"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."
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
$1000 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 these 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 characters 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 to a future article. 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 is a good thing."
"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," said Mary, "I should want to trust to my own
wings and not to bars.
"However," said Mary, going 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," said 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."
In the November instalment of "The Women of To-morrow," Mr. Hard
will discuss "The Wasters."
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Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4