is she who is so full of plans for the elevation of the club and the
development of every member that she forgets herself. And so she becomes
at once the servant and the queen of clubs. In short, the club movement
is to-day one of the greatest factors in the world’s progress; and he or
she who proclaims a disbelief in it because of the shortcomings of some
few club acquaintances lacks the faculty of a comprehensive perception of
the things of to-day as well as of prophetic insight into the future.
But when your club begins to be a bore, it is time to leave it. It is
a mistake to hold that by staying in it with a sense of resignation you
are discharging any sort of a duty to yourself or anybody. The fault is
either with you or the club, of course. If it is the former, you can
drop your connection with it without formality, with the understanding
with yourself that it is to be taken up again after a little; if it is
the latter, you would do better to go to work so to change the aspect
of the club that it will hold all of its old interest for you. But
if you do take a vacation in this fashion yourself, you need not be
afraid of losing interest altogether. The certain result will be only
a feeling of being outside everything and alien in interest to that of
your friends, and the end so brought about will be the one you want. You
will go back to your club with a new appreciation and be of new service
to it. When a club gets to be an unpleasant duty its best function is
missing. The self-seeking, ambitious woman, the woman who uses the club
merely as a pedestal on which to pose before an admiring world, or as
a stepping-stone to get into a higher grade of society than she has
previously known, having only her own selfish aims at heart, has only a
short-lived success, and appears with less frequency every season. The
club does not want and will not keep such women as leaders. To-day the
club leader must have a higher aim and a broader culture, and, added
unto these, a genuine desire to help humanity to better things than the
superficial woman who “must stand in the full glare of the footlights at
any cost.”
More than that, the woman who sees in the club movement of to-day
nothing beyond that very primitive stage when women wrote papers from
encyclopediac notes, or when they begged or hired some other person to
write them, has not passed the a b c class of the women’s clubs. It is
a beautiful idea, isn’t it? that to-day women are reaching hands across
mountains and plains and establishing hearty, whole-souled friendships
in every part of this great country. What would our grandmothers have
said at the very idea of corresponding freely and intimately with women
of whose ancestors they knew nothing and whose names, even, they had not
heard a few months before? It is one of the beauties of the club movement
of to-day, that we are opening our hearts to each other in this way:
that our ideas of helpfulness make us forget the old conventionalities
and that the broader outlook which belongs to the woman of to-day is
contagious. For it is impossible to get drawn into this larger view of
club life and remain contented with a narrow horizon. We are bound to
grow and to throw off the shackles of prejudice and pettiness. We cannot
help it.
Of course, there are certain dangers connected with club life. Our
activities multiply and we are in danger of being drawn into a vortex
that will threaten to swallow us. When the club season begins some of
us will venture into the outer edge of a whirlpool that, unless we can
manage to hold ourselves steady and keep our mental poise, will suck
us under, and we shall go on and on in the concentric circles until
we are wrecked, nerves and mind. There is little doubt that overwork
in so-called “club-duty” has reduced more than one woman to nervous
prostration. This is a gloomy view of the case, I know, and I shall
be blamed for giving utterance to it; but is it not the truth? Are we
not too apt to take ourselves too seriously? If we are individually of
“greater value than many sparrows,” are we not individually of greater
value, to ourselves and our families at least, than many clubs?
Not but what the club stands for a serious part of our life-work; not but
what we should be willing to bring to it the best of ourselves and most
earnest labors and affection. But what I deprecate is the mistaken view
of club work which we are in imminent danger of taking. When we allow
ourselves to be drawn into the whirling vortex made up of club classes,
too many clubs with the varying interests, too great a multiplicity of
club committees, receptions and club teas by the score, until the very
name of them nauseates us, the scramble for office (either for ourselves
or our friends) and the numerous petty trials and tribulations that
follow in the wake of all these things; then we are not getting the best
results from club work ourselves, nor giving them to others, either.
