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The Women of Tomorrow
By William Hard
New York
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
1911
Copyright, 1910, by
THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
Copyright, 1911, by
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK
[Illustration: JOHN SIMMONS, FOUNDER OF SIMMONS COLLEGE--THE FIRST SCHOOL
OF COLLEGE RANK IN THE UNITED STATES DEVOTED WHOLLY TO GIVING WOMEN A
DEFINITE TRAINING FOR SELF-SUPPORT.
_Photograph by Chester A. Lawrence, Boston._]
CONTENTS
PAGE
I Love Deferred 3
II Learning for Earning 41
III Learning for Spending 89
IV The Wasters 135
V Mothers of the World 179
I inscribe this book to Mrs. Peter Christian Lutkin. She said I might,
a long time since. I was a boy then. Now I come to keep her to her
promise and I lay this, my first book, on her knees, knowing that it
is full of the sounds of controversy but hoping that her gentleness,
somehow, may harmonize all harshnesses to the love I meant.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
John Simmons, Founder of Simmons College Frontispiece
Simmons College, Boston 42
Edna D. Day, the First Woman to Become a Doctor of
Philosophy in the Field of Home Economics 76
Mary Schenck Woolman, Founder of Manhattan Trade
School 76
Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois 82
Children in the Francis Parker School, Chicago 84
Household Arts Building, Columbia University 97
Household Arts Building, California Polytechnic
School 97
Mary D. Chambers, Rockford College 104
Mr. L. D. Harvey, Homemakers' School 104
Practical Experience in Serving Breakfasts, Dinners
and Suppers, Cleveland Schools 120
Girls in Cleveland Learn to Make Pottery as Well as
Design 120
Class in Food Adulterations, University of Wisconsin 122
Model House in Washington-Allston School 122
One-Week Courses in Home Economics, University of
Wisconsin 128
Evening Cookery Classes in the St. Louis High Schools 130
Interests of Chicago Women's Club: Domestic Science
Classes; Instruction for the Blind; Orchestral
Concerts; Suffrage Campaigns 186
Interests of Chicago Women's Club: Park Attendants;
Mothers' Clubs; Hospital Kindergartens; Vacation
Schools 190
Interests of Chicago Women's Club: Improvement of City
Square; Neighborhood Organizations; Industrial and
Agricultural Education for Girls 197
WHENCE AND WHY
The chapters of this book were originally articles in _Everybody's
Magazine_. I have not embellished them with footnotes nor given them
any other part of the panoply of critical apparatus. It could be done.
I have preferred to leave them in the dress I first gave them,--a
fighting dress. They owe much of their structure, it is true, to facts
and ideas out of the dust of libraries. But they owe much more to
facts and ideas exhumed out of the much more neglected dust of daily
circumstance. Either dust, by itself, is lifeless. When the two cohere
they establish the current of existence. At their meeting-place this
book has tried to stand. And so, while it hopes to have added to
knowledge, it will have failed unless it has merged into conduct.
The reader will forgive the abruptness of the shift of attention from
the subject of one chapter to the subject of the next. Each chapter,
because of having been a separate magazine article, is still an
isolated unit. Its isolation, however, is only that of form. In
thought there is a sequence both logical and temporal.
Devoting themselves to five critical phases in the mental development
of the modern woman, the five chapters of this book accompany her
through five successive stages in her personal life. The postponement
of marriage, the preliminary period of self-support, the new training
for motherhood, the problem of leisure, the opportunity for civic
service,--these subjects, treated in turn, follow one another in the
order of their appearance in a normal life-history. They are further
unified by the proof (I hope it is proof) throughout adduced that even
the most diverse of the phenomena observed, the female parasite
equally with the female suffragist, the domestic-science-and-art
enthusiast equally with the economic-independence enthusiast, are all
of them products of the one same big industrial unfoldment which is
exposing all women, willing or unwilling, to the winds of the social
process, which is giving to all women, whether home-keepers or
wanderers, in place of the old home-world, the new world-home.
WILLIAM HARD.
_Chicago, Dec., 1911._
INTRODUCTION
The woman of to-morrow will not differ from the woman of yesterday in
femininity or physique or capacity, in her charm for men, or her love
of children, but in the response of her eternally feminine nature to a
changed environment. The environment is bound to alter the superficial
characteristics of woman as every change has done. Man, in his turn,
will be a beneficiary of this new womanliness as he has been the ready
victim of the old-womanishness.
