ON THE IMITATION OF MAN
Fresh attacks on life, like chemical experiments, turn up unexpected
by-products. The Uneasy Woman, driven by the thirst for greater
freedom, and believing man's way of life will assuage it, lays siege
to his kingdom. Some of the unexpected loot she has carried away still
embarrasses her. Not a little, however, is of such undeniable
advantage that she may fairly contend that its capture alone justifies
her campaign.
Go to-day into many a woman's club house, into many a drawing-room or
studio at, let us say, the afternoon tea hour, and what will you see?
One or probably more women in mannish suits and boots calmly smoking
cigarettes while they talk, and talk well, about things in which women
are not supposed to be interested, but which it is apparent they
understand.
Look the exhibit over. It is made, you at once recognize, by women of
character, position, and sense. They have simply found certain
masculine ways to their liking and adopted them. The probability is
that if anybody should object to their habits, many of them would be
as bewildered as are the great majority of Americans by the
demonstration that "nice" women can smoke and think nothing of it!
The cigarette, the boot, and much of the talk are only by-products of
the woman's invasion of the man's world. She did not set out to win
these spoils. They came to her in the campaign!
The objects of her attack were things she considered more
fundamental. She was dissatisfied with the way her brain was being
trained, her time employed, her influence directed. "Give us the man's
way," was her demand, "then we shall understand real things, can fill
our days with important tasks, will count as human beings."
There was no uncertainty in her notion of how this was to be
accomplished. A woman rarely feels uncertainty about methods. She
instinctively sees a way and follows it with assurance. Half her
irritation against man has always been that he is a spendthrift with
time and talk. Madame Roland, sitting at her sewing table listening to
the excited debate of the Revolutionists in her salon, mourned that
though the ideas were many, the resulting measures were few. It is the
woman's eternal complaint against discussion--nothing comes of it. In
a country like our own, where reflection usually follows action, the
woman's natural mental attitude is exaggerated. It is one reason why we
have so few houses where there is anything like conversation, why with
us the salon as an institution is out of question. The woman wants
immediately to incorporate her ideas. She is not interested in turning
them over, letting her mind play with them. She has no patience with
other points of view than her own. They are _wrong_--therefore why
consider them? She detests uncertainties--questions which cannot be
settled. Only by man and the rare woman is it accepted that talk is a
good enough end in itself.
The strength of woman's attack on man's life, apart from the essential
soundness of the impulse which drove her to make it, lay then in its
directness and practicality. She began by asking to be educated in
the same way that man educated himself. Preferably she would enter his
classroom, or if that was denied her, she would follow the
"just-as-good" curriculum of the college founded for her. In the last
sixty or seventy years tens of thousands of women have been students
in American universities, colleges, and technical schools, taking
there the same training as men. In the last twenty years the annual
crescendo of numbers has been amazing; over ten thousand at the
beginning of the period, over fifty-two thousand at the end. Over
eight thousand degrees were given to women in 1910, nearly half as
many as were given to men. Fully four fifths of these women students
and graduates have worked side by side with men in schools which
served both equally.
Here, then, is a great mass of experience from which it would seem
that we ought to be able to say precisely how the intellects of the
two sexes act and react under the stimulus of serious study, to decide
definitely whether their attack on problems is the same, whether they
come out the same. Nevertheless, he would be a rash observer who would
pretend to lay down hard-and-fast generalizations. Assert whatever you
will as to the mind of woman at work and some unimpeachable authority
will rise up with experience that contradicts you. But the same may be
said of the mind of man. The mind--_per se_--is a variable and
disconcerting organ.
But admitting all this--certain generalizations, on the whole correct,
may be made from our experience with coeducation.
One of the first of these is that at the start the woman takes her
work more seriously than her masculine competitor. Fifty years ago
there was special reason for this. The few who in those early days
sought a man's education had something of the spirit of pioneers. They
had set themselves a lofty task: to prove themselves the equal of
man--to win privileges which they believed were maliciously denied
their sex. The spirit with which they attacked their studies was
illumined by the loftiness of their aim. The girl who enters college
nowadays has rarely the opportunity to be either pioneer or martyr.
She is doing what has come to be regarded as a matter of course.
Nevertheless, to-day as then, in the coeducational institution she is
more consciously on her mettle than the man.
Her attention, interest, respectfulness, docility, will be ahead of
his. It will at once be apparent that she carries the larger stock of
_untaught_ knowledge. In the classroom she will usually outstep him in
mathematics. It is an ideal subject for her, satisfying her talent
for order, for making things "come out right." Her memory will serve
her better. She can depend upon it to carry more exceptions to rules,
more fantastic irregular verbs, more dates, more lists of kings and
queens, battles and generals, and on the whole she will treat this
sort of impedimenta with more respect. She will know less of abstract
ideas, of philosophies and speculations. They will interest her less.
