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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman in Modern Society, by Earl Barnes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Woman in Modern Society
+
+Author: Earl Barnes
+
+Release Date: April 23, 2005 [EBook #15691]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY
+
+
+
+
+_BY THE SAME AUTHOR:_
+
+STUDIES IN EDUCATION
+(IN TWO VOLUMES)
+
+WHERE KNOWLEDGE FAILS
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN
+IN MODERN SOCIETY
+
+BY
+
+EARL BARNES
+
+AT ONE TIME PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY IN THE STATE
+UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA, AND LATER PROFESSOR
+OF EDUCATION IN LELAND STANFORD
+JUNIOR UNIVERSITY
+
+NEW YORK
+B.W. HUEBSCH
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1912
+BY B.W. HUEBSCH
+PRINTED IN U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+This volume is dedicated to a woman endowed by her ancestors with
+health and strength, reared by a wise mother, trained to earn her own
+living, and university bred, at one time an independent wage-earner and
+now equal partner in the business of a home, a social force in the life
+of her community, member of a woman's club, a suffragist, the devoted
+and intelligent mother of a group of fine children, and the center of a
+family which loves and reverences her and finds the deepest meaning of
+life in her presence.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                                         PAGE
+
+   I.  WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A WOMAN                 9
+  II.  WOMAN'S HERITAGE                           31
+ III.  WOMEN IN EDUCATION                         57
+  IV.  THE FEMINIZING OF CULTURE                  85
+   V.  THE ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE OF WOMEN        107
+  VI.  WOMEN IN INDUSTRY                         123
+ VII.  THE MEANING OF POLITICAL LIFE             150
+VIII.  WOMAN'S RELATION TO POLITICAL LIFE        173
+  IX.  THE MODERN FAMILY                         207
+   X.  FAMILY LIFE AS A VOCATION                 231
+  XI.  CONCLUSION                                251
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY
+
+I
+
+What it Means to be a Woman
+
+
+If we go back to the earliest forms of life, where the unit is simply a
+minute mass of protoplasm surrounded by a cell wall, we find each of
+these divisions to be a complete individual. It can feed itself, that
+its life may go on to-day; it can fight or run away, that it may be here
+to fight to-morrow; and by a process of division it can create a new
+life so that its existence may continue across the generations. With
+such units it is quite conceivable that life might go on through all
+eternity, death following birth, were it not that protoplasm contains
+within itself a principle of change. Life and change are synonymous.
+
+And this change moves ever toward a complexity, which we call
+development, where cells unite in a larger life, and functions and
+organs are specialized. Thus there comes a time when the part split off
+carries with it power to eat and digest, to fight or run away, but only
+half the power of procreation. This half unit, this incomplete
+individual, is either male or female, and from this time on, the epic of
+life gathers around the search of these half-lives for their
+complements. The force that impels to this search, while at first
+valuable only for the perpetuation of the generations, gathers into
+itself modifying feeling and desires and, at a later period, ideas and
+ideals, which finally, when men and women appear, make it the greatest
+of all the shaping forces in life.[1]
+
+[1] The fact that sexual selection does not play the part in organic
+evolution which Darwin assigned it does not affect this statement. See
+chapter on Sexual Selection in YVES DELAGEE and MARIE GOLDSMITH, _The
+Theories of Evolution_, New York: Huebsch, 1912.
+
+Of course, in such a sweeping statement as this, one must include under
+sex hunger all the forces that drive men and women to seek each other's
+society, rather than that of their own sex. In this sense, it can be
+truly said that it gives a motive for our care of offspring, and for
+all our other most self-forgetful devotions, our finest altruisms, our
+most polished expressions in language, manners and dress. It justifies
+labor, ambition, and at times even self-effacement. It underlies nearly
+all the lyric expressions in art; furnishes almost the only theme for
+that delineation of modern life which we call the novel; and is a main
+support for music, painting, statuary and belles-lettres. It gives us
+the institution of the family, which is the parent of the state; it is
+closely allied to religion; and in our individual lives it lifts us to
+the heights of self-realization and happiness, or plunges us down to the
+depths of degradation and tragedy.
+
+While this sex hunger belongs equally to men and women, it has come to
+be associated with women, until we even speak of them as "the sex."
+Hence, when we are discussing women, we are generally discussing the sex
+interest common to both men and women, and this disturbs our point of
+view. The fact is that sex interest is a common possession, that the
+unit in human life, even more than among lower animals, is always a male
+and a female bound together by love. Just as a body can function in
+sleep or under the influence of a narcotic, for a time seemingly
+independent of the mind, so a man or a woman can live for a time in
+seeming independence of the opposite sex; but from any biological point
+of view, such a separate existence of male and female is only a
+transient effort. The half-life must find its mate or, after a few brief
+days, it dies, leaving its line extinct. For all the larger purposes of
+life, man is but a half-creature, and woman is equally a fragment.
+
+It is, of course, conceivable that these two halves of the biological
+unit might have been made, or might have developed, alike in everything
+except the sexual function. At least they might have been as much alike
+as men are alike. They might have been of the same size, possessed of
+the same strength, of the same figures and gestures, complexion and
+hair. Their voices might have been alike. They might have had the same
+kinds of nervous systems, with the same desires, feelings, ideas and
+tendencies. In the assertions and arguments born of intellectual,
+industrial, social and political readjustments, it is often assumed
+that this is the case. Differences are minimized or denied, and an
+attempt is made to resolve the world of men and women into a world of
+human beings capable of living together in mingled competitions and
+coöperations, regardless of sex, except where the reproductive process
+is considered. But this view is superficial; born of argument it breaks
+down when confronted by any body of significant facts.
+
+Again, it has happened that in the long struggle of developing
+civilization, sometimes one and sometimes the other sex has gained what
+has seemed an advantage over the other, just as in the development of
+any man's individual life, his brain may gain a seeming advantage over
+his stomach, so that it has more than its fair share of nourishment and
+activity. Arguing from such a case, we might declare the brain superior
+to the stomach in power, health and function; but in the long
+accounting, all such temporary superiorities are wiped out. So with men
+and women, seeming advantages for either are gained only at the expense
+of the common life; and in the last analysis, each finds his individual
+value only in the common life of the unit.
+
+Let us try then to see what the special characteristics of women are,
+ignoring as far as possible the accidental variations of individuals,
+and the temporary advantages or disadvantages due to economic or
+ideational forces, and all assertions of what would be if things were
+not as they are.
+
+While the whole matter of sex differences is in a state of unsettlement,
+it seems very certain that males are more active and more variable than
+females. This superabundant vitality appears in the males of the higher
+animals in secondary sex characteristics, such as more abundant and
+unnecessary hair and feathers, tusks, spurs, antlers, wattles, brilliant
+colors and scent pouches. It also appears in mating calls, songs, and
+general carriage of the body. Correspondingly, the female is smaller,
+duller colored, and less immediately attractive than the male.
+
+All the studies that have been made on men and women, also confirm our
+ordinary observation that men are taller, heavier, stronger and more
+active than women, and this holds true in all stages of civilization,
+wherever tests have been made. In strength, rapidity of movement, and
+rate of fatigue Miss Thompson's studies[2] show that men have a very
+decided advantage over women. Thus in strength tests, the men in Yale
+have double the power of women in Oberlin;[3] while our college athletic
+records place men far ahead of women in all events requiring strength
+and endurance.
+
+[2] HELEN B. THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p. 167.
+University of Chicago Press, 1903.
+
+[3] THOMAS, _Sex and Society_, p. 21. University of Chicago Press, 1907.
+
+The differences in structure between men and women are such as to
+correspond with the functional differences just stated. A woman's bones
+are smaller in proportion to her size, than are those of a man. The body
+is longer, the hips broader, and the abdomen more prominent. Relatively
+to the length of the body, the arms, legs, feet and hands are shorter
+than in men, the lower leg and arm are shorter in proportion to the
+upper leg and arm. Man has the long levers and the active frame. One has
+only to look at two good statues of a man and a woman to realize the
+greater strength and activity of the man.
+
+Woman, as she actually appears in modern society, is also less subject
+to variation than man;[4] she is much less liable to be a genius or an
+idiot than her brother.[5] She offers greater resistance to disease,
+endures pain and want more stoically, and lives longer; so that while
+more boys than girls are born in all parts of the world, where
+statistics are kept, in mature years women always outnumber men.
+
+[4] KARL PEARSON denies this. See _The Chances of Death_, Vol. I, p.
+256. London, 1897.
+
+[5] C.W. SALEEBY, in _Woman and Womanhood_, p. 54, New York, Mitchell
+Kennerley, 1911, maintains that woman is biologically more variable than
+man, and that woman's less variable activity is due to her training.
+
+All these statements are summed up by saying that not only in women, but
+in most female animals of the higher orders, life is more anabolic than
+in males. They tend to more static conditions; they collect, organize,
+conserve; they are patient and stable; they move about less; they more
+easily lay on adipose tissue. Compared with the female, the male animal
+is katabolic; he is active, impulsive, destructive, skilful, creative,
+intense, spasmodic, violent. Such a generalization as this must not be
+pushed too far in its applications to our daily life; but as a statement
+of basal differences it seems justified by ordinary observation as well
+as by scientific tests.[6]
+
+[6] PATRICK GEDDES and ARTHUR THOMPSON, in _The Evolution of Sex_, D.
+Appleton & Co., 1889, first advanced this position.
+
+Meantime, it is probably true that the female, as mother of the race, is
+more important biologically than the male, since she both furnishes germ
+plasm and nourishes the newly conceived life. The latest studies, along
+lines laid down by Mendel, seem to indicate that the female brings to
+the new creation both male and female attributes, while the male brings
+only male qualities. Thus when either sex sinks into insignificance, as
+sometimes happens in lower forms of life, it is generally the male which
+exists merely for purposes of reproduction.[7]
+
+[7] C.W. SALEEBY, _Woman and Womanhood_, Chapter V. New York: Mitchell
+Kennerley, 1911.
+
+The differences in the nervous systems of men and women are now fairly
+established on the quantitative side. Marshall has shown that if we
+compare brain weight with the stature in the two sexes there is a slight
+preponderance of cerebrum in males; but if the other parts of the brain
+are taken into consideration, the sexes are equal.[8] Havelock Ellis has
+carefully gathered the results of many investigators and declares that
+woman's brain is slightly superior to man's in proportion to her
+size.[9] But these quantitative differences are now felt to have
+comparatively little significance; and of the relative qualities of the
+brain substance in the two sexes we know nothing positively. In fact, if
+we give a scientist a section of brain substance he cannot tell whether
+it is the brain of a man or a woman.
+
+[8] MARSHALL, _Journal of Anatomy and Physiology_, July, 1892.
+
+[9] HAVELOCK ELLIS, _Man and Woman_, p. 97, Contemporary Science Series.
+
+It is very probable that the average woman's mind is capable of much the
+same activity as the average man's mind, given the same heredity and the
+same training. They are both alike capable of remarkable feats of
+imitation, and an ordinarily intelligent man could probably learn to
+wear woman's clothes, and walk as she generally walks, so as to deceive
+even a jury of women, if there were a motive to justify the effort.
+Women also can perform, and they do perform, most of the feats of men.
+
+At the same time it is desirable to note present differences in modes of
+thinking and feeling, for while they may have been produced by
+environment and ideals, and may hence give way to education, they must
+be reckoned with in making the next steps. In the chapter on education
+we shall discuss certain academic peculiarities of women's minds, but
+here we are interested in seeing what fundamental differences
+characterize the thinking of the sexes.
+
+Women seem more subject to emotional states than men;[10] and this
+general observation agrees with the fact that the basal ganglia of the
+brain are more developed in women than in men, and these parts of the
+brain seem most intimately concerned with emotional activity. Whether
+emotion follows acts or leads to acts remains a disputed question, but
+certainly emotion gives charm and significance to life and distinguishes
+modes of thinking. Particularly in the dramatic art, this quality of
+mind gives women special excellence. The fact that she more often
+appeals to emotion than to reason, as cause for action, in no way marks
+her as inferior to man, but simply as different. As Ellen Key says:
+"There is nothing more futile than to try to prove the inferiority of
+woman to man, unless it be to try to prove her equality."[11]
+
+[10] HELEN BRADFORD THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p.
+171, University of Chicago Press, 1903.
+
+[11] ELLEN KEY, _Love and Ethics_, p. 52. New York: Huebsch, 1911.
+
+Most women think in particulars as compared with men. The individual
+circumstance seems to them very important; and it is hard for them to
+get away from the concrete. On the other hand, a man's thinking is more
+impersonal and general; and he is more easily drawn into abstractions.
+It is true that woman's domestic life would naturally develop this
+quality but we are not now concerned with the question of origins. Most
+women find it easy to live from day to day; the man is more given to
+systematizing and planning. Thus in offices, men are more efficient as
+heads of departments, while women handle details admirably. In public
+life we have recently seen thousands of women eager to depose a United
+States Senator, accused of polygamy, without regard to the bearing of
+the concrete act on constitutional guarantees. Women have done little
+with abstract studies like metaphysics; they have done much with the
+novel, where ideas are presented in the concrete and particular.
+
+This habit of dealing with particulars, and disinclination for
+abstraction, leads easily to habitual action. It is easy for women to
+stock up their lower nerve centers with reflex actions. This, of course,
+goes along with the general anabolic characteristics of the sex. Hence
+women are the conservers of traditions; rules of conducting social
+intercourse appeal to them; and they are the final supporters of
+theological dogmas.[12] Women naturally uphold caste, and Daughters of
+the Revolution and Colonial Dames flourish on the scantiest foundations
+of ancestral excellence. Man, on the other hand, is more radical and
+creative. He has perfected most of our inventions; he has painted our
+great pictures; carved our great statues; he has written music, while
+women have interpreted it.
+
+[12] HELEN B. THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p. 171,
+University of Chicago Press, 1903.
+
+Along with these fixed qualities of action, women have a tendency to
+indirection when they advance. We say they have diplomacy, tact and
+coquetry, while man is more direct and bald in his methods. Of course,
+one easily understands how these qualities may have arisen, since "fraud
+is the force of weak natures," and woman has always been driven to
+supplement her weakness with tact, from the days of Jael and Delilah
+down to the present day adventuress.
+
+These qualities of mind naturally drive women to literary interests
+which are concrete, personal and emotional. Men turn more easily than
+women to the abstract generalizations of science. Of course, there are
+marked exceptions to these general statements, in both sexes. Madame
+Curie, who was recently a candidate for the honors of the French
+Academy, and who, in 1911, was given the Nobel prize for her
+distinguished services to chemistry, is but one of many women who are
+famous to-day in the world of science. Still the private life of these
+women, as in the case of Sónya Kovalévsky, seems to bear out our general
+conclusion. Men, on the other hand, as milliners and editors of ladies'
+journals, show marked skill in catering to women's tastes; but on the
+whole the differences indicated seem important and widely diffused.
+
+Another profound difference between men and women is the woman's greater
+tendency to periodicity in all her functions and adjustments to
+life.[13] In all normal societies the life of the man is fairly regular
+and constant from birth to old age. He moves along lines mainly
+predetermined by his heredity and his environment, his habits and his
+work. Even puberty is less disturbing in its effect upon a boy than upon
+a girl; and often by eighteen we can anticipate the life of a young man
+with great accuracy. The one element in his life hardest to forecast is
+the effect of his love-affairs.
+
+[13] See chapter on Periodicity in G. STANLEY HALL'S _Adolescence_, Vol.
+I, p. 472.
+
+With a woman, it is quite different. As a girl, the period of puberty
+produces profound changes; and after that, for more than thirty years
+she passes through periodical exaltations and depressions that must play
+a large part in determining her health, happiness and efficiency. In the
+forties, comes another great change which affects her life to a degree
+strangely ignored by those who have dealt with her possibilities in the
+past.[14]
+
+[14] KARIN MICHAËLIS, _The Dangerous Age_, John Lane Co., 1911, is said
+to have sold 80,000 in six weeks when it first appeared in Berlin. _The
+Bride of the Mistletoe_, by JAMES LANE ALLEN (Macmillan), deals with the
+same period.
+
+But the great element of uncertainty, always fronting the girl and young
+woman, is marriage. Marriage for her generally means abandonment of old
+working interests, and a substitution of new; it brings her geographical
+change; new acquaintances and friendships; and the steady adjustment of
+her personal life to the man she has married in its relation to
+industry, religion, society and the arts. If children come to her, they
+must inevitably retire her from public life, for a time, with the danger
+of losing connections which comes to all who temporarily drop out of the
+race.
+
+A boy, industrious, observant, with some power of administration,
+studies mining engineering, moves to a mining center and expresses his
+individual and social powers along the lines of his work until he is
+sixty. The women who impinge against his life may deflect him from the
+mines in California to those in Australia, or from the actual work of
+superintendence to an office; or from an interest in Browning to
+Tennyson; or from Methodism to Christian Science. The girl with
+industrious and observant interests studies stenography and
+type-writing, moves to the vicinity of offices, but is then caught up in
+the life of a farmer-husband who shifts her center of activity to a farm
+in Idaho where she must devote herself to entirely different activities,
+form new associations, think in new terms, respond to new emotions, and
+adjust herself to her farmer-husband's personality. When, after
+twenty-five years, she has reared a family of children, and when
+improved circumstances enable them to move up to the county seat, she
+confronts many of the conditions for which she originally prepared
+herself, but with farm habits, diminishing adaptability and diminishing
+power of appealing to her husband. His powers are still comparatively
+unimpaired, and as a dealer in farm produce or farm machinery his
+interests undergo slight change. In general, it may be said that a
+woman's life falls into three great periods of twenty-five years each.
+The first twenty-five years of childhood and girlhood is a time of
+getting ready for the puzzling combination of her personal needs as a
+human being, her needs as a self-supporting social unit, and her
+probabilities of matrimony. The second twenty-five years, the domestic
+period of her life, is a time of adjustments as wife and mother, which
+may instead prove to be a period of barren waiting, or a time of
+professional and industrial self-direction and self-support. The third
+twenty-five years is a time of mature and ripened powers, of lessened
+romantic interests, and if the preceding period has been devoted to
+husband and children, it is often a time of social detachment, of
+weakened individual initiative, of old-fashioned knowledge, of
+inefficiency, of premature retirement and old age.
+
+On the moral side, as Professor Thomas has so admirably pointed
+out,[15] women have evolved a morality of the person and of the family,
+while men have evolved a morality of the group and of property. Since
+men have had a monopoly of property and of law-making they have shaped
+laws mainly for the protection of property, and in a secondary degree
+for the protection of the person. Under these laws a man who beats
+another nearly to death is less severely punished than one who signs the
+wrong name to a check for five dollars. Man's katabolic nature and his
+greater freedom have given him almost a monopoly of crime under these
+laws which he has made. Offences against the coming generation, against
+health, social efficiency and good taste have until recently been left
+to the tribunal of public opinion as expressed in social usage; and
+here, as we have seen, women are generally the judges and executioners.
+In this, her own field of moral judgment, woman is idealistic and
+uncompromising. If one of her sisters falls from virtue she will often
+pursue her unmercifully. If a man, on the other hand, commits a burglary
+or forgery her sympathy and mercy may make her a very lenient judge.
+
+[15] WILLIAM I. THOMAS, _Sex and Society_, p. 149. University of Chicago
+Press, 1907. ELLEN KEY, in _Love and Marriage,_ G.P. Putnam's Sons,
+1911, traces the same lines of growth.
+
+In æsthetics, the differences follow the same general law. Women express
+beauty in themselves; jewels are for their ornament; and rooms are
+furnished as a setting for themselves. The lives of millions of workers
+go to the adornment of women. In painting they sometimes excel, but a
+Madame Le Brun does her best work when she paints herself and her child,
+and when Angelica Kauffmann would paint a vestal virgin, she drapes a
+veil over her own head and transfers her features to the canvas.
+Sculpture and architecture are too impersonal and abstract to attract
+much attention from women at present. Even a sculptor like Mrs. Bessie
+Potter Vonnoh finds her truest theme in statuettes of mothers with their
+children about them.
+
+During the past few years psychologists have paid great attention to
+secondary sex characteristics of the mind, and doubtless many qualities
+of the thought and feeling of men and women owe their origin to the same
+source as brilliant plumage, antlers, combs and wattles. Thus the shy,
+retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing, adoring excesses of
+maidenhood and the peculiar psychological manifestations of the late
+forties must probably be understood from this point of view. So, also,
+must the bold, swaggering, assertive, compelling bearing of youth be
+interpreted. The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical cane-carrying
+youth is naturally disliked as a sexual perversion.
+
+Women alone, whether individually or in groups, tend to develop certain
+hard, dry, arid qualities of mind and heart, or they become emotional
+and unbalanced. Losing a sense of large significances, they become
+overcareful, saving, sometimes penurious, while in matters of feeling
+they lavish sentiment and sympathy on unimportant pets and movements.
+
+Men, when alone, become selfish, coarse, and reckless; their judgments
+become extravagant and their pursuits remorseless.
+
+Thus it is certainly true that men and women supplement each other in
+the subjective as in the objective life. Man creates, woman conserves;
+man composes, woman interprets; man generalizes, woman particularizes;
+man seeks beauty, woman embodies beauty; man thinks more than he feels,
+woman feels more than she thinks. For new spiritual birth, as for
+physical birth, men and women must supplement each other.
+
+To be a woman then, is to be for twenty-five years a girl and then a
+young woman, capable of feeding and protecting herself, possessed of
+preparing and conserving powers superior to her brothers. After that,
+for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to
+romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and
+motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she
+should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered
+training and powers to the service of the group. All this time she is,
+like the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and
+her greatest service only when working in loving association with the
+man of her choice.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Woman's Heritage
+
+
+So thoroughly have modern men fastened their attention upon the problems
+of the immediate present, that one feels driven to justify oneself in
+taking up an historical investigation of any subject presented in a
+popular manner. And yet it takes little argument to show that what we
+shall be depends in large measure on what we are; and that what we are
+rests back on what we have been. In anything we try to think or feel or
+do, we quickly reach a limit; and this limit is determined by the
+original quality of our nervous system plus the training it has
+received. For here is the curious fact about this instrument of thought
+and feeling which at once takes it away from comparison with mechanical
+instruments. Whatever it does, becomes a part of itself, and then helps
+to determine what it will do the next time and how it will do it. With
+the making easy of mental operations through repetition, and with the
+formation of associations based on our choices, it may be truly said
+that we become whatever we habitually think and feel and do.
+
+Every choice we make is thus literally built into our character and
+becomes a part of ourselves. After that, the old choice will help
+determine the new, and we shall find ourselves being directed by all of
+our past choices, and even by the choices of our ancestors. Since, then,
+all our earlier selves are continued in us and make us what we are, we
+are simply studying ourselves when we study the history of our
+ancestors. If we would go forward, we must first look backward; for we
+must rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves.
+
+But history is not merely the story of the past. To relate that, would
+take as long as it took to live it, and the result would be but
+weariness of spirit. History, to be significant, must select the events
+with which it will deal; it must arrange these in series that are in
+accord with the constitution of things; and then it must use the
+generalizations it reaches to interpret the present, and even to
+forecast the future. It is obvious that this interpretation will depend
+on the point of view held by the interpreter.
+
+Hence we must ask in what fundamental beliefs this presentation rests.
+These are, first, that life tends to move along certain lines that
+constitute the law of human nature. Just as the infant tends first to
+wriggle, then creep, then walk, then run and dance, so human nature
+tends to move upward from savagery through primitive settled life to the
+complex forms of larger settled units. In this progress, material or
+economic forces play a large part; but ideas, originally born out of
+circumstances, but sometimes borrowed from other people, sometimes
+degenerate remnants of past utilities, also play a large part. The
+progress we finally make is thus directed by this human tendency, by
+material circumstances, and by ideas. Sometimes it keeps pretty closely
+to what seems to us to be upward human growth; sometimes it stagnates;
+sometimes it gives us perverted products; and sometimes it destroys
+itself.
+
+Thus it becomes necessary to trace the past experiences of woman that we
+may see with what heritage she faces the future. She is all that she
+has felt and thought and done. She started with at least half of the
+destiny of the race in her keeping. Handicapped in size and agility, and
+periodically weighted down by the burdens of maternity, she still
+possessed charms and was mistress of pleasures which made her, for
+savage man, the dearest possession next to food; and for civilized man,
+the companion, joy and inspiration of his days.
+
+Of woman's position in early savage times we know only what we can learn
+from fragmentary prehistoric remains, from the structure of early
+languages, from records of travelers and students among savages of more
+recent times; or what can be inferred from human nature in general. Most
+of this data is difficult to interpret, but it is probable that woman's
+position was not much worse than man's. It is a bad beast that fouls its
+own food or its own nest; and the female had always the protection of
+the male's desire. If she could not entirely control her body, she could
+still control her own expressions of affection and desire; and, without
+these, mere possession lost much of its charm.
+
+As keeper of the cave, cultivator of the soil, and guardian of the
+child, woman, rather than her more foot-loose mate, probably became the
+center of the earliest civilization. The jealousy of men formed tribal
+rules for her protection; and to these, religion early gave its powerful
+sanctions. Thus there came a day when the woman took her mate home to
+her tribe and gave her children her own name. Even if the matriarchal
+period was not so important as has sometimes been assumed, woman
+certainly had large influence over tribal affairs in early savage life.
+
+With the increase in population, and the consequent disappearance of
+game, man was forced to turn his attention to the crude agriculture
+which woman had begun to develop. The superior qualities which he had
+acquired in war and the chase, enabled him slowly to improve on these
+beginnings and to shape a body of custom which made settled society
+possible. With man's leadership in the family the patriarchal form of
+government developed, and man's power over woman was sanctioned by
+custom and law. The woman was stolen, or bought; and while sexual
+attraction did not play the continuous part which it plays in developed
+society, it must have done much to protect women from abuse and neglect,
+at least during the years of girlhood and child-bearing. It is at this
+point that our historical records begin.
+
+In the pages of Homer, or of the Old Testament, in Tacitus's "Germania,"
+or in the writings of Livy, we find woman's position well defined. True,
+she stands second to the man, but she is his assistant, not his slave.
+She must be courted, and while marriage presents are exchanged, she is
+not bought. In times of emergency, she steps to the front and
+legislates, judges, or fights. It is possible in the pages of the Old
+Testament to find women doing everything which men can do. Even where
+the power is not nominally in her own hands, she often, as in the cases
+of Penelope or Esther, rules by indirection. Her body and her offspring
+are protected; and the Hebrew woman of the Proverbs shows us a
+singularly free and secure industrial position.[16] Such was the
+condition in primitive Judea, in early Greece, in republican Rome, or
+among the Germans who invaded southern Europe in the third and fourth
+centuries of our era.
+
+[16] _Proverbs_ xxxi, 10.
+
+Man's jealousy of his woman as a source of pleasure and honor to
+himself, and to his family, must have always acted to limit woman's
+freedom, even while it gave her protection and a secure position in
+society. With the development of settled government in city states, like
+Athens or early Rome, the necessity for defining citizenship made the
+family increasingly a political institution. A man's offspring through
+slave women, concubines, or "strangers" lived outside the citizen group,
+and so were negligible; but the citizen woman's children were citizens,
+and so she became a jealously guarded political institution. The
+established family became the test of civic, military, and property
+rights. The regulations limiting the freedom of girls and women were
+jealously enforced, since mismating might open the treasures of
+citizenship to any low born or foreign adventurer.[17]
+
+[17] T.G. TUCKER, _Life in Ancient Athens_, Chapter VIII, Macmillan Co.,
+1906.
+
+In the ancient Orient, in Greece, Rome, and in later Europe, these
+stages have been repeated again and again. Woman is first a slave,
+stolen or bought, protected by sexual interest to which is later added
+social custom and religious sanction. Early civilization centers around
+the woman, so that she becomes in some degree the center of the
+home-staying group. In primitive civilization man takes over woman's
+most important activities; but she gains a fixed position, protected,
+though still further enslaved, by political necessities.
+
+But with the increase of wealth, whether in terms of money, slaves, or
+trade, woman found herself subject to a fourth form of enslavement more
+subtly dangerous than brute force, lust, or political and religious
+institutionalism. This was the desire of man to protect her and make her
+happy because he loved her. He put golden chains about her neck and
+bracelets on her arms, clothed her in silks and satins, fed her with
+dainty fare, gave her a retinue of attendants to spare her fatigue, and
+put her in the safest rear rooms of the habitation. But it is foolish to
+talk of conscious enslavement in this connection. Rich men and luxurious
+civilizations have always enslaved women in the same way that rich,
+fond, and foolish mothers have enslaved their children, by robbing them
+of opportunity, by taking away that needful work and that vital
+experience of real life which alone can develop the powers of the soul.
+
+Thus in the Periclean age in Greece, in the Eastern Kingdoms established
+by Alexander, in Imperial Rome, in the later Italian Renaissance, in
+France under Louis XIV and Louis XV, in England under the Stuart kings,
+and in many centers of our own contemporary world, women have given up
+their legitimate heritage of work and independent thought for trinkets,
+silks, and servants, and have quickly degenerated, like the children of
+rich and foolish mothers, into luxury-loving parasites and
+playthings.[18]
+
+[18] OLIVE SCHREINER, _Woman and Labor_, Chapters on Parasitism. New
+York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.
+
+To maintain this luxurious setting for their mistresses, whether wives
+or irregular concubines, men of the Occident have generally been driven
+to ever fiercer struggle with their fellows. Thus a Pericles, at the
+zenith of his powers, facing difficulties which strained and developed
+all his forces, had for his legitimate wife a woman, bound hand and
+foot by conventions and immured in her house in Athens. But a man is
+only half a complete human being, and the other half cannot be furnished
+by a weak and ignorant kept-woman, no matter how legal the bond. Hence
+the forces always driving men to completeness and unity drove Pericles
+away from his house and his legitimate children and his mere wife to
+find the completion of his life.
+
+In these cases, as elsewhere, demand creates supply, and there were to
+be found everywhere in Athens able and cultivated foreign women, many of
+whom had come over from the mainland of Asia Minor; and one of these,
+Aspasia, became the mistress of Pericles and bore him children. She was
+no adventuress of the street, but an educated and brilliant woman, in
+whose home you might have met not only Pericles, but also Socrates,
+Phidias, Anaxagoras, Sophocles and Euripides.
+
+This is the stage that always follows the period of the luxury-loving
+wife. It was so in Imperial Rome, in later Carthage, in Venice, and in
+eighteenth-century France. But the normal human unit is the man and
+woman who love each other, not these combinations of illegality, law,
+lust, love and dishonor. Such a triangle of two women and a man rests
+its base in shame, and its lines are lies, and its value is destruction.
+So virile republican Rome swept over decadent Greece and made it into
+the Roman province of Achaia; later the chaste Germans swarmed over the
+decadent Roman Empire and then slowly rebuilt modern Europe; the ascetic
+Puritans destroyed the Stuarts; while the French Revolution was the
+deluge that swept away Louis XVI and put the virtuous, if commonplace,
+bourgeoisie in power.
+
+So far we have dealt with the position of women as though it depended
+alone on human hungers, passions and environment; but while these are
+the driving forces of life, they are very subject to the repressing and
+diverting power of ideas, working in an environment of economic
+conditions. These ideas may themselves date back to earlier passions and
+economic conditions, but they often survive the time which created them,
+and then they enter into life and conduct as seemingly independent
+forces. These ideas played a large part, even in the ancient world.
+
+The Jews organized their religious and political practices about a
+patriarchal Deity ruling a patriarchal state; and their tradition
+handicapped all women with the sin of Eve, the sin of seeking knowledge.
+The Greeks, on the other hand, gave woman a splendid place in the
+hierarchy of the gods, and idealized not only her beauty in Aphrodite
+but her chaste aloofness in Artemis, her physical strength in the
+Amazons, and her wisdom in Athena and Hera. They covered the Acropolis
+with matchless monuments in honor of Athena, patron goddess of their
+fair city, and celebrated splendid pageants on her anniversaries. So,
+too, republican Rome, while it gathered its civic life about patriarchal
+ideas in which the father was supreme, gave women positions of high
+honor in its religion, whether as deities or as servitors of the gods.
+In the Niebelungenlied, the Germans bodied forth their splendid
+conceptions of female beauty, strength and passion in such figures as
+Brunhilda. These ideas must have done much to offset the physical
+weakness and functional handicaps of women in the ancient world.
+
+The Christian ideas, which have dominated us now for nearly two
+thousand years, are generally considered to have been favorable to
+women. In their insistence on the value of the human soul, and on
+democratic equality, they have doubtless helped to raise the status of
+women along with that of all human beings. But, as between man and
+woman, Christianity has given every possible advantage to men, and has
+added needlessly to the natural burdens of women.[19]
+
+[19] JAMES DONALDSON, _Woman: Her Position and Influence in Ancient
+Greece and Rome and Among the Early Christians_, Longmans, Green, and
+Co., 1907.
+
+From Judaism, Christianity borrowed Eve, with her eternally operative
+sin, and thus placed all women under a perpetual load of suspicion and
+guilt. The Founder of the new faith never assumed the responsibilities
+of a family, and he included no woman among his disciples. Example, even
+negative example, is often more powerful than precept. Paul, the most
+learned of the disciples, in his writings, and as an organizer of the
+Church, emphasized the older Jewish position. In the new organization,
+women filled only lesser places, while the men settled all points of
+dogma, directing and mainly conducting the services of worship. Meantime
+each woman's soul remained her own, to be saved only by her individual
+actions; therein lay her hope for the future, both on earth and in
+heaven.
+
+But it was those later developments of belief and practice that gathered
+around Christian asceticism which placed woman and her special functions
+under a cloud of suspicion from which she is not even yet entirely
+freed. Celibacy became exalted; virginity was a positive virtue;
+chastity, instead of a healthful antecedent to parenthood, became an end
+in itself; and monasteries and convents multiplied throughout
+Christendom. Something of shame and guilt gathered around conception and
+birth, as representing a lower standard of life, even when sanctified by
+the ceremonies of the Church. From the second century to the sixth, the
+ablest of the Church Fathers, Greek and Latin alike, formulated
+statements in which woman became the chief ally of the devil in dragging
+men down to perdition. We still hear ancestral reverberations of these
+teachings in all our discussions of woman's place in civilization.
+
+But ideas can only for a time overcome or divert the primitive human
+hungers, and slowly Mary, Mother of Jesus, won first place among the
+saints. Celibate recluses who feared to walk the streets for fear of
+meeting a woman, and who spent the nights fighting down their noblest
+passions, starving them, flagellating and rolling their naked bodies in
+thorny rose hedges or in snow-drifts to silence demands for wife and
+children, threw themselves in an ecstacy of adoration before an image of
+the Virgin with the Baby in her arms. So Maryolatry came to bless the
+world.
+
+But even this blessing was not without alloy, for it gave us an ideal of
+woman, superhuman, immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before the angel
+with the lily, standing mute with crossed hands and downcast eyes before
+her Divine Son. She represented, not the institution of the family, but
+the institution of the Church. Even when she appeared in representations
+of the Holy Family, Joseph, her husband, was not the father of her
+child, but his servant.
+
+Chivalry took up this conception, and shaped for us the fantastic lady
+who stands back of much of modern romantic love. Robbed of her simple,
+human, pagan passions, she became often an anæmic and unfruitful, if
+angelic, creature. For the direct and passionate assurances of a
+virtuous and noble love she substituted sighs and tears, languishing
+looks and weary renunciations. This sterile hybrid, bred of human
+passions and theological negations, must be finally banished from our
+literature and from our minds before we can have a healthy eugenic
+conscience among us.[20]
+
+[20] R. DE MAULDE LA CLAVIERE, _The Woman of the Renaissance. A Study in
+Feminism_, translated by George H. Ely. New York: C.P. Putnam's Sons,
+1900.
+
+The Protestant Revolution went far to restore the special functions of
+women to respect. Belief in her individual soul, and in its need of
+salvation through individual choice, was supplemented by the belief that
+this choice must be guided by her individual judgment. Celibacy ceased
+to be a sign of righteousness; and the best men and women married. But
+beliefs cannot be directly destroyed by revolution; they can only be
+disturbed and modified. The teachings of Paul, Augustine, Tertullian and
+St. Jerome were still authoritative, and Calvin and Knox reaffirmed
+many of them. The family was still subordinate to the Church; and
+marriage still remained a sacrament, with theological significances,
+rather than the simple union of a man and woman who loved each other.
+The choice of a mate once made was final, because theological, and it
+could be broken only with infinite pain and disgrace.
+
+The great political upheaval, which we call the French Revolution,
+carried in its fundamental teachings freedom and opportunity for men and
+for women; but like the corresponding revolution in religion, it
+required time to make adjustments, and so we have been content to live
+for more than a hundred years in the midst of verbal affirmations which
+we denied in all our institutional life.
+
+In America, conditions have always been favorable for women to work out
+their freedom. Among the immigrants who came to our shores before 1840
+there were, of course, a few traders, adventurers and servants who hoped
+to improve their financial conditions; but the leaders, and most of the
+rank and file, came that they might be free to think their own thoughts
+and live their own lives. If this selection of colonists, through
+religious and political persecution, sometimes gave us bigots with one
+idea, it also gave us people who knew that ideas can change. Along with
+Cotton Mather it gave us Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams and William
+Penn.
+
+Most of these who came in the early days belonged to extreme dissenting
+sects believing in salvation through individual choice, based on
+personal judgments. Preaching was exalted at the expense of ritual; and
+by substituting new thinking for old habits in religion, the American
+settlers made it less difficult for other adjustments to be made, even
+in such a conservative matter as woman's position. It is through no
+accident that Methodists, Friends, Unitarians and the Salvation Army
+have been much more sympathetic to woman's progress than have the older
+ritualistic faiths.
+
+And these theological ideas had to be worked out under the material
+conditions of the New World, which were also favorable to the
+emancipation of women. Facing primitive conditions in the forest, it
+became a habit to do new things in new ways. Woman's work and judgment
+were indispensable; and these picked women showed themselves capable in
+every direction. They did every kind of work; and when it came to
+enduring privation or even to starving, they set an example for men.
+
+But while every new movement in ideas always carries with it other
+radical ideas, the practical difficulties of mental, social and legal
+adjustment always prevent the full and harmonious development of all
+that is involved in any new point of view. In the American colonies the
+need for new adjustments in religion, government and practical living
+made it inevitable that any very important change in woman's position
+should linger. In fact, the student of colonial records finds many
+traces of ultra conservatism in the treatment of women, though the
+forces had been liberated which must inevitably open the way for her
+through the New World of America into a new world of the spirit.
+
+And before the quickening influence of the new life had time to become
+commonplace, the struggle with England began. The Revolutionary period
+was a time of intense political education for every one. War and
+sacrifice glorified the new ideas; and even the children and women could
+not escape their influence. Why then did not the American Revolution
+pass on to full freedom and opportunity for women? For the same reason
+that it did not forever abolish slavery in America. The vested interests
+involved were so many, and the changes so momentous and difficult, that
+only the most imperative needs could receive attention.
+
+But this does not mean that the interest in a larger life for women was
+not active or that women were making no advance in self-direction. There
+is evidence that women like Abigail Adams realized the abstract
+injustice of their position, and the fact that as early as 1794, Mary
+Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was republished in
+Philadelphia shows that her ideas must have had some currency in
+America.
+
+After the Revolution, the intimate, stimulating influence of Europe,
+which the earlier colonists had enjoyed, was for a time almost entirely
+lost. The new States became extremely provincial; and minds untouched by
+the larger world always tend to conservatism. Noah Webster, in "A
+Letter to Young Ladies," published in Boston, in 1790, declared that
+they "must be content to be women; to be mild, social and sentimental."
+Three years later the "Letters to a Young Lady," by the Reverend John
+Bennett, were republished in Philadelphia, after going through several
+London editions. He placed the qualities to be cultivated in this order:
+"A genteel person, a simple nature, sensibility, cheerfulness, delicacy,
+softness, affability, good manners, regular habits, skill in fancy work,
+and a fund of hidden genteel learning." Through the first half of the
+nineteenth century these ideals struggled along parallel with the new
+ideas that were everywhere springing up from the colonial forest
+experiences of the last two generations.
+
+As conservers of morals and as leaders in higher ideals of life, the
+advanced women of America came early face to face with two outgrown
+abuses. One of these was human slavery and the other was intemperance.
+In attacking these abuses, women had to break with all the traditions
+that defined their position.
+
+The wealthy and intelligent Englishwoman, Frances Wright, who came to
+this country in 1818 to attack slavery, found herself doubly opposed
+because she was a woman speaking in public. Had not St. Paul declared:
+"It is a shame for women to speak in the church"? Lucretia Mott, born in
+the Society of Friends in Nantucket, had escaped the full force of this
+injunction, but even she found, when she attacked slavery in public,
+that she had invaded a world sacred to men, and she was sternly warned
+back. Miss Susan B. Anthony also began her public life as a teacher and
+a temperance reformer. It was only when she found herself helpless, in
+presence of the prejudices against her sex, that she turned her
+attention to freeing women from all purely sex limitation in public
+life.
+
+When the Civil War broke out, the women were ready to do their part. It
+is quite possible that the names of Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix may be
+remembered when Grant and Sherman are forgotten. With the establishing
+of new human values the historian of the future may consider the saving
+of life and the preventing of misery as more worthy of lasting record
+than even military genius. These women and their millions of helpers
+had not the resources of organized government at their disposal; but,
+instead, they had oftentimes to work against the jealousy of those in
+authority. At the close of the war, the Sanitary Commission comprised
+seven thousand aid societies scattered over the country, and it had
+raised over fifteen millions of dollars. Those women who remained at
+home, in the absence of fathers and sons for four years, faced all the
+problems of practical life. Who can estimate the value of training in
+coöperative work and organization which the Civil War gave to the
+American women?
+
+In the Civil War, women directly served men; but in the great industrial
+reorganization which came afterward they served mainly women and
+children. Here the victories have been won in the press, in the
+legislative halls, and in courts of law. Working with men, or alone,
+they have perfected organization, agitated, raised money, printed
+appeals, and carried cases through the courts, until factories and
+stores have been made safer, excessive working hours have been cut down,
+young children have been exempted from labor, many sweat-shops have
+been closed, and women workers have begun to be organized to care for
+their own needs. Much has been done; more remains to be done; but the
+training of the women has gone steadily forward.
+
+These, then, are the forces which have pushed women forward in America:
+European political and religious persecution, the forest necessities of
+colonial life, the American Revolution, the struggle with slavery and
+intemperance, the Civil War, the industrial struggle and the need to
+protect women and children from capitalistic exploitation. Possibly
+women have now reached a point in their development where they can turn
+to public service and to a full realization of their powers and
+responsibilities without the goading necessity of a great wrong. If not,
+there are sufficient wrongs still calling to lead them for many years.
+Intemperance is not yet banished; the negro is not yet freed from the
+effects of his slavery; working women and children are not yet fairly
+protected; disease reaps needlessly large harvests; Lazarus still begs
+at the table of Dives; our public education leaves much to be desired;
+criminals are badly handled; millions of European refugees come marching
+into our land needing guidance. Meantime, millions of women are content,
+because themselves comfortable, and there are some even willing to aid
+the powers of obstruction.
+
+In these later years, marvelous changes have taken place all over the
+world. Even in China, official attempts are now being made to leave
+women free to walk by abolishing the bandaging of infants' feet. In
+Turkey, women are going out from the harem to participate in public
+life. In Germany, they are escaping from the exclusive service of the
+home. In England, they are repeating the cries of the men of 1776 and of
+1789: "All men and women are born free and equal." "No taxation without
+representation." "One person, one vote." In Finland, Australia, New
+Zealand, Norway and Sweden, women have all the essential civic and
+political rights of men.
+
+But, as in all human progress, first the ideas of a few leaders change;
+they shape legislation; and the new organization slowly makes over the
+practices and then the deep-seated mental and moral habits, which
+constitute popular prejudices. These old unreasoning feelings still
+largely dominate us, blinding us to the facts of life and blocking each
+new advance by which women might pass into the world of free choice and
+adjustment of their lives as co-workers with men. In the next chapters
+we must study these present-day conditions in detail.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Women in Education
+
+
+In discussing woman's relation to formal education we are really
+examining her ability to master and teach certain intellectual
+exercises, for in our modern industrial democracies our efforts are
+confined almost exclusively to training the mind and to stocking it with
+information. Each year we talk more and more about physical, moral,
+political, social and industrial education; but requirements for
+entrance into schools, promotions in them, and graduation from their
+courses, still rest almost entirely on information acquired; and in a
+less degree, on intellectual ability displayed.
+
+Even in selecting and certifying teachers, the emphasis is all laid on
+intellectual equipment. On the physical, moral, or social sides we at
+most demand that the candidates shall not be too bad; on the political
+side we do not demand even this, since nearly 80 per cent. of our whole
+teaching force is declared legally unfit to vote or hold office, and is
+yet employed to train our future citizens. But on the intellectual side
+we demand positive proof of fitness. Thus it is fair to say that our
+modern education deals almost exclusively with knowledge.
+
+Knowledge, in the past, has nearly always been considered much as we
+consider dynamite to-day. It was a dangerous force, useful to a ruling
+class, and hence preserved in the hands of a cult, generally a
+priesthood; but it was thought capable of working endless mischief in
+the hands of ignorant people. Through all the pages of history we find
+individuals, and weaker groups, driven away from the accumulated
+treasure; and if detected in their desire to know, especially if they
+sought knowledge through original investigation, they were branded with
+such titles of disgrace as "wizard" or "heretic;" and, as a warning to
+others, they were often burned in the public square or buried alive.
+
+Women, as an inferior class, were especially restrained from learning.
+Knowledge would breed discontent in them; it would make them question
+the binding power of the conventions and beliefs which held them in
+their place; and it would show them how to achieve their freedom, and
+might even encourage them to assume leadership. Here and there,
+individual women gained the training necessary for leadership, as in the
+cases of Sappho, Aspasia or Hypatia; but the great mass of women was
+sternly repressed. Eve leads a long line of women martyrs who, across
+the ages, have paid a great price for their desire to eat of the tree of
+knowledge. For herself, she might have paid the price but, with subtle
+understanding of women, the penalty was made to involve all whom they
+loved; the terrors of that price have held the sex in restraint ever
+since. Eurydice, Pandora, Eve, Lot's wife and Bluebeard's wife have in
+turn served as awful warnings. After a time it came to be understood by
+women that they should fix their eyes on their husbands and never look
+forward or backward, lest they lose their Eden and drag those whom they
+loved after them to destruction.
+
+Of course, if women could not learn they could not teach; at least, they
+could not teach where it was necessary to impart knowledge; and so their
+share in formal education has been slight, until our own time. Young
+children have been considered their special charge, and the care and
+culture of infancy and young childhood have always rested in the hands
+of mothers, grandmothers, aunts and female servants. Beyond these early
+years, however, woman's part has been restricted to emphasizing, mainly
+with girls, the dogmas and practices of caste, kitchen and church.
+
+These were the conditions which prevailed through early Oriental and
+Classical times. Christianity brought women some degree of intellectual
+freedom, but it also imposed new forms of restraint. Its fundamental
+teachings, based as they were on a belief in individual values, were
+favorable to the extension of knowledge and to the opening of
+opportunity for all. The Church, however, shaped under the
+half-civilized conditions of the Middle Ages, quickly took knowledge
+into her own keeping, forbade its extension, and increasingly held
+before woman, as her highest ideal, the negative virtues of the
+cloister.
+
+The humanistic and theological changes which came with the awakening of
+the European mind at the close of the Middle Ages, did much to set free
+the accumulated treasures of knowledge. Protestantism, by exalting
+individual judgment and insisting on the necessity of each one reading
+and judging the sacred records for himself, made it possible for even
+women to enter into the heritage of the ages. At least, the key to
+learning, reading, was given into her hands. Later Protestant sects
+broke down the limits of sacerdotalism, until women found that they
+could look forward a little way without losing their Edens, or could
+even glance backward without being turned into pillars of reproach.
+
+The political revolutions of the eighteenth century also affirmed in
+their point of view the same intellectual freedom for women as for men.
+It has taken a long time to make the practical adjustments, but they are
+now well under way. Since 1870, women have had very great freedom in
+their approach to knowledge; and having knowledge, they have been
+allowed to impart it to others.
+
+In America, freedom for women to study has moved more rapidly than in
+Europe. Even in the colonial period, there were emancipated women, as
+we have seen; and in the last half of the eighteenth century several
+schools were opened for girls, which were more than polite finishing
+schools. Notable among these institutions were the seminary at
+Bethlehem, Pa., opened in 1753 by the Moravians, and the school
+established by the Society of Friends, in Providence, R.I., in 1784. But
+nearly all girl's schools before 1800 were limited to terms of a few
+months, where girls attended to learn needle-work, music and dancing,
+and to cultivate their morals and manners.
+
+At the close of the Revolutionary War, the leaders of public opinion
+universally recognized that their new experiment in government would
+succeed only if the voters were intelligent. This statement of belief
+became the major premise on which all arguments for free and compulsory
+education were based; and while we have practically accepted a much
+wider justification for education, in connection with the care of
+defectives, industrial training, and other recent movements, we have not
+yet changed our formulated philosophy concerning the relation of the
+state to its children. Free and compulsory education is still mainly
+justified on the ground that it produced good citizens.
+
+But the women had not full citizenship and hence the argument for
+general education did not apply to them. Had they been enfranchised
+after the Revolution, all educational opportunities would have been open
+to them at once as a matter of course; and an immense amount of
+struggle, futile effort, and unnecessary friction would have been saved.
+But this larger view of woman's rights and powers would have required an
+adjustment in deep-seated ideas and prejudices, concerning her proper
+position, too great to be undertaken by men facing a new form of
+government and the material problems of a new world.
+
+But even without this change in ideas, economic conditions steadily
+forced the women into educational activity. There were not enough men
+available to teach the scattered country schools, and citizens had to be
+trained for the needs of the new democracy. John Adams recognized this
+when he wrote to Mr. Warren that their wives must "teach their sons the
+divine science of politics;" though he would have been one of the last
+to favor admitting women to full participation in public life. He did
+not realize that if women were to train men for citizenship, the
+rudiments of knowledge which they had learned in scattered schools and
+in their poor little academies must be greatly supplemented. Life,
+however, is never logical, and at this advance men balked. Necessity was
+forcing women into schools as teachers, and hence into larger
+preparation for their own lives; but public opinion, here as elsewhere,
+failed to recognize the forces that were compelling its action.
+
+Thus the work of furnishing more advanced intellectual training for
+American women had to be started by the women themselves. This is
+possibly the first time in human history that a great group of people
+feeling itself irresistibly moving toward a social, industrial and
+political readjustment, little less than revolutionary in its nature,
+has gone deliberately to work to prepare for the change through
+education. The working classes of the world are doing the same thing
+now; but women showed them the way. In some vague degree, American
+women recognized the truth which Dr. Gore recently brought before a mass
+of working men in England. "All this passion for justice will accomplish
+nothing," he declared, "unless you get knowledge. You may become strong
+and clamorous, you may win a victory, you may affect a revolution, but
+you will be trodden down again under the feet of knowledge if you leave
+knowledge in the hands of privilege, because knowledge will always win
+over ignorance."[21]
+
+[21] _The Highway_, London, Nov., 1911.
+
+American women were fortunate, too, in having for their leaders such
+women as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon and Catherine Beecher. Emma Willard was
+a woman of the world; she had traveled abroad and she brought to her
+work a cultivated nature, wide experience of life and natural
+leadership. Her personality went far toward lifting the movement to a
+plane of respect. After trying a little academy in Vermont, she appealed
+to the State of New York in 1814 for help. In this appeal, she wisely
+adopted the prevailing view of the relation of the state to education.
+The state must have good citizens, she repeats, and then goes on, "The
+character of children will be formed by their mothers; and it is through
+the mothers that the government can control the character of its future
+citizens." The State of New York granted her articles of incorporation
+for her academy at Waterford, N.Y., but refused her the modest sum of
+five thousand dollars for which she had asked. In 1821, she established
+the Troy Female Seminary, where for years she trained and led the
+intellectual life of American women.
+
+Miss Mary Lyon begged the money from the common people with which she
+opened Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837. Those who feared the education of
+women were disarmed by the fact that in the new institution domestic
+service was emphasized to the extent of having the girls do all their
+own work. Another group of possible critics was won over by the fact
+that religious instruction received constant care. But notwithstanding
+the conserving influence of housework and religion, there went steadily
+out from Mount Holyoke during the following years a strong line of
+teachers demanding ever larger opportunity for themselves and for those
+they taught.
+
+Miss Catherine Beecher added to her work in schools for girls a general
+propaganda for woman's education, and she devised large plans for its
+development. In 1852, she organized the American Woman's Educational
+Association "to aid in securing to American women a liberal education,
+honorable position, and remunerative employment." She helped to start
+girls' schools in half a dozen cities, and by writing and talking she
+sowed in the hearts of women, especially in the Middle West, a
+discontent with existing conditions and a deep desire to know.
+
+From the time of this awakening in the thirties and forties, two lines
+of educational activity for the advancement of woman's education
+steadily developed. One was the effort of women to educate themselves in
+distinctly women's schools; and the other was the movement by which
+existing institutions for boys and men were gradually opened to girls
+and women. These two lines of activity still remain distinct, and not
+always sympathetic with each other's aims.
+
+The effort to establish distinctly women's schools was continued after
+the Civil War by Matthew Vassar, who founded in 1861, and opened in
+1865, the first adequately endowed and organized college for women in
+America. Ten years later, Miss Sophie Smith founded and endowed Smith
+College to furnish women "with means and facilities for education equal
+to those that are offered in colleges for young men." The institution
+was opened in 1875; and in the same year Henry Durant established
+Wellesley College.
+
+The last Report of the United States Commissioner of Education shows
+that there are now 108 institutions of higher learning to which men are
+not admitted; but most of them have modeled themselves so closely upon
+men's colleges that they have not been able to work out lines of
+distinctive instruction specially fitted to women. One cannot help
+feeling that since they do not open their doors to men they should do
+something more toward working out an ideal education for women than they
+have so far undertaken. When the Association of Intercollegiate Alumnæ
+met in New York, in the autumn of 1911, its discussions gathered around
+the possibility of adding to college courses subjects of special value
+to women. Hygiene, biology and sociology were the subjects most favored;
+but the matter needs attention from women and men who stand outside the
+group dominated by our older college traditions. This movement to
+provide distinctive schools for women had brought together, in 1910,
+35,714 girl students in private secondary schools and 9,082 women
+students in higher institutions of learning.
+
+The second line of development, which sought to open up all existing
+schools to girls and women, began when Boston opened a high school for
+girls in 1825. New York opened a high school for girls three years
+later.
+
+It was in the West, however, that this movement took strongest root and
+made most steady advance. The West has always led the East in opening
+equal opportunity to women, even equal suffrage. The forest and the
+frontier compel such action even in such commonwealths as Australia, New
+Zealand and Canada, where there has been no political revolution to
+hasten it. Labor is scarce; the invading people are intelligent and
+ambitious for their children and desire them educated. The women must
+teach them to read and write; the girls learn with their brothers; and
+so the women master the mysteries of formal education.
+
+Thus it is no accident that Oberlin, in the western forest, was the
+first college to open its doors to women. Antioch, under Horace Mann's
+direction, was, however, the first institution of higher learning to
+give men and women equal opportunity. The new States of the Mississippi
+Valley early established State universities. These institutions were
+little more than seminaries, but the free spirit of the frontier was so
+strong in them that in 1863 Wisconsin University admitted women to its
+privileges, and Kansas and Indiana followed shortly after.
+
+It is the year 1870, however, that marks the beginning of a new period
+in the higher education of women as in so many other lines of advance.
+In that year, Michigan University, California University and the
+University of Evanston, adopted co-education. Michigan was just entering
+on a great career and her influence was very important. There, for the
+first time, women could follow a university curriculum under the same
+conditions as men. Two years later, Andrew D. White introduced the
+Michigan idea at Cornell.
+
+In the forty years since Michigan opened her doors, the advance of women
+under conditions of co-education has been steady and rapid. In Harvard
+and Columbia opportunity takes the form of annexes where women can
+secure almost any educational opportunities they desire. In other
+universities, like Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins, women are admitted to
+graduate study. Most of the institutions of higher education that do not
+yet admit women are theological and technical schools, or small colleges
+like Haverford, where there are equivalents in Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr,
+for women who wish to attend a Friend's College. A woman can work in
+almost any important university in America to-day if she cares to do so.
+In 1910 there were conferred in the United States 12,590 A.B. degrees,
+and women took 44.1 per cent. of them.
+
+Meantime, there have been no important reactions in institutions which
+have once opened their doors to women.[22] In 1902, Chicago University
+separated men and women students, but only during the first two years of
+their undergraduate work. Practically this has affected only one-half of
+the women in the first year and a very much smaller proportion in the
+second year.[23] When Leland Stanford Junior University was opened in
+1891, 25.4% of the students were women. This proportion rose in
+successive years as follows: 1892, 29.7%; 1893, 30.4%; 1894, 33.8%;
+1895, 35.3%; 1896, 36.6%; 1897, 37.4%; 1898, 40.1%. Fearing that the
+institution would be swamped with women, and that able men students
+would stay away, Mrs. Stanford ruled that there should never be more
+than five hundred women students in the university at one time. This
+limit was reached in 1902, and it was then provided that women should
+not be received as special students, nor in partial standing. Later, men
+in partial standing were cut out, though they continued to be received
+as special students. Women are now admitted in order of application,
+but preference is given to juniors and seniors. This really establishes
+a higher standard for women than for men, and one would expect that men
+would be kept away from an institution requiring a higher standard for
+women quite as much as from one where there were many women working on
+an equality with men. In 1910, Tufts College decided to separate men and
+women, for local reasons. The statement was made at the time that a
+philanthropist had promised a gift of $500,000 for a woman's college, if
+the sexes were separated.[24] The doors of Wesleyan are to be closed to
+women after 1912, but this is due to local and financial reasons.
+
+[22] HELEN R. OLIN, _The Women of a State University_, G.P. Putnam's
+Sons, 1909.
+
+[23] MARION TALBOT, _The Education of Women_, University of Chicago
+Press, 1910.
+
+[24] _Report of the United States Commissioner of Education_, p. 132,
+1910.
+
+The movement in European universities, while not so uniform as in
+America, has been in the same direction. Miss Buss, Miss Beal and Miss
+Emily Sheriff led an early movement for higher secondary education of
+girls similar to that which gathered around Miss Willard in America. In
+1871, Miss Clough started in England the lectures for women which led
+to the establishment of Newnham and Girton at Cambridge, and opened
+Oxford to women. Now women can study almost any subject they like at
+these universities and take the same examinations as the men. They do
+not receive degrees, but they have most of the other advantages of men,
+and for forty years they have carried off many honors. In the newer
+universities of London, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and in the Welsh
+University they have every advantage open to men.
+
+In Germany, the opportunities for higher education of women have changed
+from year to year; but in 1910, there were 1,856 women in the
+universities as compared with 1,108 in 1909, and this notwithstanding
+the Emperor's well known belief that woman's sphere should be limited to
+domestic activities.
+
+The claims advanced in opposition to the higher education of women have
+largely broken down to-day. It was long maintained that her mind was
+inferior to man's mind in kind and quality, and that she could not do
+the work required. In the presence of thousands of young women carrying
+all kinds of university work with credit and honor such charges become
+absurd. The belief that woman's health could not stand the strain fails
+for the same reason. The fear that she would be less likely to marry; or
+marrying, would be less likely to have children, has been seen to have
+some body of fact behind it; but we have seen also that university
+students are recruited from groups that are not the most fecund, and
+that the same danger applies to men students as to women.[25] Women in
+higher education are now accepted as a regular part of our modern life.
+
+[25] Eight hundred and eighty-one Harvard graduates, twenty-five years
+after graduation, had but 1,226 children. If half were boys, we have but
+613 sons for 881 Harvard graduates. HUGO MÜNSTERBERG, _The Americans_,
+p. 582. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901.
+
+And yet there is one objection that still remains unanswered in very
+many minds. It has always been feared that women would lower the
+standard of scholarship; and there is much in the quality of the present
+generation of women students that may strengthen this belief. In the
+seventies and eighties, the fear of being thought peculiar still kept
+many ordinary women away from colleges. Now it has become fashionable,
+and a woman who has been to college stands better in a community than
+one who has not. Add to this the freedom and romance of "going to
+college" and it follows that many young women, with increasing economic
+freedom, are tempted to go up to the universities just as well-placed
+young Englishmen go to Cambridge or Oxford as passmen. They have no
+special interest in scholarship; but they like the life. This large body
+of young women, and of men under similar conditions, will doubtless
+lower the scholarship of modern college and university life as a whole.
+But possibly the need of the world for all-around men and women is even
+greater than its need for scholars; and in that case we may find
+justification for both passmen and passwomen.
+
+With the opening of knowledge to women it became possible for them to
+instruct children in matters intellectual; and since our school learning
+was almost entirely a matter of information and mental training, they
+early became an important part of the teaching profession in America.
+
+Once started, all our conditions favored the rapid increase of women
+teachers. There were industrial openings for men on every side; and with
+our rapid increase in population, an army of teachers was required.
+Since the calling had in the past been filled by inferior members of the
+clergy, broken-down soldiers, or old women, there was a tradition of
+constant change, and young men on their way to permanent professions
+were steadily supplanted by young women on their way to the altar.
+
+Co-education very materially assisted this substitution. Social,
+religious and economic reasons early combined to establish co-education
+in elementary schools in America, and now it has become a national
+custom. In cities like Philadelphia and Brooklyn there are some separate
+schools; but in 1910, only 4 per cent. of all the elementary children
+and only 5 per cent. of the children in public high schools were in
+separate classes. In private schools, which care for less than 10 per
+cent. of the children of the country, the percentage of children in
+separate schools is greater.
+
+Practically all American children are now in co-educational
+institutions. Had the boys been in schools by themselves it would have
+been more difficult to place women teachers over them, but in mixed
+schools the question does not arise. Even where the boys and girls were
+separated, however, that fact did not prevent the employment of women
+teachers, though it may have retarded it. Thus in Philadelphia, in 1911,
+there were 125 boys' classes, 174 girls' classes, and 894 mixed classes
+in the grammar grades; still there were but 175 men teachers employed
+and, of course, the girls' classes were all taught by women.
+
+While administrative positions are less monopolized by women than
+teaching posts, they are being steadily filled by them. For fifteen
+years Idaho has had able women State superintendents elected by popular
+suffrage; Colorado and Montana have also given this highest educational
+post to women. In most of our States we have women serving as county
+superintendents; and in Idaho women fill nearly all these positions.
+Several of our largest cities, notably Chicago and Cleveland, have women
+superintendents; while many high schools and most of our elementary
+schools have women principals. In 1909, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young was
+elected president of the National Education Association; and in 1911,
+Miss Alice Dilley was elected president of the Iowa State Teachers'
+Association. Both of these elections were victories for women won in the
+face of determined opposition from many of the men.
+
+Another feature of this monopoly of teaching by women should be
+emphasized. Many boards of education require a woman to resign her
+position if she marries, and married women are seldom appointed to
+teaching positions, except where they are widows or separated from their
+husbands. In a test case recently carried to the Supreme Court of the
+State of New York a decision was rendered that the Board of Education of
+New York City could not dismiss teachers for marrying; but by refusing
+leave of absence to prospective mothers the Board is still able to
+remove all women who dare to have children. Thus we have a modern
+industrial democracy being educated almost entirely by celibate women.
+
+But why should a woman be forced to leave teaching because she marries?
+Would not married women do much to strengthen and broaden the calling?
+Are not married women better fitted than celibates to deal with boys and
+girls in the period of adolescence? There is doubtless a feeling that a
+married woman should make way for some girl who needs the position to
+help herself along; but schools should not be used for the needs of
+teachers, no matter how deserving the individual may be.
+
+There is, too, a possibility that a married woman might have a child,
+and a feeling that this would shock the other teachers and the children.
+Surely we have grown beyond this condition; the teacher could easily be
+given a leave of absence for a few months, or for a few years; and
+nowhere else could the children better meet this fact of universal
+existence around which our Anglo-Saxon reticence has woven such a
+shameful conspiracy of silence. At least, when a woman has passed the
+period of childbearing she could bring to the school incalculable gifts
+of balanced judgment and ripe understanding of life.
+
+Meantime all the influences which have brought about the monopoly of
+teaching by women are increasingly operative. Every year more able women
+leave our high schools, normal schools and universities, with no
+corresponding new lines of occupation open to them. The feeling of
+rivalry between men and women teachers grows stronger each year.
+Powerful teachers' federations, such as those in Chicago and Buffalo,
+composed mainly of women, are said to be using their influence to favor
+women. In New York City, the women teachers have compelled the city to
+equalize the wages of men and women, at an annual expense of $3,500,000,
+after a bitter fight lasting several years.
+
+The effects of this monopoly upon the women themselves are very
+difficult to estimate. Some alarmists tell us that women teachers face
+the danger of a premature and loveless old age; that the celibate
+communities they form in the commonwealth are marked by pettiness and
+emotionalism; that the salaries paid teachers are so small that they
+cannot provide for sickness and old age, and that, unless pensioned by
+the state, some of them must one day eat the bread of charity.
+
+On the other hand, we are told that education is the natural province
+of women; that teaching fits them to be good mothers and helpful
+citizens; that women alone can form the character of girls; and that
+boys are refined and perfected by the constant contact with women.
+
+Probably neither of these statements is wholly true. It is certain that
+many women teachers do marry, do become the mothers of fine children,
+and are social forces in their communities. With advancing standards of
+scholarship, better salaries, old age pensions, and a popular demand for
+professional efficiency in teachers, it will be increasingly difficult
+for men to use the calling as a preparation for law and medicine, or for
+women to use it as a preparation for matrimony. The calling doubtless
+does offer a greater equivalent for marriage than most others; and many
+women live their mother life vicariously for other people's children.
+
+At the same time, however, when a woman has given fourteen years of her
+life to preparation for teaching, eight years in an elementary school,
+four in a high school, and from two to four in professional training,
+she has made an investment and formed habits which will make her
+hesitate before turning to matrimony. The independence and income will
+prove attractive during young maidenhood; and matrimony can hardly yield
+its best results to the woman who enters it after she is thirty. It is
+certainly true that women are decreasingly willing to enter the teaching
+profession; and in many parts of the country there is a chronic dearth
+of trained teachers.
+
+Meantime, for good or ill, women have eaten, and are eating of the tree
+of knowledge as they will. If this has driven them out of the little
+paradise of the past, they are in a fair way to make the whole world
+into a paradise of the present. Only through training their minds could
+they have broken away from an outworn past. In this time of readjustment
+there must be many mistakes and many tragedies.[26] The fool-killer will
+gather a rich harvest, but if we are open-minded and eager to see the
+truth, each martyr will teach her sisters, and the future generations
+of women will conserve the values of the past and add to them new
+treasures and new graces of knowledge and understanding.
+
+[26] See chapter on Education of Adolescent Girls, in _Adolescence_, by
+G. STANLEY HALL. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904.
+
+It is most unfortunate that these real issues should be obscured by sex
+rivalry. There can be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his body,
+between science and religion, between man and woman. Such antagonisms
+rest back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman
+alone, for any purposes of life. And there is, too, that evil notion
+which still affects economics, that when two trade one must lose. The
+fact is that in all honest exchange buyer and seller gain alike, and all
+who participate become rich. It is so in all honest relations between
+these half-creatures we call men and women. In agreement, association,
+coöperation, lies strongest significant life for both. In separation,
+competition and antagonism lie arid, poor, mean lives, conceited and
+egotistic, vapid and contemptible.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Feminizing of Culture
+
+
+With the weakening of sex prejudices and the removal of legal
+restrictions on women's freedom it was inevitable that they should
+invade fields of activity where formerly only men were found. Since
+women must eat every one knew that they must work, and the sight of a
+woman at work was no new experience. Even in the days when they were
+most secluded and protected, the number kept in ease was always very
+small compared with the women slaves and servants who spun, cooked and
+served. Hence men were used to seeing women at work; and while
+industrial adjustments have not been easily made, they have still been
+accepted as a matter of course. But who, fifty years ago, could have
+imagined that to-day women would be steadily monopolizing learning,
+teaching, literature, the fine arts, music, the church and the theater?
+And yet that is the condition at which we have arrived. We may scoff at
+the way women are doing the work, and reject the product, but that does
+not alter the fact that step by step women are taking over the field of
+liberal culture as opposed to the field of immediately productive work.
+
+Some of the reasons for this change are so clear that it seems as though
+they might have been anticipated. In a comparatively few years the
+greater part of Western Europe and all of America has become rich, not
+this time through the enslavement of other peoples and the confiscating
+of their wealth, but through the enslaving and exploitation of the
+material forces of nature. This wealth is not well distributed, but
+large numbers of families have received enough so that the women do not
+have to work constantly with their hands. At this point all historic
+precedent would have turned these women into luxury-loving parasites and
+playthings. A good many of them have taken this easiest way and entered
+the peripatetic harems of the rich. But several million women refused to
+repeat the old cycle of ruin; they knew too much.[27] What then should
+they do? Faith in the value of conventual life for women had passed;
+industrial changes had transformed their homes so that the endless
+spinning, weaving, sewing and knitting were no longer there, even to be
+supervised. Penelope's tasks had passed to foremen, working under trades
+union agreements, in the factories of Fall River and Birmingham. Even
+the function of the lady bountiful who looked after the spiritual and
+family affairs of her tenants and servants and distributed doles and
+Christmas baskets was gone. Her tenants owned their own farms, and her
+chauffeur resented her interference with his personal life. What should
+she do?
+
+[27] RHETA CHILDE DORR, _What Eight Million Women Want,_ Boston: Small,
+Maynard & Co., 1910.
+
+And this movement was not confined to the rich, for those who were not
+yet economically free were still deeply influenced by the changes which
+were taking place. The Goulds, Stanfords, Vanderbilts, Floods, Carnegies
+and Schwabs had all been lifted from the level of the masses to
+financial grandeur before the eyes of the multitude, and democratic
+ambitions drove parents who thought themselves in the line of financial
+advancement to secure culture for their girls in time. If the daughter
+was destined to live on Fifth Avenue, or to marry a duke, it was best to
+get her ready while young. In all our industrial democracies, armies of
+American parents have devoted themselves to labor, and even sacrificed
+comforts and necessities, that the daughters might get ready to live
+easier and fuller lives than the parents had known. If the choice had to
+be made between the girl and her brother, the chivalry of the father and
+the ambition of the mother very often gave the opportunity to the girl.
+
+And so an emancipated army of leisure has been formed which has
+transformed the very nature of the culture with which it has busied
+itself. Books, periodicals, musical instruments, travel became cheaper
+and cheaper as the demand increased. Wholesale production makes almost
+any luxury accessible to every one. It is also possible to find modern
+and agreeable forms for older academic exercises. If Greek and Latin
+were too full or too difficult, courses in Romanic and Germanic
+philology would do as well. Anglo-Saxon gave way to Old English; and
+Chaucer to the Lake Poets. Philosophy struggled for favor with the
+English novel on equal terms. The works of Raphael were photographed and
+lithographed until the Sistine Madonna became as commonly known as the
+face of any strenuous and popular statesman of the day. With the aid of
+these art productions, and John Addington Symonds, every woman with
+leisure became an art critic. If economics was not interesting,
+sociology was available; and it could be democratized to any degree
+desired. If travel was troublesome, one could leave it to Cook; buy a
+ticket and he would do the rest.
+
+If these awakening hungers and corresponding opportunities had affected
+only the period of life formerly thought available for education, these
+changes would have come about much more slowly than they have. But the
+genetic conception of life, steadily popularized since 1870, has led us
+to see that education is coterminous with life. It seems strange that we
+should have ever thought that mental activity belongs alone to youth.
+Dorland's study shows that in a list of four hundred fairly
+representative great men, only 10.25% ceased their mental activity
+between the ages of forty and fifty; 20.75% between fifty and sixty; 35%
+between sixty and seventy; 22.5% between seventy and eighty; and 6%
+after eighty.[28]
+
+[28] W.A. NEWMAN DORLAND, _The Age of Mental Virility_. New York: The
+Century Company, 1908.
+
+The recognition of such facts as these has given us a new genetic sense
+of life, under the influence of which mothers and grandmothers have
+joined the younger women in the pursuit of culture. They have formed
+clubs--study clubs, current events clubs, camera clubs, art clubs,
+literary clubs, civic clubs. They have organized courses of university
+extension lectures; enrolled in Chicago University correspondence
+courses; and have flocked to Chautauqua by the thousand in the summer,
+when not abroad. It is not through the generosity of men that liberal
+culture has come into the possession of women; they have carried it by
+storm and have compelled capitulation.
+
+Judging by the facts presented in the last chapter, women are pretty
+fully in possession of formal education. If we examine this monopoly a
+little more carefully, we shall find that while in the kindergarten and
+in the elementary schools boys furnish 51% of the enrollment, simply
+because more boys are born in civilized communities than girls, as soon
+as we reach the high schools, girls increasingly take the lead. In 1910,
+the girls formed 56.45% of the enrollment in high schools--or there were
+110,249 more girls than boys. The proportion of girls increased through
+each of the four years of the course, and of the graduates, 60.8% were
+girls. In the public normal schools, 64.45% of the students were girls.
+
+The universities, colleges and technical schools, which are massed
+together in our government reports, had hardly any women students in
+1870; in 1880, 19.3% of the students were women; in 1890, 27%; in 1910,
+30.4%. In all these institutions we had enrolled in 1910, 17,707 women.
+Of 602 institutions reported in 1910, 142 were for men only; 108 were
+for women only; and 352 were open to both sexes. But here again the
+influence of women increases during each of the four years for, as we
+have seen, the women took 41.1% of the A.B. degrees granted in 1910. It
+is surely not too much to say that, if present conditions continue,
+women will soon be in an overwhelming majority in all secondary and
+higher education in the United States.
+
+If we examine the teaching force, we find this monopoly already
+established. In 1870, when our government records begin, 59% of the
+teachers were women; in 1880, 57.2% were women; in 1890, 65.5%; in 1900,
+70.1%; in 1910, 78.6%. The more settled and intelligent the community
+the more rapid this advance has been. Thus Arkansas has 52.4% women
+teachers; but Massachusetts has 91.1% and Connecticut has 93%.
+
+In cities, too, the women fill nearly all teaching positions. New York
+City has 89% women in its force; Boston, 89%; Philadelphia, 91.4%;
+Chicago, 93.3%. In many cities the proportion is even greater than this:
+Omaha has 97%; Wheeling, W. Va., 97.5%; Charleston, S.C., 99.3%; and in
+forty-six American towns of 4,000 to 8,000 inhabitants there is no man
+teaching. When we remember that many of the men indicated above are in
+high schools or in supervising posts, we are prepared for the statement
+in a report recently laid before the Board of Education of New York City
+that in half the cities of the United States there are virtually no men
+teaching.
+
+In our high schools, 54% of the teachers are women; in public normal
+schools, 65%; and in institutions of higher learning 17.6% are women.
+Even in supervising positions, there are more women than men in the
+large centers of population. Certainly these figures justify us in
+saying that women have established a monopoly of education in the United
+States, except in the higher institutions.
+
+In order to discuss the effects which this monopoly of education by
+women is having on the curriculum of the schools we must first agree on
+what constitutes the peculiarity of women's minds as compared with men's
+minds.[29] In our first chapter, it was asserted that women are more
+interested in the concrete, human, personal, conserving and emotional
+aspects of life; while men more easily turn to the abstract, material,
+impersonal, creative and rational aspects. To put it broadly, women are
+more interested in the humanities; men more readily pursue the sciences.
+Let us admit at once that there are many individual exceptions to this
+statement. Some women have reached great excellence in abstract studies;
+and some men are notoriously concrete and emotional; but nevertheless
+the general statement seems borne out by a wealth of common observations
+and detailed comparisons.
+
+[29] See _The Americans_, by HUGO MÜNSTERBERG, pp. 558-589. Boston:
+Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901.
+
+Personal observation must always be colored by prejudices and
+prepossessions, but my own have been so wide, and so uniformly in one
+direction, that it seems justifiable to report them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a quarter of a century I have been working in schools or with
+teachers, and my personal observations all agree with the above
+characterization. I have spent five years in Cornell University, New
+York; one year in Zurich University in Switzerland; two years in the
+State University of Indiana and seven years in Stanford University in
+California. These institutions are widely distributed; they were all
+fully co-educational; and they each had a wide range of elective
+studies. In all of them, class-rooms devoted to literature and modern
+languages had a large attendance of women, while lecture-rooms and
+laboratories devoted to abstract science were almost deserted by them.
+This could not have been due to commercial considerations, for many of
+these women were facing teaching; and during all this time the demand
+for women who could teach science has been much greater than for women
+who could teach literature.
+
+In my work with teachers, both in the classroom and in the field, I have
+carried out many inductive, quantitative studies, based on measurements
+or returns from large numbers of children. I have never found women
+teachers taking up and carrying out this kind of work with any such
+enthusiasm as men apply to it, though it lies at the base of their
+professional life.
+
+Institutional generalizations seem all to point in this same direction.
+For instance, the Girls' Evening High School in Philadelphia is managed
+by one of the best known scientific women in the country, Dr. L.L.W.
+Wilson, head of the biological department of the Philadelphia Normal
+School. With a thousand girls of high school grade, under the leadership
+of a scientific woman, the only science courses given in the school are
+those in domestic science. The reason is that the girls, most of them
+not being candidates for a degree, will not take up science work, though
+they form strong classes in literature and languages.
+
+If, from such general facts of observation, one turns to exact
+comparisons, where quantities can be measured, the results are all the
+same. Of students enrolled in classical departments of universities,
+colleges and technical schools reporting to the United States Bureau of
+Education, in 1910, 36.5% were women, while of those enrolled in general
+science courses, but 17.2% were women. In 1,511 public and private high
+schools and seminaries, reporting to the Bureau of Education in
+1909-1910, a larger percentage of boys than of girls was enrolled in
+algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, physical geography,
+civil government and rhetoric, which is a scientific study of language.
+A larger proportion of girls enrolled in Latin, French, German, English
+literature and history, and there was a slightly greater enrollment of
+girls in botany, zoology and physiology.
+
+In the further discussion of this subject it will then be taken for
+granted that in education, feminization means emphasis on languages,
+literature and history, as opposed to mathematics, physics, chemistry
+and civics. For the elementary schools we have no data capable of
+reduction to figures, but general observation, backed by an examination
+of courses of study and textbooks, will compel any one to say that in
+twenty years we have made wonderful progress in reading, language,
+stories, mythology, biography and history; while all our efforts to
+bring nature work into vital relation with the schools have borne little
+fruit. Our country schools need lessons in agriculture, and the children
+should gain a deep sense of country life. But how can celibate young
+women, longing toward the towns, give this? Any subjects well taught are
+sure to be increasingly taught, and it takes no extended study to see
+that our elementary schools are being feminized in the direction of
+literature. This is the more striking when we remember that these twenty
+years have been dominated, in the larger world, by scientific interests.
+
+In the high schools and seminaries, we have fairly complete returns
+showing the number of students enrolled in certain subjects since 1890.
+The pupils taking Latin have increased 15%; French, 4%; German, 13%;
+English literature has increased in ten years 7% (there is no record for
+this subject before 1898); and European history, 27%. There has also
+been an increase of 11% in algebra and 10% in geometry, probably partly
+due to vocational need and to the emphasis laid on these subjects for
+admission to college. But physics, in the twenty years under
+consideration, has fallen off 7%; chemistry, 3%; physical geography, 5%;
+physiology, 15%; and civics, 7%.[30] A careful study of these figures
+must convince any fair-minded person that our school curriculum, even in
+the secondary field, where women's control is least complete, is moving
+rapidly in the direction of what we have called feminization.
+
+[30] _Report of the United States Commissioner of Education_, 1910, Vol.
+II, p. 1139.
+
+The schools, too, must increasingly do something more than train the
+intellect; and in all physical activity involuntary suggestion is very
+powerful. Playgrounds are laboratories of conduct, and they should not
+only give physical exercise, but should also furnish standards and
+ideals. There can be no doubt that women are physically more restrained,
+retiring, non-contesting, and graceful than men; but can dancing,
+marching, and gymnastics take the place of more aggressive, direct and
+violent contests in the training of boys? So in industries, women are
+more given to conserving, arranging and beautifying, more given to
+clerking and recording, while men are more creative, disbursing, more
+given to mining, agriculture and commerce. Even granting equal
+understanding and experience, the tradition of the race must count for
+much; and it would seem that at every stage of growth, boys and girls
+alike should feel the impulse to imitate men who have an instinct to
+make and unmake, to trade and carry. It is no justification of existing
+conditions to say that the men now in the teaching profession lack
+these qualities; if they do, let us get rid of them and have real men.
+And for purposes of political life, does it not seem strange to bring up
+a generation of boys and girls who are to be the future citizens of a
+democracy under the exclusive leadership of people who have never been
+encouraged to think about political life nor allowed to participate in
+it? Let us by all means enfranchise women; but even then they cannot
+hope to quickly catch up with those who have some thousands of years the
+start, even after allowing for the fact that girls inherit from both
+father and mother.
+
+Most of these differences which we have been discussing seem to rest in
+the fact that women are more personal in their interests and judgments
+than men are. This may be due to their education for thousands of years;
+but that makes it no less true. Women certainly, in a great majority of
+cases, are more interested in a case than in a constitution; in a man
+than in a mission; in a poem that in a treatise; in equity than in law.
+In a generation when everything is tending toward great aggregations,
+consolidated industries, segregated wealth, and new syntheses of
+knowledge, both boys and girls should have such training as will fit
+them to play their part in these larger units.
+
+As to the feminizing influence of exclusively women teachers on manners
+and morals and general attitude toward life there can be no real doubt.
+Boys and girls cannot spend eight or twelve impressionable years of
+childhood and youth under the constant daily influence of women without
+having the ladylike attitude toward life strongly emphasized. To deny
+this is to repudiate the power of constant involuntary suggestion and
+association. Whether it is desirable or not, is another question. The
+change may be all in the direction of advancing civilization; but just
+as in the assimilation of our subject races, the philosophic mind must
+be distressed by the disappearance of so many varieties of speech,
+customs, and artistic and industrial products, so in this present
+assimilation, one cannot help regretting the steady disappearance of the
+katabolic qualities of the human male. One does not need to say that
+this feminized product is better or worse than what we have had, but it
+is certainly narrower, and less in harmony with the world's thought and
+work, than it formerly was.
+
+If we turn from education to the press we have similar conditions.
+During these past few years, hundreds of journals have sprung up devoted
+to women's special interests. They are almost all of them showy,
+fragmentary, personal, concrete and emotional. It is difficult to find
+one that represents general or abstract interests. At least one of these
+journals which boasts a fabulous circulation is supported by its women
+subscribers and readers to oppose the larger interests of women in
+education, industry and political life. At least, if it does not oppose
+these interests, it does not aid them. Imagine a million German women
+sending the Kaiser one dollar and a half a year to induce him to tell
+them once a month to go back to their kitchens, churches and children!
