[26] See chapter on Education of Adolescent Girls, in Adolescence, by G. Stanley Hall. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904.
It is most unfortunate that these real issues should be obscured by sex rivalry. There can be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his body, between science and religion, between man and woman. Such antagonisms rest back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman alone, for any purposes of life. And there is, too, that evil notion which still affects economics, that when two trade one must lose. The fact is that in all honest exchange buyer and seller gain alike, and all who participate become rich. It is so in all honest relations between these half-creatures we call men and women. In agreement, association, coöperation, lies strongest significant life for both. In separation, competition and antagonism lie arid, poor, mean lives, conceited and egotistic, vapid and contemptible.
With the weakening of sex prejudices and the removal of legal restrictions on women's freedom it was inevitable that they should invade fields of activity where formerly only men were found. Since women must eat every one knew that they must work, and the sight of a woman at work was no new experience. Even in the days when they were most secluded and protected, the number kept in ease was always very small compared with the women slaves and servants who spun, cooked and served. Hence men were used to seeing women at work; and while industrial adjustments have not been easily made, they have still been accepted as a matter of course. But who, fifty years ago, could have imagined that to-day women would be steadily monopolizing learning, teaching, literature, the fine arts, music, the church and the theater? And yet that is the condition at which we have arrived. We may scoff at the way women are doing the work, and reject the product, but that does not alter the fact that step by step women are taking over the field of liberal culture as opposed to the field of immediately productive work.
Some of the reasons for this change are so clear that it seems as though they might have been anticipated. In a comparatively few years the greater part of Western Europe and all of America has become rich, not this time through the enslavement of other peoples and the confiscating of their wealth, but through the enslaving and exploitation of the material forces of nature. This wealth is not well distributed, but large numbers of families have received enough so that the women do not have to work constantly with their hands. At this point all historic precedent would have turned these women into luxury-loving parasites and playthings. A good many of them have taken this easiest way and entered the peripatetic harems of the rich. But several million women refused to repeat the old cycle of ruin; they knew too much.[27] What then should they do? Faith in the value of conventual life for women had passed; industrial changes had transformed their homes so that the endless spinning, weaving, sewing and knitting were no longer there, even to be supervised. Penelope's tasks had passed to foremen, working under trades union agreements, in the factories of Fall River and Birmingham. Even the function of the lady bountiful who looked after the spiritual and family affairs of her tenants and servants and distributed doles and Christmas baskets was gone. Her tenants owned their own farms, and her chauffeur resented her interference with his personal life. What should she do?
[27] Rheta Childe Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1910.
And this movement was not confined to the rich, for those who were not yet economically free were still deeply influenced by the changes which were taking place. The Goulds, Stanfords, Vanderbilts, Floods, Carnegies and Schwabs had all been lifted from the level of the masses to financial grandeur before the eyes of the multitude, and democratic ambitions drove parents who thought themselves in the line of financial advancement to secure culture for their girls in time. If the daughter was destined to live on Fifth Avenue, or to marry a duke, it was best to get her ready while young. In all our industrial democracies, armies of American parents have devoted themselves to labor, and even sacrificed comforts and necessities, that the daughters might get ready to live easier and fuller lives than the parents had known. If the choice had to be made between the girl and her brother, the chivalry of the father and the ambition of the mother very often gave the opportunity to the girl.
And so an emancipated army of leisure has been formed which has transformed the very nature of the culture with which it has busied itself. Books, periodicals, musical instruments, travel became cheaper and cheaper as the demand increased. Wholesale production makes almost any luxury accessible to every one. It is also possible to find modern and agreeable forms for older academic exercises. If Greek and Latin were too full or too difficult, courses in Romanic and Germanic philology would do as well. Anglo-Saxon gave way to Old English; and Chaucer to the Lake Poets. Philosophy struggled for favor with the English novel on equal terms. The works of Raphael were photographed and lithographed until the Sistine Madonna became as commonly known as the face of any strenuous and popular statesman of the day. With the aid of these art productions, and John Addington Symonds, every woman with leisure became an art critic. If economics was not interesting, sociology was available; and it could be democratized to any degree desired. If travel was troublesome, one could leave it to Cook; buy a ticket and he would do the rest.
