When girls in good circumstances become infected with the microbe of violent exercise and insist upon walking many miles a day, besides indulging for hours in games which permit no rest, they look like hags. Temporarily, of course. When they recover their common sense they recover their looks, for it is in their power to relax and recuperate. Men will walk twenty miles, take a cold shower, a good meal, a night's rest, and look as well as ever the next day—or at the end of the walk, for that matter. They can afford the waste. Women cannot. If women succeed in achieving hard unyielding muscles in the wrong place they suffer atrociously in childbirth; for Nature, who is as old-fashioned and inhospitable to modern ideas as a Tory statesman, takes a vicious pleasure in punishing one sex every time it succeeds in approaching the peculiar level of the other, or which diverges from the normal in any way. Note how many artists, who are nine-tenths temperament and one-tenth male, suffer; not only because they are beset with every sort of weakness that affects their social status, but because the struggle with life is too much for them unless they have real men behind them until their output is accepted by the public, and themselves with it.
Some day Society will be civilized enough to recognize the limitations and the helplessness of those who are artists first and men afterwards. But meanwhile we can only rely upon the sympathy and the understanding of the individual.
Far be it from me to advise that girls refrain from doing their part in the general work of the home, if servants are out of the question; that won't hurt them; but if some one must go out and support the family it would better be the mother or the maiden aunt.
Better still, a husband, if marriage is their goal and children the secret desire of their hearts.
If girls are so constituted mentally that they long for the independent life, self-support, self-expression, they will have it and without any advice from the worldly-wise; it is as driving an impulse as the reproductive instinct in those who are more liberally sexed. And these last are still in the majority, no doubt of that. Therefore, far better they marry and have children in their youth. They, above all, are the women whose support and protection is the natural duty of man, and while it is one of life's misfortunes for a girl to marry simply to escape life's burdens, without love and without the desire for children, it is by far the lesser evil to have the consolation of home and children in the general barrenness of life than to slave all day at an uncongenial task and go "home" to a hall bedroom.
These views were so much misunderstood when they appeared in magazine form that I have felt obliged to emphasize the differences between the still primitive woman and the woman who is the product of the higher civilization. One young socialist, who looked quite strong enough to support a family, asked me if I did not think it better for a girl to support herself than to be the slave of a man's lust and bear innumerable children, whether she wished for them or not, children to whose support society contributed nothing. But why be a man's slave, and why have more children than you can support? We live in the enlightened twentieth century, when there is precious little about anything that women do not know, and if they do not they are such hopeless fools that they should be in the State Institutions. The time has passed for women to talk of being men's slaves in any sense, except in the economic. There are still sweatshops and there is still speeding up in factories, because society is still far from perfect, but if a woman privately is a man's slave to-day it is because she is the slave of herself as well.
VI
Personally, although nothing has ever tempted me to marry a second time, I am very glad I married in my early youth, not only because matrimony enables a potential writer to see life from many more viewpoints than if she remains blissfully single, but because I was sheltered from all harsh contacts with the world. No one was ever less equipped by nature for domesticity and all the responsibilities of everyday life, and if circumstances had so ordered that I had not blundered into matrimony before twenty-four-or-five, no doubt I never should have married at all.
But at that time—I was home on a vacation from boarding-school, and had had none of that illuminating experience known as being "out," I did no reasoning whatever. On the other hand I was far too mentally undeveloped and arrogant to be capable at that tender age of falling deeply in love. My future husband proposed six times (we were in a country house). I was flattered, divided between the ambition to graduate brilliantly and to be an author with no further loss of time, and wear becoming caps and trains to my frocks. On the other hand I wanted neither a husband particularly nor to go back to school, for I felt that as my grandfather had one of the best libraries in California nothing could be more pleasant or profitable than to finish my education in it undisturbed. Nevertheless, quite abruptly I made up my mind and married; and, if the truth were known, my reasons and impulses were probably as intelligent as those of the average young girl who knows the world only through books and thinks it has little more to teach her. My life had been objective and sheltered. If forced to earn my living at sixteen no doubt the contacts impossible to escape would soon have given me a real maturity of judgment and I should have grown to love, jealously, my freedom.
