I
“The wide-spread change in thought and attitude of my sex towards
yours,” which Anastasia Beauchamp announced to Adrian Savage in “Lucas
Malet’s” novel of the latter name, affects marriage, of course,
primarily. And it appears from Ida M. Tarbell, _Making a Man of
Herself_ (_The American Magazine_, February, 1912) that the leaders
of Feminism have been trying for many years to dissuade their younger
sisters from matrimony:
Man and marriage are a trap--that is the essence the young woman
draws from the campaign for woman’s rights.... She will be a
“free” individual, not one “tied” to a man. The “drudgery” of the
household she will exchange for what she conceives to be the broad
and inspiring work which men are doing. From the narrow life of the
family she will escape to the excitement and triumph of a “career.”
The Business of Being a Woman becomes something to be ashamed of, to
be apologized for. All over the land there are women with children
clamoring about them, apologizing for never having _done_ anything.
Women whose days are spent in trades and professions complacently
congratulate themselves that they at least have _lived_. There were
girls in the early days of the movement, as there no doubt are today,
that prayed on their knees that they might escape the frightful
isolation of marriage; might be free to “live,” and to “know,” and to
“do.”
In another article she says:
“Celibacy is the aristocracy of the future,” is the preaching of one
European Feminist.... The ranks of the women celibates are not full.
Many a candidate falls out by the way, confronted by something she
had not reckoned with--the eternal command that she be a woman. She
compromises--grudgingly. She will be a woman on condition that she
is guaranteed economic freedom, opportunity for self-expressive
work, political recognition. What this amounts to is that she does
not see in the woman’s life a satisfying and permanent end.
Naturally, this attitude does not tend toward domestic contentment,
peace and happiness. The woman who marries in this frame of mind
already has her face set toward Reno.
Yet the instinct for maternity is a force. Therefore the great
desideratum in the opinion of George Bernard Shaw and Ellen Key is the
satisfaction of the instinct without the inconvenience of a husband.
But when he comes to deal with the facts Shaw’s courage fails him, and
he turns tail and flees. In _Getting Married_ he confesses that, in
spite of all its horrors, he can invent no substitute for marriage.
Ellen Key, on the other hand, in _Love and Marriage_, has the courage
of her convictions.
And yet her relations to man cannot be entirely without satisfactions
to woman. She cannot be quite the slave that the Feminists describe.
Anna A. Rogers, in _Why American Marriages Fail_ (_Atlantic Monthly_,
September, 1907) speaks of
the present false and demoralizing deification of women, especially
in this country, an idolatry of which we as a people are so
inordinately proud. One of the evil effects of this attitude is shown
in the intolerance and selfishness of young wives, which is largely
responsible for the scandalous slackening of marriage ties in the
United States.... Our women as a whole are spoiled, extremely idle,
and curiously undeserving of the maudlin worship that they demand
from our hard-working men.... The hair-dressers, the manicurists, the
cafes at lunch time, are full to overflowing with women--extravagant,
idle, self-centred.... She has not merged her fate with her
husband’s, if married, nor with her father’s if not: she does not
properly supplement their lives; she is striving for a detached,
profitless, individuality.... The sacredness and mystery of womanhood
are fast passing away from among us.
A successful woman dramatist, an interview with whom was published in
_The New York Times_ a few months ago, said:
The American man is a great deal more unselfish and chivalrous than
is good for the woman. He often bears his own burden, and part of the
woman’s. This is very excellent discipline for him, but it is hard on
the woman. She doesn’t have a chance to learn sacrifice.
Miss Tarbell recognized that the Feminist was in revolt against the
drudgery of the household. Edna Kenton, for the militants, is even
more explicit. She says in _Militant Women--and Women_ (_The Century
Magazine_, November, 1913):
There is rising revolt among women against the unspeakable dullness
of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life
servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world.... There is
nothing in the home alone to satisfy woman’s longing for variety,
adventure, romance.
How many men have any means of satisfying their longings for variety,
adventure and romance? Miss Kenton’s notion that “the restrictions on
men’s free-willing are comparatively few,” is mere silliness. In the
business and professional classes woman’s opportunities of disposing of
her time and cultivating her tastes are vastly greater than man’s, and
among the less fortunate classes, the care of a three-room flat or a
five-room house is a lighter servitude than that by which the man gets
the bread for his wife and babies. There is more companionship in the
children and the neighbors than there is in digging, in tending the
lathe, and operating the loom. There is more social life in hanging out
the clothes in the back yard, and talking to the woman who is doing
the same thing in the next yard, than there is in making entries in a
ledger, and adding up columns of figures. The kitchen utensils are as
interesting as the saw and the monkey-wrench.
Ninety-five per cent of the work of men is drudgery, and few men
have any choice in the selection of their drudgery. They do what as
boys they were set at, or what they can get a chance at. A very small
proportion of men have variety, adventure, romance, and no one who
looks at our shopping streets and places of amusement will be in any
doubt that women are less tied to their galley oars than men. Olive
Schreiner, in _Woman and Labor_, ungenerously says that men have always
been willing that women should do the coarse and ill-paid work; it is
only when women demand admission to the higher and more intellectual
occupations that men admonish them to keep within their sphere. Yet
to women of genius the world of literature and art and music has long
been open, and within recent years a multitude of occupations have
been opened to women, with little if any objection from men; perhaps
in consistency the Feminists should approve the many men who have been
glad enough to shirk the support of their womankind and let their
sisters and daughters take care of themselves.
But these are for the most part the unmarried women, very many of whom
marry and “lapse with their marriage into the old parasitism,” in the
agreeable phrase of Edna Kenton. One remedy for this that has been
proposed is that men shall pay wages to their wives. This, however,
besides commercializing the union of men and women, is open to the
further objection that if a man hires a woman to be his wife, he must
have the right to discharge her when he finds some one else that would
suit him better, for a time. This is admittedly a makeshift. A more
“thorough” remedy offered is “paid motherhood,” the men supporting the
state and the state supporting the women and children. In such a case
the state would naturally decide what mothers to pay, and what men to
mate them with. Nothing that is now recognized as a home could survive
such an arrangement, and the Feminists don’t wish it to survive.
And even so, the house work has got to be done by somebody. If it is
done by a hired charwoman she would be economically justifying her
existence, while if it is done by a wife and mother, she would be a
parasite, in the language of Olive Schreiner, and would be earning her
living by the exercise of her sex functions, in the chaste words of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman in _Women and Economics_, and Edna Kenton. And
in any case the men must go on with their drudgery, which comprises
overwhelmingly the greater part of all the work that is done in the
world.