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THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN
by
IDA M. TARBELL
Associate Editor of the "American Magazine"
Author of "Life of Abraham Lincoln"
"History of the Standard Oil Co."
"He Knew Lincoln," etc.
New York
The MacMillan Company
New York · Boston · Chicago
Dallas · San Francisco
Macmillan & Co., Limited
London · Bombay · Calcutta
Melbourne
The Macmillan Co. of Canada, Ltd.
Toronto
Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
1921
TO
E.I.T. AND C.C.T.
INTRODUCTION
The object of this little volume is to call attention to a certain
distrust, which the author feels in the modern woman, of the
significance and dignity of the work laid upon her by Nature and by
society. Its ideas are the result of a long, if somewhat desultory,
observation of the professional, political, and domestic activities of
women in this country and in France. These observations have led to
certain definite opinions as to those phases of the woman question
most in need of emphasis to-day.
A great problem of human life is to preserve faith in and zest for
everyday activities. The universal easily becomes the vulgar and the
burdensome. The highest civilization is that in which the largest
number sense, and are so placed as to realize, the dignity and the
beauty of the common experiences and obligations.
* * * * *
The courtesy of the publishers of the _American Magazine_, in
permitting the use here of chapters which have appeared in that
periodical, is gratefully acknowledged.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE UNEASY WOMAN 1
II. ON THE IMITATION OF MAN 30
III. THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN 53
IV. THE SOCIALIZATION OF THE HOME 84
V. THE WOMAN AND HER RAIMENT 109
VI. THE WOMAN AND DEMOCRACY 142
VII. THE HOMELESS DAUGHTER 164
VIII. THE CHILDLESS WOMAN AND THE FRIENDLESS CHILD 190
IX. ON THE ENNOBLING OF THE WOMAN'S BUSINESS 216
THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN
CHAPTER I
The Uneasy Woman
The most conspicuous occupation of the American woman of to-day,
dressing herself aside, is self-discussion. It is a disquieting
phenomenon. Chronic self-discussion argues chronic ferment of mind,
and ferment of mind is a serious handicap to both happiness and
efficiency. Nor is self-discussion the only exhibit of restlessness
the American woman gives. To an unaccustomed observer she seems always
to be running about on the face of things with no other purpose than
to put in her time. He points to the triviality of the things in which
she can immerse herself--her fantastic and ever-changing raiment, the
welter of lectures and other culture schemes which she supports, the
eagerness with which she transports herself to the ends of the
earth--as marks of a spirit not at home with itself, and certainly not
convinced that it is going in any particular direction or that it is
committed to any particular worth-while task.
Perhaps the most disturbing side of the phenomenon is that it is
coincident with the emancipation of woman. At a time when she is freer
than at any other period of the world's history--save perhaps at one
period in ancient Egypt--she is apparently more uneasy.
Those who do not like the exhibit are inclined to treat her as if she
were a new historical type. The reassuring fact is, that ferment of
mind is no newer thing in woman than in man. It is a human ailment.
Its attacks, however, have always been unwelcome. Society distrusts
uneasiness in sacred quarters; that is, in her established and
privileged works. They are the best mankind has to show for itself. At
least they are the things for which the race has slaved longest and
which so far have best resisted attack. We would like to pride
ourselves that they were permanent, that we had settled some things.
And hence society resents a restless woman. And this is logical
enough.
Embroiled as man is in an eternal effort to conquer, understand, and
reduce to order both nature and his fellows, it is imperative that he
have some secure spot where his head is not in danger, his heart is
not harassed. Woman, by virtue of the business nature assigns her,
has always been theoretically the maker and keeper of this necessary
place of peace. But she has rarely made it and kept it with full
content. Eve was a revoltée, so was Medea. In every century they have
appeared, restless Amazons, protesting and remolding. Out of their
uneasy souls have come the varying changes in the woman's world which
distinguish the ages.
