The Women of Tomorrow Part 6

One of the ladies-in-waiting is straightening out the tangled strands of wool with carding combs. The other has taken the combed and straightened strands and is spinning them into yarn. The queen, being the owner of the plant, has the best job. She is weaving the yarn into cloth on a loom.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THIS SKETCH OF A WOOLEN MILL OPERATED IN THE GROUNDS OF A PALACE BY A QUEEN AND HER LADIES-IN-WAITING IS TAKEN FROM A VERY OLD FRENCH TRANSLATION OF BOCCACCIO'S BOOK ON "n.o.bLE WOMEN." IN THOSE DAYS EVERY HOME WAS A FACTORY AND A TRADE SCHOOL.

_Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago._]

The daughters of the Emperor Charlemagne, who, besides being an emperor, was a very rich man, learned how to card and spin and weave.

n.o.ble women had to direct all that kind of work on their estates. They lived in the very midst of industry, of business.

So it was with those early New England women. And therefore, whether well-to-do or indigent, they pa.s.sed on to their sons as well as to their daughters a steady daily lesson in the world's work.

The most intelligent mother in the United States to-day, let her be kindergartner and psychologist and child-study specialist as much as she pleases, cannot give her children that broad early view of the organization of life. The only place where her children can get it now is the school.

On the first of January of the year 1910 Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of schools in Chicago, took algebra out of the eighth grade of the elementary schools, and, in its place, inserted a course on Chicago.

Large parts of what was once the home are now spread out through the community. The new course will teach the life of the community, its activities and opportunities, civic, aesthetic, industrial. Such a course is nothing but home training for the enlarged home.

But we must go back for a moment to that biggest and hardest department of all in the old homes of New England.

"Deceit, weeping, spinning, G.o.d hath give To women kindly that they may live,"

said Chaucer in a teasing mood.

But spinning was a very small part of the Department of Textiles. We forbear to dilate on the courses of instruction which that department offered. We confine ourselves to observing that:

First. In the Subdepartment of Flax, after heckling the flax with combs of increasing degrees of fineness till the fibers lay pretty straight, after spinning it into yarn on her spinning wheel, after reeling the yarn off into skeins, after "bucking" the skeins in hot lye through many changes of water, and after using shuttle and loom to weave the stuff into cloth, the home woman of those days had to accomplish some twenty subsequent processes of bucking, rinsing, possing, drying, and bleaching before the cloth was ready for use.

Second. In the Subdepartment of Wool, in addition to being carders, spinners, and weavers, women were dyers, handling all the color resources of the times, boiling pokeberries in alum to get a crimson, using sa.s.safras for a yellow or an orange, and producing a black by boiling the fabric with field sorrel and then boiling it again with logwood and copperas.

We pa.s.s over, as trivial, the making of flax and wool stuffs into articles of actual use. We say nothing about the transformation of cloth into clothes, table-covers, napkins; nothing about the weaving of yarn on little lap looms into narrow fabrics used for hair laces, glove ties, belts, garters, and hatbands; nothing about the incessant knitting of yarn into mittens and stockings. Those details were for idle moments.

Sweet domestic days, when girls stayed at home and helped their mothers and let father support the family!

It seems as if even Rip Van Winkle, in his most shiftless mood, ought to have been able to support a large number of daughters under such conditions.

Does it astonish you that they matured young? There, all about them, from babyhood, were the basic processes by which the world was sheltered, clothed, and fed. Those processes were numerous but simple.

Boys and girls observed them, absorbed them, through eyes, through finger-tips, during all those early years when eyes and finger-tips are the nourishing points of the intellect. Does it astonish you that they were soon ready for the duties of adult life?

John Winthrop, the first governor of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony, was married at seventeen. His parents were not only willing, but aiding and abetting. They considered him a man.

Mercy Otis, the wife of the patriot, James Warren, and Abigail Smith, the wife of the future president, John Adams, both married before twenty. A study of their lives will show that at that age they were not only _thought_ to be grown up but _were_ so.

To-day, in Boston, a woman of twenty is considered so immature that many of the hospitals will not admit her even to her preliminary training for the trade of nurse till she has added at least three years more to her mental development.

Who has thus prolonged infancy? Who has thus postponed maturity?

Science has done part of it.

By the invention of power-driven machines and by the distribution of the compact industries of the home out and into the scattered, innumerable business enterprises of the community, Science has given us, in place of a simple and near world, a complicated and distant one. It takes us longer to learn it.

Simultaneously, by research and also by the use of the printing-press, the locomotive, and the telegraph wire (which speed up the production as well as the dissemination of knowledge), Science has brought forth, in every field of human interest and of human value, a ma.s.s of facts and of principles so enormous and so important that the labors of our predecessors on this planet overwhelm us, and we grow to our full physical development long before we have caught up with the previous mental experience of the race. This is true first with regard to what is commonly called General Culture and next with regard to what is commonly called Specialization. Growth into General Culture takes longer and longer. And then so does the specialized mastery of a specialized technique. The high-school teacher must not only go to college but must do graduate work. The young doctor, after he finishes college and medical school, is found as an interne in hospitals, as an a.s.sistant to specialists, as a traveler through European lecture rooms. The young engineer, the young architect, the young specialist of every sort, finds his period of preparation steadily extending before him.

