superficial and even of fundamental contrasts, that if ever a merciful
sentence is to be passed upon one who, peering through the “turbid
media” of sociological analysis, mistakes the _Zeitgeist_ for a
new woman, it is in our own longitudes. Like a child growing up under
the eye of an arrogant and pompous parent, we have, nationally, been
made to feel from the beginning that we are new, even tentative, that
we are unclassified, all but vagrant in the ethnological sense. It is
possible that recent events will modify in certain important ways,
external contemplation of us as a nation, that, in spite of certain new
effects which we may be accused of producing, a consciousness and a
recognition of our definite maturity may have some responsive effect in
ourselves.
Meanwhile it is pleasantly easy to detect many interesting changes in
the situation of the American girl within the span of the century.
Whether she merely illustrates the social and political changes which
have taken place, or, as we so often have been urged to believe,
actually indicates why they have taken place, she presents a spectacle
of peculiar interest, a spectacle which has so successfully piqued
the analytical spirit of the period that it would be expounding the
commonplace to do more than quickly sketch a few of the outlines.
We have seen her bidding good-bye to the schoolma’am at a time when any
education was good enough for a girl,--good enough not only because
neither the kitchen nor the drawing-room exacted Greek, but because
heavier pabulum would utterly ruin her mental digestion; and we have
seen her at a later time when no education is too good for her, bidding
good-bye to an army of instructors at commencement time, radiant in her
cap and gown, the class song ringing pleasantly in her ears, the breath
of June in her life, with a crisp diploma to symbolize her triumphs.
In fact, we have seen the morality of educating her dismissed as a
settled question, and the matter of the quantity and quality left to
the perhaps not easy but at least final arbitrament of her individual
capacity.
[Illustration]
We have seen her yield up to strenuous and inventive man, one by one,
various and many offices once regarded as essentially domestic, and
even as bounding that debatable domain, her “sphere”; we have seen
the spinning wheel go into the garret and come down again years later,
pertly polished, with pink ribbons on the distaff and spindle; we have
seen the superseded milkmaid gathering bottled cream at the basement
door, the superseded seamstress wearing a man-made jacket; and all
without audible murmur at the displacement.
[Illustration]
We have seen the trained nurse succeed Sairy Gamp, many nostrums
disappearing gratefully in the transformation, and have found in
the new sisterhood of bedside saints a cheering sign of a finer
civilization, a prophecy of the future of medicine. We have seen the
amanuensis penning “Paradise Lost” and law briefs and grave history and
exhausting letters--the amanuensis celebrated in sentimental fiction
and unsentimental commerce, fulfil the promise of her own invaluable
service in the modern typewriter, whose little white fingers help move
the lever of the great mercantile machine, without whom modern trade
could scarcely stir, and whose taking away would rob all business life
of an inestimably sweetening influence.
We have seen her needle placed in the jaws of a machine, and have
seen her yoked with men in service to this iron master. We have
seen her leave the fireside armchair to climb the tall stool of
the counting-room and the railway station. We have seen the bodkin
displaced by the scalpel, the lace cap by the mortar-board, the apron
by the vestment. We have seen her emerge from the shadows of the
sanctuary to speak in the councils of the elders, we have seen her
hurry the breakfast dishes to go and vote.
We have seen her, once content to be the theme of art, become a master
of every medium, even of architecture, and throwing aside at last, and
without petulance, the insulting tributes that come under a sex label.
We have seen her, once forbidden to read newspapers, successful in
making them; committing errors, but under bad counsel and direction
rather than by any failure of her own taste, and winning highest honors
in journalistic art and conflict.
[Illustration:
_The_ Amanuensis
of
the Past]
[Illustration:
The Amanuensis
of
the Present]
The philosophy of all these changes naturally is complex and difficult.
It is a truism to remark that the danger always is of assuming that
they mean more than they do. We perhaps instinctively measure a change
by the mere picturesqueness of the contrast. We require to be reminded
much that humanity changes very little from century to century,
that whatever the appearances, great revolutions in human sentiment
and motive probably have not happened. No student of human
nature comes oftener upon any discovery than upon that of the simple
persistence in the twilight of the century of the old human instincts
that prevailed at the dawn. So that we need not think to find in all
these new clothes any greatly different people. When the century’s
clock strikes the hundredth year, and Father Time, acting as master of
ceremonies, shouts “Masks off!” there, among all the masqueraders, are
the same faces that have grown familiar in the every-day of life.
