Analyzing Character Part 22

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright, by Rockland, New York_.

FIG. 42. Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. A man of marked personality, shrewdness, ambition, courage, determination, self-reliance, persistence, and energy.

Added to these were humanitarianism, reverence, optimism, kindliness, humor, eloquence, and organizing ability. Note high, dome-like head; prominent brows; fulness of the eyes and surrounding tissues; large, bony nose; long upper lip; firm mouth; square jaw and prominent chin; large, well-formed ears; short fingers, and shrewd, kindly expression.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 43. Rufus Isaacs, Baron Reading, Lord Chief Justice of England. Keen, penetrating, alert, a.n.a.lytical, resolute, self-reliant, courageous, persistent, non-sentimental, practical financial. Note comparatively low, wide forehead, long upper lip, thin lips, square-set jaw and chin, long, large nose, with somewhat depressed tip, large ears, and flatness of the top of the head.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright by Harris & Ewing, Washington, D. C_.

FIG. 44. Hon. Elihu Root, former United States Senator from New York.

Practical, energetic, ambitious, intellectual, with courage, critical faculties, ambition, shrewdness, idealism, and a keen knowledge of human nature in excellent balance. Note high, long head; high forehead, prominent at brows, large, well-formed nose; prominent chin, general splendid balance of head and face proportions, and calm, poised, but keen and forceful expression.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 45. Harland B. Howe, Lawyer. Practical, matter-of-fact, shrewd, non-sentimental, energetic, ambitious, determined, and courageous. Note wide, high forehead; prominent at brows rather square above; high head, large nose, short, thin upper lip, and square, prominent jaw and chin.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright by Harris & Ewing, Washington, D. C_.

FIG. 46. The late Justice Horace H. Lurton, of the United States Supreme Court. Excellent example of judicial type. Practical, matter-of-fact, comparatively unemotional, calm and poised. Note prominence at brows, comparative flatness just above temples, strong jaw and chin, calm, unwavering expression.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photo by Pach_.

FIG. 47. Prof. William H. Burr, of Columbia University. Member of Isthmian Ca.n.a.l Commission. A fine example of professional type. Great intellect, energy, ambition, shrewdness, determination, and constancy, with refinement, idealism, sympathy, and friendliness. Note high, full forehead; large, long, but finely chiseled, nose; high head, narrow and straight at sides; fine texture; friendly expression.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 48. Hon. John Wesley Gaines, Ex-Congressman from Tennessee. A fine example of the dramatic orator and politician. Refined, sensitive, responsive, courageous, ambitious, energetic, friendly. Note high, long head, prominent nose, short upper lip, prominent chin, finely chiseled features, and spirited expression.]

CHAPTER XI

WOMEN'S WORK

This chapter is not written for the purpose of adding one whisper to the impa.s.sioned controversies at present raging over women's work. So far as it is within our power, we shall refrain from taking sides with either that army which contends that woman is in every way the equal of man and should be permitted to engage in all of man's activities on an equal footing with him, or with that other army which declares that woman's place is the home and that every woman should be a wife, mother, and housekeeper.

Doubtless there are many wholesome and needed reforms being agitated with reference to women's work. Doubtless, also, there are many pernicious changes being advocated by both the sincere but mistaken and the vicious and designing. It is not the purpose of this chapter to discuss these reforms or to favor or to oppose any of them. We shall, in this chapter, discuss the problem of vocation for women under present conditions.

BROAD SCOPE OF WOMEN'S WORK

The present day finds women at work in practically every field of human endeavor. There is no profession, business, trade, or calling which does not count women amongst its successful representatives. Nor does the fact that a woman has married, has a home and children, debar her from achievement in any vocation outside the home which she may choose. Madam Ernestine Schuman-Heinck, with her eight children; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with her ten children; Katherine Booth-Clibborn, with her ten children; Ethel Barrymore, with her family; Mrs. Netscher, proprietor of the Boston Store in Chicago, with her family; Mary Roberts Rhinehart, with her children; Madam Louise Homer, with her little flock, and thousands of others are examples of women who have been successful not only as home-makers but also in art, literature, professional or commercial vocations.

Since this is true, it follows that, theoretically at least, woman may choose her profession in precisely the same way that man chooses his.

Practically, however, this is not true in most cases. Undoubtedly, a very large majority of women have happily married, are sufficiently provided for, and are happier, healthier, more useful, and better satisfied with life in the home than anywhere else. Notwithstanding the fact that our girls, almost without exception, enter upon the important vocation of wifehood, motherhood and home-making with almost no proper training, their apt.i.tudes for the work are so great and their natural intuitions in regard to it so true, that unquestionably, large numbers of them in the United States are happy and satisfied and have no part and no interest in all the hue and cry in regard to women's rights or women's work.

