_November, 1900._
Looking back fifty years for the best picture of the middle-class
woman’s outlook on life, spreading itself before her after some
startling shock of reality, none seems to me so true and so vivid as
Caroline Helstone’s vision of her own future given in “Shirley.” The
book appeared in October, 1849.
Although not so instinct with the flame of genius as “Villette,” yet
in some respects “Shirley” is Charlotte Brontë’s greatest work. Her
other novels present life only as it appeared to an exceptional woman
cut off by what was in those days called the “dependent situation” of
a governess from wholesome relations with those about her. Jane Eyre
and Lucy Snowe are the morbid products of life in institutions, and
Charlotte Brontë, to whom family life was an imperative necessity, was
fully conscious of their abnormality. In “Shirley” we have a broader,
more sympathetic, in every way saner treatment of men and women. And
the protest against the unnecessary tragedy of women’s lives comes
not from the passionate egotist of the schoolroom, but from the most
lovable, perhaps the only lovable, woman in Charlotte Brontë’s books.
“I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy
it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to
be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes
to many, and is becoming to me among the rest. Nobody,” she went
on--“nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state
in which things are, and I cannot tell, however much I puzzle over
it, how they are to be altered for the better; but I feel there
is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have
more to do--better chances of interesting and profitable occupation
than they possess now.... Look at the numerous families of girls in
this neighbourhood--the Armitages, the Birtwhistles, the Sykes. The
brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions;
they have something to do; their sisters have no earthly employment
but household work and sewing, no earthly pleasure but an unprofitable
visiting; and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything better.
This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health: they are
never well; and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness.
The great wish--the sole aim--of every one of them is to be married,
but the majority will never marry; they will die as they now live.
They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen
turn them into ridicule: they don’t want them; they hold them very
cheap. They say--I have heard them say it with sneering laughs many a
time--the matrimonial market is overstocked. Fathers say so likewise,
and are angry with their daughters when they observe their manœuvres;
they order them to stay at home. What do they expect them to do at
home? If you ask, they would answer, sew and cook. They expect them to
do this, and this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly, all
their lives long, as if they had no germs of faculties for anything
else--a doctrine as unreasonable to hold, as it would be that the
fathers have no faculties but for eating what their daughters cook, or
for wearing what they sew. Could men live so themselves? Would they
not be very weary? And, when there came no relief to their weariness,
but only reproaches at its slightest manifestation, would not their
weariness ferment in time to frenzy?... King of Israel, your model
of a woman is a worthy model. But are we, in these days, brought up
to be like her? Men of Yorkshire! do your daughters reach this royal
standard? Can they reach it? Can you help them to reach it? Can you
give them a field in which their faculties may be exercised and grow?
Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around
you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse,
degenerating to sour old maids--envious, backbiting, wretched, because
life is a desert to them; or, what is worst of all, reduced to strive,
by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position
and consideration by marriage, which to celibacy is denied. Fathers!
cannot you alter these things? Perhaps not all at once; but consider
the matter well when it is brought before you, receive it as a theme
worthy of thought; do not dismiss it with an idle jest or an unmanly
insult. You would wish to be proud of your daughters and not to blush
for them--then seek for them an interest and an occupation which
shall raise them above the flirt, the manœuvrer, the mischief-making
tale-bearer. Keep your girls’ minds narrow and fettered--they will
still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you. Cultivate
them, give them scope and work--they will be your gayest companions in
health, your tenderest nurses in sickness, your most faithful prop in
age.”
And Mary Taylor--Rose Yorke in “Shirley”--added, “Make us efficient
workers, able to earn our living in order that we may be good, useful,
healthy, self-respecting women.”
How far have we travelled in these fifty years towards Mary Taylor’s
ideal? How far is it accepted as a right one? Is it now considered a
sufficiently ambitious one?
There is no doubt that we have travelled much nearer to it than anyone
in 1850 would have foreseen, and further than many pioneers at that
period would have desired.
We may safely assert that no middle-class woman of average
intelligence, educated in the high schools established during the
last twenty-five years, is unable to earn a living if she chooses to
do so. And one very important change has taken place. Whereas thirty
years ago it was the rule for many parents, although with little hope
of bequeathing an income to their daughters, to support them at home
in expectation of their marriage, this lack of foresight is becoming
rare. Our schools are no longer staffed by women who have begun their
work in life driven to it by necessity or disappointment. More and
more it is being recognised by parents that girls should be fitted to
be self-supporting; and the tendency among the girls themselves is
to concentrate their energies on the profession they take up, and to
regard marriage as a possibility which may some day call them away
from the path they are pursuing, but which should not be allowed to
interfere with their plans in the meantime.
