THE REAL AMERICAN WOMAN
The American woman is regarded both here and abroad as the strongest
and subtlest enemy of the American Democracy. She is pictured in
the imaginations of students of our life as ignorant of politics,
interested only in her own sovereignty over the American man, or,
rather, over his pocketbook, a snob and a climber and a worshiper
of European aristocratic institutions; a poor housekeeper and a
reluctant mother, and a very vampire for luxury and show, she hides
her superficiality and cold-heartedness under a mask that is fair and
fascinating. She is a born caste-worshiper, an instinctive hater of
Democracy.
What truth, if any, is there in these hardy criticisms?
We have noted how, under the leadership and inspiration of the capital
of plutocracy, New York, every city in the country is, with true
American rapidity, developing its individual fashionable society. It
is directed by the wives and daughters of rich men; it is, as we have
seen, devoted chiefly to spending time and money in unproductive and
more or less frivolous forms of self-amusement. The character of this
“set” varies slightly for each locality--but only slightly. In the
West the wealth-worship is franker; in the East more hypocritical,
more beslimed and bemessed with cant about birth and culture. But
whether Mammon is naked and unashamed or is draped and decorated, he
is still Mammon. The monotonous sameness of the people comprising each
division of the set, the sameness of their opportunities and aims,
the world-neighborliness which railways and telegraph and printing
press have brought about, prevent any notable differences. To dress,
to talk, to eat, to drive, to entertain, to bring up one’s children,
all in accord with the standards of “good form” established by the
aristocratic societies of Europe; to spend each day in pleasures
that permit one to shift most of the labor and all the thinking and
providing to hirelings of divers degrees, from lawyers and industrial
managers to secretaries, housekeepers, butlers, valets and maids; to
live worthlessly without useful work--these are the aims, East, West,
and South. And in rapidly increasing measure the aims are accomplished.
Universal freedom, universal opportunity, all but universal toil, have
indeed very suddenly brought vast riches to America, vast wealth to a
few. This sudden wealth, coming to a people whose characteristics are
energy, restlessness and lightning-like adaptability, has all in a day
relieved a relatively small but, in another aspect, very numerous and
most influential part of each large community from the necessity to
labor. Many, a great many, of these continue to strive to cherish the
ideals of a life of useful labor, continue to strive to set a worthy
example to their children and to their fellow-citizens--that is, to
remain sane and American. But a great many others have eagerly adopted
those alien ideals of the aristocracy of idleness and the vulgarity
of toil which appeal so strongly to the vanity and other ancient
weaknesses of the human animal the world over.
For this state of affairs women, imperfectly educated, wrongly,
sillily educated, in fact, practically uneducated, are in the main
responsible. Our women, like our men, inherit the American energy and
restlessness. Where circumstances compel, they work in the home, the
shop, the factory, the office, in the fine American way. But where
circumstances do not compel they seek other outlets for their restless
energy. And thus we find rich wives and daughters organizing elaborate
establishments and fashionable sets and international circuits, and
devoting themselves to erecting the life of frivolity and show into a
career that will at once fill their idle hours, gratify their vanity,
and give them the sense of doing something ambitious, of “getting on in
the world.”
Among a people who have always yielded a commanding position to
women, the power of this new American woman--attractive in dress
and in surroundings, so often fascinating in personality, usually
clever and so plausible that she deceives no one more completely than
herself--could not but be enormous. Is it strange that she weakens
the hold of the old ideals upon her husband and upon the men who are
drawn to her attractive house? Is it strange that they persuade their
consciences to let them neglect to-day’s duties while they help her
amuse them and herself? Is it strange that she has sons and daughters
devoted to her ideals? Is it strange that she gathers about her more
and more backsliders from the democratic conception of life?
Organized as we are, there is absolutely no useful place for a leisure
class. We do not purpose to be ruled, but, on the contrary, insist
that our public administrators shall be chosen from the main body
of toilers and shall execute, not direct, the popular will. Since
leadership in public and private activity thus falls to the toiler in
a Democracy, these fashionable “sets” provided by the women of the
rich class are wholly alien and hostile to us as a democratic people.
And they inevitably become a menace as their influence extends over
the men and women of superior education or natural endowments who
should be the leading exemplars of the American ideal. And this menace
threatens to erect itself into what pessimists would call a “peril,”
as the “community of interest” creates monopolies so intertwined with
our individual structure that to assail them is to jeopardize it, and
perpetuates wealth in certain families and groups.