Society has not liked it--was there to be no quiet anywhere? It is
poor understanding that does not appreciate John Adams' parry of his
wife Abigail's list of grievances, which she declared the Continental
Congress must relieve if it would avoid a woman's rebellion. Under the
stress of the Revolution children, apprentices, schools, colleges,
Indians, and negroes had all become insolent and turbulent, he told
her. What was to become of the country if women, "the most numerous
and powerful tribe in the world," grew discontented?
Now this world-old restlessness of the women has a sound and a tragic
cause. Nature lays a compelling hand on her. Unless she obeys freely
and fully she must pay in unrest and vagaries. For the normal woman
the fulfillment of life is the making of the thing we best describe as
a home--which means a mate, children, friends, with all the radiating
obligations, joys, burdens, these relations imply.
This is nature's plan for her; but the home has got to be founded
inside the imperfect thing we call society. And these two, nature and
society, are continually getting into each other's way, wrecking each
other's plans, frustrating each other's schemes. The woman almost
never is able to adjust her life so as fully to satisfy both. She is
between two fires. Euripides understood this when he put into Medea's
mouth a cry as modern as any that Ibsen has conceived:--
Of all things upon earth that grow,
A herb most bruised is woman. We must pay
Our store of gold, hoarded for that one day,
To buy us some man's love; and lo, they bring
A master of our flesh! There comes the sting
Of the whole shame. And then the jeopardy,
For good or ill, what shall that master be;
'Tis magic she must have or prophecy--
Home never taught her that--how best to guide
Toward peace this thing that sleepeth at her side.
And she who, laboring long, shall find some way
Whereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray
His yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath
That woman draws!
Medea's difficulty was that which is oftenest in the way of a woman
carrying her business in life to a satisfactory completion--false
mating. It is not a difficulty peculiar to woman. Man knows it as
often. It is the heaviest curse society brings on human beings--the
most fertile cause of apathy, agony, and failure. If the woman's cry
is more poignant under it than the man's, it is because the machine
which holds them both allows him a wider sweep, more interests outside
of their immediate alliance. "A man, when he is vexed at home,"
complains Medea, "can go out and find relief among his friends or
acquaintances, but we women have none to look at but him."
And when it is impossible longer to "look" at him, what shall she do!
Tell her woe to the world, seek a soporific, repudiate the scheme of
things, or from the vantage point of her failure turn to the untried
relations of her life, call upon her unused powers?
From the beginning of time she has tried each and all of these methods
of meeting her purely human woe. At times the women of whole peoples
have sunk into apathy, their business reduced to its dullest,
grossest forms. Again, whole groups have taken themselves out of the
partnership which both Nature and Society have ordered. The Amazons
refused to recognize man as an equal and mated simply that they might
rear more women like themselves. Here the tables were turned and the
boy baby turned out--not to the wolves, but to man! The convent has
always been a favorite way of escape.
It has never been a majority of women who for a great length of time
have shirked this problem by any one of these methods. By individuals
and by groups woman has always been seeking to develop the business of
life to such proportions, to so diversify, refine, and broaden it that
no half failure or utter failure of its fundamental relations would
swamp her, leave her comfortless, or prevent her working out that
family which she knew to be her part in the scheme of things. It is
from her conscious attempt to make the best of things when they are
proved bad, that there has come the uneasiness which trails along her
path from Eve to Mrs. Pankhurst.
When great changes have come in the social system, her quest has
responded to them, taken its color and direction from them. The
peculiar forms of uneasiness in the American woman of to-day come
naturally enough from the Revolution of 1776. That movement upset
theoretically everything which had been expected of her before.