At the period of life, then, when there is the most opportunity of
marriage there is now the least excuse for the woman who marries
merely to obtain a livelihood. The economic advance has at least been
sufficient to enable women to preserve their self-respect.
Next it must be admitted that the work which educated women are paid to
do is in the main useful and satisfying work. They no longer think of
supporting themselves by acting as useful companions to useless women;
nor do they have to spend their time in imperfectly imparting valueless
facts in the schoolroom. The teaching and nursing professions, which
include more educated women in their ranks than any other, have made
great advances. In both every worker who wishes to be efficient can
make herself so, and while youth and health last those occupations are
absorbing enough in themselves to be worth living for.
At the same time, the women who succeed in either of these callings
must be above the average in ability. The merely average girl must
turn to some occupation in which more people are wanted, but for which
less exceptional skill is required. Generally she looks for it in one
of two directions: she either becomes a clerk or some kind of domestic
help. Failing marriage, the latter occupation offers chances, but
not certainties, of making warm friends, and having abiding human
interests. But clerical work in the case of the average woman can
rarely be in itself satisfying; it is a means, not an end.
And here lies the great difference between men and women in the labour
market. All that the average man demands is that his work should be
honest and remunerative. It need not be interesting, or elevating,
or heroic. Most women, on the other hand, who look forward to a long
working career must have an occupation to which they can give both
heart and mind. The reason is simple. The woman is living an isolated
life; unless her work involves the exercise of what may be termed her
maternal faculties, she is living an unnatural life. Men, on the other
hand, whatever be their employment, are generally husbands and fathers.
What they earn is of more importance than what they do.
In measuring women’s economic advance this need for a human interest in
their work must never be forgotten. Of any occupation it must be asked,
What does it offer to women when the novelty has worn off, and they
realise that for twenty or thirty years more nearly all their time must
be given to it?
Another fact, too, must be remembered--that although high pay may
compensate for uninteresting work, a woman will never be worth high
pay if the work does not interest her. And we find, therefore, the
paradoxical result that, generally speaking, the women who earn the
highest incomes are the women who have chosen their work for the work’s
sake.
Taking these points into consideration, I am inclined to think that we
have made sufficient economic progress to be “good, useful, healthy
and self-respecting” up to the age of thirty. But the great mass of
middle-class women, if fated to earn their living as middle-aged
spinsters, would, I am afraid, be unable to earn an income sufficient
to keep either their utility or their health up to the standard.
But optimists may fairly urge that the majority will not be called
upon to go through this ordeal. The average woman marries; it is the
exceptionally intellectual or the exceptionally feeble-minded who do
not. The latter will be looked after by society, and the former can
hold her own.
That is true to some extent. But while I think we have made great
strides in the right direction, I think we have some serious truths to
face. We are constantly congratulating ourselves that our middle-aged
spinsters have nothing in common with the old maid of the past,
while we assume that the next half-century will see a still greater
exaltation of the maiden lady. I doubt it very much, unless much more
thought and effort are given to making the duller girls industrially
competent.
Our pioneers were full of enthusiasm in their journey to the promised
land where sex barriers should be removed and sex prejudices die away.
Those of us who passed through the gates which they opened for us were
(I am afraid it must be admitted) often unpopular among those we left
behind and were delighted with the novelty of the country before us.
The next generation are coming into the field under new conditions.
To begin with, it is realised that work is work; next, that economic
liberty is only obtained by the sacrifice of personal freedom; that
there is nothing very glorious in doing work that any average man can
do as well, now that we are no longer told we cannot do it. The glamour
of economic independence has faded, although the necessity for it is
greater than ever. Further, although it used to be true that a smaller
proportion of the girls who distinguished themselves most at school
and at college married than was the case among the girls in the lower
forms, this no longer holds good. Now that all girls, as a matter of
course, are taught Latin and mathematics, they are no longer regarded
as necessarily disagreeable in consequence; nor is inability to do
their school work considered a merit. Large numbers of middle-class
women must remain unmarried, but there seem to me to be many signs that
it is no longer the Sixth Form girl, but her duller schoolfellow, who
must be trained to make her way alone in the world.
And this after all means progress for the race.