The reader will find in this book a dramatic picture of the gap
between girlhood and motherhood which causes both girls and men to go
wrong, and which can only be filled adequately by work--work even more
suitably performed after marriage than before. Postponed childbearing,
if not postponed marriage, is justified by the superiority of the
younger children or the children of older parents. A declining birth
rate may be redeemed by a declining death rate and the superior
progeny of mature marriage.
The life of great-grandmamma fills us with wonder and pity. Her
labors were legion, and, while no longer necessary in the house, their
equivalent must be found or girls become parasites. Notwithstanding
her incredible labors great-grandmamma died young, having sacrificed
herself on the altar of masculine egotism and prerogative. Her life
was a short but not a merry one, but our virtuous forefather's life
was a long and sensual one.
To-day woman is beginning to be educated for the new era and man must
go with her. She is learning homemaking with new implements and new
opportunities. She need no longer be a drudge and she must not
continue to be a doll. Since the days of John Ruskin, even the
academic economists have had to put spending before saving in the
logical exposition of their science,--consumption and thrift can only
be adjusted by those who work and live. Hence, the new mother, alert
to the larger needs of her household, is more competent than
great-grandmamma and must even supplant "the tired business man" in
municipal housekeeping, until he can learn to be her equal and himself
deserve the suffrage.
Mr. Hard has produced a brilliant volume, as might have been expected.
Mr. Hard could write a book in the dark; but it may not have been
known that he could illumine with such scholarly sagacity the shadows
cast on the woman question by man's huge egotism and woman's carefully
coddled superstition. Originally magazine articles, Mr. Hard's
chapters are a unit in being sound economics and sociology on the
woman question, but they will probably not secure him a doctor's
degree from his alma mater for they are also humorous, intelligible
and inspiring.
CHARLES ZUEBLIN.
I.
Love Deferred
Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away on a
career, he were going away on a comet.
She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time she
was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn't got angry
and insisted on marrying him.
Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance put
most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama, "Love
Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any other drama
can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a thin, high note
of fine pain.
We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too professional.
He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough and more
commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which are the two big
elements in the life of Modern Man.
When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one more
year to go in engineering school.
How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!
When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the last
century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen months. The
present professors require three years.
In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend classes for four
months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for nine months
in each of four years.
As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill by
informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be generally
recognized that a four-year technical course following the high-school
course is not an adequate preparation for those who are to fill
important positions; and the University would urge all those who can
afford the time to extend their studies over a period of five or six
years."
John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in the
College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique courses in
the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of Science.
He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two
biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the
assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard
wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen cents
an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total income was
about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he was raised to
fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of Science.
The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of those
institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John didn't. He
didn't get married so early nor become a widower so often. He didn't
carry so many children to the christening font nor so many to the
cemetery.
Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.
Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at
random, run your finger down the column and pick any class. The class
of 1671!
It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don't be too
severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining ten, four were
married twice and two were married three times. For ten husbands,
therefore, there were eighteen wives.
Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very competently
remarks: "The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those
days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children."
The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their eighteen
wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They
also filled the churchyards.
_Twenty-one of those seventy-one children died in childhood._
This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving
children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of only
2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.
In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the
unfair frequency with which it had more than one wife-and-mother to
help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of young
wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the hideous
frequency with which it killed them.
Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from 1701 to
1745.
The girls they took in marriage were most of them under twenty-one and
were many of them down in their 'teens, sometimes as far down as
fourteen.
May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious
sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken
because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap
kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and salting tubs
and spinning wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by
somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other
necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn't domestic. He was
domestic.
Our young engineering friend, John, when _he_ looked forward to _his_
future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it at
all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very little
real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to "give" Mary a
home.
Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages of
mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of things. On
the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the other hand, he
was prevented from wanting anything in his marriage except just Mary.
The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous toil
(complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of result:
Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701 to
1745, there were:
Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;
Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;
Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five years old.
Those 418 Yale husbands lost 147 wives before full middle age.
It ceases, therefore, to be surprising, though it remains unabatedly
sickening, that the stories of the careers of colonial college men, of
the best-bred men of the times, are filled with such details as:
"----First wife died at twenty-four, leaving six children."
"----Eight children born within twelve years, two of them
feeble-minded."
"----First wife died at nineteen, leaving three children."
"----Fourteen children. First wife died at twenty-eight, having
borne eight children in ten years."
From that age of universal early marrying and of promiscuous early
dying we have come in two centuries to an age of delayed (and even
omitted) marrying and of a settled determination to keep on living.
