WHY WOMEN ARE SO 
 
 By 
 MARY ROBERTS COOLIDGE, Ph.D. 
 
 Author of Chinese Immigration, Almshouse Women, etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1912 
 
 . OF
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1912, 
 
 BY 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 Published October, 1912 
 
 TMC OOIMH *OOtN CO. 
 AMWY. N. J.
 
 TO 
 
 B. C. 
 
 AND OTHER NEW MEN 
 
 WHO SET HUMAN QUALITY ABOVE FEMININITY 
 IN WOMEN 
 
 2126235
 
 THE HYPOTHESIS 
 
 THESE chapters are neither a defense nor an 
 arraignment of womankind; they are, rather, a 
 first-hand study of the ordinary, orthodox, middle- 
 class women who have constituted the domestic 
 type for more than a century; the exotic great lady 
 and the morbid woman with a grievance have alike 
 been omitted. They try to answer the query: 
 why are women so? Is the characteristic be- 
 havior which is called feminine an inalienable 
 quality or merely an attitude of mind produced 
 by the coercive social habits of past times? 
 
 As a working hypothesis it is assumed that the 
 women of the nineteenth century in America were 
 for the most part what men expected them to be; 
 modified only by the disintegrating, and at the 
 same time reconstructive, forces of modern soci- 
 ety. In other words, sex traditions rather than 
 innate sex character have produced what is called 
 " feminine " as distinguished from womanly be- 
 havior.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE HYPOTHESIS v 
 
 SECTION I 
 THE DOMESTIC TRADITIONS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. THE CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD j 
 
 II. THE GREAT ADVENTURE 20 
 
 III. THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 42 
 
 IV. DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 65 
 
 SECTION II 
 THE EFFECT UPON WOMEN 
 
 V. THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT .... 89 
 
 VI. BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 108 
 
 VII. THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 130 
 
 VIII. CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 148 
 
 IX. THE VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE . . . .169 
 
 SECTION III 
 SOME EXCEPTIONS 
 
 X. THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 191 
 
 XI. THE PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY . . . 219 
 
 XII. WOMEN INSURGENTS 243 
 
 XIII. LITERARY AMATFURS . .... 271 
 
 vii
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 SECTION IV 
 FROM FEMININITY TO WOMANHOOD 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XIV. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY .... 297 
 
 XV. FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 318 
 
 XVI. THE LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP . . . .344
 
 SECTION I 
 THE DOMESTIC TRADITIONS
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 
 
 " Creatures of circumstance who waited to be fallen in love 
 with. . . . We stood and waited on approval. And then came 
 life itself and tore our mother's theories to tatters." CICELY 
 HAMILTON. 
 
 " The chief element of a good time ... as these countless rich 
 young women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and 
 to feel you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping 
 is one of its chief joys. . . . My cousins were always getting and 
 giving, my uncle caressed them with parcels and checks. . . . 
 So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at once very 
 attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equal 
 measure of becoming important and becoming old. I don't know 
 what they thought about children. I doubt if they thought about 
 them at all." H. G. WELLS. 
 
 " Fine girls sittin' like shopkeepers behind their goods, waitin' 
 and waitin' and waitin'. . . ." OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 FEMININE life in the middle Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury, and to a degree now almost inconceivable, 
 was permeated with the current traditions of what 
 good women had been, and by the assumption that 
 these stood for the pattern of what they should 
 still be. From the moment of birth their sex was 
 outwardly marked by the color of their ribbons, 
 which became the embodiment, as it were, of their 
 discreet and pallid characteristics. Throughout
 
 the weeks that followed the mother watched im- 
 patiently to see whether the baby's hair would be 
 curly " for curly hair is so pretty in a girl, you 
 know." By the time the infant could walk and 
 talk, she had learned that there were things taboo 
 for her which were perfectly proper for the little 
 male creatures of her kind : she might not yell, nor 
 romp, nor scuffle, nor, in short, " be a tomboy," 
 because it was not nice for a little girl. 
 
 While the little boys of her age were gradually 
 emancipated from lingerie garments, she still re- 
 mained the charming baby-doll of the household. 
 Her clothes continued to be made of light-colored 
 and fragile materials, which she was constantly 
 adjured not to soil. Her complexion, her hair, 
 her tiny hands and feet were discussed in her 
 presence as if they were marketable assets. Al- 
 most the first words in her vocabulary were 
 " nice " and " pretty; " the one subtly stimulating 
 sex-consciousness, the other associated with her 
 physical limitations and the good looks which 
 were to be a chief end of her existence. For her 
 alone was coined the phrase: pretty is that pretty 
 does. Boys did not have to be pretty, only good 
 and smart; and, therefore, in the initial rivalry of 
 the sexes she instinctively learned to lay her em- 
 phasis on prettiness. As a consequence, while 
 she was still in knee-length dresses, clothing, man- 
 ners, and appearance became of superlative im-
 
 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 5 
 
 portance. Her guardians need not have been sur- 
 prised, when, a few years later, she became a vain 
 and self-conscious creature, already measuring her 
 beauty against that of other girls, and prematurely 
 trying it on the males of her acquaintance. 
 
 But alas for her if her hair did not curl if she 
 turned out plain, or " not so pretty as her mother 
 was " ! She heard from grandmothers and other 
 ladies of fading complexions and charms, over 
 their needlework and tea, a chorus of pity. Many 
 a little girl has cried her eyes out in secret be- 
 cause she had straight hair, large ears, or a muddy 
 skin. This constant emphasis upon appearance 
 had the effect, upon one temperament, of con- 
 centrating the desire of her whole nature on the 
 attainment of conventional prettiness; upon an- 
 other more sensitive one to create a morbid em- 
 barrassment amounting to tragedy; and some- 
 times upon stronger natures, to turn their aspira- 
 tions toward some form of practical efficiency or 
 to intellectual pursuits. However it turned out, 
 before the girl-child was ten years old she had re- 
 ceived an indelible impression that beauty, par- 
 ticularly a purely physical and luscious loveliness 
 such as would have been a disadvantage to a 
 boy was the most important attainment of a 
 young girl's life. 
 
 Very early in this process of inculcating fem- 
 ininity it was necessary to check and pervert her
 
 6 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 
 
 physical impulses. Like the racing-horse, she 
 must be trained while yet a colt never to break 
 her gait. The goal of conventional prettiness 
 permitted no indulgence in dirt or sunburn, there- 
 fore she could not run or play freely out-of-doors 
 nor develop her muscles in competitive games that 
 required speed and wind, a quick eye and a sure 
 aim. Being a lively animal, her natural energy 
 would try to find outlet somewhere at first, ac- 
 cording to her temperament and coerced by her 
 parents' ideals of woman's sphere. If she had a ro- 
 bust body and a strong-willed, original personality, 
 she would kick over the traces and break through 
 the corral fence a good many times before the 
 habits of domestication became ingrained. Such 
 a temperament was always a source of trouble 
 until she submitted to the life predestined for her 
 by the traditions of her foremothers. She was, 
 indeed, fortunate if her temper was not embit- 
 tered, her health undermined, or her life made 
 unhappy by the thwarting of her natural character. 
 But if she were born not too vigorous, and both 
 docile and pretty, her path was smooth for her 
 from the very beginning. Before she had mas- 
 tered her letters she learned the horror of dirt, 
 and set out on that approved career of dainty 
 fastidiousness which is the glory of womankind. 
 Instead of developing her muscles in large, free 
 movements, she spent her placid girlhood in dress-
 
 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 7 
 
 ing girl-dolls that were models of ladylikeness; in 
 giving little girls' tea-parties, where the social 
 game of their elders was imitated in the exhibi- 
 tion of best clothes, the practice of polite, con- 
 versational gossip, and the rehearsal of the 
 attractive arts; and in learning to make patch- 
 work and her own clothes, prize cakes and fancy 
 jellies if her mother were of the older school; 
 or, at a later date, in doing monstrous fancy- 
 work and embroidering her undergarments. 
 
 While her brothers played baseball and shinny 
 or went swimming, she sat on a piano-stool, with 
 her feet a few inches from the floor, practising the 
 hour or two a day necessary to attain a meager 
 proficiency. For in that day the ideal young lady 
 must play the piano; not at all because she had 
 musical talent worthy of serious cultivation, or be- 
 cause it was a necessary equipment for life one 
 scarcely knows why, unless to keep her out of mis- 
 chief, or, perhaps, to make her more alluring to 
 that future husband who might like a little music 
 in the evenings now and then to soothe his 
 nerves. 
 
 Nor was her domestic training of a much more 
 thorough sort, although the tradition that the 
 women of the household should be cooks and 
 manufacturers was still widespread. Among 
 middle-class American families the domestic habits 
 of Europe persisted long after manufactured
 
 8 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 
 
 goods were to be had in stores, and even at the be- 
 ginning of a new century country women are still 
 canning fruit, making bedding, crocheting lace 
 still clinging to the handicrafts of a by-gone indus- 
 trial period. But the daughters of the latter half 
 of the Nineteenth Century have had, on the one 
 hand, slight respect for these homely accomplish- 
 ments; and, on the other, scant opportunity for 
 training in the more serious duties of administra- 
 tion of the household. 
 
 The feminine training of the Eighteenth Cen- 
 tury was purely domestic; that of our generation 
 purely academic; and thus there has been at least 
 sixty years in the interim when girls were brought 
 up almost without education for domestic life, and 
 wholly without practical preparation for any other 
 kind of life. During this period the manufac- 
 ture of cotton and woolen goods in factories 
 was superseding domestic processes; and even the 
 preparation of food products was being trans- 
 ferred from the home to large collective agencies. 
 As the processes of production were taken out 
 of the house the physically stronger girls and 
 women without male support followed it into the 
 factory, there to become producers again, or into 
 great department stores, to be distributors. But 
 the great body of mothers and daughters left be- 
 hind in homes still clung instinctively to the con- 
 vention that domestic life was the economic sphere
 
 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 9 
 
 of women, although the necessary handicrafts 
 which had made it so were all but gone. 
 
 The housewife of the Eighteenth Century 
 earned her own living, and often quite half that 
 of the family, by her labor, beside bearing and 
 rearing children; and many women in our time, on 
 the other hand, are rapidly acquiring economic in- 
 dependence; but, in the century between, thou- 
 sands of women in America scarcely earned their 
 salt. Not because they were lazy or incapable, 
 but because the older ideal did not permit any but 
 a serving-woman to go outside the home to earn 
 money, and the occupations which had formerly 
 made the home both a workshop and a store- 
 house no longer demanded their service. 
 
 So when our docile young girl in her immaculate 
 frock had tired of playing with dolls and giving 
 mannerly parties, she occupied herself in painting 
 on velvet, in embroidery, crochet, or tatting, and 
 in piano practice, in the intervals of a very polite 
 education. In school she learned the common 
 branches and, if she kept on long enough, acquired 
 a superficial knowledge of English and American 
 literature, made a painful reading-acquaintance 
 with classical French, absorbed a little political 
 history of by-gone European states, and, occa- 
 sionally, a little mathematical astronomy and 
 polite, herbarium botany. In those days, no 
 knowledge of physiology, no discoveries of the
 
 io CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 
 
 laws of life in the biological laboratory, ever dis- 
 turbed the guarded decency of the mind of any 
 potential mother of the race. 
 
 This purely cultural and well-intentioned, but 
 misdirected, education for young girls was one of 
 the early by-products of the theories of democ- 
 racy. In the Old World men and women had 
 been born to a definite status in society, in which 
 economic opportunities, duties, training, and even 
 costume, were predetermined; but in the newer 
 world, when the pioneers of the Colonial period 
 had established their families with a competence, it 
 became their ambition to lift their descendants into 
 a higher social class. While the father was earn- 
 ing the money to fulfil their ambition, and the 
 mother continued to practise the traditional handi- 
 crafts of the household, the daughters went to 
 school and expressed, by their white-handedness 
 and all but useless accomplishments, the rising so- 
 cial status of the family. 
 
 As domestic manufactures were superseded by 
 factory-made products, there was less and less 
 for girls to do at home, and there arose a kind 
 of spurious feminine craft in the shape of in- 
 artistic and perfectly useless fancy-work. When 
 the patchwork quilt, the hand-woven bed-cover 
 and linen sheet had been replaced by the manu- 
 factured comforter and cheap cotton, women be- 
 gan to devise pillow shams, bedspreads of cloth
 
 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD n 
 
 cut into crazy-shaped pieces, or knitted of a thou- 
 sand tiny shells. When the feather pillow, which 
 once cost the housewife so much labor, came to 
 be made in quantities by machinery, she turned 
 her ambition into baby-pillows, pine-pillows, head- 
 rests, throws, tidies, feather and hair flowers, sofa 
 cushions, and rag rugs in short, into a vast variety 
 of quasi-ornamental, altogether hideous, and gen- 
 erally useless articles. The tradition that the 
 woman should be a manufacturer a tradition 
 handed down from the dim ages when the female 
 tanned the skins, wove the mats and blankets, and 
 built the tepee died slowly, and is not yet wholly 
 vanished. 
 
 It may seem very strange that girls did not 
 learn at least to cook, that being the oldest and 
 most universal of women's occupations; and all 
 the more as the chief pride of their mothers lay in 
 housewifery, the center of which lay in the kitchen. 
 As other handicrafts became less imperative, the 
 housewife of the earlier period concentrated her 
 whole mind on feeding her men-folks lavishly. 
 Imbued with the colonial-English tradition of 
 good eating, and spurred on by the rivalry of 
 neighbor women equally energetic, she piled cake, 
 pie, doughnuts, preserved fruit, and pancakes, 
 with meat and vegetables, on the creaking table. 
 She would doubtless have insisted on her pretty 
 daughter learning to make all these elaborate
 
 12 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 
 
 dishes as she had learned them from her own 
 mother, but for the arrival of thousands of im- 
 migrant Irish and German servants d5 give her 
 cheap and willing assistance. 
 
 Nobody, not even a sturdy pioneer woman, con- 
 tinues to do hard manual labor when it is no 
 longer either compulsory or admirable. The 
 highly-skilled house-mother, remembering the hot 
 stove, the aching feet, and the never-ending 
 " woman's work," wanted her daughters to have 
 an easier life than she had had, and was glad to 
 accept the help of clumsy peasant hands in order 
 to release them from such hardship. Moreover, 
 the plain American fathers and mothers still as- 
 sociated gentle-hood with freedom from manual 
 labor of an obligatory kind, and would not permit 
 their soft-handed daughters to compete with for- 
 eign servant girls. 
 
 During the years of adolescence girls went to 
 school, not because they expected to use the edu- 
 cation they were getting in any practical way, 
 but largely to fill up the time in a ladylike man- 
 ner until they should be courted and married. If 
 now and then some girl too plain to join in the 
 beauty contest, or too vital and ambitious to be 
 contented with so tame a program of life at- 
 tempted to break through the meshes of the fem- 
 inine cult into a larger sphere, she found few 
 opportunities for solid education or occupation
 
 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 13 
 
 open to her, and was greeted with general dis- 
 approval. If she had a sturdy, fighting temper, 
 and a love of learning or achievement, she some- 
 times threw away her pack of feminine traditions 
 and took the trail in pursuit of the ideal. It was, 
 indeed, a desert that they traveled those first, 
 few, strong-minded young women and, however 
 the adventure turned out, the effect of opposition, 
 of lack of sympathy and opportunity, the starva- 
 tion of the natural human soul hungering for 
 justice and for the approval of its kind, could 
 only be to pervert character. Some came out of 
 the struggle strong creatures, but masculine im- 
 itations rather than fully developed women; 
 others, maddened by injustice or misunderstand- 
 ing, set their hands against every man, champion- 
 ing wild or premature causes; but the larger num- 
 ber disappeared from history, merely defeated 
 feminine souls carrying too great a handi- 
 cap. 
 
 During all those years when plain and pretty 
 girls alike were growing up, they came somehow 
 to know that their destiny was to be married. Not 
 that any one asked them what they were going 
 to be or do that would have been quite improper 
 or might have precipitated questions which girls 
 should not ask. Their brothers, even before they 
 left the grammar school, were encouraged to talk 
 of their future occupations, and to make prepara-
 
 14 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 
 
 tion for them. But while girls heard from the pul- 
 pit and the rostrum, and read in the harmless ro- 
 mances of Sunday-school books or ladies' maga- 
 zines, that marriage and motherhood were the in- 
 evitable and only admirable career of woman, 
 nothing was ever said to them, except by way of a 
 joke, about either. Indirectly, some conscientious 
 mothermight approach it shamefacedly, suggesting 
 that the daughter shouldlearn somehouseholdtask, 
 " because you may have a home of your own, some 
 day;" but never a serious word was said about 
 wifehood and motherhood. The atmosphere of 
 prudery surrounding marriage and child-bearing, 
 which was all but universal a century ago, is still 
 common enough among ignorant women, who will 
 never discuss before a spinster of any age, not 
 even before a charity visitor, the facts incident to 
 pregnancy. While boys were learning in the 
 farmyard and from other men the facts and 
 processes of reproduction, girls walked in a mist 
 of secrecy and innuendo. When their mothers 
 were bearing children they were sent away from 
 home on some pretense, lest they should witness 
 the great travail and be afraid; or, perhaps, be- 
 cause their parents were ashamed; or, it may be, 
 solely because the convention was that young girls 
 must be kept " innocent." 
 
 But girls are no more fools than boys, and the 
 atmosphere of prudish or vulgar suggestion
 
 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 15 
 
 aroused in the keen-witted ones a determination to 
 know how babies came, and what marriage meant. 
 Many a young girl, not daring to ask what she 
 wanted to know of older women, got a perverted 
 knowledge from vulgar-minded servants, or from 
 the medical dictionaries in the library; or puzzled 
 out the obscene advertisements and tragedies of 
 the half-world covertly described in the news- 
 papers; or pored over the sexual horrors of the 
 ancient scriptures, to satisfy her curiosity. 
 
 In the less curious and less original type of 
 girl the conventional silence about her future 
 career created a shrinking disgust from the facts 
 of reproductive life. She became ashamed of her 
 functions without knowing why. She could not 
 help seeing that the figures of women were not 
 beautiful during gestation, and that pregnancy 
 and childbirth were a period of inconvenience, if 
 not of semi-invalidism. While the " glory " of 
 motherhood was constantly preached at her, she 
 heard women criticising the indecency of wives 
 who appeared in public in the later months of 
 pregnancy, and sometimes saw the lascivious 
 smiles, or overheard the comments of men upon 
 them. Nor could she escape knowing that some 
 men were wild beasts, nor the suggestion that men 
 in general were not to be trusted in the dark. 
 Thus everything in her own nature and everything 
 in the social influences about her tended to pro-
 
 1 6 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 
 
 duce repulsion, if not terror, for the only ap- 
 proved destiny held out before her. 
 
 Meanwhile, during the adolescent years of both 
 the inquisitive and the acquiescent young woman, 
 her mind was being colored by the effeminate fic- 
 tion of the day, whose chief note was love and 
 lovers, with a happy ending in marriage. That 
 the experiences of the heroine did not seem to cor- 
 respond with the lives of the women she knew, 
 made it all the more alluring. In this dream-world 
 there were no puzzling and inevitable facts of 
 nature the lover was always pure and brave and 
 considerate; the heroine beautiful and adored. 
 There was no baby even, as in real life, to precipi- 
 tate difficulties, except on the last page, when he 
 might arrive to fulfil the hope of an heir to some 
 great property. 
 
 Somewhere along this road of female destiny 
 the girl received a shock; from the newspapers, 
 perhaps, or more often through some tragedy in 
 her own community, she heard that some unhappy 
 girl had murdered her baby or ended her un- 
 wedded romance in suicide. Then, suddenly, if 
 she were capable of reasoning at all, she would 
 realize that motherhood was only considered 
 sacred when licensed by the State and by the 
 Church. 
 
 At last, when she had filled in a few years 
 following her schooldays with " helping her
 
 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 17 
 
 mother," " going into society," playing the piano, 
 and teaching a Sunday-school class, and in mod- 
 estly trying out her charms on the young men of 
 her acquaintance, The Lover arrived. It is not 
 without reason that the period of courtship has 
 been depicted from time immemorial as the hap- 
 piest of life. The exhilaration of quickening in- 
 stinct, the zest of the game of advance and re- 
 treat, the grateful mutual flattery, are full of joy 
 to the woman even more than to the man. For 
 while to the man it might become the highest 
 experience of his life if the ending were happy, 
 it seldom had the full allurement of novelty. 
 Very few men, probably, brought to their final 
 courtship an unvulgarized mind, a chaste person, 
 and an entire ignorance of the other sex, such as 
 girls are expected to have. To the woman court- 
 ship and marriage were the culmination of a long 
 dream, in which her natural instincts and hunger 
 for life a real life of her own overcame her 
 fear of men and her innocent dread of the travail 
 of motherhood. Whether their temperaments 
 were really domestic and maternal or not, passion, 
 romance, and a desire for a career, combined with 
 the tradition that marriage is the highest if not 
 the only destiny to make young women take the 
 path of least resistance. 
 
 It used to be said that childhood was the hap- 
 piest time of life, and girlhood, even more than
 
 1 8 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 
 
 boyhood, full of joy. Certainly it was so when 
 the parents were wise and sympathetic, and the 
 children born with a harmonious temperament in a 
 normal body. But the unconscious joy usually at- 
 tributed to childhood has not so often existed in 
 fact. Not even yet are parents wise enough to 
 restrain without arbitrary coercion; to make the 
 path of discipline and duty more alluring than 
 that of self-indulgence; and to provide a whole- 
 some outlet for physical energy. Nor are they 
 sympathetic enough to enter into the fearsome 
 questions of the young soul, and, out of the rich- 
 ness of adult experience, guide it till it attains 
 courage and self-poise. In a girlhood such as I 
 have been describing, happiness was only possible 
 to the girl who submitted to the conventional 
 mold. The more vigorous she was, the more 
 potential character she had, the less easy she 
 would find it to conform to the pattern laid before 
 her. And if she did conform she was likely to 
 arrive at womanhood physically undeveloped, and 
 robbed of a part of her bodily vigor; prudish and 
 ignorant, yet eager to be married; without prep- 
 aration for domestic and maternal cares, and in- 
 capable of earning a fair living wage by any other 
 means; and with an abnormally feminized con- 
 science, which had no conception of men or the 
 moral issues of their lives. The girl of the 
 middle Nineteenth Century was fortunate if, by
 
 CONVENTIONS OF GIRLHOOD 19 
 
 the grace of God and the accident of heedless 
 parents, she sometimes arrived at the goal of mar- 
 riage a little less docile, pretty, anemic, con- 
 scientious, and incompetent than the ideals of her 
 time would have had her become.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 " As the vine which has long twined in graceful foliage about 
 the oak, and has been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the 
 hardy plant has been rifled by the thunderbolt, cling around it 
 with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs, so 
 it is beautifully ordained by Providence that woman, who is the 
 ornament and dependent of man in his happier hours, should 
 be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity, wind- 
 ing herself into the sudden recesses of his nature, tenderly sup- 
 porting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart." 
 From The Lady's Album, 1848. 
 
 " Woman has a better, a holier vocation. She works in the 
 elements of human nature. Her orders of architecture are 
 formed in the human soul Obedience, Temperance, Truth, Love, 
 Piety these she must build up in the character of her children; 
 often she is called upon to repair the ravages which sin, care, 
 and the desolating storms of life leave in the mind and heart 
 of her husband, whom she reverences and obeys. This task she 
 should perform faithfully but with humility; remembering that 
 it was for woman's sake Eden was forfeited, because Adam 
 loved his wife more than his Creator." Mrs. S. J. HALE in 
 Woman's Record, 1872. 
 
 " But the woman is the glory of the man. . . . Neither was 
 the man created for the woman ; but the woman for the man." 
 PAUL to the Corinthians. 
 
 THE truest things are the platitudes which 
 everybody speaks, but which few ever think of 
 practising. The sensible men and women of the 
 
 30
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 21 
 
 past century knew then as they do now that the 
 betrothal and wedding customs in vogue were 
 preposterous, injurious, and even vulgar; and 
 that the prospective bride and bridegroom were 
 rendered unfit for parenthood by the fatigue of 
 the wedding preparations and the abnormality of 
 their situation. Every father and mother, out of 
 their own experience, could have warned and ad- 
 vised on matters of housekeeping and property 
 settlements they did so but on the purposes and 
 consequences of marriage, the one great central 
 relation which concerned the engaged pair and 
 posterity, nothing was said. 
 
 It was as if each generation should begin 
 without receiving any cumulated information on 
 the subject of house-building, and should there- 
 fore be obliged to try all the experiments and 
 make all the mistakes of previous generations 
 over again. Because of the " conspiracy of 
 silence," young lovers were deprived of every 
 safeguard of knowledge in respect to sex and 
 parenthood. It is impossible to understand the 
 woman's attitude toward marriage, domesticity, 
 and motherhood, unless one visualizes the igno- 
 rance and perversion of ideas with which girls 
 came to the great event of their lives. At the risk 
 of tediousness it is necessary to present the mate- 
 rial phases of marriage in order that their 
 consequences in diverting attention from the
 
 22 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 aspects most significant to society, may be com- 
 prehended. 
 
 To the young girl the engagement ring was the 
 symbol both of obligation and individuality, for by 
 virtue of it she became for the first time in her 
 life a person of importance. To her school- 
 mates she was an object of envy because she was 
 peeping through the door which they all desired to 
 enter. If the young man were acceptable to 
 her parents, her father was frankly glad to trans- 
 fer the economic burden of a daughter to another 
 man; while her mother began to treat her with a 
 mixture of respect and solicitude which she could 
 not comprehend. Theoretically she knew that 
 she had incurred an obligation to her betrothed 
 which would some day demand wifely surrender 
 and devotion; but the more protected and in- 
 nocent she was, the less did she understand what 
 lay behind the veil of marriage. To think 
 definitely of her future relation to her husband 
 and to prepare herself for its consequences would 
 have been as gross an impropriety as to expose her 
 person to his gaze. 
 
 Nor was she conscious that she would be ex- 
 pected to submit her will and her opinions as 
 well as her body to his control. Although she 
 heard on Sunday from the pulpit that wives were 
 to obey their husbands; and although she knew 
 that her mother, in all essential matters, sub-
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 23 
 
 mitted to her father, however unwillingly, she 
 trusted that her own charm and shrewdness 
 would prove as potent after marriage as it seemed 
 to be before. For during the spell of unrealized 
 desire the two young lovers idealized each other; 
 and the lover, who had, perhaps, only lately 
 ceased from bullying his mother, and would take 
 it for granted that his wife should defer to him 
 as his mother had yielded to his father, during this 
 one interval deferred to his betrothed. She could 
 not but suppose that a lover so tender anddevoted, 
 who brought her gifts and did whatever her whims 
 commanded, would be less dominant than other 
 women's husbands. 
 
 Yet if the betrothal were prolonged enough, 
 the lovers would find that golden ring the begin- 
 ning of a chain against which both would chafe. 
 According to the customs of the time, neither 
 could properly show an interest in any other un- 
 married person of the opposite sex without giv- 
 ing cause for justifiable jealousy. Although jeal- 
 ousy was generally regarded as a testimony of af- 
 fection, it was if the lovers had but known it 
 merely a mean exhibition of that suspicious, pro- 
 prietary attitude which would make the marriage 
 a bondage rather than the highest expression of 
 mutual confidence. 
 
 The segregation of lovers from the rest of the 
 community, and the taboo surrounding them, was
 
 24 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 symptomatic of the isolation in which they were 
 to live the rest of their lives. From this time the 
 man must never show any admiration for another 
 woman; and the girl must conceal whatever inter- 
 est she might have in any other man. In village 
 communities, in church gatherings, in temperance 
 and missionary societies, men herded with men 
 and women flocked with women, losing the stim- 
 ulus of the social and intellectual comradeship en- 
 joyed by the sexes in modern life. Aside from 
 the monotony of such a society its worst aspect lay 
 in the in-and-in breeding of sex characteristics. 
 Men, associating constantly with men, perpetuated 
 the standards and habits inherited from their 
 fathers; women, corraled by themselves, gossiped 
 of their narrower experiences, perpetuating their 
 own pettiness. Between boy and girl, between 
 lover and maiden, between adult man and woman, 
 stood always the menacing figure of sex with the 
 sword of chastity, lest propriety and property be 
 violated. Not a little of the lack of comprehen- 
 sion of each sex by the other arose from this sur- 
 vival of the ownership of woman, which resulted 
 in a general assumption that neither could have 
 any decent pleasure in the society of any 
 person of the other sex except their own life 
 partner. 
 
 The engaged girl, however, was not likely to 
 question or to resent the flattering jealousy of a
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 25 
 
 man whose preference set her for the first time 
 upon a pedestal, even had she not been diverted by 
 the conventional preparations for the marriage. 
 Indeed, the man often became quite subordinate in 
 her mind to the trousseau and the wedding dis- 
 play. Her parents were the more inclined to 
 indulge her extravagant notions for the last time 
 because it would reflect credit upon themselves. 
 In the early part of the Nineteenth Century the 
 ordinary bride's outfit followed the traditions of 
 the European peasant woman, and consisted 
 chiefly of the chest of linen and household fur- 
 nishings made by her own hand; but, as manufac- 
 tures supplanted home-made articles, the bride 
 devoted more and more attention to the personal 
 trousseau. For months before the wedding-day 
 she cut and fitted and sewed; crocheted and tatted 
 and embroidered; in order that she might be able 
 to exhibit to her female friends and, incidentally, 
 to the bewildered lover, so many dozens of elab- 
 orate, hand-made chemises, nightgowns, petti- 
 coats; tablecloths, napkins, and towels. And 
 while the bride was working night and day harder 
 than ever before in her life, the proud mother, 
 with scarcely less enthusiasm, assisted the ambi- 
 tious dressmaker of the neighborhood to contrive 
 as many and as elaborate dresses as possible from 
 the money provided by a father whose pride it was 
 to give his daughter a suitable outfit.
 
 26 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 If it be thought that all this was only mere 
 girlish extravagance, let us remember that for the 
 domestic woman the wedding-day was not only the 
 first, but the sole time that she would ever be a 
 person of public interest. Not even if she should 
 bear a son to become the savior of his country, 
 would she be the principal in her family, or so 
 conspicuous a figure in a solemn ceremony. For 
 a day of such importance nothing was quite good 
 enough. The trousseau was as essential to the 
 prospective bride as an outfit to the explorer of 
 arctic or tropical wilds; or, rather, it was like the 
 equipment of a traveler who sets out for an un- 
 known Oriental country for who knew what 
 might be needed and yet unattainable in the 
 great adventure upon which she was about to 
 embark ! 
 
 Like other adventurers, she might be taking 
 many inappropriate things. The girl who mar- 
 ried a young instructor attached to one of the 
 best colleges might find it necessary to lay away 
 the dozens of delicate undergarments, replacing 
 them with plain, stout materials to be washed with 
 her own hands. The trousseau, at the end of the 
 first year, might be quite useless in view of pro- 
 spective motherhood; and might be laid away in 
 lavender, never to be resurrected, perhaps, except 
 for some old-folks masquerade devised by her 
 grown-up daughter.
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 27 
 
 No small part of the enjoyment of the ante- 
 wedding preparations lay in the receiving of 
 presents. While cities were few in America, and 
 the bulk of the population lived in villages and 
 rural neighborhoods, the custom of bridal gifts 
 was seldom overdone; but, after the war, the in- 
 crease of wealth and the growth of urban com- 
 munities gave women, particularly, leisure and ex- 
 cuse for excessive emphasis on the ornamental 
 side of life. The habit of giving wedding pres- 
 ents as is the tendency of such conventions 
 became an exaggerated social obligation which 
 has only recently begun to diminish in force. The 
 friends of both families vied with each other in 
 expressing not so much their affection as their 
 social status by the elegance of their contribution 
 to the display. Day after day the bride and her 
 fiance received them, discussing their beauty, use- 
 fulness, and cost in view of the future menage. 
 In a country town, where the neighbors clubbed 
 together to fit out completely the new kitchen, 
 the friendly practicality of the gift was a fit ex- 
 pression of the attitude of the village toward a 
 popular young couple. But more often the gifts 
 were a showy agglomeration of more or less use- 
 less or unsuitable articles, in the polite acknowl- 
 edgment of which the overworked bride spent all 
 her spare time for weeks before and after mar- 
 riage. All the pleasant excitement attendant upon
 
 28 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 giving and receiving was likely to be destroyed by 
 the numerous duplications no bride could accept 
 enthusiastically a sixth cut-glass bowl or a sev- 
 enth butter-knife. When the wedding etiquette 
 reached the stage where all the presents must be 
 displayed to the givers and the guests in a room 
 set apart for them, the custom had degenerated 
 into undisguised commercialism. 
 
 As the great day drew near the bride and her 
 family were usually engaged in a whirl of fever- 
 ish preparations: the house must be prepared for 
 a wedding breakfast, supper, or reception, the 
 church decorated for the ceremony, the wedding 
 attendants schooled in their parts even the bride 
 and groom must u rehearse " the pageant in which 
 they were to be the chief figures. Even for a 
 " simple " wedding the fatigue and the expense 
 were invariably greater than had been anticipated, 
 and the higher emotions of all concerned were 
 drowned in the effort to make as much " splurge " 
 as possible, and in anxiety about petty, material 
 details. Thus the parents and the household 
 went to bed on the bridal eve utterly exhausted, 
 and with last admonitions to the young girl to 
 sleep that her beauty might not be dimmed on the 
 morrow. 
 