That is to say, if I had been a strong girl. As a matter-of-fact I was extremely delicate, with a weak back, a threat of tuberculosis, and very bad eyes. Most of this was the result of over-study, for I had been a healthy child, but I loved books and was indifferent to exercise and nourishment. No doubt if I had been turned out into the world to fare for myself I should have gone into a decline. Therefore, it was sheer luck that betrayed me into matrimony, for although my mental energies were torpid for several years my first child seemed to dissipate the shadows that lay in my blood, and at twenty-five I was a normally strong woman. We lived in the country. My husband looked after the servants, and if we were without a cook for several days he filled her place (he had learned to cook "camping out" and liked nothing better) until my mother-in-law sent a woman from San Francisco. I read, strolled about the woods, storing up vitality but often depressed with the unutterable ennui of youth, and haunted with the fear that my story-telling faculty, which had been very pronounced, had deserted me.
When my husband died I had but one child. I left her with her two adoring grandmothers and fled to New York. I was still as callow as a boarding-school girl, but my saving grace was that I knew I did not know anything, that I never would know enough to write about life until I had seen more of it than was on exhibition in California.
But by that time my health was established. I felt quite equal to writing six books a year if any one would publish them, besides studying life at first hand as persistently and deeply as the present state of society will permit in the case of a mere woman. For that reason I shall always be sorry I did not go on a newspaper for a year as a reporter, as there is no other way for a woman to see life in all its phases. I had a letter to Charles Dana, owner of the New York Sun, and no doubt he would have put me to work, but I was still too pampered, or too snobbish, and, lacking the spur of necessity, missed one of the best of educations. Now, no matter who asks my advice in regard to the literary career, whether she is the ambitious daughter of a millionaire or a girl whose talent is for the story and whose future depends upon herself, I invariably give her one piece of advice: "Go on a newspaper. Be a reporter. Refuse no assignment. Be thankful for a merciless City Editor and his blue pencil. But, if you feel that you have the genuine story-telling gift, save your money and leave at the end of a year, or two years at most."
As for myself, I absorbed life as best I could, met people in as many walks of life as possible. As I would not marry again, and, in consequence, had no more children, nor suffered from the wearing monotonies of domestic life, I have always kept my health and been equal to an immense amount of work.
But the point is that I had been sheltered and protected during my delicate years. No doubt it was a part of my destiny to hand on the intensely American qualities of body and mind I had inherited from my Dutch and English forefathers, as well as to do my share in carrying on the race. But I got rid of all that as quickly as possible, and struck out for that plane of modern civilization planted and furrowed and replenished by daughters of men.
III
THE REAL VICTIMS OF "SOCIETY"
I
There is nothing paradoxical in affirming that while no woman before she has reached the age of thirty-five or forty should, if she can avoid it, compete with men in work which the exigencies of civilization (man-made civilization) have adapted to him alone, still, every girl of every class, from the industrial straight up to the plutocratic, should be trained in some congenial vocation during her plastic years. Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago. Socialism might solve the problem if it were not for the Socialists. Certainly no man or body of men has yet arisen with the proper amount of imagination, selflessness, brains and constructive genius, necessary to plan a social order in which all men shall work without overworking and support all women during the best years of the child-bearing and child-rearing span. If men had been clever enough to make even an imperfect attempt to protect women without independent means from the terrors of life, say by taxing themselves, they would not be pestered to-day with the demand for equal rights, see themselves menaced in nearly all of the remunerative industries and professions, above all by the return of the Matriarchate.
It is Life that has developed the fighting instinct in woman, bred the mental antagonism of sex. Nature did not implant either. Nor has she ever wavered a jot from the original mix compounded in her immemorial laboratory. Man is man and woman is woman to-day, even to the superior length of limb in the male (relative to the trunk) and the greater thickness of hairs in the woman's eyelashes. In England women of the leisure class showed during the years of the sports craze a tendency to an unfeminine length of limb, often attaining or surpassing the male average. But Nature avenged herself by narrowing the pelvis and weakening the reproductive organs. Free trade drove the old sturdy yeoman into the towns and diminished the stature and muscular power of their descendants, but ten months of trench life and Nature laughed at the weak spot in civilization. The moment false conditions are removed she claims her own.
