university. Since the girl students in all the colleges of the country
outdo the men in their studies, win the highest prizes, and attend the
most difficult lectures, the old slander about deficient brain substance
and mental incapacity can no longer serve as a pretext for closing the
university to competing womanhood. In fact, the graduate schools, which
correspond to the advanced portion of a German philosophical faculty,
and the legal and medical faculties of all state universities and of a
few private universities are open to women. But one is not to suppose
that the number of women who are thus preparing for the learned
professions, as that of medicine, law, or the ministry, is very large.
There are to-day 44,000 women college students, but only 1,253 women
graduate students; and in 1890 there were only 369. There are hardly
more than a thousand in the purely professional faculties, and these
form only 3 per cent. of the total number of students. The American
women study mostly in colleges, therefore, and their aim is generally to
get a well-grounded, liberal education, corresponding to a Gymnasium
training, together with a few semesters in the philosophical faculty.
But there are no limitations by principle; woman as such is denied no
“rights,” and the verdict is unanimous that this national experiment is
technically successful. There is no indication of moral deterioration,
of a lowered level of instruction, or of a mutual hindrance between men
and women in the matter of study. The university, in short, opens the
way to the learned professions.
When a European hears of the independent careers of American women, he
is apt to imagine something which is unknown to him—a woman in the
judicial wig or the minister’s robe; a woman doctor or university
professor. Thus he represents to himself the self-supporting women, and
he easily forgets that their number is vanishingly small beside the
masses of those who earn their living with very much less preparation.
The professional life of the American woman, her instinct to support
herself, and so to make herself equal to the man in the social and
economic worlds, cannot be understood merely from figures; for
statistics would show a much larger percentage of women in other
countries who earn their living, where the instinct for independence is
very much less. The motive is the main point. One might say that the
European woman works because the land is too poor to support the family
by the labour of the man alone. The American woman works because she
wants her own career. In travelling through Europe, one notices women
toiling painfully in the fields; this is not necessary in America,
unless among the negroes. Passing through New England, one sees a
hammock in front of every farm-house, and often catches the sound of a
piano; the wives and daughters have never thought of working in the
fields. But women crowd into all occupations in the cities, in order to
have an independent existence and to make themselves useful. They would
rather work in a factory or teach than to stay on the farm and spend
their time at house-work or embroidery.
As a matter of course, very many families are actually in need, and
innumerable motives may lead a woman to the earning of a living. But if
one compares the changes in the statistics of different employments, and
looks into the psychology of the different kinds of occupation, one sees
clearly that the spirit of self-determination is the decisive factor,
and that women compete most strongly in the professions which involve
some rational interest, and that they know where it pays to crowd the
men out. There is no male profession, outside of the soldiery and the
fire department, into which women have not felt themselves called.
Between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans there are 45 female locomotive
engineers, 31 elevator attendants, 167 masons, 5 pilots, 196
blacksmiths, 625 coal miners, 3 auctioneers, and 1,320 professional
huntresses.
Apart from such curiosities, and looking at only the large groups, we
shall discover the following professional activity of women: In 1900,
when the last census was made, there were 23,754,000 men and 5,319,000
women at paid employment—that is, only 18 per cent. of the bread-winners
were women. Of these, only 971,000 were engaged in agriculture as
against 9,404,000 men, while in the so-called professions, the
intellectual occupations, there were 430,000 women against 828,000 men.
In domestic positions, there were 2,095,000 women against 3,485,000 men;
in trade there were 503,000 against 4,263,000, and in manufactures
1,313,000 against 5.772.000. The total number of wage-earning women has
steadily increased. In 1890 it amounted to only 17 per cent., and in
1880 to only 15 per cent. The proportions in different parts of the
country are different, and not only according to the local forms of
industry, but also to the different stages of civilization; the more
advanced the civilization, the more the women go into intellectual
employments. Among a hundred wage-earning women, for instance, in the
North Atlantic States, there are only 1.9 per cent. engaged in
agriculture, but 7.6 per cent. in intellectual occupations, 37.5 per
cent. engaged in domestic service, 12.9 per cent. in trade, and 40.1 per
cent. in manufactures. In the Southern Middle States, on the other hand,
out of a hundred women only 7.2 per cent. are in manufactures, 2.6 per
cent. in trade, and 4.4 per cent. in intellectual professions.
