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Title: The Women of Tomorrow
Author: William Hard
Release Date: July 19, 2010 [EBook #33200]
Language: English
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The Women of Tomorrow
By William Hard
New York
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
1911
Copyright, 1910, by
THE RIDGWAY COMPANY
Copyright, 1911, by
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK
[Illustration: JOHN SIMMONS, FOUNDER OF SIMMONS COLLEGE--THE FIRST SCHOOL
OF COLLEGE RANK IN THE UNITED STATES DEVOTED WHOLLY TO GIVING WOMEN A
DEFINITE TRAINING FOR SELF-SUPPORT.
_Photograph by Chester A. Lawrence, Boston._]
CONTENTS
PAGE
I Love Deferred 3
II Learning for Earning 41
III Learning for Spending 89
IV The Wasters 135
V Mothers of the World 179
I inscribe this book to Mrs. Peter Christian Lutkin. She said I might,
a long time since. I was a boy then. Now I come to keep her to her
promise and I lay this, my first book, on her knees, knowing that it
is full of the sounds of controversy but hoping that her gentleness,
somehow, may harmonize all harshnesses to the love I meant.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
John Simmons, Founder of Simmons College Frontispiece
Simmons College, Boston 42
Edna D. Day, the First Woman to Become a Doctor of
Philosophy in the Field of Home Economics 76
Mary Schenck Woolman, Founder of Manhattan Trade
School 76
Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois 82
Children in the Francis Parker School, Chicago 84
Household Arts Building, Columbia University 97
Household Arts Building, California Polytechnic
School 97
Mary D. Chambers, Rockford College 104
Mr. L. D. Harvey, Homemakers' School 104
Practical Experience in Serving Breakfasts, Dinners
and Suppers, Cleveland Schools 120
Girls in Cleveland Learn to Make Pottery as Well as
Design 120
Class in Food Adulterations, University of Wisconsin 122
Model House in Washington-Allston School 122
One-Week Courses in Home Economics, University of
Wisconsin 128
Evening Cookery Classes in the St. Louis High Schools 130
Interests of Chicago Women's Club: Domestic Science
Classes; Instruction for the Blind; Orchestral
Concerts; Suffrage Campaigns 186
Interests of Chicago Women's Club: Park Attendants;
Mothers' Clubs; Hospital Kindergartens; Vacation
Schools 190
Interests of Chicago Women's Club: Improvement of City
Square; Neighborhood Organizations; Industrial and
Agricultural Education for Girls 197
WHENCE AND WHY
The chapters of this book were originally articles in _Everybody's
Magazine_. I have not embellished them with footnotes nor given them
any other part of the panoply of critical apparatus. It could be done.
I have preferred to leave them in the dress I first gave them,--a
fighting dress. They owe much of their structure, it is true, to facts
and ideas out of the dust of libraries. But they owe much more to
facts and ideas exhumed out of the much more neglected dust of daily
circumstance. Either dust, by itself, is lifeless. When the two cohere
they establish the current of existence. At their meeting-place this
book has tried to stand. And so, while it hopes to have added to
knowledge, it will have failed unless it has merged into conduct.
The reader will forgive the abruptness of the shift of attention from
the subject of one chapter to the subject of the next. Each chapter,
because of having been a separate magazine article, is still an
isolated unit. Its isolation, however, is only that of form. In
thought there is a sequence both logical and temporal.
Devoting themselves to five critical phases in the mental development
of the modern woman, the five chapters of this book accompany her
through five successive stages in her personal life. The postponement
of marriage, the preliminary period of self-support, the new training
for motherhood, the problem of leisure, the opportunity for civic
service,--these subjects, treated in turn, follow one another in the
order of their appearance in a normal life-history. They are further
unified by the proof (I hope it is proof) throughout adduced that even
the most diverse of the phenomena observed, the female parasite
equally with the female suffragist, the domestic-science-and-art
enthusiast equally with the economic-independence enthusiast, are all
of them products of the one same big industrial unfoldment which is
exposing all women, willing or unwilling, to the winds of the social
process, which is giving to all women, whether home-keepers or
wanderers, in place of the old home-world, the new world-home.
WILLIAM HARD.
_Chicago, Dec., 1911._
INTRODUCTION
The woman of to-morrow will not differ from the woman of yesterday in
femininity or physique or capacity, in her charm for men, or her love
of children, but in the response of her eternally feminine nature to a
changed environment. The environment is bound to alter the superficial
characteristics of woman as every change has done. Man, in his turn,
will be a beneficiary of this new womanliness as he has been the ready
victim of the old-womanishness.
The reader will find in this book a dramatic picture of the gap
between girlhood and motherhood which causes both girls and men to go
wrong, and which can only be filled adequately by work--work even more
suitably performed after marriage than before. Postponed childbearing,
if not postponed marriage, is justified by the superiority of the
younger children or the children of older parents. A declining birth
rate may be redeemed by a declining death rate and the superior
progeny of mature marriage.
The life of great-grandmamma fills us with wonder and pity. Her
labors were legion, and, while no longer necessary in the house, their
equivalent must be found or girls become parasites. Notwithstanding
her incredible labors great-grandmamma died young, having sacrificed
herself on the altar of masculine egotism and prerogative. Her life
was a short but not a merry one, but our virtuous forefather's life
was a long and sensual one.
To-day woman is beginning to be educated for the new era and man must
go with her. She is learning homemaking with new implements and new
opportunities. She need no longer be a drudge and she must not
continue to be a doll. Since the days of John Ruskin, even the
academic economists have had to put spending before saving in the
logical exposition of their science,--consumption and thrift can only
be adjusted by those who work and live. Hence, the new mother, alert
to the larger needs of her household, is more competent than
great-grandmamma and must even supplant "the tired business man" in
municipal housekeeping, until he can learn to be her equal and himself
deserve the suffrage.
Mr. Hard has produced a brilliant volume, as might have been expected.
Mr. Hard could write a book in the dark; but it may not have been
known that he could illumine with such scholarly sagacity the shadows
cast on the woman question by man's huge egotism and woman's carefully
coddled superstition. Originally magazine articles, Mr. Hard's
chapters are a unit in being sound economics and sociology on the
woman question, but they will probably not secure him a doctor's
degree from his alma mater for they are also humorous, intelligible
and inspiring.
CHARLES ZUEBLIN.
I.
Love Deferred
Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away on a
career, he were going away on a comet.
She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time she
was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn't got angry
and insisted on marrying him.
Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance put
most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama, "Love
Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any other drama
can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a thin, high note
of fine pain.
We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too professional.
He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough and more
commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which are the two big
elements in the life of Modern Man.
When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one more
year to go in engineering school.
How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!
When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the last
century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen months. The
present professors require three years.
In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend classes for four
months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for nine months
in each of four years.
As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill by
informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be generally
recognized that a four-year technical course following the high-school
course is not an adequate preparation for those who are to fill
important positions; and the University would urge all those who can
afford the time to extend their studies over a period of five or six
years."
John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in the
College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique courses in
the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of Science.
He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two
biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the
assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard
wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen cents
an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total income was
about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he was raised to
fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of Science.
The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of those
institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John didn't. He
didn't get married so early nor become a widower so often. He didn't
carry so many children to the christening font nor so many to the
cemetery.
Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.
Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at
random, run your finger down the column and pick any class. The class
of 1671!
It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don't be too
severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining ten, four were
married twice and two were married three times. For ten husbands,
therefore, there were eighteen wives.
Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very competently
remarks: "The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those
days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children."
The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their eighteen
wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They
also filled the churchyards.
_Twenty-one of those seventy-one children died in childhood._
This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving
children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of only
2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.
In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the
unfair frequency with which it had more than one wife-and-mother to
help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of young
wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the hideous
frequency with which it killed them.
Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from 1701 to
1745.
The girls they took in marriage were most of them under twenty-one and
were many of them down in their 'teens, sometimes as far down as
fourteen.
May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious
sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken
because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap
kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and salting tubs
and spinning wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by
somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other
necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn't domestic. He was
domestic.
Our young engineering friend, John, when _he_ looked forward to _his_
future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it at
all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very little
real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to "give" Mary a
home.
Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages of
mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of things. On
the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the other hand, he
was prevented from wanting anything in his marriage except just Mary.
The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous toil
(complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of result:
Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701 to
1745, there were:
Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;
Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;
Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five years old.
Those 418 Yale husbands lost 147 wives before full middle age.
It ceases, therefore, to be surprising, though it remains unabatedly
sickening, that the stories of the careers of colonial college men, of
the best-bred men of the times, are filled with such details as:
"----First wife died at twenty-four, leaving six children."
"----Eight children born within twelve years, two of them
feeble-minded."
"----First wife died at nineteen, leaving three children."
"----Fourteen children. First wife died at twenty-eight, having
borne eight children in ten years."
From that age of universal early marrying and of promiscuous early
dying we have come in two centuries to an age of delayed (and even
omitted) marrying and of a settled determination to keep on living.
The women's colleges are so new and they attracted in their early days
so un-average a sort of girl that their records are not conclusive.
Nevertheless, here are some guiding facts from Smith College, of
Northampton, Massachusetts:
(We are taking college facts not because this chapter is confined in
any respect to college people, but merely because the matrimonial
histories in the records of the colleges are the most complete we know
of.)
In 1888, Smith College, in its first ten classes, had graduated 370
women.
In 1903, fifteen years later, among those 370 women there were 212 who
were still single.
This record does not satisfy Mr. G. Stanley Hall, who figured it out.
The remaining facts, however, might be considered more cheering:
The 158 Smith women who had married had borne 315 children. This
was two for each of them. And most of them were still in their
childbearing period. Compare this with the colonial records. But don't
take the number of children per colonial father. Be fair. Take it per
mother.
We have the matrimonial histories of colonial Yale and Harvard men
grouped and averaged according to the decade in which they were
graduated. We will regard the graduates of each decade as together
constituting one case.
In no case does the average number of children per wife go higher than
3.89. In one case it goes as low as 2.98.
Perhaps the modern wife's habit of going on living and thereby
protracting her period of childbearing will in time cause her
fertility record to compare not unfavorably with that of the colonial
wife, who made an early start but a quick finish.
In the year 1903, among all the 370 Smith graduates in those first ten
classes, only twenty-four had died. And among all the 315 children,
only twenty-six had died. On the whole, between being the wife of a
Yale or Harvard colonial graduate and being a member of one of the
first ten Smith classes, a modern girl might conclude that the chances
of being a dead one matrimonially in the latter case would be more
than offset by the chances of being a dead one actually in the
former.
This deplorable flippancy would overlook the serious fact that
permanent or even prolonged celibacy on the part of large numbers of
young men and young women is a great social evil. The consequences of
that evil we shall observe later on.[1]
[1] In speaking about celibacy we refer wholly to secular and not at
all to religious celibacy.
In the meantime we return to John and Mary.
While John was doing his last year in engineering school, Mary did a
year of technical study in the New York School of Philanthropy, or in
the St. Louis School of Social Economy, or in the Chicago School of
Civics and Philanthropy, or in the Boston School for Social Workers.
They won't even let you start in "doing good" nowadays without some
training for it. This is wise, considering how much harm doing good
can do.
But how the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!
Mary took a civil-service examination and got a job with the State
Bureau of Labor. She finished her first year with the Bureau at the
same time that John finished his first year with the electrical firm.
She had earned $600. He had earned $480.
There were several hundred other apprentices in the shops along with
John. When he thought of the next year's work at fifty a month and
when he looked at the horde of competing Bachelors of Science in
which he was pocketed, he whitened a bit.
"I must get out of the ruck," he said to himself. "I must get a
specialty. I must do some more preparing."
He began to perceive how long it takes the modern man to grow up,
intellectually and financially. He began to perceive what a tedious
road he must travel before he could arrive at maturity--and Mary!
But he had pluck. "I'll really prepare," he said, "and then I'll
really make good."
A Western university offered a scholarship of $500 a year, the
holder of which would be free to devote himself to a certain
specified technical subject. John tried for the scholarship and got
it, and spent a year chasing electrical currents from the time
when they left the wheels of street cars to the time when they
eventually sneaked back home again into the power house, after
having sported clandestinely along gas mains and water pipes, biting
holes into them as they went.
It was a good subject, commercially. At the end of the year he was
engaged as engineer by a street-car company which was being sued by a
gas company for allowing its current to eat the gas company's
property. He was to have a salary of $1,000 a year. He was going
strong.
One thousand dollars! Millions of married couples live on less than
that. But John didn't even think of asking Mary to share it with him.
Mary, when married, was to be supported in approximate accordance with
the standards of the people John knew. Every John thinks that about
it, without really thinking about it at all. It's just in him.
It bothered Mary. How much money would John want to spend on her
before he would take her? It made her feel like a box of candy in a
store window.
Still, a social standard is a fact. Just as much so as if it could be
laid off with a tape. And there is sense in it.
"After all," thought Mary, "if we had only $1,000 a year we couldn't
live where any of our friends do, and John would be cut off from being
on daily intimate terms with people who could help him; and if we had
children--Well, there you are! We surely couldn't give our children
what _our_ children ought to have. That settles it."
The influence of social standards is greatly increased and complicated
in a world in which women earn their living before marriage and have a
chance to make social standards of their own in place of the ones they
were born to.
We here insert a few notes on cases which are not compositely
imagined--like Mary and John--but are individually (though typically)
existent in real life in one of the large American cities:
R---- J----. Makes $6,500 a year. Only man she was ever "real sweet
on" was a teamster. When she was selling in the perfumes at five a
week he used to take her to the picnics of the Social Dozen Pleasure
Club. They would practice the Denver Lurch on Professor De Vere's
dancing platform. At midnight he would give her a joy-ride home in his
employer's delivery wagon. He still drives that wagon. She is in
charge of suits and costumes and has several assistant buyers under
her. She has bought a cottage for her father, who is an ingrain
weaver in a carpet factory. She wears a stick-pin recently presented
to her by her teamster. "I like him all right," is her notion about
it, "but I ought to have took him ten years ago. Now he can't support
me."
S---- V----. Makes twelve dollars a week as a manicurist. Thinks a man
ought to have at least thirty dollars a week before marrying.
T---- V----. Sister of S---- V----, who doesn't think much of her. She
works in a paper-box factory at five dollars a week and is engaged to
a glove cutter who makes eleven.
T---- A----. Saleswoman. Thinks women ought to be paid as much as men.
"Then they wouldn't be so ready to marry _anybody_." Works in the
cloak department. Is a star. Makes about eighteen dollars a week. Says
that most of the men she knows who could support her would certainly
get in a terrible row at home if they married a cloak-department girl.
Families are stuck up. "But I don't care; let it run a while. Tell you
something. I was born in the steerage. I've been right where the money
isn't. I'm not taking any chances on getting there again. Let Georgina
do it."
R---- B----. Sub-bookkeeper. Seven dollars a week. Engaged to clerk
who earns thirteen. Says: "Of course I'm not earning much, but I'm
living with my folks and when we're married I'll have to give up a lot
of things. Kinda wish I hadn't got used even to the seven."
This last case, of the bookkeeper engaged to the clerk, is the modern
situation at its happiest normal. The modern marriage, except among
the rich, is a contraction of resources. It is just the reverse, in
that respect, of the colonial marriage.
The colonial bride, marrying into Industry, brought her full economic
value to her husband.
The modern bride, marrying out of Industry, leaves most of her
economic value behind. And the greater that value was, the sharper is
the shock of the contraction of resources.
Of course, the case of the department-store buyer and the teamster is
irrelevantly extreme. But aren't there thousands and thousands of
cases which, while less advanced, are pointed in the same direction?
The more a woman earns, the fewer become the men who can support her.
How can the clerk support the cloak saleswoman who has had eighteen
dollars a week of her own? How can the barber support the manicurist
who has had twelve?
The cloak saleswoman may talk flippantly about it, but, at heart,
isn't she seriously right? She has pulled herself up to a certain
level. Except in response to a _grande passion_ she will not again
drop below it. She will bring up her children at a point as close to
her present level as she can. That is instinct.
Meanwhile, she isn't married. But what can you do about it? She went
to work, like almost every other working woman, because she had to.
And you can't pass a law prohibiting her from earning more than five
dollars a week.
"It's all economic," thought Mary. "Nothing else." She had much reason
for thinking so.
Did you ever see Meitzen's diagram showing the relation between the
price of rye and the number of marriages in Prussia during a period of
twenty-five years?
Cheap rye, easy living conditions--number of marriages rises. Dear
rye, hard living conditions--number of marriages drops. The
fluctuations are strictly proportional. In the twenty-sixth year,
given the price of rye, you could predict very closely the number of
marriages.
It's like suicides. It's the easiest thing in the world to predict the
number of men and women who will next year "decide" to take their own
lives.
The marriage rate responds not only to the economic conditions of a
whole country but to the economic conditions of its various parts.
You live in Vermont. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and
thirty in Vermont, there will be 279 out of every 1,000 of you who
will still be single.
But you live in the State of New York. Very well. Between the ages of
twenty-five and thirty there will be 430 of you out of every 1,000 who
will still be single.
In Vermont, 279. In New York, 430. A difference of 151 in every
1,000.
For those 151 persons, is it human volition? Is it a perverse aversion
to the other sex?
Even at that, on the face of it, those who try to argue New Yorkers
into marrying young are clearly taking the difficult route to their
purpose. It would be more adroit simply to urge them to live in
Vermont.
But isn't the real reason this--that New York, with its large cities,
is farther removed than Vermont, with no large cities, from the
primitive industrial conditions of colonial times?
The North Atlantic states, as a whole, are industrially more advanced
than the South Central states. Compare them in this marriage matter:
Among all the wives in the South Central states, there are 543 out of
every 1,000 who are under thirty-five years of age.
Among all the wives in the North Atlantic states those who are under
thirty-five years of age are, in each 1,000, only 428.
In the South Central states, 543. In the North Atlantic states, 428. A
difference of 115!
Getting married early is imputed unto us for actual personal
righteousness by innumerable clergymen, essayists, and editorial
writers. Are there so many more righteous women along the Gulf of
Mexico than along the Atlantic Coast? One hundred and fifteen more out
of every thousand? We cannot quite credit so great a discrepancy in
relative human virtue.
You can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your
vicinity.
Live on the Gold Coast of Africa. When you're thirteen, if you're a
girl, they'll boil a yam and mash it and mix it with palm oil and
scatter it on the banks of the stream and wash you in the stream and
streak your body with white clay in fine lines and lead you down the
street under an umbrella and announce your readiness to be a bride.
Which you will be in a day or two.
Live in Russia, and if you're a girl you'll get married before you're
twenty in more than fifty cases out of a hundred. It's the most
primitive of civilized countries. It's halfway between Africa and,
say, Rhode Island.
These marriages before twenty tend to fall off rapidly in a rapidly
developing industrial region like Rhode Island.
In 1860 the married persons in Rhode Island who had married before
they were twenty were twenty-one in every hundred.
In 1900 they were only nine in every hundred.
A drop from twenty-one to nine in forty years!
And if you can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in
your vicinity, neither can you escape, in any numbers, from the law
which reigns in your social set.
Here's Bailey's book on "Social Conditions":
Live in England and be a girl and belong to the class of people that
miners come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average,
twenty-two. But belong to the class of people that professional men
come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average, twenty-six.
This difference exists also in the United States. It is in the direct
line of social and economic development.
The professional man is a farther developed type of man than the miner.
It takes him longer to get through his educational infancy--longer to
arrive at his mental and financial maturity. The professional man's
wife is a farther developed type than the miner's wife. Her economic
utility as a cook and as a laundress in her husband's house tends to
approach zero.
Where these two lines of development, male and female, come to a
meeting point; where the man's infancy is longest and the woman's
value as housewife is least;--_there_ is, necessarily, altogether
apart from personal preferences, the greatest postponement of
marriage.
The United States, except possibly in certain sections, has not come
to the end of its growth toward postponed marriage.
