The Business of Being a Woman/Chapter 7
One of the severest strains society makes on human life is that of adapting itself to ever changing conditions: yesterday it dragged us in a stagecoach; to-day it hurls us across country in limited expresses; to-morrow we shall fly! Once twilight and darkness were without, shadows and dim recesses within; now, wherever men gather there is one continuous blazing day. He who would keep his task abreast with the day must accept speed and light; for the law is, think, feel, do in the terms of your day, if you would keep your hold on your day.
It is a law often resented as if it were an immorality, but those who refuse the new way on principle, confuse form with principle. It is the form which changes, not the essence. The few great underlying elements from which character and happiness are evolved are permanent—their mutations are endless. Dull-minded, we take the mutations to mean shifting of principle. That is, we do not square up by truth, but by the forms of truth.
The Woman's Business has always suffered from lack of facility in adapting itself to new forms of expression. The natural task found, a method of handling it in a fashion sufficiently acceptable to prevent family revolts mastered, and the woman usually is as fixed as a star in its orbit. She resents changes of method, new interpretations, and fresh expressions. It is she, not man, who stands an immovable mountain in the path of militant feminism.
In this course she is following her nature. An instinct more powerful than logic tells her that she must preserve the thing she is making, that center for which she is responsible, that place where her child is born and reared, where her mate retreats, to be reassured that the effort to which he has committed himself is worth while, where all the community to which she belongs is served and strengthened. If this place is preserved, she must do it. Man, an experimenter and adventurer, cannot.
Changes she fears. She sees them as disturbers of her plans and her ideals. But the changes will not stay. They gather about her retreat, beat at the doors, creep in at the windows, win her husband and children from her very arms. The home on which she depended to keep them becomes impotent. While she stands an implacable guardian of a form of truth, truth has moved on, broadened its outlook, and clothed itself in new expressions.
It is entirely understandable that the woman who sees herself left behind with her dead gods should cry out against change as the ruin of her hopes. It is equally understandable that those who find themselves adrift should doubt the home as an institution. At the bottom of the revolt of thousands of our "uneasy women" of to-day lies this doubt. The home failed them, and with the logic of limited experience they cast it out of their calculations.
But the home is one of the unescapable facts of nature and society—unescapable because the child demands it. One of the earliest convictions of the child is that he has a right to a home. To him it appears as the great necessity. He cannot see himself outside of it. To be at large in the world throws him into panic. The sacrifices and pains very young children suffer uncomplainingly, particularly in great cities and factory towns, is a pathetic enough demonstration of what the word means to them. Mere children by the hundreds support families terrified by the thought of their collapse. The orphan forever dreams of the day when a home will be found for him. The child whose parents seek freedom, leaving him to school or servants, never fails to nourish a sense of injustice. Whatever one generation may decide as to the futility or burdensomeness of the home, the oncoming child will force its return.
To keep this permanent place abreast with growing truth, that is the obligation of the woman. It is the failure to do this that produces what we may call the homeless daughter; that girl who loved and often served to the point of folly, finds herself in a group where none of the imperative needs the day has awakened in her are met.
One of the first of these needs is for what we call "economic independence." The spirit of our day and of our system of government is personal, material independence for all. Under the old régime the girl had her economic place. The family was a small community. It provided for most of its own wants, hence the girl must be taught household arts and science, all of the fine traditional knowledge and skill which made, not drudges, but skilled managers, skilled cooks and needlewomen, skilled hostesses and nurses. She had a business to learn under the old régime, and there was an authority, often severely enforced no doubt, which made her learn it well. There was the same appraising of the efficiency of the girl for her business there was of the boy for his.
The girl of to-day rarely has any such systematic training for the material side of her business, nor is a dignified place provided for her in well-to-do families. Her place is parasitical and demoralizing. Take the young girl who has been what we call "educated"; that is, one who has gone through college and has not found a talent which she is eager to develop. The spirit of the times makes her less keen for marriage, puts no feeling of obligation of marriage upon her. She finds herself in a home which is not regarded as a serious industrial undertaking. Things go on more or less accidentally, according to traditions or conventions. Her ideas of scientific management, if she has any, are treated as revolutionary. Her help is not needed. There is no place for her.