Such is the anti-democratic woman. But over against her set the
American woman. The plutocratic American man, being gaudy and
conspicuous, distracts attention from the democratic American man, who
outnumbers and outvotes and out-influences him into insignificance,
except as an awful warning against flying in the face of the world’s
democratic destiny. The plutocratic American woman is even more
conspicuous than the plutocratic American man. But contrast her with
the rest of the women, especially with the women who go forth from the
homes to work. Great as is the influence against Democracy exerted by
the women of the leisure class, it is weak in comparison with that
exerted for Democracy by the professional and business women of the
United States.
Ten years ago about one-fifth of all the wage and salary earners in the
United States were women and girls. When these figures were published
there was a great outcry of wonder and alarm--wonder at the changed
conditions, alarm lest those changed conditions might be permanent
and the old-fashioned woman of the fireside and the stoveside and the
cradleside might be passing away. To-day about one-third of all the
women in the United States not on farms earn their own living outside
their own homes, and these women constitute more than one-fourth of
all the persons in the United States engaged in gainful occupations
other than agriculture.
It is evident that the changed conditions are not passing, but
permanent; that the “new woman” is the woman of the future. Yet we
still hear the old order talked of as if it were not a departing order,
and the new order criticised as if it were abnormal, a fad of a few
“freak” women.
Obviously, this change is most intimately associated with Democracy.
Democracy, work, women; women, work, Democracy. Did any of those
ancient republics we hear so much about, those whose decline and fall
Europe and our own pessimists say we must inevitably imitate, ever
number among its inhabitants a company of women wage and salary earners
such as has been so swiftly evolved in democratic, work-compelling,
work-exalting America?
In face of this army of women who work outside the home, the theory
still is that man bears the brunt of the battle for food, clothing and
shelter, while woman is sheltered and comparatively at her ease. This
theory never was sound. It never would have been accepted had writers
and thinkers kept clearly before their minds the fact that the human
race does not consist of a luxuriously comfortable class, but of vast
masses of laborious millions. From time immemorial, among the masses of
the people everywhere, the men and the women have worked equally for
the support of the family. But latterly, under the pressure of modern
conditions, which are forcing all into the general service of society,
the women have been drawn from the obscure toil of occupations within
and around the household; and also into the ranks of women toilers
have gone hundreds of thousands of women from the classes which, until
recently, did try to keep their women at home. Is it illogical to say
that we may presently see practically all the capable members of our
society, regardless of sex, self-supporting? And in such circumstances,
would not the family relations, the relations of mother to father, and
both to children, necessarily undergo a radical transformation?
To-day the women vote in four States and hold public office in all the
States and under the National Government. There are women policemen and
firemen, women locomotive engineers, women masons and plasterers and
gunsmiths, women street-car drivers and conductors, women blacksmiths
and coopers and steel and iron workers, and even women sailors--to take
only a few occupations which, on the face, would seem to exclude women.
In fact, there is not in this country a single department of skilled or
unskilled labor, except only soldier and man-o’-war’s man, which has
not its women workers in swiftly increasing numbers. In the professions
there are thousands of women doctors, lawyers, authors, professors,
musicians, artists, decorators, journalists, public speakers, and
more than a hundred thousand women teachers. In the trades there
are thousands of women hotel and restaurant keepers, insurance and
real estate agents, bookkeepers, clerks, merchants, officers in
corporations, saleswomen, stenographers, telegraph and telephone
operators. In manufactories the women operatives almost equal the men
in numbers. There are thousands of women who hold responsible positions
in the management of manufacturing corporations. All these occupations,
with the exception of such as nursing and teaching school and music,
were once exclusively in the hands of men.
The cause of the change is the same as that which has revolutionized
every part of modern society--the amazing discoveries of science,
creating an enormous number of new occupations and revolutionizing
the method of all the old occupations, from housekeeping to national
administration.
War was the department of human endeavor which not only excluded women
from itself, but also kept her fast anchored at home. Until the second
quarter of the last century war was the chief thought, the chief
pursuit of the human animal. He was either just going to war or just
coming home from war, or engaged in war or preparing for imminent war.
Obviously, so long as war occupied this position in human affairs woman
was inevitably in the background, in the secondary places, a household
drudge or plaything. But war is no longer the principal business of the
race, with peace tolerated as a breathing spell now and then. Peace and
its arts have become the serious business of civilization, the settled
order, with war as a dreadful nightmare. The wars, if not fewer, are
briefer and are carefully concentrated and confined. Civilization has
been forced upon a peace basis not by enlightenment, but by commerce
growing out of discovery and invention. It clamors for skilled hands,
not for brutal hands. Hence the vast opening for women and the
vast inrush of women. It is a democratic tide. Out of discovery and
invention comes commerce; out of commerce and its intercourse, which is
death to all forms of provincialism, both mental and physical, comes
enlightenment; in the train of enlightenment, as day in the train of
the sun, comes Democracy.
