_March, 1900._
The argument of Mrs. Stetson’s book, “Women and Economics,” may be
briefly summed up as follows:--
(1) Man is the only animal species in which the female depends on the
male for food.
(2) The married woman’s living (_i.e._, food, clothing, ornaments,
amusements, luxuries) bears no relation to her power to produce
wealth, or to her services in the house, or to her motherhood.
(3) The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The man gets his
wife by getting a living.
(4) Although marriage is a means of livelihood, it is not honest
employment, where one can offer one’s labour without shame. To earn
her living a woman must therefore make herself sexually attractive.
(5) The result of this is that, while men have been developing
humanity, women have been developing femininity, to the great moral
detriment of both men and women.
(6) The disastrous effects of this undue cultivation of sex
differences can only be prevented by the wife being economically
independent of her husband.
(7) This economic independence should be secured by the wife earning
her living by performing paid work for some person or body other than
her husband.
(8) The performance of maternal functions is not incompatible with the
performance of such remunerative services outside the family.
(9) The servant functions of preparing food and removing dirt are
not necessarily domestic functions, and could be better performed
by professional cooks outside the home, and professional cleaners
visiting the home or taking the work from the home.
(10) The nursemaid functions of minding small children can be better
performed, with greater advantage to the children, in the crêche and
kindergarten than in the domestic nursery.
(11) The wife can therefore advantageously be relieved from the
continuous supervision of the kitchen, the living rooms, and the
nursery, as she has already been relieved of the burden of the family
washing, dressmaking, tailoring, and manufacture of underclothing.
(12) She will then be free to earn her own living outside the home.
(13) By so doing she not only will prevent the evils which have arisen
from the wife’s economic dependence on her husband, but she will
develop her human faculties. For what we do modifies us more than what
is done for us.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh propositions are those on which the whole
argument hinges. Mrs. Stetson’s energy of expression and her contempt
for convention have deservedly secured for her a re-consideration of
old problems thus presented in a new form. The ability with which she
supports her conclusions is obvious. Her logic needs more careful
examination.
Her first argument I dismiss as quite irrelevant. Granted that at least
some men support their female kind, and that no brutes do, nothing
follows. I trust that there are many thousand characteristics which may
be predicated of man which must be denied of brutes.
Granted also her next argument, that what the wife obtains from her
husband bears no relation to her power to produce wealth, or to her
services in the house, or to her motherhood. Marriage, as Mrs. Stetson
maintains, should not be a business transaction, and therefore the less
commercial the relations of husband and wife to each other, the less
will service on one side be balanced against service on the other side.
The basis is the reverse of the economic basis; the honest business man
tries to get the largest amount for himself obtainable without cheating
his co-bargainer, trusting to the latter to guard his own interests,
and to see that what he gets is worth to him what he gives for it.
In any normal marriage the desire on each side is to secure to the
other the greatest amount of good at a reasonable cost to themselves,
the difference between persons determining more than anything else
what they consider a reasonable cost. Stepniak, in a struggle with
the English language, once gave a very happy definition, which most
practical people would accept. “Marriage,” he said, “is to love and put
up with.” Now these are just the two acts that no one expects from the
parties to a commercial contract.
I therefore grant Mrs. Stetson’s second argument, and put it aside, as
being, like the previous one, beside the question.
Thirdly, “The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The man
gets his wife by getting a living.” Putting aside for the moment the
question of the truth of this statement, I agree with Mrs. Stetson
that in any social group of which such a statement is true the moral
tone of women, and therefore of men, will be a low one. In such a
state of society also it would be necessary, as Mrs. Stetson says,
for a woman, in order to earn her living, to make herself sexually
attractive. But before passing on I would point out that, at this stage
of the argument, the only part of this result which I would on the
face of it admit to be bad is that the woman in such a case frequently
falsely assumes attractive qualities which she does not really possess,
or conforms to a masculine standard of what is womanly which she at
heart despises. It is, in fact, the development of the human qualities
of fraud and hypocrisy which is to be deprecated, rather than the
development of feminine attraction.