Women to-day may prove themselves quite capable of doing, and permanently, the work of men in ammunition and munition factories, but it is patent that when human bipeds first groped their way about the terrifying Earth, she was not equal to the task of leveling forests, killing the beasts that roamed them, hurling spears in savage warfare, and bearing many children for many years. She played her part in the scheme of things precisely as Nature had meant she should play it: she cooked, she soothed the warrior upon his return from killing of man or beast, and she brought up her boys to be warriors and her girls to serve them. There you have Nature and her original plan, a bald and uninteresting plan, but eminently practical for the mere purpose (which is all that concerns her) of keeping the world going. And so it would be to-day, even in the civilized core, if man had been clever enough to take the cue Nature flung in his face and kept woman where to-day he so ingenuously desires to see her, and before whose deliverance he is as helpless as old Nature herself.
Man obeyed the herding instinct whose ultimate expression was the growth of great cities, invented the telegraph, the cable, the school, the newspaper, the glittering shops, the public-lecture system; and, voluntarily or carelessly, threw open to women the gates of all the arts, to say nothing of the crafts. And all the while he not only continued to antagonize woman, proud and eager in her awakened faculties, with stupid interferences, embargoes and underhand thwartings, but he permitted her to struggle and die in the hideous contacts with life from which a small self-imposed tax would have saved her. Some of the most brilliant men the world will ever know have lived, and administered, and passed into history, and the misery of helpless women has increased from generation to generation, while coincidentally her intelligence has waxed from resignation or perplexity through indignation to a grim determination. Man missed his chance and must take the consequences.
Certainly, young women fulfill their primary duty to the race and, incidentally, do all that should be expected of them, in the bringing forth and rearing of children, making the home, and seeing to the coherence of the social groups they have organized for recreation or purely in the interest of the next generation.
Perhaps the women will solve the problem. I can conceive the time when there will have developed an enormous composite woman's brain which, combining superior powers of intuition and sympathy with that high intellectual development the modern conditions so generously permit, added to their increasing knowledge of and interest in the social, economic, and political problems, will make them a factor in the future development of the race, gradually bring about a state of real civilization which twenty generations of men have failed to accomplish.
But that is not yet, and we may all be dead before its heyday. The questions of the moment absorb us. We must take them as they arise and do the best we can with existing conditions. The world is terribly conservative. Look at the European War.
II
Nowhere are fortunes so insecure as in the United States. The phrase, "Three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves," was not coined in Europe. But neither does it embrace a great American truth Many a fortune rises and falls within the span of one generation. Many a girl reared in luxury, or what passes in her class for luxury, is suddenly forced out into the economic world with no preparation whatever. It would be interesting to gather the statistics of men who, with a large salary, or a fair practice, and indulged family, and a certain social position to keep up, either vaguely intend to save and invest one of these days—perhaps when the children are educated—or carry a large life insurance which they would find too heavy a tax at the moment.
Often, indeed, a man does insure his life, and then in some year of panic or depression is forced to sell the policy or go under. Or he insures in firms that fail. My father insured in three companies and all failed before he died. In San Francisco the "earthquake clause" prevented many men from recovering a penny on their merchandise or investments swept away by the fire. Even a large number of the rich were embarrassed by that fire, for, having invested millions in Class A buildings, which were fire-proof, they saw no necessity for expending huge sums annually in premiums. They never thought of a general conflagration whose momentum would carry the flames across the street and into their buildings through the windows, eating up the interiors and leaving the fire-proof shell. One family lost six million dollars in a few hours, and emigrated to one of the Swiss lakes in order to be able to educate their children while their fortunes slowly recovered with the aid of borrowed capital.
A large number of girls, who, without being rich, had led the sheltered life before the fire, were obliged to go to work at once. Some were clever enough to know what they could do and did it without loss of time, some were assisted, others blundered along and nearly starved.
Often men who have done well and even brilliantly up to middle life, are not equal to the tremendous demand upon the vital energies of beginning life over again after some disastrous visitation of Nature, or a panic, or an ill-advised personal venture has wrecked their own business or that of the concern in which they were a highly paid cog. In the mining States men are dependent upon the world's demand for their principal product. Farmers and stock-raisers are often cruelly visited, strikes or hard times paralyze mills and factories; and in times of panic and dry-rot the dealers in luxuries, including booksellers—to say nothing of the writers of books as well as the devotees of all the arts—are the first to suffer. And it is their women that suffer acutely, because although many of these men may hang on and recover, many more do not. They have used up their vital forces. It is not so much a matter of will as of physics. A woman in the same conditions who had been obliged to tax her vital organs for an equal number of years would no doubt have lasted as long.