If these awakening hungers and corresponding opportunities had affected only the period of life formerly thought available for education, these changes would have come about much more slowly than they have. But the genetic conception of life, steadily popularized since 1870, has led us to see that education is coterminous with life. It seems strange that we should have ever thought that mental activity belongs alone to youth. Dorland's study shows that in a list of four hundred fairly representative great men, only 10.25% ceased their mental activity between the ages of forty and fifty; 20.75% between fifty and sixty; 35% between sixty and seventy; 22.5% between seventy and eighty; and 6% after eighty.[28]
[28] W.A. Newman Dorland, The Age of Mental Virility. New York: The Century Company, 1908.
The recognition of such facts as these has given us a new genetic sense of life, under the influence of which mothers and grandmothers have joined the younger women in the pursuit of culture. They have formed clubs—study clubs, current events clubs, camera clubs, art clubs, literary clubs, civic clubs. They have organized courses of university extension lectures; enrolled in Chicago University correspondence courses; and have flocked to Chautauqua by the thousand in the summer, when not abroad. It is not through the generosity of men that liberal culture has come into the possession of women; they have carried it by storm and have compelled capitulation.
Judging by the facts presented in the last chapter, women are pretty fully in possession of formal education. If we examine this monopoly a little more carefully, we shall find that while in the kindergarten and in the elementary schools boys furnish 51% of the enrollment, simply because more boys are born in civilized communities than girls, as soon as we reach the high schools, girls increasingly take the lead. In 1910, the girls formed 56.45% of the enrollment in high schools—or there were 110,249 more girls than boys. The proportion of girls increased through each of the four years of the course, and of the graduates, 60.8% were girls. In the public normal schools, 64.45% of the students were girls.
The universities, colleges and technical schools, which are massed together in our government reports, had hardly any women students in 1870; in 1880, 19.3% of the students were women; in 1890, 27%; in 1910, 30.4%. In all these institutions we had enrolled in 1910, 17,707 women. Of 602 institutions reported in 1910, 142 were for men only; 108 were for women only; and 352 were open to both sexes. But here again the influence of women increases during each of the four years for, as we have seen, the women took 41.1% of the A.B. degrees granted in 1910. It is surely not too much to say that, if present conditions continue, women will soon be in an overwhelming majority in all secondary and higher education in the United States.
If we examine the teaching force, we find this monopoly already established. In 1870, when our government records begin, 59% of the teachers were women; in 1880, 57.2% were women; in 1890, 65.5%; in 1900, 70.1%; in 1910, 78.6%. The more settled and intelligent the community the more rapid this advance has been. Thus Arkansas has 52.4% women teachers; but Massachusetts has 91.1% and Connecticut has 93%.
In cities, too, the women fill nearly all teaching positions. New York City has 89% women in its force; Boston, 89%; Philadelphia, 91.4%; Chicago, 93.3%. In many cities the proportion is even greater than this: Omaha has 97%; Wheeling, W. Va., 97.5%; Charleston, S.C., 99.3%; and in forty-six American towns of 4,000 to 8,000 inhabitants there is no man teaching. When we remember that many of the men indicated above are in high schools or in supervising posts, we are prepared for the statement in a report recently laid before the Board of Education of New York City that in half the cities of the United States there are virtually no men teaching.
In our high schools, 54% of the teachers are women; in public normal schools, 65%; and in institutions of higher learning 17.6% are women. Even in supervising positions, there are more women than men in the large centers of population. Certainly these figures justify us in saying that women have established a monopoly of education in the United States, except in the higher institutions.
In order to discuss the effects which this monopoly of education by women is having on the curriculum of the schools we must first agree on what constitutes the peculiarity of women's minds as compared with men's minds.[29] In our first chapter, it was asserted that women are more interested in the concrete, human, personal, conserving and emotional aspects of life; while men more easily turn to the abstract, material, impersonal, creative and rational aspects. To put it broadly, women are more interested in the humanities; men more readily pursue the sciences. Let us admit at once that there are many individual exceptions to this statement. Some women have reached great excellence in abstract studies; and some men are notoriously concrete and emotional; but nevertheless the general statement seems borne out by a wealth of common observations and detailed comparisons.
