Woman in Modern Society Part 10

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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution 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' a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation_, 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x. 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 s.e.x 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 inst.i.tutions 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 s.e.xes, 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x or the other. Some day we shall know enough so that there will be little or no industrial compet.i.tion between men and women.

It is, however, in the family that both men and women must find their deepest supplementary values. s.e.x 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 pa.s.s 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 s.e.x antagonism will pa.s.s away; and the energy of reformers will be set free to work out the difficult problem of supplementary s.e.x adjustments.

And meantime, s.e.x 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.