It is true that in Massachusetts, within the past forty-five years,
the average age of women at marriage has risen from 20.7 to 24.6. That
is a very "modern" and "developed" marriage age. But many of the older
countries surpass it. In Belgium, for instance, which is a most
intensely industrialized country, the average age of women at marriage
is 28.19.
It is hard, indeed, to look at the advancing marriage age and to
compare its varying rate of progress in different continents,
different countries, different localities, and different social
circles without admitting that, whatever whirling, nebulous mists of
personal preferences it may create and carry with it, its nucleus is
purely economic.
Early marriage was made by economic advantages. It was destroyed by
economic changes. It will not be restored except by economic
adjustments.
"Nevertheless," said Mary, "I want John."
John had finished being engineer for the electric railway company.
Out of his two years' experience he had saved a few hundred dollars.
No, he hadn't. That isn't probable. The way he made his start into the
next phase of his career was not by having any ready money. Having
ready money is far from being characteristic of the young man of
to-day.
John opened his office as a consulting electrical engineer not on his
own resources but as an agent for an electrical supply company. Being
agent for that company assured him enough money to pay the office rent
and stenographer. For the rest, for his meals and his bed, he depended
on his clients. Whom he didn't have. But he started out to get them.
He opened his office in the city in which Mary was.
And then a strange but normal thing occurred. They spent enough
money on theaters and boat rides and candy in the next three
months to have paid the rent on a flat. It is true John's net income
was too small and uncertain to have justified the founding of a
family. But it was also true that they spent every cent they had.
The celibate life is an extravagant life. One of the innumerable
sources of modern extravagance is found just there.
Mary reflected on it. She didn't like it. And she began to see other
things she didn't like in this protraction of the period of
singleness.
Her work for the Bureau of Labor had taken her into many places, among
all sorts of women. She began to observe the irregular living which is
inevitably associated with a system of late marriages.
Mr. Lester F. Ward has learnedly and elaborately informed us that if
we go back to the origin of life on this planet we shall find that the
female was the only sex then existent, being original life itself,
reproducing itself by division of itself, and that the male was
created as an afterthought of nature's for the purpose of introducing
greater variation into the development of living things. The male, to
begin with, had only one function. That was to be a male. He was
purely a sex-thing.
Whether this biological theory stands or falls, it is certain that it
squares with the present character of the sexes. The sex which
originated as a sex-thing remains the more actively sexed.
There was once a very good sociologist called Robert Louis Stevenson
who made many researches into the psychology of the human race. While
on his "Inland Voyage" he observed in this matter that "it is no use
for a man to take to the woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same
thing long ago and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there
is this about some women, that they suffice to themselves and can walk
in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered
being."
The celibate life is more possible for most of them by nature. If it
were not for that fact, the postponement of marriage would by this
time have demolished the ethical code.
Even as things stand, Mary was quite willing to admit, when she saw
it, that there are two kinds of women greatly increasing in modern
days. Both have always existed, but now they are increasing very
rapidly and in parallel lines of corresponding development.
In one column is the enormous army of young women who remain
unmarried till twenty-five, till thirty, till thirty-five. Even at
that last age, and beyond it, in a well-developed city like, say,
Providence, R.I., in the age period from thirty-five to forty-five,
twenty out of every hundred women are still single.
In the other column is the enormous army of young women who, outside
of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional sex life,
venal, furtive, ignoble, and debasing; an army which has existed since
the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of
marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new
strength for poisoning the blood of life.
Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window. Angel
or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between its guises.
Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in stores
and in their apartments and in their boarding houses, women celibates
five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into the period when nature
has by irrepealable edict ordained love. It was surely unnatural, for
the mass of them. They were not vowed nuns. They were not devoted to
any great cause. They were just ordinary, normal young women,
thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of them.
Then, on the other side, Mary looked at the great army of women in
the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated
quarters--women who, however they may be sentimentalized about and
however irresponsible they may be for their own condition, are, as
a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet on them
was squandered the emotional life of millions of young men.
On the one side--intelligent, capable, effective young women, leading
lives of emotional sterility. On the other side--inferior women
blasted and withered by their specialization in the emotional life of
youth!
The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity of
living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face facts and
who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of letting facts
sleep, we rouse them and fight them we can make a better race.
The great Russian scientist, Metchnikoff, successor to Pasteur in the
Pasteur Institute, mentions the postponement of marriage as one of the
biological disharmonies of life. It is a disharmony that "among highly
civilized peoples marriage and _regular_ unions are impossible at the
_right time_."
And Mr. A. S. Johnson, writing in the authoritative report of the
committee of fifteen on the social evil, notes the parallel increase
of "young unmarried men" and of a city's "volume of vice."
He goes on to make, without comment, a statement of the economic facts
of the case.
"As a rule," he says, "the income which a young man earns, while
sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does not
suffice for founding a family."
He cannot found a family at the _right_ time. He goes unmarried
through the romantic period of his development, when the senses are at
their keenest and when the other sex, in its most vividly idealized
perfection, is most poignantly desired.
Then, later on, he may begin to get a larger income. Then marriage may
become more feasible. But then romance is waning. Then, as Mr. Johnson
says, "his standard of personal comfort rises." Romance has been
succeeded by calculation. "Accordingly he postpones marriage to a date
in the indefinite future or abandons expectation of it altogether."
Celibacy through the age of romance! It's emotionally wrong.
Sexlessness for a score of years after sex has awakened! It's
biologically wrong. It's a defiance of nature. And nature responds, as
she does to every defiance, with a scourge of physical and social
ills.
"But what of all that?" thought Mary. "Those things are just
observations. What I am going to act on is that I want John."
At which point she stopped being a typical modern young woman.
_She became a woman of the future._
"Look here," she said to John, "I'm working. You're working. We're
single. Very well. We'll change it. I'm working. You're working.
We're married. Have we lost anything? And we've gained each other."
They were married and Mary kept on working.
Two years later she stopped working.
In those two years she had helped John to start a home. She couldn't
operate soap kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and
salting tubs and spinning wheels for him. But she brought him an
equivalent of it in money. She earned from $900 to $1,000 a year.
Being married, they were more thrifty. They saved a large part of her
earnings. John was still spending a large part of his on extending his
business, on traveling, on entertaining prospective clients, on making
acquaintances. Sometimes she had to contribute some of her own money
to his expense accounts. That was the fortune of war. She helped him
pursue success.
"I wouldn't give up the memory of those two years," Mary used to say,
as she sat and stitched for her children, "for anything. I shared at
least a part of my husband's youth."
By sharing it, she won a certain happiness otherwise unattainable.
They had come to know each other and to help form each other's
character and to share each other's difficulties in the years when
only there is real joy in the struggle of life. They had not postponed
their love till, with a settled income, John could support her in
comfort and they could look back like Browning's middle-aged estranged
lovers to say:
"We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy."
"It used to take two to start a home in colonial days," Mary would
say. "I am really an old-fashioned woman. I helped to make this home.
We had twelve hundred dollars in the bank when I stopped working, and
John was pretty well established.
"I don't regret it," she went on, still speaking as a woman of the
future, "even for the children. Of course I do wish we had started
earlier. But I would have wanted to wait a while for the children in
any case. People risk too much when they start a family before they
become sufficiently used to marriage and to each other to know that
they can keep on loving each other and to know that they have in them
through their mutual, continued happiness the power to make a happy
home, a noble home, for children to live in."
As for the number of children she will have--we reserve that subject
for future discussion. We call attention here only to this:
That the facts which were cited from the Smith College records are
harmonious with many other facts and records tending to show that the
fertility of the modern wife has been considerably underrated, just as
the fertility of the colonial wife has been considerably exaggerated.
And this:
That Mary got to her childbearing period sooner than she would have if
she hadn't insisted on marrying John before he was ready to support
her. Those two years would have been childless years in any case. But
they would probably, if it hadn't been for Mary's money, have been
lengthened into four or five.
Of course, later marriages in themselves tend to reduce the number of
children. As to quality, however, the evidence is not clear. There is
even some reason to think that a moderate postponement is conducive to
an improvement in quality.
Did you ever read Havelock Ellis's book called "A Study of British
Genius"?
He made a list of the most distinguished of eminent British persons
and studied everything about them, from their religious opinions to
the color of their hair.
In the matter of the age of their parents, he finds that the
average age of the father at the birth of the person of genius was
thirty-seven years, while the average of the mother was thirty-one.
His conclusion is: "On the whole it would appear, so far as the
evidence goes, that the fathers of our eminent persons have been
predominantly middle-aged and to a marked extent elderly at the
time of the distinguished son's birth; while the mothers have been
predominantly at the period of greatest vigor and maturity and to
a somewhat unusual extent elderly. There has been a notable
deficiency of young fathers and, still more notably, of young
mothers."
And did you ever see the study which Mr. R. S. Holway made for the
Department of Education of Leland Stanford University on "The Age of
Parents: Its Effects upon Children"? His conclusions are:
"In most physical qualities the children of mature parents tend to
come out best.
"In mental ability the children of young parents show best at an early
age but rapidly lose their precocity.
"The elder children who show best tend to be the children of mature
and old parents.
"The children of elderly mothers show a tendency to superiority
throughout."
Mary did not know about all this, but she had a very strong opinion to
the effect that, in so far as the quality of her children could be
affected by their home training, she was glad she had spent at least a
few years earning her living.
"Every woman," said Mary, "ought to have some little time for
developing into an individual. Home won't do it altogether. Not
nowadays. The colonial home did, being part of the working world. But
what is the modern home? It is a nest, an eddy, a shelf, a nook. It's
something apart from the world. If a woman is going to prepare her son
for a knowledge of the real world, if she's going to be able to give
him a training which has in it an understanding and an appreciation of
the real world, if she's going to be able to educate him into real
living, she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some
experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she
becomes a mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable
postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent
individual will hereafter be urged, not opposed."
"The trouble about that," said John, "is that it makes you too
independent of me. Your proposition is to start in and earn your
living till you're pretty good at it. That is, you wouldn't marry me
till you were sure you could chuck me. How about that?"
Well, it has that side. But it has its other side, too.
Isn't there, after all, something rather pleasant for John in knowing,
_knowing_, that Mary isn't cleaving unto him simply because she can't
shift for herself? Something exquisitely gratifying in being certain,
_certain_, that it isn't just necessity that keeps her a home woman?
"If I were a man living in wedlock," said Mary, "I should want the
door of the cage always wide open, with my mate fluttering straight by
it every minute to still nestle by me. And I should want her wings to
be strong, and I should want her to know that if she went through the
door she could fly."
"For keeping her," Mary went on, "I should want to trust to my own
wings and not to bars."
* * * * *
"However," said Mary, looking farther into the future, "the process
isn't complete. Freedom is not yet completely acquired. Children! We
want them! We must have them! Yet how often they tie us to unions
which have come to be unholy, vile, full of all uncleanness. Women
will never be completely free till, besides being able to earn their
bread when they are _not_ bearing children, they are relieved of
dependence on the individual character of another human person while
they _are_. Mr. H. G. Wells is clearly right about it. When women
bear children they perform a service to the state. Children are
important to the state. They are its future life. To leave them to the
eccentricities of the economic fate of the father is ridiculous. The
woman who is bringing up children should receive from the state the
equivalent of her service in a regular income. Then, and then only, in
the union of man and woman, will love and money reach their right
relationship--love a necessity, money a welcome romance!"
"It's remote, very remote," concluded Mary. "And we can't dream it out
in detail. But when it comes it won't come out of personal sentiment.
It will come because of being demanded by the economic welfare of the
community. It will come because it is the best way to get serviceable
children for the state. It will come because, after all, it is the
final answer to the postponement of marriage."
II.
Learning for Earning
"Every Jack has his Jill." It is a tender twilight thought, and it
more or less settles Jill.
When the census man was at work in 1900, however, he went about and
counted 2,260,000 American women who were more than twenty-five years
old and who were still unmarried.
It is getting worse (or better) with every passing decade, and out of
it is emerging a new ideal of education for women, an ideal which
seems certain to penetrate the whole educational system of the United
States, all the way from the elementary schools to the universities.
The census man groups us into age-periods. The period from twenty-five
to twenty-nine is the most important matrimonially, because it is the
one in which most of us get pretty well fixed into our life work. Out
of every 1,000 women in that period, in the year 1890, the census man
found 254 who were still unmarried. _In 1900, only ten years later, he
found 275._
There is not so much _processional_ as _recessional_ about marriage at
present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the realistic
pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach the comparatively
serene, landlocked years from forty-five to fifty-four that we find
ourselves in an age period in which the number of single women has
been reduced to less than ten per cent of the total.
The rebound from this fact hits education hard. As marriage recedes,
and as the period of gainful work before marriage lengthens, the need
of real preparation for that gainful work becomes steadily more
urgent, and the United States moves steadily onward into an era of
trained women as well as of trained men.
[Illustration: SIMMONS COLLEGE, BOSTON, WHICH HAS FOUR-YEAR COURSES IN
SECRETARIAL STUDIES, LIBRARY WORK, SCIENCE, AND HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS.
_Photograph by Baer_]
In Boston, at that big new college called Simmons--the first of its
kind in the United States--a regular four-year college of which the
aim is to send out every graduate technically trained to earn her
living in some certain specific occupation--in Simmons there were
enrolled last year, besides five hundred undergraduate women, at
least eighty other women who had already earned their bachelor's
degrees at other colleges, such as Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith,
Vassar, Radcliffe, Leland Stanford, and the University of Montana.
These eighty other women, after eight years in grammar school, four
years in high school, and four years in college, were taking one year
more in technical school in order to be--what? Not doctors or lawyers
or architects. Not anything in the old "learned" professions. Their
scholastic purpose was more modest than that. Yet, modest as it was,
it was keeping them on the learner's bench longer than a "learned"
profession would have kept most of their grandfathers. _These eighty
women were taking graduate courses in order to be "social workers" in
settlements or for charity societies, in order to be library
assistants, in order to be stenographers and secretaries._
The Bachelor of Arts from Vassar who is going to be a stenographer,
and who is taking her year of graduate study at Simmons, will go to
work at the end of the year and then, six months later, if she has
made good, will get from Simmons the degree of Bachelor of Science.
At that point in her life she will have two degrees and seventeen
years of schooling behind her. A big background. But we are beginning
to do some training for almost everything.
Did you ever see a school of salesmanship for department-store women
employees? You can see one at the Women's Educational and Industrial
Union in Boston. Under the guidance of Mrs. Lucinda W. Prince, the big
department stores of Boston have come to think enough of this school
to send girls to it every morning and to pay them full wages while
they take a three months' course.
If you will attend any of the classes, in arithmetic, in textiles, in
hygiene, in color and design, in demonstration sales, in business
forms, you will get not only a new view of the art of selling goods
over the counter but a new vision of a big principle in education.
In the class on color, for instance, you will at first be puzzled by
the vivid interest taken by the pupils in the _theory_ of color. You
have never before observed in any classroom so intimate a concern
about rainbows, prisms, spectra, and the scientific sources of
æsthetic effects. Your mind runs back to your college days and returns
almost alarmed to this unacademic display of genuine, spontaneous,
unanimous enthusiasm. At last the reason for it works into your mind.
These girls are engaged in the _practice_ of color every afternoon,
over hats, ribbons, waists, gloves, costumes. When you begin once to
_study_ a subject which reaches practice in your life, you cannot stop
with practice. A law of your mind carries you on to the theory, the
philosophy, of it.
Just there you see the reason why trade training, broadly contrived,
broadens not only technique but soul, trains not only to _earn_ but to
_live_. "Refined selling" some of the girls call the salesmanship
which they learn in Mrs. Prince's class. They have perceived, to some
extent, the relation between the arts and sciences on the one hand and
their daily work on the other.
To a much greater extent has this relation been perceived by the young
woman who has taken the full four-year course in, say, "Secretarial
Studies" in Simmons and who, throughout her English, her German, her
French, her sociology, and her history, as well as throughout her
typewriting, her shorthand, and her commercial law, has necessarily
kept in view, irradiating every subject, the beacon-light of her
future working career.
"Ah! There, precisely, is the danger. Every Jack should have his Jill;
but if every Jill has her job, why, there again the wedding day goes
receding some more into the future. Let them stop all this foolishness
and get married, as their grandparents did!"
Poor Jack! Poor Jill! We lecture them, all the time, for postponing
their marriage. We ought not to stop there. We ought to go on to
lecture them for doing the thing which makes them postpone their
marriage. We ought to lecture them for postponing their _maturity_. We
ought to lecture them for prolonging their mental and financial
infancy.
The big, impersonal, unlectureable industrial reasons for the modern
prolongation of infancy were glanced at in chapter one of this book.
In the present chapter we shall glance at them again, more closely.
Just now, however, for a moment, we must revert to the Census, and we
must take one final look at the amount of marriage-postponement now
existing in this country.
It was in the United States as a whole that the census man found 275
out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period
unmarried. But the United States consists of developed and of
undeveloped regions. The cities are the high points of development.
Look at the cities:
In Chicago, out of every 1,000 women in the age-period from
twenty-five to twenty-nine, there were 314 who were unmarried. In
Denver there were 331. In Manhattan and the Bronx there were 356. In
Minneapolis there were 369. In Philadelphia there were 387.
Southern New England, however, is the most industrially developed part
of the United States, the part in which social conditions like those
of the older countries of the world are most nearly reached.
In Fall River, out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine
age-period, the unmarried were 391. In New Haven they were 393. In
Boston they were 452.
Therefore:
If, in educating girls, we educate them only for the probability of
ultimate marriage and not also for the probability of protracted
singleness, we are doing them a demonstrably grievous wrong.
But how is their singleness occupied?
We all know now that to a greater and greater degree it is getting
occupied with work, money-earning work.
The unmarried women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period
constitute more than one-fourth of the total number of women in that
age-period in the United States. In the large cities they constitute
usually more than one-third of the total number of women in that
period. Wouldn't it have been remarkable if their families had been
able to support them all at home? Wouldn't it have been remarkable if
the human race had been able to carry so large a part of itself on its
back?
We now admit the world's need of the labor-power of women. If women
aren't laboring at home (at cooking, laundering, nursing, mothering,
_something_), they will be (or ought to be) laboring elsewhere.
In the smaller cities and country districts of America home-life is
still (by comparison) quite ample in the opportunities it offers the
unmarried daughter for participation in hard labor. Nevertheless the
Census finds that the percentage of women "breadwinners" in the
"smaller cities and country districts" is as follows:
Age-Periods Breadwinners
From 16 to 20 years of age 27 women out of every 100
From 21 to 24 years of age 26 women out of every 100
From 25 to 34 years of age 17 women out of every 100
"Smaller cities," to the Census, means cities having fewer than 50,000
inhabitants. In the larger cities, in the cities which have _more_
than 50,000 inhabitants, in the urban environment in which home-life
tends most to contract to an all-modern-conveniences size, in the
urban environment in which the domestic usefulness of unmarried
daughters tends most to contract to the dimensions of "sympathy" and
"companionship," the Census finds that the percentage of women
breadwinners is as follows:
Age-Periods Breadwinners
From 16 to 20 years of age 52 women out of every 100
From 21 to 24 years of age 45 women out of every 100
From 25 to 34 years of age 27 women out of every 100
Therefore:
If, in educating girls, we do not educate them for the _possibility_
of money-earning work, we are exposing them to the possibility of
having to do that work without being schooled to it; we are exposing
them to the possibility of having to take the first job they see, of
having to do _almost anything_ for _almost nothing_; we are doing them
a wrong so demonstrable and so grievous that it cannot continue.
The schools which give a direct preparation for industrial life are
growing fast.
In the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, in New York City, many
hundreds of young girls are, in each year, enrolled. These girls
have completed the first five public-school grades. They are
learning now to be workers in paste and glue for such occupations
as sample-mounting and candle-shade-making, to be workers with
brush and pencil for such occupations as photograph-retouching and
costume-sketching, to be milliners, to be dressmakers, to be
operators of electric-power sewing-machines.