Of these occupations, the most interesting are the intellectual,
domestic, and trading activities of women. The great majority in
intellectual employments are teachers; the whole story of American
culture is told by the fact that there are 327,000 women pedagogues—an
increase of 80,000 in ten years—and only 111,000 male teachers. The
number of physicians has increased from 4,557 in 1890 to 7,399 in 1900;
but this is not ominous in comparison with their 124,000 male
colleagues. There are 52,000 musicians and music teachers, 11,000
teachers in drawing, 5,984 authors—a figure which has doubled since
1890; and in the newspaper world the troup of women reporters and
journalists has grown in ten years from 888 to 2,193. There are 8,000
women officials employed by the state, over I,000 architects produce
feminine architecture, and 3,405 ministers preach the gospel.
Turning to domestic activity, we find of course the international corps
of house-servants to include the greater part; they number 1.283.000,
and the statistics do not say whether, perhaps, one or two of these who
have a white skin were born in the country. This number was 1,216,000 in
1890, so that it has increased only 5.5 per cent.; while during the same
time population has increased 20.7 per cent., and the increasing wealth
has greatly raised the demand for service. Let us compare with this the
increased number of trained nurses, whose occupation is an arduous but
independent and in itself useful career. The number of trained nurses
has increased from 41,000 to 108,000—that is, by 163 per cent. The
figures for all such domestic employments as admit of social
independence have also increased. The female restaurant keepers have
increased from 86,000 to 147,000; the boarding-house proprietresses
number 59,455, double the figure of ten years ago. The independent
profession of washer-woman attracts 325,000, while there are only
124,000 independent domestic labourers as compared with 2,454,000 men in
the same occupations. The increase in the figures for such free
professions as are classed under trade and commerce is in part even more
striking. The number of female insurance agents, which in 1890 was less
than 5,000, is now more than 10,000; book-keepers have increased from
27,000 to 74,000; sales-women, from 58,000 to 149,000; typists and
stenographers from 21,000 to 86,000—that is, fourfold—and there are now
22,000 telephone and telegraph operators. The number of shop-keepers at
34,000 has not increased much, and is relatively small beside the
756,000 men. There are only 261 women wholesale merchants against 42,000
men, 946 women commercial travellers against 91,000 men; the profession
of lady banker has decreased shamefully from 510 to 293, although this
is no ground for despairing of the future of American banking, since the
number of bankers other than women has increased in the same time from
35,000 to 72,000.
Finally, let us look at industry and manufactures. The number of
seamstresses has been the same for ten years with mathematical
exactitude; that is, 146,000. Since the population has increased by
one-fifth, it is clear that this form of work has been unpopular,
doubtless because it involves personal abasement and exposure to the
arbitrariness of customers, and is therefore unfavourable to
self-assertion. At the same time the workers in woollen and cotton
factories have increased from 92,000 to 120,000, in silk factories from
20,000 to 32,000, and in cigar factories from 27,000 to 43,000. There
are 344,000 garment-workers, 86,000 milliners, 15,000 book-binders,
16,000 printers, 17,000 box-makers, and 39,000 in the shoe industry. The
whole picture shows a body of women whose labour is hardly necessary to
support the families of the nation, but who are firmly resolved to
assert themselves in economic and intellectual competition, who press
their way into all sorts of occupations, but avoid as far as possible
anything which restricts their personal independence, and seek out any
occupation which augments their personality and their consciousness of
independence. If all women who were not born on American soil, or if so
were born of coloured parentage, were omitted from these statistics,
then the self-asserting quality of American women who earn their living
would come out incomparably more clearly.
The bread-winning activity of women is, however, only a fraction of
their activity outside of the home. If of the 39,000,000 men in the
country, 23,754,000 have an occupation, and of the 37,000,000 women only
5,319,000 work for a living, it is clear that the great majority of
grown-up women earn nothing. But nobody who knows American life would
take these women who earn no wages from the list of those who exert a
great influence outside of the family circle, and assert themselves in
the social organization. Between the two broad oceans there is hardly
any significant movement outside of trade and politics which is not
aided by unpaid women, who work purely out of ideal motives. Vanity,
ambition, self-importance, love of diversion, and social aspirations of
all kinds, of course, play a part; but the actual labour which women
perform in the interests of the church or school, of public welfare,
social reform, music, art, popular education, care of the sick,
beautification and sanitation of cities, every day and everywhere,
represents incontestably a powerful inborn idealism.