This country was remote from other great nations and, therefore, from
the ever present threat of the actuality of war. It was--perhaps
through its freedom from war and war alarms--eagerest in seizing
upon and using the mighty industrial machinery which science gave to
the race. Thus it has come to pass with us that the abolition of the
non-worker, the progress toward the industrial equality of the two
sexes, has been most rapid.
Where European societies had a very complex organization, our society
had from the beginning simplicity as its chief characteristic. We were
really all toilers--until recently almost all toilers at occupations
close to manual labor. The women and the men were throughout on that
equal basis which in Europe was, and to a great extent is yet, found
only among the peasant and shopkeeping classes. And as the new era--the
era of steam and electricity--developed with us, our women and our men
naturally remained side by side.
Our government was founded in war. Its founders assumed, from the
history of all other nations, that offense and defense were to be
its main functions. And the barbaric theory is still ignorantly or
carelessly assented to. This explains the lagging of the political
rights of women behind their industrial and civil rights--or,
rather, industrial and civil necessities; for no right has ever
been, or probably ever will be, recognized until recognition becomes
a necessity. The development with us of a class of women who are
housekeepers only and are most of the time idle or half idle, is
foreign to the spirit of our democratic era. That development cannot,
therefore, long survive, any more than an equatorial plant can long
survive in our zone. The new departures are in harmony with Democracy;
they mean increased efficiency and usefulness of the human race; they
must persist and expand and prevail.
To three causes we owe the American woman of the class that only
pretends to contribute, or at best half-heartedly contributes, toward
the support of our social system:
First, to the survival of the Old World, old era ideas of “woman’s
sphere,” of the coarsening effect of labor upon her “finer nature,”
of the “aristocratic flavor” and “high breeding” of uselessness and
idleness.
Second, to the simpler tastes of our ancestors, and the comparative
ease with which at an early period in our national life the labor of
the men in the family could provide money enough to satisfy those
tastes.
Third, to the very tardy development of the domestic laborers and
providers that now relieve woman of the confining cares of household
and nursery.
As a result of these three causes a class of idle women sprang up--not
only among the rich and well-to-do, but even among artisans, small
farmers and shopkeepers. And this class came to be regarded as typical
and exemplary. In reality it is neither. It has no place in our
tradition of mothers and grandmothers who spun and made preserves, did
their own housework, and were busy every waking moment about matters
which are now attended to in shops and factories. It has no place in
common sense--the women who insist most strenuously that child-bearing
and home-making are woman’s whole duty are the women who, as a class,
leave the care of the home to servants and bear few children and
consign them to nurses at the earliest possible moment. And manifestly
it has no place in our future; it must inevitably go the way of all
else that is undemocratic and parasitic. Our society is founded upon
the two ideas--work and equal opportunity to all to work. It abhors
the idler as nature abhors a vacuum. And as the old-time occupations
of woman are carried on in a different way, she must find other
occupations. Must, because man will be unable both to support himself
in the comfort he ever more exactingly demands and also to support her
in idleness as well as she insists upon being supported. Must, because
her own increasing aversion to restraint will not let her rest content
with the slavish and shameful position of a cajoler and dependent.
The sex instinct is powerful enough to triumph over even the instinct
of self-preservation for a time; but it cannot withstand the steady,
day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year pressure of that instinct of
self-preservation incessantly stimulated by the operations of economic
forces. The old order, bulwarked by tradition and by the sex-passion
and by woman’s ingenuity and man’s weakness where women are concerned,
will survive long, will disintegrate gradually. But how can it be saved?
Thus we have a social organization which is in process of revolutionary
change. The women are rapidly pushing out or are rapidly being pushed
out into occupations which have been transferred from the domestic to
the general sphere; they are entering upon occupations new and old
which it was thought a few years ago would be for the men only. The men
on their part not only are working as formerly, but also are entering
occupations once followed exclusively by women. Some of the new
employments of women have already been enumerated. The new employments
of men in this country include laundry work, cooking, general
housework, nursing, keeping boarding-houses, teaching primary and
kindergarten pupils, dressmaking, millinery. The list is far shorter
and, from the old viewpoint where the equal dignity of all honorable
labor was denied, seems far less dignified than the women’s list. The
reason for this is of course that the men had small room to expand
their already multiform activities, while the women had all the room in
the world.
