoughtful
provision it makes both for the woman who means to devote herself body
and soul to the family; and for the woman who prefers, or who is
driven, to stand in the market-place and compete with men. The
_Lette-Verein_ does not train servants or admit servants to its
classes. It occupies a large block of buildings in the west of Berlin,
for its various schools and hostels require a great deal of room.
Students who live in the city can attend daily classes; but those who
come from a distance can have board and residence for £1 a week or
less. Once a week strangers are allowed to see the _Lette-Haus_ at
work, and when I went there we were taken first to the kitchens, where
the future housewives of Germany were learning to cook. The stoves
were the sensible low closed-in ones used on the continent, and the
vessels were either earthenware or metal, kept brightly polished both
inside and out. The students were preparing and cooking various
dishes, but the one that interested me was the _Leipziger Allerlei_,
because I compared it with the "herbage" an English plain cook throws
into water and sends up half drained, half cold, and often enough half
clean. I could not stop to count the vegetables required for
_Leipziger Allerlei_, but there seemed to be at least six varieties,
all cooked separately, and afterwards combined with a properly made
sauce. The Englishman may say that he prefers his half-cooked cabbage,
and the English woman, if she is a plain cook, will certainly say that
the cabbage gives her as much trouble as she means to take; but the
German woman knows that when she marries her husband will want
_Leipziger Allerlei_, so she goes to the _Lette-Haus_ and learns how
to make it. Even the young doctors of Berlin learn cooking at the
_Lette-Haus_. Special classes for invalid cookery are held on their
behalf, and are said to be popular and extremely useful. Certainly
doctors whose work is amongst the poor or in country places must often
wish they understood something about the preparation of food. The
girls who go to the _Lette-Haus_ are taught the whole art of
housekeeping, from the proper way to scour a pan or scrub a floor to
fine laundry work and darning, and even how to set and serve a table.
An intelligent girl who had been right through the courses at the
_Lette-Haus_ could train an inexperienced servant, because she would
understand exactly how things ought to be done, how much time they
should take, and what amount of fatigue they involve. If her servants
failed her she would be independent of them. Some students at the
_Lette-Haus_ do, as a matter of fact, form a household that is carried
on without a single servant, and is on this account the most
interesting branch of the organisation. The girls are from fourteen to
sixteen years of age, and they pay £25 a year for instruction, board,
and lodging. Some of them are the daughters of landed proprietors, and
some will eventually earn a living as "supports of the housewife," an
honourable career shortly referred to by Germans as _eine Stütze_.
They were a happy, healthy looking lot of girls. They wear neat
serviceable gowns while they are at work, aprons, linen sleeves to
protect their stuff ones, and pretty blue handkerchiefs tied like
turbans over their hair. Some of them were busy at the wash-tub, and
this seemed heavy work for girls of that age. The various kinds of
work are done in turn, and the student when her washing week comes
round is employed in this way three hours every morning. On alternate
days she mangles clothes, and in the afternoons she sews. Our guide
would not admit that three hours at the wash-tub could be too great a
strain on a half-developed girl, and it is a question for medical
wisdom to decide. The cooking and ironing looked hot work, but these
young German girls were cheerfully and thoroughly learning how to do
them, and whether they marry or stay single their knowledge of these
arts will be of inestimable use in later years. I heard of an
able-bodied Englishwoman the other day who took to her bed in tears
because her maids left her suddenly. She could not have roasted a leg
of mutton or made the plainest pudding. This is the school of the
future, said our enthusiastic guide when we went to see the "children"
at work at the _Lette-Haus_; and I, remembering my helpless
Englishwoman, agreed with her. The children's afternoons are mostly
given to needlework, and they are instructed in the prospectus not to
bring new clothes with them, because it is desired that they should
learn how to mend old ones neatly and correctly. They are taught to
darn and patch so finely that the repair cannot easily be discovered;
they make sets of body linen for themselves, three finely sewn men's
linen shirts, a gown for work-days, and some elaborate blouses. In
another part of the _Lette-Haus_, where students were being trained as
expert embroiderers and dressmakers, we were shown pieces of flowered
brocade into which patches had been so skilfully inserted that you
could only find them by holding them up to the light. In the
bookbinding department there were amateur and professional students.
The professionals apprentice themselves for three years, and from the
first receive a small weekly wage. The length of their apprenticeship
is determined by the length of time prescribed for men, and not by
what is necessary for their training. I asked if they easily found
regular work later, and was told that at present the demand for
expert women bookbinders exceeded the supply. The _Lette-Haus_ trains
women to be photographers, printers, and clerks. In fact, with German
thoroughness and foresight it does all one big institution can to save
the women of the nation from the curse of incompetence. It turns them
out efficient housewives or efficient craftswomen, according to their
needs.
The German woman of to-day has travelled far from the ideal set up by
Herr Riehl, and still upheld by his disciples. Women have found that
the realities of life clash with that particular ideal, and rudely
upset it. Just like any man, a woman wants bread when she is hungry,
and when there is no man to give it to her she must raven for it
herself. She has been driven from a family hearth that has no fire on
it, and from a family roof that cannot afford her shelter. On the
whole, if I may judge from personal observation, it has done her good.
The traditional old maid is dying out in Germany as assuredly as she
is dying out in England, and who shall regret her? Her outlook was
narrow, her temper often soured. She had neither self-reliance nor
charm. She was that sad, silly spectacle, a clinging plant without
support. Now that she is learning to grow on her own account, she
finds that there is a good deal in life a sensible plant can enjoy
without clinging. The German "old maid" of the twentieth century has,
like her English sister, transformed herself into a "bachelor," a
person who for this reason or that has not married, and who
nevertheless has a cheerful time. She has her own work, she often has
her own flat, and if she lives in one of the big cities she has her
own club.
There are at present three Ladies' Clubs in Berlin all flourishing.
The subscription to the _Berliner Frauenklub_ is only six marks a
year, yet it provides the members with comfortably furnished rooms
and well cooked meals at low prices. A member of this club can dine
for ninepence, and have a hot dish from fourpence to sevenpence. She
has access to a library of 1300 volumes, to the leading papers and
reviews, and to magazines in four languages. She can entertain women
at the club, but not men; though she can meet men there at certain
hours of the day. Social gatherings of various kinds are arranged to
meet the various needs and ages of the members; and one night a week
four or five card-tables are set out, so that the older members can
have a quiet game of skat or whist. We wonder what Herr Riehl would
say if he could see them.
Another German Ladies' Club in Berlin is the _Deutscher Frauenklub_,
and it is nicknamed the Millionaire's Club because the subscription is
twenty-five shillings. It is a rather smarter club than the other, and
has a charming set of rooms. There are about 450 members. The Third
Club is a branch of the London Lyceum, and it has aroused great
interest and attention in Berlin, not only because it is on a more
magnificent scale than the other clubs, but because of the brave
effort it makes to unite the women of all nations and help them. Most
of the women distinguished in art and literature have joined it.
I began this chapter by saying something of the _Stift_, the refuge
for unmarried women that Germany established in the Middle Ages and
still preserves. I end it with the Lyceum Club, that latest
manifestation of a modern woman's desire to help her own sex. The
character of these institutions and their history are both
significant. In other days men helped women; in these days women try
to help themselves. The _Stift_ gives a woman bread and shelter in
idleness; the aim of the Lyceum Club is not to give, but to bring
women together and to encourage good work. The _Stifte_ are still
crowded and the Lyceum flourishes, for in our time the old woman
jostles the new. But the new woman has arrived, and is making herself
felt; with amazing force and swiftness, you must admit when you
reflect on the position of women in Germany thirty or forty years
ago.