+
+The newspapers of America have steadily changed during the last three
+decades in the same direction. Editorial pages and news columns have
+been steadily modified in the direction of fragmentary, egoistic,
+personal and sensational, or at least emotional, appeals. These are the
+qualities of children's minds and of undeveloped minds everywhere. The
+change is, of course, a part of the larger democratic movement of our
+time, and many causes have contributed to bring it about. Had women not
+been so active, something of the same sort would have happened; but if
+women were all to forget how to read overnight, there is little doubt
+that the newspapers would find it advantageous to print more
+statesmanlike editorials and more general and abstract news.
+
+With the weeklies and monthlies, the change taking place is the same.
+The new reading public, brought in by increase in population and by
+popular education, does not support the _Atlantic_, the _Century_ and
+_Scribner's,_ but turns to _Munsey's_, _McClure's_ and _Everybody's_.
+The very change in names speaks of the new personal and egoistic element
+that has come into journalism. Of course, such changes are only in part
+due to the influence of women, but the change is in the direction of the
+qualities that characterize distinctively women's journals.
+
+In books, the personal and romantic novel has taken precedence over
+every other form of literature. Many of these are written by women;
+their circulation, both through libraries and through sales, is much
+greater with women than with men; and in many of them the personal
+gossip is as transient as that which fills the evening papers.[31]
+
+[31] _The Feminine Note in Fiction_, by W.L. COURTNEY, London, Chapman &
+Hall, 1904; the author tries to prove that there is such a thing as a
+feminine style in fiction.
+
+In the churches, especially in the ritualistic churches, women have long
+been the faithful attendants. Nowhere, except in the churches which make
+a rationalistic and abstract appeal, and in the Ethical Societies, does
+one find a preponderance of men. In 1903, a careful enumeration of all
+attendants at places of worship was made in the city of London. The
+count was taken on fair Sundays in autumn, and covered both morning and
+evening services. Sixty-one per cent. of all adult attendants were
+women, 146,372 more women than men passing through the doors.
+
+About the same time a similar census was made in the part of New York
+City lying on Manhattan Island. The women were in excess by 171,749,
+and formed 69 per cent. of all attendants. Even church service, if not
+entirely tied to set forms, must seek to interest those who occupy the
+pews; and no observer can fail to note in both England and America, a
+movement toward ritualism on the one hand, and on the other, toward
+popular, personal, concrete and sometimes sensational preaching. The
+same general changes are taking place in libraries, in the drama, in
+concerts, in all group activities connected with learning and the fine
+arts.
+
+But on the other side, if emancipated women had not applied themselves,
+since 1870, to the direction of education, literature, religion and
+amusements, all these interests must have suffered serious neglect and
+probable deterioration through the concentrating of the interests of the
+ablest men in engineering, manufacturing, commerce and other fields of
+pure and applied science. By popularizing these interests, women have
+really humanized them, as all similar revolutions have done in the past.
+In breaking up old forms and intellectual conventions they have set free
+new and vital impulses. Whether the historian of the future will
+consider this period of democratization and feminization a time of
+advance may be uncertain; but it is certainly a time of liberated energy
+and of broadening participation in all that is best in life.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Economic Independence of Women
+
+
+Nowhere does a human being escape compulsion. Even were he alone in the
+world he would be forced to obey the physical laws governing gravity,
+heat, cold, hunger and disease. No matter what his desires might be, he
+would find himself limited and constrained by fixed laws, the inexorable
+penalties of which he could escape only by obedience. If the man were
+not alone, then each one of his companions would limit his freedom, and
+he would limit each one in the group, if they were to live together in
+peace and efficiency; and yet each of the man's companions would help to
+free him from the tyranny of physical forces, from the social pressure
+of others, and even from the bondage of his own nature.
+
+Independence is thus an ideal to be achieved only through obedience. It
+begins in self-subordination and reaches its finest realization in
+social subordination. Since the beginning of time men who thought have
+always dreamed of freedom; and for two hundred years now independence
+has been a word to conjure with. But in so far as independence means
+freedom to follow one's own unregulated desires, it is a fantastic and
+dangerous dream; and yet this dream of impossible independence has been
+among the greatest influences in furthering human development in the
+past.
+
+The old-time dependence of one individual on the immediate caprices of
+another largely disappeared with the passing of slavery. But in place of
+this personal subjection has come a more complex and in some ways more
+compelling and crushing control through the monopoly of wealth. Property
+has become the medium through which the most binding of human relations
+are organized. Accumulated wealth has become a great reservoir of power
+to which some individuals gain access through rights of birth, others
+through carefully guarded privileges, and still others through cunning
+devices or through force; but the masses of the people must gain their
+fragments of this wealth through arduous lifelong labor. Even the earth,
+the original source of all wealth, is parceled out, and all of it is now
+owned by individuals or groups who control it in their own interests.
+One man may thus have thousands of acres which he cannot use, and which
+he will not allow others to use, while another has not where to lay his
+head. Laws jealously guard this wealth, which is the key to all
+opportunity; and public opinion, that most subtle, pervasive and
+compelling of all forms of law, gathers a thousand sacred initiations,
+rites, ceremonies, prohibitions and ex-communications around it. A man
+who has killed his neighbor, or ruined his friend's family, may be less
+punished by society than one who cheats at cards.
+
+In primitive life a man may be a man by virtue of what he is; to-day he
+may have all the rights and privileges of any man by virtue of what he
+possesses. In any community can be found strong men, honest, though
+misplaced or unfortunate, begging bread, wasting their lives for want of
+money to live decently. And beside these one sees other men of weak
+physique and feeble minds, who have lived as parasites on society all
+their lives, but who are handsomely dressed, well fed, and possessed of
+power to do as they will, simply because they have access to wealth. It
+is no wonder that if one would seek freedom to-day in America he must
+look for her image on a gold coin.
+
+It is not difficult to see why property has become such a powerful
+instrument in civilization. Anything which a person really owns, in a
+psychological sense, is a home for his soul. Really owning an object, a
+toy, a garment, a watch or a home, means infusing one's personality into
+it. A man who possesses significant things has a new body through which
+his soul can work; this body trains his powers; and it should give him
+life more abundantly. A landless man must become a soulless man. Of
+course, we are not here speaking of legal ownership. Many people own
+legally things into which they have never infused themselves; sometimes
+they have so many things that no individual could possibly infuse
+himself into them.
+
+These conditions may prevail even in primitive life, but to-day they
+have been vastly increased through the fact that with advancing
+civilization money was devised. This is a system of counters, generally
+coin or paper, not really valuable in themselves, but always resting
+back for value on the earth, or on something derived from it. In the
+past it was supposed that there were some things which, because of their
+nature, were not marketable, while others were beyond price. To-day we
+set values on everything, even on men's bodies; eyes, ears, legs and
+lives can be priced. There are, in fact, insurance companies and
+factories that have regular schedules of value for various parts of the
+body. Our courts set prices on blighted affections, damaged reputations,
+social advancements, impaired digestions, damaged complexions, nervous
+shocks and extreme humiliations. Even a woman's honor may have a price
+in dollars.
+
+These property rights, like the rights of the person, have always been
+subject to violence. Powerful individuals and groups have always been
+able to overstep legal restrictions and public opinion, and seize what
+they desired. The land grabbing going on in North Africa and Persia
+to-day and the activity of great industrial monopolies at home, show us
+that some property rights still need to be secured by force. In this
+struggle, it has come about naturally that men, being stronger, freer
+and less scrupulous than women, have outstripped them and have so far
+had a pretty complete monopoly of wealth. In fact women themselves have
+at times become property. In such times a man who stole or bought a
+woman, naturally took over with her all her rights in real estate and
+personal property as well as her person and her services.
+
+Only gradually did women gain power to hold property themselves. Mainly
+because fathers wished to preserve property in their families, the right
+of women to inherit became slowly established as civilization advanced.
+In Judea, Greece and Rome, certain rights of a woman to hold property
+were clearly settled. In the reversion to force under feudalism, woman's
+rights to outside property suffered; but they have been gradually
+restored during the last few centuries. To-day, in civilized lands, a
+woman's rights to property, inherited or definitely given her or
+purchased by her, are everywhere recognized, if she does not marry. In
+France, and other Latin countries, she may still lose control of her
+property if she takes a husband; but in northern and western lands, even
+a married woman may retain her possessions.
+
+Woman's body, too, is increasingly looked upon as her personal property.
+With the raising of the age of consent; with increasing severity in laws
+punishing rape, and with the abrogation of judicial orders for the
+restitution of marital rights, it is now quite generally recognized that
+a woman should have the right to control her own person. Still, in many
+lands there is much to be done before this right is fully safeguarded.
+
+The place where a woman has not yet achieved economic freedom is in the
+disposal of her labor. One must remember, however, in this connection,
+that not only is there no fixed standard of values in human service as
+yet, but that many indispensable forms of service have not even been
+legally recognized as valuable. In early forms of civilization, fighting
+and praying were considered the most important work the community
+received, and warriors and priests gained the big rewards. They
+received lands, gold, servants and dignities, while industrial workers,
+even the directors, were despised. To-day we have reversed all this and
+we may pay a general only five thousand dollars a year, and a priest
+eight hundred dollars, while a man who develops a big industry may
+receive a hundred thousand dollars annually. Again, a man who invents a
+new gun may be given a fortune, like that of Herr Krupp, while a man who
+invents a surgical instrument is prevented by the ethics of his
+profession from even patenting it. If Pasteur had been paid for his
+services to France and to humanity, he would have ranked in the
+financial world with Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Schwab. We pay a State
+superintendent of public instruction ten thousand dollars a year; but
+Miss Jane Addams, as instructor in ethics to the United States, receives
+no salary, and she must even beg the money to maintain her laboratory at
+Hull House. The whole question of payment for services is in a chaotic
+condition. Those who serve mankind most faithfully are rewarded on the
+principle, "From each according to his ability;" but nowhere is the
+remainder of the principle, "To each according to his needs,"
+recognized. Hence our greatest servants must still beg support from our
+cleverest exploiters.
+
+Domestic service is indispensable to society, but so far it has remained
+in the field of semi-slavery and uncertain barter; in a word, it is
+still in the feudal stage. The woman gives what she is and has, and
+nominally she gets protection and support. Sometimes these fail and, on
+the other hand, she occasionally receives the unearned gifts supposed to
+befit a potentate or a shrine. As women become educated they find this
+condition of uncertainty and instability unbearable. They are willing to
+work, but they must have a chance to think and to plan their lives
+according to their individual needs. Some degree of economic
+independence is necessary to intelligent thinking and orderly living. It
+is not that women are demanding more property; they are demanding some
+definite individual property as a home for their souls; and they are
+coming to realize that if this property rests on some one else's
+feelings and caprices it is no home for the soul; it is only a tavern.
+
+This conception is well illustrated by the case of a woman in western
+New York, who married about 1850, and went to live on a farm with her
+husband. They had small means, but she brought seven hundred dollars to
+the altar, which was more than he possessed in ready capital. Her part
+was, however, soon swallowed up in the general business, and while there
+was a tacit agreement, voiced at long intervals, that she had put
+something into the business, her part never increased, though the man
+with whom she worked grew well-to-do. Certain feudal rights in the
+butter the woman made and in the chickens she raised, yielded her small
+sums, which often escaped her, but which she sometimes secured and put
+into a few silver spoons and dishes for her table, a square of Brussels
+carpet, three lace curtains, a marble topped stand, and six horsehair
+covered chairs for her parlor. These articles were considered in a very
+special sense her own. The man might have sold them and used the money,
+but public opinion would have condemned him had he done so.
+
+Meantime the woman cooked for the family and the hired men, scrubbed
+and washed and mended. She strained and skimmed the milk from a dozen
+cows, and churned the butter; she fed the calves; cared for the hens;
+dug in the garden; gathered the vegetables; did the family sewing; and
+stole fragments of time for her flower-beds. Her hours were from five in
+the morning until nine at night, three hundred and sixty-five days in
+the year, with no half-days or Sundays off.
+
+Incidentally she read her Bible, maintained religious exercises in the
+village, provided the church with a carpet by methods of indirection and
+kept the church clean. She upheld a moral standard toward which men only
+weakly struggled; hunted down and drove away all other women who refused
+equal service to their lords; ministered to the neighboring sick; and
+doled out alms in winter-time. Her home was a social and industrial
+microcosm which she conducted as a feudal holding under the protection
+of her lord. It would be an interesting study to work out the rules of
+this feudal relation between husband and wife in any agricultural
+community. They would be found as varied, as unjust and arbitrary, and
+as generous, as those of the old régime in France.
+
+A woman in a home is supposed to furnish three kinds of service. She
+must be a housekeeper, a wife and a mother. As housekeeper, her services
+can be estimated in current values running from three to twenty-five
+dollars a week with board and lodging. The other two kinds of service
+have never been reduced to monetary values.
+
+As a wife, a woman is supposed to give her love, her person, her
+sympathy and inspiration; the personal care of a husband, including his
+clothes, attention to his relations and friends and general management
+of his social position and reputation. If she fills this position well,
+she is mistress, valet, confidential adviser and public entertainer.
+Possibly these services can be rated except the first, and even here the
+divorce courts scale alienated affections all the way from five hundred
+to twenty-five thousand dollars, according to the appearance of the
+woman and the skill of contending lawyers.
+
+As a mother, the woman is supposed to give children a good heritage,
+nurse them, care for them, doctor them and train them. We have
+established values for these services as wet-nurse, nurse-maid,
+governess, doctor and teacher, but who can estimate a woman's value in
+giving a child a good heritage?
+
+It is no wonder that such a difficult problem has remained thus far
+unsolved. Here and there a man gives his wife a household allowance,
+from the money they earn in common, and she struggles to save from it
+some fragments for her individual needs; others put their wives on a
+salary; and some others divide the income on a fractional basis. But the
+slightest study of existing conditions must convince any one that women
+are everywhere deeply dissatisfied with their economic relations to the
+family. On referring recently to this fact before an audience almost
+equally divided between suffragists and anti-suffragists, I found every
+woman present applauding the statement. Another time when I asked more
+than sixty of the wealthiest women in one of our cities how many were
+dissatisfied with their relations to the family property, explaining
+that I was not asking how many wanted more money but how many wanted a
+different relation to the family money, all the women raised their
+hands except three and they all had private property.
+
+Meantime, economic changes, to be described in the next chapter, have
+transformed our homes and nearly eight million women have gone outside
+to earn money. The gladness with which they have gone shows that they
+were not afraid to work, though at first the money did not belong to
+them, but to their families. Almost everywhere in the United States the
+money women now earn is their own; only in Louisiana can the husband
+collect his wife's wages. Any one who reads Mrs. Gilman's masterly study
+of the evil effects accompanying woman's economic independence must feel
+how far-reaching are not only the discontent but also the evil
+influences of our present system through over-emphasizing sex and
+through corrupting the public thinking and feeling concerning services
+and wages in general.[32]
+
+[32] CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, _Woman and Economics_, Boston: Small,
+Maynard & Co., 1898. See, also, _Woman and Labor_, by OLIVE SCHREINER,
+New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.
+
+Yet no one can seriously approach this problem in his own person
+without feeling that the relations of husband and wife contain elements
+that not only make it impossible to resolve the woman's service into
+money values, but that would make it useless to do so even if it could
+be done. The most distinctive quality of love is its desire to give.
+Love that seeks to get is not love. If when a woman gives herself she
+tries to secure individual property it will be only that she may give it
+to the man she loves. Marriage is a partnership of soul and body, and
+this includes property. It still remains true, however, that each must
+have in order that he may give. Besides this, there are always outside
+obligations, and special needs within the group, that require individual
+property for their realization.
+
+In the past, the partnership of marriage has been incomplete on the
+property side; why not complete it? Why not reorganize our laws and our
+public opinion so that two people who establish a family, putting into
+it all they have, should pay out of the income the necessary family
+expenses and divide all else equally between the parties? Property
+acquired before marriage, and all inherited property, might well be held
+in individual right since it should never be a prize for prostitution,
+not even when it is euphemistically termed "a good home."
+
+Under equal suffrage Idaho has passed such a law, and all property
+gained after marriage belongs equally to husband and wife. If the wife
+dies, her heirs, in absence of a will, inherit half of the family
+property. If the two separate, the court, in absence of an outside
+agreement, settles the property as it does the children. The judge may
+order that it be divided equally, or he may give it all to either party,
+according to conditions; but the woman has identical rights with the
+man. Surely some such solution is demanded by our present unrest. No one
+will ever be economically independent; but husband and wife should be
+economically equal.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Women in Industry
+
+
+In all the animal world one can hardly find a place where orderly
+effort, planned to secure some future advantage, does not appear.
+Getting food, defending life, and caring for offspring have all combined
+to drive not only the descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well, to
+sweat-producing effort. Of course this is not definitely planned;
+getting food often waits on appetite; defense is sometimes merely
+running away; and the young are frequently left to feed themselves or
+die. But the fact remains that in digging burrows, building nests,
+laying up honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing for the young,
+a vast deal of effort is put forth in forest and field which is not
+immediately productive of pleasure.
+
+This work is seldom equally shared by all the members of the group. With
+bees, the drones and the queen are alike exempt from work, and an
+asexual group has been developed to feed and protect them. Some ants
+compel others to do their work; and everywhere there seem to be
+individuals who are constitutionally lazy and others who, because of
+strength or sex attractiveness, are able to get more than their share of
+food and protection with less than their share of effort.
+
+From the first, some division of work between male and female grows
+almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction.
+Following conception, the male can always run away and leave the female
+to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very prone to
+do so. Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly born he
+generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and largely she
+protects and provisions it.
+
+Among domesticated animals, where their working possibilities have been
+very highly developed, females are much more desirable workers than
+males. The maternal function partly explains this, as in the case of
+cows and hens which give us milk and eggs; and even with mares and sheep
+the offspring adds to the general working value. Still, it seems to be
+true that even for purposes of draught, the males are of less value than
+the females, unless reduced to the non-sexual condition of geldings and
+oxen. The stallion, bull or ram is too katabolic, too much of a
+consuming, distributing, destroying force to be very valuable in the
+daily routine of agriculture or commerce. While the female is generally
+smaller and less powerful than the male, she is quiet, easily enslaved;
+and, as we have said, her maternal functions can be diverted to our
+daily use. She produces more workers, and her flesh is more palatable,
+because less distinctive, than that of the male. Hence, among
+domesticated animals, selection, based on considerations of work,
+multiplies females and keeps males only for breeding purposes.
+
+As a quadruped, the female suffers very little handicap from the
+functions peculiar to her sex, except when actually carrying her young
+or nursing them. When she stands erect, however, the support for the
+special organs of reproduction is far from ideal; heavy lifting, or
+long-continued standing, often leads to disaster, and the periodic
+functions, even in the healthiest conditions, must always place women
+at a working disadvantage as compared with men. Add to this the fact
+that women are smaller, less agile, and far less strong, than men, and,
+even when not encumbered with young, it is clear that a woman, when
+confronting physical work in competition with men, needs something more
+than a fair field and free competition.[33] Idealists and travelers
+among primitive people love to tell us how easily women meet their
+special functions, carrying burdens equal to those carried by men when
+on the march, and dropping out from the caravan for only a few hours to
+give birth to a child; but the fact remains that women in all primitive
+societies age quickly and that those who are spoiled are thrown aside
+and forgotten.[34] Woman's handicap as a working animal in competition
+with man is too obvious and too deep-seated to be idealized away.
+
+[33] The Supreme Court of the United States, in passing on the "Oregon
+laundry case," in 1907, declared a bill limiting a woman's working hours
+constitutional. See the _Brief for the State of Oregon_, prepared by
+LOUIS D. BRANDEIS, published by The National Consumers' League, 105 East
+22d Street, New York.
+
+[34] DUDLEY, _Principles and Practices of Gynecology_, pp. 23-24, says
+that among Indian women want of care during and after labor leads to
+numberless evils.
+
+In all savage societies labor is clearly specialized between the sexes.
+The man, because of his superior strength and mobility, fights, hunts
+and makes weapons of the chase. The woman fetches and carries, digs and
+delves, cures the meat, makes the rude huts, clothing and pottery.
+Gradually she changes wild grasses to domesticated plants, and rears the
+young animals brought home from the chase, till they follow and serve
+their human masters. She is truly the mother of industries, and it in no
+way detracts from her credit that her motherhood is here, as elsewhere,
+mainly unthinking.
+
+With the exhaustion of the supply of wild animals, man is forced to turn
+his attention to the world of vegetation and he takes over the direction
+of the plants and animals which woman has largely domesticated. In his
+career as fighter and hunter he has learned to coöperate with his
+fellows to a degree which aids him greatly in dividing the arable land,
+protecting his crops, and using grazing lands in common with the tribe.
+He has also learned to make stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows.
+Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent in her work; such new
+tools as she has devised have been helpful, but men who could not invent
+have been wiped out by those who learned to make stronger spears or
+better arrow-heads.
+
+It is the same difference in adaptability which one observes to-day
+between the farmers on the western frontier of America and those who
+remain in their peasant homes in Europe. The peasant has even greater
+need of inventing than has his expatriated countryman in Colorado, but
+he lacks the driving impulse. It was the same with women and men under
+the conditions of savage life. Thus it came about that man's greater
+strength and mobility, backed by power of coöperation and invention,
+gave him the leadership in such primitive life as we find depicted in
+the pages of Homer or in the epic of the Jews. True, woman was his first
+lieutenant, but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters of the
+industrial life.
+
+With settled conditions and accumulation of wealth, the most desirable
+women were almost entirely freed from physical labor and gradually
+became luxury-loving parasites and playthings, as we pointed out in the
+second chapter of this volume. Meantime slaves were multiplying, male
+and female and, while the most desirable women passed to the harem, the
+mass of them became drudges in house and field. It is hard for us to
+realize that it is exactly in those times when a few women are
+surrounded with great luxury that most of the sex are reduced to heavy
+labor and wretchedness.
+
+During the early Christian ages, a tradition was gradually formed
+concerning woman's place in industry, or rather three traditions were
+formed. The working woman of the lower classes was to be the
+housekeeper, which meant that she was to care for food, cook, spin,
+weave, sew and mend, scrub and wash, bear children and nurse and tend
+them. If she were of the middle class, she was to be a mother, to
+supervise this range of work, look after dependents, conserve social
+conditions and be the lady bountiful of her district. The second ideal
+was the woman of religion, who was to subdue her passions, observe set
+prayers and other religious exercises, and do the menial work of the
+convent. The third ideal was the lady of chivalry, who appeared after
+the tenth century. She was to be cared for and protected from work or
+anxiety; menials were to prepare her food, clothes and ornaments;
+gallants were to await her orders and do her bidding.
+
+With the rise of Protestantism, and later with the rise of modern
+democracy, these ideals were blended, and women found themselves, not
+indeed slaves and subject to sale, but serfs, entangled in a mass of
+feudal obligations and bound to the house. Practically, most men still
+hold this threefold conception of woman's place in the social organism.
+She is to be a combination of housekeeper, nun and lady. It is the
+kitchen, church and children ideal of the German Emperor.
+
+Meantime forces were set at work which were to change the economic
+foundations of the family and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom
+into some new form of industrial relationship. From the rise of the
+European cities in the twelfth century, certain industries have tended,
+especially in the Netherlands and in England, to segregate themselves in
+farm-houses and towns. Women naturally participated in these
+activities, generally taking the least desirable parts. With the freeing
+of the mind, which followed the democratic revolutions at the end of the
+eighteenth century, inventions blossomed out and perfected steam
+engines, cotton gins, spinning jennies, and a thousand other machines
+driven by steam or water power, which have changed the civilization of
+Europe and America. Miss Edith Abbott has shown us how this change,
+involving increasing segregation and specialization, came into America
+even in the pre-Revolutionary time.[35]
+
+[35] EDITH ABBOTT, _Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic
+History_, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1910.
+
+Spinning and weaving industries led the way in this movement, but its
+full force was not felt until the late eighteenth century. Since then,
+one industry after another has left the home for the factory until
+to-day, in all large communities, even the preparation of food
+increasingly goes to the packing-house, the canning establishment, the
+bakery and the delicatessen-store. These industries needed hands, and so
+the women followed them to the factories.
+
+As 1870 marks the beginning of higher education for women, so it also
+marks the beginning of her industrial self-consciousness. The perfecting
+of such inventions as the typewriter, the telegraph and the telephone,
+and the creation of a great variety of office appliances, together with
+the perfecting of highly elaborate means of distribution, like the
+departmental store, called for thousands of cheap workers possessed of
+some slight intelligence but not necessarily having any serious
+preliminary training. Our elementary schools and high schools have
+increasingly turned out a multitude of girls who could meet these
+requirements. The increased cost of living, the lessened labor demands
+of the home, and the attractions of the pay envelope, have called
+millions to work in industrial plants. In 1890, there were 4,005,532
+wage-earning women in the United States; in 1900, 5,319,397; while in
+1910, we have probably nearly 8,000,000.
+
+Like most other great changes in civilization, this industrial
+transformation was neither preceded nor accompanied by any general
+consciousness of what was happening. Daily necessities were offset by
+weekly pay envelopes, or the failures fell out of sight, and so the next
+week and the years followed. Country populations moved away; cities grew
+enormously, leading to congestion in living which, combined with the
+daily absence of women, has often transformed the old time homes into
+communal tiers of tenements occupied, during working hours, only by the
+young and the infirm.
+
+The children of all ages after a while followed their mothers into the
+factories; but the evil effects of child labor were so apparent that
+repressive legislative measures have increasingly raised the age of
+their admission until now, in the more advanced communities, they must
+stay outside the factory doors until they are twelve or fourteen years
+old. Some growing self-consciousness, largely of a police nature, has
+led us to institute measures for the protection of the children who are
+not allowed to work. Schools, playgrounds, day nurseries, institutional
+churches, college settlements and public social centers now bid against
+the streets and vacant lots, the nickel shows and the dancing halls, for
+the children's patronage.
+
+Education, however, true to its origin as the assistant of theology,
+refuses to recognize in any large way the new world into which we have
+come, and where the next generation of children must follow. Manual
+training has, here and there, quieted the fears of some who had
+disturbing visions; and we go on employing an army of unenfranchised,
+celibate women, with little or no industrial experience, to teach ten
+million boys how to be good citizens of a republic, and how to serve in
+a modern industrial army; and ten million girls how to work in shops and
+factories, and how to live without homes. As a consequence, girls come
+up to the factories from their schools with ideals,[36] so far as the
+school has shaped them, founded on unmarried school mistresses and
+George Washington; and they pass, by way of the altar, into cheerless
+tenements which the school still thinks of as places where children are
+cared for, family clothing is made and the family baking is done.
+Practically, of course, most education is given outside the schools, and
+there the evils of an unregulated time of transition are multiplied
+through imitation.
+
+[36] EARL BARNES, Children's Ideals, in _Studies in Education_, Vol. II,
+p. 237; also School Girls' Ideas of Women's Occupations by SARAH YOUNG,
+in _Studies in Education_, Vol. II, p. 259.
+
+The wealth and material comfort produced for the fortunate classes by
+these segregated industries have blinded us to their effects on human
+life, and we have all been bribed to silence concerning everything which
+could discourage enterprise or frighten capital. Like most bribes,
+however, these have largely stopped in the pockets of the exploiters of
+public opinion.
+
+In the opening years of this new century, public consciousness has had a
+wonderful awakening.[37] The popular mind, quickened by universal
+education, and freed from a burden of fixed beliefs, is turning
+restlessly to inquire about everything that affects human life. Work
+could not escape this inquisition, and so we are asking not only for a
+fairer division of the profits of work, but we are also inquiring what
+occupations are unfit for women, with their special limitations and
+obligations. When the work is reasonable, how long should a woman work
+daily? Should she work at night and overtime? Should she work with
+dangerous machinery? Should she handle substances that endanger health?
+Should she be required to stand through hours of continuous work? Should
+she work in bad air, due to dust, moisture, or excessive heat or cold?
+Should she have a decent retiring-room? Some daring inquirers are even
+asking whether industrial efficiency, gained through specialization and
+keying up, may not be purchased at too high a price of mental monotony
+and nervous strain. Most people are content to learn that the effects
+are not immediately destructive to the girls and women involved; but
+some day we shall demand that the barons of industry shall not be
+allowed to squander the heritage of the unborn generations.
+
+[37] C. HANFORD HENDERSON, _Pay-Day_, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co.,
+1911.
+
+Women have themselves done much to quicken this public consciousness.
+Enrolled in labor unions, they have shown power to stand together and
+make sacrifice, as in the shirt-waist makers' strike in New York in
+1908, which commanded the admiration of all fair-minded observers. The
+more fortunately placed women have aided these movements toward
+self-betterment; and, through such organizations as the National
+Consumers' League, they have compelled manufacturers and shopkeepers to
+observe more reasonable hours, pay better wages, and furnish decent
+material conditions for their employees.[38]
+
+[38] See the recent volume, based on investigations made by the National
+Consumers' League, _Making Both Ends Meet_, by SUE AINSLIE CLARK and
+EDITH WYATT, The Macmillan Co., 1911. See, also, _Saleswomen in
+Mercantile Stores_, by ELIZABETH BEARDSLEY BUTLER, published by the
+Charities Publication Committee, for the Russell Sage Foundation, 1912.
+
+The solution of woman's present industrial problem is not an easy task,
+but out of the present unsettlement certain facts are emerging with a
+good deal of clearness. The efficiency in production, secured by
+concentration and specialization, make it certain that the old-time home
+with its multiplied industries will not return, but that more and more
+even of its present lessened activities will be transferred to factories
+and to their equivalents. It is also certain that women are not going to
+be supported in indolence by men, because when deprived of the
+discipline which full participation in life gives, they must always
+degenerate. For themselves, and for the sake of their children, they
+will demand a chance to live abundantly. It is also clear that our
+present chaotic conditions are destructive of health, happy marriages,
+effective homes, and the strong line of descendants which must always be
+the chief care of an intelligent society.
+
+In the first place, then, we must work to produce an entire change in
+our present mental attitude toward organized industries. Our present
+worship of industrial products, no matter how obtained, must give way to
+a recognition of the fact that the chief asset of a nation is its
+people; that a woman is more important than the clothes she makes in
+factories or sells in stores; and that to needlessly destroy or
+scrapheap a working woman is worse than to needlessly destroy or
+scrapheap the finest and most costly machine ever devised by man. Such a
+statement seems to carry conviction in its every phrase, but the fact is
+that we do not believe it, and until we do believe it, there will be
+little help for our present absurd and wretched conditions. Unregulated
+competition, backed by greed of individuals and groups, will go on
+wasting the wealth of women's lives until we cease to be fascinated and
+hypnotized by the display of products which they make possible. Better
+fine women and children, and few things, than stores and warehouses
+crowded with goods, and the women and children of our present factory
+towns. By fixing our attention on people instead of things, we should
+almost certainly secure more and better things; but, regardless of cost,
+we must change the focus of our attention.
+
+In the second place, girls must get ready to be women. The education of
+the home and the school must be unified, and together they must give a
+training that will lead girls into the actualities of the life that lies
+before them. Our present elementary schools, and still more our high
+schools, lead girls neither to intelligent work nor to intelligent
+living as women and mothers. Up to at least the age of fourteen, the
+education should be general, looking to the development of all the
+powers of body, mind and sensibilities. But through all these eight or
+ten years of training, two factors should receive constant and
+intelligent attention. In the first place, we should realize that we are
+not fitting women for drawing-rooms nor for convents, but for a working
+world; therefore well graded and interesting manual training should run
+through all these years and should furnish a well-developed base for
+later special industrial preparation of some kind. In the second place,
+the girls should be taught by men and women, married and unmarried, and
+fine ideals of actual womanhood, not alone in shops and factories, in
+school-rooms, and in professions--but also in homes, should be
+constantly held before them. Our present education leaves this training
+mainly to the homes, and neither the parasitic rich nor our eight
+million wage-earning women, when mothers, can or will attend to it.
+
+After the girl reaches the age of fourteen, she should have at least two
+years of further education in which she could master the details of some
+necessary work which would enable her to look the world in the face and
+offer fair payment for her living. With most girls, this work would be
+connected with children and the service of the home; for domestic
+service, no matter how organized, must always occupy a multitude of
+women. All girls should have at least rudimentary training in these
+matters.
+
+During the period of transition from schools to their own family life,
+the girls might well give a half dozen years to work in factories and
+stores where the conditions should be as good, and as well guarded, as
+in our best school buildings--in factories, in a word, where the
+employers would be willing that their own daughters should work. This is
+surely a fair standard. Work which is not safe or fit for me to do, is
+not fit for me to hire done. If this principle fails, then democracy is
+but a dream.
+
+But during all this period of preparation we should never forget that,
+as Madame Gnauck-Kühne so admirably points out, "women's work has to a
+large extent an episodic character."[39] All women confront romantic
+love, marriage and children; and any woman who misses them misses the
+crowning joy and glory of her life. Vicarious realization may save the
+soul, but it can never fill the place of reality. The man fronts these
+same experiences, but they are not related to his work as they are
+related to the work of women. Surely there can be no doubt that the
+ideal solution, in this period, is a man and woman so deeply bound
+together by love that there is no question of self-protection, either in
+terms of work or money; and the man being freed from the burdens of
+maternity, should mainly earn the income. We shall discuss the new type
+of home and family in a later chapter, but in any home where there are
+children there is need of an intelligent mother's very constant care.
+
+[39] Madame GNAUCK KÜHNE, _Die Deutsche Frau_.
+
+If a happy home were the universal destiny of women, our problem would
+be greatly simplified; but this is far from being the case. Not more
+than one-half of all women over fifteen are married at any one moment.
+From the ages of twenty to thirty-five, one-half are married; but it is
+only from thirty-five to fifty-five that as many as three-fourths are
+married; over fifty-five there are less than one-half married, and most
+of the others are widows.[40] Most of these women who are not married
+must work outside the home, and no girl, rich or poor, should be allowed
+to reach maturity without being prepared to face this possibility. Work
+is not a curse but a blessing; it is an indispensable part of every
+well-ordered life; and without it, the individual and the group will
+certainly degenerate. Rich and foolish parents, who cannot realize this
+basal fact, should nevertheless see that, even as insurance, their
+daughters must be able to pay their way in life, if need comes, without
+selling themselves either in marriage or out. Even if the woman marries
+happily, she is never sure that she may not some day have to face
+self-support, and possibly for more mouths than her own.
+
+[40] B.L. HUTCHINS, Woman's Industrial Career in _The Sociological
+Review_, October, 1909.
+
+But the woman who marries during her adolescent period, between the ages
+of twenty-five and fifty, must also work, and here we meet the hardest
+problem of all. More money is often needed than the man can earn; the
+wife may bring an industrial or professional equipment which is too
+valuable to discard; often the demands of the home, especially where
+there are no children, do not call forth the best energies of the
+woman, and she needs the larger life of outside work. Hence many married
+women must continue to work away from the home. In any of these cases,
+the problem is difficult. Bearing and rearing a child should retire a
+mother from fixed outside occupation for at least a year. Arguments born
+out of conflict cannot change this primitive fact.[41] Women should not
+do shop or factory work during the last months of pregnancy, and babies
+should be nursed from seven to nine months. A baby should be nursed for
+twenty minutes, every two or three hours of its waking time; and since
+it does not always waken regularly, the nursing mother is debarred from
+most continuous work, even if it does not interfere with her
+effectiveness as a milk producer.
+
+[41] Dr. ETHEL VAUGHAN-SAWYER, speaking before the Fabian Women's Group,
+in 1910, said: "Fortunately, after the first two or three months, most
+children will thrive equally well when artificially fed, so long as the
+milk is good and reliable, and is properly prepared." All of our facts
+go to disprove this statement.
+
+The question of maternal care for children after they are weaned is more
+difficult to settle, but notwithstanding certain statistics gathered in
+Birmingham,[42] in February, 1910, which showed that the infant
+mortality among working mothers was one hundred and ninety per thousand,
+while, among those not industrially employed, it was two hundred and
+seventy per thousand, it seems sure that infant mortality is extremely
+high in foundling asylums and in factory homes. In Fall River, where out
+of every one hundred women, forty-five are at work outside the home,
+three hundred and five babies, out of every one thousand born, die
+before they are a year old; while even in New York City, but one hundred
+and eighty-nine out of a thousand die. The natural location of Fall
+River should make it a very healthy city. One remembers, too, the
+classic statement that deaths among little children fell off steadily in
+Paris during the siege of 1870. Little children seem better off even in
+time of war, with the mothers at home, than in time of peace with their
+mothers in the factory.
+
+[42] Pamphlet entitled _Report on Industrial Employment of Married Women
+and Infant Mortality_, signed by Dr. JOHN ROBERTSON, the Medical Officer
+of Health, Birmingham.
+
+A few years ago, we turned to sanitary day nurseries, and to
+pasteurized milk and other prepared baby foods, as the solution for
+neglected or unhygienic feeding. To-day we know that even a dirty and
+ill-conditioned mother secretes better milk for her baby than can be
+prepared in any laboratory. We must wash the mother and feed her the
+milk, and then let her give it to her baby, instinct with her own life.
+It is quite possible that our recent talk of ignorant mother love and of
+the necessary substitution of sanitary nurseries, canned care and
+pre-digested affection must all go the same way. We shall probably get
+our best results by cleaning up the home, enlightening the mother, and
+then letting her love her child into the full possession of its human
+qualities.
+
+Economically, too, at least with factory workers, it is questionable if
+their wages will support sanitary day-nurseries, with intelligent nurses
+for small groups of children, and at the same time pay some one to cook
+and scrub at home. If the mother must still cook and care for her house,
+in addition to her factory work, the burden is too great; and if money
+for nurses must come from the state, or from charity, then we all know
+the danger of such subsidies to industry, in its effect on wages.
+
+Surely the ideal toward which we must work is for the mother, during the
+period when she is bearing and rearing children, to be supported by the
+father of her children. Let her do the work meantime which will best
+care for her children, and at the same time conserve and strengthen her
+powers for the third period of her life.
+
+This period, from fifty to seventy-five years, is now more shamefully
+wasted than any other of our national resources. If one attends a State
+federation of women's clubs one will find nearly every delegate of this
+age. They are women of mature understanding and of ripe judgment, still
+possessing abundant health and strength, and where relieved by economic
+conditions from the necessity of manual work, they have to live such
+irregular and uncertain relations to life as can be maintained by
+mothers-in-law, grandmothers, club secretaries, and presidents of town
+improvement societies. Remove all restrictions on woman's activity, and
+these strong matrons would vitalize our schools, give us decent
+municipal housekeeping, supervise the conditions under which girls and
+women work in shops and factories, and do much to clean up our politics.
+Debarred from direct power as they are, they are still making us decent
+in spite of ourselves.
+
+For the future, then, it seems that we must accept working women in
+every path of life. We must remove all disabilities under which they
+labor, and at the same time protect them by special legislation as
+future wives and mothers. All girls must master some line of
+self-supporting work; and, except in the cases of those who have very
+special tastes and gifts, they should select work which can be
+interrupted, without too great loss, by some years of motherhood. During
+this time, the mother must be supported so that she can largely care for
+her own child, though she must also maintain outside interests through
+work, which will keep her in touch with the moving current of her time.
+Industries must be humanized and made fit for women. The last third of a
+woman's life must be freed from legal limitations and popular
+prejudices, so that we may secure these best years of her life for
+private and public service. And meantime, it is well to remember that
+every step we take in making this a fit world for woman to work in,
+makes it a fit world for her father, her brothers, her lover and her
+husband to work beside her.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+The Meaning of Political Life
+
+
+It is a well-known fact that when words have been long and vigorously
+used they gather within and around themselves varied meanings. Some
+parts of these meanings are remnants of historic, and possibly outworn,
+experience; other parts are the result of more or less deliberate
+perversion under the stress of deep feelings aroused by opposition and
+fighting. This is especially the fate of words in any way associated
+with politics. Think how battered and useless for purposes of ordinary
+discussion "democrat" and "republican" or "socialist" have become in
+America!
+
+In the struggle of the last fifty years over woman's suffrage, most of
+the words involved have undergone such transformations; and so many
+prejudices have become associated with them, that no one can think or
+speak clearly and fairly to-day in these terms. "Woman's Rights,"
+"enfranchisement," "Votes for Women," "suffragette," "polls," "ballot,"
+"political issues," and many other words, have gone through this
+destructive process.
+
+To read some of the most popular literature on this subject one might
+imagine that women had all deserted home and fireside, babies and
+baking, and were lined up, struggling fiercely to deposit certain
+printed slips, called votes or ballots, dealing with esoteric mysteries
+understood only by men like Mr. Bryan or Mr. Roosevelt, in ballot-boxes.
+These receptacles are supposed to be behind, or very near, lawless
+saloons, where gangs of hoodlums are waiting to assault the bearers of
+these mysterious tickets. Thus Miss Seawell writes in the _Atlantic
+Monthly_ for September, 1910: "The trouble would begin with the mere
+attempt of women to deposit their ballots. A dozen ruffians at a single
+polling-place would prevent a single woman from depositing a single
+vote. There can be no doubt that this means would be used by the rougher
+element and that the polls would become a scene of preordained riot and
+disorder." Of course, such statements could not appear in a leading
+magazine, in a land where women have been voting quietly for many years,
+were it not for the perversity of the words which the author tries to
+use, but which really use her. In other periodicals, equally
+respectable, one learns that women, goaded on by the intolerable
+political tyranny of men, have agreed as one soul to advance, with
+ballots in their hands, and sweep graft and greed, drink and all other
+human wrongs, into the sea of oblivion forever. Of course, this is
+nonsense, or worse, and in this chapter I should like to turn away from
+this warfare, leaving even the battered and prejudiced-soaked words
+alone, as much as may be possible, and simply ask: What is political
+life, not as defined in books, but as actually lived by a
+self-respecting farmer or merchant of our acquaintance? What qualities
+does political life presuppose in a participant? How does its use affect
+him? What does it enable him to accomplish? What is the relation of a
+woman--not some militant or unsexed ogre, nor a female breeding animal
+in a harem, but our own sisters, wives and daughters as they really
+are--what is their relation to this mysterious process?
+
+If one approaches the political life of our modern democracies in this
+simple spirit of inquiry it would seem that the first requisite for
+participation is the ability to form sound judgments concerning
+political matters; and all matters are now becoming political which
+affect the welfare of the community. Certainly the citizen cannot devise
+political machinery nor select candidates to work such machinery, much
+less "cast a ballot," until he knows what he wants done. What are some
+of the questions, then, on which he must form judgments?
+
+First of all, he must be prepared to think intelligently about
+protecting his life and property. He must know something of the danger
+of foreign invasion, of the consequent need of a navy and standing army.
+He must make up his mind whether it is necessary to spend $123,000,000
+yearly on an American navy and $156,000,000 on an American army, as we
+are at present doing, that we may be ready to fight England, Germany or
+Japan if at any time we want to do so. He must ask himself whether this
+money might not better be used in fighting ignorance, crime, poverty and
+disease.
+
+The would-be citizen must also think about protecting himself from
+assault as he walks about the streets; about protecting his house from
+thieves as he lies asleep at night. He must have thought about the
+careless use of cars, automobiles, firearms and explosives in general.
+He must consider the danger from fires, contagion, diseases, mobs; he
+must think intelligently about contaminated water and impure foods. All
+these things are necessary for the physical well-being of the community
+life. Of course, if either man or woman cannot think intelligently about
+these things, he ought not to have control of them; he should leave such
+matters to those who can think of them.
+
+In the second place, the would-be citizen must have fairly sound
+judgments on questions of raising and spending necessary revenue. What
+are the effects of direct and indirect taxation? Would a heavy tax on
+land force unused lands, including mines and waterways, into use? Should
+a man with a cash income of $50,000 a year pay more to support
+government than one with a cash income of $500? What are the objections
+to an income tax? How does it work in England, where it has been fairly
+tried? Should a great corporation pay taxes in proportion to its wealth,
+and in places where the wealth is protected by the law? If so, how can
+it be reached? Should churches, museums, libraries and schools be taxed;
+if not, why not? Should taxes be laid on flour, meat and eggs, on woolen
+cloth, on silks, velvets, ostrich plumes and diamonds? Should taxes be
+laid on whiskey, wines, tobacco, cigars and race-tracks? Should taxes be
+devised, or continued, to protect such infant industries as now handle
+our kerosene oil, meat, sugar and steel? Surely no one who cannot form
+independent judgments on these matters should presume to direct them
+through voting.
+
+But not only must a nation raise revenue in the wisest and most
+equitable manner possible, and spend it effectively and economically,
+but it must also care for its present possessions. So the would-be
+citizen must know about the wealth in which he wants to share. What do
+the national, State and municipal governments own? How should the vast
+domains of land, the onetime inexhaustible forests, the mines of coal
+and metal, the waterways and water-powers, the special privileges and
+franchises belonging to the people be used? Should they be thrown away,
+gambled away, given away as favors, rented, sold, or handled directly by
+the people? On what terms or under what guarantees should they be turned
+over to individuals or companies, if this is to be done? Those who
+cannot form judgments on these matters should not be entrusted with such
+vast responsibility, be they men or women.
+
+Questions of our foreign relations must also occupy the thought of the
+citizen. Are foreign entanglements necessary or desirable? If so, with
+what European or Asiatic nations should we seek to strengthen our
+friendship? Are our interests nearly identical with those of England? If
+we formed a close defensive alliance with her should we be thereby
+aiding universal peace as much as we might by maintaining more generally
+friendly relations with all European powers? Would an alliance with
+England probably draw us into her troubles, if she has any, in Egypt or
+India? How would such an alliance affect our relation with England's
+present ally, Japan? Are we fitted by the genius of our institutions
+and by our experience to handle a foreign empire? If not, what should
+we do with the Philippines?
+
+So, too, those who are to direct the destinies of the country must think
+out what our relations are to be with Latin America. In the past some
+statesman, a Richelieu or a Bismarck, had a policy and led his nation to
+it by devious paths of indirection. But now that each citizen is a king,
+he must have a policy for his realm. Are our republican neighbors to the
+south to be increasingly recognized as under our protection and
+direction? If so, how are we to maintain the peace and secure payment of
+their foreign debts? All these problems are bound up with the management
+of the Panama Canal. They confront us in different forms in connection
+with immigration, especially of Asiatics.
+
+Our institutional life must also be regulated by the citizens, and so
+they must have judgments about each of its details. They must know what
+they think about the family, forms of legal marriage and divorce, and
+the care of children when the family fails. The Church must be
+considered and protected; possibly it should be encouraged; and
+possibly its unwarranted assumption should sometimes be checked. Schools
+must be founded, supported, directed. Art galleries, museums and clubs
+must be chartered, and then controlled; and so must all the other
+institutions of our modern society. The would-be citizen must be able to
+think about all this work.
+
+Industries, on which our individual and collective well-being depend,
+must be encouraged by special favors, limited to the public good,
+protected from violence, inspected in the interest of employees. Hours
+must be regulated, disputes settled, conditions of labor and safety
+secured. Children should be protected against employers' greed; and
+working women must receive special consideration, if the race of strong
+men is to continue. Here again the citizen must have judgments, or the
+power to make judgments, as new needs arise.
+
+Then, too, there is a tradition of government, established by the
+fathers and modified by experience, which should be understood by the
+citizens. It recognizes certain rights as being reserved by the
+individual States, and others as belonging to the national government.
+The would-be citizen should be acquainted with this tradition so that he
+can determine how far it is desirable to adopt a new nationalism. He
+will have to pass judgment on the control of interstate commerce,
+national or State control of public lands, national divorce and liquor
+laws, national food inspection, and other practical subjects which may
+destroy the older balance of power so jealously guarded by our earlier
+statesmen. The citizen must make up his mind if this is desirable.
+
+Newer political theories must also receive the citizens' attention. Many
+people believe that wealth created by the people can be enjoyed by the
+people only when they control the sources of supply and the means of
+production and distribution. The citizen should know whether these
+socialist tendencies should be favored or suppressed. There are others
+who believe that government is unnecessary, and that men and women can
+be happy and effective only when formal laws are abrogated. The citizen
+must determine whether he will allow those who hold such doctrines to
+express them; or whether he will suppress their meetings and forbid
+them to enter the country. These are but a few of the subjects
+concerning which the citizen must think, but they are typical and they
+may represent the rest.
+
+In the last analysis, it is these judgments on political matters which
+govern a modern democracy, whatever the laws on the statute books may
+be, and whatever machinery of government may be established.
+
+Not long since, I visited one of our States where the laws forbid any
+one to make or sell, as a beverage, any intoxicating liquors, within the
+State. At the leading hotel, in the large city where I stopped, beer and
+whiskey signs were displayed outside the entrance; and at an open bar,
+in the center of the hotel, four bartenders were dispensing all kinds of
+drinks, while at the tables of the hotel restaurant, liquors were openly
+bought and drunk. There are many indictments standing against this
+hotel, but in two test cases juries have refused to convict the
+proprietors. I am told it is the same in all of the principal hotels in
+the larger cities of this State. In this same State, the laws forbid the
+manufacture or sale of cigarettes, but they are openly displayed and
+sold in nearly all cigar stores. In the same State, whites and blacks
+live under the same laws, but blacks seldom vote; they do not use the
+parks, attend white people's meetings nor ride with the whites in public
+conveyances. And yet the city was quiet and orderly and I felt as safe
+in person and property as though the laws on the statute books, instead
+of the judgments in the public mind, were being obeyed. Since this form
+of public opinion is so powerful, it is well that it should be
+intelligent.
+
+Granted, then, that the candidate for citizen honors is prepared to pass
+judgment on such matters as we have indicated, he must next be prepared
+to devise and control means to carry these judgments into effect. Here
+he approaches the problems of statescraft. He must have in his mind a
+general scheme of government, with a sense of legislative, judicial and
+executive functions. He must realize the value of a constitution, as a
+point of departure; and have a theory as to safe ways of modifying it.
+He must have fairly clear notions of legislation, and of the kinds of
+laws that are desirable and effective. He should know how far
+representative legislative bodies can be trusted to express the will of
+the people; and he should have studied the working of the initiative and
+the referendum. It is also desirable that he should know the theory of
+two chambers, and should have ideas as to how the members of the second
+chamber, if there is to be one, should be chosen.
+
+The candidate for citizen honors should know something of the
+organization of the judicial branch of government. He should know
+something of the powers and duties of local magistrates, of county,
+State and national courts. He should recognize the difference between
+civil and criminal jurisdiction. He should have an opinion as to whether
+judges should be elected or appointed, and if appointed, who should
+select them. He should realize the grave dangers that surround a corrupt
+judiciary, and he should know the means by which a court is enabled to
+maintain its standing and authority.
+
+So of the executive power, he should see its relation to the other
+powers, from the constable to the president. He should know the
+qualities required in a good executive and should be able to
+distinguish them in possible candidates. He should know that when the
+executive is lax the best of laws fall into abeyance, and he should know
+how such officers can be held up, through criticism by public opinion
+and penalties, to the fulfilment of duties. The recall should have been
+considered.
+
+In the third place, the citizen should know how to select the right kind
+of people to carry his political judgments into effect. Possibly, under
+a representative form of government, this is the most necessary
+qualification for a good voter. Many of the matters with which modern
+government must deal are technical, and the citizen here, as in his
+private affairs, must rest on the judgment of those he employs. And yet,
+in general, he must know what he wants.
+
+He must know the general laws that govern the organization of parties;
+and he should be somewhat acquainted with the psychology of crowds. He
+should know how candidates are selected under the convention or caucus
+system; he should have an independent judgment on direct primaries.
+
+In selecting men, the citizen must be able to recognize general ability
+and intellectual fitness. It is at this point that modern democracies
+are most apt to go wrong. The standards by which we measure men and
+women are most imperfect; and we are prone to let one good or bad
+quality overshadow all others. Thus in an extended study on school
+children's attitude toward Queen Victoria in England, and toward
+President McKinley in America, made while these rulers were alive, we
+found that less than twenty per cent. mentioned any kind of political
+ability, nor did they often mention their general ability, nor their
+honesty. They admired them primarily because they were "good and kind."
+In other words the school children of these two lands approve their
+rulers because, in a vague general way, they like them.[43] The
+significance of the study lies in the fact that in all democracies a
+large number of the voters live on an intellectual plane represented by
+these school children.
+
+[43] EARL BARNES, _Studies in Education_, Vol. II, pp. _5-80_.
+Philadelphia, 1902.
+
+This conclusion is borne out by the judgment of Miss Jane Addams who,
+writing of foreign voters about Hull House, says: "The desire of the
+Italian and Polish and Hungarian voters in an American city to be
+represented by 'a good man' is not a whit less strenuous than that of
+the best native stock. Only their idea of the good man is somewhat
+different. He must be good according to their highest standard of
+goodness. He must be kind to the poor, not only in a general way, but
+with particular and unfailing attention to their every want and
+misfortune. Their joys he must brighten and their sorrows he must
+alleviate. In emergency, in catastrophe, in misunderstanding with
+employers and with the law, he must be their strong tower of help. Let
+him in all these things fill up their ideal of the 'good man' and he has
+their votes at his absolute disposal."[44]
+
+[44] JANE ADDAMS, _Democracy_, p. 221. New York: The Macmillan Co.,
+1902.
+
+To be a safe citizen one must be able to go beyond this kindly feeling
+and ask, Does the candidate know enough to do what I want done? Has he
+the honesty to resist the temptation to exploit me? Has he the
+leadership to command the best efforts of the subordinates in his
+department? Has he serious defects that may cause his failure? Is he an
+opportune man for the time and place?
+
+This selection is made very difficult to-day by the misrepresentation of
+interested individuals and political parties; and especially by the
+reports in the press, which seek to discredit candidates they oppose,
+and to gloss over or deny defects in their chosen leaders. Thus the
+whole public atmosphere in the midst of a campaign is intended to
+confuse and bewilder the citizen who is honestly seeking the best
+candidate. Only ripened intelligence, experience with men and women, and
+ability to judge conflicting evidence, can enable the voter to select
+wisely.
+
+In the last place, if the citizen knows what he wants, how to devise the
+governmental machinery to get it, and how to select the right men to see
+that it is done, he must register his desire by a vote; and then watch
+his servant carefully to see if he justifies the trust imposed in him.
+If he does not, then the citizen must criticise, threaten, and, if
+necessary, finally dismiss the unfaithful employee. Only one who can
+fulfil all these functions can be considered a desirable citizen from
+the point of view of a modern democracy. "Eternal vigilance is the price
+of liberty."
+
+And why should one desire to undertake this arduous responsibility? In
+the first place, because he wants the public work well done, as he
+understands it; and the only way to have it done in this manner is to
+attend to it himself. If he does not attend to it, some one else will do
+so; and if the intelligent citizens do not look after it then the public
+business will be exploited by individuals, or groups, in their own
+interest; and, before the citizen realizes what is happening, he will be
+deprived of that political liberty to secure which millions of men and
+women have struggled and suffered and even given their lives in the
+years which lie behind us.
+
+And yet possibly the most important value of participation in political
+life to-day is the byproduct of continuous education which it gives.
+Modern political life has probably done more to train the men involved
+in it than have schools or churches. Business and industries alone might
+claim to be its rivals. In a despotism, all the events of public life
+are uncertain and seemingly accidental, depending as they do on the
+caprice of an individual. This discourages thought among the masses,
+paralyzes action, and breeds inertia and hopelessness. At best, it gives
+rise to periods of desperation and violence; at its worst, it gives us
+the hopeless masses of Mohammedan lands. In a free democracy, on the
+other hand, those who participate are in a continuous process of
+education, judging, selecting, willing, and always with regard to
+realities that affect daily life. Citizenship gives one a continuous
+laboratory course of training in the art of right living.
+
+Nor can the full value of this continuous training be obtained by the
+onlooker, no matter how intelligent he may be. For full growth of mind
+and spirit one must participate; just as in athletics one must leave the
+spectator's bench and play the game if one would develop one's own
+powers. Participation means love, hate, devotion and sacrifice, and only
+when all these powers of the soul are brought into play, together with
+the judgment, is the character strengthened and life more abundantly
+obtained.
+
+It must be evident to any one who has carefully followed this analysis
+that hardly any of the adult male voters in our modern democracies have
+the qualifications of good citizens. How, then, is good government
+achieved? It is not achieved. We have very bad government. Everywhere
+there is waste and inefficiency. Wealth is unjustly divided; great
+corporations seize public utilities and exploit them for private gain;
+enormous sums are squandered on unnecessary and dangerous battle-ships
+and soldiers; in building a single State Capitol, $3,500,000 was
+recently stolen, not only wasting public wealth, but corrupting public
+morals; in some parts of our land little children still drive the wheels
+of industry; and it is everywhere cheaper to scrap-heap men and women
+than machines; most of our cities are ugly and badly ruled; drunkenness,
+gambling and prostitution are common; life is not always secure from
+lawless attack; and the machinery of justice is clogged and moves
+slowly. Part of our intelligent adult population has no direct share in
+the government under which it must live. We have just such a government
+as we should expect where incompetent people decide such vast issues of
+life.
+
+But, on the other hand, we are vastly better off than any great people
+has ever been before us. The mistakes are our own; they are made by us
+who participate in government, and we are learning from them. Those who
+exploit us may be called to account; and frequently they are caught and
+punished. Of those who stole the millions in Harrisburg, nearly a score
+have died disgraced, or are in prison or exile; and $1,300,000 has been
+returned to the treasury of the State. Even when those who betray us are
+not caught red-handed we learn to distrust and then to despise them.
+They pass their last years in exile, and when their statues are erected
+in our State Houses they are memorials of shame. Thus we learn the art
+of living, we who participate in political action.
+
+The whole business of a modern democracy is to educate itself through
+doing, and we are all at school. If the bills are heavy, they are our
+bills; and we are steadily learning how to make them less. In the past
+no one learned. "The Bourbons learned nothing, and forgot nothing;" and
+the common people were too discouraged to think. It is on these lines
+that our modern democracies must be judged, not as efficient and
+economical political machines, but as educational institutions. Judged
+by this standard, we believe ourselves to be the triumph of the ages.
+
+Nor can it be possible for people to enter political life fully prepared
+for its duties. Even when a young man approaches a business career we do
+not ask that he shall possess a knowledge of the business before
+beginning. If he has general preparation, and a desire to learn, he is
+admitted to share in its responsibilities, and then learns as he goes
+along. It is the same in political life; few young men at twenty-one or
+foreigners at the time of naturalization, have the knowledge indicated
+in the preceding pages. If they have general preparation and a desire to
+learn, we admit them to participation, and they learn through doing.
+
+Years ago, while discussing education with an English statesman, he
+asked whom I considered the leaders of education in his country. Knowing
+his Tory instincts, I replied, "Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, William T.
+Stead, John Burns and Keir Hardie." He laughed contemptuously: "Why
+those people," he said, "are merely educating themselves in public." The
+statement was true and far-reaching; that is what we are all doing in
+our modern democracies; and that is at the same time our weakness and
+our glory.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Woman's Relation to Political Life
+
+
+In discussing woman's right to vote it is well to remember that the
+right to rule, which is implicit in the right to vote, has always been
+limited by conditions of birth, residence, wealth, morality or
+intelligence. Universal manhood suffrage has never yet been achieved,
+and probably never will be. Under the best Greek conditions, it was only
+the free-born citizen, residing in his native city state, who voted. In
+both Greece and Rome, the suffrage was limited to classes defined by
+social position, wealth or military service. In our modern democracies
+there have always been limitations of birth, which might be overcome by
+naturalization; of residence, which could be overcome by living for a
+certain time in a locality; of wealth, which was supposed to insure a
+stake in the communal well-being; and of morals and intelligence, which
+at least shut out criminals, the insane and the imbeciles.
+
+Thus the right to vote is not the same thing as the right to live; and
+even in a commonwealth founded on ideal justice only those having a
+stake in the community life, and possessing normal intelligence and
+morality, will be allowed to rule. In a word, equal suffrage is
+possible, while universal man or woman suffrage is not.
+
+All through our colonial period women had a large influence in
+determining community questions, and in Massachusetts, under the old
+Providence Charter, they voted for all elective officers for nearly a
+hundred years. Here and there women--like Margaret Brent, of Maryland;
+Abigail Adams, of Massachusetts; or Mrs. Corbin, of Virginia--put
+forward their right to participate in the public life around them. But,
+in 1776, women were not voting, and the Federal Constitution left the
+matter of determining electoral rights to the several States. They all
+decided for male suffrage.
+
+The initial impulse to secure suffrage for American women came from
+Europe. After the Revolution, Frances Wright, a young Scotchwoman, came
+to America to lecture and write, claiming equal political rights with
+men. In 1836, Ernestine L. Rose came from Poland and also advocated
+equal political rights. All the teachings of the American Revolution had
+favored the idea of human equality; and, as has been pointed out, when,
+with established peace after the War of 1812, women engaged in
+anti-slavery, temperance and allied movements, they were driven by the
+logic of events to demand the suffrage.
+
+In 1848, the women of the country began to organize. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady
+Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Martha C. Wright called together at Seneca
+Falls, New York, the first convention in America to further equal
+suffrage. No permanent organization was founded, but in 1850 a
+convention was held in Salem, Massachusetts, and in 1852 a Woman's
+Rights Convention was called in Syracuse, New York, with delegates
+present from eight States and Canada. Miss Susan B. Anthony had meantime
+joined the movement; and from this time on conventions and appeals
+became common.
+
+The Civil War distracted attention from all social and political issues
+but one. The Equal Rights Association turned its attention mainly to the
+rights of negroes; and in 1869 the National Woman's Suffrage Association
+was organized to work exclusively for woman's rights. Backed by such
+women as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, and aided by
+men like Henry Ward Beecher, the association became a national power. In
+1890, the two organizations were united under the name of The National
+American Woman's Suffrage Association. This organization still leads the
+movement in America.[45]
+
+[45] _The History of Woman Suffrage_, by ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, SUSAN
+B. ANTHONY, and IDA HUSTED HARPER, 4 vols. Rochester, N.Y.
+
+In 1902, an international meeting was called in Washington; and in 1904
+the International Suffrage Alliance was formed in Berlin with Mrs.
+Carrie Chapman Catt as president. Thirteen nations are now affiliated
+with the Alliance; and the women of the world are highly organized to
+further equal suffrage.
+
+Two generations of women have given themselves to this movement, and a
+third still faces it. To the first group belong those leaders we have
+already named: Emma Willard, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe,
+Susan B. Anthony and their associates. It was their problem to secure
+woman's control of her own body and property, some share in the
+direction of her children, and some opportunity to train her own mind
+and earn an independent living. These women bore the heat and burden of
+a conflict in which all the blind prejudices of a fixed régime were
+strongly massed, presenting few promising points of attack. It is small
+wonder that some of these leaders gained a reputation for being hard,
+dogmatic, aggressive, and sometimes careless of popular sensibilities.
+The first generation of reformers in any field must be made of stern
+stuff; and their beneficiaries are apt to forget the conditions that
+justified means no longer necessary.
+
+The lives of these women could not be expected to fully illustrate the
+type of life they hoped to see their sisters living when opportunity was
+finally won. Only women who participated in this struggle could fully
+appreciate the splendid devotion of these lives to the service of a
+group many of whom, being personally comfortable, were insensible to the
+needs of less fortunate women; and were sometimes even willing to fight
+back any advanced ideas which might disturb their own comfort. The
+feeling within this group of leaders, and the failure of oncoming
+generations of American women to recognize the debt of obligation they
+owe to its efforts, was illustrated by an incident that came up in
+connection with the Third International Congress of Women which met in
+London in 1899. The session was opened in Westminster Town Hall, with
+seven hundred delegates present, representing the most thoughtful women
+of the world. Lady Aberdeen was in the chair, and Mrs. Creighton, wife
+of the late Bishop of London, was reading a paper. In the midst of deep
+attention, a door at the rear of the platform was gently opened, and
+Miss Susan B. Anthony stepped onto the stage. She had just arrived from
+America. Her strong figure was bent with the weight of years; her face
+was squared by the conflict and partial ostracism she had met; but her
+glance had lost none of its stern kindliness, and her bearing none of
+its indomitable courage. As she appeared, this most representative
+audience of women in the world sprang to its feet and burst into wild
+cheering. In vain did Lady Aberdeen rap for order and beg the audience
+to let Mrs. Creighton proceed. Not until Miss Anthony came to the front
+and urged the women to sit down was quiet restored. These women knew the
+price of a life which their champion had paid for their opportunities.
+
+A few months after this the school children of the prosperous city of
+Rochester, N.Y., where Miss Anthony had been a leading citizen for many
+years, were asked to write school compositions in which they named the
+person they would most wish to be like. Over three thousand girls, in
+the elementary grades, wrote these papers, but not one chose Miss
+Anthony. This first generation of women reformers could not establish
+the type of womanhood for the modern world; they had not the leisure,
+nor the freedom, nor could they see all that lay in the future. But all
+the more, because their lives were hard, should they be held in grateful
+remembrance.
+
+To the second generation of leaders belong women like Alice Freeman
+Palmer, Mary Sheldon Barnes and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They came on
+the scene when the first campaign had been won; they could command their
+own bodies and property; college doors were swinging open where they
+could secure the training that should fit them for the struggle to win
+educational, industrial, social and political opportunity for all their
+sisters. They were still looked upon as blue-stockings and queer; they
+had often to serve as the butt of ridicule; but they had education,
+income, a certain degree of leisure, and a social recognition which, if
+grudging in some quarters, was all the more generous in others.
+
+With the rapid development of higher education, these women found
+themselves associated with large groups of independent women who could
+create a society of their own in advanced centers of population. There
+was still much to be done in securing opportunity for women; but they
+could go on establishing the type of life that free women were to live.
+Their problems were, however, even more complex than those which
+confronted their predecessors. What line of education should women
+pursue? What lines of work could they best undertake? How could they
+combine an independent professional or industrial career with the life
+of a home and the responsibilities of a mother? How far must older
+social restraints be modified in the interest of intellectual and
+industrial freedom? It was a time for constructive statesmanship, rather
+than for revolution; and each woman knew she was under criticism, and
+that her success or failure was vastly more than her own personal
+concern. In her all free women were being judged.
+
+To the third generation belongs the host of women who are to-day filling
+our college halls, managing the women's clubs, teaching the state
+schools, and competing with men in every industrial calling. Theirs is
+the task of completing woman's social and political emancipation, and of
+educating them to meet their newfound liberties. It is possible that
+this present generation has a keener sense of rights than of duties; and
+the young women of to-day must be led to realize that the delicate
+adjustments still to be worked out require devotion equal to that of
+the earlier generations, if the toll of wasted life is not to be
+excessive.
+
+What now is the relation of women to the range of political activity
+described in the last chapter? Have they need of the protection which
+government gives? Are they able to form political judgments? Have they
+knowledge of the working of political machinery; or, lacking it, are
+they prepared to obtain it? Are they able to make a wise selection of
+people to represent them in political action? Have they need of the
+training which participation in political life gives? Have they the
+preliminary preparation to take up that training to advantage, and can
+they undertake these duties without serious loss of qualities desirable
+in women?
+
+Women certainly have need of protection; each has a life dear to her,
+and honor which is dearer to her than life. In this respect she has a
+greater need than men. Most women, also, have property of some kind, and
+we are increasingly recognizing their right to control this for
+themselves; hence they need property protection the same as men. We do
+not need to think of Mrs. Sage, Mrs. Harriman, Miss Gould or Mrs.
+Green, in this connection, for in every community we now have many women
+who are immediately responsible for large property interests which new
+legislation might affect most seriously.
+
+In matters of institutional regulation by government, women are at least
+as vitally interested as men. In all that touches the family, marriage,
+or divorce, women have more at stake than men; and there are as many
+wives as husbands involved. The schools are also nearer to women than to
+men; more girls than boys attend them; more women are teachers; and more
+women than men are interested parents of school children. The church is
+also more vital to women to-day than to men. On the side of industries,
+it is clear that our 8,000,000 independent wage-earning women have a
+desperate stake in all governmental action touching the regulation of
+working conditions. In whatever concerns general sanitation, safe water,
+and pure foods, all are equally interested who must breathe and eat to
+live. Surely the need of women for political protection is quite as
+great as that of men.
+
+In the matter of forming political judgments, not even the wisest men
+are beyond improvement. International affairs, monetary systems, the
+best way of raising taxes, and similar problems, often divide the male
+electorate pretty evenly into rival parties. Since both cannot be right,
+a great deal of poor political thinking must be done by the present body
+of voters. Meantime, women are showing their ability to deal
+intelligently with all sorts of subjects in our educational
+institutions, in business and in social life. Their judgments command
+respect in every other field; and it is hard to see why they could not
+apply their powers to political questions.
+
+We must remember, too, that during these last years the field of
+political life has been rapidly broadening, through the awakening of
+social consciousness among the people. To concern one's self with
+politics now is to be interested in good market facilities, in rapid
+transit for cities, in recreation centers for children, in honest
+labelling of food products, in reformation of criminals, in preventing
+marriage among the unfit, and in a hundred similar matters. Here women
+will doubtless bring us a strong addition to our political efficiency.
+They have long been considered the natural directors of social life and,
+in spite of being disfranchised, they mainly handle such matters at
+present. Now that these subjects are being brought into the political
+field, women should follow them there, as they have followed their
+industries from the homes into the factories. There is no reason to
+believe that their judgments will be less sound than those of their
+brothers and husbands.
+
+Of course, women's knowledge of means and methods is much less than that
+of men in their own class. Not only have they not participated in
+political life, but they have been steadily warned away from that
+particular tree of knowledge. Yet the present generation of women has
+gone through the same preliminary education in schools with its
+brothers; and many women in high schools and colleges have made a more
+extended study of political institutionalism. Still more important, more
+than a million women have been educating themselves for some years in
+this direction through voluntary associations of some kind; while in
+most States they have had some political practice through limited
+suffrage, and in a few States full experience.
+
+In selecting representatives to carry out their will, women have certain
+obvious defects of temperament and training. Having been brought up for
+generations to judge men only as providers of sustenance and fathers of
+children, they must at first find it difficult to consider candidates
+impersonally. Still, their general morality and their standards of right
+are probably superior to those of men, and they are more intolerant of
+faults, and they find it harder to compromise on matters of character
+than do men. One can hardly believe that 1,700 women could be found
+among the respectable, church-going, American-born residents in any
+county of America, who would sell their votes, year after year, as that
+number of men voters has recently confessed to doing in Adams County,
+Ohio. In fact, Judge Blair says: "There was one class of the population
+which rebelled against the practice. It was the womanhood of Adams
+County, which had never become reconciled to the custom, and whose
+continual hostility has resulted finally, I hope, in its
+abolishment."[46]
+
+[46] Seventeen Hundred Rural Vote-Sellers, by A.Z. Blair, _McClure's
+Magazine_, November, 1911.
+
+Of the need of women for the training which participation in political
+life gives there can be no doubt. Their lives have always been directly
+dependent upon other individuals, and they are prone to think in small
+details. Any training which extends the horizon of their interests and
+enables them to deal more largely with these details will fit them
+better for living in a world where industrial, business and social
+changes are so rapidly merging details in larger wholes. Experience in
+selecting candidates for public office would also do much to broaden
+women's judgments of life, and would help to break down the pettiness
+which sometimes characterizes their personal relations.
+
+In the case of women, the community has a double reason for desiring
+that they shall develop political judgments and become acquainted with
+political methods. It is not only that they may share in the general
+intelligence and carry their fair part of the political burdens; but
+they have become the teachers, both in homes and schools, of the
+oncoming generation of male voters. We no longer live in small
+communities where children can see the simple processes of government
+operating around them, but in a complex civilization where it must all
+be interpreted to them, and mainly by women. Many boys who complete our
+elementary schools never work a day under the direction of a man. In the
+homes, busy fathers increasingly turn over the training of children to
+their wives. How can these women train safe citizens for the future if
+they do not understand the processes involved well enough to use them
+themselves?
+
+Meantime the old arguments against woman suffrage are too outworn to
+need serious attention. In the past decades our civilization has become
+so complex, with so many groups carrying on differentiated functions,
+that even if we had not the millions of educated, property-owning,
+wage-earning, voting women that now fill our public life, the old
+arguments would still be obsolete. The issues of life are no longer
+primarily military, and but a fraction of men voters is capable of
+meeting modern requirements as policemen and soldiers; in time of
+crisis, all men would be called into the reserves; but in such periods
+women have always fought in the breach, from Carthage to Paris. Still,
+in modern warfare, those who guard the rear and furnish supplies are as
+necessary as those who go to the front.
+
+It has also long been recognized that women who rear finest sons and
+daughters must sometimes turn away from the cradle to refresh their
+lives with the touch of other interests. It has also been demonstrated a
+thousand times over that women do not incite the lawless element to riot
+about the polls; but that, instead, their presence tends to remove the
+polling-place from the saloon and make it safer for men to go there on
+election-day. The plea that women would introduce a new element of sex
+into politics, thereby confounding its real issues, is certainly not
+well grounded. Sex has always played a great part in politics, as it has
+in all the vital affairs of life. In the open competitions of education,
+business or politics, sex ceases to be as significant as it is in the
+drawing-room.
+
+Nor do thoughtful people imagine to-day that if women participated in
+political life they would suddenly bring about a reign of universal
+peace and righteousness. It has taken many centuries for men to learn to
+play the game of politics indifferently well as they do. The first
+effect of woman's participation would probably be to lower the
+efficiency of the electorate in some directions; but they are starting
+much farther along than men began, and they would learn more rapidly
+than men have learned.
+
+It is often claimed that women do not want to vote; and, of course,
+there are many who do not care to assume such arduous and often
+difficult duties, if they can avoid it. The same holds true of many
+intelligent, but selfish men who desire the advantages of good
+government without its burdens. All such must be urged to do their duty
+to the state. Those who have vision and a large sense of duty can be
+trusted to do their fair part in caring for the public welfare. Those
+who wish to enjoy the benefits of peace and settled government,
+participating in the advantages of education, engaging in business, and
+having their persons and property protected, without sharing the burdens
+of government, should be forced to play their part.
+
+If a woman should board a street-car to-day and, when asked for her
+fare, should hide her face with womanly modesty and declare that she did
+not wish to be involved in such public matters, but preferred that the
+man swinging on the strap before her should pay, she would be informed
+that all who use the cars must pay for their maintenance. Women in
+America now have more than their share of education and leisure. If they
+do not wish to pay their fair proportion of service, they should
+withdraw from the high schools and colleges, from literature and music,
+from offices and factories, and not crowd into places where they are
+unwilling to play the game. The woman who leads the movement against
+equal suffrage in England has made a fortune in the open market as a
+writer, protected by the national copyrights; she maintains a house
+where she is protected in person and property by the city of London, the
+organization and administration of which calls for the constant
+attention of all intelligent citizens; and yet she urges women to take
+what they can get, but to refrain from doing their fair share of the
+city and national housekeeping, lest they lose their feminine charm.
+Surely those who profit by government should give their share of
+service.
+
+It is idle to claim that equal suffrage will make no change in women. It
+will certainly accentuate the changes already made by higher education
+and by a freer business life. Some loss there must inevitably be in any
+such far-reaching change. We lost something of chivalry and of the
+spirit of _noblesse oblige_ in the transition from feudalism to
+democracy. In transferring causes of personal difference from the
+dueling field to the courts of law, we lost a degree of poetic feeling
+and tragic exaltation, of personal initiative and physical courage. So
+when women passed from slavery to serfdom we lost something of male
+dominance and of female submission. We shall lose something in the
+present transition; but one must be content to lose Louis XIV and
+Versailles if one thereby finds modern France; one must be satisfied to
+lose an institution which gave us the tragically pathetic death of
+Alexander Hamilton, if it increases human justice and saves fathers to
+their families. We must even be content to lose the languishing and
+weeping lady of chivalry, and the coquetting, crocheting and confiding
+maiden of the eighteenth century if we gain in return fair minded
+comrades in daily living, devoted partners in family life, and strong,
+intelligent mothers for the coming generations. The sex instinct needs
+no fostering; it has led us to our best developments in civilization;
+and its work has only begun.
+
+So far we have taken the popular position, and have discussed this
+matter as though it were still in the period of debate. The fact is, it
+long ago passed from the field of theory; it is now a condition. In six
+of our States, women have now full participation in managing public
+affairs. In Wyoming, since 1869; in Colorado, since 1893; in Idaho,
+since 1896; in Washington, beginning in 1910; and in California, since
+1911, women have been sharing the vote with men. In twenty-nine States
+they have school suffrage, and in many places municipal suffrage.[47] In
+newer parts of the world, like New Zealand and Australia, women have
+complete suffrage, while in old countries, like Norway, Sweden and
+Finland, they have essentially all the rights of men. In England, there
+are 1,141 women on Boards of Guardians and 615 on Educational
+Committees; and they are demanding full participation in all political
+life. In Canada they have school and municipal suffrage. It is no longer
+a time for argument; it is time for adjustment.
+
+[47] BERTHA REMBAUGH, _The Political Status of Women in the United
+States_, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912, gives complete information to date.
+
+Meantime the results of woman's full participation in political life,
+even where they have had the suffrage for some years, are difficult to
+determine, because of the fact already pointed out that political life
+in a modern democracy is so closely bound up with all the other life
+about it. It is quite as difficult to estimate these effects as it would
+be to estimate the effects of housekeeping or of woman's special
+costume. And yet some results are clear enough to have a large bearing
+on the extension of woman's suffrage in new localities.
+
+In 1906, the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League engaged Miss Helen Sumner
+to make a careful study of the actual working of equal suffrage in the
+State of Colorado. Miss Sumner, aided by several assistants, spent
+nearly two years in the investigation. She gathered and carefully
+analyzed written answers to an extended set of questions from 1,200
+representative men and women of Colorado, some opposing and some
+favoring equal suffrage; and she and her assistants interviewed many
+more. They also made a general study of industrial conditions and of
+legislation for the State as a whole, and a detailed study of election
+records and newspaper files for representative cities and counties. Her
+report is a masterpiece of patient research and scientific
+exposition.[48]
+
+[48] HELEN L. SUMNER, _Equal Suffrage. The Results of an Investigation
+Made in Colorado for the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York
+State._ New York: Harper & Bros., 1909.
+
+Equal suffrage goes back to 1893 in Colorado; and while the influence of
+women has been in no way revolutionary, this report shows that, on the
+whole, political conditions have improved and woman's intelligence and
+her general public spirit have increased with no appreciable loss in
+distinctive feminine charm. One cannot help feeling as one reads this
+report that it is what a disinterested observer would have to say about
+the effect of woman's larger educational or industrial life since 1870.
+
+In all democracies it is difficult to bring voters to the polls unless,
+as in some Swiss cantons, they are fined for absence. In Colorado, Miss
+Sumner shows that women cast about forty per cent. of the total vote in
+the earlier years of their enfranchisement, though they were in a
+minority of the total population.[49] In the work of the primaries they
+were in a much smaller minority, except when some special problem or
+candidate appealed to them. The more intelligent the community, the
+larger the woman's vote; and it is largest of all in the best residence
+districts of Denver, the capital city. The vote of American born women
+is larger than that of foreigners; and while the prostitutes of Denver
+have been voted in the interests of the party in power, public opinion
+is steadily making this more difficult. In Idaho, all residents of the
+red light district have been disfranchised by statute; and practically
+they do not vote.
+
+[49] Mr. LAWRENCE LEWIS, in the _Outlook_, for January 27, 1906,
+analyzes the election returns for parts of Pueblo City and vicinity, and
+he finds from 25 to 46 per cent. of the vote was cast by women, and the
+proportion of women increased with the intelligence and _morale_ of the
+precinct.
+
+There is no appreciable tendency on the part of women to form a new
+party, nor to favor their own sex. They are more inclined than men to
+scratch the ticket and, as illustrated in the case of Judge Lindsey,
+they sometimes rally efficiently around an independent candidate,
+especially on a moral issue. On the whole, women vote with their
+husbands, just as sons vote with their fathers; but the strength of the
+family vote, as compared with the vote of unsettled people, is certainly
+desirable.
+
+Since the beginning of equal suffrage, Colorado has fully held her own
+with other States in advanced legislation, especially in social and
+educational lines. Women have suffered no insult at the polls, and on
+the whole polling-places have improved; but how far this is due to
+women's presence no one can say. Women have occasionally held
+legislative and executive offices; but they have especially
+distinguished themselves as State and county superintendents of schools.
+
+When it comes to estimating the effect of voting on the women
+themselves, it is still harder to form an opinion. A large majority of
+those reporting to Miss Sumner think that women have become more
+intelligent and more public-spirited, but some doubt it. Morally, they
+have shown themselves less corrupt than men; but a considerable number
+think women as a whole have suffered some deterioration. This is a
+question bound up with our deepest feelings and our most conservative
+ideals; and it is inevitable that some observers should find any change
+for the worse. On the whole, belief in equal suffrage seems to have
+increased in Colorado during the twelve years under survey. Probably the
+results are much what they would be if one were to study a group of the
+most intelligent and refined men in the same community.
+
+During the summer of 1911, I spent a month in the State of Idaho; and as
+I had long been interested in the problem of equal suffrage, both in
+England and America, I seized eagerly on the opportunity to study its
+practical workings at first hand. On the streets and in the tram-cars,
+in hotel lobbies and in lecture halls, when dining out or when making a
+call, few people escaped inquisition. I interviewed working men and
+women, men of affairs, ranchers, sheep raisers and miners, doctors,
+lawyers, teachers, ministers and practical politicians, both men and
+women.
+
+The thing that first impresses one who has been intimately in touch with
+the excited and turbulent condition of mind among the English
+suffragettes, and the sustained and often impassioned feeling of Eastern
+suffrage leaders, is the absence of any burning interest in the subject
+on the part of men or women in Idaho. In London or New York, a suffrage
+inquirer would constantly strike "live wires;" in Idaho, every one is
+insulated. The subject is no more an issue than civil service reform or
+state versus national control of banking systems. Most people have even
+forgotten the passage of the constitutional amendment conferring equal
+suffrage, in 1896. Since then, men and women have gone on voting and
+holding office until the woman's right has become as commonplace as, and
+no more interesting or questionable than, the vote of any busy citizen
+in New Jersey.
+
+The first question that one raises, is naturally whether women do
+actually vote and hold office in Idaho. To answer this question, there
+is no body of statistics available. Every one, however, declares that
+they pretty generally vote. On account of long distances in the country
+side, they poll less votes than men, especially if the weather is bad.
+Probably about three-quarters as many women as men go to the polls.
+Often I met women who said that they did not care for the vote, and
+sometimes one who said she thought women ought not to vote; but these
+same women often added that since they had the responsibility they felt
+it their duty to cast a ballot; and no woman told me that she did not
+fulfil the obligation.
+
+In the first legislature which met after the granting of equal suffrage,
+that of 1898, three women were seated, Mrs. Hattie F. Noble, Clara L.
+Cambell, and Mary A. Wright; Mrs. Wright afterward became chief clerk of
+the House. In 1908, another woman, Mrs. Lottie J. McFadden, was
+returned; but there was no woman in the last legislature, and so far as
+I can learn, only these four have taken part in law-making. When asked
+why, after the first ardor of emancipation, women have taken so little
+part in legislation, most people said it was because they had found the
+work and conditions surrounding it unsuited to them. It seems generally
+agreed, however, that a woman could be elected to the legislature at any
+time if she represented a cause which needed to be brought before the
+people through that body.