The women's colleges are so new and they attracted in their early days
so un-average a sort of girl that their records are not conclusive.
Nevertheless, here are some guiding facts from Smith College, of
Northampton, Massachusetts:
(We are taking college facts not because this chapter is confined in
any respect to college people, but merely because the matrimonial
histories in the records of the colleges are the most complete we know
of.)
In 1888, Smith College, in its first ten classes, had graduated 370
women.
In 1903, fifteen years later, among those 370 women there were 212 who
were still single.
This record does not satisfy Mr. G. Stanley Hall, who figured it out.
The remaining facts, however, might be considered more cheering:
The 158 Smith women who had married had borne 315 children. This
was two for each of them. And most of them were still in their
childbearing period. Compare this with the colonial records. But don't
take the number of children per colonial father. Be fair. Take it per
mother.
We have the matrimonial histories of colonial Yale and Harvard men
grouped and averaged according to the decade in which they were
graduated. We will regard the graduates of each decade as together
constituting one case.
In no case does the average number of children per wife go higher than
3.89. In one case it goes as low as 2.98.
Perhaps the modern wife's habit of going on living and thereby
protracting her period of childbearing will in time cause her
fertility record to compare not unfavorably with that of the colonial
wife, who made an early start but a quick finish.
In the year 1903, among all the 370 Smith graduates in those first ten
classes, only twenty-four had died. And among all the 315 children,
only twenty-six had died. On the whole, between being the wife of a
Yale or Harvard colonial graduate and being a member of one of the
first ten Smith classes, a modern girl might conclude that the chances
of being a dead one matrimonially in the latter case would be more
than offset by the chances of being a dead one actually in the
former.
This deplorable flippancy would overlook the serious fact that
permanent or even prolonged celibacy on the part of large numbers of
young men and young women is a great social evil. The consequences of
that evil we shall observe later on.[1]
[1] In speaking about celibacy we refer wholly to secular and not at
all to religious celibacy.
In the meantime we return to John and Mary.
While John was doing his last year in engineering school, Mary did a
year of technical study in the New York School of Philanthropy, or in
the St. Louis School of Social Economy, or in the Chicago School of
Civics and Philanthropy, or in the Boston School for Social Workers.
They won't even let you start in "doing good" nowadays without some
training for it. This is wise, considering how much harm doing good
can do.
But how the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!
Mary took a civil-service examination and got a job with the State
Bureau of Labor. She finished her first year with the Bureau at the
same time that John finished his first year with the electrical firm.
She had earned $600. He had earned $480.
There were several hundred other apprentices in the shops along with
John. When he thought of the next year's work at fifty a month and
when he looked at the horde of competing Bachelors of Science in
which he was pocketed, he whitened a bit.
"I must get out of the ruck," he said to himself. "I must get a
specialty. I must do some more preparing."
He began to perceive how long it takes the modern man to grow up,
intellectually and financially. He began to perceive what a tedious
road he must travel before he could arrive at maturity--and Mary!
But he had pluck. "I'll really prepare," he said, "and then I'll
really make good."
A Western university offered a scholarship of $500 a year, the
holder of which would be free to devote himself to a certain
specified technical subject. John tried for the scholarship and got
it, and spent a year chasing electrical currents from the time
when they left the wheels of street cars to the time when they
eventually sneaked back home again into the power house, after
having sported clandestinely along gas mains and water pipes, biting
holes into them as they went.
It was a good subject, commercially. At the end of the year he was
engaged as engineer by a street-car company which was being sued by a
gas company for allowing its current to eat the gas company's
property. He was to have a salary of $1,000 a year. He was going
strong.
One thousand dollars! Millions of married couples live on less than
that. But John didn't even think of asking Mary to share it with him.
Mary, when married, was to be supported in approximate accordance with
the standards of the people John knew. Every John thinks that about
it, without really thinking about it at all. It's just in him.
It bothered Mary. How much money would John want to spend on her
before he would take her? It made her feel like a box of candy in a
store window.
Still, a social standard is a fact. Just as much so as if it could be
laid off with a tape. And there is sense in it.
"After all," thought Mary, "if we had only $1,000 a year we couldn't
live where any of our friends do, and John would be cut off from being
on daily intimate terms with people who could help him; and if we had
children--Well, there you are! We surely couldn't give our children
what _our_ children ought to have. That settles it."