"Nothing to it," says an irritated manufacturer. "Nothing to it at
all. I can't get any good help any more. Back to the old days! Those
early New Englanders who made the business of this country what it is,
they didn't have all this technical business. They didn't study in
trade schools."
My dear sir, those early New Englanders not only studied in trade
schools, but worked and played and slept in trade schools. They spent
their whole lives in trade schools, from the moment when they began to
crawl on the floor among their mothers' looms and spinning-wheels.
There were few homes in early New England that didn't offer large
numbers of technical courses in which the father and the mother were
always teaching by doing and the sons and the daughters were always
learning by imitating.
The facts about this are so simple and so familiar that we don't stop
to think of their meaning.
When in the spring the wood ashes from the winter fires were poured
into the lye barrel, and water was poured in with them, and the lye
began to trickle out from the bottom of the barrel, and the winter's
savings of grease were brought out, and the grease and the lye were
boiled together in the big kettle, and mother had finished making the
family's supply of soap for another year, the children had taken not
only a little lesson in industriousness, by helping to make the soap,
but a little lesson in industry, too, by observing the technique and
organization of the soap business from start to finish. A boy from
that family, even if he never learned to read or write the word
"soap," might some day have some _ideas_ about soap.
The curriculum of an old New England home, so far as presided over by
the wife, may be incompletely suggested as follows:
(N. B. The reader will note the inappropriateness of congratulating
the daughters of that home on their not wanting a job. They had it.
And the reader will also note that the education of the early New
England girl, rich or poor, began with the education of her _hand_.)
VEGETABLES DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Gardening.
"In March and in April, from morning to night,
In sowing and setting good housewives delight."
2. A course in Medicinal Herbs. Borage, fennel, wild tansy, wormwood,
etc. Methods of distillation. Aqua composita, barberry conserve,
electuaries, salves, and ointments. A most important course for every
housewife.
"A speedy and a sovereign remedy,
The bitter wormwood, sage and marigold."
--Fletcher: _The Faithful Shepherdess_.
3. A course in Pickling.
In this course pretty nearly everything will be pickled, down to
nasturtium buds and radish pods.
PACKING-HOUSE DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Salting Meat in the "powdering" tub.
2. A course in Smoking Hams and Bacons.
3. A course in Pickling Pig's Feet and Ears.
4. A course in Headcheese and Sausages.
LIQUOR DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Beer. The making of wort out of barley. The making of
barm out of hops. The fermenting of the two together in barrels.
(This course is not so much given now in New England, but it is an
immemorial heritage of the female sex. Gervayse Markham, in his
standard book, "Instructions to a Good Housewife," says about beer:
"It is the work and care of woman, for it is a housework. The man
ought only to bring in the grain.")
2. A course in Light Drinks, such as Elderberry Wine.
CREAMERY DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Making Butter.
2. A course in Making Cheese; curdling, breaking curds in basket,
shaping in cheese-press, turning and rubbing cheese on cheese-ladder.
CLEANING DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Soap-Making.
2. A course in Making Brooms out of Guinea-wheat Straw.
3. A course in Starch-Making.
4. A course in Cleaning.
(This last course is very simple. Having manufactured the things to
wash and sweep with, the mere washing and sweeping won't take long.)
FRUIT DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Preserving. In this course everything will be preserved
unless it already has been pickled.
BREAKFAST-FOOD DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Mush and forty kinds of Bread--Rhineinjun (sometimes
called Rye and Indian), bun, bannock, jannock, rusk, etc., etc.
LIGHTING DEPARTMENT
1. A course in Dips. The melting of tallow or bayberries. The twisting
of wicks. The attaching of wicks to rods. The dipping of them into
the melted mass in the kettle. Patience in keeping on dipping them.
(Pupils taking this course are required to report each morning at five
o'clock.)
2. A course in Wax Candles. The use of molds.
These departments might give a girl a pretty fair education of
the hand and a pretty fair acquaintance with the technique and
organization of the working world; but we haven't yet mentioned
the biggest and hardest department of all.
Before mentioning it, let us take a look at the picture reproduced in
this chapter from a book published in the year 1493. This book was a
French translation of Boccaccio's collection of stories called "Noble
Women." The picture shows a woolen mill being operated in the grounds
of a palace by a queen and her ladies-in-waiting. It summons back the
days when even the daughters of kings and nobles could not help
acquiring a knowledge of the working world, because they were in it.
One of the ladies-in-waiting is straightening out the tangled strands
of wool with carding combs. The other has taken the combed and
straightened strands and is spinning them into yarn. The queen, being
the owner of the plant, has the best job. She is weaving the yarn into
cloth on a loom.
[Illustration: THIS SKETCH OF A WOOLEN MILL OPERATED IN THE GROUNDS OF A
PALACE BY A QUEEN AND HER LADIES-IN-WAITING IS TAKEN FROM A VERY OLD
FRENCH TRANSLATION OF BOCCACCIO'S BOOK ON "NOBLE WOMEN." IN THOSE DAYS
EVERY HOME WAS A FACTORY AND A TRADE SCHOOL.
_Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago._]
The daughters of the Emperor Charlemagne, who, besides being an
emperor, was a very rich man, learned how to card and spin and weave.
Noble women had to direct all that kind of work on their estates. They
lived in the very midst of industry, of business.
So it was with those early New England women. And therefore,
whether well-to-do or indigent, they passed on to their sons as
well as to their daughters a steady daily lesson in the world's work.
The most intelligent mother in the United States to-day, let her be
kindergartner and psychologist and child-study specialist as much
as she pleases, cannot give her children that broad early view of
the organization of life. The only place where her children can get
it now is the school.
On the first of January of the year 1910 Ella Flagg Young, superintendent
of schools in Chicago, took algebra out of the eighth grade of the
elementary schools, and, in its place, inserted a course on Chicago.
Large parts of what was once the home are now spread out through the
community. The new course will teach the life of the community, its
activities and opportunities, civic, æsthetic, industrial. Such a
course is nothing but home training for the enlarged home.
But we must go back for a moment to that biggest and hardest
department of all in the old homes of New England.
"Deceit, weeping, spinning, God hath give
To women kindly that they may live,"
said Chaucer in a teasing mood.
But spinning was a very small part of the Department of Textiles. We
forbear to dilate on the courses of instruction which that department
offered. We confine ourselves to observing that:
First. In the Subdepartment of Flax, after heckling the flax with
combs of increasing degrees of fineness till the fibers lay pretty
straight, after spinning it into yarn on her spinning wheel, after
reeling the yarn off into skeins, after "bucking" the skeins in hot
lye through many changes of water, and after using shuttle and loom to
weave the stuff into cloth, the home woman of those days had to
accomplish some twenty subsequent processes of bucking, rinsing,
possing, drying, and bleaching before the cloth was ready for use.
Second. In the Subdepartment of Wool, in addition to being carders,
spinners, and weavers, women were dyers, handling all the color
resources of the times, boiling pokeberries in alum to get a crimson,
using sassafras for a yellow or an orange, and producing a black by
boiling the fabric with field sorrel and then boiling it again with
logwood and copperas.
We pass over, as trivial, the making of flax and wool stuffs into
articles of actual use. We say nothing about the transformation of
cloth into clothes, table-covers, napkins; nothing about the weaving
of yarn on little lap looms into narrow fabrics used for hair laces,
glove ties, belts, garters, and hatbands; nothing about the incessant
knitting of yarn into mittens and stockings. Those details were for
idle moments.
Sweet domestic days, when girls stayed at home and helped their
mothers and let father support the family!
It seems as if even Rip Van Winkle, in his most shiftless mood, ought
to have been able to support a large number of daughters under such
conditions.
Does it astonish you that they matured young? There, all about them,
from babyhood, were the basic processes by which the world was
sheltered, clothed, and fed. Those processes were numerous but simple.
Boys and girls observed them, absorbed them, through eyes, through
finger-tips, during all those early years when eyes and finger-tips
are the nourishing points of the intellect. Does it astonish you that
they were soon ready for the duties of adult life?
John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was
married at seventeen. His parents were not only willing, but aiding
and abetting. They considered him a man.
Mercy Otis, the wife of the patriot, James Warren, and Abigail Smith,
the wife of the future president, John Adams, both married before
twenty. A study of their lives will show that at that age they were
not only _thought_ to be grown up but _were_ so.
To-day, in Boston, a woman of twenty is considered so immature that
many of the hospitals will not admit her even to her preliminary
training for the trade of nurse till she has added at least three
years more to her mental development.
Who has thus prolonged infancy? Who has thus postponed maturity?
Science has done part of it.
By the invention of power-driven machines and by the distribution of
the compact industries of the home out and into the scattered,
innumerable business enterprises of the community, Science has given
us, in place of a simple and near world, a complicated and distant
one. It takes us longer to learn it.
Simultaneously, by research and also by the use of the printing-press,
the locomotive, and the telegraph wire (which speed up the production
as well as the dissemination of knowledge), Science has brought forth,
in every field of human interest and of human value, a mass of facts
and of principles so enormous and so important that the labors of our
predecessors on this planet overwhelm us, and we grow to our full
physical development long before we have caught up with the previous
mental experience of the race. This is true first with regard to what
is commonly called General Culture and next with regard to what is
commonly called Specialization. Growth into General Culture takes
longer and longer. And then so does the specialized mastery of a
specialized technique. The high-school teacher must not only go to
college but must do graduate work. The young doctor, after he finishes
college and medical school, is found as an interne in hospitals, as an
assistant to specialists, as a traveler through European lecture
rooms. The young engineer, the young architect, the young specialist
of every sort, finds his period of preparation steadily extending
before him.
A complicated and distant world instead of a simple and near one, a
large mass of human experience to assimilate instead of a small one, a
long technique to master instead of a short one,--for all this part of
the extension of immaturity we may thank Science. For the remaining
part of it we may thank System.
The world is getting organized. Except in some of the professions
(and often even in them) we most of us start in on our life work at
some small subdivided job in a large organization of people. The
work of the organization is so systematized as to concentrate
responsibility--and remuneration--toward the top. In time, from job to
job, up an ascent which grows longer as the organization grows
bigger, we achieve responsibility. Till we do, we discharge minor
duties for minimum pay.
Thus the _mental_ immaturity resulting from Science is supplemented by
the _financial_ immaturity resulting from System.
Both kinds of immaturity last longest among the boys and girls who
come from that large section of society which is neither rich nor
poor.
This is not to say that rich and poor escape unaffected. Shall we ever
again, from the most favored of homes, see a William Pitt, Chancellor
of the Exchequer, by merit, at 23? And, in the mass of the people,
shall we ever again see that quickness of development toward adulthood
which gave us the old common-law rule validating the marriage of a
male at 14 and of a female at 12? The retardation of adulthood is
observable in all social groups. But it comes to its climax in what is
commonly called the "middle" group. For it is in that group that the
passion for education is strongest, or, at any rate, most effective.
It is from the families of average farmers, of average business men
and of average professional men that we get our big supply of pupils
for the most prolonged technical training of our schools and
universities.
In this matter, as in many other matters, the historian of the
nineteenth century may possibly find that while public attention was
being given principally to the misery of the poor and to the luxury of
the rich it was in the "middle" part of society that the really
revolutionary changes in family life were happening.
It is with the financial reason for prolonged immaturity just as it is
with the mental. The rich boy may be supported into marriage by his
family. The son of the laborer soon reaches the wage-earning level of
his environment. But the son of the average man of moderate means,
after his years of scholastic preparation, must spend yet other years
in a slow climb out of the ranks into a position of commercial or
professional promise of "success" before he acquires what is regarded
in _his_ environment as a marrying income.
They say that college girls marry late. It's true enough. But it's not
well put.
The girls in the social group from which most college girls are drawn
marry late.
Late marriage was not started by college. It would be safer to say
that college was started by late marriage.
Out of the prolongation of infancy, out of the postponement of
marriage, came the conquest by women of the intellectual freedom of
the world.
We can learn something about the nature of education by following the
history of that conquest.
When the old New England homestead furnished adequate employment to
all its daughters, and when those daughters passed directly from
girlhood to wifehood and were still most adequately employed, there
was really little reason why they should attend the schools in which
their brothers were being taught the knowledges of the outside world.
The girls did not belong to the outside world. Nor did the outside
world have anything to teach them about their work in the household.
In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that in 1684 the New
Haven Grammar School should have ordered that "all girls be excluded
as improper and inconsistent with such a grammar school as the law
enjoins."
In proportion, however, as the work of the household was shifted out
into the outside world, and in proportion as women began to follow
that work out into the outside world, the knowledges of the outside
world became appropriate and necessary for them. Hence, a hundred
years later, in 1790, it was as much a changing industrial condition
as a changing psychological one which caused the school authorities of
Gloucester, Mass., to resolve that "two hours (in each school-day) be
devoted to the instruction of females, as they are a tender and
interesting branch of the community."
But grammar-school education, even high-school education, was not long
enough for the women in the families in which the prolongation of
infancy, and the consequent postponement of marriage, was greatest.
While their future husbands were going through the long process of
education in school and college and university and then through the
long process of commercial and professional apprenticeship, these
girls were passing through the grammar-school age, through the
high-school age, and then on into what in those days looked like
old-maidhood. Their social environment did not lead them into factory
work. Yet their families were not rich. How were they to be occupied?
The father of Frederick the Great used to go about his realm with a
stick, and when he saw a woman in the street he would shake the stick
at her and say: "Go back into the house. An honest woman keeps
indoors."
Probably quite sensible. When she went indoors, she went into a job.
The "middle class" daughter of to-day, if her mother is living and
housekeeping, goes indoors into a vacuum.
Out of that vacuum came the explosion which created the first woman's
college.
There was plenty of sentiment in the explosion. That was the splendid,
blinding part of it. That was the part of it which even to-day dazzles
us with the nobility of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They
made Troy Female Seminary in the twenties and Mount Holyoke in the
thirties in the image of the aspirations, as well as in the image of
the needs, of the women of the times.
But the needs were there, the need to _be_ something, the need to do
something, self-respecting, self-supporting. The existence of those
needs was clearly revealed in the fact that from the early women's
colleges and from the early coeducational universities there at once
issued a large supply of teachers.
This flow of teachers goes back to the very fountain-head of the
higher education of women in this country. Emma Willard, even before
she founded Troy Female Seminary, back in the days when she was
running her school in Middlebury, Conn., was training young women to
_teach_, and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently
urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal school
in the United States.
From that time to this most college women have taught school before
getting married. _The higher education of women has been, in economic
effect, a trade school for training women for the trade of teacher._
But isn't it the purpose of the colleges to avoid training their
pupils for specific occupations? Isn't it their purpose to give their
pupils discipline and culture, pure and broad, unaffected by
commercial intention? Isn't that what colleges are, and ought to be,
for?
On the shore of this vast and violent controversy we discreetly pause.
We shall not enter it. We cannot refrain, however, from extending our
finger at three reefs of solid fact which unsubmergably jut out above
the surface of the raging waters.
First. The colleges instruct their pupils in the subjects which those
pupils subsequently teach.
Second. The pupils specialize in the subjects which they are going to
teach.
Third. The colleges, besides providing the future teachers with
subjects, almost always offer to provide them with instruction in the
principles of education, and frequently offer to provide them with
instruction in the very technique of class-room work.
Our verdict, therefore, which we hope will be satisfactory to counsel
on both sides, is that the college is by no means a trade school, but
that if the woman who is going to earn her living will choose the one
trade of teaching, she can almost always get a pretty fair trade
training by going to college.
Passing beyond even the suspicion of controversy, we may observe,
uncontradicted, that the amount of trade training which a teacher is
expected to take is increasing year by year. In teaching, as in other
trades, the period and scope of preliminary preparation continue to
expand.
In the last calendar of Bryn Mawr College, the Department of
Education, in announcing its courses, makes the following common-sense
remarks:
"It is the purpose of this department to offer to students intending
to become teachers an opportunity to obtain a technical preparation
for their profession. Hitherto practical training has been thought
necessary for teachers of primary schools only, but similar
training is very desirable for teachers in high schools and colleges
also. Indeed, it is already becoming increasingly difficult for
college graduates without practical and theoretical pedagogical
knowledge to secure good positions. In addition to the lectures
open to undergraduates, courses will be organized for graduate
students only, conducted with special reference to preparation for the
headship and superintendence of schools."
There could hardly be a clearer recognition of the _vocational_ duty
of a college. There is meaning in that phrase "to secure good
positions." Bryn Mawr is willing to train girls not only to be
cultivated but to secure good positions, _as teachers_.
But the teaching trade is getting choked. There is too much supply.
Girls are going to college in hordes. Graduating from college, looking
for work, there is usually just one kind of work toward which they are
mentally alert. Their college experience has seldom roused their minds
toward any other kind of work. They start to teach. They drug the
market. And so the teaching trade, the great occupation of unmarried
educated women, ceases to be able to provide those women, as a class,
with an adequate field of employment.
It is a turning point in the economic history of educated women. It
is a turning point in the history of women's education.
At the 1909 annual convention of the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ,
in Cincinnati, Miss Susan Kingsbury (acting for a committee of which
Mrs. Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Miss
Breckenridge, of the University of Chicago, were members) read a real
essay on "The Economic Efficiency of College Women."
This essay was not written till detailed reports on income and
expenditure from 377 self-supporting college women had been got
together.
Out of these 377 there were 317 who were teachers. All of them had
gone all the way through college. More than half of them had
followed up their regular college course with from one to eight
years of graduate study. The capital invested in their education
was, in the average case, from $2,500 to $3,500. Often, however, it
amounted to $7,000 because of advanced work and travel. After all
this preparation, the average income achieved may be sufficiently
disclosed in the one fact that, among those graduates who had been at
work for from six to eight years, more than seventy per cent. were
still earning less than $1,100.
After drawing a complete statistical picture of the case, Miss
Kingsbury concluded with certain questions and recommendations, here
condensed, which show the new economic needs of educated women
knocking at the door of the higher education.
"Should not the oversupply of teachers be reduced by directing many of
our graduates into other pursuits than teaching? This will place upon
the college, just where the responsibility is due, the obligation of
discovering what those opportunities are and what preparation should
be given.
"This organization should endeavor to arouse in our colleges a sense
of responsibility for knowing the facts with regard to their
graduates, both social and economic, and should also endeavor to
influence our colleges through appointment secretaries, to direct
women, according to fitness, into other lines than teaching.
"Should not courses be added to the college curriculum to give women
the fundamental principles in other professions, or lines of industry
or commerce, than teaching?
"May not required courses be added to the college curriculum to
inculcate business power and sense in all women?"
This philosophy seems to aim at making the modern school as
informative about the occupations of modern women as the primitive
colonial home used to be about the occupations of the women of early
New England.
You see, we have always had vocational education. The early New
England girl was gradually inducted into her life-tasks by her mother.
The modern girl will be gradually inducted into her life-tasks by her
teachers.
You can observe the development toward this conclusion going on at any
educational level you please.
Let's look for a moment at the industrial level. Here's a girl, in the
north end of Boston, who is going to have to go to work young. She
knows it. Her family knows it. Well, even for this girl, whose
schooling will be brief, there are already three different periods of
gradual induction into industry.
First, when she has completed the lowest grades of her regular public
school, she may go for a while to the North Bennet Street Industrial
School. Here she will give just about half her time to manual work
such as machine- and hand-sewing. She will also study arithmetic,
literature and composition, geography and history; but (or, rather,
_and_) her interest in these subjects will be stimulated as powerfully
as possible by their practical applications, as well as by their
general relations, to the manual work she is doing and to the working
world she is so soon to enter.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
We are coming to admit the fact now that "pure" language and "pure"
mathematics unapplied to actual problems are, for the mass of boys and
girls, not only uninteresting but astonishingly unproductive of mental
results. One of the first discoveries made by Mrs. Mary Schenck
Woolman in her management of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was
that the public-school pupils who came to her after several years in
the grades were "unable to utilize their public-school academic work
in practical trade affairs." Their progress, if it could be called
so, had been toward reception, not toward action. In the North Bennet
Industrial School our Boston girl will make progress toward action.
