The making and managing of the great engines of modern industry, the
threading of earth and sea in our vast systems of transportation,
the handling of our elaborate machinery of trade, commerce, and
government--these things could not be done so well by women in their
present degree of economic development. This is not owing to lack of
the essential human faculties necessary to such achievements, nor to
any inherent disability of sex, but to the present condition of woman
forbidding the development of this degree of economic ability.
While reducing maternal duties to a minimum, Mrs. Stetson admits no
disposition to evade them, and if she nevertheless considers that
women are hindered by no inherent disability of sex from equalling the
industrial achievements of men, it must be because she thinks the
interruption of work in early middle life is of no great importance.
The fact that whereas marriage generally stimulates a man to work more
strenuously, it lessens a woman’s power of concentrating her energies
on her profession or industrial employment, must always handicap her in
industrial competition with men.
Again, in advocating that the varied occupations of the housewife or
house servant should be exchanged for specialised employment in large
kitchens, in crêches, in the bedrooms of apartment houses, she is
really condemning women to a worse servitude than anything necessarily
imposed by domestic service. The girl who is successful with
two-year-old babies is to manage babies all day long, and for life, for
crêche experience does not qualify for admission to the kindergarten
or the high school, and marriage is to offer no release. The good cook
is to live in a restaurant kitchen, cooking meals for all hours in the
day. The professional chambermaid is expected to look forward to being
a charwoman always.
Mrs. Stetson has strange ideas about the effects of regular outside
work:--
“The mother,” she says, “as a social servant instead of a house
servant, will not lack in true mother duty. She will love her child
as well, perhaps better, when she is not in hourly contact with it,
when she goes from its life to her own life, and back from her own
life to its life, with ever new delight and power. She can keep the
deep thrilling joy of motherhood far fresher in her heart, far more
vivid and open in voice and eyes and tender hands, when the hours of
individual work give her mind another channel for her own part of the
day. From her work, loved and honoured though it is, she will return
to the home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure,
cleansed of all the fret and friction and weariness that so mar it
now.”
This all sounds very beautiful, but is it true? This is not the frame
of mind in which men generally return from their work, but perhaps
that is because they are only fathers. Nor am I acquainted with any
well-paid work that one can love and honour all day long; at best it
is physically exhausting, and when it is not it is generally routine
drudgery. Again, children have a way of choosing their own times for
being affectionate, and the half hour or so their mother has to spare
before it is their time to go to bed may be considered by them an
inopportune time for endearments. The hardened babies who have found
the day attractive enough without anybody’s hugs and kisses may perhaps
find their sentimental mother’s embraces an irritating nuisance.
I see no reason for believing that either wife, husband, or children
will be anything but worse off if the wife goes outside the home to
earn a living; nor do I know of any skilled work for educated women,
requiring daily assiduous attention for the whole day, in which
maternity, or the possibility of maternity, would not be a drawback in
the eyes of an experienced employer. It is conceivable that a married
woman with capital might be successful as an employer herself, with the
power to delegate her business supervision to others when necessary;
but I doubt whether she has ever done so with much success, except in
cases, as in France, where the wife has generally been the assistant of
her husband, or assisted by him.
But the real value of Mrs. Stetson’s argument is that by its
absurdity it brings home to us with striking force a fact of which
most middle-class people have only a sub-conscious knowledge--that,
unfortunately, in England at any rate, what Mrs. Stetson calls the
economic independence of the wife is in too many cases not an ideal,
but a reality.
Mrs. Stetson says that economic independence among human beings means
that the individual pays for what he gets, works for what he gets,
gives to the other an equivalent for what the other gives him. “As long
as what I get is obtained by what I give,” says Mrs. Stetson, “I am
economically independent.”
I do not accept this as a true definition of independence, but it is
sufficient that this represents the ideal of independence that Mrs.
Stetson desires.
Well, nearly all unmarried women in England are self-supporting.
