The woman of to-morrow

It has been the fashion, and is still with a certain class of people, to disparage the woman’s club. They say the club is a place where gossip and backbiting flourish, and the virtues of love and charity and tolerance are chiefly conspicuous by their absence. I have even known a brilliant lecturer, who depends for her audiences on these same women’s clubs, to refuse to lend a hand in any active work, saying she “did not believe in women’s clubs, because the members are selfish, self-seeking and trivial; because the club women are all envious and uncharitable.”

Now, isn’t this sweeping accusation rather unjust? When we look about and see what women have accomplished for their own sex since the clubs were established; when we look about and see what the clubs are really doing to-day for their communities; when we count up the libraries, the improved sanitary conditions of towns and cities, the increased educational advantages; when we realize the increased average intelligence of the average woman who belongs to current events classes and literary clubs; when, in short, we note the broadening of character in the average individual club woman, is this a fair statement?

To be sure, there are narrow-minded, envious women in clubs. Alas! we all know them. One such woman is enough to injure seriously the work of a small club; half a dozen of her can give a large club a bad name—a reputation for backbiting and all uncharitableness. Half a dozen such women can keep a club in a chronic quarrelsome state, and by spreading evil reports outside can destroy all its usefulness in a community. But in the most notorious of such affairs the trouble is caused by a mere handful of narrow-minded women, while nine-tenths of the membership sit sadly by in shamed silence. Shall they be condemned because of the quarrelsome few?

But in the vast majority of clubs the spirit of petty rivalry and self-seeking which is sometimes noticeable in individual cases is fast disappearing, or has never materialized. There is such a great and splendid work for the women’s clubs to do that the earnest, noble, unselfish woman becomes absorbed in something beyond self-seeking. She ceases to care whether her name stands first on the list of committees, or, indeed, whether it is there at all. She ceases to mind if she is left off the list of after-dinner speakers at the annual banquet. She ceases to suffer an envious pang because her enemy is asked to write the club poem, for the simple reason that she has ceased to be conscious of an enemy.

She has ceased to feel the slights which may have grieved her in the past, because she has ceased to “wear a chip on her shoulder.” She has come to rejoice and be glad in any good thing that may befall any good woman because she has grown broad-minded enough to recognize that honor and glory falling to one woman mean honor and glory for the cause of all women; that in these days the advancement of woman and the glory of womanhood comes to all and for all and through all of us. For such is the real sisterhood of woman. The club movement was never more serious, perhaps never so earnest as it is to-day. It may be because women are finding how much better it is to do than to talk, to be than to vainly imagine. As one bright woman said: “It doesn’t always mean that a woman is growing because she talks a great deal.”

The ordinary club woman who is a busy wife and mother seeks her club as a rest and a change from the activities of home; the friendships she forms there make an added interest to her life and help to get her out of the treadmill of her daily existence. The ordinary wife and mother has plenty to do in her own family, to be sure, but she can do that plenty ten times as well for the change that is afforded by an hour or two at the club each week; for there she is transported to a different environment, sees through another pair of eyes and comes in contact with another set of minds. She goes home rested, refreshed and stimulated through her club friendships. She has not belittled herself with club gossip, but she has enlarged her sympathies and taken a fresh outlook on life.

If this is true of the woman who has her days crowded full with home ties and home interests, how much more is it true of the woman who has no home ties; and unfortunately we have hundreds, yes, thousands of such women in this country. In the club memberships there are not only many unmarried women, but there are widows who have been bereft of their families, and a goodly proportion of comfortable matrons whose children have grown up and left home, either to establish nests of their own or to go into business for themselves. The club has been the salvation of all these women and has prevented their growing old before their time. “There are no old women nowadays,” says some one, and it is largely because we have women’s clubs, where women keep young without thinking about it.

