THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN
Respect for the Creator of this world is basic among all civilized
people. The longer one lives, the more thoroughly one realizes the
soundness of this respect. The earth and its works _are_ good. Most
human conceptions are barred by strange inconsistencies. The man who
praises the works of the Creator as all wise not infrequently treats
His arrangement for carrying on the race as if it were unfit to be
spoken of in polite society. Nowhere does the modern God-fearing man
come nearer to sacrilege than in his attitude toward the divine plan
for renewing life.
A strange mixture of sincerity and hypocrisy, self-flagellation and
lust, aspiration and superstition, has gone into the making of this
attitude. With the development of it we have nothing to do here. What
does concern us is the effect of this profanity on the Business of
Being a Woman.
The central fact of the woman's life--Nature's reason for her--is the
child, his bearing and rearing. There is no escape from the divine
order that her life must be built around this constraint, duty, or
privilege, as she may please to consider it. But from the beginning to
the end of life she is never permitted to treat it naturally and
frankly. As a child accepting all that opens to her as a matter of
course, she is steered away from it as if it were something evil. Her
first essays at evasion and spying often come to her in connection
with facts which are sacred and beautiful and which she is perfectly
willing to accept as such if they were treated intelligently and
reverently. If she could be kept from all knowledge of the procession
of new life except as Nature reveals it to her, there would be reason
in her treatment. But this is impossible. From babyhood she breathes
the atmosphere of unnatural prejudices and misconceptions which
envelop the fact.
Throughout her girlhood the atmosphere grows thicker. She finally
faces the most perilous and beautiful of experiences with little more
than the ideas which have come to her from the confidences of
evil-minded servants, inquisitive and imaginative playmates, or the
gossip she overhears in her mother's society. Every other matter of
her life, serious and commonplace, has received careful attention, but
here she has been obliged to feel her way and, worst of abominations,
to feel it with an inner fear that she ought not to know or seek to
know.
If there were no other reason for the modern woman's revolt against
marriage, the usual attitude toward its central facts would be
sufficient. The idea that celibacy for woman is "the aristocracy of
the future" is soundly based if the Business of Being a Woman rests on
a mystery so questionable that it cannot be frankly and truthfully
explained by a girl's mother at the moment her interest and curiosity
seeks satisfaction. That she gets on as well as she does, results, of
course, from the essential soundness of the girl's nature, the armor
of modesty, right instinct, and reverence with which she is endowed.
The direst result of ignorance or of distorted ideas of this
tremendous matter of carrying on human life is that it leaves the girl
unconscious of the supreme importance of her mate. So heedlessly and
ignorantly is our mating done to-day that the huge machinery of Church
and State and the tremendous power of public opinion combined have
been insufficient to preserve to the institution of marriage anything
like the stability it once had, or that it is desirable that it should
have, if its full possibilities are to be realized. The immorality and
inhumanity of compelling the obviously mismated to live together, grow
on society. Divorce and separation are more and more tolerated. Yet
little is done to prevent the hasty and ill-considered mating which is
at the source of the trouble.
Rarely has a girl a sound and informed sense to guide her in accepting
her companion. The corollary of this bad proposition is that she has
no sufficient idea of the seriousness of her undertaking. She starts
out as if on a lifelong joyous holiday, primarily devised for her
personal happiness. And what is happiness in her mind? Certainly it is
not a good to be conquered--a state of mind wrested from life by
tackling and mastering its varied experiences, the _end_, not the
beginning, of a great journey. Too often it is that of the modern
Uneasy Woman--the attainment of something _outside_ of herself. She
visualizes it, as possessions, as ease, a "good time," opportunities
for self-culture, the exclusive devotion of the mate to her. Rarely
does she understand that happiness in her undertaking depends upon the
wisdom and sense with which she conquers a succession of hard
places--calling for readjustment of her ideas and sacrifice of her
desires. All this she must discover for herself. She is like a voyager
who starts out on a great sea with no other chart than a sailor's
yarns, no other compass than curiosity.