Unless defective, there is not a girl alive, certainly not an American girl, who is wholly lacking in some sort of ability. The parasite type (who is growing rare in these days, by the way, for it is now the fashion to "do things") either fastens herself upon complacent relatives or friends when deserted by fortune, or drifts naturally into the half-world, always abundantly recruited from such as she.
Many girls have a certain facility in the arts and crafts, which, with severe training, might fit them for a second place in the class which owes its origin to Heaven-born gifts. If their facility manifests itself in writing they could be trained at college, or even on the small local newspaper to write a good mechanical story, constructed out of popular elements and eminently suited to the popular magazine. Or they may fit themselves for dramatic or musical criticism, or advertisement writing, which pays enormously but is not as easy as it sounds. Or if every school (I am saying nothing about girls' colleges) would train their promising "composition" writers in reporting, their graduates would plant their weary feet far more readily than they do now when they come to a great city and beseech a busy editor to give them a chance.
Almost anything can be done with the plastic mind. But not always. It is the better part of wisdom for proud parents to discover just what their offspring's facility amounts to before spending money on an art or a musical education, for instance. I had a painful experience, and no doubt it has been duplicated a thousand times, for Europe before the war was full of girls (many living on next to nothing) who were studying "art" or "voice culture," with neither the order of endowment nor the propelling brain-power to justify the sacrifice of their parents or the waste of their own time.
Some years ago, finding that a young relative, who was just finishing her school course, drew and painted in water colors with quite a notable facility, and the family for generations having manifested talents in one way or another, I decided to take her abroad and train her faculty that she might be spared the humiliation of dependence, nor feel a natural historic inclination to marry the first man who offered her an alternative dependence; and at the same time be enabled to support herself in a wholly congenial way. I did not delude myself with the notion that she was a genius, but I thought it likely she would become apt in illustrating, and I knew that I could throw any amount of work in her way, or secure her a position in the art department of some magazine.
I took her to the European city where I was then living and put her in the best of its art schools. To make a long story short, after I had expended some five thousand dollars on her, including traveling expenses and other incidentals, the net result was an elongated thumb. I was forced to the conclusion that she had not an atom of real talent, merely the treacherous American facility. Moreover, she lost all her interest in "art" when it meant hard work and persistent application. I was wondering what on earth I was to do with her when she solved the problem herself. She announced with unusual decision that she wanted to be a nurse, had always wanted to be a nurse (she had never mentioned the aspiration to me) and that nothing else interested her. Her mother had been an invalid; one way or another she had seen a good deal of illness.
Accordingly I sent her back to this country and entered her, through the influence of friends, at a hospital. She graduated at the head of her class, and although that was three or four years ago she has never been idle since. She elected to take infectious cases, as the remuneration is higher, and although she is very small, with such tiny hands and feet that while abroad her gloves and boots had to be made to order, no doubt she has so trained her body that the strains in nursing fall upon no particular member.
In that case I paid for my own mistake, and she found her level in ample time, which is as it should be. Of what use is experience if you are to be misled by family vanity? As she is pretty and quite mad about children, no doubt she will marry; but the point is that she can wait; or, later, if the man should prove inadequate, she can once more support herself, and with enthusiasm, for she loves the work.
To be a nurse is no bed of roses; but neither is anything else. To be dependent in the present stage of civilization is worse, and nothing real is accomplished in life without work and its accompaniment of hard knocks. Nursing is not only a natural vocation for a woman, but an occupation which increases her matrimonial chances about eighty per cent. Nor is it as arduous after the first year's training is over as certain other methods of wresting a livelihood from an unwilling world—reporting, for instance. It is true that only the fit survive the first year's ordeal, but on the other hand few girls are so foolish as to choose the nursing career who do not feel within themselves a certain stolid vitality. After graduation from the hospital course their future depends upon themselves. Doctors soon discover the most desirable among the new recruits, others find permanent places in hospitals; and, it may be added, the success of these young women depends upon a quality quite apart from mere skill—personality. In the spring of 1915 I was in a hospital and there was one nurse I would not have in the room. I was told that she was one of the most valuable nurses on the staff, but that was nothing to me.