The daughters of the very poor often have better fortune than she in this respect. They, from very early years, have known that they were necessary to the family. Almost invariably they accept heavy and sometimes cruel burdens cheerfully, even proudly. It is the pride of knowing themselves important to those whom they love. One of the difficult things to combat in enforcing the laws which forbid children under fourteen working, is the child's desire to help. He may hate the hardship, but at least there is in his lot none of that hopeless sense of futility which comes over the girl of high spirit when she realizes she has no practical value in the group to which she belongs. "Not needed"—that is one of the tragic experiences of the young girl in the well-to-do family. To save herself, to meet the truth of her day which has taken hold of her, she must seek a productive place; that is, leave home, seek work. If she has some special talent, knows what she wants to do, she is fortunate indeed. With the majority it is work, something to do, a place where they can be independently productive, that is sought.
The girl of the family in moderate circumstances is no better off. She must contribute in some way, and there is no scientific management in her home—no study of ways and means which enables her to contribute and remain at home. She is driven outside in order to support herself. I cannot but believe that here is one of the gravest weaknesses in our educational machinery, this failure to give the girl inclined to remain at home a training which would enable her to help make more of a limited income. Nothing is so rare to-day as the fine habit of making much of little. A dollar mixed with brains is worth five in every place where dollars are used. Particularly is this true in the household. The failure to teach how to mix brains and dollars, and to inspire respect for the undertaking, annually drives thousands of girls into our already overburdened industrial system who would be healthier and happier at home and who would render there a much greater economic service. Such work as is being done in certain Western agricultural colleges for girls, in the Carnegie School for Women in Pittsburg, in Miss Kittridge's Household Centers in New York City, is a recognition of this need of making scientific managers—trained household workers—of young women. There is no more practical way of relieving the industrial strain.
It is not always the dependent and so humiliating position a girl finds herself in that drives her from home. It is frequently the discovery that she is a member of a group that has no responsible place in the community; that regards itself as a purely isolated, unrelated, irresponsible unit,—an atom without affinities! The home can be, if it will, the most antisocial force in existence, for it can, if it will, exist practically for itself. That excessive individualism, which is responsible for so many evils in our country, has encouraged this isolation. The girl who finds herself without a productive place at home at the same time finds none of the fine inspiration which comes from fitting herself into a social scheme and helping to do its work. The spirit of the age is social. She feels its call, she sees how unresponsive, even antipathetic, to it her home is. She concludes that if she is to serve she must seek something to do in some remote city. The attraction the Social Settlement has for the girl finds its base here. The loss to communities of their educated young women, who find no response to their need, no place to serve in their own society, is incalculable.
It is not infrequent that a girl who may have by some chance of fortune a sufficient sense of independence in her home, who knows herself needed there, and is ready to perform the service, is driven out by the persistence of that spirit of parental authority, which looks upon it as a duty to rule the life, particularly of the daughter, as long as she is at home. There is nothing clearer than that the old domination of one person by another is a thing of the past. A new spirit of cooperation and friendly direction has come into the world. The home which it does not pervade cannot keep its young.
The most essential thing for a woman to understand is that her business is not to order her daughter's life, but to assist that daughter to shape it herself. She should be prepared to say to her: "The most interesting and important thing in the world for you is to work out your own particular life. You must build it from the place where you stand and with the materials in your hands. Nobody else ever stood in your particular place or ever will stand in one identical; nobody ever has or can possess the same materials. You alone can fuse the elements. Hold your place; do not try to shift into the place that another occupies. Keep your eye on what you have to work with, not on what somebody else has. The ultimate result, the originality, flavor, distinction, usefulness of your life, depend on the care, the reverence, and the intelligence with which you work up and out from where you are and with what you have."