The influence of social standards is greatly increased and complicated
in a world in which women earn their living before marriage and have a
chance to make social standards of their own in place of the ones they
were born to.
We here insert a few notes on cases which are not compositely
imagined--like Mary and John--but are individually (though typically)
existent in real life in one of the large American cities:
R---- J----. Makes $6,500 a year. Only man she was ever "real sweet
on" was a teamster. When she was selling in the perfumes at five a
week he used to take her to the picnics of the Social Dozen Pleasure
Club. They would practice the Denver Lurch on Professor De Vere's
dancing platform. At midnight he would give her a joy-ride home in his
employer's delivery wagon. He still drives that wagon. She is in
charge of suits and costumes and has several assistant buyers under
her. She has bought a cottage for her father, who is an ingrain
weaver in a carpet factory. She wears a stick-pin recently presented
to her by her teamster. "I like him all right," is her notion about
it, "but I ought to have took him ten years ago. Now he can't support
me."
S---- V----. Makes twelve dollars a week as a manicurist. Thinks a man
ought to have at least thirty dollars a week before marrying.
T---- V----. Sister of S---- V----, who doesn't think much of her. She
works in a paper-box factory at five dollars a week and is engaged to
a glove cutter who makes eleven.
T---- A----. Saleswoman. Thinks women ought to be paid as much as men.
"Then they wouldn't be so ready to marry _anybody_." Works in the
cloak department. Is a star. Makes about eighteen dollars a week. Says
that most of the men she knows who could support her would certainly
get in a terrible row at home if they married a cloak-department girl.
Families are stuck up. "But I don't care; let it run a while. Tell you
something. I was born in the steerage. I've been right where the money
isn't. I'm not taking any chances on getting there again. Let Georgina
do it."
R---- B----. Sub-bookkeeper. Seven dollars a week. Engaged to clerk
who earns thirteen. Says: "Of course I'm not earning much, but I'm
living with my folks and when we're married I'll have to give up a lot
of things. Kinda wish I hadn't got used even to the seven."
This last case, of the bookkeeper engaged to the clerk, is the modern
situation at its happiest normal. The modern marriage, except among
the rich, is a contraction of resources. It is just the reverse, in
that respect, of the colonial marriage.
The colonial bride, marrying into Industry, brought her full economic
value to her husband.
The modern bride, marrying out of Industry, leaves most of her
economic value behind. And the greater that value was, the sharper is
the shock of the contraction of resources.
Of course, the case of the department-store buyer and the teamster is
irrelevantly extreme. But aren't there thousands and thousands of
cases which, while less advanced, are pointed in the same direction?
The more a woman earns, the fewer become the men who can support her.
How can the clerk support the cloak saleswoman who has had eighteen
dollars a week of her own? How can the barber support the manicurist
who has had twelve?
The cloak saleswoman may talk flippantly about it, but, at heart,
isn't she seriously right? She has pulled herself up to a certain
level. Except in response to a _grande passion_ she will not again
drop below it. She will bring up her children at a point as close to
her present level as she can. That is instinct.
Meanwhile, she isn't married. But what can you do about it? She went
to work, like almost every other working woman, because she had to.
And you can't pass a law prohibiting her from earning more than five
dollars a week.
"It's all economic," thought Mary. "Nothing else." She had much reason
for thinking so.
Did you ever see Meitzen's diagram showing the relation between the
price of rye and the number of marriages in Prussia during a period of
twenty-five years?
Cheap rye, easy living conditions--number of marriages rises. Dear
rye, hard living conditions--number of marriages drops. The
fluctuations are strictly proportional. In the twenty-sixth year,
given the price of rye, you could predict very closely the number of
marriages.
It's like suicides. It's the easiest thing in the world to predict the
number of men and women who will next year "decide" to take their own
lives.
The marriage rate responds not only to the economic conditions of a
whole country but to the economic conditions of its various parts.
You live in Vermont. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and
thirty in Vermont, there will be 279 out of every 1,000 of you who
will still be single.
But you live in the State of New York. Very well. Between the ages of
twenty-five and thirty there will be 430 of you out of every 1,000 who
will still be single.
In Vermont, 279. In New York, 430. A difference of 151 in every
1,000.
For those 151 persons, is it human volition? Is it a perverse aversion
to the other sex?
Even at that, on the face of it, those who try to argue New Yorkers
into marrying young are clearly taking the difficult route to their
purpose. It would be more adroit simply to urge them to live in
Vermont.