+
+Theorists have always insisted that equal suffrage would greatly improve
+the material conditions which surround the polls on election day. One of
+the prominent political leaders in Idaho, who has been intimately in
+touch with conditions for a quarter of a century, said that of course
+there had been great improvement in the last fifteen years. "Things
+would have improved any way," he said, "but I am sure that the women
+have had a large influence. No woman has ever been insulted at the polls
+in Idaho and she runs no more danger of annoyance than she would in
+buying her ticket at a railway window. Men are not always sober in
+either place; but if a man made a remark to a woman that was not polite,
+or used annoying language in her presence, he would be mobbed by the
+men even in the roughest mining camp in the State." Doubtless women have
+helped to break the connection between the saloon and the polling-place,
+but no one claims that women have made voting into a drawing-room
+ceremony. On the contrary, women are very persistent workers at the
+polls, seeking to direct doubtful voters.
+
+Advocates of equal suffrage have pretty generally held the belief that
+if women were given the ballot their superior moral standards would lead
+to a marked change in the handling of such problems as the liquor
+traffic and the control of red light districts. Of woman's superior
+moral standards there can be no doubt; of the actual effect of her vote
+upon these questions there is a great deal of doubt. While I was in
+Idaho, the question of local option came up before the voters of Salt
+Lake City, in the neighboring equal suffrage State of Utah, and the
+"wets" won by a vote of 14,775 to 9,162. Thousands of women must have
+voted for license to bring about this result. In April, 1911, the
+question of license or no license was voted on in Boisé. In this case
+again the "wets" won by a considerable majority.
+
+Take another case. For several years in Boisé, until 1909, the red light
+district was segregated in two alleys in the heart of the city. In the
+municipal election of that year this issue came fairly before the
+voters, and the democratic nominee for mayor, who was pledged to break
+up the system, was elected by a considerable majority, though the city
+is strongly republican. This result was undoubtedly due to the women's
+vote. After two years, the issue came up again; and the republican
+nominee, who was opposed to the scattering policy though not pledged to
+segregation, was elected; and this result must again have been due to
+the woman's vote. Prominent women of the city told me that during the
+two years when the scattering policy prevailed, the evil was very
+conspicuous, and women going about alone felt far less comfortable than
+under the older system.
+
+There are two ways to explain the fact that, after fifteen years of
+political experience, the women of Boisé voted in large numbers for
+license and for a policy in handling the red light district which they
+knew would mean a return to police control. In the first place, it may
+be said that fifteen years of steady contact with political life had
+blunted the sensibilities of women and dulled their moral feeling. On
+the other hand, it may be held that practical experience, under the
+steady pressure of responsibility, had made them realize the
+difficulties involved in the handling of these great social problems and
+had made them feel that a law which could command the support of public
+opinion, even though it regulated these difficulties, was better than a
+law which they might consider ideal, but which was incapable of
+execution.
+
+In Idaho, as in Colorado, the payment of women political workers seems
+to have become a rather wide-spread abuse. Under the conditions of the
+State, with many new settlers constantly arriving, it has long been
+thought necessary to employ paid workers to register voters, get them
+out on election-day and influence those who are uncertain. After 1896,
+women were often hired to do this work, and were paid from three to five
+dollars a day. With their weak sense of party affiliation, it is
+claimed that they will work for the party that pays best. A candidate
+with plenty of money may hire so many workers that it becomes a system
+of wholesale bribery. It is universally conceded that this is an abuse,
+and that many women look upon election service as a source of pin money
+to a degree that is undesirable. Meantime, practical politicians assured
+me that it was a system the women found in operation when they came in;
+that far more men than women were paid; and that the abuse could be
+corrected by proper legislation.
+
+To summarize the matter, we may say that equal suffrage in Idaho has
+simply accentuated the movement toward setting women free to live their
+individual lives which general education and participation in industrial
+life has already carried so far all over the country. Equal suffrage is
+accepted there, as the higher education of women is accepted in
+Massachusetts, and the results in the two cases have been much the same.
+
+Surely these reports carry the matter beyond the experimental stage.
+Conditions in Colorado and Idaho are not identical with those in the
+East, but they are similar enough to make the experience of these States
+amount to a demonstration. Meantime the new obligation resting on women
+is profound. They must learn to "sweat their tempers and learn to know
+their man." They must become students of public affairs and of
+institutional life. Old issues are past; and equal suffrage will soon
+prevail everywhere. Women, like men, have more "rights" in our modern
+democracies than they can use. Woman's Rights are largely realized; from
+now on we must front Woman's Duties.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+The Modern Family
+
+
+The most powerful influence in shaping our lives to-day is the sexual
+impulse which has created the institution we call the family. Few of us,
+at least in our modern democracies, live in daily fear that our
+neighbors will attack and kill us, or carry us off into slavery. Even
+the hunger for food, that once forced men into action, plays little
+direct part in the shaping of the lives of most of us. None of those who
+read these pages would starve if they never did any more work. If they
+tried to starve, they would be arrested and sent to jail; and if they
+persisted, they would be fed by force.
+
+Meantime it is sex hunger, manifesting itself in a hundred forms of
+beauty and ugliness, courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and
+ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive indecencies, honor and
+dishonor, self-repression and prostitution, love and lust, children of
+gladness and children of shame, that lifts us to such heights as we
+attain, or plunges us into the hells we create for ourselves. If one
+could insure one good thing in life for the child one loves, one would
+ask, not money nor fame, but a continuously happy marriage.
+
+In the past, women have always looked upon marriage and family life as a
+career; and the majority of men have found their most significant life
+in the building up of the family institution. To-day, however, family
+life as a career is everywhere called in question. Many women claim to
+prefer educational opportunity, professional recognition or an
+independent bank account to husband and children. Social service is
+exalted; domestic service is debased. Why is it so much nobler to care
+for other people's children in a social settlement, or in a school, than
+to care for one's own in a home? Why should women mass themselves
+together in vast groups as industrial workers, as teachers, as
+suffragettes? We hear of women's work, of women's careers, of women's
+clubs, associations and parties, of women's interests, movements,
+causes. In November, 1911, two hundred and twenty women were arrested
+in London for assaulting the English government in the supposed interest
+of women. Why do women prefer social to domestic service?
+
+Two reasons spring at once to the mind of any intelligent observer of
+the life about him. The first is the complexity of our modern life; the
+second is the nature of the institution of marriage.
+
+A man or woman wishes to live with the one he or she loves. Sexual love
+is in its very nature restricted, circumscribed, monopolistic--in a
+word, monogamic. As has been said repeatedly in this volume, the human
+unit is neither a man nor a woman; it is a man and a woman united in a
+new personality through the unifying and blending power of love. To say
+that this unit is exclusive and monogamic is simply saying that it
+respects its own personality. It can no longer act simply as a man or a
+woman; it is a family and it must act as such in order to satisfy its
+own demands. A man can no more act independently of the woman he loves
+than the heart can act independently of the lungs. The man and woman who
+compose the new unit are not only flesh of one flesh, but they are one
+soul, one life; they are a complete organism. And the life of this
+organism must be persistent to realize its own aims. In all the higher
+forms of existence, processes move slowly. For nine months a woman
+carries her baby as a part of her own body; then for three years the
+father and mother carry the child in their arms; for a score of years
+they must support, protect and train it before they let it go to seek
+its own. Hence sexual love must be persistent as well as monogamic.
+
+From all this it follows that each half of the human unit must find the
+major part of its adult life in devotion to the one it has chosen as its
+complement. This is no hardship; it is divine opportunity, if love binds
+the lives in harmonious unity. If love is lacking, then there is no new
+organism; and such a case falls outside this discussion.
+
+Under the simpler forms of civilization that have prevailed in the past,
+it was comparatively easy to find the complement for any particular man
+or woman. With physical sympathy and desire, little more was needed than
+common race and the same general social position. With simple
+personalities even the marriage of convenience was apt to prove happy.
+
+But, to-day, not only have men become infinitely more complex and
+self-conscious than formerly, but women have ceased to be a general
+class; and, in becoming individuals, they have developed wide ranges of
+individual needs. Instead of fitting at the two or three points of
+physical desire, race and social position, a man or woman, to live
+strongly and well in this close union of body and soul, must fit each
+other at many points. To the older sympathies must be added a common
+attitude toward religion, education, artistic tastes, social ambitions,
+industrial aptitudes, and a score of other living sympathies, if the
+days are to pass in happiness, and each is to maintain his fair share of
+the life of the new unit. Physical desire still remains the paramount
+thing, but these other sympathies tend to strengthen it, or their
+absence may weaken and ultimately destroy it. It is comparatively easy
+for a person to find a complement to two or three of his, or her,
+qualities; it is very difficult for a person to find fulfilment for a
+score of his personal needs in another personality.
+
+In earlier times, too, the individual reached such maturity as he or she
+was to attain much earlier than now, when education has become a
+life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively little danger
+that passing years would develop latent tastes that might prove
+dissimilar. To-day, complete union at twenty may mean many oppositions
+at forty, if each half of the unit goes on developing its powers. And we
+must add to this individual complexity and slower development of the
+present-day men and women the intense self-consciousness of modern times
+which makes it impossible for us to forget our conditions and go on
+living in a world once significant and true but now empty or false.
+
+A second cause for the unrest of the present is doubtless to be found in
+the inflexibility of the institution of the family, under which lovers
+are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of
+their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of
+mediæval disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for
+peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken
+fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism,
+culminating in absolute monarchy, which gave them political security.
+They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic Church that they might worship in
+peace. They shaped the guilds that they might work quietly, and enjoy
+the fruits of their labors. The family, with its civil and
+ecclesiastical sanctions, was formed to protect the personal lives of
+men and women who wished to live together and rear children.
+
+But with peace, life grew stronger and more intense; and the bonds which
+the people had shaped, and which had given them security, reached their
+limits of growth, became painful, and threatened to prevent all further
+development. The rising cities bought their freedom from feudal lords;
+even the serfs won better conditions; and the rising national units beat
+down the older political institutions with their swords. Finally the
+movements that gather around the French Revolution opened the way for us
+into the democratic freedom and security which we enjoy to-day. The
+guilds were broken up and a measure of freedom was secured, though the
+industrial institution which shall give us freedom and security in our
+work is yet to be formed. The Protestant Revolution led us by devious
+ways into religious freedom where men can worship as they will.
+
+Of all these older institutions, shaped under iron necessity, the only
+one that remains practically unchanged is the family. Dealing with the
+most powerful of all our human hungers, as it does, we have not dared to
+make it fit our modern life. Not only is this true, but the forces of
+the older state and church which survived, fastened themselves upon this
+institution and strengthened its resisting power. The church
+increasingly made marriage into a holy sacrament, so that it not only
+protected lovers, but became a subtle, inviolable and indissoluble
+mystery. The state sanctioned the family, and made it an instrument for
+regulating political and property rights. Formal society proclaimed the
+family and made it the standard for respectability.
+
+Two centuries hence, our family, with its sacramental significances, its
+lack of a eugenic conscience, its financial subordination of women, its
+frequent lack of love and sympathy, its primogeniture, and its
+determining power over social opportunity, will be as incomprehensible
+to students of institutional forms as the Holy Roman Empire is to us
+to-day. Who will then understand how church and state could have
+licensed and consummated marriages between young and inexperienced
+people, marriages which were to be binding on their thought, feeling and
+action for life without requiring some time, however brief, between the
+application for a license and the final binding of vows? Who will be
+able to understand how church and state could have sanctioned marriage
+between a broken-down old noble and a young and inexperienced girl of
+seventeen? How will the future student explain the fact that in New
+Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of
+an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148
+feeble-minded children to curse the state.[50]
+
+[50] See _The Kalikak Family_, by HERBERT H. GODDARD, New York:
+Macmillan Company, 1912.
+
+Who will then understand why a man and woman who had not only ceased to
+love each other but had come to feel a deep repugnance for each other
+should have been compelled to share bed and board, even when there were
+no children, until even murder seemed preferable to such slavery of soul
+and body? How can this student understand woman's economic dependence,
+her uncertain income, her insecure rights in property for which she
+toiled side by side with her husband? Who will then believe that in the
+year 1911 an English citizen could go before a court and secure an order
+for legalized rape, under the name of restitution of marital rights?
+
+Meantime every issue of the daily press counts as its choicest items
+stories of the shameful and soul-destroying ways in which men and women
+are trying to live their lives in spite of this mediæval institution. So
+far-reaching is the unrest, that at each new revelation of marital
+heresy, society feels constrained to rush forward and frantically
+denounce the heretic in order to prove its own orthodoxy.
+
+Our own attitude toward marriage as a sacrament to be directed by a
+church, or as a pleasure to be exploited by individuals, must be
+changed if the life of the family is to be re-established as the great
+vocation of earnest men and women. Intelligence must be turned upon this
+problem as upon all others that vitally affect our lives. What President
+Eliot has called "the conspiracy of silence touching matters of sex"
+must be broken, and when it is, I believe honest men will agree with
+Ellen Key that "In love humanity has found the form of selection most
+conducive to the ennoblement of the species."[51]
+
+[51] ELLEN KEY, _Love and Marriage._ New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911
+
+In this field, at least, a eugenic conscience must take the place of the
+older theological conscience.[52] We must recognize the infamy of
+knowingly bringing defective children into existence. We must agree that
+under no conditions should people tainted with syphilis be allowed to
+marry; and that those subject to imbecility or insanity should not be
+allowed to live together unless they are unsexed.[53] Justice to future
+generations, and protection of the state, demands at least this much.
+
+[52] See the publications of the Eugenic Education Society, especially
+files of _The Eugenics Review_, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, London.
+
+[53] Indiana has an admirable law on this subject, and New Jersey has
+just added the same to her statutes.
+
+Whether alcoholics, those suffering from congenital sense defects, and
+near relatives, should be allowed to marry may still be an open
+question; but it should be recognized that the state has the right and
+the duty to inquire into these conditions and to impose restrictions.
+Society must come to feel that it is at least as shameful for a broken
+old noble to live with a young girl under the forms of marriage as for
+two young lovers to live together outside them.
+
+As to what the personal, social and industrial relation of man and wife
+should be, we have widely different views and practices. The older view,
+still embodied in the practice of most nations, and best seen in Germany
+and England, is that the woman's duty is to complement the husband. He
+does what he wishes, so far as he can, and the wife rounds out the
+whole. It is the old ideal of later savagery, that the man should
+provide and protect, and the woman should breed children, care for the
+home, pray and wait.
+
+This is really the same ideal that dominated our political life until a
+hundred and fifty years ago. It was the duty of the lords to direct and
+fight; the peasants should work and wait. In politics there gradually
+grew up a middle class which combined with the peasants to overthrow the
+older privileges; and now all classes direct, fight, wait and watch
+together. Whether this democratic idea is finally to prevail, we may not
+know; but it is well worth trying, and the results so far are full of
+promise.
+
+In the same way, in the family, a great middle class of wives has grown
+up, largely since 1870, through education and industry, as the burgers
+did in political life, and these emancipated women are insisting that
+the peasant of the family, the _Hausfrau_, shall join with them and
+dethrone the husband so that all shall share life's responsibilities
+together as free and equal partners. In fact, in America, the revolution
+has already come; and, as in the earlier stages of political
+revolutions, those deposed are having a hard time to maintain even their
+equal share of opportunity.
+
+But the parallel between political and domestic life is not complete,
+and if pushed too far the analogy is mischievous. The assumption of
+physical, intellectual and social superiority on the side of political
+lords and domestic lords was the same. It is possible, however, rightly
+or wrongly, to reduce all the people to the same political level and set
+them all at work doing the same things. But between men and women there
+was not only the assumption of physical and mental difference, but there
+was and must always be the infinite difference of sex. In domestic life,
+the women cannot live without men nor the men without women. Not only
+would the generations fail, but the present generation would lose its
+deepest meaning, if either sex were banished or debased.
+
+In their reactions against old abuses, writers like Mrs. Gilman or Olive
+Schreiner try to create a world for women alone, on the political
+analogy. Men might be tolerated as fathers; but, to secure political
+freedom, these leaders would turn to that nebulous creation of social
+reformers, the state; and it should subsidize the mothers in their
+periods of need. But there are only two ingredients out of which a
+nation can be formed: one is women; the other is men. Shall woman in
+her time of need turn to a state made up of other women, or to a state
+made up of men? Obviously it must be to both; and if woman is to depend
+on men, she might as well depend on man. No, in the political
+revolutions we broke up artificial, outworn and unjust combinations; but
+in this domestic revolution we are breaking up and must readjust the
+fundamental unit of life.
+
+Men and women must live and work together in the domestic unit, and they
+cannot do the same things. Nature has specialized their functions and
+each must supplement the other. Even in Germany, the _Hausfrau_ is not
+going back to an exclusive service of children, cooking and church; nor
+in America will man continue to be merely the breadwinner and the father
+of children. With the enlightenment that is on the way, we shall see
+that husband and wife can have no antagonistic differences. Each profits
+in all that really benefits the other; and slowly we shall shape a new
+institution based on absolute equality, and at the same time on
+complementary service.
+
+In this adjustment, legal forms can help or hinder; but they cannot
+prevent nor compel the final action of human beings. Sex instinct is
+stronger than any human law. The law can, however, help us in regulating
+conditions of marriage, in settling disputes about common property and
+children, and in determining how the contract may be set aside when that
+becomes necessary.
+
+The right of the church to sanction or regulate the family, rests in a
+belief that marriage involves spiritual changes and obligations that
+make it a sacrament, in its nature inviolable, and to be administered
+only by the church, like the sacrament of baptism. This is a belief
+resting not in eugenic considerations, nor in the human needs of the
+persons involved, but in theological dogmas with which this chapter
+cannot deal. Hence we shall maintain that the church has no more right
+to control matters of marriage than it has to interfere in business or
+political relations.
+
+The state, on the other hand, meaning by the state the whole community,
+must concern itself with the marriage of its individuals. The
+commonwealth must have future citizens, and these should be strong and
+intelligent; hence it must prevent the breeding of the unfit. If parents
+die, or fail in obligations, the community must care for the children.
+In case of disagreement between married people, the courts of the
+community must settle disputes about children and property; hence the
+state must know when a man and woman determine to live together. The
+regulation of marriage certainly belongs to the state, that is, to all
+of us.
+
+Marriage should therefore always be a matter of definite and open record
+in the archives of the community. It should also be advertised, through
+the public record, for a considerable time, preferably six months or a
+year, before consummation, that the past experiences of contracting
+parties may be looked up by interested friends or officials, and the
+marriage of the unfit prevented; and so that mere caprice and passion
+shall have time to realize their mistake and turn away. The form which
+the final ceremony of marriage will take can well be left to the tastes
+and traditions of the contracting parties.
+
+The question of rights in children, or in property acquired after
+marriage, should be settled by the state; and it is hard to see how it
+can ever be settled satisfactorily except on a basis of equal
+partnership. No man should be contented with a woman to bear and train
+his children, and create a social atmosphere for his home, who is not
+worth half of what he makes; and the same holds true of a woman. So with
+regard to children, while one parent or the other may, under certain
+conditions, be given the direction of the child's life, it is hard to
+imagine any circumstances that would justify society in refusing either
+father or mother the right frequently to see his child.
+
+Since marriages must be contracted in youth and since inexperienced
+people must make mistakes and the wisest must sometimes change, it will
+sometimes happen that men and women must face the possibility of
+separation. The problem of divorce is very difficult.[54] In less than
+twenty years, from 1887 to 1906, 945,625 divorces were granted in the
+United States; so that probably to-day there are nearly one million
+divorced people in this country. Generally speaking, the divorce rate
+increases as one goes westward. In 1900, the State of Washington led the
+country with 184 divorces for each 100,000 of population. For the whole
+country we averaged 73 per 100,000 of population. Japan alone leads us
+with 215, while England and Wales had only 2. England grants divorce
+only for infidelity; and on the man's side it must be accompanied by
+cruelty; all divorce cases must be tried in London, and the expense,
+never less than two hundred dollars, is prohibitive for the poor.
+Meantime, England grants many separation orders; and it seems sure that
+the Royal Commission, which has been taking evidence for the past three
+years, will favor a freer system of divorce.
+
+[54] See _Statistics of Marriage and Divorce_, prepared by the Bureau of
+the Census, beginning in 1906, and published in 1910.
+
+While divorce is increasing steadily all over the world, and most
+rapidly in the most intelligent and progressive sections, the subject is
+so bound up with our most deep-seated prejudices that it is difficult to
+secure any intelligent thinking on the subject. Thus, most people think
+Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, and Reno, Nevada, are places of free
+divorce, but the fact is that twenty-one other States have a higher
+divorce rate than South Dakota; and fourteen have a higher rate than
+Nevada. So, too, the impression that divorces spring from hasty action
+is certainly wrong, for in 46.5 per cent. of those for which we have
+records there had been a separation of more than three years before the
+divorce was granted. The idea that people generally seek divorces that
+they may marry some one else seems also unfounded, since in the cases
+for which we have records, less than forty per cent. remarry within a
+year.
+
+There are three main objections which one hears urged against free
+divorce. The first is that organized society rests on the family, and
+with free divorce anarchy would ensue. In reply, it is pointed out that
+the same argument was used to support kings, aristocracies and a
+universal church. All these have been set aside, in many parts of the
+earth, and society seems even more stable than before. The love of men
+and women is probably more powerful and less in need of adventitious
+support than either patriotism or religion.
+
+In the second place, it is claimed that children will suffer when
+parents separate. It is replied that this is true, but they were already
+suffering when parents had ceased to love each other. The fact that
+children are involved in only two out of five divorces seems to indicate
+that children hold parents together when the opposition is not too
+strong; and when a separation occurs, those who favor divorce claim that
+a child is better off with either father or mother alone than with both
+if love is absent.
+
+In the third place, it is pointed out that often only one desires the
+divorce and that this brings tragedy to the other life. In reply it is
+claimed that many of the tragedies of life have always gathered around
+the love of men and women, that when marriage is declined tragedy often
+follows, and that compelling a person to live with some one whom he does
+not love, and may even dislike, is more tragic than any separation.
+
+In conclusion, advocates of free divorce claim that their proposals are
+profoundly conservative, that they are seeking to bring marriage back to
+its eternally binding realities. They say that under our present
+conditions of restricted divorce, we have wide-spread prostitution,
+constant irregularities that are tolerated and condoned, and a million
+divorced people, some prevented from remarrying and all socially
+ostracized, so that the whole group is a dangerous element in our midst.
+These advocates claim that with free divorce, granted some months after
+the determination to separate had been registered in the public records,
+the love of men and women and their mutual love for their children would
+be free to bind families together in permanent trust and open honesty;
+and that with all excuse for irregularity absent, the unfaithful man or
+woman would sink to the level of unfaithfulness in business or political
+life. With freedom to readjust their lives, if they preferred to keep
+what they had and get what they could, they would simply take their
+place among thieves and liars, and most of them would disappear.
+
+All transitions are hard, and this one in which we are involved is most
+difficult of all; but no one can study the conditions around him without
+seeing that change is inevitable and that we are not going back to our
+earlier ideals. At the same time, no one can read the singularly
+scholarly and fair-minded presentations of Ellen Key[55] without feeling
+that she has a vision of the future.
+
+[55] _The Century of the Child._ New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907.
+_Love and Marriage_, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911. _Love and Ethics._ New
+York: B.W. Huebsch, 1911.
+
+With regard to the nature of the material plant in which the family
+should live, there are also two widely different ideals struggling for
+favor in the public mind, and for realization in practice. The one
+ideal, while recognizing the changes necessitated by modern conditions,
+would still seek to retain those features which have been supposed to
+make for family privacy, the kitchen, the nursery, and the garden. The
+other would frankly accept our changed conditions, and pass on to the
+larger groups of socialized buildings, with common kitchens, day
+nurseries, and parks.[56]
+
+[56] See _Woman and Economics_, by CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, Boston:
+Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; and the writings of H.G. WELLS.
+
+This question has been discussed in the chapter on industry, and it will
+be considered again in the following chapter. Meantime there can be no
+doubt that love is reticent so far as the outside world is concerned;
+and domesticity must always demand a large measure of privacy. It still
+remains to be proved that this can be secured, in the absence of a
+private kitchen, nursery and garden. Children, too, seem to need the
+personal care and constant love of mothers, and women seem to need a
+long period of loving and caring for a family to round out a deeply
+significant life.
+
+To summarize this chapter we may say that the realization of romantic
+love, under conditions of domesticity, is necessary for men and women,
+and for the well-being of the race. Our present marriage system is
+defective, and needs to be corrected through the creation of a eugenic
+conscience. It should be taken out of the hands of the church and made
+more difficult by the state. Women's property rights should be defined
+and safeguarded, and men and women should never live together when they
+are repugnant to each other.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Family Life as a Vocation
+
+
+The greatest of all wisdom is that which leads men and women to see the
+real significance of their lives while they are still living. Life's
+values, like the manna in the wilderness, must be gathered daily. If not
+nourished day by day the power to live atrophies and dies; and no one
+can live well to-day on the shrunken memories of yesterday. A full and
+significant life is its own justification; and in a last analysis
+philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which
+the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring. Buddhism offers
+us eternal peaceful existence in Nirvana; Epicureanism offers pleasure,
+which is but an intensification of life; Stoicism offers us life freed
+from disturbing forces; and the great lure which Christianity has always
+held before humanity is life eternal. Life is its own justification.
+
+We have maintained throughout this volume that complete
+self-realization is impossible for the half-units which we call men and
+women, when either lives alone. On every side of their natures they are
+complementary; and the unit of human life must be found in the family
+composed of a man and woman who love each other and the children born of
+their love. "There are two worlds below, the home and outside of it." It
+is in this unit, under the stress of sexual passion and maternal love,
+that all the finer forces of our civilization have had their origin.
+Unselfishness, devotion, pity and the higher altruisms all hark back to
+the home as their source.
+
+But, meantime, evil counsels prevail and one hears everywhere of the
+antagonistic interests of men and women. There can be no real rivalry
+between a man's soul and his body, between science and religion, between
+man and woman. The trouble all rests back in the failure to realize the
+incompleteness of man or woman alone for any of the purposes of life.
+And there is that evil notion which still afflicts economics that when
+two trade one must lose. The fact is that, in all honest trade, buyer
+and seller gain alike; and fair exchange makes all who participate in it
+rich. It is so in all real relations between these half-creatures we
+call men and women. In agreement, association and coöperation lies
+strong and significant life for both. In antagonism, separation and
+competition lie arid, poor, mean lives, egotistic and conceited, vapid
+and fickle.
+
+In primitive life, the family furnished a full and adequate career for
+men and women alike. The political life was the family life; each family
+was a religious group; families mustered for war; and each family
+maintained within itself a wide range of industrial activity. But,
+because this unit was so basal, because all later special developments
+of state, church and industry came from it, it was steadily perverted.
+Warped from its original purpose, it has served in turn, as we have
+seen, to define and secure all our later institutions until it has
+become the servant of state, church, social ambition, property and
+industrial advance. Marriage and the birthrate are seldom discussed
+to-day from the point of view of individual needs; but are almost
+always considered from the point of view of national and industrial
+efficiencies.
+
+To-day men and women are confronted by two tempters which constantly
+lure them away from the complete living of the family; one is work, and
+the other is comfort. With the majority of people in our modern
+industrial democracies work uses up the hours and the energy of life. We
+have passed into a time when our habitual material needs are great, and
+the products of work are shamelessly diverted to the excessive uses of
+comparatively few individuals and groups. Hence millions of workers
+march along the narrow dark roads that lead through factories and farms
+to the grave. Only little patches of their nervous systems are ever
+used, but all their energy flows through these sections day after day,
+leaving their lives dull and empty.
+
+Marriage for these workers means decreased earning power for the woman,
+with increased needs for the family, especially when the children come.
+As one watches the procession of young factory and shop women, with
+Sunday finery and some leisure, passing over into draggled factory
+mothers, with no finery and no leisure, one marvels at the strength of
+the forces with which nature drives them to their destiny. And yet, even
+with these hopeless workers, marriage and children mark the heights of
+life.
+
+With others, who are economically freer, work has become an obsession. A
+Charles Darwin or a Herbert Spencer turns all of life's forces to
+shaping facts into science; our industrial leaders mint their hours into
+dollars; our reformers give up their lives that social conditions may be
+changed; our society leaders trade life for triumphs. Meantime we all
+know, or would know if we stopped to consider, that we are here to live
+life fully and significantly day by day. But domesticity takes time and
+effort, and so the hurrying specialist follows the narrow line of
+success until he or she becomes a machine for manufacturing
+generalizations, for painting pictures, for performing surgical
+operations or for merely getting money. The richest woman in America
+said with approval recently that her son was too busy to fall in love.
+
+As industry drives the mass of workers and specialists away from life's
+deepest realizations, so the desire to become comfortable, physically
+and mentally, through avoiding the deeper experiences of life, robs many
+of those who have a large measure of economic freedom. In all periods of
+great wealth this disease of ease has afflicted mankind. Life more
+abundantly comes only at the price of vigorous living; and love travels
+always in company with anxiety. It would be well, says Cicero, to have
+children, were it not for the fear of losing them. Let a man apply this
+principle to wife, friends, possessions and enthusiasm in general and
+life sinks into utter worthlessness.
+
+The love of ease among women is in a measure independent of the
+emancipation movement, but the entry of great numbers of young women
+into lines of independent livelihood has placed them in a condition
+where the ideals of a materialistic and commercial civilization appeal
+to them with great force. Many of them have been liberally educated and
+are living lives of independence. They lodge in flats or boarding houses
+where they have no responsibilities for the routine work connected with
+daily living. They carry their own latch-keys; and no one interferes
+with their friendships or their pleasures. They read the books they
+like, attend the theaters that appeal to them, and avoid people who bore
+them. One can easily understand why these young women hesitate before
+abandoning their easy conditions for the uncertain economic position of
+wife and mother, with a man whose career lies in the future. And yet
+here, as everywhere, one must lose one's life to gain it.
+
+What then does daily association of a man and woman who belong together
+do for them? It gives gladness and peace, and these are fundamental
+conditions for all good and healthful living. It gives incentive to
+effort, for a man or woman dares not fail before the one he or she
+loves; but, in case of failure, it gives comfort and support, for love
+understands and credits intent and effort as highly as achievement. It
+complements the powers, for it gives four eyes, four hands and two minds
+with but one aim. And in this it does not simply multiply by two, but
+the blended powers are far more than two times one. It calls into
+activity all the gracious, artistic and altruistic powers of the soul.
+Surely these are gifts for which we may well forego some material
+comforts, may well work, and even face anxieties unafraid.
+
+Each part of the human unit must educate the other to a realization of
+the fulness of life. This education is not entirely dependent on
+physical intimacy. It is the development of soul and spirit. It polishes
+the manners, cultivates the voice, broadens the judgments, sharpens the
+wit. It makes conversation an art and discussion significant. A
+woman-hating man or a man-hating woman is an unpolished and half-alive
+creature, whether he be a mediæval saint, or she a militant suffragette,
+or they both be simply commonplace egoists.
+
+Because married life is so perfect when it finds its highest levels, it
+is capable of sinking to any form of vulgarity, base betrayal and
+cynicism when realization fails. The God to whom noblest souls aspire in
+hours of deepest exaltation, is the God invoked by the ribald drunkard
+when he curses his comrade. The family life we are discussing is the
+subject of most of the vulgar and indecent jokes of the disappointed and
+the unfit. The earth which nourishes the nations, merely soils the
+boots of the boor who unthinkingly lives on her bounty.
+
+On the working side the life of the family has an evil record for
+pettiness and monotony, but much of this is due to wrong comparisons. A
+woman who does her own housework would presumably have to work in any
+case. Is the work of the family more petty or monotonous than the work
+of the factory, shop or office? Surely the woman who spends her days
+looking after the details of furnishing a house and keeping it clean, of
+providing and serving meals, of looking after clothing and caring for
+children, has a world of self-expression compared with which factory and
+shop work is infinitely petty and mean. In the social life of friends,
+neighborhood, school and church she is at least as well placed as the
+factory worker. If the woman has the preparation required for teaching
+or independent business, she will find ways to use her powers that will
+relieve the routine of housework. And if the family has means to hire
+help, the wife has a position from which she can exercise social and
+political power superior to that of the foot-loose celibate.
+
+Meantime, the housework grows steadily simpler and less exacting, even
+with the growing complexity of our modern life. Most of the primitive
+industries have left the home, and products come from the factory ready
+to use. Furnace heating, hot and cold water, improved cooking conditions
+and many domestic inventions of our day are keeping housework well
+abreast of other unspecialized work in attractiveness.
+
+The fact that domestic servants are scarce and unwilling to do general
+housework, in no way disproves the soundness of these conclusions. The
+wife, if she is a real wife, and we are discussing no others, is working
+for those she loves, under conditions of free initiative. The general
+servant is working for those who will not even admit her right to
+participate in their social life, and instead of freedom in her
+industrial life, she must generally adjust her efforts to the caprices
+of an untrained mistress. Well-trained mistresses, who know how to work
+themselves and who have a democratic sense of human values, seldom have
+trouble in securing able servants, even in this transition time when the
+shops and factories are calling so loudly to working girls.
+
+No intelligence which a woman may possess needs remain unused in the
+handling of a family. Women spend most of the household money to-day, at
+least in lower and middle-class homes. To use wisely the family
+pay-envelope requires knowledge and judgment of a high order. Problems
+in economics, sanitation, food-values and æsthetics confront the
+housewife at every turn of the day's work. "Even a slave need not work
+as a slave;" and a woman living with the man she loves is the freest
+woman on earth, so far as mind and spirit are concerned.
+
+But the factory girl, or the teacher, or the professional woman who
+seeks the fulfilment of all of life in the factory, the school or the
+consulting-room, will soon tire and clamor for relief. The housewife, or
+the mistress of a home, must likewise seek life away from her work if
+she is to love it and wake each morning with a desire to continue it.
+Luckily we have reached a place where working women in the home are
+seeking supplementary life outside, and they seem to be quite as
+successful in their search as are factory girls or teachers.
+
+To the man, family life, of the kind we are considering, brings a vital
+connection with the past and the future. Reputation, possessions,
+friends, all become deeply significant when a man becomes a link in the
+generations of men. In establishing his material home, and modifying it
+to the changing conditions of the family; in building up a social
+setting for the group; in projecting his work and his service into the
+future, he is held to highest standards by the fact that he is working
+with the partner of his choice, and for interests that are in harmony
+with the constitution of the universe.
+
+Of the greater physical health of married people there can be no doubt.
+Statistics all show the greater longevity of married people, and
+insurance companies recognize it. The celibate type of physical
+degeneration is so well differentiated that it can generally be
+recognized even among strangers, at least after forty.[57] On the moral
+side, too, very few criminals are found among married people.
+
+[57] ARNOLD LORAND, _Old Age Deferred. The Cause of Old Age and its
+Postponement by Hygienic and Therapeutic Measures._ F.A. Davis Co.,
+1911.
+
+If children come to bless these homes of men and women, then even
+intellectual life may shift to a higher level than was before possible.
+With advancing years intellectual interests tend to become specialized.
+The man or woman gives up singing, ceases to be interested in plant
+life, stops reading poetry. One activity after another is cut off and
+interests concentrate in some comparatively small field of work or
+pleasure. But when a child comes, the parents are forced to start over
+the round of human interests and thought once more. Before, they lived
+it as children; now, they live the cycle as grown men and women.
+
+No matter how completely a woman has given up music, she will some day
+find herself singing when she holds her baby in her arms. As she recites
+Mother Goose and the fairy and folk-lore tales, she moves through the
+path of man's upward progress, led by a child, but with the life and
+understanding of adult years. As she walks with her child in the garden
+and in the fields, she is driven to a new interpretation of the world
+of nature. Few things can so broaden, quicken and enrich the
+intellectual life as growing up with one's children.
+
+On the social side, a parent who has children is forced to live in all
+the social world around him. The water-supply, the sewage, pure foods,
+vacant lots, paving, fast driving in the streets, police protection,
+undesirable residents, saloons and churches, schools and
+libraries--everything that touches the social well-being--touches him
+vitally and imperatively. The foot-loose celibate can always go away.
+The parent finds it difficult to leave the place where he has planted
+his roof-tree. Of course, there are many unmarried people, and people
+who are childless, who live this domestic life vicariously through
+friends or other people's children. One cannot but be grateful that life
+is so organized that no woman can be entirely shut off, unless she wills
+it, from the fructifying life that knits together the generations of the
+old and the young.
+
+Ideals are very powerful in determining conduct, and the ideals of
+extreme individualism, now so constantly presented by certain leaders
+among emancipated women, must bear bitter fruit for an army of women in
+the future. While the women are young, ambition and the charm of freedom
+bear them gaily along. Generally better educated than the men of their
+own class, habituated to a personal expenditure which would correspond
+with a large family expenditure, their intelligence prevents their
+falling desperately in love with the men whom they might marry. But in
+the thirties they have visions of the future which are deeply
+disturbing; and in the forties they face the tragedy of a lonely old
+age. Some men and women there must always be whose lives lack the
+fulfilment of family life because of ill health or the accidents of
+personal relations. But most women, if they are willing to pay the same
+price for a significant family life that they so gladly pay for
+professional success, will find the way open to live all of life. Why is
+it that women count it an honor to work and starve for an art, but
+dishonor to undergo privations for their children? All that is here said
+of women may be said of men, but the man's period of family life is
+longer than woman's, and the tragedy of lonely old age with him seems
+less overwhelming.
+
+The old plea that we must have an army of celibate women because in
+civilized countries there is a preponderance of females does not hold at
+present in the United States. The census of 1910 shows an excess of
+2,691,678 males in this country. Nor is this entirely due to
+immigration. More boys than girls are always born in civilized lands;
+and of native white people born of native parents in the United States
+there were, in 1910, 25,229,294 males and 24,259,147 females, a
+difference obviously due to natural causes. New England alone in America
+has a preponderance of females; and the excess there, as also in England
+and Germany, is needed all along the frontiers of civilization. With the
+industrial and social freeing of women now going on, we may reasonably
+hope that the communities of old maids left behind, through the
+emigration of young men, will be broken up.
+
+Of course, it will be pointed out that many men and women who do marry
+fail to realize the ideal presented in these pages. Every form of living
+is dangerous and not every one can hope to be a successful husband and
+father or wife and mother. Even devotion to religion furnishes many
+inmates for insane asylums; athletic contests leave a line of cripples
+behind them; and railroad disasters fill thousands of graves annually.
+The institution of marriage has had no such intelligence applied to its
+improvement during the past years as has been given to perfecting
+railroads; and since founding a family is a more difficult undertaking
+than making a journey, one need not be astonished at the number of
+fatalities. Even if the institution of marriage were as intelligently
+and carefully brought up to date as railroad systems are, it would still
+remain dangerous to live either in or out of marriage.
+
+And yet the danger could be greatly reduced by proper education of
+youth. At present we are educating 10,000,000 girls in the state schools
+of America, and as many boys. They are spending eight to twelve years,
+under the direction of celibate women teachers, sharpening their
+intelligence. Their most important work in life is to be the making of
+homes, but they are supposed to master this art through imitating the
+homes in which they grow up. Many of these are unworthy of imitation,
+and they are all in process of transition.
+
+Every girl should be thoroughly trained in handling an income and in
+spending money wisely. She should have a general knowledge of household
+sanitation, of water-supply and sewage, of foods and their preparation.
+She should know about clothes, their cost, wearing qualities and
+decorative values. She should have a sense of the family and its
+significance in life; of at least the social relations that husband and
+wife must maintain toward each other if their partnership is to be happy
+and effective. She should have the beginnings of a eugenic conscience
+established in her, and she should know something of the care of
+infancy. All this should be given in the school, if it is not definitely
+given in the home, and no girl who goes through the eighth grade should
+escape it. Before the girl is married, she should have wise counsel from
+mature women who have lived and learned the art of living. Boys should,
+of course, also be trained in comparable directions for this great part
+of their lives.
+
+Something is already being done in this direction through the
+establishing of special courses in domestic science, and allied branches
+in our schools. The fact that educational leaders are awake to the need
+was shown by the applause that followed Superintendent Harvey's plea for
+this training in his paper on the education of girls at the
+Superintendents' Association in St. Louis in February, 1912.[58] The
+leading educators of the country greeted his plea with an enthusiasm
+called out by no other paper of the session.
+
+[58] See _Report of the Department of Superintendence of the National
+Education Association_, 1912.
+
+Every woman, then, and every man, not debarred by disease or accident
+and not specially dedicated to a work which precludes marriage, should
+spend his life in a family group, not that the state may have more
+soldiers, or factory employees, but that he may realize the deepest
+significance of his life. In this life the woman should be as free as
+the man, an equal financial partner, and should share in all the social
+and political opportunities of the community. When she bears children,
+she should have special protection, support and reverence; and support
+should come from the father of her children. If he fails her, then the
+group, in its capacity as a state, should care for her honorably. But to
+justify this protection and reverence, she should bring to her special
+functions as mother of the generations a strong body, an intelligent
+mind, a eugenic conscience and an absolute devotion to the children born
+of her love.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Conclusion
+
+
+The last two hundred years have revolutionized nearly all of our deepest
+conceptions concerning the relations of human beings to religion,
+government, property, and to each other. New knowledge has given us
+partial control over vast forces of nature; and has so increased our
+mobility as almost to free us from limitations of space. We have had
+wonderful visions of the possibilities that lie in intelligent human
+coöperation, and have begun to realize them in a hundred new forms. In
+the midst of these compelling changes, women could no more remain
+undisturbed, within the confines of kitchen and nursery, than men could
+remain on their little New England farms or cobbling shoes and making
+tin pans in the petty workshops of a century ago. But meantime the
+special interests of women have been sadly confused because of the
+larger changes in which all human relations have been involved in this
+time of readjustment. Instead of talking of unquiet women to-day, we
+should talk of an unquiet world.
+
+In the midst of this confusion, most of those who have sought to secure
+a truer relation of women to the life around them have worked on the
+lines of minimizing sex differences. It has been felt that the
+educational, industrial, social and political limitations under which
+women rested were due to the desire of men to exploit them. Men, being
+free, had developed for themselves an ideal world of thought and work;
+and if women wished to be free and happy, they needed only to break down
+the barriers separating them from this man's world.
+
+Most of these barriers are now down; but the women who study in
+universities, teach in the schools, maintain offices as doctors or
+lawyers, collect news for the press, tend spindles in a factory or sell
+ribbons at a counter have found that the man's world is far from ideal
+and that by entering it they have not escaped the special limitations of
+their sex. Everywhere the feeling is abroad that, instead of having
+arrived at a destination, women have embarked on a journey fraught with
+many uncertainties.
+
+This volume has been written in the belief that men and women alike will
+achieve greatest freedom and happiness, not by minimizing sex
+differences, but by frankly recognizing them and using them. If we could
+reduce men and women to sameness, we should destroy at least half the
+values of human life. They are not alike; but they are perfectly
+supplementary. The unit can never be a man nor a woman; it must always
+be a man and a woman. This means that in all the activities essential to
+human development men and women must carefully study to find what each
+can best provide.
+
+Thus we must some day have a Church, not composed exclusively of male
+priests and women worshipers, not confined to rationalistic appeal nor
+to ritualistic observance, but expressing the whole range of human
+aspiration toward the unknown. Rational men and women of feeling must
+combine with reverent men and intelligent women to create a belief and a
+service which will express all the longings of humanity toward
+perfection.
+
+So in government, we must have a state which will be not only just but
+merciful; which will concern itself not only with militant economics but
+also with human well-being. If men are more capable in expressing the
+katabolic needs of aggression and protection, women must furnish the
+anabolic products of care and conservation. If women must help pay the
+bills and nurse the wounded, they must first have a voice in determining
+whether there shall be a war. Men and women must join their qualities in
+building and caring for cities, and in shaping nations, where they can
+both live their largest lives.
+
+In education, we must devise institutions which will provide for the
+special needs of women; and we must have the combined qualities of men
+and women brought to bear on children of both sexes, and at all ages.
+The foster parents of the nation's children must be both men and women.
+The present attempt to exploit our twenty millions of boys and girls in
+the interest of a sex will be a crime against humanity when we are
+intelligent enough to see its real meaning.
+
+The specialization going on in industry means infinite variety if we
+look at the whole field of activity. Some parts of the world's work are
+specially fitted for men; other parts to women. No intelligent division
+of labor has been attempted in the period since all work was transformed
+by our modern inventions. Possibly men should do most of the
+dressmaking, and women should make men's clothing, but no intelligent
+man or woman can doubt that most work falls naturally into the hands of
+one sex or the other. Some day we shall know enough so that there will
+be little or no industrial competition between men and women.
+
+It is, however, in the family that both men and women must find their
+deepest supplementary values. Sex antagonism can do much to impoverish
+and ruin individual lives; but the monogamic and persistent union of
+lovers, surrounded by their children, will easily survive all the
+mistakes of a time of transition. In the meantime, those who would
+uphold the finest family ideals of the past have less cause to fear the
+militant agitator than they have to fear the idle, parasitic wife, who
+relies on her legal rights to give her luxuries without labor, position
+without leadership, and wifehood without the care and responsibility of
+children.
+
+From the point of view of this book, all the efforts to open the doors
+of opportunity, through which women can pass into the man's world, are
+but preparations for the beginning of a journey. The sooner all such
+doors are opened the better, for then a great source of dangerous sex
+antagonism will pass away; and the energy of reformers will be set free
+to work out the difficult problem of supplementary sex adjustments.
+
+And meantime, sex remains the greatest mystery and the most powerful
+thing in human life. Its deeper values are lost sight of when men and
+women are warring over work, wages, and votes, just as the meaning of
+religion has been lost when priests and laity sought to advance their
+meanly selfish interests. But in the crises of life it always comes
+back. When a great ship founders in midocean, and but a third of the
+people can be saved, there is then no question of woman's rights. In the
+darkness of early morning, eager men's hands place their women in the
+life-boats and push them off. The poorest peasant woman takes
+precedence over any man. Almost every woman there would prefer to stay
+and die with her man; would glory in staying and dying if he might thus
+be saved; but in her keeping are the generations of the future, and she
+is weak, therefore the strong gladly stand back and go down to death.
+The solution of woman's place in the society of the future must be based
+on a recognition of the supplementary forces that send women to
+undesired safety while men die.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman in Modern Society, by Earl Barnes
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Woman in Modern Society, by Earl Barnes.
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman in Modern Society, by Earl Barnes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+Title: Woman in Modern Society
+
+Author: Earl Barnes
+
+Release Date: April 23, 2005 [EBook #15691]
+
+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY ***
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+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
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+</pre>
+
+<h1><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1"></a>WOMAN</h1>
+<h1>IN MODERN SOCIETY</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>EARL BARNES</h2>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+
+<h3><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2"></a><i>BY THE SAME AUTHOR:</i></h3>
+
+<p class="center">STUDIES IN EDUCATION<br />
+(IN TWO VOLUMES)</p>
+
+<p class="center">WHERE KNOWLEDGE FAILS
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3"></a>WOMAN<br />
+IN MODERN SOCIETY</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>EARL BARNES</h2>
+
+<p class="center">AT ONE TIME PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY IN THE STATE<br />
+UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA, AND LATER PROFESSOR<br />
+OF EDUCATION IN LELAND STANFORD<br />
+JUNIOR UNIVERSITY</p>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p class="center">NEW YORK<br />
+B.W. HUEBSCH
+</p>
+
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+<div><br /></div>
+
+<p class="center"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4"></a>COPYRIGHT, 1912<br />
+BY <span class="smcap">B.W. Huebsch</span><br />
+PRINTED IN U.S.A.
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5"></a>This volume is dedicated to a woman endowed by
+her ancestors with health and strength, reared by
+a wise mother, trained to earn her own living,
+and university bred, at one time an independent
+wage-earner and now equal partner in the business
+of a home, a social force in the life of her community,
+member of a woman's club, a suffragist, the
+devoted and intelligent mother of a group of fine
+children, and the center of a family which loves
+and reverences her and finds the deepest meaning
+of life in her presence.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6"></a><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+<tr><td align='right'>CHAPTER</td><td align='left'></td><td align='right'>PAGE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>I.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#I">What it Means to be a Woman</a></span></td><td align='right'>9</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>II.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#II">Woman's Heritage</a></span></td><td align='right'>31</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>III.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#III">Women in Education</a></span></td><td align='right'>57</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IV.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#IV">The Feminizing of Culture</a></span></td><td align='right'>85</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>V.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#V">The Economic Independence of Women</a></span></td><td align='right'>107</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VI.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#VI">Women in Industry</a></span></td><td align='right'>123</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VII.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#VII">The Meaning of Political Life</a></span></td><td align='right'>150</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VIII.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#VIII">Woman's Relation to Political Life</a></span></td><td align='right'>173</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IX.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#IX">The Modern Family</a></span></td><td align='right'>207</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>X.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#X">Family Life as a Vocation</a></span></td><td align='right'>231</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XI.</td><td align='left'><span class="smcap"><a href="#XI">Conclusion</a></span></td><td align='right'>251</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="WOMAN_IN_MODERN_SOCIETY" id="WOMAN_IN_MODERN_SOCIETY"></a><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8"></a><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9"></a>WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2>
+
+<h2>What it Means to be a Woman</h2>
+
+
+<p>If we go back to the earliest forms of life, where
+the unit is simply a minute mass of protoplasm
+surrounded by a cell wall, we find each of
+these divisions to be a complete individual. It
+can feed itself, that its life may go on to-day;
+it can fight or run away, that it may be here to
+fight to-morrow; and by a process of division it
+can create a new life so that its existence may
+continue across the generations. With such units
+it is quite conceivable that life might go on
+through all eternity, death following birth, were
+it not that protoplasm contains within itself a
+principle of change. Life and change are synonymous.</p>
+
+<p>And this change moves ever toward a complexity,
+which we call development, where cells
+unite in a larger life, and functions and organs
+<a name="Page_10" id="Page_10"></a>are specialized. Thus there comes a time when
+the part split off carries with it power to eat and
+digest, to fight or run away, but only half the
+power of procreation. This half unit, this incomplete
+individual, is either male or female,
+and from this time on, the epic of life gathers
+around the search of these half-lives for their
+complements. The force that impels to this
+search, while at first valuable only for the perpetuation
+of the generations, gathers into itself
+modifying feeling and desires and, at a later
+period, ideas and ideals, which finally, when
+men and women appear, make it the greatest
+of all the shaping forces in life.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The fact that sexual selection does not play the part in
+organic evolution which Darwin assigned it does not affect
+this statement. See chapter on Sexual Selection in <span class="smcap">Yves
+Delagee</span> and <span class="smcap">Marie Goldsmith</span>, <i>The Theories of Evolution</i>,
+New York: Huebsch, 1912.</p></div>
+
+<p>Of course, in such a sweeping statement as
+this, one must include under sex hunger all the
+forces that drive men and women to seek each
+other's society, rather than that of their own
+sex. In this sense, it can be truly said that it
+gives a motive for our care of offspring, and
+<a name="Page_11" id="Page_11"></a>for all our other most self-forgetful devotions,
+our finest altruisms, our most polished expressions
+in language, manners and dress. It
+justifies labor, ambition, and at times even
+self-effacement. It underlies nearly all the
+lyric expressions in art; furnishes almost the
+only theme for that delineation of modern life
+which we call the novel; and is a main support
+for music, painting, statuary and belles-lettres.
+It gives us the institution of the family, which
+is the parent of the state; it is closely allied to
+religion; and in our individual lives it lifts us
+to the heights of self-realization and happiness,
+or plunges us down to the depths of degradation
+and tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>While this sex hunger belongs equally to
+men and women, it has come to be associated
+with women, until we even speak of them as
+"the sex." Hence, when we are discussing
+women, we are generally discussing the sex
+interest common to both men and women, and
+this disturbs our point of view. The fact is that
+sex interest is a common possession, that the
+unit in human life, even more than among
+lower animals, is always a male and a female
+<a name="Page_12" id="Page_12"></a>bound together by love. Just as a body can
+function in sleep or under the influence of a
+narcotic, for a time seemingly independent of
+the mind, so a man or a woman can live for a
+time in seeming independence of the opposite
+sex; but from any biological point of view, such
+a separate existence of male and female is only
+a transient effort. The half-life must find its
+mate or, after a few brief days, it dies, leaving
+its line extinct. For all the larger purposes of
+life, man is but a half-creature, and woman is
+equally a fragment.</p>
+
+<p>It is, of course, conceivable that these two
+halves of the biological unit might have been
+made, or might have developed, alike in everything
+except the sexual function. At least they
+might have been as much alike as men are alike.
+They might have been of the same size, possessed
+of the same strength, of the same figures and
+gestures, complexion and hair. Their voices
+might have been alike. They might have had
+the same kinds of nervous systems, with the
+same desires, feelings, ideas and tendencies. In
+the assertions and arguments born of intellectual,
+industrial, social and political readjust<a name="Page_13" id="Page_13"></a>ments,
+it is often assumed that this is the case.
+Differences are minimized or denied, and an
+attempt is made to resolve the world of men
+and women into a world of human beings capable
+of living together in mingled competitions
+and co&ouml;perations, regardless of sex, except where
+the reproductive process is considered. But this
+view is superficial; born of argument it breaks
+down when confronted by any body of significant
+facts.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it has happened that in the long
+struggle of developing civilization, sometimes
+one and sometimes the other sex has gained
+what has seemed an advantage over the other,
+just as in the development of any man's individual
+life, his brain may gain a seeming advantage
+over his stomach, so that it has more than
+its fair share of nourishment and activity.
+Arguing from such a case, we might declare
+the brain superior to the stomach in power,
+health and function; but in the long accounting,
+all such temporary superiorities are wiped
+out. So with men and women, seeming advantages
+for either are gained only at the expense
+of the common life; and in the last analysis,
+<a name="Page_14" id="Page_14"></a>each finds his individual value only in the common
+life of the unit.</p>
+
+<p>Let us try then to see what the special characteristics
+of women are, ignoring as far as possible
+the accidental variations of individuals,
+and the temporary advantages or disadvantages
+due to economic or ideational forces, and all
+assertions of what would be if things were not
+as they are.</p>
+
+<p>While the whole matter of sex differences is
+in a state of unsettlement, it seems very certain
+that males are more active and more variable
+than females. This superabundant vitality
+appears in the males of the higher animals in
+secondary sex characteristics, such as more
+abundant and unnecessary hair and feathers,
+tusks, spurs, antlers, wattles, brilliant colors and
+scent pouches. It also appears in mating calls,
+songs, and general carriage of the body. Correspondingly,
+the female is smaller, duller
+colored, and less immediately attractive than
+the male.</p>
+
+<p>All the studies that have been made on men
+and women, also confirm our ordinary observation
+that men are taller, heavier, stronger and
+<a name="Page_15" id="Page_15"></a>more active than women, and this holds true in
+all stages of civilization, wherever tests have
+been made. In strength, rapidity of movement,
+and rate of fatigue Miss Thompson's studies<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>
+show that men have a very decided advantage
+over women. Thus in strength tests, the men
+in Yale have double the power of women in
+Oberlin;<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> while our college athletic records
+place men far ahead of women in all events
+requiring strength and endurance.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Helen B. Thompson</span>, <i>Psychological Norms in Men and
+Women</i>, p. 167. University of Chicago Press, 1903.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Thomas</span>, <i>Sex and Society</i>, p. 21. University of Chicago
+Press, 1907.</p></div>
+
+<p>The differences in structure between men
+and women are such as to correspond with the
+functional differences just stated. A woman's
+bones are smaller in proportion to her size, than
+are those of a man. The body is longer, the
+hips broader, and the abdomen more prominent.
+Relatively to the length of the body, the arms,
+legs, feet and hands are shorter than in men,
+the lower leg and arm are shorter in proportion
+to the upper leg and arm. Man has the long
+levers and the active frame. One has only to
+<a name="Page_16" id="Page_16"></a>look at two good statues of a man and a woman
+to realize the greater strength and activity of
+the man.</p>
+
+<p>Woman, as she actually appears in modern
+society, is also less subject to variation than
+man;<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> she is much less liable to be a genius
+or an idiot than her brother.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> She offers
+greater resistance to disease, endures pain and
+want more stoically, and lives longer; so that
+while more boys than girls are born in all parts
+of the world, where statistics are kept, in mature
+years women always outnumber men.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Karl Pearson</span> denies this. See <i>The Chances of Death</i>,
+Vol. I, p. 256. London, 1897.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <span class="smcap">C.W. Saleeby</span>, in <i>Woman and Womanhood</i>, p. 54, New
+York, Mitchell Kennerley, 1911, maintains that woman is
+biologically more variable than man, and that woman's less
+variable activity is due to her training.</p></div>
+
+<p>All these statements are summed up by saying
+that not only in women, but in most female
+animals of the higher orders, life is more anabolic
+than in males. They tend to more static conditions;
+they collect, organize, conserve; they are
+patient and stable; they move about less; they
+more easily lay on adipose tissue. Compared
+with the female, the male animal is katabolic;
+<a name="Page_17" id="Page_17"></a>he is active, impulsive, destructive, skilful,
+creative, intense, spasmodic, violent. Such a
+generalization as this must not be pushed too
+far in its applications to our daily life; but as a
+statement of basal differences it seems justified
+by ordinary observation as well as by scientific
+tests.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Patrick Geddes</span> and <span class="smcap">Arthur Thompson</span>, in <i>The Evolution
+of Sex</i>, D. Appleton &amp; Co., 1889, first advanced this
+position.</p></div>
+
+<p>Meantime, it is probably true that the
+female, as mother of the race, is more important
+biologically than the male, since she both furnishes
+germ plasm and nourishes the newly conceived
+life. The latest studies, along lines laid
+down by Mendel, seem to indicate that the
+female brings to the new creation both male and
+female attributes, while the male brings only
+male qualities. Thus when either sex sinks into
+insignificance, as sometimes happens in lower
+forms of life, it is generally the male which
+exists merely for purposes of reproduction.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <span class="smcap">C.W. Saleeby</span>, <i>Woman and Womanhood</i>, Chapter V.
+New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1911.</p></div>
+
+<p>The differences in the nervous systems of
+<a name="Page_18" id="Page_18"></a>men and women are now fairly established on
+the quantitative side. Marshall has shown that
+if we compare brain weight with the stature in
+the two sexes there is a slight preponderance of
+cerebrum in males; but if the other parts of the
+brain are taken into consideration, the sexes are
+equal.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> Havelock Ellis has carefully gathered
+the results of many investigators and declares
+that woman's brain is slightly superior to man's
+in proportion to her size.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> But these quantitative
+differences are now felt to have comparatively
+little significance; and of the relative
+qualities of the brain substance in the two sexes
+we know nothing positively. In fact, if we give
+a scientist a section of brain substance he cannot
+tell whether it is the brain of a man or a woman.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Marshall</span>, <i>Journal of Anatomy and Physiology</i>, July,
+1892.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Havelock Ellis</span>, <i>Man and Woman</i>, p. 97, Contemporary
+Science Series.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is very probable that the average woman's
+mind is capable of much the same activity as
+the average man's mind, given the same heredity
+and the same training. They are both alike
+capable of remarkable feats of imitation, and an
+<a name="Page_19" id="Page_19"></a>ordinarily intelligent man could probably learn
+to wear woman's clothes, and walk as she generally
+walks, so as to deceive even a jury of
+women, if there were a motive to justify the
+effort. Women also can perform, and they do
+perform, most of the feats of men.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time it is desirable to note present
+differences in modes of thinking and feeling,
+for while they may have been produced by
+environment and ideals, and may hence give
+way to education, they must be reckoned with
+in making the next steps. In the chapter on
+education we shall discuss certain academic peculiarities
+of women's minds, but here we are
+interested in seeing what fundamental differences
+characterize the thinking of the sexes.</p>
+
+<p>Women seem more subject to emotional
+states than men;<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> and this general observation
+agrees with the fact that the basal ganglia of
+the brain are more developed in women than in
+men, and these parts of the brain seem most
+intimately concerned with emotional activity.
+Whether emotion follows acts or leads to acts
+<a name="Page_20" id="Page_20"></a>remains a disputed question, but certainly emotion
+gives charm and significance to life and
+distinguishes modes of thinking. Particularly
+in the dramatic art, this quality of mind gives
+women special excellence. The fact that she
+more often appeals to emotion than to reason,
+as cause for action, in no way marks her as
+inferior to man, but simply as different. As
+Ellen Key says: "There is nothing more futile
+than to try to prove the inferiority of woman to
+man, unless it be to try to prove her equality."<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Helen Bradford Thompson</span>, <i>Psychological Norms in Men
+and Women</i>, p. 171, University of Chicago Press, 1903.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Ellen Key</span>, <i>Love and Ethics</i>, p. 52. New York: Huebsch,
+1911.</p></div>
+
+<p>Most women think in particulars as compared
+with men. The individual circumstance seems
+to them very important; and it is hard for them
+to get away from the concrete. On the other
+hand, a man's thinking is more impersonal and
+general; and he is more easily drawn into abstractions.
+It is true that woman's domestic life
+would naturally develop this quality but we are
+not now concerned with the question of origins.
+Most women find it easy to live from day to
+day; the man is more given to systematizing
+and planning. Thus in offices, men are more
+<a name="Page_21" id="Page_21"></a>efficient as heads of departments, while women
+handle details admirably. In public life we
+have recently seen thousands of women eager to
+depose a United States Senator, accused of polygamy,
+without regard to the bearing of the concrete
+act on constitutional guarantees. Women
+have done little with abstract studies like metaphysics;
+they have done much with the novel,
+where ideas are presented in the concrete and
+particular.</p>
+
+<p>This habit of dealing with particulars, and
+disinclination for abstraction, leads easily to
+habitual action. It is easy for women to stock
+up their lower nerve centers with reflex actions.
+This, of course, goes along with the general
+anabolic characteristics of the sex. Hence
+women are the conservers of traditions; rules of
+conducting social intercourse appeal to them;
+and they are the final supporters of theological
+dogmas.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> Women naturally uphold caste, and
+Daughters of the Revolution and Colonial Dames
+flourish on the scantiest foundations of ancestral
+excellence. Man, on the other hand, is more
+<a name="Page_22" id="Page_22"></a>radical and creative. He has perfected most of
+our inventions; he has painted our great pictures;
+carved our great statues; he has written
+music, while women have interpreted it.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Helen B. Thompson</span>, <i>Psychological Norms in Men and
+Women</i>, p. 171, University of Chicago Press, 1903.</p></div>
+
+<p>Along with these fixed qualities of action,
+women have a tendency to indirection when
+they advance. We say they have diplomacy,
+tact and coquetry, while man is more direct and
+bald in his methods. Of course, one easily understands
+how these qualities may have arisen,
+since "fraud is the force of weak natures," and
+woman has always been driven to supplement
+her weakness with tact, from the days of Jael
+and Delilah down to the present day adventuress.</p>
+
+<p>These qualities of mind naturally drive
+women to literary interests which are concrete,
+personal and emotional. Men turn more easily
+than women to the abstract generalizations of
+science. Of course, there are marked exceptions
+to these general statements, in both sexes.
+Madame Curie, who was recently a candidate
+for the honors of the French Academy, and
+who, in 1911, was given the Nobel prize for her
+distinguished services to chemistry, is but one of
+<a name="Page_23" id="Page_23"></a>many women who are famous to-day in the world
+of science. Still the private life of these women,
+as in the case of S&oacute;nya Koval&eacute;vsky, seems to
+bear out our general conclusion. Men, on the
+other hand, as milliners and editors of ladies'
+journals, show marked skill in catering to
+women's tastes; but on the whole the differences
+indicated seem important and widely diffused.</p>
+
+<p>Another profound difference between men
+and women is the woman's greater tendency to
+periodicity in all her functions and adjustments
+to life.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> In all normal societies the life of the
+man is fairly regular and constant from birth to
+old age. He moves along lines mainly predetermined
+by his heredity and his environment,
+his habits and his work. Even puberty is less
+disturbing in its effect upon a boy than upon a
+girl; and often by eighteen we can anticipate
+the life of a young man with great accuracy.
+The one element in his life hardest to forecast is
+the effect of his love-affairs.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> See chapter on Periodicity in <span class="smcap">G. Stanley Hall's</span> <i>Adolescence</i>,
+Vol. I, p. 472.</p></div>
+
+<p>With a woman, it is quite different. As a
+girl, the period of puberty produces profound
+<a name="Page_24" id="Page_24"></a>changes; and after that, for more than thirty
+years she passes through periodical exaltations
+and depressions that must play a large part in
+determining her health, happiness and efficiency.
+In the forties, comes another great change which
+affects her life to a degree strangely ignored by
+those who have dealt with her possibilities in
+the past.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Karin Micha&euml;lis</span>, <i>The Dangerous Age</i>, John Lane Co.,
+1911, is said to have sold 80,000 in six weeks when it first
+appeared in Berlin. <i>The Bride of the Mistletoe</i>, by <span class="smcap">James
+Lane Allen</span> (Macmillan), deals with the same period.</p></div>
+
+<p>But the great element of uncertainty, always
+fronting the girl and young woman, is marriage.
+Marriage for her generally means abandonment
+of old working interests, and a substitution of
+new; it brings her geographical change; new
+acquaintances and friendships; and the steady
+adjustment of her personal life to the man she
+has married in its relation to industry, religion,
+society and the arts. If children come to her,
+they must inevitably retire her from public life,
+for a time, with the danger of losing connections
+which comes to all who temporarily drop out of
+the race.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25"></a>A boy, industrious, observant, with some
+power of administration, studies mining engineering,
+moves to a mining center and expresses
+his individual and social powers along the lines
+of his work until he is sixty. The women who
+impinge against his life may deflect him from
+the mines in California to those in Australia, or
+from the actual work of superintendence to an
+office; or from an interest in Browning to Tennyson;
+or from Methodism to Christian Science.
+The girl with industrious and observant interests
+studies stenography and type-writing, moves to
+the vicinity of offices, but is then caught up in
+the life of a farmer-husband who shifts her center
+of activity to a farm in Idaho where she must
+devote herself to entirely different activities,
+form new associations, think in new terms, respond
+to new emotions, and adjust herself to
+her farmer-husband's personality. When, after
+twenty-five years, she has reared a family of
+children, and when improved circumstances enable
+them to move up to the county seat, she
+confronts many of the conditions for which she
+originally prepared herself, but with farm habits,
+diminishing adaptability and diminishing power
+<a name="Page_26" id="Page_26"></a>of appealing to her husband. His powers are
+still comparatively unimpaired, and as a dealer
+in farm produce or farm machinery his interests
+undergo slight change. In general, it may be
+said that a woman's life falls into three great
+periods of twenty-five years each. The first
+twenty-five years of childhood and girlhood is a
+time of getting ready for the puzzling combination
+of her personal needs as a human being,
+her needs as a self-supporting social unit, and
+her probabilities of matrimony. The second
+twenty-five years, the domestic period of her
+life, is a time of adjustments as wife and mother,
+which may instead prove to be a period of
+barren waiting, or a time of professional and
+industrial self-direction and self-support. The
+third twenty-five years is a time of mature
+and ripened powers, of lessened romantic interests,
+and if the preceding period has been
+devoted to husband and children, it is often a
+time of social detachment, of weakened individual
+initiative, of old-fashioned knowledge,
+of inefficiency, of premature retirement and old
+age.</p>
+
+<p>On the moral side, as Professor Thomas has
+<a name="Page_27" id="Page_27"></a>so admirably pointed out,<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> women have evolved
+a morality of the person and of the family,
+while men have evolved a morality of the group
+and of property. Since men have had a monopoly
+of property and of law-making they have
+shaped laws mainly for the protection of property,
+and in a secondary degree for the protection
+of the person. Under these laws a man who
+beats another nearly to death is less severely
+punished than one who signs the wrong name
+to a check for five dollars. Man's katabolic nature
+and his greater freedom have given him
+almost a monopoly of crime under these laws
+which he has made. Offences against the coming
+generation, against health, social efficiency
+and good taste have until recently been left to
+the tribunal of public opinion as expressed in
+social usage; and here, as we have seen,
+women are generally the judges and executioners.
+In this, her own field of moral judgment,
+woman is idealistic and uncompromising.
+If one of her sisters falls from virtue she will
+<a name="Page_28" id="Page_28"></a>often pursue her unmercifully. If a man, on
+the other hand, commits a burglary or forgery
+her sympathy and mercy may make her a very
+lenient judge.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> <span class="smcap">William I. Thomas</span>, <i>Sex and Society</i>, p. 149. University
+of Chicago Press, 1907. <span class="smcap">Ellen Key</span>, in <i>Love and Marriage,</i>
+G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911, traces the same lines of growth.</p></div>
+
+<p>In &aelig;sthetics, the differences follow the same
+general law. Women express beauty in themselves;
+jewels are for their ornament; and
+rooms are furnished as a setting for themselves.
+The lives of millions of workers go to the adornment
+of women. In painting they sometimes
+excel, but a Madame Le Brun does her best
+work when she paints herself and her child, and
+when Angelica Kauffmann would paint a vestal
+virgin, she drapes a veil over her own head and
+transfers her features to the canvas. Sculpture
+and architecture are too impersonal and abstract
+to attract much attention from women at present.
+Even a sculptor like Mrs. Bessie Potter
+Vonnoh finds her truest theme in statuettes of
+mothers with their children about them.</p>
+
+<p>During the past few years psychologists have
+paid great attention to secondary sex characteristics
+of the mind, and doubtless many qualities
+of the thought and feeling of men and women
+owe their origin to the same source as brilliant
+<a name="Page_29" id="Page_29"></a>plumage, antlers, combs and wattles. Thus the
+shy, retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing,
+adoring excesses of maidenhood and the peculiar
+psychological manifestations of the late forties
+must probably be understood from this point of
+view. So, also, must the bold, swaggering,
+assertive, compelling bearing of youth be interpreted.
+The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical
+cane-carrying youth is naturally disliked
+as a sexual perversion.</p>
+
+<p>Women alone, whether individually or in
+groups, tend to develop certain hard, dry, arid
+qualities of mind and heart, or they become
+emotional and unbalanced. Losing a sense of
+large significances, they become overcareful,
+saving, sometimes penurious, while in matters
+of feeling they lavish sentiment and sympathy
+on unimportant pets and movements.</p>
+
+<p>Men, when alone, become selfish, coarse, and
+reckless; their judgments become extravagant
+and their pursuits remorseless.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it is certainly true that men and women
+supplement each other in the subjective as in
+the objective life. Man creates, woman conserves;
+man composes, woman interprets; man
+<a name="Page_30" id="Page_30"></a>generalizes, woman particularizes; man seeks
+beauty, woman embodies beauty; man thinks
+more than he feels, woman feels more than she
+thinks. For new spiritual birth, as for physical
+birth, men and women must supplement each
+other.</p>
+
+<p>To be a woman then, is to be for twenty-five
+years a girl and then a young woman, capable
+of feeding and protecting herself, possessed of
+preparing and conserving powers superior to her
+brothers. After that, for twenty-five years, she
+is a human being primarily devoted to romanticism,
+finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood
+and motherhood, direct or vicarious; in
+the last twenty-five years, she should be a wise
+woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her
+gathered training and powers to the service of
+the group. All this time she is, like the man,
+an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest
+power and her greatest service only when working
+in loving association with the man of her
+choice.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31"></a>II</h2>
+
+<h2>Woman's Heritage</h2>
+
+
+<p>So thoroughly have modern men fastened
+their attention upon the problems of the
+immediate present, that one feels driven to justify
+oneself in taking up an historical investigation
+of any subject presented in a popular manner.
+And yet it takes little argument to show
+that what we shall be depends in large measure
+on what we are; and that what we are rests back
+on what we have been. In anything we try to
+think or feel or do, we quickly reach a limit;
+and this limit is determined by the original quality
+of our nervous system plus the training it
+has received. For here is the curious fact about
+this instrument of thought and feeling which at
+once takes it away from comparison with mechanical
+instruments. Whatever it does, becomes a
+part of itself, and then helps to determine what
+it will do the next time and how it will do it.
+With the making easy of mental operations
+<a name="Page_32" id="Page_32"></a>through repetition, and with the formation of
+associations based on our choices, it may be truly
+said that we become whatever we habitually
+think and feel and do.</p>
+
+<p>Every choice we make is thus literally built
+into our character and becomes a part of ourselves.
+After that, the old choice will help determine
+the new, and we shall find ourselves
+being directed by all of our past choices, and
+even by the choices of our ancestors. Since,
+then, all our earlier selves are continued in us
+and make us what we are, we are simply studying
+ourselves when we study the history of our
+ancestors. If we would go forward, we must
+first look backward; for we must rise on stepping-stones
+of our dead selves.</p>
+
+<p>But history is not merely the story of the
+past. To relate that, would take as long as it
+took to live it, and the result would be but
+weariness of spirit. History, to be significant,
+must select the events with which it will deal;
+it must arrange these in series that are in accord
+with the constitution of things; and then it must
+use the generalizations it reaches to interpret the
+present, and even to forecast the future. It is
+<a name="Page_33" id="Page_33"></a>obvious that this interpretation will depend on
+the point of view held by the interpreter.</p>
+
+<p>Hence we must ask in what fundamental
+beliefs this presentation rests. These are, first,
+that life tends to move along certain lines that
+constitute the law of human nature. Just as
+the infant tends first to wriggle, then creep, then
+walk, then run and dance, so human nature
+tends to move upward from savagery through
+primitive settled life to the complex forms of
+larger settled units. In this progress, material
+or economic forces play a large part; but ideas,
+originally born out of circumstances, but sometimes
+borrowed from other people, sometimes
+degenerate remnants of past utilities, also play
+a large part. The progress we finally make is
+thus directed by this human tendency, by material
+circumstances, and by ideas. Sometimes it
+keeps pretty closely to what seems to us to be
+upward human growth; sometimes it stagnates;
+sometimes it gives us perverted products; and
+sometimes it destroys itself.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it becomes necessary to trace the past
+experiences of woman that we may see with what
+heritage she faces the future. She is all that
+<a name="Page_34" id="Page_34"></a>she has felt and thought and done. She started
+with at least half of the destiny of the race in
+her keeping. Handicapped in size and agility,
+and periodically weighted down by the burdens
+of maternity, she still possessed charms and was
+mistress of pleasures which made her, for savage
+man, the dearest possession next to food; and
+for civilized man, the companion, joy and inspiration
+of his days.</p>
+
+<p>Of woman's position in early savage times
+we know only what we can learn from fragmentary
+prehistoric remains, from the structure of
+early languages, from records of travelers and
+students among savages of more recent times;
+or what can be inferred from human nature in
+general. Most of this data is difficult to interpret,
+but it is probable that woman's position
+was not much worse than man's. It is a bad
+beast that fouls its own food or its own nest;
+and the female had always the protection of the
+male's desire. If she could not entirely control
+her body, she could still control her own expressions
+of affection and desire; and, without these,
+mere possession lost much of its charm.</p>
+
+<p>As keeper of the cave, cultivator of the soil,
+<a name="Page_35" id="Page_35"></a>and guardian of the child, woman, rather than
+her more foot-loose mate, probably became the
+center of the earliest civilization. The jealousy
+of men formed tribal rules for her protection;
+and to these, religion early gave its powerful
+sanctions. Thus there came a day when the
+woman took her mate home to her tribe and
+gave her children her own name. Even if the
+matriarchal period was not so important as has
+sometimes been assumed, woman certainly had
+large influence over tribal affairs in early savage
+life.</p>
+
+<p>With the increase in population, and the
+consequent disappearance of game, man was
+forced to turn his attention to the crude agriculture
+which woman had begun to develop. The
+superior qualities which he had acquired in war
+and the chase, enabled him slowly to improve
+on these beginnings and to shape a body of custom
+which made settled society possible. With
+man's leadership in the family the patriarchal
+form of government developed, and man's power
+over woman was sanctioned by custom and law.
+The woman was stolen, or bought; and while
+sexual attraction did not play the continuous
+<a name="Page_36" id="Page_36"></a>part which it plays in developed society, it must
+have done much to protect women from abuse
+and neglect, at least during the years of girlhood
+and child-bearing. It is at this point that our
+historical records begin.</p>
+
+<p>In the pages of Homer, or of the Old Testament,
+in Tacitus's "Germania," or in the
+writings of Livy, we find woman's position
+well defined. True, she stands second to the
+man, but she is his assistant, not his slave. She
+must be courted, and while marriage presents
+are exchanged, she is not bought. In times
+of emergency, she steps to the front and legislates,
+judges, or fights. It is possible in the pages of
+the Old Testament to find women doing everything
+which men can do. Even where the power
+is not nominally in her own hands, she often, as
+in the cases of Penelope or Esther, rules by
+indirection. Her body and her offspring are
+protected; and the Hebrew woman of the Proverbs
+shows us a singularly free and secure industrial
+position.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> Such was the condition in
+primitive Judea, in early Greece, in republican
+Rome, or among the Germans who invaded
+<a name="Page_37" id="Page_37"></a>southern Europe in the third and fourth centuries
+of our era.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Proverbs</i> xxxi, 10.</p></div>
+
+<p>Man's jealousy of his woman as a source of
+pleasure and honor to himself, and to his family,
+must have always acted to limit woman's freedom,
+even while it gave her protection and a
+secure position in society. With the development
+of settled government in city states, like
+Athens or early Rome, the necessity for defining
+citizenship made the family increasingly a political
+institution. A man's offspring through slave
+women, concubines, or "strangers" lived outside
+the citizen group, and so were negligible; but
+the citizen woman's children were citizens, and
+so she became a jealously guarded political institution.
+The established family became the test
+of civic, military, and property rights. The
+regulations limiting the freedom of girls and
+women were jealously enforced, since mismating
+might open the treasures of citizenship to any
+low born or foreign adventurer.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <span class="smcap">T.G. Tucker</span>, <i>Life in Ancient Athens</i>, Chapter VIII,
+Macmillan Co., 1906.</p></div>
+
+<p>In the ancient Orient, in Greece, Rome, and
+in later Europe, these stages have been repeated
+<a name="Page_38" id="Page_38"></a>again and again. Woman is first a slave, stolen
+or bought, protected by sexual interest to which
+is later added social custom and religious sanction.
+Early civilization centers around the
+woman, so that she becomes in some degree the
+center of the home-staying group. In primitive
+civilization man takes over woman's most important
+activities; but she gains a fixed position,
+protected, though still further enslaved, by political
+necessities.</p>
+
+<p>But with the increase of wealth, whether in
+terms of money, slaves, or trade, woman found
+herself subject to a fourth form of enslavement
+more subtly dangerous than brute force, lust, or
+political and religious institutionalism. This
+was the desire of man to protect her and make
+her happy because he loved her. He put golden
+chains about her neck and bracelets on her arms,
+clothed her in silks and satins, fed her with
+dainty fare, gave her a retinue of attendants to
+spare her fatigue, and put her in the safest rear
+rooms of the habitation. But it is foolish to
+talk of conscious enslavement in this connection.
+Rich men and luxurious civilizations have
+always enslaved women in the same way that
+<a name="Page_39" id="Page_39"></a>rich, fond, and foolish mothers have enslaved
+their children, by robbing them of opportunity,
+by taking away that needful work and that
+vital experience of real life which alone can
+develop the powers of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>Thus in the Periclean age in Greece, in the
+Eastern Kingdoms established by Alexander, in
+Imperial Rome, in the later Italian Renaissance,
+in France under Louis XIV and Louis XV, in
+England under the Stuart kings, and in many
+centers of our own contemporary world, women
+have given up their legitimate heritage of work
+and independent thought for trinkets, silks, and
+servants, and have quickly degenerated, like the
+children of rich and foolish mothers, into luxury-loving
+parasites and playthings.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Olive Schreiner</span>, <i>Woman and Labor</i>, Chapters on Parasitism.
+New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.</p></div>
+
+<p>To maintain this luxurious setting for their
+mistresses, whether wives or irregular concubines,
+men of the Occident have generally been driven
+to ever fiercer struggle with their fellows. Thus
+a Pericles, at the zenith of his powers, facing
+difficulties which strained and developed all his
+forces, had for his legitimate wife a woman,
+<a name="Page_40" id="Page_40"></a>bound hand and foot by conventions and immured
+in her house in Athens. But a man is
+only half a complete human being, and the other
+half cannot be furnished by a weak and ignorant
+kept-woman, no matter how legal the bond.
+Hence the forces always driving men to completeness
+and unity drove Pericles away from his
+house and his legitimate children and his mere
+wife to find the completion of his life.</p>
+
+<p>In these cases, as elsewhere, demand creates
+supply, and there were to be found everywhere
+in Athens able and cultivated foreign women,
+many of whom had come over from the mainland
+of Asia Minor; and one of these, Aspasia,
+became the mistress of Pericles and bore him
+children. She was no adventuress of the street,
+but an educated and brilliant woman, in whose
+home you might have met not only Pericles,
+but also Socrates, Phidias, Anaxagoras, Sophocles
+and Euripides.</p>
+
+<p>This is the stage that always follows the
+period of the luxury-loving wife. It was so in
+Imperial Rome, in later Carthage, in Venice,
+and in eighteenth-century France. But the
+normal human unit is the man and woman who
+<a name="Page_41" id="Page_41"></a>love each other, not these combinations of illegality,
+law, lust, love and dishonor. Such a triangle
+of two women and a man rests its base in
+shame, and its lines are lies, and its value is
+destruction. So virile republican Rome swept
+over decadent Greece and made it into the
+Roman province of Achaia; later the chaste
+Germans swarmed over the decadent Roman
+Empire and then slowly rebuilt modern Europe;
+the ascetic Puritans destroyed the Stuarts;
+while the French Revolution was the deluge
+that swept away Louis XVI and put the virtuous,
+if commonplace, bourgeoisie in power.</p>
+
+<p>So far we have dealt with the position of
+women as though it depended alone on human
+hungers, passions and environment; but while
+these are the driving forces of life, they are very
+subject to the repressing and diverting power of
+ideas, working in an environment of economic
+conditions. These ideas may themselves date
+back to earlier passions and economic conditions,
+but they often survive the time which created
+them, and then they enter into life and conduct
+as seemingly independent forces. These ideas
+played a large part, even in the ancient world.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42"></a>The Jews organized their religious and political
+practices about a patriarchal Deity ruling
+a patriarchal state; and their tradition handicapped
+all women with the sin of Eve, the sin
+of seeking knowledge. The Greeks, on the
+other hand, gave woman a splendid place in the
+hierarchy of the gods, and idealized not only her
+beauty in Aphrodite but her chaste aloofness in
+Artemis, her physical strength in the Amazons,
+and her wisdom in Athena and Hera. They
+covered the Acropolis with matchless monuments
+in honor of Athena, patron goddess of
+their fair city, and celebrated splendid pageants
+on her anniversaries. So, too, republican Rome,
+while it gathered its civic life about patriarchal
+ideas in which the father was supreme, gave
+women positions of high honor in its religion,
+whether as deities or as servitors of the gods.
