WOMEN'S WORK
This chapter is not written for the purpose of adding one whisper to the
impassioned controversies at present raging over women's work. So far as
it is within our power, we shall refrain from taking sides with either
that army which contends that woman is in every way the equal of man and
should be permitted to engage in all of man's activities on an equal
footing with him, or with that other army which declares that woman's
place is the home and that every woman should be a wife, mother, and
housekeeper.
Doubtless there are many wholesome and needed reforms being agitated with
reference to women's work. Doubtless, also, there are many pernicious
changes being advocated by both the sincere but mistaken and the vicious
and designing. It is not the purpose of this chapter to discuss these
reforms or to favor or to oppose any of them. We shall, in this chapter,
discuss the problem of vocation for women under present conditions.
BROAD SCOPE OF WOMEN'S WORK
The present day finds women at work in practically every field of human
endeavor. There is no profession, business, trade, or calling which does
not count women amongst its successful representatives. Nor does the fact
that a woman has married, has a home and children, debar her from
achievement in any vocation outside the home which she may choose. Madam
Ernestine Schuman-Heinck, with her eight children; Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
with her ten children; Katherine Booth-Clibborn, with her ten children;
Ethel Barrymore, with her family; Mrs. Netscher, proprietor of the Boston
Store in Chicago, with her family; Mary Roberts Rhinehart, with her
children; Madam Louise Homer, with her little flock, and thousands of
others are examples of women who have been successful not only as
home-makers but also in art, literature, professional or commercial
vocations.
Since this is true, it follows that, theoretically at least, woman may
choose her profession in precisely the same way that man chooses his.
Practically, however, this is not true in most cases. Undoubtedly, a very
large majority of women have happily married, are sufficiently provided
for, and are happier, healthier, more useful, and better satisfied with
life in the home than anywhere else. Notwithstanding the fact that our
girls, almost without exception, enter upon the important vocation of
wifehood, motherhood and home-making with almost no proper training, their
aptitudes for the work are so great and their natural intuitions in regard
to it so true, that unquestionably, large numbers of them in the United
States are happy and satisfied and have no part and no interest in all the
hue and cry in regard to women's rights or women's work.
WOMEN NATURAL-BORN WIVES AND MOTHERS
The natural tendency of the majority of women for maternity and
home-making must be taken into consideration. Some boys play with weapons,
others with machinery, still others are interested in dogs and horses.
Some boys are natural traders, others love to hunt and fish, while you
will find an occasional lad curled up in a big chair in the library
absorbed in a book. But practically all girls play with dolls, which is a
sufficient evidence of the almost universality of the maternal instinct in
women. The pity is that our educational traditions, almost without
exception, are those handed down to us from schools and universities which
educated boys and men only. We are therefore educating our girls to be
merchants, lawyers, doctors, accountants, artists, musicians; in fact,
almost anything but mothers. Twenty years ago, this was universally true.
To-day, fortunately, the light has begun to break, and in many schools,
both public and private, we are beginning to teach our girls domestic
science, the care and feeding of infants, pre-natal culture, home
management, economic purchasing, and other such important subjects.
VOCATIONS FOR MOTHERS
Occasionally we find a girl who has no talent for housework or home
management. She is not particularly interested in it. She finds it
monotonous and distasteful. For these reasons she probably does not do it
well. On the other hand, she may have keen, reliable commercial instincts
and be well qualified for a business career, or she may be educational,
artistic, literary or professional in type. Such a woman has, of course,
no business trying to keep house. She may have a strong love nature and
ardent maternal desires. If so, there is no reason why she should not
marry and become the mother of children. If she does, however, she should
turn the management of the home over to someone else and seek
self-expression and compensation in the vocation for which she is best
fitted. This, of course, is no easy matter. Many men either have violent
or stubborn prejudices against any such arrangement. Whether or not she
can take her true place in the world depends upon the courage,
determination, tactfulness, and personal force of each individual woman.
WOMEN AS TEACHERS
There is one occupation for women which is thoroughly established,
entirely respectable, socially uplifting, and fully approved by even the
most conservative and fastidious. This is teaching. The result is that the
profession of teaching, for women, is overcrowded and becoming more
overcrowded. The work done is, on the whole, mediocre or worse, and, as a
result of these two conditions, the pay is pitifully small considering the
importance of the results.
Because women can become teachers without losing one notch of their social
standing in even the most hide-bound communities, thousands of women
become teachers who ought to be housewives. Thousands of others struggle
in the schoolroom, doing work they hate and despise, for a miserable
pittance, when they might be happy and successful in a store or an
office. We have met women teachers who ought to have been physicians;
others who ought to have been lawyers; others, many of them, who ought to
have been in business; and still others, thousands of them, who ought to
have been in their own homes. And, naturally enough, we have also met
women in the professions and in business and in their homes who ought to
have been teachers--but not nearly so many.
