In the face of so vital and radical a change in human life as this
change of economic base in the position of women, it is well to call
attention more at length to the illustrations of every-day facts in our
common lives, which he who runs may read, if he knows how to read. We do
not, as a rule, know how to read the most important messages to
humanity,—the signs of the times. Historic crises, which have been
slowly maturing, burst upon us in sudden birth before the majority of
the people imagine that anything is going on. The first gun fired at
Fort Sumter was an extreme surprise to most of the citizens of the
Union. The Boston Tea Party was, no doubt, an unaccountable piece of
insolence to many worthy Britons. When “the deluge” did pour over the
_noblesse_ of France, few had been really foreseeing enough to avoid it.
Fortunately, the laws of social evolution do not wait for our
recognition or acceptance: they go straight on. And this greater and
more important change than the world has ever seen, this slow emergence
of the long-subverted human female to full racial equality, has been
going on about us full long enough to be observed. It is seen more
prominently in this country than in any other, for many reasons.
The Anglo-Saxon blood, that English mixture of which Tennyson
sings,—“Saxon and Norman and Dane though we be,”—is the most powerful
expression of the latest current of fresh racial life from the
north,—from those sturdy races where the women were more like men, and
the men no less manly because of it. The strong, fresh spirit of
religious revolt in the new church that protested against and broke
loose from the old, woke and stirred the soul of woman as well as the
soul of man, and in the equality of martyrdom the sexes learned to stand
side by side. Then, in the daring and exposure, the strenuous labor and
bitter hardship of the pioneer life of the early settlers, woman’s very
presence was at a premium; and her labor had a high economic value.
Sex-dependence was almost unfelt. She who moulded the bullets, and
loaded the guns while the men fired them, was co-defender of the home
and young. She who carded and dyed and wove and spun was co-provider for
the family. Men and women prayed together, worked together, and fought
together in comparative equality. More than all, the development of
democracy has brought to us the fullest individualization that the world
has ever seen. Although politically expressed by men alone, the
character it has produced is inherited by their daughters. The Federal
Democracy in its organic union, reacting upon individuals, has so
strengthened, freed, emboldened, the human soul in America that we have
thrown off slavery, and with the same impulse have set in motion the
long struggle toward securing woman’s fuller equality before the law.
This struggle has been carried on unflaggingly for fifty years, and fast
nears its victorious end. It is not only in the four States where full
suffrage is exercised by both sexes, nor in the twenty-four where
partial suffrage is given to women, that we are to count progress; but
in the changes legal and social, mental and physical, which mark the
advance of the mother of the world toward her full place. Have we not
all observed the change even in size of the modern woman, with its
accompanying strength and agility? The Gibson Girl and the Duchess of
Towers,—these are the new women; and they represent a noble type,
indeed. The heroines of romance and drama to-day are of a different sort
from the Evelinas and Arabellas of the last century. Not only do they
look differently, they behave differently. The false sentimentality, the
false delicacy, the false modesty, the utter falseness of elaborate
compliment and servile gallantry which went with the other
falsehoods,—all these are disappearing. Women are growing honester,
braver, stronger, more healthful and skilful and able and free, more
human in all ways.
The change in education is in large part a cause of this, and
progressively a consequence. Day by day the bars go down. More and more
the field lies open for the mind of woman to glean all it can, and it
has responded most eagerly. Not only our pupils, but our teachers, are
mainly women. And the clearness and strength of the brain of the woman
prove continually the injustice of the clamorous contempt long poured
upon what was scornfully called “the female mind.” There is no female
mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.
Woman’s progress in the arts and sciences, the trades and professions,
is steady; but it is most unwise to claim from these relative advances
the superiority of women to men, or even their equality, in these
fields. What is more to the purpose and easily to be shown is the
superiority of the women of to-day to those of earlier times, the
immense new development of racial qualities in the sex. No modern
proverbs, if we expressed ourselves in proverbs now, would speak with
such sweeping, unbroken contumely of the women of to-day as did those
unerring exhibitors of popular feeling in former times.
The popular thought of our day is voiced in fiction, fluent verse, and
an incessant play of humor. By what is freely written by most authors
and freely read by most people is shown our change in circumstances and
change in feeling. In old romances the woman was nothing save beautiful,
high-born, virtuous, and perhaps “accomplished.” She did nothing but
love and hate, obey or disobey, and be handed here and there among
villain, hero, and outraged parent, screaming, fainting, or bursting
into floods of tears as seemed called for by the occasion.
