THE CHILDLESS WOMAN AND THE FRIENDLESS CHILD
One of the first conclusions forced on a thoughtful unprejudiced
observer of society is that the major percentage of its pains and its
vices result from a failure to make good connections. Children pine
and even die for fruit in the cities, while a hundred miles away
thousands of barrels of apples are rotting on the ground. Famine
devastates one country, while the granaries of another are bursting
with food. Men and women drink themselves into the gutter from sheer
loneliness, while other men and women shrivel up in isolated comfort.
One of the most pitiful examples of this failure to connect is that
of the childless woman and the friendless, uncared-for child.
There never at any time in any country in the world's history existed
so large a group of women with whom responsibility and effort were a
matter of choice, as exists to-day in the United States. While a large
number of these free women are devoting themselves whole-heartedly to
public service of the most intelligent and ingenious kind, the great
majority recognize no obligation to make any substantial return to
society for its benefits. A small percentage of these are
self-supporting, but the majority are purely parasitical. Indeed, the
heaviest burden to-day on productive America, aside from the burden
imposed by a vicious industrial system, is that of its nonproductive
women. They are the most demanding portion of our society. They spend
more money than any other group, are more insistent in their cry for
amusement, are more resentful of interruptions of their pleasures and
excitements; they go to greater extremes of indolence and of
uneasiness.
The really serious side to the existence of this parasitical group is
that great numbers of other women, not free, forced to produce, accept
their standards of life. We hear women, useful women, everywhere
talking about the desirability of not being obliged to do anything,
commiserating women who must work, commiserating those who have heavy
household responsibilities, and by the whole gist of their words and
acts influencing those younger and less experienced than themselves to
believe that happiness lies in irresponsible living.
Various gradations of the theory of which this is the extreme
expression show themselves. Thus there are great numbers of women of
moderate means, who by a little daily effort can keep comfortable and
attractive homes for themselves and their husbands, and yet who are
utterly regardless of outside responsibilities, who are practically
isolated in the community. They pass their lives in a little round of
household activities, sunning and preening themselves in their long
hours of leisure like so many sleek cats.
There is still another division of this irresponsible class, who build
up frenzied existences for themselves in all sorts of outside
activities. They plunge headlong into each new proposition for
pleasure or social service only to desert it as something more novel
and exciting and, for the instant, popular, appears. Steady,
intelligent standing by an undertaking through its ups and downs, its
dull seasons and its unpopular phases, they are incapable of. Their
efforts have no relation to an intelligently conceived purpose. With
them may be grouped those women who, by their canonization of the
unimportant, construct heavily burdened but utterly fruitless lives.
They laboriously pad out their days with trivial things, vanities,
shams, and shadows, to which they give the serious undivided attention
which should be bestowed only on real enterprises.
There are others who seek soporifics, release from a hearty tackling
of their individual situations, in absorbing work, a work which
perhaps fills their minds, but which is mere occupation--something to
make them forget--not an art for art's sake, not labor for its useful
fruits, but a protective, separating shield to shut out the insistent
demands of life in the place where they find themselves.
All of these women are rightfully classed as irresponsible, whether
they are moved by vanity, indolence, purposelessness, social
blindness, or, most pitiful, a sense of the emptiness of life
unattended by the imagination which reveals the sources from which
life is filled. No one of them is building a "House of Life" for
herself. They are building gimcrack palaces, gingerbread cottages,
structures which the first full blast of life will level to the
ground.
These women are not peculiar to city or to country. They are scattered
nation-wide. You find them on farms and in mansions, in offices and in
academic halls. In startling contrast there exists almost under the
very eaves of the roofs which shelter them a vast and pitiful group of
friendless children,--the deserted babe, the "little mother," the boys
and girls running wild on side streets in every village in our land
and in every slum in the cities, the factory child, the shop girl who
has no home. Let us remember that a goodly percentage of those at work
have homes and that they are engaged in a stimulating, if hard, effort
to "help," that they have the steadying consciousness that they are
needed. Nevertheless, this mass of youth is on the whole in an
unnatural position--an antisocial relation.
