CHAPTER XVITHE REAL AMERICAN WOMAN
TheAmerican woman is regarded both here and abroad as the strongest and subtlest enemy of the American Democracy. She is pictured in the imaginations of students of our life as ignorant of politics, interested only in her own sovereignty over the American man, or, rather, over his pocketbook, a snob and a climber and a worshiper of European aristocratic institutions; a poor housekeeper and a reluctant mother, and a very vampire for luxury and show, she hides her superficiality and cold-heartedness under a mask that is fair and fascinating. She is a born caste-worshiper, an instinctive hater of Democracy.
What truth, if any, is there in these hardy criticisms?
We have noted how, under the leadership and inspiration of the capital of plutocracy, New York,every city in the country is, with true American rapidity, developing its individual fashionable society. It is directed by the wives and daughters of rich men; it is, as we have seen, devoted chiefly to spending time and money in unproductive and more or less frivolous forms of self-amusement. The character of this “set” varies slightly for each locality—but only slightly. In the West the wealth-worship is franker; in the East more hypocritical, more beslimed and bemessed with cant about birth and culture. But whether Mammon is naked and unashamed or is draped and decorated, he is still Mammon. The monotonous sameness of the people comprising each division of the set, the sameness of their opportunities and aims, the world-neighborliness which railways and telegraph and printing press have brought about, prevent any notable differences. To dress, to talk, to eat, to drive, to entertain, to bring up one’s children, all in accord with the standards of “good form” established by the aristocratic societies of Europe; to spend each day in pleasures that permit one to shift most of the labor and all the thinking and providing to hirelings of divers degrees, from lawyers and industrial managers to secretaries, housekeepers,butlers, valets and maids; to live worthlessly without useful work—these are the aims, East, West, and South. And in rapidly increasing measure the aims are accomplished.
Universal freedom, universal opportunity, all but universal toil, have indeed very suddenly brought vast riches to America, vast wealth to a few. This sudden wealth, coming to a people whose characteristics are energy, restlessness and lightning-like adaptability, has all in a day relieved a relatively small but, in another aspect, very numerous and most influential part of each large community from the necessity to labor. Many, a great many, of these continue to strive to cherish the ideals of a life of useful labor, continue to strive to set a worthy example to their children and to their fellow-citizens—that is, to remain sane and American. But a great many others have eagerly adopted those alien ideals of the aristocracy of idleness and the vulgarity of toil which appeal so strongly to the vanity and other ancient weaknesses of the human animal the world over.
For this state of affairs women, imperfectly educated, wrongly, sillily educated, in fact, practically uneducated, are in the main responsible. Ourwomen, like our men, inherit the American energy and restlessness. Where circumstances compel, they work in the home, the shop, the factory, the office, in the fine American way. But where circumstances do not compel they seek other outlets for their restless energy. And thus we find rich wives and daughters organizing elaborate establishments and fashionable sets and international circuits, and devoting themselves to erecting the life of frivolity and show into a career that will at once fill their idle hours, gratify their vanity, and give them the sense of doing something ambitious, of “getting on in the world.”
Among a people who have always yielded a commanding position to women, the power of this new American woman—attractive in dress and in surroundings, so often fascinating in personality, usually clever and so plausible that she deceives no one more completely than herself—could not but be enormous. Is it strange that she weakens the hold of the old ideals upon her husband and upon the men who are drawn to her attractive house? Is it strange that they persuade their consciences to let them neglect to-day’s duties while they help her amuse them and herself? Is it strange that shehas sons and daughters devoted to her ideals? Is it strange that she gathers about her more and more backsliders from the democratic conception of life?
Organized as we are, there is absolutely no useful place for a leisure class. We do not purpose to be ruled, but, on the contrary, insist that our public administrators shall be chosen from the main body of toilers and shall execute, not direct, the popular will. Since leadership in public and private activity thus falls to the toiler in a Democracy, these fashionable “sets” provided by the women of the rich class are wholly alien and hostile to us as a democratic people. And they inevitably become a menace as their influence extends over the men and women of superior education or natural endowments who should be the leading exemplars of the American ideal. And this menace threatens to erect itself into what pessimists would call a “peril,” as the “community of interest” creates monopolies so intertwined with our individual structure that to assail them is to jeopardize it, and perpetuates wealth in certain families and groups.