But Mrs. Stetson makes the universal statement that women have been
developing femininity to a harmful degree, and to the injury of the
human attributes which should be common to both sexes. At first
imagining that Mrs. Stetson, like most women, was confining her
attention to the present and the near past, I was extremely puzzled at
this assertion. It seemed especially strange that it should come from
America, where even more than in England women have been supposed to
be developing their individuality in all kinds of occupations hitherto
supposed to be only suitable for men. But suddenly Mrs. Stetson
announces that after all she is only arguing in favour of what many
women are already doing, and have been doing for the last half century
or so.
Now to decide whether femininity has become excessive, we must first
know what group of women we are studying, and also with what other
group of women we are comparing them. Mrs. Stetson is not apparently
describing the present century as ending with a great development of
purely feminine qualities, and even if she were, we might fairly ask
her to tell us whether she includes Americans, Turks, Hindoos, and
Hottentots under the same category. But there is no hint given of any
great differences between women rendering it necessary to limit the
nations coming under review, nor do I find it possible to date exactly
the epochs chosen for comparison. On p. 129 we have the following
condonement of the treatment of woman in past ages:--
With a full knowledge of the initial superiority of her sex, and the
sociological necessity for its temporary subversion, she should feel
only a deep and tender pride in the long patient ages during which
she has waited and suffered that man might slowly rise to full racial
equality with her. She could afford to wait. She could afford to
suffer.
Searching carefully to find at what period of the world’s history the
initial superiority of the woman was obvious prior to its temporary
subversion, I find on page 70 the approximate date given in the
following passage:--
The action of heredity has been to equalise what every tendency of
environment and education made to differ. This has saved us from such
a female as the gypsy moth. It has held up the woman and held down the
man. It has set iron bounds to our absurd effort to make a race with
one sex a million years behind the other.
Clearly, then, the decline and fall of woman dates back at least one
million years. In practical retrospection there must be a Statute of
Limitations. Neither Mrs. Stetson nor any one else knows what men or
women were like a million years ago, or even ten thousand years ago.
Nor is it permissible to turn, as Mrs. Stetson frequently does, to
feeble-minded contemporary savages. Darwin, unlike the majority of
those who quote him, did not profess to know everything, or to be able
to supply the history of events of which no record has been left. We
have no reason whatever for imagining that our ancestors were lacking
in fortitude and intellectual vigour, and we have much for believing
that no highly civilised race will ever be developed from the savage
tribes with which we are acquainted. “From the good and brave are
born the brave.” Horace knew probably as much about heredity as most
of us do, and the average person’s principal debt to Darwin is his
emancipation from the bondage of Hebrew mythology.
While declining, therefore, to follow Mrs. Stetson in her wonderful
flights of fancy with regard to unknown times and races of mankind, and
acknowledging myself incapable of judging whether women have become
more or less feminine as compared with prehistoric times, I agree with
Mrs. Stetson, so far as regards a section of American and English
society, when she says (p. 149) that “women are growing honester,
braver, stronger, more healthful and skilful and able and free--more
human in all ways,” and that this improvement has been at least
coincident with, and to some extent due to, the effort to become at
least _capable_ of economic independence.
But Mrs. Stetson takes a flying leap when from these premisses she
jumps to the conclusion that the wife’s economic independence of the
husband is necessary to prevent the evils consequent on women being
dependent on marriage for a living.
Mrs. Stetson makes no distinction between the effects of economic
dependence before marriage and economic dependence after marriage.
But provided that before marriage a woman is able to support herself
with sufficient ease to render her a free agent, and that she retains
the _power_ of being self-supporting should economic necessity from
any cause arise after marriage, what is the objection to pecuniary
dependence on the husband? I see none whatever.
So that I find myself obliged to put aside all Mrs. Stetson’s stirring
appeals for a moral advance as very interesting, but as having really
no bearing on her proposed reforms, which must therefore be considered
on their own merits.
Criticism of the proposed reorganisation of domestic arrangements I
leave to the practical housewife.
It is only the fitness of the mother, or perhaps, for anything the
employer can tell, the about-to-become mother, for regular work
away from home that I wish to consider. Her own physical condition,
to say nothing of the liability of her children to get measles,
whooping-cough, croup, and mumps, will prevent her services from being
warmly appreciated in most skilled occupations. Then Mrs. Stetson
leaves us in the dark as to what these remunerative occupations are in
which mothers may earn a living in their leisure hours.