“There is but one way to become a perfect, all-round club woman, and that
is by being a perfect all-round woman.” And the first essential for that
is, to find and keep our mental poise—to make ourselves something more
than a social chatterbox or a bundle of nerves.
Those writers who are fond of descanting on the injury to the home that
attends club membership seldom understand their subject. As one woman,
responding to a toast on “The Club Husband,” puts it:
“The unwritten law of the ideal women’s club is: This club exists for the
happiness of the whole family. When that ceases, the club’s reason for
existence will cease. So long as we are thus considerate, never allowing
our club life to absorb the attention that belongs to our home life, just
so long may our club husband snap his fingers at the people who try to
pity him. Let the critics carp. They are like the young girl who walked
through her uncle’s chair-factory, and gazed at the rows upon rows of
chairs, saying, ‘Why, uncle, what can you ever do with all these chairs?’
“‘Don’t you fret, Maria, settin’-down ain’t goin’ out o’ fashion!’
“The making of homes and cherishing those in them is not going out of
fashion, and the club husband would be the first to agree to it.”
The club is meant, primarily, for all classes of women. The constitution
of about every club in the land will tell you that it is banded together
for the elevation of women in its own community and for the purpose of
bringing them together for moral and social advancement—or words to
that effect. If this means anything, it means that the butcher’s wife
and the baker’s wife and the candlestick-maker’s wife are on a level
in the club with the wives and daughters of millionaires, should the
latter condescend to become members; though, for that matter, in these
latter days some of our greatest millionaires are butchers and bakers
and candlestick-makers, dignified by the names of pork-packers, biscuit
producers and silver manufacturers. And yet in our clubs are a great many
women who find it hard to make both ends meet. Many of these are quite
as well educated as any member of the club to which they belong; others
are not; but in any case the club idea places all on an equality, and it
is in every club member’s power to contribute something to the permanent
happiness of all the others.
There are some women to whom the club brings all of social life they ever
know; indeed, in these days of hurry and worry this is coming to be more
and more true of all of us. Therefore let us give out all the sunshine
on club days that we possibly can. Let us then radiate sweetness and
light, and cease from taking our pleasures too sadly or too seriously.
And the paragrapher who looks to women’s clubs for material for his
never-satisfied hopper, finds here the same attitude and converts it into
cause for mirth. We should take life seriously, because it is a solemn
thing; but on the other hand there is no need of letting our Puritanic
inheritances of mind and training tinge all existence with gloom. When
we set out to have a good time, let us have it. And let us have it all
the time. Happiness is more a habit of the mind than anything else.
If we keep ourselves in that mental frame, admitting nothing but the
sunlight of existence, sunshine will become such a habit with us that we
can no more help shedding sunlight around us than we can help breathing.
Isn’t that worth while? And the club, where we come to meet our sisters
who have the same kind of trials and difficulties as we do, is one of
the places where we should not only seek to gather up sunshine, but to
scatter it. For we cannot reap what we do not sow, nor reflect what is
not in the soul.
Above all, let us cease here all sorts of petty criticism. The club
should be so charged with the atmosphere of kindliness and good-will
that those who come to it shall receive a new baptism of love for
their fellow-creatures. Have you ever belonged to a club where the very
spirit of things was so charged with wrangling and petty criticism and
smothering hatred that you have gone home feeling that nothing but a
Turkish bath and an old-fashioned revival prayer-meeting could ever get
you clean again, body and soul? Alas, that there are such clubs and women
enough in them to keep them alive. But if you or I belong to such an one,
it is our duty first to try to improve matters, and failing in that, to
resign membership in it. We owe it to our immortal souls not to smirch
them with hatred and wrangling and ill-temper, whenever we can help it;
and we usually can.
It is so easy to see the faults or the ridiculous side of other people.