There is nothing that develops a woman better, or that broadens her character more than a club life. Give her something to think about, something to take away with her when she comes into the club; she will soon be willing to do her share of the work, and then she will begin to grow. Many a fine president of to-day can recall the time when she was afraid of her own voice, when she accepted her first bit of committee work with fear and trembling. And she knows that the years between have been years of growth and helpfulness and work for others. For, after all, that is the true secret of the good club woman—helpfulness to others. She who goes on to committees and works her way through the lower offices and up to the president’s chair simply from personal ambition and self-seeking pride, is not the good club woman, nor the really successful one. For in these modern days personal ambition is more plainly discerned than it used to be, and the woman who climbs into the presidential chair merely for personal glorification is not destined to sit there long.

There must be a higher, a more altruistic purpose. The best president is she who is so full of plans for the elevation of the club and the development of every member that she forgets herself. And so she becomes at once the servant and the queen of clubs. In short, the club movement is to-day one of the greatest factors in the world’s progress; and he or she who proclaims a disbelief in it because of the shortcomings of some few club acquaintances lacks the faculty of a comprehensive perception of the things of to-day as well as of prophetic insight into the future.

But when your club begins to be a bore, it is time to leave it. It is a mistake to hold that by staying in it with a sense of resignation you are discharging any sort of a duty to yourself or anybody. The fault is either with you or the club, of course. If it is the former, you can drop your connection with it without formality, with the understanding with yourself that it is to be taken up again after a little; if it is the latter, you would do better to go to work so to change the aspect of the club that it will hold all of its old interest for you. But if you do take a vacation in this fashion yourself, you need not be afraid of losing interest altogether. The certain result will be only a feeling of being outside everything and alien in interest to that of your friends, and the end so brought about will be the one you want. You will go back to your club with a new appreciation and be of new service to it. When a club gets to be an unpleasant duty its best function is missing. The self-seeking, ambitious woman, the woman who uses the club merely as a pedestal on which to pose before an admiring world, or as a stepping-stone to get into a higher grade of society than she has previously known, having only her own selfish aims at heart, has only a short-lived success, and appears with less frequency every season. The club does not want and will not keep such women as leaders. To-day the club leader must have a higher aim and a broader culture, and, added unto these, a genuine desire to help humanity to better things than the superficial woman who “must stand in the full glare of the footlights at any cost.”

More than that, the woman who sees in the club movement of to-day nothing beyond that very primitive stage when women wrote papers from encyclopediac notes, or when they begged or hired some other person to write them, has not passed the a b c class of the women’s clubs. It is a beautiful idea, isn’t it? that to-day women are reaching hands across mountains and plains and establishing hearty, whole-souled friendships in every part of this great country. What would our grandmothers have said at the very idea of corresponding freely and intimately with women of whose ancestors they knew nothing and whose names, even, they had not heard a few months before? It is one of the beauties of the club movement of to-day, that we are opening our hearts to each other in this way: that our ideas of helpfulness make us forget the old conventionalities and that the broader outlook which belongs to the woman of to-day is contagious. For it is impossible to get drawn into this larger view of club life and remain contented with a narrow horizon. We are bound to grow and to throw off the shackles of prejudice and pettiness. We cannot help it.

Of course, there are certain dangers connected with club life. Our activities multiply and we are in danger of being drawn into a vortex that will threaten to swallow us. When the club season begins some of us will venture into the outer edge of a whirlpool that, unless we can manage to hold ourselves steady and keep our mental poise, will suck us under, and we shall go on and on in the concentric circles until we are wrecked, nerves and mind. There is little doubt that overwork in so-called “club-duty” has reduced more than one woman to nervous prostration. This is a gloomy view of the case, I know, and I shall be blamed for giving utterance to it; but is it not the truth? Are we not too apt to take ourselves too seriously? If we are individually of “greater value than many sparrows,” are we not individually of greater value, to ourselves and our families at least, than many clubs?