The chances are that she will be less skillful with microscope and
scalpel, though this is not certain. She will show less enthusiasm for
technical problems, for machinery and engineering; more for social
problems, particularly when it is a question of meeting them with
preventives or remedies. In the first two or three years after
entering college, she will almost invariably appear superior to the
men of her age, more grown up, more interested, surer of herself,
readier. Later you will find her on the whole less inclined to
experiment with her gifts, to feel her wings, to make unexpected
dashes into life. It begins to look as if he were the experimenter,
she the conservator. And by the time she is a senior, look out! The
chances are she will have less interest from now on with man's
business and more with her own! In any case she will rarely develop as
rapidly in his field from this point as he is doing.
He becomes assertive, confident, dominating; the male taking a male's
place. He discovers that his intellectual processes are more
scientific than hers, therefore he concludes they are superior. He
finds he can outargue her, draw logical conclusions as she cannot. He
can do anything with her but convince her, for she jumps the process,
lands on her conclusion, and there she sits. Things are so because
they are so. And the chances are she is right, in spite of the
irregular way she got there. Something superior to reason enters into
her operations--an intuition of truth akin to inspiration. In early
ages women unusually endowed with this quality of perception were
honored as seers. To-day they are recognized as counselors of
prophetic wisdom. "If I had taken my wife's advice!" How often one
hears it!
One most important fact has come out of our great coeducational
experiment: The college cannot entirely rub feminity out and
masculinity into a woman's brain. The woman's mind is still the
woman's mind, although she is usually the last to recognize it. It is
another proof of the eternal fact that Nature looks after her own good
works!
But it takes more than a college course to make an efficient,
flexible, and trustworthy organ from a mind, masculine or feminine.
It must be applied to productive labor in competition with other
trained minds, before you can decide what it is worth. Set the
man-trained woman's mind at what is called man's business, let it be
what you will--keeping a shop, practicing medicine or law, editing,
running a factory--let her do it in what she considers to be a man's
way, and with fidelity to her original theory that his way is more
desirable than hers; that is, let her succeed in the task of making a
man of herself--what about her?--what kind of a man does she become?
Here again there is ample experience to go on. For seventy years we
have had them with us--the stern disciples of the militant program.
Greater fidelity to a task than they show it would be impossible to
find--a fidelity so unwavering that it is often painful. Their care
for detail, for order, for exactness, is endless. Dignity, respect for
their undertaking, devotion to professional etiquette they may be
counted on to show in the highest degree. These are admirable
qualities. They have led hundreds of women into independence and good
service. Almost never, however, have they led one to the top. In free
fields such as merchandising, editing, and manufacturing we have yet
to produce a woman of the first caliber; that is, daring,
experimenting, free from prejudice, with a vision of the future great
enough to lead her to embody something of the future in her task.
In every profession we have scores of successful women--almost never a
_great_ woman, and yet the world is full of great women! That is, of
women who understand, are familiar with the big sacrifices,
appreciative of the fine things, far-seeing, prophetic. Why does this
greatness so rarely find expression in their professional
undertakings?
The answer is no doubt complex, but one factor is the general notion
of the woman that if she succeeds she must suppress her natural
emotions and meet the world with a surface as non-resilient as she
conceives that of man to be in his dealings with the world. She is
strengthened in this notion by hard necessity. No woman could live and
respond as freely as her nature prompts to the calls on her sympathy
which come in the contact with all conditions of life involved in
practicing a trade or a profession. She must save herself. To do it
she incases herself in an unnatural armor. For the normal, healthy
woman this means the suppression of what is strongest in her nature,
that power which differentiates her chiefly from man, her power of
emotion, her "affectability" as the scientists call it. She must
overcome her own nature, put it in bonds, cripple it, if she is to do
her work. Here is a fundamental reason for the failure of woman to
reach the first rank. She has sacrificed the most wonderful part of
her endowment, that which when trained gives her vision, sharpens her
intuitions, reveals the need and the true course. This superior
affectability crushed, leaves her atrophied.
The common characterization of this atrophied woman is that she is
"cold." It is the exact word. She _is_ cold, also she is self-centered
and intensely personal. Let a woman make success in a trade or
profession her exclusive and sufficient ambition, and the result,
though it may be brilliant, is repellent.
She gives to her task an altogether disproportionate place in her
scheme of things. Life is not made by work, important as is work in
life. Human nature has varied needs. It calls imperatively for a task,
something to do with brain and hands--a productive something which
fits the common good, without which the world would not be as orderly
and as happy. Say what we will, it matters very little what the task
is--if it contributes in some fashion to this superior orderliness and
happiness. But it means more. It means leisure, pleasure, excitements;
it means feeding of the taste, the curiosity, the emotions, the
reflective powers; and it means love, love of the mate, the child, the
friend, and neighbor. It means reverence for the scheme of things and
one's place in it; worship of the author of it, religion.