Only one motive more, which is by no means unidealistic, dictates this
purely practical devotion; it is the motive of helping on this very
self-assertion of women. Work is done for the sake of work, but more or
less in the consciousness that one is a woman and that whatever good one
does, raises the position of the sex. Thus, in women’s clubs and
organizations, through noisy agitation or quieter feminine influences,
the American woman’s spirit of self-assertion impresses itself in a
hundred thousand ways. Women are the majority in every public lecture
and in every broadly benevolent undertaking; schools and churches, the
care of the poor and the ill are enlivened by their zeal, and in this
respect the East and the West feel quite alike. Certainly this influence
beyond the home does not end with direct self-conscious labour; it goes
on where there are no women presidents, secretaries, treasurers, and
committee members, but wherever women go for enjoyment and relaxation.
Women form a large majority in art exhibitions, concerts, theatres, and
in church services; women decide the fate of every new novel; and
everywhere women stand in the foreground, wide awake and self-assertive.
It is incredible to the European how very much the unselfish and
high-minded women of America are able to accomplish, and how so many of
them can combine a vast deal of practical work with living in the midst
of bustling social affairs, and themselves entertaining perhaps in a
brilliant way. Such a woman will go early in the morning to the
committee meeting of her club, inspect a school or poor-house on the
way, then help to draw up by-laws for a society, deliver an address,
preside at some other meeting, and meet high officials in the interests
of some public work. She expends her energy for every new movement,
keeps in touch with every new tendency in art and literature, and is yet
a pleasant and comfortable mother in her own home. This youthful
freshness never succumbs to age. In Boston, the widow of the zoölogist
Agassiz, although now eighty years of age, is still tirelessly active as
honourary president of Radcliffe College; and Julia Ward Howe, the
well-known poetess, in spite of her eighty-four years, presides at every
meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club, still with her quiet but fresh and
delightful humour.
The leadership of women which is a problem to be discussed, as far as
public life is concerned, is an absolute dogma which it would be
sacrilege to call in question, so far as social and domestic life go.
Just as Lincoln said that the American government is a government “of
the people, by the people, and for the people,” so certainly American
society is a government of the women, by the women, and for the women.
The part which the wife plays determines so unconditionally the social
status of every home, that even a man who has his own social ambitions
can accomplish his end in no better way than by doing everything to
further the plans and even the whims of his wife. And the luxury in
which she is maintained is so entirely a symbol of social position that
the man comes instinctively to believe that he is himself enjoying
society when he worries and over-works in order to provide jewelry and
funds for the elaborate entertainments of his wife
Just as the wife of the millionaire has her place arranged to suit
herself, so the modest townswoman does in her small home, and so also
the wife of the day labourer, in her still narrower surroundings. The
man pushes the baby carriage, builds the kitchen fire, and takes care of
the furnace, so that his wife can attend to getting fashionable
clothing; he denies himself cigars in order to send her into the country
for the summer. And she takes this as a matter of course. She has seen
this done from her childhood by all men, and she would be offended if
her husband were to do anything less. The American woman’s spirit of
self-assertion would be aroused directly if social equality were to be
interpreted in such a ridiculous way as to make the man anything but the
social inferior.
The outward noise would make one believe that the self-assertion of the
feminine soul were most energetically concerned with political rights;
woman’s suffrage is the great watchword. But the general noise is
deceptive; the demands for equal school and college education for young
women, for admission to industrial positions on the same footing with
men, for an independent existence and life career for every woman who
wants it, and for social domination—all these are impulses which really
pervade the national consciousness. But the demand for equal suffrage is
not nearly so universal. In the nature of things, it is often put forth
by radical lecturers on woman’s rights; and it is natural that some
large societies support the efforts, and that even masculine logic
should offer no objections in many cases. The familiar arguments known
to all the world have hardly been augmented by a single new reason on
the woman’s side. But the old arguments appear on the surface to be such
sound deductions from all the fundamental political, social, and
economic principles of America that they come here to have new force. If
in spite of this their practical success is still exceedingly small, and
the most energetic opposition is not from the stronger sex but from the
women themselves, it shows clearly that there is some strong opposing
impulse in the American public mind. The social self-assertion of women,
in which every American believes with all his heart, is just as little
likely ever to lead to universal political suffrage for women as
American industrial self-assertion will ever lead to socialism.
But the irony of world history has brought it about that women began
with just those rights which to-day some of them are demanding. When
English law was brought across the ocean by the colonists in the
seventeenth century, the women had the constitutional right to vote, and
in exceptional cases made use of it; not one of the constitutions of the
thirteen states limited the suffrage to men. The State of New York was
the first to improve or to injure its constitution by adding the
qualification “male,” in the year 1778. One state followed after
another, and New Jersey was the last, in 1844. But just as the last door
was closed, the hue and cry was raised that they all ought to be opened.
