are studying its social conditions is of tremendous significance. We
began in club life by studying literature, present and past. Then we
took up history, and from comparing causes and effects in the past we
naturally come to studying the economic conditions of to-day. Once take
up this question and we become a powerful factor in its evolution. Women
can create and maintain public sentiment, and it is the thinking women
who usually become club women. The new political economy, which means
the care and culture of mankind, to-day demands our attention. There are
many phases of it, but most of our studies bear upon it in one form or
another. It is not pleasant to hear about women who make shirtwaists for
forty-eight cents a dozen and ruffled skirts for nineteen cents apiece,
and thankful—poor creatures!—to get even that. It is heart-breaking to
hear of the girls who work in laundries at three to six dollars a week,
and at a risk of having hand or foot crushed in the mangle. It is quite
heartrending to be told of the hardships that befall a girl who has lost
her hand and must find some way to earn her scanty living. But when we
are told how we can help these conditions the matter becomes practical.
When we are shown that by patronizing bargain counters and buying
cheap shirtwaists and petticoats we encourage these conditions, and it
is explained how we can improve matters for the laundry girl, then our
feelings have not been harrowed in vain.
When we come to realize that it rests with us to create a demand for
better conditions we are ready for our part of the work. We may deplore
the existence of “yellow journals,” but if we buy them we encourage their
sale and contribute to their support. We may believe the sweatshop to be
a pet institution of Satan, but if we buy its products we are encouraging
the men who keep up its existence. One of the most hopeful auguries for
the future of the concerted “woman movement” is the fact that it has
definitely recognized its duty with respect to industrial conditions.
Thousands of women and children are suffering from the lack of
intelligent sympathy as well as from scanty wages, impure air, improper
food and all the other things that are attendant on grinding poverty.
Shall we—because fate has cast our lot in happier conditions—ignore these
sisters of ours? Shall we not, rather, set about the earnest study of our
duty in the premises?
You remember the story of Henry Ward Beecher, who hired a horse at a
livery stable to go for a drive. Before starting he said, “That is a
fine-looking animal; is he as good as he looks?” The owner replied, “Mr.
Beecher, that horse will work in any place you put him and do all that
any horse can do.” And Mr. Beecher eyed the animal still more admiringly
and remarked, “Well, I wish to goodness he was a member of my church.”
Now, that is the way we ought to work if we would find all that modern
opportunities mean for us individually—“Work in any place we are put and
do all that a woman can do.” But not restlessly, strenuously.
The truest and best philanthropic work tends to broaden the sympathy and
widen the conception, if not of the brotherhood of man, at least of the
sisterhood of woman. There is really no end to it—this question of what
women may accomplish for the public good. And one of the most hopeful
signs of this close of the nineteenth century is that women are no longer
content with hiding their light under a bushel. They think very little
about the position of the light, so that it is shedding bright rays over
the dark places of the earth.
There is still here and there a woman who feels that she is of no value
because she has not money or some special gift. Let her take heart.
Whatever she is of herself, whatever she can do in the way of personal
service, is of inestimable value. There is nothing else to compare with
it. Christ gave Himself. It is the highest gift, and its noblest form is
personal service in small things.
XV
ON HOME-LOVING AND HOUSEKEEPING
There are people in the world in this enlightened age who are worrying
about the relation of the woman of to-morrow to the home. They argue
that the new woman, with her opportunities, her relation to the business
world, her college education, her mental development (which they delight
in referring to as “so far ahead of their physical development”)—that
this woman of the future is sure to cut asunder from all home ties; that
we are to become a race of nomads, who roam desolately from one hotel
or boarding-house or lodging-house to another, with no taste or desire
for the old-fashioned home. But this is now, as it always was, sheer
nonsense. Ever since Eve hugged her first baby to her heart women have
been proud and happy mothers. Ever since she urged Adam to partake of
the fateful apple woman has been enticing man with dinners, good or
bad. Think you that after thousands of years we are going to change our
natures entirely because of a little college training, a little “advanced
thought”? Not while women are women.
Woman’s life for centuries has been narrowed to a compass bounded by
four walls; it is true that she has now stepped out and demonstrated her
fitness to do her part of the work beyond those confines. She has learned
the beauty and usefulness of association, the part that sustains the
great whole. She has found out the meaning of the word “coördination”
and the beauty of community work. She knows how to make the right
connection between home life and world interests, and her family are the
better therefor. She realizes what relation a good home bears to the
good school, the influential church and pure society. She even begins to
comprehend the immense bearing a good home and an upright community have
upon a healthy industrial system.