 The wedding-day itself would probably remain 
 forever, in the memories of both bride and groom, 
 a nightmare of jumbled impressions the con-
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 29 
 
 fusion and haste of last preparations, the full- 
 dress parade, the blur of curious spectators, even 
 the solemn vows and prayers; the congratula- 
 tions, tears, and kisses; the eating, drinking, and 
 going away all alike, to the chief actors in the 
 spectacle, could only be a series of perfunctory 
 performances to be lived through in order that 
 they might be allowed to attain the joy of per- 
 manent companionship. It was as if the King's 
 trumpeters had announced from the city towers: 
 " Behold this man and woman about to enter 
 upon the most intimate human relation ! See how 
 correct, how respectable they are! " 
 
 Meanwhile, during all this furor, the groom 
 had been quite a minor figure, occupied in waiting 
 on the bride, assisting in the preparations, and 
 privately cursing the social traditions which had 
 involved him in so irksome a tangle of splurge and 
 etiquette. If he were a simple, clean-minded fel- 
 low, the irritation and the strain of his abnormal 
 position were likely to put him in anything but a 
 loverlike frame of mind; if he were the " average 
 young man," he would probably accept the in- 
 vitation of his bachelor friends to celebrate the 
 last days of his freedom with an orgy of eating, 
 drinking, and unprintable jests. 
 
 The facetious attitude toward marriage was 
 often, in country neighborhoods, carried to the 
 height of a vulgar practical joke in the custom of
 
 30 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 the " shivaree." Upon the wedding-night or 
 upon the return of the newly-wedded pair from 
 the honeymoon, the men friends surrounded the 
 house, let loose a pandemonium of hideous noises, 
 demanding a sight of the bride and a speech from 
 the groom. The custom was, in fact, so general 
 in many places that the bridal pair provided re- 
 freshments in advance for the invading party. 
 
 It was certainly only by the grace of God and 
 much mutual affection that the young married 
 couple kept their respect for each other through 
 these preliminaries of marriage. After this 
 nerve-racking performance the bridegroom not 
 infrequently found himself the guardian of a 
 shrinking child, who was on the verge of hysterics 
 through exhaustion and fear. To many a man 
 there must have been a shock of astonishment, if 
 not of dismay, on discovering that his wife was 
 afraid of him, and had only the vaguest notion 
 of their inevitable marital relation. The con- 
 vention of absolute ignorance in which the young 
 girl had usually been brought up, made of the 
 sex relation an experience scarcely less terrible 
 than bodily assault. Girls whose persons since 
 their childhood had been sacred even from their 
 mother's eyes, who had been taught not to look 
 at their own bodies, and to bathe in the dark, 
 found themselves in the keeping of men to whom 
 the sex relation was already a commonplace. The
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 31 
 
 husband, as a rule, entered upon marriage with 
 slight illusions and with the natural impulses of a 
 healthy animal. The young wife had been taught 
 to ignore the very idea of passion, and, in pro- 
 portion as she was physically delicate and modest, 
 received a shock which was intensified if she im- 
 mediately became pregnant. After a honeymoon 
 of shame and disillusionment, she would gradu- 
 ally readjust her ideas to the facts of life under 
 the instruction of her husband, and if she were 
 fully occupied with household details, would 
 ultimately recover an ideal of wedded happiness. 
 Then, and not till then, would she fully under- 
 stand why her mother and other wives had wept 
 instead of rejoiced on her wedding-day. 
 
 On the other hand, the young husband, with 
 every intention of cherishing her, might find him- 
 self in the position of an unintentional brute, and 
 might suffer as great a disappointment as the 
 bride, because of mutual misunderstanding. If 
 he were a man of fine feeling and quick percep- 
 tion, and if the wife were a vigorous and sensible 
 girl, the readjustment might be swift and happy; 
 but if he were just the ordinary thick-skinned, 
 wholesome fellow of the world, the wife merely 
 surrendered, and both emerged into mutual tol- 
 eration rather than happiness. 
 
 When the great adventure of marriage had 
 been undertaken, then, indeed, began the real
 
 32 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 development of the girl of the past century. 
 Molded and hemmed in by the traditions of what 
 was proper and desirable for girls, she had more 
 or less consciously looked forward to emancipa- 
 tion into a larger life, in which she was to be not 
 only the helpmate of her husband, but a responsi- 
 ble personality. She had been educated to be- 
 lieve that in place of an aggressive part in life, 
 her power lay in her " influence," and with this 
 vague hypnotism she expected to mold the life 
 of her husband and to control her children. In 
 many cases she found herself in the situation of 
 the wife described in the following paragraph: 
 
 " A few significant incidents had revealed to her that 
 his good nature covered cold-blooded indifference where 
 all but his own interests were vitally concerned. His 
 apparent pliability hid a dexterity which evaded every 
 recognized principle. In vain she exerted the influence 
 with which he had pretended to invest her. The first 
 effort proved that it never really existed. It was no 
 more in his life than the valuable ornament on his mantel- 
 shelf a thing to be dusted, preserved, and admired in 
 leisure hours, never set to serious use." 
 
 If, on the other hand, the young husband were 
 inspired by happiness and family responsibility 
 to rise above his ordinary level, the young wife's 
 childish ignorance and lack of intelligent sym- 
 pathy with his aims not infrequently thwarted 
 them.
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 33 
 
 Misled by the glamor of courtship and the ex- 
 purgated novels of her girlhood, perhaps also by 
 her parents' indulgence, the bride naturally sup- 
 posed that her feelings, her wishes, would con- 
 tinue to be through marriage, as through the en- 
 gagement, the determinant of their joint lives. 
 Her astonishment, anger, and grief, when she 
 found that she had to deal with a being who had 
 always had his own way, and had always been 
 deferred to by womenkind, often became a 
 tragedy. She made herself and her husband 
 wretched; while he in turn could not comprehend 
 why his wife had suddenly become so different 
 from what his mother was, from the docile 
 creature a woman should be, from what she had 
 appeared to be during their courtship. 
 
 The period of readjustment in which the hus- 
 band and wife began to re-form each other's 
 character might be uncontentious between self- 
 respecting persons, but it was rarely happy. Out 
 of it emerged a new ideal of happiness for both, 
 or an enduring mutual discontent. If children 
 arrived early the personalities of both parents 
 were, at least temporarily, subordinated to the 
 new relation. But the original causes of disillu- 
 sionment were often merely latent, and gradually 
 reappeared in the shape of unseemly contests over 
 the discipline and education of the children, or in 
 squabbles over expenditure and property. In a
 
 34 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 majority of cases that first great schism in their 
 married life had brought so much pain that both 
 parties ever after shrank with horror from an- 
 other clash. Inevitably the woman, accustomed 
 to obedience and clinging desperately to her ideal 
 of a loving husband, gave way first; while the 
 man, bewildered by the strength of the will he 
 had met, cautiously avoided invoking it again. 
 When each had realized the scarifying results of 
 selfishness toward one they loved, there grew up 
 a living hypothesis between them : " It is better to 
 be loving than to be right." Then, slowly, the 
 shadowy ghost of their youthful aura of marriage 
 came back, and, if cherished by both, it might 
 become a hovering angel of happiness. 
 
 Such lives, issuing in mutual readjustment and 
 soon merged in the development of children, 
 should have been and were, oftentimes, rich in 
 domestic satisfaction; but with one phase of them, 
 we may venture to say, no woman was ever con- 
 tent. As a child in her father's house, even to 
 the day of her wedding, she had been by custom 
 entitled to a living; and, by custom also, as a 
 wife she had a right to a reasonable provision. 
 But just when she could afford a new dress, and 
 how much money for her personal expenses was 
 to be forthcoming, and when, she did not know. 
 It was considered unnecessary, indeed, it was 
 scarcely proper for a wife to have an allowance
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 35 
 
 it savored of quarrels and too much wifely in- 
 dependence for it was assumed that any decent 
 husband would provide for his wife. As a mat- 
 ter of experience, the wheedling or termagant 
 wives of indulgent husbands got more than they 
 should have, in a proper division of the family 
 income, while timid and more self-respecting 
 women had to make suffice whatever a forgetful 
 or selfish husband irregularly doled out; and 
 often wept in secret humiliation before asking 
 for what they were justly entitled to. Although 
 in theory the wife had a right to a reasonable 
 share of the family resources, she was, neverthe- 
 less, in the position of asking for it like a child 
 or a charity dependent. That the average Amer- 
 ican husband was generous did not make the ar- 
 rangement less unjust, though it might prevent the 
 wife from insisting on a more equitable and self- 
 respecting division. 
 
 But if the mother of a family found this finan- 
 cial tradition irksome, the childless wife if she 
 thought about it at all was scarcely able to keep 
 her self-respect. While she earned her board 
 and lodging generally, and often the wage of a 
 servant, if she did the whole work of the house- 
 hold, she was at least in a position of relative 
 dignity. But in many cases the married partners 
 took advantage of cheap immigrant service to 
 lift themselves into a higher social stratum. Thus
 
 36 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 released from the heavier portion of the house- 
 hold cares, without children, without intellectual 
 tastes, without any exacting occupation, she had 
 nothing to do with her leisure but to return to the 
 superficial accomplishments of her girlhood, or to 
 fill the time with social engagements and the pur- 
 suit of dress. In short, she made something to 
 do, instead of being compelled to do something 
 necessary to the household and worthy of a human 
 being. 
 
 Some wives, under this social regime, became 
 lazy, frivolous, and extravagant; others de- 
 veloped an abnormal devotion to the petty de- 
 tails of dress and housekeeping, or an all but in- 
 sane love of cleanliness, of order, or of orna- 
 ment; and all became morally and physically 
 anemic, wreaking on their partners the morbid 
 peevishness of a childish and discontented disposi- 
 tion. Now and then, some stronger woman 
 with or without the approval of her husband, who 
 could not be expected to know what was the mat- 
 ter sought in lady-like philanthropy some ex- 
 pression of the pent-up energy within her; and 
 rarely, a wiser man would take her into genuine 
 partnership, replacing the natural tie of children 
 with a useful business interest. 
 
 When the initial stages of marriage had settled 
 themselves more or less comfortably, the great 
 adventure of the woman's life resolved itself into
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 37 
 
 a journey along a country road, sometimes green 
 and shady, sometimes dusty and rough, but seldom 
 affording an exciting prospect. Like the farmer, 
 with whose labor the vocation of domesticity has 
 elsewhere been compared, the housewife pursued 
 her unexciting round; or, more like a pet squirrel 
 in a cage well-fed and cared-for, but debarred 
 by domestic traditions from exploring for herself 
 the interesting world about her. All her knowl- 
 edge was second-hand, so to speak, filtered 
 through the mind of a partner who told her as 
 much or as little as he thought she could com- 
 prehend; and the only other stimuli that were 
 likely to reach her came through the educational 
 experiences of the children or through effeminate 
 publications filled up with household recipes and 
 a little harmless stuff predigested for feminine 
 needs. 
 
 The intellectual interests of married women, 
 like those of most persons, are dictated by their 
 experiences in life a fact upon which modern 
 journalism bases its principal appeal. The racing 
 edition for sporting men; the yellow newspaper 
 for crude people, who live wholly on sensations; 
 the semi-religious, predigested survey of current 
 events for the orthodox; adventure magazines 
 with a few " hells " and " damns " to catch the 
 drummer and the cowboy or with lurid stories 
 but no swear-words for those who like Western
 
 38 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 color, but are shocked by the real thing these, 
 in our era, are some of the thousand kinds for as 
 many people. But before the Civil War there 
 were fewer of any kind, and only one sort deemed 
 suitable for women. 
 
 Whatever her taste, the journalistic estimate 
 of woman's needs was adjusted to the kitchen- 
 children-clothing-church routine of the ordinary 
 woman's life. The great body of country and 
 village housewives read the weekly county paper, 
 a missionary or religious journal, and the Bible, 
 regularly but quite unthinkingly. The more 
 sophisticated read a Lady-Book, in which was 
 always to be found a careful mixture of feeble 
 romance, moral essays, cooking recipes, fashions, 
 and designs for needlework. These polite maga- 
 zines for the promotion of u religion and gentil- 
 ity " had for their aim the expression of " the 
 spirit of progress without compromising true 
 womanliness; " and reached large circulations, 
 owing to an innocuous mixture of platitudes, 
 trivialities, and French fashion plates. 
 
 Having had no thorough education in any di- 
 rection, the ideally domestic woman seldom ac- 
 quired a taste for abstract or enlightened in- 
 formation. Her idea of the pleasure of reading 
 was to get the practical experience of other house- 
 wives on such matters as the making of new 
 variations in crochet patterns and cake, and how
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 39 
 
 to contrive a chair out of old barrel-staves; or, on 
 the other hand, to fill up the lack of the pic- 
 turesque and dramatic in her life with the emo- 
 tional adventures of some immaculate heroine of 
 fiction. As the deer comes to the salt-lick; as the 
 laborer, doomed to repetitious drudgery, seeks 
 variety in a drunken spree so the domestic 
 woman often found in her leisure hours a passive 
 pseudo-excitement in romance. In much the same 
 manner the modern woman of leisure satisfies her 
 natural craving for adventurous interests with 
 emotions induced by the theater and the orchestra. 
 A modern satirist has acutely remarked that, 
 while a man was supposing that his wife's ideal of 
 a husband was a middle-aged, baldheaded man, 
 who was a good provider, his wife was going to 
 the matinee to adore a beautiful young man with 
 dark eyes and a tenor voice. 
 
 The only activity outside the home in which 
 married women might take part without violating 
 the proprieties, was the support and promotion 
 of religious work. The finances and the admin- 
 istration of the churches were in the hands of 
 men; but the money for the minister's salary, for 
 a new church carpet, or for foreign missions, was 
 commonly raised by the women through socials, 
 fairs, bees, picnics, suppers where hot coffee and 
 good pie might be expected to unloose masculine 
 purse-strings. Here the woman of executive abil-
 
 40 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 
 
 ity found a chance for leadership; here house- 
 wives exchanged the gossip of the neighborhood, 
 or the ingenuities and economies by which they 
 stretched their purses. While men were whet- 
 ting their minds on politics, on war or recon- 
 struction, on tariff measures or the panic, and 
 running the churches and the local government, 
 women revolved within the narrow circle of do- 
 mestic and pious detail, and kept silence on 
 larger matters, as behooved the supplementary 
 sex. 
 
 The conventional domestic ideal involved, as 
 we have shown in a previous chapter, a girlhood 
 spent in attaining a superficial education which 
 had no direct relation to domesticity or to moth- 
 erhood, and an early womanhood spent chiefly in 
 preening and expectation. With such a prepara- 
 tion it was not surprising if women generally 
 found marriage less romantic and less satisfying 
 as a career than they had been led to anticipate. 
 Instead of an interesting adventure into which 
 they were to be led by the sympathetic and ador- 
 ing hero of their dreams, the wife's role was usu- 
 ally that of an understudy for a leading part who 
 never got a chance to take the boards. If, per- 
 chance, she showed dissatisfaction with her lot, 
 she was always assured that motherhood was the 
 only worthy career, to which wifehood and 
 domesticity were merely supplementary mother-
 
 THE GREAT ADVENTURE 41 
 
 hood was to be her compensation. To a consid- 
 eration of the career afforded by motherhood we 
 must turn, therefore, if we would understand both 
 the glory and the inadequacy of the Nineteenth- 
 Century woman.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 " There is an African bird, the hornbill, whose habits in some 
 respects are a model. The female builds her nest in a hollow 
 tree, lays her eggs, and broods on them. Then the male feels 
 that he must also contribute some service; so he walls up the 
 hole closely, giving only room for the point of the female's bill 
 to protrude. Until the eggs are hatched, she is thenceforth con- 
 fined to her nest, and is in the meantime fed assiduously by her 
 mate. . . . 
 
 " Nature has kindly provided various types of bird households 
 to suit all varieties of taste. The bright orioles filling the 
 summer boughs with color and with song, are as truly domestic 
 in the freedom of their airy nest as the poor hornbills who ig- 
 norantly make their home in a dungeon. And certainly each 
 new generation of orioles . . . are a happier illustration of 
 judicious nurture than are the uncouth little offspring of the 
 hornbills ... so flabby, and transparent as to resemble a 
 bladder of jelly furnished with head, legs, and rudimentary 
 wings, but with not a sign of a feather." THOMAS WENTWORTH 
 HIGGINSON. 
 
 " It is a fact kept, perhaps, too much in the background, that 
 mothers have a larger self than their maternity, and that when 
 their sons have become taller than themselves, and gone from 
 them . . . there are wide spaces of time which are not filled 
 with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying 
 yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt buttons." 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 " Woman is given to us that she may bear children. Woman 
 is our property, we are not hers, because she produces children 
 for us we do not yield any to her. She is, therefore, our pos- 
 session as the fruit tree is that of the gardener." NAPOLEON. 
 
 42
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 43 
 
 MERELY to be a woman is not a vocation, 
 though formerly many women were obliged by 
 custom to make it serve in lieu of one; but to be a 
 married mother has long been regarded as a 
 quasi-profession which, for the time being, pre- 
 cluded any other. During the earlier part of the 
 Nineteenth Century, while the family still con- 
 stituted an industrial unit, child-bearing was inci- 
 dental in the midst of pioneer toil, and not at all 
 the subject of reasoning. As women began to be 
 released from directly productive labor, and here 
 and there ventured into publicity, there grew up 
 in the Press and the Pulpit a habit of lauding the 
 " glory " of motherhood in much the same man- 
 ner as they dwelt upon the " dignity " of manual 
 labor. Any thoughtful person could see that the 
 conditions of labor were often inhuman and de- 
 grading; and no one who could escape from such 
 toil into a cleaner and easier mode of living was 
 prevented from doing so by his belief in its dig- 
 nity. So, also, the sentimentality of the mid- 
 century was accustomed to play up the emotional 
 and spiritual compensations of motherhood, while 
 ignoring or glozing over its hardships. 
 
 There is slight need of writing on the com- 
 pensatory aspects of motherhood, since healthy, 
 happy mothers in every age have been satisfied 
 with their lot, and have not needed either flattery 
 or a fence to keep them within their sphere. But
 
 44 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 many mothers perhaps a majority in the past 
 century were neither contented nor adequate to 
 their^task. That they did not attempt to escape 
 was chiefly due to their conventional limitations. 
 Without discounting in any degree the beauty or 
 the rewards of normal motherhood, it is neces- 
 sary to point out how far short, in the past, the 
 actual experience often fell of that ideal so con- 
 stantly preached; and to analyze it from the rea- 
 sonable standpoint of the career for which it was 
 a substitute. If motherhood were, indeed, a holy 
 vocation, for which women had been set apart, it 
 should be able to bear the tests to which other 
 less sacred occupations were subjected. To com- 
 prehend why the conditions of motherhood are 
 still so far from what they should be, it is neces- 
 sary to draw a plain picture of what they were 
 for the average woman of the past century. 
 
 We have seen in the chapter on Girlhood that 
 girls were very early imbued with the idea that 
 they did not need to equip themselves for earning 
 a living, nor to acquire more than a limited and 
 superficial education, because they were to be 
 married and, by inference, to be mothers. The 
 Puritan reaction from the sensuality of English 
 society had taken the form of prudery and silence 
 on sex matters, which placed every marriageable 
 girl in an anomalous situation. Marriage and 
 motherhood were constantly referred to in her
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 45 
 
 hearing as the highest, indeed, the only succcess- 
 ful, career for woman; yet, nothing in her train- 
 ing had any direct relation to it, and the con- 
 ventional standard of modesty required her to be 
 wholly ignorant of its physical aspects. When 
 she walked up the church aisle in her bridal veil, 
 she must be as innocent in mind as she was chaste 
 in body, but at any moment after the marriage 
 vows were spoken she might know everything. 
 The conventional attitude is aptly expressed by 
 Dorothea's Uncle in Mlddlemarch, when he 
 suggests to the bridegroom that he get her to read 
 him " light things, Smollett Roderick Random, 
 Humphrey Clinker; they are a little broad, but 
 she may read anything, now she's married, you 
 know." 
 
 Just how and when she was to enter upon 
 motherhood she did not know, but if she per- 
 mitted herself to think of it at all, she naturally 
 supposed that she would at least have some choice 
 as to the convenient season. But since the con- 
 ventional training of girls prescribed that she 
 should not think of it at all, the conception of her 
 first child was almost certainly " an accident," 
 neither desired nor predetermined, merely inci- 
 dental to the period of excitement, fatigue, and 
 mixed emotion following upon the wedding dis- 
 play and the honeymoon tour. Any sturdy and 
 vulgar-minded servant maid was in a more
 
 46 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 natural and wholesome state of mind upon her 
 marriage than the hyper-modest, carefully pro- 
 tected daughter of the house. The ignorant 
 young wife waited upon her fate more often in 
 fear than in joy, and was, not infrequently, the 
 subject of jest on the matter of her pregnancy 
 before she herself learned what the disturbance 
 of her physical rhythm presaged. 
 
 Though she might look forward with joy to 
 having a child of her love, the lifelong habits of 
 exaggerated modesty could not be thrown aside, 
 but were rather intensified by the consciousness 
 of her condition. She tried to conceal it as long 
 as she could by corsets and clothing which were 
 injurious, and when it was no longer possible to 
 hide the fact, she stayed indoors like an invalid, 
 venturing out only after nightfall or in a carriage. 
 Such unhygienic living made her appetite capri- 
 cious and her temper as well; robbed her muscles 
 undeveloped enough already of their proper 
 nutrition and exercise; and made her more and 
 more unfit for the severe physical test of child- 
 birth. 
 
 If such a degree of ignorance concerning the 
 facts of sex be thought incredible, one has only 
 to inquire of elderly women still living, or to read 
 the biographies of our grandmothers, to know 
 that their prudish habits were maintained through- 
 out a lifetime. Their code did not permit the
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 47 
 
 mention of approaching confinement even to 
 their female relatives. In the biography of 
 Susan B. Anthony there occurs this paragraph 
 about her mother: 
 
 " Lucy Read Anthony was of a very timid and reticent 
 disposition, and painfully modest and shrinking. Before 
 the birth of every child she was overwhelmed with em- 
 barrassment and humiliation, secluded herself from the 
 outside world, and would not speak of the expected little 
 one even to her mother. The mother would assist her 
 over-burdened daughter by making the necessary garments, 
 take them to her home, and lay them away carefully in a 
 drawer, but no word of acknowledgment ever passed 
 between them." 
 
 And yet Lucy Read Anthony was set down as a 
 very " happy wife and mother," and her husband 
 was an exceptionally kind and generous man. 
 
 Before the end of the Nineteenth Century the 
 physical poverty and nervousness of American 
 women had become a matter of serious concern. 
 Medical men were searching for subtle causes, 
 while all the time a perfectly patent group of 
 causes were only vaguely recognized. It was still 
 the fashion to attribute all the weaknesses of 
 women to their inherent nature, rather than to 
 look for their origin in social convention and 
 inactivity. When one realizes how widespread 
 was the ideal of girlish delicacy half a century 
 ago, the wonder is that any wife who had been
 
 48 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 brought up under the restrictions of that period, 
 survived to bear more than a single child. Per- 
 haps all that saved them was the necessity of 
 caring for the child itself, and sometimes of do- 
 ing their own housework. 
 
 It was the husband's exclusive privilege to 
 initiate the innocent girl whom he married into 
 the mysteries of the sex relation. The only other 
 information regarding motherhood that she re- 
 ceived was usually obtained after conception from 
 her mother and the neighbor women. This 
 mother-lore was a mixture of old women's tradi- 
 tions and midwives' quackery handed down from 
 one generation to another, and the prospective 
 mother's sensitive organization was stimulated 
 with the details of miscarriages, premature deliv- 
 eries, still-births, and all the sensational symp- 
 toms within their experience. During the later 
 months of pregnancy she remained altogether in- 
 doors, more often than not, waiting from day to 
 day in a state of terror for labor to begin. 
 
 The thought that a strange man would attend 
 her at childbirth added to her shrinking, and often 
 caused her to prefer the services of a self-trained 
 midwife, whose ignorance of obstetrical practice 
 and hygiene might leave her a semi-wreck for life. 
 Aside from her own undeveloped physique, the 
 lack of properly trained attendants of her own 
 sex was unquestionably a considerable factor in
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 49 
 
 the preventable miseries from which many a child- 
 bearing woman suffered. 
 
 When she was on her feet again, and before 
 she had fully recovered her strength, she was 
 confronted with a new duty, for which she had 
 had no preparation whatever, unless she herself 
 had been an elder daughter in a large family. 
 If she were able to nurse her child, she was for- 
 tunate, but if not as often happened she en- 
 tered upon a period of almost sleepless vigilance 
 to keep alive the precious creature who had al- 
 ready cost her so much. For her task of nurse 
 she was as unfitted as she had been unprepared 
 for marriage. In her day there were no specialist 
 treatises on the care and feeding of infants, nor 
 trained nurses at call, to supply her deficiencies 
 and to teach her how to care for her baby. The 
 polite education in music, French, and the rise 
 and fall of European kingdoms, of which she had 
 been so proud, had small application seemingly 
 to the problems of nutrition and bacteriology 
 which must be solved. And no blame could fall 
 on so conscientious and inadequate a mother if, 
 after weeks of exacting care, the poor little life 
 flickered out. 
 
 The child-bearing woman of the past century 
 was, indeed, the victim of the traditions of her 
 time, which had predestined her to physical weak- 
 ness, sexual ignorance, and incompetence in the
 
 50 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 only career which was open to her. Nor did she 
 alone pay the cost. In every large family there 
 was a miscarriage or an infant death for every 
 two or three children that survived to adult years. 
 The physical exhaustion, the sorrow, and the dis- 
 ruption of the family comfort in such infant 
 losses, cannot be measured in economic terms, but 
 were none the less costly to society. 
 
 If the young mother were vigorous enough to 
 endure repeated pregnancies at intervals of fif- 
 teen or twenty months, she gradually learned her 
 business and outlived some of her maiden fears 
 and griefs, as all her powers were drawn upon 
 by the demands of a growing family. There is a 
 curious literature of what might be called " tired 
 motherhood " hidden away in old albums and 
 the quaint magazines which constituted family 
 reading from 1840 to, 1880. In one of these vol- 
 umes, printed as late as 1872, there is a series of 
 articles on the " Physical Life of Women," which, 
 in process of giving good advice, affords a picture 
 of the ordinary mother's life. 
 
 " She cannot be sick there is no one to care for her if 
 she is; on the contrary, the whole family feel injured be- 
 cause their comfort is disturbed and their habits of de- 
 pendence upon ' Mother ' broken in upon. . . . She grows 
 nervous and irritable . . . she has little time for senti- 
 ment, but she is shocked sometimes to find how all light 
 and sunshine seem gradually fading out of her life. . . .
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 51 
 
 "The children! Ah, well, children are a well-spring 
 of pleasure when the house is wide, the purse long, and 
 the welcome warm; but how is it when they represent so 
 many pairs of worn-out shoes, an ever-ascending pile of 
 unending stockings, continually recurring questions of hats, 
 and suits, and aprons, and innumerable other articles of 
 clothing, which not only have to be made, but made over 
 with every changing season and every addition to the in- 
 creasing family. . . . 
 
 " She is aware that her husband secretly chafes at the 
 change in her appearance, and is growing indifferent to her 
 under the combined influence of family responsibility and 
 the occasional experience of bitterness prompted by her 
 own soreness of heart. She cannot make him understand 
 how the bright, sunny-tempered girl whom he married is 
 dying by inches, leaving a careworn, joyless woman in her 
 place! And so she goes on her hurried, yet monotonous 
 way, each day repeating itself, until some morning she is 
 obliged to take time to die and be buried." 
 
 Even when the house was wide, the purse long, 
 and the welcome warm to each successive child, 
 many a tired mother must have felt like Samuel 
 Sewall, the Colonial father, who hoped, when his 
 fourteenth child was born, that " The Lord would 
 think that was enough." For, consider the daily 
 round of the mother of even a moderate family 
 of five children the actual physical labor in- 
 volved in merely feeding and clothing them, and 
 attending to their toilet. A man who had seen 
 a woman contractor in a Southwestern city down 
 in a ditch, showing a laborer how to lay sewer
 
 52 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 pipe, remarked thoughtfully that, perhaps, it was 
 not any more disagreeable than the sanitary duties 
 of the mother of a household. Consider the in- 
 cessantness of children their questions and cry- 
 ings, their demands and naughtiness, all of which 
 must be patiently and kindly and wisely attended 
 to by the competent mother. The typical father, 
 who spent most of his waking hours outside the 
 house, saw only their pleasant qualities, and sel- 
 dom experienced to the full the monotony of their 
 importunity and distraction. A delightful mother 
 of my acquaintance was accustomed to invite her 
 friends to visit her only in the evening, because, 
 as she said, " I am only a human being after the 
 children are asleep;" and another healthy mother 
 of three vigorous youngsters used to say that 
 Heaven was to her a place where she could sleep 
 as long as she wished. 
 
 Nor must it be forgotten that in the intervals 
 of baby-tending and child-rearing, the typical 
 country house-mother of the past century expected 
 to do the larger part of the housework without 
 the aid of any of the modern conveniences; cook- 
 ing and dishwashing without running water in the 
 house; washing of clothes without set tubs and 
 washing-powders; ironing of garments for it 
 would have been slovenly to leave them " rough 
 dry " without electric and gas devices. Miss 
 Anthony recorded in her Life and Letters how
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 53 
 
 the young married women who were interested 
 in women's rights, and anti-slavery, and temper- 
 ance, dropped out of the work as soon as they 
 were caught in the "matrimonial maelstrom;" 
 and she remarked in a letter to one of them: " If 
 you allowed yourself to remain too long snuggled 
 in the Abrahamic bosom of home, it required 
 great will power to resurrect your soul." 
 
 During the infancy of her children, the mother 
 had very little life of her own, but, if she were a 
 happy wife, found her compensation for her per- 
 sonal sacrifices in the satisfaction of the maternal 
 passion and in the unfolding intelligence of the 
 children. One by one they left her to go to 
 school, and began to bring home new ideas; these 
 furnished excitement and incentive to her vicari- 
 ous ambition, and throughout their childhood 
 years provided the chief stimulus of the mother's 
 life. But by so much as their opportunities were 
 better than hers had been, they began to outstrip 
 her intellectually. For beyond the three R's her 
 education had not only been useless, but it had not 
 even taught her to think for herself, nor incul- 
 cated a taste for serious reading and information. 
 When the smaller children wanted help in the 
 solution of some arithmetical problem, or in the 
 construction of a composition, she found herself 
 too rusty, if not too ignorant, and covered up her 
 chagrin with an excuse of busy-ness.
 
 54 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 By the time the boys were in trousers, and the 
 girls in long skirts, they had found out that their 
 mother's ideas were not only old-fashioned, but 
 often foolish. In the family discussions on public 
 events they saw that their father had no respect 
 for her opinions, though he might receive them 
 with polite tolerance. The mother's mind, hav- 
 ing been for years wholly absorbed in household 
 and maternal details, gradually lost the power 
 to be interested in impersonal topics. Her con- 
 versation became inconsequential, and she was, 
 as a rule, quite incapable of concentrating her- 
 self for any length of time upon a single idea. 
 The distinguishing mental characteristic of the 
 domestic, especially of the maternal woman, came 
 to be heterogeneity. The necessity every mother 
 was under of giving her mind simultaneously to 
 a great variety of childish and domestic demands, 
 all day long and for years together, produced a 
 habit of mental scrappiness. Having -herself 
 been interrupted incessantly, she had no hesitation 
 in breaking in upon any talk or reading with ir- 
 relevant questions and comments. If proof were 
 needed, one need only contemplate the intellectual 
 attempts of certain middle-aged clubwoman who 
 are trying to regain, after a life of distracting 
 domestic detail, the power to think intelligently 
 on wider subjects. 
 
 In most cases the mother developed the charac-
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 55 
 
 teristic female virtues essential to family peace 
 industry, patience, devotion to physical comfort, 
 sympathy with petty griefs, discomforts, and ail- 
 ments, and, above all, unselfishness to an exag- 
 gerated degree, and, in the process, lost sight of 
 the larger values. The children, therefore, how- 
 ever they might depend upon her affection and 
 sacrifice, discounted her opinions. The boys were 
 apt to become unruly before they reached the age 
 of puberty, and had to be turned over to their 
 father in the hope that he might instil good be- 
 havior, if not respect, by his technically greater 
 authority. The half-grown girls were likely to 
 begin to model themselves upon the pattern of 
 some younger, more attractive woman, less care- 
 worn and old-fashioned than their mother. 
 
 If, perchance, by the unselfishness and sweet- 
 ness of her character, she still was able to keep 
 their confidence, she might remain the confidante 
 of their troubles and ambitions, though without 
 the ability to be a trustworthy and intelligent 
 guide. Like the hen who hatched ducklings, she 
 saw them swim away, though she could not swim 
 herself. Some day, when they were married and 
 had children of their own, they might begin to 
 appreciate, in the light of their own experiences, 
 what they owed to their mother; but in propor- 
 tion as they developed beyond her, they would 
 also rate her at her true social value, in spite of
 
 56 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 all affection. For gratitude grows only in rich 
 soil, and filial piety is apt to flower only in pro- 
 portion to the quality of parental culture. 
 