In the average club, the actual working force is seldom over ten per
cent. of the membership. The thinking for the club is done by a few,
while the remainder come in to reap the results of what has been
prepared, often by actual “sweat of the brow” and almost the life-blood
of that small remnant which constitutes the working force and is rewarded
only by having its several names recorded as a committee. Would it not
seem, then, that the least we could do—those of us who leave the work to
others—is to be lenient to the shortcomings of the committee, if there
seem to be any? It is so easy to criticise. The duty of extracting motes
from other people’s eyes is very attractive, but there is excellent
advice on the subject of neglecting the beam in our own eye which the
average woman may well read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
If the club is not making us better women in every way, broader-minded
and more liberal in our judgment towards the rest of the world, more
tolerant of other people’s views, more fond of our home and more
interesting to those who have to live with us in it, more hopeful of
the future and less satisfied with our present mental and spiritual
acquirements, more interested in the uplifting of humanity, yet less
willing to cut off our home ties, more loving in our relations with each
other, more tolerant of the failings of our fellow-members and more
intolerant of gossip pertaining thereto; if the club does not mean all
these things and more, then we would better give up our membership and
take up the duties of home exclusively.
If we are not the more attractive at home for the broadening and
developing influence of the club, then are we failing to grasp the
significance of what the club should mean. If a woman comes home fresh
and smiling from a club meeting, full of interest in matters outside
the four walls of her home and ideas regarding them, she can do so much
more for her family. The woman who was heard to say that she was saving
her money to go and hear a performance of Mozart’s Twelfth Mass because
that was the regiment her husband enlisted in, was not a club woman
and had lacked the opportunities which the club affords for picking up
knowledge on subjects which her previous education had lacked. We need
more perfectly rounded and thoroughly developed characters, and that is
exactly what the club should mean to us as individuals.
They say women have no sense of humor. At least, they—and, of course,
it was a masculine “they”—said it in former times. How would it work to
put more humor into our meetings? Say, have a funny programme once in a
month or a winter? Look at the year books, for instance. The subjects in
some are appallingly heavy: “Slavery—Its Rise and Extinction,” “Rise of
Political Parties,” “Evils That Menace a Republic.” Two-thirds of the
women attending come from homes where there is constant care and worry.
They need lightening and heartening. They need a hearty laugh. On the
contrary, everything is planned to “stimulate thought” and improve the
mind. Why not have one afternoon a month devoted to everyone telling the
very funniest thing she ever read, saw, or heard? Or have one member
relate some mirth-provoking story? There will surely be some one who,
like Artemus Ward, was so “patriotic as to sacrifice all his wife’s
relations to the cause of liberty”; and the funniest things that happen
are not always told. Sometimes because there is no one to appreciate
them. Somebody suggests that “if any sedate member object to such levity
she could have the next meeting of a grim character and discuss ‘Whether
the increase of cremation would affect the price of pottery’ or ‘Should
a funeral be held in the morning or the afternoon?’ Women’s clubs are a
good thing and their price is above rubies, but put a few pickles and
salads in your solid repast, and let the drawn lines of thought relax
over a little bit of nonsense.”
