committee in favor of giving to the city council a check upon the
expenditures of the school committee, gave as one reason that this body
would probably include more women henceforward, and that women were
ordinarily more lavish than men in their use of money. The truth of this
assumption was questioned at the time: and, the more I think of it, the
more contrary it is to my whole experience. I should say that women,
from the very habit of their lives, are led to be more particular about
details, and more careful as to small economies. The very fact that they
handle less money tends to this. When they are told to spend money, as
they often are by loving or ambitious husbands, they no doubt do it
freely: they have naturally more taste than men, and quite as much love
of luxury. In some instances in this country they spend money recklessly
and wickedly, like the heroines of French novels; but as, even in
brilliant Paris, the women of the middle classes are notoriously better
managers than the men, so we often see, in our scheming America, the
same relative superiority. Often have I heard young men say, “I never
knew how to economize until after my marriage;” and who has not seen
multitudes of instances where women accustomed to luxury have accepted
poverty without a murmur for the sake of those whom they loved?
I remember a young girl, accustomed to the gayest society of New York,
who engaged herself to a young naval officer, against the advice of the
friends of both. One of her near relatives said to me, “Of all the young
girls I have ever known, she is the least fitted for a poor man’s wife.”
Yet from the very moment of her marriage she brought their joint
expenses within his scanty pay, and even saved a little money from it.
Everybody knows such instances. We hear men denounce the extravagance of
women, while those very men spend on wine and cigars, on clubs and
horses, twice what their wives spend on their toilet. If the wives are
economical, the husbands perhaps urge them on to greater lavishness.
“Why do you not dress like Mrs. So-and-so?”—“I can’t afford it.”—“But
_I_ can afford it;” and then, when the bills come in, the talk of
extravagance recommences. At one time in Newport that lady among the
summer visitors who was reported to be Worth’s best customer was also
well known to be quite indifferent to society, and to go into it mainly
to please her husband, whose social ambition was notorious.
It has often happened to me to serve in organizations where both sexes
were represented, and where expenditures were to be made for business or
pleasure. In these I have found, as a rule, that the women were more
careful, or perhaps I should say more timid, than the men, less willing
to risk any thing: the bolder financial experiments came from the men,
as one might expect. In talking the other day with the secretary of an
important educational enterprise, conducted by women, I was surprised to
find that it was cramped for money, though large subscriptions were said
to have been made to it. On inquiry it appeared that these ladies,
having pledged themselves for four years, had divided the amount
received into four parts, and were resolutely limiting themselves, for
the first year, to one quarter part of what had been subscribed. No
board of men would have done so. Any board of men would have allowed far
more than a quarter of the sum for the first year’s expenditures, justly
reasoning that if the enterprise began well it would command public
confidence, and bring in additional subscriptions as time went on. I
would appeal to any one whose experience has been in joint associations
of men and women, whether this is not a fair statement of the difference
between their ways of working. It does not prove that women are more
honest than men, but that their education or their nature makes them
more cautious in expenditure.
The habits of society make the dress of a fashionable woman far more
expensive than that of a man of fashion. Formerly it was not so; and, so
long as it was not so, the extravagance of men in this respect quite
equalled that of women. It now takes other forms, but the habit is the
same. There is not a club-house in Boston furnished with such absence of
luxury as the Women’s Club rooms on Park Street: the contrast was at
first so great as to seem almost absurd. The waiters at any fashionable
restaurant will tell you that what is a cheap dinner for a man would be
a dear dinner for a woman. Yet after all, the test is not in any
particular class of expenditures, but in the business-like habit. Men
are of course more business-like in large combinations, for they are
more used to them; but for the small details of daily economy women are
more watchful. The cases where women ruin their husbands by extravagance
are exceptional. As a rule, the men are the bread-winners; but the
careful saving and managing and contriving come from the women.
XXXII.
GREATER INCLUDES LESS.
I was once at a little musical party in New York, where several
accomplished amateur singers were present, and with them the eminent
professional, Miss Adelaide Phillips. The amateurs were first called on.
Each chose some difficult operatic passage, and sang her best. When it
came to the great opera-singer’s turn, instead of exhibiting her ability
to eclipse those rivals on her own ground, she simply seated herself at
the piano, and sang “Kathleen Mavourneen” with such thrilling sweetness,
that the young Irish girl who was setting the supper-table in the next
room forgot all her plates and teaspoons, threw herself into a chair,
put her apron over her face, and sobbed as if her heart would break. All
the training of Adelaide Phillips—her magnificent voice, her stage
experience, her skill in effects, her power of expression—went into the
performance of that simple song. The greater included the less. And thus
all the intellectual and practical training that any woman can have, all
her public action and her active career, will make her, if she be a true
woman, more admirable as a wife, a mother, and a friend. The greater
includes the less for her also.