[29] See The Americans, by Hugo Münsterberg, pp. 558-589. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901.
Personal observation must always be colored by prejudices and prepossessions, but my own have been so wide, and so uniformly in one direction, that it seems justifiable to report them.
For a quarter of a century I have been working in schools or with teachers, and my personal observations all agree with the above characterization. I have spent five years in Cornell University, New York; one year in Zurich University in Switzerland; two years in the State University of Indiana and seven years in Stanford University in California. These institutions are widely distributed; they were all fully co-educational; and they each had a wide range of elective studies. In all of them, class-rooms devoted to literature and modern languages had a large attendance of women, while lecture-rooms and laboratories devoted to abstract science were almost deserted by them. This could not have been due to commercial considerations, for many of these women were facing teaching; and during all this time the demand for women who could teach science has been much greater than for women who could teach literature.
In my work with teachers, both in the classroom and in the field, I have carried out many inductive, quantitative studies, based on measurements or returns from large numbers of children. I have never found women teachers taking up and carrying out this kind of work with any such enthusiasm as men apply to it, though it lies at the base of their professional life.
Institutional generalizations seem all to point in this same direction. For instance, the Girls' Evening High School in Philadelphia is managed by one of the best known scientific women in the country, Dr. L.L.W. Wilson, head of the biological department of the Philadelphia Normal School. With a thousand girls of high school grade, under the leadership of a scientific woman, the only science courses given in the school are those in domestic science. The reason is that the girls, most of them not being candidates for a degree, will not take up science work, though they form strong classes in literature and languages.
If, from such general facts of observation, one turns to exact comparisons, where quantities can be measured, the results are all the same. Of students enrolled in classical departments of universities, colleges and technical schools reporting to the United States Bureau of Education, in 1910, 36.5% were women, while of those enrolled in general science courses, but 17.2% were women. In 1,511 public and private high schools and seminaries, reporting to the Bureau of Education in 1909-1910, a larger percentage of boys than of girls was enrolled in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, physical geography, civil government and rhetoric, which is a scientific study of language. A larger proportion of girls enrolled in Latin, French, German, English literature and history, and there was a slightly greater enrollment of girls in botany, zoology and physiology.
In the further discussion of this subject it will then be taken for granted that in education, feminization means emphasis on languages, literature and history, as opposed to mathematics, physics, chemistry and civics. For the elementary schools we have no data capable of reduction to figures, but general observation, backed by an examination of courses of study and textbooks, will compel any one to say that in twenty years we have made wonderful progress in reading, language, stories, mythology, biography and history; while all our efforts to bring nature work into vital relation with the schools have borne little fruit. Our country schools need lessons in agriculture, and the children should gain a deep sense of country life. But how can celibate young women, longing toward the towns, give this? Any subjects well taught are sure to be increasingly taught, and it takes no extended study to see that our elementary schools are being feminized in the direction of literature. This is the more striking when we remember that these twenty years have been dominated, in the larger world, by scientific interests.
In the high schools and seminaries, we have fairly complete returns showing the number of students enrolled in certain subjects since 1890. The pupils taking Latin have increased 15%; French, 4%; German, 13%; English literature has increased in ten years 7% (there is no record for this subject before 1898); and European history, 27%. There has also been an increase of 11% in algebra and 10% in geometry, probably partly due to vocational need and to the emphasis laid on these subjects for admission to college. But physics, in the twenty years under consideration, has fallen off 7%; chemistry, 3%; physical geography, 5%; physiology, 15%; and civics, 7%.[30] A careful study of these figures must convince any fair-minded person that our school curriculum, even in the secondary field, where women's control is least complete, is moving rapidly in the direction of what we have called feminization.
[30] Report of the United States Commissioner of Education, 1910, Vol. II, p. 1139.