But isn't the real reason this--that New York, with its large cities,
is farther removed than Vermont, with no large cities, from the
primitive industrial conditions of colonial times?
The North Atlantic states, as a whole, are industrially more advanced
than the South Central states. Compare them in this marriage matter:
Among all the wives in the South Central states, there are 543 out of
every 1,000 who are under thirty-five years of age.
Among all the wives in the North Atlantic states those who are under
thirty-five years of age are, in each 1,000, only 428.
In the South Central states, 543. In the North Atlantic states, 428. A
difference of 115!
Getting married early is imputed unto us for actual personal
righteousness by innumerable clergymen, essayists, and editorial
writers. Are there so many more righteous women along the Gulf of
Mexico than along the Atlantic Coast? One hundred and fifteen more out
of every thousand? We cannot quite credit so great a discrepancy in
relative human virtue.
You can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your
vicinity.
Live on the Gold Coast of Africa. When you're thirteen, if you're a
girl, they'll boil a yam and mash it and mix it with palm oil and
scatter it on the banks of the stream and wash you in the stream and
streak your body with white clay in fine lines and lead you down the
street under an umbrella and announce your readiness to be a bride.
Which you will be in a day or two.
Live in Russia, and if you're a girl you'll get married before you're
twenty in more than fifty cases out of a hundred. It's the most
primitive of civilized countries. It's halfway between Africa and,
say, Rhode Island.
These marriages before twenty tend to fall off rapidly in a rapidly
developing industrial region like Rhode Island.
In 1860 the married persons in Rhode Island who had married before
they were twenty were twenty-one in every hundred.
In 1900 they were only nine in every hundred.
A drop from twenty-one to nine in forty years!
And if you can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in
your vicinity, neither can you escape, in any numbers, from the law
which reigns in your social set.
Here's Bailey's book on "Social Conditions":
Live in England and be a girl and belong to the class of people that
miners come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average,
twenty-two. But belong to the class of people that professional men
come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average, twenty-six.
This difference exists also in the United States. It is in the direct
line of social and economic development.
The professional man is a farther developed type of man than the miner.
It takes him longer to get through his educational infancy--longer to
arrive at his mental and financial maturity. The professional man's
wife is a farther developed type than the miner's wife. Her economic
utility as a cook and as a laundress in her husband's house tends to
approach zero.
Where these two lines of development, male and female, come to a
meeting point; where the man's infancy is longest and the woman's
value as housewife is least;--_there_ is, necessarily, altogether
apart from personal preferences, the greatest postponement of
marriage.
The United States, except possibly in certain sections, has not come
to the end of its growth toward postponed marriage.
It is true that in Massachusetts, within the past forty-five years,
the average age of women at marriage has risen from 20.7 to 24.6. That
is a very "modern" and "developed" marriage age. But many of the older
countries surpass it. In Belgium, for instance, which is a most
intensely industrialized country, the average age of women at marriage
is 28.19.
It is hard, indeed, to look at the advancing marriage age and to
compare its varying rate of progress in different continents,
different countries, different localities, and different social
circles without admitting that, whatever whirling, nebulous mists of
personal preferences it may create and carry with it, its nucleus is
purely economic.
Early marriage was made by economic advantages. It was destroyed by
economic changes. It will not be restored except by economic
adjustments.
"Nevertheless," said Mary, "I want John."
John had finished being engineer for the electric railway company.
Out of his two years' experience he had saved a few hundred dollars.
No, he hadn't. That isn't probable. The way he made his start into the
next phase of his career was not by having any ready money. Having
ready money is far from being characteristic of the young man of
to-day.
John opened his office as a consulting electrical engineer not on his
own resources but as an agent for an electrical supply company. Being
agent for that company assured him enough money to pay the office rent
and stenographer. For the rest, for his meals and his bed, he depended
on his clients. Whom he didn't have. But he started out to get them.
He opened his office in the city in which Mary was.
And then a strange but normal thing occurred. They spent enough
money on theaters and boat rides and candy in the next three
months to have paid the rent on a flat. It is true John's net income
was too small and uncertain to have justified the founding of a
family. But it was also true that they spent every cent they had.
The celibate life is an extravagant life. One of the innumerable
sources of modern extravagance is found just there.
Mary reflected on it. She didn't like it. And she began to see other
things she didn't like in this protraction of the period of
singleness.
Her work for the Bureau of Labor had taken her into many places, among
all sorts of women. She began to observe the irregular living which is
inevitably associated with a system of late marriages.