Theoretically, it broke down the division fences which had kept her in
sets and groups. She was no longer to be a woman of class; she was a
woman of the people. This was striking at the very underpinning of
femininity, as the world knew it. Theoretically, too, her ears were no
longer to be closed to all ideas save those of her church or
party,--a new thing, freedom of speech, was abroad,--her lips were
opened with man's. Moreover, her business of family building was
modified, as well as her attitude towards life. The necessity of all
women educating themselves that they might be able to educate their
children was an obligation on the face of the new undertaking. Another
revolutionary duty put upon her was--_paying her way_. There can be no
real democracy where there is parasitism. She must achieve conscious
independence whether in or out of the family. Unquestionably there
came with the Revolution a vision of a new woman--a woman from whom
all of the willfulness and frivolity and helplessness of the "Lady" of
the old régime should be stripped, while all her qualities of
gentleness and charm should be preserved. The old-world lady was to
be merged into a woman strong, capable, severely beautiful, a creature
who had all of the virtues and none of the follies of femininity.
It was strong yeast they put into the pot in '76.
A fresh leaven in a people can never be distributed evenly. Moreover,
the mass to which it is applied is never homogeneous. There are spots
so hard no yeast can move them; there are others so light the yeast
burns them out. Taken as a whole, the change is labored and painful.
So our new notions worked on women. There were groups which resented
and refused them, became reactionary at the stating of them. There
were those which grew grave and troubled under them, shrinking from
the portentous upheaval they felt in their touch, yet sensing that
they must be accepted. There were still others where the notion
frothed and foamed, turning up unexpected ideas, revealing depths of
dissatisfaction, of desire, of unsuspected powers in woman that
startled the staid old world. It was in these quarters that there was
produced the uneasy woman typical of the day.
Her ferment went to the bottom of things this time. Not since the age
of the Amazon had a body of women broken more utterly with things as
they are. And like the Amazon, the revolt was against man and his
pretensions.
It was no unorganized revolt. It was deliberate. It presented her case
in a carefully prepared List of Grievances, and an eloquent
Declaration of Sentiments[1] both adopted in a strictly parliamentary
way, and made the basis of an organized revolt, which has gone on
systematically ever since. The essence of her complaint, as embodied
in the above expression, is that man is a conscious tyrant holding
woman an unwilling captive--cutting her off from the things in life
which really matter: education, freedom of speech, the ballot; that
she can never be his equal until she does the same things her tyrant
does, studies the book he studies, practices the trades and
professions he practices, works with him in government.
The inference from all this is that the Business of Being a Woman, as
it has been conducted heretofore by society, is of less importance
than the Business of Being a Man, and that the time has come to enter
his world and prove her equality.
There are certain assumptions in her program which will bear
examination. Is man the calculating tyrant the modern uneasy woman
charges? Are her fetters due only to his unfair domination? Or is she
suffering from the generally bungling way things go in the world? And
is not man a victim as well as she--caught in the same trap?
Moreover, is woman never a tyrant? One of the first answers to her
original revolt came from the most eminent woman of the day, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and it was called "_Pink and White_ Tyranny!" "I have
seen a collection of medieval English poems," says Chesterton, "in
which the section headed 'Poems of Domestic Life' consisted entirely
(literally entirely) of the complaints of husbands bullied by their
wives."
Again, will doing the same things a man does work as well in stifling
her unrest as she fancies it has in man's case? If a woman's
temperamental and intellectual operations were identical with a man's,
there would be hope of success,--but they are not. She is a different
being. Whether she is better or worse, stronger or weaker, primary or
secondary, is not the question. She is different.
And she tries to ease a world-old human curse by imitating the
occupations, points of views, and methods of a radically different
being. Can she realize her quest in this way? Generally speaking,
nothing is more wasteful in human operations than following a course
which is not native and spontaneous, not according to the law of the
being.
If she demonstrates her points, successfully copies man's activities,
can she impress her program on any great body of women? The mass of
women believe in their task. Its importance is not capable of argument
in their minds. Nor do they see themselves dwarfed by their business.
They know instinctively that under no other circumstances can such
ripeness and such wisdom be developed, that nowhere else is the full
nature called upon, nowhere else are there such intricate, delicate,
and intimate forces in play, calling and testing them.