The schools, too, must increasingly do something more than train the intellect; and in all physical activity involuntary suggestion is very powerful. Playgrounds are laboratories of conduct, and they should not only give physical exercise, but should also furnish standards and ideals. There can be no doubt that women are physically more restrained, retiring, non-contesting, and graceful than men; but can dancing, marching, and gymnastics take the place of more aggressive, direct and violent contests in the training of boys? So in industries, women are more given to conserving, arranging and beautifying, more given to clerking and recording, while men are more creative, disbursing, more given to mining, agriculture and commerce. Even granting equal understanding and experience, the tradition of the race must count for much; and it would seem that at every stage of growth, boys and girls alike should feel the impulse to imitate men who have an instinct to make and unmake, to trade and carry. It is no justification of existing conditions to say that the men now in the teaching profession lack these qualities; if they do, let us get rid of them and have real men. And for purposes of political life, does it not seem strange to bring up a generation of boys and girls who are to be the future citizens of a democracy under the exclusive leadership of people who have never been encouraged to think about political life nor allowed to participate in it? Let us by all means enfranchise women; but even then they cannot hope to quickly catch up with those who have some thousands of years the start, even after allowing for the fact that girls inherit from both father and mother.
Most of these differences which we have been discussing seem to rest in the fact that women are more personal in their interests and judgments than men are. This may be due to their education for thousands of years; but that makes it no less true. Women certainly, in a great majority of cases, are more interested in a case than in a constitution; in a man than in a mission; in a poem that in a treatise; in equity than in law. In a generation when everything is tending toward great aggregations, consolidated industries, segregated wealth, and new syntheses of knowledge, both boys and girls should have such training as will fit them to play their part in these larger units.
As to the feminizing influence of exclusively women teachers on manners and morals and general attitude toward life there can be no real doubt. Boys and girls cannot spend eight or twelve impressionable years of childhood and youth under the constant daily influence of women without having the ladylike attitude toward life strongly emphasized. To deny this is to repudiate the power of constant involuntary suggestion and association. Whether it is desirable or not, is another question. The change may be all in the direction of advancing civilization; but just as in the assimilation of our subject races, the philosophic mind must be distressed by the disappearance of so many varieties of speech, customs, and artistic and industrial products, so in this present assimilation, one cannot help regretting the steady disappearance of the katabolic qualities of the human male. One does not need to say that this feminized product is better or worse than what we have had, but it is certainly narrower, and less in harmony with the world's thought and work, than it formerly was.
If we turn from education to the press we have similar conditions. During these past few years, hundreds of journals have sprung up devoted to women's special interests. They are almost all of them showy, fragmentary, personal, concrete and emotional. It is difficult to find one that represents general or abstract interests. At least one of these journals which boasts a fabulous circulation is supported by its women subscribers and readers to oppose the larger interests of women in education, industry and political life. At least, if it does not oppose these interests, it does not aid them. Imagine a million German women sending the Kaiser one dollar and a half a year to induce him to tell them once a month to go back to their kitchens, churches and children!
The newspapers of America have steadily changed during the last three decades in the same direction. Editorial pages and news columns have been steadily modified in the direction of fragmentary, egoistic, personal and sensational, or at least emotional, appeals. These are the qualities of children's minds and of undeveloped minds everywhere. The change is, of course, a part of the larger democratic movement of our time, and many causes have contributed to bring it about. Had women not been so active, something of the same sort would have happened; but if women were all to forget how to read overnight, there is little doubt that the newspapers would find it advantageous to print more statesmanlike editorials and more general and abstract news.
With the weeklies and monthlies, the change taking place is the same. The new reading public, brought in by increase in population and by popular education, does not support the Atlantic, the Century and Scribner's, but turns to Munsey's, McClure's and Everybody's. The very change in names speaks of the new personal and egoistic element that has come into journalism. Of course, such changes are only in part due to the influence of women, but the change is in the direction of the qualities that characterize distinctively women's journals.
In books, the personal and romantic novel has taken precedence over every other form of literature. Many of these are written by women; their circulation, both through libraries and through sales, is much greater with women than with men; and in many of them the personal gossip is as transient as that which fills the evening papers.[31]
[31] The Feminine Note in Fiction, by W.L. Courtney, London, Chapman & Hall, 1904; the author tries to prove that there is such a thing as a feminine style in fiction.