If the reader detects in this attitude any wish to escape the burdens
of an explanation, an anxiety to dodge the awful Why? in all these
outward modifications of Miss America, he, and especially she, is quite
at liberty to do so, for, as I perhaps have indicated, and must repeat
defensively from time to time, definitely to explain Miss America is
farthest from my thoughts; though I cannot deny an intention, which
doubtless appeared at an early stage, to express respectfully certain
untested, and, it may be, actually impulsive, personal opinions
regarding her. To refrain from exercising such a privilege under
circumstances which forbid interruption would be superhuman.
More interesting to me at the moment are some appearances already
fairly familiar, yet new in garb and situation. The young woman in
new lights and new places has a natural fascination. I realized this
vividly one day in the hotel of a Western city, when I became conscious
that an unusual guest had arrived. She was a sturdy young woman,
yet delicate of feature, with a mild, undismayed blue eye. She came
swinging into the hotel, a darkey lad at her russet shoe heels with a
telescope bag. She herself carried a sleek yellow satchel which she
placed in front of the desk. She wrote her name in a firm, small hand,
took a heap of letters handed to her by the clerk, and dropped into a
near-by chair to open several of them with a quick flip of her gloved
finger. In no way was she radically dressed. Her tailor-made suit was
of a fine cloth, richly trimmed. Her clothes, like her manner, had not
an unnecessary touch. Later, I saw her interviewing the porter, who
presently was rolling three large sample trunks into one of those first
floor rooms provided by certain hotels for the use of drummers, whose
goods for display cannot well be taken upstairs. I saw her come in at
different times with three different shopkeepers, and others came,
evidently by appointment, to inspect many rolls of carpet which soon
littered the display room.
[Illustration: Thanksgiving Day: Old Style]
[Illustration: Thanksgiving Day: New Style]
“She’s a trump!” muttered the clerk, with an admiring glance across the
corridor; “the best drummer Warp & Woof ever had. She succeeded one of
their New York men, and she beat his orders by forty thousand dollars
the first year. And there’s no fooling about her either. She doesn’t
try to mesmerize the customers, though she’s pretty enough to do that
if she cared to. She simply makes them want the goods, and she sells so
square that she doesn’t have any trouble coming back to the same
people.”
“Is she a single woman?” I asked. Something in this inquiry amused the
clerk. Then he said: “Well, they say she’s engaged to a drummer for
Felt, Feathers & Co., and that if they ever manage to get into Chicago
at the same time they will get married.”
One day in mid-Missouri a lean, brown, bare-footed boy was driving me
across country to a railway station. Suddenly the boy said: “We ain’t
goin’ t’ have no dog show.”
“No?” The boy shook his head. Presently he added: “And that girl’s dead
sore on this town.”
“What girl?” I demanded.
The boy turned to me with a look of incredulity. “Didn’t you see ’er?”
“You don’t mean that girl in the blue dress that was at the hotel
breakfast this morning?”
“That’s her, yes.”
I remembered that she had very dark eyes, and no color; that she wore
an Alpine hat and a neat gown, that she looked straight before her with
an almost sullen expression when she spoke to the waiter.
“I drove her over to Bimley’s,” the boy said, “and she sat there where
you are for two miles without saying a word. Then she turned at me
quick and says, ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ and I said yes I had, just
one. Then she said, ‘Have yer got a match?’ and I give her that, and
she smoked for a long time without sayin’ anything. After a while she
let out and said this was the meanest, low-down town she ever struck,
that they was meaner’n dirt here, especially the college, and that she
never wanted t’ see it n’r hear of it agin. Yer see, she goes from one
town to another and gits up dog shows for the people that have fine
dogs, and they have the town band, an’ lemonade an’ cake an’ prizes.