Anyone who has appeared on the platform before women’s audiences, with
a strain of humor showing through the talk, can appreciate their plaint
that we do not respond quickly to satire or to mild “hits.” Wit must be
sharp to catch the average woman. Why is it that we do not laugh more,
and laugh more heartily? “Have we gotten the idea in some cobwebbed
corner of our brains that it is wicked to be merry,” says one club-woman
on this subject, “or are we indeed the ‘serious sex,’ so called, and
hopelessly so; or is our humor, as Mr. Harry Thurston Peck says it is,
‘entirely superficial’—that is, put on for the occasion? No one questions
that there is plenty of laughter, at least of smile, among women, but it
lacks sincerity; it has not the earnest ring of genuine merriment. If we
stop to question the reason why, and if we are scientifically inclined we
cannot fail to do so, as a lack of humor assigns a race to a lower order
of development, we find the answer to be one of two causes. First, women,
as a whole, look at life in all its relations from an intensely personal
standpoint. For example, if you ask one to admire a gown, a carpet or a
picture, she will do so, and then add (as a rule) either that she has or
did have one almost exactly like it. If you tell her of some personal
experience, she usually grows impatient with the desire to relate a
corresponding one of her own. She does not seem to be able to put herself
out of the equation. For this reason, when anything genuinely ludicrous
occurs, she must first think of her own relation to it, whether by any
possibility the laugh can be turned against herself, and by this time the
spontaneity of the laughter, its genuineness, has vanished. This, I find
to be one cause. Another is her persistent clinging to the small burdens
of life. Men, most of them, seem able to drop even very heavy business
cares when they enter the home life; but woman too often carries these
everywhere—in her pleasure excursions, to her afternoon teas; even, and
perhaps more often than anywhere else, to her couch. One woman told me
that she arranged all her plans and all her meals for the next day after
she was in her bed at night. How, then, can women help being serious,
when the mind is always heavily burdened, when it carries about with it
an unconscious, but real, weight, which it never discards, and which
never leaves it free and open to impressions?”
Once in a while you find a woman who does not, like the snail, carry
her house on her back. The ability to cast it off is certainly an
accomplishment which every one should cultivate, and the more she gets
interested in outside affairs—world interests—the less likely she is to
become narrowed. That there are still clubs which devote themselves to
the pursuit of culture as obtained from encyclopædias and who take their
mental pabulum from the mouths of babes and sucklings, and that there are
still women who make a fetish of their clubs, erecting false standards
of life until their homes are left unto them desolate, must be admitted.
It is a significant fact, however, that women are being called upon to
consider problems, civic and social, which require a broader training
than it was possible for them to obtain a generation or more ago.
This training the woman’s college and the woman’s club, when properly
conducted, supply, the latter, especially, giving to women who have
missed a college training the opportunity of keeping up intellectual life
and of putting newly acquired knowledge to practical use in some line of
economic endeavor or social service, for the day has not yet passed when
the woman’s club may be styled the “middle-aged woman’s university.”
No; let us have our clubs and work in them together, for so shall we gain
new ideas and a more thorough understanding of the real sisterhood of our
sex. We shall renew our strength as the eagles, and our belief in each
other as actual living factors in the world’s work. And if the club has
an altruistic basis, if it has a clause in its constitution about being
the means of “elevating this community,” if it is really working for some
actual barriers, then let the public know it by every possible means. One
of the hopeful signs of club-work is that there are few clubs left that
consider their papers and discussions too sacred to be shared with common
folk.
Of course, there is danger of running to the opposite extreme. Those
clubs whose most laborious efforts seem to lie in serving tea once a
month and providing a literary programme that is indeed milk for babes
are too often inclined to rush into print with elaborated accounts of
table decorations and good gowns, but even that shows a hospitable
spirit, does it not? At least, they are setting a good example to clubs
whose discussions and papers, if accurately reported, would be of immense
value to younger clubs and to the outside world of women who cannot
attend the meetings. For even the occasional woman who boasts that she
never belonged to a club reads the club column in her favorite newspaper.
Exclusiveness, after all, is only another name for selfishness. And
selfishness is utterly and thoroughly incompatible with the idea of
women’s clubs. The club motif is helpfulness, and that is a quality
diametrically opposed to selfishness. We might go further and say that
the sensitiveness which so many of us plead is only another phase of
selfishness—and none of us have a right to plead that. Why is it that
some words we roll as a sweet morsel under our tongues, while their
definitions we abhor?
Let us, as club-women, make some good resolutions and then keep them.
Whereas, we are all human and therefore love gossip, let us resolve:
That we will cultivate a spirit of love and patience for every woman in
the club.
That if we hear a single word of criticism on her words or actions or
dress or face or figure, we will not repeat it.
That we will not answer such criticisms, except to say something good of
the assailed.
That we will make the club a place where helpfulness and kindliness go
hand in hand with inspiration.