To bear and to rear, to feel the dependence of man and child--the
necessity for themselves--to know that upon them depend the health,
the character, the happiness, the future of certain human beings--to
see themselves laying and preserving the foundations of so imposing a
thing as a family--to build so that this family shall become a strong
stone in the state--to feel themselves through this family
perpetuating and perfecting church, society, republic,--this is their
destiny,--this is worth while. They may not be able to state it, but
all their instincts and experiences convince them of the supreme and
eternal value of their place in the world. They dare not tamper with
it. Their opposition to the militant program badly and even cruelly
expressed at times has at bottom, as an opposition always has, the
principle of preservation. It is not bigotry or vanity or a petty
notion of their own spheres which has kept the majority of women from
lending themselves to the radical wing of the woman's movement. It is
fear to destroy a greater thing which they possess. The fear of change
is not an irrational thing--the fear of change is founded on the risk
of losing what you have, on the certainty of losing much temporarily
at least. It sees the cost, the ugly and long period of transition.
Moreover, respect for your calling brings patience with its burden and
its limitations. The change you desire you work for conservatively, if
at all. The women who opposed the first movement for women's rights in
this country might deplore the laws that gave a man the power to beat
his wife--but as a matter of fact few men did beat their wives, and
popular opinion was a powerful weapon. They might deplore the laws of
property--but few of them were deeply touched by them. The husband,
the child, the home, the social circle, the church, these things were
infinitely more interesting and important to them than diplomas,
rights to work, rights to property, rights to vote. All the sentiments
in the revolting women's program seemed trivial, cold, profitless
beside the realities of life as they dreamed them and struggled to
realize them.
It is this same intuitive loyalty to her Business of Being a Woman,
her unwillingness to have it tampered with, that is to-day the great
obstacle to our Uneasy Woman putting her program of relief into force.
And it is the effort to move this mass which she derides as inert that
leads to much of the overemphasis in her program and her methods. If
she is to attract attention, she must be extreme. The campaigner is
like the actor--he must exaggerate to get his effect over the
footlights. Moreover, there are natures like that of the actor who
could not play Othello unless his whole body was blackened. Nor is the
extravagance of the methods, which the militant lady follows to put
over her program, so foreign to her nature as it may seem. The
suffragette adapts to her needs a form of feminine coquetry as old as
the world. To defy and denounce the male has always been one of
woman's most successful provocative ways!
However much certain of the assumptions in her program may seem to be
against its success, there is much for it. It gives her a
scapegoat--an outside, personal, attackable cause for the limitations
and defeats she suffers. And there is no greater consolation than
fixing blame. It is half a cure in itself to know or to think you know
the cause of your difficulties. Moreover, it gives her a scapegoat
against whom it is easy to make up a case. She knows him too well,
much better than he knows her, much better than she knows herself; at
least her knowledge of him is better formulated. And she has this
advantage: custom makes it cowardly for a man to attempt to
demonstrate that woman is a tyrant--it laughs and applauds woman's
attempt to fix the charge on man.
It gives her a definite program of relief. To attack life as man does:
to secure the same kind of training, enter a trade or profession where
she can support herself, mingle with the crowd as he does, get into
politics--that she assumes to be the practical way of curing the
inferiority of position and of powers which she is willing to admit,
even willing to demonstrate. That a man's life may not be altogether
satisfactory, she declines to believe. The uneasy woman has always
taken it for granted that man is happier than woman. It is an
assumption which is at least discussible.