Anyway, she had a hard time stirrin’ them up here; but she could have
got through all right only for the president of the college. He said he
wouldn’t let the girls go, and that settled it. They gave it up after
this girl’d blown in a two days’ bill at the hotel, and she got mad and
lit out. Well, she quieted down agin before we got to Bimley’s, and
when we was in the hollow by Moresville I looked at her and she was
cryin’.”
One other glimpse: Miss Linnett was the typewriter at Stoke Brothers’.
At first she had been just the typewriter, coming highly recommended
from the typewriter school. She appeared at the minute of nine and went
away at the minute of five, unless one of the Stokes stayed beyond that
hour, or late letters and the copying book delayed her. She unvaryingly
dressed in black, wore her brown hair simply in a knot, and in the
depth of winter always had a flower of some sort on her table. The
elder Stoke was feeble, and his eyesight grew to be so poor that she
read his letters to him. The junior Stoke would never let her take
formal dictation, preferring to give her the gist of what he wanted to
say and letting her put it in her own way. In this habit they both came
greatly to depend upon her. After a time, too, her growing knowledge of
the business induced the cashier and bookkeeper to go to her in certain
contingencies, and she acquired, without either seeking or rejecting
it, various discretionary powers in regard to the machinery of the
business. If anything went wrong they resorted to Miss Linnett. If old
Stoke forgot anything Miss Linnett was a second memory to him. If the
younger Stoke was in a hurry he would hand over the letters to Miss
Linnett to answer as she saw fit. She knew all the correspondents of
the house and their prejudices. She knew the combination of old Stoke’s
private safe after Stoke himself had forgotten it. She had a way of her
own in putting away documents, and nobody ever thought of studying the
scheme. She met all of these obligations with a dispassionate serenity,
and everything she did was done with an easy and amiable quickness. She
became the brain centre of the office. She was Stoke Brothers.
Then one night she broke down, fainted, there before old Stoke, who
fell on his knees beside her and wept in real anguish while the little
white bookkeeper ran for a doctor, and the cashier tremblingly fetched
water to sprinkle her face. When she did not come the next day at nine
the situation in the office was pitiful. Old Stoke was useless, and the
younger Stoke shifted his letters from one hand to the other in utter
misery. The bookkeeper and cashier fumbled through their work dazed and
unstrung. In the days of doubt that followed the situation grew more
gloomy. There was great excitement when one morning she came down town
in a cab, white and fluttering, and, leaning on the bookkeeper’s arm,
made her way from the elevator to the office. She smiled at the little
group, accepted the homage quietly, insisted on showing them where
certain papers were, promised them that she should be back very soon,
and went away again, old Stoke patting her hand and telling her to be
careful. At the end of the month she died.
“What did they ever do without her?” I asked when I had heard the story.
“They didn’t do without her. Stoke Brothers went out of business. I
suppose they had been thinking of doing that; they were pretty well on
in years--and they couldn’t get on without Miss Linnett.”
* * * * *
Yes, of all the changes that have marked this changeful century, of all
the transformations, social, political and economic, that have affected
the situation of women since the establishment of the Republic, that
change is most significant and potent which has placed her so widely
and so potently in business. Miss America is in business: patiently
ambitiously, grotesquely, indispensably in business. The social changes
have not been great,--indeed, one is often startled to find how slight
they have been. Political changes, important and prophetic as they
are, have not as yet sensibly affected the life of women in general;
while the extraordinary extent of women’s entrance into business in
co-operation with and competition with men, has had an unexampled
effect upon the American girl’s domestic, social and political
situation.
[Illustration]
The American girl is not, as yet, very definitely conscious of this
effect, although she has been told about it often and vehemently in one
way or another. Unless she is writing a paper for her club she hasn’t
time to think much about it. She enjoys business as distinguished from
plain work. The idea of a business training rather piques the fancy
of an era that has laughed away the tradition of a “sphere,” and the
sort of young lady who in a past era would have no obligations beyond
needlework, is found dabbling in shorthand and bookkeeping, as the
princes learn a trade.