The underlying principle of this redistribution of activities is the
common-sense principle that every unit in a society should do the work
at hand for which it is best fitted. This principle explains every
case. Where we find a man dusting, scrubbing and doing laundry work
it is because he could find nothing more remunerative to do and could
outbid the women applying for that particular task. Wherever we find
a woman plastering, or keeping books, or driving a street-car, or
managing a store or corporation, it is for the same reason. And this
modern principle wholly ignores sex and looks only at the work to be
done and at the comparative fitness of the male and female applicants
for it. We are being taught by destiny that parasitism and dependence
are no more essentials of the feminine than the brands and manacles
which at one time most men wore were essentials of the masculine.
It is not prophecy to say that, as more and more millions of women
enter the industrial fields, these readjustments and redivisions, this
absorption of some occupations by women and of other occupations by
men, will go on apace. We may not like it; but we can no more stop it
than we can stop the physical and mental development of woman, or the
use of steam and electricity.
The missionary work for Democracy done by the women already
understanding the values of work will undoubtedly eventually reach the
“exclusive,” most distinctly leisure class. Its influence is seen on
every hand, among the girls and young women of the very well-to-do,
in families where the daughters are still persuaded to remain idly at
home against their own inclinations. Probably every woman earning her
own living, who has associates among women more or less comfortably
supported in idleness, and in restraint, by men, is envied by not a
few of them, by all not hopelessly corrupted by laziness and caste.
And eventually they will be following her example. As the number
of educated, valuable women forced to work for a living increases,
the number of the same kind of women voluntarily going to work will
increase.
And finally the richer women will be reached and impelled. Their
yearning to do something will take tangible form. We may live to see
the discontented, folly-chasing daughters of the rich stepping not
down to, but up to a place beside the woman wage-earner, because they
are sick and tired of having no sensible employment, tired of the
pitiful wait for some man with the right qualifications of personal and
pecuniary attractiveness; because they have sufficiently developed in
intelligence to have not a theoretic but a practical envy of the joys
of the woman who is absolute mistress of herself and is waiting for the
right man only as a man now waits for the right woman.
There is no such simplifier of life as work. Its effect upon the dress,
the home surroundings, the very expression and manners of women once
accustomed to leisure, is enormous. It tends to make them far more
attractive to their own sex and also to such men as are not afraid
an intelligent, competent woman would at close range discover the
shallowness of their posings and pretenses. Finally, it makes them
democratic--all of them that have the wisdom to look on their work
not as a sentence to drudgery from which they hope they can presently
cajole some man into releasing them, but as a high dispensation of
destiny in their favor. The “emancipation of woman” is no mere sonorous
phrase. The new woman can, indeed must, retain all the virtues of
the “old-fashioned” woman. Feminine is as eternal and immutable
as masculine; and the other virtues of the old were the virtues
inseparable from a life of busy usefulness. The new woman can and must,
and therefore will, free herself from the vices of the old-fashioned
woman--the vices of narrowness and irrationality, of artifice that
harks back to the days when woman was the servant of man’s appetites
and had to pander to them.
The decisive advantage the men have had in the fifty years since
Democracy set its powerful forces to work upon woman has been not their
superior strength or skill or faithfulness or industry, but that woman
has worked merely as a temporary expedient. She has tenaciously assumed
that she would presently “quit work” and be supported by some man.
This dream has been largely fanciful, though none the less potent for
that. The woman, married, has usually found that she has not stopped
working, but has undertaken a far more laborious and ever grudgingly
paid occupation. The delusion has made her wages smaller. Who will not
pay more to a worker who expects to go on working than to a worker who
expects presently to stop work, and is meanwhile giving at least half
her energy to another occupation, that of catching a husband? The
delusion has also destroyed or impaired her ambition. Why struggle to
rise in an occupation which one hopes and intends presently to abandon
for another that is wholly different?
But latterly a host of women have been coming into conspicuous
positions because ambition drove them there. They have begun to work
for work’s sake. They have seen the fraud in the silly and shallow
twaddle about “woman and the home”--as if for centuries the mothers of
the men most useful to society had not been for the most part working
women who could not, if they would, have pleaded child-bearing and
nursery and housework in excuse for doing nothing to add to the family
income. The “new woman” is not a slovenly drudge waiting irritably for
the advent of a husband that she may become a tenement “sill-warmer”
or a palace parasite. She works until she is married; she continues
to work after she is married. And there is no shadow of a taint of
pecuniary interest in the love and affection she gives.
Disregard the negligible few women of the plutocracy and its environs,
as we have disregarded the unimportant few men of the same class,
and looking at all over eight millions, you find that the American
woman, like the American man, is developing in harmony with the ideal
of Democracy. Democracy is no discriminator either among persons
or between sexes. It respects the mothers of future generations as
profoundly as it respects the fathers. And it has the same gifts for
all--freedom, intelligence, the joy of work.