Mr. Lester F. Ward has learnedly and elaborately informed us that if
we go back to the origin of life on this planet we shall find that the
female was the only sex then existent, being original life itself,
reproducing itself by division of itself, and that the male was
created as an afterthought of nature's for the purpose of introducing
greater variation into the development of living things. The male, to
begin with, had only one function. That was to be a male. He was
purely a sex-thing.
Whether this biological theory stands or falls, it is certain that it
squares with the present character of the sexes. The sex which
originated as a sex-thing remains the more actively sexed.
There was once a very good sociologist called Robert Louis Stevenson
who made many researches into the psychology of the human race. While
on his "Inland Voyage" he observed in this matter that "it is no use
for a man to take to the woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same
thing long ago and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there
is this about some women, that they suffice to themselves and can walk
in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered
being."
The celibate life is more possible for most of them by nature. If it
were not for that fact, the postponement of marriage would by this
time have demolished the ethical code.
Even as things stand, Mary was quite willing to admit, when she saw
it, that there are two kinds of women greatly increasing in modern
days. Both have always existed, but now they are increasing very
rapidly and in parallel lines of corresponding development.
In one column is the enormous army of young women who remain
unmarried till twenty-five, till thirty, till thirty-five. Even at
that last age, and beyond it, in a well-developed city like, say,
Providence, R.I., in the age period from thirty-five to forty-five,
twenty out of every hundred women are still single.
In the other column is the enormous army of young women who, outside
of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional sex life,
venal, furtive, ignoble, and debasing; an army which has existed since
the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of
marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new
strength for poisoning the blood of life.
Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window. Angel
or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between its guises.
Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in stores
and in their apartments and in their boarding houses, women celibates
five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into the period when nature
has by irrepealable edict ordained love. It was surely unnatural, for
the mass of them. They were not vowed nuns. They were not devoted to
any great cause. They were just ordinary, normal young women,
thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of them.
Then, on the other side, Mary looked at the great army of women in
the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated
quarters--women who, however they may be sentimentalized about and
however irresponsible they may be for their own condition, are, as
a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet on them
was squandered the emotional life of millions of young men.
On the one side--intelligent, capable, effective young women, leading
lives of emotional sterility. On the other side--inferior women
blasted and withered by their specialization in the emotional life of
youth!
The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity of
living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face facts and
who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of letting facts
sleep, we rouse them and fight them we can make a better race.
The great Russian scientist, Metchnikoff, successor to Pasteur in the
Pasteur Institute, mentions the postponement of marriage as one of the
biological disharmonies of life. It is a disharmony that "among highly
civilized peoples marriage and _regular_ unions are impossible at the
_right time_."
And Mr. A. S. Johnson, writing in the authoritative report of the
committee of fifteen on the social evil, notes the parallel increase
of "young unmarried men" and of a city's "volume of vice."
He goes on to make, without comment, a statement of the economic facts
of the case.
"As a rule," he says, "the income which a young man earns, while
sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does not
suffice for founding a family."
He cannot found a family at the _right_ time. He goes unmarried
through the romantic period of his development, when the senses are at
their keenest and when the other sex, in its most vividly idealized
perfection, is most poignantly desired.
Then, later on, he may begin to get a larger income. Then marriage may
become more feasible. But then romance is waning. Then, as Mr. Johnson
says, "his standard of personal comfort rises." Romance has been
succeeded by calculation. "Accordingly he postpones marriage to a date
in the indefinite future or abandons expectation of it altogether."
Celibacy through the age of romance! It's emotionally wrong.
Sexlessness for a score of years after sex has awakened! It's
biologically wrong. It's a defiance of nature. And nature responds, as
she does to every defiance, with a scourge of physical and social
ills.
"But what of all that?" thought Mary. "Those things are just
observations. What I am going to act on is that I want John."
At which point she stopped being a typical modern young woman.
_She became a woman of the future._
"Look here," she said to John, "I'm working. You're working. We're
single. Very well. We'll change it. I'm working. You're working.
We're married. Have we lost anything? And we've gained each other."
They were married and Mary kept on working.
Two years later she stopped working.
In those two years she had helped John to start a home. She couldn't
operate soap kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and
salting tubs and spinning wheels for him. But she brought him an
equivalent of it in money. She earned from $900 to $1,000 a year.