WOMEN NATURAL-BORN WIVES AND MOTHERS

The natural tendency of the majority of women for maternity and home-making must be taken into consideration. Some boys play with weapons, others with machinery, still others are interested in dogs and horses.

Some boys are natural traders, others love to hunt and fish, while you will find an occasional lad curled up in a big chair in the library absorbed in a book. But practically all girls play with dolls, which is a sufficient evidence of the almost universality of the maternal instinct in women. The pity is that our educational traditions, almost without exception, are those handed down to us from schools and universities which educated boys and men only. We are therefore educating our girls to be merchants, lawyers, doctors, accountants, artists, musicians; in fact, almost anything but mothers. Twenty years ago, this was universally true.

To-day, fortunately, the light has begun to break, and in many schools, both public and private, we are beginning to teach our girls domestic science, the care and feeding of infants, pre-natal culture, home management, economic purchasing, and other such important subjects.

VOCATIONS FOR MOTHERS

Occasionally we find a girl who has no talent for housework or home management. She is not particularly interested in it. She finds it monotonous and distasteful. For these reasons she probably does not do it well. On the other hand, she may have keen, reliable commercial instincts and be well qualified for a business career, or she may be educational, artistic, literary or professional in type. Such a woman has, of course, no business trying to keep house. She may have a strong love nature and ardent maternal desires. If so, there is no reason why she should not marry and become the mother of children. If she does, however, she should turn the management of the home over to someone else and seek self-expression and compensation in the vocation for which she is best fitted. This, of course, is no easy matter. Many men either have violent or stubborn prejudices against any such arrangement. Whether or not she can take her true place in the world depends upon the courage, determination, tactfulness, and personal force of each individual woman.

WOMEN AS TEACHERS

There is one occupation for women which is thoroughly established, entirely respectable, socially uplifting, and fully approved by even the most conservative and fastidious. This is teaching. The result is that the profession of teaching, for women, is overcrowded and becoming more overcrowded. The work done is, on the whole, mediocre or worse, and, as a result of these two conditions, the pay is pitifully small considering the importance of the results.

Because women can become teachers without losing one notch of their social standing in even the most hide-bound communities, thousands of women become teachers who ought to be housewives. Thousands of others struggle in the schoolroom, doing work they hate and despise, for a miserable pittance, when they might be happy and successful in a store or an office. We have met women teachers who ought to have been physicians; others who ought to have been lawyers; others, many of them, who ought to have been in business; and still others, thousands of them, who ought to have been in their own homes. And, naturally enough, we have also met women in the professions and in business and in their homes who ought to have been teachers--but not nearly so many.

The true teacher has three fundamental qualifications. First, a love of knowledge; second, a desire to impart knowledge, and third, a love of young people. Added to these should be patience, firmness, tactfulness, knowledge of human nature, facility in expression, reasoning power, enthusiasm, and a personality which inspires confidence. Can any county superintendent discover these qualities by means of the examination upon which first, second and third-grade certificates are based? Have the members of any average school board the discrimination necessary to determine the presence or absence of these qualities in any candidate who brings her certificate?

WOMEN IN BUSINESS

The business world suffers from the presence in the ranks of its workers of thousands of hopelessly inefficient girls who have no apt.i.tudes for business, or even for the minor detailed processes of commercial activity.

They take no real interest in their work. They have no particular ambition for advancement. Their one motive for condescending to grace the office with their presence at all is to earn pin-money or, perhaps, to support themselves in some fashion until they marry. It is true that some of these girls might be taught to be reliable and efficient in their work if they could be persuaded to take an interest in it, to look upon it as something more potent and more important than a mere stop-gap. Many of them, no doubt, could be trained to earn salaries which would pay them to continue in business even after marriage.

WOMEN IN DOMESTIC SERVICE

Others of these girls are utterly unfitted for office work. Some of them would succeed very well as teachers, some as artists, and others as musicians. Like so many of their brothers, however, they have followed the line of least resistance--regardless of their apt.i.tudes. Most of these girls belong in the home. They are quite justified in looking forward to matrimony as their true career. How much better if they would only earn the necessary pin-money in domestic service! From a monetary point of view, thirty dollars a month, with board, room, laundry, and many other necessities furnished, is a princely compensation compared with the five or eight dollars a week received by most girls in an office. From an economic point of view, the coming into our homes of thousands of intelligent, fairly well educated, trained, and ambitious young women would be a blessing and benefit. Socially, of course, the first young women who adopted such a radical change in custom would be pariahs. They would also, doubtless, suffer many hardships in the way of irregular hours, small, dark, stuffy rooms, unreasonable mistresses, no adequate place to entertain their friends, and other such injustices. But, with a higher and more intelligent cla.s.s of household servants, doubtless these abuses would disappear.

We opened this chapter with the disavowal of any intention to advocate reform. We make this one exception. We most earnestly hope that such a reform may be consummated. At the same time, we have an uneasy suspicion that we are sighing for the moon.