I could not see that any of the nurses in this large hospital was overworked. All looked healthy and contented. My own "night special," save when I had a temperature and demanded ice, slept from the time she prepared me for the night until she rose to prepare me for the day, with the exception of the eleven o'clock supper which she shared with the hospital staff. Being very pretty and quite charming she will marry, no doubt, although she refuses to nurse men. But there are always the visiting doctors, the internes, and the unattached men in households, where in the most seductive of all garbs, she remains for weeks at a time.
In fact nearly all nurses are pretty. I wonder why?
The hospital nurses during the day arrived at intervals to take my temperature, give me detestable nourishment, or bring me flowers or a telephone message. It certainly never occurred to me to pity any of them, and when they lingered to talk they entertained me with pleasant pictures of their days off. They struck me as being able to enjoy life very keenly, possibly because of being in a position to appreciate its contrasts.
I know the daughter of a wealthy and historic family, whose head—he is precisely the type of the elderly, cold-blooded, self-righteous, self-conscious New York aristocrat of the stage—will not permit her to gratify her desire to write for publication, "for," saith he, "I do not wish to see my honored name on the back of works of fiction."
I do not think, myself, that he has deprived the world of one more author, for if she had fiction in her brain-cells no parental dictum could keep it confined within the walls of her skull; but the point is that being a young woman of considerable energy and mental activity, she found mere society unendurable and finally persuaded her father to make her one of his secretaries. She learned not only stenography and typewriting but telegraphy. There is a private apparatus in their Newport home for her father's confidential work, and this she manipulates with the skill of a professional. If the fortunes of her family should go to pieces, she could find a position and support herself without the dismal and health-racking transition which is the fate of so many unfortunate girls suddenly bereft and wholly unprepared.
III
The snobbishness of this old gentleman is by no means a prerogative of New York's "old families." One finds it in every class of American men above the industrial. In Honoré Willsie's novel, Lydia of the Pines, an American novel of positive value, the father was a day laborer, as a matter of a fact (although of good old New England farming stock), earning a dollar and a half a day, and constantly bemoaning the fact; yet when "young Lydia," who was obliged to dress like a scarecrow, wished to earn her own pin-money by making fudge he objected violently. The itching pride of the American male deprives him of many comforts and sometimes of honor and freedom, because he will not let his wife use her abilities and her spare time. He will steal or embezzle rather than have the world look on while "his" wife ekes out the family income. The determined Frenchwomen have had their men in training for generations, and the wife is the business partner straight up to the haute bourgeoisie; but the American woman, for all her boasted tyranny over the busy male of her land, is either an expensive toy or a mere household drudge, until years and experience give her freedom of spirit. This war will do more to liberate her than that mild social earthquake called the suffrage movement. The rich women are working so hard that not only do they dress and entertain far less than formerly but their husbands are growing quite accustomed to their separate prominence and publicly admitted usefulness. The same may be said of groups of women in less conspicuous classes, and when the war is over it is safe to say these women will continue to do as they please. There is something insidiously fascinating in work to women that never have worked, not so much in the publicity it may give but in the sense of mental expansion; and, in the instance of war, the passion of usefulness, the sense of dedication to a high cause, the necessary frequent suppression of self, stamp the soul with an impress that never can be obliterated. That these women engaged in good works often quarrel like angry cats, or fight for their relief organization as a lioness would fight for her hungry cub, is beside the point. That is merely another way of admitting they are human beings; not necessarily women, but just human beings. As it was in the beginning, is now, etc. Far better let loose their angry passions in behalf of the men who are fighting to save the world from a reversion to barbarism, than rowing their dressmakers, glaring across the bridge table, and having their blood poisoned by eternal jealousy over some man.