Next, from the North Bennet, she may go to the Boston Trade School for
Girls. This school was given its first form under private management
by Miss Florence Marshall. It has now been absorbed into the
public-school system. What was a private fad has become a public
function.
In the Trade School the pupil whom we are following may decide to be a
milliner. But she will not yet confine her attention to millinery. She
will take courses in personal hygiene, business forms, spelling,
business English, industrial conditions, textiles, color-design. She's
not yet in the purely "technical" part of her education. She's still,
to some extent, in the general vocational part of it. But she is
entering deeper and deeper into technique. While in the Trade School
she will give much of her time for four months to plain sewing, then
for four months to making summer hats and finally for four months to
making winter hats.
She has now completed two of the industrial educational periods we
mentioned. She may go on to a third. She may proceed to spend a year
in the millinery trade-shop of the Women's Educational and Industrial
Union. Here she will get into technique completely. The conditions
will be virtually those of a factory. She will be trained to precision
and to speed. Her product will be sold. She will receive wages. Yet
she is still in school. She is still regarded not as an employee to be
discharged offhand for incompetency but as a pupil to be instructed
and assisted on into competency.
When that girl goes to a real commercial millinery shop she will be as
thoroughly ready for it as the New England girl was ready for a loom
when her mother let her at last run it by herself.
We have looked now at the industrial educational level. And, happening
to be in the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, we can look at
two other educational levels without going out of the building.
On the commercial level we can remind ourselves of the rapid spread of
modern commercial education by visiting the classroom of Mrs. Prince's
school of department-store salesmanship. It is such a successful
school now that the Women's Educational and Industrial Union offers,
in conjunction with Simmons College, to teach people to teach
salesmanship in other similar schools which are being started
elsewhere.
Leaving this commercial level, we can go to the academic level by
visiting the Appointment Bureau. We may call it the academic level
because the Appointment Bureau exists chiefly for the benefit of girls
who have been to college. Its purpose, however, is non-academic in the
extreme.
The Appointment Bureau is an employment agency, and one of the most
extraordinary employment agencies ever organized. Its object is not
merely to introduce existing clients to existing jobs (which is the
proper normal function of employment agencies), but to make forays
into the wild region of "occupations other than teaching," and there
to find jobs, and then to find girls to fit those jobs. In other
words, it is a kind of "Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson's
Bay" for the purpose of exploring, surveying, developing, and settling
the region of "occupations other than teaching" on behalf of college
women.
It is managed by Miss Laura Drake Gill, president of the National
Association of Collegiate Alumnæ and former dean of Barnard College.
She is assisted by an advisory council of representatives of near-by
colleges--Radcliffe, Wellesley, Simmons, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and
Brown.
In harmony with this work the Women's Educational and Industrial Union
has just issued a handbook of three hundred pages, entitled "Vocations
for the Trained Woman." It is an immense map of the occupational world
for educated women, in which every bay and headland, every lake and
hill, is drawn to scale, from poultry farming to department-store
buying, from lunch-room management to organized child-saving.
We here see the educational system, at its college academic level,
moving not simply toward preparing girls for money-earning work but
also toward actually putting them into that work and, in order to put
them into it, finding it.
This last innovation, this advising of graduates with regard to the
occupational world and this guiding of them into the occupations for
which they are best fitted, will bring education closer to the
ultimate needs of those who are being educated than any other
innovation of recent years. It will establish the final permanent
contact between two isolations,--the isolation of aimless learning and
the isolation of ignorant doing. It is still, however, a project, a
prospect. The other two innovations which we have mentioned press
closer to immediacy. Immediate, certainly, is the demand of "middle
class" women for larger occupational opportunities. And almost
immediate is the success of the demand that the school system shall
fit them to the use of those opportunities.
In a small Illinois city there is a woman's college, founded as a
preparatory school in the forties and soon advanced to be a seminary,
which, with Anna P. Sill for its first head, Jane Addams for its
best-known graduate, and Julia Gulliver for its present president, has
come to be a college of standing and of leading. Only Troy Female
Seminary and Mount Holyoke Seminary preceded it, in date of
foundation, among the important women's institutions.
Rockford College is ranked to-day, by the reports of the United States
Commissioner of Education, in rank one--among the sixteen best women's
colleges in the United States. It hasn't risen to that rank by any
quick, money-spurred spurt. It brings with it out of its far past all
the traditions of that early struggle for the higher education which,
by friction, kindled among women so flaming an enthusiasm for pure
knowledge. It remains "collegiate" in the old sense, quiet, cloistral,
inhabiting old-fashioned brick buildings in an old-fashioned large
yard, looking still like the Illinois of war times more than like the
Illinois of the twentieth century, retaining all the home ideals of
those times--a large interest in feminine accomplishments, a strict
regard for manners, a belief in the value of charm.
But here, in this quiet, non-metropolitan college, so really
"academic," so really--in the oldest-fashioned ways--"cultural," here
is a two-year course in Secretarial Studies.
[Illustration: ROCKFORD COLLEGE, IN ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS. IN ITS
OLD-FASHIONED BUILDINGS, WHICH PRESERVE THE SPIRIT OF THE ACADEMIC LIFE
OF THE OLD DAYS, THERE IS NOW A VERY MODERN DEPARTMENT OF SECRETARIAL
STUDIES.]
It is the first time (within our knowledge) that such a thing has
happened in any of the old first-rank women's colleges.
The course in Secretarial Studies at Rockford gives the pupil English,
accounts, commerce, commercial law, and economic history in her first
year, and political science, English, and economics in her second
year. Shorthand and typewriting are required in both years, and a few
hours a week are reserved in each year for elective courses to be
chosen by the pupil among offerings in French, German, Spanish, and
history.
There is here a double concession: first, to the increased need of
"middle class" women for "occupations other than teaching"; second, to
the increased recognition of those other occupations as being worthy
of "cultural" training.
This turn in education has been made on an economic pivot. The
commercial and industrial occupations of the world are coming to
demand scholastic preparation. And the women who have had scholastic
preparation, even the most complete and long-continued scholastic
preparation, are coming to demand admission into the commercial and
industrial occupations of the world. The era of the purely scholastic
occupation _and no other_ for the scholastically trained woman has
come to an end.
We have observed the contraction of the home as a field of adequate
employment for daughters. We have observed the postponement of
marriage in its effect on the occupational opportunities of those
daughters. Deprived of adequate employment at home, we have seen them
seek it elsewhere. Marriage and housekeeping and child-rearing, as an
occupation, we have seen deferred to a later and later period in life.
Let us now assume that every woman who has a husband is removed from
money-earning work. It is an assumption very contrary to fact. But let
us make it. And then let us look at this compact picture of the extent
to which being married is an occupation for American women:
In the United States, in the year 1900, among women twenty years of
age and over, the married women numbered 13,400,000. The unmarried
women and the widows together numbered 6,900,000. For every two women
married there was one woman either single or widowed.
[Illustration: THESE CHILDREN IN THE FRANCIS PARKER SCHOOL IN CHICAGO ARE
GETTING AN EARLY START IN THEIR TRAINING FOR THEIR FUTURE WORK IN THEIR
HOMES.
_Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago._]
What futility, as well as indignity, there is in the idea that the
query of support for women gets its full answer in a husband!
Surely we may now say: If education does not (1) give women a
comprehension of the organization of the money-earning world, and (2)
train them to one of the techniques which lead to self-support in that
world, it is not education.
Just at this point, though, we encounter a curious conflict in women's
education. Just as we see their urgent need of a money-earning
technique, we simultaneously hear, coming from a corner of the
battlefield and swelling till it fills the air with a nation-wide
battle cry, the sentiment: "The Home is also a technique. All women
must be trained to it."
At Rockford College, illustrating this conflict, there exists, besides
the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home
Economics.
In an illustration in this chapter we show the tiny children of the
Francis Parker School in Chicago taking their first lesson in the
technique of the home. In another picture we show the post-graduate
laboratory in the technique of the home at the University of Illinois.
And the space between the kindergarten and the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy threatens to get filled up almost everywhere with courses
in cooking, sewing, chemistry of diet, composition of textiles, art of
marketing, and other phases of home management.
The money-earning world, a technique! The home, a technique! The boy
learns only one. Must the girl learn two, be twice a specialist?
III.
Learning for Spending
The First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was
held in 1908 at Fribourg in Switzerland. It was no improvised,
amateur-uplift, private-theatricals affair.
The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of
Fribourg's State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics were
printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members numbered
seven hundred. The discussions developed the characteristic points of
three rival varieties of household-arts instruction--the German, the
Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of
Fribourg, Berne, and Zurich, in each of which there is an elaborate
system for the training of household-arts teachers. In the end, in
order that facts and ideas about the education of girls for their
duties as housekeepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted
to establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent International
Information Committee.
Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have almost
all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking
and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever
slaking concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders,--the
manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an
age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs the spectators to say "thumbs down" and
let her put it out of its agony altogether--in such an age there
comes, at Fribourg, in this First International Congress on Domestic
Science and Arts, the most serious, the most notable, recognition ever
given in any age to the home's economic value.
A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the fluttering
thought that theories of industrial evolution, one's own as well as
Mrs. Gilman's, are a bit like automobiles--not always all that they
are cranked up to be.
Certainly the revival of the home seems to attract larger crowds to
the mourners' bench every year.
At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in home
economics was gathered in the spring of 1910. They were seven. Of the
120 units of work required for graduation they had earned at least 38
in such subjects as "Textiles and Clothing," "Food Chemistry,"
"General Foods," "Advanced Foods," "Home Sanitation," "House
Furnishing and Decoration," and "Home Administration." Most of them,
besides taking a degree in Home Economics, took likewise a degree in
Education. We may therefore assume that schools as well as homes will
listen to their new message.
Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who subsequently left Missouri to
organize a department of home economics in the University of Kansas,
is a novel type of New Woman in that she has earned the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in "Woman's Sphere." She took graduate work in
the department of home administration in the University of Chicago and
achieved her doctorate with an investigation into "The Effect of
Cooking on the Digestibility of Starch." What she found out was
subsequently printed as a bulletin by the United States Department of
Agriculture.
In the midst of the festivities at the wake held over the home, it
perplexes the mourners to learn that some of those domestic science
bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture excite a
demand for a million copies.
It is a wake like Mike McCarthy's.
Mike was lookin' iligant
As he rested there in state.
But
When the fun was at its height
McCarthy sat up straight.
This ballad (one of the most temperately worded of literary successes)
goes on to say that "the effect was great." So it has been in the
parallel case here considered--great enough to be felt all the way
around the world.
It is being felt in the Island Empire of the East. Miss Ume Tsuda's
Institute at Tokyo (which stands so high that its graduates are
allowed to teach in secondary schools without further government
examination) has installed courses in English domestic science as well
as in the domestic science of Japan.
It is being felt in the Island Empire of the West. King's College, of
the University of London, has organized a three-year course leading to
the degree of Mistress of Home Science, and has also established a
"Post-Graduates' Course in Home Science," in which out of fourteen
students (in the first year of its existence) four were graduates of
the courses of academic study of Oxford or Cambridge.
It is being felt in the United States at every educational level.
We expect domestic science and art now in the schools of agriculture
and we regard it as natural that the legislature of Montana should
appropriate $50,000 to the Montana State Agricultural College for a
women's dormitory.
We expect domestic science and art in the elementary schools and we
are not astonished to find that in Boston, in every grade above the
third, for every girl, there is sewing, or cooking, or both, for 120
minutes every week.
We begin to expect domestic science and art in the high schools. In
Illinois there are 71 high schools in which instruction is offered in
one or more of the three great divisions of the Study of Daily
Life--Food, Clothing, the Home. In such of these high schools as are
within the limits of the city of Chicago there is a four-year
Household-Arts course so contrived that the girls who enroll
themselves in it, while not neglecting literature, art, and the pure
sciences like physics, will spend at least eight hours every week on
"Domestic Science" or on "Textiles."
We are impelled now to admit that the work done in domestic science
and art by the high schools should be recognized by the colleges and
universities. The University of California requires its freshmen to
come to it with 45 "units" of standardized high-school work, of
various sorts, accomplished. We learn, but we are not startled when we
learn, that the University of California will henceforth allow the
entering freshman to offer nine of her 45 "units" in sewing,
dressmaking, millinery, decorating, furnishing (all accompanied with
free-hand drawing); and in cooking, hygiene, dietetics, laundering,
nursing (all accompanied with chemistry).
Even in the colleges and universities themselves, especially if they
are of recent foundation, we accept, if we do not expect, a
domestic-science-and-art department of utilitarian value and of
academic worth. At Chicago University it is called the Department of
Household Administration; sixty women undergraduates are specializing
in it. At the University of Illinois it is called the Department of
Household Science; one-third of all the women in the university are
taking courses in it; one-fifth of them are "majoring" in it; number
four of volume two of the university bulletins is by Miss Sprague on
"A Precise Method of Roasting Beef"; in the research laboratory Miss
Goldthwaite, _Doctor_ Goldthwaite, is making chemical experiments with
pectin, sugar, fruit-juice, tartaric acid, to the point of determining
that the mixture should be withdrawn from heat at a temperature of 103
degrees Centigrade and at a specific gravity of 1.28 in order that it
shall invariably "jell"; in the graduate school the women who attend
the household-arts seminar are being directed toward original
inquiries into "Co-operative Housekeeping," "Dietetic Cults," "Hygiene
of Clothing," "Pure Food Laws."
Seeing how far the newer universities go, we return to rest our
eyes, without their rolling in the frenzy which would attack
Alexander Hamilton if he were with us, on Hamilton's alma mater,
Columbia University, venerable but adventurous, giving courses in
"Housewifery," in "Shirtwaists," and in "Domestic Laundering."
[Illustration: UPPER PICTURE: IN CENTER IS THE NEW $500,000 HOUSEHOLD
ARTS BUILDING OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN NEW YORK.
LOWER PICTURE IS THE HOUSEHOLD ARTS BUILDING OF CALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC
SCHOOL AT SAN LUIS OBISPO.]
It is not till we come to the really-truly, more than masculinely,
academic and cultural eastern women's colleges such as Vassar,
Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr that we experience a genuine
journalistic shock on hearing a domestic-science-and-art piece of
news. Those colleges will be the last to succumb. But the day of their
fall approaches. The alumnæ association of Wellesley voted, in 1910,
to petition the trustees to establish home-economics courses; and, in
the same year, the president of Wellesley put into her commencement
address the words: "I hope the time may soon come when we can have a
department of domestic science which shall give a sound basis for the
problems of the household."
The resuscitated Home has become one of the livest of pedagogical
personages. It has added a great and growing field to the estate of
Education. To supply that field with teachers of high qualifications
we find highly extended training courses in such institutions as
Drexel in Philadelphia, Pratt in Brooklyn, Simmons in Boston and
Teachers College in New York. In fact, the conclusion of the epoch of
pioneer domestic-science-and-art agitation might perhaps be said to
have been announced to the country when Teachers College, in 1909,
erected a new building at a cost of $500,000 and dedicated it, in its
entirety, to Household Arts.
What does it all mean?
"Fellow citizens," said the colored orator, reported by Dr. Paul
Monroe of Columbia, "what am education? Education am the palladium of
our liberties and the grand pandemonium of civilization."
But it does mean something, this Home Economics disturbance. _And
something very different from what it seems to._
* * * * *
Mr. Edward T. Devine, of the New York Charity Organization Society,
has distinguished himself in the field of economic thought as well as
in the field of active social reform. Among his works is a minute but
momentous treatise on "The Economic Function of Women." It is really a
plea for the proposition that to-day the art of consuming wealth is
just as important a study as the art of producing it.
"If acquisition," says Mr. Devine, "has been the idea which in the
past history of economics has been unduly emphasized, expenditure is
the idea which the future history of the science will place beside
it."
We have used our brains while getting hold of money. We are going to
use our brains while getting rid of it. We have studied banking,
engineering, shop practice, cost systems, salesmanship. We are going
to study food values, the hygiene of clothing, the sanitary
construction and operation of living quarters, the mental reaction of
amusements, the distribution of income, the art of making choices,
according to our means, from among the millions of things, harmful and
helpful, ugly and beautiful, offered to us by the producing world.
Mr. Devine ventures to hope that "we may look for a radical
improvement in general economic conditions from a wiser use of the
wealth which we have chosen to produce."
This enlarged view of the economic importance of consumption brings
with it a correspondingly enlarged view of the economic importance of
the Home. "If the factory," says Mr. Devine, "has been the center of
the economics which has had to do with Production, the home will
displace the factory as the center of interest in a system which gives
due prominence to Enjoyment and Use."
"There will result," continues Mr. Devine, "an increased respect on
the part of economists for the industrial function which woman
performs," for "there is no economic function higher than that of
determining how wealth shall be used," so that "even if man remain the
chief producer of wealth and woman remain the chief factor in
determining how wealth shall be used, the economic position of woman
will not be considered by those who judge with discrimination to be
inferior to that of man."
Mr. Devine then lays out for the economist a task in the discharge of
which the innocent bystander will sincerely wish him a pleasant trip
and a safe return.
"It is the present duty of the economist," says Mr. Devine, "to
accompany the wealth expender to the very threshold of the home, that
he may point out, with untiring vigilance, its emptiness, caused not
so much by lack of income as by lack of knowledge of how to spend
wisely."
Mr. Devine's proposition therefore would seem finally to sanction some
such conclusion as this:
Physical science and social science (and common sense) are making such
important contributions to the subject of the rearing of children and
to the subject of the maintenance of wholesome and beautiful living
conditions and to the subject of the use of leisure that, while the
home woman has lost almost all of the productive industries which she
once controlled, she has simultaneously gained a whole new field of
labor. Consumption has ceased to be merely _passive_ and has become
_active_. It has ceased to be mere _Absorption_ and has become
_Choice_. And the active choosing of the products of the world (both
spiritual and material) in connection with her children, her house,
and her spare time has developed for the home woman into a task so
broad, into an art so difficult, as to require serious study.
We have quoted at length from Mr. Devine's discourse because it is
recognized as the classic statement of the case and because it has had
the warm personal commendation of such women as the late Mrs. Ellen H.
Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose skill as
scientist and vision as philosopher made her the most authoritative
personality in the American Home Economics Association. (That
association, by the way, has some fifteen hundred due-paying
members.)
The scales fall from our eyes now and we see at least one thing which
we had not seen before. We had supposed that sewing and cooking were
the vitals of the home economics movement. Not at all! The home woman
might cease altogether to sew and to cook (just as she has ceased
altogether to spin, weave, brew, etc.) without depriving the home
economics movement of any considerable part of its driving power.
Sewing and cooking are productive processes. They add economic value
to certain commodities; namely, cloth and food. But it is not
production, it is consumption, which the home economics movement is at
heart devoted to.
This is plainly set forth by some of its most zealous workers. Thus
Edna D. Day, at the Lake Placid Conference on home economics in 1908,
was more or less sorry that "domestic science has come to be so
largely sewing and cooking in our schools"; was quite willing to look
at the white of the eye of the fact that "more and more we are buying
ready-made clothes and ready-cooked foods"; and marked out the policy
of her "Survey Course in Home Economics" at the University of Missouri
in the statement that "sewing and cooking are decreasingly home
problems, while the problems of wise buying, of adjusting standards of
living to income, and of developing right feelings in regard to
family responsibilities are increasingly difficult."
To choose and use the world's resources intelligently on behalf of
family and community--in this Mr. Devine saw a new field of action, in
this Mrs. Richards saw a new field of education.
Women will train themselves for their duties as consumers or else
continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation pronounced upon
them by Florence Nightingale. "Three-fourths of the mischief in
women's lives," said she, "arises from their excepting themselves from
the rule of training considered necessary for men."
But what, in this case, is the training proposed?