THE TRAGEDY OF BAD COOKING

The whole problem of household management is just now a very serious one.

When the maid is ignorant, untrained, and, as is so often the case, slack, wasteful, and inefficient, the situation is, in all conscience, bad enough. But when the mistress is only a little less ignorant than her servant, is equally slack, and perhaps even more inefficient, the high cost of living gets a terrific boost in that household, while comfort, wholesomeness, and adequacy of living are correspondingly depressed. One of the saddest elements in our consultation work is the stream of both men and women who lack courage, aggressiveness, initiative, mental focus, and personal efficiency generally because they are deficient in physical stamina. Their whole life is, as it were, sub-normal. With inherent qualifications for success, they are, nevertheless, threatened with failure because, to use the language of the ring, "they lack the punch."

The trouble with nine out of ten of these unfortunates is that they are under-nourished. Not because they do not get enough food, but because their diet is not properly balanced, is served to them in incompatible combinations, is badly prepared, poorly cooked, unpalatable, and doubtless, in many cases, served in anything but an appetizing manner.

Napoleon is quoted as having said that an army fights with its stomach.

The man who goes out to do battle for commercial or professional success from an ill-managed and inefficient kitchen and dining-room is as badly off as the army with an inadequate commissary department. Yet, while the commissary department of the modern army receives the most scientific and careful supervision, many a man must leave his kitchen in the hands of a wife who received her training in music, literature, modern languages, and cla.s.sics, or in a business college, and of a servant who received what little training she has as a farm laborer in Europe.

There is no denying the truth that if housewives themselves were scientifically trained, we should have a far higher average of training and efficiency amongst domestic servants. One of the consequences of our deplorable self-consciousness in the matter of s.e.x is that we have been too prudish frankly to train our girls to become successful wives and mothers. The result is that, when it becomes necessary for them to earn money before their marriage, instead of gaining experience in housekeeping, cooking and purchasing, they have taken up the stage, teaching, factory work, office work, and retail selling. As we have seen, a great many of them are misfits in these callings. Good food is wasted, good stomachs are impaired, and good brains and nerves deteriorate because, as a general rule, only those who are too ignorant or too inefficient for office work or factory work can be induced to take service in our kitchens.

CHAPTER XII

SPECIAL FORMS OF UNFITNESS

Place a quinine tablet and a strychnine tablet of the same size on the table before you. Can you, by looking at them, smelling of them, or feeling of them, tell them apart? Would you know the difference instantly, by their appearance, between bichloride of mercury tablets and soda tablets? Down in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a manufacturing chemist's huge building, there is a girl placing tablets in boxes and bottles. They come to her in huge bins. One tablet looks very much like another. Upon her faithful, conscientious and unerring attention to every minute detail of her rather routine and monotonous work may depend the fate of empires.

In an office on the main floor of this same building sits a man directing the policy of the entire industry. Upon him rests the responsibility for the success of the enterprise a year, five years, twenty years ahead. He gives an order: "Purchase land. Build a factory for the making of carbolic acid. Equip it with the necessary machinery and apparatus. Purchase in advance the needed raw materials. Be ready to put the product on the market by the first of September." The execution of that order involves minute attention to thousands of details. Yet, if the man who gave it were to consider many of them and render decision upon them, the business would rapidly become a ship in a storm with no one at the helm.

The work of the girl in the bas.e.m.e.nt, sorting tablets, may turn out to be far more important in the world's history than the work of the man in the front office, managing the business. It is just as important, therefore, that she should be fitted for her vocation as that he should be fitted for his.

GENERALS AND DETAIL WORKERS

Fortunately for carrying on the business of the world, there are many people who love detail, take delight in handling it, find intense satisfaction in seeing that the few little parts of the great machinery of life under their care are always in the right place at the right time and under the right conditions. Since there is such an incalculable ma.s.s of these important trifles to be looked after, it is well that the majority of people are better detail workers than formulators of policies and leaders of great movements. Tragedy results when the man with the detail worker's heart and brain attempts to wear the diadem of authority. He breaks his back trying to carry burdens no human shoulders are broad enough to bear. He is so bowed down by them that he sees only his mincing footsteps and has no conception of the general direction in which he is going. Nine times out of ten he travels wearily around in a little circle, which grows smaller and smaller as his over-taxed strength grows less and less.

When you put a man of larger mental grasp in charge of a wearying round of monotonous details, you have mingled the elements out of which a cataclysm sometimes comes. These are the men who, with the very best intentions in the world, fail to appear with the horseshoe nail at the correct moment.

To be there, at that time, with the horseshoe nail is their duty. Nothing greater than that is expected of them. Yet, because their minds grasp the great movements of armies in battles and campaigns, they overlook the horseshoe nail and, as the old poem says: