Woman in Modern Society Part 3

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 MuNSTERBERG, _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 pa.s.smen. 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 pa.s.smen and pa.s.swomen.

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 a.s.sisted this subst.i.tution. 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 cla.s.ses. 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 inst.i.tutions. 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded it. Thus in Philadelphia, in 1911, there were 125 boys' cla.s.ses, 174 girls' cla.s.ses, and 894 mixed cla.s.ses in the grammar grades; still there were but 175 men teachers employed and, of course, the girls' cla.s.ses 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 princ.i.p.als. In 1909, Mrs. Ella Flagg Young was elected president of the National Education a.s.sociation; and in 1911, Miss Alice Dilley was elected president of the Iowa State Teachers'

a.s.sociation. 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.e.x 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 partic.i.p.ate become rich. It is so in all honest relations between these half-creatures we call men and women. In agreement, a.s.sociation, cooperation, lies strongest significant life for both. In separation, compet.i.tion and antagonism lie arid, poor, mean lives, conceited and egotistic, vapid and contemptible.

IV

The Feminizing of Culture

With the weakening of s.e.x 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 antic.i.p.ated. 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 pa.s.sed; 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.ses to financial grandeur before the eyes of the mult.i.tude, 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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 ma.s.sed 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 inst.i.tutions we had enrolled in 1910, 17,707 women.

Of 602 inst.i.tutions reported in 1910, 142 were for men only; 108 were for women only; and 352 were open to both s.e.xes. 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions.

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 const.i.tutes the peculiarity of women's minds as compared with men's minds.[29] In our first chapter, it was a.s.serted 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 MuNSTERBERG, 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 inst.i.tutions are widely distributed; they were all fully co-educational; and they each had a wide range of elective studies. In all of them, cla.s.s-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 cla.s.sroom and in the field, I have carried out many inductive, quant.i.tative 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.

Inst.i.tutional 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.