The budget of axioms she brings to her guidance she has picked up
helter-skelter. They are the crumbs gathered from the table of the
Uneasy Woman, or worse, of the pharisaical and satisfied woman, from
good and bad books, from newspaper exploitations of divorce and
scandal, from sly gossip with girls whose budget of marital wisdom is
as higgledy-piggledy as her own.
And a pathetically trivial budget it is:--
"He must _tell_ her everything." "He must always pick up what she
drops." "He must dress for dinner." "He must remember her birthday."
That is, she begins her adventure with a set of hard-and-fast
rules,--and nothing in this life causes more mischief than the effort
to force upon another one's own rules!
That marriage gives the finest opportunity that life affords for
practicing, not rules, but principles, she has never been taught.
Flexibility, adaptation, fair-mindedness, the habit of supplementing
the weakness of the one by the strength of the other, all the fine
things upon which the beauty, durability, and growth of human
relations depend,--these are what decide the future of her marriage.
These she misses while she insists on her rules; and ruin is often the
end. Study the causes back of divorces and separations, the brutal
criminal causes aside, and one finds that usually they begin in
trivial things,--an irritating habit or an offensive opinion persisted
in on the one side and not endured philosophically on the other; a
petty selfishness indulged on the one side and not accepted humorously
on the other,--that is, the marriage is made or unmade by small, not
great, things.
It is a lack of any serious consideration of the nature of the
undertaking she is going into which permits her at the start to accept
a false notion of her economic position. She agrees that she is being
"supported"; she consents to accept what is given her; she even
consents to ask for money. Men and society at large take her at her
own valuation. Loose thinking by those who seek to influence public
opinion has aggravated the trouble. They start with the idea that she
is a parasite--does not pay her way. "Men hunt, fish, keep the cattle,
or raise corn," says a popular writer, "for women to eat the game, the
fish, the meat, and the corn." The inference is that the men alone
render useful service. But neither man nor woman eats of these things
until the woman has prepared them. The theory that the man who raises
corn does a more important piece of work than the woman who makes it
into bread is absurd. The theory that she does something more
difficult and less interesting is equally absurd.
The practice of handing over the pay envelope at the end of the week
to the woman, so common among laboring people, is a recognition of her
equal economic function. It is a recognition that the venture of the
two is common and that its success depends as much on the care and
intelligence with which she spends the money as it does on the energy
and steadiness with which he earns it. Whenever one or the other
fails, trouble begins. The failure to understand this business side of
the marriage relation almost inevitably produces humiliation and
irritation. So serious has the strain become because of this false
start that various devices have been suggested to repair it--Mr.
Wells' "Paid Motherhood" is one; weekly wages as for a servant is
another. Both notions encourage the primary mistake that the woman has
not an equal economic place with the man in the marriage.
Marriage is a business as well as a sentimental partnership. But a
business partnership brings grave practical responsibilities, and
this, under our present system, the girl is rarely trained to face.
She becomes a partner in an undertaking where her function is
spending. The probability is she does not know a credit from a debit,
has to learn to make out a check correctly, and has no conscience
about the fundamental matter of living within the allowance which can
be set aside for the family expenses. When this is true of her, she at
once puts herself into the rank of an incompetent--she becomes an
economic dependent. She has laid the foundation for becoming an Uneasy
Woman.
It is common enough to hear women arguing that this close grappling
with household economy is narrowing, not worthy of them. Why keeping
track of the cost of eggs and butter and calculating how much your
income will allow you to buy is any more narrowing than keeping track
of the cost and quality of cotton or wool or iron and calculating how
much a mill requires, it is hard to see. It is the same kind of a
problem. Moreover, it has the added interest of being always an
independent _personal_ problem. Most men work under the deadening
effect of impersonal routine. They do that which others have planned
and for results in which they have no permanent share.