The answer to that question will cause some more scales to fall from
our eyes. Just as we have seen that home economics does not consist
essentially of sewing and cooking, we shall see that consumption
is not at all a specialized technique in the sense in which
electrical engineering, department-store buying, railroading, cotton
manufacturing, medicine, and the other occupations of the outside
world are specialized techniques. Home economics will not narrow
women's education but in the end will enlarge it. For consumption,
instead of being a specialty, is a generality so broad as almost
to glitter.
* * * * *
At Menomonie, Wis., Mr. L. D. Harvey, lately president of the National
Education Association, has established a Homemakers' School. It does
not turn out teachers. Its course of instruction is solely for the
prospective housewife.
If we look at the number of things the prospective housewife is to be
we shall soon perceive that she cannot be any one of them in any
specialized technical way and that what she is getting is not so much
a training for a trade as a training for life at large.
The first grand division of study is The House.
[Illustration: MARY D. CHAMBERS, HOME ECONOMICS, ROCKFORD COLLEGE.
_Photograph by Devenier._]
[Illustration: MR. L. D. HARVEY, HOMEMAKERS' SCHOOL, MENOMONIE,
WISCONSIN.
_Photograph by Stein, Milwaukee._]
We here observe that the housewife is going to be something of a
sanitary engineer, since she studies chemistry, physics, and
bacteriology in their "application to such subjects as the heating,
lighting, ventilation, and plumbing of a house." It is thought that
knowledge of this sort "will go a long way toward improving the health
conditions of the country."
We also observe that the housewife is going to be something of an
interior decorator, since she studies "design, color, house planning
and furnishing."
She also acquires some skill as purchasing agent, bookkeeper, and
employer of labor when she takes the course on household management
and studies "the proper apportioning of income among the different
lines of home expenditures, the systematizing and keeping of household
accounts, and the question of domestic service."
The second grand division is Food Study and Preparation.
Here the housewife becomes, to some extent, a dietitian, studying "the
chemical processes in the preparation and digestion of foods," and
considering the question "how she shall secure for the family the
foods best suited to the various activities of each individual."
Here, likewise, she makes a start toward being a pure-food expert,
through a study of "physical and chemical changes induced in food
products by the growth of molds, yeasts, and bacteria," and a start
toward being a health officer, through a study of "bacteria in their
relation to disease, sources of infection, personal and household
disinfection."
Nor does she omit to acquire some of the technique of the physical
director through a course in physiology bearing on "digestion, storage
of energy, rest, sleep, exercise, and regularity of habits."
Of course, in her work in cookery, she pays some attention to special
cookery for invalids.
The third grand division, that of Clothing and Household Fabrics,
produces a dressmaker, a milliner, and an embroiderer, as well as a
person trained to see to it that "the expenditure for clothing shall
be correct in proportion to the expenditure for other purposes."
The fourth grand division, the Care of Children, is of course
limitless. The rearing of the human young is, as we all know and as
Mr. Eliot of Harvard has insisted, the most intellectual occupation in
the world. Here the homemaker applies all the knowledge she has gained
from her study of the hygiene of foods and of the hygiene of clothes,
and also makes some progress toward becoming a trained nurse and a
kindergartner by means of researches into "infant diseases and
emergencies," "the stages of the mental development of the child,"
"the child's imagination with regard to truth-telling and deceit,"
"the history of children's books," and "the art of story-telling."
Passing over the fifth grand division, Home Nursing and Emergencies
(in which the pupil learns simply "the use of household remedies,"
"the care of the sick room," etc.), we come to the wide expanse of the
sixth grand division, Home and Social Economics.
The work in this division begins with a study of the primitive
evolution of the home and comes on down to the present time, when "the
passing of many of the former lines of woman's work into the factory
has brought to many women leisure time which should be spent in social
service."
Note that last fact carefully. _Home economics is no attempt to drive
women back into home seclusion. On the contrary, it is an attempt to
bring the home and its occupants into the scientific and sociological
developments of the outside world._
For this reason, in traversing the division of home and social
economics, the pupil encounters "an effort to determine problems in
civic life which seem to be a part of the duties of women."
Seventhly and lastly, there is a division dedicated to Literature, in
which "a systematic course in reading is carried on through the two
years." Indispensable! No degree of proficiency at inserting calories
in correct numbers into Little Sally's stomach could atone for lack of
skill in leading Little Sally herself through the "Child's Garden of
Verses" with trowel in hand to dig up the gayest plants and reset them
in the memory.
So we come back to our old statement and vary it in phrase but not in
effect by saying that home-economics courses, totaled, do not give a
_technique_ so much as an _outlook_.
The homemaker may happen to be a specialist in some one direction, but
it is clear that she cannot simultaneously know as much about food
values as the real dietitian, as much about the physical care of her
child as the real trained nurse, as much about the wholesomeness of
her living arrangements as the real sanitarian, as much about music as
the Thomas Orchestra, as much about social service as Mr. Devine, and
as much about poems as Mr. Stevenson. Her peculiar equipment, if she
is a good homemaker, is a round of experience and a bent of mind which
make it possible for her to coöperate intelligently with the
dietitian, the trained nurse, the sanitarian, the Thomas Orchestra,
Mr. Devine, Mr. Stevenson, and the various other representatives of
the various other specialized techniques of the outside world.
It follows that her school discipline cannot be too comprehensive. No
other occupation demands such breadth of sense and sensibility. One
could make a perfectly good cotton manufacturer on the basis of a very
narrow training. One cannot make a good consumer without a really
_liberal education_.
For this reason it becomes necessary to resist certain narrownesses in
certain phases of home economics.
One of these narrownesses is the assumption that because a thing
happens to be close to us it is therefore important. We have heard
lecturers insist that because a house contains drain pipes a woman
should learn _all_ about drain pipes. But why? In most communities
drain pipes are installed and repaired and in every way controlled by
gentlemen who are drainpipe specialists. The woman who lives in the
house has no more need of a professional knowledge of the structural
mysteries of drain pipes than a reporter has of a professional
knowledge of the structural mysteries of his typewriting machine. The
reporter is supplemented at that point by the office mechanic and, so
far as his efficiency as a reporter is concerned, a technical inquiry
into his faithful keyboard's internal arrangements would be in most
cases an amiable waste of time.
Another possible narrowness is the attempt to manufacture "cultural
backgrounds" for various important but quite safe-and-sane household
tasks.
For instance, in the books and in the courses of instruction (of
college grade) on "the house" we have sometimes observed elaborate
accounts of the evolution of the human home, beginning with the huts
of the primitive Simians. And in pursuing the very essential subject
of "clothes and fabrics" we have not infrequently found ourselves in
the midst of spacious preliminary dissertations on the structure of
the loom, beginning with that which was used by the Anthropenguins.
Now we would not for the world speak disparagingly of looms or huts.
We have ourselves examined some of them in the Hull House Museum in
Chicago and in the woods of Canada, and have found them instructive.
We suggest only that college life is short, that the college
curriculum is crowded, and that (except possibly for those students
who are especially interested in anthropology or in industrial
evolution) it would surely be a misfortune to learn of the Simian hut
and to miss Rossetti's "House of Life," or to get the impression that
as a "cultural background" for shirtwaists the Anthropenguinian loom
can really compete with Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus."
If this occasional tendency toward exaggerating the importance of
drain pipes, window curtains, and door mats were to grow strong, and
if girls, as a class, should be required to spend any large proportion
of their time on the specialized history and sociology of feminine
implements and tasks while the boys were still in the current of the
affairs of the race, we should indeed want President Thomas of Bryn
Mawr to repeat on a thousand lecture platforms her indignant assertion
of the fact that "nothing more disastrous for women, or for men, can
be conceived of than specialized education of women as a sex."
These parenthetical observations, however, amount simply to the
expression of our personal opinion that home economics, like every new
idea, carries with it large quantities of dross which will have to be
refined out in the smelter of trial. The real metal in it is its
attempt to establish the principle that intelligent consumption is an
important and difficult task. For that reason it will not only desire
but demand the utmost equality of educational opportunity. And women,
like men, will continue to get their "cultural backgrounds" in the
great achievements of the whole race, where they can hold converse
with Lincoln and Darwin and the makers of the Cologne Cathedral and
George Meredith and Pasteur and Karl Marx and Whistler and Joan of Arc
and St. John.
The woman voiced a great truth who said that the soul which can
irradiate the numberless pettinesses of home management (and it is
folly to deny that there _are_ numberless pettinesses in it) is the
soul "nourished elsewhere." Think that over. It tells the story.
Whether the "elsewhere" is the deep recesses of her own religious
nature or the wide stretches of the great arts and sciences, it is
always an "elsewhere."
Let that be granted, as it must be granted. Let us say that there
shall be no abridgment of the offerings of so-called academic
education. What does a course of study like that of Mr. Harvey's
Homemakers' School attempt to add to academic education?
Principally three things.
First: Certain manual arts.
Second: Certain domestic applications of the physical and sociological
sciences.
Third: Money sense in expenditure (in the course on household
management).
Let us review these things in reverse order.
The last of the three is showing itself in many places. At the
University of Illinois, for instance, Professor Kinley, recently
delegate from the United States to the Pan-American Congress, has
given courses in home administration for women which he has regarded
as of equal importance with his courses in business administration for
men.
At the University of Chicago, in the department of household
administration, course 44 is on "the administration of the house" and
includes "the proper apportionment of income."
The business man says: "My sales cost, or my manufacturing cost, or my
office force cost, is such and such a per cent. of my total cost. When
it goes above that, I want to know why; and I find out; and, if there
isn't a mighty good reason for its going up, I make it go down again
to where it was." Shall we come to the day when in spending the money
which has been earned in business we shall say: "Such and such a per
cent. to food; and such and such a per cent. to clothes; and such and
such a per cent. to shelter; and such and such a per cent. to health
and recreation; and such and such a per cent. to good works; and such
and such other per cents. to such and such other purposes"? Shall we
come to the day when we shall consume wealth with as much forethought
and with as much balance of judgment between conflicting claims as we
now exhibit in acquiring wealth?
They are trying to develop this "costs system for home expenditures"
in many of the schools and departments of home economics to-day. They
believe that most people, because of not looking ahead and because of
not making definite plans based on previous experience, come to the
contemplation of their bills on the first of each month with every
reason to confess that they have bought those things which they ought
not to have bought and have left unbought those things which they
ought to have bought.
But it is not only a matter of reaching a systematic instead of a
helter-skelter enjoyment of the offerings of the world. It is also a
matter of reaching, by study of money values, a mental habit of
economy. And it comes at a time when that habit is needed.
We are just beginning to realize in the United States that we cannot
spend all our annual earnings on living expenses and still have a
surplus for fresh capital for new industrial enterprises. We are on
the point of perceiving that we are cramping and stunting the future
industrial expansion of the country by our personal extravagance. We
shall soon really believe Mr. James J. Hill when he says that "every
dollar unprofitably spent is a crime against posterity."
When international industrial competition reaches its climax, that
nation will have an advantage whose people feel most keenly that the
wise expenditure of income is a patriotic as well as a personal duty.
But is this a matter for women alone? Do not men also consume? Are
there no vats in Milwaukee, no stills in Kentucky, no factories
wrapping paper rings around bunches of dead leaves at Tampa? Are there
no men's tailors, gents' furnishing shops, luncheons, clubs,
banquets, athletics, celebrations? And as for home expenditures
themselves, is the man simply to bring the plunder to the door, get
patted on the head, and trot off in search of more plunder? We must
doubt if economy will be reached by such a route. We find ourselves
agreeing rather with the home economics lecturer who said: "There
never yet was a family income really wisely expended without
coöperation in all matters between husband and wife."
The Massachusetts legislature has passed a law looking toward the
teaching of thrift in the public schools. Boys and girls need it
equally. And we venture to surmise that in so far as the new art and
science of consumption is concerned with wise spending, the bulk of
its teachings ultimately will be enjoyed by both sexes. It will not
be, to any great extent, a specialized education for women.
So much for the "money sense in expenditure" which a full home
economics course adds to "academic" education. The more we admit its
value, the more convinced we must be that it ought to include every
kind of expenditure and both kinds of human being.
A precisely similar conviction arises with regard to those "domestic
applications of the physical and sociological sciences" which a full
home economics course adds to an "academic" education.
Those "domestic" applications are most of them broadly "human"
applications. They bear on daily living, exercise, fresh air, personal
cleanliness, diet, sleep, the avoidance of contagion, methods of
fighting off disease, general physical efficiency. They largely amount
to what Mrs. Ellen H. Richards used to call Right Living. She wanted
four R's instead of three: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, Right Living.
Now is Right Living to be only for girls?
Mr. Eliot of Harvard does not think so. In a recent "Survey of the
Needs of Education," he said:
"Public instruction in preventive medicine must be provided for all
children and the hygienic method of living must be taught in all
schools.... To make this new knowledge and skill a universal subject
of instruction in our schools, colleges, and universities is by no
means impossible--indeed, it would not even be difficult, for it is a
subject full of natural history as well as social interest....
American schools of every sort ought to provide systematic instruction
on public and private hygiene, diet, sex hygiene, and the prevention
of disease and premature death, not only because these subjects
profoundly affect human affections and public happiness, but because
they are of high economic importance."
It may very well be that what Mr. Eliot had in mind will not only come
to pass but will even exceed his expectations. It may very well be
that the educational policy of the future was correctly search-lighted
by Miss Henrietta I. Goodrich (who used to direct the Boston School of
Housekeeping before it was merged into Simmons College) when she
said:
"We need to have courage to break the present courses in household
arts and domestic science into their component parts and begin again
on the much broader basis of a study of living conditions. Our plea
would be this: that instruction in the facts of daily living be
incorporated in the state's educational system from the primary grades
through the graduate departments of the universities, with a rank
equal to that of any subject that is taught, _as required work for
both boys and girls_."
We revert now finally to the "manual arts" which a full course in home
economics adds to an "academic" education. In this matter, just as in
the matter of money sense in expenditure and in the matter of right
living, we observe that the ultimate issue of the movement is not so
much a specialized education for women as a practical efficiency in
the common things of life for men and women both.
A reasonable proficiency in manual arts will some day be the heritage
of all educated people. Mr. Eliot, in his "Survey of the Needs of
Education," speaks appreciatingly of his father's having caused him to
learn carpentry and wood-turning. He goes on to say:
"This I hold to be the great need of education in the United
States--the devoting of a much larger proportion of the total school
time to the training of the eye, ear, and hand."
[Illustration: PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE IN SERVING BREAKFASTS, DINNERS AND
SUPPERS FOR A SMALL FAMILY, CLEVELAND.]
[Illustration: THE GIRLS IN THE CLEVELAND TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL LEARN TO
MAKE POTTERY AS WELL AS TO MAKE DESIGNS.]
It follows, then, that cooking and sewing for girls in the elementary
schools must be made just as rigorous a discipline for eye and hand as
wood-working is for boys. It even follows that boys and girls will
often get their manual training together.
It will not be a case of "household drudgery" for the girls while the
boys are studying civics.
Somewhere in this chapter the reader will find a picture of the
"living room" of the "model" house of the Washington-Allston
Elementary School in Boston. The boys and girls of graduating grade
in that school give four hours a week to matters connected with the
welfare of that house. They have furnished it throughout with their
own handiwork, the girls making pillow-cases, wall-coverings,
window-curtains, etc., and the boys making chairs, tables, cupboards,
etc. Succeeding classes will furnish it again. _The reason why Mr.
Crawford, the master of the school, chose to have a house for a
manual training laboratory was simply that a house offers ampler
opportunities than any other kind of place for instruction in the
practical efficiencies of daily living for both sexes._
The system will be complete when the girls get a bigger training in
design by making more of the chairs, and when the boys get a bigger
training in diet by doing more of the cooking.
* * * * *
We have now glanced at each of the three principal contributions made
to modern education by the new study of the home. We have come to
understand that much of each contribution will be for the male as well
as for the female inhabitants of the home. If girls are to be led
toward wisdom in the use of money, so are boys. If girls are to be
habituated to the principles of Right Living, so again are boys. If
girls have a need of manual training, with certain materials and
implements, so boys, with perhaps other materials and implements, have
a need of manual training, too.
[Illustration: UPPER PICTURE IS A CLASS IN FOOD ADULTERATIONS IN THE HOME
ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.
LOWER PICTURE IS THE LIVING ROOM OF THE "MODEL" HOUSE IN THE
WASHINGTON-ALLSTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, BOSTON.]
It may be that in each case, except the last, there will be an ampler
body of instruction for feminine than for masculine use. But the
excess will be small enough to be absorbed without interference with
general education of the largest and most liberal sort. If this were
not true by natural fact, it would have to be made true artificially.
The body of home economics instruction could not be suffered to defeat
its own ultimate mental purpose. The study of specialized techniques
could not be permitted to narrow the spacious educational experience
needed for that broadest of all generalities, the homemaker's
intelligent Consumption, Enjoyment, Use of all the world's physical
and spiritual commodities.
Surely we can now say with unanimous consent that Home Economics
has revealed itself to be not a species of sex education but a
species of vocational education. We miss its inmost intent, and we
divert it from its mission, if we start with saying "Let us teach
girls." We have to start with saying "Let us teach Foods, Textiles,
Hygiene." We then ask "Who need to know about Foods, Textiles,
Hygiene?" In answer, our largest group of scholars will come from
among the prospective managers of households. But we are not
teaching feminine accomplishments. We are teaching human life-tasks.
Widening with this vocational principle, Miss Goodrich's vision of the
inclusion of both sexes in the courses of study now labeled
"domestic-science-and-art" finds widening fulfilment. Side by side
with young women in the Foods laboratory we shall see young men who
are going to be chefs, dietitians, pure-food inspectors. In the
Textiles laboratory we shall see young women who are going to sew at
home, young women who are going to sew in factories, young men who are
going to manufacture cloth. Hygiene will attract the sanitarian, the
nurse, the hotel manager, trousered or petticoated.
We come thus face to face with the final development of the home
economics movement. It issues into a double system. After providing,
to the young, that general introduction to life at large which we have
already detailed, it goes on, in its second phase, to provide
immediate information of a more specialized character to scholars more
mature _at the time when that information is immediately needed_. A
large part of the home economics movement of the future will be the
establishment of a system of continuous instruction for wives,
mothers, housekeepers, already entered upon their task of home-making
and child-rearing.
The need of this development appears as soon as we take the sequence
of events in a girl's life and place it beside the sequence of events
in a boy's. If a boy is going to be a cotton-machinery engineer, a
municipal sanitary expert, a food specialist, we do not give him his
real technical finish till he is entering his trade. We may have given
him, we ought to have given him, a vocational foundation of pertinent
knowledge. But we do not give him the minutiæ of trade technique till
he is at the point of practicing his trade or has already begun to
practice it. This principle, applicable to the preparation for all
trades whatsoever, sets limits to the amount of detailed preparation
for home-making which can profitably be introduced, for most girls,
into the curricula of schools and colleges.
In former chapters of this book we have seen that for most girls there
is a gap, a large gap, between school and marriage, between girlhood
and motherhood. We have seen, too, that this gap tends to be filled
with money-earning work which demands a certain preparation of its
own. That point aside, however, the very existence of the gap in
question, no matter how it may be filled, means that if we give a
minute and elaborate preparation of home-making to girlhood we may
wait five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, before we see
wifehood and motherhood put that preparation to use.
Anybody who proposed to give a boy a minute and elaborate preparation
for civil engineering a possible twenty years before he became a civil
engineer and in contempt of the possible contingency of his not
becoming a civil engineer at all, would hardly deserve to be called
practical. Yet, in the name of practical education, we are sometimes
asked to tolerate a correspondingly complete preparation for wifehood
and motherhood at an age when both of those estates are mere
prospects, distant and indefinite. We cannot believe that so extreme a
demand will ever be acceded to by educators who have fully considered
the modern postponement of marriage. Home economics, in schools and
colleges, except for girls who are going to become teachers of it or
who in other ways are going to make it their immediate money-earning
work, must stop with its broad applications to daily human living. So
will it be useful, in different degrees, to both sexes and clash
neither with general academic preparation nor with the preparation for
self-support.
There will remain, unlearned, a great deal that modern science and
modern sociology have to offer to the wife and mother. Let that great
deal, in its more technical teachings, be learned when it can be
carried forward into action.
The machinery of home economics instruction for adults is even now
being erected, is even now being operated.
The Chicago School of Domestic Arts and Science, after much teaching
of young girls, has established a "Housekeepers' Association." The
members of that association are adult practicing housekeepers. The
same school will soon establish a course in the study of the Care of
Children. The pupils enrolled in that course will be mothers.
The fact is that science and sociology are so constantly amending and
enlarging their teachings that a knowledge of what they taught twenty
years ago is inadequate and a knowledge of the minutiæ of what they
taught twenty years ago is futile. The housekeeper of the future will
have to keep on studying while housekeeping.
Several hundred housekeepers come each winter to the University of
Wisconsin to attend the "Women's Course in Home Economics." They hear
Professor Hastings talk about the "Production and Care of Milk." They
hear Dr. Evans talk about the "Prevention of Infant Mortality." They
hear Professor Marlatt talk about "Diets in Disease." In each case
they hear something very different from what they would have heard in
their girlhood. For this reason alone, even if the gap between
girlhood and motherhood did not exist, the machinery of home economics
instruction for adults would have become necessary.
[Illustration: ONE-WEEK COURSES IN HOME ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF
WISCONSIN.]
It is for adults that the United States Government issues such
bulletins as "Modern Conveniences for the Farm Home." It is for adults
that Cornell University sends out its Farmers' Wives' Bulletins in
editions of twenty thousand. It is for adults that Columbia University
prints pamphlets like "The Feeding of Children in a Family with an
Income of $800 a Year."
For adults, again, are such institutions as the American School of
Home Economics, in Chicago, which, in the few years of its life, has
enrolled more than 10,000 pupils in its correspondence courses.
For adults, finally, are the Homemakers' Conferences held in
conjunction with Farmers' Institutes as well as the extension-course
lectures given to local groups in city and in country by teachers sent
out from state universities and agricultural colleges.
All this machinery, which here we do not attempt to describe but only
to indicate, will some day find its scattered units associated and
harmonized through the work of a Federal Bureau of Domestic Science
and Art. Bills for the establishment of such a bureau have already
been introduced into Congress. It will not be a cooking and sewing
school for children. It will be a technical continuation school for
adults. The National Congress of Mothers discerned one of its
functions when it said: "The time has come when every nation through
a special department should provide data concerning infants which may
be used by mothers everywhere."
At the end of chapter two of this book we asked whether or not, in the
field of education, the training for the home and the training for
self-support would impose a double burden on the girl pupil. If our
interpretation of the spirit of the home economics movement has been
correct we may now say that the training for the home is so largely a
training for life in general and is so distributed through different
life-periods that it will not be felt to be burdensome at all. We may
even go on to suggest that self-support and housekeeping, world and
home, and the trainings for them, will merge for the girl into a
progressive unified experience.
First. That part of home economics which can profitably be taught to
the mass of pupils in elementary and high school and in the colleges,
with its manual arts, its Right Living and its money-sense, will be
helpful, much of it, to boys as well as to girls and will actually,
since it develops the whole personality of the pupil, be part of the
training for self-support itself.
[Illustration: MARRIED WOMEN AND WOMEN WHO WORK DURING THE DAY ATTEND THE
EVENING COOKERY CLASSES IN THE ST. LOUIS HIGH SCHOOLS.]
Second. The years spent in self-support, in learning the world, will
be part of the training for the home, because hereafter, as the Mary
of our first chapter remarked, the mother who does not know the world
cannot wisely rear boys up into it.
Third. After the period of self-support, when marriage comes, what
further technical instruction the housekeeper and mother may need will
be furnished to her by a system of adult education limitless in its
possible growth.
IV.
The Wasters
It got talked around among Marie's friends that she didn't want
children.
This was considered very surprising, in view of all that her father
and husband had done for her.
Here is what they had done for her:
They had removed from her life all need, and finally all desire, to
make efforts and to accomplish results through struggle in defiance of
difficulty and at the cost of pain.
Work and pain were the two things Marie was on no account to be
exposed to. With this small but important reservation:
She might _work_ at _avoiding_ pain.
When the cook had a headache she took Getting Breakfast for it. When
Marie had a headache she worked not at breakfast but at the headache.
It was a social ceremony of large proportions, with almost
everybody among those present, from the doctor down through Mother
and Auntie to Little Sister. The decorations, which were very
elaborate, comprised, besides the usual tasteful arrangement of
thermometers, eau-de-Karlsbad, smelling-salts bottles, cracked ice,
and chocolate creams, a perfect shower of tourmaline roses, the odor
of which, alone among all the vegetable odors in the world, had
been found after long experimentation to be soothing to Marie on
such occasions. It was not thought that Marie could vanquish a
headache except after a plucky fight of at least one day's duration.
Actresses go on and do their turns day after day and night after night
with hardly a miss. Marie's troubles were no more numerous than
theirs. But they were much larger. Troubles are like gases. They
expand to fill any void into which they are introduced. Marie's spread
themselves through a vacuum as large as her life.
The making of that vacuum and the inserting of Marie into it cost her
father and her husband prodigious toil and was a great pleasure to
them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Class. Socially, she was therefore
distinctly superior to her father and her husband.
[Illustration: WORK? FOR MARIE? FOR MY DAUGHTER? SHOCKING!]
President Thomas of Bryn Mawr had Marie in mind when she said:
"By the leisured class we mean in America the class whose men work
harder than any other men in the excitement of professional and
commercial rivalry, but whose women constitute the only leisured
class we have and the most leisured class in the world."
Marie's father wasn't so very rich, either. He was engaged in a
business so vividly competitive that Marie's brother was hurried
through college as fast as possible and brought into the game at
twenty-two with every nerve stretched taut.
Nothing like that was expected of Marie. She was brought up to
think that leisure was woman's natural estate. Work, for any girl,
she regarded as an accident due to the unexpected and usually
reprehensible collapse of the males of the poor girl's family.
This view of the matter gave Marie, _unconsciously to herself_, what
morality she had. Hard drinking, "illegitimate" gambling, and
excessive dissipations of all sorts are observed commonly to have a
prejudicial effect on male efficiency and on family prosperity.
Against all "vices," therefore (although she didn't catch the
"therefore"), Marie was a Moral Force of a million angel-power.
Aside from "vices," however, all kinds of conduct looked much alike
to her. Ethics is the rules of the game, the decencies of the struggle
for existence. Marie had no part in the struggle. She violated its
decencies without being at all aware of it.
All the way, for instance, from stealing a place in the line in front
of a box-office window ahead of ten persons who were there before her,
up the tiny scale of petty aggressions within her narrow reach to the
cool climax of spending three months every summer in a pine-wood
mountain resort (thus depriving her city-bound husband of the personal
companionship which was the one best thing she had to give him in
return for what he gave her), she was as competent a little grafter as
the town afforded.
But she was a perfectly logical one. Her family had trained her to
deadhead her way through life and she did it. Finally she went beyond
their expectations. They hadn't quite anticipated all of the sweetly
undeviating inertia of her mind.
Nevertheless she was a nice girl. In fact, she was The Nice Girl. She
was sweet-tempered, sweet-mannered, and sweet-spoken--a perfect dear.
She never did a "bad" thing in her life. And she never ceased from her
career of moral forcing. She wrote to her husband from her mountain
fastness, warning him against high-balls in hot weather. She went
twice a month during the winter to act as librarian for an evening at
a settlement in a district which was inhabited by perfectly
respectable working people but which, while she passed out the books,
she sympathetically alluded to as a "slum."
It is hardly fair, however, to lay the whole explanation of Marie on
her father, her husband, and herself.
A few years ago, in the churchyard of St. Philip's Church at
Birmingham, they set up a tombstone which had fallen down, and they
reinscribed it in honor of the long-neglected memory of the man who
had been resting beneath it for a century and a half. His name was
Wyatt. John Wyatt. He had a good deal to do with making Marie what she
was.
What toil, what tossing nights, what sweating days, what agonized
wrenching of the imagination toward a still unreached idea, have gone
into the making of leisure--for other people!
Wyatt strained toward, and touched, the idea which was the real start
of modern leisure.
In the year 1733, coming from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where
the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near
Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and
forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical
triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a
few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and
millions of them.
It was only about two feet square. But it accomplished a thing never
before accomplished. It spun the first thread ever spun in the history
of the world without the intervention of human fingers.
On that night woman lost her oldest and most significant title and
function. The Spinster ceased to be.
The mistress and her maid, spinning together in the Hall, their
fingers drawing the roving from the distaff and stretching it out as
the spindle twisted it, were finally on the point of separating
forever.
We all see what Wyatt's machine did to the maids. We all understand
that when he started his mill at Birmingham and hired his working
force of _ten girls_, he prophesied the factory "slum."
We do not yet realize what he did to the mistresses, how he utterly
changed their character and how he marvelously increased their
number.
But look! His machine, with the countless machines which followed it,
in the spinning industry and in all other industries, made it possible
to organize masses of individuals into industrial regiments which
required captains and majors and colonels and generals. It created the
need of leadership, of _multitudinous_ leadership. And with leadership
came the rewards of leadership. And the wives and daughters of the
leaders (a race of men previously, by comparison, nonexistent) arose
in thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions to live in leisure
and semi-leisure on the fruits of the new system.
While the maids went to the "slums," the mistresses went to the
suburbs.
What did Wyatt get out of it? Imprisonment for debt and the buzz of
antiquarians above his rotted corpse.
Wyatt and his equally humble successors in genius, Hargreaves and
Crompton, artisans! Where in history shall we find men the world took
more from, gave less to?
To Hargreaves, inventing the spinning-jenny, a mob and a flight from
Lancashire, a wrecked machine and a sacked house! To Crompton,
inventing the spinning-mule (which, in simulating, surpassed the
delicate pulling motion of the spinster's arm)--to Crompton, poverty
so complete that the mule, patient bearer of innumerable fortunes to
investors, was surrendered to them unpatented, while its maker retired
to his "Hall-in-the-Wood" and his workman wages!
Little did Wyatt and Hargreaves and Crompton eat of the bread of
idleness they built the oven for.
But Arkwright! There was the man who foreshadowed, in his own career,
the new aristocracy about to be evoked by the new machinery. He made
spinning devices of his own. He used everybody else's devices. He
patented them all. He lied in the patents. He sued infringers of them.
He overlooked his defeats in the courts. He bit and gouged and endured
and invented and organized till, from being a barber and dealing in
hair-dyes and bargaining for the curls of pretty girls at country
fairs, he ended up Sir Richard Arkwright and--last perfect touch in a
fighting career--was building a church when he died.
And his son was England's richest commoner.
It was the dawn of the day of common richness.
The new aristocracy was as hospitably large as the old aristocracy had
been sternly small. Before Wyatt, leisure had been the thinnest of
exhalations along the very top of society. Since Wyatt, it has got
diffused in greater and greater density through at least the upper
third of it. And for all that magical extension of free time, wrested
from the ceaseless toil with which God cursed Adam, we stand indebted
(and so recently!) to the machinery _set_ going by that spontaneous
explosion of artisan genius in England only a hundred and fifty years
ago, _kept_ going (and faster and faster) by the labor of men, women,
and children behind factory windows, the world over, to-day.
Marie's view of the situation, however, is the usual one. We are
billions of miles from really realizing that leisure is produced by
somebody's work, that just "Being a Good Woman" or "Being a Decent
Fellow" is so far from being an adequate return for the toil of other
people that it is just exactly no return at all. We are billions of
miles from admitting that the virtuous parasite is just as much a
parasite as the vicious parasite:--that the former differs from the
latter in the use of the money but not at all in the matter of getting
it in return for nothing.
Getting something for nothing is the fundamental immorality of the
world. But we don't believe it. There will be a revolution before we
get it into our heads that trying to trade a sweet disposition or an
intelligent appreciation of opera or a proficiency at amateur tennis
for three meals a day is a fraud.
Marie didn't mean to commit a fraud. She just dropped a sentimental,
non-negotiable plugged nickel into the slot-machine of life and drew
out a motor-car and a country place, and was innocently pleased. Such
a wonderful slot-machine! She never saw the laboring multitudes behind
it, past and present multitudes, dead fingers, living fingers, big
men's fingers, little children's fingers, pulling the strings,
delivering the prizes, laying aside the plugged nickel in the treasury
of a remote revenge.
[Illustration: TO CURE A HEADACHE--WORKING-GIRL THERAPY: TAKE A GOOD JOB
AND STIR IT CONSTANTLY FROM BREAKFAST TO SUPPER.]
Perhaps the reason why she didn't catch on to the fact that, instead
of being the world's creditor, she was really inhabiting an almshouse
was that she was so busy.
You see, she not only did things all the time but she had to find and
invent them to do. Her life, even before she was married, was much
more difficult than her brother's, who simply got up in the morning
and took the same old 7.42 to the same old office.
When he wanted clothes he went to the nearest decent tailor.
No such cinch for Marie. Her tailor lived in Sutherton, on the
directly opposite side of the city from the suburb in which Marie
lived. Just to get to that tailor's cost Marie an hour and a half of
effort. She had got up early, but by the time the tailor had stuck the
world's visible supply of pins into the lines of her new coat, most of
the forenoon had been arduously occupied.
Of course many forenoons had to be thus occupied. Never forget it! The
modish adaptation of woven fabrics to the female contour becomes
increasingly complex and minute and exacting and time-occupying in
precise proportion as the amount of time increases for which
occupation must be devised.
Besides, it gives employment to the tailors.
This is the really meritorious function of the leisure class. It
gives employment. And every extension of its tastes and needs gives
more employment. Marie and her friends greatly increased the number
and prosperity of tailors and milliners and candy-dippers and
perfume-manufacturers and manicurists and hairdressers and plumed-bird
hunters and florists and cab-drivers and Irish lace-makers and
Chinese silkworm tenders and violet-and-orris sachet-powder makers
and matinée heroes and French nuns who embroider underwear and
fur-traders and pearl-divers and other deserving persons, not
forgetting the multitudes of Turks who must make nougat or perish.
In fact, Marie and her friends, in the course of a year, gave as much
employment as a fair-sized earthquake. That is, in the course of a
year, they destroyed, without return, a large amount of wealth and set
many people to work replacing it. If we had a large enough leisure
class we should have no need of fires and railroad wrecks and the
other valuable events which increase our prosperity by consuming it.
Marie belonged to the real Consumers' League. And she consumed
prettily and virtuously. It wasn't bad air that suffocated her soul.
It was no air.
[Illustration: TO CURE A HEADACHE--SHIRKING-GIRL THERAPY: TAKE A DOCTOR,
A FAMILY, A NICE BRIGHT DAY, AND A BOX OF CHOCOLATES: USE THEM ALL UP.]
She thought she was breathing, however, and breathing fast. Why, it
was half past eleven before she got back downtown from her tailor, and
she bought a wedding present till one, and she was just famished and
ran to a tea room, but she had hardly touched a mouthful when she
remembered there was a girl from out of town who had come in to spend
a month doing nothing and had to be helped, but though she rushed to
the 'phone she couldn't get her friend before it was time to catch her
suburban train home; in order to do which she jumped into the station
'bus, only to remember she had forgotten to buy a ribbon for her
Siamese costume for the Benefit Ball; but it was too late now and she
spent her time, going out on the train, trying to think of some way of
getting along without it, and her head began to ache; but luckily she
met some of the girls on her way from the station to her high-school
sorority alumnæ reunion and they began to tell her how to do it; but
she had to hurry away because she had promised to go to the house of
one of the girls and do stencil patterns, which started to be
beautiful, but before she could get any of them really done she
recollected that Chunk Brown had sent over a bunch of new songs and
was coming to call to-night and she had to scoot home and practice
"June time is moon time and tune time and spoon time," as well as "The
grass is blue o'er little Sue," till there was just one hour left
before dinner and she was perfectly crazy over the new "do" which one
of the girls had showed her and she rushed upstairs and went at that
"do" and by dinner time she had got it almost right, so that her
father told her always to do her hair like that and brother wished he
had it down at the factory to replace a broken dynamo brush, while as
for Chunk, he was nicer than ever till he learned he had to take her
to a rehearsal of the Siamese Group for the Benefit Ball: so that,
what with having to coax him to go and what with changing into her
costume, she got to the rehearsal so tired she couldn't stand up to
go through the figures till she caught sight of the celebrated
æsthete, the Swami Ram Chandra Gunga Din, who was there to hand out
the right slants about oriental effects and who had persuaded Marie
there was great consolation to be found in realizing that life is a
spiral and that therefore you can't make progress straight up but must
go round and round through rhythmic alternations of joy and sorrow,
which caused Chunk to relapse again from his attentiveness but which
pleased Marie greatly because she was always unhappy in between two
periods of happiness and therefore felt she was getting along the
spiral and into Culture pretty well, till it was eleven o'clock and
she waked Chunk up out of a chair in the hall and made him take her
home; and he said the Swami was a _very clever_ man and she said
American men had no culture and didn't understand women, and Chunk
didn't even say good night to her, and she went to sleep crying, and
remembering she hadn't after all learned from the girls how to get
along without that ribbon in her costume and she must get up early and
buy it, which made her utter one final little plaintive sniffle of
vexation.
It was a nice child's life, full of small things which looked big,
uncorrected in its view of love, culture, charity, or anything else by
any carrying of the burdens, enduring of the shocks, or thrilling to
the triumphs, of a really adult life. Her brother, when he went to
work, was her junior. In five years he was much her senior. (You may
verify this by observation among your own acquaintances.) Marie was
not a minute older now than when she left school. Talking to her at
twenty-six was exactly the same experience as talking to her at
twenty-one. That was what the world, from John Wyatt to her father,
had done for her.
[Illustration: SEE THE PROUD HUSBAND. HE DID IT ALL HIMSELF.]
From such a life there are necessarily revulsions. The empty leisure
of the Nice Girl is quite successfully total waste. But it becomes
intolerable to that waster who, though not desiring genuine
occupation, desires genuine sensation.
Hence smart sets.
Every social group in which there is much leisure has its own smart
set. There may be a million dollars a year to spend. There may be only
a few thousands. But there is always a smart set.
How suddenly its smartness may follow its leisure, how accurately its
plunge into luxury may duplicate the suddenness of modern luxury
itself, you may observe with your own eyes almost anywhere.
You see a little crowd of women come into the Mandarin Tea Room of the
St. DuBarry in Novellapolis in the fresh West. When they remove their
automobile veils you see that they were once, and very recently, the
nicest sort of members of the sewing circle and the W. C. T. U. of
Lone Tree Crossing.
When the waiter comes along with their cocktails and they begin to sip
them out of their tea cups, you wake up with a jerk to realize that
it's half past three in the afternoon and the evening has begun.
How rapid it all is!
There's Margaret Simpson. A few years ago you might have seen her
pumping the water for Jim's breakfast, cleaning the lamps, and picking
bugs off the potato vines.
Jim came to town. He struck it poor. Then he struck it rich. He
owns a bunch of moving-picture places. He manufactures a patented
bottle-stopper. He's a pavement contractor. His wife has just as
much leisure as any duchess.
The duchess has her individual estate and resources, which make it
possible for her to lead an almost complete social life within her
own walls. But never mind! Margaret has the Downtown District,
coöperatively owned, coöperatively maintained, magnificently
equipped with bright boudoirs in the rest rooms of the department
stores, with wonderful conservatories where one may enter and gaze and
pay no more attention to the florist than to one's own gardener,
with sumptuous drawing-rooms, like the Purple Parlor of the St.
DuBarry, with body-servants in the beauty shops, with coachmen on
the taxicabs, with seclusion in the Ladies' Department of the
Novellapolis Athletic Club--an infinitely resourceful estate, which
Margaret knows as intimately as the duchess knows hers.
This morning she hunted down a new reduction plant on the eighteenth
floor of the Beauty Block and weighed in at 185 on the white enamel
scales. After an hour of Thermo-Vibro-Magneto-Magenta-Edison-Company
light therapy, she weighed out at 182-6.