Not but what the club stands for a serious part of our life-work; not but what we should be willing to bring to it the best of ourselves and most earnest labors and affection. But what I deprecate is the mistaken view of club work which we are in imminent danger of taking. When we allow ourselves to be drawn into the whirling vortex made up of club classes, too many clubs with the varying interests, too great a multiplicity of club committees, receptions and club teas by the score, until the very name of them nauseates us, the scramble for office (either for ourselves or our friends) and the numerous petty trials and tribulations that follow in the wake of all these things; then we are not getting the best results from club work ourselves, nor giving them to others, either. “There is but one way to become a perfect, all-round club woman, and that is by being a perfect all-round woman.” And the first essential for that is, to find and keep our mental poise—to make ourselves something more than a social chatterbox or a bundle of nerves.

Those writers who are fond of descanting on the injury to the home that attends club membership seldom understand their subject. As one woman, responding to a toast on “The Club Husband,” puts it:

“The unwritten law of the ideal women’s club is: This club exists for the happiness of the whole family. When that ceases, the club’s reason for existence will cease. So long as we are thus considerate, never allowing our club life to absorb the attention that belongs to our home life, just so long may our club husband snap his fingers at the people who try to pity him. Let the critics carp. They are like the young girl who walked through her uncle’s chair-factory, and gazed at the rows upon rows of chairs, saying, ‘Why, uncle, what can you ever do with all these chairs?’

“‘Don’t you fret, Maria, settin’-down ain’t goin’ out o’ fashion!’

“The making of homes and cherishing those in them is not going out of fashion, and the club husband would be the first to agree to it.”

The club is meant, primarily, for all classes of women. The constitution of about every club in the land will tell you that it is banded together for the elevation of women in its own community and for the purpose of bringing them together for moral and social advancement—or words to that effect. If this means anything, it means that the butcher’s wife and the baker’s wife and the candlestick-maker’s wife are on a level in the club with the wives and daughters of millionaires, should the latter condescend to become members; though, for that matter, in these latter days some of our greatest millionaires are butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers, dignified by the names of pork-packers, biscuit producers and silver manufacturers. And yet in our clubs are a great many women who find it hard to make both ends meet. Many of these are quite as well educated as any member of the club to which they belong; others are not; but in any case the club idea places all on an equality, and it is in every club member’s power to contribute something to the permanent happiness of all the others.

There are some women to whom the club brings all of social life they ever know; indeed, in these days of hurry and worry this is coming to be more and more true of all of us. Therefore let us give out all the sunshine on club days that we possibly can. Let us then radiate sweetness and light, and cease from taking our pleasures too sadly or too seriously. And the paragrapher who looks to women’s clubs for material for his never-satisfied hopper, finds here the same attitude and converts it into cause for mirth. We should take life seriously, because it is a solemn thing; but on the other hand there is no need of letting our Puritanic inheritances of mind and training tinge all existence with gloom. When we set out to have a good time, let us have it. And let us have it all the time. Happiness is more a habit of the mind than anything else. If we keep ourselves in that mental frame, admitting nothing but the sunlight of existence, sunshine will become such a habit with us that we can no more help shedding sunlight around us than we can help breathing. Isn’t that worth while? And the club, where we come to meet our sisters who have the same kind of trials and difficulties as we do, is one of the places where we should not only seek to gather up sunshine, but to scatter it. For we cannot reap what we do not sow, nor reflect what is not in the soul.

Above all, let us cease here all sorts of petty criticism. The club should be so charged with the atmosphere of kindliness and good-will that those who come to it shall receive a new baptism of love for their fellow-creatures. Have you ever belonged to a club where the very spirit of things was so charged with wrangling and petty criticism and smothering hatred that you have gone home feeling that nothing but a Turkish bath and an old-fashioned revival prayer-meeting could ever get you clean again, body and soul? Alas, that there are such clubs and women enough in them to keep them alive. But if you or I belong to such an one, it is our duty first to try to improve matters, and failing in that, to resign membership in it. We owe it to our immortal souls not to smirch them with hatred and wrangling and ill-temper, whenever we can help it; and we usually can.