Of course this is a statement of general facts and tendencies. There
must be among women, as among men, an endless variety of individual
temperaments. There will always be plenty whose career will illustrate
the infirmities of genius, and whom no training can convince that two
and two make four. But the general fact is sure. As no sensible man
would seriously prefer for a wife a Hindoo or Tahitian woman rather than
one bred in England or America, so every further advantage of education
or opportunity will only improve, not impair, the true womanly type.
Lucy Stone once said, “Woman’s nature was stamped and sealed by the
Almighty, and there is no danger of her unsexing herself while his eye
watches her.” Margaret Fuller said, “One hour of love will teach a woman
more of her true relations than all your philosophizing.” These were the
testimony of women who had studied Greek, and were only the more womanly
for the study. They are worth the opinions of a million half-developed
beings like the Duchess de Fontanges, who was described as being “as
beautiful as an angel and as silly as a goose.” The greater includes the
less. Your view from the mountain-side may be very pretty, but she who
has taken one step higher commands your view and her own also. It was no
dreamy recluse, but the accomplished and experienced Stendhal, who
wrote, “The joys of the gay world do not count for much with happy
women.”[7]
Footnote 7:
De l’Amour, par de Stendhal (Henri Beyle): “Les plaisirs du grand
monde n’en sont pas pour les femmes heureuses,” p. 189.
If a highly educated man is incapable and unpractical, we do not say
that he is educated too well, but not well enough. He ought to know what
he knows, and other things also. Never yet did I see a woman too well
educated to be a wife and a mother; but I know multitudes who deplore,
or have reason to deplore, every day of their lives, the untrained and
unfurnished minds that are so ill-prepared for these sacred duties.
Every step towards equalizing the opportunities of men and women meets
with resistance, of course; but every step, as it is accomplished,
leaves men still men, and women still women. And as we who heard
Adelaide Phillips felt that she had never had a better tribute to her
musical genius than that young Irish girl’s tears; so the true woman
will feel that all her college training for instance, if she has it, may
have been well invested, even for the sake of the baby on her knee. And
it is to be remembered, after all, that each human being lives to unfold
his or her own powers, and do his or her own duties first, and that
neither woman nor man has the right to accept a merely secondary and
subordinate life. A noble woman must be a noble human being; and the
most sacred special duties, as of wife or mother, are all included in
this, as the greater includes the less.
XXXIII.
A CO-PARTNERSHIP.
Marriage, considered merely in its financial and business relations, may
be regarded as a permanent co-partnership.
Now, in an ordinary co-partnership, there is very often a complete
division of labor among the partners. If they manufacture
locomotive-engines, for instance, one partner perhaps superintends the
works, another attends to mechanical inventions and improvements,
another travels for orders, another conducts the correspondence, another
receives and pays out the money. The latter is not necessarily the head
of the firm. Perhaps his place could be more easily filled than some of
the other posts. Nevertheless, more money passes through his hands than
through those of all the others put together. Now, should he, at the
year’s end, call together the inventor and the superintendent and the
traveller and the correspondent, and say to them, “I have earned all
this money this year, but I will generously give you some of it,”—he
would be considered simply impertinent, and would hardly have a chance
to repeat the offence, the year after.
Yet precisely what would be called folly in this business partnership is
constantly done by men in the co-partnership of marriage, and is there
called “common-sense” and “social science” and “political economy.”
For instance, a farmer works himself half to death in the hay-field, and
his wife meanwhile is working herself wholly to death in the dairy. The
neighbors come in to sympathize after her demise; and, during the few
months’ interval before his second marriage, they say approvingly, “He
was always a generous man to his folks! He was a good provider!” But
where was the room for generosity, any more than the member of any other
firm is to be called generous, when he keeps the books, receipts the
bills, and divides the money?
In case of the farming business, the share of the wife is so direct and
unmistakable that it can hardly be evaded. If any thing is earned by the
farm, she does her distinct and important share of the earning. But it
is not necessary that she should do even that, to make her, by all the
rules of justice, an equal partner, entitled to her full share of the
financial proceeds.
Let us suppose an ordinary case. Two young people are married, and begin
life together. Let us suppose them equally poor, equally capable,
equally conscientious, equally healthy. They have children. Those
children must be supported by the earning of money abroad, by attendance
and care at home. If it requires patience and labor to do the outside
work, no less is required inside. The duties of the household are as
hard as the duties of the shop or office. If the wife took her husband’s
work for a day, she would probably be glad to return to her own. So
would the husband if he undertook hers. Their duties are ordinarily as
distinct and as equal as those of two partners in any other
co-partnership. It so happens, that the out-door partner has the
handling of the money; but does that give him a right to claim it as his
exclusive earnings? No more than in any other business operation.