In the fiction of to-day women are continually taking larger place in
the action of the story. They are given personal characteristics beyond
those of physical beauty. And they are no longer content simply to _be_:
they _do_. They are showing qualities of bravery, endurance, strength,
foresight, and power for the swift execution of well-conceived plans.
They have ideas and purposes of their own; and even when, as in so many
cases described by the more reactionary novelists, the efforts of the
heroine are shown to be entirely futile, and she comes back with a rush
to the self-effacement of marriage with economic dependence, still the
efforts were there. Disapprove as he may, use his art to oppose and
contemn as he may, the true novelist is forced to chronicle the
distinctive features of his time; and no feature is more distinctive of
this time than the increasing individualization of women. With lighter
touch, but with equally unerring truth, the wit and humor of the day
show the same development. The majority of our current jokes on women
turn on their “newness,” their advance.
No sociological change equal in importance to this clearly marked
improvement of an entire sex has ever taken place in one century. Under
it all, the _crux_ of the whole matter, goes on the one great change,
that of the economic relation. This follows perfectly natural lines.
Just as the development of machinery constantly lowers the importance of
mere brute strength of body and raises that of mental power and skill,
so the pressure of industrial conditions demands an ever-higher
specialization, and tends to break up that relic of the patriarchal
age,—the family as an economic unit.
Women have been led under pressure of necessity into a most reluctant
entrance upon fields of economic activity. The sluggish and greedy
disposition bred of long ages of dependence has by no means welcomed the
change. Most women still work only as they “have to,” until they can
marry and “be supported.” Men, too, liking the power that goes with
money, and the poor quality of gratitude and affection bought with it,
resent and oppose the change; but all this disturbs very little the
course of social progress.
A truer spirit is the increasing desire of young girls to be
independent, to have a career of their own, at least for a while, and
the growing objection of countless wives to the pitiful asking for
money, to the beggary of their position. More and more do fathers give
their daughters, and husbands their wives, a definite allowance,—a
separate bank account,—something which they can play is all their own.
The spirit of personal independence in the women of to-day is sure proof
that a change has come.
For a while the introduction of machinery which took away from the home
so many industries deprived woman of any importance as an economic
factor; but presently she arose, and followed her lost wheel and loom to
their new place, the mill. To-day there is hardly an industry in the
land in which some women are not found. Everywhere throughout America
are women workers outside the unpaid labor of the home, the last census
giving three million of them. This is so patent a fact, and makes itself
felt in so many ways by so many persons, that it is frequently and
widely discussed. Without here going into its immediate advantages or
disadvantages from an industrial point of view, it is merely instanced
as an undeniable proof of the radical change in the economic position of
women that is advancing upon us. She is assuming new relations from year
to year before our eyes; but we, seeing all social facts from a personal
point of view, have failed to appreciate the nature of the change.
Consider, too, the altered family relation which attends this movement.
Entirely aside from the strained relation in marriage, the other
branches of family life feel the strange new forces, and respond to
them. “When I was a girl,” sighs the gray-haired mother, “we sisters all
sat and sewed while mother read to us. Now every one of my daughters has
a different club!” She sighs, be it observed. We invariably object to
changed conditions in those departments of life where we have
established ethical values. For all the daughters to sew while the
mother read aloud to them was esteemed right; and, therefore, the
radiating diffusion of daughters among clubs is esteemed wrong,—a danger
to home life. In the period of the common sewing and reading the women
so assembled were closely allied in industrial and intellectual
development as well as in family relationship. They all could do the
same work, and liked to do it. They all could read the same book, and
liked to read it. (And reading, half a century ago, was still considered
half a virtue and the other half a fine art.) Hence the ease with which
this group of women entered upon their common work and common pleasure.
The growing individualization of democratic life brings inevitable
change to our daughters as well as to our sons. Girls do not all like to
sew, many do not know how. Now to sit sewing together, instead of being
a harmonizing process, would generate different degrees of restlessness,
of distaste, and of nervous irritation. And, as to the reading aloud, it
is not so easy now to choose a book that a well-educated family of
modern girls and their mother would all enjoy together. As the race
become more specialized, more differentiated, the simple lines of
relation in family life draw with less force, and the more complex lines
of relation in social life draw with more force; and this is a perfectly
natural and desirable process for women as well as for men.