In the churches, especially in the ritualistic churches, women have long been the faithful attendants. Nowhere, except in the churches which make a rationalistic and abstract appeal, and in the Ethical Societies, does one find a preponderance of men. In 1903, a careful enumeration of all attendants at places of worship was made in the city of London. The count was taken on fair Sundays in autumn, and covered both morning and evening services. Sixty-one per cent. of all adult attendants were women, 146,372 more women than men passing through the doors.
About the same time a similar census was made in the part of New York City lying on Manhattan Island. The women were in excess by 171,749, and formed 69 per cent. of all attendants. Even church service, if not entirely tied to set forms, must seek to interest those who occupy the pews; and no observer can fail to note in both England and America, a movement toward ritualism on the one hand, and on the other, toward popular, personal, concrete and sometimes sensational preaching. The same general changes are taking place in libraries, in the drama, in concerts, in all group activities connected with learning and the fine arts.
But on the other side, if emancipated women had not applied themselves, since 1870, to the direction of education, literature, religion and amusements, all these interests must have suffered serious neglect and probable deterioration through the concentrating of the interests of the ablest men in engineering, manufacturing, commerce and other fields of pure and applied science. By popularizing these interests, women have really humanized them, as all similar revolutions have done in the past. In breaking up old forms and intellectual conventions they have set free new and vital impulses. Whether the historian of the future will consider this period of democratization and feminization a time of advance may be uncertain; but it is certainly a time of liberated energy and of broadening participation in all that is best in life.
Nowhere does a human being escape compulsion. Even were he alone in the world he would be forced to obey the physical laws governing gravity, heat, cold, hunger and disease. No matter what his desires might be, he would find himself limited and constrained by fixed laws, the inexorable penalties of which he could escape only by obedience. If the man were not alone, then each one of his companions would limit his freedom, and he would limit each one in the group, if they were to live together in peace and efficiency; and yet each of the man's companions would help to free him from the tyranny of physical forces, from the social pressure of others, and even from the bondage of his own nature.
Independence is thus an ideal to be achieved only through obedience. It begins in self-subordination and reaches its finest realization in social subordination. Since the beginning of time men who thought have always dreamed of freedom; and for two hundred years now independence has been a word to conjure with. But in so far as independence means freedom to follow one's own unregulated desires, it is a fantastic and dangerous dream; and yet this dream of impossible independence has been among the greatest influences in furthering human development in the past.
The old-time dependence of one individual on the immediate caprices of another largely disappeared with the passing of slavery. But in place of this personal subjection has come a more complex and in some ways more compelling and crushing control through the monopoly of wealth. Property has become the medium through which the most binding of human relations are organized. Accumulated wealth has become a great reservoir of power to which some individuals gain access through rights of birth, others through carefully guarded privileges, and still others through cunning devices or through force; but the masses of the people must gain their fragments of this wealth through arduous lifelong labor. Even the earth, the original source of all wealth, is parceled out, and all of it is now owned by individuals or groups who control it in their own interests. One man may thus have thousands of acres which he cannot use, and which he will not allow others to use, while another has not where to lay his head. Laws jealously guard this wealth, which is the key to all opportunity; and public opinion, that most subtle, pervasive and compelling of all forms of law, gathers a thousand sacred initiations, rites, ceremonies, prohibitions and ex-communications around it. A man who has killed his neighbor, or ruined his friend's family, may be less punished by society than one who cheats at cards.
In primitive life a man may be a man by virtue of what he is; to-day he may have all the rights and privileges of any man by virtue of what he possesses. In any community can be found strong men, honest, though misplaced or unfortunate, begging bread, wasting their lives for want of money to live decently. And beside these one sees other men of weak physique and feeble minds, who have lived as parasites on society all their lives, but who are handsomely dressed, well fed, and possessed of power to do as they will, simply because they have access to wealth. It is no wonder that if one would seek freedom to-day in America he must look for her image on a gold coin.
It is not difficult to see why property has become such a powerful instrument in civilization. Anything which a person really owns, in a psychological sense, is a home for his soul. Really owning an object, a toy, a garment, a watch or a home, means infusing one's personality into it. A man who possesses significant things has a new body through which his soul can work; this body trains his powers; and it should give him life more abundantly. A landless man must become a soulless man. Of course, we are not here speaking of legal ownership. Many people own legally things into which they have never infused themselves; sometimes they have so many things that no individual could possibly infuse himself into them.