The true teacher has three fundamental qualifications. First, a love of
knowledge; second, a desire to impart knowledge, and third, a love of
young people. Added to these should be patience, firmness, tactfulness,
knowledge of human nature, facility in expression, reasoning power,
enthusiasm, and a personality which inspires confidence. Can any county
superintendent discover these qualities by means of the examination upon
which first, second and third-grade certificates are based? Have the
members of any average school board the discrimination necessary to
determine the presence or absence of these qualities in any candidate who
brings her certificate?
WOMEN IN BUSINESS
The business world suffers from the presence in the ranks of its workers
of thousands of hopelessly inefficient girls who have no aptitudes for
business, or even for the minor detailed processes of commercial activity.
They take no real interest in their work. They have no particular ambition
for advancement. Their one motive for condescending to grace the office
with their presence at all is to earn pin-money or, perhaps, to support
themselves in some fashion until they marry. It is true that some of these
girls might be taught to be reliable and efficient in their work if they
could be persuaded to take an interest in it, to look upon it as something
more potent and more important than a mere stop-gap. Many of them, no
doubt, could be trained to earn salaries which would pay them to continue
in business even after marriage.
WOMEN IN DOMESTIC SERVICE
Others of these girls are utterly unfitted for office work. Some of them
would succeed very well as teachers, some as artists, and others as
musicians. Like so many of their brothers, however, they have followed the
line of least resistance--regardless of their aptitudes. Most of these
girls belong in the home. They are quite justified in looking forward to
matrimony as their true career. How much better if they would only earn
the necessary pin-money in domestic service! From a monetary point of
view, thirty dollars a month, with board, room, laundry, and many other
necessities furnished, is a princely compensation compared with the five
or eight dollars a week received by most girls in an office. From an
economic point of view, the coming into our homes of thousands of
intelligent, fairly well educated, trained, and ambitious young women
would be a blessing and benefit. Socially, of course, the first young
women who adopted such a radical change in custom would be pariahs. They
would also, doubtless, suffer many hardships in the way of irregular
hours, small, dark, stuffy rooms, unreasonable mistresses, no adequate
place to entertain their friends, and other such injustices. But, with a
higher and more intelligent class of household servants, doubtless these
abuses would disappear.
We opened this chapter with the disavowal of any intention to advocate
reform. We make this one exception. We most earnestly hope that such a
reform may be consummated. At the same time, we have an uneasy suspicion
that we are sighing for the moon.
THE TRAGEDY OF BAD COOKING
The whole problem of household management is just now a very serious one.
When the maid is ignorant, untrained, and, as is so often the case, slack,
wasteful, and inefficient, the situation is, in all conscience, bad
enough. But when the mistress is only a little less ignorant than her
servant, is equally slack, and perhaps even more inefficient, the high
cost of living gets a terrific boost in that household, while comfort,
wholesomeness, and adequacy of living are correspondingly depressed. One
of the saddest elements in our consultation work is the stream of both men
and women who lack courage, aggressiveness, initiative, mental focus, and
personal efficiency generally because they are deficient in physical
stamina. Their whole life is, as it were, sub-normal. With inherent
qualifications for success, they are, nevertheless, threatened with
failure because, to use the language of the ring, "they lack the punch."
The trouble with nine out of ten of these unfortunates is that they are
under-nourished. Not because they do not get enough food, but because
their diet is not properly balanced, is served to them in incompatible
combinations, is badly prepared, poorly cooked, unpalatable, and
doubtless, in many cases, served in anything but an appetizing manner.
Napoleon is quoted as having said that an army fights with its stomach.
The man who goes out to do battle for commercial or professional success
from an ill-managed and inefficient kitchen and dining-room is as badly
off as the army with an inadequate commissary department. Yet, while the
commissary department of the modern army receives the most scientific and
careful supervision, many a man must leave his kitchen in the hands of a
wife who received her training in music, literature, modern languages, and
classics, or in a business college, and of a servant who received what
little training she has as a farm laborer in Europe.
There is no denying the truth that if housewives themselves were
scientifically trained, we should have a far higher average of training
and efficiency amongst domestic servants. One of the consequences of our
deplorable self-consciousness in the matter of sex is that we have been
too prudish frankly to train our girls to become successful wives and
mothers. The result is that, when it becomes necessary for them to earn
money before their marriage, instead of gaining experience in
housekeeping, cooking and purchasing, they have taken up the stage,
teaching, factory work, office work, and retail selling. As we have seen,
a great many of them are misfits in these callings. Good food is wasted,
good stomachs are impaired, and good brains and nerves deteriorate
because, as a general rule, only those who are too ignorant or too
inefficient for office work or factory work can be induced to take service
in our kitchens.