of the home. Labor-saving inventions have multiplied and every year
brings new ones. Thus have the forces of water and air and electricity
conspired to take away much of the ancient prerogative of woman. Your
great-grandmother, in all probability, made all the clothing for her
family, men included. Moreover, she and her assistants wove the cloth
and her hands spun the wool out of which it was made. The linen and the
wool must still be woven and made into cloth, but it must be done
outside of the home. One would almost have to be wealthy now in order to
wear garments toward which no machine had made any contribution. The
Ruskin weaving industries of England are an example of the handwork of
the twentieth century, but the textiles made on those looms are costly.
In your great-grandmother's home were manufactured all the lights
needed, the wax or tallow candles. We now demand gas and electricity.
Then all the food consumed in the home was prepared there. Now vast
canneries and factories do the work at less cost than it can be done in
the home. Ready-made clothing can often be bought as cheaply as the
materials alone for home manufacture.
What I wish to show is that the transference of the labor of the home to
the factory has robbed many women of useful, satisfying labor. This has
produced widespread unrest among them. The protest against inactivity
has caused an increasing army of women to knock upon the door of every
opportunity for productive, satisfying occupation.
It is not a wrong instinct in women which urges them, when not needed in
the home, to find activity outside of it. If you have a craving to do
something in the world, don't be ashamed of it. It may not be best for
you to do it, but the wish to do it does not prove that you are
unwomanly, even if it is something that has oftenest been done by men. I
am always glad when I find a girl seriously taking up some line of work
by means of which she may, if necessary, gain a livelihood. Is it wise
for parents to bring their daughters up without any definite aim,
instilling into their minds the idea that they will always be taken care
of and protected? Who is protected, who can be protected, when fortunes
are heaped up to-day only to be swept away to-morrow?
In the progress of women, it is the question of their enfranchisement
which is particularly agitating the world to-day, just as, yesterday, it
was the question of their education. We have no right not to be
interested in the matter. The statement may fearlessly be made that
there is not an American young woman alive to-day upon whom will not
fall, if she lives to a reasonable age, the responsibility of the
ballot. You may believe in woman suffrage or you may not, yet, with your
consent or without it, there will some time be placed in your hands an
instrument for the possession of which men struggled and fought for
hundreds of years, and for which many of them died; and for which women
have struggled since long before you were born, and for which many of
them would have been willing to die. The danger is that when woman
suffrage shall have become universal, and we are no longer reminded, as
we now constantly are, of the cost and the value of the ballot, we shall
cease to prize it, and shall grow careless of its use, as many men also
have done. That is the way of the world. What one generation purchases
at tremendous cost, the next accepts as a matter of course. A
distinguished woman, who, though she labored hard to help secure higher
educational privileges for women, was born a little too soon to avail
herself of them, gave an illustration of this. Her granddaughter, just
home on her first vacation from college, said to her, "Grandmother, I
wonder that you did not go to college. It is splendid!" How little that
girl knew of the long, uphill struggle that had taken place in order
that she might receive a college education!
Why are women asking for an opportunity to vote? Whatever arguments may
be adduced in favor of woman suffrage, we always come back to equality
as a first principle, the primary right of each individual to claim
before the law the same right as every other individual. It is not
entirely a question of the wise use of suffrage, it is a question of
liberty and equality. As the world has become more enlightened, liberty
has more and more become its governing principle, and the progress
cannot stop until every adult fitted for citizenship in any civilized
state shall be enfranchised.
Here are several reasons why, it seems to me, women should have the
ballot.
First, in order that they may feed and clothe their families properly
and provide healthful homes for them to live in. The preparation of food
used to be solely women's business, but it is not now, as I have said.
Upon proper inspection of dairies, bakeries, canneries, etc., every
family depends for its well-being. Adulteration of food and misbranding
need to be guarded against. We all know something of the struggle that
has been waged for years by the Consumers' League and other beneficent
agencies against the sweat-shop system. Poisonous germs may lurk in a
garment made under unwholesome conditions. A polluted water-supply or a
defective sewage system may bring disease or death into any home. The
ballot is not the only weapon which can be employed against these evils
that menace the home, but it is probably the most effective one.
Another reason why women should vote is for the sake of the moral
welfare of their children. It is the voter who has it in his hands to
eliminate the saloon and to control the public dance-hall, the debasing
theater or moving-picture show, and other sources of moral corruption.
It is the voter who has the power to establish libraries and art
galleries, playgrounds and parks.
Women ought to vote for the sake of protecting and helping those who
cannot help themselves; for the sake of abolishing child-labor, and of
securing humane hours and reasonable wages for working-women as well as
better protection for young girls against those who would ensnare them.