It is only the woman who is prepared to say something like that to her daughter, to help her to see it, and to rise to it that has brought into her home the spirit of to-day.
Where there is failure at any one of these points, and if one fails, all probably will, since they are obvious elements in the liberal view of life, the girl must go forth if her life is to go progressively on. She must seek work, less for the sake of work than for the sake of life. To remain where she is, unproductive in a group which does not recognize the calls of the present world and where another person—for the mother who tries to force the individuality becomes another person—insists on shaping her course,—to do this is to quench the spirit, stop the very breath of life.
The girl goes forth to seek work. She has almost invariably the idea that work outside the home has less of drudgery in it, i.e. less routine and meanness, more excitement. She is unprepared for the years of steady grinding labor which she must go through to earn her bread in any trade or profession. She learns that work is work whether done in kitchen, sewing room, countinghouse, studio, or editor's sanctum, and all that keeps the operations which consume the bulk of the worker's time in any of these places from being drudgery is that he keeps before him the end for which they are performed. The first disillusionment comes, then, when she faces the necessity of a long steady pull for years if she is to "arrive."
A second comes when she finds she must prove to a busy, driven world that she is worth its attention; she must do more than simply knock for admission and declare her fealty to its ideals. She realizes sooner or later that she is an outsider and must delve her way in. No sapper works harder to make his trench than most young women do to make stable places for themselves in strange communities.
The gnawing loneliness of the girl who has left home to make her way is one of the most fruitful causes of the questionable relations which well-born girls form more often than society realizes. The girl seizes eagerly every chance for companionship or pleasure. Her keen need of it makes her overappreciative and undercritical. Moreover, she has the confidence of ignorance. Most American girls are brought up as if wrongdoing were impossible to them. Nobody has ever suggested to them that they have the possibility of all crimes in their makeup! Parents and teachers ordinarily have extraordinary skill in evading, but little in facing, the facts of life.
Disarmed by her ignorance, the girl goes out to a freedom such as no country has ever before believed it safe to allow the young, either girl or boy. This freedom is of course the logical result of what we call the "emancipation of women." It is the swinging of the pendulum from the old system of chaperonage and authority. The weak point is in the fact that the girl has not knowledge enough for her freedom. It is not a return of the old system of guarded girls which is needed. That is impossible under modern conditions, out of harmony with modern ideas. The great need is that the women of the country realize that freedom unaccompanied by knowledge is one of the most dangerous tools that can be put into a human being's hands. The reluctance of women to face this fact is the most discouraging side of the woman question.
The girl who goes forth should go armed with knowledge. Moreover, in moments of loneliness, when she is ready to slip, she should be literally jerked back by the pull of the home. This hold of the home is no chimerical thing. It is a positive, living reality. The home has a power of projecting itself into the lives of those who go out from it. It is where the girl does not carry away a sense of an uninterrupted relation—a certainty that she is a part of that group and that achievement, that she is only carrying on, enlarging, helping to extend, beautify, and ripen its work, that she is not homeless. Nothing can so hold her in her isolation as that sense.
The Uneasy Woman of to-day who has fulfilled to the letter, as she understands it, the Woman's Business, is frequently heard to say: "My boys are in college; they do not need me. My girls are married or at work, and they do not need me. I have nothing to do. My business is complete. I am retired, sidetracked. It is for this reason that I ask a part in politics." But her argument proves that she does not understand her business. She may want and need some outside occupation for the very health of her business, politics perhaps, but certainly not because her business is done.
There is no more critical time for her than when her young people go out to try themselves in the world. The girl particularly needs this pull of the home, not only to keep her on a straight path, but to keep her from the narrowness and selfishness which overtake so many self-supporting women who have no close family responsibilities. The fetich which has been made, for many years now, of work for women, that is, of work outside of the home, frequently leads the woman to take some particular virtue to herself for self-support. She feels that it entitles her to special consideration, releases her from obligations which she does not voluntarily assume. The attitude is enough to narrow and harden her life. The great preventive of this disaster is a responsible home relation. If she must share her earnings, it is a blessed thing for her. If not, she should share its burdens and its hopes, in order to have a continued source of outside interest to broaden and soften her, to keep her out of the ranks of the charmless, self-centered, single women, whose only occupations are self-support and self-care.