But the woman argues that her task has no relation to the state. Her
failure to see that relation costs this country heavily. Her concern
is with retail prices. If she does her work intelligently, she
follows and studies every fluctuation of price in standards. She also
knows whether she is receiving the proper quality and quantity; and
yet so poorly have women discharged these obligations that dealers for
years have been able to manipulate prices practically to please
themselves, and as for quality and quantity we have the scandal of
American woolen goods, of food adulteration, of false weights and
measures. No one of these things could have come about in this country
if woman had taken her business as a consumer with anything like the
seriousness with which man takes his as a producer.
Her ignorance in handling the products of industry has helped the
monopolistically inclined trust enormously. I can remember the day
when the Beef Trust invaded a certain Middle Western town. The war on
the old-time butchers of the village was open. "Buy of us," was the
order, "or we'll fill the storage house so full that the legs of the
steers will hang out of the windows, and we'll give away the meat."
The women of the town had a prosperous club which might have resisted
the tyranny which the members all deplored, but the club was busy that
winter with the study of the Greek drama! They deplored the tyranny,
but they bought the cut-rate meat--the old butchers fought to a
finish, and the housekeepers are now paying higher prices for poorer
meat and railing at the impotency of man in breaking up the Beef
Trust!
If two years ago when the question of a higher duty on hosiery was
before Congress any woman or club of women had come forward with
carefully tabulated experiments, showing exactly the changes which
have gone on of late years in the shape, color, and wearing quality of
the 15-, 25-, and 50-cent stockings, the stockings of the poor, she
would have rendered a genuine economic service. The women held mass
meetings and prepared petitions instead, using on the one side the
information the shopkeepers furnished, on the other that which the
stocking manufacturers furnished. Agitation based upon anything but
personal knowlledge is not a public service. It may be easily a grave
public danger. The facts needed for fixing the hosiery duty the women
should have furnished, for they buy the stockings.
If the Uneasy American Woman were really fulfilling her economic
functions to-day, she would never allow a short pound of butter, a
yard of adulterated woolen goods, to come into her home. She would
never buy a ready-made garment which did not bear the label of the
Consumer's League. She would recognize that she is a guardian of
quality, honesty, and humanity in industry.
A persistent misconception of the nature and the possibilities of this
practical side of the Business of Being a Woman runs through all
present-day discussions of the changes in household economy. The woman
no longer has a chance to pay her way, we are told, because it is
really cheaper to buy bread than to bake it, to buy jam than to put it
up. Of course, this is a part of the vicious notion that a woman only
makes an economic return by the manual labor she does. The Uneasy
Woman takes up the point and complains that she has nothing to do. But
this release from certain kinds of labor once necessary, merely puts
upon her the obligation to apply the ingenuity and imagination
necessary to make her business meet the changes of an ever changing
world. Because the conditions under which a household must be run now
are not what they were fifty years ago is no proof that the woman no
longer has here an important field of labor. There is more to the
practical side of her business than preparing food for the family! It
means, for one thing, the directing of its wants. The success of a
household lies largely in its power of selection. To-day selection has
given way to accumulation. The family becomes too often an
incorporated company for getting things--with frightful results. The
woman holds the only strong strategic position from which to war on
this tendency, as well as on the habits of wastefulness which are
making our national life increasingly hard and ugly. She is so
positioned that she can cultivate and enforce simplicity and thrift,
the two habits which make most for elegance and for satisfaction in
the material things of life.
Whenever a woman does master this economic side of her business in a
manner worthy of its importance, she establishes the most effective
school for teaching thrift, quality, management, selection--all the
factors in the economic problem. Such scientific household management
is the rarest kind of a training school. And here we touch the most
vital part in the Woman's Business--that of education.