The servant-keeping class is probably less than 12 per cent. of the
population; a considerable number of unmarried women even in these
classes support themselves. It is only in this servant-keeping class
that it has ever been true that there was no means for a woman to get
a living except by marriage. And if in the classes below women have
married in order to be relieved from working for their living, they
have found that the married woman’s life was harder, so far as work
was concerned, than that of the unmarried woman. Domestic servants,
accustomed to luxurious living and comparative ease as professional
servants, willingly consent to marry artisans on 25_s._ a week, and to
work harder than any maid-of-all-work would be asked to do. In factory
districts a considerable percentage of the married women go out to
work; and there is no greater slave to her husband than the woman who
receives no support from him.
I am far from maintaining that a married woman should not do paid work.
In all cases where a wife knows herself to be decidedly below par in
housekeeping capacity, it is a natural enough thing that she should
wish to make up for her expensiveness in this direction by earning
some money by work for which she has more aptitude. But even in this
case, unless she has some specially strong aptitude for some kind of
highly-paid casual work, she would probably be wiser to spend her
energies in trying to make herself better fitted for her position of
house mistress.
“The development of any human labour requires specialisation,”
says Mrs. Stetson. But the _direction_ of human labour requires
generalisation; and the married woman, by giving up her post of
general, will go down several grades in the army of workers. As it is,
she alone amongst skilled workers can watch the development of human
beings of both sexes at every stage; the best fitted psychological
laboratory in Germany cannot compete with the one that every married
woman has at hand in which to study human nature, if only she has the
intelligence to know it. Even the domestic servant system at its worst
has at least one merit--that it prevents us from ever being able to
shut our eyes to the great deficiencies in the education of the working
classes. Dismiss our servants to the restaurant kitchen or the bedroom
cleaners’ supply associations, and who knows what sham admiration of
the working classes, and real apathy with regard to their welfare, may
be developed?
The married woman who knows how to turn her experience to good
advantage may eventually become a person of high industrial value. In
a world where so many odd jobs which ought to be done are left undone,
because all the experienced workers are permanently employed, the
married woman with experience and judgment comes in as the right person
in the right place. She is perhaps the only skilled casual worker. If
there is no need for money, she should prove the best philanthropic
worker, her position as mistress of a house making it possible for
her to give a personal service in her own home which the official
philanthropist must often regret she is unable to offer. And when her
children really are old enough to be quite satisfactorily left to
themselves and their teachers for the working day, I see no reason
why the skilled married woman should not enter the labour market, and
undertake the direction of one or other of those big institutions
which Mrs. Stetson wishes to be universal, and which most of us regard
as in some cases necessary. It is not permissible to serve two masters.
The mother who thinks of earning her living must choose whether her
children or the earning of an income shall be her first duty. If her
children take the second place, she is worth nothing as a mother; if
they take the first place, she is worth little as an outside worker.
But in later life the two occupations need not clash. But although the
elderly married woman may prove a valuable industrial organiser in the
hotel, the residential chambers company, the hospital, the orphanage,
or the college, it will only be by having served her apprenticeship,
and taken honours as a house mistress and mother.
I have not cared to discuss Mrs. Stetson’s views on housekeeping. But
I not only see room for improvement in the domestic organisation of
working women’s homes, but feel very hopeful of the power of women in
the working classes to arrive at, at least, a partial solution of their
difficulties by co-operation in removing them. The most important
result of the co-operative movement will, I believe, be the improvement
of the conditions of home life, and the better organisation of the
housework of the overtasked wives of our artisans and clerks.
There is much truth in Mrs. Stetson’s criticisms of women’s failures in
every direction, but the remedy is better education and simpler tastes.
It is only for the sake of her thesis that Mrs. Stetson finds fault
with women or with men. She is generous in her estimate of the actual
and possible capacities of both, and is full of high-minded delusions
about them. “Woman holds her great position as the selector of the best
among competing males; woman’s beautiful work is to improve the race by
right marriage.”
And not once does it cross her mind that most women are neither
particularly attractive nor particularly good, and that they have
therefore neither the power nor the right to assume this lofty office.
She is never so childlike as when she imagines she is most daring. And
the charm of the book is its excessive femininity. What she says,
even when not absolutely absurd, may be of little importance; but her
feeling is so genuine and strong as to merit respect and attention.