The problems involved in keeping the girl who has a home from being homeless are not simple. They are as intricate as anything a woman can face. They call for the highest understanding, responsiveness, and activity. No futile devices will meet them. "My daughter is not coming home to be idle," I heard a fine-intentioned woman say recently. "I insist that she take all the care of her room, save the weekly cleaning, and that she keep the living-room tidy." But what an occupation for a young woman with a college degree, who for four years has led a busy, well-organized life in which each task was directed toward some definite purpose! What a commentary on the mother's understanding of "economic independence," a matter of which she talks eloquently at her club! All that it proved was that the woman had never realized the girl's case, had never given consecutive, serious thought to its handling.
How little chance there will probably be for this same girl to do at home any serious work in case she develops a talent for it. The home of the prosperous, energetic American woman is pervaded by a spirit of eager and generally happy excitement. Good works and gay pleasures fill its days in a wild jumble. There is little or no order, selection, or discretion discernible in the result. "Something doing" all the time seems to be the motto, and to take part in this headless procession of unrelated events becomes the first law of the household. The daughter has been living an organized life in college. She wants to study or write, or do regular work of some kind. But there is no order in the spirit of the place, no respect for order, no respect for a regular occupation. "I cannot work at home"—one hears the cry often enough. It is not always because of this atmosphere of helter-skelter activity. It is often because of something worse,—an atmosphere of slothful, pleasure-loving indifference to activities of all kinds, or one of tacit or expressed discontent with the burdens and the limitations which are an inescapable part of the Business of Being a Woman.
The problems connected with a girl's desire to be of social service are even more difficult. There is a curious blindness or indifference in our town and country districts to social needs. There is still alive the notion that sending flowers and jellies to the hospital, distributing old clothes wisely, and packing generous Christmas baskets meet all obligations. Social service—of which one may, and generally does, hear a great deal in the women's clubs—is vaguely supposed to be something which has to do with great cities and factory towns, not with the small community. Yet one reason that social problems are so acute in great groups of men and women is that they are so poorly met in small and scattered groups. There is the same need of industrial training, of efficient schools, of books, of neighborliness, of innocent amusements, of finding opportunities for the exceptional child, of looking after the adenoids and teeth, of segregating the tubercular, of doing all the scores of social services in the small town as in the great. Work is really more hopeful there because there is some possibility of knowing approximately all the cases, which is never possible in the city. And yet how far from general it is to find anything like organized efforts at real social service in the small community. If a girl serves in such a community, it is because she has the parts of a pioneer—and few have.
It is not the girl who, having a home, yet is homeless, who is responsible for her situation. Her necessity is to see herself acting as a responsible and useful factor in an intelligent plan. If the family does not present itself to her as a grave, dignified undertaking on which several persons dear to her have embarked, how can she be expected to tie to it? The old phrases which she may hear now and then—"the honor of the family"—"duty to parents"—only savor of cant to her. They have no pricking vitality in them. She gets no acute reaction from them. She sees herself merely as an accident in an accidental group, headed nowhere in particular.
What it all amounts to is that the greatest art in the Woman's Business is using youth. It is no easy matter. Youth is a terrible force, confident, selfish, unknowing. Rarely has it real courage, real interest in aught but itself. It has all to learn, but it is youth, the most beautiful and hopeful thing in life. And it is the thing upon which the full development of life for a woman depends. She must have it always at her side, if she is to know her own full meaning in the scheme of things. It is part of her tragedy that she fails so often to understand how essential is youth to her as an individual, her happiness and her growth.
The fact that a woman is childless is no reason in the present world why she should be cut off from the developing and ennobling association. Indeed, the childless woman of to-day, in addition to her obligation to herself, has a peculiar obligation to society in the matter of the friendless child.