What I should like to know is, how “the enlargement of woman’s sphere”
by her entrance into various activities of commercial, professional
and industrial life benefits the sex. It may please Helen Gougar and
satisfy her sense of logical accuracy to say, as she does: “We women
must work in order to fill the places left vacant by liquor-drinking
men.” But who filled these places before? Did they remain vacant, or
were there then disappointed applicants, as now? If my memory serves,
there has been no time in the period that it covers when the supply
of workers—abstemious male workers—was not in excess of the demand.
That it has always been so is sufficiently attested by the universally
inadequate wage rate.
Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they
need. The field into which women have put their sickles was already
overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have obtained
has been got by displacing men—who would otherwise be supporting
women. Where is the general advantage? We may shout “high tariff,”
“combination of capital,” “demonetization of silver,” and what not, but
if searching for the cause of augmented poverty and crime, “industrial
discontent” and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically expounding it,
we should take some account of this enormous, sudden addition to the
number of workers seeking work. If any one thinks that within the brief
period of a generation the visible supply of labor can be enormously
augmented without profoundly affecting the stability of things and
disastrously touching the interests of wage-workers let no rude
voice dispel his dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous
understanding may joy to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung
themselves in advocacy of quack remedies for evils of which themselves
are cause; it remains true that when the contention of two lions for
one bone is exacerbated by the accession of a lioness the squabble is
not composable by stirring up some bears in the cage adjacent.
Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to
the good of her sex by foregoing needed employment in the hope that
it may fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our
congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual
head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve’s daughters. This
is a world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are so
intertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitious
to help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to that
end provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The “enlargement of woman’s
opportunities” has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the
sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can
not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly
traceable to “emancipation of woman” is as impregnable to the light as
a toad in a rock.
A marked demerit of the new order of things—the _régime_ of female
commercial service—is that its main advantage accrues, not to the
race, not to the sex, not to the class, not to the individual woman,
but to the person of least need and worth—the male employer. (Female
employers in any considerable number there will not be, but those that
we have could give the male ones profitable instruction in grinding
the faces of their employees.) This constant increase of the army
of labor—always and everywhere too large for the work in sight—by
accession of a new contingent of natural oppressibles makes the very
teeth of old Munniglut thrill with a poignant delight. It brings in
that situation known as two laborers seeking one job—and one of them a
person whose bones he can easily grind to make his bread; and Munniglut
is a miller of skill and experience, dusted all over with the evidence
of his useful craft. When Heaven has assisted the Daughters of Hope
to open to women a new “avenue of opportunities” the first to enter
and walk therein, like God in the Garden of Eden, is the good Mr.
Munniglut, contentedly smoothing the folds out of the superior slope of
his paunch, exuding the peculiar aroma of his oleaginous personality
and larding the new roadway with the overflow of a righteousness
stimulated to action by relish of his own identity. And ever thereafter
the subtle suggestion of a fat philistinism lingers along that path of
progress like an assertion of a possessory right.
It is God’s own crystal truth that in dealing with women unfortunate
enough to be compelled to earn their own living and fortunate enough to
have wrested from Fate an opportunity to do so, men of business and
affairs treat them with about the same delicate consideration that they
show to dogs and horses of the inferior breeds. It does not commonly
occur to the wealthy “professional man,” or “prominent merchant,” to
be ashamed to add to his yearly thousands a part of the salary justly
due to his female bookkeeper or typewriter, who sits before him all day
with an empty belly in order to have an habilimented back. He has a
vague, hazy notion that the law of supply and demand is mandatory, and
that in submitting himself to it by paying her a half of what he would
have to pay a man of inferior efficiency he is supplying the world
with a noble example of obedience. I must take the liberty to remind
him that the law of supply and demand is not imperative; it is not a
statute but a phenomenon. He may reply: “It is imperative; the penalty
for disobedience is failure. If I pay more in salaries and wages than
I need to, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will
drive me from the field.” If his margin of profit is so small that he
must eke it out by coining the sweat of his workwomen into nickels I’ve
nothing to say to him. Let him adopt in peace the motto, “I cheat to
eat.” I do not know why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided
sustenance for the worming sparrow, the sparrowing owl and the owling
eagle, approves the needy man of prey and makes a place for him at
table.
Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there
is a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch—as cunning is the
wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward. Nobody is
altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpaying workmen
in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigent seamen. To
oppress one’s own workmen, and provide for the workmen of a neighbor—to
skin those in charge of one’s own interests while cottoning and oiling
the residuary product of another’s skinnery—that is not very good
benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves in place of both. The
man who eats _pâté de fois gras_ in the sweat of his girl cashier’s
face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that his typewriter may
have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerably satisfactory
specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that in his own
home—a fairly good one—he may enjoy and merit that highest and most
honorable title on the scroll of woman’s favor, “a good provider.” One
having a claim to that glittering distinction should enjoy immunity
from the coarse and troublesome question, “From whose backs and bellies
do you provide?”
So much for the material results to the sex. What are the moral
results? One does not like to speak of them, particularly to those who
do not and can not know—to good women in whose innocent minds female
immorality is inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face;
to foolish, book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective
sanctity that hedges womanhood. If men of the world with years enough
to have lived out of the old _régime_ into the new would testify
in this matter there would ensue a great rattling of dry bones in
bodices of reform-ladies. Nay, if the young man about town, knowing
nothing of how things were in the “dark backward and absym of time,”
but something of the moral distance between even so free-running a
creature as the society girl and the average working girl of the
factory, the shop and the office, would speak out (under assurance of
immunity from prosecution) his testimony would be a surprise to the
cartilaginous virgins, blowsy matrons, acrid relicts and hairy males
of Emancipation. It would pain, too, some very worthy but unobservant
persons not in sympathy with “the cause.”
Certain significant facts are within the purview of all but the very
young and the comfortably blind. To the woman of to-day the man of
to-day is imperfectly polite. In place of reverence he gives her
“deference;” to the language of compliment has succeeded the language
of raillery. Men have almost forgotten how to bow. Doubtless the
advanced female prefers the new manner, as may some of her less forward
sisters, thinking it more sincere. It is not; our giddy grandfather
talked high-flown nonsense because his heart had tangled his tongue.
He treated his woman more civilly than we ours because he loved her
better. He never had seen her on the “rostrum” and in the lobby, never
had heard her in advocacy of herself, never had read her confessions
of his sins, never had felt the stress of her competition, nor himself
assisted by daily personal contact in rubbing the bloom off her. He did
not know that her virtues were due to her secluded life, but thought,
dear old boy, that they were a gift of God.