And if it will hasten the emancipation of the American man from the thralldom of snobbery still another barrier will go down in the path of the average woman. Just consider for a moment how many men are failures. They struggle along until forty or forty-five "on their own," although fitted by nature to be clerks and no more, striving desperately to keep up appearances—for the sake of their own pride, for the sake of their families, even for the sake of being "looked up to" by their wife and observant offspring. But without real hope, because without real ability (they soon, unless fools, outlive the illusions of youth when the conquest of fortune was a matter of course) always in debt, and doomed to defeat.
How many women have said to me—women in their thirties or early forties, and with two or three children of increasing demands: "Oh, if I could help! How unjust of parents not to train girls to do something they can fall back on. I want to go to work myself and insure my children a good education and a start in the world, but what can I do? If I had been specialized in any one thing I'd use it now whether my husband liked it or not. But although I have plenty of energy and courage and feel that I could succeed in almost anything I haven't the least idea how to go about it."
If a woman's husband collapses into death or desuetude while her children are young, it certainly is the bounden duty of some member of her family to support her until her children are old enough to go to school, for no one can take her place in the home before that period. Moreover, her mind should be as free of anxiety as her body of strain. But what a ghastly reflection upon civilization it is when she is obliged to stand on her feet all day in a shop or factory, or make tempting edibles for some Woman's Exchange, because she cannot afford to spend time upon a belated training that might admit her lucratively to one of the professions or business industries.
The childless woman solves the problem with comparative ease. She invariably shows more energy and decision, provided, of course, these qualities have been latent within her.
Nevertheless, it is often extraordinary just what she does do. For instance I knew a family of girls upon whose college education an immense sum had been expended, and whose intellectual arrogance I never have seen equalled. When their father failed and died, leaving not so much as a small life insurance, what did they do? Teach? Write? Edit? Become some rich and ignorant man's secretary? Not a bit of it. They cooked. Always noted in their palmy days for their "table," and addicted to relieving the travail of intellect with the sedative of the homeliest of the minor arts, they began on preserves for the Woman's Exchange; and half the rich women in town were up at their house day after day stirring molten masses in a huge pot on a red-hot range.
It was sometime before they were taken seriously, and, particularly after the enthusiasm of their friends waned, there was a time of hard anxious struggle. But they were robust and determined, and in time they launched out as caterers and worked up a first-class business. They took their confections to the rear entrances of their friends' houses on festive occasions and accepted both pay and tips with lively gratitude. They educated their younger brothers and lost their arrogance. They never lost their friends.
Owing to dishonest fiction the impression prevails throughout the world that "Society" is heartless and that the rich and well-to-do drop their friends the moment financial reverses force them either to reduce their scale of living far below the standard, or go to work. When that happens it is the fault of the reversed, not of the entrenched. False pride, constant whining, or insupportable irritabilities gradually force them into a dreary class apart. If anything, people of wealth and secure position take a pride in standing by their old friends (their "own sort"), in showing themselves above all the means sins of which fiction and the stage have accused them, and in lending what assistance they can. Even when the head of the family has disgraced himself and either blown out his brains or gone to prison, it depends entirely upon the personalities of his women whether or not they retain their friends. In fact any observant student of life is reminded daily that one's real position in the world depends upon personality, more particularly if backed by character. Certainly it is nine-tenths of the battle for struggling women.
Another woman whom I always had looked upon as a charming butterfly, but who, no doubt, had long shown her native shrewdness and determination in the home, stepped into her husband's shoes when he collapsed from strain, abetted by drink, and now competes in the insurance business with the best of the men. But she had borne the last of her children and she has perfect health.
Galsworthy's play, The Fugitive, may not have been good drama but it had the virtue of provoking thought after one had left the theater. More than ever it convinced me, at least, that the women of means and leisure with sociological leanings should let the working girl take care of herself for a time and devote their attention to the far more hopeless problem of the lady suddenly thrown upon her own resources.
No doubt this problem will have ceased to exist twenty years hence. Every girl, rich or poor, and all grades between, will have specialized during her plastic years on something to be used as a resource; but at present there are thousands of young women who find the man they married in ignorance an impossible person to live with and yet linger on in wretched bondage because what little they know of social conditions terrifies them. If they are pretty they fear other men as much as they fear their own husbands, and for all the "jobs" open to unspecialized women, they seem to be preeminently unfitted. If the rich women of every large city would build a great college in which every sort of trade and profession could be taught, from nursing to stenography, from retouching photographs to the study of law, while the applicant, after her sincerity had been established, was kept in comfort and ease of mind, with the understanding that she should repay her indebtedness in weekly installments after the college had launched her into the world, we should have no more such ghastly plays as The Fugitive or hideous sociological tracts as A Bed of Roses.