Society can never run rightfully until all its members are performing
their natural functions. No woman, whatever her condition, can escape
her obligation to youth without youth suffering, and without suffering
herself. One of the crying needs of to-day is a crusade, a jar, which
will force upon our free women the friendless children of the country,
give them some sense of the undeniable relation they bear to them,
show them that they are in a sense the cause of this pathetic group
and that it is their work to relieve it.
True, for a woman there is nothing more painful than putting herself
face to face with the suffering of children. Yet for many years now we
have had in this country a large and increasing number who were going
through the daily pain of grappling with every phase of the
distressing problems which come from the poverty, friendlessness, and
overwork of the young. Out of their heartbreaking scrutinies there
have come certain determinations which are being adopted rapidly
wherever the social sense is aroused. We may roughly sum up these
conclusions or determinations to be these:--
It is not necessary or endurable that children grow up starved and
overworked, that boys and girls be submitted to vicious surroundings,
that talent be crushed, that young men and young women be devoured by
crime and greed. Youth, its nurturing and developing, has become the
passion of the day. This is the meaning of our bureaus of Child Labor,
of our Children's Courts, our Houses of Correction, our Fresh-Air
Funds and Vacation Homes, our laws regulating hours and conditions,
our Social Settlements.
At its very best, however, legislation, organization, work in groups,
only indirectly reach the base of the trouble. These homeless babes
and children, these neglected boys and girls, these reckless shop and
factory girls, are generally the pain and menace that they are because
they have not had, as individuals, that guidance and affection of
women to which each has a natural right. No collective work, however
good it may be, can protect or guide these children properly.
Rightfully they should be the charge of that body of women who are
unhampered, "free." These women have more, or less, intelligence,
time, and means. They owe society a return for their freedom, their
means, and their education. Nature has made them the guardians of
childhood. Can they decently shirk the obligation any more than a man
can decently shirk his duty as a citizen? Indeed, the case of the
woman unresponsive to her duty toward youth is parallel to that of the
man unresponsive to his duty toward public affairs. One is as
profitless and parasitical as the other.
The man who has no notion of what is doing politically in his own
ward, who does not sense the malign influences which may be working in
his neighborhood, in his very street, perhaps in the next house, who
has not his eye on the unscrupulous small politician who leads the
ward by the nose, who knows nothing of the records of the local
candidates, never goes to the primaries,--this man is one of the most
dangerous citizens we have. It is he who makes the machine possible.
If he did his work, the governmental machine, which starts there with
him, would be sound. It would be begun by honest men interested in
serving the country to the best of their ability, and on such a
foundation no future solidarity of corruption would be possible.
The individual woman's obligation toward the children and young people
in her neighborhood is very like this obligation of the man to public
affairs. It is for her to know the conditions under which the
children, the boys and girls, young men and maids, in her vicinity are
actually living. It is for her to be alert to their health,
amusements, and general education. It is for her to find the one--and
there always is one--that actually needs her. It is for her to
correlate her personal discoveries and experiences with the general
efforts of the community.
This is no work for an occasional morning. It does not mean sporadic
or even regular "neighborhood visiting." It means observation,
reflection, and study. It has nothing to do save indirectly with
societies, or groups, or laws. It is a personal work, something nobody
else can do, and something which, if it is neglected, adds just so
much more to the stream of uncared-for youth. How is it to be done?
Have you ever watched a woman interested in birds making her
observations? She will get up at daylight to catch a note of a new
singer. She will study in detail the little family that is making its
home on her veranda. From the hour that the birds arrive in the spring
until the hour that they leave in the fall she misses nothing of their
doings. It is a beautiful and profitable study, and it is a type of
what is required of a woman who would fulfill her obligation toward
the youth of her neighborhood.
Could we have such study everywhere in country and town, what
tragedies and shames we might be spared! A few months ago the whole
nation was horrified by a riot in a prosperous small city of the
Middle West which ended in the lynching of a young man, a mere boy,
who in trying to discharge his duty as a public official had killed a
man. Some thirty persons, _over half of them boys under twenty years
of age_, are to-day serving terms of from fifteen to twenty years in
the penitentiary for their part in this lynching.