But the woman sternly set to do a man's business, believing it better
than the woman's, too often views life as made up of business. She
throws her whole nature to the task. Her work is her child. She gives
it the same exclusive passionate attention. She is as fiercely jealous
of interference in it as she would be if it were a child. She resents
suggestions and change. It is hers, a personal thing to which she
clings as if it were a living being. That attitude is the chief reason
why working with women in the development of great undertakings is as
difficult as coöperating with them in the rearing of a family. It is
also a reason why they rarely rise to the first rank. They cannot get
away from their undertakings sufficiently to see the big truths and
movements which are always impersonal.
Brilliant and satisfying as her triumph may be to her personally, she
frequently finds that it is resented by nature and by society. She
finds that nature lays pitfalls for her, cracks the ice of her heart
and sets it aflame, often for absurd and unworthy causes. She finds
that the great mass of unconscious women commiserate or scorn her as
one who has missed the fullness of life. She finds that society
regards her as one who shirked the task of life, and who, therefore,
should not be honored as the woman who has stood up to the common
burden. When she senses this--which is not always--she treats it as
prejudice. As a matter of fact, the antagonism of Nature and Society
to the militant woman is less prejudice than self-defense. It is a
protest against the wastefulness and sacrifice of her career. It is a
right saving impulse to prevent perversion of the qualities and powers
of women which are most needed in the world, those qualities and
powers which differentiate her from man, which make for the variety,
the fullness, the charm, and interest of life.
Moreover, Nature and Society must not permit her triumph to appear
desirable to the young. They must be made to understand what her
winnings have cost in lovely and desirable things. They must know that
the unrest which drove her to the attempt is not necessarily satisfied
by her triumph, that it is merely stifled and may break out at any
time in vagaries and follies. They must be made to realize the
essential barrenness of her triumph, its lack of the savor and tang of
life, the multitude of makeshifts she must practice to recompense her
for the lack of the great adventure of natural living.
And they see it, many of them, before they are out of college, and
their militancy falls off like the cloak it generally is. The girl
abandons her quest. In the early days she was likely to be treated as
an apostate if, instead of following the "life work" she had picked
out, she slipped back into matrimony. I can remember the dismay among
certain militant friends when Alice Freeman married. "Our first
college president," they groaned. "A woman who so vindicated the sex."
It was like the grieving of Miss Anthony that Mrs. Stanton wasted so
much time having babies!
The militant theory, as originally conceived, instead of increasing in
favor, has declined. There is little likelihood now that any great
number of women will ever regard it as a desirable working formula for
more than a short period of their lives. But I am not saying that this
theory is no longer influential. It is probable that in a modified
form it was never more influential than it is to-day. For, while the
Uneasy Woman has practically demonstrated that "making a man of
herself" does not solve her problem, she has by no means given up the
notion that the Business of Being a Woman is narrowing and
unsatisfying. Nor has she ceased to consider man's life more desirable
than woman's.
The present effort of the serious-minded to meet the case takes two
general directions, natural enough outgrowths of the original
militancy. The first of these is a frank advocacy of celibacy.
"_Celibacy is the aristocracy of the future_," is the preaching of one
European feminist. It is a modification of the scheme by which the
medieval woman sought to escape unrest. Four hundred years ago a woman
sought celibacy as an escape from sin; service and righteousness were
her aim. To-day she adopts it to escape inferiority and servitude;
superiority and freedom her aim.
The ranks of the woman 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. There are various points at which she claims it
fails. It is antagonistic to personal ambition. It makes a dependent
of her. It leaves her in middle life without an occupation. It keeps
her out of the great movements of her day--gives her no part in the
solution of the ethical and economical problems which affect her and
her children. She declares that she wants fuller participation in
life, and by life she seems to mean the elaborate machinery by which
human wants are supplied and human beings kept in something like
order; the movements of the market place, of politics, and of
government.
Now if there were not something in her contention, the Uneasy Woman
would not be with us as she is to-day, more vociferous, more insistent
than ever in the world's history. What is there in her case?
If the cultivation of individual tastes and talents to a useful,
productive point is out of question in the woman's business, if it is
not a part of it, something is weak in the scheme. Something is weak
if the woman is or feels that she is not paying her way. Both are not
only individual rights; they are individual duties.
Moreover, she is certainly right to be dissatisfied, if, after
spending twenty-five years, more or less, she is to be left in middle
life, her forces spent, without interests and obligations which will
occupy brain and heart to the full, without important tasks which are
the logical outcome of her experience and which she must carry on in
order to complete that experience.
But what is the truth about it? What is the Business of Being a Woman?
Is it something incompatible with free and joyous development of one's
talents? Is there no place in it for economic independence? Has it no
essential relation to the world's movements? Is it an episode which
drains the forces and leaves a dreary wreck behind? Is it something
that cannot be organized into a profession of dignity, and opportunity
for service and for happiness?