Such is the anti-democratic woman. But over against her set the American woman. The plutocraticAmerican man, being gaudy and conspicuous, distracts attention from the democratic American man, who outnumbers and outvotes and out-influences him into insignificance, except as an awful warning against flying in the face of the world’s democratic destiny. The plutocratic American woman is even more conspicuous than the plutocratic American man. But contrast her with the rest of the women, especially with the women who go forth from the homes to work. Great as is the influence against Democracy exerted by the women of the leisure class, it is weak in comparison with that exerted for Democracy by the professional and business women of the United States.
Ten years ago about one-fifth of all the wage and salary earners in the United States were women and girls. When these figures were published there was a great outcry of wonder and alarm—wonder at the changed conditions, alarm lest those changed conditions might be permanent and the old-fashioned woman of the fireside and the stoveside and the cradleside might be passing away. To-day about one-third of all the women in the United States not on farms earn their own living outside their own homes, and these women constitute morethan one-fourth of all the persons in the United States engaged in gainful occupations other than agriculture.
It is evident that the changed conditions are not passing, but permanent; that the “new woman” is the woman of the future. Yet we still hear the old order talked of as if it were not a departing order, and the new order criticised as if it were abnormal, a fad of a few “freak” women.
Obviously, this change is most intimately associated with Democracy. Democracy, work, women; women, work, Democracy. Did any of those ancient republics we hear so much about, those whose decline and fall Europe and our own pessimists say we must inevitably imitate, ever number among its inhabitants a company of women wage and salary earners such as has been so swiftly evolved in democratic, work-compelling, work-exalting America?
In face of this army of women who work outside the home, the theory still is that man bears the brunt of the battle for food, clothing and shelter, while woman is sheltered and comparatively at her ease. This theory never was sound. It never would have been accepted had writers and thinkerskept clearly before their minds the fact that the human race does not consist of a luxuriously comfortable class, but of vast masses of laborious millions. From time immemorial, among the masses of the people everywhere, the men and the women have worked equally for the support of the family. But latterly, under the pressure of modern conditions, which are forcing all into the general service of society, the women have been drawn from the obscure toil of occupations within and around the household; and also into the ranks of women toilers have gone hundreds of thousands of women from the classes which, until recently, did try to keep their women at home. Is it illogical to say that we may presently see practically all the capable members of our society, regardless of sex, self-supporting? And in such circumstances, would not the family relations, the relations of mother to father, and both to children, necessarily undergo a radical transformation?
To-day the women vote in four States and hold public office in all the States and under the National Government. There are women policemen and firemen, women locomotive engineers, women masons and plasterers and gunsmiths, women street-cardrivers and conductors, women blacksmiths and coopers and steel and iron workers, and even women sailors—to take only a few occupations which, on the face, would seem to exclude women. In fact, there is not in this country a single department of skilled or unskilled labor, except only soldier and man-o’-war’s man, which has not its women workers in swiftly increasing numbers. In the professions there are thousands of women doctors, lawyers, authors, professors, musicians, artists, decorators, journalists, public speakers, and more than a hundred thousand women teachers. In the trades there are thousands of women hotel and restaurant keepers, insurance and real estate agents, bookkeepers, clerks, merchants, officers in corporations, saleswomen, stenographers, telegraph and telephone operators. In manufactories the women operatives almost equal the men in numbers. There are thousands of women who hold responsible positions in the management of manufacturing corporations. All these occupations, with the exception of such as nursing and teaching school and music, were once exclusively in the hands of men.
The cause of the change is the same as that which has revolutionized every part of modern society—theamazing discoveries of science, creating an enormous number of new occupations and revolutionizing the method of all the old occupations, from housekeeping to national administration.
War was the department of human endeavor which not only excluded women from itself, but also kept her fast anchored at home. Until the second quarter of the last century war was the chief thought, the chief pursuit of the human animal. He was either just going to war or just coming home from war, or engaged in war or preparing for imminent war. Obviously, so long as war occupied this position in human affairs woman was inevitably in the background, in the secondary places, a household drudge or plaything. But war is no longer the principal business of the race, with peace tolerated as a breathing spell now and then. Peace and its arts have become the serious business of civilization, the settled order, with war as a dreadful nightmare. The wars, if not fewer, are briefer and are carefully concentrated and confined. Civilization has been forced upon a peace basis not by enlightenment, but by commerce growing out of discovery and invention. It clamors for skilled hands, not for brutal hands. Hence the vast openingfor women and the vast inrush of women. It is a democratic tide. Out of discovery and invention comes commerce; out of commerce and its intercourse, which is death to all forms of provincialism, both mental and physical, comes enlightenment; in the train of enlightenment, as day in the train of the sun, comes Democracy.