It may be suggested, in passing, that one of the causes of
“Americanitis” is this increasing nervous strain in family relation,
acting especially upon woman. As she becomes more individualized, she
suffers more from the primitive and undifferentiated conditions of the
family life of earlier times. What “a wife” and “a mother” was supposed
to find perfectly suitable, this newly specialized wife and mother, who
is also a personality, finds clumsy and ill-fitting,—a mitten where she
wants a glove. The home cares and industries, still undeveloped, give no
play for her increasing specialization. Where the embryonic combination
of cook-nurse-laundress-chambermaid-housekeeper-waitress-governess was
content to be “jack of all trades” and mistress of none, the woman who
is able to be one of these things perfectly, and by so much less able to
be all the others, suffers doubly from not being able to do what she
wants to do, and from being forced to do what she does not want to do.
To the delicately differentiated modern brain the jar and shock of
changing from trade to trade a dozen times a day is a distinct injury, a
waste of nervous force. With the larger socialization of the woman of
to-day, the fitness for and accompanying desire for wider combinations,
more general interest, more organized methods of work for larger ends,
she feels more and more heavily the intensely personal limits of the
more primitive home duties, interests, methods. And this pain and strain
must increase with the advance of women until the new functional power
makes to itself organic expression, and the belated home industries are
elevated and organized, like the other necessary labors of modern life.
In the meantime, however, the very best and foremost women suffer most;
and a heavy check is placed on social progress by this difficulty in
enlarging old conditions to suit new powers. It should still be
remembered it is not the essential relations of wife and mother which
are thus injurious, but the industrial conditions born of the economic
dependence of the wife and mother, and hitherto supposed to be part of
her functions. The change we are making does not in any way militate
against the true relations of the family, marriage, and parentage, but
only against those sub-relations belonging to an earlier period and now
in process of extinction. The family as an entity, an economic and
social unit, does not hold as it did. The ties between brother and
sister, cousins and relatives generally, are gradually lessening their
hold, and giving way under pressure of new forces which tend toward
better things.
The change is more perceptible among women than among men, because of
the longer survival of more primitive phases of family life in them. One
of its most noticeable features is the demand in women not only for
their own money, but for their own work for the sake of personal
expression. Those who object to women’s working on the ground that they
should not compete with men or be forced to struggle for existence look
only at work as a means of earning money. They should remember that
human labor is an exercise of faculty, without which we should cease to
be human; that to do and to make not only gives deep pleasure, but is
indispensable to healthy growth. Few girls to-day fail to manifest some
signs of this desire for individual expression. It is not only in the
classes who are forced to it: even among the rich we find this same
stirring of normal race-energy. To carve in wood, to hammer brass, to do
“art dressmaking,” to raise mushrooms in the cellar,—our girls are all
wanting to do something individually. It is a most healthy state, and
marks the development of race-distinction in women with a corresponding
lowering of sex-distinction to its normal place.
In body and brain, wherever she touches life, woman is changing
gloriously from the mere creature of sex, all her race-functions held in
abeyance, to the fully developed human being, none the less true woman
for being more truly human. What alarms and displeases us in seeing
these things is our funny misconception that race-functions are
masculine. Much effort is wasted in showing that women will become
“unsexed” and “masculine” by assuming these human duties. We are told
that a slight sex-distinction is characteristic of infancy and old age,
and that the assumption of opposite traits by either sex shows either a
decadent or an undeveloped condition. The young of any race are less
marked by sex-distinction; and in old age the distinguishing traits are
sometimes exchanged, as in the crowing of old hens and in the growing of
the beard on old women. And we are therefore assured that the endeavor
of women to perform these masculine economic functions marks a decadent
civilization, and is greatly to be deprecated. There would be some
reason in this objection if the common racial activities of humanity,
into which women are now so eagerly entering, were masculine functions.
But they are not. There is no more sublimated expression of our morbid
ideas of sex-distinction than in this complacent claiming of all human
life-processes as sex-functions of the male. “Masculine” and “feminine”
are only to be predicated of reproductive functions,—processes of
race-preservation. The processes of self-preservation are racial,
peculiar to the species, but common to either sex.