 If the husband and father were a man who, by 
 virtue of integrity, justice, and gentleness, com- 
 manded the willing obedience of his children, he 
 enforced upon them respectful behavior toward 
 their mother, no matter how limited or undeserv- 
 ing she might be. But if, as sometimes happened, 
 the titular head of the family were lazy, incapable, 
 eccentric, or drunken, the competent mother's 
 position became well-nigh intolerable. She must 
 obey her husband by law of Church and State 
 and she must continue to bear children to a man 
 whose superior she knew herself to be, but with- 
 out authority to enforce even nominal respect and 
 obedience upon them. Thus motherhood might 
 become a sort of doom. 
 
 On the other hand, according to the standard 
 of the time, there was no woman so petty, so 
 vain, so enfeebled in body or mind, that she 
 might not become the wife of an intelligent and 
 honorable man and, hanging like a dead-weight 
 upon him, become the incompetent mother of 
 puny children. A society which was shocked at 
 a female preacher or painter or doctor, com- 
 placently acquiesced in the tradition that any 
 woman was good enough to be a mother, if only 
 she wore a wedding-ring. The convenient theory
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 57 
 
 handed down from licentious ages, that parent- 
 hood was both inevitable and praiseworthy, what- 
 ever the qualifications of the progenitors, reduced 
 some wives to the position of mistresses, without 
 any of the advantages of that more independent 
 position. 
 
 The teaching of the clergy that all children 
 came from God, and that the man who begot the 
 greatest number was a benefactor to the State, 
 was, in fact, left over from an age when the 
 survival of a State might depend upon the capacity 
 of its women to replace those fallen in war. Aside 
 from the fact that the less intelligent a popula- 
 tion is, the more recklessly it will breed, the con- 
 ditions of rural life in America demanded 
 abundant child labor. The farmer's daughter 
 stood on a stool to wash dishes, made patch- 
 work quilts, and acted as a " little mother " to 
 the younger children; while boys, from the time 
 they were ten years old, earned their " keep " by 
 chores and the lighter farm labor. 
 
 Children were then an economic asset. Fol- 
 lowing the English tradition, the prosperous 
 American farmer of the earlier Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury often retired from active labor at fifty or 
 fifty-five, allowing his wife and his numerous 
 progeny to support him. By custom the children 
 who went from home to work turned their wages 
 over to their parents until they were of age, and
 
 58 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 expected nothing more than a " setting-out " when 
 they left home permanently. In such a society, 
 the more children there were, provided, always, 
 they were vigorous, the richer the parents. 
 
 The statistics of the period do not afford any 
 trustworthy information of the death-rate of 
 married women; but, indirectly, the family his- 
 tories of the time reveal an unusual number of 
 second and even third wives. There is abundant 
 evidence that the large family of which we read 
 so much was often produced at the cost of the 
 first wife's life. Even when the mother of a large 
 family outlived puerperal fevers, lacerations, and 
 the exhaustion of rapidly succeeding pregnancies, 
 it was not as we often assume to enjoy a vigor- 
 ous, intelligent old-womanhood, but in a state of 
 premature decrepitude, similar to that of women 
 among primitive races. In fact, we need only 
 take account of the increasing youthfulness of 
 middle-aged women to infer that many men as 
 well as women have begun to count the cost of 
 parenthood as measured by a rising standard of 
 child quality and child care. 
 
 In an economic estimate of motherhood as 
 a vocation, it must be remembered that this 
 " career " became anomalous only when wives 
 ceased to do anything of value, except child- 
 bearing. So long as married women were pro- 
 ducers and manufacturers in their own homes,
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 59 
 
 they needed no other justification in the eyes of 
 their husbands or society, whether they bore many 
 or few children. When, however, they became 
 relatively idle and unproductive, as in the latter 
 part of the last century, the sole claim they could 
 make for accepting a parasitic existence, lay in 
 motherhood. Yet for this their feeble physique 
 and childish mentality had in great measure un- 
 fitted them; while, at the same time, children 
 themselves had become less an asset and more of 
 a privilege or of a burden, from another stand- 
 point because they must be supported, educated, 
 and launched in life upon a much higher plane. 
 
 The confusion involved in the purely senti- 
 mental estimate of motherhood was produced by 
 such discordant ideas as the voluntary sacrifice of 
 women to posterity; the dependence of women, 
 whether mothers or not, upon men; and their im- 
 plied release from economic and social responsi- 
 bility. Toward the end of the century the cost 
 of such a mixed system became apparent. For 
 the traditions of the home-seeking and home- 
 keeping woman reacted almost as disastrously 
 upon husbands and fathers as upon women. Men 
 were encouraged in reckless paternity for what 
 else was a woman good for aside from the sex- 
 relation and motherhood ! Since home was the 
 woman's sphere, the husband felt himself re- 
 lieved from all responsibility when he had ful-
 
 60 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 filled his own notion of being a good provider. 
 He betook himself of an evening to the village 
 store on a plea of business, or to the neighboring 
 town, leaving his wife to the doubtful amusement 
 of gossip and the weekly prayer meeting. He 
 saw no reason for keeping his wife's mind alive 
 by drawing her into the circle of his own broader 
 interests, because he had been brought up to sup- 
 pose that she had only a puny intellect, and it 
 would be of no use to her anyway. Not until the 
 children were old enough to be interesting in 
 themselves did he take much account of them 
 beyond performing his financial and disciplinary 
 duties. In consequence of this complete division 
 of interests and duties, the fathers and sons, and 
 the mothers and daughters in any town or neigh- 
 borhood, constituted social cliques separated by 
 a sex-convention analogous to race-prejudice. 
 And each clique had a sort of racial contempt 
 for the ideas of the other, which was a common 
 subject of mutual jests. 
 
 Hardly did the busy mother and wife of the 
 Nineteenth Century reach the mid-plateau of her 
 life and begin to rest a little from absorbing 
 family cares, when the second great apprehension 
 of her life would begin to creep upon her. The 
 children grown up, married, and gone away; the 
 finances of the household eased, making hard 
 work and strict economy no longer necessary; she
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 61 
 
 feared to find herself gradually isolated, and of 
 less and less use. She, who had been important 
 to several, was now reduced to petting her grand- 
 children, seeing that all her husband's tastes were 
 indulged, reviving the semi-ornamental handi- 
 crafts of her youth, gossiping over the tea-table 
 with other capable, restless middle-aged ladies as 
 busily idle as herself striving to pass from wife- 
 hood to old age. Coerced by the tradition cur- 
 rent among women that she must be physically 
 miserable at the time of the climacteric, and mor- 
 bidly afraid that her husband would not continue 
 to love her, she wore out the last years of her 
 potential motherhood in teaching herself to be 
 semi-idle, and accustoming herself to be " laid on 
 the shelf." With so little worth while to do, and 
 twenty or thirty years yet to do it in, she descended 
 prematurely upon the tiresome road to her grave. 
 If she lived out the allotted span of years, they 
 were passed swathed in mourning for those who 
 had gone before; as a widow, perhaps living 
 round in the houses of one child or another, whose 
 more modern habits left her behind; losing 
 through inertia the last ray of the brightness of 
 her maidenhood, and cherishing pitifully the 
 motherhood which had given her life its only pro- 
 found meaning. To the end the glory of mother- 
 hood remained her pride and comfort. Whether 
 her later years proved busy with grandmotherly
 
 62 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 cares, or merely wasted away in the futile busy- 
 ness of old-womanhood, she had, at any rate, ful- 
 filled the appointed destiny of her sex in achiev- 
 ing marriage and children. Even if the man had 
 been a bad husband, and though some of the chil- 
 dren turned out poor human specimens, she had, 
 nevertheless, justified her own existence. 
 
 For practical purposes in life the Universe is 
 no larger than the limits of perception. The fly 
 sees no farther than the infinitesimal radius of his 
 vision, and is at the mercy of the huge thing 
 beyond it; the dog exists to follow his nose; and 
 the doves that cross the Mediterranean beat them- 
 selves to death against the snares of men. So it 
 has been with womankind, whose nature in the 
 course of evolution has been restricted to the 
 narrow demands of an inner domestic circle whose 
 periphery has been constantly expanded by man. 
 
 The zoologists are well aware that in spite of 
 every care the higher animals will rarely breed 
 in captivity yet womankind is expected to do so 
 successfully. Not a little of the growing dis- 
 content of women with their lot in the past cen- 
 tury arose from the unformulated but justifiable 
 resentments of those elected to be mothers. In 
 proportion as they were intelligent they knew 
 themselves the victims of a sort of social pre- 
 tense; the solemn talk about the "glory of 
 motherhood " and the " only worthy sphere "
 
 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 63 
 
 was by no means always borne out by the facts. 
 Motherhood was, indeed, glorious when joyously 
 and intelligently undertaken; and, as a career, 
 worthy of the best ambition and much sacrifice 
 when the parents were equally yoked to bear the 
 load, and the mother fit for her share of it. But 
 in many instances the mothers had been led to 
 marry by the deceiving glamor of love, while lit- 
 tle more than children themselves in physique 
 and mind, and while wholly ignorant of the seri- 
 ous import of that to which they committed them- 
 selves; and in so doing they had been placed ab- 
 solutely at the mercy of the man who only nom- 
 inally guaranteed them support. 
 
 The mother, even in her best estate, knew her- 
 self a sort of charitable dependent; and it is to 
 the credit of men that they were so often more 
 generous than law and social custom. Yet the 
 logical result of a social arrangement which, in 
 the guise of protection, afforded an opportunity 
 for outrage or neglect, could only be resentment 
 and ultimately protest, on the part of married 
 women. The startling proposals of the present 
 day, the transition from unalterable wedlock to 
 more and more divorce, the resistance of many 
 women to involuntary motherhood; the entrance 
 of protected women into wage-earning occupa- 
 tions; these and many other symptoms are 
 phases of evolution engendered in part by the
 
 64 THE CAREER OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 hiatus between the high rank which women be- 
 lieved motherhood should hold, and the realities 
 of married women's lives in the past generation. 
 If it be thought that too dark a picture has 
 been drawn, let it be compared with the educated 
 and relatively competent motherhood of the pres- 
 ent day. Among younger women there are not a 
 few though still too few who, after a thorough 
 education, became engaged to men whom they had 
 known in college or in industry. Taking their 
 future task as mothers and wives intelligently and 
 seriously, they informed themselves on sex- 
 hygiene and the care of children. For the mar- 
 riage ceremony they chose a period of highest 
 health, declining to make a public display. Dur- 
 ing the months of gestation they developed their 
 muscles in anticipation of childbirth, putting them- 
 selves in training as for a race, under the direc- 
 tion of a physician. Often overcoming their own 
 hereditary weakness, they have brought lusty, 
 much-desired children into the world, whose phys- 
 ical and mental development they are capable of 
 directing. Such motherhood may well be called 
 a worthy career, and the joys and glory of it only 
 bring into darker contrast the childish, unpre- 
 pared, enfeebled motherhood of the times whose 
 legacy of miserable children and unhappy homes 
 has not yet passed away.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 " Woman's work is a round of endless detail. Little, insig- 
 nificant, provoking items, that she gets no credit for doing, but 
 fatal discredit for leaving undone. Nobody notices that things 
 are as they should be; but if things are not as they should be, 
 it were better for her that a mill-stone were hanged about her 
 neck. ... A woman who is satisfied with the small economies, 
 the small interests, the constant contemplation of the small 
 things which a household demands, is a very small sort of 
 woman. ... A noble discontent, not a peevish complaining, but 
 a universal and spontaneous protest, is a woman's safeguard 
 against the deterioration which such a life threatens ; her proof 
 of capacity and her note of preparation for a higher." GAIL 
 HAMILTON. 
 
 " That's what makes women a curse all life is stunted to 
 their littleness." From Felix Holt, GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 " Any industry, task, or occupation that deforms the hand and 
 hollows the chest, mars the features and destroys the beauty, 
 the health and self-respect of the workers that makes them 
 indifferent and careless to their personal appearance and clean- 
 liness is unprofitable, both for the worker and for the com- 
 munity. . . . Any form of woman's work, whether in the home 
 or out of it, that produces similar results will soon come under 
 the ban . . . whether that work be the slavery of the factory 
 or the shop, the drudgery of the household, excessive child- 
 bearing, or the slavish care of more children than can be 
 properly supported and given a civilized chance with the means 
 at her disposal." WOODS HUTCHINSON. 
 
 IN the making of a human being there are three 
 variables what he was when he came into the 
 
 65
 
 66 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 world, what he found there, and what he made of 
 it and of himself when he grew up. Boys and 
 girls, if not precisely alike in the beginning, were 
 probably substantially equal, the advantage of 
 greater size in the one being made up in the other 
 by finer nervous organization and endurance. 
 What each sex found in our American world in 
 the Nineteenth Century was, however, very dif- 
 ferent; for social tradition ordained a wide dif- 
 ferentiation in nurture and habit, which was 
 justified in theory by the sex-specialization of fe- 
 males. Neither the education nor the duties of 
 girls, in spite of their special function, prepared 
 them in any direct fashion for motherhood; 
 rather, they were consciously designed to fit them 
 to be domestic servers and housekeepers. 
 
 There had been a time in history not long past, 
 when the choice of a vocation was confined to 
 certain occupations open to the class in which 
 men happened to be born, but in the new democ- 
 racy every field was at least nominally open to 
 any man. Women, meanwhile, whether married 
 or not, whether likely to be mothers or not, were 
 still limited to the group of occupations which 
 could be carried on under the home roof. At 
 the beginning of the last century these comprised 
 a variety of crafts and manufactures, but in the 
 course of fifty years the sphere of the domestic 
 countrywoman was coming to be limited to a
 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 67 
 
 few miscellaneous and belated trades, which were 
 still assigned to women merely because they were 
 performed within the household. 
 
 Although it continued to be assumed that the 
 static and limited condition of women was due 
 chiefly to their primary function as mothers and 
 nurses, an analysis of these purely domestic lives 
 will show that a relatively small portion of 
 women's time and energy was spent in actual 
 mothering. Less than half the fifty years of her 
 adult life were so consumed by the average 
 woman; and in all but the largest families the 
 wife actually occupied more hours per day in 
 washing and laundry work than in the care of 
 children. If the capacity to bear children had 
 in fact incapacitated women for other physical ex- 
 ertion to the extent that it was always assumed 
 it did whenever women wished to do anything 
 outside the home, most families would have 
 lacked food, clothing, and comfort for long 
 periods of time. 
 
 From six to twelve children were born during 
 twenty years to the average wife, and during 
 those years she did most of the labor of the 
 household, including a good deal of manufactur- 
 ing now done in factories, with only such help as 
 the older children could give. The life of my 
 own grandmother was typical of that of many an- 
 other well-to-do farmer's wife between 1825 and
 
 68 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 1875, and an almost exact counterpart of that of 
 Lucy Read Anthony, as described by her 
 daughter. 
 
 " Lucy Anthony soon became acquainted with the stern 
 realities of life. Her third baby was born when the first 
 was three years and two months old. That summer she 
 boarded eleven factory hands who roomed in her house, 
 and she did all the cooking, washing, and ironing, with no 
 help except that of a thirteen-year-old girl, who went to 
 school, and did chores night and morning. The cooking 
 for a family of sixteen was done on the hearth in front 
 of the fireplace, and in a brick oven at the side. Daniel 
 Anthony was a generous man, loved his wife, and was well 
 able to hire help, but such a thing was not thought of at 
 that time. No matter how heavy the work, the woman 
 of the household was expected to do it, and probably 
 would have been the first to resent the idea that assistance 
 was needed." 
 
 Domesticity is here used for convenience to 
 designate all the duties which a married woman 
 of the past century was expected to perform. It 
 consisted first of the physiological functions of 
 wifehood and motherhood; second, of the handi- 
 crafts of a civilized household cooking, sewing, 
 washing, cleaning, and household decoration; and 
 third, the social duties of hospitality and the 
 cultivation of good manners. In the earlier part 
 of the century it involved also the manufacture of 
 nearly all the raw products of the farm into the 
 necessary food, clothing, and bedding for a fam-
 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 69 
 
 ily of six to twelve persons. The household was 
 then not merely a shelter and a boarding-house, 
 but a miniature factory, to which the men-folk 
 furnished the raw products, and over which the 
 wife presided as the working boss. 
 
 The amount of labor, skill, and knowledge 
 necessary to the successful performance of such a 
 variety of duties may be imagined when one re- 
 members that from this family-factory have al- 
 ready been differentiated the separate vocations 
 of nursing, dressmaking, tailoring, knitting, laun- 
 dering, and baking, every kind of cloth manufac- 
 ture, and almost all the primary preparation of 
 foods. If a woman really mastered to the 
 point of competence the essentials of most of 
 these handicrafts, she was necessarily strong, in- 
 telligent, and skilful. Under such circumstances 
 the vocation of domesticity was an immense and 
 stimulating field of action, and likely, therefore, 
 to produce a high quality of mind and char- 
 acter. 
 
 In the attempt to measure the effect of domestic 
 occupations upon women's capacity and character, 
 it is difficult to find any perfect analogy with men's 
 industries. Most of the occupations assigned to 
 men had long ago been specialized into separate 
 trades; while there remained to women, even 
 after a considerable portion of the domestic 
 processes had been transferred to factories, sev-
 
 70 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 eral miscellaneous vocations which had no in- 
 herent connection except that they were under- 
 taken under a single family roof. In this respect 
 domesticity was heterogeneous in much the same 
 sense that general farming was, and still is. 
 Agriculture, as practised in America before the 
 War, comprised several branches, which had no 
 necessary relation except that all of them required 
 the use of land. The raising of grain and hay, 
 of livestock of the several kinds; the production 
 of butter, milk, and cheese; the growing and mar- 
 keting of vegetables and fruit; all required a vast 
 amount and variety of technique and knowledge, 
 but the farmer's education, like the housewife's, 
 consisted in acquiring the traditional methods of 
 several, if not of all these specialties. Although 
 they involved such difficult scientific subjects as the 
 chemistry of soils, the effects of tillage and 
 moisture, the laws of heredity and breeding, the 
 chemistry of milk and its products, the growth 
 and fertilization of plants; there was no available 
 fund of information and no opportunity for sys- 
 tematic education on these points. Each farmer 
 started with his father's traditional ideas and 
 methods; if he learned to think for himself, he 
 varied them, made some experiments on his own 
 account, and, if he were successful, was imitated 
 by a few of his neighbors, thus promoting the 
 progress of science. If he failed he paid a pen-
 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 71 
 
 alty in a loss of profits and reaped the scorn of 
 the neighborhood. 
 
 Housewifery, though as heterogeneous in char- 
 acter and traditional in method as farming, dif- 
 fered from it in several other ways. Though the 
 farmer's work was from " sun to sun," the 
 woman's work was never done. During all the 
 years of child-bearing the mother added to a 
 twelve- or fourteen-hour day of housework the 
 nightly tending of children; and, in case of illness 
 in the family, nursing as well. Toward the latter 
 part of the century, the agitation by workingmen 
 for a shorter day in other occupations reacted to 
 shorten the farmer's day; and, coincidently, the 
 removal of manufactures from the home lessened 
 the amount of labor in the house. It did not, 
 however, perceptibly alter the intermittent char- 
 acter of domestic occupations and, as a rule, it 
 tended to make them less and less educative. 
 
 The domestic sphere was gradually being nar- 
 rowed in much the same way as the shoemaker's. 
 He had once been a highly skilled workman, 
 whose trade demanded a knowledge of a number 
 of skilful processes, from the tanning of leather 
 to the designing of lasts. If he followed his 
 trade into the factory he was reduced to perform- 
 ing a few monotonous operations requiring little 
 intelligence; if he remained outside he became a 
 handy repairer of half-worn footwear. Like the
 
 72 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 housewife, he was left with only the fragmentary 
 processes of his trade, and those the least inter- 
 esting, and gradually lost the stimulus to 
 originality and skill which had been in itself an 
 education. 
 
 Cooking, which was the most varied of the 
 crafts left in the home, became more and more 
 elaborate as women expended more time and 
 thought upon it. Every housewife tried to vie 
 with her neighbor in concocting some new com- 
 bination of eggs, milk, sugar, and flour, et cetera; 
 recipes became more complicated and laborious 
 though the food did not become more nutritious 
 and digestible until the principal literature of 
 the self-educated woman consisted of cookbooks 
 filled with hundreds of formulas. Such meager 
 schooling as she received had no relation either to 
 housewifery or motherhood. It was inevitable 
 that when she had mastered the technique of 
 ordinary homekeeping, whatever originality and 
 ambition she might possess would have to be 
 exercised within the limits of her sphere, and 
 would, therefore, develop in the direction of 
 elaboration of living. As we shall see in the 
 chapters on dress, personal adornment and 
 clothes became almost an occupation in them- 
 selves, engaging more and more time and atten- 
 tion. Like a squirrel in a cage, she must exercise 
 herself by running around in the wheel contrived
 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 73 
 
 for her, instead of roaming freely at large to 
 gather nuts against the winter's need. 
 
 Another simple difference between domesticity 
 and farming the difference between indoor and 
 outdoor life has produced effects upon women 
 so far-reaching as to be incalculable. The 
 farmer, as general agriculture began to be sub- 
 divided into special lines, concentrated his energy 
 and technique on those to which his taste and his 
 land were adapted. He was not shut up in the 
 barn to devote himself solely to milking cows and 
 currying horses and feeding the animals three 
 times a day. Merely from a hygienic standpoint, 
 housekeeping, as it became more narrow and 
 more elaborate, became less healthful. Thou- 
 sands of steps patter, patter from one end of 
 the house to the other, upstairs and down cellar; 
 hundreds of mechanical operations sweeping, 
 dusting, beating of eggs, kneading bread, wash- 
 ing, ironing, and scrubbing; millions of stitches 
 in sewing, mending, knitting, quilting these and 
 similar petty labors, varied by three meals a day 
 and three piles of dishes to wash, and, mayhap, 
 the care of a baby or two, made up the vocation 
 of domesticity. It was a monotony of hetero- 
 geneous drudgery, comparable only to farming, 
 and as much more enervating as four walls and a 
 roof are than the blue sky, the brown furrow, and 
 the live and growing world outside.
 
 74 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 A few years ago two college women tested the 
 ordinary household operations by the criteria of 
 hygienic gymnastics. Beginning with the cus- 
 tomary assumption that " gravity is the enemy of 
 woman," they found that all the work of the 
 housewife except scrubbing kept her on her feet 
 excessively, that most of the arm and back move- 
 ments were in a cramped and strained position; 
 and that she walked from five to eight miles a day 
 in dead, if not altogether bad, air in short, that 
 housekeeping was hard manual labor. Though 
 every housewife knew this without scientific 
 demonstration, it has not been sufficiently recog- 
 nized that housework of the old-fashioned kind 
 lacked fresh air, variety, and exhilaration pre- 
 cisely as factory labor does, and to a much greater 
 degree than farming. 
 
 The mental element of joy in the product, which 
 is the highest compensation one can have for any 
 labor, was to a great extent lost in the repetition 
 involved in domestic production. No doubt the 
 woman who made the first chocolate cake or the 
 first pumpkin pie got lots of fun out of it, and so 
 long as she kept her reputation as the superior 
 and original maker, she was stimulated to further 
 skill. But no woman could keep up her enthusi- 
 asm for preparing potatoes three times a day, 
 much less for washing the tri-daily dishes, any 
 more than the ditchdigger could develop his mind
 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 75 
 
 and continue to lift with zest so many hundred 
 shovelfuls of dirt during three hundred days in 
 a year. 
 
 Work is, undoubtedly, the chief means by which 
 human capacity is increased and moral percep- 
 tions lifted to a higher level; but drudgery that 
 is, the indefinite repetition of operations requiring 
 the minimum of technique and intelligence dead- 
 ens the mind and, if pursued in the midst of filth 
 and darkness, brutalizes the worker. In our day 
 it is being recognized that in proportion as 
 drudgery is done under healthful conditions and 
 for the attainment of an interesting and worthy 
 goal, it may become a means of self-development. 
 Professor Lillien J. Martin made more than sev- 
 enty-five thousand observations, extending over a 
 period of three years, on one subject, in order to 
 determine a certain fact in experimental psychol- 
 ogy; in point of repetition it was as wearisome as 
 if she had washed dishes three times a day for a 
 lifetime; but in point of mental interest it had the 
 zest of working in a new field, and for its goal the 
 greatest intellectual joy in life, the making of a 
 scientific discovery. 
 
 One further parallel may be drawn between 
 domesticity as a vocation and the occupations of 
 men. At the beginning of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury the American family was still an industrial 
 unit. All of its members were producers accord-
 
 76 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 ing to their age, sex, and ability, and all pooled 
 their products and shared the results. Very little 
 ready money was in circulation, and the male head 
 of the family had relatively small chance to rob 
 his dependents while living, although he might 
 distribute his estate very unjustly after he was 
 dead. When the family gradually ceased to be 
 an industrial unit, the minor children began to 
 control their own earnings as soon as they left 
 home, and the husband sold the products of the 
 farm or the business for money. But the women 
 of the household, no longer economically im- 
 portant as manufacturers of raw material, were 
 not in a position to sell their services in the public 
 market. They were still producers, but only sec- 
 ondary producers, so to speak, by so much as a 
 cooked egg is better than a raw one, and a clean 
 sheet than a dirty one; and they were in conse- 
 quence reduced to a position of quasi-peonage. 
 Just as the serf of medieval times was at the 
 mercy of his master-employer because he could 
 not leave the land for another and better-paid job, 
 so mothers and daughters became dependent upon 
 the goodwill of the master of their household. 
 
 Nor did the fact that, unlike the peon, many a 
 woman might receive more than the value of her 
 service, alter her economic dependence. Greedy, 
 idle, seductive females practised the arts of their 
 kind to wring from industrious men a luxurious
 
 77 
 
 living to which they were not entitled; while the 
 majority of hard-working, devoted wives were 
 left without recourse against their particular sup- 
 porter's notion of what they had earned. 
 
 How this situation worked out occasionally is 
 illustrated by the following story, told by a lawyer 
 about an old farmer's wife down on Cape Cod. 
 The farmer died without a will, and his greedy 
 heirs, grudging her the life-use of one-third of 
 the estate, which the law gave her, managed to 
 prove that the farmer had imposed upon her by 
 an illegal ceremony of marriage, and that she, 
 therefore, was not entitled to any of the estate. 
 The Judge, thereupon, advised the old woman to 
 bring in a bill for her services, for if she had not 
 been his wife, the farmer was not entitled to have 
 her do his housework for nothing. Accordingly, 
 she brought in a bill at the current rate of wage 
 for a domestic servant, which the Court allowed, 
 and it took the whole of the estate to pay it. Of 
 course, she had been " supported " all that time, 
 but with the discovery that she was not the man's 
 wife, it was also discovered that her support 
 alone was not a full equivalent for her labor. 
 
 The same principle was put in a slightly differ- 
 ent way by Higginson, when he wrote: 
 
 " A farmer works himself to death in the hay field, 
 and his wife works herself wholly to death in the dairy.
 
 78 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 The neighbors come in to sympathize after her demise; 
 and during the few months' interval before his second 
 marriage, they say approvingly: ' He always was a gen- 
 erous man to his folks! He was a good provider! ' But 
 where was the room for generosity any more than the 
 member of any other firm is to be called generous, when 
 he keeps the books, receipts the bills, and divides the 
 money?" 
 
 The economic disintegration of the Puritan- 
 Colonial family in the last century resulted in 
 taking away from the housewife one of the chief 
 incentives of any labor, i.e., definite money com- 
 pensation. Marriage, though nominally a part- 
 nership, left the second partner in the position of 
 putting in her property and her labor, and then 
 being obliged to trust the first partner to give 
 her as much or as little of the increase as he chose. 
 Stripped of its sentimental aspects, such a bargain 
 was a much greater risk for the woman than for 
 the man, and equally unjust, whether the wife got 
 more or less. 
 
 The reaction of an occupation pursued through 
 a lifetime is so tremendous upon the physique 
 and the mental and moral development of men, 
 that its effects are easily recognized everywhere. 
 But in a country where a man is comparatively 
 free to choose or to drift into the occupation to 
 which he is suited, the affinity between a man and 
 his calling would naturally reinforce his stronger
 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 79 
 
 characteristics, and become an element of general 
 social progress. Men do better that which they 
 are fitted for, and they are apt to like what they 
 can do well. Now, the peculiar misfortune of 
 women has been that, while the original field of 
 domestic production was rapidly narrowed, so- 
 cial convention, during at least two generations, 
 prevented them from engaging in any substitute 
 for it outside the home. Although their primi- 
 tive sphere was constantly shrinking they were 
 not yet freed to find another. The theory of 
 mankind and of the Church was still: all women 
 must be domestic, whether married or single; 
 whether by temperament maternal or celibate; 
 whether adapted to domestic detail or not. The 
 vocation manacled the woman, the woman could 
 not choose what she liked, or what she was fitted 
 to do. 
 
 The effect of this social coercion was to 
 suppress initiative and originality to a degree 
 beyond imagination. For it was inevitably the 
 women of most active minds and of largest ad- 
 ministrative capacity who found the limitations 
 of housekeeping most irksome. Suppose every 
 man in the world had to be a farmer, and could 
 never break away into law or science or art or 
 engineering or even literature, without paying a 
 penalty in social ostracism, and worst of all 
 in the sacrifice of a family and a home; suppose
 
 8o DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 that he never received any wages directly, but was 
 just " supported," and now and then accepted 
 what his senior partner chose to give. Indeed, 
 we need not suppose, for this was the state of a 
 large class of men in the Middle Ages. But the 
 historian calls them the " dark ages," and ex- 
 plains carefully that under such limitations the 
 development of great men and great ideas was 
 not to be expected. No more was it probable 
 that domesticated women, inheriting an environ- 
 ment and a tradition of smallness, would show, 
 even when the doors of opportunity were opened 
 a little way, a high degree of talent in untried 
 fields. It is only by some such analogy as this 
 that we can realize the effect of housewifery in 
 stunting women of exceptional ability who, con- 
 scientiously pinching themselves to fit their sphere, 
 were unhappy or ill-tempered; or, if they had the 
 courage to break through that domestic in- 
 closure, found themselves pariahs, doomed to 
 isolation, if not to failure, in the unfriendly metier 
 for which they had no preparation. 
 
 When, toward the end of the last century, 
 women first began to organize themselves into 
 clubs for self-culture and social activity, they were 
 ridiculed for their lack of ability to do team- 
 work. Their critics seemed to have forgotten 
 that there had never been incentive or oppor- 
 tunity for cooperation toward larger ends, except
 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 81 
 
 in the sewing-bee and the Ladies' Aid Society. 
 Miss Tarbell has clearly shown that the Civil 
 War was the first occasion in which any large 
 number of women came together outside the home 
 to work for the public good. That excessive de- 
 votion to the need of her own family which was 
 the glory of her womanhood prevented her from 
 taking an interest in larger affairs. Just as the 
 lawyer instinctively measured everything by the 
 law, so the specialized domestic woman limited 
 her thinking within the periphery of those matters 
 which it was necessary for a woman to know. She 
 took the personal view, because she had to her 
 happiness and comfort depended not on town 
 government and trade, not on political theories 
 and international quarrels, but on the will of the 
 person nearest to her. In other words, her vo- 
 cation was to wait upon and please a small 
 circle of people, and therefore her intuitions 
 in respect to personality were extraordinarily 
 developed. 
 
 Many of the minor characteristics set down as 
 peculiarly feminine are, in fact, the product of the 
 universal domestic employment of women in past 
 times; as, for instance, the proficiency in the ob- 
 servation and memory of details. Women re- 
 member certain personal details of indoor life 
 for the same reason that the ornithologist sees 
 and remembers the markings of every bird. This
 
 82 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 same man, however, would probably not remem- 
 ber the pattern of the wallpaper in his bed-cham- 
 ber, nor be capable of choosing a tasteful neck- 
 tie; while his equally capable wife could not tell 
 a robin from a peewee, and yet could describe ac- 
 curately the dress of all her guests at a tea 
 party. 
 
 Women are precisely like men in that they fol- 
 low the line of least resistance, and of greatest 
 apparent self-interest. Since successful domes- 
 ticity required the mastery of an immense num- 
 ber of petty details inside the house, and the at- 
 tainment of order, cleanliness, and comfort 
 therein, the mind of the homekeeping woman 
 dwelt incessantly not alone upon these affairs, 
 but also upon the persons whom they concerned. 
 Formerly women could recall the marriage rela- 
 tionship of the whole family connection, and the 
 number of the children; while many a man could 
 not tell how old his wife was, nor whether the 
 first baby was born in the old house or the new 
 one. It is, indeed, no more masculine for men 
 to be oblivious of domestic details than it is fem- 
 inine to be master of them it is merely human to 
 be what one has to be in the station to which one 
 was born and reared. 
 
 It is a natural corollary to this principle that the 
 purely domestic woman of the end of the nine- 
 teenth century should have been quite as " eager
 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 83 
 
 in the pursuit of trifles " as the lady of leisure 
 whom Mercy Warren complained of a hundred 
 years earlier. Given a vocation which demanded 
 incessant attention to a thousand small matters, 
 even when the number of those affairs was di- 
 minished so as to greatly release the housewife, 
 the average woman would still inevitably pursue 
 trifles until there was both a chance and an in- 
 centive to follow larger things. Only a very ex- 
 ceptional girl would make a new path for herself 
 because the cost of any departure from the sanc- 
 tified conventions of women's lives was so tre- 
 mendous. It cost a man something to refuse to 
 treat other men to liquor in a country where that 
 was the universal custom, but it did not make him 
 a by-word or prevent him from marrying and 
 having a home. And it is not exaggeration to 
 say that nothing less than this was the penalty for 
 any woman who broke through the appointed 
 sphere and offered opinions on those larger ques- 
 tions relegated to men. 
 