Their terrible work was no insane outbreak. Analyzed, it was a logical
consequence of the social and political conditions under which the
boys had been brought up. In a pretty, rich, busy town of 30,000
people proud of its churches and its schools, _eighty saloons_
industriously plied their business--and part of their business, as it
always is, was to train youths to become their patrons.
What were the women doing in the town? I asked the question of one who
knew it. "Why," he said, "they were doing just what women do
everywhere, no better, no worse. They had their clubs; I suppose a
dozen literary clubs, several sewing clubs, several bridge clubs, and
a number of dancing clubs. I think they cared a little more for bridge
than for literature, many of them at least. They took little part in
civic work, though they had done much for the city library and city
hospital. Many girls went to college, to the State Institute, to
Vassar and Smith. They came back to teach and to marry. It was just as
it is everywhere."
Another to whom I put the same question, answered me in a sympathetic
letter full of understanding comment. The mingled devotion, energy,
and blindness of the women the letter described, spoke in its every
line. They built charming homes, reared healthy, active children whom
they educated at any personal sacrifice--all within a circle of eighty
saloons! To offset the saloons they built churches--a church for each
sect--each more gorgeous than its neighbor. It was in building
churches that they showed the "greatest tenacity of purpose." They had
a large temperance organization. It supported a rest room and met
fortnightly to pray "ardently and sincerely." How little this body of
good women sensed their problem, how little they were fitted to deal
with it, my informant's comment reveals. "You doubtless remember the
story," the letter runs, "of the old lady who deplored the shooting
of craps because, though she didn't know what they were, 'life was
probably as dear to them as to anybody.'"
"It was just as it is everywhere." Busy with self and their immediate
circles, they went their daily ways unseeing, though these ways were
hedged with a corruption whose rank and horrible offshoots at every
step clutched the feet of the children for whom they were responsible.
Perhaps there is nothing to-day needed in this country more than
driving into the minds of women this personal obligation to do what
may be called intensive gardening in youth. Whether a woman wishes to
see it or not, she is the center of a whirl of life. The health, the
happiness, and the future of those that are in this whirl are affected
vitally by what she is and does. To know all of the elements which
are circulating about her as a man knows, if he does his work, the
political and business elements in his own group, this is her
essential task. That she should adjust her discoveries to the
organizations, political, educational, and religious, which are about
her, goes without saying, but these organizations are not the heart of
her matter. The heart of her matter lies in what she does for those
who come into immediate contact with her.
Her business firmly established in her immediate group should grow as
a man's business does in the outer circle where he naturally operates.
It will become stable or unstable exactly as trade or profession
becomes stable or unstable. Every year it should take on new elements,
ramify, turn up new obligations, knit itself more firmly into the life
of the community. With every year it should become necessarily more
complicated, broader in interests, more demanding on her intellectual
and spiritual qualities. Each one of the original members of her group
gathers others about himself. In the nature of the case she will
become one of the strongest influences in these new groups. As a
member goes out she will project herself into other communities or
perhaps other lands, into all sorts of industries, professions, and
arts. Her growth is absolutely natural. It is, too, one of the most
economical growths the world knows. Nothing is lost in it. She spreads
literally like the banyan tree.
Yet in spite of this perfectly obvious fact, there are people to-day
asking, with all appearance of sincerity, what a woman of fifty or
more can _do_! Their confining work in the home, say these observers,
is done. A common suggestion is that they be utilized in politics.
This suggestion has its comical side. A person who has nothing to do
after fifty years of life in a business as many-sided and demanding as
that of a woman, can hardly be expected to be worth much in a business
as complicated and uncertain as politics, and for which she has had no
training. The notion that the woman's business is ended at fifty or
sixty is fantastic. It only ends there if she has been blind to the
meaning of her own experiences; if she has never gone below the
surface of her task--never seen in it anything but physical relations
and duties; has sensed none of its intimate relations to the
community, none of its obligations toward those who have left her,
none of those toward the oncoming generations. If it ends there, she
has failed to realize, too, the tremendous importance to all those
who belong in her circle or who touch it _of what she makes of
herself_, of her personal achievement.