They should vote, also, in order that they may have a voice in measures
affecting the public welfare, such as old-age pensions, mothers'
pensions, industrial insurance, prison reform, better care of the sick
and the aged, and all forms of civic betterment.
Women should vote in order that they may help to abolish unjust
discrimination against women. Even in this free Republic many steps will
have to be taken before women will have the same rights before the law
as men. The enfranchisement of women will hasten that time. It is only a
few years since Senator Tillman, of South Carolina, called to his aid an
ancient law of that State in order to enable his son, who had left his
wife, to take their children from her. South Carolina is not the only
State in which the law, in case of a legal separation, is most unjust to
the woman. According to a recent authority, women have the same rights
as men in the guardianship of their children in only sixteen States of
the Union. In some States the father has even power to deed the children
away from their mother. In a number of the States of the Union, the
husband still has legal control of his wife's property and he may claim
her wages. Every woman should resolve to do all in her power to help to
abolish such obviously unjust laws as these.
There is one more reason why women should vote, and that is, for their
own growth and enlargement. Only a few hundred years ago woman had
practically no liberty. She had little freedom before marriage, small
choice in marriage, unequal rights as a wife, no legal right to her
children. She could own no property; educational opportunities were
denied her; and her life from birth to death was determined by others,
not by herself. One has only to read such a story as Browning's "The
Ring and the Book" to understand something of the wrongs that millions
of women suffered before the days when the world in the process of
evolution was brought to a more enlightened idea of the rights of woman.
What vast progress she has made! One who knows the story of it can be
patient in regard to further progress, confident that it will come as
surely as the planets will continue in their orbits. And we must not
forget that at every step upward hands of strong and fearless men have
been held out to her, else she could not have reached her present
position. That person is doing small service to the world who attempts
to set the interests of women over against those of men and to create
antagonism between them. Let us never forget that their interests are
not opposed to each other, but that in the long run nothing can be
detrimental to one which is not also detrimental to the other.
"The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free;
· · · · · · ·
If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?"
XIII
SOURCES OF HAPPINESS
You do not need to be reminded of the importance of this subject. Do we
not hear on all sides that happiness is what all the world is seeking?
Why are men toiling and struggling and warring with each other to heap
up wealth except that they believe it will bring happiness? It is
probably true that most of the actions of the majority of human beings
are directed, consciously or unconsciously, toward happiness as an end.
"We keep pleasure in the background of our minds, not allowing it to be
seen, yet always hoping for more and more of it," says one of our modern
writers on ethics. Yet I should be sorry to have you believe that
pleasure is the _summum bonum_ of life.
All normal, healthy young people are happy. There may be disappointments
and sorrows, but the power of rebound is great and happiness returns.
The Creator evidently wants us to be happy, and any other theory of life
is an unnatural one. The ascetics of the Middle Ages had a mistaken idea
of serving God, believing that the more they suffered, the better they
were pleasing Him. Our conception of God as a God of love forbids that
theory. In children and animals happiness is always a sign of
well-being, as it seems to denote absence of ill-adjustment. If a young
child appears to be happy, we feel that all is well with it. The
frolicsome play of all young creatures is an expression of the gladness
that has been implanted within them. The further removed we are from the
spirit of gladness, the less are we conforming to one of the deepest
laws of our being.
Happiness is good, not only as a sign that all is well with us, just as
silence in the machine denotes perfect adjustment, but it is good as
productive of something beyond itself. If we are happy, we work better.
Happiness has an exhilarating effect. If we are happy, we add to the joy
of all about us and thus increase the gladness of the world. Happiness
is not only the sign of absence of friction, it removes friction. It is
not only an indication of health, but a cause of health. One who enjoys
his dinner will digest it better than one who eats from duty. If
happiness is, then, so important, we may reasonably ask what we can do
to secure it.
We may rightly say that we want all the happiness we can have consistent
with other aims. A wrong attitude regarding it is that we must purchase
it at any cost, no matter how much we have to ride over the rights of
others to secure it. This is the attitude of many young people who have
been brought up in affluence and who have formed the fatal habit of
thinking that life must bring them whatever they want. One longs to say
to such young people that happiness does not depend upon what we have,
but upon what we are. The person who is discontented in a hovel would be
discontented in a palace, for even there he would have to live with
himself. Mrs. Wiggs could not have been happier in a mansion than she
was in her cabbage-patch, because her happiness was independent of
external things. She made it herself by her attitude toward the world,
toward her work, toward her troubles and her blessings. Those, however,
who are of an unhappy, discontented nature always attribute their lack
of happiness to some definite thing or things which their more fortunate
friends have and the possession of which they think would bring complete
happiness. In the expressive words of George Eliot, "Dissatisfaction
seeks a definite object and finds it in the privation of an untried
good."