[Illustration]
And so the scientific observer is greatly distressed at times by the
thought that there must be a mighty readjustment before things can
come out smooth again. You might think that the whole thing had come
upon science unawares, that it was, in the phrase of a young woman who
was not new, all “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden.” But no sound
authority exhibits real worriment on this point. If it is man who
complains, it is man who refuses to get along without her. From this
time forth business is going to be a co-educational affair. We shall be
told many times again that somehow all this will detract from woman’s
charm, and whether we believe or mistrust so much, we shall, I suspect,
go on taking the interesting risk.
[Illustration: The Editor’s Busy Day]
By the natural processes of time, women, young and old, will, I
suppose, like the rest of creation, continue to become better off.
Doubtless this is optimism. Pessimism says that two and two make three.
Sentimentalism says that two and two make five. It is optimism that is
content, and with good reason, to say that two and two make four.
The traveller in a scurrying railroad train becomes familiar with few
more thought-suggesting sights than the farm woman in the cottage
door. She comes forward with her hands in her apron, if not with a
baby on her arm. Sometimes she waves her hand to the unanswering
train. Sometimes she leans against the door-post and looks, one
might fancy wistfully, at the clattering cars, at the people who are
going somewhere. Sometimes the doorway is in a cabin with one room.
Sometimes the woman is slatternly, drooping; sometimes she has the
glow of content. The spectator in the car cannot but wonder what are
the emotions of the spectator in the doorway. Doubtless there is both
envy and commiseration on each side. If the spectator in the cars
sometimes pities the woman in the cabin door as one who is left out
and left behind, the spectator in the cabin door sometimes pities the
haste-hunted spectator who is being noisily flung about in the great
loom of life.
To glance backward over a century is to feel that life constantly
reiterates this situation. We all of us are roughly divided--very
roughly, sometimes--into the two groups: the people in the cars and
the people in the doorways. The look of things must go on being
affected by the point of view. There is a view-point aloof from either
situation, but it is not one which the merely human sojourner ever can
be privileged to occupy.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
IV
STITCHES AND LINKS
[Illustration]
“Did it ever occur to you,” demanded the Professor, “how few people
actually do fashionable things?--that we probably are just as
hyperbolical in assuming that young women once amused themselves with
embroidery as that they now amuse themselves with golf?”
“Stitches and links,” I pondered, knowing that the Professor did not
expect an answer.
“What proportion of folks should you say actually do concentrate their
functions in the ‘barbaric swat’?”
I lifted my head; and she went on:
“Yes, I know that there always must be a fashionable, a dominating
pastime, and I have no disparagement of golf as golf. It is a good
enough game in its way. I am bound to admit this after having made a
very good score myself. Moreover, it is Scottish, which is a guarantee
of a latent profundity. It is a large game, and, as Sir Walter said of
eating tarts, is ‘no inelegant pleasure.’ I have been told by those
who have had an opportunity to know, that it calls out a great variety
of qualities. That may be said of many other things; but no matter.
My suggestion is that the assumption of prevalence in a so-called
fashionable thing leaves something unexplained, something that may be
very important, a philosophical hiatus--”
“Professor,” I said, “have you never stopped to think that fashionable
fads and fads that are not fashionable are potent in two ways, that
is to say, first and primarily, in participation, and second, in
contemplation? There is less golf than talk about golf. One game of
golf may be repeated any day, for example, one hundred million times in
print. As the newspapers play golf with type, so the physically present
spectators on the links are repeated many-fold in those who not less
are participants and spectators, who wear ostentatious golf stockings
without ever having seen a teeing ground. This secondary participation
and appreciation is the breath of life to social fads. Probably this
may be said of all not absolutely primary pleasures. And so society
says, ‘We are all playing golf,’ which is not true at all, but which
instantly produces a situation that amounts to the same thing. We shall
say that one woman in ten thousand who may be in a situation, so far as
opportunity is concerned, to play anything, is playing golf, but this
shall not make it possible for the other nine thousand nine hundred
and ninety-nine who are not playing golf, to play anything else and
make it fashionable at the same time. This could not be, any more than
that we could have more than one Napoleon, more than one most-talked-of
book, more than one absorbing scandal, at a time. All epidemics present
this feature of concentration. Napoleon was just as much an epidemic
as crinoline or ‘Robert Elsmere.’ The hypnotists have a word for this
which has escaped me at the moment--”
“Multo-suggestion,” contributed the Professor, patiently.