+In the Niebelungenlied, the Germans bodied
+forth their splendid conceptions of female
+beauty, strength and passion in such figures
+as Brunhilda. These ideas must have done
+much to offset the physical weakness and functional
+handicaps of women in the ancient world.</p>
+
+<p>The Christian ideas, which have dominated
+<a name="Page_43" id="Page_43"></a>us now for nearly two thousand years, are generally
+considered to have been favorable to
+women. In their insistence on the value of the
+human soul, and on democratic equality, they
+have doubtless helped to raise the status of
+women along with that of all human beings.
+But, as between man and woman, Christianity
+has given every possible advantage to men, and
+has added needlessly to the natural burdens of
+women.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <span class="smcap">James Donaldson</span>, <i>Woman: Her Position and Influence in
+Ancient Greece and Rome and Among the Early Christians</i>,
+Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907.</p></div>
+
+<p>From Judaism, Christianity borrowed Eve,
+with her eternally operative sin, and thus placed
+all women under a perpetual load of suspicion
+and guilt. The Founder of the new faith never
+assumed the responsibilities of a family, and he
+included no woman among his disciples. Example,
+even negative example, is often more
+powerful than precept. Paul, the most learned
+of the disciples, in his writings, and as an organizer
+of the Church, emphasized the older Jewish
+position. In the new organization, women filled
+only lesser places, while the men settled all
+<a name="Page_44" id="Page_44"></a>points of dogma, directing and mainly conducting
+the services of worship. Meantime each
+woman's soul remained her own, to be saved
+only by her individual actions; therein lay her
+hope for the future, both on earth and in heaven.</p>
+
+<p>But it was those later developments of belief
+and practice that gathered around Christian
+asceticism which placed woman and her special
+functions under a cloud of suspicion from which
+she is not even yet entirely freed. Celibacy
+became exalted; virginity was a positive virtue;
+chastity, instead of a healthful antecedent to
+parenthood, became an end in itself; and monasteries
+and convents multiplied throughout
+Christendom. Something of shame and guilt
+gathered around conception and birth, as representing
+a lower standard of life, even when sanctified
+by the ceremonies of the Church. From
+the second century to the sixth, the ablest of the
+Church Fathers, Greek and Latin alike, formulated
+statements in which woman became the
+chief ally of the devil in dragging men down to
+perdition. We still hear ancestral reverberations
+of these teachings in all our discussions of
+woman's place in civilization.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45"></a>But ideas can only for a time overcome or
+divert the primitive human hungers, and slowly
+Mary, Mother of Jesus, won first place among
+the saints. Celibate recluses who feared to walk
+the streets for fear of meeting a woman, and
+who spent the nights fighting down their noblest
+passions, starving them, flagellating and rolling
+their naked bodies in thorny rose hedges or in
+snow-drifts to silence demands for wife and
+children, threw themselves in an ecstacy of adoration
+before an image of the Virgin with the
+Baby in her arms. So Maryolatry came to bless
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>But even this blessing was not without alloy,
+for it gave us an ideal of woman, superhuman,
+immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before
+the angel with the lily, standing mute with
+crossed hands and downcast eyes before her
+Divine Son. She represented, not the institution
+of the family, but the institution of the
+Church. Even when she appeared in representations
+of the Holy Family, Joseph, her husband,
+was not the father of her child, but his servant.</p>
+
+<p>Chivalry took up this conception, and shaped
+for us the fantastic lady who stands back of
+<a name="Page_46" id="Page_46"></a>much of modern romantic love. Robbed of her
+simple, human, pagan passions, she became
+often an an&aelig;mic and unfruitful, if angelic,
+creature. For the direct and passionate assurances
+of a virtuous and noble love she substituted
+sighs and tears, languishing looks and
+weary renunciations. This sterile hybrid, bred
+of human passions and theological negations,
+must be finally banished from our literature
+and from our minds before we can have a healthy
+eugenic conscience among us.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <span class="smcap">R. de Maulde la Claviere</span>, <i>The Woman of the Renaissance.
+A Study in Feminism</i>, translated by George H. Ely. New
+York: C.P. Putnam's Sons, 1900.</p></div>
+
+<p>The Protestant Revolution went far to restore
+the special functions of women to respect. Belief
+in her individual soul, and in its need of
+salvation through individual choice, was supplemented
+by the belief that this choice must be
+guided by her individual judgment. Celibacy
+ceased to be a sign of righteousness; and the
+best men and women married. But beliefs cannot
+be directly destroyed by revolution; they
+can only be disturbed and modified. The teachings
+of Paul, Augustine, Tertullian and St.<a name="Page_47" id="Page_47"></a>
+Jerome were still authoritative, and Calvin and
+Knox reaffirmed many of them. The family
+was still subordinate to the Church; and marriage
+still remained a sacrament, with theological
+significances, rather than the simple union
+of a man and woman who loved each other.
+The choice of a mate once made was final, because
+theological, and it could be broken only
+with infinite pain and disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>The great political upheaval, which we call
+the French Revolution, carried in its fundamental
+teachings freedom and opportunity for
+men and for women; but like the corresponding
+revolution in religion, it required time to make
+adjustments, and so we have been content to live
+for more than a hundred years in the midst of
+verbal affirmations which we denied in all our
+institutional life.</p>
+
+<p>In America, conditions have always been
+favorable for women to work out their freedom.
+Among the immigrants who came to our shores
+before 1840 there were, of course, a few traders,
+adventurers and servants who hoped to improve
+their financial conditions; but the leaders, and
+most of the rank and file, came that they might
+<a name="Page_48" id="Page_48"></a>be free to think their own thoughts and live
+their own lives. If this selection of colonists,
+through religious and political persecution,
+sometimes gave us bigots with one idea, it also
+gave us people who knew that ideas can change.
+Along with Cotton Mather it gave us Anne
+Hutchinson, Roger Williams and William Penn.</p>
+
+<p>Most of these who came in the early days
+belonged to extreme dissenting sects believing
+in salvation through individual choice, based
+on personal judgments. Preaching was exalted
+at the expense of ritual; and by substituting
+new thinking for old habits in religion, the
+American settlers made it less difficult for other
+adjustments to be made, even in such a conservative
+matter as woman's position. It is through
+no accident that Methodists, Friends, Unitarians
+and the Salvation Army have been much more
+sympathetic to woman's progress than have the
+older ritualistic faiths.</p>
+
+<p>And these theological ideas had to be worked
+out under the material conditions of the New
+World, which were also favorable to the emancipation
+of women. Facing primitive conditions
+in the forest, it became a habit to do new things
+<a name="Page_49" id="Page_49"></a>in new ways. Woman's work and judgment
+were indispensable; and these picked women
+showed themselves capable in every direction.
+They did every kind of work; and when it came
+to enduring privation or even to starving, they
+set an example for men.</p>
+
+<p>But while every new movement in ideas
+always carries with it other radical ideas, the
+practical difficulties of mental, social and legal
+adjustment always prevent the full and harmonious
+development of all that is involved in any
+new point of view. In the American colonies
+the need for new adjustments in religion, government
+and practical living made it inevitable
+that any very important change in woman's
+position should linger. In fact, the student of
+colonial records finds many traces of ultra conservatism
+in the treatment of women, though
+the forces had been liberated which must inevitably
+open the way for her through the New
+World of America into a new world of the spirit.</p>
+
+<p>And before the quickening influence of the
+new life had time to become commonplace, the
+struggle with England began. The Revolutionary
+period was a time of intense political educa<a name="Page_50" id="Page_50"></a>tion
+for every one. War and sacrifice glorified
+the new ideas; and even the children and women
+could not escape their influence. Why then did
+not the American Revolution pass on to full
+freedom and opportunity for women? For the
+same reason that it did not forever abolish slavery
+in America. The vested interests involved
+were so many, and the changes so momentous
+and difficult, that only the most imperative
+needs could receive attention.</p>
+
+<p>But this does not mean that the interest in a
+larger life for women was not active or that
+women were making no advance in self-direction.
+There is evidence that women like Abigail
+Adams realized the abstract injustice of their
+position, and the fact that as early as 1794,
+Mary Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the
+Rights of Woman" was republished in Philadelphia
+shows that her ideas must have had
+some currency in America.</p>
+
+<p>After the Revolution, the intimate, stimulating
+influence of Europe, which the earlier
+colonists had enjoyed, was for a time almost
+entirely lost. The new States became extremely
+provincial; and minds untouched by the larger
+<a name="Page_51" id="Page_51"></a>world always tend to conservatism. Noah Webster,
+in "A Letter to Young Ladies," published
+in Boston, in 1790, declared that they "must be
+content to be women; to be mild, social and
+sentimental." Three years later the "Letters
+to a Young Lady," by the Reverend John Bennett,
+were republished in Philadelphia, after
+going through several London editions. He
+placed the qualities to be cultivated in this
+order: "A genteel person, a simple nature,
+sensibility, cheerfulness, delicacy, softness, affability,
+good manners, regular habits, skill in
+fancy work, and a fund of hidden genteel learning."
+Through the first half of the nineteenth
+century these ideals struggled along parallel
+with the new ideas that were everywhere springing
+up from the colonial forest experiences of
+the last two generations.</p>
+
+<p>As conservers of morals and as leaders in
+higher ideals of life, the advanced women of
+America came early face to face with two outgrown
+abuses. One of these was human slavery
+and the other was intemperance. In attacking
+these abuses, women had to break with all the
+traditions that defined their position.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52"></a>The wealthy and intelligent Englishwoman,
+Frances Wright, who came to this country in
+1818 to attack slavery, found herself doubly opposed
+because she was a woman speaking in public.
+Had not St. Paul declared: "It is a shame
+for women to speak in the church"? Lucretia
+Mott, born in the Society of Friends in Nantucket,
+had escaped the full force of this injunction,
+but even she found, when she attacked
+slavery in public, that she had invaded a world
+sacred to men, and she was sternly warned back.
+Miss Susan B. Anthony also began her public
+life as a teacher and a temperance reformer. It
+was only when she found herself helpless, in presence
+of the prejudices against her sex, that she
+turned her attention to freeing women from all
+purely sex limitation in public life.</p>
+
+<p>When the Civil War broke out, the women
+were ready to do their part. It is quite possible
+that the names of Clara Barton and Dorothea
+Dix may be remembered when Grant and Sherman
+are forgotten. With the establishing of
+new human values the historian of the future
+may consider the saving of life and the preventing
+of misery as more worthy of lasting record
+<a name="Page_53" id="Page_53"></a>than even military genius. These women and
+their millions of helpers had not the resources
+of organized government at their disposal; but,
+instead, they had oftentimes to work against the
+jealousy of those in authority. At the close of
+the war, the Sanitary Commission comprised
+seven thousand aid societies scattered over the
+country, and it had raised over fifteen millions of
+dollars. Those women who remained at home,
+in the absence of fathers and sons for four years,
+faced all the problems of practical life. Who can
+estimate the value of training in co&ouml;perative
+work and organization which the Civil War gave
+to the American women?</p>
+
+<p>In the Civil War, women directly served
+men; but in the great industrial reorganization
+which came afterward they served mainly
+women and children. Here the victories have
+been won in the press, in the legislative halls,
+and in courts of law. Working with men, or
+alone, they have perfected organization, agitated,
+raised money, printed appeals, and carried cases
+through the courts, until factories and stores
+have been made safer, excessive working hours
+have been cut down, young children have been
+<a name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></a>exempted from labor, many sweat-shops have
+been closed, and women workers have begun to
+be organized to care for their own needs. Much
+has been done; more remains to be done; but
+the training of the women has gone steadily
+forward.</p>
+
+<p>These, then, are the forces which have pushed
+women forward in America: European political
+and religious persecution, the forest necessities
+of colonial life, the American Revolution, the
+struggle with slavery and intemperance, the
+Civil War, the industrial struggle and the need
+to protect women and children from capitalistic
+exploitation. Possibly women have now reached
+a point in their development where they can
+turn to public service and to a full realization of
+their powers and responsibilities without the
+goading necessity of a great wrong. If not,
+there are sufficient wrongs still calling to lead
+them for many years. Intemperance is not yet
+banished; the negro is not yet freed from the
+effects of his slavery; working women and children
+are not yet fairly protected; disease reaps
+needlessly large harvests; Lazarus still begs at
+the table of Dives; our public education leaves
+<a name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></a>much to be desired; criminals are badly handled;
+millions of European refugees come marching
+into our land needing guidance. Meantime,
+millions of women are content, because themselves
+comfortable, and there are some even
+willing to aid the powers of obstruction.</p>
+
+<p>In these later years, marvelous changes have
+taken place all over the world. Even in China,
+official attempts are now being made to leave
+women free to walk by abolishing the bandaging
+of infants' feet. In Turkey, women are going
+out from the harem to participate in public life.
+In Germany, they are escaping from the exclusive
+service of the home. In England, they are
+repeating the cries of the men of 1776 and of
+1789: "All men and women are born free and
+equal." "No taxation without representation."
+"One person, one vote." In Finland, Australia,
+New Zealand, Norway and Sweden, women
+have all the essential civic and political rights of
+men.</p>
+
+<p>But, as in all human progress, first the ideas
+of a few leaders change; they shape legislation;
+and the new organization slowly makes over the
+practices and then the deep-seated mental and
+<a name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></a>moral habits, which constitute popular prejudices.
+These old unreasoning feelings still largely
+dominate us, blinding us to the facts of life
+and blocking each new advance by which women
+might pass into the world of free choice and
+adjustment of their lives as co-workers with men.
+In the next chapters we must study these present-day
+conditions in detail.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></a>III</h2>
+
+<h2>Women in Education</h2>
+
+
+<p>In discussing woman's relation to formal education
+we are really examining her ability
+to master and teach certain intellectual exercises,
+for in our modern industrial democracies
+our efforts are confined almost exclusively to
+training the mind and to stocking it with information.
+Each year we talk more and more
+about physical, moral, political, social and
+industrial education; but requirements for entrance
+into schools, promotions in them, and
+graduation from their courses, still rest almost
+entirely on information acquired; and in a less
+degree, on intellectual ability displayed.</p>
+
+<p>Even in selecting and certifying teachers,
+the emphasis is all laid on intellectual equipment.
+On the physical, moral, or social sides
+we at most demand that the candidates shall
+not be too bad; on the political side we do not
+demand even this, since nearly 80 per cent. of
+<a name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></a>our whole teaching force is declared legally unfit
+to vote or hold office, and is yet employed to
+train our future citizens. But on the intellectual
+side we demand positive proof of fitness. Thus
+it is fair to say that our modern education deals
+almost exclusively with knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Knowledge, in the past, has nearly always
+been considered much as we consider dynamite
+to-day. It was a dangerous force, useful to a ruling
+class, and hence preserved in the hands of a
+cult, generally a priesthood; but it was thought
+capable of working endless mischief in the hands
+of ignorant people. Through all the pages of
+history we find individuals, and weaker groups,
+driven away from the accumulated treasure;
+and if detected in their desire to know, especially
+if they sought knowledge through original
+investigation, they were branded with such titles
+of disgrace as "wizard" or "heretic;" and, as a
+warning to others, they were often burned in
+the public square or buried alive.</p>
+
+<p>Women, as an inferior class, were especially
+restrained from learning. Knowledge would
+breed discontent in them; it would make them
+question the binding power of the conventions
+<a name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></a>and beliefs which held them in their place; and
+it would show them how to achieve their freedom,
+and might even encourage them to assume leadership.
+Here and there, individual women
+gained the training necessary for leadership, as
+in the cases of Sappho, Aspasia or Hypatia; but
+the great mass of women was sternly repressed.
+Eve leads a long line of women martyrs who,
+across the ages, have paid a great price for their
+desire to eat of the tree of knowledge. For
+herself, she might have paid the price but, with
+subtle understanding of women, the penalty was
+made to involve all whom they loved; the terrors
+of that price have held the sex in restraint ever
+since. Eurydice, Pandora, Eve, Lot's wife and
+Bluebeard's wife have in turn served as awful
+warnings. After a time it came to be understood
+by women that they should fix their eyes
+on their husbands and never look forward or
+backward, lest they lose their Eden and drag
+those whom they loved after them to destruction.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, if women could not learn they
+could not teach; at least, they could not teach
+where it was necessary to impart knowledge;
+and so their share in formal education has been
+<a name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></a>slight, until our own time. Young children
+have been considered their special charge, and
+the care and culture of infancy and young childhood
+have always rested in the hands of mothers,
+grandmothers, aunts and female servants. Beyond
+these early years, however, woman's part
+has been restricted to emphasizing, mainly with
+girls, the dogmas and practices of caste, kitchen
+and church.</p>
+
+<p>These were the conditions which prevailed
+through early Oriental and Classical times.
+Christianity brought women some degree of
+intellectual freedom, but it also imposed new
+forms of restraint. Its fundamental teachings,
+based as they were on a belief in individual
+values, were favorable to the extension of knowledge
+and to the opening of opportunity for all.
+The Church, however, shaped under the half-civilized
+conditions of the Middle Ages, quickly
+took knowledge into her own keeping, forbade
+its extension, and increasingly held before
+woman, as her highest ideal, the negative
+virtues of the cloister.</p>
+
+<p>The humanistic and theological changes
+which came with the awakening of the Euro<a name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></a>pean
+mind at the close of the Middle Ages, did
+much to set free the accumulated treasures of
+knowledge. Protestantism, by exalting individual
+judgment and insisting on the necessity of
+each one reading and judging the sacred records
+for himself, made it possible for even women to
+enter into the heritage of the ages. At least,
+the key to learning, reading, was given into her
+hands. Later Protestant sects broke down the
+limits of sacerdotalism, until women found that
+they could look forward a little way without
+losing their Edens, or could even glance backward
+without being turned into pillars of
+reproach.</p>
+
+<p>The political revolutions of the eighteenth
+century also affirmed in their point of view the
+same intellectual freedom for women as for men.
+It has taken a long time to make the practical
+adjustments, but they are now well under way.
+Since 1870, women have had very great freedom
+in their approach to knowledge; and having
+knowledge, they have been allowed to impart it
+to others.</p>
+
+<p>In America, freedom for women to study has
+moved more rapidly than in Europe. Even in
+<a name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></a>the colonial period, there were emancipated
+women, as we have seen; and in the last half of
+the eighteenth century several schools were
+opened for girls, which were more than polite
+finishing schools. Notable among these institutions
+were the seminary at Bethlehem, Pa.,
+opened in 1753 by the Moravians, and the school
+established by the Society of Friends, in Providence,
+R.I., in 1784. But nearly all girl's
+schools before 1800 were limited to terms of a
+few months, where girls attended to learn
+needle-work, music and dancing, and to cultivate
+their morals and manners.</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the Revolutionary War, the
+leaders of public opinion universally recognized
+that their new experiment in government would
+succeed only if the voters were intelligent. This
+statement of belief became the major premise
+on which all arguments for free and compulsory
+education were based; and while we have practically
+accepted a much wider justification for
+education, in connection with the care of defectives,
+industrial training, and other recent movements,
+we have not yet changed our formulated
+philosophy concerning the relation of the state
+<a name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></a>to its children. Free and compulsory education
+is still mainly justified on the ground that it
+produced good citizens.</p>
+
+<p>But the women had not full citizenship and
+hence the argument for general education did
+not apply to them. Had they been enfranchised
+after the Revolution, all educational opportunities
+would have been open to them at once as a
+matter of course; and an immense amount of
+struggle, futile effort, and unnecessary friction
+would have been saved. But this larger view of
+woman's rights and powers would have required
+an adjustment in deep-seated ideas and prejudices,
+concerning her proper position, too great
+to be undertaken by men facing a new form of
+government and the material problems of a new
+world.</p>
+
+<p>But even without this change in ideas, economic
+conditions steadily forced the women into
+educational activity. There were not enough
+men available to teach the scattered country
+schools, and citizens had to be trained for the
+needs of the new democracy. John Adams
+recognized this when he wrote to Mr. Warren
+that their wives must "teach their sons the
+<a name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></a>divine science of politics;" though he would
+have been one of the last to favor admitting
+women to full participation in public life. He
+did not realize that if women were to train men
+for citizenship, the rudiments of knowledge
+which they had learned in scattered schools and
+in their poor little academies must be greatly
+supplemented. Life, however, is never logical,
+and at this advance men balked. Necessity was
+forcing women into schools as teachers, and hence
+into larger preparation for their own lives; but
+public opinion, here as elsewhere, failed to
+recognize the forces that were compelling its
+action.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the work of furnishing more advanced
+intellectual training for American women had
+to be started by the women themselves. This
+is possibly the first time in human history that
+a great group of people feeling itself irresistibly
+moving toward a social, industrial and political
+readjustment, little less than revolutionary in
+its nature, has gone deliberately to work to prepare
+for the change through education. The
+working classes of the world are doing the same
+thing now; but women showed them the way.<a name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></a>
+In some vague degree, American women recognized
+the truth which Dr. Gore recently brought
+before a mass of working men in England.
+"All this passion for justice will accomplish
+nothing," he declared, "unless you get knowledge.
+You may become strong and clamorous,
+you may win a victory, you may affect a revolution,
+but you will be trodden down again under
+the feet of knowledge if you leave knowledge in
+the hands of privilege, because knowledge will
+always win over ignorance."<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> <i>The Highway</i>, London, Nov., 1911.</p></div>
+
+<p>American women were fortunate, too, in
+having for their leaders such women as Emma
+Willard, Mary Lyon and Catherine Beecher.
+Emma Willard was a woman of the world; she
+had traveled abroad and she brought to her
+work a cultivated nature, wide experience of
+life and natural leadership. Her personality
+went far toward lifting the movement to a plane
+of respect. After trying a little academy in
+Vermont, she appealed to the State of New York
+in 1814 for help. In this appeal, she wisely
+adopted the prevailing view of the relation of
+the state to education. The state must have
+<a name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></a>good citizens, she repeats, and then goes on,
+"The character of children will be formed by
+their mothers; and it is through the mothers
+that the government can control the character
+of its future citizens." The State of New York
+granted her articles of incorporation for her
+academy at Waterford, N.Y., but refused her
+the modest sum of five thousand dollars for
+which she had asked. In 1821, she established
+the Troy Female Seminary, where for years she
+trained and led the intellectual life of American
+women.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Mary Lyon begged the money from the
+common people with which she opened Mount
+Holyoke Seminary in 1837. Those who feared
+the education of women were disarmed by the
+fact that in the new institution domestic service
+was emphasized to the extent of having the girls
+do all their own work. Another group of possible
+critics was won over by the fact that religious
+instruction received constant care. But notwithstanding
+the conserving influence of housework
+and religion, there went steadily out from
+Mount Holyoke during the following years a
+strong line of teachers demanding ever larger
+<a name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></a>opportunity for themselves and for those they
+taught.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Catherine Beecher added to her work in
+schools for girls a general propaganda for
+woman's education, and she devised large plans
+for its development. In 1852, she organized the
+American Woman's Educational Association "to
+aid in securing to American women a liberal
+education, honorable position, and remunerative
+employment." She helped to start girls' schools
+in half a dozen cities, and by writing and talking
+she sowed in the hearts of women, especially
+in the Middle West, a discontent with existing
+conditions and a deep desire to know.</p>
+
+<p>From the time of this awakening in the
+thirties and forties, two lines of educational
+activity for the advancement of woman's education
+steadily developed. One was the effort of
+women to educate themselves in distinctly
+women's schools; and the other was the movement
+by which existing institutions for boys and
+men were gradually opened to girls and women.
+These two lines of activity still remain distinct,
+and not always sympathetic with each other's
+aims.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></a>The effort to establish distinctly women's
+schools was continued after the Civil War by
+Matthew Vassar, who founded in 1861, and
+opened in 1865, the first adequately endowed
+and organized college for women in America.
+Ten years later, Miss Sophie Smith founded and
+endowed Smith College to furnish women "with
+means and facilities for education equal to those
+that are offered in colleges for young men."
+The institution was opened in 1875; and in the
+same year Henry Durant established Wellesley
+College.</p>
+
+<p>The last Report of the United States Commissioner
+of Education shows that there are now
+108 institutions of higher learning to which men
+are not admitted; but most of them have
+modeled themselves so closely upon men's colleges
+that they have not been able to work out
+lines of distinctive instruction specially fitted to
+women. One cannot help feeling that since
+they do not open their doors to men they should
+do something more toward working out an ideal
+education for women than they have so far undertaken.
+When the Association of Intercollegiate
+Alumn&aelig; met in New York, in the autumn
+<a name="Page_69" id="Page_69"></a>of 1911, its discussions gathered around the possibility
+of adding to college courses subjects of
+special value to women. Hygiene, biology and
+sociology were the subjects most favored; but
+the matter needs attention from women and
+men who stand outside the group dominated by
+our older college traditions. This movement
+to provide distinctive schools for women had
+brought together, in 1910, 35,714 girl students
+in private secondary schools and 9,082 women
+students in higher institutions of learning.</p>
+
+<p>The second line of development, which
+sought to open up all existing schools to girls
+and women, began when Boston opened a high
+school for girls in 1825. New York opened a
+high school for girls three years later.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the West, however, that this movement
+took strongest root and made most steady
+advance. The West has always led the East in
+opening equal opportunity to women, even equal
+suffrage. The forest and the frontier compel
+such action even in such commonwealths as
+Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where there
+has been no political revolution to hasten it.
+Labor is scarce; the invading people are intelli<a name="Page_70" id="Page_70"></a>gent
+and ambitious for their children and desire
+them educated. The women must teach them
+to read and write; the girls learn with their
+brothers; and so the women master the mysteries
+of formal education.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it is no accident that Oberlin, in the
+western forest, was the first college to open
+its doors to women. Antioch, under Horace
+Mann's direction, was, however, the first institution
+of higher learning to give men and women
+equal opportunity. The new States of the Mississippi
+Valley early established State universities.
+These institutions were little more than seminaries,
+but the free spirit of the frontier was so
+strong in them that in 1863 Wisconsin University
+admitted women to its privileges, and Kansas
+and Indiana followed shortly after.</p>
+
+<p>It is the year 1870, however, that marks the
+beginning of a new period in the higher education
+of women as in so many other lines of
+advance. In that year, Michigan University,
+California University and the University of
+Evanston, adopted co-education. Michigan was
+just entering on a great career and her influence
+was very important. There, for the first time,
+<a name="Page_71" id="Page_71"></a>women could follow a university curriculum
+under the same conditions as men. Two years
+later, Andrew D. White introduced the Michigan
+idea at Cornell.</p>
+
+<p>In the forty years since Michigan opened her
+doors, the advance of women under conditions of
+co-education has been steady and rapid. In
+Harvard and Columbia opportunity takes the
+form of annexes where women can secure almost
+any educational opportunities they desire. In
+other universities, like Pennsylvania and Johns
+Hopkins, women are admitted to graduate
+study. Most of the institutions of higher education
+that do not yet admit women are theological
+and technical schools, or small colleges like
+Haverford, where there are equivalents in
+Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, for women who
+wish to attend a Friend's College. A woman can
+work in almost any important university in
+America to-day if she cares to do so. In 1910
+there were conferred in the United States 12,590
+A.B. degrees, and women took 44.1 per cent. of
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, there have been no important
+reactions in institutions which have once opened
+<a name="Page_72" id="Page_72"></a>their doors to women.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> In 1902, Chicago University
+separated men and women students, but
+only during the first two years of their undergraduate
+work. Practically this has affected
+only one-half of the women in the first year and
+a very much smaller proportion in the second
+year.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> When Leland Stanford Junior University
+was opened in 1891, 25.4% of the students
+were women. This proportion rose in successive
+years as follows: 1892, 29.7%; 1893, 30.4%;
+1894, 33.8%; 1895, 35.3%; 1896, 36.6%; 1897,
+37.4%; 1898, 40.1%. Fearing that the institution
+would be swamped with women, and that
+able men students would stay away, Mrs. Stanford
+ruled that there should never be more than
+five hundred women students in the university
+at one time. This limit was reached in 1902,
+and it was then provided that women should
+not be received as special students, nor in partial
+standing. Later, men in partial standing were
+cut out, though they continued to be received as
+<a name="Page_73" id="Page_73"></a>special students. Women are now admitted in
+order of application, but preference is given to
+juniors and seniors. This really establishes a
+higher standard for women than for men, and
+one would expect that men would be kept away
+from an institution requiring a higher standard
+for women quite as much as from one where
+there were many women working on an equality
+with men. In 1910, Tufts College decided to
+separate men and women, for local reasons.
+The statement was made at the time that a
+philanthropist had promised a gift of $500,000
+for a woman's college, if the sexes were separated.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a>
+The doors of Wesleyan are to be closed
+to women after 1912, but this is due to local
+and financial reasons.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Helen R. Olin</span>, <i>The Women of a State University</i>, G.P.
+Putnam's Sons, 1909.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Marion Talbot</span>, <i>The Education of Women</i>, University of
+Chicago Press, 1910.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> <i>Report of the United States Commissioner of Education</i>, p.
+132, 1910.</p></div>
+
+<p>The movement in European universities,
+while not so uniform as in America, has been in
+the same direction. Miss Buss, Miss Beal and
+Miss Emily Sheriff led an early movement for
+higher secondary education of girls similar to
+that which gathered around Miss Willard in
+America. In 1871, Miss Clough started in Eng<a name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></a>land
+the lectures for women which led to the
+establishment of Newnham and Girton at Cambridge,
+and opened Oxford to women. Now
+women can study almost any subject they like
+at these universities and take the same examinations
+as the men. They do not receive degrees,
+but they have most of the other advantages of
+men, and for forty years they have carried off
+many honors. In the newer universities of
+London, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and in
+the Welsh University they have every advantage
+open to men.</p>
+
+<p>In Germany, the opportunities for higher
+education of women have changed from year to
+year; but in 1910, there were 1,856 women in
+the universities as compared with 1,108 in 1909,
+and this notwithstanding the Emperor's well
+known belief that woman's sphere should be
+limited to domestic activities.</p>
+
+<p>The claims advanced in opposition to the
+higher education of women have largely broken
+down to-day. It was long maintained that her
+mind was inferior to man's mind in kind and
+quality, and that she could not do the work
+required. In the presence of thousands of young
+<a name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></a>women carrying all kinds of university work
+with credit and honor such charges become
+absurd. The belief that woman's health could
+not stand the strain fails for the same reason.
+The fear that she would be less likely to marry;
+or marrying, would be less likely to have children,
+has been seen to have some body of fact
+behind it; but we have seen also that university
+students are recruited from groups that are not
+the most fecund, and that the same danger
+applies to men students as to women.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> Women
+in higher education are now accepted as a
+regular part of our modern life.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Eight hundred and eighty-one Harvard graduates,
+twenty-five years after graduation, had but 1,226 children.
+If half were boys, we have but 613 sons for 881 Harvard
+graduates. <span class="smcap">Hugo M&uuml;nsterberg</span>, <i>The Americans</i>, p. 582. Boston:
+Houghton, Mifflin &amp; Co., 1901.</p></div>
+
+<p>And yet there is one objection that still
+remains unanswered in very many minds. It
+has always been feared that women would lower
+the standard of scholarship; and there is much
+in the quality of the present generation of
+women students that may strengthen this belief.
+In the seventies and eighties, the fear of being
+thought peculiar still kept many ordinary
+<a name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></a>women away from colleges. Now it has become
+fashionable, and a woman who has been to college
+stands better in a community than one who has
+not. Add to this the freedom and romance of
+"going to college" and it follows that many
+young women, with increasing economic freedom,
+are tempted to go up to the universities
+just as well-placed young Englishmen go to
+Cambridge or Oxford as passmen. They have
+no special interest in scholarship; but they like
+the life. This large body of young women, and
+of men under similar conditions, will doubtless
+lower the scholarship of modern college and university
+life as a whole. But possibly the need
+of the world for all-around men and women is
+even greater than its need for scholars; and in
+that case we may find justification for both passmen
+and passwomen.</p>
+
+<p>With the opening of knowledge to women it
+became possible for them to instruct children in
+matters intellectual; and since our school learning
+was almost entirely a matter of information
+and mental training, they early became an
+important part of the teaching profession in
+America.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77"></a>Once started, all our conditions favored the
+rapid increase of women teachers. There were
+industrial openings for men on every side; and
+with our rapid increase in population, an army
+of teachers was required. Since the calling had
+in the past been filled by inferior members of
+the clergy, broken-down soldiers, or old women,
+there was a tradition of constant change, and
+young men on their way to permanent professions
+were steadily supplanted by young women
+on their way to the altar.</p>
+
+<p>Co-education very materially assisted this
+substitution. Social, religious and economic
+reasons early combined to establish co-education
+in elementary schools in America, and now it has
+become a national custom. In cities like Philadelphia
+and Brooklyn there are some separate
+schools; but in 1910, only 4 per cent. of all the
+elementary children and only 5 per cent. of the
+children in public high schools were in separate
+classes. In private schools, which care for less
+than 10 per cent. of the children of the country,
+the percentage of children in separate schools is
+greater.</p>
+
+<p>Practically all American children are now in
+<a name="Page_78" id="Page_78"></a>co-educational institutions. Had the boys been
+in schools by themselves it would have been
+more difficult to place women teachers over
+them, but in mixed schools the question does
+not arise. Even where the boys and girls were
+separated, however, that fact did not prevent
+the employment of women teachers, though it
+may have retarded it. Thus in Philadelphia,
+in 1911, there were 125 boys' classes, 174 girls'
+classes, and 894 mixed classes in the grammar
+grades; still there were but 175 men teachers
+employed and, of course, the girls' classes were
+all taught by women.</p>
+
+<p>While administrative positions are less monopolized
+by women than teaching posts, they are
+being steadily filled by them. For fifteen years
+Idaho has had able women State superintendents
+elected by popular suffrage; Colorado and Montana
+have also given this highest educational
+post to women. In most of our States we have
+women serving as county superintendents; and
+in Idaho women fill nearly all these positions.
+Several of our largest cities, notably Chicago
+and Cleveland, have women superintendents;
+while many high schools and most of our ele<a name="Page_79" id="Page_79"></a>mentary
+schools have women principals. In
+1909, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young was elected president
+of the National Education Association;
+and in 1911, Miss Alice Dilley was elected
+president of the Iowa State Teachers' Association.
+Both of these elections were victories for
+women won in the face of determined opposition
+from many of the men.</p>
+
+<p>Another feature of this monopoly of teaching
+by women should be emphasized. Many
+boards of education require a woman to resign
+her position if she marries, and married women
+are seldom appointed to teaching positions, except
+where they are widows or separated from
+their husbands. In a test case recently carried
+to the Supreme Court of the State of New York
+a decision was rendered that the Board of Education
+of New York City could not dismiss teachers
+for marrying; but by refusing leave of absence
+to prospective mothers the Board is still
+able to remove all women who dare to have
+children. Thus we have a modern industrial
+democracy being educated almost entirely by
+celibate women.</p>
+
+<p>But why should a woman be forced to leave
+<a name="Page_80" id="Page_80"></a>teaching because she marries? Would not married
+women do much to strengthen and broaden
+the calling? Are not married women better
+fitted than celibates to deal with boys and girls
+in the period of adolescence? There is doubtless
+a feeling that a married woman should
+make way for some girl who needs the position
+to help herself along; but schools should not be
+used for the needs of teachers, no matter how
+deserving the individual may be.</p>
+
+<p>There is, too, a possibility that a married
+woman might have a child, and a feeling that
+this would shock the other teachers and the
+children. Surely we have grown beyond this
+condition; the teacher could easily be given a
+leave of absence for a few months, or for a few
+years; and nowhere else could the children
+better meet this fact of universal existence
+around which our Anglo-Saxon reticence has
+woven such a shameful conspiracy of silence.
+At least, when a woman has passed the period
+of childbearing she could bring to the school
+incalculable gifts of balanced judgment and
+ripe understanding of life.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime all the influences which have
+<a name="Page_81" id="Page_81"></a>brought about the monopoly of teaching by
+women are increasingly operative. Every year
+more able women leave our high schools, normal
+schools and universities, with no corresponding
+new lines of occupation open to them. The
+feeling of rivalry between men and women
+teachers grows stronger each year. Powerful
+teachers' federations, such as those in Chicago
+and Buffalo, composed mainly of women, are
+said to be using their influence to favor women.
+In New York City, the women teachers have
+compelled the city to equalize the wages of men
+and women, at an annual expense of $3,500,000,
+after a bitter fight lasting several years.</p>
+
+<p>The effects of this monopoly upon the women
+themselves are very difficult to estimate. Some
+alarmists tell us that women teachers face the
+danger of a premature and loveless old age;
+that the celibate communities they form in the
+commonwealth are marked by pettiness and
+emotionalism; that the salaries paid teachers
+are so small that they cannot provide for sickness
+and old age, and that, unless pensioned by
+the state, some of them must one day eat the
+bread of charity.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82"></a>On the other hand, we are told that education
+is the natural province of women; that
+teaching fits them to be good mothers and helpful
+citizens; that women alone can form the
+character of girls; and that boys are refined and
+perfected by the constant contact with women.</p>
+
+<p>Probably neither of these statements is wholly
+true. It is certain that many women teachers
+do marry, do become the mothers of fine children,
+and are social forces in their communities.
+With advancing standards of scholarship, better
+salaries, old age pensions, and a popular demand
+for professional efficiency in teachers, it will be
+increasingly difficult for men to use the calling
+as a preparation for law and medicine, or for
+women to use it as a preparation for matrimony.
+The calling doubtless does offer a greater equivalent
+for marriage than most others; and many
+women live their mother life vicariously for
+other people's children.</p>
+
+<p>At the same time, however, when a woman
+has given fourteen years of her life to preparation
+for teaching, eight years in an elementary
+school, four in a high school, and from two to
+four in professional training, she has made an
+<a name="Page_83" id="Page_83"></a>investment and formed habits which will make
+her hesitate before turning to matrimony. The
+independence and income will prove attractive
+during young maidenhood; and matrimony can
+hardly yield its best results to the woman who
+enters it after she is thirty. It is certainly true
+that women are decreasingly willing to enter the
+teaching profession; and in many parts of the
+country there is a chronic dearth of trained
+teachers.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, for good or ill, women have eaten,
+and are eating of the tree of knowledge as they
+will. If this has driven them out of the little
+paradise of the past, they are in a fair way to
+make the whole world into a paradise of the
+present. Only through training their minds
+could they have broken away from an outworn
+past. In this time of readjustment there must
+be many mistakes and many tragedies.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> The
+fool-killer will gather a rich harvest, but if we
+are open-minded and eager to see the truth,
+each martyr will teach her sisters, and the future
+<a name="Page_84" id="Page_84"></a>generations of women will conserve the values of
+the past and add to them new treasures and new
+graces of knowledge and understanding.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> See chapter on Education of Adolescent Girls, in <i>Adolescence</i>,
+by <span class="smcap">G. Stanley Hall</span>. New York: D. Appleton &amp;
+Co., 1904.</p></div>
+
+<p>It is most unfortunate that these real issues
+should be obscured by sex rivalry. There can
+be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his
+body, between science and religion, between man
+and woman. Such antagonisms rest back in the
+failure to realize the incompleteness of man or
+woman alone, for any purposes of life. And
+there is, too, that evil notion which still affects
+economics, that when two trade one must lose.
+The fact is that in all honest exchange buyer
+and seller gain alike, and all who participate
+become rich. It is so in all honest relations
+between these half-creatures we call men and
+women. In agreement, association, co&ouml;peration,
+lies strongest significant life for both. In separation,
+competition and antagonism lie arid,
+poor, mean lives, conceited and egotistic, vapid
+and contemptible.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85"></a>IV</h2>
+
+<h2>The Feminizing of Culture</h2>
+
+
+<p>With the weakening of sex prejudices and
+the removal of legal restrictions on women's
+freedom it was inevitable that they should
+invade fields of activity where formerly only men
+were found. Since women must eat every one
+knew that they must work, and the sight of a
+woman at work was no new experience. Even
+in the days when they were most secluded and
+protected, the number kept in ease was always
+very small compared with the women slaves and
+servants who spun, cooked and served. Hence
+men were used to seeing women at work; and
+while industrial adjustments have not been
+easily made, they have still been accepted as a
+matter of course. But who, fifty years ago,
+could have imagined that to-day women would
+be steadily monopolizing learning, teaching,
+literature, the fine arts, music, the church and
+<a name="Page_86" id="Page_86"></a>the theater? And yet that is the condition at
+which we have arrived. We may scoff at the
+way women are doing the work, and reject the
+product, but that does not alter the fact that
+step by step women are taking over the field of
+liberal culture as opposed to the field of immediately
+productive work.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the reasons for this change are so
+clear that it seems as though they might have
+been anticipated. In a comparatively few years
+the greater part of Western Europe and all of
+America has become rich, not this time through
+the enslavement of other peoples and the confiscating
+of their wealth, but through the enslaving
+and exploitation of the material forces of
+nature. This wealth is not well distributed,
+but large numbers of families have received
+enough so that the women do not have to work
+constantly with their hands. At this point all
+historic precedent would have turned these
+women into luxury-loving parasites and playthings.
+A good many of them have taken this
+easiest way and entered the peripatetic harems
+of the rich. But several million women refused
+to repeat the old cycle of ruin; they knew too
+<a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"></a>much.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> What then should they do? Faith in
+the value of conventual life for women had
+passed; industrial changes had transformed
+their homes so that the endless spinning, weaving,
+sewing and knitting were no longer there,
+even to be supervised. Penelope's tasks had
+passed to foremen, working under trades union
+agreements, in the factories of Fall River and
+Birmingham. Even the function of the lady
+bountiful who looked after the spiritual and
+family affairs of her tenants and servants and
+distributed doles and Christmas baskets was
+gone. Her tenants owned their own farms, and
+her chauffeur resented her interference with his
+personal life. What should she do?</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Rheta Childe Dorr</span>, <i>What Eight Million Women Want,</i>
+Boston: Small, Maynard &amp; Co., 1910.</p></div>
+
+<p>And this movement was not confined to the
+rich, for those who were not yet economically
+free were still deeply influenced by the changes
+which were taking place. The Goulds, Stanfords,
+Vanderbilts, Floods, Carnegies and
+Schwabs had all been lifted from the level of
+the masses to financial grandeur before the eyes
+of the multitude, and democratic ambitions
+<a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"></a>drove parents who thought themselves in the
+line of financial advancement to secure culture
+for their girls in time. If the daughter was
+destined to live on Fifth Avenue, or to marry a
+duke, it was best to get her ready while young.
+In all our industrial democracies, armies of
+American parents have devoted themselves to
+labor, and even sacrificed comforts and necessities,
+that the daughters might get ready to live
+easier and fuller lives than the parents had
+known. If the choice had to be made between
+the girl and her brother, the chivalry of the
+father and the ambition of the mother very often
+gave the opportunity to the girl.</p>
+
+<p>And so an emancipated army of leisure has
+been formed which has transformed the very
+nature of the culture with which it has busied
+itself. Books, periodicals, musical instruments,
+travel became cheaper and cheaper as the demand
+increased. Wholesale production makes
+almost any luxury accessible to every one. It is
+also possible to find modern and agreeable forms
+for older academic exercises. If Greek and
+Latin were too full or too difficult, courses in
+Romanic and Germanic philology would do as
+<a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"></a>well. Anglo-Saxon gave way to Old English;
+and Chaucer to the Lake Poets. Philosophy
+struggled for favor with the English novel on
+equal terms. The works of Raphael were photographed
+and lithographed until the Sistine Madonna
+became as commonly known as the face of
+any strenuous and popular statesman of the day.
+With the aid of these art productions, and John
+Addington Symonds, every woman with leisure
+became an art critic. If economics was not interesting,
+sociology was available; and it could
+be democratized to any degree desired. If travel
+was troublesome, one could leave it to Cook;
+buy a ticket and he would do the rest.</p>
+
+<p>If these awakening hungers and corresponding
+opportunities had affected only the period of
+life formerly thought available for education,
+these changes would have come about much
+more slowly than they have. But the genetic
+conception of life, steadily popularized since
+1870, has led us to see that education is coterminous
+with life. It seems strange that we
+should have ever thought that mental activity
+belongs alone to youth. Dorland's study shows
+that in a list of four hundred fairly representa<a name="Page_90" id="Page_90"></a>tive
+great men, only 10.25% ceased their mental
+activity between the ages of forty and fifty;
+20.75% between fifty and sixty; 35% between
+sixty and seventy; 22.5% between seventy and
+eighty; and 6% after eighty.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> <span class="smcap">W.A. Newman Dorland</span>, <i>The Age of Mental Virility</i>.
+New York: The Century Company, 1908.</p></div>
+
+<p>The recognition of such facts as these has
+given us a new genetic sense of life, under the
+influence of which mothers and grandmothers
+have joined the younger women in the pursuit
+of culture. They have formed clubs&mdash;study
+clubs, current events clubs, camera clubs, art
+clubs, literary clubs, civic clubs. They have
+organized courses of university extension lectures;
+enrolled in Chicago University correspondence
+courses; and have flocked to Chautauqua
+by the thousand in the summer, when not
+abroad. It is not through the generosity of
+men that liberal culture has come into the
+possession of women; they have carried it by
+storm and have compelled capitulation.</p>
+
+<p>Judging by the facts presented in the last
+chapter, women are pretty fully in possession of
+formal education. If we examine this monopoly
+<a name="Page_91" id="Page_91"></a>a little more carefully, we shall find that while
+in the kindergarten and in the elementary
+schools boys furnish 51% of the enrollment,
+simply because more boys are born in civilized
+communities than girls, as soon as we reach the
+high schools, girls increasingly take the lead.
+In 1910, the girls formed 56.45% of the enrollment
+in high schools&mdash;or there were 110,249
+more girls than boys. The proportion of girls
+increased through each of the four years of the
+course, and of the graduates, 60.8% were girls.
+In the public normal schools, 64.45% of the
+students were girls.</p>
+
+<p>The universities, colleges and technical
+schools, which are massed together in our government
+reports, had hardly any women students
+in 1870; in 1880, 19.3% of the students were
+women; in 1890, 27%; in 1910, 30.4%. In
+all these institutions we had enrolled in 1910,
+17,707 women. Of 602 institutions reported in
+1910, 142 were for men only; 108 were for
+women only; and 352 were open to both sexes.
+But here again the influence of women increases
+during each of the four years for, as we have
+seen, the women took 41.1% of the A.B. degrees
+<a name="Page_92" id="Page_92"></a>granted in 1910. It is surely not too much to
+say that, if present conditions continue, women
+will soon be in an overwhelming majority in all
+secondary and higher education in the United
+States.</p>
+
+<p>If we examine the teaching force, we find
+this monopoly already established. In 1870,
+when our government records begin, 59% of the
+teachers were women; in 1880, 57.2% were
+women; in 1890, 65.5%; in 1900, 70.1%; in
+1910, 78.6%. The more settled and intelligent
+the community the more rapid this advance
+has been. Thus Arkansas has 52.4% women
+teachers; but Massachusetts has 91.1% and
+Connecticut has 93%.</p>
+
+<p>In cities, too, the women fill nearly all teaching
+positions. New York City has 89% women
+in its force; Boston, 89%; Philadelphia, 91.4%;
+Chicago, 93.3%. In many cities the proportion
+is even greater than this: Omaha has 97%;
+Wheeling, W. Va., 97.5%; Charleston, S.C.,
+99.3%; and in forty-six American towns of 4,000
+to 8,000 inhabitants there is no man teaching.
+When we remember that many of the men indicated
+above are in high schools or in supervising
+<a name="Page_93" id="Page_93"></a>posts, we are prepared for the statement in a
+report recently laid before the Board of Education
+of New York City that in half the cities of
+the United States there are virtually no men
+teaching.</p>
+
+<p>In our high schools, 54% of the teachers are
+women; in public normal schools, 65%; and in
+institutions of higher learning 17.6% are women.
+Even in supervising positions, there are more
+women than men in the large centers of population.
+Certainly these figures justify us in saying
+that women have established a monopoly of education
+in the United States, except in the higher
+institutions.</p>
+
+<p>In order to discuss the effects which this
+monopoly of education by women is having on
+the curriculum of the schools we must first agree
+on what constitutes the peculiarity of women's
+minds as compared with men's minds.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> In our
+first chapter, it was asserted that women are
+more interested in the concrete, human, personal,
+conserving and emotional aspects of life;
+while men more easily turn to the abstract,
+<a name="Page_94" id="Page_94"></a>material, impersonal, creative and rational
+aspects. To put it broadly, women are more
+interested in the humanities; men more readily
+pursue the sciences. Let us admit at once that
+there are many individual exceptions to this
+statement. Some women have reached great
+excellence in abstract studies; and some men are
+notoriously concrete and emotional; but nevertheless
+the general statement seems borne out by
+a wealth of common observations and detailed
+comparisons.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> See <i>The Americans</i>, by <span class="smcap">Hugo M&uuml;nsterberg</span>, pp. 558-589.
+Boston: Houghton, Mifflin &amp; Co., 1901.</p></div>
+
+<p>Personal observation must always be colored
+by prejudices and prepossessions, but my own
+have been so wide, and so uniformly in one
+direction, that it seems justifiable to report
+them.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>For a quarter of a century I have been working
+in schools or with teachers, and my personal
+observations all agree with the above characterization.
+I have spent five years in Cornell
+University, New York; one year in Zurich University
+in Switzerland; two years in the State
+University of Indiana and seven years in Stanford
+University in California. These institu<a name="Page_95" id="Page_95"></a>tions
+are widely distributed; they were all fully
+co-educational; and they each had a wide range
+of elective studies. In all of them, class-rooms
+devoted to literature and modern languages had
+a large attendance of women, while lecture-rooms
+and laboratories devoted to abstract
+science were almost deserted by them. This
+could not have been due to commercial considerations,
+for many of these women were facing
+teaching; and during all this time the demand
+for women who could teach science has been
+much greater than for women who could teach
+literature.</p>
+
+<p>In my work with teachers, both in the classroom
+and in the field, I have carried out many
+inductive, quantitative studies, based on measurements
+or returns from large numbers of
+children. I have never found women teachers
+taking up and carrying out this kind of work
+with any such enthusiasm as men apply to it,
+though it lies at the base of their professional
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Institutional generalizations seem all to point
+in this same direction. For instance, the Girls'
+Evening High School in Philadelphia is man<a name="Page_96" id="Page_96"></a>aged
+by one of the best known scientific women
+in the country, Dr. L.L.W. Wilson, head of
+the biological department of the Philadelphia
+Normal School. With a thousand girls of high
+school grade, under the leadership of a scientific
+woman, the only science courses given in the
+school are those in domestic science. The reason
+is that the girls, most of them not being candidates
+for a degree, will not take up science work,
+though they form strong classes in literature and
+languages.</p>
+
+<p>If, from such general facts of observation,
+one turns to exact comparisons, where quantities
+can be measured, the results are all the same.
+Of students enrolled in classical departments of
+universities, colleges and technical schools reporting
+to the United States Bureau of Education,
+in 1910, 36.5% were women, while of those
+enrolled in general science courses, but 17.2%
+were women. In 1,511 public and private high
+schools and seminaries, reporting to the Bureau
+of Education in 1909-1910, a larger percentage
+of boys than of girls was enrolled in algebra,
+geometry, trigonometry, physics, chemistry,
+physical geography, civil government and rhet<a name="Page_97" id="Page_97"></a>oric,
+which is a scientific study of language.
+A larger proportion of girls enrolled in Latin,
+French, German, English literature and history,
+and there was a slightly greater enrollment of
+girls in botany, zoology and physiology.</p>
+
+<p>In the further discussion of this subject it
+will then be taken for granted that in education,
+feminization means emphasis on languages, literature
+and history, as opposed to mathematics,
+physics, chemistry and civics. For the elementary
+schools we have no data capable of reduction
+to figures, but general observation, backed by
+an examination of courses of study and textbooks,
+will compel any one to say that in twenty
+years we have made wonderful progress in reading,
+language, stories, mythology, biography
+and history; while all our efforts to bring nature
+work into vital relation with the schools have
+borne little fruit. Our country schools need
+lessons in agriculture, and the children should
+gain a deep sense of country life. But how can
+celibate young women, longing toward the
+towns, give this? Any subjects well taught are
+sure to be increasingly taught, and it takes no
+extended study to see that our elementary
+<a name="Page_98" id="Page_98"></a>schools are being feminized in the direction of
+literature. This is the more striking when we
+remember that these twenty years have been
+dominated, in the larger world, by scientific
+interests.</p>
+
+<p>In the high schools and seminaries, we have
+fairly complete returns showing the number of
+students enrolled in certain subjects since 1890.
+The pupils taking Latin have increased 15%;
+French, 4%; German, 13%; English literature
+has increased in ten years 7% (there is no record
+for this subject before 1898); and European history,
+27%. There has also been an increase of
+11% in algebra and 10% in geometry, probably
+partly due to vocational need and to the emphasis
+laid on these subjects for admission to college.
+But physics, in the twenty years under consideration,
+has fallen off 7%; chemistry, 3%; physical
+geography, 5%; physiology, 15%; and civics,
+7%.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> A careful study of these figures must
+convince any fair-minded person that our school
+curriculum, even in the secondary field, where
+women's control is least complete, is moving
+<a name="Page_99" id="Page_99"></a>rapidly in the direction of what we have called
+feminization.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> <i>Report of the United States Commissioner of Education</i>,
+1910, Vol. II, p. 1139.</p></div>
+
+<p>The schools, too, must increasingly do something
+more than train the intellect; and in all
+physical activity involuntary suggestion is very
+powerful. Playgrounds are laboratories of conduct,
+and they should not only give physical
+exercise, but should also furnish standards and
+ideals. There can be no doubt that women are
+physically more restrained, retiring, non-contesting,
+and graceful than men; but can dancing,
+marching, and gymnastics take the place
+of more aggressive, direct and violent contests
+in the training of boys? So in industries, women
+are more given to conserving, arranging and
+beautifying, more given to clerking and recording,
+while men are more creative, disbursing,
+more given to mining, agriculture and commerce.
+Even granting equal understanding
+and experience, the tradition of the race must
+count for much; and it would seem that at
+every stage of growth, boys and girls alike
+should feel the impulse to imitate men who
+have an instinct to make and unmake, to trade
+and carry. It is no justification of existing con<a name="Page_100" id="Page_100"></a>ditions
+to say that the men now in the teaching
+profession lack these qualities; if they do, let us
+get rid of them and have real men. And for
+purposes of political life, does it not seem
+strange to bring up a generation of boys and
+girls who are to be the future citizens of a
+democracy under the exclusive leadership of
+people who have never been encouraged to think
+about political life nor allowed to participate in
+it? Let us by all means enfranchise women;
+but even then they cannot hope to quickly catch
+up with those who have some thousands of years
+the start, even after allowing for the fact that
+girls inherit from both father and mother.</p>
+
+<p>Most of these differences which we have been
+discussing seem to rest in the fact that women
+are more personal in their interests and judgments
+than men are. This may be due to their
+education for thousands of years; but that makes
+it no less true. Women certainly, in a great
+majority of cases, are more interested in a case
+than in a constitution; in a man than in a mission;
+in a poem that in a treatise; in equity
+than in law. In a generation when everything
+is tending toward great aggregations, consoli<a name="Page_101" id="Page_101"></a>dated
+industries, segregated wealth, and new
+syntheses of knowledge, both boys and girls
+should have such training as will fit them to
+play their part in these larger units.</p>
+
+<p>As to the feminizing influence of exclusively
+women teachers on manners and morals and
+general attitude toward life there can be no
+real doubt. Boys and girls cannot spend eight
+or twelve impressionable years of childhood and
+youth under the constant daily influence of
+women without having the ladylike attitude
+toward life strongly emphasized. To deny this
+is to repudiate the power of constant involuntary
+suggestion and association. Whether it is desirable
+or not, is another question. The change
+may be all in the direction of advancing civilization;
+but just as in the assimilation of our subject
+races, the philosophic mind must be distressed
+by the disappearance of so many varieties
+of speech, customs, and artistic and industrial
+products, so in this present assimilation, one
+cannot help regretting the steady disappearance
+of the katabolic qualities of the human male.
+One does not need to say that this feminized
+product is better or worse than what we have
+<a name="Page_102" id="Page_102"></a>had, but it is certainly narrower, and less in
+harmony with the world's thought and work,
+than it formerly was.</p>
+
+<p>If we turn from education to the press we
+have similar conditions. During these past few
+years, hundreds of journals have sprung up
+devoted to women's special interests. They are
+almost all of them showy, fragmentary, personal,
+concrete and emotional. It is difficult to
+find one that represents general or abstract interests.
+At least one of these journals which
+boasts a fabulous circulation is supported by its
+women subscribers and readers to oppose the
+larger interests of women in education, industry
+and political life. At least, if it does not oppose
+these interests, it does not aid them. Imagine
+a million German women sending the Kaiser
+one dollar and a half a year to induce him to
+tell them once a month to go back to their
+kitchens, churches and children!</p>
+
+<p>The newspapers of America have steadily
+changed during the last three decades in the
+same direction. Editorial pages and news columns
+have been steadily modified in the direction
+of fragmentary, egoistic, personal and
+<a name="Page_103" id="Page_103"></a>sensational, or at least emotional, appeals.
+These are the qualities of children's minds and
+of undeveloped minds everywhere. The change
+is, of course, a part of the larger democratic
+movement of our time, and many causes have
+contributed to bring it about. Had women not
+been so active, something of the same sort would
+have happened; but if women were all to forget
+how to read overnight, there is little doubt that
+the newspapers would find it advantageous to
+print more statesmanlike editorials and more
+general and abstract news.</p>
+
+<p>With the weeklies and monthlies, the change
+taking place is the same. The new reading
+public, brought in by increase in population and
+by popular education, does not support the
+<i>Atlantic</i>, the <i>Century</i> and <i>Scribner's,</i> but turns
+to <i>Munsey's</i>, <i>McClure's</i> and <i>Everybody's</i>. The
+very change in names speaks of the new personal
+and egoistic element that has come into journalism.
+Of course, such changes are only in part
+due to the influence of women, but the change
+is in the direction of the qualities that characterize
+distinctively women's journals.</p>
+
+<p>In books, the personal and romantic novel
+<a name="Page_104" id="Page_104"></a>has taken precedence over every other form of
+literature. Many of these are written by
+women; their circulation, both through libraries
+and through sales, is much greater with
+women than with men; and in many of them
+the personal gossip is as transient as that which
+fills the evening papers.<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> <i>The Feminine Note in Fiction</i>, by <span class="smcap">W.L. Courtney</span>,
+London, Chapman &amp; Hall, 1904; the author tries to prove
+that there is such a thing as a feminine style in fiction.</p></div>
+
+<p>In the churches, especially in the ritualistic
+churches, women have long been the faithful
+attendants. Nowhere, except in the churches
+which make a rationalistic and abstract appeal,
+and in the Ethical Societies, does one find a
+preponderance of men. In 1903, a careful enumeration
+of all attendants at places of worship
+was made in the city of London. The
+count was taken on fair Sundays in autumn,
+and covered both morning and evening services.
+Sixty-one per cent. of all adult attendants were
+women, 146,372 more women than men passing
+through the doors.</p>
+
+<p>About the same time a similar census was
+made in the part of New York City lying on<a name="Page_105" id="Page_105"></a>
+Manhattan Island. The women were in excess
+by 171,749, and formed 69 per cent. of all attendants.
+Even church service, if not entirely
+tied to set forms, must seek to interest those
+who occupy the pews; and no observer can fail
+to note in both England and America, a movement
+toward ritualism on the one hand, and on
+the other, toward popular, personal, concrete and
+sometimes sensational preaching. The same
+general changes are taking place in libraries, in
+the drama, in concerts, in all group activities
+connected with learning and the fine arts.</p>
+
+<p>But on the other side, if emancipated women
+had not applied themselves, since 1870, to the
+direction of education, literature, religion and
+amusements, all these interests must have suffered
+serious neglect and probable deterioration
+through the concentrating of the interests of the
+ablest men in engineering, manufacturing, commerce
+and other fields of pure and applied
+science. By popularizing these interests, women
+have really humanized them, as all similar
+revolutions have done in the past. In breaking
+up old forms and intellectual conventions they
+have set free new and vital impulses. Whether
+<a name="Page_106" id="Page_106"></a>the historian of the future will consider this
+period of democratization and feminization a
+time of advance may be uncertain; but it is certainly
+a time of liberated energy and of broadening
+participation in all that is best in life.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107"></a>V</h2>
+
+<h2>The Economic Independence of
+Women</h2>
+
+
+<p>Nowhere does a human being escape compulsion.
+Even were he alone in the world
+he would be forced to obey the physical laws
+governing gravity, heat, cold, hunger and disease.
+No matter what his desires might be, he
+would find himself limited and constrained by
+fixed laws, the inexorable penalties of which he
+could escape only by obedience. If the man
+were not alone, then each one of his companions
+would limit his freedom, and he would limit
+each one in the group, if they were to live together
+in peace and efficiency; and yet each of
+the man's companions would help to free him
+from the tyranny of physical forces, from the
+social pressure of others, and even from the
+bondage of his own nature.</p>
+
+<p>Independence is thus an ideal to be achieved
+only through obedience. It begins in self-sub<a name="Page_108" id="Page_108"></a>ordination
+and reaches its finest realization in
+social subordination. Since the beginning of
+time men who thought have always dreamed of
+freedom; and for two hundred years now independence
+has been a word to conjure with. But
+in so far as independence means freedom to
+follow one's own unregulated desires, it is a
+fantastic and dangerous dream; and yet this
+dream of impossible independence has been
+among the greatest influences in furthering
+human development in the past.</p>
+
+<p>The old-time dependence of one individual
+on the immediate caprices of another largely
+disappeared with the passing of slavery. But
+in place of this personal subjection has come a
+more complex and in some ways more compelling
+and crushing control through the monopoly
+of wealth. Property has become the medium
+through which the most binding of human relations
+are organized. Accumulated wealth has
+become a great reservoir of power to which some
+individuals gain access through rights of birth,
+others through carefully guarded privileges, and
+still others through cunning devices or through
+force; but the masses of the people must gain
+<a name="Page_109" id="Page_109"></a>their fragments of this wealth through arduous
+lifelong labor. Even the earth, the original
+source of all wealth, is parceled out, and all of
+it is now owned by individuals or groups who
+control it in their own interests. One man may
+thus have thousands of acres which he cannot
+use, and which he will not allow others to use,
+while another has not where to lay his head.
+Laws jealously guard this wealth, which is the
+key to all opportunity; and public opinion, that
+most subtle, pervasive and compelling of all
+forms of law, gathers a thousand sacred initiations,
+rites, ceremonies, prohibitions and ex-communications
+around it. A man who has
+killed his neighbor, or ruined his friend's family,
+may be less punished by society than one
+who cheats at cards.</p>
+
+<p>In primitive life a man may be a man by
+virtue of what he is; to-day he may have all the
+rights and privileges of any man by virtue of
+what he possesses. In any community can be
+found strong men, honest, though misplaced or
+unfortunate, begging bread, wasting their lives
+for want of money to live decently. And beside
+these one sees other men of weak physique and
+<a name="Page_110" id="Page_110"></a>feeble minds, who have lived as parasites on
+society all their lives, but who are handsomely
+dressed, well fed, and possessed of power to do as
+they will, simply because they have access to
+wealth. It is no wonder that if one would seek
+freedom to-day in America he must look for her
+image on a gold coin.</p>
+
+<p>It is not difficult to see why property has
+become such a powerful instrument in civilization.
+Anything which a person really owns, in
+a psychological sense, is a home for his soul.
+Really owning an object, a toy, a garment, a
+watch or a home, means infusing one's personality
+into it. A man who possesses significant
+things has a new body through which his soul
+can work; this body trains his powers; and it
+should give him life more abundantly. A landless
+man must become a soulless man. Of
+course, we are not here speaking of legal ownership.
+Many people own legally things into
+which they have never infused themselves;
+sometimes they have so many things that no
+individual could possibly infuse himself into
+them.</p>
+
+<p>These conditions may prevail even in primi<a name="Page_111" id="Page_111"></a>tive
+life, but to-day they have been vastly increased
+through the fact that with advancing
+civilization money was devised. This is a system
+of counters, generally coin or paper, not really
+valuable in themselves, but always resting back
+for value on the earth, or on something derived
+from it. In the past it was supposed that there
+were some things which, because of their nature,
+were not marketable, while others were beyond
+price. To-day we set values on everything, even
+on men's bodies; eyes, ears, legs and lives can
+be priced. There are, in fact, insurance companies
+and factories that have regular schedules
+of value for various parts of the body. Our
+courts set prices on blighted affections, damaged
+reputations, social advancements, impaired
+digestions, damaged complexions, nervous
+shocks and extreme humiliations. Even a
+woman's honor may have a price in dollars.</p>
+
+<p>These property rights, like the rights of the
+person, have always been subject to violence.
+Powerful individuals and groups have always
+been able to overstep legal restrictions and public
+opinion, and seize what they desired. The
+land grabbing going on in North Africa and<a name="Page_112" id="Page_112"></a>
+Persia to-day and the activity of great industrial
+monopolies at home, show us that some property
+rights still need to be secured by force. In this
+struggle, it has come about naturally that men,
+being stronger, freer and less scrupulous than
+women, have outstripped them and have so far
+had a pretty complete monopoly of wealth. In
+fact women themselves have at times become
+property. In such times a man who stole or
+bought a woman, naturally took over with her
+all her rights in real estate and personal property
+as well as her person and her services.</p>
+
+<p>Only gradually did women gain power to
+hold property themselves. Mainly because
+fathers wished to preserve property in their
+families, the right of women to inherit became
+slowly established as civilization advanced. In
+Judea, Greece and Rome, certain rights of a
+woman to hold property were clearly settled.
+In the reversion to force under feudalism,
+woman's rights to outside property suffered;
+but they have been gradually restored during
+the last few centuries. To-day, in civilized
+lands, a woman's rights to property, inherited
+or definitely given her or purchased by her, are
+<a name="Page_113" id="Page_113"></a>everywhere recognized, if she does not marry.
+In France, and other Latin countries, she may
+still lose control of her property if she takes a
+husband; but in northern and western lands, even
+a married woman may retain her possessions.</p>
+
+<p>Woman's body, too, is increasingly looked
+upon as her personal property. With the raising
+of the age of consent; with increasing severity
+in laws punishing rape, and with the abrogation
+of judicial orders for the restitution of marital
+rights, it is now quite generally recognized
+that a woman should have the right to control
+her own person. Still, in many lands there is
+much to be done before this right is fully safeguarded.</p>
+
+<p>The place where a woman has not yet
+achieved economic freedom is in the disposal of
+her labor. One must remember, however, in
+this connection, that not only is there no fixed
+standard of values in human service as yet, but
+that many indispensable forms of service have
+not even been legally recognized as valuable.
+In early forms of civilization, fighting and praying
+were considered the most important work
+the community received, and warriors and priests
+<a name="Page_114" id="Page_114"></a>gained the big rewards. They received lands,
+gold, servants and dignities, while industrial
+workers, even the directors, were despised. To-day
+we have reversed all this and we may pay a
+general only five thousand dollars a year, and a
+priest eight hundred dollars, while a man who
+develops a big industry may receive a hundred
+thousand dollars annually. Again, a man who
+invents a new gun may be given a fortune, like
+that of Herr Krupp, while a man who invents a
+surgical instrument is prevented by the ethics
+of his profession from even patenting it. If
+Pasteur had been paid for his services to France
+and to humanity, he would have ranked in the
+financial world with Mr. Rockefeller and Mr.
+Schwab. We pay a State superintendent of
+public instruction ten thousand dollars a year;
+but Miss Jane Addams, as instructor in ethics to
+the United States, receives no salary, and she
+must even beg the money to maintain her laboratory
+at Hull House. The whole question of
+payment for services is in a chaotic condition.
+Those who serve mankind most faithfully are
+rewarded on the principle, "From each according
+to his ability;" but nowhere is the remain<a name="Page_115" id="Page_115"></a>der
+of the principle, "To each according to his
+needs," recognized. Hence our greatest servants
+must still beg support from our cleverest
+exploiters.</p>
+
+<p>Domestic service is indispensable to society,
+but so far it has remained in the field of semi-slavery
+and uncertain barter; in a word, it is
+still in the feudal stage. The woman gives
+what she is and has, and nominally she gets
+protection and support. Sometimes these fail
+and, on the other hand, she occasionally receives
+the unearned gifts supposed to befit a potentate
+or a shrine. As women become educated they
+find this condition of uncertainty and instability
+unbearable. They are willing to work, but they
+must have a chance to think and to plan their
+lives according to their individual needs. Some
+degree of economic independence is necessary to
+intelligent thinking and orderly living. It is
+not that women are demanding more property;
+they are demanding some definite individual
+property as a home for their souls; and they are
+coming to realize that if this property rests on
+some one else's feelings and caprices it is no
+home for the soul; it is only a tavern.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116"></a>This conception is well illustrated by the
+case of a woman in western New York, who
+married about 1850, and went to live on a farm
+with her husband. They had small means, but
+she brought seven hundred dollars to the altar,
+which was more than he possessed in ready
+capital. Her part was, however, soon swallowed
+up in the general business, and while there was
+a tacit agreement, voiced at long intervals, that
+she had put something into the business, her
+part never increased, though the man with whom
+she worked grew well-to-do. Certain feudal
+rights in the butter the woman made and in the
+chickens she raised, yielded her small sums,
+which often escaped her, but which she sometimes
+secured and put into a few silver spoons
+and dishes for her table, a square of Brussels
+carpet, three lace curtains, a marble topped
+stand, and six horsehair covered chairs for her
+parlor. These articles were considered in a very
+special sense her own. The man might have
+sold them and used the money, but public
+opinion would have condemned him had he
+done so.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime the woman cooked for the family
+<a name="Page_117" id="Page_117"></a>and the hired men, scrubbed and washed and
+mended. She strained and skimmed the milk
+from a dozen cows, and churned the butter; she
+fed the calves; cared for the hens; dug in the
+garden; gathered the vegetables; did the family
+sewing; and stole fragments of time for her
+flower-beds. Her hours were from five in the
+morning until nine at night, three hundred and
+sixty-five days in the year, with no half-days or
+Sundays off.</p>
+
+<p>Incidentally she read her Bible, maintained
+religious exercises in the village, provided the
+church with a carpet by methods of indirection
+and kept the church clean. She upheld a moral
+standard toward which men only weakly struggled;
+hunted down and drove away all other
+women who refused equal service to their lords;
+ministered to the neighboring sick; and doled
+out alms in winter-time. Her home was a
+social and industrial microcosm which she conducted
+as a feudal holding under the protection
+of her lord. It would be an interesting study
+to work out the rules of this feudal relation
+between husband and wife in any agricultural
+community. They would be found as varied,
+<a name="Page_118" id="Page_118"></a>as unjust and arbitrary, and as generous, as
+those of the old r&eacute;gime in France.</p>
+
+<p>A woman in a home is supposed to furnish
+three kinds of service. She must be a housekeeper,
+a wife and a mother. As housekeeper,
+her services can be estimated in current values
+running from three to twenty-five dollars a week
+with board and lodging. The other two kinds
+of service have never been reduced to monetary
+values.</p>
+
+<p>As a wife, a woman is supposed to give her
+love, her person, her sympathy and inspiration;
+the personal care of a husband, including his
+clothes, attention to his relations and friends and
+general management of his social position and
+reputation. If she fills this position well, she
+is mistress, valet, confidential adviser and public
+entertainer. Possibly these services can be
+rated except the first, and even here the divorce
+courts scale alienated affections all the way from
+five hundred to twenty-five thousand dollars,
+according to the appearance of the woman and
+the skill of contending lawyers.</p>
+
+<p>As a mother, the woman is supposed to give
+children a good heritage, nurse them, care for
+<a name="Page_119" id="Page_119"></a>them, doctor them and train them. We have
+established values for these services as wet-nurse,
+nurse-maid, governess, doctor and teacher, but
+who can estimate a woman's value in giving a
+child a good heritage?</p>
+
+<p>It is no wonder that such a difficult problem
+has remained thus far unsolved. Here and
+there a man gives his wife a household allowance,
+from the money they earn in common,
+and she struggles to save from it some fragments
+for her individual needs; others put their wives
+on a salary; and some others divide the income
+on a fractional basis. But the slightest study
+of existing conditions must convince any one
+that women are everywhere deeply dissatisfied
+with their economic relations to the family. On
+referring recently to this fact before an audience
+almost equally divided between suffragists and
+anti-suffragists, I found every woman present
+applauding the statement. Another time when
+I asked more than sixty of the wealthiest women
+in one of our cities how many were dissatisfied
+with their relations to the family property, explaining
+that I was not asking how many wanted
+more money but how many wanted a different
+<a name="Page_120" id="Page_120"></a>relation to the family money, all the women
+raised their hands except three and they all had
+private property.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, economic changes, to be described
+in the next chapter, have transformed our homes
+and nearly eight million women have gone outside
+to earn money. The gladness with which
+they have gone shows that they were not afraid
+to work, though at first the money did not belong
+to them, but to their families. Almost
+everywhere in the United States the money
+women now earn is their own; only in Louisiana
+can the husband collect his wife's wages. Any
+one who reads Mrs. Gilman's masterly study of
+the evil effects accompanying woman's economic
+independence must feel how far-reaching are not
+only the discontent but also the evil influences
+of our present system through over-emphasizing
+sex and through corrupting the public thinking
+and feeling concerning services and wages in
+general.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Charlotte Perkins Gilman</span>, <i>Woman and Economics</i>, Boston:
+Small, Maynard &amp; Co., 1898. See, also, <i>Woman and
+Labor</i>, by <span class="smcap">Olive Schreiner</span>, New York: Frederick A. Stokes
+Co., 1911.</p></div>
+
+<p><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121"></a>Yet no one can seriously approach this problem
+in his own person without feeling that the
+relations of husband and wife contain elements
+that not only make it impossible to resolve the
+woman's service into money values, but that
+would make it useless to do so even if it could
+be done. The most distinctive quality of love
+is its desire to give. Love that seeks to get is
+not love. If when a woman gives herself she
+tries to secure individual property it will be only
+that she may give it to the man she loves. Marriage
+is a partnership of soul and body, and this
+includes property. It still remains true, however,
+that each must have in order that he may
+give. Besides this, there are always outside
+obligations, and special needs within the group,
+that require individual property for their realization.</p>
+
+<p>In the past, the partnership of marriage has
+been incomplete on the property side; why not
+complete it? Why not reorganize our laws and
+our public opinion so that two people who establish
+a family, putting into it all they have,
+should pay out of the income the necessary family
+expenses and divide all else equally between the
+<a name="Page_122" id="Page_122"></a>parties? Property acquired before marriage,
+and all inherited property, might well be held
+in individual right since it should never be
+a prize for prostitution, not even when it is
+euphemistically termed "a good home."</p>
+
+<p>Under equal suffrage Idaho has passed such
+a law, and all property gained after marriage
+belongs equally to husband and wife. If the
+wife dies, her heirs, in absence of a will, inherit
+half of the family property. If the two separate,
+the court, in absence of an outside agreement,
+settles the property as it does the children. The
+judge may order that it be divided equally, or
+he may give it all to either party, according to
+conditions; but the woman has identical rights
+with the man. Surely some such solution is
+demanded by our present unrest. No one will
+ever be economically independent; but husband
+and wife should be economically equal.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123"></a>VI</h2>
+
+<h2>Women in Industry</h2>
+
+
+<p>In all the animal world one can hardly find a
+place where orderly effort, planned to secure
+some future advantage, does not appear. Getting
+food, defending life, and caring for offspring
+have all combined to drive not only the
+descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well,
+to sweat-producing effort. Of course this is not
+definitely planned; getting food often waits on
+appetite; defense is sometimes merely running
+away; and the young are frequently left to feed
+themselves or die. But the fact remains that
+in digging burrows, building nests, laying up
+honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing
+for the young, a vast deal of effort is put
+forth in forest and field which is not immediately
+productive of pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>This work is seldom equally shared by all
+the members of the group. With bees, the
+drones and the queen are alike exempt from
+<a name="Page_124" id="Page_124"></a>work, and an asexual group has been developed
+to feed and protect them. Some ants compel
+others to do their work; and everywhere there
+seem to be individuals who are constitutionally
+lazy and others who, because of strength or sex
+attractiveness, are able to get more than their
+share of food and protection with less than their
+share of effort.</p>
+
+<p>From the first, some division of work between
+male and female grows almost inevitably
+out of their different relations to reproduction.
+Following conception, the male can always run
+away and leave the female to feed and fight for
+herself and her offspring, and he is very prone
+to do so. Even when he stays by and shares in
+the joy of the newly born he generally leaves
+the female to get ready the nest, and largely
+she protects and provisions it.</p>
+
+<p>Among domesticated animals, where their
+working possibilities have been very highly
+developed, females are much more desirable
+workers than males. The maternal function
+partly explains this, as in the case of cows and
+hens which give us milk and eggs; and even
+with mares and sheep the offspring adds to the
+<a name="Page_125" id="Page_125"></a>general working value. Still, it seems to be
+true that even for purposes of draught, the males
+are of less value than the females, unless reduced
+to the non-sexual condition of geldings and oxen.
+The stallion, bull or ram is too katabolic, too
+much of a consuming, distributing, destroying
+force to be very valuable in the daily routine of
+agriculture or commerce. While the female is
+generally smaller and less powerful than the
+male, she is quiet, easily enslaved; and, as we
+have said, her maternal functions can be diverted
+to our daily use. She produces more workers,
+and her flesh is more palatable, because less distinctive,
+than that of the male. Hence, among
+domesticated animals, selection, based on considerations
+of work, multiplies females and keeps
+males only for breeding purposes.</p>
+
+<p>As a quadruped, the female suffers very little
+handicap from the functions peculiar to her sex,
+except when actually carrying her young or
+nursing them. When she stands erect, however,
+the support for the special organs of reproduction
+is far from ideal; heavy lifting, or long-continued
+standing, often leads to disaster, and
+the periodic functions, even in the healthiest
+<a name="Page_126" id="Page_126"></a>conditions, must always place women at a working
+disadvantage as compared with men. Add
+to this the fact that women are smaller, less
+agile, and far less strong, than men, and, even
+when not encumbered with young, it is clear
+that a woman, when confronting physical work
+in competition with men, needs something more
+than a fair field and free competition.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> Idealists
+and travelers among primitive people love to
+tell us how easily women meet their special
+functions, carrying burdens equal to those carried
+by men when on the march, and dropping
+out from the caravan for only a few hours to
+give birth to a child; but the fact remains that
+women in all primitive societies age quickly and
+that those who are spoiled are thrown aside and
+forgotten.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> Woman's handicap as a working
+<a name="Page_127" id="Page_127"></a>animal in competition with man is too obvious
+and too deep-seated to be idealized away.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> The Supreme Court of the United States, in passing on
+the "Oregon laundry case," in 1907, declared a bill limiting
+a woman's working hours constitutional. See the <i>Brief
+for the State of Oregon</i>, prepared by <span class="smcap">Louis D. Brandeis</span>, published
+by The National Consumers' League, 105 East 22d
+Street, New York.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Dudley</span>, <i>Principles and Practices of Gynecology</i>, pp. 23-24,
+says that among Indian women want of care during and
+after labor leads to numberless evils.</p></div>
+
+<p>In all savage societies labor is clearly specialized
+between the sexes. The man, because of
+his superior strength and mobility, fights, hunts
+and makes weapons of the chase. The woman
+fetches and carries, digs and delves, cures the
+meat, makes the rude huts, clothing and pottery.
+Gradually she changes wild grasses to
+domesticated plants, and rears the young animals
+brought home from the chase, till they
+follow and serve their human masters. She is
+truly the mother of industries, and it in no way
+detracts from her credit that her motherhood is
+here, as elsewhere, mainly unthinking.</p>
+
+<p>With the exhaustion of the supply of wild
+animals, man is forced to turn his attention to
+the world of vegetation and he takes over the
+direction of the plants and animals which
+woman has largely domesticated. In his career
+as fighter and hunter he has learned to co&ouml;perate
+with his fellows to a degree which aids him
+greatly in dividing the arable land, protecting
+his crops, and using grazing lands in common
+with the tribe. He has also learned to make
+<a name="Page_128" id="Page_128"></a>stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows.
+Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent
+in her work; such new tools as she has devised
+have been helpful, but men who could not invent
+have been wiped out by those who learned
+to make stronger spears or better arrow-heads.</p>
+
+<p>It is the same difference in adaptability
+which one observes to-day between the farmers
+on the western frontier of America and those
+who remain in their peasant homes in Europe.
+The peasant has even greater need of inventing
+than has his expatriated countryman in Colorado,
+but he lacks the driving impulse. It was the
+same with women and men under the conditions
+of savage life. Thus it came about that man's
+greater strength and mobility, backed by power
+of co&ouml;peration and invention, gave him the
+leadership in such primitive life as we find depicted
+in the pages of Homer or in the epic of
+the Jews. True, woman was his first lieutenant,
+but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters
+of the industrial life.</p>
+
+<p>With settled conditions and accumulation of
+wealth, the most desirable women were almost
+entirely freed from physical labor and gradually
+<a name="Page_129" id="Page_129"></a>became luxury-loving parasites and playthings,
+as we pointed out in the second chapter of this
+volume. Meantime slaves were multiplying,
+male and female and, while the most desirable
+women passed to the harem, the mass of them
+became drudges in house and field. It is hard
+for us to realize that it is exactly in those times
+when a few women are surrounded with great
+luxury that most of the sex are reduced to heavy
+labor and wretchedness.</p>
+
+<p>During the early Christian ages, a tradition
+was gradually formed concerning woman's place
+in industry, or rather three traditions were
+formed. The working woman of the lower
+classes was to be the housekeeper, which meant
+that she was to care for food, cook, spin, weave,
+sew and mend, scrub and wash, bear children
+and nurse and tend them. If she were of the
+middle class, she was to be a mother, to supervise
+this range of work, look after dependents,
+conserve social conditions and be the lady bountiful
+of her district. The second ideal was the
+woman of religion, who was to subdue her passions,
+observe set prayers and other religious
+exercises, and do the menial work of the con<a name="Page_130" id="Page_130"></a>vent.
+The third ideal was the lady of chivalry,
+who appeared after the tenth century. She was
+to be cared for and protected from work or anxiety;
+menials were to prepare her food, clothes
+and ornaments; gallants were to await her orders
+and do her bidding.</p>
+
+<p>With the rise of Protestantism, and later
+with the rise of modern democracy, these ideals
+were blended, and women found themselves, not
+indeed slaves and subject to sale, but serfs, entangled
+in a mass of feudal obligations and
+bound to the house. Practically, most men still
+hold this threefold conception of woman's place
+in the social organism. She is to be a combination
+of housekeeper, nun and lady. It is the
+kitchen, church and children ideal of the German
+Emperor.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime forces were set at work which were
+to change the economic foundations of the family
+and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom
+into some new form of industrial relationship.