At luncheon she ate only purée of tomatoes, creamed chicken and
sweetbreads, Boston bread and butter, orange punch and Lady Baltimore
cake, severely cutting out the potatoes.
After luncheon she spent an hour in a tiny room which had mirrors all
around it and a maid (as trim and French-accented as any maid any
duchess could have) and a couple of fitters and a head fitter. It
ended up with: "Do you mean to tell me that after all the reducing and
dieting I've been doing I can't wear under a twenty-seven? It's
ridiculous. I tell you what. Measure me for a made-to-order. These
stock sizes all run large. If it's made to order I can wear a
twenty-six as easy as anybody."
Then she met up with her friends at the St. DuBarry.
You watch the waiter bring another round of drinks and you perceive
that the evening is well under way and that the peak of the
twenty-four hours is being disputatiously approached.
It appears that Perinique's is a swell place to dine, but that the
cheese is bad. The cheese is good right here at the St. DuBarry, but
they don't know how to toast the biscuits. At the Grünewurst the
waiters are poor. At Max's the soup is always cold. The mural
decorations at the Prince Eitel are so gloomy they give you a chill.
Despair settles down on the scene. There seems to be no likelihood
that there will be any dinner at all anywhere. In the absence,
however, of that kind of good cheer, another kind is spread on the
table when the inquiry is flung down whether or not the way in which
Jim looked at Dora last night has been generally observed.
You conclude that poor, dear, innocent Dora ought not to have been
looked at in that way. You were hasty. Nobody is innocent in the
Mandarin Tea Room of the St. DuBarry, when not there. Dora, you soon
learn, deserves to be looked at in any and all ways. It's not for her
that we're worried. It's for Jim.
At the name of Jim, Margaret begins to look uncomfortable and
helpless. She sinks lower and lower into her chair; and says nothing;
and keeps on saying nothing; and seems likely to drown in silence; but
her friends start in to rescue her. You can't help seeing some of the
life-lines as they are thrown out.
"If I were _you_, Margaret, and _my_ husband behaved to _me_ as Jim is
behaving to _you_, _I'd_----"
"When you married Jim, Margaret, you were the prettiest----"
"No wonder Dora's husband divorced her."
"It's a wonder she wouldn't confine herself to making trouble for her
own husbands without----"
"The trouble with you, Margaret, is that you're too good to Jim,
letting him run around with Dora and not doing anything yourself. If
you had any sense you'd make him so jealous he'd walk on his hands
and hold a loaf of sugar on his nose for you."
"Say, Fannie, why don't you tell your friend Ned to cut in here and
pay a little attention to Marge?"
"Oh, Ned's no good."
"Well, then, I'll tell my husband to----"
"Don't you do it! I started my husband once on a thing like that and
he went at it so strong--Choose a bachelor."
"That's right. Ned's not married. Let him do it."
"Somebody ought to."
"Say, Fannie, call Ned on the 'phone."
"All right. I'll be back in a minute."
"Say, Marge, we'll eat at the Royal Gorge and I'll put you and Ned
side by side."
"And _I'll_ sit next to your husband and tell him how strong Ned is
with the ladies. He'll take a good look all right."
"Now buck up, Marge, and encourage Ned a little. Don't be a fool."
"I tell you, Marge, you'll do a lot more with Jim by cutting up a
little bit than by all this dieting you're trying to do."
"Say, Marge, it's a good thing you've got on your white broadcloth and
your willow plumes."
"You can get 'em at Delatour's now for twenty-five dollars."
"Hello, Fannie, did you get Ned?"
"I got him all right, but what do you think? He's got another date for
to-night, so he can't come."
"Oh, flam!"
"Well, well, here's Dora now, as usual. I suppose she'll try to butt
in."
But she doesn't. She just hesitates beside the table long enough to
say: "Got to sweep right along, girlies. Going to buzz out to the
Inland Inn for dinner with Ned. Yep. What's the matter? You know Ned.
Our old friend Ned. The same. He's waiting for me now. G'bye."
Talk of nerve! You have to hand it to that Dora girl!
Exit Dora. Enter Jim and five or six other men, mostly husbands to the
women already present.
Jim begins by asking if anybody has seen Dora. The ensemble tells him
not only that but everything else about Dora. Harry orders a round of
drinks. So does Charlie. Somebody praises the drawn-butter sauce at
the Suddington. This is met with the merits of the pineapple parfait
at the La Fontaine. Jim orders a round of drinks. Jim is willing to
eat his hat if Dora's divorce wasn't her husband's fault. Must have
been. Never saw the husband. But Dora's character! Jim drinks off one
of the cocktails standing in front of his right-hand neighbor Frank,
and returns to Dora's character. No straighter little girl ever came
to this town. On hearing this from her husband, Margaret gets up and
leaves the Tea Room and goes to the Purple Parlor and cries. Fannie
takes her opportunity and begins to tell Jim how attentive Ned has
been lately to Margaret. This is so helpful that Jim drinks off
another of Frank's cocktails and runs to the Purple Parlor to find
Margaret. She's still crying. He thinks she's crying because Ned is
away with Dora. He rebukes her. In King Arthur's vein. Is he not her
husband? Woman, tell him that. But dignity soon tapers off with him
into the "Now I warn you to cut it out" of the tyrannical manikin
with a cinder in the eye of his self-conceit. Their friends hear them
quarreling and follow them into the Purple Parlor. There's a terrible
row in the Purple Parlor. The Purple Parlor is full of persons
explaining. Fannie explains. Charlie explains. Each person explains,
individually, to each other person, individually. Each couple reaches
a satisfactory explanation. But, somehow, when they start to explain
that explanation to the next couple, it vanishes. Everybody runs about
trying to find it. The waiter runs about trying to find the gen'l'man
to pay for the undrunk drinks back in the Tea Room. Frank, being the
only member of the party who hasn't been drinking, can't help seeing
what the waiter means. He pays the bill. Then he exerts himself like a
sheep-dog and runs the whole crowd down the corridor and out into a
couple of taxicabs. The air reminds them of unsatisfied appetites.
Conjugal problems are things of the past. As the taxicabs jump out
from the curb to the street-center everybody's head is out of window
and everybody's voice is saying "The Suddington," "The Grünewurst,"
"Max's," "The Royal Gorge," "Perinique's."
The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night
leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a
useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic
Independence, which has been spoken of in former chapters; Social
Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of in the next chapter.
Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the
one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the
current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence,
carries them out of the world's mental life. If it is the one toward
frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a
quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and of
service which produce power and character.
* * * * *
With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back
into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And
it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort--to and beyond all
other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery of it in
torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment of all the world's
worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its
sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong,
its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle
for existence! What a work!
But what a preparation for it had Marie!
She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the
ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she
began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.
She became a woman of the future--_of her type_.
From the facts of modern leisure the positive character reacts
toward novel activity. It may be a reaction toward Civic Service.
Or toward Self-Support. Or toward an enormous never-before-witnessed
expenditure of intelligent care on the physical and mental education
of children. The positive character, fighting modern facts, creates
new ideals. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs
along as a neutral mixture of the old ideals and of the modern
facts, of child-rearing made amateurish by idling and of idling
made irritable by child-rearing. The negative character--like
Marie's--just yields to the modern facts and is swept along by them
into final irresponsibility and inutility.
But Marie wasn't negative enough--she wasn't _emotional_ enough in her
negativeness--to plunge into _dissipation_. It wasn't in her nature to
do any _plunging_ of any kind. Good, safe, motionless _sponging_ was
her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed
respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She
is charming.
When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment
appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all
occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.
No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on
it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really
did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the
barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see
lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high
reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a
recognized commercial asset.
Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner
table in the café of their apartment building. She knew how to order
the right dishes when they entertained and dined down town. She made
it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social
attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and
he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly
and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt
stud.
No struggle in Marie's life so far! No _having_ to swim in the cold
water of daily enforced duty or else sink. _No being accustomed to the
disagreeable feel of that water._
She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being _hardened_
to work. That was everything.
The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort came
when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a
while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected,
Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary.
But there had been no necessity in Marie's experience. They became
quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn. Marie talked about her mother and
her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.
For two years she inhabited Chunk's flat in the city and lived on
Chunk's monthly check.
She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. He was the man
nearest to her. Her father had once supported her. Her job then had
been Being Nice. Her father had supported her for that, even after she
had grown up. Well, she still was nice. And she still was, and
deserved to be, supported. Perfectly logical.
For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being
obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what
to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the
parties for Chunk's business friends, she did nothing but become more
and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hardship,
in her horror of pain.
When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that
she didn't want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the
world had capsized.
In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to
that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was
widespread.
Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just
once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a
diffusion of leisure.
The causes were similar.
The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have
conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of
despoiled peoples, just as we live on the products of exploited
continents. They had slaves in multitudes, just as we have machines in
masses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of
their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured
housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women
who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do.
Along with leisure and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences,
just as we have acquired them. And the sermons of Augustus Cæsar,
first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are
perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of
ours.
Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered
into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons
identical with ours--the increased competitiveness of the modern
life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the
satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And
their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation,
divorce, and aversion to childbearing leave nothing to be desired,
in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric--or
for ineffectiveness in result.
Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence
through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to
child-bearing in the Roman world--for she did not exist. It could not
have been the woman who desires full citizenship--for _she_ did not
exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire
woman desired and achieved was parasitic--the economic power which
comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes
from the exercise of sexual charm.
The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern
world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the
emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for
equal economic and political opportunity.
The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her
girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her;
trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the
dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously
irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her
real work, going then into marriage with none of the discipline of
habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to
share his struggle but his prosperity--that sort of New Woman they
had, just as we have her, in smaller number, it is true, but in
identical character.
They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury
the _start_? Wasn't it only the means to the _finish_?
Eating a grouse destroys, in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a
ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider down or on straw,
arose Bismarck.
The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably
immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is
giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.
On the other hand, we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on
the luxury of stable floors and of free-lunch counters, just as
thoroughly as any nobleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the
luxury of castles and of game preserves.
It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham
sandwiches, of either eider down or straw, _without service rendered
and without fatigue endured_, that ultimately desiccates the moral
character and drains it of all capacity for effort.
Marie was enervated not by her luxury but by her failure to _pay_ for
her luxury. She wouldn't have had to pay much. Her luxury was petty.
But she paid nothing. And her failure to pay was just as big as if her
luxury had been bigger. Getting three thousand a year in return for
nothing leaves you morally just as bankrupt as if you had got three
million.
Marie came to her abdication of life's _greatest_ effort not by
wearing too many clothes or by eating too many foods but by becoming
accustomed to getting clothes and foods and all other things without
the _smallest_ effort.
She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the
_habit_ of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an
effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.
Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last,
in her negative, non-resistive mind, atrophied all the instincts of
that struggle, including finally the instinct for reproduction.
The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle
for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for
perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. Work, the
perpetuation of one's own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging
to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the
individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to
the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the
class, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no
more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to
live.
The detailed daily reasons for this social law stand clear in Marie's
life. It is a strong law. Its triumph in Marie could have been
thwarted only by the presence in her of a certain other social law.
Authority!
The woman who is coerced by Authority, the woman who is operated by
ideals introduced into her from without, will bear children even when
she does not feel the active wish to bear them. She will bear them
just because the authoritative expectation is that she _shall_ bear
them.
But Marie was free!
She was free from the requirement of an heir for the family estate.
The modern form of property, requiring no male warrior for its
defense in the next generation, had done that for her.
She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal
duty and unrestricted reproduction. Modern Protestantism had done that
for her.
She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband's
will. Modern individualism had done that for her.
She was free! Uncoerced by family authority, uncoerced by ecclesiastical
authority, uncoerced by marital authority, she was almost limitlessly
free!
There being no _external force_ compelling her to bear children, she
had to follow _internal instinct_.
That instinct, if it had existed in her, would have been a sufficient
guide. It would have been a commanding guide. It would have been the
best possible guide. Rising in her from the original eternal
life-power it would have driven her to child-bearing more surely than
she could have been driven to it by any external agency whatsoever.
But the instinct toward child-bearing could not now be revived in
Marie. With the cessation from struggle and from effort and from
fatigue and from discipline and from the sorrow of pain that brings
the joy of accomplishment, with that cessation the instinct toward
child-bearing had reached cessation, too. With the petrifaction of its
soil it had withered away.
Nobody had ever tried to bring Marie back to the soil of struggle.
Nobody,--not her father, not her mother, not her husband, not one of
her friends, not one of her teachers had ever taught her to return to
life by returning to labor.
The greatest wrong possible to a woman had been wrought upon her.
She had been sedulously trained out of the life of the race into
race-death.
Yet when it got talked around among her friends that she didn't want
children, people blamed her and said it was very surprising, _in view
of all that had been done for her_.
V.
Mothers of the World
Leaning over a tiled parapet, we looked down at the streak of street
so far below. Motor-cars, crawling--crawling, glossy-backed beetles.
"Drop a pin and impale that green one." One couldn't, from up there,
give motor-car and motor-car owner the reverence rightly theirs. A
thousand miles of horizontal withdrawal into majestic forest recesses
may leave one's regard for worldly greatness unabated. A perpendicular
vantage of a hundred and fifty feet destroys it utterly.
"But look at that!" she said.
In the east, dull red on the quick blue of Lake Michigan, an ore-boat.
Low and long. A marvelously persistent and protracted boat. Might have
been christened _The Eel_. Or _The Projectile_. No masts. And, except
at her stern, under her deferred smokestack, no portholes. Forward
from that stack her body stretched five hundred feet to her bow
without excrescences and without apertures. Stripped and shut-eyed for
the fight, grimmer than a battle ship, not a waste line nor a false
motion in her, she went by, loaded with seven thousand tons of
hematite, down to the blast furnaces of South Chicago.
"But," she said, "look at this."
She turned me from the lake. We crossed the roof's tarred gravel and
looked north, west, and south abroad at the city.
Puffs of energy had raised high buildings over there; over there an
eccentric subsidence had left behind it a slum. Queer, curling
currents of trade and of lust, here, there, and everywhere, were
carrying little clutching eddies of disease and of vice across the
thoroughfares of the wholesome and of the innocent. Sweet unused earth
lay yonder in a great curve of green; within two miles of it stood
clotted houses in which children were dying for air; brown levels of
cottage and tenement, black bubbles of mill and factory, floating side
by side, meeting, mingling, life and light merged into filth and
fume--uncalculated; uncontrolled; fortuitous swirls and splutters on
senseless molten metal; a reproduction in human lives of the phantom
flurry which on simmering ladles in the steel mills they call the
Devil's Flower Garden.
"Not so clever as the ore-boat, is it?" she said. "That was making
wealth, conquering. Well done. This is using wealth, living. Done ill.
A city. Better than many. Worse than many. But none of my business.
I'm emancipated."
She waved her hand and blotted out the city from before me. In its
place I saw now only an uninhabited wilderness plain. In a moment,
however, in the side of a distant ridge, there appeared a tiny
opening. A woman sat near it, plaiting a grass mat. A mile away a man
stood, mending a bow.
It was the scene Mr. Kipling once reported:
"The man didn't begin to be tame till he met the woman. She picked out
a nice dry cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and
she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood
at the back of the cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail
down, across the opening of the cave; and she said: 'Wipe your feet,
dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.'"
As we looked, we saw the man fit an arrow to his bow, take aim, and
bring down a deer. He carried it to the cave. The woman rose to meet
him, the mat in her hand. He pushed her away savagely, took the mat
from her, and threw the deer on the ground. She picked herself up and
began to skin the deer with a knife which she slipped from her belt.
He lay down on the mat and went to sleep.
I heard my companion say: "_I_ did all the housekeeping of _that_
camp. It was woman's work. But now----"
She waved her hand and restored the city to my gaze.
"Now, of _this_ camp _you_ are the real housekeeper. The arranging of
it, the cleaning of it, the decorating of it, on the big scale, as a
total, all masculine, all yours! How you have expanded your duties,
you who were once just hunter and fighter, principally fighter! How
your sphere is swollen! You do not realize it. You are familiar enough
with the commonplace fact that most primitive industry in its origin
owed little to you except (a big 'except') the protection of your
sword against enemies. You are familiar with the fact that the
plaiting of mats and the tanning of hides and every other industrial
feature of housekeeping has passed from my control to yours in precise
proportion as it has ceased to be individual and has become
collective. You dominate everything collective. You understand that.
What you don't understand is this:
"It is not only the _industrial_ features of housekeeping which tend
to become collective. It is also its _administrative_ features. I will
give you just one illustration. I cannot now keep my premises clean,
beautiful, livable, except through the collective control of smoke,
garbage, billboards, noise. And that control is yours.
"Further!
"Even the tenderer phases of housekeeping, those which are more subtle
than mere administration, move steadily toward becoming yours. I will
give you an illustration of that. The very children, now no longer
always at their mothers' knees, but spread abroad through school and
park and playground and street and factory, are now much in your
hands, for school and park and playground and street and factory are
essentially controlled by you. You are increasingly housekeeper, and
even mother. You not only control Working. You also control Living.
But who are you, you that now control Living? You are----"
She tapped my shoulder and laughed.
"You are the Tired Business Man. Yes, whether manufacturer, financier,
scholar, or poet, you are the Tired Business Man. You always were. You
still are. You are a fighter still, by nature. You conquer steel and
steam--and make a boat that will carry a mountain of ore. You conquer
mounds of stock certificates and masses of men--and organize armies
for the production of wealth. You conquer knowledge--and write your
treatise. You conquer the sources of emotion--and write your poem.
Then you're through. You lie down on your mat and go to sleep. To be
housekeeper, to be homemaker, to take from each part of life its
offerings of value and patiently to weld them into a coherent, livable
whole--that is not your faculty. You are a specialist. Produce,
produce, produce--a certain thing, a one certain thing, any one
certain thing, from corkscrews to madonnas--you can do it. But to make
a city a home, to elicit from discordant elements a harmonious total
of warm, charming, noble, livable life--you'll never do it, by
yourself."
She paused.
"Well," she said, "why don't you ask me to help you a bit? Even aside
from any special qualities of my sex, don't you know that the greatest
reserve fund of energy in any American city to-day is the leisure and
semi-leisure of certain classes of its women?"
"But they can give their leisure to 'good works' now if they want to,"
I answered.
"Yes," she said, "but if they do that, they'll want to go farther.
Look!"
And this is what she showed me--what she told me:
* * * * *
Over there on Michigan Avenue, occupying the whole front part of the
ninth floor of the Fine Arts Building, are the quarters of the Chicago
Woman's Club. Twenty-seven years ago, in the Brighton public school,
northwest of the Yards, that club started a kindergarten, providing
the money, the materials, the teacher, the energy--everything but the
room.
[Illustration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: DOMESTIC SCIENCE
CLASSES; INSTRUCTION FOR THE BLIND; ORCHESTRAL CONCERTS; SUFFRAGE
CAMPAIGNS.]
It was a "good work," one might think, quite within "woman's sphere."
But it wasn't entered into lightly and unadvisedly. In one of the
club's old pamphlets you'll find it set down that Goethe had said that
activity without insight is an evil. Accordingly, the club had spent
its youth, from 1876 to 1883, reading, considering, discussing. But
certain topics were excluded. _Particularly woman's suffrage._
But kindergartens! Something for children! Could anything be more
womanly? So on the fifth of December, 1883, the long-apprehended
question arose: "Shall Our Club Do Practical Work?" There was much
hesitation. But the vote was affirmative.
Seems strange to-day, doesn't it, that there should have been any
hesitation at all?
There beneath us, on the Lake Front, in the Art Institute, on Sunday
afternoons, there are excellent orchestral concerts to which you will
be admitted on payment of ten cents. A work of this club.