A woman of fifty or sixty who has succeeded, has come to a point of
sound philosophy and serenity which is of the utmost value in the
mental and spiritual development of the group to which she belongs.
Life at every one of its seven stages has its peculiar harrowing
experiences; hope mingles with uncertainty in youth; fear and struggle
characterize early manhood; disillusionment, the question whether it
is worth while, fill the years from forty to fifty,--but resolute
grappling with each period brings one out almost inevitably into a
fine serene certainty which cannot but have its effect on those who
are younger. Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one
of the finest influences in the world. We hang Rembrandt's or
Whistler's picture of his mother on our walls that we may feel its
quieting hand, the sense of peace and achievement which the picture
carries. We have no better illustration of the meaning of old age.
Family and social groups should be a blend of all ages. One of the
present weaknesses of our society is that we herd each age together.
The young do not have enough of the stimulating intellectual influence
of their elders. The elders do not have enough of the vitalizing
influence of the young. We make up our dinner party according to age,
with the result that we lose the full, fine blend of life.
The notion that a woman has no worthy place or occupation after she is
fifty or sixty, and that she can be utilized in public affairs, could
only be entertained by one who has no clear conception of either
private or public affairs--no vision of the infinite reaches of the
one or the infinite complexities of the other. Human society may be
likened to two great circles, one revolving within the other. In the
inner circle rules the woman. Here she breeds and trains the material
for the outer circle, which exists only by and for her. That accident
may throw her into this outer circle is of course true, but it is not
her natural habitat, nor is she fitted by nature to live and circulate
freely there. We underestimate, too, the kind of experience which is
essential for intelligent citizenship in this outer circle. To know
what is wise and needed there one should circulate in it. The man at
his labor in the street, in the meeting places of men, learns
unconsciously, as a rule, the code, the meaning, the need of public
affairs as woman learns those of private affairs. What it all amounts
to is that the labor of the world is naturally divided between the
two different beings that people the world. It is unfair to the woman
that she be asked to do the work of the outer circle. The man can do
that satisfactorily if she does her part; that is, if she prepares him
the material. Certainly, he can never come into the inner circle and
do her work.
The idea that there is a kind of inequality for a woman in minding her
own business and letting man do the same, comes from our confused and
rather stupid notion of the meaning of equality. Popularly we have
come to regard being alike as being equal. We prove equality by
wearing the same kind of clothes, studying the same books, regardless
of nature or capacity or future life. Insisting that women do the same
things that men do, may make the two exteriorly more alike--it does
not make them more equal. Men and women are widely apart in functions
and in possibilities. They cannot be made equal by exterior devices
like trousers, ballots, the study of Greek. The effort to make them so
is much more likely to make them unequal. One only comes to his
highest power by following unconsciously and joyfully his own nature.
We run the risk of destroying the capacity for equality when we
attempt to make one human being like another human being.
The theory that the class of free women considered here would be fired
to unselfish interest in uncared-for youth if they were included in
the electorate of the nation is hardly sustainable. The ballot has not
prevented the growth of a similar class of men. Something more biting
than a new tool is needed to arouse men and women who are absorbed in
self--some poignant experience which thrusts upon their indolent
minds and into their restricted visions the actualities of life.
It should be said, however, that the recent agitation for the ballot
has served as such an experience for a good many women, particularly
in the East. Perhaps for the first time they have heard from the
suffrage platform of the "little mother," the factory child, the girl
living on $6 a week. They have done more than espouse the suffrage
cause for the sake of the child; they have gone out to find where they
could serve.
It is a new knowledge of that tide of life which breaks at her very
gate that the childless and the free American woman needs, if she is
to discharge her obligation to the uncared-for child. To force these
facts upon her, to cry to her, "You are the woman,--you cannot escape
the guilt of the woe and crime which must come from the neglect of
childhood in your radius,"--this is the business of every man and
woman who has had the pain and the privilege of seeing something of
the actual life of the people of this world.