+From the rise of the European cities in
+the twelfth century, certain industries have
+tended, especially in the Netherlands and in
+England, to segregate themselves in farm-houses
+<a name="Page_131" id="Page_131"></a>and towns. Women naturally participated in
+these activities, generally taking the least desirable
+parts. With the freeing of the mind, which
+followed the democratic revolutions at the end
+of the eighteenth century, inventions blossomed
+out and perfected steam engines, cotton gins,
+spinning jennies, and a thousand other machines
+driven by steam or water power, which have
+changed the civilization of Europe and America.
+Miss Edith Abbott has shown us how this
+change, involving increasing segregation and
+specialization, came into America even in the
+pre-Revolutionary time.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Edith Abbott</span>, <i>Women in Industry: A Study in American
+Economic History</i>, New York: D. Appleton &amp; Co., 1910.</p></div>
+
+<p>Spinning and weaving industries led the way
+in this movement, but its full force was not felt
+until the late eighteenth century. Since then,
+one industry after another has left the home for
+the factory until to-day, in all large communities,
+even the preparation of food increasingly
+goes to the packing-house, the canning establishment,
+the bakery and the delicatessen-store.
+These industries needed hands, and so the women
+followed them to the factories.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132"></a>As 1870 marks the beginning of higher
+education for women, so it also marks the beginning
+of her industrial self-consciousness. The
+perfecting of such inventions as the typewriter,
+the telegraph and the telephone, and the creation
+of a great variety of office appliances, together
+with the perfecting of highly elaborate
+means of distribution, like the departmental
+store, called for thousands of cheap workers possessed
+of some slight intelligence but not necessarily
+having any serious preliminary training.
+Our elementary schools and high schools have
+increasingly turned out a multitude of girls who
+could meet these requirements. The increased
+cost of living, the lessened labor demands of the
+home, and the attractions of the pay envelope,
+have called millions to work in industrial plants.
+In 1890, there were 4,005,532 wage-earning
+women in the United States; in 1900, 5,319,397;
+while in 1910, we have probably nearly
+8,000,000.</p>
+
+<p>Like most other great changes in civilization,
+this industrial transformation was neither
+preceded nor accompanied by any general consciousness
+of what was happening. Daily neces<a name="Page_133" id="Page_133"></a>sities
+were offset by weekly pay envelopes, or
+the failures fell out of sight, and so the next
+week and the years followed. Country populations
+moved away; cities grew enormously,
+leading to congestion in living which, combined
+with the daily absence of women, has often
+transformed the old time homes into communal
+tiers of tenements occupied, during working
+hours, only by the young and the infirm.</p>
+
+<p>The children of all ages after a while followed
+their mothers into the factories; but the evil
+effects of child labor were so apparent that repressive
+legislative measures have increasingly
+raised the age of their admission until now, in
+the more advanced communities, they must stay
+outside the factory doors until they are twelve
+or fourteen years old. Some growing self-consciousness,
+largely of a police nature, has led
+us to institute measures for the protection of
+the children who are not allowed to work.
+Schools, playgrounds, day nurseries, institutional
+churches, college settlements and public social
+centers now bid against the streets and vacant
+lots, the nickel shows and the dancing halls, for
+the children's patronage.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134"></a>Education, however, true to its origin as the
+assistant of theology, refuses to recognize in any
+large way the new world into which we have
+come, and where the next generation of children
+must follow. Manual training has, here and
+there, quieted the fears of some who had disturbing
+visions; and we go on employing an
+army of unenfranchised, celibate women, with
+little or no industrial experience, to teach ten
+million boys how to be good citizens of a republic,
+and how to serve in a modern industrial
+army; and ten million girls how to work in
+shops and factories, and how to live without
+homes. As a consequence, girls come up to the
+factories from their schools with ideals,<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> so far as
+the school has shaped them, founded on unmarried
+school mistresses and George Washington;
+and they pass, by way of the altar, into cheerless
+tenements which the school still thinks of as
+places where children are cared for, family clothing
+is made and the family baking is done.<a name="Page_135" id="Page_135"></a>
+Practically, of course, most education is given
+outside the schools, and there the evils of an
+unregulated time of transition are multiplied
+through imitation.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Earl Barnes</span>, Children's Ideals, in <i>Studies in Education</i>,
+Vol. II, p. 237; also School Girls' Ideas of Women's Occupations
+by <span class="smcap">Sarah Young</span>, in <i>Studies in Education</i>, Vol. II, p. 259.</p></div>
+
+<p>The wealth and material comfort produced
+for the fortunate classes by these segregated
+industries have blinded us to their effects on
+human life, and we have all been bribed to silence
+concerning everything which could discourage
+enterprise or frighten capital. Like most
+bribes, however, these have largely stopped in
+the pockets of the exploiters of public opinion.</p>
+
+<p>In the opening years of this new century,
+public consciousness has had a wonderful awakening.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a>
+The popular mind, quickened by universal
+education, and freed from a burden of
+fixed beliefs, is turning restlessly to inquire
+about everything that affects human life. Work
+could not escape this inquisition, and so we are
+asking not only for a fairer division of the profits
+of work, but we are also inquiring what occupations
+are unfit for women, with their special
+limitations and obligations. When the work is
+<a name="Page_136" id="Page_136"></a>reasonable, how long should a woman work
+daily? Should she work at night and overtime?
+Should she work with dangerous machinery?
+Should she handle substances that endanger
+health? Should she be required to stand
+through hours of continuous work? Should she
+work in bad air, due to dust, moisture, or excessive
+heat or cold? Should she have a decent
+retiring-room? Some daring inquirers are even
+asking whether industrial efficiency, gained
+through specialization and keying up, may not
+be purchased at too high a price of mental monotony
+and nervous strain. Most people are
+content to learn that the effects are not immediately
+destructive to the girls and women involved;
+but some day we shall demand that
+the barons of industry shall not be allowed to
+squander the heritage of the unborn generations.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> <span class="smcap">C. Hanford Henderson</span>, <i>Pay-Day</i>, Boston: Houghton,
+Mifflin Co., 1911.</p></div>
+
+<p>Women have themselves done much to
+quicken this public consciousness. Enrolled in
+labor unions, they have shown power to stand
+together and make sacrifice, as in the shirt-waist
+makers' strike in New York in 1908, which
+commanded the admiration of all fair-minded
+<a name="Page_137" id="Page_137"></a>observers. The more fortunately placed women
+have aided these movements toward self-betterment;
+and, through such organizations as the
+National Consumers' League, they have compelled
+manufacturers and shopkeepers to observe
+more reasonable hours, pay better wages, and
+furnish decent material conditions for their employees.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> See the recent volume, based on investigations made by
+the National Consumers' League, <i>Making Both Ends Meet</i>, by
+<span class="smcap">Sue Ainslie Clark</span> and <span class="smcap">Edith Wyatt</span>, The Macmillan Co.,
+1911. See, also, <i>Saleswomen in Mercantile Stores</i>, by <span class="smcap">Elizabeth
+Beardsley Butler</span>, published by the Charities Publication
+Committee, for the Russell Sage Foundation, 1912.</p></div>
+
+<p>The solution of woman's present industrial
+problem is not an easy task, but out of the present
+unsettlement certain facts are emerging with
+a good deal of clearness. The efficiency in production,
+secured by concentration and specialization,
+make it certain that the old-time home
+with its multiplied industries will not return,
+but that more and more even of its present
+lessened activities will be transferred to factories
+and to their equivalents. It is also certain that
+women are not going to be supported in indolence
+by men, because when deprived of the dis<a name="Page_138" id="Page_138"></a>cipline
+which full participation in life gives, they
+must always degenerate. For themselves, and
+for the sake of their children, they will demand
+a chance to live abundantly. It is also clear
+that our present chaotic conditions are destructive
+of health, happy marriages, effective homes,
+and the strong line of descendants which must
+always be the chief care of an intelligent society.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, then, we must work to
+produce an entire change in our present mental
+attitude toward organized industries. Our
+present worship of industrial products, no matter
+how obtained, must give way to a recognition of
+the fact that the chief asset of a nation is its
+people; that a woman is more important than
+the clothes she makes in factories or sells in
+stores; and that to needlessly destroy or scrapheap
+a working woman is worse than to needlessly
+destroy or scrapheap the finest and most
+costly machine ever devised by man. Such a
+statement seems to carry conviction in its every
+phrase, but the fact is that we do not believe it,
+and until we do believe it, there will be little
+help for our present absurd and wretched conditions.
+Unregulated competition, backed by
+<a name="Page_139" id="Page_139"></a>greed of individuals and groups, will go on
+wasting the wealth of women's lives until we
+cease to be fascinated and hypnotized by the
+display of products which they make possible.
+Better fine women and children, and few things,
+than stores and warehouses crowded with goods,
+and the women and children of our present
+factory towns. By fixing our attention on
+people instead of things, we should almost certainly
+secure more and better things; but, regardless
+of cost, we must change the focus of our
+attention.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, girls must get ready to
+be women. The education of the home and the
+school must be unified, and together they must
+give a training that will lead girls into the actualities
+of the life that lies before them. Our
+present elementary schools, and still more our
+high schools, lead girls neither to intelligent
+work nor to intelligent living as women and
+mothers. Up to at least the age of fourteen,
+the education should be general, looking to the
+development of all the powers of body, mind
+and sensibilities. But through all these eight
+or ten years of training, two factors should
+<a name="Page_140" id="Page_140"></a>receive constant and intelligent attention. In
+the first place, we should realize that we are not
+fitting women for drawing-rooms nor for convents,
+but for a working world; therefore well
+graded and interesting manual training should
+run through all these years and should furnish a
+well-developed base for later special industrial
+preparation of some kind. In the second place,
+the girls should be taught by men and women,
+married and unmarried, and fine ideals of actual
+womanhood, not alone in shops and factories, in
+school-rooms, and in professions&mdash;but also in
+homes, should be constantly held before them.
+Our present education leaves this training
+mainly to the homes, and neither the parasitic
+rich nor our eight million wage-earning women,
+when mothers, can or will attend to it.</p>
+
+<p>After the girl reaches the age of fourteen,
+she should have at least two years of further
+education in which she could master the details
+of some necessary work which would enable her
+to look the world in the face and offer fair payment
+for her living. With most girls, this work
+would be connected with children and the service
+of the home; for domestic service, no matter
+<a name="Page_141" id="Page_141"></a>how organized, must always occupy a multitude
+of women. All girls should have at least rudimentary
+training in these matters.</p>
+
+<p>During the period of transition from schools
+to their own family life, the girls might well
+give a half dozen years to work in factories and
+stores where the conditions should be as good,
+and as well guarded, as in our best school buildings&mdash;in
+factories, in a word, where the employers
+would be willing that their own daughters
+should work. This is surely a fair standard.
+Work which is not safe or fit for me to do, is
+not fit for me to hire done. If this principle
+fails, then democracy is but a dream.</p>
+
+<p>But during all this period of preparation we
+should never forget that, as Madame Gnauck-K&uuml;hne
+so admirably points out, "women's work
+has to a large extent an episodic character."<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a>
+All women confront romantic love, marriage
+and children; and any woman who misses them
+misses the crowning joy and glory of her life.
+Vicarious realization may save the soul, but it
+can never fill the place of reality. The man
+<a name="Page_142" id="Page_142"></a>fronts these same experiences, but they are not
+related to his work as they are related to the
+work of women. Surely there can be no doubt
+that the ideal solution, in this period, is a man
+and woman so deeply bound together by love
+that there is no question of self-protection, either
+in terms of work or money; and the man being
+freed from the burdens of maternity, should
+mainly earn the income. We shall discuss the
+new type of home and family in a later chapter,
+but in any home where there are children there
+is need of an intelligent mother's very constant
+care.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> Madame <span class="smcap">Gnauck K&uuml;hne</span>, <i>Die Deutsche Frau</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>If a happy home were the universal destiny
+of women, our problem would be greatly simplified;
+but this is far from being the case. Not
+more than one-half of all women over fifteen are
+married at any one moment. From the ages of
+twenty to thirty-five, one-half are married; but
+it is only from thirty-five to fifty-five that as
+many as three-fourths are married; over fifty-five
+there are less than one-half married, and
+most of the others are widows.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> Most of these
+<a name="Page_143" id="Page_143"></a>women who are not married must work outside
+the home, and no girl, rich or poor, should be
+allowed to reach maturity without being prepared
+to face this possibility. Work is not a
+curse but a blessing; it is an indispensable part
+of every well-ordered life; and without it, the
+individual and the group will certainly degenerate.
+Rich and foolish parents, who cannot realize
+this basal fact, should nevertheless see that,
+even as insurance, their daughters must be able
+to pay their way in life, if need comes, without
+selling themselves either in marriage or out.
+Even if the woman marries happily, she is never
+sure that she may not some day have to face self-support,
+and possibly for more mouths than her
+own.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> <span class="smcap">B.L. Hutchins</span>, Woman's Industrial Career in <i>The
+Sociological Review</i>, October, 1909.</p></div>
+
+<p>But the woman who marries during her
+adolescent period, between the ages of twenty-five
+and fifty, must also work, and here we meet
+the hardest problem of all. More money is often
+needed than the man can earn; the wife may
+bring an industrial or professional equipment
+which is too valuable to discard; often the
+demands of the home, especially where there are
+no children, do not call forth the best energies
+<a name="Page_144" id="Page_144"></a>of the woman, and she needs the larger life of
+outside work. Hence many married women
+must continue to work away from the home.
+In any of these cases, the problem is difficult.
+Bearing and rearing a child should retire a
+mother from fixed outside occupation for at least
+a year. Arguments born out of conflict cannot
+change this primitive fact.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> Women should not
+do shop or factory work during the last months
+of pregnancy, and babies should be nursed from
+seven to nine months. A baby should be nursed
+for twenty minutes, every two or three hours of
+its waking time; and since it does not always
+waken regularly, the nursing mother is debarred
+from most continuous work, even if it does not
+interfere with her effectiveness as a milk producer.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> Dr. <span class="smcap">Ethel Vaughan-Sawyer</span>, speaking before the Fabian
+Women's Group, in 1910, said: "Fortunately, after the first
+two or three months, most children will thrive equally well
+when artificially fed, so long as the milk is good and reliable,
+and is properly prepared." All of our facts go to disprove
+this statement.</p></div>
+
+<p>The question of maternal care for children
+after they are weaned is more difficult to settle,
+but notwithstanding certain statistics gathered
+<a name="Page_145" id="Page_145"></a>in Birmingham,<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> in February, 1910, which
+showed that the infant mortality among working
+mothers was one hundred and ninety per
+thousand, while, among those not industrially
+employed, it was two hundred and seventy per
+thousand, it seems sure that infant mortality is
+extremely high in foundling asylums and in
+factory homes. In Fall River, where out of
+every one hundred women, forty-five are at work
+outside the home, three hundred and five babies,
+out of every one thousand born, die before they
+are a year old; while even in New York City,
+but one hundred and eighty-nine out of a thousand
+die. The natural location of Fall River
+should make it a very healthy city. One remembers,
+too, the classic statement that deaths
+among little children fell off steadily in Paris
+during the siege of 1870. Little children seem
+better off even in time of war, with the mothers
+at home, than in time of peace with their
+mothers in the factory.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Pamphlet entitled <i>Report on Industrial Employment of
+Married Women and Infant Mortality</i>, signed by Dr. <span class="smcap">John
+Robertson</span>, the Medical Officer of Health, Birmingham.</p></div>
+
+<p>A few years ago, we turned to sanitary day
+<a name="Page_146" id="Page_146"></a>nurseries, and to pasteurized milk and other
+prepared baby foods, as the solution for neglected
+or unhygienic feeding. To-day we know
+that even a dirty and ill-conditioned mother
+secretes better milk for her baby than can be
+prepared in any laboratory. We must wash the
+mother and feed her the milk, and then let her
+give it to her baby, instinct with her own life.
+It is quite possible that our recent talk of ignorant
+mother love and of the necessary substitution
+of sanitary nurseries, canned care and pre-digested
+affection must all go the same way.
+We shall probably get our best results by cleaning
+up the home, enlightening the mother, and
+then letting her love her child into the full
+possession of its human qualities.</p>
+
+<p>Economically, too, at least with factory
+workers, it is questionable if their wages will
+support sanitary day-nurseries, with intelligent
+nurses for small groups of children, and at the
+same time pay some one to cook and scrub at
+home. If the mother must still cook and care
+for her house, in addition to her factory work,
+the burden is too great; and if money for nurses
+must come from the state, or from charity, then
+<a name="Page_147" id="Page_147"></a>we all know the danger of such subsidies to
+industry, in its effect on wages.</p>
+
+<p>Surely the ideal toward which we must
+work is for the mother, during the period when
+she is bearing and rearing children, to be supported
+by the father of her children. Let her
+do the work meantime which will best care for
+her children, and at the same time conserve and
+strengthen her powers for the third period of
+her life.</p>
+
+<p>This period, from fifty to seventy-five years,
+is now more shamefully wasted than any other
+of our national resources. If one attends a State
+federation of women's clubs one will find nearly
+every delegate of this age. They are women of
+mature understanding and of ripe judgment,
+still possessing abundant health and strength,
+and where relieved by economic conditions from
+the necessity of manual work, they have to live
+such irregular and uncertain relations to life as
+can be maintained by mothers-in-law, grandmothers,
+club secretaries, and presidents of town
+improvement societies. Remove all restrictions
+on woman's activity, and these strong matrons
+would vitalize our schools, give us decent muni<a name="Page_148" id="Page_148"></a>cipal
+housekeeping, supervise the conditions
+under which girls and women work in shops
+and factories, and do much to clean up our
+politics. Debarred from direct power as they
+are, they are still making us decent in spite of
+ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>For the future, then, it seems that we must
+accept working women in every path of life.
+We must remove all disabilities under which
+they labor, and at the same time protect them
+by special legislation as future wives and mothers.
+All girls must master some line of self-supporting
+work; and, except in the cases of those who
+have very special tastes and gifts, they should
+select work which can be interrupted, without
+too great loss, by some years of motherhood.
+During this time, the mother must be supported
+so that she can largely care for her own child,
+though she must also maintain outside interests
+through work, which will keep her in touch with
+the moving current of her time. Industries
+must be humanized and made fit for women.
+The last third of a woman's life must be freed
+from legal limitations and popular prejudices, so
+that we may secure these best years of her life for
+<a name="Page_149" id="Page_149"></a>private and public service. And meantime, it
+is well to remember that every step we take in
+making this a fit world for woman to work in,
+makes it a fit world for her father, her brothers,
+her lover and her husband to work beside her.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150"></a>VII</h2>
+
+<h2>The Meaning of Political Life</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is a well-known fact that when words have
+been long and vigorously used they gather
+within and around themselves varied meanings.
+Some parts of these meanings are remnants of
+historic, and possibly outworn, experience; other
+parts are the result of more or less deliberate
+perversion under the stress of deep feelings
+aroused by opposition and fighting. This is
+especially the fate of words in any way associated
+with politics. Think how battered and useless
+for purposes of ordinary discussion "democrat"
+and "republican" or "socialist" have become in
+America!</p>
+
+<p>In the struggle of the last fifty years over
+woman's suffrage, most of the words involved
+have undergone such transformations; and so
+many prejudices have become associated with
+them, that no one can think or speak clearly
+and fairly to-day in these terms. "Wom<a name="Page_151" id="Page_151"></a>an's
+Rights," "enfranchisement," "Votes for
+Women," "suffragette," "polls," "ballot," "political
+issues," and many other words, have
+gone through this destructive process.</p>
+
+<p>To read some of the most popular literature
+on this subject one might imagine that women
+had all deserted home and fireside, babies and
+baking, and were lined up, struggling fiercely
+to deposit certain printed slips, called votes or
+ballots, dealing with esoteric mysteries understood
+only by men like Mr. Bryan or Mr.
+Roosevelt, in ballot-boxes. These receptacles
+are supposed to be behind, or very near, lawless
+saloons, where gangs of hoodlums are waiting
+to assault the bearers of these mysterious tickets.
+Thus Miss Seawell writes in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>
+for September, 1910: "The trouble would begin
+with the mere attempt of women to deposit
+their ballots. A dozen ruffians at a single polling-place
+would prevent a single woman from
+depositing a single vote. There can be no
+doubt that this means would be used by the
+rougher element and that the polls would become
+a scene of preordained riot and disorder."
+Of course, such statements could not appear in
+<a name="Page_152" id="Page_152"></a>a leading magazine, in a land where women
+have been voting quietly for many years, were
+it not for the perversity of the words which the
+author tries to use, but which really use her.
+In other periodicals, equally respectable, one
+learns that women, goaded on by the intolerable
+political tyranny of men, have agreed as one
+soul to advance, with ballots in their hands,
+and sweep graft and greed, drink and all other
+human wrongs, into the sea of oblivion forever.
+Of course, this is nonsense, or worse, and in
+this chapter I should like to turn away from this
+warfare, leaving even the battered and prejudiced-soaked
+words alone, as much as may be
+possible, and simply ask: What is political life,
+not as defined in books, but as actually lived by
+a self-respecting farmer or merchant of our
+acquaintance? What qualities does political
+life presuppose in a participant? How does its
+use affect him? What does it enable him to accomplish?
+What is the relation of a woman&mdash;not
+some militant or unsexed ogre, nor a female
+breeding animal in a harem, but our own sisters,
+wives and daughters as they really are&mdash;what is
+their relation to this mysterious process?</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153"></a>If one approaches the political life of our
+modern democracies in this simple spirit of
+inquiry it would seem that the first requisite for
+participation is the ability to form sound judgments
+concerning political matters; and all
+matters are now becoming political which affect
+the welfare of the community. Certainly the
+citizen cannot devise political machinery nor
+select candidates to work such machinery, much
+less "cast a ballot," until he knows what he
+wants done. What are some of the questions,
+then, on which he must form judgments?</p>
+
+<p>First of all, he must be prepared to think
+intelligently about protecting his life and property.
+He must know something of the danger
+of foreign invasion, of the consequent need of a
+navy and standing army. He must make up
+his mind whether it is necessary to spend $123,000,000
+yearly on an American navy and $156,000,000
+on an American army, as we are at
+present doing, that we may be ready to fight
+England, Germany or Japan if at any time we
+want to do so. He must ask himself whether
+this money might not better be used in fighting
+ignorance, crime, poverty and disease.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154"></a>The would-be citizen must also think about
+protecting himself from assault as he walks
+about the streets; about protecting his house
+from thieves as he lies asleep at night. He
+must have thought about the careless use of cars,
+automobiles, firearms and explosives in general.
+He must consider the danger from fires, contagion,
+diseases, mobs; he must think intelligently
+about contaminated water and impure foods.
+All these things are necessary for the physical
+well-being of the community life. Of course, if
+either man or woman cannot think intelligently
+about these things, he ought not to have control
+of them; he should leave such matters to
+those who can think of them.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, the would-be citizen
+must have fairly sound judgments on questions of
+raising and spending necessary revenue. What
+are the effects of direct and indirect taxation?
+Would a heavy tax on land force unused lands, including
+mines and waterways, into use? Should
+a man with a cash income of $50,000 a year
+pay more to support government than one with
+a cash income of $500? What are the objections
+to an income tax? How does it work in Eng<a name="Page_155" id="Page_155"></a>land,
+where it has been fairly tried? Should a
+great corporation pay taxes in proportion to its
+wealth, and in places where the wealth is protected
+by the law? If so, how can it be reached?
+Should churches, museums, libraries and schools
+be taxed; if not, why not? Should taxes be
+laid on flour, meat and eggs, on woolen cloth,
+on silks, velvets, ostrich plumes and diamonds?
+Should taxes be laid on whiskey, wines, tobacco,
+cigars and race-tracks? Should taxes be devised,
+or continued, to protect such infant industries as
+now handle our kerosene oil, meat, sugar and
+steel? Surely no one who cannot form independent
+judgments on these matters should presume
+to direct them through voting.</p>
+
+<p>But not only must a nation raise revenue in
+the wisest and most equitable manner possible,
+and spend it effectively and economically, but it
+must also care for its present possessions. So
+the would-be citizen must know about the wealth
+in which he wants to share. What do the national,
+State and municipal governments own?
+How should the vast domains of land, the onetime
+inexhaustible forests, the mines of coal and
+metal, the waterways and water-powers, the
+<a name="Page_156" id="Page_156"></a>special privileges and franchises belonging to the
+people be used? Should they be thrown away,
+gambled away, given away as favors, rented,
+sold, or handled directly by the people? On
+what terms or under what guarantees should
+they be turned over to individuals or companies,
+if this is to be done? Those who cannot form
+judgments on these matters should not be entrusted
+with such vast responsibility, be they
+men or women.</p>
+
+<p>Questions of our foreign relations must also
+occupy the thought of the citizen. Are foreign
+entanglements necessary or desirable? If so,
+with what European or Asiatic nations should
+we seek to strengthen our friendship? Are our
+interests nearly identical with those of England?
+If we formed a close defensive alliance with her
+should we be thereby aiding universal peace as
+much as we might by maintaining more generally
+friendly relations with all European powers?
+Would an alliance with England probably draw
+us into her troubles, if she has any, in Egypt or
+India? How would such an alliance affect our
+relation with England's present ally, Japan?
+Are we fitted by the genius of our institutions
+<a name="Page_157" id="Page_157"></a>and by our experience to handle a foreign empire?
+If not, what should we do with the
+Philippines?</p>
+
+<p>So, too, those who are to direct the destinies
+of the country must think out what our relations
+are to be with Latin America. In the past some
+statesman, a Richelieu or a Bismarck, had a
+policy and led his nation to it by devious paths
+of indirection. But now that each citizen is a
+king, he must have a policy for his realm. Are
+our republican neighbors to the south to be increasingly
+recognized as under our protection
+and direction? If so, how are we to maintain
+the peace and secure payment of their foreign
+debts? All these problems are bound up with
+the management of the Panama Canal. They
+confront us in different forms in connection with
+immigration, especially of Asiatics.</p>
+
+<p>Our institutional life must also be regulated
+by the citizens, and so they must have judgments
+about each of its details. They must
+know what they think about the family, forms
+of legal marriage and divorce, and the care of
+children when the family fails. The Church
+must be considered and protected; possibly it
+<a name="Page_158" id="Page_158"></a>should be encouraged; and possibly its unwarranted
+assumption should sometimes be checked.
+Schools must be founded, supported, directed.
+Art galleries, museums and clubs must be chartered,
+and then controlled; and so must all the
+other institutions of our modern society. The
+would-be citizen must be able to think about all
+this work.</p>
+
+<p>Industries, on which our individual and collective
+well-being depend, must be encouraged
+by special favors, limited to the public good,
+protected from violence, inspected in the interest
+of employees. Hours must be regulated,
+disputes settled, conditions of labor and safety
+secured. Children should be protected against
+employers' greed; and working women must
+receive special consideration, if the race of strong
+men is to continue. Here again the citizen
+must have judgments, or the power to make
+judgments, as new needs arise.</p>
+
+<p>Then, too, there is a tradition of government,
+established by the fathers and modified by experience,
+which should be understood by the
+citizens. It recognizes certain rights as being
+reserved by the individual States, and others as
+<a name="Page_159" id="Page_159"></a>belonging to the national government. The
+would-be citizen should be acquainted with this
+tradition so that he can determine how far it is
+desirable to adopt a new nationalism. He will
+have to pass judgment on the control of interstate
+commerce, national or State control of
+public lands, national divorce and liquor laws,
+national food inspection, and other practical
+subjects which may destroy the older balance of
+power so jealously guarded by our earlier statesmen.
+The citizen must make up his mind if
+this is desirable.</p>
+
+<p>Newer political theories must also receive the
+citizens' attention. Many people believe that
+wealth created by the people can be enjoyed by
+the people only when they control the sources of
+supply and the means of production and distribution.
+The citizen should know whether these
+socialist tendencies should be favored or suppressed.
+There are others who believe that
+government is unnecessary, and that men and
+women can be happy and effective only when
+formal laws are abrogated. The citizen must
+determine whether he will allow those who hold
+such doctrines to express them; or whether he
+<a name="Page_160" id="Page_160"></a>will suppress their meetings and forbid them to
+enter the country. These are but a few of the
+subjects concerning which the citizen must think,
+but they are typical and they may represent the
+rest.</p>
+
+<p>In the last analysis, it is these judgments on
+political matters which govern a modern democracy,
+whatever the laws on the statute books
+may be, and whatever machinery of government
+may be established.</p>
+
+<p>Not long since, I visited one of our States
+where the laws forbid any one to make or sell, as
+a beverage, any intoxicating liquors, within the
+State. At the leading hotel, in the large city
+where I stopped, beer and whiskey signs were
+displayed outside the entrance; and at an open
+bar, in the center of the hotel, four bartenders
+were dispensing all kinds of drinks, while at the
+tables of the hotel restaurant, liquors were openly
+bought and drunk. There are many indictments
+standing against this hotel, but in two test cases
+juries have refused to convict the proprietors. I
+am told it is the same in all of the principal
+hotels in the larger cities of this State. In this
+same State, the laws forbid the manufacture or
+<a name="Page_161" id="Page_161"></a>sale of cigarettes, but they are openly displayed
+and sold in nearly all cigar stores. In the same
+State, whites and blacks live under the same
+laws, but blacks seldom vote; they do not use
+the parks, attend white people's meetings nor
+ride with the whites in public conveyances. And
+yet the city was quiet and orderly and I felt as
+safe in person and property as though the laws
+on the statute books, instead of the judgments
+in the public mind, were being obeyed. Since
+this form of public opinion is so powerful, it is
+well that it should be intelligent.</p>
+
+<p>Granted, then, that the candidate for citizen
+honors is prepared to pass judgment on such
+matters as we have indicated, he must next be
+prepared to devise and control means to carry
+these judgments into effect. Here he approaches
+the problems of statescraft. He must have in
+his mind a general scheme of government, with
+a sense of legislative, judicial and executive
+functions. He must realize the value of a constitution,
+as a point of departure; and have a
+theory as to safe ways of modifying it. He
+must have fairly clear notions of legislation, and
+of the kinds of laws that are desirable and effec<a name="Page_162" id="Page_162"></a>tive.
+He should know how far representative
+legislative bodies can be trusted to express the
+will of the people; and he should have studied
+the working of the initiative and the referendum.
+It is also desirable that he should know the
+theory of two chambers, and should have ideas
+as to how the members of the second chamber,
+if there is to be one, should be chosen.</p>
+
+<p>The candidate for citizen honors should know
+something of the organization of the judicial
+branch of government. He should know something
+of the powers and duties of local magistrates,
+of county, State and national courts.
+He should recognize the difference between civil
+and criminal jurisdiction. He should have an
+opinion as to whether judges should be elected
+or appointed, and if appointed, who should select
+them. He should realize the grave dangers that
+surround a corrupt judiciary, and he should
+know the means by which a court is enabled to
+maintain its standing and authority.</p>
+
+<p>So of the executive power, he should see its
+relation to the other powers, from the constable
+to the president. He should know the qualities
+required in a good executive and should be able
+<a name="Page_163" id="Page_163"></a>to distinguish them in possible candidates. He
+should know that when the executive is lax the
+best of laws fall into abeyance, and he should
+know how such officers can be held up, through
+criticism by public opinion and penalties, to the
+fulfilment of duties. The recall should have
+been considered.</p>
+
+<p>In the third place, the citizen should know
+how to select the right kind of people to carry
+his political judgments into effect. Possibly,
+under a representative form of government, this
+is the most necessary qualification for a good
+voter. Many of the matters with which modern
+government must deal are technical, and the
+citizen here, as in his private affairs, must rest
+on the judgment of those he employs. And yet,
+in general, he must know what he wants.</p>
+
+<p>He must know the general laws that govern
+the organization of parties; and he should be
+somewhat acquainted with the psychology of
+crowds. He should know how candidates are
+selected under the convention or caucus system;
+he should have an independent judgment on
+direct primaries.</p>
+
+<p>In selecting men, the citizen must be able to
+<a name="Page_164" id="Page_164"></a>recognize general ability and intellectual fitness.
+It is at this point that modern democracies are
+most apt to go wrong. The standards by which
+we measure men and women are most imperfect;
+and we are prone to let one good or bad quality
+overshadow all others. Thus in an extended
+study on school children's attitude toward
+Queen Victoria in England, and toward President
+McKinley in America, made while these
+rulers were alive, we found that less than twenty
+per cent. mentioned any kind of political ability,
+nor did they often mention their general ability,
+nor their honesty. They admired them primarily
+because they were "good and kind." In
+other words the school children of these two
+lands approve their rulers because, in a vague
+general way, they like them.<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> The significance
+of the study lies in the fact that in all democracies
+a large number of the voters live on an
+intellectual plane represented by these school
+children.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Earl Barnes</span>, <i>Studies in Education</i>, Vol. II, pp. <i>5-80</i>.
+Philadelphia, 1902.</p></div>
+
+<p>This conclusion is borne out by the judgment
+of Miss Jane Addams who, writing of
+<a name="Page_165" id="Page_165"></a>foreign voters about Hull House, says: "The
+desire of the Italian and Polish and Hungarian
+voters in an American city to be represented by
+'a good man' is not a whit less strenuous than
+that of the best native stock. Only their idea of
+the good man is somewhat different. He must
+be good according to their highest standard of
+goodness. He must be kind to the poor, not
+only in a general way, but with particular and
+unfailing attention to their every want and misfortune.
+Their joys he must brighten and their
+sorrows he must alleviate. In emergency, in
+catastrophe, in misunderstanding with employers
+and with the law, he must be their strong tower
+of help. Let him in all these things fill up their
+ideal of the 'good man' and he has their votes
+at his absolute disposal."<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Jane Addams</span>, <i>Democracy</i>, p. 221. New York: The
+Macmillan Co., 1902.</p></div>
+
+<p>To be a safe citizen one must be able to go
+beyond this kindly feeling and ask, Does the
+candidate know enough to do what I want done?
+Has he the honesty to resist the temptation to
+exploit me? Has he the leadership to command
+the best efforts of the subordinates in his depart<a name="Page_166" id="Page_166"></a>ment?
+Has he serious defects that may cause
+his failure? Is he an opportune man for the
+time and place?</p>
+
+<p>This selection is made very difficult to-day
+by the misrepresentation of interested individuals
+and political parties; and especially by the
+reports in the press, which seek to discredit
+candidates they oppose, and to gloss over or
+deny defects in their chosen leaders. Thus the
+whole public atmosphere in the midst of a campaign
+is intended to confuse and bewilder the
+citizen who is honestly seeking the best candidate.
+Only ripened intelligence, experience
+with men and women, and ability to judge conflicting
+evidence, can enable the voter to select
+wisely.</p>
+
+<p>In the last place, if the citizen knows what
+he wants, how to devise the governmental
+machinery to get it, and how to select the right
+men to see that it is done, he must register his
+desire by a vote; and then watch his servant
+carefully to see if he justifies the trust imposed
+in him. If he does not, then the citizen must
+criticise, threaten, and, if necessary, finally dismiss
+the unfaithful employee. Only one who
+<a name="Page_167" id="Page_167"></a>can fulfil all these functions can be considered
+a desirable citizen from the point of view of a
+modern democracy. "Eternal vigilance is the
+price of liberty."</p>
+
+<p>And why should one desire to undertake this
+arduous responsibility? In the first place, because
+he wants the public work well done, as he
+understands it; and the only way to have it
+done in this manner is to attend to it himself.
+If he does not attend to it, some one else will do
+so; and if the intelligent citizens do not look
+after it then the public business will be exploited
+by individuals, or groups, in their own interest;
+and, before the citizen realizes what is happening,
+he will be deprived of that political liberty
+to secure which millions of men and women have
+struggled and suffered and even given their lives
+in the years which lie behind us.</p>
+
+<p>And yet possibly the most important value
+of participation in political life to-day is the byproduct
+of continuous education which it gives.
+Modern political life has probably done more to
+train the men involved in it than have schools or
+churches. Business and industries alone might
+claim to be its rivals. In a despotism, all the
+<a name="Page_168" id="Page_168"></a>events of public life are uncertain and seemingly
+accidental, depending as they do on the caprice
+of an individual. This discourages thought
+among the masses, paralyzes action, and breeds
+inertia and hopelessness. At best, it gives rise
+to periods of desperation and violence; at its
+worst, it gives us the hopeless masses of Mohammedan
+lands. In a free democracy, on the other
+hand, those who participate are in a continuous
+process of education, judging, selecting, willing,
+and always with regard to realities that affect
+daily life. Citizenship gives one a continuous
+laboratory course of training in the art of right
+living.</p>
+
+<p>Nor can the full value of this continuous
+training be obtained by the onlooker, no matter
+how intelligent he may be. For full growth of
+mind and spirit one must participate; just as in
+athletics one must leave the spectator's bench
+and play the game if one would develop one's
+own powers. Participation means love, hate,
+devotion and sacrifice, and only when all these
+powers of the soul are brought into play, together
+with the judgment, is the character
+strengthened and life more abundantly obtained.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"></a>It must be evident to any one who has carefully
+followed this analysis that hardly any of
+the adult male voters in our modern democracies
+have the qualifications of good citizens. How,
+then, is good government achieved? It is not
+achieved. We have very bad government.
+Everywhere there is waste and inefficiency.
+Wealth is unjustly divided; great corporations
+seize public utilities and exploit them for private
+gain; enormous sums are squandered on unnecessary
+and dangerous battle-ships and soldiers;
+in building a single State Capitol, $3,500,000
+was recently stolen, not only wasting public
+wealth, but corrupting public morals; in some
+parts of our land little children still drive the
+wheels of industry; and it is everywhere cheaper
+to scrap-heap men and women than machines;
+most of our cities are ugly and badly ruled;
+drunkenness, gambling and prostitution are
+common; life is not always secure from lawless
+attack; and the machinery of justice is clogged
+and moves slowly. Part of our intelligent adult
+population has no direct share in the government
+under which it must live. We have just
+such a government as we should expect where
+<a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"></a>incompetent people decide such vast issues of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>But, on the other hand, we are vastly better
+off than any great people has ever been before
+us. The mistakes are our own; they are made
+by us who participate in government, and we
+are learning from them. Those who exploit us
+may be called to account; and frequently they
+are caught and punished. Of those who stole
+the millions in Harrisburg, nearly a score have
+died disgraced, or are in prison or exile; and
+$1,300,000 has been returned to the treasury of
+the State. Even when those who betray us are
+not caught red-handed we learn to distrust and
+then to despise them. They pass their last years
+in exile, and when their statues are erected in
+our State Houses they are memorials of shame.
+Thus we learn the art of living, we who participate
+in political action.</p>
+
+<p>The whole business of a modern democracy is
+to educate itself through doing, and we are all
+at school. If the bills are heavy, they are our
+bills; and we are steadily learning how to make
+them less. In the past no one learned. "The
+Bourbons learned nothing, and forgot nothing;"<a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"></a>
+and the common people were too discouraged to
+think. It is on these lines that our modern
+democracies must be judged, not as efficient and
+economical political machines, but as educational
+institutions. Judged by this standard, we believe
+ourselves to be the triumph of the ages.</p>
+
+<p>Nor can it be possible for people to enter
+political life fully prepared for its duties. Even
+when a young man approaches a business career
+we do not ask that he shall possess a knowledge
+of the business before beginning. If he has
+general preparation, and a desire to learn, he is
+admitted to share in its responsibilities, and then
+learns as he goes along. It is the same in political
+life; few young men at twenty-one or
+foreigners at the time of naturalization, have
+the knowledge indicated in the preceding pages.
+If they have general preparation and a desire to
+learn, we admit them to participation, and they
+learn through doing.</p>
+
+<p>Years ago, while discussing education with
+an English statesman, he asked whom I considered
+the leaders of education in his country.
+Knowing his Tory instincts, I replied, "Bradlaugh,
+Annie Besant, William T. Stead, John<a name="Page_172" id="Page_172"></a>
+Burns and Keir Hardie." He laughed contemptuously:
+"Why those people," he said,
+"are merely educating themselves in public."
+The statement was true and far-reaching; that
+is what we are all doing in our modern democracies;
+and that is at the same time our weakness
+and our glory.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+<h2>Woman's Relation to Political Life</h2>
+
+
+<p>In discussing woman's right to vote it is well
+to remember that the right to rule, which
+is implicit in the right to vote, has always been
+limited by conditions of birth, residence, wealth,
+morality or intelligence. Universal manhood
+suffrage has never yet been achieved, and probably
+never will be. Under the best Greek conditions,
+it was only the free-born citizen, residing
+in his native city state, who voted. In both
+Greece and Rome, the suffrage was limited to
+classes defined by social position, wealth or military
+service. In our modern democracies there
+have always been limitations of birth, which
+might be overcome by naturalization; of residence,
+which could be overcome by living for a
+certain time in a locality; of wealth, which was
+supposed to insure a stake in the communal well-being;
+and of morals and intelligence, which
+<a name="Page_174" id="Page_174"></a>at least shut out criminals, the insane and the
+imbeciles.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the right to vote is not the same thing
+as the right to live; and even in a commonwealth
+founded on ideal justice only those having
+a stake in the community life, and possessing
+normal intelligence and morality, will be
+allowed to rule. In a word, equal suffrage is
+possible, while universal man or woman suffrage
+is not.</p>
+
+<p>All through our colonial period women had a
+large influence in determining community questions,
+and in Massachusetts, under the old Providence
+Charter, they voted for all elective officers
+for nearly a hundred years. Here and there
+women&mdash;like Margaret Brent, of Maryland;
+Abigail Adams, of Massachusetts; or Mrs. Corbin,
+of Virginia&mdash;put forward their right to participate
+in the public life around them. But, in
+1776, women were not voting, and the Federal
+Constitution left the matter of determining
+electoral rights to the several States. They all
+decided for male suffrage.</p>
+
+<p>The initial impulse to secure suffrage for
+American women came from Europe. After
+<a name="Page_175" id="Page_175"></a>the Revolution, Frances Wright, a young Scotchwoman,
+came to America to lecture and write,
+claiming equal political rights with men. In
+1836, Ernestine L. Rose came from Poland and
+also advocated equal political rights. All the
+teachings of the American Revolution had
+favored the idea of human equality; and, as
+has been pointed out, when, with established
+peace after the War of 1812, women engaged in
+anti-slavery, temperance and allied movements,
+they were driven by the logic of events to
+demand the suffrage.</p>
+
+<p>In 1848, the women of the country began to
+organize. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia
+Mott and Martha C. Wright called together
+at Seneca Falls, New York, the first convention
+in America to further equal suffrage. No permanent
+organization was founded, but in 1850
+a convention was held in Salem, Massachusetts,
+and in 1852 a Woman's Rights Convention was
+called in Syracuse, New York, with delegates
+present from eight States and Canada. Miss
+Susan B. Anthony had meantime joined the
+movement; and from this time on conventions
+and appeals became common.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176"></a>The Civil War distracted attention from all
+social and political issues but one. The Equal
+Rights Association turned its attention mainly
+to the rights of negroes; and in 1869 the National
+Woman's Suffrage Association was organized
+to work exclusively for woman's rights.
+Backed by such women as Susan B. Anthony,
+Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, and aided
+by men like Henry Ward Beecher, the association
+became a national power. In 1890, the
+two organizations were united under the name
+of The National American Woman's Suffrage
+Association. This organization still leads the
+movement in America.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> <i>The History of Woman Suffrage</i>, by <span class="smcap">Elizabeth Cady
+Stanton</span>, <span class="smcap">Susan B. Anthony</span>, and <span class="smcap">Ida Husted Harper</span>, 4
+vols. Rochester, N.Y.</p></div>
+
+<p>In 1902, an international meeting was called
+in Washington; and in 1904 the International
+Suffrage Alliance was formed in Berlin with
+Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt as president. Thirteen
+nations are now affiliated with the Alliance;
+and the women of the world are highly organized
+to further equal suffrage.</p>
+
+<p>Two generations of women have given them<a name="Page_177" id="Page_177"></a>selves
+to this movement, and a third still faces
+it. To the first group belong those leaders we
+have already named: Emma Willard, Elizabeth
+Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe, Susan B.
+Anthony and their associates. It was their
+problem to secure woman's control of her own
+body and property, some share in the direction
+of her children, and some opportunity to train
+her own mind and earn an independent living.
+These women bore the heat and burden of a
+conflict in which all the blind prejudices of a
+fixed r&eacute;gime were strongly massed, presenting
+few promising points of attack. It is small
+wonder that some of these leaders gained a
+reputation for being hard, dogmatic, aggressive,
+and sometimes careless of popular sensibilities.
+The first generation of reformers in any field
+must be made of stern stuff; and their beneficiaries
+are apt to forget the conditions that justified
+means no longer necessary.</p>
+
+<p>The lives of these women could not be expected
+to fully illustrate the type of life they hoped
+to see their sisters living when opportunity was
+finally won. Only women who participated in
+this struggle could fully appreciate the splendid
+<a name="Page_178" id="Page_178"></a>devotion of these lives to the service of a group
+many of whom, being personally comfortable,
+were insensible to the needs of less fortunate
+women; and were sometimes even willing to
+fight back any advanced ideas which might
+disturb their own comfort. The feeling within
+this group of leaders, and the failure of oncoming
+generations of American women to recognize
+the debt of obligation they owe to its efforts,
+was illustrated by an incident that came up in
+connection with the Third International Congress
+of Women which met in London in 1899.
+The session was opened in Westminster Town
+Hall, with seven hundred delegates present,
+representing the most thoughtful women of the
+world. Lady Aberdeen was in the chair, and
+Mrs. Creighton, wife of the late Bishop of London,
+was reading a paper. In the midst of deep
+attention, a door at the rear of the platform was
+gently opened, and Miss Susan B. Anthony
+stepped onto the stage. She had just arrived
+from America. Her strong figure was bent with
+the weight of years; her face was squared by
+the conflict and partial ostracism she had met;
+but her glance had lost none of its stern kindli<a name="Page_179" id="Page_179"></a>ness,
+and her bearing none of its indomitable
+courage. As she appeared, this most representative
+audience of women in the world sprang to
+its feet and burst into wild cheering. In vain
+did Lady Aberdeen rap for order and beg the
+audience to let Mrs. Creighton proceed. Not
+until Miss Anthony came to the front and urged
+the women to sit down was quiet restored.
+These women knew the price of a life which
+their champion had paid for their opportunities.</p>
+
+<p>A few months after this the school children
+of the prosperous city of Rochester, N.Y., where
+Miss Anthony had been a leading citizen for
+many years, were asked to write school compositions
+in which they named the person they would
+most wish to be like. Over three thousand
+girls, in the elementary grades, wrote these
+papers, but not one chose Miss Anthony. This
+first generation of women reformers could not
+establish the type of womanhood for the modern
+world; they had not the leisure, nor the freedom,
+nor could they see all that lay in the
+future. But all the more, because their lives
+were hard, should they be held in grateful
+remembrance.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180"></a>To the second generation of leaders belong
+women like Alice Freeman Palmer, Mary Sheldon
+Barnes and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
+They came on the scene when the first campaign
+had been won; they could command their own
+bodies and property; college doors were swinging
+open where they could secure the training
+that should fit them for the struggle to win
+educational, industrial, social and political
+opportunity for all their sisters. They were
+still looked upon as blue-stockings and queer;
+they had often to serve as the butt of ridicule;
+but they had education, income, a certain degree
+of leisure, and a social recognition which, if
+grudging in some quarters, was all the more
+generous in others.</p>
+
+<p>With the rapid development of higher education,
+these women found themselves associated
+with large groups of independent women who
+could create a society of their own in advanced
+centers of population. There was still much to
+be done in securing opportunity for women;
+but they could go on establishing the type of
+life that free women were to live. Their problems
+were, however, even more complex than
+<a name="Page_181" id="Page_181"></a>those which confronted their predecessors. What
+line of education should women pursue? What
+lines of work could they best undertake? How
+could they combine an independent professional
+or industrial career with the life of a home and
+the responsibilities of a mother? How far must
+older social restraints be modified in the interest
+of intellectual and industrial freedom? It was a
+time for constructive statesmanship, rather than
+for revolution; and each woman knew she was
+under criticism, and that her success or failure
+was vastly more than her own personal concern.
+In her all free women were being judged.</p>
+
+<p>To the third generation belongs the host of
+women who are to-day filling our college halls,
+managing the women's clubs, teaching the state
+schools, and competing with men in every
+industrial calling. Theirs is the task of completing
+woman's social and political emancipation,
+and of educating them to meet their newfound
+liberties. It is possible that this present
+generation has a keener sense of rights than of
+duties; and the young women of to-day must be
+led to realize that the delicate adjustments still
+to be worked out require devotion equal to that
+<a name="Page_182" id="Page_182"></a>of the earlier generations, if the toll of wasted
+life is not to be excessive.</p>
+
+<p>What now is the relation of women to the
+range of political activity described in the last
+chapter? Have they need of the protection
+which government gives? Are they able to
+form political judgments? Have they knowledge
+of the working of political machinery; or,
+lacking it, are they prepared to obtain it? Are
+they able to make a wise selection of people to
+represent them in political action? Have they
+need of the training which participation in
+political life gives? Have they the preliminary
+preparation to take up that training to advantage,
+and can they undertake these duties without
+serious loss of qualities desirable in women?</p>
+
+<p>Women certainly have need of protection;
+each has a life dear to her, and honor which is
+dearer to her than life. In this respect she has
+a greater need than men. Most women, also,
+have property of some kind, and we are increasingly
+recognizing their right to control this for
+themselves; hence they need property protection
+the same as men. We do not need to think of
+Mrs. Sage, Mrs. Harriman, Miss Gould or Mrs.<a name="Page_183" id="Page_183"></a>
+Green, in this connection, for in every community
+we now have many women who are immediately
+responsible for large property interests
+which new legislation might affect most seriously.</p>
+
+<p>In matters of institutional regulation by
+government, women are at least as vitally interested
+as men. In all that touches the family,
+marriage, or divorce, women have more at stake
+than men; and there are as many wives as husbands
+involved. The schools are also nearer to
+women than to men; more girls than boys
+attend them; more women are teachers; and
+more women than men are interested parents of
+school children. The church is also more vital
+to women to-day than to men. On the side of
+industries, it is clear that our 8,000,000 independent
+wage-earning women have a desperate stake
+in all governmental action touching the regulation
+of working conditions. In whatever concerns
+general sanitation, safe water, and pure
+foods, all are equally interested who must breathe
+and eat to live. Surely the need of women for
+political protection is quite as great as that of
+men.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184"></a>In the matter of forming political judgments,
+not even the wisest men are beyond improvement.
+International affairs, monetary systems,
+the best way of raising taxes, and similar problems,
+often divide the male electorate pretty
+evenly into rival parties. Since both cannot be
+right, a great deal of poor political thinking
+must be done by the present body of voters.
+Meantime, women are showing their ability to
+deal intelligently with all sorts of subjects in our
+educational institutions, in business and in social
+life. Their judgments command respect in
+every other field; and it is hard to see why they
+could not apply their powers to political questions.</p>
+
+<p>We must remember, too, that during these
+last years the field of political life has been
+rapidly broadening, through the awakening of
+social consciousness among the people. To concern
+one's self with politics now is to be interested
+in good market facilities, in rapid transit
+for cities, in recreation centers for children, in
+honest labelling of food products, in reformation
+of criminals, in preventing marriage among
+the unfit, and in a hundred similar matters.<a name="Page_185" id="Page_185"></a>
+Here women will doubtless bring us a strong
+addition to our political efficiency. They have
+long been considered the natural directors of
+social life and, in spite of being disfranchised,
+they mainly handle such matters at present.
+Now that these subjects are being brought into
+the political field, women should follow them
+there, as they have followed their industries
+from the homes into the factories. There is no
+reason to believe that their judgments will be
+less sound than those of their brothers and husbands.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, women's knowledge of means and
+methods is much less than that of men in their
+own class. Not only have they not participated
+in political life, but they have been steadily
+warned away from that particular tree of knowledge.
+Yet the present generation of women
+has gone through the same preliminary education
+in schools with its brothers; and many
+women in high schools and colleges have made
+a more extended study of political institutionalism.
+Still more important, more than a million
+women have been educating themselves for some
+years in this direction through voluntary associa<a name="Page_186" id="Page_186"></a>tions
+of some kind; while in most States they
+have had some political practice through limited
+suffrage, and in a few States full experience.</p>
+
+<p>In selecting representatives to carry out their
+will, women have certain obvious defects of temperament
+and training. Having been brought
+up for generations to judge men only as providers
+of sustenance and fathers of children, they
+must at first find it difficult to consider candidates
+impersonally. Still, their general morality
+and their standards of right are probably
+superior to those of men, and they are more
+intolerant of faults, and they find it harder to
+compromise on matters of character than do
+men. One can hardly believe that 1,700 women
+could be found among the respectable, church-going,
+American-born residents in any county of
+America, who would sell their votes, year after
+year, as that number of men voters has recently
+confessed to doing in Adams County, Ohio. In
+fact, Judge Blair says: "There was one class of
+the population which rebelled against the practice.
+It was the womanhood of Adams County,
+which had never become reconciled to the cus<a name="Page_187" id="Page_187"></a>tom,
+and whose continual hostility has resulted
+finally, I hope, in its abolishment."<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> Seventeen Hundred Rural Vote-Sellers, by A.Z. Blair,
+<i>McClure's Magazine</i>, November, 1911.</p></div>
+
+<p>Of the need of women for the training which
+participation in political life gives there can be
+no doubt. Their lives have always been directly
+dependent upon other individuals, and they are
+prone to think in small details. Any training
+which extends the horizon of their interests and
+enables them to deal more largely with these
+details will fit them better for living in a world
+where industrial, business and social changes are
+so rapidly merging details in larger wholes.
+Experience in selecting candidates for public
+office would also do much to broaden women's
+judgments of life, and would help to break down
+the pettiness which sometimes characterizes their
+personal relations.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of women, the community has a
+double reason for desiring that they shall develop
+political judgments and become acquainted with
+political methods. It is not only that they may
+share in the general intelligence and carry their
+fair part of the political burdens; but they have
+<a name="Page_188" id="Page_188"></a>become the teachers, both in homes and schools,
+of the oncoming generation of male voters. We
+no longer live in small communities where children
+can see the simple processes of government
+operating around them, but in a complex civilization
+where it must all be interpreted to them,
+and mainly by women. Many boys who complete
+our elementary schools never work a day
+under the direction of a man. In the homes,
+busy fathers increasingly turn over the training
+of children to their wives. How can these
+women train safe citizens for the future if they
+do not understand the processes involved well
+enough to use them themselves?</p>
+
+<p>Meantime the old arguments against woman
+suffrage are too outworn to need serious attention.
+In the past decades our civilization has
+become so complex, with so many groups carrying
+on differentiated functions, that even if we
+had not the millions of educated, property-owning,
+wage-earning, voting women that now fill
+our public life, the old arguments would still be
+obsolete. The issues of life are no longer primarily
+military, and but a fraction of men voters
+is capable of meeting modern requirements as
+<a name="Page_189" id="Page_189"></a>policemen and soldiers; in time of crisis, all
+men would be called into the reserves; but in
+such periods women have always fought in the
+breach, from Carthage to Paris. Still, in modern
+warfare, those who guard the rear and furnish
+supplies are as necessary as those who go to
+the front.</p>
+
+<p>It has also long been recognized that women
+who rear finest sons and daughters must sometimes
+turn away from the cradle to refresh their
+lives with the touch of other interests. It has
+also been demonstrated a thousand times over
+that women do not incite the lawless element to
+riot about the polls; but that, instead, their
+presence tends to remove the polling-place from
+the saloon and make it safer for men to go there
+on election-day. The plea that women would
+introduce a new element of sex into politics,
+thereby confounding its real issues, is certainly
+not well grounded. Sex has always played a
+great part in politics, as it has in all the vital
+affairs of life. In the open competitions of education,
+business or politics, sex ceases to be as
+significant as it is in the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>Nor do thoughtful people imagine to-day
+<a name="Page_190" id="Page_190"></a>that if women participated in political life they
+would suddenly bring about a reign of universal
+peace and righteousness. It has taken many
+centuries for men to learn to play the game of
+politics indifferently well as they do. The first
+effect of woman's participation would probably
+be to lower the efficiency of the electorate in
+some directions; but they are starting much
+farther along than men began, and they would
+learn more rapidly than men have learned.</p>
+
+<p>It is often claimed that women do not want
+to vote; and, of course, there are many who do
+not care to assume such arduous and often difficult
+duties, if they can avoid it. The same
+holds true of many intelligent, but selfish men
+who desire the advantages of good government
+without its burdens. All such must be urged to
+do their duty to the state. Those who have
+vision and a large sense of duty can be trusted
+to do their fair part in caring for the public
+welfare. Those who wish to enjoy the benefits
+of peace and settled government, participating
+in the advantages of education, engaging in
+business, and having their persons and property
+protected, without sharing the burdens of
+<a name="Page_191" id="Page_191"></a>government, should be forced to play their
+part.</p>
+
+<p>If a woman should board a street-car to-day
+and, when asked for her fare, should hide her
+face with womanly modesty and declare that
+she did not wish to be involved in such public
+matters, but preferred that the man swinging
+on the strap before her should pay, she would be
+informed that all who use the cars must pay for
+their maintenance. Women in America now
+have more than their share of education and
+leisure. If they do not wish to pay their fair
+proportion of service, they should withdraw
+from the high schools and colleges, from literature
+and music, from offices and factories, and
+not crowd into places where they are unwilling
+to play the game. The woman who leads the
+movement against equal suffrage in England
+has made a fortune in the open market as a
+writer, protected by the national copyrights;
+she maintains a house where she is protected in
+person and property by the city of London, the
+organization and administration of which calls
+for the constant attention of all intelligent citizens;
+and yet she urges women to take what
+<a name="Page_192" id="Page_192"></a>they can get, but to refrain from doing their
+fair share of the city and national housekeeping,
+lest they lose their feminine charm. Surely
+those who profit by government should give
+their share of service.</p>
+
+<p>It is idle to claim that equal suffrage will
+make no change in women. It will certainly
+accentuate the changes already made by higher
+education and by a freer business life. Some
+loss there must inevitably be in any such far-reaching
+change. We lost something of chivalry
+and of the spirit of <i>noblesse oblige</i> in the transition
+from feudalism to democracy. In transferring
+causes of personal difference from the
+dueling field to the courts of law, we lost a
+degree of poetic feeling and tragic exaltation,
+of personal initiative and physical courage. So
+when women passed from slavery to serfdom we
+lost something of male dominance and of female
+submission. We shall lose something in the
+present transition; but one must be content to
+lose Louis XIV and Versailles if one thereby finds
+modern France; one must be satisfied to lose an
+institution which gave us the tragically pathetic
+death of Alexander Hamilton, if it increases
+<a name="Page_193" id="Page_193"></a>human justice and saves fathers to their families.
+We must even be content to lose the languishing
+and weeping lady of chivalry, and the
+coquetting, crocheting and confiding maiden of
+the eighteenth century if we gain in return
+fair minded comrades in daily living, devoted
+partners in family life, and strong, intelligent
+mothers for the coming generations. The sex
+instinct needs no fostering; it has led us to our
+best developments in civilization; and its work
+has only begun.</p>
+
+<p>So far we have taken the popular position,
+and have discussed this matter as though it were
+still in the period of debate. The fact is, it long
+ago passed from the field of theory; it is now a
+condition. In six of our States, women have
+now full participation in managing public affairs.
+In Wyoming, since 1869; in Colorado, since
+1893; in Idaho, since 1896; in Washington,
+beginning in 1910; and in California, since 1911,
+women have been sharing the vote with men.
+In twenty-nine States they have school suffrage,
+and in many places municipal suffrage.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> In
+<a name="Page_194" id="Page_194"></a>newer parts of the world, like New Zealand and
+Australia, women have complete suffrage, while
+in old countries, like Norway, Sweden and Finland,
+they have essentially all the rights of men.
+In England, there are 1,141 women on Boards
+of Guardians and 615 on Educational Committees;
+and they are demanding full participation
+in all political life. In Canada they have school
+and municipal suffrage. It is no longer a time
+for argument; it is time for adjustment.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Bertha Rembaugh</span>, <i>The Political Status of Women in the
+United States</i>, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912, gives complete
+information to date.</p></div>
+
+<p>Meantime the results of woman's full participation
+in political life, even where they have
+had the suffrage for some years, are difficult to
+determine, because of the fact already pointed
+out that political life in a modern democracy is
+so closely bound up with all the other life about
+it. It is quite as difficult to estimate these
+effects as it would be to estimate the effects of
+housekeeping or of woman's special costume.
+And yet some results are clear enough to have a
+large bearing on the extension of woman's suffrage
+in new localities.</p>
+
+<p>In 1906, the Collegiate Equal Suffrage
+League engaged Miss Helen Sumner to make a
+careful study of the actual working of equal
+<a name="Page_195" id="Page_195"></a>suffrage in the State of Colorado. Miss Sumner,
+aided by several assistants, spent nearly two
+years in the investigation. She gathered and
+carefully analyzed written answers to an extended
+set of questions from 1,200 representative
+men and women of Colorado, some opposing
+and some favoring equal suffrage; and she
+and her assistants interviewed many more.
+They also made a general study of industrial
+conditions and of legislation for the State as a
+whole, and a detailed study of election records
+and newspaper files for representative cities and
+counties. Her report is a masterpiece of patient
+research and scientific exposition.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Helen L. Sumner</span>, <i>Equal Suffrage. The Results of an
+Investigation Made in Colorado for the Collegiate Equal Suffrage
+League of New York State.</i> New York: Harper &amp; Bros., 1909.</p></div>
+
+<p>Equal suffrage goes back to 1893 in Colorado;
+and while the influence of women has been
+in no way revolutionary, this report shows that,
+on the whole, political conditions have improved
+and woman's intelligence and her general public
+spirit have increased with no appreciable loss in
+distinctive feminine charm. One cannot help
+feeling as one reads this report that it is what
+<a name="Page_196" id="Page_196"></a>a disinterested observer would have to say about
+the effect of woman's larger educational or industrial
+life since 1870.</p>
+
+<p>In all democracies it is difficult to bring
+voters to the polls unless, as in some Swiss cantons,
+they are fined for absence. In Colorado,
+Miss Sumner shows that women cast about forty
+per cent. of the total vote in the earlier years of
+their enfranchisement, though they were in a
+minority of the total population.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> In the work
+of the primaries they were in a much smaller
+minority, except when some special problem or
+candidate appealed to them. The more intelligent
+the community, the larger the woman's
+vote; and it is largest of all in the best residence
+districts of Denver, the capital city. The vote
+of American born women is larger than that of
+foreigners; and while the prostitutes of Denver
+have been voted in the interests of the party in
+power, public opinion is steadily making this
+more difficult. In Idaho, all residents of the
+<a name="Page_197" id="Page_197"></a>red light district have been disfranchised by
+statute; and practically they do not vote.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> Mr. <span class="smcap">Lawrence Lewis</span>, in the <i>Outlook</i>, for January 27,
+1906, analyzes the election returns for parts of Pueblo City
+and vicinity, and he finds from 25 to 46 per cent. of the
+vote was cast by women, and the proportion of women increased
+with the intelligence and <i>morale</i> of the precinct.</p></div>
+
+<p>There is no appreciable tendency on the
+part of women to form a new party, nor to favor
+their own sex. They are more inclined than
+men to scratch the ticket and, as illustrated in
+the case of Judge Lindsey, they sometimes rally
+efficiently around an independent candidate,
+especially on a moral issue. On the whole,
+women vote with their husbands, just as sons
+vote with their fathers; but the strength of the
+family vote, as compared with the vote of unsettled
+people, is certainly desirable.</p>
+
+<p>Since the beginning of equal suffrage, Colorado
+has fully held her own with other States
+in advanced legislation, especially in social and
+educational lines. Women have suffered no
+insult at the polls, and on the whole polling-places
+have improved; but how far this is due
+to women's presence no one can say. Women
+have occasionally held legislative and executive
+offices; but they have especially distinguished
+themselves as State and county superintendents
+of schools.</p>
+
+<p>When it comes to estimating the effect of
+<a name="Page_198" id="Page_198"></a>voting on the women themselves, it is still
+harder to form an opinion. A large majority
+of those reporting to Miss Sumner think that
+women have become more intelligent and more
+public-spirited, but some doubt it. Morally,
+they have shown themselves less corrupt than
+men; but a considerable number think women
+as a whole have suffered some deterioration.
+This is a question bound up with our deepest
+feelings and our most conservative ideals; and it
+is inevitable that some observers should find any
+change for the worse. On the whole, belief in
+equal suffrage seems to have increased in Colorado
+during the twelve years under survey.
+Probably the results are much what they would
+be if one were to study a group of the most
+intelligent and refined men in the same community.</p>
+
+<p>During the summer of 1911, I spent a month
+in the State of Idaho; and as I had long been
+interested in the problem of equal suffrage, both
+in England and America, I seized eagerly on
+the opportunity to study its practical workings
+at first hand. On the streets and in the tram-cars,
+in hotel lobbies and in lecture halls, when
+<a name="Page_199" id="Page_199"></a>dining out or when making a call, few people
+escaped inquisition. I interviewed working men
+and women, men of affairs, ranchers, sheep
+raisers and miners, doctors, lawyers, teachers,
+ministers and practical politicians, both men
+and women.</p>
+
+<p>The thing that first impresses one who has
+been intimately in touch with the excited and
+turbulent condition of mind among the English
+suffragettes, and the sustained and often impassioned
+feeling of Eastern suffrage leaders, is the
+absence of any burning interest in the subject
+on the part of men or women in Idaho. In
+London or New York, a suffrage inquirer would
+constantly strike "live wires;" in Idaho, every
+one is insulated. The subject is no more an
+issue than civil service reform or state versus
+national control of banking systems. Most people
+have even forgotten the passage of the constitutional
+amendment conferring equal suffrage,
+in 1896. Since then, men and women
+have gone on voting and holding office until the
+woman's right has become as commonplace as,
+and no more interesting or questionable than,
+the vote of any busy citizen in New Jersey.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200"></a>The first question that one raises, is naturally
+whether women do actually vote and hold office
+in Idaho. To answer this question, there is no
+body of statistics available. Every one, however,
+declares that they pretty generally vote. On
+account of long distances in the country side,
+they poll less votes than men, especially if the
+weather is bad. Probably about three-quarters
+as many women as men go to the polls. Often
+I met women who said that they did not care for
+the vote, and sometimes one who said she thought
+women ought not to vote; but these same women
+often added that since they had the responsibility
+they felt it their duty to cast a ballot; and
+no woman told me that she did not fulfil the
+obligation.</p>
+
+<p>In the first legislature which met after the
+granting of equal suffrage, that of 1898, three
+women were seated, Mrs. Hattie F. Noble,
+Clara L. Cambell, and Mary A. Wright; Mrs.
+Wright afterward became chief clerk of the
+House. In 1908, another woman, Mrs. Lottie
+J. McFadden, was returned; but there was no
+woman in the last legislature, and so far as I
+can learn, only these four have taken part in
+<a name="Page_201" id="Page_201"></a>law-making. When asked why, after the first
+ardor of emancipation, women have taken so
+little part in legislation, most people said it was
+because they had found the work and conditions
+surrounding it unsuited to them. It seems generally
+agreed, however, that a woman could be
+elected to the legislature at any time if she
+represented a cause which needed to be brought
+before the people through that body.</p>
+
+<p>Theorists have always insisted that equal
+suffrage would greatly improve the material
+conditions which surround the polls on election
+day. One of the prominent political leaders in
+Idaho, who has been intimately in touch with
+conditions for a quarter of a century, said that
+of course there had been great improvement in
+the last fifteen years. "Things would have improved
+any way," he said, "but I am sure that
+the women have had a large influence. No
+woman has ever been insulted at the polls in
+Idaho and she runs no more danger of annoyance
+than she would in buying her ticket at a
+railway window. Men are not always sober in
+either place; but if a man made a remark to a
+woman that was not polite, or used annoying
+<a name="Page_202" id="Page_202"></a>language in her presence, he would be mobbed
+by the men even in the roughest mining camp
+in the State." Doubtless women have helped
+to break the connection between the saloon and
+the polling-place, but no one claims that women
+have made voting into a drawing-room ceremony.
+On the contrary, women are very persistent
+workers at the polls, seeking to direct
+doubtful voters.</p>
+
+<p>Advocates of equal suffrage have pretty generally
+held the belief that if women were given
+the ballot their superior moral standards would
+lead to a marked change in the handling of such
+problems as the liquor traffic and the control of
+red light districts. Of woman's superior moral
+standards there can be no doubt; of the actual
+effect of her vote upon these questions there is a
+great deal of doubt. While I was in Idaho, the
+question of local option came up before the
+voters of Salt Lake City, in the neighboring
+equal suffrage State of Utah, and the "wets"
+won by a vote of 14,775 to 9,162. Thousands
+of women must have voted for license to bring
+about this result. In April, 1911, the question
+of license or no license was voted on in Bois&eacute;.<a name="Page_203" id="Page_203"></a>
+In this case again the "wets" won by a considerable
+majority.</p>
+
+<p>Take another case. For several years in
+Bois&eacute;, until 1909, the red light district was
+segregated in two alleys in the heart of the city.
+In the municipal election of that year this issue
+came fairly before the voters, and the democratic
+nominee for mayor, who was pledged to
+break up the system, was elected by a considerable
+majority, though the city is strongly republican.
+This result was undoubtedly due to the
+women's vote. After two years, the issue came
+up again; and the republican nominee, who was
+opposed to the scattering policy though not
+pledged to segregation, was elected; and this
+result must again have been due to the woman's
+vote. Prominent women of the city told me
+that during the two years when the scattering
+policy prevailed, the evil was very conspicuous,
+and women going about alone felt far less comfortable
+than under the older system.</p>
+
+<p>There are two ways to explain the fact that,
+after fifteen years of political experience, the
+women of Bois&eacute; voted in large numbers for
+license and for a policy in handling the red
+<a name="Page_204" id="Page_204"></a>light district which they knew would mean a
+return to police control. In the first place, it
+may be said that fifteen years of steady contact
+with political life had blunted the sensibilities
+of women and dulled their moral feeling. On
+the other hand, it may be held that practical
+experience, under the steady pressure of responsibility,
+had made them realize the difficulties
+involved in the handling of these great social
+problems and had made them feel that a law
+which could command the support of public
+opinion, even though it regulated these difficulties,
+was better than a law which they might
+consider ideal, but which was incapable of
+execution.</p>
+
+<p>In Idaho, as in Colorado, the payment of
+women political workers seems to have become
+a rather wide-spread abuse. Under the conditions
+of the State, with many new settlers constantly
+arriving, it has long been thought necessary
+to employ paid workers to register voters,
+get them out on election-day and influence those
+who are uncertain. After 1896, women were
+often hired to do this work, and were paid from
+three to five dollars a day. With their weak
+<a name="Page_205" id="Page_205"></a>sense of party affiliation, it is claimed that they
+will work for the party that pays best. A
+candidate with plenty of money may hire so
+many workers that it becomes a system of wholesale
+bribery. It is universally conceded that
+this is an abuse, and that many women look
+upon election service as a source of pin money to
+a degree that is undesirable. Meantime, practical
+politicians assured me that it was a system
+the women found in operation when they came
+in; that far more men than women were paid;
+and that the abuse could be corrected by proper
+legislation.</p>
+
+<p>To summarize the matter, we may say that
+equal suffrage in Idaho has simply accentuated
+the movement toward setting women free to
+live their individual lives which general education
+and participation in industrial life has
+already carried so far all over the country.
+Equal suffrage is accepted there, as the higher
+education of women is accepted in Massachusetts,
+and the results in the two cases have been much
+the same.</p>
+
+<p>Surely these reports carry the matter beyond
+the experimental stage. Conditions in Colorado
+<a name="Page_206" id="Page_206"></a>and Idaho are not identical with those in the
+East, but they are similar enough to make the
+experience of these States amount to a demonstration.
+Meantime the new obligation resting
+on women is profound. They must learn to
+"sweat their tempers and learn to know their
+man." They must become students of public
+affairs and of institutional life. Old issues are
+past; and equal suffrage will soon prevail everywhere.
+Women, like men, have more "rights"
+in our modern democracies than they can use.
+Woman's Rights are largely realized; from now
+on we must front Woman's Duties.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207"></a>IX</h2>
+
+<h2>The Modern Family</h2>
+
+
+<p>The most powerful influence in shaping our
+lives to-day is the sexual impulse which
+has created the institution we call the family.
+Few of us, at least in our modern democracies,
+live in daily fear that our neighbors will attack
+and kill us, or carry us off into slavery. Even
+the hunger for food, that once forced men into
+action, plays little direct part in the shaping of
+the lives of most of us. None of those who read
+these pages would starve if they never did any
+more work. If they tried to starve, they would
+be arrested and sent to jail; and if they persisted,
+they would be fed by force.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime it is sex hunger, manifesting itself
+in a hundred forms of beauty and ugliness,
+courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and
+ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive
+indecencies, honor and dishonor, self-repression
+and prostitution, love and lust, children of glad<a name="Page_208" id="Page_208"></a>ness
+and children of shame, that lifts us to such
+heights as we attain, or plunges us into the hells
+we create for ourselves. If one could insure one
+good thing in life for the child one loves, one
+would ask, not money nor fame, but a continuously
+happy marriage.</p>
+
+<p>In the past, women have always looked upon
+marriage and family life as a career; and the
+majority of men have found their most significant
+life in the building up of the family institution.
+To-day, however, family life as a career
+is everywhere called in question. Many women
+claim to prefer educational opportunity, professional
+recognition or an independent bank account
+to husband and children. Social service
+is exalted; domestic service is debased. Why is
+it so much nobler to care for other people's children
+in a social settlement, or in a school, than
+to care for one's own in a home? Why should
+women mass themselves together in vast groups
+as industrial workers, as teachers, as suffragettes?
+We hear of women's work, of women's careers,
+of women's clubs, associations and parties, of
+women's interests, movements, causes. In November,
+1911, two hundred and twenty women
+<a name="Page_209" id="Page_209"></a>were arrested in London for assaulting the English
+government in the supposed interest of
+women. Why do women prefer social to domestic
+service?</p>
+
+<p>Two reasons spring at once to the mind of
+any intelligent observer of the life about him.
+The first is the complexity of our modern life;
+the second is the nature of the institution of
+marriage.</p>
+
+<p>A man or woman wishes to live with the
+one he or she loves. Sexual love is in its very
+nature restricted, circumscribed, monopolistic&mdash;in
+a word, monogamic. As has been said repeatedly
+in this volume, the human unit is
+neither a man nor a woman; it is a man and
+a woman united in a new personality through
+the unifying and blending power of love. To
+say that this unit is exclusive and monogamic
+is simply saying that it respects its own personality.
+It can no longer act simply as a
+man or a woman; it is a family and it must
+act as such in order to satisfy its own demands.
+A man can no more act independently of the
+woman he loves than the heart can act independently
+of the lungs. The man and woman who
+<a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"></a>compose the new unit are not only flesh of one
+flesh, but they are one soul, one life; they are a
+complete organism. And the life of this organism
+must be persistent to realize its own aims.
+In all the higher forms of existence, processes
+move slowly. For nine months a woman carries
+her baby as a part of her own body; then for
+three years the father and mother carry the child
+in their arms; for a score of years they must
+support, protect and train it before they let it
+go to seek its own. Hence sexual love must be
+persistent as well as monogamic.</p>
+
+<p>From all this it follows that each half of the
+human unit must find the major part of its adult
+life in devotion to the one it has chosen as its
+complement. This is no hardship; it is divine
+opportunity, if love binds the lives in harmonious
+unity. If love is lacking, then there is no
+new organism; and such a case falls outside this
+discussion.</p>
+
+<p>Under the simpler forms of civilization that
+have prevailed in the past, it was comparatively
+easy to find the complement for any particular
+man or woman. With physical sympathy and
+desire, little more was needed than common race
+<a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"></a>and the same general social position. With
+simple personalities even the marriage of convenience
+was apt to prove happy.</p>
+
+<p>But, to-day, not only have men become infinitely
+more complex and self-conscious than
+formerly, but women have ceased to be a general
+class; and, in becoming individuals, they
+have developed wide ranges of individual needs.
+Instead of fitting at the two or three points of
+physical desire, race and social position, a man
+or woman, to live strongly and well in this close
+union of body and soul, must fit each other at
+many points. To the older sympathies must
+be added a common attitude toward religion,
+education, artistic tastes, social ambitions, industrial
+aptitudes, and a score of other living
+sympathies, if the days are to pass in happiness,
+and each is to maintain his fair share of the life
+of the new unit. Physical desire still remains
+the paramount thing, but these other sympathies
+tend to strengthen it, or their absence may
+weaken and ultimately destroy it. It is comparatively
+easy for a person to find a complement
+to two or three of his, or her, qualities; it
+is very difficult for a person to find fulfilment
+<a name="Page_212" id="Page_212"></a>for a score of his personal needs in another personality.</p>
+
+<p>In earlier times, too, the individual reached
+such maturity as he or she was to attain much
+earlier than now, when education has become a
+life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively
+little danger that passing years would
+develop latent tastes that might prove dissimilar.
+To-day, complete union at twenty may mean
+many oppositions at forty, if each half of the
+unit goes on developing its powers. And we
+must add to this individual complexity and
+slower development of the present-day men and
+women the intense self-consciousness of modern
+times which makes it impossible for us to forget
+our conditions and go on living in a world once
+significant and true but now empty or false.</p>
+
+<p>A second cause for the unrest of the present
+is doubtless to be found in the inflexibility of
+the institution of the family, under which lovers
+are allowed to live together and bring into existence
+the children of their love. The family, as
+we have it, was shaped under the stress of medi&aelig;val
+disorder. In such a time men are willing
+to pay any price for peace and quiet. And so
+<a name="Page_213" id="Page_213"></a>the barbarian invaders, living among the broken
+fragments of Greek and Roman civilization,
+gradually shaped feudalism, culminating in
+absolute monarchy, which gave them political
+security. They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic
+Church that they might worship in peace.
+They shaped the guilds that they might work
+quietly, and enjoy the fruits of their labors.
+The family, with its civil and ecclesiastical
+sanctions, was formed to protect the personal
+lives of men and women who wished to live
+together and rear children.</p>
+
+<p>But with peace, life grew stronger and more
+intense; and the bonds which the people had
+shaped, and which had given them security,
+reached their limits of growth, became painful,
+and threatened to prevent all further development.
+The rising cities bought their freedom
+from feudal lords; even the serfs won better
+conditions; and the rising national units beat
+down the older political institutions with their
+swords. Finally the movements that gather
+around the French Revolution opened the way
+for us into the democratic freedom and security
+which we enjoy to-day. The guilds were broken
+<a name="Page_214" id="Page_214"></a>up and a measure of freedom was secured, though
+the industrial institution which shall give us
+freedom and security in our work is yet to be
+formed. The Protestant Revolution led us by
+devious ways into religious freedom where men
+can worship as they will.</p>
+
+<p>Of all these older institutions, shaped under
+iron necessity, the only one that remains practically
+unchanged is the family. Dealing with
+the most powerful of all our human hungers, as
+it does, we have not dared to make it fit our
+modern life. Not only is this true, but the
+forces of the older state and church which survived,
+fastened themselves upon this institution
+and strengthened its resisting power. The
+church increasingly made marriage into a holy
+sacrament, so that it not only protected lovers,
+but became a subtle, inviolable and indissoluble
+mystery. The state sanctioned the family, and
+made it an instrument for regulating political
+and property rights. Formal society proclaimed
+the family and made it the standard for respectability.</p>
+
+<p>Two centuries hence, our family, with its
+sacramental significances, its lack of a eugenic
+<a name="Page_215" id="Page_215"></a>conscience, its financial subordination of women,
+its frequent lack of love and sympathy, its primogeniture,
+and its determining power over social
+opportunity, will be as incomprehensible to students
+of institutional forms as the Holy Roman
+Empire is to us to-day. Who will then understand
+how church and state could have licensed
+and consummated marriages between young and
+inexperienced people, marriages which were to
+be binding on their thought, feeling and action
+for life without requiring some time, however
+brief, between the application for a license and
+the final binding of vows? Who will be able to
+understand how church and state could have
+sanctioned marriage between a broken-down old
+noble and a young and inexperienced girl of
+seventeen? How will the future student explain
+the fact that in New Jersey state and church
+combined to sanction and bless the marriage of
+an imbecile woman and of her offspring until
+they had produced 148 feeble-minded children
+to curse the state.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> See <i>The Kalikak Family</i>, by <span class="smcap">Herbert H. Goddard</span>, New
+York: Macmillan Company, 1912.</p></div>
+
+<p>Who will then understand why a man and
+<a name="Page_216" id="Page_216"></a>woman who had not only ceased to love each
+other but had come to feel a deep repugnance
+for each other should have been compelled to
+share bed and board, even when there were no
+children, until even murder seemed preferable
+to such slavery of soul and body? How can this
+student understand woman's economic dependence,
+her uncertain income, her insecure rights
+in property for which she toiled side by side with
+her husband? Who will then believe that in
+the year 1911 an English citizen could go before
+a court and secure an order for legalized rape,
+under the name of restitution of marital rights?</p>
+
+<p>Meantime every issue of the daily press
+counts as its choicest items stories of the shameful
+and soul-destroying ways in which men and
+women are trying to live their lives in spite of
+this medi&aelig;val institution. So far-reaching is
+the unrest, that at each new revelation of marital
+heresy, society feels constrained to rush forward
+and frantically denounce the heretic in order to
+prove its own orthodoxy.</p>
+
+<p>Our own attitude toward marriage as a sacrament
+to be directed by a church, or as a pleasure
+to be exploited by individuals, must be
+<a name="Page_217" id="Page_217"></a>changed if the life of the family is to be re-established
+as the great vocation of earnest men and
+women. Intelligence must be turned upon this
+problem as upon all others that vitally affect our
+lives. What President Eliot has called "the
+conspiracy of silence touching matters of sex"
+must be broken, and when it is, I believe honest
+men will agree with Ellen Key that "In love
+humanity has found the form of selection most
+conducive to the ennoblement of the species."<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Ellen Key</span>, <i>Love and Marriage.</i> New York: G.P.
+Putnam's Sons, 1911</p></div>
+
+<p>In this field, at least, a eugenic conscience
+must take the place of the older theological
+conscience.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> We must recognize the infamy of
+knowingly bringing defective children into existence.
+We must agree that under no conditions
+should people tainted with syphilis be allowed
+to marry; and that those subject to imbecility
+or insanity should not be allowed to live together
+unless they are unsexed.<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> Justice to future gen<a name="Page_218" id="Page_218"></a>erations,
+and protection of the state, demands
+at least this much.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> See the publications of the Eugenic Education Society,
+especially files of <i>The Eugenics Review</i>, 6 York Buildings,
+Adelphi, London.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> Indiana has an admirable law on this subject, and New
+Jersey has just added the same to her statutes.</p></div>
+
+<p>Whether alcoholics, those suffering from congenital
+sense defects, and near relatives, should
+be allowed to marry may still be an open question;
+but it should be recognized that the state
+has the right and the duty to inquire into these
+conditions and to impose restrictions. Society
+must come to feel that it is at least as shameful
+for a broken old noble to live with a young girl
+under the forms of marriage as for two young
+lovers to live together outside them.</p>
+
+<p>As to what the personal, social and industrial
+relation of man and wife should be, we have
+widely different views and practices. The older
+view, still embodied in the practice of most
+nations, and best seen in Germany and England,
+is that the woman's duty is to complement
+the husband. He does what he wishes, so far
+as he can, and the wife rounds out the whole.