Every home is perforce a good or bad educational center. It does its
work in spite of every effort to shirk or supplement it. No teacher
can entirely undo what it does, be that good or bad. The natural
joyous opening of a child's mind depends on its first intimate
relations. These are, as a rule, with the mother. It is the mother
who "takes an interest," who oftenest decides whether the new mind
shall open frankly and fearlessly. How she does her work, depends less
upon her ability to answer questions than her effort not to discourage
them; less upon her ability to lead authoritatively into great fields
than her efforts to push the child ahead into those which attract him.
To be responsive to his interests is the woman's greatest contribution
to the child's development.
I remember a call once made on me by two little girls when our time
was spent in an excited discussion of the parts of speech. They were
living facts to them, as real as if their discovery had been printed
that morning for the first time in the newspaper. I was interested to
find who it was that had been able to keep their minds so naturally
alive. I found that it came from the family habit of treating with
respect whatever each child turned up. Nothing was slurred over as if
it had no relation to life--not even the parts of speech! They were
not asked or forced to load themselves up with baggage in which they
soon discovered their parents had no interest. Everything was treated
as if it had a permanent place in the scheme to which they were being
introduced. It is only in some such relation that the natural bent of
most children can flower, that they can come early to themselves.
Where this warming, nourishing intimacy is wanting, where the child is
turned over to schools to be put through the mass drill which numbers
make imperative--it is impossible for the most intelligent teacher to
do a great deal to help the child to his own. What the Uneasy Woman
forgets is that no two children born were ever alike, and no two
children who grow to manhood and womanhood will ever live the same
life. The effort to make one child like another, to make him what his
parents want, not what he is born to be, is one of the most cruel and
wasteful in society. It is the woman's business to prevent this.
The Uneasy Woman tells you that this close attention to the child is
too confining, too narrowing. "I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness
of her task," says Chesterton; "I will never pity her for its
smallness." A woman never lived who did all she might have done to
open the mind of her child for its great adventure. It is an
exhaustless task. The woman who sees it knows she has need of all the
education the college can give, all the experience and culture she can
gather. She knows that the fuller her individual life, the broader her
interests, the better for the child. She should be a person in his
eyes. The real service of the "higher education," the freedom to take
a part in whatever interests or stimulates her--lies in the fact that
it fits her intellectually to be a companion worthy of a child. She
should know that unless she does this thing for him he goes forth with
his mind still in swaddling clothes, with the chances that it will not
be released until relentless life tears off the bands.
The progress of society depends upon getting out of men and women an
increasing amount of the powers with which they are born and which bad
surroundings at the start blunt or stupefy. This is what all systems
of education try to do, but the result of all systems of education
depends upon the material that comes to the educator. Opening the mind
of the child, that is the delicate task the state asks of the mother,
and the quality of the future state depends upon the way she
discharges this part of her business.
I think it is historically correct to say that the reason of the
sudden and revolutionary change in the education of American women,
which began with the nineteenth century and continued through it, was
the realization that if we were to make real democrats, we must begin
with the child, and if we began with the child, we must begin with the
mother!
Everybody saw that unless the child learned by example and precept the
great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he was going to
remain what by nature we all are,--imperious, demanding, and
self-seeking. The whole scheme must fail if his education failed. It
is not too much to say that the success of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution depended, in the minds of certain
early Democrats, upon the woman. The doctrines of these great
instruments would be worked out according to the way she played her
part. Her serious responsibility came in the fact that her work was
one that nobody could take off her hands. This responsibility required
a preparation entirely different from that which had been hers. She
must be given education and liberty. The woman saw this, and the story
of her efforts to secure both, that she might meet the requirements,
is one of the noblest in history. There was no doubt, then, as to the
value of the tasks, no question as to their being worthy national
obligations. It was a question of fitting herself for them.
But what has happened? In the process of preparing herself to
discharge more adequately her task as a woman in a republic, her
respect for the task has been weakened. In this process, which we call
emancipation, she has in a sense lost sight of the purposes of
emancipation. Interested in acquiring new tools, she has come to
believe the tools more important than the thing for which she was to
use them. She has found out that with education and freedom, pursuits
of all sorts are open to her, and by following these pursuits she can
preserve her personal liberty, avoid the grave responsibility, the
almost inevitable sorrows and anxieties, which belong to family life.