Her program, too, has the immense advantage of including all that the
new order of things in this country, instituted by the Revolution,
made imperative for women--the schooling, the liberty of action, the
independent pocket book. Because she has formulated these notions so
definitely and has hammered on them so hard, the militant woman
frequently claims that they originated with her, that she is the
_cause_ of the great development in educational opportunities, in
freedom to work and to circulate, in the increasing willingness to
face the facts of life and speak the truth. This claim she should
drop. She is rather the logical result of these notions, their extreme
expression. She has, however, had an enormous influence in keeping
them alive in the great slow-moving mass of women, where the fate of
new ideas rests and where they are always tried out with extreme
caution. Without her the vision of enlarging and liberalizing their
own particular business to meet the needs of the New Democracy which
so exalted the women of the Revolution, would not to-day be as nearly
realized as it is. To speak slightingly of her part in the women's
movement is uncomprehending. She was then, and always has been, a
tragic figure, this woman in the front of the woman's movement--driven
by a great unrest, sacrificing old ideals to attain new, losing
herself in a frantic and frequently blind struggle, often putting back
her cause by the sad illustration she was of the price that must be
paid to attain a result. Certainly no woman who to-day takes it as a
matter of course that she should study what she chooses, go and come
as she will, support herself unquestioned by trade, profession, or
art, work in public or private, handle her own property, share her
children on equal terms with her husband, receive a respectful
attention on platform or before legislature, live freely in the world,
should think with anything but reverence particularly of the early
disturbers of convention and peace, for they were an essential element
in the achievement.
The great strength of the radical program is now, as it has always
been, the powerful appeal it makes to the serious young woman. Man and
marriage are a trap--that is the essence the young woman draws from
the campaign for woman's rights. All the vague terror which at times
runs through a girl's dream of marriage, the sudden vision of probable
agonies, of possible failure and death, become under the teachings of
the militant woman so many realities. She sees herself a "slave," as
the jargon has it, putting all her eggs into one basket with the
certainty that some, perhaps all, will be broken.
The new gospel offers an escape from all that. 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. For 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 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 trade
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 to-day, who prayed on their knees that
they might escape the frightful isolation of marriage, might be free
to "live" and to "work," to "know" and to "do."
What it was really all about they never knew until it was too late.
That is, they examined neither the accusations nor the premises. They
accepted them. Strong young natures are quick to accept charges of
injustice. To them it is unnatural that life should be hampered, that
it should be anything but radiant. Curing injustice, too, seems
particularly easy to the young. It is simply a matter of finding a
remedy and putting it into force! The young American woman of
militant cast finds it is easy to believe that the Business of Being a
Woman is slavery. She has her mother's pains and sacrifices and tears
before her, and she resents them. She meets the theory on every hand
that the distress she loathes is of man's doing, that it is for her to
revolt, to enter his business, and so doing escape his tyranny, find a
worth-while life for herself, and at the same time help "liberate" her
sex.
And so for sixty years she has been working on this thesis. That she
has not demonstrated it sufficiently to satisfy even herself is shown
by the fact that she is still the most conspicuous of Uneasy Women.
But that she has produced a type and an influential one is certain.
Indeed, she may be said to have demonstrated sufficiently for
practical purposes what there is for her in imitating the activities
of man.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one
portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the
earth a position different from that which they have hitherto
occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God
entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind
requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to
such a course.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women
are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights
governments are instituted, deriving their just power from the
consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer
from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the
institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such
principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established
should not be changed for light and transient causes; and
accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more
disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they were accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government,
and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been
the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and
such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the
equal station to which they are entitled.
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and
usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in direct
object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove
this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to
the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which
she has no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most
ignorant and degraded men--both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective
franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls
of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
He has made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she
earns.
He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can
commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the
presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is
compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all
intents and purposes, her master--the law giving him power to
deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the
proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship
of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the
happiness of women--the law, in all cases, going upon a false
supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his
hands.
After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single,
and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a
government which recognizes her only when her property can be made
profitable to it.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from
those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty
remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and
distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a
teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough
education, all colleges being closed against her.
He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate
position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the
ministry, and, with some exception, from any public participation
in the affairs of the Church.
He has created a false sentiment by giving to the world a
different code of morals for men and women, by which moral
delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only
tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as
his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs
to her conscience and to her God.
He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her
confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to
make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.