These conditions may prevail even in primitive life, but to-day they have been vastly increased through the fact that with advancing civilization money was devised. This is a system of counters, generally coin or paper, not really valuable in themselves, but always resting back for value on the earth, or on something derived from it. In the past it was supposed that there were some things which, because of their nature, were not marketable, while others were beyond price. To-day we set values on everything, even on men's bodies; eyes, ears, legs and lives can be priced. There are, in fact, insurance companies and factories that have regular schedules of value for various parts of the body. Our courts set prices on blighted affections, damaged reputations, social advancements, impaired digestions, damaged complexions, nervous shocks and extreme humiliations. Even a woman's honor may have a price in dollars.
These property rights, like the rights of the person, have always been subject to violence. Powerful individuals and groups have always been able to overstep legal restrictions and public opinion, and seize what they desired. The land grabbing going on in North Africa and Persia to-day and the activity of great industrial monopolies at home, show us that some property rights still need to be secured by force. In this struggle, it has come about naturally that men, being stronger, freer and less scrupulous than women, have outstripped them and have so far had a pretty complete monopoly of wealth. In fact women themselves have at times become property. In such times a man who stole or bought a woman, naturally took over with her all her rights in real estate and personal property as well as her person and her services.
Only gradually did women gain power to hold property themselves. Mainly because fathers wished to preserve property in their families, the right of women to inherit became slowly established as civilization advanced. In Judea, Greece and Rome, certain rights of a woman to hold property were clearly settled. In the reversion to force under feudalism, woman's rights to outside property suffered; but they have been gradually restored during the last few centuries. To-day, in civilized lands, a woman's rights to property, inherited or definitely given her or purchased by her, are everywhere recognized, if she does not marry. In France, and other Latin countries, she may still lose control of her property if she takes a husband; but in northern and western lands, even a married woman may retain her possessions.
Woman's body, too, is increasingly looked upon as her personal property. With the raising of the age of consent; with increasing severity in laws punishing rape, and with the abrogation of judicial orders for the restitution of marital rights, it is now quite generally recognized that a woman should have the right to control her own person. Still, in many lands there is much to be done before this right is fully safeguarded.
The place where a woman has not yet achieved economic freedom is in the disposal of her labor. One must remember, however, in this connection, that not only is there no fixed standard of values in human service as yet, but that many indispensable forms of service have not even been legally recognized as valuable. In early forms of civilization, fighting and praying were considered the most important work the community received, and warriors and priests gained the big rewards. They received lands, gold, servants and dignities, while industrial workers, even the directors, were despised. To-day we have reversed all this and we may pay a general only five thousand dollars a year, and a priest eight hundred dollars, while a man who develops a big industry may receive a hundred thousand dollars annually. Again, a man who invents a new gun may be given a fortune, like that of Herr Krupp, while a man who invents a surgical instrument is prevented by the ethics of his profession from even patenting it. If Pasteur had been paid for his services to France and to humanity, he would have ranked in the financial world with Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Schwab. We pay a State superintendent of public instruction ten thousand dollars a year; but Miss Jane Addams, as instructor in ethics to the United States, receives no salary, and she must even beg the money to maintain her laboratory at Hull House. The whole question of payment for services is in a chaotic condition. Those who serve mankind most faithfully are rewarded on the principle, "From each according to his ability;" but nowhere is the remainder of the principle, "To each according to his needs," recognized. Hence our greatest servants must still beg support from our cleverest exploiters.
Domestic service is indispensable to society, but so far it has remained in the field of semi-slavery and uncertain barter; in a word, it is still in the feudal stage. The woman gives what she is and has, and nominally she gets protection and support. Sometimes these fail and, on the other hand, she occasionally receives the unearned gifts supposed to befit a potentate or a shrine. As women become educated they find this condition of uncertainty and instability unbearable. They are willing to work, but they must have a chance to think and to plan their lives according to their individual needs. Some degree of economic independence is necessary to intelligent thinking and orderly living. It is not that women are demanding more property; they are demanding some definite individual property as a home for their souls; and they are coming to realize that if this property rests on some one else's feelings and caprices it is no home for the soul; it is only a tavern.
