WHAT I should like to know is, how "the enlargement of woman's sphere"
by entrance into the various activities of commercial, professional and
industrial life benefits the sex. It may please Helen Gougar and satisfy
her sense of logical accuracy to say, as she does: "We women must work
in order to fill the places left vacant by liquor-drinking men." But who
filled these places before? Did they remain vacant, or were there then
disappointed applicants, as now? If my memory serves, there has been no
time in the period that it covers when the supply of workers--abstemious
male workers--was not in excess of the demand. That it has always been
so is sufficiently attested by the universally inadequate wage rate.
Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they
need. The field, then, into which women have put their sickles was
already overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have
obtained has been got by displacing men--who would otherwise be
supporting women. Where is the general advantage? We may shout "high
tariff," "combination of capital," "demonetization of silver," and what
not, but if searching for the cause of augmented poverty and crime,
"industrial discontent," and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically
expounding it, we should take some account of this enormous, sudden
addition to the number of workers seeking work. If any one thinks that
within the brief period of a generation the visible supply of labor can
be enormously augmented without profoundly affecting the stability of
things and disastrously touching the interests of wage-workers, let no
rude voice dispel his dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous
understanding may joy to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung
themselves in advocacy of quack remedies for evils for which they
themselves are cause; it remains true that when the contention of two
lions for one bone is exacerbated by the accession of a lioness the
squabble is not composable by stirring up some bears in the cage
adjacent.
Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to the
good of her sex by refusing needed employment in the hope that it
may fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our
congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual
head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve's daughters. This is
a world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are so
intertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitious
to help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to that
end provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The "enlargement of woman's
opportunities" has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the
sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can
not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly
traceable to "emancipation of woman" is as impregnable to the light as a
toad in a rock.
A marked demerit of the new order of things--the régime of female
commercial service--is that its main advantage accrues, not to the race,
not to the sex, not to the class, not to the individual woman, but to
the person of least need and worth--the male employer. (Female employers
in any considerable number there will not be, but those that we have
could give the male ones profitable instruction in grinding the faces
of their employees.) This constant increase of the army of labor--always
and everywhere too large for the work in sight--by accession of a new
contingent of natural oppressibles makes the very teeth of old Munniglut
thrill with a poignant delight. It brings in that situation known as two
laborers seeking one job---and one of them a person whose bones he can
easily grind to make his bread. And Munniglut is a miller of skill and
experience, dusted all over with the evidence of his useful craft. When
Heaven has assisted the Daughters of Hope to open to women a new "avenue
of opportunities" the first to enter and walk therein, like God in the
Garden of Eden, is the good Mr. Munniglut, contentedly smoothing the
folds out of the superior slope of his paunch, exuding the peculiar
aroma of his oleagmous personality, and larding the new roadway with the
overflow of a righteousness secreted by some spiritual gland stimulated
to action by relish of his own identity. And ever thereafter the subtle
suggestion of a fat Philistinism lingers along the path of progress like
an assertion of a possessory right.
It is God's own crystal truth that in dealing with women unfortunate
enough to be compelled to earn their own living and fortunate enough
to have wrested from Fate an opportunity to do so, men of business and
affairs treat them with about the same delicate consideration that they
show to dogs and horses of the inferior breeds. It does not commonly
occur to the wealthy "professional man," or "prominent merchant," to be
ashamed to add to his yearly thousands a part of the salary justly due
to his female bookkeeper or typewriter, who sits before him all day with
an empty belly in order to have an habilimented back. He has a vague,
hazy notion that the law of supply and demand is mandatory, and that in
submitting himself to it by paying her a half of what he would have to
pay a man of inferior efficiency he is supplying the world with a noble
example of obedience. I must take the liberty to remind him that the
law of supply and demand is not imperative; it is not a statute, but
a phenomenon. He may reply: "It is imperative; the penalty for
disobedience is failure. If I pay more in salaries and wages than I need
to, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will drive me
from the field." If his margin of profit is so small that he must eke
it out by coining the sweat of his workmen into nickels, I've nothing to
say to him. Let him adopt in peace the motto, "I cheat to eat" I do not
know why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided sustenance for the
worming sparrow, the sparrowing owl, and the owling eagle, approves the
needy man of prey, and makes a place for him at table.
Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is
a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch--as cunning is the
wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward. Nobody
is altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpaying
the workmen in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigent
seamen. To oppress one's own workmen, and provide for the workmen of
a neighbor--to skin those in charge of one's own interests, while
cottoning and oiling the residuary product of another's skinnery--that
is not very good benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves in
place of both. The man who eats _pâté de fois gras_ in the sweat of his
girl cashier's face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that his
typewriter may have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerably
satisfactory specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that in
his own home--a fairly good one--he may enjoy and merit that highest
and most honorable title in the hierarchy of woman's favor, "a good
provider." One having a just claim to that glittering distinction should
enjoy a sacred immunity from the coarse and troublesome question, "From
whose backs and bellies do you provide?"
So much for the material results to the sex. What are the moral results?
One does not like to speak of them, particularly to those who do not and
can not know--to good women in whose innocent minds female immorality
is inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face; to foolish,
book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective sanctity that
hedges womanhood. If men of the world with years enough to have lived
out of the old _régime_ into the new would testify in this matter there
would ensue a great rattling of dry bones in bodices of reform ladies.
Nay, if the young man about town, knowing nothing of how things were
in the "dark backward and abysm of time," but something of the moral
difference between even so free-running a creature as the society girl
and the average working girl of the factory, the shop and the office,
would speak out (under assurance of immunity from prosecution) his
testimony would be a surprise to the cartilaginous virgins, blowsy
matrons, acrid relicts and hairy males of Emancipation. It would pain,
too, some very worthy but unobservant persons not in sympathy with "the
cause."
Certain significant facts are within the purview of all but the very
young and the comfortably blind. To the woman of today the man of today
is imperfectly polite. In place of reverence he gives her "deference;"
to the language of compliment has succeeded the language of raillery.
Men have almost forgotten how to bow. Doubtless the advanced female
prefers the new manner, as may some of her less forward sisters,
thinking it more sincere. It is not; our giddy grandfather talked
high-flown nonsense because his heart had tangled his tongue. He treated
his woman more civilly than we ours because he loved her better. He
never had seen her on the "rostrum" and in the lobby, never had seen
her in advocacy of herself, never had read her confessions of his sins,
never had felt the stress of her competition, nor himself assisted by
daily personal contact in rubbing the bloom off her. He did not know
that her virtues were due to her secluded life, but thought, dear old
boy, that they were a gift of God.