He earned the money for the children and the household. She disbursed it
for the children and the household. The very laws of nature, by giving
her the children to bear and rear, absolve her from the duty of their
support, so long as he is alive who was left free by nature for that
purpose. Her task on the average is as hard as his: nay, a portion of it
is so especially hard that it is distinguished from all others by the
name “labor.” If it does not earn money, it is because it is not to be
measured in money, while it exists—nor to be replaced by money, if lost.
If a business man loses his partner, he can obtain another: and a man,
no doubt, may take a second wife; but he cannot procure for his children
a second mother. Indeed, it is a palpable insult to the whole relation
of husband and wife when one compares it, even in a financial light, to
that of business partners. It is only because a constant effort is made
to degrade the practical position of woman below even this standard of
comparison, that it becomes her duty to claim for herself at least as
much as this.
There was a tradition in a town where I once lived, that a certain
Quaker, who had married a fortune, was once heard to repel his wife, who
had asked him for money in a public place, with the response, “Rachel,
where is that ninepence I gave thee yesterday?” When I read in
Scribner’s Monthly an article deriding the right to representation of
the Massachusetts women who pay two millions of tax on one hundred and
thirty-two million dollars of property,—asserting that they produced
nothing of it; that it was only “men who produced this wealth, and
bestowed it upon these women;” that it was “all drawn from land and sea
by the hands of men whose largess testifies alike of their love and
their munificence,”—I must say that I am reminded of Rachel’s ninepence.
XXXIV.
“ONE RESPONSIBLE HEAD.”
When we look through any business directory, there seem to be almost as
many co-partnerships as single dealers; and three-quarters of these
co-partnerships appear to consist of precisely two persons, no more, no
less. These partners are, in the eye of the law, equal. It is not found
necessary under the law, to make a general provision that in each case
one partner should be supreme and the other subordinate. In many cases,
by the terms of the co-partnership there are limitations on one side and
special privileges on the other,—marriage settlements, as it were; but
the general law of co-partnership is based on the presumption of
equality. It would be considered infinitely absurd to require, that, as
the general rule, one party or the other should be in a state of
_coverture_, during which the very being and existence of the one should
be suspended, or entirely merged and incorporated into that of the
other.
And yet this requirement, which would be an admitted absurdity in the
case of two business partners, is precisely that which the English
common law still lays down in case of husband and wife. The words which
I employed to describe it, in the preceding sentence, are the very
phrases in which Blackstone describes the legal position of women. And
though the English common law has been, in this respect, greatly
modified and superseded by statute law; yet, when it comes to an
argument on woman suffrage, it is constantly this same tradition to
which men and even women habitually appeal,—the necessity of a single
head to the domestic partnership, and the necessity that the husband
should be that head. This is especially true of English men and women;
but it is true of Americans as well. Nobody has stated it more tersely
than Fitzjames Stephen, in his “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” (p.
216), when arguing against Mr. Mill’s view of the equality of the sexes.
“Marriage is a contract, one of the principal objects in which is
the government of a family.
“This government must be vested, either by law or by contract, in
the hands of one of the two married persons.”
[Then follow some collateral points, not bearing on the present
question.]
“Therefore if marriage is to be permanent, the government of the
family must be put by law and by morals into the hands of the
husband, for no one proposes to give it to the wife.”
This argument he calls “as clear as that of a proposition in Euclid.” He
thinks that the business of life can be carried on by no other method.
How is it, then, that when we come to what is called technically and
especially the “business” of every day, this whole finespun theory is
disregarded, and men come together in partnership on the basis of
equality?
Nobody is farther than I from regarding marriage as a mere business
partnership. But it is to be observed that the points wherein it differs
from a merely mercantile connection are points that should make equality
more easy, not more difficult. The tie between two ordinary business
partners is merely one of interest: it is based on no sentiments, sealed
by no solemn pledge, enriched by no home associations, cemented by no
new generation of young life. If a relation like this is found to work
well on terms of equality,—so well that a large part of the business of
the world is done by it,—is it not absurd to suppose that the same equal
relation cannot exist in the married partnership of husband and wife?
And if law, custom, society, all recognize this fact of equality in the
one case, why, in the name of common-sense, should they not equally
recognize it in the other?
And, again, it must be far easier to assign a sphere to each partner in
marriage than in business; and therefore the double headship of a family
will involve less need of collision. In nine cases out of ten, the
external support of the family can devolve upon the husband,
unquestioned by the wife; and its internal economy upon the wife,
unquestioned by the husband. No voluntary distribution of powers and
duties between business partners can work so naturally, on the whole, as
this simple and easy demarcation, with which the claim of suffrage makes
no necessary interference. It may require angry discussion to decide
which of two business partners shall buy, and which shall sell; which
shall keep the books, and which do the active work, and so on; but all
this is usually settled in married life by the natural order of things.