This conception is well illustrated by the case of a woman in western New York, who married about 1850, and went to live on a farm with her husband. They had small means, but she brought seven hundred dollars to the altar, which was more than he possessed in ready capital. Her part was, however, soon swallowed up in the general business, and while there was a tacit agreement, voiced at long intervals, that she had put something into the business, her part never increased, though the man with whom she worked grew well-to-do. Certain feudal rights in the butter the woman made and in the chickens she raised, yielded her small sums, which often escaped her, but which she sometimes secured and put into a few silver spoons and dishes for her table, a square of Brussels carpet, three lace curtains, a marble topped stand, and six horsehair covered chairs for her parlor. These articles were considered in a very special sense her own. The man might have sold them and used the money, but public opinion would have condemned him had he done so.
Meantime the woman cooked for the family and the hired men, scrubbed and washed and mended. She strained and skimmed the milk from a dozen cows, and churned the butter; she fed the calves; cared for the hens; dug in the garden; gathered the vegetables; did the family sewing; and stole fragments of time for her flower-beds. Her hours were from five in the morning until nine at night, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, with no half-days or Sundays off.
Incidentally she read her Bible, maintained religious exercises in the village, provided the church with a carpet by methods of indirection and kept the church clean. She upheld a moral standard toward which men only weakly struggled; hunted down and drove away all other women who refused equal service to their lords; ministered to the neighboring sick; and doled out alms in winter-time. Her home was a social and industrial microcosm which she conducted as a feudal holding under the protection of her lord. It would be an interesting study to work out the rules of this feudal relation between husband and wife in any agricultural community. They would be found as varied, as unjust and arbitrary, and as generous, as those of the old régime in France.
A woman in a home is supposed to furnish three kinds of service. She must be a housekeeper, a wife and a mother. As housekeeper, her services can be estimated in current values running from three to twenty-five dollars a week with board and lodging. The other two kinds of service have never been reduced to monetary values.
As a wife, a woman is supposed to give her love, her person, her sympathy and inspiration; the personal care of a husband, including his clothes, attention to his relations and friends and general management of his social position and reputation. If she fills this position well, she is mistress, valet, confidential adviser and public entertainer. Possibly these services can be rated except the first, and even here the divorce courts scale alienated affections all the way from five hundred to twenty-five thousand dollars, according to the appearance of the woman and the skill of contending lawyers.
As a mother, the woman is supposed to give children a good heritage, nurse them, care for them, doctor them and train them. We have established values for these services as wet-nurse, nurse-maid, governess, doctor and teacher, but who can estimate a woman's value in giving a child a good heritage?
It is no wonder that such a difficult problem has remained thus far unsolved. Here and there a man gives his wife a household allowance, from the money they earn in common, and she struggles to save from it some fragments for her individual needs; others put their wives on a salary; and some others divide the income on a fractional basis. But the slightest study of existing conditions must convince any one that women are everywhere deeply dissatisfied with their economic relations to the family. On referring recently to this fact before an audience almost equally divided between suffragists and anti-suffragists, I found every woman present applauding the statement. Another time when I asked more than sixty of the wealthiest women in one of our cities how many were dissatisfied with their relations to the family property, explaining that I was not asking how many wanted more money but how many wanted a different relation to the family money, all the women raised their hands except three and they all had private property.
Meantime, economic changes, to be described in the next chapter, have transformed our homes and nearly eight million women have gone outside to earn money. The gladness with which they have gone shows that they were not afraid to work, though at first the money did not belong to them, but to their families. Almost everywhere in the United States the money women now earn is their own; only in Louisiana can the husband collect his wife's wages. Any one who reads Mrs. Gilman's masterly study of the evil effects accompanying woman's economic independence must feel how far-reaching are not only the discontent but also the evil influences of our present system through over-emphasizing sex and through corrupting the public thinking and feeling concerning services and wages in general.[32]
[32] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Woman and Economics, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898. See, also, Woman and Labor, by Olive Schreiner, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.