The first woman’s convention to make an urgent appeal for the restoring
of these rights was held in New York in 1848. There was a violent
opposition; but the movement extended to a great many states, and
finally, in 1866, a national organization was formed which asked for a
national law. This was just after the Civil War, when the amendment
giving the suffrage to the negroes was the chief subject of political
discussion. A petition with eighty thousand signatures was gotten up
urging that the Constitution should be interpreted so as to give women
the right to vote. Two women brought legal action, which went up through
all the courts to the Supreme Court, but was there decided against the
women, and therefore the sex has not the suffrage.
No national movements have, therefore, to-day any practical significance
unless three-quarters of all state legislatures can be induced to vote
for an amendment to the Constitution in favour of woman’s suffrage—that
is, to vote that no state be allowed to exclude women from the ballot.
This is hardly more likely to happen than a Constitutional amendment to
introduce hereditary monarchy. Meanwhile, the agitation in the various
states has by no means entirely stopped. Time after time attempts have
been made to alter the constitution of a single state, but
unsuccessfully. The only states to introduce complete woman’s suffrage
have been Wyoming in 1869, Colorado in 1893, and Utah in 1895. Kansas
allows women to vote in municipal elections. The agitation has been
really successful in only one direction; it has succeeded in getting
from a majority of the states the right to vote for the local school
committees.
Such experience as the country has had with woman’s suffrage has not
been specially favourable to the movement. A good deal goes to show
that, even if full privileges were granted, they would remain a dead
letter for the overwhelming majority of women. The average woman does
not wish to go into politics. It has been affirmed that in the modern
way of living, with servants to do all the house-work, factories to do
the spinning and weaving and every sort of economic convenience, the
married woman has too little to do, and needs the political field in
which to give her energies free play. But so long as statistics show
that four-fifths of the married women in the country do all their
house-work, and so long as such a great variety of ethical,
intellectual, æsthetic and social duties lie before every woman, it is
no wonder that very few are eager to take on new responsibilities at the
ballot-box. Those, however, who would make most use of the suffrage
would be, as the women who oppose the movement say, the worst female
element of the large cities, and they would bring in all the worst evils
of a low class of voters led by demagogues. Political corruption at the
ballot would receive a new and specially dangerous impetus; the
political machines would win new and disgusting strength from the
feebleness of these women to resist political pressure, and instead of
women’s ennobling and refining political ethics, as their partisans
hope, they would be more apt to drag politics down to the very depths.
Those who oppose the movement see a decided prejudice to political
soundness even in the mere numerical doubling of the voting class.
Most of all, the conservative element can assert, with an excellent
array of facts, that the healthy progress of woman’s self-assertion best
proceeds by keeping away from politics and turning directly toward the
improvement of the conditions of living and of instruction, toward the
opening up of professions, the framing of industrial laws, and-other
reforms. The radical political demands of women in all other fields, and
most especially in the socialistic direction, inclining as they
naturally do to be extreme, have worked rather to hinder than to aid the
social progress of women. Even where the social independence of women is
properly contested, there works the deterring consideration that
politics might bring about differences between husband and wife. Taken
all in all, the self-assertion of women in political matters is hardly a
practical question. One who looks into their tracts and propaganda feels
for a long while that the last one he has read, on which ever side it
is, is wrong; but when he has come to a point where he meets only the
old arguments revamped, he feels that on the whole the radical side has
still less justice than the other. And the nation has come to the same
conclusion. We may thus leave politics quite out of account in turning
finally to the main question which relates to women; this is, How has
this remarkable self-assertion of woman affected the life of the nation,
both on the whole and in special spheres?
Let us look first at the sphere of the family. The situation here is
often decidedly misinterpreted; the frequent divorces in America are
cited very often in order to put American family life in an unfavourable
light. According to the census report of 1900, the ratio of divorced to
married men was 0.6 per cent., and of women 0.8 per cent.; while in 1890
the respective figures were only 0.4 per cent. and 0.6 per cent.
Nevertheless, the total number of divorced persons is only 0.3 per cent.
of the whole population, as compared with 5.1 per cent. who are widows,
36.5 per cent. who are married, and 57.9 per cent. of bachelors—with a
small remainder unaccounted for. It is true that divorced persons who
have remarried are here included among the married persons; but even if
the number of dissolved marriages is somewhat greater than it appears in
the statistics, that fact shows nothing as to the moral status of
marriage in America.