 There were thus both negative and positive rea- 
 sons for woman to become small-minded. On 
 the one hand, the sole occupation of her life con- 
 sisted of exacting, repetitious, and ephemeral 
 things; on the other, until there was an impera- 
 tive call to other vocations outside, she could not 
 develop the larger mind and become convinced of 
 the futility of the conventional methods of house-
 
 84 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 keeping. The more conscientious the housewife 
 was, the more petty she surely became, devoting 
 herself to the elaboration of food, clothes, dec- 
 oration, and needlework in the effort to be the 
 perfectly correct feminine creature. 
 
 Curiously enough, it was not purely domestic 
 women who revolutionized domestic science in the 
 last quarter of the century and relieved it of its 
 terrible drudgery and picayune monotony, but 
 rather thinking, educated women who, having 
 escaped into a larger world of scientific, sanitary, 
 and economic progress, looked back and, out of 
 pity, began to rescue their sisters from the bog 
 of household tradition. One woman, Ellen H. 
 Richards, devoting herself to chemistry and 
 hygiene, did more to make the home a livable 
 place than a thousand other conscientious, de- 
 voted homekeepers, who remained imprisoned in 
 the woman's sphere of her generation, and that 
 without the sacrifice of any truly feminine qual- 
 ity. The " model domestic woman " is now gen- 
 erally the one whose methods are belated; who 
 cannot keep her servants, and does not yet dream 
 that this is the day of employes; who does her 
 tasks in the old-fashioned way; who still thinks it 
 shiftless to leave any of the laundry unironed; 
 who balks at a patent dishwasher and a fireless 
 cooker; and who has not yet found out that there 
 is a whole library of household science with which
 
 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 85 
 
 she might educate herself and mitigate the end- 
 less pettiness of living. 
 
 It was inevitable, as soon as women in any num- 
 bers undertook work outside the home for wages, 
 that they should begin to compare domesticity dis- 
 advantageously with other vocations. The first 
 effect of this was that the American girl would 
 no longer work out as a servant, and, when she 
 married, would have as her social ambition the 
 employment of some immigrant to do the more 
 laborious and tedious things. The next and 
 logical result was that a good many young women 
 declined to keep house even for their husbands, 
 and went to boarding; and that indulgent hus- 
 bands, who preferred good-temper and dainty, 
 agreeable companionship in a wife, encouraged 
 wives to rid themselves of every form of drudg- 
 ery. Whenever the wife had earned money be- 
 fore marriage she could not help measuring her 
 wifehood in financial terms whether she did any 
 household labor or not for she had been brought 
 up on the theory that because of her potential 
 motherhood she was " entitled to support." At 
 the beginning of the present century not a few 
 such women have become intelligent enough to 
 question the tradition of economic dependence, 
 and cannot keep their self-respect unless they give 
 a full return for what they receive. 
 
 The " strictly domestic " woman is a rapidly
 
 86 DOMESTICITY AS A VOCATION 
 
 vanishing type, eliminated by world-changes in 
 social and industrial conditions, but it will be sev- 
 eral generations probably before the effects of 
 domesticity upon the character and mentality of 
 women will disappear. Women of the more be- 
 lated kind will continue to be petty, devoted to 
 unnecessary details of dress and household affairs, 
 timid, and unoriginal the sport of hereditary 
 and conventional forces which they do not com- 
 prehend. Of necessity, being out of touch both 
 with the old and the new order, they will be dis- 
 contented and will make the homes of which they 
 are the mistresses as unsatisfactory as themselves. 
 But in proportion as domesticity is remodeled 
 and made tolerable by scientific administration, 
 women, even domestic women, will cease to be 
 petty, gossipy, unthinking servants of the house- 
 hold. There will be as great a revolution in the 
 characteristics of the homemaking woman as 
 there has been in the qualities of the farmer since 
 the spread of agricultural science. It is sig- 
 nificant that, as the traditional household labors 
 are modified or vanish altogether from the home, 
 wifehood and motherhood are seen to have no es- 
 sential connection with sewing, cooking, or laun- 
 dry-work under the conditions of modern life, and 
 stand out as true vocational functions in them- 
 selves.
 
 SECTION II 
 THE EFFECT UPON WOMEN
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 " I would rather have a thorn in my side than an echo." 
 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
 " Mirth and opium, ratafia and tears, 
 The daily anodyne and nightly draught 
 To kill those foes to fair ones, time and thought." 
 
 ALEXANDER POPE. 
 
 MANNERS and mannerisms, which are the con- 
 scious adjustment of their behavior that human 
 beings make to the conventions of society, have a 
 greater significance than is generally attributed 
 to them. The habitual bearing reflects the social 
 stratum from which the person came, modified by 
 the need of making himself acceptable to the par- 
 ticular circle in which he ultimately found him- 
 self. Since manner was always a post-natal ac- 
 quisition, any unforeseen situation or emotion was 
 likely to bring to the surface the unmannerly, 
 primitive human being. A grown man and an 
 adult woman have a code of behavior quite dif- 
 ferent from each other, which is usually ascribed 
 to the fundamental sex distinction and which, for 
 want of a better term, we may assign to the 
 " temperament " of each. 
 
 8 9
 
 90 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 In a small town in New Mexico I saw playing 
 opposite my window for several weeks a child 
 perhaps six years of age. It was neatly dressed 
 in boy's trousers, but had two long braids of 
 black hair tied with bows of pink ribbon hanging 
 down its back. From the way in which it ran 
 and played, from its tone of voice and manner, 
 it was impossible to know whether it was a boy 
 or girl, and, curiously enough, neither the children 
 with whom it played, nor the neighbors, seemed 
 to know nor, I might almost add, to care nor 
 did I ever learn its sex. Yet in a very few years 
 it will undoubtedly learn a behavior befitting the 
 conventions of its sex; that is, it will acquire the 
 mannerisms of masculinity or femininity. 
 
 It is well known that a girl brought up among 
 boys becomes " hoydenish," that is to say, boyish 
 in manner; while a boy brought up in a family of 
 women is apt to be " a sissy," or, so to speak, 
 girlish in his ways. It is probable that if they 
 were brought up together from babyhood with- 
 out having suggested to them that any difference 
 of behavior was necessary, their manners would 
 vary with their innate temperament more than 
 with their sex. In a society where, from in- 
 fancy, great stress was laid upon sex differences, 
 the tendency to be bold or shrinking, polite or 
 rude, loud-mouthed or soft-spoken, lively or 
 quiet, emotional or judicial, impulsive or re-
 
 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 91 
 
 strained, vulgar or refined, became predominant 
 or was rigidly repressed along the lines of social 
 approval or disapproval. Among the few prim- 
 itive peoples where men and women were ap- 
 proximately equal in status, there was no essential 
 difference in courage, emotionality, and delicacy; 
 but among the majority of races where the one 
 sex has controlled the destiny of the other, the 
 standards both of morals and manners were laid 
 down by men chiefly for their own convenience 
 and pleasure, and continually tended to become 
 exaggerated in the efforts of women to win and 
 to satisfy their masters. It came about that 
 women, particularly of the well-to-do classes, 
 were expected to be excessively timid, gentle, un- 
 reasoning, fastidious, vivacious in two words, 
 charming and docile. Or, in another phrase, the 
 successful woman must be what men approved. 
 
 Now, naturally, a member of the ruling class 
 would not like an aggressive subordinate, because 
 she might sometimes cross his will; nor a too- 
 reasoning creature, because she might think other- 
 wise or put him in the wrong; nor a slovenly 
 partner, for she would not make a home pleas- 
 ant; nor a grumpy one, because she would not be 
 an agreeable companion. In short, civilized man 
 molded woman into the chaste image of what he 
 himself would rather not be, and required her to 
 practise the difficult habits which insured his
 
 92 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 comfort, pleased his taste, and would not disturb 
 his peace. As a result of a long period of in- 
 culcation, in women of successive generations, 
 they have acquired an extreme code of conduct 
 and manners. Having no opportunity and little 
 encouragement to be natural, they suppressed all 
 the masculine, that is to say, the stronger, tend- 
 encies of their natures, and became, as idleness 
 and ease permitted, more and more effeminate. 
 The cultivation of abnormal delicacy of feeling, 
 of excessive dependence upon men, and of hyper- 
 weakness, or, to use the current mocking phrase 
 of the past time, " the clinging vine," became the 
 pose of the woman who aspired to be a perfect 
 lady. 
 
 Since one of the first results of a democratic 
 regime was to make every citizen try to rise into 
 a higher social stratum, American women of 
 every grade were stimulated to be as ladylike as 
 possible in imitation of the affected manners of 
 the women of greater leisure and resources above 
 them. They seized upon the conventional 
 standard of ladyhood, and affected it to a 
 ludicrous degree. In this way there came to be 
 two conflicting ideals of behavior: the one 
 originally developed in the marriageable type by 
 man for purposes of domesticity; the other 
 adopted by women themselves for the purpose of 
 social elevation.
 
 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 93 
 
 Of all the habits which woman tried to ac- 
 quire, vivacity was, perhaps, the most conspicu- 
 ous the more so as it was not characteristic 
 either of the primitive or the intellectual type. 
 As civilized woman enlarged her social functions, 
 she added to the tricks of allurement other man- 
 ners with which to fill up her increasing leisure, 
 and to express vicariously the rising status of the 
 family. In earlier times men offered hospitality 
 and their dependents, of whom the wife was chief, 
 performed the labor which it entailed; but in 
 Nineteenth-Century America one of the principal 
 glories of the housewife was to keep an open 
 house. The English custom of after-dinner 
 coffee, wine, and conversation, and the Conti- 
 nental habit of frequenting a cafe or a garden for 
 social diversion, had been replaced by the amuse- 
 ments of the Puritanized domestic circle and, 
 for a certain class of men, by the saloon. 
 
 In this new field of mixed society, women took 
 a much larger share of leadership than they had 
 been allowed in the Old World, and talkativeness 
 became a necessary accomplishment for any young 
 woman who wished to marry well. As the " pro- 
 fessional entertainer " of private life, she must 
 decorate her person and cultivate a lively, witty, 
 agreeable manner. Whether she had anything to 
 say or not, she must appear to have she must 
 learn to keep the ball rolling. Unfortunately,
 
 94 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 her life being largely indoors, there was very little 
 common ground of conversation between a 
 woman and a man. Starting with the instinctive 
 coquetry of the mating female, there was evolved 
 for social purposes a series of devices for ex- 
 ercising her charm and giving young men a good 
 time. The subjects of conversation were neces- 
 sarily limited to personal relations and social gos- 
 sip, in both of which there was lacking the element 
 of unexpectedness. It, therefore, became a part 
 of the talk-game for girls to express themselves 
 in veiled meanings, or by teasing, or by pseudo- 
 quarrels, to produce the sensation of novelty. 
 Such a mental paper-chase afforded amusement 
 to the young of both sexes without committing 
 them to serious courtship. Indeed, girls prac- 
 tised it on their fathers and other elderly men, 
 who were entertained thereby as by the antics of 
 a puppy in training. 
 
 In order to enhance the bird-like sprightliness 
 which, at this period, was the ideal behavior of a 
 charming girl, somebody invented " silvery 
 laughter." Children laughed naturally, if not 
 always sweetly, as a sign of physical exuberance 
 rather than of wit. Adults outgrew it as they did 
 the animal instinct to maul each other. If be- 
 longing to a crude society, they might sometimes 
 guffaw or titter, according to convention, while 
 in more cultivated strata humor met merely with
 
 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 95 
 
 the appreciation of a low chuckle or smile. The 
 girlish habit of constant laughter over trifles that 
 were not at all funny in themselves, was partly, no 
 doubt, an expression of health, but it was con- 
 tinued into womanhood as a means of entertain- 
 ing and of appearing gay and young. Among 
 men, on the contrary, a youthful appearance was 
 a disadvantage, and the boy, therefore, assumed 
 gravity at the earliest possible age. 
 
 The superficial animation, which was merely a 
 curious habit connected with feminine parade, dis- 
 appeared with the worn-out trousseau. The wife 
 found out very soon after marriage that her girl- 
 ish tricks did not any longer entertain her hus- 
 band, and practised them, if at all, on other 
 women. Though no longer keyed up to the 
 maiden tension, she was apt to keep the habit of 
 petty, driveling, scrappy talk about clothes, 
 recipes, babies, and neighborhood trivialities. 
 She had, as a matter of fact, no incentive to dis- 
 cuss or to inform herself upon the larger affairs 
 of the world, having in nobody's eyes any concern 
 with them. If she did offer opinions or ask ques- 
 tions, her men-folk rarely treated them seriously. 
 
 The insistent and pervasive character of do- 
 mestic duty required that women should never 
 forget their household matters, and, if they talked 
 at all, it was inevitably of the things nearest them. 
 It is proverbial that young mothers can seldom
 
 96 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 be diverted from baby-talk or talk about the 
 baby it becomes a sort of obsession. This is, 
 indeed, not so much out of motherly conceit as 
 because the baby itself is so absolutely incessant 
 that it leaves no time for thinking of impersonal 
 matters. The mother, for the first year of a 
 child's life, is much like a patient in a sanatorium, 
 except that her mind is fixed on the infant's symp- 
 toms rather than upon her own. 
 
 Again, " the typical woman " used to gabble of 
 ephemeral things for the same reason that com- 
 mercial men will sit smoking and swapping stories 
 in a hotel lobby it is both amusing and relaxing. 
 But while women, like men, talk not only to 
 amuse others, but to relieve the nervous tension 
 of the day, there was, after all, one striking dif- 
 ference between the domestic woman and the 
 average man in the purpose of their conversation. 
 Having a stake in matters outside the sphere of 
 home, and of general interest, men formed the 
 habit of conversing to get and to give informa- 
 tion. Men of superior ability alternated in talk- 
 ing and listening, while the ordinary woman was 
 like a cowboy or a miner, or a countryman whose 
 experience is so limited that he does not willingly 
 listen to accounts of foreign travel or adventure, 
 much less to descriptions of pictures or historic 
 monuments. 
 
 The cumulative effect of domesticity has been
 
 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 97 
 
 to produce scrappy-mindedness in woman. The 
 average housewife's attention hops from one 
 thing to another, never having been concentrated 
 upon a continuous, homogeneous occupation, but 
 rather upon a succession of miscellaneous details, 
 all of which are about equally unimportant, but 
 none of which must be forgotten. Many women, 
 even well-bred ones, constantly interrupt the con- 
 versation with irrelevant exclamations. Like 
 children they have slight power of inhibition; they 
 can't wait to be heard, and so two talk at the same 
 time; they spill over, so to speak, and say what- 
 ever comes uppermost without discretion or dis- 
 crimination. Half-grown boys, as well as girls, 
 have these same conversational tendencies, but 
 they usually lose them early because men will not 
 tolerate a talkative, foolish kid, while, in the case 
 of girls, the average man of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury liked them to be childish chatterers. It is a 
 curious fact that civilized men have always put 
 a premium on foolishness in girls especially in 
 pretty girls while they spoke scornfully of it in 
 older women. 
 
 In no respect have women been supposed to 
 differ more markedly from men than in the ex- 
 pression of emotion. The feminine type of the 
 past century laughed often and too easily; wept 
 almost as readily with any shock of fear or grief, 
 and not infrequently as a sign of extreme anger.
 
 98 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 It is a significant fact, which is generally over- 
 looked, that the women of the Twentieth Cen- 
 tury, and particularly those who have made them- 
 selves economically independent, no longer be- 
 have in this way. Tearfulness, along with talka- 
 tiveness, has gone out of fashion. The heroines 
 who fainted in the Eighteenth-Century novel, and 
 cried buckets of tears in the fiction of the past 
 generation, now control their emotions almost as 
 well as men perhaps even better, if one may 
 judge from the copious swear-words which char- 
 acterize the lively feelings of the typical Western 
 hero. In infants, crying has always been re- 
 garded as an evidence that they wanted attention 
 that they were uncomfortable, or wished to be 
 dandled; and at this age there is certainly no dif- 
 ference between the sexes. Nor throughout 
 childhood where they have had the same 
 discipline and an equal reason for self-control- 
 did children show any perceptible variation along 
 the line of sex. But by the time the boy and the 
 girl had reached the period of adolescence, girls 
 had usually formed the habit of crying when they 
 were unhappy and displeased; and boys, of fight- 
 ing, swearing, and smashing things. 
 
 In modern systems of education, the power of 
 suggestion is recognized to be as strong as that 
 of authority in molding children. But even in 
 the by-gone period of stricter discipline, sug-
 
 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 99 
 
 gestion was no less a factor in the formation of 
 character, though not consciously practised. The 
 habits of common decency brushing the teeth, 
 cleaning the nails, and bathing as every mother 
 knew had to be assured not so much by coercion 
 as by appeals to pride and affection. It was sug- 
 gested to the boy or girl that they could never be 
 grown up till they had learned to button their 
 clothes. 
 
 In such matters boys and girls received pre- 
 cisely the same suggestions, but in every habit 
 where the conventional standards for men and 
 women differed, the force of suggestion re- 
 inforced girlishness in girls and boyishness in 
 boys. When a boy cried with hurt or fury, he 
 was told he could " never be a man " if he cried. 
 Girls, on the other hand, were expected to cry, 
 out of their feminine temperament, and if, now 
 and then, one did not do so, but raged and 
 smashed things, she was regarded as a tomboy 
 and a scandal to her sex. When little girls wept, 
 they were likely to be petted and comforted; if 
 they kicked and yelled, they were punished and 
 made to understand that to behave like a boy 
 was the most outrageous thing they could do a 
 sin comparable to lying and stealing. Now if, 
 as is well known, a baby a week old learns that 
 somebody will give it attention if it yells long 
 enough, and takes advantage thereby, it is
 
 ioo THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 scarcely possible to exaggerate the effect of the 
 constant emphasis on hysteria as the proper form 
 of emotional explosion for women. 
 
 Emotional expression is, in fact, determined 
 far more by race and temperament than by sex. 
 The South European peoples are in this respect 
 more highly developed than the Northern, and 
 the negro than the white race. The so-called 
 " artistic " temperament is merely a display of the 
 characteristics commonly attributed to women 
 and, until recently, male artists were looked upon 
 by other men as essentially effeminate. In so far 
 as the artist has a highly developed nervous or- 
 ganization, he is, indeed, like a finely strung 
 woman, but his effeminacy consists, on the other 
 hand, in an over-stimulation of his emotions, and 
 in the absence of the motives for self-control 
 which usually operate among men. 
 
 The artist, too, is the victim of a tradition that 
 singers and painters are inevitably erratic and 
 self-indulgent. The artist is by nature a finely 
 sensitive human organism and, since success de- 
 pends upon very early specialization in the ex- 
 pression of beauty and feeling, the so-called manly 
 qualities are likely to remain in abeyance or to be 
 suppressed. The feminine and the masculine 
 temperaments are at this moment strikingly typi- 
 fied in two men singers now at the height of their 
 fame. One, born of a southern race, and trained
 
 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 101 
 
 from childhood exclusively in the direction of 
 artistic expression, behaves precisely in the man- 
 ner of a petted, extravagant, emotional woman. 
 The other, of a northern race, educated in the 
 broad, practical manner of the normal man, and 
 rather late in life devoted to the exclusive culture 
 of his artistic gift, is both a great singer and a 
 controlled and manly human being. 
 
 In much the same way, the great preacher and 
 the brilliant orator are effeminate, producing their 
 effects far more by the hypnotism of high emo- 
 tion than by the ideas which they express. Like 
 actors, they, too, are subject to extreme reaction 
 after the culmination of any emotional effort in 
 which they are often as irresponsible as children. 
 It is particularly suggestive that of all the types 
 of men denominated " effeminate," the actor most 
 nearly resembles the type of woman set up as the 
 ideal in the past century. He, like the woman, 
 makes his place in life chiefly by the cultivation 
 of manner and appearance. He, like her, de- 
 pends for success upon pleasing rather than being 
 admirable. The " matinee idol " is an extreme 
 example of character or, rather, perversion of 
 character by the social necessity of being charm- 
 ing and of trading in assumed emotions. 
 
 For this was in truth what the American 
 woman was driven to do in the sphere offered in 
 the past century. With the approach of ado-
 
 102 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 lescence and the development of the sex instinct, 
 young people of both sexes began to preen them- 
 selves, the boy exaggerating the masculine qual- 
 ities to attract attention; the girl pretending to be 
 extremely delicate, elusive, and emotional in 
 order to enhance her charms. One of the chief 
 elements of courtship is surprise; and emotional 
 outbursts, whether of laughter, tears, or temper, 
 were one of the readiest means of producing un- 
 expected turns in personal relations. The lover, 
 taken unaware, would succumb to the assault of 
 hysteria just as the girl's father had done in 
 earlier years, and as the husband would do later. 
 Hysteria was, indeed, by virtue of convention and 
 cultivation, as much the weapon of the domestic, 
 feminine type as bluffing, bullying, and epithets 
 were " natural " to men whose traditions did not 
 permit the exhibition of weaker forms of emo- 
 tional expression. The cultivation of anger from 
 bravado to fisticuffs was one of the insignia of 
 manliness, as tears and weakness were of woman- 
 liness, though by nature the boy might be a 
 coward and the girl a fighter. 
 
 Since men liked docility in wives, marriageable 
 girls must cultivate the appearance of gentleness, 
 whatever their natural disposition might be. 
 Just as boys in the family might throw their 
 clothes on the floor, expecting mother to pick 
 them up, while girls were trained to put away
 
 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 103 
 
 their own garments; so boys were rather admired 
 for getting mad and getting into a fight, while 
 their sisters, under similar provocation, would be 
 called " vixens " and meet with severe disap- 
 proval. The girl of high temper which often 
 indicated superior strength of character either 
 became the female bully of the neighborhood, or, 
 more often, learned to dissemble her disposition 
 by putting on a " honeyed " manner. One of 
 the " sweetest " women I have ever known 
 and she was typical of many of her sort one 
 whose outward manner was invariably defer- 
 ential, sweet, and considerate toward her neigh- 
 bors and her family, kept her husband in abject 
 fear of her displeasure. The temper which this 
 delicate and gentle appearing creature would un- 
 leash in private to get what she wanted from a 
 refined and too-indulgent husband, was incredibly 
 savage, and was always reinforced with the ap- 
 peal to tears. She had been a delicate and 
 only daughter, over-indulged, but, nevertheless, 
 brought up in the practice of the strictest con- 
 ventional behavior. She could and did control 
 herself in every public relation, toward every one 
 except her immediate family, but, when crossed by 
 them, she fought like a man, with the only weap- 
 ons she knew. 
 
 The society manner was an extension of the 
 habits acquired by girls for the purpose of their
 
 io 4 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 sphere, which included entertaining along with 
 housekeeping and motherhood. Objectively, it 
 was intended to make the guest have a good time 
 by putting him at ease, and at the same time pleas- 
 ing and piquing him with interest; subjectively, 
 it was the accepted method of displaying the 
 feminine charm, of giving marriageable girls a 
 chance to make their market, and of maintaining 
 the social status of the household. It, therefore, 
 demanded a careful attention to appearances, the 
 playing up of all the attractive resources of the 
 feminine members of the family, and the conceal- 
 ment of whatever might not be creditable. If a 
 woman thus set out to please everybody, even 
 within the confines of her own social circle, she 
 could never say what she thought nor behave as 
 she felt. Indeed, the more charming she was, 
 the more insincere she must necessarily be. She 
 must always be complimentary to her acquaint- 
 ances, praising their dress, belongings, and per- 
 formances. The guest who loved music and 
 sang off the key, must be invited to perform as 
 cordially as if she were a really pleasing musician; 
 the man who told wearisome anecdotes must be 
 met with all the spontaneous laughter due to wit. 
 The more tactful the woman contrived to be, the 
 more social success she attained and, per contra, 
 the more insincere she became. 
 
 It is evident that slow-witted or straight-
 
 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 105 
 
 forward women would have no chance at all in 
 a society where the coin of exchange was mutual 
 and graceful flattery. In the nature of things 
 the quickest-witted women were the most 
 capable of practising concealment of their 
 thoughts, while those of more solid qualities 
 would either not be able to attain the acrobatic 
 grace necessary to social success, or would have 
 an honest distaste for its superficiality. The 
 more intellectual and sincere, and the more rea- 
 sonable a young woman was, the less likely she 
 was to be socially successful, and she must either 
 be content to be a " blue-stocking," and remain 
 unmarried, or she must conceal her natural com- 
 mon-sense and imitate the feminine characteristics 
 then in vogue. 
 
 Thus imitation rather than originality became 
 the keynote of women's lives. In a democratic 
 society composed largely of people born in the 
 working classes, whose social ambitions were 
 chiefly limited to financial ease and the hope of 
 rising into the next higher stratum, there were 
 many kinds of men, but only two sorts of women. 
 The success of a man consisted in material 
 achievement; of a woman in appearing to be what 
 was pleasing to man in order that she might 
 be invited to share his height. Men were mak- 
 ing themselves, so to speak, of the genuine stuff 
 soft or hard, fine or coarse-grained, of pine, oak,
 
 106 THE FEMININE TEMPERAMENT 
 
 or mahogany; while women, of whatever ma- 
 terial, must be carefully veneered with a thin 
 and costly layer of unreality a sort of imitation 
 composite, a spurious femininity. 
 
 It is certainly significant that, in proportion as 
 the women of the Nineteenth Century were re- 
 leased from domestic, manual labor, they became 
 more and more extravagantly feminine; and that 
 this phenomenon was a repetition of what had 
 previously marked the behavior of every class 
 of women at leisure throughout the world's his- 
 tory. There is no evidence that our manufactur- 
 ing grandmothers of the early Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury were afflicted with any such degree of ef- 
 fusive, excitable, unreasoning temperament as 
 that which characterized the strictly feminine 
 ideal of their immediate descendants. Among 
 Parisians at the present day, where there is al- 
 most no line drawn between the economic sphere 
 of men and women, and where both husband and 
 wife among the masses must work to make a liv- 
 ing, there is no marked difference between them 
 in respect to emotional expression. The women 
 of Paris have fought as savagely as men in the 
 revolutions; and French men are notoriously as 
 emotional as the typical American woman, and as 
 unreasoning when carried beyond self-control. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the social behavior 
 which is commonly described as " typically femi-
 
 nine " is an over-development of characters not 
 at all uncommon among men, and often lacking 
 in women. When women have been more given 
 to superficial talk and gayety than men, it is 
 because men desired them to be so, and because it 
 was, therefore, to their advantage. If they have 
 been accustomed to use hysteria as their weapon 
 of defense, instead of talking reason or using 
 their fists, it was probably because they had never 
 had either encouragement or opportunity to em- 
 ploy mind or brute force. 
 
 With the opening of all occupations to woman, 
 and with nearly equal opportunities for intel- 
 lectual training, there has been developed in a 
 single generation a large number of American 
 women who are less excitable than a Frenchman, 
 less sentimental than a German, and less emo- 
 tional than an Italian in short, almost as rea- 
 sonable and self-poised as the men of their own 
 class and race.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 "There was no reason why woman should not labor in 
 primitive society. The forces which withdrew her from labor 
 were expressions of later social traditions. Speaking largely, 
 these considerations were the desire of men to preserve the 
 beauty of women, and their desire to withdraw them from as- 
 sociation with other men. It is the connection in thought and 
 fact between idle and beautiful women and wealth, indeed, 
 which has frequently led to the keeping of a superfluous num- 
 ber of such women as a sign of wealth." THOMAS Sex and 
 Society. 
 
 " Female selection . . . created a fantastic and extravagant 
 male efflorescence. Male selection . . . produced a female eti- 
 olation, diminutive stature, beauty without utility." LESTER F. 
 WARD. 
 
 " The woman who is beautiful and vivacious, and not actu- 
 ally feeble-minded, will be endowed with all graces of mind 
 and soul by three-fourths of all who see her on the street, 
 while the most highly intellectual frump will often be set down 
 as stupid and crabbed, purely on the strength of her appearance. 
 
 " In fine, beauty, to a woman of average intelligence and char- 
 acter ... is her most valuable asset from a worldly stand- 
 point. . . . Beauty is the outward and visible sign of the in- 
 ward and spiritual grace health. . . . " WOODS HUTCHINSON. 
 
 THE types of spurious and anemic beauty 
 prevalent in the Nineteenth Century in this coun- 
 try may be accounted for historically by the 
 conflicting ideas inherited, on the one hand from 
 
 108
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 109 
 
 ascetic religion, on the other through the sensual 
 luxury of higher English society. Behind both, 
 permeating and coercing the lives of women even 
 down to the present time, was the idea left over 
 from still older societies, that the bodies of women 
 were owned by the men who espoused them, 
 which carried with it the implication that the 
 chief use of beauty is the satisfaction of sexual 
 greed. One of the foremost modern sociologists 
 tells us that, if we go back far enough, there was 
 a long period of time when women had no need 
 to be beautiful in order to attract their mates; a 
 time, indeed, when males put on a temporary 
 beauty in order that they might be chosen; and 
 that it was not until the power of choice had been 
 transferred from females to males that women in 
 their turn began to cultivate those physical qual- 
 ities which would most attract men. Even then 
 relatively few women were beautiful in the mod- 
 ern sense, and they only for the short period of 
 extreme youth. 
 
 For the ordinary woman, beauty as an aim and 
 asset is quite a modern idea. In the earlier ages 
 of mankind, strength, fertility, and skill in handi- 
 craft were the qualities most desired in wives, as 
 in slaves. When King Solomon pictured the 
 ideal domestic woman, he did not dwell upon the 
 color of her eyes and hair, nor upon the sym- 
 metry of her form, but described in great detail
 
 no BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 the things she could do, praising her indefatigable 
 industry, and ending with these words: 
 
 " Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain ; but a woman 
 that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. Give her of 
 the fruit of her hands and let her own works praise her 
 in the gates." 
 
 Beauty in a wife or a slave was a rarity quite 
 out of reach of the common man; a thing of great 
 price, reserved for kings, princes, and the leaders 
 of armies, and to be guarded, like treasure, in 
 harems. The Greek hero, Paris, carried off 
 women from Sidon, not for their beauty, but that 
 they might weave purple cloth for Helen of Troy 
 a situation typical of the relative positions of 
 the Beauty and the ordinary woman. 
 
 There was, in the ancient world, and even quite 
 down to recent times, no economic surplus upon 
 which society could fall back. War and waste, 
 pestilence and the lack of mechanical inventions, 
 made it necessary not only to breed great num- 
 bers of human beings, but that men, women, and 
 children all except a small upper class should 
 work incessantly. To the ordinary man, who 
 could afford only one wife, strength and fertility 
 were highly important; and though he might 
 prefer the looks of one maid above another, his 
 taste was likely to be overcome by his judgment 
 or nullified by family and financial considerations.
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS in 
 
 At the beginning of the Christian Era, beauty 
 in women was associated exclusively with luxury 
 and sensuality a fact which accounts for the an- 
 tipathy toward them evinced by certain apostolic 
 writers. Among the poverty-stricken masses of 
 the later Roman Empire, severe labor and early 
 marriage destroyed in girls, almost before they 
 were grown, such ephemeral prettiness as they 
 might possess. The ascetic reaction of the early 
 Christian Church, during the Middle Ages, from 
 the frank sensuality of the Roman world, empha- 
 sized still further the purely animal aspects of 
 female beauty. With each recurrent wave of 
 social reform in the Christianized world the es- 
 sential relation between good looks and wicked- 
 ness was reiterated until it culminated a second 
 time among the Puritans as it had the first time 
 among the ascetics in a belief that women, par- 
 ticularly attractive women, were agents of the 
 devil. 
 
 Although Puritanism had begun to loosen its 
 hold on the minds of American men at the begin- 
 ning of the Nineteenth Century, the theory that 
 women were tempters and a menace to every good 
 man, was still generally accepted. The natural 
 instinct of youth to admire and to choose the 
 more attractive maiden was morbidly distorted by 
 the religious teaching of the day into a sinful sug- 
 gestion, and robbed of all its innocent joy. This
 
 ii2 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 unwholesome suppression of the animal side of 
 human nature produced a sort of subterranean 
 vulgarity in the majority of common people, and a 
 revulsion of exaggerated shame in those of 
 greater refinement. The fear of loveliness in 
 women was extended to other forms of beauty in 
 American life for Puritanism had put a ban, 
 too, upon painting, sculpture, music, and the 
 drama. All were still regarded as frivolous, if 
 not dangerous to morals; and thus our parents 
 and grandparents were almost destitute of any 
 form of artistic pleasure. 
 
 But even if there had been the same racial and 
 temperamental sense of beauty as that pervading 
 the French and Italian populace of the same pe- 
 riod, the life of a pioneer community was neces- 
 sarily ugly. The struggle with nature for the 
 crude necessities of living devastated alike what- 
 ever beauty of landscape or of human nature there 
 might be, and left scant leisure or desire for the 
 beautiful. 
 