This country was remote from other great nations and, therefore, from the ever present threat of the actuality of war. It was—perhaps through its freedom from war and war alarms—eagerest in seizing upon and using the mighty industrial machinery which science gave to the race. Thus it has come to pass with us that the abolition of the non-worker, the progress toward the industrial equality of the two sexes, has been most rapid.
Where European societies had a very complex organization, our society had from the beginning simplicity as its chief characteristic. We were really all toilers—until recently almost all toilers at occupations close to manual labor. The women and the men were throughout on that equal basis which in Europe was, and to a great extent is yet, found only among the peasant and shopkeeping classes. And as the new era—the era of steamand electricity—developed with us, our women and our men naturally remained side by side.
Our government was founded in war. Its founders assumed, from the history of all other nations, that offense and defense were to be its main functions. And the barbaric theory is still ignorantly or carelessly assented to. This explains the lagging of the political rights of women behind their industrial and civil rights—or, rather, industrial and civil necessities; for no right has ever been, or probably ever will be, recognized until recognition becomes a necessity. The development with us of a class of women who are housekeepers only and are most of the time idle or half idle, is foreign to the spirit of our democratic era. That development cannot, therefore, long survive, any more than an equatorial plant can long survive in our zone. The new departures are in harmony with Democracy; they mean increased efficiency and usefulness of the human race; they must persist and expand and prevail.
To three causes we owe the American woman of the class that only pretends to contribute, or at best half-heartedly contributes, toward the support of our social system:
First, to the survival of the Old World, old era ideas of “woman’s sphere,” of the coarsening effect of labor upon her “finer nature,” of the “aristocratic flavor” and “high breeding” of uselessness and idleness.
Second, to the simpler tastes of our ancestors, and the comparative ease with which at an early period in our national life the labor of the men in the family could provide money enough to satisfy those tastes.
Third, to the very tardy development of the domestic laborers and providers that now relieve woman of the confining cares of household and nursery.
As a result of these three causes a class of idle women sprang up—not only among the rich and well-to-do, but even among artisans, small farmers and shopkeepers. And this class came to be regarded as typical and exemplary. In reality it is neither. It has no place in our tradition of mothers and grandmothers who spun and made preserves, did their own housework, and were busy every waking moment about matters which are now attended to in shops and factories. It has no place in common sense—the women who insist most strenuouslythat child-bearing and home-making are woman’s whole duty are the women who, as a class, leave the care of the home to servants and bear few children and consign them to nurses at the earliest possible moment. And manifestly it has no place in our future; it must inevitably go the way of all else that is undemocratic and parasitic. Our society is founded upon the two ideas—work and equal opportunity to all to work. It abhors the idler as nature abhors a vacuum. And as the old-time occupations of woman are carried on in a different way, she must find other occupations. Must, because man will be unable both to support himself in the comfort he ever more exactingly demands and also to support her in idleness as well as she insists upon being supported. Must, because her own increasing aversion to restraint will not let her rest content with the slavish and shameful position of a cajoler and dependent.
The sex instinct is powerful enough to triumph over even the instinct of self-preservation for a time; but it cannot withstand the steady, day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year pressure of that instinct of self-preservation incessantly stimulated by the operations of economic forces. The oldorder, bulwarked by tradition and by the sex-passion and by woman’s ingenuity and man’s weakness where women are concerned, will survive long, will disintegrate gradually. But how can it be saved?
Thus we have a social organization which is in process of revolutionary change. The women are rapidly pushing out or are rapidly being pushed out into occupations which have been transferred from the domestic to the general sphere; they are entering upon occupations new and old which it was thought a few years ago would be for the men only. The men on their part not only are working as formerly, but also are entering occupations once followed exclusively by women. Some of the new employments of women have already been enumerated. The new employments of men in this country include laundry work, cooking, general housework, nursing, keeping boarding-houses, teaching primary and kindergarten pupils, dressmaking, millinery. The list is far shorter and, from the old viewpoint where the equal dignity of all honorable labor was denied, seems far less dignified than the women’s list. The reason for this is of course that the men had small room to expandtheir already multiform activities, while the women had all the room in the world.