If it could be shown that the women of to-day were growing beards, were
changing as to pelvic bones, were developing bass voices, or that in
their new activities they were manifesting the destructive energy, the
brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the male, then
there would be cause for alarm. But the one thing that has been shown in
what study we have been able to make of women in industry is that they
are women still, and this seems to be a surprise to many worthy souls. A
female horse is no less female than a female starfish, but she has more
functions. She can do more things, is a more highly specialized
organism, has more intelligence, and, with it all, is even more feminine
in her more elaborate and farther-reaching processes of reproduction. So
the “new woman” will be no less female than the “old” woman, though she
has more functions, can do more things, is a more highly specialized
organism, has more intelligence. She will be, with it all, more
feminine, in that she will develope far more efficient processes of
caring for the young of the human race than our present wasteful and
grievous method, by which we lose fifty per cent. of them, like a
codfish. The average married pair, says the scientific dictator, in all
sobriety, should have four children merely to preserve our present
population, two to replace themselves and two to die,—a pleasant method
this, and redounding greatly to the credit of our motherhood.
The rapid extension of function in the modern woman has nothing to do
with any exchange of masculine and feminine traits: it is simply an
advance in human development of traits common to both sexes, and is
wholly good in its results. No one who looks at the life about us can
fail to see the alteration going on. It is a pity that we so fail to
estimate its value. On the other hand, the growth and kindling intensity
of the social consciousness among us all is as conspicuous a feature of
modern life as the change in woman’s position, and closely allied
therewith.
Never before have people cared so much about other people. From its
first expression in greater kindliness and helpfulness toward individual
human beings to its last expression in the vague, blind, groping
movements toward international justice and law, the heart of the world
is alive and stirring to-day. The whole social body is affected with
sudden shudders of feeling over some world calamity or world rejoicing.
When the message of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” ran from heart to heart around
the world, kindling a streak of fire, the fire of human love and
sympathy which is latent in us all and longing always for some avenue of
common expression, it proved that in every civilized land of our time
the people are of one mind on some subjects. Nothing could have so
spread and so awakened a response in the Periclean, the Augustan, or
even the Elizabethan age; for humanity was not then so far socialized
and so far individualized as to be capable of such a general feeling.
Invention and the discoveries of science are steadily unifying the world
to-day. The statement is frequently advanced that the minds of the men
of Greece or of the great thinkers of the Middle Ages were stronger and
larger than the minds of the men of to-day. Perhaps they were. So were
the bodies of the megatherium and the ichthyosaurus stronger and larger
than the bodies of the animals of to-day. Yet they were lower in the
scale of organic evolution. The ability of the individual is not so much
the criterion of social progress as that organic relation of individuals
which makes the progress of each available to all. Emerson has done more
for America than Plato could do for Greece. Indeed, Plato has done more
for America than he could do for Greece, because the printing-press and
the public school have made thought more freely and easily
transmissible.
Human progress lies in the perfecting of the social organization, and it
is here that the changes of our day are most marked. Whereas, in more
primitive societies, injuries were only felt by the individual as they
affected his own body or direct personal interests, and later his own
nation or church, to-day there is a growing sensitiveness to social
injuries, even to other nations. The civilized world has suffered in
Armenia’s agony, even though the machinery of social expression is yet
unable fully to carry out the social feeling or the social will.
Function comes before organ always; and the human heart and mind, which
are the social heart and mind, must feel and think long before the
social body can act in full expression.
Social sympathy and thought are growing more intense and active every
day. In our cumbrous efforts at international arbitration, in the
half-hearted alliances and agreements between great peoples, in the
linking of humanity together across ocean and mountain and desert plain
by steam and electricity, in the establishment of such world-functions
as the international postal service,—in these, externally, our social
unity has begun to act. In the more familiar field of personal life, who
has not seen how unceasingly many of us are occupied in the interests of
the community, even to the injury of our own? The rising manifestations
of social interest among women were covered with ridicule at first,
through such characters as Mrs. Jellyby or Mrs. Pardiggle, although a
few women who were so great and so identified with religion and
philanthropy as to command respect, women like the saintly Elizabeth
Fry, Florence Nightingale, and Clara Barton, escaped. But both belong to
the same age, are part of the same phenomena. To-day there is hardly a
woman of intelligence in all America, to say nothing of other countries,
who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest,
who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood
relationship.