 The higher manifestations of beauty, whether 
 in art or in womanhood, are necessarily of slow 
 growth, and are always coincident with a certain 
 degree of material ease. In proportion as the 
 New World became prosperous, the mere 
 abundance of good food, the prevalence of rela- 
 tive peace and plenty throughout a selected pop- 
 ulation, produced a better grade of human being.
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 113 
 
 And as the lives of ordinary women became 
 easier, with more comfortable conditions of living 
 and the removal of some of the hardest domestic 
 labor to factories, the young were born with a 
 greater degree of physical symmetry, and were 
 able to keep it through adolescence and even into 
 adult years. 
 
 Nevertheless, while the general average of 
 bodily perfection was rising, its higher realization 
 was hindered by the tyranny of religious tradi- 
 tions and the distorted image of what beauty in 
 women consisted in. The entirely inconsistent 
 types of physique which had survived from 
 wholly different classes in the Old World, were 
 still the models for imitation. The " over- 
 sexed cow-mother " of medieval Europe as 
 Hutchinson calls her found her analogue in 
 America in the mother of a large family, whose 
 too-frequent pregnancies and incessant industry 
 left her at middle age either an exhausted, 
 wrinkled creature, without a grace of body or 
 mind; or else a shapeless bulk of flesh, more like 
 a breeding animal than a human being. At the 
 antipodes of such a woman was the attenuated 
 fine-lady, modeled upon the type of the 
 Eighteenth Century as feeble, affected, and 
 under-sexed as the breeding mother was vital. 
 A third type, the French fashion-plate woman, 
 who was, in fact, only slightly modified from the
 
 ii2 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 unwholesome suppression of the animal side of 
 human nature produced a sort of subterranean 
 vulgarity in the majority of common people, and a 
 revulsion of exaggerated shame in those of 
 greater refinement. The fear of loveliness in 
 women was extended to other forms of beauty in 
 American life for Puritanism had put a ban, 
 too, upon painting, sculpture, music, and the 
 drama. All were still regarded as frivolous, if 
 not dangerous to morals; and thus our parents 
 and grandparents were almost destitute of any 
 form of artistic pleasure. 
 
 But even if there had been the same racial and 
 temperamental sense of beauty as that pervading 
 the French and Italian populace of the same pe- 
 riod, the life of a pioneer community was neces- 
 sarily ugly. The struggle with nature for the 
 crude necessities of living devastated alike what- 
 ever beauty of landscape or of human nature there 
 might be, and left scant leisure or desire for the 
 beautiful. 
 
 The higher manifestations of beauty, whether 
 in art or in womanhood, are necessarily of slow 
 growth, and are always coincident with a certain 
 degree of material ease. In proportion as the 
 New World became prosperous, the mere 
 abundance of good food, the prevalence of rela- 
 tive peace and plenty throughout a selected pop- 
 ulation, produced a better grade of human being.
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 113 
 
 And as the lives of ordinary women became 
 easier, with more comfortable conditions of living 
 and the removal of some of the hardest domestic 
 labor to factories, the young were born with a 
 greater degree of physical symmetry, and were 
 able to keep it through adolescence and even into 
 adult years. 
 
 Nevertheless, while the general average of 
 bodily perfection was rising, its higher realization 
 was hindered by the tyranny of religious tradi- 
 tions and the distorted image of what beauty in 
 women consisted in. The entirely inconsistent 
 types of physique which had survived from 
 wholly different classes in the Old World, were 
 still the models for imitation. The " over- 
 sexed cow-mother " of medieval Europe as 
 Hutchinson calls her found her analogue in 
 America in the mother of a large family, whose 
 too-frequent pregnancies and incessant industry 
 left her at middle age either an exhausted, 
 wrinkled creature, without a grace of body or 
 mind; or else a shapeless bulk of flesh, more like 
 a breeding animal than a human being. At the 
 antipodes of such a woman was the attenuated 
 fine-lady, modeled upon the type of the 
 Eighteenth Century as feeble, affected, and 
 under-sexed as the breeding mother was vital. 
 A third type, the French fashion-plate woman, 
 who was, in fact, only slightly modified from the
 
 u6 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 to meet the requirements of Puritan modesty. 
 No better illustration could be found of the con- 
 flicting traditions which ignorant women were 
 blindly following. 
 
 Without attempting to account for the vagaries 
 of modesty a subject upon which much has al- 
 ready been written the effect of a single conven- 
 tion upon the health and beauty of women may be 
 dwelt upon. Throughout the past century, to be 
 obviously two-legged was to be immodest. The 
 Chinese woman as modest and feminine as any 
 of her sex in the world, perhaps has had the use 
 of her legs, if not of her feet, for thousands of 
 years, but the American woman has always had to 
 pretend that she had only one. The peasant 
 woman of northern Europe, though burdened 
 with heavy petticoats, might exhibit her body be- 
 low the knee, but the " free " woman of the new 
 democracy had to conceal, as far as possible, even 
 her ankles. 
 
 This convention restricted every activity, and 
 was, unquestionably, one of the factors in the 
 deterioration of the health of American women. 
 For three hundred years western women have 
 ridden on horseback sidewise, with feet enveloped 
 in a voluminous skirt, solely because a French 
 Princess long ago set the fashion to conceal her 
 own deformed spine. Because the roues of a 
 decadent society attached sexual significance to
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 117 
 
 ankles, the American girl walked encased in heavy 
 drapery, which compelled a narrow, uncertain 
 tread. Millions of women lifted their petticoats 
 billions of times in the course of their lives; while 
 housewives scoured their floors, hampered by the 
 uniform of their sex, and endangered their lives 
 whenever they got in or out of a vehicle; all for 
 no other reason than that the particular form of 
 modesty inculcated by Puritan society had tabooed 
 legs in women. The early advocates of Women's 
 Rights were right, if not wise, in associating a 
 bifurcated costume with equality and freedom, 
 but it was equally necessary to the production of 
 true beauty. 
 
 Shame and inactivity, thus linked together, pro- 
 duced a strangely distorted and bloodless creature 
 whose only sign of real loveliness was a pretty 
 face. The grace of symmetry and the exhilaration 
 of free motion were denied not only to women 
 of the leisure classes, but to working-women as 
 well, because every woman in America was try- 
 ing " to be a lady," and the conventions of the 
 Fore-time had so ordained. Even when the 
 Puritan regime declined and women were begin- 
 ning to be released from the older conventions, 
 they were at the same time presented with a 
 vicious foreign model by the vogue of fashions 
 which had been brought in to promote journalism 
 and manufacture.
 
 n8 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 Convention has this peculiarity: it is no sooner 
 established than it tends to become exaggerated; 
 probably for the reason pointed out by Darwin, 
 that men like what they are accustomed to, car- 
 ried to a moderate extreme. In the United 
 States, before the Civil War, the almost total ab- 
 sence of art education in any form painting, 
 sculpture, and decoration caused men to be satis- 
 fied with the most perverted and crude standards 
 of pseudo-beauty in women. The pinched waist, 
 the flat chest, and protruding abdomen, the bodily 
 outline wholly destroyed by drapery in the wrong 
 places, were merely symptoms of the general 
 crudity of taste displayed in the architecture of 
 the same period. Doric columns reproduced in 
 wood, medieval towers in shingles, and the ginger- 
 bread decorations of the planing-mill, represented 
 a riot of untrained, artistic ambition. 
 
 This period of base reproduction and violent 
 novelties in art did give, fortunately, an oppor- 
 tunity for the release of varied and less conven- 
 tional types of beauty among women. Red hair, 
 which for several generations had been considered 
 ugly all but improper began to be tolerated 
 and, among people who had acquired some slight 
 culture in foreign art, was even admired. The 
 more permanent aspects of physical loveliness 
 grace of outline, purity and richness of color 
 gained some attention. Two extreme types of
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 119 
 
 women the household drudge who stood for ef- 
 ficiency without beauty, and the doll-woman who 
 represented beauty without utility began to go 
 out of fashion. For as the new types of men 
 produced by democracy became prosperous and 
 worldly, they wanted something more in a wife 
 than a homely sex-mate and servant; or, than a 
 pretty but half-sick and helpless fool. 
 
 There began to emerge among us a conception 
 of human beauty which might have higher reason 
 than sexuality for its existence. The type of 
 beauty developed among the Greeks had lacked, 
 so far as women were concerned, essential ele- 
 ments. While exhibiting symmetry, color, and 
 grace, it had been greatly deficient in expression; 
 that is to say, it was the perfection of the physical 
 female without the capacity for varied emotion 
 and intelligence which is an inseparable part of 
 the modern ideal. The Venus of Melos would 
 probably attract very little attention now as a 
 woman in cultivated society, though she might 
 serve as an artist's model for life study. 
 
 Aside from the sensual and ascetic traditions 
 which largely determined the conventional ideas 
 of the earlier part of the past century, another 
 influence of quite a different sort was brought to 
 bear upon the feminine physique. It is not too 
 much to say that science, particularly biological 
 science, has assured the emancipation of woman;
 
 120 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 nor that freedom from the limitations and de- 
 formities of the domestic tradition was impossible 
 until the facts of evolution had been discovered. 
 For the perpetuation of the weakness and sub- 
 jection of women was certain so long as the 
 Christian scriptures continued to be literally in- 
 terpreted; around them had been built a wall of 
 social convention which was all but impregnable. 
 So long as the doctrine that " the woman is the 
 glory of the man " dominated the Church and, 
 therefore, mankind, so long women would con- 
 tinue to be weak because they were dependent; 
 so long would they mold themselves into what 
 men wanted them to be, rather than develop their 
 own capacities. In less than one century science 
 undermined the view that the female was neces- 
 sarily weak, bringing to light a mass of proof 
 that among many orders of animals and that 
 among primitive men she was strong, even 
 stronger than the male. Physiology and hygiene, 
 medicine and bacteriology, have uncovered the 
 hidden sources of the physical weaknesses of 
 modern women, and have demonstrated that the 
 greater part of them, perhaps all, are pre- 
 ventable. 
 
 At the present day, health and beauty are in 
 our minds very nearly inseparable, but when we 
 go back two or three generations we read con- 
 stantly about the delicacy and ill-health of well-
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 121 
 
 known society beauties. The very term formerly 
 in polite use female complaints stood for the 
 physical poverty of womankind. A perfectly 
 normal function, like menstruation, which rarely 
 gave discomfort to primitive women, or to women 
 of active, outdoor life, had come to be regarded 
 as a periodic sickness. Girls were imbued with 
 the idea that it must inevitably incapacitate them, 
 and this pervasive suggestion, combined with bad 
 physical habits, heavy and constrictive clothing, 
 and inactivity, made it so. The period of gesta- 
 tion, which, among Indian and peasant women, 
 and even among the vigorous farmers' wives of a 
 hundred years ago, caused relatively slight incon- 
 venience, had taken on the aspect of a prolonged, 
 chronic illness. 
 
 As the young girl became anemic, and the young 
 wife inactive, for want of vigorous, compulsory 
 outdoor occupation, pregnancy became a serious 
 discomfort, and childbirth a terror. At the very 
 time when the prospective mother should have 
 been developing her abdominal muscles and stim- 
 ulating her nutrition to the utmost, the conven- 
 tional prudery of the Nineteenth Century dictated 
 a careful concealment of her condition. Among 
 South European peoples prospective motherhood 
 is a subject for public congratulation, but in Amer- 
 ica the " sacred duty " and the " only worthy 
 sphere " was a thing to be concealed a subject
 
 122 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 of jest and shameful innuendo. This degenerate 
 prudery went so far in the middle of the Nine- 
 teenth Century that many girls were married in 
 complete ignorance of their wifely functions, and 
 were, in consequence, the victims of licensed, 
 though unintentional, rape. 
 
 It was to be expected that girls, only partially 
 informed about their physical destiny, and observ- 
 ing, as they grew up, the nasty attitude toward 
 the pregnant woman, and her ashamed aspect, 
 would acquire a repulsion for everything con- 
 nected with motherhood. After overhearing the 
 painful details of the discomforts of pregnancy 
 and of agonizing childbirth, they could not help 
 looking forward to marriage with fear. Such 
 girls would want to marry, but they would be 
 afraid of the consequences. It was not surpris- 
 ing that women began to search for and to take 
 advantage of devices for preventing conception, 
 nor that men who loved their wives should abet 
 them in doing so. 
 
 At the time when the sciences were beginning 
 to make their first helpful applications to common 
 life, the health of American women was at a very 
 low point. Pale, undeveloped, over-feminized 
 wives were finding themselves wholly inadequate 
 to the bearing and rearing of even small fam- 
 ilies, and the suggestive modesties which were de- 
 manded of conventionally educated girls pre-
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 123 
 
 vented them from attaining any high degree of 
 health. Such a state of things might have gone 
 on indefinitely, to the extinction of the native- 
 born American, perhaps, but for the advance of 
 medicine, the gradual spread of hygienic knowl- 
 edge, and their effects in liberating younger women 
 from the traditions of prudery and inactivity. 
 
 But the process of freeing women from the 
 tradition of weakness and bodily shame is a very 
 slow one. Nearly two generations have elapsed 
 since the Bloomer costume was mobbed; and it 
 is only in exceptional places and for special pur- 
 poses, such as horseback-riding, swimming, and 
 gymnastics, that young women are permitted to 
 reveal their two legs. Even yet the prospective 
 mother must hide herself like a thief or a pros- 
 titute till after dark during the latter time of her 
 pregnancy. 
 
 The majority of people who lived in the 
 Nineteenth Century did not die of tuberculosis, 
 typhoid fever, cancer, or even in accidents or in 
 war but in their beds after a period of lingering 
 degeneration. In their last years they reaped the 
 accumulated results of the petty, physiological 
 misdeeds of their earlier life. It is a fact, too 
 little dwelt upon in discussing the physiological 
 limitations of womenkind, that all the minor 
 causes of ill-health have operated with much 
 greater injury upon them than upon men in civ-
 
 124 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 ilized life. A recent writer enumerates a few of 
 what he calls the commonest physical peccadilloes : 
 
 " The respiration of a very little impure air eighteen 
 times a minute eighteen times a day for twenty years; a few 
 foods preserved by injurious substances; teeth irregularly 
 brushed; stuffy sleeping- rooms ; living-rooms excessively 
 upholstered; carpets full of dust; domestic atmosphere at 
 once motionless, furnace-dried, and kept at high tem- 
 perature; clothing impervious to sun and air; insufficient 
 baths; insufficient exercise; late hours; overwork; over- 
 eating; under-drinking (of water) ; eating and drinking 
 together instead of separately; and patent medicines; not 
 to mention in the case of woman, the strangling of her 
 vital organs by the stylish harness of society these are 
 a few of those so-called ' negligible transgressions.' " 
 
 Nearly all of these degenerative influences af- 
 fected the women of the past generation more 
 than they do the women of the present; but it 
 still remains true that, owing to conventionalities 
 of dress and behavior, to the sedentary character 
 of their occupations, and their relatively inactive, 
 indoor lives, they suffer from them far more seri- 
 ously than men. 
 
 It is one of the ironies of social development 
 that, while ascetic religion has been a most power- 
 ful hindrance to women, the stage has become one 
 of the strongest influences to elevate our ideals 
 of pure beauty. At the beginning of the Nine- 
 teenth Century the drama was generally regarded
 
 125 
 
 in America as an evil influence, and an actress as 
 a foredoomed prostitute. But in the last hun- 
 dred years the stage has drawn to itself the high- 
 est productions of literary and scenic art, and the 
 acting profession has produced some of the 
 noblest human beings of our time. The vulgar- 
 ities which appealed to the audiences of the 
 Eighteenth Century are no longer tolerated in 
 the better theaters; even Shakespeare has to be 
 expurgated. While there is still too frequent ap- 
 peal to the obscene mind in the poorer and 
 cheaper theaters, the level of dramatic art is con- 
 stantly rising. Dancing, from being an appeal 
 merely to the lascivious imagination, has reached 
 the plane of an art as fine in its tone as Grecian 
 sculpture. The French ballet, with its affected 
 and tortured movements, and its suggestive cos- 
 tume, is being more and more replaced by posture 
 and folk dancing, in which the sensual is sub- 
 ordinated to beauty of line and form, to grace of 
 movement, and to picturesque grouping. 
 
 All this has had a perceptible effect on the gen- 
 eral standards of modesty, beauty, and taste, and 
 especially among women. In proportion as the 
 stage has become more " respectable," it has been 
 patronized by the religiously minded, conven- 
 tional middle classes, who have learned from it 
 what a really beautiful human creature may be. 
 The average American at the time of the Cen-
 
 126 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 tennial, 1876, had seen once, or twice perhaps, 
 a few bronze monuments, possibly a single gal- 
 lery of poor and very proper paintings, and had 
 probably never seen a nude statue in his life. The 
 cultivation of the eye to enjoy symmetry and un- 
 trammeled grace has come chiefly through 
 dramatic art in this country. As the public be- 
 came accustomed to really beautiful women on 
 the stage, the tightly corseted, flat-chested, thick- 
 hipped figure, encased in mosaic clothing from the 
 ears to the toes, began to look ugly. 
 
 The dress of the fashionable woman, too, has 
 been revolutionized by the artistic ideal a move- 
 ment in which actresses have set the model and 
 led the way. In the pursuit of novelty and to 
 enhance her own personal charm, each actress 
 has compelled the dressmakers educated by the 
 French fashion-plate to devise new and ever 
 more graceful draperies, and more exquisite com- 
 binations of color; until now the whole field of 
 Oriental and European art is studied in pursuit 
 of fresh ideas. 
 
 The new idea, to be sure, when once offered 
 for admiration on the stage, is quickly snatched 
 up by manufacturers and designers, and usually 
 exaggerated, if not perverted, into some mon- 
 strous travesty of style. But at the swift pace of 
 modern changes in fashion, the most extreme, al- 
 though it is the first to be adopted by persons of
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 127 
 
 crude taste, is also the first to be supplanted by 
 another. And, owing to the enormous variations 
 produced in any one season in a single fashion, 
 the various grades of taste, from crude to highly 
 refined, will find satisfaction. 
 
 But the most conspicuous contribution of the 
 stage to the emancipation of women lies in its 
 liberation of legs and torso. Good legs are an 
 asset to a chorus girl, and, the city population hav- 
 ing become accustomed to seeing them unashamed 
 at the theater, is no longer shocked at a moderate 
 display of ankles on the street. The corset, worn 
 originally for the distortion of the body to make 
 its sex characters more conspicuous, became con- 
 ventionalized in this exaggerated style. The 
 fashion-plate figure admired in the last century 
 was truly hideous as far from flexibility and 
 grace as the form of the lady of the Civil War 
 period was from that of the Laughing Bacchante. 
 But stage beauties, as a mere matter of business, 
 have demanded innumerable variations, which 
 have stimulated the corsetiere to devise models 
 for mitigating the most imperfect figures. The 
 straight-front corset, an invention for distributing 
 the abdominal flesh, has, in ten years, revolution- 
 ized the ideas of every country woman in Amer- 
 ica, as to what a " good figure " should be. 
 Thousands of women have seen Madame Sara 
 Bernhardt, when long past middle age, play
 
 128 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 
 
 L'Aiglon, the part of a youth of nineteen; and 
 many more thousands read the interviews in 
 which she explained how she kept her youthful 
 figure by muscular activity and hygienic living. 
 Such examples, and the industrious careers of a 
 large number of actresses at the present day, are 
 having an astonishing reaction upon the physique 
 and dress of young women of the domestic type. 
 
 In addition to the correction and cultivation of 
 taste the stage has had an incalculable influence 
 upon the standards of health among women. The 
 actress, the dancer, and the prima donna must 
 have, before all talent, strength to endure the 
 training and the hardships of her profession. 
 However sensual and violent her temper may be, 
 to win success she must deny her appetites and 
 work work incredibly hard. With the never- 
 ceasing curiosity of the general public regarding 
 the lives of stage people, these facts have become 
 known, and in their dissemination have educated 
 every stage-struck girl as well as many feeble 
 amateurs. 
 
 The modification of religious dogma, the dis- 
 coveries of science and their application to com- 
 mon life, the development of dramatic art, and 
 the practice of physical exercise these and other 
 less important influences are the first steps toward 
 separating physical beauty from its exclusive 
 association with sensual images. Health and
 
 BEAUTY AND WEAKNESS 129 
 
 beauty are becoming legitimate aims for the en- 
 richment of life, as well as for the elevation of the 
 race. Scientific discovery and medical skill are 
 emancipating women from the enervating com- 
 plaints once thought inherent in femaleness, but 
 due in fact to constricting conditions of life, to 
 over-breeding, and to the contamination of 
 venereal diseases. Physical training, the develop- 
 ment of the body by systematic activity, which has 
 only in the last quarter of the century become ac- 
 ceptable, is doing away with the prudery in which 
 girls were once reared, and preparing them for a 
 kind of motherhood no longer blindly instinctive, 
 but adequate and intelligent. Beauty is no longer 
 merely " vain," nor favor inevitably deceitful 
 and the fruit of her hands shall yet praise her.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 
 
 " We have plucked up a little spirit and have even signed a 
 sort of feeble declaration of independence against our old 
 enemies, French fashions and perfect uniformity in dress. How 
 well I remember a certain spring season in my childhood, when 
 every woman between the age of fourteen and forty wore a 
 yellow straw bonnet trimmed with green ribbon on the outside 
 and pink on the inside! And that summer, after Napoleon III.'s 
 campaign in Italy, when no respectable person thought of hav- 
 ing her bonnet trimmed with any other color than solferino or 
 magenta. . . . 
 
 " The study of dress in these days is an approved branch of 
 female education. It has never been wholly neglected, only 
 women have too often pursued it with their eyes shut, and now 
 they mean to keep them open. . . . 
 
 " Whether Woman is behind Man in civilization because she 
 pays an attention to dress which she has long ago disused, or 
 whether her devotion to it is because Man requires her to be 
 robed in gay attire . . . we are expected in this age to pay more 
 attention to dress than men do, and are justified in doing so 
 within limits." From Social Customs FLORENCE HOWE HALL, 
 1887. 
 
 " To get emancipated from Man, or the political sovereignty 
 of men in the State, is a very small matter and a victory quite 
 insignificant compared with the conquest of Fashion." HORACE 
 BUSH NELL. 
 
 THE excessive and universal interest in dress 
 displayed by American women, has been, like 
 many other qualities, denominated " feminine," 
 
 130
 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 131 
 
 but has been only superficially accounted for. 
 Whether, as the sociologists suggest, it be 
 analogous to the gorgeous pelage and plumage 
 assumed by certain animals in the mating season; 
 or whether it be associated with caste and class 
 distinctions in society, one primary factor must 
 not be overlooked. Before the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury luxury in dress and toilet was quite as char- 
 acteristic of men of any given rank as of their 
 womankind. Since the decline of elaborate 
 clothing among men is historically so recent, the 
 significant point to be raised is: why has not the 
 modern woman's interest in personal adornment 
 declined in the same degree? 
 
 In the discussion of dress, as of politics, the 
 American and the French Revolutions form a 
 convenient landmark. When the coterie of 
 Marie Antoinette played at dairying in the cos- 
 tumes of shepherds and maids, it might be re- 
 garded as a mere vagary of idle persons in search 
 of a new sensation. But when the whole French 
 nation assumed the dress of plain citizens; and 
 when the American gentleman laid aside his 
 peruke and lace ruffles, and went to work in the 
 costume of the common man, it signified that the 
 theories of democracy had taken a profound hold 
 on the human mind. In the United States the ab- 
 sence of a large aristocratic class and the hardy 
 life of a pioneer population tended to reduce
 
 1 32 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 
 
 men's clothing to the simple requirements of util- 
 ity and cleanliness. Even for men of wealth and 
 station, a single " costume de luxe " served every 
 purpose. Thus, at the beginning of the Nine- 
 teenth Century, dress as an important pursuit in 
 life was confined to a small class of fine ladies, 
 while the women of the mercantile and agricul- 
 tural masses, busied with domestic manufactures, 
 gave scarcely more attention to fripperies and 
 changes in style than did their menkind. 
 
 In all ages clothing has been one of the first 
 items of living to be affected by increasing pros- 
 perity. In proportion as the family surplus in- 
 creased among Americans, it was exhibited in 
 richer materials and greater variety of clothes 
 at first for use on Sundays and gala days alone. 
 But as the poor, the well-to-do, and the rich were 
 more clearly distinguished into classes, elegance 
 in dress became in this country, as elsewhere, the 
 mark of the least industrious section of society. 
 And in the latter part of the century, as we shall 
 see, an occupation in itself for the semi-idle and 
 protected woman. The coincidence of great 
 prosperity, arising in part from universal habits 
 of industry among all classes of men, with the 
 gradual release of large numbers of women from 
 severe household labor by the removal of manu- 
 facture from the home to the factory, gave women 
 money and leisure. Having slight intellectual im-
 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 133 
 
 pulse toward self-culture, and no conception of 
 philanthropy as a career, such as now engages 
 much of the leisure of protected women, they de- 
 voted themselves to the elaboration of their 
 clothes. 
 
 The ideals set before the boy and the girl by 
 the parents and the teachers of this period were 
 diametrically opposed: the boy must prepare to 
 do something, the girl merely to be attractively 
 feminine. One aimed directly at achievement, 
 the other had no definite aim, but was encouraged 
 to concentrate her attention on manners and ap- 
 pearance. Indirectly a premium was put on 
 prettiness and docility in girls, with a covert sug- 
 gestion that they might find an ultimate reward 
 in marriage. Among young men, marriage was 
 only one, and by no means the first, of several 
 aims in life; while among girls though not often 
 consciously acknowledged it was the chief am- 
 bition, because, on the one hand, wifehood and 
 motherhood was the accepted and only creditable 
 career, and, on the other, there was no wage- 
 earning occupation, as there is now, offered as an 
 alternative. 
 
 Since young women were properly the chosen, 
 and not the choosers of their fate, they necessarily 
 resorted to every indirect method of attracting a 
 partner. Striking and elaborate apparel was the 
 easiest and most conspicuous means of allurement.
 
 i 3 4 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 
 
 This efflorescence not unlike the mating display 
 among animals was part of the appropriate be- 
 havior during courtship, and to some extent was 
 affected by young men as well as maidens. Grave 
 attention to neckties, the fit of clothing, and the 
 use of hair and shaving cosmetics, was as com- 
 mon a symptom of the wooer as color, grace, and 
 coquetry were of the wooed, but declined even 
 more rapidly when the wooing-game gave place 
 to the marital partnership. 
 
 In these displays the young were encouraged by 
 their parents, partly out of affectionate pride, but 
 chiefly, no doubt, as a way of calling attention to 
 their rising standard in life. For in this freer 
 country it was the mark of a good parent to give 
 his children the opportunity and the means of at- 
 taining a higher social plane. The sons of sober, 
 industrious people were permitted to splurge into 
 smoking, drinking, horse-flesh, and sports; the 
 daughters were released from the heavier house- 
 hold tasks to spend their time in contriving flirta- 
 tion, finery, and fancy-work. Long before the 
 destined husband appeared, the bride-to-be was 
 preparing household linen, and accumulating the 
 requisite dozens of hand-made undergarments 
 trimmed with hundreds of yards of crochet, 
 tatting, and embroidery. In all this elaboration 
 there was, fortunately, some opportunity for the 
 development of the artistic sense, and a training
 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 135 
 
 in thoroughness of detail, which later found ap- 
 plication to the perfection of domestic mat- 
 ters. 
 
 Mixed up with the conventional theory of mar- 
 riage as the suitable outlet for woman's ability, 
 there was also a general opinion that one of her 
 secondary functions should be " to please," not 
 only all marriageable men, but society at large. 
 This involved incessant attention to appearances, 
 to manners, and to lively conversation. Young 
 women, therefore, spent a good deal of their 
 time in pleasing and piquing each other prac- 
 tising, so to speak, the art by which their future 
 station might be secured, and which would per- 
 fect them in the graces expected of leisurely 
 womenkind. The art of setting off the person 
 with beautiful clothes, carefully put on and en- 
 hanced with grace of manner, required constant 
 rehearsal, and this, in turn, resulted in competi- 
 tion among women to see who could attain the 
 highest standard. 
 
 Women gradually devised, as their occupations 
 came to be less and less directly productive, a 
 round of social functions in which men had little 
 or no part, and in which they found stimulation 
 for their ultra-feminine tastes and trivial duties, 
 to take up the time which, in a previous genera- 
 tion, would have been employed in domestic in- 
 dustries. When marriage provided them ac-
 
 136 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 
 
 cording to the theory with plenty to do, it was 
 supposed that this harmless and pretty efflo- 
 rescence of the young female would cease. As a 
 matter of fact, when the income of the new house- 
 hold was not enough to afford plenty of service, 
 and when children came promptly, it did stop 
 abruptly. The worn-out trousseau was replaced 
 with few and serviceable garments; the delicate 
 bridal lingerie was often laid away to yellow be- 
 cause it would cost too much labor to launder it; 
 and the young mother, struggling with duties for 
 which she had almost no preparation, was content 
 to dress her babies elaborately, while herself re- 
 lapsing prematurely into the plainness deemed 
 suitable to motherhood and middle-age. 
 
 But when a girl had had urged upon her from 
 babyhood the vital importance of dress; when she 
 had spent not less than ten years of her life in 
 adornment as one of the chief aims of her ex- 
 istence, making a game of it, and enjoying the 
 zest of competition, she did not all at once lose 
 her taste for pretty clothes, even though diverted 
 by motherhood. If her husband was of the sort 
 who observed such matters, and wished her to 
 please the public as well as himself by her appear- 
 ance, she might have encouragement to continue 
 after marriage the arts which had filled up her 
 girlish days. Wherever money is easily made,
 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 137 
 
 as it was in the Nineteenth-Century America, 
 men are generous with it; but in such a pioneer 
 society men had not the leisure to cultivate the 
 habits of luxurious expenditure, and they left to 
 the woman the function of " vicarious consump- 
 tion." Her costly and troublesome clothes were 
 comparable, according to Professor Veblen, to 
 " the livery of the chief menial of the household." 
 In default of men's leisure the wife became the 
 social representative of the family, expressing in 
 her person, in her entertainments, and her en- 
 gagements, the rising social status and the degree 
 of her husband's financial success. 
 
 Beyond this, to what degree the lack of ab- 
 sorbing duty and labor on the one hand, and, on 
 the other, the appetite for amusement, have con- 
 tributed to the elaboration of dress by married 
 women, it is not easy to say; but these were un- 
 questionably some of the reasons for prolonging 
 the excessive absorption of young girls in their 
 appearance, into the later life of women. The 
 pursuit of the fashions afforded satisfaction, 
 moreover, to the desire for variety and novelty; 
 and here originality and taste found expression. 
 Thus a variety of economic and social motives 
 added to the initial impulse of self-adornment in 
 women a force out of all proportion to its nor- 
 mal value. Under similar circumstances, and 
 denied so apparently harmless a diversion, men
 
 138 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 
 
 were accustomed to resort to sports and vice, to 
 gambling, racing, and athletics. 
 
 Aside from these two main influences increas- 
 ing leisure and great prosperity another of even 
 greater force was set in motion by the increase 
 of machine-made goods in the latter half of 
 the past century. Until then, rapidly changing 
 fashions had been within the reach of only a 
 small upper class; while all other classes in so- 
 ciety continued to wear for generations, almost 
 unaltered, the distinctive dress which marked 
 them off from those above and below them. In 
 the New Democracy, in proportion as the 
 boundaries of class were blurred and obliterated 
 by successful men passing up from a lower to a 
 higher stratum, and taking their womankind with 
 them, the fashion of clothing became more 
 varied, especially among the younger members 
 of the family. And always the women had more 
 time than men to give to these insignia of af- 
 fluence. 
 
 So long, however, as materials and garment , 
 continued to be hand-made, the fashions re- 
 mained, as compared with our day, relatively 
 stable. Too much labor and time was consumed 
 in producing garments for the ordinary person 
 to discard them before they were worn out. The 
 socks, which cost the housewife days of labor in 
 the knitting, besides the expense of yarn, had to
 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 139 
 
 be darned and patched and refooted; while in 
 our time they are so cheap that the traveling man 
 and the prospector might almost be trailed by 
 the unwashed pairs he leaves at each stopping- 
 place. The element of irreplaceableness in 
 determining use and value, which now applies to 
 only a few accessories of dress, such as lace, 
 jewels, rare shawls, and the like, once applied to 
 nearly all good clothes. As invention brought 
 about the rapid and comparatively inexpensive 
 production of dress materials, and then of ready- 
 made clothing, the variety of stuffs for clothing 
 increased, and the incentive for women to vary 
 their clothing was immensely augmented. 
 
 The manufacturer and the merchant, mean- 
 while, set out to sell an ever-increasing product by 
 coaxing the consumer to throw away the old gar- 
 ment long before it was worn out, and to buy 
 new; and, as if this were not inducement enough, 
 the designer, the tailor, and the dressmaker added 
 a threat in the shape of that Bug-a-boo, Being- 
 out-of-Fashion. Thus Fashion, once the amuse- 
 ment of the highly born and the leisurely, and 
 associated with " reputable futility," became, in 
 the Nineteenth Century, the principal means of 
 stimulating trade. Its subtle tyranny has spread 
 far beyond the original limits of class distinction 
 and occupation: determining the width of 
 mourning-crape and the designs of household
 
 140 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 
 
 furniture; the color of men's hats and the type of 
 auto-cars; the length of hair and the brand of 
 whiskey; the size of trousers and the markings of 
 thoroughbred animals. 
 