Being married, they were more thrifty. They saved a large part of her
earnings. John was still spending a large part of his on extending his
business, on traveling, on entertaining prospective clients, on making
acquaintances. Sometimes she had to contribute some of her own money
to his expense accounts. That was the fortune of war. She helped him
pursue success.
"I wouldn't give up the memory of those two years," Mary used to say,
as she sat and stitched for her children, "for anything. I shared at
least a part of my husband's youth."
By sharing it, she won a certain happiness otherwise unattainable.
They had come to know each other and to help form each other's
character and to share each other's difficulties in the years when
only there is real joy in the struggle of life. They had not postponed
their love till, with a settled income, John could support her in
comfort and they could look back like Browning's middle-aged estranged
lovers to say:
"We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy."
"It used to take two to start a home in colonial days," Mary would
say. "I am really an old-fashioned woman. I helped to make this home.
We had twelve hundred dollars in the bank when I stopped working, and
John was pretty well established.
"I don't regret it," she went on, still speaking as a woman of the
future, "even for the children. Of course I do wish we had started
earlier. But I would have wanted to wait a while for the children in
any case. People risk too much when they start a family before they
become sufficiently used to marriage and to each other to know that
they can keep on loving each other and to know that they have in them
through their mutual, continued happiness the power to make a happy
home, a noble home, for children to live in."
As for the number of children she will have--we reserve that subject
for future discussion. We call attention here only to this:
That the facts which were cited from the Smith College records are
harmonious with many other facts and records tending to show that the
fertility of the modern wife has been considerably underrated, just as
the fertility of the colonial wife has been considerably exaggerated.
And this:
That Mary got to her childbearing period sooner than she would have if
she hadn't insisted on marrying John before he was ready to support
her. Those two years would have been childless years in any case. But
they would probably, if it hadn't been for Mary's money, have been
lengthened into four or five.
Of course, later marriages in themselves tend to reduce the number of
children. As to quality, however, the evidence is not clear. There is
even some reason to think that a moderate postponement is conducive to
an improvement in quality.
Did you ever read Havelock Ellis's book called "A Study of British
Genius"?
He made a list of the most distinguished of eminent British persons
and studied everything about them, from their religious opinions to
the color of their hair.
In the matter of the age of their parents, he finds that the
average age of the father at the birth of the person of genius was
thirty-seven years, while the average of the mother was thirty-one.
His conclusion is: "On the whole it would appear, so far as the
evidence goes, that the fathers of our eminent persons have been
predominantly middle-aged and to a marked extent elderly at the
time of the distinguished son's birth; while the mothers have been
predominantly at the period of greatest vigor and maturity and to
a somewhat unusual extent elderly. There has been a notable
deficiency of young fathers and, still more notably, of young
mothers."
And did you ever see the study which Mr. R. S. Holway made for the
Department of Education of Leland Stanford University on "The Age of
Parents: Its Effects upon Children"? His conclusions are:
"In most physical qualities the children of mature parents tend to
come out best.
"In mental ability the children of young parents show best at an early
age but rapidly lose their precocity.
"The elder children who show best tend to be the children of mature
and old parents.
"The children of elderly mothers show a tendency to superiority
throughout."
Mary did not know about all this, but she had a very strong opinion to
the effect that, in so far as the quality of her children could be
affected by their home training, she was glad she had spent at least a
few years earning her living.
"Every woman," said Mary, "ought to have some little time for
developing into an individual. Home won't do it altogether. Not
nowadays. The colonial home did, being part of the working world. But
what is the modern home? It is a nest, an eddy, a shelf, a nook. It's
something apart from the world. If a woman is going to prepare her son
for a knowledge of the real world, if she's going to be able to give
him a training which has in it an understanding and an appreciation of
the real world, if she's going to be able to educate him into real
living, she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some
experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she
becomes a mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable
postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent
individual will hereafter be urged, not opposed."
"The trouble about that," said John, "is that it makes you too
independent of me. Your proposition is to start in and earn your
living till you're pretty good at it. That is, you wouldn't marry me
till you were sure you could chuck me. How about that?"
Well, it has that side. But it has its other side, too.
Isn't there, after all, something rather pleasant for John in knowing,
_knowing_, that Mary isn't cleaving unto him simply because she can't
shift for herself? Something exquisitely gratifying in being certain,
_certain_, that it isn't just necessity that keeps her a home woman?
"If I were a man living in wedlock," said Mary, "I should want the
door of the cage always wide open, with my mate fluttering straight by
it every minute to still nestle by me. And I should want her wings to
be strong, and I should want her to know that if she went through the
door she could fly."