She can choose her friends and change them. She can travel, and
gratify her tastes, satisfy her personal ambitions. The snare has been
too great; the beauty and joy of free individual life have dulled the
sober sense of national obligation. The result is that she is
frequently failing to discharge satisfactorily some of the most
imperative demands the nation makes upon her.
Take as an illustration the moral training of the child. The most
essential obligation in a Woman's Business is establishing her
household on a sound moral basis. If a child is anchored to basic
principles, it is because his home is built on them. If he understands
integrity as a man, it is usually because a woman has done her work
well. If she has not done it well, it is probable that he will be a
disturbance and a menace when he is turned over to society. Sending
defective steel to a gunmaker is no more certain to result in unsafe
guns than turning out boys who are shifty and tricky is to result in a
corrupt and unhappy community.
Appalled by the seriousness of the task, or lured from it by the joys
of liberty and education, the woman has too generally shifted it to
other shoulders--shoulders which were waiting to help her work out the
problem, but which could never be a substitute. She has turned over
the child to the teacher, secular and religious, and fancied that he
might be made a man of integrity by an elaborate system of teaching in
a mass. Has this shifting of responsibility no relation to the general
lowering of our commercial and political morality?
For years we have been bombarded with evidence of an appalling
indifference to the moral quality of our commercial and political
transactions. It is not too much to say that the revelations of
corruption in our American cities, the use of town councils, State
legislatures, and even of the Federal Government in the interests of
private business, have discredited the democratic system throughout
the world. It has given more material for those of other lands who
despise democracy to sneer at us than anything that has yet happened
in this land. And _this has come about under the régime of the
emancipated woman_. Is she in no way responsible for it? If she had
kept the early ideals of the woman's part in democracy as clearly
before her eyes as she has kept some of her personal wants and needs,
could there have been so disastrous a condition? Would she be the
Uneasy Woman she is if she had kept faith with the ideals that forced
her emancipation?--if she had not substituted for them dreams of
personal ambition, happiness, and freedom!
The failure to fulfill your function in the scheme under which you
live always produces unrest. Content of mind is usually in proportion
to the service one renders in an undertaking he believes worth while.
If our Uneasy Woman could grasp the full meaning of her place in this
democracy, a place so essential that democracy must be overthrown
unless she rises to it--a part which man is not equipped to play and
which he ought not to be asked to play, would she not cease to
apologize for herself--cease to look with envy on man's occupations?
Would she not rise to her part and we not have at last the "new woman"
of whom we have talked so long?
Learning, business careers, political and industrial activities--none
of these things is more than incidental in the national task of woman.
Her great task is to prepare the citizen. The citizen is not prepared
by a training in practical politics. Something more fundamental is
required. The meaning of honor and of the sanctity of one's word, the
understanding of the principles of democracy and of the society in
which we live, the love of humanity, and the desire to serve,--these
are what make a good citizen. The tools for preparing herself to give
this training are in the woman's hands. It calls for education, and
the nation has provided it. It calls for freedom of movement and
expression, and she has them. It calls for ability to organize, to
discuss problems, to work for whatever changes are essential. She is
developing this ability. It may be that it calls for the vote. I do
not myself see this, but it is certain that she will have the vote as
soon as not a majority, but an approximate half, not of men--but of
women--feel the need of it.
What she has partially at least lost sight of is that education,
freedom, organization, agitation, the suffrage, are but tools to an
end. What she now needs is to formulate that end so nobly and clearly
that the most ignorant woman may understand it. The failure to do
this is leading her deeper and deeper into fruitless unrest. It is
also dulling her sense of the necessity of keeping her business
abreast with the times. At one particular and vital point this shows
painfully, and that is her slowness in socializing her home.