 Its coercion, now primarily commercial, is felt 
 by men as well as women, though not, perhaps, 
 to the same extent. To be out-of-style marks a 
 man as being unsophisticated or unsuccessful- 
 characters not to be endured except by the day 
 laborer, the artist, and the scholar. Nor do men, 
 as a class, rise superior to this social convention; 
 they merely restrict their changes of clothing to 
 a narrower range of more practicable garments, 
 exercising their taste by proxy, and leave to their 
 wives or a haberdashery expert the determination 
 of what they shall wear. The standardization of 
 men's clothing has reduced them to a certain uni- 
 formity of appearance, and has produced a class 
 of clerks whose business it is to act as arbiters of 
 fashion, but it has not done away with the neces- 
 sity of keeping up with the styles. One has only 
 to recall the punctilious and agonizing care with 
 which modest gentlemen of infrequent social ex- 
 cursions attend to every detail of their evening- 
 dress, to realize that not even they can tolerate 
 with courage the possibility of seeming queer in 
 the eyes of their friends. 
 
 Even less can any man endure that his wife or 
 his sister should appear out-of-date, a dowdy or
 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 141 
 
 an esthetic freak in dress. When monstrous 
 hats recently came into fashion, the newspapers 
 and mankind generally belabored women with 
 ridicule in order to remove these obscurations 
 at the theater. Yet quite as powerful as the con- 
 servatism of women in delaying the reform, was 
 the reluctance of every individual man to let his 
 womankind be the first to begin it. The incon- 
 sistencies produced in women by the domination 
 of the styles are well-matched by those among 
 men of crude and traditional tastes, who inveigh 
 against the extravagance and vagaries of the 
 other sex, and yet no less openly give their ad- 
 miration to the most " stylish " women of their 
 acquaintance. Whatever they may say, most 
 men want their own women-folk to be dressed 
 " with the best," and this is, in itself, aside from 
 the stimulus of an ever-changing display, the 
 most potent influence in making older women as 
 well as young girls devote an inordinate attention 
 to self-adornment. 
 
 Nothing more aptly illustrates the control 
 which men exercise over the type of women's 
 clothing than the rise and decline of the various 
 dress-reform movements of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury. Of these the best known and one of the 
 shortest-lived was the street dress misnamed the 
 " Bloomer " costume. Designed for the relief 
 of invalid women from the heavy skirts of the
 
 142 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 
 
 Civil War period, it was adopted and worn in 
 Washington by a beautiful and cultivated woman 
 whose prestige led to other women most of them 
 connected with the Woman's Rights movement- 
 adopting it. It consisted of a short skirt to the 
 boot-tops, at first, with Turkish trousers, after- 
 wards buttoned gaiters, underneath. It must be 
 granted that it was a sensible and modest, if not 
 perfectly graceful costume. Yet the violence of 
 men, expressed through the newspapers, and the 
 vulgarities of street mobs, made it impossible 
 for women of the most irreproachable reputations 
 to wear the costume, as the following quotation 
 will show: 
 
 " The outcry against it extended from one end of the 
 country to the other; the Press howled in derision, the 
 pulpit hurled its anathemas, and the rabble took up the 
 refrain. On the streets of the larger cities the women 
 were followed by mobs of men and boys . . . throwing 
 sticks and stones and giving three cheers and a tiger end- 
 ing in the loudest of groans. Sometimes these demonstra- 
 tions became so violent that the women were obliged to 
 seek refuge . . . their husbands and children refused to 
 be seen with them in public, and they were wholly ostra- 
 cized by other women. 
 
 " With the exception of Gerrit Smith, all the prom- 
 inent men, Garrison, Phillips, Channing, May, were 
 bitterly opposed to the short dress, and tried to dissuade 
 the women from wearing it by every argument in their 
 power. The costume, however, was adopted as a matter
 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 143 
 
 of principle, and for it they suffered a martyrdom which 
 would have made burning at the stake seem comfortable. 
 . . . No pen can describe what these women endured for 
 the two or three years in which they tried to establish this 
 principle, through such sacrifice as only a woman can un- 
 derstand." * 
 
 When the bifurcated costume was revived in a 
 modified form toward the end of the Nineteenth 
 Century by the vogue of the bicycle, it was joy- 
 fully adopted by a large number of modest but 
 active young women; and it shortly went out of 
 use, chiefly because the more conservative men 
 did not want their feminine companions to be con- 
 spicuous. This illustrates another of the anom- 
 alies of dress: A woman might make herself very 
 conspicuous indeed, was encouraged to do so 
 by the novel and bizarre aspect of her dress, so 
 long as it followed the newest mode from Paris, 
 but she was always dubbed " strong-minded," or 
 worse, if she made herself conspicuous by merely 
 being rational. 
 
 In addition to economic motives and the neces- 
 sity of pleasing men, there are other lesser con- 
 siderations leading to excessive emphasis on per- 
 sonal adornment. Whether girls have inher- 
 ently more artistic impulse than boys, may be 
 questioned; but there is no doubt that women have 
 a more cultivated taste in clothing and furnishing 
 
 Harper, Life and Work of S. B. Anthony, Vol. I, p. 112.
 
 144 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 
 
 than men. It is a difference arising largely from 
 education and incessant attention on the part of 
 women, for the male dressmaker, the male artist, 
 and the curio dealer often have as refined, if not 
 as conventional, a sense of color and design as the 
 woman milliner and the fine lady. Whatever 
 artistic impulse girls may have had in past times, 
 was expressed within the limits of dress, house 
 decoration, and gardening; and its restriction 
 within these narrow fields served probably to in- 
 tensify the more fundamental motives, leading 
 them to constantly elaborate and make over their 
 clothes, and to redecorate and refurnish their 
 houses. 
 
 The ornamentation of even the most hideously 
 furnished houses of the past century discloses an 
 astonishing amount of crude potential art-sense in 
 the housewife. The rag carpet, for instance, 
 cleverly woven from the bits of worn cloth- 
 ing, although displaced by ugly patterns of fac- 
 tory-made floor coverings, has now come back 
 again with the revival of art handicrafts. Fashion, 
 which now encourages originality at any rate in 
 the designers and purveyors of goods, formerly 
 perverted and suppressed it. If the ability which 
 our grandmothers expended on rag-rugs and 
 woven bedspreads had been turned into channels 
 more free and stimulating, outside as well as in- 
 side the house, the artistic capacity and impulse
 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 145 
 
 of the modern woman might be much better de- 
 veloped than it is. 
 
 Indirectly, the increase in variety of materials 
 stimulated both men and women to desire a 
 greater diversity of clothes. Because men's gar- 
 ments earlier became standarized, the multi- 
 formity of materials and modes played within a 
 narrower range; but in women's dress it has, as 
 yet, found no limit. The delicacy and manifold 
 beauty of textiles; the infinite number of patterns; 
 and the constantly changing styles have stimulated 
 the desires of women for varied clothing, just as 
 the ever-widening range of foods in the hotels and 
 restaurants have taught men to demand a larger 
 variety of more elaborately prepared dishes on 
 their home tables. Fragility of texture, too, has 
 been emphasized, until durability has become an 
 essential only of the most expensive articles. That 
 a thing should be showy and stylish was much 
 more desirable than that it should be lasting. 
 When fashions in the accessories of dress, such as 
 collars, ties, bags, gloves, handkerchiefs, stock- 
 ings, petty jewelry, combs, et cetera, came to be 
 changed at least once or twice a year, the more 
 quickly they grew shabby, the sooner the con- 
 sumer would be justified in buying new ones. In 
 the case of women, the mere habit of indoor liv- 
 ing, which permitted the use of perishable and 
 delicate clothing, in turn reacted to make them
 
 i 4 6 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 
 
 want frequent changes; while in the measure that 
 they were at leisure they welcomed dress as an 
 occupation affording an outlet for taste and a 
 variety of interest to break the insipid monotony 
 of their lives. 
 
 Briefly, then, the pursuit of dress as a serious 
 matter by a larger number of women than ever 
 before in the history of the world, has been pri- 
 marily due to a number of political, social, and 
 commercial influences, for which women them- 
 selves were not responsible. It was one of the 
 first signs that the " ages of deficit " were ended, 
 and the era of surplus arrived. It was one of 
 the earliest expressions of democratic principles, 
 and, as invention and manufacture have de- 
 veloped, it has become the approved means of 
 promoting trade. And these national forces 
 were acting throughout the Nineteenth Century 
 with constantly increasing strength upon women. 
 The degree of female receptiveness depended 
 upon two things: the amount of leisure, and the 
 extent to which they had imbibed the tradition 
 that a lovely appearance was the quality most to 
 be desired in woman. This beauty-cult is now 
 fast becoming secondary among well-educated 
 women to the cultivation of the mind and the 
 practice of gentle manners. Why, then, do the 
 majority of women still pursue the vagaries of 
 fashion so madly? Because the average woman
 
 THE PURSUIT OF DRESS 147 
 
 does not easily outgrow impressions stamped upon 
 her by the traditions of her kind, we must turn 
 for an explanation to the effect of the pursuit of 
 dress upon her personal character.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 " He that is proud of the russling of his silks like a madman 
 laughs at the rattling of his fetters. For, indeed, Clothes ought 
 to be our remembrancers of our lost innocency." THOMAS 
 FULLER. 
 
 "Thy Clothes are all the Soul thou hast." BEAUMONT and 
 FLETCHER. 
 
 EVER since the Civil War the amount of time 
 and expense put upon dress by women in this coun- 
 try has been increasing, until now it has become 
 the chief occupation and the accepted amusement 
 of a very large number of those above the labor- 
 ing class. It has been generally assumed that this 
 is due to some inherent personal taste on the part 
 of women; but it is a matter of economic history, 
 as we have already seen, that dress as a pursuit 
 has been the result of the development of manu- 
 facture and of modern methods of trade promo- 
 tion rather than of an innate frivolity, to which 
 leisure and idleness have always contributed. 
 
 When we visualize the typical jeweler, deft- 
 handed, short-sighted, and stoop-shouldered; or 
 the drygoods clerk, radiating smiles and ladylike 
 
 148
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 149 
 
 manners; or the politician, swollen with self- 
 confidence and over-eating; we do not assume that 
 he could never have been any other sort of man, 
 even though his natural temperament may have 
 dictated his choice of occupation. It is taken for 
 granted in explaining such men that their ambi- 
 tions in life have been molded by their environ- 
 ment to produce certain types of physique and 
 character. It is a matter of common experience 
 that there are very few human beings so spe- 
 cialized by their hereditary qualities that they 
 could not have been different had they been born 
 in another environment than the one in which we 
 see them. When they are so specialized they are 
 called eccentrics, and sometimes recognized as 
 having genius. 
 
 One has only to observe the modifications of 
 character and habits which take place in men who 
 change from one industrial medium to another, re- 
 quiring very different qualifications, to infer that 
 women of the same breed might show unexpected 
 variations if their environment were as varied and 
 as stimulating. The effect of social surroundings 
 in developing in women an inordinate love of 
 adornment can be best measured, perhaps, by con- 
 templating other and rather unusual types pro- 
 duced by exceptional circumstances. During the 
 past century, wherever a girl, by force of cir- 
 cumstance or natural hatred of physical restraint,
 
 150 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 refused to submit to the tyranny of dress, she be- 
 came almost invariably and, it might almost be 
 said, by virtue thereof, a superior human being. 
 The wives of the California pioneers, brought up 
 like other Eastern girls to give the utmost care 
 to their dress, when transplanted to isolated 
 homes on ranches and in mining camps, without 
 servants, and often compelled to do the labor of a 
 large household, while rearing their families, al- 
 most always emancipated their bodies from the 
 trammels of long skirts and from corsets. Util- 
 ity and cleanliness became the sole requisites of 
 their clothing, and thus was released a vast 
 amount of physical and mental energy to be spent 
 in other and worthier directions. They managed 
 complicated households, reared vigorous children, 
 in emergencies guarded water-rights and mining 
 properties with a shotgun; and in their old age 
 were as fearless, as able-bodied, as warm-hearted, 
 and as capable as their partners. 
 
 The influence of the Quaker costume and plain 
 traditions in minimizing feminine and developing 
 larger human qualities in women is registered in 
 the Woman's Rights movement, in which the 
 Friends played so large a part between 1840 and 
 1870. Lucretia Mott, the Quaker preacher, an 
 exquisite, gentle, frail, and yet brilliant woman, 
 was doubtless the most important figure among 
 all the delegates to the World's Convention in
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 151 
 
 London. Clothes were the least of all concerns 
 to her, we may infer, for she wrote of herself: 
 
 " My life, in the domestic sphere, has passed much as 
 that of other wives and mothers in this country. I have 
 had six children. Not accustomed to resigning them to 
 the care of a nurse, I was much confined to them during 
 their infancy and childhood. Being fond of reading, I 
 omitted much unnecessary stitching and ornamental work 
 in the sewing for my family, so that I might have time 
 for this indulgence and for the improvement of the mind. 
 For novels and light reading I never had much taste. 
 The ' Ladies' Department ' in the periodicals of the day 
 had no attraction for me." 
 
 By dwelling on such exceptional women, it may 
 be possible to conceive what the effect of orna- 
 mentation as a principal aim in life has been upon 
 the greater number of average young girls 
 brought up in middle-class homes. To them dress 
 involved a constant consideration of money 
 how to get it without directly entering the wage- 
 earning class; how far it might be made to go, 
 and even how things might be got without it. 
 Money has rarely been looked at in the large by 
 women as income or capital, but rather as a suc- 
 cession of petty, irregular sums to be spread over 
 a thousand necessities and luxuries. Because the 
 husband and father was the earning partner he 
 was inevitably the financial head, paying the larger 
 household expenses himself, and handing out to
 
 152 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 the wife and minor children for their clothing and 
 incidentals such generous or niggardly pin-money 
 as his temperament and means dictated. The ef- 
 fect upon women was similar to that of an ir- 
 regular wage upon the casual workingman; there 
 was no incentive to thrift, but every inducement 
 to shortsighted and petty extravagance. There 
 was never butter to cover a whole slice of bread, 
 therefore why trouble about butter at all? why 
 not have a string of imitation pearls? so women 
 naturally reasoned. Expenditure dribbled along 
 on the hand-to-mouth principle : a girl might need 
 hat, shoes, underwear, all at once, but, as the 
 sum given her at any one time was never enough 
 to cover them all, she naturally bought the hat 
 first, the shoes next, and postponed the under- 
 wear, making the best appearance she could. A 
 constantly rising scale of dress accessories often 
 cut off among poorer girls garments, and even 
 food, necessary to health. 
 
 Such a perversion of judgment in the distribu- 
 tion of income was, and is still, quite character- 
 istic of the average woman. I have known a 
 mother of a family, living on a scale of several 
 thousand a year, in a pretty house, among cul- 
 tivated people, who set a meager luncheon (when 
 her husband was absent), and never had blankets 
 enough for all the beds, who, nevertheless, " had 
 to have " solid silver and cut glass on her table,
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 153 
 
 and decollete dinner dresses, in order to feel 
 happy and respectable. There are many others 
 of the same type, who find money to buy pretty 
 clothes and artistic house furnishings, but never to 
 pay adequately for house-services. A woman 
 who lived on a scale twice that of a college pro- 
 fessor, who was always beautifully gowned and 
 bejeweled, seriously asked that a university should 
 give her son a scholarship because the standard 
 of living expected of people in their social posi- 
 tion did not permit them to send their son through 
 college, nor admit of his working his own way. 
 A lecturer on dress reform, who urged that one 
 conservative tailor-made suit, with the necessary 
 accessories, bought carefully each year, was the 
 most economical way of being well dressed, was 
 continually met by the objection that her hearers 
 could not save up enough ahead to get what they 
 needed all at once. 
 
 Even when the woman had a regular allowance 
 her sense of proportion was seldom developed 
 to the point of providing the necessities first, and 
 choosing among a thousand luxuries afterwards. 
 Yet that such lack of judgment is due rather to 
 lack of education in personal finance than to sex 
 may be illustrated by the idiosyncrasies of college 
 boys in the same matters. The college boy 
 usually pays his board bill, because he must eat, 
 and he buys such books as he cannot borrow; but
 
 154 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 he lets the laundryman and the tailor wait, some- 
 times indefinitely, wears a sweater and corduroys 
 not merely because he is lazy and they are a sort 
 of collegiate livery, but to economize. He thinks 
 himself justifiably " cute " when he arrives at 
 home in vacation so shabby that his foolish par- 
 ents insist on presenting him with new clothes 
 without reflecting that he spent in unreported ex- 
 travagances what should have clothed him 
 properly. 
 
 It is evident enough without further illustra- 
 tion that, because women did not earn their 
 money, and received it irregularly in small 
 amounts, they had no occasion to develop a bal- 
 anced financial sense; but acquired, on the one 
 hand, a wonderful skill in spreading petty 
 amounts thinly over large areas, and, on the 
 other, a perverted judgment of values. If this 
 had produced in them only a petty thrift and fool- 
 ish expenditure, the remedy would be obvious and 
 easy; but it has, in truth, eaten into character 
 much more deeply. For the love of dress and the 
 necessity of satisfying it by getting it from some 
 man who earned it, made girls from their child- 
 hood contrive, deceive, and manoeuver. It is a 
 common enough joke that men are better- 
 humored after dinner than before, but among 
 women it is a commonplace quite without any 
 humorous color. Every dependent creature,
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 155 
 
 whether woman or child, peon or dog, as a matter 
 of safety or comfort, learns to read the temper 
 of his master; and in proportion as he is able to 
 play upon it, finds life easier. Wheedling and 
 cunning, the whole battery of feminine weapons 
 from caresses to tears and temper, were in- 
 evitably employed upon negligent and selfish men 
 by their dependents; and often to the extent of 
 imposition upon generous men. 
 
 Sometimes, when there was no man to supply 
 an income, or the man was too unremunerative, 
 the woman resorted to other means of eking 
 out her purse without appearing to work for a 
 living. The business of the Woman's Exchange 
 was originally devised to give the untrained gen- 
 tlewoman a chance to market her products with- 
 out being known. Many a woman, who, in our 
 day, would go into a shop or become a typist, 
 tried to keep herself within the pale of her social 
 class by selling, surreptitiously, embroideries and 
 pastry. While even yet the society girl, whose 
 standard of dress must be kept up as a matter 
 of convention, receives the second-hand dealer 
 quietly at her home, and turns her slightly worn 
 evening dresses into money, which may be spent 
 for those of the latest mode. 
 
 If the initial expense in time, money, and 
 thought required in stylish dressing had been all 
 that the pursuit demanded, as it has been gener-
 
 156 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 ally among men, it might be worth the price, for 
 good appearance has everywhere a recognized 
 value in the world. But it did not end there, as 
 in the case of a man who might purchase a whole 
 outfit and its accessories at one or two stores, 
 and, after a few days, put it on with the assur- 
 ance that for six months at least he was properly 
 clothed. In our country the ready-made clothing 
 industries have greatly diminished the amount of 
 time and attention necessary to procure the es- 
 sentials, even of women's clothing, but this is of 
 quite recent date, and has not by any means done 
 away with the minute attention which has to be 
 bestowed on every detail if a woman wishes to 
 attain the recognized standard. 
 
 The stylish woman had forever to pursue that 
 will-o'-the-wisp of fashion, " the newest thing," 
 not only in boots, stockings, lingerie, dresses, and 
 hats, but also the latest-uttermost-refinement-of- 
 the-newest-thing in braids, lace, embroidery, 
 beads, passementerie, trimmings, of which there 
 were hundreds of designs rapidly succeeding each 
 other. There were, besides, an infinitude of 
 shades, widths, textile surfaces in an ever-enlarg- 
 ing variety of stuffs; and these had to be com- 
 bined by herself or the dressmaker, after consulta- 
 tion of several American and French fashion 
 books, in the momentarily approved design. And 
 all this energy was expended without hope of any-
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 157 
 
 thing more than temporary success, except for 
 those who could make over or replace the gar- 
 ment to meet the next incoming fashion. 
 
 The making-over of clothes every year, if not 
 every six months, as the pace of fashion speeded 
 up, came to take the place of many of those 
 spurious handicrafts with which the clever woman 
 of the mid-century had been wont to busy her 
 hands. It became a matter of pride with those 
 of small means to " make something out of 
 nothing," as the complimentary phrase went 
 to contrive a new and stylish dress out of two old 
 ones; to conceal paucity of material by piecing 
 small bits of cloth together, and decorating the 
 tell-tale seams; to make a jacket of a man's dis- 
 carded overcoat, lined with the less-worn portions 
 of an old silk petticoat. As the rule of Fashion 
 spread to carpets, curtains, bedding, and furni- 
 ture, the inexorable principle of multiplying de- 
 signs to stimulate buying, invaded this field as 
 well; and the devoted housewife, according to her 
 means and her ingenuity, conscientiously set her- 
 self the duty of keeping her house as well as her- 
 self and children " in the Fashion." In all this 
 she exercised her brain as much as her manufac- 
 turing grandmother had done before her, but with 
 infinitely less of real value to show for it. 
 
 Perhaps all the more because the result did not 
 command satisfactory appreciation from her men-
 
 158 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 folk, whose crude tastes and practical turn of 
 mind did not readily grasp the desperate need of 
 women to be in the fashion, she required the ap- 
 proval of other womankind. So much struggle 
 and economy must be worthy of recognition; and 
 if, unhappily, her men friends did not notice and 
 praise the triumphs of her ingenious and often 
 wasted skill, she turned to other women to se- 
 cure their proper appraisal. It is no doubt true 
 that women competing in the dress contest are 
 often jealous of each other, but it is far more sig- 
 nificant that they have devised a code of manners 
 with which to satisfy each other's hunger for ap- 
 preciation. Each agrees to admire, or, at any 
 rate, to appear to admire, the other's dress. 
 When two women meet, it is customary, after the 
 conventional greeting, for one to say: "How 
 pretty your new hat is ! " And for the other to 
 reply: " I'm so glad you like it I saw the new 
 shape at Smith's Emporium, and I trimmed it 
 with the velvet off my last winter's hat." When 
 this topic has been canvassed to the satisfaction 
 of the wearer of the hat, she in turn will compli- 
 ment her friend's taste and ingenuity by praising 
 something she is wearing. In such wise have 
 women expended their perverted abilities and 
 kindliness, spurred on by the race of commercial 
 fashion, and lacking an education in larger 
 things.
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 159 
 
 Dress, moreover, came to take the place of 
 healthful exercise and recreation. The lazy 
 afternoon parade through the shopping streets, 
 to see the newest fashions displayed four times a 
 year at the change of seasons, became a weekly 
 excursion as the varieties of materials and style 
 increased. And in our day many women of small 
 means know scarcely any other way of spending 
 their leisure except to drag a fretful child past 
 the shop windows every weekday afternoon; and 
 then to go home and try to copy the most violent 
 combinations of color and the most striking de- 
 signs in slazy, cheap imitations. 
 
 It is a trite old saying that a man with a cham- 
 pagne taste and a beer income is sure of trouble. 
 In women a similar desire for display, gratified at 
 the cost of the earning power of which they them- 
 selves have no direct experience, is equally dis- 
 astrous in producing effeminacy and discontent. 
 The capacity for detail developed through a thou- 
 sand generations of domestic necessity has been 
 turned into a few narrow channels, the chief of 
 which has at last come to be the pursuit of dress. 
 Their age-long economy has become shortsighted 
 pinching in some, and equally ill-judged extrava- 
 gance in others. And the constant chase after 
 fashions which no amount of money would en- 
 able them to really come up with has produced a 
 state of chronic dissatisfaction with themselves,
 
 160 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 their lot, and with the men who supply their in- 
 come. Petty-mindedness has at last become the 
 distinguishing characteristic of the average 
 woman. The marvelous thrift which enables her 
 to dress stylishly on a small sum; the originality 
 with which she contrives and imitates ever-new 
 prettinesses ; the ingenuity with which she makes a 
 good show on small resources all these valuable 
 but perverted qualities would, if applied to the 
 larger problems of common life, clean up the 
 cities, find a home for every normal child, and 
 reform our haphazard domestic economy; and 
 would produce that sureness of aim, that sense of 
 being a useful cog in the world's machinery, with- 
 out which no human being can be happy. 
 
 One has only to listen to the conversation of 
 women among themselves to realize that clothes 
 are sure to come to the top. From the latest 
 sensation in the newspapers or the last play, the 
 talk drifts quickly around to the newest departure 
 in fashions proposed by the Ladies' Scrap-Bag, 
 the pretty knitted capes for babies depicted in the 
 last number of the Perambulator, or the wonder- 
 ful bargains in petticoats to be had at Rosen- 
 berg's. They skip from topic to topic without 
 apparent logic, each new subject being suggested 
 by the speaker's latest interest in dress. Since the 
 experience of the domestic woman was necessarily 
 limited to a certain round of topics clothes,
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 161 
 
 cooking, servants, and children her conversation 
 had rarely any continuity, because her life had 
 none. It consisted rather of hopping from one 
 unrelated fact to another without that impulse of 
 a ball lightly tossed back and forth by which an 
 intelligent conversation is developed. When op- 
 portunity offered, her talk degenerated into that 
 bog of narrowness and ill-breeding, a monologue 
 of her personal grievances. 
 
 The female mind, thus fed on details of 
 ephemeral importance, had no reason for larger 
 intellectual interests; and constant occupation 
 with the attainment of the correct accessories of 
 her costume left little leisure for reading. Such 
 books as she found time for would naturally be 
 of the emasculated sort, whose heroines were 
 the beautiful and perfectly dressed kind she strove 
 to be; to whom impossible, but perfectly moral, 
 adventures happened, until they culminated in a 
 blissful engagement. For a quarter of a cen- 
 tury at least, the Sunday-school novel and maga- 
 zines of the type of Godey's Lady's Book sup- 
 plied the mental pabulum of the majority of 
 American women. The magazines inculcated 
 the pursuit of dress as a most important duty of 
 woman, as part of the ideal of gentility and re- 
 ligion set before the perfect lady. 
 
 And if it be thought that women no longer feed 
 on this anemic literary diet, one has only to ex-
 
 1 62 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 amine any one of the strictly feminine journals to 
 learn how pervasive it still is. Many of them 
 profit by, if they are not published in, the interest 
 of trade and manufactures for women, and it is 
 highly important to them that the love of dress 
 should be intensified. From one of them, which 
 may be matched by many others published in 
 1910, I quote the following passage: 
 
 " Indeed, all women in this enlightened age study the 
 subject of dress in a way so thorough that it would have 
 been considered irreligious a century ago. Now, it is as 
 well understood and accepted as any other duty, for being 
 well-dressed, which means suitably dressed, imparts the 
 serenity and poise which make for happiness; and the 
 woman who is happy and well-poised makes everybody 
 around her better and more serene." 
 
 This harping on the " duty " of being well- 
 dressed, which is, in plain English, an invitation 
 to throw away the old and buy new, whether the 
 woman can afford it or not, is the stock in trade 
 of the Fashion writers: 
 
 " Since hats first came into fashion woman has found 
 them an inexhaustible source of interest. The quest for 
 becomingness is always fascinating, and though we do 
 not always find it, it is every woman's duty to make the 
 most of herself. . . . 
 
 " It has become wellnigh impossible to create anything 
 sensational in the way of a hat. Extreme size and over- 
 abundance of trimming have ceased to surprise."
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 163 
 
 In the same magazine I find another appeal to 
 the feminine conscience : 
 
 " There never was a time when Dame Fashion's hair- 
 dresser made it so possible for every woman to look her 
 best as now. No matter what her features, she can make 
 them appear to the best advantage by adopting the most 
 becoming style of hair-dressing. ... It is a common fault 
 of women that they fail to realize the importance of 
 making the most of their crowning glory the hair." 
 
 In an article on the mistakes of women in 
 dressing, the matter is put on a higher plane: 
 
 " The study of clothes is considered to be a good deal 
 of a frivolous subject, unworthy of thought or considera- 
 tion by serious people ; and yet to attain the good taste 
 which results thereby, and which means true simplicity 
 and good art in clothes, requires the same effort and 
 thought which are necessary to reach a high standard in 
 any other art worthy of the name." 
 
 The elderly woman is then encouraged not to 
 let herself be left behind by the statement that 
 " fashion no longer relegates the woman past the 
 youthful years to circumscribed styles ... as 
 worn but a short time ago;" and the crafty ex- 
 pert in female psychology then gives a page of 
 charming heads of middle-aged women with 
 lovely complexions, regular features, and not a 
 wrinkle, encased in the smartest of hats not in
 
 1 64 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 bonnets. The plain elderly woman is still further 
 tolled along by such phrases as " these have more 
 dignity," or " have an indefinable sense of fit- 
 ness," until, by the time the sheet is finished, a 
 thousand women are convinced not only that they 
 must have a new hat, but that this particular new 
 style will make them young and beautiful. 
 
 In order to focus the feminine mind on the 
 spring fashions and incidentally to sell their 
 wares another journal has a clever article on 
 the Paris dressmakers, in which we are led to see 
 the poetry of design, in this wise : 
 
 " For there is something in the atmosphere of Paris 
 . . . that seems to create a desire for lovely things and 
 to furnish dressmakers with an incentive and an inspira- 
 tion for their work. . . . Perhaps it is because Paris has 
 always been a sort of playground for rich men and lovely 
 women, exquisites with whom pleasure is a life study, 
 dress a fine art, beauty a religion. 
 
 " If the dressmakers do not create their styles out of 
 thin air they at least have a wizardry of touch that makes 
 the dross of the commonplace turn into pure gold in their 
 hands. . . . Manufacture is rather a sordid term, per- 
 haps, to apply to the turning out of masterpieces that 
 will surprise and delight the expectant public at the com- 
 ing openings." 
 
 After a resume of the dominating character- 
 istics of the styles, this subtle promoter of novelty
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 165 
 
 soothes us into the delusion that, after all, we are 
 not compelled to adopt any one of the new ideas: 
 
 " Further than that no one, not even the dressmakers 
 themselves, can say what will be worn, for the decision 
 on a new style or a change in an old style rests with the 
 public. Ultimately by continually harping on one string 
 the dressmakers may lure the populace into dancing the 
 tune they pipe, but they cannot force it. They can only 
 lead and suggest, and make their suggestions so attractive 
 that the public, like a spoiled child, drops its old toy and 
 reaches out its hand to grasp the new." 
 
 Since the days of the forties, when French 
 fashion-plates were successfully introduced, this 
 sort of literature has been served up to make 
 women buy new, and always more fantastic, cloth- 
 ing. It requires no great acumen to conclude that 
 it would inevitably lead to extravagance. Having 
 no responsibility for earning their own money 
 though indirectly they might, nevertheless, earn 
 it and very little experience in handling it, ex- 
 cept in small amounts, they did not reckon its 
 value in the large. And having been encouraged 
 to concentrate their energies on appearance, they 
 came to have a highly cultivated taste nay, more 
 than taste, appetite for pretty clothes which, like 
 an appetite for drink or games of chance, must 
 be satisfied. Yet it, like many another social 
 habit, could never be satisfied. It might also be
 
 1 66 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 said that the more time and money they had to 
 give to dress, the more discontented they were 
 sure to be. If the father or husband could not 
 meet this rising demand, they pitied themselves 
 for his lack of success; if he set a limit of ex- 
 penditure, they regarded him as a selfish brute. 
 Now and then they degenerated into dishonest 
 schemers, running up large bills for which their 
 menkind were responsible; cheating the dress- 
 maker and the milliner; sending back garments as 
 unsatisfactory after wearing them; practising the 
 deceits of the adventuress in the guise of a re- 
 spectable woman of society. 
 
 Yet, in justice to womankind, it must be granted 
 that the dress-mania produced very few of these 
 types, as compared with hundreds of conscien- 
 tious, economical women, who, misled by the con- 
 ventions of their social station, took out of them- 
 selves, rather than out of men's pockets, the 
 wherewithal to achieve the proper clothes of a 
 lady. These dear, fussy, dutiful creatures sacri- 
 ficed their health, their love of nature, their taste 
 for art, for literature, even their companionable- 
 ness, to the Juggernaut of women Suitability. 
 Moreover, because men were conspicuously the 
 producing class, and women for the most part ob- 
 viously the consumers, extravagance came to be 
 regarded as a female propensity; while, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, it was no more truly characteristic of
 
 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 167 
 
 one than of the other. What men spent in cigars 
 and tobacco, in heavy eating and drinking, in 
 club life and dues, and in careless, unconsidered 
 sums, women balanced by their equally wasteful 
 but careful spreading of small sums upon the 
 elaboration of dress. 
 
 One of the last and most demoralizing aspects 
 of fashion-promotion has been the infliction upon 
 children of the over-developed taste for tawdry 
 ornament. The women's magazines cater to the 
 mother's pride by providing embroidery patterns 
 to be worked upon little boys' blouses; suggestions 
 of how to cut over little girls' dresses to keep pace 
 with the newest idea. While the laundry bills 
 mount ever higher, the fashionable little girl is 
 rigged out in more fragile and impracticable and 
 unwholesome clothing. It is as if the mother 
 were still a child herself, playing with a live doll 
 which, though it cannot be broken, may still be 
 distorted into her own foolish image. 
 