The underlying principle of this redistribution of activities is the common-sense principle that every unit in a society should do the work at hand for which it is best fitted. This principle explains every case. Where we find a man dusting, scrubbing and doing laundry work it is because he could find nothing more remunerative to do and could outbid the women applying for that particular task. Wherever we find a woman plastering, or keeping books, or driving a street-car, or managing a store or corporation, it is for the same reason. And this modern principle wholly ignores sex and looks only at the work to be done and at the comparative fitness of the male and female applicants for it. We are being taught by destiny that parasitism and dependence are no more essentials of the feminine than the brands and manacles which at one time most men wore were essentials of the masculine.
It is not prophecy to say that, as more and more millions of women enter the industrial fields, these readjustments and redivisions, this absorption of some occupations by women and of other occupations by men, will go on apace. We may not likeit; but we can no more stop it than we can stop the physical and mental development of woman, or the use of steam and electricity.
The missionary work for Democracy done by the women already understanding the values of work will undoubtedly eventually reach the “exclusive,” most distinctly leisure class. Its influence is seen on every hand, among the girls and young women of the very well-to-do, in families where the daughters are still persuaded to remain idly at home against their own inclinations. Probably every woman earning her own living, who has associates among women more or less comfortably supported in idleness, and in restraint, by men, is envied by not a few of them, by all not hopelessly corrupted by laziness and caste. And eventually they will be following her example. As the number of educated, valuable women forced to work for a living increases, the number of the same kind of women voluntarily going to work will increase.
And finally the richer women will be reached and impelled. Their yearning to do something will take tangible form. We may live to see the discontented, folly-chasing daughters of the rich stepping not down to, but up to a place beside thewoman wage-earner, because they are sick and tired of having no sensible employment, tired of the pitiful wait for some man with the right qualifications of personal and pecuniary attractiveness; because they have sufficiently developed in intelligence to have not a theoretic but a practical envy of the joys of the woman who is absolute mistress of herself and is waiting for the right man only as a man now waits for the right woman.
There is no such simplifier of life as work. Its effect upon the dress, the home surroundings, the very expression and manners of women once accustomed to leisure, is enormous. It tends to make them far more attractive to their own sex and also to such men as are not afraid an intelligent, competent woman would at close range discover the shallowness of their posings and pretenses. Finally, it makes them democratic—all of them that have the wisdom to look on their work not as a sentence to drudgery from which they hope they can presently cajole some man into releasing them, but as a high dispensation of destiny in their favor. The “emancipation of woman” is no mere sonorous phrase. The new woman can, indeed must, retain all the virtues of the “old-fashioned” woman. Feminineis as eternal and immutable as masculine; and the other virtues of the old were the virtues inseparable from a life of busy usefulness. The new woman can and must, and therefore will, free herself from the vices of the old-fashioned woman—the vices of narrowness and irrationality, of artifice that harks back to the days when woman was the servant of man’s appetites and had to pander to them.
The decisive advantage the men have had in the fifty years since Democracy set its powerful forces to work upon woman has been not their superior strength or skill or faithfulness or industry, but that woman has worked merely as a temporary expedient. She has tenaciously assumed that she would presently “quit work” and be supported by some man. This dream has been largely fanciful, though none the less potent for that. The woman, married, has usually found that she has not stopped working, but has undertaken a far more laborious and ever grudgingly paid occupation. The delusion has made her wages smaller. Who will not pay more to a worker who expects to go on working than to a worker who expects presently to stop work, and is meanwhile giving at least half her energy to another occupation, that of catching ahusband? The delusion has also destroyed or impaired her ambition. Why struggle to rise in an occupation which one hopes and intends presently to abandon for another that is wholly different?
But latterly a host of women have been coming into conspicuous positions because ambition drove them there. They have begun to work for work’s sake. They have seen the fraud in the silly and shallow twaddle about “woman and the home”—as if for centuries the mothers of the men most useful to society had not been for the most part working women who could not, if they would, have pleaded child-bearing and nursery and housework in excuse for doing nothing to add to the family income. The “new woman” is not a slovenly drudge waiting irritably for the advent of a husband that she may become a tenement “sill-warmer” or a palace parasite. She works until she is married; she continues to work after she is married. And there is no shadow of a taint of pecuniary interest in the love and affection she gives.
Disregard the negligible few women of the plutocracy and its environs, as we have disregarded the unimportant few men of the same class, and looking at all over eight millions, you find that theAmerican woman, like the American man, is developing in harmony with the ideal of Democracy. Democracy is no discriminator either among persons or between sexes. It respects the mothers of future generations as profoundly as it respects the fathers. And it has the same gifts for all—freedom, intelligence, the joy of work.