+It is the old ideal of later savagery, that the
+man should provide and protect, and the woman
+should breed children, care for the home, pray
+and wait.</p>
+
+<p>This is really the same ideal that dominated
+<a name="Page_219" id="Page_219"></a>our political life until a hundred and fifty years
+ago. It was the duty of the lords to direct and
+fight; the peasants should work and wait. In
+politics there gradually grew up a middle class
+which combined with the peasants to overthrow
+the older privileges; and now all classes direct,
+fight, wait and watch together. Whether this
+democratic idea is finally to prevail, we may not
+know; but it is well worth trying, and the
+results so far are full of promise.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way, in the family, a great middle
+class of wives has grown up, largely since
+1870, through education and industry, as the
+burgers did in political life, and these emancipated
+women are insisting that the peasant of
+the family, the <i>Hausfrau</i>, shall join with them
+and dethrone the husband so that all shall share
+life's responsibilities together as free and equal
+partners. In fact, in America, the revolution
+has already come; and, as in the earlier stages
+of political revolutions, those deposed are having
+a hard time to maintain even their equal share
+of opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>But the parallel between political and
+domestic life is not complete, and if pushed too
+<a name="Page_220" id="Page_220"></a>far the analogy is mischievous. The assumption
+of physical, intellectual and social superiority on
+the side of political lords and domestic lords was
+the same. It is possible, however, rightly or
+wrongly, to reduce all the people to the same
+political level and set them all at work doing
+the same things. But between men and women
+there was not only the assumption of physical
+and mental difference, but there was and must
+always be the infinite difference of sex. In
+domestic life, the women cannot live without
+men nor the men without women. Not only
+would the generations fail, but the present generation
+would lose its deepest meaning, if either
+sex were banished or debased.</p>
+
+<p>In their reactions against old abuses, writers
+like Mrs. Gilman or Olive Schreiner try to create
+a world for women alone, on the political analogy.
+Men might be tolerated as fathers; but, to secure
+political freedom, these leaders would turn
+to that nebulous creation of social reformers, the
+state; and it should subsidize the mothers in
+their periods of need. But there are only two
+ingredients out of which a nation can be formed:
+one is women; the other is men. Shall woman
+<a name="Page_221" id="Page_221"></a>in her time of need turn to a state made up of
+other women, or to a state made up of men?
+Obviously it must be to both; and if woman is
+to depend on men, she might as well depend on
+man. No, in the political revolutions we broke
+up artificial, outworn and unjust combinations;
+but in this domestic revolution we are breaking
+up and must readjust the fundamental unit of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>Men and women must live and work together
+in the domestic unit, and they cannot do the
+same things. Nature has specialized their functions
+and each must supplement the other.
+Even in Germany, the <i>Hausfrau</i> is not going
+back to an exclusive service of children, cooking
+and church; nor in America will man continue
+to be merely the breadwinner and the father of
+children. With the enlightenment that is on
+the way, we shall see that husband and wife can
+have no antagonistic differences. Each profits
+in all that really benefits the other; and slowly
+we shall shape a new institution based on absolute
+equality, and at the same time on complementary
+service.</p>
+
+<p>In this adjustment, legal forms can help or
+<a name="Page_222" id="Page_222"></a>hinder; but they cannot prevent nor compel the
+final action of human beings. Sex instinct is
+stronger than any human law. The law can,
+however, help us in regulating conditions of
+marriage, in settling disputes about common
+property and children, and in determining how
+the contract may be set aside when that becomes
+necessary.</p>
+
+<p>The right of the church to sanction or regulate
+the family, rests in a belief that marriage
+involves spiritual changes and obligations that
+make it a sacrament, in its nature inviolable,
+and to be administered only by the church, like
+the sacrament of baptism. This is a belief resting
+not in eugenic considerations, nor in the
+human needs of the persons involved, but in
+theological dogmas with which this chapter cannot
+deal. Hence we shall maintain that the
+church has no more right to control matters of
+marriage than it has to interfere in business or
+political relations.</p>
+
+<p>The state, on the other hand, meaning by
+the state the whole community, must concern
+itself with the marriage of its individuals. The
+commonwealth must have future citizens, and
+<a name="Page_223" id="Page_223"></a>these should be strong and intelligent; hence
+it must prevent the breeding of the unfit. If
+parents die, or fail in obligations, the community
+must care for the children. In case of disagreement
+between married people, the courts of
+the community must settle disputes about children
+and property; hence the state must know
+when a man and woman determine to live together.
+The regulation of marriage certainly
+belongs to the state, that is, to all of us.</p>
+
+<p>Marriage should therefore always be a matter
+of definite and open record in the archives of
+the community. It should also be advertised,
+through the public record, for a considerable
+time, preferably six months or a year, before
+consummation, that the past experiences of contracting
+parties may be looked up by interested
+friends or officials, and the marriage of the unfit
+prevented; and so that mere caprice and passion
+shall have time to realize their mistake and turn
+away. The form which the final ceremony of
+marriage will take can well be left to the tastes
+and traditions of the contracting parties.</p>
+
+<p>The question of rights in children, or in
+property acquired after marriage, should be
+<a name="Page_224" id="Page_224"></a>settled by the state; and it is hard to see how
+it can ever be settled satisfactorily except on a
+basis of equal partnership. No man should be
+contented with a woman to bear and train his
+children, and create a social atmosphere for his
+home, who is not worth half of what he makes;
+and the same holds true of a woman. So with
+regard to children, while one parent or the other
+may, under certain conditions, be given the
+direction of the child's life, it is hard to imagine
+any circumstances that would justify society in
+refusing either father or mother the right frequently
+to see his child.</p>
+
+<p>Since marriages must be contracted in youth
+and since inexperienced people must make mistakes
+and the wisest must sometimes change, it
+will sometimes happen that men and women
+must face the possibility of separation. The
+problem of divorce is very difficult.<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> In less
+than twenty years, from 1887 to 1906, 945,625
+divorces were granted in the United States; so
+that probably to-day there are nearly one million
+<a name="Page_225" id="Page_225"></a>divorced people in this country. Generally
+speaking, the divorce rate increases as one goes
+westward. In 1900, the State of Washington
+led the country with 184 divorces for each 100,000
+of population. For the whole country we
+averaged 73 per 100,000 of population. Japan
+alone leads us with 215, while England and
+Wales had only 2. England grants divorce only
+for infidelity; and on the man's side it must be
+accompanied by cruelty; all divorce cases must
+be tried in London, and the expense, never less
+than two hundred dollars, is prohibitive for the
+poor. Meantime, England grants many separation
+orders; and it seems sure that the Royal
+Commission, which has been taking evidence
+for the past three years, will favor a freer system
+of divorce.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> See <i>Statistics of Marriage and Divorce</i>, prepared by the
+Bureau of the Census, beginning in 1906, and published in
+1910.</p></div>
+
+<p>While divorce is increasing steadily all over
+the world, and most rapidly in the most intelligent
+and progressive sections, the subject is so
+bound up with our most deep-seated prejudices
+that it is difficult to secure any intelligent thinking
+on the subject. Thus, most people think
+Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, and Reno, Nevada,
+are places of free divorce, but the fact is that
+<a name="Page_226" id="Page_226"></a>twenty-one other States have a higher divorce
+rate than South Dakota; and fourteen have a
+higher rate than Nevada. So, too, the impression
+that divorces spring from hasty action is
+certainly wrong, for in 46.5 per cent. of those
+for which we have records there had been a
+separation of more than three years before the
+divorce was granted. The idea that people
+generally seek divorces that they may marry
+some one else seems also unfounded, since in the
+cases for which we have records, less than forty
+per cent. remarry within a year.</p>
+
+<p>There are three main objections which one
+hears urged against free divorce. The first is
+that organized society rests on the family, and
+with free divorce anarchy would ensue. In
+reply, it is pointed out that the same argument
+was used to support kings, aristocracies and a
+universal church. All these have been set aside,
+in many parts of the earth, and society seems
+even more stable than before. The love of men
+and women is probably more powerful and less
+in need of adventitious support than either
+patriotism or religion.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place, it is claimed that chil<a name="Page_227" id="Page_227"></a>dren
+will suffer when parents separate. It is
+replied that this is true, but they were already
+suffering when parents had ceased to love each
+other. The fact that children are involved in
+only two out of five divorces seems to indicate
+that children hold parents together when the
+opposition is not too strong; and when a separation
+occurs, those who favor divorce claim that a
+child is better off with either father or mother
+alone than with both if love is absent.</p>
+
+<p>In the third place, it is pointed out that
+often only one desires the divorce and that this
+brings tragedy to the other life. In reply it is
+claimed that many of the tragedies of life have
+always gathered around the love of men and
+women, that when marriage is declined tragedy
+often follows, and that compelling a person to
+live with some one whom he does not love, and
+may even dislike, is more tragic than any separation.</p>
+
+<p>In conclusion, advocates of free divorce claim
+that their proposals are profoundly conservative,
+that they are seeking to bring marriage back to
+its eternally binding realities. They say that
+under our present conditions of restricted di<a name="Page_228" id="Page_228"></a>vorce,
+we have wide-spread prostitution, constant
+irregularities that are tolerated and condoned,
+and a million divorced people, some prevented
+from remarrying and all socially ostracized, so
+that the whole group is a dangerous element in
+our midst. These advocates claim that with free
+divorce, granted some months after the determination
+to separate had been registered in the
+public records, the love of men and women and
+their mutual love for their children would be
+free to bind families together in permanent trust
+and open honesty; and that with all excuse
+for irregularity absent, the unfaithful man or
+woman would sink to the level of unfaithfulness
+in business or political life. With freedom
+to readjust their lives, if they preferred to keep
+what they had and get what they could, they
+would simply take their place among thieves
+and liars, and most of them would disappear.</p>
+
+<p>All transitions are hard, and this one in
+which we are involved is most difficult of all;
+but no one can study the conditions around him
+without seeing that change is inevitable and
+that we are not going back to our earlier ideals.
+At the same time, no one can read the singu<a name="Page_229" id="Page_229"></a>larly
+scholarly and fair-minded presentations of
+Ellen Key<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> without feeling that she has a vision
+of the future.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> <i>The Century of the Child.</i> New York: G.P. Putnam's
+Sons, 1907. <i>Love and Marriage</i>, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911.
+<i>Love and Ethics.</i> New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1911.</p></div>
+
+<p>With regard to the nature of the material
+plant in which the family should live, there are
+also two widely different ideals struggling for
+favor in the public mind, and for realization in
+practice. The one ideal, while recognizing the
+changes necessitated by modern conditions,
+would still seek to retain those features which
+have been supposed to make for family privacy,
+the kitchen, the nursery, and the garden. The
+other would frankly accept our changed conditions,
+and pass on to the larger groups of socialized
+buildings, with common kitchens, day nurseries,
+and parks.<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> See <i>Woman and Economics</i>, by <span class="smcap">Charlotte Perkins Gilman</span>,
+Boston: Small, Maynard &amp; Co., 1898; and the writings
+of <span class="smcap">H.G. Wells</span>.</p></div>
+
+<p>This question has been discussed in the chapter
+on industry, and it will be considered again
+in the following chapter. Meantime there can
+be no doubt that love is reticent so far as the
+<a name="Page_230" id="Page_230"></a>outside world is concerned; and domesticity
+must always demand a large measure of privacy.
+It still remains to be proved that this can be
+secured, in the absence of a private kitchen,
+nursery and garden. Children, too, seem to
+need the personal care and constant love of
+mothers, and women seem to need a long period
+of loving and caring for a family to round out a
+deeply significant life.</p>
+
+<p>To summarize this chapter we may say that
+the realization of romantic love, under conditions
+of domesticity, is necessary for men and
+women, and for the well-being of the race. Our
+present marriage system is defective, and needs to
+be corrected through the creation of a eugenic
+conscience. It should be taken out of the hands
+of the church and made more difficult by the
+state. Women's property rights should be defined
+and safeguarded, and men and women
+should never live together when they are repugnant
+to each other.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231"></a>X</h2>
+
+<h2>Family Life as a Vocation</h2>
+
+
+<p>The greatest of all wisdom is that which
+leads men and women to see the real
+significance of their lives while they are still living.
+Life's values, like the manna in the wilderness,
+must be gathered daily. If not nourished
+day by day the power to live atrophies and
+dies; and no one can live well to-day on the
+shrunken memories of yesterday. A full and
+significant life is its own justification; and in a
+last analysis philosophies and theologies offer us
+only the life more abundantly which the great
+Teacher said he came into the world to bring.
+Buddhism offers us eternal peaceful existence in
+Nirvana; Epicureanism offers pleasure, which
+is but an intensification of life; Stoicism offers
+us life freed from disturbing forces; and the
+great lure which Christianity has always held
+before humanity is life eternal. Life is its own
+justification.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232"></a>We have maintained throughout this volume
+that complete self-realization is impossible for
+the half-units which we call men and women,
+when either lives alone. On every side of their
+natures they are complementary; and the unit
+of human life must be found in the family composed
+of a man and woman who love each other
+and the children born of their love. "There are
+two worlds below, the home and outside of it."
+It is in this unit, under the stress of sexual
+passion and maternal love, that all the finer
+forces of our civilization have had their origin.
+Unselfishness, devotion, pity and the higher
+altruisms all hark back to the home as their
+source.</p>
+
+<p>But, meantime, evil counsels prevail and one
+hears everywhere of the antagonistic interests of
+men and women. There can be no real rivalry
+between a man's soul and his body, between
+science and religion, between man and woman.
+The trouble all rests back in the failure to realize
+the incompleteness of man or woman alone
+for any of the purposes of life. And there is
+that evil notion which still afflicts economics that
+when two trade one must lose. The fact is
+<a name="Page_233" id="Page_233"></a>that, in all honest trade, buyer and seller gain
+alike; and fair exchange makes all who participate
+in it rich. It is so in all real relations
+between these half-creatures we call men and
+women. In agreement, association and co&ouml;peration
+lies strong and significant life for both. In
+antagonism, separation and competition lie arid,
+poor, mean lives, egotistic and conceited, vapid
+and fickle.</p>
+
+<p>In primitive life, the family furnished a full
+and adequate career for men and women alike.
+The political life was the family life; each family
+was a religious group; families mustered for
+war; and each family maintained within itself a
+wide range of industrial activity. But, because
+this unit was so basal, because all later special
+developments of state, church and industry came
+from it, it was steadily perverted. Warped
+from its original purpose, it has served in turn,
+as we have seen, to define and secure all our
+later institutions until it has become the servant
+of state, church, social ambition, property and
+industrial advance. Marriage and the birthrate
+are seldom discussed to-day from the point
+of view of individual needs; but are almost
+<a name="Page_234" id="Page_234"></a>always considered from the point of view of
+national and industrial efficiencies.</p>
+
+<p>To-day men and women are confronted by
+two tempters which constantly lure them away
+from the complete living of the family; one
+is work, and the other is comfort. With the
+majority of people in our modern industrial
+democracies work uses up the hours and the
+energy of life. We have passed into a time
+when our habitual material needs are great, and
+the products of work are shamelessly diverted to
+the excessive uses of comparatively few individuals
+and groups. Hence millions of workers
+march along the narrow dark roads that lead
+through factories and farms to the grave. Only
+little patches of their nervous systems are ever
+used, but all their energy flows through these
+sections day after day, leaving their lives dull
+and empty.</p>
+
+<p>Marriage for these workers means decreased
+earning power for the woman, with increased
+needs for the family, especially when the children
+come. As one watches the procession of
+young factory and shop women, with Sunday
+finery and some leisure, passing over into drag<a name="Page_235" id="Page_235"></a>gled
+factory mothers, with no finery and no
+leisure, one marvels at the strength of the forces
+with which nature drives them to their destiny.
+And yet, even with these hopeless workers, marriage
+and children mark the heights of life.</p>
+
+<p>With others, who are economically freer,
+work has become an obsession. A Charles Darwin
+or a Herbert Spencer turns all of life's forces
+to shaping facts into science; our industrial
+leaders mint their hours into dollars; our reformers
+give up their lives that social conditions
+may be changed; our society leaders trade life
+for triumphs. Meantime we all know, or would
+know if we stopped to consider, that we are here
+to live life fully and significantly day by day.
+But domesticity takes time and effort, and so the
+hurrying specialist follows the narrow line of
+success until he or she becomes a machine for
+manufacturing generalizations, for painting pictures,
+for performing surgical operations or for
+merely getting money. The richest woman in
+America said with approval recently that her
+son was too busy to fall in love.</p>
+
+<p>As industry drives the mass of workers and
+specialists away from life's deepest realizations,
+<a name="Page_236" id="Page_236"></a>so the desire to become comfortable, physically
+and mentally, through avoiding the deeper experiences
+of life, robs many of those who have a
+large measure of economic freedom. In all
+periods of great wealth this disease of ease has
+afflicted mankind. Life more abundantly comes
+only at the price of vigorous living; and love
+travels always in company with anxiety. It
+would be well, says Cicero, to have children,
+were it not for the fear of losing them. Let a
+man apply this principle to wife, friends, possessions
+and enthusiasm in general and life sinks
+into utter worthlessness.</p>
+
+<p>The love of ease among women is in a measure
+independent of the emancipation movement,
+but the entry of great numbers of young women
+into lines of independent livelihood has placed
+them in a condition where the ideals of a materialistic
+and commercial civilization appeal to
+them with great force. Many of them have
+been liberally educated and are living lives of
+independence. They lodge in flats or boarding
+houses where they have no responsibilities for
+the routine work connected with daily living.
+They carry their own latch-keys; and no one
+<a name="Page_237" id="Page_237"></a>interferes with their friendships or their pleasures.
+They read the books they like, attend
+the theaters that appeal to them, and avoid people
+who bore them. One can easily understand
+why these young women hesitate before abandoning
+their easy conditions for the uncertain
+economic position of wife and mother, with a
+man whose career lies in the future. And yet
+here, as everywhere, one must lose one's life to
+gain it.</p>
+
+<p>What then does daily association of a man
+and woman who belong together do for them?
+It gives gladness and peace, and these are fundamental
+conditions for all good and healthful living.
+It gives incentive to effort, for a man or
+woman dares not fail before the one he or she
+loves; but, in case of failure, it gives comfort and
+support, for love understands and credits intent
+and effort as highly as achievement. It complements
+the powers, for it gives four eyes, four
+hands and two minds with but one aim. And
+in this it does not simply multiply by two, but
+the blended powers are far more than two times
+one. It calls into activity all the gracious,
+artistic and altruistic powers of the soul. Surely
+<a name="Page_238" id="Page_238"></a>these are gifts for which we may well forego
+some material comforts, may well work, and
+even face anxieties unafraid.</p>
+
+<p>Each part of the human unit must educate
+the other to a realization of the fulness of life.
+This education is not entirely dependent on
+physical intimacy. It is the development of
+soul and spirit. It polishes the manners, cultivates
+the voice, broadens the judgments, sharpens
+the wit. It makes conversation an art and
+discussion significant. A woman-hating man or
+a man-hating woman is an unpolished and half-alive
+creature, whether he be a medi&aelig;val saint,
+or she a militant suffragette, or they both be
+simply commonplace egoists.</p>
+
+<p>Because married life is so perfect when it
+finds its highest levels, it is capable of sinking
+to any form of vulgarity, base betrayal and
+cynicism when realization fails. The God to
+whom noblest souls aspire in hours of deepest
+exaltation, is the God invoked by the ribald
+drunkard when he curses his comrade. The
+family life we are discussing is the subject of
+most of the vulgar and indecent jokes of the
+disappointed and the unfit. The earth which
+<a name="Page_239" id="Page_239"></a>nourishes the nations, merely soils the boots of
+the boor who unthinkingly lives on her bounty.</p>
+
+<p>On the working side the life of the family
+has an evil record for pettiness and monotony,
+but much of this is due to wrong comparisons.
+A woman who does her own housework would
+presumably have to work in any case. Is the
+work of the family more petty or monotonous
+than the work of the factory, shop or office?
+Surely the woman who spends her days looking
+after the details of furnishing a house and keeping
+it clean, of providing and serving meals, of
+looking after clothing and caring for children,
+has a world of self-expression compared with
+which factory and shop work is infinitely petty
+and mean. In the social life of friends, neighborhood,
+school and church she is at least as well
+placed as the factory worker. If the woman has
+the preparation required for teaching or independent
+business, she will find ways to use her
+powers that will relieve the routine of housework.
+And if the family has means to hire
+help, the wife has a position from which she can
+exercise social and political power superior to
+that of the foot-loose celibate.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240"></a>Meantime, the housework grows steadily
+simpler and less exacting, even with the growing
+complexity of our modern life. Most of the
+primitive industries have left the home, and products
+come from the factory ready to use.
+Furnace heating, hot and cold water, improved
+cooking conditions and many domestic inventions
+of our day are keeping housework well
+abreast of other unspecialized work in attractiveness.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that domestic servants are scarce
+and unwilling to do general housework, in no
+way disproves the soundness of these conclusions.
+The wife, if she is a real wife, and we are discussing
+no others, is working for those she loves,
+under conditions of free initiative. The general
+servant is working for those who will not even
+admit her right to participate in their social life,
+and instead of freedom in her industrial life, she
+must generally adjust her efforts to the caprices
+of an untrained mistress. Well-trained mistresses,
+who know how to work themselves and
+who have a democratic sense of human values,
+seldom have trouble in securing able servants,
+even in this transition time when the shops
+<a name="Page_241" id="Page_241"></a>and factories are calling so loudly to working
+girls.</p>
+
+<p>No intelligence which a woman may possess
+needs remain unused in the handling of a family.
+Women spend most of the household
+money to-day, at least in lower and middle-class
+homes. To use wisely the family pay-envelope
+requires knowledge and judgment of a
+high order. Problems in economics, sanitation,
+food-values and &aelig;sthetics confront the housewife
+at every turn of the day's work. "Even a slave
+need not work as a slave;" and a woman living
+with the man she loves is the freest woman
+on earth, so far as mind and spirit are concerned.</p>
+
+<p>But the factory girl, or the teacher, or the
+professional woman who seeks the fulfilment of
+all of life in the factory, the school or the consulting-room,
+will soon tire and clamor for relief.
+The housewife, or the mistress of a home, must
+likewise seek life away from her work if she is
+to love it and wake each morning with a desire
+to continue it. Luckily we have reached a
+place where working women in the home are
+seeking supplementary life outside, and they
+<a name="Page_242" id="Page_242"></a>seem to be quite as successful in their search as
+are factory girls or teachers.</p>
+
+<p>To the man, family life, of the kind we are
+considering, brings a vital connection with the
+past and the future. Reputation, possessions,
+friends, all become deeply significant when a
+man becomes a link in the generations of men.
+In establishing his material home, and modifying
+it to the changing conditions of the family;
+in building up a social setting for the group; in
+projecting his work and his service into the
+future, he is held to highest standards by the
+fact that he is working with the partner of his
+choice, and for interests that are in harmony
+with the constitution of the universe.</p>
+
+<p>Of the greater physical health of married
+people there can be no doubt. Statistics all
+show the greater longevity of married people,
+and insurance companies recognize it. The celibate
+type of physical degeneration is so well
+differentiated that it can generally be recognized
+even among strangers, at least after forty.<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> On
+<a name="Page_243" id="Page_243"></a>the moral side, too, very few criminals are found
+among married people.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> <span class="smcap">Arnold Lorand</span>, <i>Old Age Deferred. The Cause of Old
+Age and its Postponement by Hygienic and Therapeutic Measures.</i>
+F.A. Davis Co., 1911.</p></div>
+
+<p>If children come to bless these homes of men
+and women, then even intellectual life may shift
+to a higher level than was before possible. With
+advancing years intellectual interests tend to
+become specialized. The man or woman gives
+up singing, ceases to be interested in plant life,
+stops reading poetry. One activity after another
+is cut off and interests concentrate in some comparatively
+small field of work or pleasure. But
+when a child comes, the parents are forced to
+start over the round of human interests and
+thought once more. Before, they lived it as
+children; now, they live the cycle as grown
+men and women.</p>
+
+<p>No matter how completely a woman has
+given up music, she will some day find herself
+singing when she holds her baby in her arms.
+As she recites Mother Goose and the fairy and
+folk-lore tales, she moves through the path of
+man's upward progress, led by a child, but with
+the life and understanding of adult years. As
+she walks with her child in the garden and in
+the fields, she is driven to a new interpretation
+<a name="Page_244" id="Page_244"></a>of the world of nature. Few things can so
+broaden, quicken and enrich the intellectual
+life as growing up with one's children.</p>
+
+<p>On the social side, a parent who has children
+is forced to live in all the social world around
+him. The water-supply, the sewage, pure foods,
+vacant lots, paving, fast driving in the streets,
+police protection, undesirable residents, saloons
+and churches, schools and libraries&mdash;everything
+that touches the social well-being&mdash;touches him
+vitally and imperatively. The foot-loose celibate
+can always go away. The parent finds it
+difficult to leave the place where he has planted
+his roof-tree. Of course, there are many unmarried
+people, and people who are childless, who
+live this domestic life vicariously through friends
+or other people's children. One cannot but be
+grateful that life is so organized that no woman
+can be entirely shut off, unless she wills it, from
+the fructifying life that knits together the generations
+of the old and the young.</p>
+
+<p>Ideals are very powerful in determining conduct,
+and the ideals of extreme individualism,
+now so constantly presented by certain leaders
+among emancipated women, must bear bitter
+<a name="Page_245" id="Page_245"></a>fruit for an army of women in the future.
+While the women are young, ambition and the
+charm of freedom bear them gaily along. Generally
+better educated than the men of their own
+class, habituated to a personal expenditure which
+would correspond with a large family expenditure,
+their intelligence prevents their falling
+desperately in love with the men whom they
+might marry. But in the thirties they have
+visions of the future which are deeply disturbing;
+and in the forties they face the tragedy of
+a lonely old age. Some men and women there
+must always be whose lives lack the fulfilment
+of family life because of ill health or the accidents
+of personal relations. But most women,
+if they are willing to pay the same price for a
+significant family life that they so gladly pay
+for professional success, will find the way open
+to live all of life. Why is it that women count
+it an honor to work and starve for an art, but
+dishonor to undergo privations for their children?
+All that is here said of women may be said of
+men, but the man's period of family life is
+longer than woman's, and the tragedy of lonely
+old age with him seems less overwhelming.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246"></a>The old plea that we must have an army of
+celibate women because in civilized countries
+there is a preponderance of females does not
+hold at present in the United States. The census
+of 1910 shows an excess of 2,691,678 males
+in this country. Nor is this entirely due to
+immigration. More boys than girls are always
+born in civilized lands; and of native white
+people born of native parents in the United
+States there were, in 1910, 25,229,294 males
+and 24,259,147 females, a difference obviously
+due to natural causes. New England alone in
+America has a preponderance of females; and
+the excess there, as also in England and Germany,
+is needed all along the frontiers of civilization.
+With the industrial and social freeing
+of women now going on, we may reasonably
+hope that the communities of old maids left
+behind, through the emigration of young men,
+will be broken up.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, it will be pointed out that many
+men and women who do marry fail to realize
+the ideal presented in these pages. Every form
+of living is dangerous and not every one can
+hope to be a successful husband and father or
+<a name="Page_247" id="Page_247"></a>wife and mother. Even devotion to religion
+furnishes many inmates for insane asylums;
+athletic contests leave a line of cripples behind
+them; and railroad disasters fill thousands of
+graves annually. The institution of marriage
+has had no such intelligence applied to its improvement
+during the past years as has been
+given to perfecting railroads; and since founding
+a family is a more difficult undertaking than
+making a journey, one need not be astonished
+at the number of fatalities. Even if the institution
+of marriage were as intelligently and carefully
+brought up to date as railroad systems are,
+it would still remain dangerous to live either in
+or out of marriage.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the danger could be greatly reduced
+by proper education of youth. At present we
+are educating 10,000,000 girls in the state
+schools of America, and as many boys. They
+are spending eight to twelve years, under the
+direction of celibate women teachers, sharpening
+their intelligence. Their most important work
+in life is to be the making of homes, but they
+are supposed to master this art through imitating
+the homes in which they grow up. Many
+<a name="Page_248" id="Page_248"></a>of these are unworthy of imitation, and they are
+all in process of transition.</p>
+
+<p>Every girl should be thoroughly trained in
+handling an income and in spending money
+wisely. She should have a general knowledge
+of household sanitation, of water-supply and
+sewage, of foods and their preparation. She
+should know about clothes, their cost, wearing
+qualities and decorative values. She should
+have a sense of the family and its significance in
+life; of at least the social relations that husband
+and wife must maintain toward each other if
+their partnership is to be happy and effective.
+She should have the beginnings of a eugenic
+conscience established in her, and she should
+know something of the care of infancy. All
+this should be given in the school, if it is not
+definitely given in the home, and no girl who
+goes through the eighth grade should escape it.
+Before the girl is married, she should have wise
+counsel from mature women who have lived
+and learned the art of living. Boys should, of
+course, also be trained in comparable directions
+for this great part of their lives.</p>
+
+<p>Something is already being done in this
+<a name="Page_249" id="Page_249"></a>direction through the establishing of special
+courses in domestic science, and allied branches
+in our schools. The fact that educational leaders
+are awake to the need was shown by the
+applause that followed Superintendent Harvey's
+plea for this training in his paper on the education
+of girls at the Superintendents' Association
+in St. Louis in February, 1912.<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> The leading
+educators of the country greeted his plea with
+an enthusiasm called out by no other paper of
+the session.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> See <i>Report of the Department of Superintendence of the
+National Education Association</i>, 1912.</p></div>
+
+<p>Every woman, then, and every man, not
+debarred by disease or accident and not specially
+dedicated to a work which precludes marriage,
+should spend his life in a family group, not that
+the state may have more soldiers, or factory
+employees, but that he may realize the deepest
+significance of his life. In this life the woman
+should be as free as the man, an equal financial
+partner, and should share in all the social and
+political opportunities of the community. When
+she bears children, she should have special protection,
+support and reverence; and support
+<a name="Page_250" id="Page_250"></a>should come from the father of her children. If
+he fails her, then the group, in its capacity as a
+state, should care for her honorably. But to
+justify this protection and reverence, she should
+bring to her special functions as mother of the
+generations a strong body, an intelligent mind,
+a eugenic conscience and an absolute devotion to
+the children born of her love.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251"></a>XI</h2>
+
+<h2>Conclusion</h2>
+
+<p>The last two hundred years have revolutionized
+nearly all of our deepest conceptions
+concerning the relations of human beings to religion,
+government, property, and to each other.
+New knowledge has given us partial control
+over vast forces of nature; and has so increased
+our mobility as almost to free us from limitations
+of space. We have had wonderful visions
+of the possibilities that lie in intelligent human
+co&ouml;peration, and have begun to realize them in
+a hundred new forms. In the midst of these
+compelling changes, women could no more
+remain undisturbed, within the confines of
+kitchen and nursery, than men could remain on
+their little New England farms or cobbling
+shoes and making tin pans in the petty workshops
+of a century ago. But meantime the
+special interests of women have been sadly confused
+because of the larger changes in which all
+<a name="Page_252" id="Page_252"></a>human relations have been involved in this
+time of readjustment. Instead of talking of
+unquiet women to-day, we should talk of an
+unquiet world.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of this confusion, most of those
+who have sought to secure a truer relation of
+women to the life around them have worked on
+the lines of minimizing sex differences. It has
+been felt that the educational, industrial, social
+and political limitations under which women
+rested were due to the desire of men to exploit
+them. Men, being free, had developed for
+themselves an ideal world of thought and work;
+and if women wished to be free and happy, they
+needed only to break down the barriers separating
+them from this man's world.</p>
+
+<p>Most of these barriers are now down; but
+the women who study in universities, teach in
+the schools, maintain offices as doctors or lawyers,
+collect news for the press, tend spindles in
+a factory or sell ribbons at a counter have found
+that the man's world is far from ideal and that
+by entering it they have not escaped the special
+limitations of their sex. Everywhere the feeling
+is abroad that, instead of having arrived
+<a name="Page_253" id="Page_253"></a>at a destination, women have embarked on a
+journey fraught with many uncertainties.</p>
+
+<p>This volume has been written in the belief
+that men and women alike will achieve greatest
+freedom and happiness, not by minimizing sex
+differences, but by frankly recognizing them
+and using them. If we could reduce men and
+women to sameness, we should destroy at least
+half the values of human life. They are not
+alike; but they are perfectly supplementary.
+The unit can never be a man nor a woman; it
+must always be a man and a woman. This
+means that in all the activities essential to human
+development men and women must carefully
+study to find what each can best provide.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we must some day have a Church, not
+composed exclusively of male priests and women
+worshipers, not confined to rationalistic appeal
+nor to ritualistic observance, but expressing the
+whole range of human aspiration toward the
+unknown. Rational men and women of feeling
+must combine with reverent men and intelligent
+women to create a belief and a service
+which will express all the longings of humanity
+toward perfection.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254"></a>So in government, we must have a state
+which will be not only just but merciful; which
+will concern itself not only with militant economics
+but also with human well-being. If
+men are more capable in expressing the katabolic
+needs of aggression and protection, women
+must furnish the anabolic products of care and
+conservation. If women must help pay the bills
+and nurse the wounded, they must first have a
+voice in determining whether there shall be a
+war. Men and women must join their qualities
+in building and caring for cities, and in shaping
+nations, where they can both live their largest
+lives.</p>
+
+<p>In education, we must devise institutions
+which will provide for the special needs of
+women; and we must have the combined qualities
+of men and women brought to bear on
+children of both sexes, and at all ages. The
+foster parents of the nation's children must be
+both men and women. The present attempt to
+exploit our twenty millions of boys and girls in
+the interest of a sex will be a crime against
+humanity when we are intelligent enough to
+see its real meaning.</p>
+
+<p><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255"></a>The specialization going on in industry
+means infinite variety if we look at the whole
+field of activity. Some parts of the world's
+work are specially fitted for men; other parts
+to women. No intelligent division of labor has
+been attempted in the period since all work was
+transformed by our modern inventions. Possibly
+men should do most of the dressmaking,
+and women should make men's clothing, but
+no intelligent man or woman can doubt that
+most work falls naturally into the hands of one
+sex or the other. Some day we shall know
+enough so that there will be little or no industrial
+competition between men and women.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, in the family that both men
+and women must find their deepest supplementary
+values. Sex antagonism can do much to
+impoverish and ruin individual lives; but the
+monogamic and persistent union of lovers, surrounded
+by their children, will easily survive all
+the mistakes of a time of transition. In the
+meantime, those who would uphold the finest
+family ideals of the past have less cause to fear
+the militant agitator than they have to fear
+the idle, parasitic wife, who relies on her legal
+<a name="Page_256" id="Page_256"></a>rights to give her luxuries without labor, position
+without leadership, and wifehood without
+the care and responsibility of children.</p>
+
+<p>From the point of view of this book, all the
+efforts to open the doors of opportunity, through
+which women can pass into the man's world, are
+but preparations for the beginning of a journey.
+The sooner all such doors are opened the better,
+for then a great source of dangerous sex
+antagonism will pass away; and the energy of
+reformers will be set free to work out the difficult
+problem of supplementary sex adjustments.</p>
+
+<p>And meantime, sex remains the greatest
+mystery and the most powerful thing in human
+life. Its deeper values are lost sight of when
+men and women are warring over work, wages,
+and votes, just as the meaning of religion has
+been lost when priests and laity sought to
+advance their meanly selfish interests. But in
+the crises of life it always comes back. When
+a great ship founders in midocean, and but a
+third of the people can be saved, there is then
+no question of woman's rights. In the darkness
+of early morning, eager men's hands place their
+women in the life-boats and push them off.<a name="Page_257" id="Page_257"></a>
+The poorest peasant woman takes precedence
+over any man. Almost every woman there
+would prefer to stay and die with her man;
+would glory in staying and dying if he might
+thus be saved; but in her keeping are the generations
+of the future, and she is weak, therefore
+the strong gladly stand back and go down
+to death. The solution of woman's place in the
+society of the future must be based on a recognition
+of the supplementary forces that send
+women to undesired safety while men die.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman in Modern Society, by Earl Barnes
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman in Modern Society, by Earl Barnes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Woman in Modern Society
+
+Author: Earl Barnes
+
+Release Date: April 23, 2005 [EBook #15691]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY
+
+
+
+
+_BY THE SAME AUTHOR:_
+
+STUDIES IN EDUCATION
+(IN TWO VOLUMES)
+
+WHERE KNOWLEDGE FAILS
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN
+IN MODERN SOCIETY
+
+BY
+
+EARL BARNES
+
+AT ONE TIME PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY IN THE STATE
+UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA, AND LATER PROFESSOR
+OF EDUCATION IN LELAND STANFORD
+JUNIOR UNIVERSITY
+
+NEW YORK
+B.W. HUEBSCH
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1912
+BY B.W. HUEBSCH
+PRINTED IN U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+This volume is dedicated to a woman endowed by her ancestors with
+health and strength, reared by a wise mother, trained to earn her own
+living, and university bred, at one time an independent wage-earner and
+now equal partner in the business of a home, a social force in the life
+of her community, member of a woman's club, a suffragist, the devoted
+and intelligent mother of a group of fine children, and the center of a
+family which loves and reverences her and finds the deepest meaning of
+life in her presence.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER                                         PAGE
+
+   I.  WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A WOMAN                 9
+  II.  WOMAN'S HERITAGE                           31
+ III.  WOMEN IN EDUCATION                         57
+  IV.  THE FEMINIZING OF CULTURE                  85
+   V.  THE ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE OF WOMEN        107
+  VI.  WOMEN IN INDUSTRY                         123
+ VII.  THE MEANING OF POLITICAL LIFE             150
+VIII.  WOMAN'S RELATION TO POLITICAL LIFE        173
+  IX.  THE MODERN FAMILY                         207
+   X.  FAMILY LIFE AS A VOCATION                 231
+  XI.  CONCLUSION                                251
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY
+
+I
+
+What it Means to be a Woman
+
+
+If we go back to the earliest forms of life, where the unit is simply a
+minute mass of protoplasm surrounded by a cell wall, we find each of
+these divisions to be a complete individual. It can feed itself, that
+its life may go on to-day; it can fight or run away, that it may be here
+to fight to-morrow; and by a process of division it can create a new
+life so that its existence may continue across the generations. With
+such units it is quite conceivable that life might go on through all
+eternity, death following birth, were it not that protoplasm contains
+within itself a principle of change. Life and change are synonymous.
+
+And this change moves ever toward a complexity, which we call
+development, where cells unite in a larger life, and functions and
+organs are specialized. Thus there comes a time when the part split off
+carries with it power to eat and digest, to fight or run away, but only
+half the power of procreation. This half unit, this incomplete
+individual, is either male or female, and from this time on, the epic of
+life gathers around the search of these half-lives for their
+complements. The force that impels to this search, while at first
+valuable only for the perpetuation of the generations, gathers into
+itself modifying feeling and desires and, at a later period, ideas and
+ideals, which finally, when men and women appear, make it the greatest
+of all the shaping forces in life.[1]
+
+[1] The fact that sexual selection does not play the part in organic
+evolution which Darwin assigned it does not affect this statement. See
+chapter on Sexual Selection in YVES DELAGEE and MARIE GOLDSMITH, _The
+Theories of Evolution_, New York: Huebsch, 1912.
+
+Of course, in such a sweeping statement as this, one must include under
+sex hunger all the forces that drive men and women to seek each other's
+society, rather than that of their own sex. In this sense, it can be
+truly said that it gives a motive for our care of offspring, and for
+all our other most self-forgetful devotions, our finest altruisms, our
+most polished expressions in language, manners and dress. It justifies
+labor, ambition, and at times even self-effacement. It underlies nearly
+all the lyric expressions in art; furnishes almost the only theme for
+that delineation of modern life which we call the novel; and is a main
+support for music, painting, statuary and belles-lettres. It gives us
+the institution of the family, which is the parent of the state; it is
+closely allied to religion; and in our individual lives it lifts us to
+the heights of self-realization and happiness, or plunges us down to the
+depths of degradation and tragedy.
+
+While this sex hunger belongs equally to men and women, it has come to
+be associated with women, until we even speak of them as "the sex."
+Hence, when we are discussing women, we are generally discussing the sex
+interest common to both men and women, and this disturbs our point of
+view. The fact is that sex interest is a common possession, that the
+unit in human life, even more than among lower animals, is always a male
+and a female bound together by love. Just as a body can function in
+sleep or under the influence of a narcotic, for a time seemingly
+independent of the mind, so a man or a woman can live for a time in
+seeming independence of the opposite sex; but from any biological point
+of view, such a separate existence of male and female is only a
+transient effort. The half-life must find its mate or, after a few brief
+days, it dies, leaving its line extinct. For all the larger purposes of
+life, man is but a half-creature, and woman is equally a fragment.
+
+It is, of course, conceivable that these two halves of the biological
+unit might have been made, or might have developed, alike in everything
+except the sexual function. At least they might have been as much alike
+as men are alike. They might have been of the same size, possessed of
+the same strength, of the same figures and gestures, complexion and
+hair. Their voices might have been alike. They might have had the same
+kinds of nervous systems, with the same desires, feelings, ideas and
+tendencies. In the assertions and arguments born of intellectual,
+industrial, social and political readjustments, it is often assumed
+that this is the case. Differences are minimized or denied, and an
+attempt is made to resolve the world of men and women into a world of
+human beings capable of living together in mingled competitions and
+cooperations, regardless of sex, except where the reproductive process
+is considered. But this view is superficial; born of argument it breaks
+down when confronted by any body of significant facts.
+
+Again, it has happened that in the long struggle of developing
+civilization, sometimes one and sometimes the other sex has gained what
+has seemed an advantage over the other, just as in the development of
+any man's individual life, his brain may gain a seeming advantage over
+his stomach, so that it has more than its fair share of nourishment and
+activity. Arguing from such a case, we might declare the brain superior
+to the stomach in power, health and function; but in the long
+accounting, all such temporary superiorities are wiped out. So with men
+and women, seeming advantages for either are gained only at the expense
+of the common life; and in the last analysis, each finds his individual
+value only in the common life of the unit.
+
+Let us try then to see what the special characteristics of women are,
+ignoring as far as possible the accidental variations of individuals,
+and the temporary advantages or disadvantages due to economic or
+ideational forces, and all assertions of what would be if things were
+not as they are.
+
+While the whole matter of sex differences is in a state of unsettlement,
+it seems very certain that males are more active and more variable than
+females. This superabundant vitality appears in the males of the higher
+animals in secondary sex characteristics, such as more abundant and
+unnecessary hair and feathers, tusks, spurs, antlers, wattles, brilliant
+colors and scent pouches. It also appears in mating calls, songs, and
+general carriage of the body. Correspondingly, the female is smaller,
+duller colored, and less immediately attractive than the male.
+
+All the studies that have been made on men and women, also confirm our
+ordinary observation that men are taller, heavier, stronger and more
+active than women, and this holds true in all stages of civilization,
+wherever tests have been made. In strength, rapidity of movement, and
+rate of fatigue Miss Thompson's studies[2] show that men have a very
+decided advantage over women. Thus in strength tests, the men in Yale
+have double the power of women in Oberlin;[3] while our college athletic
+records place men far ahead of women in all events requiring strength
+and endurance.
+
+[2] HELEN B. THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p. 167.
+University of Chicago Press, 1903.
+
+[3] THOMAS, _Sex and Society_, p. 21. University of Chicago Press, 1907.
+
+The differences in structure between men and women are such as to
+correspond with the functional differences just stated. A woman's bones
+are smaller in proportion to her size, than are those of a man. The body
+is longer, the hips broader, and the abdomen more prominent. Relatively
+to the length of the body, the arms, legs, feet and hands are shorter
+than in men, the lower leg and arm are shorter in proportion to the
+upper leg and arm. Man has the long levers and the active frame. One has
+only to look at two good statues of a man and a woman to realize the
+greater strength and activity of the man.
+
+Woman, as she actually appears in modern society, is also less subject
+to variation than man;[4] she is much less liable to be a genius or an
+idiot than her brother.[5] She offers greater resistance to disease,
+endures pain and want more stoically, and lives longer; so that while
+more boys than girls are born in all parts of the world, where
+statistics are kept, in mature years women always outnumber men.
+
+[4] KARL PEARSON denies this. See _The Chances of Death_, Vol. I, p.
+256. London, 1897.
+
+[5] C.W. SALEEBY, in _Woman and Womanhood_, p. 54, New York, Mitchell
+Kennerley, 1911, maintains that woman is biologically more variable than
+man, and that woman's less variable activity is due to her training.
+
+All these statements are summed up by saying that not only in women, but
+in most female animals of the higher orders, life is more anabolic than
+in males. They tend to more static conditions; they collect, organize,
+conserve; they are patient and stable; they move about less; they more
+easily lay on adipose tissue. Compared with the female, the male animal
+is katabolic; he is active, impulsive, destructive, skilful, creative,
+intense, spasmodic, violent. Such a generalization as this must not be
+pushed too far in its applications to our daily life; but as a statement
+of basal differences it seems justified by ordinary observation as well
+as by scientific tests.[6]
+
+[6] PATRICK GEDDES and ARTHUR THOMPSON, in _The Evolution of Sex_, D.
+Appleton & Co., 1889, first advanced this position.
+
+Meantime, it is probably true that the female, as mother of the race, is
+more important biologically than the male, since she both furnishes germ
+plasm and nourishes the newly conceived life. The latest studies, along
+lines laid down by Mendel, seem to indicate that the female brings to
+the new creation both male and female attributes, while the male brings
+only male qualities. Thus when either sex sinks into insignificance, as
+sometimes happens in lower forms of life, it is generally the male which
+exists merely for purposes of reproduction.[7]
+
+[7] C.W. SALEEBY, _Woman and Womanhood_, Chapter V. New York: Mitchell
+Kennerley, 1911.
+
+The differences in the nervous systems of men and women are now fairly
+established on the quantitative side. Marshall has shown that if we
+compare brain weight with the stature in the two sexes there is a slight
+preponderance of cerebrum in males; but if the other parts of the brain
+are taken into consideration, the sexes are equal.[8] Havelock Ellis has
+carefully gathered the results of many investigators and declares that
+woman's brain is slightly superior to man's in proportion to her
+size.[9] But these quantitative differences are now felt to have
+comparatively little significance; and of the relative qualities of the
+brain substance in the two sexes we know nothing positively. In fact, if
+we give a scientist a section of brain substance he cannot tell whether
+it is the brain of a man or a woman.
+
+[8] MARSHALL, _Journal of Anatomy and Physiology_, July, 1892.
+
+[9] HAVELOCK ELLIS, _Man and Woman_, p. 97, Contemporary Science Series.
+
+It is very probable that the average woman's mind is capable of much the
+same activity as the average man's mind, given the same heredity and the
+same training. They are both alike capable of remarkable feats of
+imitation, and an ordinarily intelligent man could probably learn to
+wear woman's clothes, and walk as she generally walks, so as to deceive
+even a jury of women, if there were a motive to justify the effort.
+Women also can perform, and they do perform, most of the feats of men.
+
+At the same time it is desirable to note present differences in modes of
+thinking and feeling, for while they may have been produced by
+environment and ideals, and may hence give way to education, they must
+be reckoned with in making the next steps. In the chapter on education
+we shall discuss certain academic peculiarities of women's minds, but
+here we are interested in seeing what fundamental differences
+characterize the thinking of the sexes.
+
+Women seem more subject to emotional states than men;[10] and this
+general observation agrees with the fact that the basal ganglia of the
+brain are more developed in women than in men, and these parts of the
+brain seem most intimately concerned with emotional activity. Whether
+emotion follows acts or leads to acts remains a disputed question, but
+certainly emotion gives charm and significance to life and distinguishes
+modes of thinking. Particularly in the dramatic art, this quality of
+mind gives women special excellence. The fact that she more often
+appeals to emotion than to reason, as cause for action, in no way marks
+her as inferior to man, but simply as different. As Ellen Key says:
+"There is nothing more futile than to try to prove the inferiority of
+woman to man, unless it be to try to prove her equality."[11]
+
+[10] HELEN BRADFORD THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p.
+171, University of Chicago Press, 1903.
+
+[11] ELLEN KEY, _Love and Ethics_, p. 52. New York: Huebsch, 1911.
+
+Most women think in particulars as compared with men. The individual
+circumstance seems to them very important; and it is hard for them to
+get away from the concrete. On the other hand, a man's thinking is more
+impersonal and general; and he is more easily drawn into abstractions.
+It is true that woman's domestic life would naturally develop this
+quality but we are not now concerned with the question of origins. Most
+women find it easy to live from day to day; the man is more given to
+systematizing and planning. Thus in offices, men are more efficient as
+heads of departments, while women handle details admirably. In public
+life we have recently seen thousands of women eager to depose a United
+States Senator, accused of polygamy, without regard to the bearing of
+the concrete act on constitutional guarantees. Women have done little
+with abstract studies like metaphysics; they have done much with the
+novel, where ideas are presented in the concrete and particular.
+
+This habit of dealing with particulars, and disinclination for
+abstraction, leads easily to habitual action. It is easy for women to
+stock up their lower nerve centers with reflex actions. This, of course,
+goes along with the general anabolic characteristics of the sex. Hence
+women are the conservers of traditions; rules of conducting social
+intercourse appeal to them; and they are the final supporters of
+theological dogmas.[12] Women naturally uphold caste, and Daughters of
+the Revolution and Colonial Dames flourish on the scantiest foundations
+of ancestral excellence. Man, on the other hand, is more radical and
+creative. He has perfected most of our inventions; he has painted our
+great pictures; carved our great statues; he has written music, while
+women have interpreted it.
+
+[12] HELEN B. THOMPSON, _Psychological Norms in Men and Women_, p. 171,
+University of Chicago Press, 1903.
+
+Along with these fixed qualities of action, women have a tendency to
+indirection when they advance. We say they have diplomacy, tact and
+coquetry, while man is more direct and bald in his methods. Of course,
+one easily understands how these qualities may have arisen, since "fraud
+is the force of weak natures," and woman has always been driven to
+supplement her weakness with tact, from the days of Jael and Delilah
+down to the present day adventuress.
+
+These qualities of mind naturally drive women to literary interests
+which are concrete, personal and emotional. Men turn more easily than
+women to the abstract generalizations of science. Of course, there are
+marked exceptions to these general statements, in both sexes. Madame
+Curie, who was recently a candidate for the honors of the French
+Academy, and who, in 1911, was given the Nobel prize for her
+distinguished services to chemistry, is but one of many women who are
+famous to-day in the world of science. Still the private life of these
+women, as in the case of Sonya Kovalevsky, seems to bear out our general
+conclusion. Men, on the other hand, as milliners and editors of ladies'
+journals, show marked skill in catering to women's tastes; but on the
+whole the differences indicated seem important and widely diffused.
+
+Another profound difference between men and women is the woman's greater
+tendency to periodicity in all her functions and adjustments to
+life.[13] In all normal societies the life of the man is fairly regular
+and constant from birth to old age. He moves along lines mainly
+predetermined by his heredity and his environment, his habits and his
+work. Even puberty is less disturbing in its effect upon a boy than upon
+a girl; and often by eighteen we can anticipate the life of a young man
+with great accuracy. The one element in his life hardest to forecast is
+the effect of his love-affairs.
+
+[13] See chapter on Periodicity in G. STANLEY HALL'S _Adolescence_, Vol.
+I, p. 472.
+
+With a woman, it is quite different. As a girl, the period of puberty
+produces profound changes; and after that, for more than thirty years
+she passes through periodical exaltations and depressions that must play
+a large part in determining her health, happiness and efficiency. In the
+forties, comes another great change which affects her life to a degree
+strangely ignored by those who have dealt with her possibilities in the
+past.[14]
+
+[14] KARIN MICHAELIS, _The Dangerous Age_, John Lane Co., 1911, is said
+to have sold 80,000 in six weeks when it first appeared in Berlin. _The
+Bride of the Mistletoe_, by JAMES LANE ALLEN (Macmillan), deals with the
+same period.
+
+But the great element of uncertainty, always fronting the girl and young
+woman, is marriage. Marriage for her generally means abandonment of old
+working interests, and a substitution of new; it brings her geographical
+change; new acquaintances and friendships; and the steady adjustment of
+her personal life to the man she has married in its relation to
+industry, religion, society and the arts. If children come to her, they
+must inevitably retire her from public life, for a time, with the danger
+of losing connections which comes to all who temporarily drop out of the
+race.
+
+A boy, industrious, observant, with some power of administration,
+studies mining engineering, moves to a mining center and expresses his
+individual and social powers along the lines of his work until he is
+sixty. The women who impinge against his life may deflect him from the
+mines in California to those in Australia, or from the actual work of
+superintendence to an office; or from an interest in Browning to
+Tennyson; or from Methodism to Christian Science. The girl with
+industrious and observant interests studies stenography and
+type-writing, moves to the vicinity of offices, but is then caught up in
+the life of a farmer-husband who shifts her center of activity to a farm
+in Idaho where she must devote herself to entirely different activities,
+form new associations, think in new terms, respond to new emotions, and
+adjust herself to her farmer-husband's personality. When, after
+twenty-five years, she has reared a family of children, and when
+improved circumstances enable them to move up to the county seat, she
+confronts many of the conditions for which she originally prepared
+herself, but with farm habits, diminishing adaptability and diminishing
+power of appealing to her husband. His powers are still comparatively
+unimpaired, and as a dealer in farm produce or farm machinery his
+interests undergo slight change. In general, it may be said that a
+woman's life falls into three great periods of twenty-five years each.
+The first twenty-five years of childhood and girlhood is a time of
+getting ready for the puzzling combination of her personal needs as a
+human being, her needs as a self-supporting social unit, and her
+probabilities of matrimony. The second twenty-five years, the domestic
+period of her life, is a time of adjustments as wife and mother, which
+may instead prove to be a period of barren waiting, or a time of
+professional and industrial self-direction and self-support. The third
+twenty-five years is a time of mature and ripened powers, of lessened
+romantic interests, and if the preceding period has been devoted to
+husband and children, it is often a time of social detachment, of
+weakened individual initiative, of old-fashioned knowledge, of
+inefficiency, of premature retirement and old age.
+
+On the moral side, as Professor Thomas has so admirably pointed
+out,[15] women have evolved a morality of the person and of the family,
+while men have evolved a morality of the group and of property. Since
+men have had a monopoly of property and of law-making they have shaped
+laws mainly for the protection of property, and in a secondary degree
+for the protection of the person. Under these laws a man who beats
+another nearly to death is less severely punished than one who signs the
+wrong name to a check for five dollars. Man's katabolic nature and his
+greater freedom have given him almost a monopoly of crime under these
+laws which he has made. Offences against the coming generation, against
+health, social efficiency and good taste have until recently been left
+to the tribunal of public opinion as expressed in social usage; and
+here, as we have seen, women are generally the judges and executioners.
+In this, her own field of moral judgment, woman is idealistic and
+uncompromising. If one of her sisters falls from virtue she will often
+pursue her unmercifully. If a man, on the other hand, commits a burglary
+or forgery her sympathy and mercy may make her a very lenient judge.
+
+[15] WILLIAM I. THOMAS, _Sex and Society_, p. 149. University of Chicago
+Press, 1907. ELLEN KEY, in _Love and Marriage,_ G.P. Putnam's Sons,
+1911, traces the same lines of growth.
+
+In aesthetics, the differences follow the same general law. Women express
+beauty in themselves; jewels are for their ornament; and rooms are
+furnished as a setting for themselves. The lives of millions of workers
+go to the adornment of women. In painting they sometimes excel, but a
+Madame Le Brun does her best work when she paints herself and her child,
+and when Angelica Kauffmann would paint a vestal virgin, she drapes a
+veil over her own head and transfers her features to the canvas.
+Sculpture and architecture are too impersonal and abstract to attract
+much attention from women at present. Even a sculptor like Mrs. Bessie
+Potter Vonnoh finds her truest theme in statuettes of mothers with their
+children about them.
+
+During the past few years psychologists have paid great attention to
+secondary sex characteristics of the mind, and doubtless many qualities
+of the thought and feeling of men and women owe their origin to the same
+source as brilliant plumage, antlers, combs and wattles. Thus the shy,
+retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing, adoring excesses of
+maidenhood and the peculiar psychological manifestations of the late
+forties must probably be understood from this point of view. So, also,
+must the bold, swaggering, assertive, compelling bearing of youth be
+interpreted. The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical cane-carrying
+youth is naturally disliked as a sexual perversion.
+
+Women alone, whether individually or in groups, tend to develop certain
+hard, dry, arid qualities of mind and heart, or they become emotional
+and unbalanced. Losing a sense of large significances, they become
+overcareful, saving, sometimes penurious, while in matters of feeling
+they lavish sentiment and sympathy on unimportant pets and movements.
+
+Men, when alone, become selfish, coarse, and reckless; their judgments
+become extravagant and their pursuits remorseless.
+
+Thus it is certainly true that men and women supplement each other in
+the subjective as in the objective life. Man creates, woman conserves;
+man composes, woman interprets; man generalizes, woman particularizes;
+man seeks beauty, woman embodies beauty; man thinks more than he feels,
+woman feels more than she thinks. For new spiritual birth, as for
+physical birth, men and women must supplement each other.
+
+To be a woman then, is to be for twenty-five years a girl and then a
+young woman, capable of feeding and protecting herself, possessed of
+preparing and conserving powers superior to her brothers. After that,
+for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to
+romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and
+motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she
+should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered
+training and powers to the service of the group. All this time she is,
+like the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and
+her greatest service only when working in loving association with the
+man of her choice.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Woman's Heritage
+
+
+So thoroughly have modern men fastened their attention upon the problems
+of the immediate present, that one feels driven to justify oneself in
+taking up an historical investigation of any subject presented in a
+popular manner. And yet it takes little argument to show that what we
+shall be depends in large measure on what we are; and that what we are
+rests back on what we have been. In anything we try to think or feel or
+do, we quickly reach a limit; and this limit is determined by the
+original quality of our nervous system plus the training it has
+received. For here is the curious fact about this instrument of thought
+and feeling which at once takes it away from comparison with mechanical
+instruments. Whatever it does, becomes a part of itself, and then helps
+to determine what it will do the next time and how it will do it. With
+the making easy of mental operations through repetition, and with the
+formation of associations based on our choices, it may be truly said
+that we become whatever we habitually think and feel and do.
+
+Every choice we make is thus literally built into our character and
+becomes a part of ourselves. After that, the old choice will help
+determine the new, and we shall find ourselves being directed by all of
+our past choices, and even by the choices of our ancestors. Since, then,
+all our earlier selves are continued in us and make us what we are, we
+are simply studying ourselves when we study the history of our
+ancestors. If we would go forward, we must first look backward; for we
+must rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves.
+
+But history is not merely the story of the past. To relate that, would
+take as long as it took to live it, and the result would be but
+weariness of spirit. History, to be significant, must select the events
+with which it will deal; it must arrange these in series that are in
+accord with the constitution of things; and then it must use the
+generalizations it reaches to interpret the present, and even to
+forecast the future. It is obvious that this interpretation will depend
+on the point of view held by the interpreter.
+
+Hence we must ask in what fundamental beliefs this presentation rests.
+These are, first, that life tends to move along certain lines that
+constitute the law of human nature. Just as the infant tends first to
+wriggle, then creep, then walk, then run and dance, so human nature
+tends to move upward from savagery through primitive settled life to the
+complex forms of larger settled units. In this progress, material or
+economic forces play a large part; but ideas, originally born out of
+circumstances, but sometimes borrowed from other people, sometimes
+degenerate remnants of past utilities, also play a large part. The
+progress we finally make is thus directed by this human tendency, by
+material circumstances, and by ideas. Sometimes it keeps pretty closely
+to what seems to us to be upward human growth; sometimes it stagnates;
+sometimes it gives us perverted products; and sometimes it destroys
+itself.
+
+Thus it becomes necessary to trace the past experiences of woman that we
+may see with what heritage she faces the future. She is all that she
+has felt and thought and done. She started with at least half of the
+destiny of the race in her keeping. Handicapped in size and agility, and
+periodically weighted down by the burdens of maternity, she still
+possessed charms and was mistress of pleasures which made her, for
+savage man, the dearest possession next to food; and for civilized man,
+the companion, joy and inspiration of his days.
+
+Of woman's position in early savage times we know only what we can learn
+from fragmentary prehistoric remains, from the structure of early
+languages, from records of travelers and students among savages of more
+recent times; or what can be inferred from human nature in general. Most
+of this data is difficult to interpret, but it is probable that woman's
+position was not much worse than man's. It is a bad beast that fouls its
+own food or its own nest; and the female had always the protection of
+the male's desire. If she could not entirely control her body, she could
+still control her own expressions of affection and desire; and, without
+these, mere possession lost much of its charm.
+
+As keeper of the cave, cultivator of the soil, and guardian of the
+child, woman, rather than her more foot-loose mate, probably became the
+center of the earliest civilization. The jealousy of men formed tribal
+rules for her protection; and to these, religion early gave its powerful
+sanctions. Thus there came a day when the woman took her mate home to
+her tribe and gave her children her own name. Even if the matriarchal
+period was not so important as has sometimes been assumed, woman
+certainly had large influence over tribal affairs in early savage life.
+
+With the increase in population, and the consequent disappearance of
+game, man was forced to turn his attention to the crude agriculture
+which woman had begun to develop. The superior qualities which he had
+acquired in war and the chase, enabled him slowly to improve on these
+beginnings and to shape a body of custom which made settled society
+possible. With man's leadership in the family the patriarchal form of
+government developed, and man's power over woman was sanctioned by
+custom and law. The woman was stolen, or bought; and while sexual
+attraction did not play the continuous part which it plays in developed
+society, it must have done much to protect women from abuse and neglect,
+at least during the years of girlhood and child-bearing. It is at this
+point that our historical records begin.
+
+In the pages of Homer, or of the Old Testament, in Tacitus's "Germania,"
+or in the writings of Livy, we find woman's position well defined. True,
+she stands second to the man, but she is his assistant, not his slave.
+She must be courted, and while marriage presents are exchanged, she is
+not bought. In times of emergency, she steps to the front and
+legislates, judges, or fights. It is possible in the pages of the Old
+Testament to find women doing everything which men can do. Even where
+the power is not nominally in her own hands, she often, as in the cases
+of Penelope or Esther, rules by indirection. Her body and her offspring
+are protected; and the Hebrew woman of the Proverbs shows us a
+singularly free and secure industrial position.[16] Such was the
+condition in primitive Judea, in early Greece, in republican Rome, or
+among the Germans who invaded southern Europe in the third and fourth
+centuries of our era.
+
+[16] _Proverbs_ xxxi, 10.
+
+Man's jealousy of his woman as a source of pleasure and honor to
+himself, and to his family, must have always acted to limit woman's
+freedom, even while it gave her protection and a secure position in
+society. With the development of settled government in city states, like
+Athens or early Rome, the necessity for defining citizenship made the
+family increasingly a political institution. A man's offspring through
+slave women, concubines, or "strangers" lived outside the citizen group,
+and so were negligible; but the citizen woman's children were citizens,
+and so she became a jealously guarded political institution. The
+established family became the test of civic, military, and property
+rights. The regulations limiting the freedom of girls and women were
+jealously enforced, since mismating might open the treasures of
+citizenship to any low born or foreign adventurer.[17]
+
+[17] T.G. TUCKER, _Life in Ancient Athens_, Chapter VIII, Macmillan Co.,
+1906.
+
+In the ancient Orient, in Greece, Rome, and in later Europe, these
+stages have been repeated again and again. Woman is first a slave,
+stolen or bought, protected by sexual interest to which is later added
+social custom and religious sanction. Early civilization centers around
+the woman, so that she becomes in some degree the center of the
+home-staying group. In primitive civilization man takes over woman's
+most important activities; but she gains a fixed position, protected,
+though still further enslaved, by political necessities.
+
+But with the increase of wealth, whether in terms of money, slaves, or
+trade, woman found herself subject to a fourth form of enslavement more
+subtly dangerous than brute force, lust, or political and religious
+institutionalism. This was the desire of man to protect her and make her
+happy because he loved her. He put golden chains about her neck and
+bracelets on her arms, clothed her in silks and satins, fed her with
+dainty fare, gave her a retinue of attendants to spare her fatigue, and
+put her in the safest rear rooms of the habitation. But it is foolish to
+talk of conscious enslavement in this connection. Rich men and luxurious
+civilizations have always enslaved women in the same way that rich,
+fond, and foolish mothers have enslaved their children, by robbing them
+of opportunity, by taking away that needful work and that vital
+experience of real life which alone can develop the powers of the soul.
+
+Thus in the Periclean age in Greece, in the Eastern Kingdoms established
+by Alexander, in Imperial Rome, in the later Italian Renaissance, in
+France under Louis XIV and Louis XV, in England under the Stuart kings,
+and in many centers of our own contemporary world, women have given up
+their legitimate heritage of work and independent thought for trinkets,
+silks, and servants, and have quickly degenerated, like the children of
+rich and foolish mothers, into luxury-loving parasites and
+playthings.[18]
+
+[18] OLIVE SCHREINER, _Woman and Labor_, Chapters on Parasitism. New
+York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.
+
+To maintain this luxurious setting for their mistresses, whether wives
+or irregular concubines, men of the Occident have generally been driven
+to ever fiercer struggle with their fellows. Thus a Pericles, at the
+zenith of his powers, facing difficulties which strained and developed
+all his forces, had for his legitimate wife a woman, bound hand and
+foot by conventions and immured in her house in Athens. But a man is
+only half a complete human being, and the other half cannot be furnished
+by a weak and ignorant kept-woman, no matter how legal the bond. Hence
+the forces always driving men to completeness and unity drove Pericles
+away from his house and his legitimate children and his mere wife to
+find the completion of his life.
+
+In these cases, as elsewhere, demand creates supply, and there were to
+be found everywhere in Athens able and cultivated foreign women, many of
+whom had come over from the mainland of Asia Minor; and one of these,
+Aspasia, became the mistress of Pericles and bore him children. She was
+no adventuress of the street, but an educated and brilliant woman, in
+whose home you might have met not only Pericles, but also Socrates,
+Phidias, Anaxagoras, Sophocles and Euripides.
+
+This is the stage that always follows the period of the luxury-loving
+wife. It was so in Imperial Rome, in later Carthage, in Venice, and in
+eighteenth-century France. But the normal human unit is the man and
+woman who love each other, not these combinations of illegality, law,
+lust, love and dishonor. Such a triangle of two women and a man rests
+its base in shame, and its lines are lies, and its value is destruction.
+So virile republican Rome swept over decadent Greece and made it into
+the Roman province of Achaia; later the chaste Germans swarmed over the
+decadent Roman Empire and then slowly rebuilt modern Europe; the ascetic
+Puritans destroyed the Stuarts; while the French Revolution was the
+deluge that swept away Louis XVI and put the virtuous, if commonplace,
+bourgeoisie in power.
+
+So far we have dealt with the position of women as though it depended
+alone on human hungers, passions and environment; but while these are
+the driving forces of life, they are very subject to the repressing and
+diverting power of ideas, working in an environment of economic
+conditions. These ideas may themselves date back to earlier passions and
+economic conditions, but they often survive the time which created them,
+and then they enter into life and conduct as seemingly independent
+forces. These ideas played a large part, even in the ancient world.
+
+The Jews organized their religious and political practices about a
+patriarchal Deity ruling a patriarchal state; and their tradition
+handicapped all women with the sin of Eve, the sin of seeking knowledge.
+The Greeks, on the other hand, gave woman a splendid place in the
+hierarchy of the gods, and idealized not only her beauty in Aphrodite
+but her chaste aloofness in Artemis, her physical strength in the
+Amazons, and her wisdom in Athena and Hera. They covered the Acropolis
+with matchless monuments in honor of Athena, patron goddess of their
+fair city, and celebrated splendid pageants on her anniversaries. So,
+too, republican Rome, while it gathered its civic life about patriarchal
+ideas in which the father was supreme, gave women positions of high
+honor in its religion, whether as deities or as servitors of the gods.
+In the Niebelungenlied, the Germans bodied forth their splendid
+conceptions of female beauty, strength and passion in such figures as
+Brunhilda. These ideas must have done much to offset the physical
+weakness and functional handicaps of women in the ancient world.
+
+The Christian ideas, which have dominated us now for nearly two
+thousand years, are generally considered to have been favorable to
+women. In their insistence on the value of the human soul, and on
+democratic equality, they have doubtless helped to raise the status of
+women along with that of all human beings. But, as between man and
+woman, Christianity has given every possible advantage to men, and has
+added needlessly to the natural burdens of women.[19]
+
+[19] JAMES DONALDSON, _Woman: Her Position and Influence in Ancient
+Greece and Rome and Among the Early Christians_, Longmans, Green, and
+Co., 1907.
+
+From Judaism, Christianity borrowed Eve, with her eternally operative
+sin, and thus placed all women under a perpetual load of suspicion and
+guilt. The Founder of the new faith never assumed the responsibilities
+of a family, and he included no woman among his disciples. Example, even
+negative example, is often more powerful than precept. Paul, the most
+learned of the disciples, in his writings, and as an organizer of the
+Church, emphasized the older Jewish position. In the new organization,
+women filled only lesser places, while the men settled all points of
+dogma, directing and mainly conducting the services of worship. Meantime
+each woman's soul remained her own, to be saved only by her individual
+actions; therein lay her hope for the future, both on earth and in
+heaven.
+
+But it was those later developments of belief and practice that gathered
+around Christian asceticism which placed woman and her special functions
+under a cloud of suspicion from which she is not even yet entirely
+freed. Celibacy became exalted; virginity was a positive virtue;
+chastity, instead of a healthful antecedent to parenthood, became an end
+in itself; and monasteries and convents multiplied throughout
+Christendom. Something of shame and guilt gathered around conception and
+birth, as representing a lower standard of life, even when sanctified by
+the ceremonies of the Church. From the second century to the sixth, the
+ablest of the Church Fathers, Greek and Latin alike, formulated
+statements in which woman became the chief ally of the devil in dragging
+men down to perdition. We still hear ancestral reverberations of these
+teachings in all our discussions of woman's place in civilization.
+
+But ideas can only for a time overcome or divert the primitive human
+hungers, and slowly Mary, Mother of Jesus, won first place among the
+saints. Celibate recluses who feared to walk the streets for fear of
+meeting a woman, and who spent the nights fighting down their noblest
+passions, starving them, flagellating and rolling their naked bodies in
+thorny rose hedges or in snow-drifts to silence demands for wife and
+children, threw themselves in an ecstacy of adoration before an image of
+the Virgin with the Baby in her arms. So Maryolatry came to bless the
+world.
+
+But even this blessing was not without alloy, for it gave us an ideal of
+woman, superhuman, immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before the angel
+with the lily, standing mute with crossed hands and downcast eyes before
+her Divine Son. She represented, not the institution of the family, but
+the institution of the Church. Even when she appeared in representations
+of the Holy Family, Joseph, her husband, was not the father of her
+child, but his servant.
+
+Chivalry took up this conception, and shaped for us the fantastic lady
+who stands back of much of modern romantic love. Robbed of her simple,
+human, pagan passions, she became often an anaemic and unfruitful, if
+angelic, creature. For the direct and passionate assurances of a
+virtuous and noble love she substituted sighs and tears, languishing
+looks and weary renunciations. This sterile hybrid, bred of human
+passions and theological negations, must be finally banished from our
+literature and from our minds before we can have a healthy eugenic
+conscience among us.[20]
+
+[20] R. DE MAULDE LA CLAVIERE, _The Woman of the Renaissance. A Study in
+Feminism_, translated by George H. Ely. New York: C.P. Putnam's Sons,
+1900.
+
+The Protestant Revolution went far to restore the special functions of
+women to respect. Belief in her individual soul, and in its need of
+salvation through individual choice, was supplemented by the belief that
+this choice must be guided by her individual judgment. Celibacy ceased
+to be a sign of righteousness; and the best men and women married. But
+beliefs cannot be directly destroyed by revolution; they can only be
+disturbed and modified. The teachings of Paul, Augustine, Tertullian and
+St. Jerome were still authoritative, and Calvin and Knox reaffirmed
+many of them. The family was still subordinate to the Church; and
+marriage still remained a sacrament, with theological significances,
+rather than the simple union of a man and woman who loved each other.
+The choice of a mate once made was final, because theological, and it
+could be broken only with infinite pain and disgrace.
+
+The great political upheaval, which we call the French Revolution,
+carried in its fundamental teachings freedom and opportunity for men and
+for women; but like the corresponding revolution in religion, it
+required time to make adjustments, and so we have been content to live
+for more than a hundred years in the midst of verbal affirmations which
+we denied in all our institutional life.
+
+In America, conditions have always been favorable for women to work out
+their freedom. Among the immigrants who came to our shores before 1840
+there were, of course, a few traders, adventurers and servants who hoped
+to improve their financial conditions; but the leaders, and most of the
+rank and file, came that they might be free to think their own thoughts
+and live their own lives. If this selection of colonists, through
+religious and political persecution, sometimes gave us bigots with one
+idea, it also gave us people who knew that ideas can change. Along with
+Cotton Mather it gave us Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams and William
+Penn.
+
+Most of these who came in the early days belonged to extreme dissenting
+sects believing in salvation through individual choice, based on
+personal judgments. Preaching was exalted at the expense of ritual; and
+by substituting new thinking for old habits in religion, the American
+settlers made it less difficult for other adjustments to be made, even
+in such a conservative matter as woman's position. It is through no
+accident that Methodists, Friends, Unitarians and the Salvation Army
+have been much more sympathetic to woman's progress than have the older
+ritualistic faiths.
+
+And these theological ideas had to be worked out under the material
+conditions of the New World, which were also favorable to the
+emancipation of women. Facing primitive conditions in the forest, it
+became a habit to do new things in new ways. Woman's work and judgment
+were indispensable; and these picked women showed themselves capable in
+every direction. They did every kind of work; and when it came to
+enduring privation or even to starving, they set an example for men.
+
+But while every new movement in ideas always carries with it other
+radical ideas, the practical difficulties of mental, social and legal
+adjustment always prevent the full and harmonious development of all
+that is involved in any new point of view. In the American colonies the
+need for new adjustments in religion, government and practical living
+made it inevitable that any very important change in woman's position
+should linger. In fact, the student of colonial records finds many
+traces of ultra conservatism in the treatment of women, though the
+forces had been liberated which must inevitably open the way for her
+through the New World of America into a new world of the spirit.
+
+And before the quickening influence of the new life had time to become
+commonplace, the struggle with England began. The Revolutionary period
+was a time of intense political education for every one. War and
+sacrifice glorified the new ideas; and even the children and women could
+not escape their influence. Why then did not the American Revolution
+pass on to full freedom and opportunity for women? For the same reason
+that it did not forever abolish slavery in America. The vested interests
+involved were so many, and the changes so momentous and difficult, that
+only the most imperative needs could receive attention.
+
+But this does not mean that the interest in a larger life for women was
+not active or that women were making no advance in self-direction. There
+is evidence that women like Abigail Adams realized the abstract
+injustice of their position, and the fact that as early as 1794, Mary
+Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was republished in
+Philadelphia shows that her ideas must have had some currency in
+America.
+
+After the Revolution, the intimate, stimulating influence of Europe,
+which the earlier colonists had enjoyed, was for a time almost entirely
+lost. The new States became extremely provincial; and minds untouched by
+the larger world always tend to conservatism. Noah Webster, in "A
+Letter to Young Ladies," published in Boston, in 1790, declared that
+they "must be content to be women; to be mild, social and sentimental."
+Three years later the "Letters to a Young Lady," by the Reverend John
+Bennett, were republished in Philadelphia, after going through several
+London editions. He placed the qualities to be cultivated in this order:
+"A genteel person, a simple nature, sensibility, cheerfulness, delicacy,
+softness, affability, good manners, regular habits, skill in fancy work,
+and a fund of hidden genteel learning." Through the first half of the
+nineteenth century these ideals struggled along parallel with the new
+ideas that were everywhere springing up from the colonial forest
+experiences of the last two generations.
+
+As conservers of morals and as leaders in higher ideals of life, the
+advanced women of America came early face to face with two outgrown
+abuses. One of these was human slavery and the other was intemperance.
+In attacking these abuses, women had to break with all the traditions
+that defined their position.
+
+The wealthy and intelligent Englishwoman, Frances Wright, who came to
+this country in 1818 to attack slavery, found herself doubly opposed
+because she was a woman speaking in public. Had not St. Paul declared:
+"It is a shame for women to speak in the church"? Lucretia Mott, born in
+the Society of Friends in Nantucket, had escaped the full force of this
+injunction, but even she found, when she attacked slavery in public,
+that she had invaded a world sacred to men, and she was sternly warned
+back. Miss Susan B. Anthony also began her public life as a teacher and
+a temperance reformer. It was only when she found herself helpless, in
+presence of the prejudices against her sex, that she turned her
+attention to freeing women from all purely sex limitation in public
+life.
+
+When the Civil War broke out, the women were ready to do their part. It
+is quite possible that the names of Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix may be
+remembered when Grant and Sherman are forgotten. With the establishing
+of new human values the historian of the future may consider the saving
+of life and the preventing of misery as more worthy of lasting record
+than even military genius. These women and their millions of helpers
+had not the resources of organized government at their disposal; but,
+instead, they had oftentimes to work against the jealousy of those in
+authority. At the close of the war, the Sanitary Commission comprised
+seven thousand aid societies scattered over the country, and it had
+raised over fifteen millions of dollars. Those women who remained at
+home, in the absence of fathers and sons for four years, faced all the
+problems of practical life. Who can estimate the value of training in
+cooperative work and organization which the Civil War gave to the
+American women?
+
+In the Civil War, women directly served men; but in the great industrial
+reorganization which came afterward they served mainly women and
+children. Here the victories have been won in the press, in the
+legislative halls, and in courts of law. Working with men, or alone,
+they have perfected organization, agitated, raised money, printed
+appeals, and carried cases through the courts, until factories and
+stores have been made safer, excessive working hours have been cut down,
+young children have been exempted from labor, many sweat-shops have
+been closed, and women workers have begun to be organized to care for
+their own needs. Much has been done; more remains to be done; but the
+training of the women has gone steadily forward.
+
+These, then, are the forces which have pushed women forward in America:
+European political and religious persecution, the forest necessities of
+colonial life, the American Revolution, the struggle with slavery and
+intemperance, the Civil War, the industrial struggle and the need to
+protect women and children from capitalistic exploitation. Possibly
+women have now reached a point in their development where they can turn
+to public service and to a full realization of their powers and
+responsibilities without the goading necessity of a great wrong. If not,
+there are sufficient wrongs still calling to lead them for many years.
+Intemperance is not yet banished; the negro is not yet freed from the
+effects of his slavery; working women and children are not yet fairly
+protected; disease reaps needlessly large harvests; Lazarus still begs
+at the table of Dives; our public education leaves much to be desired;
+criminals are badly handled; millions of European refugees come marching
+into our land needing guidance. Meantime, millions of women are content,
+because themselves comfortable, and there are some even willing to aid
+the powers of obstruction.
+
+In these later years, marvelous changes have taken place all over the
+world. Even in China, official attempts are now being made to leave
+women free to walk by abolishing the bandaging of infants' feet. In
+Turkey, women are going out from the harem to participate in public
+life. In Germany, they are escaping from the exclusive service of the
+home. In England, they are repeating the cries of the men of 1776 and of
+1789: "All men and women are born free and equal." "No taxation without
+representation." "One person, one vote." In Finland, Australia, New
+Zealand, Norway and Sweden, women have all the essential civic and
+political rights of men.
+
+But, as in all human progress, first the ideas of a few leaders change;
+they shape legislation; and the new organization slowly makes over the
+practices and then the deep-seated mental and moral habits, which
+constitute popular prejudices. These old unreasoning feelings still
+largely dominate us, blinding us to the facts of life and blocking each
+new advance by which women might pass into the world of free choice and
+adjustment of their lives as co-workers with men. In the next chapters
+we must study these present-day conditions in detail.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+Women in Education
+
+
+In discussing woman's relation to formal education we are really
+examining her ability to master and teach certain intellectual
+exercises, for in our modern industrial democracies our efforts are
+confined almost exclusively to training the mind and to stocking it with
+information. Each year we talk more and more about physical, moral,
+political, social and industrial education; but requirements for
+entrance into schools, promotions in them, and graduation from their
+courses, still rest almost entirely on information acquired; and in a
+less degree, on intellectual ability displayed.
+
+Even in selecting and certifying teachers, the emphasis is all laid on
+intellectual equipment. On the physical, moral, or social sides we at
+most demand that the candidates shall not be too bad; on the political
+side we do not demand even this, since nearly 80 per cent. of our whole
+teaching force is declared legally unfit to vote or hold office, and is
+yet employed to train our future citizens. But on the intellectual side
+we demand positive proof of fitness. Thus it is fair to say that our
+modern education deals almost exclusively with knowledge.
+
+Knowledge, in the past, has nearly always been considered much as we
+consider dynamite to-day. It was a dangerous force, useful to a ruling
+class, and hence preserved in the hands of a cult, generally a
+priesthood; but it was thought capable of working endless mischief in
+the hands of ignorant people. Through all the pages of history we find
+individuals, and weaker groups, driven away from the accumulated
+treasure; and if detected in their desire to know, especially if they
+sought knowledge through original investigation, they were branded with
+such titles of disgrace as "wizard" or "heretic;" and, as a warning to
+others, they were often burned in the public square or buried alive.
+
+Women, as an inferior class, were especially restrained from learning.
+Knowledge would breed discontent in them; it would make them question
+the binding power of the conventions and beliefs which held them in
+their place; and it would show them how to achieve their freedom, and
+might even encourage them to assume leadership. Here and there,
+individual women gained the training necessary for leadership, as in the
+cases of Sappho, Aspasia or Hypatia; but the great mass of women was
+sternly repressed. Eve leads a long line of women martyrs who, across
+the ages, have paid a great price for their desire to eat of the tree of
+knowledge. For herself, she might have paid the price but, with subtle
+understanding of women, the penalty was made to involve all whom they
+loved; the terrors of that price have held the sex in restraint ever
+since. Eurydice, Pandora, Eve, Lot's wife and Bluebeard's wife have in
+turn served as awful warnings. After a time it came to be understood by
+women that they should fix their eyes on their husbands and never look
+forward or backward, lest they lose their Eden and drag those whom they
+loved after them to destruction.
+
+Of course, if women could not learn they could not teach; at least, they
+could not teach where it was necessary to impart knowledge; and so their
+share in formal education has been slight, until our own time. Young
+children have been considered their special charge, and the care and
+culture of infancy and young childhood have always rested in the hands
+of mothers, grandmothers, aunts and female servants. Beyond these early
+years, however, woman's part has been restricted to emphasizing, mainly
+with girls, the dogmas and practices of caste, kitchen and church.