 As a result of the combined influence of eco- 
 nomic forces and social traditions, centering in 
 dress, women have acquired a set of habits of ex- 
 penditure and thinking which lead to discontent 
 and waste of time in the trivialities of taste, in the 
 pursuit of petty economies, and in the discussion 
 of dress detail. These are, however, the least of 
 the evil effects of the dress-cult: in many women 
 they degenerate into exploitation of men, dishon-
 
 1 68 CLOTHES AND CHARACTER 
 
 esty toward tradespeople, and the vulgarities of 
 conspicuous display. It may almost be asserted 
 that competence, good humor, and intelligence in 
 women are now in inverse proportion to the 
 amount of time they spend on the fashion of 
 their clothes. A woman of influence and a " real 
 lady " in the Twentieth Century is known, more 
 often than not, by the fact that she is not dressed 
 conspicuously in the latest fashion. She may be 
 known even more by the fact that her children are 
 dressed in the simplest and most child-like 
 manner.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 THE VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 " The virtues of the man and woman are the same." 
 ANTISTHENES. 
 
 " I am ignorant of any one quality that is admirable in woman 
 which is not equally so in man. I do not except even modesty 
 and gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly 
 which is not equally detestable in both." DEAN SWIFT. 
 
 " Virtue consists not in refusal, but in selection." LESTER F. 
 WARD. 
 
 THE old-fashioned word, virtue, is now 
 familiar to us chiefly in certain phrases from the 
 Hebrew Scriptures. The translators of King 
 James used it in the original Latin sense as de- 
 noting the qualities of a man strength, courage, 
 capacity as may be seen in the tenth chapter of 
 Proverbs, where Solomon is describing the ideal 
 mistress of a household. She whose price was 
 " above rubies " appears to have been valued 
 most for incessant and varied industry, and for 
 her administrative ability; at any rate, nothing is 
 there said about her personal appearance, nor 
 her bodily habits. Words, even Biblical words, 
 however, have a way of changing color accord- 
 
 169
 
 1 70 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 ing to the lights of those who use them. In the 
 mouths of the Puritans of the past century the 
 vigorous word virtue had all but lost its strong 
 tint of manliness. It had come to signify, rather, 
 the qualities of the chaste and docile female, who 
 was the ideal Christian housewife in that society; 
 and these qualities were carefully inculcated by a 
 process of domestication. 
 
 In their development under domestication 
 there is an interesting analogy between human- 
 kind and animals. The bull is still a thick- 
 necked, violent, undisciplined creature, of slight 
 use, except to propagate his kind; while his mate, 
 the cow which is not merely maternal, but also 
 specialized along an important line of production 
 has developed the qualities of domestication to 
 a high degree. She bears her young and gives up 
 her milk meekly at the will of a master, losing 
 the characteristics of the wild bovine under the 
 discipline of unremitting fertility. In the United 
 States, the male horse, unless deprived of the 
 organs of sex, is isolated almost like a wild beast; 
 in French cities he is made useful as a draft ani- 
 mal only by excluding mares entirely from the 
 environs, and consigning them to the rural 
 districts. Thus, in modern life, the sexual 
 qualities of male animals often make them nui- 
 sances. 
 
 The point of significance of all this in the pres-
 
 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 171 
 
 ent discussion is, that the female domestic animal 
 and the unsexed steer and gelding have been com- 
 pelled, under the hand of man, to suppress the 
 more aggressive traits native to them, and to put 
 on the milder qualities of domestication. In 
 much the same way the human female, under the 
 double discipline of maternity and hard work, 
 originally acquired the passive qualities of endur- 
 ance, at the same time suppressing the ruder and 
 more pugnacious virtues. This change took 
 place, it may be supposed, just in proportion as 
 her relation to the economic and political ar- 
 rangements of society became indirect. As soon 
 as wives and daughters ceased to be direct pro- 
 ducers and accepted support and protection for 
 as much or as little personal service as they 
 chose to give, they put on, of necessity, the 
 qualities which their supporters demanded or 
 admired. 
 
 Mastery or control, as we politely call it now 
 was the natural ambition of men not fully civ- 
 ilized; but, in a brutal, competitive world, they 
 found it difficult to achieve over other men and 
 contrary circumstances. All the more, therefore, 
 they desired mastery in their households it was 
 easier to begin at home. The head of a family 
 who spent his days even in mere commercial con- 
 test with other men, would naturally expect sub- 
 servience in his wife and children, just as he did
 
 172 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 in his employes; nor would he be likely to toler- 
 ate in them original opinions and independent 
 action. 
 
 Womenkind have generally had to please the 
 Head of the Family if they wished to be com- 
 fortable and happy. Herbert Spencer remarks 
 that the gentler type of women survived among 
 primitive peoples, because they had to practise 
 obedience or be knocked on the head; and that 
 the sympathetic female was at a premium, because 
 she could adjust herself to the moods of her lord. 
 It is certain that even in quite modern times men 
 have unconsciously preferred girls whose inex- 
 perience and apparent docility gave promise that 
 at home, at least, the man's will would prevail. 
 It not infrequently happened that the lover was 
 deceived by the yielding temper of his betrothed, 
 which, like the mating plumage of the male bird, 
 had been assumed instinctively merely for the 
 season. 
 
 The virtues of subordination in women, as in 
 the laboring classes, are even yet found in toler- 
 ably exact measure as these classes are industri- 
 ally dependent. Our grandmothers of the 
 early Nineteenth Century were first-hand pro- 
 ducers and, inevitably, partners with their hus- 
 bands. Within the sphere of domesticity at least, 
 they ruled with a degree of independence. The 
 social history of their time dwells upon their
 
 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 173 
 
 courage and prudence, their loyalty and industry, 
 but scarcely mentions docility and obedience, al- 
 though these were required of them by the code 
 of society and religion. But by the middle of the 
 century the emphasis upon the qualities desirable 
 in women had perceptibly shifted from the posi- 
 tive virtues of relative independence to the more 
 negative qualities of subservience. 
 
 The discipline of dependence and maternity 
 was further reinforced by the approving emphasis 
 of society upon those qualities which men pre- 
 ferred in their subordinates. Women were 
 taught by the clergy that u the men of the na- 
 tion are what their mothers make them," and that 
 they should not desire any power beyond the do- 
 mestic circle. 
 
 " Of this realm Woman is Queen ; it takes its cue and 
 hue from her. If she is in the best sense womanly if 
 she is true and tender, loving and heroic, patient and 
 self-devoted, she consciously and unconsciously organizes 
 and puts in operation a set of influences that do more to 
 mold the destiny of the nation than any man." 
 
 This kind of flattering half-truth was con- 
 stantly urged as the reason why women should 
 obey their husbands, and not venture outside their 
 appointed sphere. The curious theological argu- 
 ment by which women justified it and convinced 
 themselves that they were, therefore, morally
 
 i 7 4 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 superior to men, is rehearsed at length in the 
 Woman's Record of 1872. 
 
 " For this cause ought the woman to have power on her 
 head because of the Angels. (I Cor. xiv, 10; also 
 Tim. ii.). Angels are witnesses that the woman is 
 ' the glory of the man '. . . . This glory she would for- 
 feit, should she attempt to usurp authority over him. And 
 while the wife is commanded to reverence and obey her 
 husband, is he not the superior? In the estimation of the 
 world he is, because he holds the highest place in the 
 family; but the tenure of his office proves her superior 
 moral endowments. The wife must reverence and obey 
 her husband because ' he is the saviour of the body ' (see 
 Ephes. v, 22-23) ; that is, the worker, the provider, the 
 law-giver. God placed man in this office . . . and the 
 wife should unhesitatingly submit to this law. . . . God, 
 by commanding husbands to love their wives, has set his 
 seal to this doctrine that women are holier than men. 
 The world also bears witness . . . for of all the sinful 
 deeds done on earth, nine-tenths are committed by man. 
 . . . The Church bears witness to this truth more than 
 three-fourths of the professed followers of Christ are 
 women." 
 
 The ingenious feminine author of this logic, 
 Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, not being wholly ignorant 
 of the discontent of modern womenkind, clinched 
 her argument with the following: 
 
 " Does any wife say that her husband is not worthy of 
 this honor? Then render it to the office with which God
 
 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 175 
 
 has invested the head of the family; but use your priv- 
 ilege of motherhood to train your sons so that the)' may 
 be worthy of this reverence and obedience from their wives. 
 Thus through your suffering the world may be made 
 better." 
 
 It is one of the humorous commonplaces of 
 morals that men most admire the virtues they 
 themselves possess, and minimize the value of 
 those they find it difficult to practise. From time 
 immemorial men have cultivated the qualities ac- 
 quired by predominance, leaving to women and 
 servants the less spectacular virtues of self-sacri- 
 fice, patience, obedience, humility, sweetness of 
 temper, and sympathy, which were needed to 
 make the home atmosphere soothing. While 
 men found it convenient to inculcate the gentler 
 attributes, women, per contra, found it safe and 
 praiseworthy to exercise them. In truth, a triple 
 premium was offered for the virtues of obedience, 
 self-sacrifice, and patience husbands demanded 
 them, the Church insisted upon them, and any 
 female who neglected to acquire them who ex- 
 hibited self-will, who scorned the deceits of af- 
 fectation and loved truth, who was intellectually 
 and physically brave was almost sure to find her- 
 self outside the pale of marriage; or, if within it, 
 a misfit. In any orthodox society she was re- 
 garded both as immodest and superfluous, a sport 
 as it were, from the true feminine type.
 
 176 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 The cultivation of these virtues produced, how- 
 ever, some corresponding feminine deficiencies. 
 The more women practised obedience, the less oc- 
 casion they had to reason, for to reason is often 
 to differ from authority. Like the soldiers at 
 Balaklava : 
 
 " Theirs not to make reply, 
 Theirs not to reason why, 
 Theirs but to do and die." 
 
 The " smart " woman, who could not help rea- 
 soning, while still under the necessity to obey, 
 developed a sort of compensatory shrewdness. 
 The " managing " wife was formerly a very com- 
 mon type; the woman of strong character, who 
 nominally deferred to her husband in everything, 
 yet achieved her own will by subtly persuading 
 him that he was having his own way. Her 
 powers of indirection if not of deceit thus be- 
 came highly developed, while he was pacified 
 with a swollen and often unmerited self-impor- 
 tance. The children, too, as they grew to discre- 
 tion, sometimes joined in making the master com- 
 fortable, while at the same time outwitting him. 
 But a clever woman in so anomalous a position 
 was not altogether a dependable creature. She 
 was likely to acquire vexatious tricks refusing to 
 be bridled now and then, and biting in the stall. 
 Like the domesticated driving-horse, if she ever
 
 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 177 
 
 took the bit in her teeth and ran away, she could 
 scarcely be trusted afterwards for family use. 
 
 In the past century, nevertheless, by far the 
 larger number of women were well broken; and, 
 in proportion as they were, they lost the power of 
 thinking and deciding for themselves in any mat- 
 ter outside the household affairs for which they 
 were responsible. Such women not only followed 
 the lead of their husbands, but asked advice of 
 the neighbors in every detail of life. If a child 
 took the scarlet fever, the doctor might be called, 
 but his orders were supplemented by the con- 
 tradictory suggestions of the neighbor-women 
 whom the mother consulted. She had, in fact, 
 " no mind of her own," and submitted herself to 
 every wind of doctrine, while thinking herself 
 conscientious in doing so. Such a woman acquired 
 a habitual state of indecision choosing a dress 
 pattern one day, and, after exhibiting it to a 
 critical friend or two, returning to change it for 
 another, which " she didn't know whether she 
 liked or not;" and which, when made up, she 
 would regard with discontent. 
 
 The model wife, when left a widow, trans- 
 ferred her submission to an older son or, in de- 
 fault of male relatives, to the attorney in charge 
 of her estate, blindly accepting his dicta as to 
 where she should live, how much she should 
 spend, and what was " proper " for her, regard-
 
 178 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 less of her own comfort or her technical rights. 
 After half a lifetime, perhaps, of loyal industry 
 and maternal sacrifice she was " bossed about " 
 by people who naturally regarded her as childish 
 and incapable. In the practice of deference and 
 submission she had often lost, also, not only the 
 capacity to judge and decide for herself, but the 
 belief that she ought to do so. It was as if the 
 helpless people of a State should constantly ex- 
 ercise the referendum without the power to 
 initiate measures or to recall those who fail to 
 fulfil them. And, withal, she was apt to fall into 
 a morbid state of suspiciousness toward those who 
 attempted to guide her. Her second childhood 
 thus began at middle age, or as soon as her hus- 
 band's hand was removed. 
 
 There is no more dangerous virtue than self- 
 sacrifice, for it cultivates complacency in those 
 who consciously practise it, and is apt to produce 
 selfishness in those who accept its benefits. Ex- 
 ceptional men have practised it in all the Christian 
 ages for the purpose of attaining merit, while 
 upon women it was enforced both by inevitable 
 maternity and by their social dependence. If the 
 quality of self-sacrifice in women and servitors 
 had been as productive of antagonism and dis- 
 comfort as moral courage, for instance, or just- 
 mindedness, it may be doubted whether it would 
 have been so disproportionately lauded by man-
 
 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 179 
 
 kind. Or, if women themselves had found un- 
 selfishness as difficult and odious as these upset- 
 ting attributes, it seems probable that they 
 would not have claimed it for their characteristic 
 virtue. 
 
 There is no virtue for which women have been 
 more indiscriminately praised than patience. Of 
 that blind acceptance of duty which is necessary 
 to get the monotonous and unpleasant tasks of 
 the world done, they have certainly the larger 
 share as compared with men. It was a neces- 
 sary qualification for child-rearing and domestic 
 success as it has been in the laboring peasant and 
 the donkey on the treadmill. The mother who 
 gave her whole time to the nurture of children 
 and to household cares, would have become im- 
 becile had she not been able to adjust her mind 
 patiently and cheerfully to a succession of petty 
 demands and services. She acquired, perforce, 
 an instinctive endurance like that of the draft ani- 
 mal which has never learned to balk and does not 
 know that it can run away. The woman who did 
 not learn patience met with the disapproval of the 
 world of men and women alike; and she who ran 
 away faced social ostracism, if she were not cast 
 into outer darkness. 
 
 But of that considered, reasoning patience with 
 which the scientist and the inventor pursue far-off 
 and inspiring mysteries through years of labori-
 
 i8o VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 ous experiment and failure, the ordinary woman 
 developed very little. Because the issues of her 
 life were small, innumerable, and rapidly succeed- 
 ing each other, she had no time to consider them 
 in perspective, or to do aught but attend to each 
 faithfully as it arose. Her capacity for sustained 
 effort was, therefore, determined by things closely 
 related to her. Great numbers of men in the 
 business world subordinate desire and comfort to 
 the attainment of far-off ambitions; but women, 
 like children, want to see immediate results. 
 
 But from the standpoint of the Nineteenth 
 Century, self-devotion and uncomplainingness 
 were, after all, subsidiary endowments in women 
 as compared with physical purity. It might al- 
 most seem from the emphasis laid upon The Fem- 
 inine Virtue, that our fathers must have misread 
 one of their favorite Scripture passages: 
 
 " Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and 
 
 though I give my body to be burned, 
 And have not chastity, 
 
 It profiteth me nothing." 
 
 Under a tradition which had arisen when women 
 were property, and with the injunctions of re- 
 ligion, this one quality became the specific and ex- 
 clusively feminine attribute. Virtue had come to 
 mean, not strength, courage, capacity, but chastity 
 the female sine qua non. A woman might be
 
 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 181 
 
 violent in temper, cruel in speech, selfish, idle, a 
 devourer of the substance of industrious and gen- 
 erous men, yet if she were technically " pure " she 
 kept her place in the Church and in her social 
 circle. But if, like Mary Wollstonecraft or 
 George Eliot, she gave herself openly, though 
 there might be extenuation, and though she might 
 have every other feminine virtue and some 
 masculine ones besides, the pure women and the 
 unchaste men of her world would have no place 
 for her. Not even the high quality of courage 
 and honesty with which she accepted her anom- 
 alous position, could save her from being 
 classed with the parasitic mistress who gave bodily 
 service in return for luxury. As for the few 
 who, tormented by the natural human hunger for 
 joy and adventure, broke away from home ties 
 altogether, there was seldom even a modicum of 
 pity. Yet, however futile their quest, they were 
 at any rate, themselves not hypocrites and surely 
 every human being may have a choice of the kind 
 of evil that is most tolerable. 
 
 For us, in an age more generous and discrim- 
 inating toward human frailties, it is difficult to un- 
 derstand how so cruel a standard could have come 
 about; yet it goes back to the primitive conditions 
 of society, in which women were quasi-slaves and 
 chattels. Professor Thomas has very acutely re- 
 marked:
 
 i8z VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 ' The morality of man is peculiarly a morality of 
 prowess and contract, while woman's morality is to a 
 greater degree a morality of bodily habits, both because 
 child-bearing, which is a large factor in determining 
 sexual morality, is more closely connected with her per- 
 son, and in consequence also of male jealousy. ... In 
 the course of history woman developed an excessive and 
 scrupulous concern for the propriety of her behavior, espe- 
 cially in connection with her bodily habits; and this in 
 turn became fixed and particularized by fashion, with the 
 result that not only her physical life became circum- 
 scribed, but her attention and mental interest became lim- 
 ited largely to safeguarding and enhancing her person." * 
 
 Darwin, in the Descent of Man, says that habit 
 was a more effective factor than selection in the 
 development of human morality. It has already 
 been shown, in the chapter on the Conventions of 
 Girlhood, that a prudish degree of modesty was 
 enforced upon girls literally from the cradle; and 
 that the vaguely evasive phrases of teachers and 
 clergymen about purity, coincident with a com- 
 plete " conspiracy of silence " as to physiological 
 facts, produced an abnormal state of mind toward 
 the whole subject. Although clergymen were, as 
 a class, more refined and gentle than average 
 men, they were not the less inclined to insist upon 
 men's standards of propriety for their female 
 parishioners. In each community they stood for 
 conservatism for the " superior past," for the 
 
 * Thomas, Sex and Society, pp. 219-220.
 
 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 183 
 
 gospel of the Fathers as then interpreted and, 
 naturally, resisted any attempt to ameliorate the 
 Puritan code of morality. Indeed, to men so 
 high and narrow, propriety was morality. Hu- 
 mility, obedience, charity, Godliness, and, above 
 all, propriety of behavior and chastity these 
 were the virtues indispensable to Christian 
 women. 
 
 As to the attitude of women themselves, Miss 
 Ida Tarbell has correctly described it: 
 
 ' They got from the Church the reason for things as 
 they found them the reason for their submission to 
 masculine authority the explanation for their place in 
 society, their program of activities . . . and, as a rule, 
 they took the teachings quite literally and devoutly." 
 
 But, aside from the emphasis laid upon bodily 
 purity by parents and moral teachers, the two 
 great economic influences from which that in- 
 sistence had originally come, dress and slavery, 
 were operating in the Nineteenth Century, and 
 still persist in some degree at the present day. 
 The sociologists tell us that so long as the habit 
 of nakedness was general, no such theory of mod- 
 esty existed; but that so soon as humankind for 
 any reason began to cover the body, nakedness 
 became conspicuous, and, thus, clothing reinforced 
 the suggestiveness of sex characters. It is a per- 
 tinent fact that in proportion as clothing became
 
 184 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 elaborate and dress a pursuit in itself, ideas of 
 propriety became more inflexible and perverted. 
 Among civilized peoples decollete dress has no 
 longer any relation to climatic conditions, but is 
 coincident with a luxury-loving society; and the 
 conspicuous outlining of the figure, which was 
 once solely practised by the slave and the pro- 
 fessionally unchaste class, has been adopted by the 
 modest female of modern times. 
 
 In primitive and semi-civilized societies women 
 were marketable commodities rather than human 
 beings. Immodesty that is, any behavior cal- 
 culated to attract the attention of strange men 
 might cause the human chattel to be stolen, and 
 the female who was unchaste, whether by accident 
 or choice, was regarded as damaged goods. The 
 phenomenon of jealousy even yet goes back ob- 
 scurely to the fact that not even an unmarried 
 woman owned her own person; while the appeal 
 to the " unwritten law " still sometimes made 
 to escape the penalty of murders of passion is 
 based on the convention that the possession of the 
 body is the asset of an owner, not the gift of a 
 partner. 
 
 The idea so prevalent in the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury, that chastity in a female constituted her 
 chief qualification to the respect of mankind, pro- 
 duced some curious and even humorous perver- 
 sions. Modesty the behavior becoming to the
 
 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 185 
 
 chaste female became an end in itself. It is re- 
 lated of M'a'am Betty, the dame-tutor of Lydia 
 Child, " a spinster of supernatural shyness," that 
 the chief calamity of her life was that Dr. Brooks 
 once saw her drinking water from the spout of a 
 tea-kettle. Yet this same proper lady, we are 
 told, was not only shockingly untidy, but chewed 
 tobacco! A similar distortion of ideas is il- 
 lustrated by the persistence in some churches of 
 the convention that women must not be uncov- 
 ered; the woman who should take off her hat 
 would be regarded as an " immodest female." 
 
 It has come to be a fact that conspicuosity, 
 which is everywhere and in all ages the pro- 
 fessional qualification of the unchaste, may now 
 be safely practised by any nice woman, so long as 
 it is achieved in accordance with the current 
 fashion. On the other hand, the adventurous 
 woman, who is a sort of composite produced by 
 idleness and ennui, by love of excitement and of 
 luxury, plays on the passions of men while re- 
 taining the control of her own person. She be- 
 gins, at least, by drawing a clear line between her 
 own technical virtue and the wickedness of those 
 who sell themselves frankly into bodily service. 
 
 Both the inflexibility and the inconsistency of 
 the conventions involved in the requirements of 
 technical chastity in the past century are best il- 
 lustrated, perhaps, by the laws relating to the
 
 1 86 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 age of consent in young girls. Even as late as 
 1885, by the laws of many states, young girls 
 were made capable of consenting to their own 
 ruin at ten years of age, and in Delaware at the 
 age of seven. Even yet there are two states 
 which set the technical age of seduction at twelve 
 and one at ten years of age. Yet girls in tutelage 
 might not make wills, contracts, or deeds, under 
 eighteen to twenty years of age. They were 
 never willingly permitted to know anything about 
 the physiology of their own bodies or the 
 processes of reproduction they must obey their 
 parents but they might be seduced with im- 
 punity during and even before the age of puberty. 
 And when their childish bodies had been devoured 
 by men, the virtuously conventional society of the 
 Nineteenth Century made outcasts and harlots of 
 them. In truth, there is no cruelty more terrible 
 than that of ignorantly good people. 
 
 In the feministic literature of two generations 
 ago certain words denoting moral qualities of the 
 highest status are conspicuously lacking. Fe- 
 males were repeatedly adjured to be humble and 
 patient, but courage was not urged upon them; 
 they were besought to be tender and devoted, but 
 just-mindedness was not included among their 
 cardinal virtues. Charity, in both its senses, was 
 inculcated, but of honor it was assumed that 
 women could have slight need. The differentia-
 
 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 187 
 
 tion of morals was seemingly as complete as the 
 social habits of the two sexes. For courage might 
 have implied conscientious independence on the 
 part of wives and daughters; which did not, of 
 course, appeal to heads of families any more than 
 it does now to political bosses. Justice is a far- 
 off word, even in the mouths of men, and was 
 certainly too high for the feeble minds of our 
 foremothers. Such justice as there was, was 
 precious; to be handed over in homeopathic 
 doses by the heads of families, whose moral 
 standards were practical rather than ideal. And 
 as for honor, whether moral or commercial, men 
 were, theoretically at least, still the protectors of 
 women, and therefore entitled to its exclusive ex- 
 ercise. 
 
 Thus, in brief, it had come about in the Nine- 
 teenth Century that women had a monopoly of 
 the passive virtues of subservience, and, for lack 
 of exercise, the more positive and fundamental 
 moral attributes were in abeyance. Their one 
 essential and superlative virtue, chastity, over- 
 shadowed all and led to the neglect of others 
 more spiritual and not less important. The more 
 " typically feminine " a woman was, the more 
 she was destined not merely to subordination, but 
 to become the prey of shrewd and selfish persons. 
 Her humble and narrow principles, evolved in 
 devotion to home, husband; and children, gave
 
 i88 VIRTUES OF SUBSERVIENCE 
 
 her no leverage upon a wicked world; and she 
 must piously shut her eyes to the unchastity of 
 any man who offered himself as father to her un- 
 born children. Lacking initiative, courage, and 
 the normal egotism, when she was blindly driven 
 into competitive industry she beat about among 
 the underbrush, bruising her tender inexperience, 
 and unable to follow or to mark out her own 
 trail.
 
 SECTION III 
 SOME EXCEPTIONS
 
 CHAPTER X 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 " The Gospel is the most tremendous engine of democracy 
 ever forged. It is destined to break in pieces all castes, priv- 
 ileges, and oppressions. Perhaps the last caste to be destroyed 
 will be that of sex." HELEN B. MONTGOMERY. 
 
 " The power of educated womanhood in the world is simply 
 the power of skilled service. . . . The world is full of need 
 and every opportunity is a duty. Preparation for these duties 
 is education, whatever form it may take and whatever service 
 may result. The trained, which means the educated in mind 
 and hand, win influence and power simply because they know 
 how." ISABELLA THOBURN. 
 
 " There is nothing in the Universe that I fear, save that I 
 shall not know all my duty or shall fail to perform it." MARY 
 LYON, 1849. 
 
 THE forces which were transforming and de- 
 stroying the established traditions of women's 
 lives in the last century produced very different 
 effects upon them, according to their individual 
 temperaments and breeding, and the degree of 
 social restriction to which they were subjected. 
 While some exploded in an indignant demand for 
 their rights, others, scarcely less discontented, but 
 lacking initiative and courage, set conventional- 
 
 191
 
 192 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 ity aside with more discretion. By far the 
 larger number, however, unconscious of the im- 
 pulse that moved them, instinctively responded 
 to it while still endeavoring to remain within 
 their appointed sphere. They accepted as or- 
 dained and necessary their indirect relation to 
 the world outside the home, and adapted as best 
 they might their fledgling spirits to the shell in 
 which they found themselves. They were as- 
 sured that woman's power lay in her " influence." 
 If the lives of their men-folk showed small im- 
 press of their prayers and innocent admoni- 
 tions, they, nevertheless, believed themselves ap- 
 pointed agents of morality and trusted to an in- 
 scrutable Providence to make that influence 
 effective. 
 
 A few whom we have called the Elect felt 
 a call from God which transcended any that 
 women had ever known. To those who believed 
 that their social responsibility lay in domestic 
 sacrifice and consecration, the religious awaken- 
 ing of the early Nineteenth Century brought a 
 special opportunity for the exercise of womanly 
 devotion a way not in any wise inconsistent 
 with the strictest canons of female duty, yet 
 leading out into a foreign world, where pro- 
 founder consecration was required. The terri- 
 fying, yet fascinating, tales of the heathen in 
 kingdoms on the other side of the globe lent a
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 193 
 
 glamor to the work of foreign missions. Their 
 strange unchristian customs woke, in hearts filled 
 with religious fervor, the primal instinct of the 
 born adventurer. And not alone among men; 
 for among women missionaries there have been 
 some with as great a desire as a Stanley or a 
 Peary for the unknown and the picturesque. 
 
 Men who dedicated themselves to foreign mis- 
 sionary work were expected, as part of their 
 preparation, to choose for wives women of ex- 
 ceptional piety and bodily vigor, not only as a 
 safeguard against evil, but to double their own 
 efficiency by establishing among lost souls a model 
 Christian household. Now and then these quite 
 human apostles took with them some exemplary 
 but feeble young girl, who shortly laid down her 
 life in a strange country for a cause that she did 
 not comprehend; but, for the most part, they 
 chose prayerfully some young woman whose 
 local reputation for piety and competence marked 
 her out as suitable for missionary labors. Many 
 a romantic girl, filled with religious enthusiasm, 
 and after the slightest acquaintance with a young 
 clergyman, married the Cause rather than the 
 Man. 
 
 Whether congenially mated or not, there was 
 scant time for uxorious sentiment in the exac- 
 tions of the arduous life to which they went. 
 The hardships of their physical existence, and
 
 194 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 the ever-pressing miseries of the needy creatures 
 to whom they had dedicated their service, over- 
 topped their merely personal griefs. Into many 
 such families child after child was born, to fade 
 away prematurely in an enervating climate; and 
 such children as survived were of necessity sent 
 to America to grow up among strangers. Both 
 parents found their reward in the glory of the 
 greater sacrifice; and the sons might well dedicate 
 their easier tasks, as did the son of Adoniram 
 Judson : 
 
 " To the children of the missionaries, the involuntary 
 inheritors of their parents' sufferings and rewards." 
 
 On first thought it might seem that no woman 
 would be farther from sharing the discontents 
 which were moving her sex in America to 
 struggle against their social bonds, than the mis- 
 sionary wife. There was certainly nothing novel 
 in the consecration of wives to their husbands 
 and children, since it had been the accepted duty 
 of woman throughout the ages. But little as she 
 might sympathize with woman's rights, it was 
 the peculiar distinction of the missionary wife to 
 dedicate herself, not like plain women to her 
 family, but to the Cause of Christ, counting it all 
 glory to share the perils of the pioneers who car- 
 ried Christianity wherever men lay in darkness.
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 195 
 
 " Judson in his prison, Moffat with the savages in 
 South Africa, Chalmers in the wilderness of New Guinea, 
 Hunt and Calvert in blood-stained Fiji, Patson in the 
 New Hebrides, all these and thousands more had some 
 woman who stood shoulder to shoulder to them, sharing 
 weariness, danger, loneliness, sickness, death." 
 
 It is written that of twelve missionaries sent to 
 Sierra Leone in 1823, ten of whom were hus- 
 bands and wives, six died that year, and four 
 more in eighteen months; of the women none 
 survived, and three were buried in the first year, 
 with their babes beside them. However un- 
 aware of it, these women were as much fulfilling 
 their inevitable share in the emancipation of their 
 sex as those who suffered ostracism for demand- 
 ing equal rights. 
 
 No more inspiring illustration of the unpre- 
 meditated manner in which such women took a 
 new place in the world can be given, perhaps, 
 than the lives of Ann Hasseltine, Sarah H. 
 Boardman, and Emily Chubbock, each of whom 
 successively became the wife of Adoniram Jud- 
 son, the first missionary to Burmah. Of the first 
 it has been said that her record and her sufferings 
 have no parallel in missionary annals. A well- 
 born and well-educated New England girl, she 
 was fascinated as much, it may be, by the mission 
 as by the personality of the young theological 
 student; and her life was looked upon by them
 
 196 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 both as even more a partnership in apostleship 
 than an obedience to wifely duty. During the 
 fourteen years of her marriage, while she carried 
 domestic cares and bore children for whom there 
 was no hope of survival, she performed also 
 prodigies of missionary labor. When, during 
 the war between England and Burmah, Dr. Jud- 
 son was thrown into the death prison, she was 
 left quite unprotected. With an infant in her 
 arms, she daily visited and comforted the pris- 
 oners, and her diplomacy and moving appeals to 
 the government prepared the way for the ultimate 
 release of all the English captives. Even when 
 she went home with health undermined by fever, 
 hardships, and grief, she spent her furlough in 
 rousing interest in missions, finding time to write 
 and translate extensively in the difficult Burmese 
 language. One is not surprised to learn that 
 when her body at last gave way from sheer ex- 
 haustion, she was " glad to go " to a world 
 which promised rest. She had sacrificed her 
 children as ungrudgingly as Abraham; she had 
 laid down her life as deliberately as John Huss; 
 for she had given herself body and soul, not to 
 Adoniram Judson, but to the work of the Lord 
 in whom she believed. 
 
 Sarah Boardman, the second wife, gave her- 
 self with just as clear a vision when she married 
 Dr. Judson, for she was then the widow of a
 
 197 
 
 missionary who had died in the field. And 
 again the union was a partnership in the promo- 
 tion of the missions rather than for the attain- 
 ment of any mere domestic comfort. After ten 
 years she too gave her life gladly on the altar 
 of missionary teaching. Yet this ruthless man 
 of God had no hesitation, apparently, in inducing 
 a delicate literary woman a few years afterward 
 to return to the Orient with him. Though he 
 died prematurely, and she was able to return to 
 her native land with his children, she, too, paid 
 the penalty in an early death, though not until 
 she had written the biography of the first Mrs. 
 Judson. 
 
 Estimated by the unchristian mind, the lives 
 of these women might appear to have been sacri- 
 ficed to the visionary egotism of a religious 
 fanatic. But the utter absence of any petty 
 feminine exactions toward their husband, and 
 the evident admiration which each displayed, not 
 only for his mission, but for her own predecessor, 
 leaves no doubt that these martyrs to a cause 
 counted it a privilege so to die for a great idea. 
 Many a sister at home made almost as great 
 sacrifices of her personal desires and comfort to 
 some merely human man, who accepted it as due 
 to himself and quite inevitable in the life of a 
 proper domestic woman. The wives of Adoni- 
 ram Judson had at least the compensation of giv-
 
 198 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 ing their lives to something larger than them- 
 selves; and of breathing freely in a world from 
 which all the pettier feminine coercions had 
 dropped away. 
 
 Their pitiful and more profound experiences 
 served other women, too, by affording inspiration 
 to those who, not elected to special work, pur- 
 sued the commonplace round of living. Com- 
 fortable women, in whom the horrors of jails 
 and asylums in their own towns had not roused 
 an active sense of social responsibility, felt their 
 imaginations kindle at the recital of heathen bar- 
 barities and missionary sacrifice. 
 