I suppose I am optimistic, but it seems to me that things are going very
well for our sex and that we have very little to complain of; also,
that the opposite sex has very little to complain of as well, for he is
still far from a buttonless state, and he acts as if he enjoyed having
intelligent companionship from or with his womenkind. Few women are yet
so “advanced” as to wish to bring up their babies on the coöperative
plan. Many young women persist in getting married every year, and also in
having babies. And what do they do about it? In the beginning they pin a
little band around them and see that their milk is maternally sweet, and
look confidently to God for the rest. And so far as we can judge, they
seem to enjoy motherhood. Oh, I know it is the fashion to cry out “race
suicide,” and all that, but let us not take to heart too seriously the
dismal state of affairs bewailed by certain sensational reformers. For
the world is rolling on towards the good—still swinging out to the light.
The most enduring element of our national strength lies in the fact that
our American life centres around the home fireside. We are proud to boast
of the goodness and bravery of our men, the beauty and purity of our
women, and they have these qualities because the home is their school and
the mother their teacher. The wise Creator, when He made woman, gave
her the two highest offices in His gift—those of wife and mother. Kings
boast of reigning by right divine, and inscribe “Rex Dei Gratia” upon the
laws of their land, but woman is the only creature who may truthfully use
those words, and she may say, “I am a woman by the grace of God, and rule
in a kingdom of kingdoms.” She makes no laws, leads no armies, governs no
enterprises, but she forms those by whom laws are made, armies led, great
enterprises managed. I often think the wife and mother who lives quietly
at home and looks well to the ways of her household; who still pursues
the simple art of making her husband happy (I trust I do not misuse the
word “simple”) and of bringing up her children to be good citizens—I
often think that this woman feels that her life is wasted. She reads
and hears of the public work of women, and sighs that her life is being
thrown away. Not so. This woman is fulfilling the mission of her being,
and the old-fashioned wife and mother will not go out of fashion as long
as the world stands. Neither do those of us who do not happen to be
wives and mothers do right in belittling their work and arrogating unto
ourselves all the glory. I have never known a more splendidly developed
woman, spiritually and intellectually, than my mother; and I have chanced
to know most of the prominent women of the last quarter of a century. And
I cannot go back on her work, although had the Lord seen fit to place her
in the ranks of the care-free, or in the present day and generation, she
would have gained far wider recognition.
Collectively, women may have been weak, mistakenly zealous, or wofully
deficient in method, but in this modern association of all grades in
society they are coming to know themselves and their possibilities
as well as their limitations. And they are beginning to realize that
collectively they are only beginning their education.
The men and women who by their lives have influenced the world, have
been those who lived simple, earnest, honest lives. What was it that
endeared the late Queen of England to her humble subjects? It was her
interest and participation in the common things of every-day life. Her
love of children, tenderness toward animals, even her relish for oatmeal
porridge was a virtue in their eyes. The homes of the nation mean the
life of the nation. No stream can rise higher than its fountain, and as
we build our homes so our land will prosper. God has given us a picture
of what Heaven may be, and He has given it in the shape of a perfect
home. When we learn to give our girls the training for home life which
will give them such power over their work that each day’s tasks will come
to willing and able hands, then we shall have solved many of the problems
that confront us at the beginning of this twentieth century. And right
here, although it may not seem apropos, how many mothers are educating
their sons in the matter of newspaper reading? How many wives say to
the husband who brings home a pink or a yellow or a green, or even some
of the white newspapers, “Please do not bring such papers home for the
children to read”? Some women do this, it is true, but more are utterly
thoughtless about it. Hosts of good women read the sensational papers
themselves—because, perchance they cost only a cent, while perhaps the
better ones cost two; and hosts of others allow their children to read
the sensational, unreliable paper without ever giving a thought to the
fact that those young, eager minds are being subjected to a lowering of
taste and a lowering of moral and mental tone. They are particular about
the associates their children select; they are even particular about the
books they read; but a newspaper is an ephemeral thing, read to-day and
forgotten to-morrow, and it does not occur to them that the effect upon
the child’s taste is morally and intellectually the same as if they were
allowed to come under the influence of a teacher with low morals.
I say this because the modern newspaper has a direct influence on the
home and the people that dwell therein. The woman who used to spend her
evenings picking out the rules for crocheting a cushion cover from the
woman’s page has learned how to read good books, to write papers without
a too free use of the encyclopedia, how to use her brains, how to think.
Just as the woman who used to edit the page has come into her own and
convinced the editor that women’s whole existence is not bounded on the
north by angel cake, on the east by baby’s afghans, on the south by her
pet dog, and on the west by her husband’s dinner; and that the magnetic
needle which points her compass is not a crochet hook. Women everywhere
are learning that scientific or simplified housekeeping is not beneath
the attention of the refined nor beyond the comprehension of the
uncultured. It is the duty of the rich and the salvation of the poor. We
are all agreed that as our lives are now ordered we have too many things
to care for, too much show and too little comfort.