The woman’s club movement is one of the most important sociological
phenomena of the century,—indeed, of all centuries,—marking as it does
the first timid steps toward social organization of these so long
unsocialized members of our race. Social life is absolutely conditioned
upon organization. The military organizations which promote peace, the
industrial organizations which maintain life, and all the educational,
religious, and charitable organizations which serve our higher needs
constitute the essential factors of that social activity in which, as
individuals, we live and grow; and it is plain, therefore, that while
women had no part in these organizations they had no part in social
life. Their main relation to society was an individual one, an animal
one, a sexual one. They produced the people of whom society was made,
but they were not society. Of course, they were indispensable in this
capacity; but one might as well call food a part of society because
people could not exist without eating as to call women a social factor
because people could not exist without being born. Women have made the
people who made the world, and will always continue so to do. But they
have heretofore had a most insignificant part in the world their sons
have made.
The only form of organization possible to women was for long the
celibate religious community. This has always been dear to them; and, as
to-day many avoid undesired marriage for the sake of “independence,” so
in earlier times many fled from undesired marriage to the communal
independence of the convent. The fondness of women for the church has
been based, not only on religious feeling, but on the force of the human
longing for co-ordinate interest and activities; and only here could
this be gratified. In the church at least they could be together. They
could feel in common and act in common,—the deepest human joy. As the
church has widened its activities, it has found everywhere in women its
most valuable and eager workers. To labor together, together to raise
funds for a common end, for a new building or a new minister, for local
charities or for foreign missions,—but to labor together, and for other
needs than those of the family relation,—this has always met glad
response from the struggling human soul in woman. When it became
possible to work together for other than religious ends,—when large
social service was made possible to women, as in our sanitary commission
during the last war,—women everywhere rose to meet the need. The rise
and spread of that greatest of women’s organizations, the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, has shown anew how ready is the heart of
woman to answer the demands of other than personal relations.
And now the whole country is budding into women’s clubs. The clubs are
uniting and federating by towns, States, nations: there are even world
organizations. The sense of human unity is growing daily among women.
Not to see it is impossible. Not to watch with pleasure and admiration
this new growth in social life, this sudden and enormous re-enforcement
of our best forces from the very springs of life, only shows how blind
we are to true human advantage, how besotted in our fondness for
sex-distinction in excess.
One of the most valuable features of this vast line of progress is the
new heroism it is pouring into life. The crumbling and flattening of
ambitions and ideals under pressure of our modern business life is a
patent fact. We are growing to surrender taste and conscience and honor
itself to the demands of business success, prostituting the noblest
talents to the most ignoble uses with that last excuse of cowardice,—“A
man must live.” Into this phase of life comes a new spirit,—the spirit
of such women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; of Dr.
Elizabeth Blackwell and her splendid sisterhood; of all the women who
have battled and suffered for half a century, forcing their way, with
sacrifices never to be told, into the field of freedom so long denied
them,—not for themselves alone, but for one another. We have loudly
cried out at the injury to the home and family which are supposed to
follow such a course. We have unsparingly ridiculed the unattractive and
unfeminine among these vanguard workers. But few have thought what
manner of spirit it must take to leave the dear old easy paths so long
trodden by so many feet, and go to hew out new ones alone. The nature of
the effort involved and the nature of the opposition incurred conduced
to lessen the soft charms and graces of the ultra-feminine state; but
the women who follow and climb swiftly up the steps which these great
leaders so laboriously built may do the new work in the new places, and
still keep much of what these strenuous heroes had to lose.
It is not being a doctor that makes a woman unwomanly, but the treatment
which the first women medical students and physicians received was such
as to make even men unmanly. That time is largely past. The gates are
nearly all open, at least in some places; and the racial activities of
women are free to develope as rapidly as the nature of the case will
allow. The main struggle now is with the distorted nature of the
creature herself. Grand as are the women who embody at whatever cost the
highest spirit of the age, there still remains to us the heavy legacy of
the years behind,—the innumerable weak and little women, with the
aspirations of an affectionate guinea pig. The soul of woman must speak
through the long accumulations of her intensified sex-nature, through
the uncertain impulses of a starved and thwarted class. She must
recognize that she is handicapped. She must understand her difficulty,
and meet it bravely and firmly.
But this is a matter for personal volition, for subjective
consciousness. The thing to see and to rejoice in is that, with and
without their conscious volition, with or without the approval and
assistance of men, in spite of that crowning imbecility of history,—the
banded opposition of some women to the advance of the others,—the female
of our race is making sure and rapid progress in human development.