It is so easy to see the faults or the ridiculous side of other people. In the average club, the actual working force is seldom over ten per cent. of the membership. The thinking for the club is done by a few, while the remainder come in to reap the results of what has been prepared, often by actual “sweat of the brow” and almost the life-blood of that small remnant which constitutes the working force and is rewarded only by having its several names recorded as a committee. Would it not seem, then, that the least we could do—those of us who leave the work to others—is to be lenient to the shortcomings of the committee, if there seem to be any? It is so easy to criticise. The duty of extracting motes from other people’s eyes is very attractive, but there is excellent advice on the subject of neglecting the beam in our own eye which the average woman may well read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

If the club is not making us better women in every way, broader-minded and more liberal in our judgment towards the rest of the world, more tolerant of other people’s views, more fond of our home and more interesting to those who have to live with us in it, more hopeful of the future and less satisfied with our present mental and spiritual acquirements, more interested in the uplifting of humanity, yet less willing to cut off our home ties, more loving in our relations with each other, more tolerant of the failings of our fellow-members and more intolerant of gossip pertaining thereto; if the club does not mean all these things and more, then we would better give up our membership and take up the duties of home exclusively.

If we are not the more attractive at home for the broadening and developing influence of the club, then are we failing to grasp the significance of what the club should mean. If a woman comes home fresh and smiling from a club meeting, full of interest in matters outside the four walls of her home and ideas regarding them, she can do so much more for her family. The woman who was heard to say that she was saving her money to go and hear a performance of Mozart’s Twelfth Mass because that was the regiment her husband enlisted in, was not a club woman and had lacked the opportunities which the club affords for picking up knowledge on subjects which her previous education had lacked. We need more perfectly rounded and thoroughly developed characters, and that is exactly what the club should mean to us as individuals.

They say women have no sense of humor. At least, they—and, of course, it was a masculine “they”—said it in former times. How would it work to put more humor into our meetings? Say, have a funny programme once in a month or a winter? Look at the year books, for instance. The subjects in some are appallingly heavy: “Slavery—Its Rise and Extinction,” “Rise of Political Parties,” “Evils That Menace a Republic.” Two-thirds of the women attending come from homes where there is constant care and worry. They need lightening and heartening. They need a hearty laugh. On the contrary, everything is planned to “stimulate thought” and improve the mind. Why not have one afternoon a month devoted to everyone telling the very funniest thing she ever read, saw, or heard? Or have one member relate some mirth-provoking story? There will surely be some one who, like Artemus Ward, was so “patriotic as to sacrifice all his wife’s relations to the cause of liberty”; and the funniest things that happen are not always told. Sometimes because there is no one to appreciate them. Somebody suggests that “if any sedate member object to such levity she could have the next meeting of a grim character and discuss ‘Whether the increase of cremation would affect the price of pottery’ or ‘Should a funeral be held in the morning or the afternoon?’ Women’s clubs are a good thing and their price is above rubies, but put a few pickles and salads in your solid repast, and let the drawn lines of thought relax over a little bit of nonsense.”

Anyone who has appeared on the platform before women’s audiences, with a strain of humor showing through the talk, can appreciate their plaint that we do not respond quickly to satire or to mild “hits.” Wit must be sharp to catch the average woman. Why is it that we do not laugh more, and laugh more heartily? “Have we gotten the idea in some cobwebbed corner of our brains that it is wicked to be merry,” says one club-woman on this subject, “or are we indeed the ‘serious sex,’ so called, and hopelessly so; or is our humor, as Mr. Harry Thurston Peck says it is, ‘entirely superficial’—that is, put on for the occasion? No one questions that there is plenty of laughter, at least of smile, among women, but it lacks sincerity; it has not the earnest ring of genuine merriment. If we stop to question the reason why, and if we are scientifically inclined we cannot fail to do so, as a lack of humor assigns a race to a lower order of development, we find the answer to be one of two causes. First, women, as a whole, look at life in all its relations from an intensely personal standpoint. For example, if you ask one to admire a gown, a carpet or a picture, she will do so, and then add (as a rule) either that she has or did have one almost exactly like it. If you tell her of some personal experience, she usually grows impatient with the desire to relate a corresponding one of her own. She does not seem to be able to put herself out of the equation. For this reason, when anything genuinely ludicrous occurs, she must first think of her own relation to it, whether by any possibility the laugh can be turned against herself, and by this time the spontaneity of the laughter, its genuineness, has vanished. This, I find to be one cause. Another is her persistent clinging to the small burdens of life. Men, most of them, seem able to drop even very heavy business cares when they enter the home life; but woman too often carries these everywhere—in her pleasure excursions, to her afternoon teas; even, and perhaps more often than anywhere else, to her couch. One woman told me that she arranged all her plans and all her meals for the next day after she was in her bed at night. How, then, can women help being serious, when the mind is always heavily burdened, when it carries about with it an unconscious, but real, weight, which it never discards, and which never leaves it free and open to impressions?”