“We have exchanged our stage coach for the electric motor, our tallow
candles for the incandescent light, and our simple living for nervous
prostration, so that inductive science, the new gospel, must come to our
aid,” says a bright woman. “If we would save our bodies as well as our
souls, and if the knowledge of household economics means anything to
us, it means we must get back to nature’s heart and be content to live
simpler lives.”
And we must remember that for every bad woman, every erratic woman, every
cold and selfish woman in the world, there are a thousand good and true
and faithful unto death. Only the cynic and the critic do not consider
the latter worth talking about. They only emphasize the abnormal woman,
thinking all the time they are holding the mirror up to nature and
proving something; which they are not.
Domestic science is domestic sense, and domestic sense is common sense.
Women should have the best and highest education they can obtain, and
more especially if their lives are to be rounded out in the limited
bounds of a four-room cottage; and while she may have caught the spirit
of the times and become an expansionist by invading new territories, and
may have been masquerading as the “eternal feminine” or the “new woman,”
these little excursions and diversions only make her prize the more her
old dominion, and the complexities of her nature find full play in the
evolutions in the American home.
Statistics have already proved that the college-bred woman marries in
the same proportion and infinitely better than the simpering sister who
cares nothing for education. And she not only has as many children, but
is manifestly better fitted to train them up to good citizenship. It
is also evident that woman’s experience in the business world—while it
makes her more cautious about marriage—renders her a more sympathetic,
appreciative and sensible wife than the girl who waits at home for a
husband, who, she has been taught to believe, must ever after be her
body-slave. And although modern conditions make it possible for a woman
to be self-supporting, and therefore not to marry unless she does it
for that greatest reason in the world—_love_—the business of marrying
and having children is going right on, age after age, generation after
generation, long after you and I are forgotten. So there is no real cause
for worry. Even the rankest pessimist may take heart if he will. And to
all I commend the lamented Frank Norris’ definition of a “womanly woman,”
a term we all love to use:
“To be womanly? It’s to be kind and well-bred and gentle mostly, and
never to be bold or conspicuous; and to love one’s home and take care of
it, and to love and believe in one’s husband, or parents, or children, or
even one’s sister, above any one else in the world.”
XVI
ON GROWING OLD
It is often said that we have no old women nowadays, that modern
conditions and modern dress keep us young until we drop into our graves.
And when we look at women, marvelous women, indeed, like Julia Ward
Howe and Susan B. Anthony, and Mary A. Livermore[1] and others whose
activities and beneficences have kept them young, we are inclined to
believe all this. But how is it with the most of us? Have we learned the
true art of “growing old gracefully”? In this age of hurry-scurry let us
give ourselves pause, once in awhile, long enough to remember that we owe
ourselves something, and also those around us. I know a woman who broke
down under the strain of club life a few years ago; she was one of those
willing creatures who do everything anybody asks of them, and she finally
had to withdraw from everything and remain in quiet seclusion for some
years. I thought she had learned her lesson, but no. I met her again,
almost breathless in her chase about the city on some mission or other.
“Why do you do it?” I asked. “You have broken down once under the strain
of all this excitement. Why don’t you keep out of it now? Or, if you must
be in the midst of things again, why not let others do the hard work?”
“Oh,” she replied, “I must do it. It has got to be done, and who else
will do it?”
“My dear, good friend,” I asked her, “did you ever stop to ask yourself
what would happen if you and I were to die?”
“Oh,” she exclaimed hurriedly, “nobody else will do my work; and it is
very important—I really _have_ to do it.”
“No, you don’t have to,” I answered. “If we were to die to-night
the waters would close right over our heads, and after saying the
conventional things about us, and passing suitable votes of condolence,
somebody else would take up our particular line of work; these things
we think nobody else could possibly do so well would get done just as
quickly and possibly a great deal better than if you and I kept wearing
ourselves out with them. You just try it and see.”
She thought a moment and said: “You are right. I know you are right, and
I am going to stop now.”
But she didn’t. And I suppose she will keep on, strong in the belief that
the work she is doing could not possibly be done if she did not wear
herself out with it, until she lands in a sanitarium again with nervous
prostration. I see her now and then, always daintily dressed, always
refined and delicate-looking, but with a wild air, a restless, hunted
look, when she might be so pretty and attractive.
Are we not all overdoing this matter of public work? I have done my share
of burning the candle at both ends—yes, and in the middle, too—and have
had to “give myself pause.” And I have come to see that there is nothing
to be gained by hurrying through life without a moment’s stop to consider
the real meaning of it. It is sometimes a difficult thing to be in the
midst of much work without overdoing. There is scarcely time enough to
accomplish half what one sets out to do, is there? Then do not map out so
much, but try to do your “stint” more leisurely. What is to be gained by
rushing through life as though a whirlwind were on our path?