Yet no one can seriously approach this problem in his own person without feeling that the relations of husband and wife contain elements that not only make it impossible to resolve the woman's service into money values, but that would make it useless to do so even if it could be done. The most distinctive quality of love is its desire to give. Love that seeks to get is not love. If when a woman gives herself she tries to secure individual property it will be only that she may give it to the man she loves. Marriage is a partnership of soul and body, and this includes property. It still remains true, however, that each must have in order that he may give. Besides this, there are always outside obligations, and special needs within the group, that require individual property for their realization.
In the past, the partnership of marriage has been incomplete on the property side; why not complete it? Why not reorganize our laws and our public opinion so that two people who establish a family, putting into it all they have, should pay out of the income the necessary family expenses and divide all else equally between the parties? Property acquired before marriage, and all inherited property, might well be held in individual right since it should never be a prize for prostitution, not even when it is euphemistically termed "a good home."
Under equal suffrage Idaho has passed such a law, and all property gained after marriage belongs equally to husband and wife. If the wife dies, her heirs, in absence of a will, inherit half of the family property. If the two separate, the court, in absence of an outside agreement, settles the property as it does the children. The judge may order that it be divided equally, or he may give it all to either party, according to conditions; but the woman has identical rights with the man. Surely some such solution is demanded by our present unrest. No one will ever be economically independent; but husband and wife should be economically equal.
In all the animal world one can hardly find a place where orderly effort, planned to secure some future advantage, does not appear. Getting food, defending life, and caring for offspring have all combined to drive not only the descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well, to sweat-producing effort. Of course this is not definitely planned; getting food often waits on appetite; defense is sometimes merely running away; and the young are frequently left to feed themselves or die. But the fact remains that in digging burrows, building nests, laying up honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing for the young, a vast deal of effort is put forth in forest and field which is not immediately productive of pleasure.
This work is seldom equally shared by all the members of the group. With bees, the drones and the queen are alike exempt from work, and an asexual group has been developed to feed and protect them. Some ants compel others to do their work; and everywhere there seem to be individuals who are constitutionally lazy and others who, because of strength or sex attractiveness, are able to get more than their share of food and protection with less than their share of effort.
From the first, some division of work between male and female grows almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction. Following conception, the male can always run away and leave the female to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very prone to do so. Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly born he generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and largely she protects and provisions it.
Among domesticated animals, where their working possibilities have been very highly developed, females are much more desirable workers than males. The maternal function partly explains this, as in the case of cows and hens which give us milk and eggs; and even with mares and sheep the offspring adds to the general working value. Still, it seems to be true that even for purposes of draught, the males are of less value than the females, unless reduced to the non-sexual condition of geldings and oxen. The stallion, bull or ram is too katabolic, too much of a consuming, distributing, destroying force to be very valuable in the daily routine of agriculture or commerce. While the female is generally smaller and less powerful than the male, she is quiet, easily enslaved; and, as we have said, her maternal functions can be diverted to our daily use. She produces more workers, and her flesh is more palatable, because less distinctive, than that of the male. Hence, among domesticated animals, selection, based on considerations of work, multiplies females and keeps males only for breeding purposes.
As a quadruped, the female suffers very little handicap from the functions peculiar to her sex, except when actually carrying her young or nursing them. When she stands erect, however, the support for the special organs of reproduction is far from ideal; heavy lifting, or long-continued standing, often leads to disaster, and the periodic functions, even in the healthiest conditions, must always place women at a working disadvantage as compared with men. Add to this the fact that women are smaller, less agile, and far less strong, than men, and, even when not encumbered with young, it is clear that a woman, when confronting physical work in competition with men, needs something more than a fair field and free competition.[33] Idealists and travelers among primitive people love to tell us how easily women meet their special functions, carrying burdens equal to those carried by men when on the march, and dropping out from the caravan for only a few hours to give birth to a child; but the fact remains that women in all primitive societies age quickly and that those who are spoiled are thrown aside and forgotten.[34] Woman's handicap as a working animal in competition with man is too obvious and too deep-seated to be idealized away.