A complicated and distant world instead of a simple and near one, a large ma.s.s of human experience to a.s.similate instead of a small one, a long technique to master instead of a short one,--for all this part of the extension of immaturity we may thank Science. For the remaining part of it we may thank System.

The world is getting organized. Except in some of the professions (and often even in them) we most of us start in on our life work at some small subdivided job in a large organization of people. The work of the organization is so systematized as to concentrate responsibility--and remuneration--toward the top. In time, from job to job, up an ascent which grows longer as the organization grows bigger, we achieve responsibility. Till we do, we discharge minor duties for minimum pay.

Thus the _mental_ immaturity resulting from Science is supplemented by the _financial_ immaturity resulting from System.

Both kinds of immaturity last longest among the boys and girls who come from that large section of society which is neither rich nor poor.

This is not to say that rich and poor escape unaffected. Shall we ever again, from the most favored of homes, see a William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, by merit, at 23? And, in the ma.s.s of the people, shall we ever again see that quickness of development toward adulthood which gave us the old common-law rule validating the marriage of a male at 14 and of a female at 12? The r.e.t.a.r.dation of adulthood is observable in all social groups. But it comes to its climax in what is commonly called the "middle" group. For it is in that group that the pa.s.sion for education is strongest, or, at any rate, most effective.

It is from the families of average farmers, of average business men and of average professional men that we get our big supply of pupils for the most prolonged technical training of our schools and universities.

In this matter, as in many other matters, the historian of the nineteenth century may possibly find that while public attention was being given princ.i.p.ally to the misery of the poor and to the luxury of the rich it was in the "middle" part of society that the really revolutionary changes in family life were happening.

It is with the financial reason for prolonged immaturity just as it is with the mental. The rich boy may be supported into marriage by his family. The son of the laborer soon reaches the wage-earning level of his environment. But the son of the average man of moderate means, after his years of scholastic preparation, must spend yet other years in a slow climb out of the ranks into a position of commercial or professional promise of "success" before he acquires what is regarded in _his_ environment as a marrying income.

They say that college girls marry late. It's true enough. But it's not well put.

The girls in the social group from which most college girls are drawn marry late.

Late marriage was not started by college. It would be safer to say that college was started by late marriage.

Out of the prolongation of infancy, out of the postponement of marriage, came the conquest by women of the intellectual freedom of the world.

We can learn something about the nature of education by following the history of that conquest.

When the old New England homestead furnished adequate employment to all its daughters, and when those daughters pa.s.sed directly from girlhood to wifehood and were still most adequately employed, there was really little reason why they should attend the schools in which their brothers were being taught the knowledges of the outside world.

The girls did not belong to the outside world. Nor did the outside world have anything to teach them about their work in the household.

In such circ.u.mstances it is hardly surprising that in 1684 the New Haven Grammar School should have ordered that "all girls be excluded as improper and inconsistent with such a grammar school as the law enjoins."

In proportion, however, as the work of the household was shifted out into the outside world, and in proportion as women began to follow that work out into the outside world, the knowledges of the outside world became appropriate and necessary for them. Hence, a hundred years later, in 1790, it was as much a changing industrial condition as a changing psychological one which caused the school authorities of Gloucester, Ma.s.s., to resolve that "two hours (in each school-day) be devoted to the instruction of females, as they are a tender and interesting branch of the community."

But grammar-school education, even high-school education, was not long enough for the women in the families in which the prolongation of infancy, and the consequent postponement of marriage, was greatest.

While their future husbands were going through the long process of education in school and college and university and then through the long process of commercial and professional apprenticeship, these girls were pa.s.sing through the grammar-school age, through the high-school age, and then on into what in those days looked like old-maidhood. Their social environment did not lead them into factory work. Yet their families were not rich. How were they to be occupied?

The father of Frederick the Great used to go about his realm with a stick, and when he saw a woman in the street he would shake the stick at her and say: "Go back into the house. An honest woman keeps indoors."

Probably quite sensible. When she went indoors, she went into a job.

The "middle cla.s.s" daughter of to-day, if her mother is living and housekeeping, goes indoors into a vacuum.

Out of that vacuum came the explosion which created the first woman's college.

There was plenty of sentiment in the explosion. That was the splendid, blinding part of it. That was the part of it which even to-day dazzles us with the n.o.bility of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They made Troy Female Seminary in the twenties and Mount Holyoke in the thirties in the image of the aspirations, as well as in the image of the needs, of the women of the times.

But the needs were there, the need to _be_ something, the need to do something, self-respecting, self-supporting. The existence of those needs was clearly revealed in the fact that from the early women's colleges and from the early coeducational universities there at once issued a large supply of teachers.

This flow of teachers goes back to the very fountain-head of the higher education of women in this country. Emma Willard, even before she founded Troy Female Seminary, back in the days when she was running her school in Middlebury, Conn., was training young women to _teach_, and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal school in the United States.

From that time to this most college women have taught school before getting married. _The higher education of women has been, in economic effect, a trade school for training women for the trade of teacher._