IV
ONE SOLUTION OF A GREAT PROBLEM
I
The world is willing and eager to buy what it wants. If you have goods to sell you soon find your place at the counter, unless owing to some fault of character your fellow barterers and their patrons will have none of you. Of course there is always the meanest of all passions, jealousy, waiting to thwart you at every turn, but no woman with a modicum of any one of those wares the world wants and must have need fear any enemy but her own loss of courage.
The pity is that so many women with no particular gift and only minor energies are thrust into the economic world without either natural or deliberate equipment. All that saves them in nine cases out of ten is conserved energies, and if they are thrust out too young they are doubly at a disadvantage.
A good deal has been written about the fresh enthusiasm of the young worker, as contrasted with the slackened energies and disillusioned viewpoint of middle life. But I think most honest employers will testify that a young girl worker's enthusiasm is for closing time, and her dreams are not so much of the higher skilfulness as of the inevitable man. Nature is inexorable. She means that the young things shall reproduce. If they will not or cannot that is not her fault; she is always there with the urge. Even when girls think they sell themselves for the adornments so dear to youth they are merely the victims of the race, driven toward the goal by devious ways. Nature, of course, when she fashioned the world reckoned without science. I sometimes suspect her of being of German origin, for so methodical and mechanical is her kultur that she will go on repeating "two and two make four" until the final cataclysm.
I think that American women are beginning to realize that American men are played out at forty-five; or fifty, at the most. There are exceptions, of course, but with the vast majority the strain is too great and the rewards are too small. They cannot retire in time. I have a friend who, after a brilliant and active career, has withdrawn to the communion of nature and become a philosopher. He insists that all men should be retired by law at forty-five and condemned to spend the rest of their days tilling the soil gratis for women and the rising generation. The outdoor life would restore a measure of their dissipated vitality and prolong their lives.
This may come to pass in time: stranger things have happened. But, as I remarked before, it is the present we have to consider. It seems to me it would be a good idea if every woman who is both protected and untrained but whose husband is approaching forty should, if not financially independent, begin seriously to think of fitting herself for self-support. The time to prepare for possible disaster is not after the torpedo has struck the ship.
A thousand avenues are open to women, and fresh ones open yearly. She can prepare secretly, or try her hand at first one and then another (if she begins by being indeterminate) of such congenial occupations as are open to women of her class, beyond cooking, teaching, clerking. Those engaged in reforms, economic improvements, church work, and above all, to-day, war relief work, should not be long discovering their natural bent as well as its marketable value, and the particular rung of the ladder upon which to start.
Many women whose energies have long been absorbed by the home are capable of flying leaps. These women still in their thirties, far from neglecting their children when looking beyond the home, are merely ensuring their proper nourishment and education.
Why do not some of the public spirited women, whose own fortunes are secure, form bureaus where all sorts of women, apprehensive of the future, may be examined, advised, steered on their way? In this they would merely be taking a leaf from the present volume of French history its women are writing. It is the women of independent means over there who have devised so many methods by which widows and girls and older spinsters tossed about in the breakers of war may support themselves and those dependent upon them. There is Mlle. Thompson's École Feminine, for instance, and Madame Goujon's hundred and one practical schemes which I will not reiterate here.
Women of the industrial class in the United States need new laws, but little advice how to support themselves. They fall into their natural place almost automatically, for they are the creatures of circumstances, which are set in motion early enough to determine their fate. If they do hesitate their minds are quickly made up for them by either their parents or their social unit. The great problem to-day is for the women of education, fastidiousness, a certain degree of ease, threatened with a loss of that male support upon which ancient custom bred them to rely. Their children will be specialized; they will see to that. But their own problem is acute and it behooves trained and successful women to take it up, unless the war lasts so long that every woman will find her place as inevitably as the working girl.