+
+These were the conditions which prevailed through early Oriental and
+Classical times. Christianity brought women some degree of intellectual
+freedom, but it also imposed new forms of restraint. Its fundamental
+teachings, based as they were on a belief in individual values, were
+favorable to the extension of knowledge and to the opening of
+opportunity for all. The Church, however, shaped under the
+half-civilized conditions of the Middle Ages, quickly took knowledge
+into her own keeping, forbade its extension, and increasingly held
+before woman, as her highest ideal, the negative virtues of the
+cloister.
+
+The humanistic and theological changes which came with the awakening of
+the European mind at the close of the Middle Ages, did much to set free
+the accumulated treasures of knowledge. Protestantism, by exalting
+individual judgment and insisting on the necessity of each one reading
+and judging the sacred records for himself, made it possible for even
+women to enter into the heritage of the ages. At least, the key to
+learning, reading, was given into her hands. Later Protestant sects
+broke down the limits of sacerdotalism, until women found that they
+could look forward a little way without losing their Edens, or could
+even glance backward without being turned into pillars of reproach.
+
+The political revolutions of the eighteenth century also affirmed in
+their point of view the same intellectual freedom for women as for men.
+It has taken a long time to make the practical adjustments, but they are
+now well under way. Since 1870, women have had very great freedom in
+their approach to knowledge; and having knowledge, they have been
+allowed to impart it to others.
+
+In America, freedom for women to study has moved more rapidly than in
+Europe. Even in the colonial period, there were emancipated women, as
+we have seen; and in the last half of the eighteenth century several
+schools were opened for girls, which were more than polite finishing
+schools. Notable among these institutions were the seminary at
+Bethlehem, Pa., opened in 1753 by the Moravians, and the school
+established by the Society of Friends, in Providence, R.I., in 1784. But
+nearly all girl's schools before 1800 were limited to terms of a few
+months, where girls attended to learn needle-work, music and dancing,
+and to cultivate their morals and manners.
+
+At the close of the Revolutionary War, the leaders of public opinion
+universally recognized that their new experiment in government would
+succeed only if the voters were intelligent. This statement of belief
+became the major premise on which all arguments for free and compulsory
+education were based; and while we have practically accepted a much
+wider justification for education, in connection with the care of
+defectives, industrial training, and other recent movements, we have not
+yet changed our formulated philosophy concerning the relation of the
+state to its children. Free and compulsory education is still mainly
+justified on the ground that it produced good citizens.
+
+But the women had not full citizenship and hence the argument for
+general education did not apply to them. Had they been enfranchised
+after the Revolution, all educational opportunities would have been open
+to them at once as a matter of course; and an immense amount of
+struggle, futile effort, and unnecessary friction would have been saved.
+But this larger view of woman's rights and powers would have required an
+adjustment in deep-seated ideas and prejudices, concerning her proper
+position, too great to be undertaken by men facing a new form of
+government and the material problems of a new world.
+
+But even without this change in ideas, economic conditions steadily
+forced the women into educational activity. There were not enough men
+available to teach the scattered country schools, and citizens had to be
+trained for the needs of the new democracy. John Adams recognized this
+when he wrote to Mr. Warren that their wives must "teach their sons the
+divine science of politics;" though he would have been one of the last
+to favor admitting women to full participation in public life. He did
+not realize that if women were to train men for citizenship, the
+rudiments of knowledge which they had learned in scattered schools and
+in their poor little academies must be greatly supplemented. Life,
+however, is never logical, and at this advance men balked. Necessity was
+forcing women into schools as teachers, and hence into larger
+preparation for their own lives; but public opinion, here as elsewhere,
+failed to recognize the forces that were compelling its action.
+
+Thus the work of furnishing more advanced intellectual training for
+American women had to be started by the women themselves. This is
+possibly the first time in human history that a great group of people
+feeling itself irresistibly moving toward a social, industrial and
+political readjustment, little less than revolutionary in its nature,
+has gone deliberately to work to prepare for the change through
+education. The working classes of the world are doing the same thing
+now; but women showed them the way. In some vague degree, American
+women recognized the truth which Dr. Gore recently brought before a mass
+of working men in England. "All this passion for justice will accomplish
+nothing," he declared, "unless you get knowledge. You may become strong
+and clamorous, you may win a victory, you may affect a revolution, but
+you will be trodden down again under the feet of knowledge if you leave
+knowledge in the hands of privilege, because knowledge will always win
+over ignorance."[21]
+
+[21] _The Highway_, London, Nov., 1911.
+
+American women were fortunate, too, in having for their leaders such
+women as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon and Catherine Beecher. Emma Willard was
+a woman of the world; she had traveled abroad and she brought to her
+work a cultivated nature, wide experience of life and natural
+leadership. Her personality went far toward lifting the movement to a
+plane of respect. After trying a little academy in Vermont, she appealed
+to the State of New York in 1814 for help. In this appeal, she wisely
+adopted the prevailing view of the relation of the state to education.
+The state must have good citizens, she repeats, and then goes on, "The
+character of children will be formed by their mothers; and it is through
+the mothers that the government can control the character of its future
+citizens." The State of New York granted her articles of incorporation
+for her academy at Waterford, N.Y., but refused her the modest sum of
+five thousand dollars for which she had asked. In 1821, she established
+the Troy Female Seminary, where for years she trained and led the
+intellectual life of American women.
+
+Miss Mary Lyon begged the money from the common people with which she
+opened Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837. Those who feared the education of
+women were disarmed by the fact that in the new institution domestic
+service was emphasized to the extent of having the girls do all their
+own work. Another group of possible critics was won over by the fact
+that religious instruction received constant care. But notwithstanding
+the conserving influence of housework and religion, there went steadily
+out from Mount Holyoke during the following years a strong line of
+teachers demanding ever larger opportunity for themselves and for those
+they taught.
+
+Miss Catherine Beecher added to her work in schools for girls a general
+propaganda for woman's education, and she devised large plans for its
+development. In 1852, she organized the American Woman's Educational
+Association "to aid in securing to American women a liberal education,
+honorable position, and remunerative employment." She helped to start
+girls' schools in half a dozen cities, and by writing and talking she
+sowed in the hearts of women, especially in the Middle West, a
+discontent with existing conditions and a deep desire to know.
+
+From the time of this awakening in the thirties and forties, two lines
+of educational activity for the advancement of woman's education
+steadily developed. One was the effort of women to educate themselves in
+distinctly women's schools; and the other was the movement by which
+existing institutions for boys and men were gradually opened to girls
+and women. These two lines of activity still remain distinct, and not
+always sympathetic with each other's aims.
+
+The effort to establish distinctly women's schools was continued after
+the Civil War by Matthew Vassar, who founded in 1861, and opened in
+1865, the first adequately endowed and organized college for women in
+America. Ten years later, Miss Sophie Smith founded and endowed Smith
+College to furnish women "with means and facilities for education equal
+to those that are offered in colleges for young men." The institution
+was opened in 1875; and in the same year Henry Durant established
+Wellesley College.
+
+The last Report of the United States Commissioner of Education shows
+that there are now 108 institutions of higher learning to which men are
+not admitted; but most of them have modeled themselves so closely upon
+men's colleges that they have not been able to work out lines of
+distinctive instruction specially fitted to women. One cannot help
+feeling that since they do not open their doors to men they should do
+something more toward working out an ideal education for women than they
+have so far undertaken. When the Association of Intercollegiate Alumnae
+met in New York, in the autumn of 1911, its discussions gathered around
+the possibility of adding to college courses subjects of special value
+to women. Hygiene, biology and sociology were the subjects most favored;
+but the matter needs attention from women and men who stand outside the
+group dominated by our older college traditions. This movement to
+provide distinctive schools for women had brought together, in 1910,
+35,714 girl students in private secondary schools and 9,082 women
+students in higher institutions of learning.
+
+The second line of development, which sought to open up all existing
+schools to girls and women, began when Boston opened a high school for
+girls in 1825. New York opened a high school for girls three years
+later.
+
+It was in the West, however, that this movement took strongest root and
+made most steady advance. The West has always led the East in opening
+equal opportunity to women, even equal suffrage. The forest and the
+frontier compel such action even in such commonwealths as Australia, New
+Zealand and Canada, where there has been no political revolution to
+hasten it. Labor is scarce; the invading people are intelligent and
+ambitious for their children and desire them educated. The women must
+teach them to read and write; the girls learn with their brothers; and
+so the women master the mysteries of formal education.
+
+Thus it is no accident that Oberlin, in the western forest, was the
+first college to open its doors to women. Antioch, under Horace Mann's
+direction, was, however, the first institution of higher learning to
+give men and women equal opportunity. The new States of the Mississippi
+Valley early established State universities. These institutions were
+little more than seminaries, but the free spirit of the frontier was so
+strong in them that in 1863 Wisconsin University admitted women to its
+privileges, and Kansas and Indiana followed shortly after.
+
+It is the year 1870, however, that marks the beginning of a new period
+in the higher education of women as in so many other lines of advance.
+In that year, Michigan University, California University and the
+University of Evanston, adopted co-education. Michigan was just entering
+on a great career and her influence was very important. There, for the
+first time, women could follow a university curriculum under the same
+conditions as men. Two years later, Andrew D. White introduced the
+Michigan idea at Cornell.
+
+In the forty years since Michigan opened her doors, the advance of women
+under conditions of co-education has been steady and rapid. In Harvard
+and Columbia opportunity takes the form of annexes where women can
+secure almost any educational opportunities they desire. In other
+universities, like Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins, women are admitted to
+graduate study. Most of the institutions of higher education that do not
+yet admit women are theological and technical schools, or small colleges
+like Haverford, where there are equivalents in Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr,
+for women who wish to attend a Friend's College. A woman can work in
+almost any important university in America to-day if she cares to do so.
+In 1910 there were conferred in the United States 12,590 A.B. degrees,
+and women took 44.1 per cent. of them.
+
+Meantime, there have been no important reactions in institutions which
+have once opened their doors to women.[22] In 1902, Chicago University
+separated men and women students, but only during the first two years of
+their undergraduate work. Practically this has affected only one-half of
+the women in the first year and a very much smaller proportion in the
+second year.[23] When Leland Stanford Junior University was opened in
+1891, 25.4% of the students were women. This proportion rose in
+successive years as follows: 1892, 29.7%; 1893, 30.4%; 1894, 33.8%;
+1895, 35.3%; 1896, 36.6%; 1897, 37.4%; 1898, 40.1%. Fearing that the
+institution would be swamped with women, and that able men students
+would stay away, Mrs. Stanford ruled that there should never be more
+than five hundred women students in the university at one time. This
+limit was reached in 1902, and it was then provided that women should
+not be received as special students, nor in partial standing. Later, men
+in partial standing were cut out, though they continued to be received
+as special students. Women are now admitted in order of application,
+but preference is given to juniors and seniors. This really establishes
+a higher standard for women than for men, and one would expect that men
+would be kept away from an institution requiring a higher standard for
+women quite as much as from one where there were many women working on
+an equality with men. In 1910, Tufts College decided to separate men and
+women, for local reasons. The statement was made at the time that a
+philanthropist had promised a gift of $500,000 for a woman's college, if
+the sexes were separated.[24] The doors of Wesleyan are to be closed to
+women after 1912, but this is due to local and financial reasons.
+
+[22] HELEN R. OLIN, _The Women of a State University_, G.P. Putnam's
+Sons, 1909.
+
+[23] MARION TALBOT, _The Education of Women_, University of Chicago
+Press, 1910.
+
+[24] _Report of the United States Commissioner of Education_, p. 132,
+1910.
+
+The movement in European universities, while not so uniform as in
+America, has been in the same direction. Miss Buss, Miss Beal and Miss
+Emily Sheriff led an early movement for higher secondary education of
+girls similar to that which gathered around Miss Willard in America. In
+1871, Miss Clough started in England the lectures for women which led
+to the establishment of Newnham and Girton at Cambridge, and opened
+Oxford to women. Now women can study almost any subject they like at
+these universities and take the same examinations as the men. They do
+not receive degrees, but they have most of the other advantages of men,
+and for forty years they have carried off many honors. In the newer
+universities of London, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and in the Welsh
+University they have every advantage open to men.
+
+In Germany, the opportunities for higher education of women have changed
+from year to year; but in 1910, there were 1,856 women in the
+universities as compared with 1,108 in 1909, and this notwithstanding
+the Emperor's well known belief that woman's sphere should be limited to
+domestic activities.
+
+The claims advanced in opposition to the higher education of women have
+largely broken down to-day. It was long maintained that her mind was
+inferior to man's mind in kind and quality, and that she could not do
+the work required. In the presence of thousands of young women carrying
+all kinds of university work with credit and honor such charges become
+absurd. The belief that woman's health could not stand the strain fails
+for the same reason. The fear that she would be less likely to marry; or
+marrying, would be less likely to have children, has been seen to have
+some body of fact behind it; but we have seen also that university
+students are recruited from groups that are not the most fecund, and
+that the same danger applies to men students as to women.[25] Women in
+higher education are now accepted as a regular part of our modern life.
+
+[25] Eight hundred and eighty-one Harvard graduates, twenty-five years
+after graduation, had but 1,226 children. If half were boys, we have but
+613 sons for 881 Harvard graduates. HUGO MUeNSTERBERG, _The Americans_,
+p. 582. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901.
+
+And yet there is one objection that still remains unanswered in very
+many minds. It has always been feared that women would lower the
+standard of scholarship; and there is much in the quality of the present
+generation of women students that may strengthen this belief. In the
+seventies and eighties, the fear of being thought peculiar still kept
+many ordinary women away from colleges. Now it has become fashionable,
+and a woman who has been to college stands better in a community than
+one who has not. Add to this the freedom and romance of "going to
+college" and it follows that many young women, with increasing economic
+freedom, are tempted to go up to the universities just as well-placed
+young Englishmen go to Cambridge or Oxford as passmen. They have no
+special interest in scholarship; but they like the life. This large body
+of young women, and of men under similar conditions, will doubtless
+lower the scholarship of modern college and university life as a whole.
+But possibly the need of the world for all-around men and women is even
+greater than its need for scholars; and in that case we may find
+justification for both passmen and passwomen.
+
+With the opening of knowledge to women it became possible for them to
+instruct children in matters intellectual; and since our school learning
+was almost entirely a matter of information and mental training, they
+early became an important part of the teaching profession in America.
+
+Once started, all our conditions favored the rapid increase of women
+teachers. There were industrial openings for men on every side; and with
+our rapid increase in population, an army of teachers was required.
+Since the calling had in the past been filled by inferior members of the
+clergy, broken-down soldiers, or old women, there was a tradition of
+constant change, and young men on their way to permanent professions
+were steadily supplanted by young women on their way to the altar.
+
+Co-education very materially assisted this substitution. Social,
+religious and economic reasons early combined to establish co-education
+in elementary schools in America, and now it has become a national
+custom. In cities like Philadelphia and Brooklyn there are some separate
+schools; but in 1910, only 4 per cent. of all the elementary children
+and only 5 per cent. of the children in public high schools were in
+separate classes. In private schools, which care for less than 10 per
+cent. of the children of the country, the percentage of children in
+separate schools is greater.
+
+Practically all American children are now in co-educational
+institutions. Had the boys been in schools by themselves it would have
+been more difficult to place women teachers over them, but in mixed
+schools the question does not arise. Even where the boys and girls were
+separated, however, that fact did not prevent the employment of women
+teachers, though it may have retarded it. Thus in Philadelphia, in 1911,
+there were 125 boys' classes, 174 girls' classes, and 894 mixed classes
+in the grammar grades; still there were but 175 men teachers employed
+and, of course, the girls' classes were all taught by women.
+
+While administrative positions are less monopolized by women than
+teaching posts, they are being steadily filled by them. For fifteen
+years Idaho has had able women State superintendents elected by popular
+suffrage; Colorado and Montana have also given this highest educational
+post to women. In most of our States we have women serving as county
+superintendents; and in Idaho women fill nearly all these positions.
+Several of our largest cities, notably Chicago and Cleveland, have women
+superintendents; while many high schools and most of our elementary
+schools have women principals. In 1909, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young was
+elected president of the National Education Association; and in 1911,
+Miss Alice Dilley was elected president of the Iowa State Teachers'
+Association. Both of these elections were victories for women won in the
+face of determined opposition from many of the men.
+
+Another feature of this monopoly of teaching by women should be
+emphasized. Many boards of education require a woman to resign her
+position if she marries, and married women are seldom appointed to
+teaching positions, except where they are widows or separated from their
+husbands. In a test case recently carried to the Supreme Court of the
+State of New York a decision was rendered that the Board of Education of
+New York City could not dismiss teachers for marrying; but by refusing
+leave of absence to prospective mothers the Board is still able to
+remove all women who dare to have children. Thus we have a modern
+industrial democracy being educated almost entirely by celibate women.
+
+But why should a woman be forced to leave teaching because she marries?
+Would not married women do much to strengthen and broaden the calling?
+Are not married women better fitted than celibates to deal with boys and
+girls in the period of adolescence? There is doubtless a feeling that a
+married woman should make way for some girl who needs the position to
+help herself along; but schools should not be used for the needs of
+teachers, no matter how deserving the individual may be.
+
+There is, too, a possibility that a married woman might have a child,
+and a feeling that this would shock the other teachers and the children.
+Surely we have grown beyond this condition; the teacher could easily be
+given a leave of absence for a few months, or for a few years; and
+nowhere else could the children better meet this fact of universal
+existence around which our Anglo-Saxon reticence has woven such a
+shameful conspiracy of silence. At least, when a woman has passed the
+period of childbearing she could bring to the school incalculable gifts
+of balanced judgment and ripe understanding of life.
+
+Meantime all the influences which have brought about the monopoly of
+teaching by women are increasingly operative. Every year more able women
+leave our high schools, normal schools and universities, with no
+corresponding new lines of occupation open to them. The feeling of
+rivalry between men and women teachers grows stronger each year.
+Powerful teachers' federations, such as those in Chicago and Buffalo,
+composed mainly of women, are said to be using their influence to favor
+women. In New York City, the women teachers have compelled the city to
+equalize the wages of men and women, at an annual expense of $3,500,000,
+after a bitter fight lasting several years.
+
+The effects of this monopoly upon the women themselves are very
+difficult to estimate. Some alarmists tell us that women teachers face
+the danger of a premature and loveless old age; that the celibate
+communities they form in the commonwealth are marked by pettiness and
+emotionalism; that the salaries paid teachers are so small that they
+cannot provide for sickness and old age, and that, unless pensioned by
+the state, some of them must one day eat the bread of charity.
+
+On the other hand, we are told that education is the natural province
+of women; that teaching fits them to be good mothers and helpful
+citizens; that women alone can form the character of girls; and that
+boys are refined and perfected by the constant contact with women.
+
+Probably neither of these statements is wholly true. It is certain that
+many women teachers do marry, do become the mothers of fine children,
+and are social forces in their communities. With advancing standards of
+scholarship, better salaries, old age pensions, and a popular demand for
+professional efficiency in teachers, it will be increasingly difficult
+for men to use the calling as a preparation for law and medicine, or for
+women to use it as a preparation for matrimony. The calling doubtless
+does offer a greater equivalent for marriage than most others; and many
+women live their mother life vicariously for other people's children.
+
+At the same time, however, when a woman has given fourteen years of her
+life to preparation for teaching, eight years in an elementary school,
+four in a high school, and from two to four in professional training,
+she has made an investment and formed habits which will make her
+hesitate before turning to matrimony. The independence and income will
+prove attractive during young maidenhood; and matrimony can hardly yield
+its best results to the woman who enters it after she is thirty. It is
+certainly true that women are decreasingly willing to enter the teaching
+profession; and in many parts of the country there is a chronic dearth
+of trained teachers.
+
+Meantime, for good or ill, women have eaten, and are eating of the tree
+of knowledge as they will. If this has driven them out of the little
+paradise of the past, they are in a fair way to make the whole world
+into a paradise of the present. Only through training their minds could
+they have broken away from an outworn past. In this time of readjustment
+there must be many mistakes and many tragedies.[26] The fool-killer will
+gather a rich harvest, but if we are open-minded and eager to see the
+truth, each martyr will teach her sisters, and the future generations
+of women will conserve the values of the past and add to them new
+treasures and new graces of knowledge and understanding.
+
+[26] See chapter on Education of Adolescent Girls, in _Adolescence_, by
+G. STANLEY HALL. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904.
+
+It is most unfortunate that these real issues should be obscured by sex
+rivalry. There can be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his body,
+between science and religion, between man and woman. Such antagonisms
+rest back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman
+alone, for any purposes of life. And there is, too, that evil notion
+which still affects economics, that when two trade one must lose. The
+fact is that in all honest exchange buyer and seller gain alike, and all
+who participate become rich. It is so in all honest relations between
+these half-creatures we call men and women. In agreement, association,
+cooperation, lies strongest significant life for both. In separation,
+competition and antagonism lie arid, poor, mean lives, conceited and
+egotistic, vapid and contemptible.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Feminizing of Culture
+
+
+With the weakening of sex prejudices and the removal of legal
+restrictions on women's freedom it was inevitable that they should
+invade fields of activity where formerly only men were found. Since
+women must eat every one knew that they must work, and the sight of a
+woman at work was no new experience. Even in the days when they were
+most secluded and protected, the number kept in ease was always very
+small compared with the women slaves and servants who spun, cooked and
+served. Hence men were used to seeing women at work; and while
+industrial adjustments have not been easily made, they have still been
+accepted as a matter of course. But who, fifty years ago, could have
+imagined that to-day women would be steadily monopolizing learning,
+teaching, literature, the fine arts, music, the church and the theater?
+And yet that is the condition at which we have arrived. We may scoff at
+the way women are doing the work, and reject the product, but that does
+not alter the fact that step by step women are taking over the field of
+liberal culture as opposed to the field of immediately productive work.
+
+Some of the reasons for this change are so clear that it seems as though
+they might have been anticipated. In a comparatively few years the
+greater part of Western Europe and all of America has become rich, not
+this time through the enslavement of other peoples and the confiscating
+of their wealth, but through the enslaving and exploitation of the
+material forces of nature. This wealth is not well distributed, but
+large numbers of families have received enough so that the women do not
+have to work constantly with their hands. At this point all historic
+precedent would have turned these women into luxury-loving parasites and
+playthings. A good many of them have taken this easiest way and entered
+the peripatetic harems of the rich. But several million women refused to
+repeat the old cycle of ruin; they knew too much.[27] What then should
+they do? Faith in the value of conventual life for women had passed;
+industrial changes had transformed their homes so that the endless
+spinning, weaving, sewing and knitting were no longer there, even to be
+supervised. Penelope's tasks had passed to foremen, working under trades
+union agreements, in the factories of Fall River and Birmingham. Even
+the function of the lady bountiful who looked after the spiritual and
+family affairs of her tenants and servants and distributed doles and
+Christmas baskets was gone. Her tenants owned their own farms, and her
+chauffeur resented her interference with his personal life. What should
+she do?
+
+[27] RHETA CHILDE DORR, _What Eight Million Women Want,_ Boston: Small,
+Maynard & Co., 1910.
+
+And this movement was not confined to the rich, for those who were not
+yet economically free were still deeply influenced by the changes which
+were taking place. The Goulds, Stanfords, Vanderbilts, Floods, Carnegies
+and Schwabs had all been lifted from the level of the masses to
+financial grandeur before the eyes of the multitude, and democratic
+ambitions drove parents who thought themselves in the line of financial
+advancement to secure culture for their girls in time. If the daughter
+was destined to live on Fifth Avenue, or to marry a duke, it was best to
+get her ready while young. In all our industrial democracies, armies of
+American parents have devoted themselves to labor, and even sacrificed
+comforts and necessities, that the daughters might get ready to live
+easier and fuller lives than the parents had known. If the choice had to
+be made between the girl and her brother, the chivalry of the father and
+the ambition of the mother very often gave the opportunity to the girl.
+
+And so an emancipated army of leisure has been formed which has
+transformed the very nature of the culture with which it has busied
+itself. Books, periodicals, musical instruments, travel became cheaper
+and cheaper as the demand increased. Wholesale production makes almost
+any luxury accessible to every one. It is also possible to find modern
+and agreeable forms for older academic exercises. If Greek and Latin
+were too full or too difficult, courses in Romanic and Germanic
+philology would do as well. Anglo-Saxon gave way to Old English; and
+Chaucer to the Lake Poets. Philosophy struggled for favor with the
+English novel on equal terms. The works of Raphael were photographed and
+lithographed until the Sistine Madonna became as commonly known as the
+face of any strenuous and popular statesman of the day. With the aid of
+these art productions, and John Addington Symonds, every woman with
+leisure became an art critic. If economics was not interesting,
+sociology was available; and it could be democratized to any degree
+desired. If travel was troublesome, one could leave it to Cook; buy a
+ticket and he would do the rest.
+
+If these awakening hungers and corresponding opportunities had affected
+only the period of life formerly thought available for education, these
+changes would have come about much more slowly than they have. But the
+genetic conception of life, steadily popularized since 1870, has led us
+to see that education is coterminous with life. It seems strange that we
+should have ever thought that mental activity belongs alone to youth.
+Dorland's study shows that in a list of four hundred fairly
+representative great men, only 10.25% ceased their mental activity
+between the ages of forty and fifty; 20.75% between fifty and sixty; 35%
+between sixty and seventy; 22.5% between seventy and eighty; and 6%
+after eighty.[28]
+
+[28] W.A. NEWMAN DORLAND, _The Age of Mental Virility_. New York: The
+Century Company, 1908.
+
+The recognition of such facts as these has given us a new genetic sense
+of life, under the influence of which mothers and grandmothers have
+joined the younger women in the pursuit of culture. They have formed
+clubs--study clubs, current events clubs, camera clubs, art clubs,
+literary clubs, civic clubs. They have organized courses of university
+extension lectures; enrolled in Chicago University correspondence
+courses; and have flocked to Chautauqua by the thousand in the summer,
+when not abroad. It is not through the generosity of men that liberal
+culture has come into the possession of women; they have carried it by
+storm and have compelled capitulation.
+
+Judging by the facts presented in the last chapter, women are pretty
+fully in possession of formal education. If we examine this monopoly a
+little more carefully, we shall find that while in the kindergarten and
+in the elementary schools boys furnish 51% of the enrollment, simply
+because more boys are born in civilized communities than girls, as soon
+as we reach the high schools, girls increasingly take the lead. In 1910,
+the girls formed 56.45% of the enrollment in high schools--or there were
+110,249 more girls than boys. The proportion of girls increased through
+each of the four years of the course, and of the graduates, 60.8% were
+girls. In the public normal schools, 64.45% of the students were girls.
+
+The universities, colleges and technical schools, which are massed
+together in our government reports, had hardly any women students in
+1870; in 1880, 19.3% of the students were women; in 1890, 27%; in 1910,
+30.4%. In all these institutions we had enrolled in 1910, 17,707 women.
+Of 602 institutions reported in 1910, 142 were for men only; 108 were
+for women only; and 352 were open to both sexes. But here again the
+influence of women increases during each of the four years for, as we
+have seen, the women took 41.1% of the A.B. degrees granted in 1910. It
+is surely not too much to say that, if present conditions continue,
+women will soon be in an overwhelming majority in all secondary and
+higher education in the United States.
+
+If we examine the teaching force, we find this monopoly already
+established. In 1870, when our government records begin, 59% of the
+teachers were women; in 1880, 57.2% were women; in 1890, 65.5%; in 1900,
+70.1%; in 1910, 78.6%. The more settled and intelligent the community
+the more rapid this advance has been. Thus Arkansas has 52.4% women
+teachers; but Massachusetts has 91.1% and Connecticut has 93%.
+
+In cities, too, the women fill nearly all teaching positions. New York
+City has 89% women in its force; Boston, 89%; Philadelphia, 91.4%;
+Chicago, 93.3%. In many cities the proportion is even greater than this:
+Omaha has 97%; Wheeling, W. Va., 97.5%; Charleston, S.C., 99.3%; and in
+forty-six American towns of 4,000 to 8,000 inhabitants there is no man
+teaching. When we remember that many of the men indicated above are in
+high schools or in supervising posts, we are prepared for the statement
+in a report recently laid before the Board of Education of New York City
+that in half the cities of the United States there are virtually no men
+teaching.
+
+In our high schools, 54% of the teachers are women; in public normal
+schools, 65%; and in institutions of higher learning 17.6% are women.
+Even in supervising positions, there are more women than men in the
+large centers of population. Certainly these figures justify us in
+saying that women have established a monopoly of education in the United
+States, except in the higher institutions.
+
+In order to discuss the effects which this monopoly of education by
+women is having on the curriculum of the schools we must first agree on
+what constitutes the peculiarity of women's minds as compared with men's
+minds.[29] In our first chapter, it was asserted that women are more
+interested in the concrete, human, personal, conserving and emotional
+aspects of life; while men more easily turn to the abstract, material,
+impersonal, creative and rational aspects. To put it broadly, women are
+more interested in the humanities; men more readily pursue the sciences.
+Let us admit at once that there are many individual exceptions to this
+statement. Some women have reached great excellence in abstract studies;
+and some men are notoriously concrete and emotional; but nevertheless
+the general statement seems borne out by a wealth of common observations
+and detailed comparisons.
+
+[29] See _The Americans_, by HUGO MUeNSTERBERG, pp. 558-589. Boston:
+Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901.
+
+Personal observation must always be colored by prejudices and
+prepossessions, but my own have been so wide, and so uniformly in one
+direction, that it seems justifiable to report them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a quarter of a century I have been working in schools or with
+teachers, and my personal observations all agree with the above
+characterization. I have spent five years in Cornell University, New
+York; one year in Zurich University in Switzerland; two years in the
+State University of Indiana and seven years in Stanford University in
+California. These institutions are widely distributed; they were all
+fully co-educational; and they each had a wide range of elective
+studies. In all of them, class-rooms devoted to literature and modern
+languages had a large attendance of women, while lecture-rooms and
+laboratories devoted to abstract science were almost deserted by them.
+This could not have been due to commercial considerations, for many of
+these women were facing teaching; and during all this time the demand
+for women who could teach science has been much greater than for women
+who could teach literature.
+
+In my work with teachers, both in the classroom and in the field, I have
+carried out many inductive, quantitative studies, based on measurements
+or returns from large numbers of children. I have never found women
+teachers taking up and carrying out this kind of work with any such
+enthusiasm as men apply to it, though it lies at the base of their
+professional life.
+
+Institutional generalizations seem all to point in this same direction.
+For instance, the Girls' Evening High School in Philadelphia is managed
+by one of the best known scientific women in the country, Dr. L.L.W.
+Wilson, head of the biological department of the Philadelphia Normal
+School. With a thousand girls of high school grade, under the leadership
+of a scientific woman, the only science courses given in the school are
+those in domestic science. The reason is that the girls, most of them
+not being candidates for a degree, will not take up science work, though
+they form strong classes in literature and languages.
+
+If, from such general facts of observation, one turns to exact
+comparisons, where quantities can be measured, the results are all the
+same. Of students enrolled in classical departments of universities,
+colleges and technical schools reporting to the United States Bureau of
+Education, in 1910, 36.5% were women, while of those enrolled in general
+science courses, but 17.2% were women. In 1,511 public and private high
+schools and seminaries, reporting to the Bureau of Education in
+1909-1910, a larger percentage of boys than of girls was enrolled in
+algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, physical geography,
+civil government and rhetoric, which is a scientific study of language.
+A larger proportion of girls enrolled in Latin, French, German, English
+literature and history, and there was a slightly greater enrollment of
+girls in botany, zoology and physiology.
+
+In the further discussion of this subject it will then be taken for
+granted that in education, feminization means emphasis on languages,
+literature and history, as opposed to mathematics, physics, chemistry
+and civics. For the elementary schools we have no data capable of
+reduction to figures, but general observation, backed by an examination
+of courses of study and textbooks, will compel any one to say that in
+twenty years we have made wonderful progress in reading, language,
+stories, mythology, biography and history; while all our efforts to
+bring nature work into vital relation with the schools have borne little
+fruit. Our country schools need lessons in agriculture, and the children
+should gain a deep sense of country life. But how can celibate young
+women, longing toward the towns, give this? Any subjects well taught are
+sure to be increasingly taught, and it takes no extended study to see
+that our elementary schools are being feminized in the direction of
+literature. This is the more striking when we remember that these twenty
+years have been dominated, in the larger world, by scientific interests.
+
+In the high schools and seminaries, we have fairly complete returns
+showing the number of students enrolled in certain subjects since 1890.
+The pupils taking Latin have increased 15%; French, 4%; German, 13%;
+English literature has increased in ten years 7% (there is no record for
+this subject before 1898); and European history, 27%. There has also
+been an increase of 11% in algebra and 10% in geometry, probably partly
+due to vocational need and to the emphasis laid on these subjects for
+admission to college. But physics, in the twenty years under
+consideration, has fallen off 7%; chemistry, 3%; physical geography, 5%;
+physiology, 15%; and civics, 7%.[30] A careful study of these figures
+must convince any fair-minded person that our school curriculum, even in
+the secondary field, where women's control is least complete, is moving
+rapidly in the direction of what we have called feminization.
+
+[30] _Report of the United States Commissioner of Education_, 1910, Vol.
+II, p. 1139.
+
+The schools, too, must increasingly do something more than train the
+intellect; and in all physical activity involuntary suggestion is very
+powerful. Playgrounds are laboratories of conduct, and they should not
+only give physical exercise, but should also furnish standards and
+ideals. There can be no doubt that women are physically more restrained,
+retiring, non-contesting, and graceful than men; but can dancing,
+marching, and gymnastics take the place of more aggressive, direct and
+violent contests in the training of boys? So in industries, women are
+more given to conserving, arranging and beautifying, more given to
+clerking and recording, while men are more creative, disbursing, more
+given to mining, agriculture and commerce. Even granting equal
+understanding and experience, the tradition of the race must count for
+much; and it would seem that at every stage of growth, boys and girls
+alike should feel the impulse to imitate men who have an instinct to
+make and unmake, to trade and carry. It is no justification of existing
+conditions to say that the men now in the teaching profession lack
+these qualities; if they do, let us get rid of them and have real men.
+And for purposes of political life, does it not seem strange to bring up
+a generation of boys and girls who are to be the future citizens of a
+democracy under the exclusive leadership of people who have never been
+encouraged to think about political life nor allowed to participate in
+it? Let us by all means enfranchise women; but even then they cannot
+hope to quickly catch up with those who have some thousands of years the
+start, even after allowing for the fact that girls inherit from both
+father and mother.
+
+Most of these differences which we have been discussing seem to rest in
+the fact that women are more personal in their interests and judgments
+than men are. This may be due to their education for thousands of years;
+but that makes it no less true. Women certainly, in a great majority of
+cases, are more interested in a case than in a constitution; in a man
+than in a mission; in a poem that in a treatise; in equity than in law.
+In a generation when everything is tending toward great aggregations,
+consolidated industries, segregated wealth, and new syntheses of
+knowledge, both boys and girls should have such training as will fit
+them to play their part in these larger units.
+
+As to the feminizing influence of exclusively women teachers on manners
+and morals and general attitude toward life there can be no real doubt.
+Boys and girls cannot spend eight or twelve impressionable years of
+childhood and youth under the constant daily influence of women without
+having the ladylike attitude toward life strongly emphasized. To deny
+this is to repudiate the power of constant involuntary suggestion and
+association. Whether it is desirable or not, is another question. The
+change may be all in the direction of advancing civilization; but just
+as in the assimilation of our subject races, the philosophic mind must
+be distressed by the disappearance of so many varieties of speech,
+customs, and artistic and industrial products, so in this present
+assimilation, one cannot help regretting the steady disappearance of the
+katabolic qualities of the human male. One does not need to say that
+this feminized product is better or worse than what we have had, but it
+is certainly narrower, and less in harmony with the world's thought and
+work, than it formerly was.
+
+If we turn from education to the press we have similar conditions.
+During these past few years, hundreds of journals have sprung up devoted
+to women's special interests. They are almost all of them showy,
+fragmentary, personal, concrete and emotional. It is difficult to find
+one that represents general or abstract interests. At least one of these
+journals which boasts a fabulous circulation is supported by its women
+subscribers and readers to oppose the larger interests of women in
+education, industry and political life. At least, if it does not oppose
+these interests, it does not aid them. Imagine a million German women
+sending the Kaiser one dollar and a half a year to induce him to tell
+them once a month to go back to their kitchens, churches and children!
+
+The newspapers of America have steadily changed during the last three
+decades in the same direction. Editorial pages and news columns have
+been steadily modified in the direction of fragmentary, egoistic,
+personal and sensational, or at least emotional, appeals. These are the
+qualities of children's minds and of undeveloped minds everywhere. The
+change is, of course, a part of the larger democratic movement of our
+time, and many causes have contributed to bring it about. Had women not
+been so active, something of the same sort would have happened; but if
+women were all to forget how to read overnight, there is little doubt
+that the newspapers would find it advantageous to print more
+statesmanlike editorials and more general and abstract news.
+
+With the weeklies and monthlies, the change taking place is the same.
+The new reading public, brought in by increase in population and by
+popular education, does not support the _Atlantic_, the _Century_ and
+_Scribner's,_ but turns to _Munsey's_, _McClure's_ and _Everybody's_.
+The very change in names speaks of the new personal and egoistic element
+that has come into journalism. Of course, such changes are only in part
+due to the influence of women, but the change is in the direction of the
+qualities that characterize distinctively women's journals.
+
+In books, the personal and romantic novel has taken precedence over
+every other form of literature. Many of these are written by women;
+their circulation, both through libraries and through sales, is much
+greater with women than with men; and in many of them the personal
+gossip is as transient as that which fills the evening papers.[31]
+
+[31] _The Feminine Note in Fiction_, by W.L. COURTNEY, London, Chapman &
+Hall, 1904; the author tries to prove that there is such a thing as a
+feminine style in fiction.
+
+In the churches, especially in the ritualistic churches, women have long
+been the faithful attendants. Nowhere, except in the churches which make
+a rationalistic and abstract appeal, and in the Ethical Societies, does
+one find a preponderance of men. In 1903, a careful enumeration of all
+attendants at places of worship was made in the city of London. The
+count was taken on fair Sundays in autumn, and covered both morning and
+evening services. Sixty-one per cent. of all adult attendants were
+women, 146,372 more women than men passing through the doors.
+
+About the same time a similar census was made in the part of New York
+City lying on Manhattan Island. The women were in excess by 171,749,
+and formed 69 per cent. of all attendants. Even church service, if not
+entirely tied to set forms, must seek to interest those who occupy the
+pews; and no observer can fail to note in both England and America, a
+movement toward ritualism on the one hand, and on the other, toward
+popular, personal, concrete and sometimes sensational preaching. The
+same general changes are taking place in libraries, in the drama, in
+concerts, in all group activities connected with learning and the fine
+arts.
+
+But on the other side, if emancipated women had not applied themselves,
+since 1870, to the direction of education, literature, religion and
+amusements, all these interests must have suffered serious neglect and
+probable deterioration through the concentrating of the interests of the
+ablest men in engineering, manufacturing, commerce and other fields of
+pure and applied science. By popularizing these interests, women have
+really humanized them, as all similar revolutions have done in the past.
+In breaking up old forms and intellectual conventions they have set free
+new and vital impulses. Whether the historian of the future will
+consider this period of democratization and feminization a time of
+advance may be uncertain; but it is certainly a time of liberated energy
+and of broadening participation in all that is best in life.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Economic Independence of Women
+
+
+Nowhere does a human being escape compulsion. Even were he alone in the
+world he would be forced to obey the physical laws governing gravity,
+heat, cold, hunger and disease. No matter what his desires might be, he
+would find himself limited and constrained by fixed laws, the inexorable
+penalties of which he could escape only by obedience. If the man were
+not alone, then each one of his companions would limit his freedom, and
+he would limit each one in the group, if they were to live together in
+peace and efficiency; and yet each of the man's companions would help to
+free him from the tyranny of physical forces, from the social pressure
+of others, and even from the bondage of his own nature.
+
+Independence is thus an ideal to be achieved only through obedience. It
+begins in self-subordination and reaches its finest realization in
+social subordination. Since the beginning of time men who thought have
+always dreamed of freedom; and for two hundred years now independence
+has been a word to conjure with. But in so far as independence means
+freedom to follow one's own unregulated desires, it is a fantastic and
+dangerous dream; and yet this dream of impossible independence has been
+among the greatest influences in furthering human development in the
+past.
+
+The old-time dependence of one individual on the immediate caprices of
+another largely disappeared with the passing of slavery. But in place of
+this personal subjection has come a more complex and in some ways more
+compelling and crushing control through the monopoly of wealth. Property
+has become the medium through which the most binding of human relations
+are organized. Accumulated wealth has become a great reservoir of power
+to which some individuals gain access through rights of birth, others
+through carefully guarded privileges, and still others through cunning
+devices or through force; but the masses of the people must gain their
+fragments of this wealth through arduous lifelong labor. Even the earth,
+the original source of all wealth, is parceled out, and all of it is now
+owned by individuals or groups who control it in their own interests.
+One man may thus have thousands of acres which he cannot use, and which
+he will not allow others to use, while another has not where to lay his
+head. Laws jealously guard this wealth, which is the key to all
+opportunity; and public opinion, that most subtle, pervasive and
+compelling of all forms of law, gathers a thousand sacred initiations,
+rites, ceremonies, prohibitions and ex-communications around it. A man
+who has killed his neighbor, or ruined his friend's family, may be less
+punished by society than one who cheats at cards.
+
+In primitive life a man may be a man by virtue of what he is; to-day he
+may have all the rights and privileges of any man by virtue of what he
+possesses. In any community can be found strong men, honest, though
+misplaced or unfortunate, begging bread, wasting their lives for want of
+money to live decently. And beside these one sees other men of weak
+physique and feeble minds, who have lived as parasites on society all
+their lives, but who are handsomely dressed, well fed, and possessed of
+power to do as they will, simply because they have access to wealth. It
+is no wonder that if one would seek freedom to-day in America he must
+look for her image on a gold coin.
+
+It is not difficult to see why property has become such a powerful
+instrument in civilization. Anything which a person really owns, in a
+psychological sense, is a home for his soul. Really owning an object, a
+toy, a garment, a watch or a home, means infusing one's personality into
+it. A man who possesses significant things has a new body through which
+his soul can work; this body trains his powers; and it should give him
+life more abundantly. A landless man must become a soulless man. Of
+course, we are not here speaking of legal ownership. Many people own
+legally things into which they have never infused themselves; sometimes
+they have so many things that no individual could possibly infuse
+himself into them.
+
+These conditions may prevail even in primitive life, but to-day they
+have been vastly increased through the fact that with advancing
+civilization money was devised. This is a system of counters, generally
+coin or paper, not really valuable in themselves, but always resting
+back for value on the earth, or on something derived from it. In the
+past it was supposed that there were some things which, because of their
+nature, were not marketable, while others were beyond price. To-day we
+set values on everything, even on men's bodies; eyes, ears, legs and
+lives can be priced. There are, in fact, insurance companies and
+factories that have regular schedules of value for various parts of the
+body. Our courts set prices on blighted affections, damaged reputations,
+social advancements, impaired digestions, damaged complexions, nervous
+shocks and extreme humiliations. Even a woman's honor may have a price
+in dollars.
+
+These property rights, like the rights of the person, have always been
+subject to violence. Powerful individuals and groups have always been
+able to overstep legal restrictions and public opinion, and seize what
+they desired. The land grabbing going on in North Africa and Persia
+to-day and the activity of great industrial monopolies at home, show us
+that some property rights still need to be secured by force. In this
+struggle, it has come about naturally that men, being stronger, freer
+and less scrupulous than women, have outstripped them and have so far
+had a pretty complete monopoly of wealth. In fact women themselves have
+at times become property. In such times a man who stole or bought a
+woman, naturally took over with her all her rights in real estate and
+personal property as well as her person and her services.
+
+Only gradually did women gain power to hold property themselves. Mainly
+because fathers wished to preserve property in their families, the right
+of women to inherit became slowly established as civilization advanced.
+In Judea, Greece and Rome, certain rights of a woman to hold property
+were clearly settled. In the reversion to force under feudalism, woman's
+rights to outside property suffered; but they have been gradually
+restored during the last few centuries. To-day, in civilized lands, a
+woman's rights to property, inherited or definitely given her or
+purchased by her, are everywhere recognized, if she does not marry. In
+France, and other Latin countries, she may still lose control of her
+property if she takes a husband; but in northern and western lands, even
+a married woman may retain her possessions.
+
+Woman's body, too, is increasingly looked upon as her personal property.
+With the raising of the age of consent; with increasing severity in laws
+punishing rape, and with the abrogation of judicial orders for the
+restitution of marital rights, it is now quite generally recognized that
+a woman should have the right to control her own person. Still, in many
+lands there is much to be done before this right is fully safeguarded.
+
+The place where a woman has not yet achieved economic freedom is in the
+disposal of her labor. One must remember, however, in this connection,
+that not only is there no fixed standard of values in human service as
+yet, but that many indispensable forms of service have not even been
+legally recognized as valuable. In early forms of civilization, fighting
+and praying were considered the most important work the community
+received, and warriors and priests gained the big rewards. They
+received lands, gold, servants and dignities, while industrial workers,
+even the directors, were despised. To-day we have reversed all this and
+we may pay a general only five thousand dollars a year, and a priest
+eight hundred dollars, while a man who develops a big industry may
+receive a hundred thousand dollars annually. Again, a man who invents a
+new gun may be given a fortune, like that of Herr Krupp, while a man who
+invents a surgical instrument is prevented by the ethics of his
+profession from even patenting it. If Pasteur had been paid for his
+services to France and to humanity, he would have ranked in the
+financial world with Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Schwab. We pay a State
+superintendent of public instruction ten thousand dollars a year; but
+Miss Jane Addams, as instructor in ethics to the United States, receives
+no salary, and she must even beg the money to maintain her laboratory at
+Hull House. The whole question of payment for services is in a chaotic
+condition. Those who serve mankind most faithfully are rewarded on the
+principle, "From each according to his ability;" but nowhere is the
+remainder of the principle, "To each according to his needs,"
+recognized. Hence our greatest servants must still beg support from our
+cleverest exploiters.
+
+Domestic service is indispensable to society, but so far it has remained
+in the field of semi-slavery and uncertain barter; in a word, it is
+still in the feudal stage. The woman gives what she is and has, and
+nominally she gets protection and support. Sometimes these fail and, on
+the other hand, she occasionally receives the unearned gifts supposed to
+befit a potentate or a shrine. As women become educated they find this
+condition of uncertainty and instability unbearable. They are willing to
+work, but they must have a chance to think and to plan their lives
+according to their individual needs. Some degree of economic
+independence is necessary to intelligent thinking and orderly living. It
+is not that women are demanding more property; they are demanding some
+definite individual property as a home for their souls; and they are
+coming to realize that if this property rests on some one else's
+feelings and caprices it is no home for the soul; it is only a tavern.
+
+This conception is well illustrated by the case of a woman in western
+New York, who married about 1850, and went to live on a farm with her
+husband. They had small means, but she brought seven hundred dollars to
+the altar, which was more than he possessed in ready capital. Her part
+was, however, soon swallowed up in the general business, and while there
+was a tacit agreement, voiced at long intervals, that she had put
+something into the business, her part never increased, though the man
+with whom she worked grew well-to-do. Certain feudal rights in the
+butter the woman made and in the chickens she raised, yielded her small
+sums, which often escaped her, but which she sometimes secured and put
+into a few silver spoons and dishes for her table, a square of Brussels
+carpet, three lace curtains, a marble topped stand, and six horsehair
+covered chairs for her parlor. These articles were considered in a very
+special sense her own. The man might have sold them and used the money,
+but public opinion would have condemned him had he done so.
+
+Meantime the woman cooked for the family and the hired men, scrubbed
+and washed and mended. She strained and skimmed the milk from a dozen
+cows, and churned the butter; she fed the calves; cared for the hens;
+dug in the garden; gathered the vegetables; did the family sewing; and
+stole fragments of time for her flower-beds. Her hours were from five in
+the morning until nine at night, three hundred and sixty-five days in
+the year, with no half-days or Sundays off.
+
+Incidentally she read her Bible, maintained religious exercises in the
+village, provided the church with a carpet by methods of indirection and
+kept the church clean. She upheld a moral standard toward which men only
+weakly struggled; hunted down and drove away all other women who refused
+equal service to their lords; ministered to the neighboring sick; and
+doled out alms in winter-time. Her home was a social and industrial
+microcosm which she conducted as a feudal holding under the protection
+of her lord. It would be an interesting study to work out the rules of
+this feudal relation between husband and wife in any agricultural
+community. They would be found as varied, as unjust and arbitrary, and
+as generous, as those of the old regime in France.
+
+A woman in a home is supposed to furnish three kinds of service. She
+must be a housekeeper, a wife and a mother. As housekeeper, her services
+can be estimated in current values running from three to twenty-five
+dollars a week with board and lodging. The other two kinds of service
+have never been reduced to monetary values.
+
+As a wife, a woman is supposed to give her love, her person, her
+sympathy and inspiration; the personal care of a husband, including his
+clothes, attention to his relations and friends and general management
+of his social position and reputation. If she fills this position well,
+she is mistress, valet, confidential adviser and public entertainer.
+Possibly these services can be rated except the first, and even here the
+divorce courts scale alienated affections all the way from five hundred
+to twenty-five thousand dollars, according to the appearance of the
+woman and the skill of contending lawyers.
+
+As a mother, the woman is supposed to give children a good heritage,
+nurse them, care for them, doctor them and train them. We have
+established values for these services as wet-nurse, nurse-maid,
+governess, doctor and teacher, but who can estimate a woman's value in
+giving a child a good heritage?
+
+It is no wonder that such a difficult problem has remained thus far
+unsolved. Here and there a man gives his wife a household allowance,
+from the money they earn in common, and she struggles to save from it
+some fragments for her individual needs; others put their wives on a
+salary; and some others divide the income on a fractional basis. But the
+slightest study of existing conditions must convince any one that women
+are everywhere deeply dissatisfied with their economic relations to the
+family. On referring recently to this fact before an audience almost
+equally divided between suffragists and anti-suffragists, I found every
+woman present applauding the statement. Another time when I asked more
+than sixty of the wealthiest women in one of our cities how many were
+dissatisfied with their relations to the family property, explaining
+that I was not asking how many wanted more money but how many wanted a
+different relation to the family money, all the women raised their
+hands except three and they all had private property.
+
+Meantime, economic changes, to be described in the next chapter, have
+transformed our homes and nearly eight million women have gone outside
+to earn money. The gladness with which they have gone shows that they
+were not afraid to work, though at first the money did not belong to
+them, but to their families. Almost everywhere in the United States the
+money women now earn is their own; only in Louisiana can the husband
+collect his wife's wages. Any one who reads Mrs. Gilman's masterly study
+of the evil effects accompanying woman's economic independence must feel
+how far-reaching are not only the discontent but also the evil
+influences of our present system through over-emphasizing sex and
+through corrupting the public thinking and feeling concerning services
+and wages in general.[32]
+
+[32] CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, _Woman and Economics_, Boston: Small,
+Maynard & Co., 1898. See, also, _Woman and Labor_, by OLIVE SCHREINER,
+New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.
+
+Yet no one can seriously approach this problem in his own person
+without feeling that the relations of husband and wife contain elements
+that not only make it impossible to resolve the woman's service into
+money values, but that would make it useless to do so even if it could
+be done. The most distinctive quality of love is its desire to give.
+Love that seeks to get is not love. If when a woman gives herself she
+tries to secure individual property it will be only that she may give it
+to the man she loves. Marriage is a partnership of soul and body, and
+this includes property. It still remains true, however, that each must
+have in order that he may give. Besides this, there are always outside
+obligations, and special needs within the group, that require individual
+property for their realization.
+
+In the past, the partnership of marriage has been incomplete on the
+property side; why not complete it? Why not reorganize our laws and our
+public opinion so that two people who establish a family, putting into
+it all they have, should pay out of the income the necessary family
+expenses and divide all else equally between the parties? Property
+acquired before marriage, and all inherited property, might well be held
+in individual right since it should never be a prize for prostitution,
+not even when it is euphemistically termed "a good home."
+
+Under equal suffrage Idaho has passed such a law, and all property
+gained after marriage belongs equally to husband and wife. If the wife
+dies, her heirs, in absence of a will, inherit half of the family
+property. If the two separate, the court, in absence of an outside
+agreement, settles the property as it does the children. The judge may
+order that it be divided equally, or he may give it all to either party,
+according to conditions; but the woman has identical rights with the
+man. Surely some such solution is demanded by our present unrest. No one
+will ever be economically independent; but husband and wife should be
+economically equal.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+Women in Industry
+
+
+In all the animal world one can hardly find a place where orderly
+effort, planned to secure some future advantage, does not appear.
+Getting food, defending life, and caring for offspring have all combined
+to drive not only the descendants of Adam, but his ancestors as well, to
+sweat-producing effort. Of course this is not definitely planned;
+getting food often waits on appetite; defense is sometimes merely
+running away; and the young are frequently left to feed themselves or
+die. But the fact remains that in digging burrows, building nests,
+laying up honey and nuts, and in protecting and providing for the young,
+a vast deal of effort is put forth in forest and field which is not
+immediately productive of pleasure.
+
+This work is seldom equally shared by all the members of the group. With
+bees, the drones and the queen are alike exempt from work, and an
+asexual group has been developed to feed and protect them. Some ants
+compel others to do their work; and everywhere there seem to be
+individuals who are constitutionally lazy and others who, because of
+strength or sex attractiveness, are able to get more than their share of
+food and protection with less than their share of effort.
+
+From the first, some division of work between male and female grows
+almost inevitably out of their different relations to reproduction.
+Following conception, the male can always run away and leave the female
+to feed and fight for herself and her offspring, and he is very prone to
+do so. Even when he stays by and shares in the joy of the newly born he
+generally leaves the female to get ready the nest, and largely she
+protects and provisions it.
+
+Among domesticated animals, where their working possibilities have been
+very highly developed, females are much more desirable workers than
+males. The maternal function partly explains this, as in the case of
+cows and hens which give us milk and eggs; and even with mares and sheep
+the offspring adds to the general working value. Still, it seems to be
+true that even for purposes of draught, the males are of less value than
+the females, unless reduced to the non-sexual condition of geldings and
+oxen. The stallion, bull or ram is too katabolic, too much of a
+consuming, distributing, destroying force to be very valuable in the
+daily routine of agriculture or commerce. While the female is generally
+smaller and less powerful than the male, she is quiet, easily enslaved;
+and, as we have said, her maternal functions can be diverted to our
+daily use. She produces more workers, and her flesh is more palatable,
+because less distinctive, than that of the male. Hence, among
+domesticated animals, selection, based on considerations of work,
+multiplies females and keeps males only for breeding purposes.
+
+As a quadruped, the female suffers very little handicap from the
+functions peculiar to her sex, except when actually carrying her young
+or nursing them. When she stands erect, however, the support for the
+special organs of reproduction is far from ideal; heavy lifting, or
+long-continued standing, often leads to disaster, and the periodic
+functions, even in the healthiest conditions, must always place women
+at a working disadvantage as compared with men. Add to this the fact
+that women are smaller, less agile, and far less strong, than men, and,
+even when not encumbered with young, it is clear that a woman, when
+confronting physical work in competition with men, needs something more
+than a fair field and free competition.[33] Idealists and travelers
+among primitive people love to tell us how easily women meet their
+special functions, carrying burdens equal to those carried by men when
+on the march, and dropping out from the caravan for only a few hours to
+give birth to a child; but the fact remains that women in all primitive
+societies age quickly and that those who are spoiled are thrown aside
+and forgotten.[34] Woman's handicap as a working animal in competition
+with man is too obvious and too deep-seated to be idealized away.
+
+[33] The Supreme Court of the United States, in passing on the "Oregon
+laundry case," in 1907, declared a bill limiting a woman's working hours
+constitutional. See the _Brief for the State of Oregon_, prepared by
+LOUIS D. BRANDEIS, published by The National Consumers' League, 105 East
+22d Street, New York.
+
+[34] DUDLEY, _Principles and Practices of Gynecology_, pp. 23-24, says
+that among Indian women want of care during and after labor leads to
+numberless evils.
+
+In all savage societies labor is clearly specialized between the sexes.
+The man, because of his superior strength and mobility, fights, hunts
+and makes weapons of the chase. The woman fetches and carries, digs and
+delves, cures the meat, makes the rude huts, clothing and pottery.
+Gradually she changes wild grasses to domesticated plants, and rears the
+young animals brought home from the chase, till they follow and serve
+their human masters. She is truly the mother of industries, and it in no
+way detracts from her credit that her motherhood is here, as elsewhere,
+mainly unthinking.
+
+With the exhaustion of the supply of wild animals, man is forced to turn
+his attention to the world of vegetation and he takes over the direction
+of the plants and animals which woman has largely domesticated. In his
+career as fighter and hunter he has learned to cooperate with his
+fellows to a degree which aids him greatly in dividing the arable land,
+protecting his crops, and using grazing lands in common with the tribe.
+He has also learned to make stone hatchets, spears and bows and arrows.
+Woman has not felt the same necessity to invent in her work; such new
+tools as she has devised have been helpful, but men who could not invent
+have been wiped out by those who learned to make stronger spears or
+better arrow-heads.
+
+It is the same difference in adaptability which one observes to-day
+between the farmers on the western frontier of America and those who
+remain in their peasant homes in Europe. The peasant has even greater
+need of inventing than has his expatriated countryman in Colorado, but
+he lacks the driving impulse. It was the same with women and men under
+the conditions of savage life. Thus it came about that man's greater
+strength and mobility, backed by power of cooperation and invention,
+gave him the leadership in such primitive life as we find depicted in
+the pages of Homer or in the epic of the Jews. True, woman was his first
+lieutenant, but he spoke for her in most of the larger matters of the
+industrial life.
+
+With settled conditions and accumulation of wealth, the most desirable
+women were almost entirely freed from physical labor and gradually
+became luxury-loving parasites and playthings, as we pointed out in the
+second chapter of this volume. Meantime slaves were multiplying, male
+and female and, while the most desirable women passed to the harem, the
+mass of them became drudges in house and field. It is hard for us to
+realize that it is exactly in those times when a few women are
+surrounded with great luxury that most of the sex are reduced to heavy
+labor and wretchedness.
+
+During the early Christian ages, a tradition was gradually formed
+concerning woman's place in industry, or rather three traditions were
+formed. The working woman of the lower classes was to be the
+housekeeper, which meant that she was to care for food, cook, spin,
+weave, sew and mend, scrub and wash, bear children and nurse and tend
+them. If she were of the middle class, she was to be a mother, to
+supervise this range of work, look after dependents, conserve social
+conditions and be the lady bountiful of her district. The second ideal
+was the woman of religion, who was to subdue her passions, observe set
+prayers and other religious exercises, and do the menial work of the
+convent. The third ideal was the lady of chivalry, who appeared after
+the tenth century. She was to be cared for and protected from work or
+anxiety; menials were to prepare her food, clothes and ornaments;
+gallants were to await her orders and do her bidding.
+
+With the rise of Protestantism, and later with the rise of modern
+democracy, these ideals were blended, and women found themselves, not
+indeed slaves and subject to sale, but serfs, entangled in a mass of
+feudal obligations and bound to the house. Practically, most men still
+hold this threefold conception of woman's place in the social organism.
+She is to be a combination of housekeeper, nun and lady. It is the
+kitchen, church and children ideal of the German Emperor.
+
+Meantime forces were set at work which were to change the economic
+foundations of the family and enable the woman to emerge from serfdom
+into some new form of industrial relationship. From the rise of the
+European cities in the twelfth century, certain industries have tended,
+especially in the Netherlands and in England, to segregate themselves in
+farm-houses and towns. Women naturally participated in these
+activities, generally taking the least desirable parts. With the freeing
+of the mind, which followed the democratic revolutions at the end of the
+eighteenth century, inventions blossomed out and perfected steam
+engines, cotton gins, spinning jennies, and a thousand other machines
+driven by steam or water power, which have changed the civilization of
+Europe and America. Miss Edith Abbott has shown us how this change,
+involving increasing segregation and specialization, came into America
+even in the pre-Revolutionary time.[35]
+
+[35] EDITH ABBOTT, _Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic
+History_, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1910.
+
+Spinning and weaving industries led the way in this movement, but its
+full force was not felt until the late eighteenth century. Since then,
+one industry after another has left the home for the factory until
+to-day, in all large communities, even the preparation of food
+increasingly goes to the packing-house, the canning establishment, the
+bakery and the delicatessen-store. These industries needed hands, and so
+the women followed them to the factories.
+
+As 1870 marks the beginning of higher education for women, so it also
+marks the beginning of her industrial self-consciousness. The perfecting
+of such inventions as the typewriter, the telegraph and the telephone,
+and the creation of a great variety of office appliances, together with
+the perfecting of highly elaborate means of distribution, like the
+departmental store, called for thousands of cheap workers possessed of
+some slight intelligence but not necessarily having any serious
+preliminary training. Our elementary schools and high schools have
+increasingly turned out a multitude of girls who could meet these
+requirements. The increased cost of living, the lessened labor demands
+of the home, and the attractions of the pay envelope, have called
+millions to work in industrial plants. In 1890, there were 4,005,532
+wage-earning women in the United States; in 1900, 5,319,397; while in
+1910, we have probably nearly 8,000,000.
+
+Like most other great changes in civilization, this industrial
+transformation was neither preceded nor accompanied by any general
+consciousness of what was happening. Daily necessities were offset by
+weekly pay envelopes, or the failures fell out of sight, and so the next
+week and the years followed. Country populations moved away; cities grew
+enormously, leading to congestion in living which, combined with the
+daily absence of women, has often transformed the old time homes into
+communal tiers of tenements occupied, during working hours, only by the
+young and the infirm.
+
+The children of all ages after a while followed their mothers into the
+factories; but the evil effects of child labor were so apparent that
+repressive legislative measures have increasingly raised the age of
+their admission until now, in the more advanced communities, they must
+stay outside the factory doors until they are twelve or fourteen years
+old. Some growing self-consciousness, largely of a police nature, has
+led us to institute measures for the protection of the children who are
+not allowed to work. Schools, playgrounds, day nurseries, institutional
+churches, college settlements and public social centers now bid against
+the streets and vacant lots, the nickel shows and the dancing halls, for
+the children's patronage.
+
+Education, however, true to its origin as the assistant of theology,
+refuses to recognize in any large way the new world into which we have
+come, and where the next generation of children must follow. Manual
+training has, here and there, quieted the fears of some who had
+disturbing visions; and we go on employing an army of unenfranchised,
+celibate women, with little or no industrial experience, to teach ten
+million boys how to be good citizens of a republic, and how to serve in
+a modern industrial army; and ten million girls how to work in shops and
+factories, and how to live without homes. As a consequence, girls come
+up to the factories from their schools with ideals,[36] so far as the
+school has shaped them, founded on unmarried school mistresses and
+George Washington; and they pass, by way of the altar, into cheerless
+tenements which the school still thinks of as places where children are
+cared for, family clothing is made and the family baking is done.
+Practically, of course, most education is given outside the schools, and
+there the evils of an unregulated time of transition are multiplied
+through imitation.
+
+[36] EARL BARNES, Children's Ideals, in _Studies in Education_, Vol. II,
+p. 237; also School Girls' Ideas of Women's Occupations by SARAH YOUNG,
+in _Studies in Education_, Vol. II, p. 259.
+
+The wealth and material comfort produced for the fortunate classes by
+these segregated industries have blinded us to their effects on human
+life, and we have all been bribed to silence concerning everything which
+could discourage enterprise or frighten capital. Like most bribes,
+however, these have largely stopped in the pockets of the exploiters of
+public opinion.
+
+In the opening years of this new century, public consciousness has had a
+wonderful awakening.[37] The popular mind, quickened by universal
+education, and freed from a burden of fixed beliefs, is turning
+restlessly to inquire about everything that affects human life. Work
+could not escape this inquisition, and so we are asking not only for a
+fairer division of the profits of work, but we are also inquiring what
+occupations are unfit for women, with their special limitations and
+obligations. When the work is reasonable, how long should a woman work
+daily? Should she work at night and overtime? Should she work with
+dangerous machinery? Should she handle substances that endanger health?
+Should she be required to stand through hours of continuous work? Should
+she work in bad air, due to dust, moisture, or excessive heat or cold?
+Should she have a decent retiring-room? Some daring inquirers are even
+asking whether industrial efficiency, gained through specialization and
+keying up, may not be purchased at too high a price of mental monotony
+and nervous strain. Most people are content to learn that the effects
+are not immediately destructive to the girls and women involved; but
+some day we shall demand that the barons of industry shall not be
+allowed to squander the heritage of the unborn generations.
+
+[37] C. HANFORD HENDERSON, _Pay-Day_, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co.,
+1911.
+
+Women have themselves done much to quicken this public consciousness.
+Enrolled in labor unions, they have shown power to stand together and
+make sacrifice, as in the shirt-waist makers' strike in New York in
+1908, which commanded the admiration of all fair-minded observers. The
+more fortunately placed women have aided these movements toward
+self-betterment; and, through such organizations as the National
+Consumers' League, they have compelled manufacturers and shopkeepers to
+observe more reasonable hours, pay better wages, and furnish decent
+material conditions for their employees.[38]
+
+[38] See the recent volume, based on investigations made by the National
+Consumers' League, _Making Both Ends Meet_, by SUE AINSLIE CLARK and
+EDITH WYATT, The Macmillan Co., 1911. See, also, _Saleswomen in
+Mercantile Stores_, by ELIZABETH BEARDSLEY BUTLER, published by the
+Charities Publication Committee, for the Russell Sage Foundation, 1912.
+
+The solution of woman's present industrial problem is not an easy task,
+but out of the present unsettlement certain facts are emerging with a
+good deal of clearness. The efficiency in production, secured by
+concentration and specialization, make it certain that the old-time home
+with its multiplied industries will not return, but that more and more
+even of its present lessened activities will be transferred to factories
+and to their equivalents. It is also certain that women are not going to
+be supported in indolence by men, because when deprived of the
+discipline which full participation in life gives, they must always
+degenerate. For themselves, and for the sake of their children, they
+will demand a chance to live abundantly. It is also clear that our
+present chaotic conditions are destructive of health, happy marriages,
+effective homes, and the strong line of descendants which must always be
+the chief care of an intelligent society.
+
+In the first place, then, we must work to produce an entire change in
+our present mental attitude toward organized industries. Our present
+worship of industrial products, no matter how obtained, must give way to
+a recognition of the fact that the chief asset of a nation is its
+people; that a woman is more important than the clothes she makes in
+factories or sells in stores; and that to needlessly destroy or
+scrapheap a working woman is worse than to needlessly destroy or
+scrapheap the finest and most costly machine ever devised by man. Such a
+statement seems to carry conviction in its every phrase, but the fact is
+that we do not believe it, and until we do believe it, there will be
+little help for our present absurd and wretched conditions. Unregulated
+competition, backed by greed of individuals and groups, will go on
+wasting the wealth of women's lives until we cease to be fascinated and
+hypnotized by the display of products which they make possible. Better
+fine women and children, and few things, than stores and warehouses
+crowded with goods, and the women and children of our present factory
+towns. By fixing our attention on people instead of things, we should
+almost certainly secure more and better things; but, regardless of cost,
+we must change the focus of our attention.
+
+In the second place, girls must get ready to be women. The education of
+the home and the school must be unified, and together they must give a
+training that will lead girls into the actualities of the life that lies
+before them. Our present elementary schools, and still more our high
+schools, lead girls neither to intelligent work nor to intelligent
+living as women and mothers. Up to at least the age of fourteen, the
+education should be general, looking to the development of all the
+powers of body, mind and sensibilities. But through all these eight or
+ten years of training, two factors should receive constant and
+intelligent attention. In the first place, we should realize that we are
+not fitting women for drawing-rooms nor for convents, but for a working
+world; therefore well graded and interesting manual training should run
+through all these years and should furnish a well-developed base for
+later special industrial preparation of some kind. In the second place,
+the girls should be taught by men and women, married and unmarried, and
+fine ideals of actual womanhood, not alone in shops and factories, in
+school-rooms, and in professions--but also in homes, should be
+constantly held before them. Our present education leaves this training
+mainly to the homes, and neither the parasitic rich nor our eight
+million wage-earning women, when mothers, can or will attend to it.
+
+After the girl reaches the age of fourteen, she should have at least two
+years of further education in which she could master the details of some
+necessary work which would enable her to look the world in the face and
+offer fair payment for her living. With most girls, this work would be
+connected with children and the service of the home; for domestic
+service, no matter how organized, must always occupy a multitude of
+women. All girls should have at least rudimentary training in these
+matters.
+
+During the period of transition from schools to their own family life,
+the girls might well give a half dozen years to work in factories and
+stores where the conditions should be as good, and as well guarded, as
+in our best school buildings--in factories, in a word, where the
+employers would be willing that their own daughters should work. This is
+surely a fair standard. Work which is not safe or fit for me to do, is
+not fit for me to hire done. If this principle fails, then democracy is
+but a dream.
+
+But during all this period of preparation we should never forget that,
+as Madame Gnauck-Kuehne so admirably points out, "women's work has to a
+large extent an episodic character."[39] All women confront romantic
+love, marriage and children; and any woman who misses them misses the
+crowning joy and glory of her life. Vicarious realization may save the
+soul, but it can never fill the place of reality. The man fronts these
+same experiences, but they are not related to his work as they are
+related to the work of women. Surely there can be no doubt that the
+ideal solution, in this period, is a man and woman so deeply bound
+together by love that there is no question of self-protection, either in
+terms of work or money; and the man being freed from the burdens of
+maternity, should mainly earn the income. We shall discuss the new type
+of home and family in a later chapter, but in any home where there are
+children there is need of an intelligent mother's very constant care.
+
+[39] Madame GNAUCK KUeHNE, _Die Deutsche Frau_.
+
+If a happy home were the universal destiny of women, our problem would
+be greatly simplified; but this is far from being the case. Not more
+than one-half of all women over fifteen are married at any one moment.
+From the ages of twenty to thirty-five, one-half are married; but it is
+only from thirty-five to fifty-five that as many as three-fourths are
+married; over fifty-five there are less than one-half married, and most
+of the others are widows.[40] Most of these women who are not married
+must work outside the home, and no girl, rich or poor, should be allowed
+to reach maturity without being prepared to face this possibility. Work
+is not a curse but a blessing; it is an indispensable part of every
+well-ordered life; and without it, the individual and the group will
+certainly degenerate. Rich and foolish parents, who cannot realize this
+basal fact, should nevertheless see that, even as insurance, their
+daughters must be able to pay their way in life, if need comes, without
+selling themselves either in marriage or out. Even if the woman marries
+happily, she is never sure that she may not some day have to face
+self-support, and possibly for more mouths than her own.
+
+[40] B.L. HUTCHINS, Woman's Industrial Career in _The Sociological
+Review_, October, 1909.
+
+But the woman who marries during her adolescent period, between the ages
+of twenty-five and fifty, must also work, and here we meet the hardest
+problem of all. More money is often needed than the man can earn; the
+wife may bring an industrial or professional equipment which is too
+valuable to discard; often the demands of the home, especially where
+there are no children, do not call forth the best energies of the
+woman, and she needs the larger life of outside work. Hence many married
+women must continue to work away from the home. In any of these cases,
+the problem is difficult. Bearing and rearing a child should retire a
+mother from fixed outside occupation for at least a year. Arguments born
+out of conflict cannot change this primitive fact.[41] Women should not
+do shop or factory work during the last months of pregnancy, and babies
+should be nursed from seven to nine months. A baby should be nursed for
+twenty minutes, every two or three hours of its waking time; and since
+it does not always waken regularly, the nursing mother is debarred from
+most continuous work, even if it does not interfere with her
+effectiveness as a milk producer.
+
+[41] Dr. ETHEL VAUGHAN-SAWYER, speaking before the Fabian Women's Group,
+in 1910, said: "Fortunately, after the first two or three months, most
+children will thrive equally well when artificially fed, so long as the
+milk is good and reliable, and is properly prepared." All of our facts
+go to disprove this statement.
+
+The question of maternal care for children after they are weaned is more
+difficult to settle, but notwithstanding certain statistics gathered in
+Birmingham,[42] in February, 1910, which showed that the infant
+mortality among working mothers was one hundred and ninety per thousand,
+while, among those not industrially employed, it was two hundred and
+seventy per thousand, it seems sure that infant mortality is extremely
+high in foundling asylums and in factory homes. In Fall River, where out
+of every one hundred women, forty-five are at work outside the home,
+three hundred and five babies, out of every one thousand born, die
+before they are a year old; while even in New York City, but one hundred
+and eighty-nine out of a thousand die. The natural location of Fall
+River should make it a very healthy city. One remembers, too, the
+classic statement that deaths among little children fell off steadily in
+Paris during the siege of 1870. Little children seem better off even in
+time of war, with the mothers at home, than in time of peace with their
+mothers in the factory.
+
+[42] Pamphlet entitled _Report on Industrial Employment of Married Women
+and Infant Mortality_, signed by Dr. JOHN ROBERTSON, the Medical Officer
+of Health, Birmingham.
+
+A few years ago, we turned to sanitary day nurseries, and to
+pasteurized milk and other prepared baby foods, as the solution for
+neglected or unhygienic feeding. To-day we know that even a dirty and
+ill-conditioned mother secretes better milk for her baby than can be
+prepared in any laboratory. We must wash the mother and feed her the
+milk, and then let her give it to her baby, instinct with her own life.
+It is quite possible that our recent talk of ignorant mother love and of
+the necessary substitution of sanitary nurseries, canned care and
+pre-digested affection must all go the same way. We shall probably get
+our best results by cleaning up the home, enlightening the mother, and
+then letting her love her child into the full possession of its human
+qualities.
+
+Economically, too, at least with factory workers, it is questionable if
+their wages will support sanitary day-nurseries, with intelligent nurses
+for small groups of children, and at the same time pay some one to cook
+and scrub at home. If the mother must still cook and care for her house,
+in addition to her factory work, the burden is too great; and if money
+for nurses must come from the state, or from charity, then we all know
+the danger of such subsidies to industry, in its effect on wages.
+
+Surely the ideal toward which we must work is for the mother, during the
+period when she is bearing and rearing children, to be supported by the
+father of her children. Let her do the work meantime which will best
+care for her children, and at the same time conserve and strengthen her
+powers for the third period of her life.
+
+This period, from fifty to seventy-five years, is now more shamefully
+wasted than any other of our national resources. If one attends a State
+federation of women's clubs one will find nearly every delegate of this
+age. They are women of mature understanding and of ripe judgment, still
+possessing abundant health and strength, and where relieved by economic
+conditions from the necessity of manual work, they have to live such
+irregular and uncertain relations to life as can be maintained by
+mothers-in-law, grandmothers, club secretaries, and presidents of town
+improvement societies. Remove all restrictions on woman's activity, and
+these strong matrons would vitalize our schools, give us decent
+municipal housekeeping, supervise the conditions under which girls and
+women work in shops and factories, and do much to clean up our politics.
+Debarred from direct power as they are, they are still making us decent
+in spite of ourselves.
+
+For the future, then, it seems that we must accept working women in
+every path of life. We must remove all disabilities under which they
+labor, and at the same time protect them by special legislation as
+future wives and mothers. All girls must master some line of
+self-supporting work; and, except in the cases of those who have very
+special tastes and gifts, they should select work which can be
+interrupted, without too great loss, by some years of motherhood. During
+this time, the mother must be supported so that she can largely care for
+her own child, though she must also maintain outside interests through
+work, which will keep her in touch with the moving current of her time.
+Industries must be humanized and made fit for women. The last third of a
+woman's life must be freed from legal limitations and popular
+prejudices, so that we may secure these best years of her life for
+private and public service. And meantime, it is well to remember that
+every step we take in making this a fit world for woman to work in,
+makes it a fit world for her father, her brothers, her lover and her
+husband to work beside her.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+The Meaning of Political Life
+
+
+It is a well-known fact that when words have been long and vigorously
+used they gather within and around themselves varied meanings. Some
+parts of these meanings are remnants of historic, and possibly outworn,
+experience; other parts are the result of more or less deliberate
+perversion under the stress of deep feelings aroused by opposition and
+fighting. This is especially the fate of words in any way associated
+with politics. Think how battered and useless for purposes of ordinary
+discussion "democrat" and "republican" or "socialist" have become in
+America!
+
+In the struggle of the last fifty years over woman's suffrage, most of
+the words involved have undergone such transformations; and so many
+prejudices have become associated with them, that no one can think or
+speak clearly and fairly to-day in these terms. "Woman's Rights,"
+"enfranchisement," "Votes for Women," "suffragette," "polls," "ballot,"
+"political issues," and many other words, have gone through this
+destructive process.
+
+To read some of the most popular literature on this subject one might
+imagine that women had all deserted home and fireside, babies and
+baking, and were lined up, struggling fiercely to deposit certain
+printed slips, called votes or ballots, dealing with esoteric mysteries
+understood only by men like Mr. Bryan or Mr. Roosevelt, in ballot-boxes.
+These receptacles are supposed to be behind, or very near, lawless
+saloons, where gangs of hoodlums are waiting to assault the bearers of
+these mysterious tickets. Thus Miss Seawell writes in the _Atlantic
+Monthly_ for September, 1910: "The trouble would begin with the mere
+attempt of women to deposit their ballots. A dozen ruffians at a single
+polling-place would prevent a single woman from depositing a single
+vote. There can be no doubt that this means would be used by the rougher
+element and that the polls would become a scene of preordained riot and
+disorder." Of course, such statements could not appear in a leading
+magazine, in a land where women have been voting quietly for many years,
+were it not for the perversity of the words which the author tries to
+use, but which really use her. In other periodicals, equally
+respectable, one learns that women, goaded on by the intolerable
+political tyranny of men, have agreed as one soul to advance, with
+ballots in their hands, and sweep graft and greed, drink and all other
+human wrongs, into the sea of oblivion forever. Of course, this is
+nonsense, or worse, and in this chapter I should like to turn away from
+this warfare, leaving even the battered and prejudiced-soaked words
+alone, as much as may be possible, and simply ask: What is political
+life, not as defined in books, but as actually lived by a
+self-respecting farmer or merchant of our acquaintance? What qualities
+does political life presuppose in a participant? How does its use affect
+him? What does it enable him to accomplish? What is the relation of a
+woman--not some militant or unsexed ogre, nor a female breeding animal
+in a harem, but our own sisters, wives and daughters as they really
+are--what is their relation to this mysterious process?
+
+If one approaches the political life of our modern democracies in this
+simple spirit of inquiry it would seem that the first requisite for
+participation is the ability to form sound judgments concerning
+political matters; and all matters are now becoming political which
+affect the welfare of the community. Certainly the citizen cannot devise
+political machinery nor select candidates to work such machinery, much
+less "cast a ballot," until he knows what he wants done. What are some
+of the questions, then, on which he must form judgments?
+
+First of all, he must be prepared to think intelligently about
+protecting his life and property. He must know something of the danger
+of foreign invasion, of the consequent need of a navy and standing army.
+He must make up his mind whether it is necessary to spend $123,000,000
+yearly on an American navy and $156,000,000 on an American army, as we
+are at present doing, that we may be ready to fight England, Germany or
+Japan if at any time we want to do so. He must ask himself whether this
+money might not better be used in fighting ignorance, crime, poverty and
+disease.
+
+The would-be citizen must also think about protecting himself from
+assault as he walks about the streets; about protecting his house from
+thieves as he lies asleep at night. He must have thought about the
+careless use of cars, automobiles, firearms and explosives in general.
+He must consider the danger from fires, contagion, diseases, mobs; he
+must think intelligently about contaminated water and impure foods. All
+these things are necessary for the physical well-being of the community
+life. Of course, if either man or woman cannot think intelligently about
+these things, he ought not to have control of them; he should leave such
+matters to those who can think of them.
+
+In the second place, the would-be citizen must have fairly sound
+judgments on questions of raising and spending necessary revenue. What
+are the effects of direct and indirect taxation? Would a heavy tax on
+land force unused lands, including mines and waterways, into use? Should
+a man with a cash income of $50,000 a year pay more to support
+government than one with a cash income of $500? What are the objections
+to an income tax? How does it work in England, where it has been fairly
+tried? Should a great corporation pay taxes in proportion to its wealth,
+and in places where the wealth is protected by the law? If so, how can
+it be reached? Should churches, museums, libraries and schools be taxed;
+if not, why not? Should taxes be laid on flour, meat and eggs, on woolen
+cloth, on silks, velvets, ostrich plumes and diamonds? Should taxes be
+laid on whiskey, wines, tobacco, cigars and race-tracks? Should taxes be
+devised, or continued, to protect such infant industries as now handle
+our kerosene oil, meat, sugar and steel? Surely no one who cannot form
+independent judgments on these matters should presume to direct them
+through voting.
+
+But not only must a nation raise revenue in the wisest and most
+equitable manner possible, and spend it effectively and economically,
+but it must also care for its present possessions. So the would-be
+citizen must know about the wealth in which he wants to share. What do
+the national, State and municipal governments own? How should the vast
+domains of land, the onetime inexhaustible forests, the mines of coal
+and metal, the waterways and water-powers, the special privileges and
+franchises belonging to the people be used? Should they be thrown away,
+gambled away, given away as favors, rented, sold, or handled directly by
+the people? On what terms or under what guarantees should they be turned
+over to individuals or companies, if this is to be done? Those who
+cannot form judgments on these matters should not be entrusted with such
+vast responsibility, be they men or women.
+
+Questions of our foreign relations must also occupy the thought of the
+citizen. Are foreign entanglements necessary or desirable? If so, with
+what European or Asiatic nations should we seek to strengthen our
+friendship? Are our interests nearly identical with those of England? If
+we formed a close defensive alliance with her should we be thereby
+aiding universal peace as much as we might by maintaining more generally
+friendly relations with all European powers? Would an alliance with
+England probably draw us into her troubles, if she has any, in Egypt or
+India? How would such an alliance affect our relation with England's
+present ally, Japan? Are we fitted by the genius of our institutions
+and by our experience to handle a foreign empire? If not, what should
+we do with the Philippines?
+
+So, too, those who are to direct the destinies of the country must think
+out what our relations are to be with Latin America. In the past some
+statesman, a Richelieu or a Bismarck, had a policy and led his nation to
+it by devious paths of indirection. But now that each citizen is a king,
+he must have a policy for his realm. Are our republican neighbors to the
+south to be increasingly recognized as under our protection and
+direction? If so, how are we to maintain the peace and secure payment of
+their foreign debts? All these problems are bound up with the management
+of the Panama Canal. They confront us in different forms in connection
+with immigration, especially of Asiatics.
+
+Our institutional life must also be regulated by the citizens, and so
+they must have judgments about each of its details. They must know what
+they think about the family, forms of legal marriage and divorce, and
+the care of children when the family fails. The Church must be
+considered and protected; possibly it should be encouraged; and
+possibly its unwarranted assumption should sometimes be checked. Schools
+must be founded, supported, directed. Art galleries, museums and clubs
+must be chartered, and then controlled; and so must all the other
+institutions of our modern society. The would-be citizen must be able to
+think about all this work.