Out over the city, if your eyes could compass it, you would see a
blind man going from place to place, North Side, West Side, South
Side, seeking out other blind people, entering their homes, teaching
them how to read the books published in Braille and Moon raised
characters, teaching them how to weave, teaching them how to use the
typewriter, teaching them even how to make stenographic notes on a
little keyboarded machine which impresses raised characters on a
tape to be read off afterwards with the finger tips, giving his
fellow-dwellers in darkness an occupation to be their solace, and
even an occupation to be their support. A work of this club.
And the interval between these two kinds of work could be filled up
with hundreds of entries. You have grown accustomed to all this. The
Chicago Woman's Club, the scores of other woman's clubs in this city,
the thousands in this country--you expect them to be active. But you
do not perceive the consequences.
When the Chicago Woman's Club started its work in the Brighton School,
there wasn't any such work in Chicago maintained by public funds. The
town's pioneer kindergarten had been founded in 1867, by a woman.
There had then grown up an association called the Chicago Froebel
Association, which established and operated kindergartens in public
school buildings out of its own resources. The Board of Education
provided space, but nothing more. The Froebel Association was composed
entirely of women, and many of its members were also members of the
Chicago Woman's Club. The steam in the cylinders of the kindergarten
movement in Chicago was the enthusiasm of women.
Well, in 1892, the Board of Education took the kindergartens over. The
kindergarten system became thoroughly public, civic, collective. The
control of it had lain with women. The control of it now passed to
men. Oh, there's no complaint. It's what the women wanted. They asked
the men to do it. But I say--No, I'll postpone saying it till I've
told you another story or two.
In the late nineties the Chicago Woman's Club took the leading rôle in
the formation of what was known as the Vacation Schools Committee.
More than sixty woman's organizations finally sent delegates to it.
Its object was to give city-street children, in summer time, some
sort of experience resembling, if not reproducing, the activity and
the knowledge of nature which comes with summer life in the country.
The vacation school, with its play and its nature study, turned out to
be both useful and popular. For a decade or more the Vacation Schools
Committee, composed entirely of women, raised large sums of money and
extended its efforts from school to school till there came to be an
established and recognized vacation schools system. The women whose
energy carried it forward year after year were, in fact, school
directors. Now the vacation schools system has been adopted by the
Board of Education. Those women are school directors no longer. Nor
have they any voice in the _selecting_ of school directors.
Almost immediately the women changed the name of the Vacation Schools
Committee to Permanent School Extension Committee. Its objects now are
to extend the use of school buildings and to extend the educational
system itself. Its work may be seen in many parts of town.
Ten miles to the south, near the mouth of the Calumet River, where
that ore-boat was turning in, the "Johnson Cubs" and the "South
Side Stars" and other organizations of boys, principally from the
Thorp School, have been getting manual training and football and
cross-country hikes and gymnastic skill under the direction of a
salaried representative of the Permanent School Extension Committee,
who has been trying to make their hours out of school count for
something in their development.
[Illustration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: PARK ATTENDANTS;
MOTHERS' CLUBS; HOSPITAL KINDERGARTENS; VACATION SCHOOLS.]
Southwest of us, far over, back of the Yards, at the Hamline School,
for five years the Committee has maintained a "social worker" who,
through clubs and classes and entertainments and festivals in the
evenings as well as in the afternoons, for adults as well as for
children, has been trying to write over the doors of the school the
words which appear frequently enough elsewhere: "Family Entrance."
Trifling? Dreamy? Just the sort of thing woman's club women would do?
Well, it seems to be about to lapse. But why? Because the Board of
Education, at last half-convinced, has appropriated $10,000 for
social-center work of its own in the school buildings.
The rest of the present work of the Permanent School Extension
Committee will lapse, too--in time.
Last spring, in the Hamline School, for six weeks eighteen children
who needed the treatment did their work in a room in which the windows
were kept open. The Permanent School Extension Committee provided
special chairs, blankets, milk and eggs for morning and afternoon, a
hot meal for lunch.
During the summer, in three school yards--the Lake View on the North
Side, the Penn on the West, the Libby on the South--there were
vacation schools for six weeks in the open air, with special teaching
and special feeding. The Permanent School Extension Committee provided
the meals and the cooks.
The gain made in physical and mental condition by the children so
treated was such that the time is sure to come when the principle of
extra air and extra food for below-par pupils, like the principle of
kindergartens, the principle of vacation schools, and the principle of
school social centers, will be absorbed into the general policy of the
public school system.
And now I will say the things I hesitated to say a few moments ago.
First. Is it likely that women who have helped to add element after
element of value to the public school system would fail to acquire an
interest in the public school system itself? Is it likely that women
who have had a voice in certain important matters would relinquish all
personal concern about them immediately upon their absorption into the
city government? In other words, is it strange that the topic of
woman's suffrage is now tolerated on the floor of the Chicago Woman's
Club?
Second. Might not one unwarily imagine that among the women who for so
many years have given so much thought and action to school affairs
there would be found many whose experience _and whose leisure_ would
be draughted (with a press gang, if necessary) into the public
service?
Is it not strange that among the twenty-one members of the Chicago
Board of Education only one is a woman? And doesn't this become still
stranger when it is recollected that most members of the Board of
Education (to say nothing of their not having merited their
appointment by any notable benefits conferred on the school system)
are so overwhelmed by private business as to find their attendance on
board committee meetings a hardship?
This last feature of the situation is the one that more and more fills
me with amazement. Here is a woman whose acquaintance with educational
developments of all sorts is of long duration, whose achievements in
coöperation with the schools have been admittedly successful, whose
time, now that her children are grown up, is much at her free
disposal--here she is, working away on the edges and fringes of the
school system, while some Tired Business Man is giving the interstices
of his commercial preoccupation to the settlement of comprehensive
questions of educational policy.
But never mind. Things may change. The present superintendent of
schools is a woman. That's something. And, anyway, the women I am
speaking of, though increasingly conscious of the degree of their
exclusion from the collective civic life of the town, do not spend so
much time in repining about it as they spend in seeking new
opportunities for such civic service as is possible to them.
Sometimes it is hard to say whether they are within the bounds of
private life or not.
If you will go up the Chicago River, up past that bend, into the North
Branch, up beyond that gas plant where vagrant oils streak the surface
of the muddy water, vilely, vividly, with the drifting hues of a lost
and tangled rainbow, up by factory and lumber yard, up into the
reaches of the open fields, till the straight lines of wharves give
way to tree-marked windings, graceful bendings gracefully followed by
bending willows, you will come presently to a school which tries to
restore to city children something of the peace and strength of the
country.
It is the Illinois Industrial School for Girls. A few years ago it was
in collapse--filthily housed, educationally demoralized, heavily
indebted. A few women, principally from the Chicago Woman's Club,
became interested in it. They bought a farm for it. They put up
buildings for it. Not a big prison dormitory. Little brick cottages.
Matron in each one. Chance for a kind of home life. Chance, also, for
instruction in housekeeping. Big vegetable patches for instruction in
gardening. Friendly cows to help along with instruction in dairying.
Everything for outdoor life, working life, life that engages and
disciplines.
[Illustration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: IMPROVEMENT OF CITY
SQUARES; NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATIONS; INDUSTRIAL AND AGRICULTURAL
EDUCATION FOR GIRLS.]
All the twenty-four directors of this school (with two exceptions) are
women. Most of them are members of the Chicago Woman's Club. One of
the cottages is named after the club. But the school is, in a way, a
county institution. That is, the county makes a certain contribution
to it, under a state law, for the support of each girl committed to it
as a dependent by the Juvenile Court. The directors, therefore, are
trustees each year for a large amount of public money.
Question: Are they in public life?
Answer: If the school is ever really owned by the public, they will be
discharged from public life with extraordinary immediacy. The way to
deprive any enterprise of the possibility of effective support from
the female half of the community is to give it to the community.
No, I'll admit that isn't quite true. The women do keep on trying to
help.
How I wish I could make you see the whole of this city, its streets,
its vacant places, the inside of its buildings, all, all at once, with
all the things happening which have been set going by this Chicago
Woman's Club and by the organizations with which it associates
itself!
You'd see (and in each case you'd know that what you were seeing was
due either entirely or very largely to the labors of the club, its
committees, its departments, or its close allies)----
You'd see night matrons in the police stations giving women arrests a
degree of protection they did not at one time have.
You'd see in the Art Institute a line of pupils who from year to year
have passed through its study rooms because of a certain scholarship
yearly offered.
You'd see in the City Hall a new official called the city forester,
helping to save the trees the town now has, issuing bulletins of
professional advice, giving his aid to the Arbor Day enthusiasm which
last year put some 400,000 seedlings into the parkways and private
yards of Chicago.
You'd see, over the whole extent of the city, local improvement
associations, which on street cleaning and other local needs, not
adequately met by the city government, spend a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars a year.
You'd see, in the jail, a school for young men prisoners, now taken
over and supported by the county, but still watched by the club. You'd
also see certain recent interests of the club: a woman's dining room,
an examining physician to segregate contagious diseases, a fumigating
plant.
You'd see the paintings on the walls of the assembly hall of the
McKinley High School--the first mural paintings in any school in
Chicago.
You'd see children, after school, in the park playhouses, listening to
"story ladies," who tell them fairy tales, historical tales, tales of
adventure and achievement.
You'd see, in one of the small parks of the West Side, a woman "social
worker," who gets the mothers and fathers of the neighborhood into
the way of using the park and the park building, even for Christmas
Eve family parties. And then you'd see "social workers" appointed by
the park board itself and paid with public money.
You'd see, in many places, audiences listening to free lectures on
Social Hygiene.
You'd see important excerpts from the city code bearing on personal
conduct being taken into the newspaper offices to be printed under the
heading--"Ordinances You Ought to Know."
You'd see paintings and engravings being hung in the public schools by
the Public School Art Society, till in a case such as that of the
Drake School the collection in a single school building amounts in
value to several thousand dollars.
You'd see wagonloads of coats and hats and dresses and trousers being
carried from the School Children's Aid Society to public schools in
all parts of the city, to be secretly conveyed to boys and girls who
otherwise could not come through wintry weather to their lessons.
You'd see flower gardens springing up in many school yards, after a
little encouragement and advice from the Women's Outdoor Art League.
You'd see a girl behind the walls of the Northwestern University
Building, over there on Dearborn Street, telling her story of
deception, or of outrage, or of error, to the superintendent of the
Legal Aid Society. It used to be the Women's Protective Association
till it was merged with the Bureau of Justice a few years since. It
was initiated by the Chicago Woman's Club a generation ago. It has
ministered to thousands of young women cursed with that curse both of
God and of man which gives them, however wronged, almost all the
burden and almost all the shame of the event. It is due mainly to the
work done here that in Illinois to-day a girl cannot legally consent
to her own undoing till she is at least sixteen years old and that
even till she is eighteen her injurer, immune from nature's revenge,
is not immune from the law's.
These things you'd see, and innumerable others. All that I have
mentioned have been suggested to me by lines of communication which
stretch out over the town from the one club I have particularly noted.
If I tried to unravel all those lines to all their endings, I should
keep you here beyond your patience. If I tried to extend my survey to
other similar clubs, younger, smaller, but equally zealous, in this
community, I should keep you here even beyond mine.
They began, those women of the Chicago Woman's Club, with remembering
that Goethe said that activity without insight is an evil. Last spring
they remembered something else that Goethe said. Their president,
retiring from office, comprehended the history of the club and of
thousands of other woman's clubs thus:
"Goethe, who started with the theory that the highest life was to be
gained by self-culture, in later years concluded that service was the
way to happiness. So we have risen by stepping stones to higher
things; through study, through _interest_ in humanity, the supreme
motive of this club has come to be _service_ to humanity."
And yet I haven't mentioned the greatest service ever rendered to the
town by its women.
One day a woman went on a visit, one of many, to the jail. There
were a lot of boys playing about a man in a dressing-gown and
rocking-chair. She inquired about him. "Him?" said the children,
"He's a fellow just murdered his wife. He's our boss."
Visits like that, scenes like that, were the beginning of the Juvenile
Court in Chicago. As the idea began to traverse the local sky, it
gathered about it a most useful and honorable aura of masculine
interest. But the nucleus of it was feminine. And it is to women that
the United States really owes its first Juvenile Court law.
The incident might end there and be notable enough. But it goes
farther.
At the very first session of the Chicago Juvenile Court there appeared
two women. One of them offered to be a probation officer. The other,
with a consciousness of many friends behind her, offered to accumulate
a fund on which a staff of probation officers might be maintained.
From those offers grew the Juvenile Court Committee. Its work during
the next eight years was an integral part of the administration of
the Juvenile Court. There's little wisdom (in a city as large as
Chicago) in paroling a wayward boy unless there's a probation officer
to follow him, to watch him, to encourage him, to keep him from
relapsing into the hands of the judge. Some 3,500 children pass
through the court every year. The judge cannot be father to many of
them. The probation officers are the judge's eyes and hands, giving
him knowledge and control of his family. Without the probation
officers the new system would have been an amiable reform, but not an
effective agency for juvenile regeneration.
The Juvenile Court Committee developed a staff of probation officers,
which finally had twenty-two members. The Juvenile Court Committee
also undertook the maintenance and management of the detention home in
which boys were sheltered and instructed while awaiting the final
disposition of their cases. The Juvenile Court Committee also gave
time and money to many other features of the development of the court,
all the way from paying the salaries of a chief clerk and a chief
stenographer to suggesting the advisability and securing the adoption
of necessary amendments to the Juvenile Court law.
From the year 1898 to the year 1907 the Juvenile Court Committee
raised and spent $100,000. But it did its best work in depriving
itself of its occupation. It secured the passage of a law which
established the probation officer system as part of the Juvenile Court
system, to be maintained forever by the county authorities. And it
succeeded, after long negotiations, in persuading the county and the
city governments to coöperate in the erection of a Children's
Building, which houses both the court and the detention home.
The original purpose of the Juvenile Court Committee was now
fulfilled. The Committee perished. But it immediately rose from its
ashes as the Juvenile Protective Association. Instead of supporting
_probation_ officers to look after children who are _already_ in the
care of the court, it now spends some $25,000 a year on _protective_
officers, who have it for their ultimate object to prevent children
from _getting into_ the care of the court. Can anything be done to dam
the stream of dependent and delinquent children which flows through
the children's building so steadily? What are the subterranean sources
of that stream? Can they be staunched?
The managers of the Juvenile Protective Association, in going back of
the court to study the home lives, the industrial occupations, and the
amusements which form the characters, for better or for worse, of the
city's children, are approaching the field in which the causes of
social corruption will stand much more clearly revealed than at
present to our intelligence and conscience. It is fundamental work.
But what of the women who are directing that work? What of the women
who are directing the other enterprises I have mentioned? Would they
make good citizens?
They are militant citizens now, _with the rank of noncombatants_.
* * * * *
We crossed the roof's tarred gravel once more, and once more leaned
over the tiled parapet and looked abroad at the city.
"I told you," she said, "that women cannot give their leisure to
useful activity without verging toward citizenship. That is the rule.
There are exceptions, caused by individual temperament. But that
is the rule. Make one group of the women who use their leisure to
_good_ purpose. Make another of the women who use their leisure to
_no_ purpose. You'll find a growing desire for citizenship in the
former. You'll find little such desire in the latter. The conflict
that is going on among women who have any leisure at all is between
the spirit which drives them toward a union with the life of the
world and the spirit which drives them toward complete detachment
and irresponsibility.
"So let's say no more about the suffrage agitation. It's simply a
sequel to women's interest in the world's housekeeping. The broader
question is, 'Will that interest grow?'
"One would think it could hardly help growing. The hosts of women who
are earning their living--they are immersed in the world even as men.
But the women who are at home, with little children about them!
They're abstracted from the world, aren't they? Yes, _physically_,
just as much as ever. But _mentally_ they come closer and closer to
the world all the time.
"Have you read the Home Economics books? The day is coming, you know,
when every girl will have the training those books suggest. It will
make her a home woman, you say. Yes, it will help do that. But it will
help even more to make her something else, too.
"Do you know that the Home Economics literature has more in it about
civic service than any other one general kind of educational
literature you can lay your hands on?
"Does that seem odd to you? I'll tell you the reason for it.
"Home Economics is the study of Right Living, the study of the
importance, the utility, and the possible beauty of the common things
of daily existence. Now one cannot study sanitation, fresh air, pure
food, adequate housing, the care of children, the protection of the
family from disease, the maintenance of a proper environment and
regimen for health and efficiency, without instantly perceiving the
closeness of the relationship between the life of the individual and
the life of the community.
"The so-called bread-and-butter studies, now being inserted into
women's education, have the merit, superficially paradoxical, of
raising the mind to the duties of citizenship. The simplest mother,
immured in her home with her small children, will in the days to come
realize, as she does not now at all realize, what the freshness of the
milk supply, what the purity of the city water, what the efficiency of
the health department, mean to those children. She will know--and when
she knows she will care.
"Let me give you one illustration of the extent to which certain
teachers of Home Economics recognize the future civic responsibilities
of their pupils.
"In a little town far up in the Northwest there's a famous Homemakers'
School. It is far from the social pressure of packed populations.
Nevertheless, along with all the housekeeping details which crowd its
two-year course, you'll find a series of lectures on 'Home and Social
Economics' based on a theory which I'll try to give in almost the very
words used by the school itself in its public announcements of policy.
It's this:
"'The growing wealth of different communities, the application of
modern inventions to home industries, the passing of many of the
former lines of women's work into the factory have brought to many
women leisure time which should be spent in social service. Civic
cleanliness, the humane treatment of children, the city beautiful,
education, civic morality, the protection of children from immoral
influences, child labor, the organizations to protect neglected
children and to reform delinquent children--all are legitimately
within the province of motherhood, and the attempt to improve
conditions is a part of the duty of the modern woman.'
"Is that radical? Surely not. Surely it's conservative. There's not a
suggestion in it of any change in woman's interests. There's only an
awakening to the fact that her interests are now diffused throughout
the community, that what could once be comprehended in a wilderness
cave is now spread abroad through all the lands of all the world.
"I said I taught housekeeping in that cave. I wonder if I could teach
better housekeeping to the whole world.
"I know I could if I would. But----
"I'm thinking now of the millions of women who, after all their home
duties are done, still have some time they could give me for a more
livable world life. Will they? I can't say. But I will say this:
"Either their public spirit will grow or their private character will
decline. One of the two. Because they carry, along with that leisure
of theirs, not only its blessings but also its curse. They must
sanctify it or perish by it.
"Leisure! Culture! Emancipation! All nothing unless there is something
more. Culture without action is an ingrowing disease which first
debilitates and then dissolves the will to live. Emancipation without
duty is a mirage of pleasure which raises thirst but never quenches
it. The Romans emancipated their women, in the days of their
degeneration, but with no result except a completer collapse of family
life and of personal virtue.
"But perhaps there will be a new issue of events this time. It looks
as if there might be.
"That weary ancient world, recoiling from its luxuries, its
dissipations, its surfeits, turned to pessimistic mysticism, to the
theory that the flesh and the things of the flesh are vile, to
monastic withdrawal into the desert and the mountains, to the life of
inward searchings.
"This modern world is turning to optimistic materialism, to the theory
that the flesh and the things of the flesh can be made noble, to
anti-tuberculosis societies and juvenile courts, to the life of
outward workings.
"_That_ world found peace in _renunciation_. _This_ world seeks peace
in _service_.
"It is going to be an era of the importance, the utility, and the
possible beauty of the common things of daily existence. It is going
to be an era of Right Living.
"Will not woman have a _particular_ part in it? May she not even have
a _dominant_ part in it?
"I have watched her every hour from the beginning--from the very first
beginning of any life that had any warmth of love in it. I have seen
her make the hearth the symbol of the stability of the individual
life. Now, when the duties of the home, the stones of which that
hearth was made, are scattered far and wide, shall I not see her
reassemble them on a grander scale to make a total of stability for
all life whatsoever? Shall I not?"
"But who?" I said, "who are you?"
"I," she said, "I am the spirit that made woman love her child, and
that shall yet make her love her kind."
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