II
For a long time to come women will be forced to leave the administering of the nation as well as of states and cities to men, for men are still too strong for them. The only sort of women that men will spontaneously boost into public life are pretty, bright, womanly, spineless creatures who may be trusted to set the cause of woman back a few years at least, and gratify their own sense of humorous superiority.
Women would save themselves much waste of energy and many humiliations if they would devote themselves exclusively to helping and training their own sex. Thousands are at work on the problems of higher wage and shorter hours for women of the industrial class, but this problem of the carefully nurtured, wholly untrained, and insecurely protected woman they have so far ignored. To my mind this demands the first consideration and the application of composite woman's highest intelligence. The industrial woman has been trained to work, she learns as she grows to maturity to protect herself and fight her own battles, and in nine cases out of ten she resents the interference of the leisure class in her affairs as much as she would charity. The leaders of every class should be its own strong spirits. And the term "class consciousness" was not invented by fashionable society.
There is another problem that women, forced imminently or prospectively to support themselves, must face before long, and that is the heavy immigration from Europe. Of course some of those competent women over there will keep the men's jobs they hold now, and among the widows and the fatherless there will be a large number of clerks and agriculturists. But many réformés will be able to fill those positions satisfactorily, and, when sentiment has subsided, young women at least (who are also excellent workers) will begin to think of husbands; and, unless the war goes on for many years and reduces our always available crop, American girls of the working class will have to look to their laurels both ways.
III
Here is the reverse of the picture, which possibly may save the too prosperous and tempting United States from what in the end could not fail to be a further demoralization of her ancient ideals and depletion of the old American stock:
No matter how many men are killed in a war there are more males when peace is declared than the dead and blasted, unless starvation literally has sent the young folks back to the earth. During any war children grow up, and even in a war of three years' duration it is estimated that as against four million males killed there will be six million young males to carry on the race as well as its commerce and industries. For the business of the nation and high finance there are the men whose age saved them from the dangers of the battlefield.
There will therefore be many million marriageable men in Europe if the war ends in 1917. But they will, for the most part, be of a very tender age indeed, and normal young women between twenty and thirty do not like spring chickens. They are beloved only by idealess girls of their own age, by a certain type of young women who are alluded to slightingly as "crazy about boys," possibly either because men of mature years find them uninteresting or because of a certain vampire quality in their natures, and by blasée elderly women who generally foot the bills.
Dr. Talcott Williams pointed out to me not long since that after all great wars, and notably after our own Civil War, there has been a notable increase in the number of marriages in which the preponderance of years was on the wrong side. Also that it was not until after our own war that the heroine of fiction began to reverse the immemorial procedure and marry a man her inferior in years. In other words, anything she could get. This would almost argue that fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.
It is quite true that young men coming to maturity during majestic periods of the world's history are not likely to have the callow brains and petty ideals which distinguished the average youth of peace. Even boys of fourteen these days talk intelligently of the war and the future. They read the newspapers, even subscribing for one if at a boarding-school. In the best of the American universities the men have been alive to the war from the first, and a large proportion of the young Americans who have done gallant service with the American Ambulance Corps had recently graduated when the war broke out. Others are serving during vacations, and are difficult to lure back to their studies.
Some of the young Europeans of eighteen or twenty will come home from the trenches when peace is declared, and beyond a doubt will compel the love if not the respect of damsels of twenty-five and upward. But will they care whether they fascinate spinsters of twenty-five and upward, or not? The fact is not to be overlooked that there will be as many young girls as youths, and as these girls also have matured during their long apprenticeship to sorrow and duty, it is not to be imagined they will fail to interest young warriors of their own age—nor fail to battle for their rights with every device known to the sex.
Temperament must be taken into consideration, of course, and a certain percentage of men and women of unbalanced ages will be drawn together. That happens in times of peace. Moreover it is likely that a large number of young Germans in this country either will conceive it their duty to return to Germany and marry there or import the forlorn in large numbers. If they have already taken to themselves American wives it is on the cards that they will renounce them also. There is nothing a German cannot be made to believe is his duty to the Fatherland, and he was brought up not to think. But if monarchy falls in Germany, and a republic, socialistic or merely democratic, rises on the ruins, then it is more than likely that the superfluous women will be encouraged to transfer themselves and their maidenly dreams to the great dumping-ground of the world.
Unless we legislate meanwhile.