+
+Industries, on which our individual and collective well-being depend,
+must be encouraged by special favors, limited to the public good,
+protected from violence, inspected in the interest of employees. Hours
+must be regulated, disputes settled, conditions of labor and safety
+secured. Children should be protected against employers' greed; and
+working women must receive special consideration, if the race of strong
+men is to continue. Here again the citizen must have judgments, or the
+power to make judgments, as new needs arise.
+
+Then, too, there is a tradition of government, established by the
+fathers and modified by experience, which should be understood by the
+citizens. It recognizes certain rights as being reserved by the
+individual States, and others as belonging to the national government.
+The would-be citizen should be acquainted with this tradition so that he
+can determine how far it is desirable to adopt a new nationalism. He
+will have to pass judgment on the control of interstate commerce,
+national or State control of public lands, national divorce and liquor
+laws, national food inspection, and other practical subjects which may
+destroy the older balance of power so jealously guarded by our earlier
+statesmen. The citizen must make up his mind if this is desirable.
+
+Newer political theories must also receive the citizens' attention. Many
+people believe that wealth created by the people can be enjoyed by the
+people only when they control the sources of supply and the means of
+production and distribution. The citizen should know whether these
+socialist tendencies should be favored or suppressed. There are others
+who believe that government is unnecessary, and that men and women can
+be happy and effective only when formal laws are abrogated. The citizen
+must determine whether he will allow those who hold such doctrines to
+express them; or whether he will suppress their meetings and forbid
+them to enter the country. These are but a few of the subjects
+concerning which the citizen must think, but they are typical and they
+may represent the rest.
+
+In the last analysis, it is these judgments on political matters which
+govern a modern democracy, whatever the laws on the statute books may
+be, and whatever machinery of government may be established.
+
+Not long since, I visited one of our States where the laws forbid any
+one to make or sell, as a beverage, any intoxicating liquors, within the
+State. At the leading hotel, in the large city where I stopped, beer and
+whiskey signs were displayed outside the entrance; and at an open bar,
+in the center of the hotel, four bartenders were dispensing all kinds of
+drinks, while at the tables of the hotel restaurant, liquors were openly
+bought and drunk. There are many indictments standing against this
+hotel, but in two test cases juries have refused to convict the
+proprietors. I am told it is the same in all of the principal hotels in
+the larger cities of this State. In this same State, the laws forbid the
+manufacture or sale of cigarettes, but they are openly displayed and
+sold in nearly all cigar stores. In the same State, whites and blacks
+live under the same laws, but blacks seldom vote; they do not use the
+parks, attend white people's meetings nor ride with the whites in public
+conveyances. And yet the city was quiet and orderly and I felt as safe
+in person and property as though the laws on the statute books, instead
+of the judgments in the public mind, were being obeyed. Since this form
+of public opinion is so powerful, it is well that it should be
+intelligent.
+
+Granted, then, that the candidate for citizen honors is prepared to pass
+judgment on such matters as we have indicated, he must next be prepared
+to devise and control means to carry these judgments into effect. Here
+he approaches the problems of statescraft. He must have in his mind a
+general scheme of government, with a sense of legislative, judicial and
+executive functions. He must realize the value of a constitution, as a
+point of departure; and have a theory as to safe ways of modifying it.
+He must have fairly clear notions of legislation, and of the kinds of
+laws that are desirable and effective. He should know how far
+representative legislative bodies can be trusted to express the will of
+the people; and he should have studied the working of the initiative and
+the referendum. It is also desirable that he should know the theory of
+two chambers, and should have ideas as to how the members of the second
+chamber, if there is to be one, should be chosen.
+
+The candidate for citizen honors should know something of the
+organization of the judicial branch of government. He should know
+something of the powers and duties of local magistrates, of county,
+State and national courts. He should recognize the difference between
+civil and criminal jurisdiction. He should have an opinion as to whether
+judges should be elected or appointed, and if appointed, who should
+select them. He should realize the grave dangers that surround a corrupt
+judiciary, and he should know the means by which a court is enabled to
+maintain its standing and authority.
+
+So of the executive power, he should see its relation to the other
+powers, from the constable to the president. He should know the
+qualities required in a good executive and should be able to
+distinguish them in possible candidates. He should know that when the
+executive is lax the best of laws fall into abeyance, and he should know
+how such officers can be held up, through criticism by public opinion
+and penalties, to the fulfilment of duties. The recall should have been
+considered.
+
+In the third place, the citizen should know how to select the right kind
+of people to carry his political judgments into effect. Possibly, under
+a representative form of government, this is the most necessary
+qualification for a good voter. Many of the matters with which modern
+government must deal are technical, and the citizen here, as in his
+private affairs, must rest on the judgment of those he employs. And yet,
+in general, he must know what he wants.
+
+He must know the general laws that govern the organization of parties;
+and he should be somewhat acquainted with the psychology of crowds. He
+should know how candidates are selected under the convention or caucus
+system; he should have an independent judgment on direct primaries.
+
+In selecting men, the citizen must be able to recognize general ability
+and intellectual fitness. It is at this point that modern democracies
+are most apt to go wrong. The standards by which we measure men and
+women are most imperfect; and we are prone to let one good or bad
+quality overshadow all others. Thus in an extended study on school
+children's attitude toward Queen Victoria in England, and toward
+President McKinley in America, made while these rulers were alive, we
+found that less than twenty per cent. mentioned any kind of political
+ability, nor did they often mention their general ability, nor their
+honesty. They admired them primarily because they were "good and kind."
+In other words the school children of these two lands approve their
+rulers because, in a vague general way, they like them.[43] The
+significance of the study lies in the fact that in all democracies a
+large number of the voters live on an intellectual plane represented by
+these school children.
+
+[43] EARL BARNES, _Studies in Education_, Vol. II, pp. _5-80_.
+Philadelphia, 1902.
+
+This conclusion is borne out by the judgment of Miss Jane Addams who,
+writing of foreign voters about Hull House, says: "The desire of the
+Italian and Polish and Hungarian voters in an American city to be
+represented by 'a good man' is not a whit less strenuous than that of
+the best native stock. Only their idea of the good man is somewhat
+different. He must be good according to their highest standard of
+goodness. He must be kind to the poor, not only in a general way, but
+with particular and unfailing attention to their every want and
+misfortune. Their joys he must brighten and their sorrows he must
+alleviate. In emergency, in catastrophe, in misunderstanding with
+employers and with the law, he must be their strong tower of help. Let
+him in all these things fill up their ideal of the 'good man' and he has
+their votes at his absolute disposal."[44]
+
+[44] JANE ADDAMS, _Democracy_, p. 221. New York: The Macmillan Co.,
+1902.
+
+To be a safe citizen one must be able to go beyond this kindly feeling
+and ask, Does the candidate know enough to do what I want done? Has he
+the honesty to resist the temptation to exploit me? Has he the
+leadership to command the best efforts of the subordinates in his
+department? Has he serious defects that may cause his failure? Is he an
+opportune man for the time and place?
+
+This selection is made very difficult to-day by the misrepresentation of
+interested individuals and political parties; and especially by the
+reports in the press, which seek to discredit candidates they oppose,
+and to gloss over or deny defects in their chosen leaders. Thus the
+whole public atmosphere in the midst of a campaign is intended to
+confuse and bewilder the citizen who is honestly seeking the best
+candidate. Only ripened intelligence, experience with men and women, and
+ability to judge conflicting evidence, can enable the voter to select
+wisely.
+
+In the last place, if the citizen knows what he wants, how to devise the
+governmental machinery to get it, and how to select the right men to see
+that it is done, he must register his desire by a vote; and then watch
+his servant carefully to see if he justifies the trust imposed in him.
+If he does not, then the citizen must criticise, threaten, and, if
+necessary, finally dismiss the unfaithful employee. Only one who can
+fulfil all these functions can be considered a desirable citizen from
+the point of view of a modern democracy. "Eternal vigilance is the price
+of liberty."
+
+And why should one desire to undertake this arduous responsibility? In
+the first place, because he wants the public work well done, as he
+understands it; and the only way to have it done in this manner is to
+attend to it himself. If he does not attend to it, some one else will do
+so; and if the intelligent citizens do not look after it then the public
+business will be exploited by individuals, or groups, in their own
+interest; and, before the citizen realizes what is happening, he will be
+deprived of that political liberty to secure which millions of men and
+women have struggled and suffered and even given their lives in the
+years which lie behind us.
+
+And yet possibly the most important value of participation in political
+life to-day is the byproduct of continuous education which it gives.
+Modern political life has probably done more to train the men involved
+in it than have schools or churches. Business and industries alone might
+claim to be its rivals. In a despotism, all the events of public life
+are uncertain and seemingly accidental, depending as they do on the
+caprice of an individual. This discourages thought among the masses,
+paralyzes action, and breeds inertia and hopelessness. At best, it gives
+rise to periods of desperation and violence; at its worst, it gives us
+the hopeless masses of Mohammedan lands. In a free democracy, on the
+other hand, those who participate are in a continuous process of
+education, judging, selecting, willing, and always with regard to
+realities that affect daily life. Citizenship gives one a continuous
+laboratory course of training in the art of right living.
+
+Nor can the full value of this continuous training be obtained by the
+onlooker, no matter how intelligent he may be. For full growth of mind
+and spirit one must participate; just as in athletics one must leave the
+spectator's bench and play the game if one would develop one's own
+powers. Participation means love, hate, devotion and sacrifice, and only
+when all these powers of the soul are brought into play, together with
+the judgment, is the character strengthened and life more abundantly
+obtained.
+
+It must be evident to any one who has carefully followed this analysis
+that hardly any of the adult male voters in our modern democracies have
+the qualifications of good citizens. How, then, is good government
+achieved? It is not achieved. We have very bad government. Everywhere
+there is waste and inefficiency. Wealth is unjustly divided; great
+corporations seize public utilities and exploit them for private gain;
+enormous sums are squandered on unnecessary and dangerous battle-ships
+and soldiers; in building a single State Capitol, $3,500,000 was
+recently stolen, not only wasting public wealth, but corrupting public
+morals; in some parts of our land little children still drive the wheels
+of industry; and it is everywhere cheaper to scrap-heap men and women
+than machines; most of our cities are ugly and badly ruled; drunkenness,
+gambling and prostitution are common; life is not always secure from
+lawless attack; and the machinery of justice is clogged and moves
+slowly. Part of our intelligent adult population has no direct share in
+the government under which it must live. We have just such a government
+as we should expect where incompetent people decide such vast issues of
+life.
+
+But, on the other hand, we are vastly better off than any great people
+has ever been before us. The mistakes are our own; they are made by us
+who participate in government, and we are learning from them. Those who
+exploit us may be called to account; and frequently they are caught and
+punished. Of those who stole the millions in Harrisburg, nearly a score
+have died disgraced, or are in prison or exile; and $1,300,000 has been
+returned to the treasury of the State. Even when those who betray us are
+not caught red-handed we learn to distrust and then to despise them.
+They pass their last years in exile, and when their statues are erected
+in our State Houses they are memorials of shame. Thus we learn the art
+of living, we who participate in political action.
+
+The whole business of a modern democracy is to educate itself through
+doing, and we are all at school. If the bills are heavy, they are our
+bills; and we are steadily learning how to make them less. In the past
+no one learned. "The Bourbons learned nothing, and forgot nothing;" and
+the common people were too discouraged to think. It is on these lines
+that our modern democracies must be judged, not as efficient and
+economical political machines, but as educational institutions. Judged
+by this standard, we believe ourselves to be the triumph of the ages.
+
+Nor can it be possible for people to enter political life fully prepared
+for its duties. Even when a young man approaches a business career we do
+not ask that he shall possess a knowledge of the business before
+beginning. If he has general preparation, and a desire to learn, he is
+admitted to share in its responsibilities, and then learns as he goes
+along. It is the same in political life; few young men at twenty-one or
+foreigners at the time of naturalization, have the knowledge indicated
+in the preceding pages. If they have general preparation and a desire to
+learn, we admit them to participation, and they learn through doing.
+
+Years ago, while discussing education with an English statesman, he
+asked whom I considered the leaders of education in his country. Knowing
+his Tory instincts, I replied, "Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, William T.
+Stead, John Burns and Keir Hardie." He laughed contemptuously: "Why
+those people," he said, "are merely educating themselves in public." The
+statement was true and far-reaching; that is what we are all doing in
+our modern democracies; and that is at the same time our weakness and
+our glory.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+Woman's Relation to Political Life
+
+
+In discussing woman's right to vote it is well to remember that the
+right to rule, which is implicit in the right to vote, has always been
+limited by conditions of birth, residence, wealth, morality or
+intelligence. Universal manhood suffrage has never yet been achieved,
+and probably never will be. Under the best Greek conditions, it was only
+the free-born citizen, residing in his native city state, who voted. In
+both Greece and Rome, the suffrage was limited to classes defined by
+social position, wealth or military service. In our modern democracies
+there have always been limitations of birth, which might be overcome by
+naturalization; of residence, which could be overcome by living for a
+certain time in a locality; of wealth, which was supposed to insure a
+stake in the communal well-being; and of morals and intelligence, which
+at least shut out criminals, the insane and the imbeciles.
+
+Thus the right to vote is not the same thing as the right to live; and
+even in a commonwealth founded on ideal justice only those having a
+stake in the community life, and possessing normal intelligence and
+morality, will be allowed to rule. In a word, equal suffrage is
+possible, while universal man or woman suffrage is not.
+
+All through our colonial period women had a large influence in
+determining community questions, and in Massachusetts, under the old
+Providence Charter, they voted for all elective officers for nearly a
+hundred years. Here and there women--like Margaret Brent, of Maryland;
+Abigail Adams, of Massachusetts; or Mrs. Corbin, of Virginia--put
+forward their right to participate in the public life around them. But,
+in 1776, women were not voting, and the Federal Constitution left the
+matter of determining electoral rights to the several States. They all
+decided for male suffrage.
+
+The initial impulse to secure suffrage for American women came from
+Europe. After the Revolution, Frances Wright, a young Scotchwoman, came
+to America to lecture and write, claiming equal political rights with
+men. In 1836, Ernestine L. Rose came from Poland and also advocated
+equal political rights. All the teachings of the American Revolution had
+favored the idea of human equality; and, as has been pointed out, when,
+with established peace after the War of 1812, women engaged in
+anti-slavery, temperance and allied movements, they were driven by the
+logic of events to demand the suffrage.
+
+In 1848, the women of the country began to organize. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady
+Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Martha C. Wright called together at Seneca
+Falls, New York, the first convention in America to further equal
+suffrage. No permanent organization was founded, but in 1850 a
+convention was held in Salem, Massachusetts, and in 1852 a Woman's
+Rights Convention was called in Syracuse, New York, with delegates
+present from eight States and Canada. Miss Susan B. Anthony had meantime
+joined the movement; and from this time on conventions and appeals
+became common.
+
+The Civil War distracted attention from all social and political issues
+but one. The Equal Rights Association turned its attention mainly to the
+rights of negroes; and in 1869 the National Woman's Suffrage Association
+was organized to work exclusively for woman's rights. Backed by such
+women as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, and aided by
+men like Henry Ward Beecher, the association became a national power. In
+1890, the two organizations were united under the name of The National
+American Woman's Suffrage Association. This organization still leads the
+movement in America.[45]
+
+[45] _The History of Woman Suffrage_, by ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, SUSAN
+B. ANTHONY, and IDA HUSTED HARPER, 4 vols. Rochester, N.Y.
+
+In 1902, an international meeting was called in Washington; and in 1904
+the International Suffrage Alliance was formed in Berlin with Mrs.
+Carrie Chapman Catt as president. Thirteen nations are now affiliated
+with the Alliance; and the women of the world are highly organized to
+further equal suffrage.
+
+Two generations of women have given themselves to this movement, and a
+third still faces it. To the first group belong those leaders we have
+already named: Emma Willard, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Julia Ward Howe,
+Susan B. Anthony and their associates. It was their problem to secure
+woman's control of her own body and property, some share in the
+direction of her children, and some opportunity to train her own mind
+and earn an independent living. These women bore the heat and burden of
+a conflict in which all the blind prejudices of a fixed regime were
+strongly massed, presenting few promising points of attack. It is small
+wonder that some of these leaders gained a reputation for being hard,
+dogmatic, aggressive, and sometimes careless of popular sensibilities.
+The first generation of reformers in any field must be made of stern
+stuff; and their beneficiaries are apt to forget the conditions that
+justified means no longer necessary.
+
+The lives of these women could not be expected to fully illustrate the
+type of life they hoped to see their sisters living when opportunity was
+finally won. Only women who participated in this struggle could fully
+appreciate the splendid devotion of these lives to the service of a
+group many of whom, being personally comfortable, were insensible to the
+needs of less fortunate women; and were sometimes even willing to fight
+back any advanced ideas which might disturb their own comfort. The
+feeling within this group of leaders, and the failure of oncoming
+generations of American women to recognize the debt of obligation they
+owe to its efforts, was illustrated by an incident that came up in
+connection with the Third International Congress of Women which met in
+London in 1899. The session was opened in Westminster Town Hall, with
+seven hundred delegates present, representing the most thoughtful women
+of the world. Lady Aberdeen was in the chair, and Mrs. Creighton, wife
+of the late Bishop of London, was reading a paper. In the midst of deep
+attention, a door at the rear of the platform was gently opened, and
+Miss Susan B. Anthony stepped onto the stage. She had just arrived from
+America. Her strong figure was bent with the weight of years; her face
+was squared by the conflict and partial ostracism she had met; but her
+glance had lost none of its stern kindliness, and her bearing none of
+its indomitable courage. As she appeared, this most representative
+audience of women in the world sprang to its feet and burst into wild
+cheering. In vain did Lady Aberdeen rap for order and beg the audience
+to let Mrs. Creighton proceed. Not until Miss Anthony came to the front
+and urged the women to sit down was quiet restored. These women knew the
+price of a life which their champion had paid for their opportunities.
+
+A few months after this the school children of the prosperous city of
+Rochester, N.Y., where Miss Anthony had been a leading citizen for many
+years, were asked to write school compositions in which they named the
+person they would most wish to be like. Over three thousand girls, in
+the elementary grades, wrote these papers, but not one chose Miss
+Anthony. This first generation of women reformers could not establish
+the type of womanhood for the modern world; they had not the leisure,
+nor the freedom, nor could they see all that lay in the future. But all
+the more, because their lives were hard, should they be held in grateful
+remembrance.
+
+To the second generation of leaders belong women like Alice Freeman
+Palmer, Mary Sheldon Barnes and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They came on
+the scene when the first campaign had been won; they could command their
+own bodies and property; college doors were swinging open where they
+could secure the training that should fit them for the struggle to win
+educational, industrial, social and political opportunity for all their
+sisters. They were still looked upon as blue-stockings and queer; they
+had often to serve as the butt of ridicule; but they had education,
+income, a certain degree of leisure, and a social recognition which, if
+grudging in some quarters, was all the more generous in others.
+
+With the rapid development of higher education, these women found
+themselves associated with large groups of independent women who could
+create a society of their own in advanced centers of population. There
+was still much to be done in securing opportunity for women; but they
+could go on establishing the type of life that free women were to live.
+Their problems were, however, even more complex than those which
+confronted their predecessors. What line of education should women
+pursue? What lines of work could they best undertake? How could they
+combine an independent professional or industrial career with the life
+of a home and the responsibilities of a mother? How far must older
+social restraints be modified in the interest of intellectual and
+industrial freedom? It was a time for constructive statesmanship, rather
+than for revolution; and each woman knew she was under criticism, and
+that her success or failure was vastly more than her own personal
+concern. In her all free women were being judged.
+
+To the third generation belongs the host of women who are to-day filling
+our college halls, managing the women's clubs, teaching the state
+schools, and competing with men in every industrial calling. Theirs is
+the task of completing woman's social and political emancipation, and of
+educating them to meet their newfound liberties. It is possible that
+this present generation has a keener sense of rights than of duties; and
+the young women of to-day must be led to realize that the delicate
+adjustments still to be worked out require devotion equal to that of
+the earlier generations, if the toll of wasted life is not to be
+excessive.
+
+What now is the relation of women to the range of political activity
+described in the last chapter? Have they need of the protection which
+government gives? Are they able to form political judgments? Have they
+knowledge of the working of political machinery; or, lacking it, are
+they prepared to obtain it? Are they able to make a wise selection of
+people to represent them in political action? Have they need of the
+training which participation in political life gives? Have they the
+preliminary preparation to take up that training to advantage, and can
+they undertake these duties without serious loss of qualities desirable
+in women?
+
+Women certainly have need of protection; each has a life dear to her,
+and honor which is dearer to her than life. In this respect she has a
+greater need than men. Most women, also, have property of some kind, and
+we are increasingly recognizing their right to control this for
+themselves; hence they need property protection the same as men. We do
+not need to think of Mrs. Sage, Mrs. Harriman, Miss Gould or Mrs.
+Green, in this connection, for in every community we now have many women
+who are immediately responsible for large property interests which new
+legislation might affect most seriously.
+
+In matters of institutional regulation by government, women are at least
+as vitally interested as men. In all that touches the family, marriage,
+or divorce, women have more at stake than men; and there are as many
+wives as husbands involved. The schools are also nearer to women than to
+men; more girls than boys attend them; more women are teachers; and more
+women than men are interested parents of school children. The church is
+also more vital to women to-day than to men. On the side of industries,
+it is clear that our 8,000,000 independent wage-earning women have a
+desperate stake in all governmental action touching the regulation of
+working conditions. In whatever concerns general sanitation, safe water,
+and pure foods, all are equally interested who must breathe and eat to
+live. Surely the need of women for political protection is quite as
+great as that of men.
+
+In the matter of forming political judgments, not even the wisest men
+are beyond improvement. International affairs, monetary systems, the
+best way of raising taxes, and similar problems, often divide the male
+electorate pretty evenly into rival parties. Since both cannot be right,
+a great deal of poor political thinking must be done by the present body
+of voters. Meantime, women are showing their ability to deal
+intelligently with all sorts of subjects in our educational
+institutions, in business and in social life. Their judgments command
+respect in every other field; and it is hard to see why they could not
+apply their powers to political questions.
+
+We must remember, too, that during these last years the field of
+political life has been rapidly broadening, through the awakening of
+social consciousness among the people. To concern one's self with
+politics now is to be interested in good market facilities, in rapid
+transit for cities, in recreation centers for children, in honest
+labelling of food products, in reformation of criminals, in preventing
+marriage among the unfit, and in a hundred similar matters. Here women
+will doubtless bring us a strong addition to our political efficiency.
+They have long been considered the natural directors of social life and,
+in spite of being disfranchised, they mainly handle such matters at
+present. Now that these subjects are being brought into the political
+field, women should follow them there, as they have followed their
+industries from the homes into the factories. There is no reason to
+believe that their judgments will be less sound than those of their
+brothers and husbands.
+
+Of course, women's knowledge of means and methods is much less than that
+of men in their own class. Not only have they not participated in
+political life, but they have been steadily warned away from that
+particular tree of knowledge. Yet the present generation of women has
+gone through the same preliminary education in schools with its
+brothers; and many women in high schools and colleges have made a more
+extended study of political institutionalism. Still more important, more
+than a million women have been educating themselves for some years in
+this direction through voluntary associations of some kind; while in
+most States they have had some political practice through limited
+suffrage, and in a few States full experience.
+
+In selecting representatives to carry out their will, women have certain
+obvious defects of temperament and training. Having been brought up for
+generations to judge men only as providers of sustenance and fathers of
+children, they must at first find it difficult to consider candidates
+impersonally. Still, their general morality and their standards of right
+are probably superior to those of men, and they are more intolerant of
+faults, and they find it harder to compromise on matters of character
+than do men. One can hardly believe that 1,700 women could be found
+among the respectable, church-going, American-born residents in any
+county of America, who would sell their votes, year after year, as that
+number of men voters has recently confessed to doing in Adams County,
+Ohio. In fact, Judge Blair says: "There was one class of the population
+which rebelled against the practice. It was the womanhood of Adams
+County, which had never become reconciled to the custom, and whose
+continual hostility has resulted finally, I hope, in its
+abolishment."[46]
+
+[46] Seventeen Hundred Rural Vote-Sellers, by A.Z. Blair, _McClure's
+Magazine_, November, 1911.
+
+Of the need of women for the training which participation in political
+life gives there can be no doubt. Their lives have always been directly
+dependent upon other individuals, and they are prone to think in small
+details. Any training which extends the horizon of their interests and
+enables them to deal more largely with these details will fit them
+better for living in a world where industrial, business and social
+changes are so rapidly merging details in larger wholes. Experience in
+selecting candidates for public office would also do much to broaden
+women's judgments of life, and would help to break down the pettiness
+which sometimes characterizes their personal relations.
+
+In the case of women, the community has a double reason for desiring
+that they shall develop political judgments and become acquainted with
+political methods. It is not only that they may share in the general
+intelligence and carry their fair part of the political burdens; but
+they have become the teachers, both in homes and schools, of the
+oncoming generation of male voters. We no longer live in small
+communities where children can see the simple processes of government
+operating around them, but in a complex civilization where it must all
+be interpreted to them, and mainly by women. Many boys who complete our
+elementary schools never work a day under the direction of a man. In the
+homes, busy fathers increasingly turn over the training of children to
+their wives. How can these women train safe citizens for the future if
+they do not understand the processes involved well enough to use them
+themselves?
+
+Meantime the old arguments against woman suffrage are too outworn to
+need serious attention. In the past decades our civilization has become
+so complex, with so many groups carrying on differentiated functions,
+that even if we had not the millions of educated, property-owning,
+wage-earning, voting women that now fill our public life, the old
+arguments would still be obsolete. The issues of life are no longer
+primarily military, and but a fraction of men voters is capable of
+meeting modern requirements as policemen and soldiers; in time of
+crisis, all men would be called into the reserves; but in such periods
+women have always fought in the breach, from Carthage to Paris. Still,
+in modern warfare, those who guard the rear and furnish supplies are as
+necessary as those who go to the front.
+
+It has also long been recognized that women who rear finest sons and
+daughters must sometimes turn away from the cradle to refresh their
+lives with the touch of other interests. It has also been demonstrated a
+thousand times over that women do not incite the lawless element to riot
+about the polls; but that, instead, their presence tends to remove the
+polling-place from the saloon and make it safer for men to go there on
+election-day. The plea that women would introduce a new element of sex
+into politics, thereby confounding its real issues, is certainly not
+well grounded. Sex has always played a great part in politics, as it has
+in all the vital affairs of life. In the open competitions of education,
+business or politics, sex ceases to be as significant as it is in the
+drawing-room.
+
+Nor do thoughtful people imagine to-day that if women participated in
+political life they would suddenly bring about a reign of universal
+peace and righteousness. It has taken many centuries for men to learn to
+play the game of politics indifferently well as they do. The first
+effect of woman's participation would probably be to lower the
+efficiency of the electorate in some directions; but they are starting
+much farther along than men began, and they would learn more rapidly
+than men have learned.
+
+It is often claimed that women do not want to vote; and, of course,
+there are many who do not care to assume such arduous and often
+difficult duties, if they can avoid it. The same holds true of many
+intelligent, but selfish men who desire the advantages of good
+government without its burdens. All such must be urged to do their duty
+to the state. Those who have vision and a large sense of duty can be
+trusted to do their fair part in caring for the public welfare. Those
+who wish to enjoy the benefits of peace and settled government,
+participating in the advantages of education, engaging in business, and
+having their persons and property protected, without sharing the burdens
+of government, should be forced to play their part.
+
+If a woman should board a street-car to-day and, when asked for her
+fare, should hide her face with womanly modesty and declare that she did
+not wish to be involved in such public matters, but preferred that the
+man swinging on the strap before her should pay, she would be informed
+that all who use the cars must pay for their maintenance. Women in
+America now have more than their share of education and leisure. If they
+do not wish to pay their fair proportion of service, they should
+withdraw from the high schools and colleges, from literature and music,
+from offices and factories, and not crowd into places where they are
+unwilling to play the game. The woman who leads the movement against
+equal suffrage in England has made a fortune in the open market as a
+writer, protected by the national copyrights; she maintains a house
+where she is protected in person and property by the city of London, the
+organization and administration of which calls for the constant
+attention of all intelligent citizens; and yet she urges women to take
+what they can get, but to refrain from doing their fair share of the
+city and national housekeeping, lest they lose their feminine charm.
+Surely those who profit by government should give their share of
+service.
+
+It is idle to claim that equal suffrage will make no change in women. It
+will certainly accentuate the changes already made by higher education
+and by a freer business life. Some loss there must inevitably be in any
+such far-reaching change. We lost something of chivalry and of the
+spirit of _noblesse oblige_ in the transition from feudalism to
+democracy. In transferring causes of personal difference from the
+dueling field to the courts of law, we lost a degree of poetic feeling
+and tragic exaltation, of personal initiative and physical courage. So
+when women passed from slavery to serfdom we lost something of male
+dominance and of female submission. We shall lose something in the
+present transition; but one must be content to lose Louis XIV and
+Versailles if one thereby finds modern France; one must be satisfied to
+lose an institution which gave us the tragically pathetic death of
+Alexander Hamilton, if it increases human justice and saves fathers to
+their families. We must even be content to lose the languishing and
+weeping lady of chivalry, and the coquetting, crocheting and confiding
+maiden of the eighteenth century if we gain in return fair minded
+comrades in daily living, devoted partners in family life, and strong,
+intelligent mothers for the coming generations. The sex instinct needs
+no fostering; it has led us to our best developments in civilization;
+and its work has only begun.
+
+So far we have taken the popular position, and have discussed this
+matter as though it were still in the period of debate. The fact is, it
+long ago passed from the field of theory; it is now a condition. In six
+of our States, women have now full participation in managing public
+affairs. In Wyoming, since 1869; in Colorado, since 1893; in Idaho,
+since 1896; in Washington, beginning in 1910; and in California, since
+1911, women have been sharing the vote with men. In twenty-nine States
+they have school suffrage, and in many places municipal suffrage.[47] In
+newer parts of the world, like New Zealand and Australia, women have
+complete suffrage, while in old countries, like Norway, Sweden and
+Finland, they have essentially all the rights of men. In England, there
+are 1,141 women on Boards of Guardians and 615 on Educational
+Committees; and they are demanding full participation in all political
+life. In Canada they have school and municipal suffrage. It is no longer
+a time for argument; it is time for adjustment.
+
+[47] BERTHA REMBAUGH, _The Political Status of Women in the United
+States_, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1912, gives complete information to date.
+
+Meantime the results of woman's full participation in political life,
+even where they have had the suffrage for some years, are difficult to
+determine, because of the fact already pointed out that political life
+in a modern democracy is so closely bound up with all the other life
+about it. It is quite as difficult to estimate these effects as it would
+be to estimate the effects of housekeeping or of woman's special
+costume. And yet some results are clear enough to have a large bearing
+on the extension of woman's suffrage in new localities.
+
+In 1906, the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League engaged Miss Helen Sumner
+to make a careful study of the actual working of equal suffrage in the
+State of Colorado. Miss Sumner, aided by several assistants, spent
+nearly two years in the investigation. She gathered and carefully
+analyzed written answers to an extended set of questions from 1,200
+representative men and women of Colorado, some opposing and some
+favoring equal suffrage; and she and her assistants interviewed many
+more. They also made a general study of industrial conditions and of
+legislation for the State as a whole, and a detailed study of election
+records and newspaper files for representative cities and counties. Her
+report is a masterpiece of patient research and scientific
+exposition.[48]
+
+[48] HELEN L. SUMNER, _Equal Suffrage. The Results of an Investigation
+Made in Colorado for the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York
+State._ New York: Harper & Bros., 1909.
+
+Equal suffrage goes back to 1893 in Colorado; and while the influence of
+women has been in no way revolutionary, this report shows that, on the
+whole, political conditions have improved and woman's intelligence and
+her general public spirit have increased with no appreciable loss in
+distinctive feminine charm. One cannot help feeling as one reads this
+report that it is what a disinterested observer would have to say about
+the effect of woman's larger educational or industrial life since 1870.
+
+In all democracies it is difficult to bring voters to the polls unless,
+as in some Swiss cantons, they are fined for absence. In Colorado, Miss
+Sumner shows that women cast about forty per cent. of the total vote in
+the earlier years of their enfranchisement, though they were in a
+minority of the total population.[49] In the work of the primaries they
+were in a much smaller minority, except when some special problem or
+candidate appealed to them. The more intelligent the community, the
+larger the woman's vote; and it is largest of all in the best residence
+districts of Denver, the capital city. The vote of American born women
+is larger than that of foreigners; and while the prostitutes of Denver
+have been voted in the interests of the party in power, public opinion
+is steadily making this more difficult. In Idaho, all residents of the
+red light district have been disfranchised by statute; and practically
+they do not vote.
+
+[49] Mr. LAWRENCE LEWIS, in the _Outlook_, for January 27, 1906,
+analyzes the election returns for parts of Pueblo City and vicinity, and
+he finds from 25 to 46 per cent. of the vote was cast by women, and the
+proportion of women increased with the intelligence and _morale_ of the
+precinct.
+
+There is no appreciable tendency on the part of women to form a new
+party, nor to favor their own sex. They are more inclined than men to
+scratch the ticket and, as illustrated in the case of Judge Lindsey,
+they sometimes rally efficiently around an independent candidate,
+especially on a moral issue. On the whole, women vote with their
+husbands, just as sons vote with their fathers; but the strength of the
+family vote, as compared with the vote of unsettled people, is certainly
+desirable.
+
+Since the beginning of equal suffrage, Colorado has fully held her own
+with other States in advanced legislation, especially in social and
+educational lines. Women have suffered no insult at the polls, and on
+the whole polling-places have improved; but how far this is due to
+women's presence no one can say. Women have occasionally held
+legislative and executive offices; but they have especially
+distinguished themselves as State and county superintendents of schools.
+
+When it comes to estimating the effect of voting on the women
+themselves, it is still harder to form an opinion. A large majority of
+those reporting to Miss Sumner think that women have become more
+intelligent and more public-spirited, but some doubt it. Morally, they
+have shown themselves less corrupt than men; but a considerable number
+think women as a whole have suffered some deterioration. This is a
+question bound up with our deepest feelings and our most conservative
+ideals; and it is inevitable that some observers should find any change
+for the worse. On the whole, belief in equal suffrage seems to have
+increased in Colorado during the twelve years under survey. Probably the
+results are much what they would be if one were to study a group of the
+most intelligent and refined men in the same community.
+
+During the summer of 1911, I spent a month in the State of Idaho; and as
+I had long been interested in the problem of equal suffrage, both in
+England and America, I seized eagerly on the opportunity to study its
+practical workings at first hand. On the streets and in the tram-cars,
+in hotel lobbies and in lecture halls, when dining out or when making a
+call, few people escaped inquisition. I interviewed working men and
+women, men of affairs, ranchers, sheep raisers and miners, doctors,
+lawyers, teachers, ministers and practical politicians, both men and
+women.
+
+The thing that first impresses one who has been intimately in touch with
+the excited and turbulent condition of mind among the English
+suffragettes, and the sustained and often impassioned feeling of Eastern
+suffrage leaders, is the absence of any burning interest in the subject
+on the part of men or women in Idaho. In London or New York, a suffrage
+inquirer would constantly strike "live wires;" in Idaho, every one is
+insulated. The subject is no more an issue than civil service reform or
+state versus national control of banking systems. Most people have even
+forgotten the passage of the constitutional amendment conferring equal
+suffrage, in 1896. Since then, men and women have gone on voting and
+holding office until the woman's right has become as commonplace as, and
+no more interesting or questionable than, the vote of any busy citizen
+in New Jersey.
+
+The first question that one raises, is naturally whether women do
+actually vote and hold office in Idaho. To answer this question, there
+is no body of statistics available. Every one, however, declares that
+they pretty generally vote. On account of long distances in the country
+side, they poll less votes than men, especially if the weather is bad.
+Probably about three-quarters as many women as men go to the polls.
+Often I met women who said that they did not care for the vote, and
+sometimes one who said she thought women ought not to vote; but these
+same women often added that since they had the responsibility they felt
+it their duty to cast a ballot; and no woman told me that she did not
+fulfil the obligation.
+
+In the first legislature which met after the granting of equal suffrage,
+that of 1898, three women were seated, Mrs. Hattie F. Noble, Clara L.
+Cambell, and Mary A. Wright; Mrs. Wright afterward became chief clerk of
+the House. In 1908, another woman, Mrs. Lottie J. McFadden, was
+returned; but there was no woman in the last legislature, and so far as
+I can learn, only these four have taken part in law-making. When asked
+why, after the first ardor of emancipation, women have taken so little
+part in legislation, most people said it was because they had found the
+work and conditions surrounding it unsuited to them. It seems generally
+agreed, however, that a woman could be elected to the legislature at any
+time if she represented a cause which needed to be brought before the
+people through that body.
+
+Theorists have always insisted that equal suffrage would greatly improve
+the material conditions which surround the polls on election day. One of
+the prominent political leaders in Idaho, who has been intimately in
+touch with conditions for a quarter of a century, said that of course
+there had been great improvement in the last fifteen years. "Things
+would have improved any way," he said, "but I am sure that the women
+have had a large influence. No woman has ever been insulted at the polls
+in Idaho and she runs no more danger of annoyance than she would in
+buying her ticket at a railway window. Men are not always sober in
+either place; but if a man made a remark to a woman that was not polite,
+or used annoying language in her presence, he would be mobbed by the
+men even in the roughest mining camp in the State." Doubtless women have
+helped to break the connection between the saloon and the polling-place,
+but no one claims that women have made voting into a drawing-room
+ceremony. On the contrary, women are very persistent workers at the
+polls, seeking to direct doubtful voters.
+
+Advocates of equal suffrage have pretty generally held the belief that
+if women were given the ballot their superior moral standards would lead
+to a marked change in the handling of such problems as the liquor
+traffic and the control of red light districts. Of woman's superior
+moral standards there can be no doubt; of the actual effect of her vote
+upon these questions there is a great deal of doubt. While I was in
+Idaho, the question of local option came up before the voters of Salt
+Lake City, in the neighboring equal suffrage State of Utah, and the
+"wets" won by a vote of 14,775 to 9,162. Thousands of women must have
+voted for license to bring about this result. In April, 1911, the
+question of license or no license was voted on in Boise. In this case
+again the "wets" won by a considerable majority.
+
+Take another case. For several years in Boise, until 1909, the red light
+district was segregated in two alleys in the heart of the city. In the
+municipal election of that year this issue came fairly before the
+voters, and the democratic nominee for mayor, who was pledged to break
+up the system, was elected by a considerable majority, though the city
+is strongly republican. This result was undoubtedly due to the women's
+vote. After two years, the issue came up again; and the republican
+nominee, who was opposed to the scattering policy though not pledged to
+segregation, was elected; and this result must again have been due to
+the woman's vote. Prominent women of the city told me that during the
+two years when the scattering policy prevailed, the evil was very
+conspicuous, and women going about alone felt far less comfortable than
+under the older system.
+
+There are two ways to explain the fact that, after fifteen years of
+political experience, the women of Boise voted in large numbers for
+license and for a policy in handling the red light district which they
+knew would mean a return to police control. In the first place, it may
+be said that fifteen years of steady contact with political life had
+blunted the sensibilities of women and dulled their moral feeling. On
+the other hand, it may be held that practical experience, under the
+steady pressure of responsibility, had made them realize the
+difficulties involved in the handling of these great social problems and
+had made them feel that a law which could command the support of public
+opinion, even though it regulated these difficulties, was better than a
+law which they might consider ideal, but which was incapable of
+execution.
+
+In Idaho, as in Colorado, the payment of women political workers seems
+to have become a rather wide-spread abuse. Under the conditions of the
+State, with many new settlers constantly arriving, it has long been
+thought necessary to employ paid workers to register voters, get them
+out on election-day and influence those who are uncertain. After 1896,
+women were often hired to do this work, and were paid from three to five
+dollars a day. With their weak sense of party affiliation, it is
+claimed that they will work for the party that pays best. A candidate
+with plenty of money may hire so many workers that it becomes a system
+of wholesale bribery. It is universally conceded that this is an abuse,
+and that many women look upon election service as a source of pin money
+to a degree that is undesirable. Meantime, practical politicians assured
+me that it was a system the women found in operation when they came in;
+that far more men than women were paid; and that the abuse could be
+corrected by proper legislation.
+
+To summarize the matter, we may say that equal suffrage in Idaho has
+simply accentuated the movement toward setting women free to live their
+individual lives which general education and participation in industrial
+life has already carried so far all over the country. Equal suffrage is
+accepted there, as the higher education of women is accepted in
+Massachusetts, and the results in the two cases have been much the same.
+
+Surely these reports carry the matter beyond the experimental stage.
+Conditions in Colorado and Idaho are not identical with those in the
+East, but they are similar enough to make the experience of these States
+amount to a demonstration. Meantime the new obligation resting on women
+is profound. They must learn to "sweat their tempers and learn to know
+their man." They must become students of public affairs and of
+institutional life. Old issues are past; and equal suffrage will soon
+prevail everywhere. Women, like men, have more "rights" in our modern
+democracies than they can use. Woman's Rights are largely realized; from
+now on we must front Woman's Duties.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+The Modern Family
+
+
+The most powerful influence in shaping our lives to-day is the sexual
+impulse which has created the institution we call the family. Few of us,
+at least in our modern democracies, live in daily fear that our
+neighbors will attack and kill us, or carry us off into slavery. Even
+the hunger for food, that once forced men into action, plays little
+direct part in the shaping of the lives of most of us. None of those who
+read these pages would starve if they never did any more work. If they
+tried to starve, they would be arrested and sent to jail; and if they
+persisted, they would be fed by force.
+
+Meantime it is sex hunger, manifesting itself in a hundred forms of
+beauty and ugliness, courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and
+ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive indecencies, honor and
+dishonor, self-repression and prostitution, love and lust, children of
+gladness and children of shame, that lifts us to such heights as we
+attain, or plunges us into the hells we create for ourselves. If one
+could insure one good thing in life for the child one loves, one would
+ask, not money nor fame, but a continuously happy marriage.
+
+In the past, women have always looked upon marriage and family life as a
+career; and the majority of men have found their most significant life
+in the building up of the family institution. To-day, however, family
+life as a career is everywhere called in question. Many women claim to
+prefer educational opportunity, professional recognition or an
+independent bank account to husband and children. Social service is
+exalted; domestic service is debased. Why is it so much nobler to care
+for other people's children in a social settlement, or in a school, than
+to care for one's own in a home? Why should women mass themselves
+together in vast groups as industrial workers, as teachers, as
+suffragettes? We hear of women's work, of women's careers, of women's
+clubs, associations and parties, of women's interests, movements,
+causes. In November, 1911, two hundred and twenty women were arrested
+in London for assaulting the English government in the supposed interest
+of women. Why do women prefer social to domestic service?
+
+Two reasons spring at once to the mind of any intelligent observer of
+the life about him. The first is the complexity of our modern life; the
+second is the nature of the institution of marriage.
+
+A man or woman wishes to live with the one he or she loves. Sexual love
+is in its very nature restricted, circumscribed, monopolistic--in a
+word, monogamic. As has been said repeatedly in this volume, the human
+unit is neither a man nor a woman; it is a man and a woman united in a
+new personality through the unifying and blending power of love. To say
+that this unit is exclusive and monogamic is simply saying that it
+respects its own personality. It can no longer act simply as a man or a
+woman; it is a family and it must act as such in order to satisfy its
+own demands. A man can no more act independently of the woman he loves
+than the heart can act independently of the lungs. The man and woman who
+compose the new unit are not only flesh of one flesh, but they are one
+soul, one life; they are a complete organism. And the life of this
+organism must be persistent to realize its own aims. In all the higher
+forms of existence, processes move slowly. For nine months a woman
+carries her baby as a part of her own body; then for three years the
+father and mother carry the child in their arms; for a score of years
+they must support, protect and train it before they let it go to seek
+its own. Hence sexual love must be persistent as well as monogamic.
+
+From all this it follows that each half of the human unit must find the
+major part of its adult life in devotion to the one it has chosen as its
+complement. This is no hardship; it is divine opportunity, if love binds
+the lives in harmonious unity. If love is lacking, then there is no new
+organism; and such a case falls outside this discussion.
+
+Under the simpler forms of civilization that have prevailed in the past,
+it was comparatively easy to find the complement for any particular man
+or woman. With physical sympathy and desire, little more was needed than
+common race and the same general social position. With simple
+personalities even the marriage of convenience was apt to prove happy.
+
+But, to-day, not only have men become infinitely more complex and
+self-conscious than formerly, but women have ceased to be a general
+class; and, in becoming individuals, they have developed wide ranges of
+individual needs. Instead of fitting at the two or three points of
+physical desire, race and social position, a man or woman, to live
+strongly and well in this close union of body and soul, must fit each
+other at many points. To the older sympathies must be added a common
+attitude toward religion, education, artistic tastes, social ambitions,
+industrial aptitudes, and a score of other living sympathies, if the
+days are to pass in happiness, and each is to maintain his fair share of
+the life of the new unit. Physical desire still remains the paramount
+thing, but these other sympathies tend to strengthen it, or their
+absence may weaken and ultimately destroy it. It is comparatively easy
+for a person to find a complement to two or three of his, or her,
+qualities; it is very difficult for a person to find fulfilment for a
+score of his personal needs in another personality.
+
+In earlier times, too, the individual reached such maturity as he or she
+was to attain much earlier than now, when education has become a
+life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively little danger
+that passing years would develop latent tastes that might prove
+dissimilar. To-day, complete union at twenty may mean many oppositions
+at forty, if each half of the unit goes on developing its powers. And we
+must add to this individual complexity and slower development of the
+present-day men and women the intense self-consciousness of modern times
+which makes it impossible for us to forget our conditions and go on
+living in a world once significant and true but now empty or false.
+
+A second cause for the unrest of the present is doubtless to be found in
+the inflexibility of the institution of the family, under which lovers
+are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of
+their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of
+mediaeval disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for
+peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken
+fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism,
+culminating in absolute monarchy, which gave them political security.
+They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic Church that they might worship in
+peace. They shaped the guilds that they might work quietly, and enjoy
+the fruits of their labors. The family, with its civil and
+ecclesiastical sanctions, was formed to protect the personal lives of
+men and women who wished to live together and rear children.
+
+But with peace, life grew stronger and more intense; and the bonds which
+the people had shaped, and which had given them security, reached their
+limits of growth, became painful, and threatened to prevent all further
+development. The rising cities bought their freedom from feudal lords;
+even the serfs won better conditions; and the rising national units beat
+down the older political institutions with their swords. Finally the
+movements that gather around the French Revolution opened the way for us
+into the democratic freedom and security which we enjoy to-day. The
+guilds were broken up and a measure of freedom was secured, though the
+industrial institution which shall give us freedom and security in our
+work is yet to be formed. The Protestant Revolution led us by devious
+ways into religious freedom where men can worship as they will.
+
+Of all these older institutions, shaped under iron necessity, the only
+one that remains practically unchanged is the family. Dealing with the
+most powerful of all our human hungers, as it does, we have not dared to
+make it fit our modern life. Not only is this true, but the forces of
+the older state and church which survived, fastened themselves upon this
+institution and strengthened its resisting power. The church
+increasingly made marriage into a holy sacrament, so that it not only
+protected lovers, but became a subtle, inviolable and indissoluble
+mystery. The state sanctioned the family, and made it an instrument for
+regulating political and property rights. Formal society proclaimed the
+family and made it the standard for respectability.
+
+Two centuries hence, our family, with its sacramental significances, its
+lack of a eugenic conscience, its financial subordination of women, its
+frequent lack of love and sympathy, its primogeniture, and its
+determining power over social opportunity, will be as incomprehensible
+to students of institutional forms as the Holy Roman Empire is to us
+to-day. Who will then understand how church and state could have
+licensed and consummated marriages between young and inexperienced
+people, marriages which were to be binding on their thought, feeling and
+action for life without requiring some time, however brief, between the
+application for a license and the final binding of vows? Who will be
+able to understand how church and state could have sanctioned marriage
+between a broken-down old noble and a young and inexperienced girl of
+seventeen? How will the future student explain the fact that in New
+Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of
+an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148
+feeble-minded children to curse the state.[50]
+
+[50] See _The Kalikak Family_, by HERBERT H. GODDARD, New York:
+Macmillan Company, 1912.
+
+Who will then understand why a man and woman who had not only ceased to
+love each other but had come to feel a deep repugnance for each other
+should have been compelled to share bed and board, even when there were
+no children, until even murder seemed preferable to such slavery of soul
+and body? How can this student understand woman's economic dependence,
+her uncertain income, her insecure rights in property for which she
+toiled side by side with her husband? Who will then believe that in the
+year 1911 an English citizen could go before a court and secure an order
+for legalized rape, under the name of restitution of marital rights?
+
+Meantime every issue of the daily press counts as its choicest items
+stories of the shameful and soul-destroying ways in which men and women
+are trying to live their lives in spite of this mediaeval institution. So
+far-reaching is the unrest, that at each new revelation of marital
+heresy, society feels constrained to rush forward and frantically
+denounce the heretic in order to prove its own orthodoxy.
+
+Our own attitude toward marriage as a sacrament to be directed by a
+church, or as a pleasure to be exploited by individuals, must be
+changed if the life of the family is to be re-established as the great
+vocation of earnest men and women. Intelligence must be turned upon this
+problem as upon all others that vitally affect our lives. What President
+Eliot has called "the conspiracy of silence touching matters of sex"
+must be broken, and when it is, I believe honest men will agree with
+Ellen Key that "In love humanity has found the form of selection most
+conducive to the ennoblement of the species."[51]
+
+[51] ELLEN KEY, _Love and Marriage._ New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911
+
+In this field, at least, a eugenic conscience must take the place of the
+older theological conscience.[52] We must recognize the infamy of
+knowingly bringing defective children into existence. We must agree that
+under no conditions should people tainted with syphilis be allowed to
+marry; and that those subject to imbecility or insanity should not be
+allowed to live together unless they are unsexed.[53] Justice to future
+generations, and protection of the state, demands at least this much.
+
+[52] See the publications of the Eugenic Education Society, especially
+files of _The Eugenics Review_, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, London.
+
+[53] Indiana has an admirable law on this subject, and New Jersey has
+just added the same to her statutes.
+
+Whether alcoholics, those suffering from congenital sense defects, and
+near relatives, should be allowed to marry may still be an open
+question; but it should be recognized that the state has the right and
+the duty to inquire into these conditions and to impose restrictions.
+Society must come to feel that it is at least as shameful for a broken
+old noble to live with a young girl under the forms of marriage as for
+two young lovers to live together outside them.
+
+As to what the personal, social and industrial relation of man and wife
+should be, we have widely different views and practices. The older view,
+still embodied in the practice of most nations, and best seen in Germany
+and England, is that the woman's duty is to complement the husband. He
+does what he wishes, so far as he can, and the wife rounds out the
+whole. It is the old ideal of later savagery, that the man should
+provide and protect, and the woman should breed children, care for the
+home, pray and wait.
+
+This is really the same ideal that dominated our political life until a
+hundred and fifty years ago. It was the duty of the lords to direct and
+fight; the peasants should work and wait. In politics there gradually
+grew up a middle class which combined with the peasants to overthrow the
+older privileges; and now all classes direct, fight, wait and watch
+together. Whether this democratic idea is finally to prevail, we may not
+know; but it is well worth trying, and the results so far are full of
+promise.
+
+In the same way, in the family, a great middle class of wives has grown
+up, largely since 1870, through education and industry, as the burgers
+did in political life, and these emancipated women are insisting that
+the peasant of the family, the _Hausfrau_, shall join with them and
+dethrone the husband so that all shall share life's responsibilities
+together as free and equal partners. In fact, in America, the revolution
+has already come; and, as in the earlier stages of political
+revolutions, those deposed are having a hard time to maintain even their
+equal share of opportunity.
+
+But the parallel between political and domestic life is not complete,
+and if pushed too far the analogy is mischievous. The assumption of
+physical, intellectual and social superiority on the side of political
+lords and domestic lords was the same. It is possible, however, rightly
+or wrongly, to reduce all the people to the same political level and set
+them all at work doing the same things. But between men and women there
+was not only the assumption of physical and mental difference, but there
+was and must always be the infinite difference of sex. In domestic life,
+the women cannot live without men nor the men without women. Not only
+would the generations fail, but the present generation would lose its
+deepest meaning, if either sex were banished or debased.
+
+In their reactions against old abuses, writers like Mrs. Gilman or Olive
+Schreiner try to create a world for women alone, on the political
+analogy. Men might be tolerated as fathers; but, to secure political
+freedom, these leaders would turn to that nebulous creation of social
+reformers, the state; and it should subsidize the mothers in their
+periods of need. But there are only two ingredients out of which a
+nation can be formed: one is women; the other is men. Shall woman in
+her time of need turn to a state made up of other women, or to a state
+made up of men? Obviously it must be to both; and if woman is to depend
+on men, she might as well depend on man. No, in the political
+revolutions we broke up artificial, outworn and unjust combinations; but
+in this domestic revolution we are breaking up and must readjust the
+fundamental unit of life.
+
+Men and women must live and work together in the domestic unit, and they
+cannot do the same things. Nature has specialized their functions and
+each must supplement the other. Even in Germany, the _Hausfrau_ is not
+going back to an exclusive service of children, cooking and church; nor
+in America will man continue to be merely the breadwinner and the father
+of children. With the enlightenment that is on the way, we shall see
+that husband and wife can have no antagonistic differences. Each profits
+in all that really benefits the other; and slowly we shall shape a new
+institution based on absolute equality, and at the same time on
+complementary service.
+
+In this adjustment, legal forms can help or hinder; but they cannot
+prevent nor compel the final action of human beings. Sex instinct is
+stronger than any human law. The law can, however, help us in regulating
+conditions of marriage, in settling disputes about common property and
+children, and in determining how the contract may be set aside when that
+becomes necessary.
+
+The right of the church to sanction or regulate the family, rests in a
+belief that marriage involves spiritual changes and obligations that
+make it a sacrament, in its nature inviolable, and to be administered
+only by the church, like the sacrament of baptism. This is a belief
+resting not in eugenic considerations, nor in the human needs of the
+persons involved, but in theological dogmas with which this chapter
+cannot deal. Hence we shall maintain that the church has no more right
+to control matters of marriage than it has to interfere in business or
+political relations.
+
+The state, on the other hand, meaning by the state the whole community,
+must concern itself with the marriage of its individuals. The
+commonwealth must have future citizens, and these should be strong and
+intelligent; hence it must prevent the breeding of the unfit. If parents
+die, or fail in obligations, the community must care for the children.
+In case of disagreement between married people, the courts of the
+community must settle disputes about children and property; hence the
+state must know when a man and woman determine to live together. The
+regulation of marriage certainly belongs to the state, that is, to all
+of us.
+
+Marriage should therefore always be a matter of definite and open record
+in the archives of the community. It should also be advertised, through
+the public record, for a considerable time, preferably six months or a
+year, before consummation, that the past experiences of contracting
+parties may be looked up by interested friends or officials, and the
+marriage of the unfit prevented; and so that mere caprice and passion
+shall have time to realize their mistake and turn away. The form which
+the final ceremony of marriage will take can well be left to the tastes
+and traditions of the contracting parties.
+
+The question of rights in children, or in property acquired after
+marriage, should be settled by the state; and it is hard to see how it
+can ever be settled satisfactorily except on a basis of equal
+partnership. No man should be contented with a woman to bear and train
+his children, and create a social atmosphere for his home, who is not
+worth half of what he makes; and the same holds true of a woman. So with
+regard to children, while one parent or the other may, under certain
+conditions, be given the direction of the child's life, it is hard to
+imagine any circumstances that would justify society in refusing either
+father or mother the right frequently to see his child.
+
+Since marriages must be contracted in youth and since inexperienced
+people must make mistakes and the wisest must sometimes change, it will
+sometimes happen that men and women must face the possibility of
+separation. The problem of divorce is very difficult.[54] In less than
+twenty years, from 1887 to 1906, 945,625 divorces were granted in the
+United States; so that probably to-day there are nearly one million
+divorced people in this country. Generally speaking, the divorce rate
+increases as one goes westward. In 1900, the State of Washington led the
+country with 184 divorces for each 100,000 of population. For the whole
+country we averaged 73 per 100,000 of population. Japan alone leads us
+with 215, while England and Wales had only 2. England grants divorce
+only for infidelity; and on the man's side it must be accompanied by
+cruelty; all divorce cases must be tried in London, and the expense,
+never less than two hundred dollars, is prohibitive for the poor.
+Meantime, England grants many separation orders; and it seems sure that
+the Royal Commission, which has been taking evidence for the past three
+years, will favor a freer system of divorce.
+
+[54] See _Statistics of Marriage and Divorce_, prepared by the Bureau of
+the Census, beginning in 1906, and published in 1910.
+
+While divorce is increasing steadily all over the world, and most
+rapidly in the most intelligent and progressive sections, the subject is
+so bound up with our most deep-seated prejudices that it is difficult to
+secure any intelligent thinking on the subject. Thus, most people think
+Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, and Reno, Nevada, are places of free
+divorce, but the fact is that twenty-one other States have a higher
+divorce rate than South Dakota; and fourteen have a higher rate than
+Nevada. So, too, the impression that divorces spring from hasty action
+is certainly wrong, for in 46.5 per cent. of those for which we have
+records there had been a separation of more than three years before the
+divorce was granted. The idea that people generally seek divorces that
+they may marry some one else seems also unfounded, since in the cases
+for which we have records, less than forty per cent. remarry within a
+year.
+
+There are three main objections which one hears urged against free
+divorce. The first is that organized society rests on the family, and
+with free divorce anarchy would ensue. In reply, it is pointed out that
+the same argument was used to support kings, aristocracies and a
+universal church. All these have been set aside, in many parts of the
+earth, and society seems even more stable than before. The love of men
+and women is probably more powerful and less in need of adventitious
+support than either patriotism or religion.
+
+In the second place, it is claimed that children will suffer when
+parents separate. It is replied that this is true, but they were already
+suffering when parents had ceased to love each other. The fact that
+children are involved in only two out of five divorces seems to indicate
+that children hold parents together when the opposition is not too
+strong; and when a separation occurs, those who favor divorce claim that
+a child is better off with either father or mother alone than with both
+if love is absent.
+
+In the third place, it is pointed out that often only one desires the
+divorce and that this brings tragedy to the other life. In reply it is
+claimed that many of the tragedies of life have always gathered around
+the love of men and women, that when marriage is declined tragedy often
+follows, and that compelling a person to live with some one whom he does
+not love, and may even dislike, is more tragic than any separation.
+
+In conclusion, advocates of free divorce claim that their proposals are
+profoundly conservative, that they are seeking to bring marriage back to
+its eternally binding realities. They say that under our present
+conditions of restricted divorce, we have wide-spread prostitution,
+constant irregularities that are tolerated and condoned, and a million
+divorced people, some prevented from remarrying and all socially
+ostracized, so that the whole group is a dangerous element in our midst.
+These advocates claim that with free divorce, granted some months after
+the determination to separate had been registered in the public records,
+the love of men and women and their mutual love for their children would
+be free to bind families together in permanent trust and open honesty;
+and that with all excuse for irregularity absent, the unfaithful man or
+woman would sink to the level of unfaithfulness in business or political
+life. With freedom to readjust their lives, if they preferred to keep
+what they had and get what they could, they would simply take their
+place among thieves and liars, and most of them would disappear.
+
+All transitions are hard, and this one in which we are involved is most
+difficult of all; but no one can study the conditions around him without
+seeing that change is inevitable and that we are not going back to our
+earlier ideals. At the same time, no one can read the singularly
+scholarly and fair-minded presentations of Ellen Key[55] without feeling
+that she has a vision of the future.
+
+[55] _The Century of the Child._ New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907.
+_Love and Marriage_, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911. _Love and Ethics._ New
+York: B.W. Huebsch, 1911.
+
+With regard to the nature of the material plant in which the family
+should live, there are also two widely different ideals struggling for
+favor in the public mind, and for realization in practice. The one
+ideal, while recognizing the changes necessitated by modern conditions,
+would still seek to retain those features which have been supposed to
+make for family privacy, the kitchen, the nursery, and the garden. The
+other would frankly accept our changed conditions, and pass on to the
+larger groups of socialized buildings, with common kitchens, day
+nurseries, and parks.[56]
+
+[56] See _Woman and Economics_, by CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, Boston:
+Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; and the writings of H.G. WELLS.
+
+This question has been discussed in the chapter on industry, and it will
+be considered again in the following chapter. Meantime there can be no
+doubt that love is reticent so far as the outside world is concerned;
+and domesticity must always demand a large measure of privacy. It still
+remains to be proved that this can be secured, in the absence of a
+private kitchen, nursery and garden. Children, too, seem to need the
+personal care and constant love of mothers, and women seem to need a
+long period of loving and caring for a family to round out a deeply
+significant life.
+
+To summarize this chapter we may say that the realization of romantic
+love, under conditions of domesticity, is necessary for men and women,
+and for the well-being of the race. Our present marriage system is
+defective, and needs to be corrected through the creation of a eugenic
+conscience. It should be taken out of the hands of the church and made
+more difficult by the state. Women's property rights should be defined
+and safeguarded, and men and women should never live together when they
+are repugnant to each other.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Family Life as a Vocation
+
+
+The greatest of all wisdom is that which leads men and women to see the
+real significance of their lives while they are still living. Life's
+values, like the manna in the wilderness, must be gathered daily. If not
+nourished day by day the power to live atrophies and dies; and no one
+can live well to-day on the shrunken memories of yesterday. A full and
+significant life is its own justification; and in a last analysis
+philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which
+the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring. Buddhism offers
+us eternal peaceful existence in Nirvana; Epicureanism offers pleasure,
+which is but an intensification of life; Stoicism offers us life freed
+from disturbing forces; and the great lure which Christianity has always
+held before humanity is life eternal. Life is its own justification.
+
+We have maintained throughout this volume that complete
+self-realization is impossible for the half-units which we call men and
+women, when either lives alone. On every side of their natures they are
+complementary; and the unit of human life must be found in the family
+composed of a man and woman who love each other and the children born of
+their love. "There are two worlds below, the home and outside of it." It
+is in this unit, under the stress of sexual passion and maternal love,
+that all the finer forces of our civilization have had their origin.
+Unselfishness, devotion, pity and the higher altruisms all hark back to
+the home as their source.
+
+But, meantime, evil counsels prevail and one hears everywhere of the
+antagonistic interests of men and women. There can be no real rivalry
+between a man's soul and his body, between science and religion, between
+man and woman. The trouble all rests back in the failure to realize the
+incompleteness of man or woman alone for any of the purposes of life.
+And there is that evil notion which still afflicts economics that when
+two trade one must lose. The fact is that, in all honest trade, buyer
+and seller gain alike; and fair exchange makes all who participate in it
+rich. It is so in all real relations between these half-creatures we
+call men and women. In agreement, association and cooperation lies
+strong and significant life for both. In antagonism, separation and
+competition lie arid, poor, mean lives, egotistic and conceited, vapid
+and fickle.
+
+In primitive life, the family furnished a full and adequate career for
+men and women alike. The political life was the family life; each family
+was a religious group; families mustered for war; and each family
+maintained within itself a wide range of industrial activity. But,
+because this unit was so basal, because all later special developments
+of state, church and industry came from it, it was steadily perverted.
+Warped from its original purpose, it has served in turn, as we have
+seen, to define and secure all our later institutions until it has
+become the servant of state, church, social ambition, property and
+industrial advance. Marriage and the birthrate are seldom discussed
+to-day from the point of view of individual needs; but are almost
+always considered from the point of view of national and industrial
+efficiencies.
+
+To-day men and women are confronted by two tempters which constantly
+lure them away from the complete living of the family; one is work, and
+the other is comfort. With the majority of people in our modern
+industrial democracies work uses up the hours and the energy of life. We
+have passed into a time when our habitual material needs are great, and
+the products of work are shamelessly diverted to the excessive uses of
+comparatively few individuals and groups. Hence millions of workers
+march along the narrow dark roads that lead through factories and farms
+to the grave. Only little patches of their nervous systems are ever
+used, but all their energy flows through these sections day after day,
+leaving their lives dull and empty.
+
+Marriage for these workers means decreased earning power for the woman,
+with increased needs for the family, especially when the children come.
+As one watches the procession of young factory and shop women, with
+Sunday finery and some leisure, passing over into draggled factory
+mothers, with no finery and no leisure, one marvels at the strength of
+the forces with which nature drives them to their destiny. And yet, even
+with these hopeless workers, marriage and children mark the heights of
+life.
+
+With others, who are economically freer, work has become an obsession. A
+Charles Darwin or a Herbert Spencer turns all of life's forces to
+shaping facts into science; our industrial leaders mint their hours into
+dollars; our reformers give up their lives that social conditions may be
+changed; our society leaders trade life for triumphs. Meantime we all
+know, or would know if we stopped to consider, that we are here to live
+life fully and significantly day by day. But domesticity takes time and
+effort, and so the hurrying specialist follows the narrow line of
+success until he or she becomes a machine for manufacturing
+generalizations, for painting pictures, for performing surgical
+operations or for merely getting money. The richest woman in America
+said with approval recently that her son was too busy to fall in love.
+
+As industry drives the mass of workers and specialists away from life's
+deepest realizations, so the desire to become comfortable, physically
+and mentally, through avoiding the deeper experiences of life, robs many
+of those who have a large measure of economic freedom. In all periods of
+great wealth this disease of ease has afflicted mankind. Life more
+abundantly comes only at the price of vigorous living; and love travels
+always in company with anxiety. It would be well, says Cicero, to have
+children, were it not for the fear of losing them. Let a man apply this
+principle to wife, friends, possessions and enthusiasm in general and
+life sinks into utter worthlessness.
+
+The love of ease among women is in a measure independent of the
+emancipation movement, but the entry of great numbers of young women
+into lines of independent livelihood has placed them in a condition
+where the ideals of a materialistic and commercial civilization appeal
+to them with great force. Many of them have been liberally educated and
+are living lives of independence. They lodge in flats or boarding houses
+where they have no responsibilities for the routine work connected with
+daily living. They carry their own latch-keys; and no one interferes
+with their friendships or their pleasures. They read the books they
+like, attend the theaters that appeal to them, and avoid people who bore
+them. One can easily understand why these young women hesitate before
+abandoning their easy conditions for the uncertain economic position of
+wife and mother, with a man whose career lies in the future. And yet
+here, as everywhere, one must lose one's life to gain it.
+
+What then does daily association of a man and woman who belong together
+do for them? It gives gladness and peace, and these are fundamental
+conditions for all good and healthful living. It gives incentive to
+effort, for a man or woman dares not fail before the one he or she
+loves; but, in case of failure, it gives comfort and support, for love
+understands and credits intent and effort as highly as achievement. It
+complements the powers, for it gives four eyes, four hands and two minds
+with but one aim. And in this it does not simply multiply by two, but
+the blended powers are far more than two times one. It calls into
+activity all the gracious, artistic and altruistic powers of the soul.
+Surely these are gifts for which we may well forego some material
+comforts, may well work, and even face anxieties unafraid.
+
+Each part of the human unit must educate the other to a realization of
+the fulness of life. This education is not entirely dependent on
+physical intimacy. It is the development of soul and spirit. It polishes
+the manners, cultivates the voice, broadens the judgments, sharpens the
+wit. It makes conversation an art and discussion significant. A
+woman-hating man or a man-hating woman is an unpolished and half-alive
+creature, whether he be a mediaeval saint, or she a militant suffragette,
+or they both be simply commonplace egoists.
+
+Because married life is so perfect when it finds its highest levels, it
+is capable of sinking to any form of vulgarity, base betrayal and
+cynicism when realization fails. The God to whom noblest souls aspire in
+hours of deepest exaltation, is the God invoked by the ribald drunkard
+when he curses his comrade. The family life we are discussing is the
+subject of most of the vulgar and indecent jokes of the disappointed and
+the unfit. The earth which nourishes the nations, merely soils the
+boots of the boor who unthinkingly lives on her bounty.
+
+On the working side the life of the family has an evil record for
+pettiness and monotony, but much of this is due to wrong comparisons. A
+woman who does her own housework would presumably have to work in any
+case. Is the work of the family more petty or monotonous than the work
+of the factory, shop or office? Surely the woman who spends her days
+looking after the details of furnishing a house and keeping it clean, of
+providing and serving meals, of looking after clothing and caring for
+children, has a world of self-expression compared with which factory and
+shop work is infinitely petty and mean. In the social life of friends,
+neighborhood, school and church she is at least as well placed as the
+factory worker. If the woman has the preparation required for teaching
+or independent business, she will find ways to use her powers that will
+relieve the routine of housework. And if the family has means to hire
+help, the wife has a position from which she can exercise social and
+political power superior to that of the foot-loose celibate.
+
+Meantime, the housework grows steadily simpler and less exacting, even
+with the growing complexity of our modern life. Most of the primitive
+industries have left the home, and products come from the factory ready
+to use. Furnace heating, hot and cold water, improved cooking conditions
+and many domestic inventions of our day are keeping housework well
+abreast of other unspecialized work in attractiveness.
+
+The fact that domestic servants are scarce and unwilling to do general
+housework, in no way disproves the soundness of these conclusions. The
+wife, if she is a real wife, and we are discussing no others, is working
+for those she loves, under conditions of free initiative. The general
+servant is working for those who will not even admit her right to
+participate in their social life, and instead of freedom in her
+industrial life, she must generally adjust her efforts to the caprices
+of an untrained mistress. Well-trained mistresses, who know how to work
+themselves and who have a democratic sense of human values, seldom have
+trouble in securing able servants, even in this transition time when the
+shops and factories are calling so loudly to working girls.
+
+No intelligence which a woman may possess needs remain unused in the
+handling of a family. Women spend most of the household money to-day, at
+least in lower and middle-class homes. To use wisely the family
+pay-envelope requires knowledge and judgment of a high order. Problems
+in economics, sanitation, food-values and aesthetics confront the
+housewife at every turn of the day's work. "Even a slave need not work
+as a slave;" and a woman living with the man she loves is the freest
+woman on earth, so far as mind and spirit are concerned.
+
+But the factory girl, or the teacher, or the professional woman who
+seeks the fulfilment of all of life in the factory, the school or the
+consulting-room, will soon tire and clamor for relief. The housewife, or
+the mistress of a home, must likewise seek life away from her work if
+she is to love it and wake each morning with a desire to continue it.
+Luckily we have reached a place where working women in the home are
+seeking supplementary life outside, and they seem to be quite as
+successful in their search as are factory girls or teachers.
+
+To the man, family life, of the kind we are considering, brings a vital
+connection with the past and the future. Reputation, possessions,
+friends, all become deeply significant when a man becomes a link in the
+generations of men. In establishing his material home, and modifying it
+to the changing conditions of the family; in building up a social
+setting for the group; in projecting his work and his service into the
+future, he is held to highest standards by the fact that he is working
+with the partner of his choice, and for interests that are in harmony
+with the constitution of the universe.
+
+Of the greater physical health of married people there can be no doubt.
+Statistics all show the greater longevity of married people, and
+insurance companies recognize it. The celibate type of physical
+degeneration is so well differentiated that it can generally be
+recognized even among strangers, at least after forty.[57] On the moral
+side, too, very few criminals are found among married people.
+
+[57] ARNOLD LORAND, _Old Age Deferred. The Cause of Old Age and its
+Postponement by Hygienic and Therapeutic Measures._ F.A. Davis Co.,
+1911.
+
+If children come to bless these homes of men and women, then even
+intellectual life may shift to a higher level than was before possible.
+With advancing years intellectual interests tend to become specialized.
+The man or woman gives up singing, ceases to be interested in plant
+life, stops reading poetry. One activity after another is cut off and
+interests concentrate in some comparatively small field of work or
+pleasure. But when a child comes, the parents are forced to start over
+the round of human interests and thought once more. Before, they lived
+it as children; now, they live the cycle as grown men and women.
+
+No matter how completely a woman has given up music, she will some day
+find herself singing when she holds her baby in her arms. As she recites
+Mother Goose and the fairy and folk-lore tales, she moves through the
+path of man's upward progress, led by a child, but with the life and
+understanding of adult years. As she walks with her child in the garden
+and in the fields, she is driven to a new interpretation of the world
+of nature. Few things can so broaden, quicken and enrich the
+intellectual life as growing up with one's children.
+
+On the social side, a parent who has children is forced to live in all
+the social world around him. The water-supply, the sewage, pure foods,
+vacant lots, paving, fast driving in the streets, police protection,
+undesirable residents, saloons and churches, schools and
+libraries--everything that touches the social well-being--touches him
+vitally and imperatively. The foot-loose celibate can always go away.
+The parent finds it difficult to leave the place where he has planted
+his roof-tree. Of course, there are many unmarried people, and people
+who are childless, who live this domestic life vicariously through
+friends or other people's children. One cannot but be grateful that life
+is so organized that no woman can be entirely shut off, unless she wills
+it, from the fructifying life that knits together the generations of the
+old and the young.
+
+Ideals are very powerful in determining conduct, and the ideals of
+extreme individualism, now so constantly presented by certain leaders
+among emancipated women, must bear bitter fruit for an army of women in
+the future. While the women are young, ambition and the charm of freedom
+bear them gaily along. Generally better educated than the men of their
+own class, habituated to a personal expenditure which would correspond
+with a large family expenditure, their intelligence prevents their
+falling desperately in love with the men whom they might marry. But in
+the thirties they have visions of the future which are deeply
+disturbing; and in the forties they face the tragedy of a lonely old
+age. Some men and women there must always be whose lives lack the
+fulfilment of family life because of ill health or the accidents of
+personal relations. But most women, if they are willing to pay the same
+price for a significant family life that they so gladly pay for
+professional success, will find the way open to live all of life. Why is
+it that women count it an honor to work and starve for an art, but
+dishonor to undergo privations for their children? All that is here said
+of women may be said of men, but the man's period of family life is
+longer than woman's, and the tragedy of lonely old age with him seems
+less overwhelming.
+
+The old plea that we must have an army of celibate women because in
+civilized countries there is a preponderance of females does not hold at
+present in the United States. The census of 1910 shows an excess of
+2,691,678 males in this country. Nor is this entirely due to
+immigration. More boys than girls are always born in civilized lands;
+and of native white people born of native parents in the United States
+there were, in 1910, 25,229,294 males and 24,259,147 females, a
+difference obviously due to natural causes. New England alone in America
+has a preponderance of females; and the excess there, as also in England
+and Germany, is needed all along the frontiers of civilization. With the
+industrial and social freeing of women now going on, we may reasonably
+hope that the communities of old maids left behind, through the
+emigration of young men, will be broken up.
+
+Of course, it will be pointed out that many men and women who do marry
+fail to realize the ideal presented in these pages. Every form of living
+is dangerous and not every one can hope to be a successful husband and
+father or wife and mother. Even devotion to religion furnishes many
+inmates for insane asylums; athletic contests leave a line of cripples
+behind them; and railroad disasters fill thousands of graves annually.
+The institution of marriage has had no such intelligence applied to its
+improvement during the past years as has been given to perfecting
+railroads; and since founding a family is a more difficult undertaking
+than making a journey, one need not be astonished at the number of
+fatalities. Even if the institution of marriage were as intelligently
+and carefully brought up to date as railroad systems are, it would still
+remain dangerous to live either in or out of marriage.
+
+And yet the danger could be greatly reduced by proper education of
+youth. At present we are educating 10,000,000 girls in the state schools
+of America, and as many boys. They are spending eight to twelve years,
+under the direction of celibate women teachers, sharpening their
+intelligence. Their most important work in life is to be the making of
+homes, but they are supposed to master this art through imitating the
+homes in which they grow up. Many of these are unworthy of imitation,
+and they are all in process of transition.
+
+Every girl should be thoroughly trained in handling an income and in
+spending money wisely. She should have a general knowledge of household
+sanitation, of water-supply and sewage, of foods and their preparation.
+She should know about clothes, their cost, wearing qualities and
+decorative values. She should have a sense of the family and its
+significance in life; of at least the social relations that husband and
+wife must maintain toward each other if their partnership is to be happy
+and effective. She should have the beginnings of a eugenic conscience
+established in her, and she should know something of the care of
+infancy. All this should be given in the school, if it is not definitely
+given in the home, and no girl who goes through the eighth grade should
+escape it. Before the girl is married, she should have wise counsel from
+mature women who have lived and learned the art of living. Boys should,
+of course, also be trained in comparable directions for this great part
+of their lives.
+
+Something is already being done in this direction through the
+establishing of special courses in domestic science, and allied branches
+in our schools. The fact that educational leaders are awake to the need
+was shown by the applause that followed Superintendent Harvey's plea for
+this training in his paper on the education of girls at the
+Superintendents' Association in St. Louis in February, 1912.[58] The
+leading educators of the country greeted his plea with an enthusiasm
+called out by no other paper of the session.
+
+[58] See _Report of the Department of Superintendence of the National
+Education Association_, 1912.
+
+Every woman, then, and every man, not debarred by disease or accident
+and not specially dedicated to a work which precludes marriage, should
+spend his life in a family group, not that the state may have more
+soldiers, or factory employees, but that he may realize the deepest
+significance of his life. In this life the woman should be as free as
+the man, an equal financial partner, and should share in all the social
+and political opportunities of the community. When she bears children,
+she should have special protection, support and reverence; and support
+should come from the father of her children. If he fails her, then the
+group, in its capacity as a state, should care for her honorably. But to
+justify this protection and reverence, she should bring to her special
+functions as mother of the generations a strong body, an intelligent
+mind, a eugenic conscience and an absolute devotion to the children born
+of her love.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+Conclusion
+
+
+The last two hundred years have revolutionized nearly all of our deepest
+conceptions concerning the relations of human beings to religion,
+government, property, and to each other. New knowledge has given us
+partial control over vast forces of nature; and has so increased our
+mobility as almost to free us from limitations of space. We have had
+wonderful visions of the possibilities that lie in intelligent human
+cooperation, and have begun to realize them in a hundred new forms. In
+the midst of these compelling changes, women could no more remain
+undisturbed, within the confines of kitchen and nursery, than men could
+remain on their little New England farms or cobbling shoes and making
+tin pans in the petty workshops of a century ago. But meantime the
+special interests of women have been sadly confused because of the
+larger changes in which all human relations have been involved in this
+time of readjustment. Instead of talking of unquiet women to-day, we
+should talk of an unquiet world.
+
+In the midst of this confusion, most of those who have sought to secure
+a truer relation of women to the life around them have worked on the
+lines of minimizing sex differences. It has been felt that the
+educational, industrial, social and political limitations under which
+women rested were due to the desire of men to exploit them. Men, being
+free, had developed for themselves an ideal world of thought and work;
+and if women wished to be free and happy, they needed only to break down
+the barriers separating them from this man's world.
+
+Most of these barriers are now down; but the women who study in
+universities, teach in the schools, maintain offices as doctors or
+lawyers, collect news for the press, tend spindles in a factory or sell
+ribbons at a counter have found that the man's world is far from ideal
+and that by entering it they have not escaped the special limitations of
+their sex. Everywhere the feeling is abroad that, instead of having
+arrived at a destination, women have embarked on a journey fraught with
+many uncertainties.
+
+This volume has been written in the belief that men and women alike will
+achieve greatest freedom and happiness, not by minimizing sex
+differences, but by frankly recognizing them and using them. If we could
+reduce men and women to sameness, we should destroy at least half the
+values of human life. They are not alike; but they are perfectly
+supplementary. The unit can never be a man nor a woman; it must always
+be a man and a woman. This means that in all the activities essential to
+human development men and women must carefully study to find what each
+can best provide.
+
+Thus we must some day have a Church, not composed exclusively of male
+priests and women worshipers, not confined to rationalistic appeal nor
+to ritualistic observance, but expressing the whole range of human
+aspiration toward the unknown. Rational men and women of feeling must
+combine with reverent men and intelligent women to create a belief and a
+service which will express all the longings of humanity toward
+perfection.
+
+So in government, we must have a state which will be not only just but
+merciful; which will concern itself not only with militant economics but
+also with human well-being. If men are more capable in expressing the
+katabolic needs of aggression and protection, women must furnish the
+anabolic products of care and conservation. If women must help pay the
+bills and nurse the wounded, they must first have a voice in determining
+whether there shall be a war. Men and women must join their qualities in
+building and caring for cities, and in shaping nations, where they can
+both live their largest lives.
+
+In education, we must devise institutions which will provide for the
+special needs of women; and we must have the combined qualities of men
+and women brought to bear on children of both sexes, and at all ages.
+The foster parents of the nation's children must be both men and women.
+The present attempt to exploit our twenty millions of boys and girls in
+the interest of a sex will be a crime against humanity when we are
+intelligent enough to see its real meaning.
+
+The specialization going on in industry means infinite variety if we
+look at the whole field of activity. Some parts of the world's work are
+specially fitted for men; other parts to women. No intelligent division
+of labor has been attempted in the period since all work was transformed
+by our modern inventions. Possibly men should do most of the
+dressmaking, and women should make men's clothing, but no intelligent
+man or woman can doubt that most work falls naturally into the hands of
+one sex or the other. Some day we shall know enough so that there will
+be little or no industrial competition between men and women.
+
+It is, however, in the family that both men and women must find their
+deepest supplementary values. Sex antagonism can do much to impoverish
+and ruin individual lives; but the monogamic and persistent union of
+lovers, surrounded by their children, will easily survive all the
+mistakes of a time of transition. In the meantime, those who would
+uphold the finest family ideals of the past have less cause to fear the
+militant agitator than they have to fear the idle, parasitic wife, who
+relies on her legal rights to give her luxuries without labor, position
+without leadership, and wifehood without the care and responsibility of
+children.
+
+From the point of view of this book, all the efforts to open the doors
+of opportunity, through which women can pass into the man's world, are
+but preparations for the beginning of a journey. The sooner all such
+doors are opened the better, for then a great source of dangerous sex
+antagonism will pass away; and the energy of reformers will be set free
+to work out the difficult problem of supplementary sex adjustments.
+
+And meantime, sex remains the greatest mystery and the most powerful
+thing in human life. Its deeper values are lost sight of when men and
+women are warring over work, wages, and votes, just as the meaning of
+religion has been lost when priests and laity sought to advance their
+meanly selfish interests. But in the crises of life it always comes
+back. When a great ship founders in midocean, and but a third of the
+people can be saved, there is then no question of woman's rights. In the
+darkness of early morning, eager men's hands place their women in the
+life-boats and push them off. The poorest peasant woman takes
+precedence over any man. Almost every woman there would prefer to stay
+and die with her man; would glory in staying and dying if he might thus
+be saved; but in her keeping are the generations of the future, and she
+is weak, therefore the strong gladly stand back and go down to death.
+The solution of woman's place in the society of the future must be based
+on a recognition of the supplementary forces that send women to
+undesired safety while men die.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman in Modern Society, by Earl Barnes
+
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