Even in regard to the management of children, where collision is likely
to come, if anywhere, it can commonly be settled by that happy formula
of Jean Paul’s, that the mother usually supplies the commas and the
semicolons in the child’s book of life, and the father the colons and
periods. And as to matters in general, the simple and practical rule,
that each question that arises should be decided by that partner who has
personally most at stake in it, will, in ninety-nine times out of a
hundred, carry the domestic partnership through without shipwreck. Those
who cannot meet the hundredth case by mutual forbearance are in a
condition of shipwreck already.
XXXV.
ASKING FOR MONEY.
One of the very best wives and mothers I have ever known once said to
me, that, whenever her daughters should be married, she should stipulate
in their behalf with their husbands for a regular sum of money to be
paid them, at certain intervals, for their personal expenditures.
Whether this sum was to be larger or smaller, was a matter of secondary
importance,—that must depend on the income, and the style of living; but
the essential thing was, that it should come to the wife regularly, so
that she should no more have to make a special request for it than her
husband would have to ask her for a dinner. This lady’s own husband was,
as I happened to know, of a most generous disposition, was devotedly
attached to her, and denied her nothing. She herself was a most accurate
and careful manager. There was every thing in the household to make the
financial arrangements flow smoothly. Yet she said to me, “I suppose no
man can possibly understand how a sensitive woman shrinks from _asking_
for money. If I can prevent it, my daughters shall never have to ask for
it. If they do their duty as wives and mothers they have a right to
their share of the joint income, within reasonable limits; for certainly
no money could buy the services they render. Moreover, they have a right
to a share in determining what those reasonable limits are.”
Now, it so happened that I had myself gone through an experience which
enabled me perfectly to comprehend this feeling. In early life I was for
a time in the employ of one of my relatives, who paid me a fair salary
but at no definite periods: I was at liberty to ask him for money up to
a certain amount whenever I needed it. This seemed to me, in advance, a
most agreeable arrangement; but I found it quite otherwise. It proved to
be very disagreeable to ask for money: it made every dollar seem a
special favor; it brought up all kinds of misgivings, as to whether he
could spare it without inconvenience, whether he really thought my
services worth it, and so on. My employer was a thoroughly upright and
noble man, and I was much attached to him. I do not know that he ever
refused or demurred when I asked for money. The annoyance was simply in
the process of asking; and this became so great, that I often underwent
serious inconvenience rather than ask. Finally, at the year’s end, I
surprised my relative very much by saying that I would accept, if
necessary, a lower salary, on condition that it should be paid on
regular days, and as a matter of business. The wish was at once granted,
without the reduction; and he probably never knew what a relief it was
to me.
Now, if a young man is liable to feel this pride and reluctance toward
an employer, even if a kinsman, it is easy to understand how many women
may feel the same, even in regard to a husband. And I fancy that those
who feel it most are often the most conscientious and high-minded women.
It is unreasonable to say of such persons, “Too sensitive! Too
fastidious!” For it is just this quality of finer sensitiveness which
men affect to prize in a woman, and wish to protect at all hazards. The
very fact that a husband is generous; the very fact that his income is
limited,—these may bring in conscience and gratitude to increase the
restraining influence of pride, and make the wife less willing to ask
money of such a husband than if he were a rich man or a mean one. The
only dignified position in which a man can place his wife is to treat
her at least as well as he would treat a housekeeper, and give her the
comfort of a perfectly clear and definite arrangement as to money
matters. She will not then be under the necessity of nerving herself to
solicit from him as a favor what she really needs and has a right to
spend. Nor will she be torturing herself, on the other side, with the
secret fear lest she has asked too much and more than they can really
spare. She will, in short, be in the position of a woman and a wife, not
of a child or a toy.
I have carefully avoided using the word “allowance” in what has been
said, because that word seems to imply the untrue and mean assumption
that the money is all the husband’s to give or withhold as he will. Yet
I have heard this sort of phrase from men who were living on a wife’s
property or a wife’s earnings; from men who nominally kept
boarding-houses, working a little, while their wives worked hard,—or
from farmers, who worked hard, and made their wives work harder. Even in
cases where the wife has no direct part in the money-making, the
indirect part she performs, if she takes faithful charge of her
household, is so essential, so beyond all compensation in money, that it
is an utter shame and impertinence in the husband when he speaks of
“giving” money to his wife as if it were an act of favor. It is no more
an act of favor than when the business manager of a firm pays out money
to the unseen partner who directs the indoor business or runs the
machinery. Be the joint income more or less, the wife has a claim to her
honorable share, and that as a matter of right, without the daily
ignominy of sending in a petition for it.
XXXVI.
WOMANHOOD AND MOTHERHOOD.