We get to a point where we feel ourselves so necessary. We find so many
things that need to be done, and we are sure nobody else can do them
so well as we. And so we go on straining every nerve until the tension
becomes too great, and we either go under—and discover that the world can
and does move just as well without us—or we become so arbitrary that our
usefulness is ended. And then we discover that we are only one of many
just as capable as ourselves.
I know of no one who has given better advice on this subject than
Caroline Bartlett Crane, who also “speaks whereof she knows.” In talking
once on the subject of overwork, she said:
“If we will not be forewarned against overwork, let us at least be
certain that what goes by that name is the real thing. Above all, dear
ladies, let us not make our lives vain, vainglorious and in vain, by
fancying that all busyness is business; by hugging a merely cluttered
existence with ecstatic and debilitating self-consciousness, which is one
of the deadliest banes to be guarded against as long as ‘woman’s work,’
‘woman’s mission,’ ‘woman’s institutions’ and the ‘woman question’
agitate the air. Let us strive for more of that poise which experience
and a stable nervous organization has given men; let us remember that
there are absolutely no safeguards against fussing and worry; and let us
question whether, if the deeps of nervous prostration could give up its
half dead, it would not thereby appear that lack of system and synthesis
in what we do, apprehensions for what we are about to do, regrets for
what we did or did not do, omnivorous yearning for what we have no call
to do, fretting distaste for what fate ordains we shall do, doing all the
little unimportant things first under the delusion that then we will get
unencumbered leisure for the things really worth while, doing things a
hundred times in imagination before they are done, and doing them as many
times again in retrospect, with carking concern for how the doer appears
in the doing—let us ask ourselves if such travesties upon the dignity
and simplicity, the singleness and wholesomeness of real work are not
responsible for a very considerable share of the evils we commonly lay at
the door of overwork; and are not such things unworthy of us?
“Let us strive to realize that we influence more by what we are than
by what we do or what we say; and that what we say and do derives its
quality from our quality. And quality is felt _in toto_, while of
quantity a census and appraisal must needs be made.
“And let us remember, too, that when we rob a day of order, beauty,
peace, we rob life of these things. How can we live our days one way and
talk of living our lives another way? ‘As thy days so shall thy strength
be.’ We must live so as to praise God all the days of our lives, if we
would praise Him. Let us find some time in every day to lift unencumbered
hands and heart, and exclaim with the psalmist, ‘This is the day which
the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.’”
It rests with us and no one else to strike the notes that give the purest
melody. There is the life of pretence, with its artificial standards, and
the life of honest endeavor, where every note rings true; in other words,
a whole world of real people, where each man and each woman is measured
by their own true work, where friendships are honest, where laughs are
hearty and tears are real, where lives are happiest because they are
lived simplest, where the air is pure and the clothes you wear do not
signify.
Then, too, think what trouble might be avoided if we only mastered the
power of silence. Especially is this true when some controversy arises.
It is hard indeed to be at all interested in and to sit still when a
heated discussion is on. But it is a good discipline. Next time just
shut your teeth together and say to yourself, “After all, what does
it matter?” You will soon find that other people are doing all the
quarreling. It is wonderful how small a compass many controversies can be
crowded into when you really stop to consider how much of them are worth
while.
We all know how impossible it is to do our best in the home if we have
to live in the spirit of criticism. If there is some one in the family
whom it is impossible to please, who stands ready to ascribe to us
motives unworthy of any good woman, and to deny that we have anything
but self-seeking and selfishness behind all our actions, it becomes
impossible for us to live out the best that is in us, or to keep anger
and jealousy and suspicion out of our own hearts, after a time at least.
Few women there are but know or have known what it means to have such
an element somewhere in the family connections. But, even if some one
says hard things about you, the most powerful weapon is silence. The most
contemptuous or stinging retort has not the force nor the strength of
simply saying nothing. For there is nothing which you could say that is
so hard on your adversary as to ignore her argument.
Vanity enters so largely into the make-up of most mortals that it must be
recognized. When a gossip brings a tale about some friend, there is no
rebuke so keenly felt as a dignified and sober silence. When such a story
is brought and you ask some question, or even seem to acquiesce, you are
pretty sure to be reported as having told the story. We all have days,
too, which seem to be filled with petty trials and miserable crosses.
The woman at home as well as the man in business has to bear these until
every nerve seems bare. Small things assume huge proportions, and life
seems almost unendurable. We cannot see a bit beyond the little circle
of our trials, and discouragements loom large on our horizon. Nothing is
right simply because we are not right.
Do not give way to ill-temper and snap up those around you. Go where you
can be alone—out-of-doors if possible; if not, in a room by yourself. Say
a little prayer. Relax your muscles. Think of the country, the mountains,
the sea, a starry night—anything but your troubles. Stay in the silence
fifteen minutes. There is wonderful magic in it.