Once in a while you find a woman who does not, like the snail, carry her house on her back. The ability to cast it off is certainly an accomplishment which every one should cultivate, and the more she gets interested in outside affairs—world interests—the less likely she is to become narrowed. That there are still clubs which devote themselves to the pursuit of culture as obtained from encyclopædias and who take their mental pabulum from the mouths of babes and sucklings, and that there are still women who make a fetish of their clubs, erecting false standards of life until their homes are left unto them desolate, must be admitted. It is a significant fact, however, that women are being called upon to consider problems, civic and social, which require a broader training than it was possible for them to obtain a generation or more ago. This training the woman’s college and the woman’s club, when properly conducted, supply, the latter, especially, giving to women who have missed a college training the opportunity of keeping up intellectual life and of putting newly acquired knowledge to practical use in some line of economic endeavor or social service, for the day has not yet passed when the woman’s club may be styled the “middle-aged woman’s university.”

No; let us have our clubs and work in them together, for so shall we gain new ideas and a more thorough understanding of the real sisterhood of our sex. We shall renew our strength as the eagles, and our belief in each other as actual living factors in the world’s work. And if the club has an altruistic basis, if it has a clause in its constitution about being the means of “elevating this community,” if it is really working for some actual barriers, then let the public know it by every possible means. One of the hopeful signs of club-work is that there are few clubs left that consider their papers and discussions too sacred to be shared with common folk.

Of course, there is danger of running to the opposite extreme. Those clubs whose most laborious efforts seem to lie in serving tea once a month and providing a literary programme that is indeed milk for babes are too often inclined to rush into print with elaborated accounts of table decorations and good gowns, but even that shows a hospitable spirit, does it not? At least, they are setting a good example to clubs whose discussions and papers, if accurately reported, would be of immense value to younger clubs and to the outside world of women who cannot attend the meetings. For even the occasional woman who boasts that she never belonged to a club reads the club column in her favorite newspaper.

Exclusiveness, after all, is only another name for selfishness. And selfishness is utterly and thoroughly incompatible with the idea of women’s clubs. The club motif is helpfulness, and that is a quality diametrically opposed to selfishness. We might go further and say that the sensitiveness which so many of us plead is only another phase of selfishness—and none of us have a right to plead that. Why is it that some words we roll as a sweet morsel under our tongues, while their definitions we abhor?

Let us, as club-women, make some good resolutions and then keep them.

Whereas, we are all human and therefore love gossip, let us resolve:

That we will cultivate a spirit of love and patience for every woman in the club.

That if we hear a single word of criticism on her words or actions or dress or face or figure, we will not repeat it.

That we will not answer such criticisms, except to say something good of the assailed.

That we will make the club a place where helpfulness and kindliness go hand in hand with inspiration.

That the Golden Rule is just as good a guide to club life as to home life.

And that we will adopt it and practice it.

And let us reflect that if the club movement were not a good thing we would not find a million of the best women in our country in it.

I have seen many club mottoes and club platforms in my day and generation, but the following seems to me the best. It originated with the Lincoln (Neb.) club-women:

“Ours is an inclusive, departmental club. Since its object is to help and be helped, the following women are invited to become members:—