Happiness is never won by direct pursuit. Just when she seems so close
that we are sure we can reach out the hand and grasp her, she is gone,
and again we must start in hot pursuit. Many have spent their lives in
this way, a bootless chase. It is only when we give up this mad pursuit
and attend to our business in life that Happiness comes and makes her
home with us. "Pleasure to be got must be forgot."
But you are happy, so why talk to you about securing something which you
already possess, indeed, have never been without? Because there are many
kinds of happiness, some far more satisfying and more permanent than
others. It is for us to see to it that ours is of a kind that will stand
every test. At your stage of life you possess most of the blessings
which the world has always regarded as most desirable. If you wish to
count them you may begin with youth. To be young means that almost all
of life is before you and that no irrevocable mistakes have as yet been
made. There are many with misspent lives behind them, who would barter
everything they possess for youth and the opportunity to begin all over
again. You possess health. What would not the aged and feeble, the
crippled, the diseased, give for your vigorous body! Like most of our
truest riches, however, health is something we take as a matter of
course and do not know the value of until it has departed from us. You
have human love. Whoever you are there are those whose world is made
brighter because of your presence in it.
Youth, health, love are yours, so why should you not be happy? But I
have already said that you are happy. And yet I did not quite mean it. I
should probably do you no injustice if I should say that you are not as
happy as this splendid trio of blessings would seem to warrant. The
reason is that real happiness does not come as a gift. It is achieved
happiness that is of most worth.
You have often been told, no doubt, that the school days are the
happiest days of life. Some men and women of maturer years are very fond
of preaching this doctrine to young people. But it is a wrong and
pernicious theory of life, and those who advocate it condemn themselves
by their own words, for they show that they have lacked the power to
make life richer and deeper as it went on. "I never will believe," says
George Eliot, "that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable
augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the
individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy
one!"
Getting to the end of school days is not, then, like walking off a
precipice. There is much beyond and it is good. To be sure, there will
be no more days just like the school days, with their freedom from care,
their glorious comradeship, and their stimulus to high endeavor. In
future years they doubtless will wear a halo possessed by no others, but
this will not mean that they were really the happiest. In fact, if the
first twenty years of one's life have truly prepared one to live, life
should constantly grow richer as it moves onward. We should grow happier
as we grow older because of two things, increasing power of service, and
a growing capacity for enjoyment. Dr. Eliot, ex-President of Harvard
University, once defined education as "increasing the capacity for
serviceableness and for enjoyment." In this sense education does not
stop with the school days. Each year should reveal new springs of power
and should develop within us new resources. Women ought to be even more
careful than men to develop such powers and resources, for a man's
active life in the world is much more likely to compel growth in him.
How many women there are who, after reaching middle life, when their
children are grown up and gone out of the home, find it impossible to
secure happy employment for the mind! They might have developed
resources and powers which would have given them an ever-increasing
interest in life.
We often hear people wish for childhood or youth again. When any one
expresses such a wish, he generally means that he would like to be a
child or youth again if he could take back with him all the wisdom and
all the powers and capacities that the years have brought him in
exchange for his vanished youth. But to be a child again, just such a
child as he was, and to grow up all over again, making the same unhappy
blunders and suffering from the same hard knocks in the process of
adjustment to an inexorable universe--who would wish it? As a matter of
fact, if we are really wise, we shall never wish that we might repeat
any period of life. Always, just beyond and beckoning to us, is the next
period, and we should always believe with Browning that "the best is yet
to be." No period of life has or can have a monopoly of happiness.
What, then, is this mysterious thing called happiness, which apparently
cannot be taken away from some, yet which others vainly pursue for a
lifetime? I have already said that it is something that has to be
learned or to be won. It is clear that having everything in the world to
make one happy does not always bring happiness, and the reason is that
there is no real well-being without consciousness of well-being. If one
were heir to vast riches, yet lived and died without knowing of his
wealth, it would have been just the same as to have had no wealth. To
have youth, health, love, and opportunity, and not to know that one is
blest by and through these great gifts, is, perhaps, not greatly
different from having none of them. So we see the importance of being
fully awake to the blessings we have. You think, for example, that you
enjoy and appreciate your home, but if you should learn to-morrow that
you had lost it, you would probably discover that you had not received
nearly as much happiness from it as you should have. Perhaps you would
even recall with remorse that you had sometimes envied the fairer home
of some friend, and had allowed yourself to grow quite unhappy over the
matter. If those you love best were suddenly to be taken from you, would
you then discover how small had been your real appreciation of them?