That the Golden Rule is just as good a guide to club life as to home life.
And that we will adopt it and practice it.
And let us reflect that if the club movement were not a good thing we
would not find a million of the best women in our country in it.
I have seen many club mottoes and club platforms in my day and
generation, but the following seems to me the best. It originated with
the Lincoln (Neb.) club-women:
“Ours is an inclusive, departmental club. Since its object is to help and
be helped, the following women are invited to become members:—
1. The university graduate.
2. The woman of common school education.
3. The self-educated woman.
4. The woman who belongs to other clubs.
5. The non-club woman.
6. The woman who does not believe in clubs.
7. The woman who does not wish to join a department.
8. The woman who wants to attend the club meetings but twice a
year.
9. The woman who wants to be a member for the name of it.
10. The tired woman, full of domestic responsibilities, who
wants to be a sponge, fold her hands, take in what the bright
free woman who needs an audience, has learned, and then go home
refreshed to her treadmill.
11. The woman without companionship.
12. The young woman and the young-old woman.”
XII
ON THE ETHICS OF CLOTHES
This is not a chapter on “What to wear and how to wear it.” It is not a
question altogether of becoming and fashionable attire. It is, rather,
of our clothes and their relation to the rest of the world that I would
speak. We talk a great deal about art; is it not just as desirable in
dress as anywhere? God meant women to be attractive just as He meant
flowers to be lovely and birds to sing. Why, then, should women of
earnest purpose think it advances their work to make frumps of themselves?
Is there a shy, poorly dressed woman coming to your church, always taking
a back seat and slipping off like a frightened lamb when the service
is over? Hunt her out and say something pleasant to her. And remember,
especially if you can afford gorgeous raiment yourself, that that very
woman may have something for you. Try it and see. I have often been asked
if I do not consider it wrong for a rich woman to wear better clothes to
her club than the average member can afford. I say No. As long as women
are women half the pleasure of going out anywhere, even to church, lies
in the opportunity it gives for seeing what other women wear. And it does
not follow, because we cannot wear rich clothing ourselves, that we are
unable to bear the sight of it displayed on the person of another woman
without that secret stirring of pride and all uncharitableness of which
Saint Paul speaks so eloquently. On the contrary, most of us delight in
beautiful things, and it is a pleasure to see fine clothes, even if we
cannot behold them under our own roof-tree and in our own wardrobes.
Another thing. No woman likes to feel that she is being dressed down
to, or that some other woman is pitying her because her raiment is not
costly. If the choice lies between feeling that some other woman can wear
better things than I do, or the consciousness that this other woman feels
that she can and is trying to dress down to the limits of my purse, give
me the former; I will try to bear the sight of her fine clothes with
patience and to believe that my soul is above the glitter of outside
adornment. For a woman’s a woman for a’ that.
The time is coming—we see it already around the corner—when clothes do
not make the woman. The plain little woman whose garb is just about
as noticeable as the feathers of a little brown sparrow is quite as
apt to be the leading spirit in her club or town or State, as the one
with reception gowns from Felix and tailor suits from Redfern. And yet
why should anybody speak or think disparagingly of a woman because she
follows Shakespeare’s advice, “Costly thy raiment as thy purse can buy”?
May there not be just as much uncharitableness among women in this
direction as in the other? Possibly a woman is abundantly able to wear a
tailor gown that costs a hundred dollars or more, and her husband is more
than particular about her dress. Some husbands are. Is it her duty to
wear a cheaper gown because some of her sisters must?
Here is a nice question in club ethics. One’s husband may count his money
by the hundred thousands or even the millions; both he and the children
may be strenuous about the mother’s clothes. What is her duty? Shall
she go against the wishes of her own family, not to mention her personal
taste in the matter, and studiously avoid wearing good gowns when she
goes to the club—simply because there are women there whose husbands can
scarcely afford the “ready-made tailor” or the home-seamstress-made silk
which they are wearing?