"For keeping her," Mary went on, "I should want to trust to my own
wings and not to bars."
* * * * *
"However," said Mary, looking farther into the future, "the process
isn't complete. Freedom is not yet completely acquired. Children! We
want them! We must have them! Yet how often they tie us to unions
which have come to be unholy, vile, full of all uncleanness. Women
will never be completely free till, besides being able to earn their
bread when they are _not_ bearing children, they are relieved of
dependence on the individual character of another human person while
they _are_. Mr. H. G. Wells is clearly right about it. When women
bear children they perform a service to the state. Children are
important to the state. They are its future life. To leave them to the
eccentricities of the economic fate of the father is ridiculous. The
woman who is bringing up children should receive from the state the
equivalent of her service in a regular income. Then, and then only, in
the union of man and woman, will love and money reach their right
relationship--love a necessity, money a welcome romance!"
"It's remote, very remote," concluded Mary. "And we can't dream it out
in detail. But when it comes it won't come out of personal sentiment.
It will come because of being demanded by the economic welfare of the
community. It will come because it is the best way to get serviceable
children for the state. It will come because, after all, it is the
final answer to the postponement of marriage."
II.
Learning for Earning
"Every Jack has his Jill." It is a tender twilight thought, and it
more or less settles Jill.
When the census man was at work in 1900, however, he went about and
counted 2,260,000 American women who were more than twenty-five years
old and who were still unmarried.
It is getting worse (or better) with every passing decade, and out of
it is emerging a new ideal of education for women, an ideal which
seems certain to penetrate the whole educational system of the United
States, all the way from the elementary schools to the universities.
The census man groups us into age-periods. The period from twenty-five
to twenty-nine is the most important matrimonially, because it is the
one in which most of us get pretty well fixed into our life work. Out
of every 1,000 women in that period, in the year 1890, the census man
found 254 who were still unmarried. _In 1900, only ten years later, he
found 275._
There is not so much _processional_ as _recessional_ about marriage at
present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the realistic
pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach the comparatively
serene, landlocked years from forty-five to fifty-four that we find
ourselves in an age period in which the number of single women has
been reduced to less than ten per cent of the total.
The rebound from this fact hits education hard. As marriage recedes,
and as the period of gainful work before marriage lengthens, the need
of real preparation for that gainful work becomes steadily more
urgent, and the United States moves steadily onward into an era of
trained women as well as of trained men.
[Illustration: SIMMONS COLLEGE, BOSTON, WHICH HAS FOUR-YEAR COURSES IN
SECRETARIAL STUDIES, LIBRARY WORK, SCIENCE, AND HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS.
_Photograph by Baer_]
In Boston, at that big new college called Simmons--the first of its
kind in the United States--a regular four-year college of which the
aim is to send out every graduate technically trained to earn her
living in some certain specific occupation--in Simmons there were
enrolled last year, besides five hundred undergraduate women, at
least eighty other women who had already earned their bachelor's
degrees at other colleges, such as Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith,
Vassar, Radcliffe, Leland Stanford, and the University of Montana.
These eighty other women, after eight years in grammar school, four
years in high school, and four years in college, were taking one year
more in technical school in order to be--what? Not doctors or lawyers
or architects. Not anything in the old "learned" professions. Their
scholastic purpose was more modest than that. Yet, modest as it was,
it was keeping them on the learner's bench longer than a "learned"
profession would have kept most of their grandfathers. _These eighty
women were taking graduate courses in order to be "social workers" in
settlements or for charity societies, in order to be library
assistants, in order to be stenographers and secretaries._
The Bachelor of Arts from Vassar who is going to be a stenographer,
and who is taking her year of graduate study at Simmons, will go to
work at the end of the year and then, six months later, if she has
made good, will get from Simmons the degree of Bachelor of Science.
At that point in her life she will have two degrees and seventeen
years of schooling behind her. A big background. But we are beginning
to do some training for almost everything.
Did you ever see a school of salesmanship for department-store women
employees? You can see one at the Women's Educational and Industrial
Union in Boston. Under the guidance of Mrs. Lucinda W. Prince, the big
department stores of Boston have come to think enough of this school
to send girls to it every morning and to pay them full wages while
they take a three months' course.
If you will attend any of the classes, in arithmetic, in textiles, in
hygiene, in color and design, in demonstration sales, in business
forms, you will get not only a new view of the art of selling goods
over the counter but a new vision of a big principle in education.