With a deeper appreciation would be found a gratitude constantly
translating itself in terms of kindness, patience, and unselfishness.
Ask yourself, then, whether you are sure you have derived the happiness
that should have been yours from the blessings nearest you.
Have we not learned in part the secret of happiness? _Consciousness of
our blessings, deep gratitude for them_, is one of the chief sources of
happiness. And do we not see why we grow happier as we grow older? Our
losses may be great,--are almost sure to be great,--but how we learn to
appreciate what we have left! How trivialities sink into their place and
the great things of life loom large! Once the day was overcast because
of some fancied slight or neglect, or the weather had upset some
cherished plan, or--but why go on with the list? Since then greater
troubles have come and a new sense of proportion has been born within
us; a consciousness of our great wealth is ever with us. This is one of
the secure foundations of happiness.
Do not wait for Experience to teach you these things, for she keeps a
dear school. Learn from the experience of others. There is plenty of
justifiable sadness in the world, there is plenty of real trouble. Those
of us who are not experiencing it owe it to those who are to be
cheerful, serene, and strong, that they may lean on us and that we may
help carry some of their heavy burdens.
Since it is entirely possible for life to grow happier as it goes on,
and since many people find it exactly the reverse, what more can be said
by way of pointing out the right path? And when should one seek this
path? May one wait until the years of unhappiness come? _One may not
wait._ The path may be choked with weeds unless one's feet find it now.
As you look forward into the years you have yet to live, what saner
question can you ask than how you can find that inward happiness which
has for many proved a bulwark against all the buffetings of fate?
It would be hard to over-emphasize the part _work_ plays in making one
happy. Idle people are generally unhappy. Look forward, then, to being
busy, as long as you live. Find something to do, somewhere, and throw
your whole self into your work. It need not be work that is paid for
with money, but something to occupy your time and thoughts you must
have. You need to feel that by your endeavors you are adding to the
world's welfare. Look forward to getting a large share of your happiness
in _service_ and you will not be disappointed. Work is a panacea for
most of the ills of life. When a great sorrow comes, how shall one
endure it unless one has work to do?
Another deep source of happiness is the carrying of responsibility. It
is good to develop early in life the habit of solicitude for others.
Fortunate are we if there are those who are in some way dependent upon
us; it is good for us to deny ourselves for their sake. Happy is the
girl who has younger brothers and sisters needing her affectionate and
watchful care.
Love must play a large part in every life. In solitude we become narrow,
we can never discover ourselves. We need friends and the stimulus of
contact with our fellow men. We must give and receive affection. The
trouble with most of us is that we think too much about receiving and
not enough about giving. Here as everywhere it is more blessed to give
than to receive.
For true happiness we need constantly increasing knowledge. An ignorant
life can hardly be a happy life. We should be on terms of closest
friendship with books. Every one should have some department or field of
learning in which he is steadily making conquests, and this in addition
to the reading of the best literature. It may be music, or art, or a
science, or a language, or some other pursuit to which one turns for
recreation and inspiration. In these days good instruction is obtained
so easily that intellectual stagnation is inexcusable. Indeed, any one
who is really in earnest can make intellectual progress without
instruction except that which one gives himself. I knew a busy lawyer
who so mastered the subject of botany through self-instruction that he
became an able writer and a recognized authority on the subject. Many
have mastered a foreign language with the assistance only of books. What
a mistake it is to think that with the closing of the school and college
days one should cease to be a student! We are never too old to begin the
serious study of some subject hitherto unknown to us. Did not Julia Ward
Howe begin the study of Greek at an age when most people only doze by
the fire?
I have mentioned as important sources of happiness four things--work,
responsibility, love, knowledge. It remains to call attention to three
kinds, or perhaps three degrees, of happiness. The lowest is merely
pleasure or a succession of pleasures. Pleasure depends largely upon
what we have, that is, upon external things. It has no deep roots at
life's center; yet it is good if we estimate it rightly and recognize
that it is not real happiness. Beautiful clothes to wear, good things to
eat and drink, a fine house to live in--these things all give pleasure,
yet many have found happiness without them. Some have had all of these
and yet have led discontented lives. Parties, balls, social pleasures of
every sort; travel, money to spend according to one's whims; these have
their place. Do they occupy a large place in your life? Well and good;
but there is nothing about any of these worthy to be ranked as
happiness. You can easily imagine yourself stripped of them all. Would
you then be miserable?
Congenial companionship and congenial work come nearer to making real
happiness for most of us. Indeed, there are few things upon which the
majority of people are so dependent. Yet it would not be difficult to
find those who have been deprived of both, and have yet led strong,
serene, and useful lives.