[Illustration]
“Something to that effect, in which we have a scientific explanation of
the exclusiveness of fashion, an explanation of fashion itself. And the
thing could not be different. That susceptibility to the contagion of
enthusiasm which inspires the American with so passionate an interest
in all of his hobbies, is a susceptibility which explains his keener
interest in life, his democracy of sentiment, his ardent yet generally
cautious and sane pursuit of entertainment.”
“Much of this,” interposed the Professor, in her ruthless way, “might,
it seems to me, be said with equal propriety of any civilized people.”
“I think, Professor, that there are some significant points of
difference--points of difference associated very largely, I think, with
the American sense of humor, which we are in the habit of complacently
arrogating. I think, Professor, that your philosophical hiatus is
occupied very largely by a sense of humor.”
“That,” laughed the Professor, “reminds me of that story of the boy
who was seeking to explain to his companion the characteristics of
spaghetti. ‘You know maccaroni?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you know the hole through
it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, spaghetti’s the hole.’ I do wish I could believe
more completely in your sense of humor theory. In the first place it
is hard to explain some of the things the young people do by their
possession of a sense of humor.”
[Illustration]
“On the contrary, Professor, I think American young folks develop a
sense of humor earlier than any other in the world, which is a Yankee
enough thing to say. This may be an odd contention from me, but to me
one of the most distinctive traits of the American girl is her gift for
being unserious. It is not always a sense of humor, either; if it is,
it is a sense entirely her own, for it certainly is not associated
with traits which we ascribe to a sense of humor in men. In any case
it is a saving sense, a sense that keeps her from taking things so
tragically as the unknowing or unsympathetic spectator might expect.
The American has a genius for radicalism, a creative defiance of logic
and tradition. Once in a while some philosopher discovers that the
frivolities of life have an immense importance. Scientifically the
physical distortions of a laugh are ridiculous. Yet we almost have
ceased to defend it, even in young ladies.”
“A ready laugh,” the Professor said, “is no indication of a sense of
humor. The comic and the humorous are sometimes even antagonistic. You
have heard me defend irreverence in girls, but a want of seriousness
often indicates a want of humor, for a sense of humor, my friend,
is essentially a sense of proportion. Now, to my mind, the American
girl does not indicate so keen a sense of proportion in her golf, for
instance, as in her clubs.”
“Well,” I ventured, “she is serious enough in them, surely.”
“Only to those who do not understand her,” returned the Professor
severely. “That women take their clubs too seriously, too improvingly,
has been a matter of complaint for a long time. There has been almost
a missionary spirit among those who have sought to save our girls from
clubs. Some of the missionaries have preached total abstinence among
the girls. ‘If you take one club,’ they have said, ‘you will take
another. The appetite will grow on you. You pride yourself on your
power of resistance now; but after you have taken a club, a dreadful,
unappeasable craving will spring up within you, and you will want more.
You will not be able to pass a club without wanting it. Even after you
have yielded to a morning, afternoon, and evening indulgence, you will
find a temptation to take a luncheon club too,--and when you take them
with your meals they have a particularly insidious effect. From this
it is but a step to a Browning bracer at nine A. M. and a Schopenhauer
cocktail just before dinner. Take no clubs at all--especially the
subtle, supposed-to-be-innocuous reading club--’”
“Look not upon the club when it is read,” I murmured.
“‘--for these,’” the Professor continued, with her inimitable chuckle,
“‘for these lead surely to more deadly stimulants. Indeed, these are,
to those who truly know them, more deadly than many another sort.’
Then there is the more moderate school of missionaries which is for
limiting the number of clubs to so many a week, or to cutting them
down gradually on the theory that a girl who has been taking clubs
right along cannot stop short without peril to her health. By dropping,
say, one club a week for a whole season, a girl may, from a repulsive
intellectual sot be brought back, by patient nursing, and in due time,
to decency and three clubs a week.”
“But, Professor,” I said, “they must believe in clubs as a medicine, as
a stimulant in the case of a threatening mental chill--”
[Illustration]