 " Though they had little to give, the egg money, the 
 butter money, the rag money, was theirs to squander in 
 missions if they chose. Hundreds of female cent societies 
 . . . mite societies, female praying societies, sewing and 
 Dorcas societies, sprang up in support of missions." 
 
 They begged from door to door; they devised 
 leaflets, wrote missionary stories and poems, and 
 published news from the foreign field; and by 
 such inconspicuous cooperation gained enlarge- 
 ment of their own lives. At the same time they 
 became imbued with the thought that some 
 women might be elected to a wider destiny, not 
 less feminine and moral, but larger than their 
 own. 
 
 Thus the members of churches were being
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 199 
 
 prepared for the proposal that single women 
 should be educated to go out as teachers and 
 medical missionaries. Yet it was thirty years 
 before this proposal was acted upon, so deep- 
 rooted was the tradition still that an unmarried 
 woman could properly do nothing in the world 
 alone. Even after its practical adoption, the mis- 
 sionary spinster was often regarded as a sort of 
 social roustabout to the men in the field. It is 
 related of Bishop Thoburn that, convinced that 
 it was impossible for men to reach the Hindu 
 household, he sent for his sister, Isabella, to come 
 out to India for this work. Miss Thoburn, who 
 had had a large experience in teaching and nurs- 
 ing, objected to her brother's assumption that she 
 had come out merely to be his clerk and as- 
 sistant, and the Bishop was compelled to recon- 
 sider the situation. He wrote thus frankly of 
 his conversion to a broader view: 
 
 " I accepted the fact that a Christian woman sent out 
 to the field was a Christian missionary, and that her time 
 was as precious, her work as important, and her rights 
 as sacred as those of the more conventional missionaries 
 of the other sex. The old-time notion that a woman in 
 her best estate is only a helper, and should only be recog- 
 nized as an assistant, is based on a very shallow fallacy." 
 
 Yet even so just a man as this could not wholly 
 divest his mind of the tradition that woman was 
 made for man, for he adds:
 
 200 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 " She is a helper in the marriage relation, but in God's 
 wide vineyard there are many departments of labor in 
 which she can successfully maintain the position of an 
 independent worker." 
 
 The increasing demand of the foreign mission 
 work for women trained in nursing and medicine, 
 reacted helpfully upon the struggle then in 
 progress at home for the admission of women 
 to the medical profession. While the Philadel- 
 phia Medical Society was excommunicating some 
 of its members for lecturing in a woman's medical 
 college, the experience of men in the evangeliza- 
 tion of the heathen had forced upon them and 
 their boards of management the conviction that 
 "the heathen woman drowned all ideas;" and 
 that " the citadel of heathendom was in the home, 
 which could only be taken by the assault of 
 women." This imperative need created a de- 
 mand for trained women. As Helen Mont- 
 gomery puts it, in her Western Women in 
 Eastern Lands: 
 
 " Whether there were to be women physicians in Amer- 
 ica was a matter of interest ; but in Asia it was a matter 
 of life and death. The women of half the world were 
 shut out from medical assistance unless they could receive 
 it at the hands of women." 
 
 Here was a field of high professional labor 
 which men had perforce to yield to women.
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 201 
 
 While the clergy at home were still preaching 
 that medicine was outside the sphere of woman; 
 and the medical profession itself, with greater 
 vehemence and less excuse, was denying them op- 
 portunities for study and practice, a few young 
 women began to prepare themselves for this 
 service. Clara Swain, the first fully-equipped 
 medical woman to be sent to India in 1869, suf- 
 fered to the full all the hindrances set by 
 prejudice in the path of the unusual woman. 
 Upon her fell the combined resistance of men 
 physicians, of the conservatives in the churches, 
 and of a society still permeated with the conven- 
 tional views of feminine limitations. 
 
 W T hile more than a thousand women, married 
 and single, were suffering moral and social exile 
 in foreign lands for the succor of lost souls, the 
 sisters at home were also caught on the swell of 
 a humanitarian wave that was destined to carry 
 a great body of pious, domestic women far out- 
 side the limits of orthodox femininity. Temper- 
 ance reform, already a generation old, had lan- 
 guished while men and women alike were ab- 
 sorbed in the exigencies of war. But the experi- 
 ence of that struggle had given women occasion 
 for the development of their powers of organi- 
 zation; and when it was past they no longer de- 
 sired to return to that exclusive sphere from
 
 202 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 which they had been wrenched by a national 
 emergency. 
 
 Most of the temperance leaders were as far 
 as possible from supposing that they were allied 
 with the emancipation of their sex. They had 
 little sympathy with woman's rights, and no in- 
 tention of adopting its direct and startling 
 methods. Although there was scarcely a state in 
 which drunkenness was then recognized as cause 
 for divorce, the temperance women were shocked 
 by the proposition of Elizabeth Cady Stanton to 
 adopt a resolution that no woman should remain 
 in the relation of wife with a confirmed drunkard. 
 They, nevertheless, justified their own unprece- 
 dented campaigns on the orthodox ground of 
 their peculiar mission for the moral uplift of man- 
 kind. The Woman's Crusade, which spread in 
 1874 from Ohio over all the Northern States with 
 a kind of pentecostal power, has been sympa- 
 thetically described by Frances E. Willard: 
 
 " That women should thus dare, after they had so long 
 endured, was a wonder. . . . Woman-like, they took their 
 knitting, their zephyr-work, or their embroidery, and 
 simply swarmed into the drink-shops, seated themselves, 
 and watched the proceedings. Usually they came in a 
 long procession from their rendezvous at some church, 
 where they had held morning prayer-meeting, entered the 
 saloon with kind faces, and the sweet songs of church and 
 home upon their lips, while some Madonna-like leader
 
 203 
 
 . . . took her stand beside the bar, and gently asked if she 
 might read God's word and offer prayer. 
 
 " Women gave of their best during the two months of 
 that wonderful uprising. All other engagements were 
 laid aside; elegant women of society walked beside quiet 
 women of the home, school, and shop in the strange pro- 
 cessions that soon lined the chief streets, not only of nearly 
 every town and village in the state that was its birthplace, 
 but of leading cities there and elsewhere; and voices trained 
 in Paris and Berlin sang ' Rock of Ages, cleft for me,' in 
 the malodorous air of liquor-rooms and beer-halls. 
 
 " Thousands of men signed the pledge . . . others 
 slunk out of sight, and a few cursed the women openly; 
 . . . soon the saloonkeepers surrendered in large num- 
 bers . . . the liquor traffic was temporarily driven out of 
 two hundred and fifty towns to which the Crusade ex- 
 tended. ... In Cincinnati the women . . . were ar- 
 rested and locked up in jail, in Cleveland dogs were set 
 upon the Crusaders, while in several places they were 
 smoked out or had the hose turned upon them. Men say 
 there was a spirit in the air such as they never knew be- 
 fore ; a sense of God and human brotherhood." 
 
 This extraordinary outburst on the part of the 
 mothers of the country, a class that had hitherto 
 been untouched by the political and social reforms 
 proposed by the woman's rights group, culmi- 
 nated in the organization of the Woman's Chris- 
 tian Temperance Union, which spread through- 
 out every state in the Union, and ultimately to 
 foreign countries. In 1890 it was publishing 
 130,000 pages of temperance literature, and a
 
 204 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 journal of its own; it had established a temper- 
 ance hospital, and a lecture bureau, built a 
 woman's temple, and was extending its work to 
 schools, restaurants, lodging-houses for the 
 friendless, and many other forms of philanthropy. 
 With the extent and variety of its work we are 
 not here particularly concerned; the significance 
 of this movement for our present purpose lies in 
 its unconscious expression of precisely the same 
 expanding spirit as that displayed by such widely 
 separated groups as the suffragists, the mission- 
 aries, and the literary amateurs. 
 
 Men had concentrated their temperance agita- 
 tion chiefly upon legislative reforms, and pro- 
 moted it by exhortation. But wome/i, in their 
 characteristic manner of inexperience, attacked 
 it from forty different sides, all of which grew 
 naturally out of their feminine conception of the 
 disasters wrought upon the family life by the use 
 of intoxicants. Their methods were perfectly 
 direct and simple. Total abstinence and prohibi- 
 tion were the uncompromising words around 
 which they rallied. They pledged and converted 
 the drunkard, and they made the saloon odious 
 and often ridiculous. They harassed politicians 
 and legislators with petitions, until public men 
 dared not refuse directly the measures they de- 
 manded for fear of having their devious records 
 on the drink question, and on the social evil, ex-
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 205 
 
 posed. Like the enfant terrible in the family, 
 these devoted women said everything right out 
 innocently setting an example to their imitators, 
 the modern muck-rakers. 
 
 Nor did they limit themselves to direct attack 
 upon institutions and legislation. Since they 
 were " to carry the home into the world," they 
 must needs devise means for the protection of 
 their children from the three curses: "the curse 
 of narcotic poisons, alcohol, and nicotine; the 
 curse of gambling; the curse of the social sin, 
 deadlier than all." The preventive measures 
 which they undertook, and especially the so-called 
 scientific temperance instruction which they suc- 
 ceeded in introducing into the public curriculum, 
 afford a striking illustration of both the strength 
 and the weakness of the organization. Peculi- 
 arly ignorant as women have generally been on 
 physiological matters, they adopted statements 
 as to the effects of alcohol on the human system 
 which suited their personal bias; and by their per- 
 tinacity managed to get them officially accepted 
 by school authorities. 
 
 They had previously commanded the approval, 
 if not the cooperation, of the general public, and 
 even of the drinking class, in their campaign 
 against drunkenness, the treating habit, and the 
 saloon. But when they filled schoolbooks with 
 dogmatic statements, unjustifiably exaggerated,
 
 206 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 if not untrue, concerning a scientific question 
 about which the scientists themselves disagreed, 
 they exposed their cause to easy attack. The 
 mistake then made not because they were 
 women, but because they were ignorant checked 
 the sympathy and undermined the confidence of 
 many intelligent men and women whose support 
 they could ill afford to lose. 
 
 Aside from important concrete results in social 
 reform with which the Woman's Christian Tem- 
 perance Union should be credited, their contribu- 
 tion to the feminist movement was also consider- 
 able. Thousands of housemothers had learned 
 to work in small groups together, and even ag- 
 gressively, for the public welfare outside the 
 church and the home. Having no experience in 
 parliamentary tactics, they developed remarkably 
 flexible methods of their own. By ignoring 
 theological disputations, as women generally do, 
 they were able to avoid sectarianism and section- 
 alism. The organization is, in fact, one of the 
 few instances in which women have not been in 
 the least imitative, for they neither asked nor 
 took the advice of men. By the very spon- 
 taneity and originality of their measures, these 
 women of a purely domestic type emancipated 
 themselves into a world of larger ideas. Begin- 
 ning with a disavowal of connection with the mili- 
 tant section of femininity, they ended with a
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 207 
 
 motto as unequivocal as that of the suffra- 
 gists: 
 
 " Woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, 
 and she will enter every place." 
 
 The woman's temperance movement " of 
 women, by women, for humanity " exhibits in 
 a peculiar degree the unpremeditated and in- 
 stinctive character of the impulses which drove 
 even mothers, a specialized and isolated class, to 
 break the conventions of their time and to ex- 
 press themselves in larger ways than domesticity. 
 A third class of homekeeping women the 
 Ladies Bountiful illustrates the tendency of 
 their conservative kind to adjust the traditional 
 feminine limitations with some form of religio- 
 humanitarian service outside the home. In so 
 far as they were merely using their advantages of 
 wealth and birth in the service of the poor, they 
 were following the traditions of religion from the 
 time of the early Christian church. Among this 
 class of domestic philanthropists, Mrs. Sarah 
 Platt Doremus, though inconspicuous in her own 
 day, was, perhaps, the most typical. Born of a 
 family noted for its piety, wealth, and charitable- 
 ness, she was early married to a man of similar 
 social station, and became the mother of nine 
 children. Her private benefactions were count- 
 less; and, in addition, she founded several
 
 208 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 charitable institutions, extended perpetual hospi- 
 tality to impecunious missionaries of every sect, 
 and was constantly serving on boards and com- 
 mittees. We are assured that, in spite of these 
 incessant and varied activities, " nothing was ever 
 allowed to interfere with her home life." Al- 
 though she attained a place among famous 
 women by her benevolence, her biographer is at 
 great pains to describe in detail her feminine 
 charm and housewifely accomplishments: 
 
 " All her labors for suffering humanity were so un- 
 ostentatiously performed that much was not known until 
 after her death. No outside duty was undertaken until 
 the claims of her household were minutely discharged. 
 From her youth she was a notable housewife, and her 
 delicacies for the sick were among the crowning achieve- 
 ments of her education. She was skilled in all the ac- 
 complishments of the day, and her paintings and em- 
 broideries were preserved as evidences of her versatile 
 talents. To the last day of her life she was to be seen 
 making dainty fabrics with the dexterity and rapidity of 
 the young. 
 
 " Her beauty was retained to old age, and her clear, 
 cameo-cut features, her delicate complexion, with its soft 
 color, and deep blue eyes, gave her a passport to all hearts. 
 
 " Her power to organize undertakings, broad and far- 
 reaching, was only equaled by her execution of the 
 minutest details . . . especially with a delicacy of health 
 which might have precluded all service. The secret of her 
 success in every department of work was her entire con- 
 secration to the Lord's service."
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 209 
 
 It is certainly not surprising that, in her case, 
 as in that of almost every married woman in the 
 first half of the Nineteenth Century, all this was 
 accomplished with the accompaniment, if not the 
 result, of ill-health. It is, in truth, incredible that 
 any woman should have borne nine children, per- 
 formed every conventional feminine duty, prac- 
 tised the most exacting accomplishments, exer- 
 cised unlimited hospitality, and still have had time 
 left in which to be chairman of committees and 
 founder of half a dozen societies, and as many 
 more institutions. Beside such a record, the 
 activities of the modern clubwoman and charity 
 worker seem inconsiderable. 
 
 Mrs. Doremus was, indeed, one of a type soon 
 to pass away, for she represented the very limit 
 to which the domestic woman of exceptional abil- 
 ity could go without breaking through the ap- 
 pointed sphere. When women began to reform 
 charitable institutions, besieging legislators on 
 behalf of the neglected insane and town poor, and 
 invading prisons to expose their horrors, they 
 were regarded as going quite beyond the conven- 
 tions of almsgiving. To understand the repug- 
 nance which their aggressive ideas aroused, we 
 must see them with men's eyes, in perspective 
 with the social conditions of the period. Men 
 might themselves attempt to reform a society in 
 which they had always been leaders and dictators,
 
 210 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 and they could accept without injury to their 
 pride the proposals of other men; but when 
 women presumed to criticise and, moreover, to 
 overturn by public agitation, that which had been 
 established and called good, the proceeding was 
 held to be almost as outrageous as the demand 
 for equal rights. 
 
 When Dorothea Dix, a school-teacher of ex- 
 ceptional culture, visited, in 1843, every alms- 
 house and jail in Massachusetts, and appealed to 
 the Legislature for the reform of their horrible 
 conditions, she was doing as unfeminine a thing 
 as Susan B. Anthony, when she attempted to vote 
 in the face of threatened arrest. 
 
 " She then went from state to state, in a time when 
 traveling was difficult and tedious, ignoring fatigue and a 
 system actually saturated with malaria, until she saw 
 twenty asylums in twenty states under proper manage- 
 ment. In less than four years she traveled ten thousand 
 miles, visited eighteen penitentiaries, three hundred county 
 jails and houses of correction, and more than five hun- 
 dred almshouses, besides hospitals and houses of refuge. 
 No place was too horrible, no spectacle too sickening, to 
 damp her enthusiasm or to hold back this delicate and 
 refined woman from her self-appointed task." 
 
 From America she went to foreign countries 
 to revolutionize there the methods of charitable 
 institutions; and rounded out her long life of 
 social service with work in the hospitals during
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 211 
 
 the Civil War. Because we now venerate such 
 women as Miss Dix it is the more difficult to 
 realize the criticism which their rare and un- 
 precedented behavior created. She definitely 
 smashed the theory that a single woman had no 
 duty outside the home, accomplishing, in spite of 
 opposition and limited physical strength, tasks of 
 which men might be proud. 
 
 Long before the War, there had been other 
 women liberated here and there to social service 
 through their characteristic feminine sympathies. 
 While some were laying down their lives to help 
 heathen women and children, others found their 
 election at home in teaching negroes. Before the 
 suffragists were mobbed and hooted in the streets 
 of Eastern towns, Prudence Crandall was ar- 
 rested, imprisoned, convicted, boycotted, and in- 
 humanly persecuted in a town in Connecticut, for 
 carrying on a school for colored girls. While 
 Clara Barton was giving herself to the work of 
 the Sanitary Commission, and conceiving the 
 great idea which was to make the Red Cross 
 a symbol of worldwide humanity, Josephine 
 Griffing was devoting herself and her property to 
 the relief of the thousands of homeless negroes 
 that were pouring into the City of Washington. 
 When the War was over, it was her plan for 
 the Freedmen's Bureau that was adopted by the 
 Government. From Margaret Gaffney, the un-
 
 212 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 educated daughter of an Irish immigrant, who, 
 childless and widowed, founded orphan asylums 
 in New Orleans with the profits of her dairy and 
 bakery, to Josephine Shaw Lowell, the well-born 
 and well-educated young girl bereft of her hus- 
 band by the Civil contest, who gave her whole 
 life to the charities of New York State, and left 
 an indelible mark on the philanthropies of her 
 generation women of every class felt the breath 
 of a spirit which compelled them to do strange, 
 new things in spite of their domestic traditions. 
 In all that dignifies human nature, they sur- 
 passed their sex. Some carried themselves 
 against criticism with the courage of the well- 
 born among canaille; some with the inspired 
 fanaticism of religion; breaking through the 
 prejudices of a complacent society in the service 
 of unpopular causes, defying ostracism, ignor- 
 ing weakness of body and physical hardships, 
 sacrificing the thing dearest to woman her repu- 
 tation for womanliness in devotion to the larger 
 human need. By their deeds and their social 
 martyrdom they justified their commission as 
 " moral agents." As the numbers of such phil- 
 anthropic women increased toward the end of 
 the century, it might almost seem that here was 
 their destined field of work outside the home. 
 Certainly they contributed to humanitarian enter- 
 prises a quality of devotion and sacrifice not often
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 213 
 
 seen before; blindly imposing upon them the 
 standards of the pious, domestic circle with a 
 singlemindedness born of ignorance and con- 
 secration. 
 
 While thousands of Christian women were 
 dedicating themselves to foreign missions, carry- 
 ing on temperance crusades and entering innumer- 
 able fields of philanthropy thus more or less un- 
 consciously enlarging their sphere one woman 
 alone was destined to leave an ineffaceable mark 
 on the Christian religion. The life of Mary 
 Baker Eddy covered more than three-quarters of 
 the Nineteenth Century; and at her death, in 
 1910, she was acknowledged, even by those who 
 were not followers of her faith, to be the most 
 remarkable woman of her time. Only the brief- 
 est resume of her career is required to show that 
 that opinion was well founded. 
 
 Mary Baker was born in 1821, of plain New 
 England parents, and brought up in the stern 
 religious beliefs of that period. She was always 
 a delicate child, but she seems to have been some- 
 what better educated than most girls of her time. 
 She married, and bore one child, and was not 
 unlike other women, except, perhaps, in being 
 less strong and less happily situated. At forty 
 years of age she seemed a confirmed invalid. At 
 forty-six an age when most women have fin- 
 ished all the constructive work of their lives
 
 2i 4 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 she passed through mental experiences which led 
 to the foundation of the system now known as 
 Christian Science. Yet another decade of life 
 was passed in " finding herself," and in teaching 
 and writing. Her best-known book, Science and 
 Health, with Key to the Scriptures, was not pub- 
 lished till 1875, but has now gone through some 
 hundreds of editions of one thousand copies each. 
 The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was not or- 
 ganized till 1879; yet, at the time of her death, 
 there were nearly one thousand churches of this 
 sect, which claims a million adherents through- 
 out the world. " No other faith ... as far as 
 human annals go, has risen and extended so rap- 
 idly, so quietly, so persistently." 
 
 It has been truthfully said that Mrs. Eddy 
 built up a career " out of nothing that is phys- 
 ical, no great fortune, no industrial invention, no 
 inherited opportunity." Her achievements were 
 based, rather, upon a recognition of " God as 
 Divine Principle, and the consequent allness of 
 good and unreality of evil." Although neither 
 of these ideas the non-reality of matter and the 
 influence of mind over matter was new, she 
 gave them new vitality by interpreting both the 
 Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures in their 
 light. The doctrines of Christian Science, like 
 those of older sects, were dependent upon a lit- 
 eral acceptance of the Bible; but Mrs. Eddy
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 215 
 
 transferred the emphasis from the passages of 
 wrath and painful prohibition to those of faith 
 and cheerful assurance. 
 
 Christian Science was one, and perhaps the 
 most conspicuous, of the reactions against Puri- 
 tanism on the one hand; and, on the other, against 
 materialism and the negations of physical science. 
 In both aspects it met the spiritual needs of men 
 as well as of women, and therefore reacted upon 
 other Christian denominations to humanize and 
 revivify the Gospel message. Aside from this ef- 
 fect, it was also destined to alter the attitude of 
 Christian thinking toward women. Repeatedly 
 in the preceding chapters of this book, it has 
 been pointed out how an excessively masculine 
 interpretation of the Scriptures and the con- 
 servatism of the clergy together reinforced 
 primitive social habits to keep women in sub- 
 ordination. But Mrs. Eddy interpreted the 
 Scriptures wholly without reference to sex. Nor 
 does Science and Health contain any peculiar 
 earmarks of feminine authorship not even in 
 the chapter on Marriage unless it be in the em- 
 phasis upon the reciprocal and equal duties of 
 husband and wife. 
 
 Mrs. Eddy's chief contribution to humane re- 
 ligion lay probably in the negation of fear. For 
 many generations the teachers of Christianity 
 had been dwelling upon the wrath of God, the
 
 216 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 terrors of Satanic evil, and the punishments of 
 hell ; to the neglect of those large and tender 
 mercies which Jesus himself had chiefly preached. 
 Suffering was believed to be necessary, inevitable, 
 sent by God for the chastening of the wicked 
 human soul; poverty and sickness were ir- 
 remediable and " Providential." To all this the 
 doctrine of Christian Science was flatly opposed. 
 One of its basic propositions was declared to be 
 true, whether read forward or backward: " Life, 
 God, omnipotent good, deny death, evil, sin, dis- 
 ease Disease, sin, evil, death, deny good om- 
 nipotent, God, Life." 
 
 Such a doctrine of cheerfulness came as a 
 revelation of divine goodness to overburdened, 
 neurasthenic, fearful, hyper-sensitive people; and 
 whatever may be thought of the system of thera- 
 peutics taught by Mrs. Eddy, the insistence upon 
 a humaner interpretation of the Scriptures has 
 been an incalculable benefit to mankind. 
 
 In her own personality, Mary Baker Eddy 
 illustrated in a high degree the very qualities in 
 which the average woman of the past century was 
 lacking: her indomitable will, her serene assur- 
 ance and belief in her own message; her genius 
 for large organization, and her power to hold 
 the allegiance of men and women alike, were 
 absolutely " unfeminine," judged by the stand- 
 ards of her time. Her career was, indeed, a
 
 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 217 
 
 signal example of the sexlessness of great gifts. 
 In no respect was she more exceptional than in 
 the courage with which she endured ridicule and 
 opposition: 
 
 " For more than half a century, the most powerful 
 oppositions and antagonisms beat around her. For years 
 . . . she was the target for ridicule, abuse, slander, and 
 calumny. Conventional religion and organized medicine 
 vied with each other in attacking her theory, ridiculing her 
 position, and impugning her motives. Foes arose within 
 her own household. . . . This persistent, tireless, and 
 many-sided opposition would have crushed any one not 
 sustained by invincible living faith." 
 
 It is not the province of a non-adherent, nor 
 the purpose of this sketch, to estimate the 
 ultimate religious significance of Mrs. Eddy's 
 teachings; but, from a purely worldly standpoint, 
 she rises unchallenged an exception to all 
 criteria of feminine capacity. Even if the cult of 
 Christian Science should ultimately decline, as 
 many others have done, the sheer indomitable 
 dignity and power of the woman herself will re- 
 main to suggest what may be possible to any 
 woman. While all the other sects were clinging 
 to masculine interpretations, a woman of limited 
 training, under the handicap of physical weak- 
 ness, and quite without appeal to any personal 
 charm, founded a new, prosperous, and humane 
 denomination; and this not among the ignorant,
 
 2i 8 THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN 
 
 but among a highly intelligent class of people. 
 While tradition was still reiterating the necessary 
 inferiority of the female sex, women like Mrs. 
 Eddy and Dorothea Dix, and many another 
 whose name is scarcely remembered now, were 
 attacking men's problems with a grasp of in- 
 tellect, a fertility of resource, and an indomitable 
 force of will such as go to make a great states- 
 man or a great commander. But if they had 
 done no more than prepare the world to follow 
 the social leadership of Jane Addams; or even if 
 they had been no more than moving illustrations 
 of the need under which all women labored for 
 lack of opportunity and training, they would have 
 served their kind and time. By so much as they 
 rose above their weakness and their limitations, 
 finding courage for rare deeds, they helped to 
 liberate all other women from paralyzing con- 
 ventions.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED 
 LADY 
 
 " Women are free to adorn their persons, but if they seek to 
 cultivate their minds, it is treason against the prerogative of 
 man." SARAH JOSEPHINE HALE, 1868. 
 
 "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I 
 suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the 
 man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. 
 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was 
 in the transgression." Epistle of Paul to Timothy. 
 
 NOTHING is more unaccountable in the attitude 
 of Nineteenth-Century society toward women 
 than its unreasoning fear of the effect of freedom 
 and education upon their natures. As the dif- 
 fusion of knowledge had been resisted in preced- 
 ing centuries lest it should corrupt the common 
 man and undermine the accepted forms of 
 dogma, so in our own country there was set up a 
 sort of straw-woman the learned female an 
 unsexed, monstrous perversion of the traditional 
 model of femininity. Women's rights and anti- 
 slavery in the United States were, indeed, merely 
 later phases of those class and race struggles 
 which had agitated civilized Europe. One his- 
 
 219
 
 220 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 torian illustrates the modern apprehension by 
 the tale of Saint Avila, who was said to have 
 gained renown by a marvel of self-control. Once 
 when frying fish in a convent she was seized with 
 religious ecstasy, but she did not drop the grid- 
 iron, nor let the fish burn. At the beginning of 
 the last century most men, even men of intel- 
 ligence and generosity, were convinced that an 
 educated woman would drop her gridiron. 
 
 In 1819, when Emma Willard petitioned the 
 New York Legislature to endow institutions for 
 girls equal to those already established for boys, 
 her greatest fear was that " the phantom of the 
 college-learned lady would rise up to destroy 
 every good resolution in her favor." Some men 
 thought women so inferior to men mentally as to 
 be quite incapable of reasoning; others, though 
 granting a degree of capacity, were sure that 
 higher thinking was wholly incompatible with the 
 domestic and family duties for which God and 
 Nature had designed them. These two theories 
 really inconsistent with each other which 
 were traceable partly to a military society, in 
 which women and non-combatants had always 
 been held in contempt; and partly to the degen- 
 eracy and sentimentalism of Eighteenth-Century 
 England, had become the ruling traditions of the 
 American Colonies. Not until the political and 
 social revolutions of the end of that period had
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 221 
 
 definitely broken the ties between the old and 
 new society were they likely to be questioned. 
 Education is necessarily an art of peace, and not 
 until the American states had entered upon an 
 era of nationalism was there leisure for its pro- 
 motion. 
 
 Aside from the prevalent tradition of women's 
 inferiority, other social influences delayed the 
 provision of educational privileges for girls. 
 Learning had always been associated with the 
 idea of aristocracy, and was certainly not to be 
 offered to women while still denied to ordinary 
 men. In the Colonies the chief motive for the 
 education of a select class of men had been to 
 provide a learned ministry capable of interpret- 
 ing the Scriptures. Both the Pauline and the 
 Puritan interpretation taught the subjection of 
 women, and the current secular philosophy of 
 the time corroborated it. Rousseau's dictum 
 " She is to know but little and the little she knows 
 is to be pleasing to man " was as acceptable to 
 free-thinkers as the theory that her subordina- 
 tion was " ordained by God " would naturally 
 be to an always conservative clergy. 
 
 The safety of a democratic nation must lie in 
 diffusion of intelligence but this commonplace 
 of our day was not at once recognized by the 
 states as an inevitable consequence of their ideal 
 phrase, " Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Hap-
 
 222 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 piness." Even when the movement for public 
 schools began to gather headway, English tradi- 
 tions still pervaded them to the exclusion of girls ; 
 and when, here and there, it was realized that 
 girls required something more than desultory 
 home training, their schooling was often fearfully 
 and grudgingly granted. Throughout the cen- 
 tury, as grammar and high schools, academies 
 and seminaries, semi-colleges and full-grown col- 
 leges, and at last true universities were founded, 
 the sharing of such opportunities by girls and 
 women was steadily resisted. Even when that 
 resistance was gradually broken down, girls were 
 often prevented from making use of them by the 
 general opinion which still prevailed, that women 
 did not need for domestic purposes an education 
 as thorough or as extensive as that of men. When 
 girls, in process of time, came to be taught at 
 all, it was not simultaneously with boys, but 
 during vacations, before and after the regular 
 hours of sessions, by inferior and overworked 
 teachers, and with a limited range of studies. 
 Although constantly gaining opportunities for 
 higher study, they were yet, at the very end of 
 the so-called " woman's century," weighted with 
 limiting conditions. 
 
 While the active resistance to the equal ad- 
 mission of girls to educational privileges was 
 made by the men who controlled taxation, endow-
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 223 
 
 ments, and school equipment, it must be acknowl- 
 edged that a far more subtle and effective check 
 lay in the tradition current among women them- 
 selves, that intellectual attainments in their sex 
 were both improper and unattractive. The same 
 elusive and belated convention, which still pre- 
 vents the general adoption by women of bifur- 
 cated garments, prevented them earlier from tak- 
 ing advantage of the higher education. Women 
 who had themselves attained a degree of cul- 
 ture were often doubtful of its usefulness to their 
 sex generally. The accomplished Mrs. Barbauld 
 thought young ladies ought only to have " such a 
 general tincture of knowledge as to make them 
 agreeable companions to a man of sense, and 
 ought to gain these accomplishments in a more 
 quiet and unobserved manner, from intercourse 
 and conversation at home, with father, brother, 
 or friend." If women at this time ever con- 
 sciously reasoned out their situation, the logic 
 must have run something like this: It is the busi- 
 ness of women to please and to serve men 
 men do not like women to know as much as them- 
 selves, nor does a servant need education. Since 
 learning adds nothing to our attractiveness, let us 
 not appear intellectual, even though we may have 
 inadvertently acquired a little knowledge. 
 
 The legacy of advice left by Dr. John 
 Gregory to his daughters in 1774, was still quite
 
 224 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 appropriate in the middle of the following cen- 
 tury: 
 
 " Be even cautious in displaying your good sense. But 
 if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound 
 secret, especially from men, who generally look with a 
 jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts 
 and a cultivated understanding." 
 
 In an old Ladies' Magazine of the ante-bellum 
 type, advice of precisely the same tenor is given: 
 
 " She ought to present herself as a being made to 
 please, to love, and to seek support; a being inferior to 
 man and near to Angels." 
 
 It was, indeed, almost as improper a century 
 ago for a lady publicly to display an intellectual 
 interest as it would now be for her to attend a 
 prize-fight or drink at the hotel bar. Until after 
 1830 women were not expected to attend any 
 public lecture except those of a religious char- 
 acter, nor to avail themselves of public collections 
 of books and pictures. The shy and eager- 
 minded Hannah Adams, " who learned Greek 
 and Latin from some theological students board- 
 ing in her father's house, and who had written 
 books," was the first woman to scandalize Boston 
 by making use of the Public Library. 
 
 Without rehearsing in detail the formal steps
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 225 
 
 in the growth of education for girls, it is amusing 
 to recall what was considered desirable for a 
 young woman to know before the days of public 
 schools and seminaries. One of the most cul- 
 tivated women of her time, Abigail Adams, the 
 wife of the President, said in her old age: 
 
 " The only chance for much intellectual improvement 
 in the female sex was to be found in the families of the 
 educated class, and in occasional intercourse with the 
 learned of the day. Whatever of useful instruction was 
 received in the practical conduct of life came from 
 maternal lips; and what of farther mental development, 
 depended more upon the eagerness with which the casual 
 teachings of daily conversation were treasured up, than 
 upon any labor expended purposely to promote it. Fe- 
 male education in the best families went no further than 
 writing and arithmetic, and in some few and rare in- 
 stances, music and dancing." 
 
 A quarter of a century later girls were still 
 not generally admitted to the public schools, and 
 the education thought necessary for them con- 
 sisted of reading, writing, spelling, the first rule 
 of arithmetic addition good manners, needle- 
 work, and knitting. To this the best educated 
 girls added no more than music, grammar and 
 rhetoric, and geography. Even fifty years later 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson complained: 
 
 " When you hear of a young lady as ' splendidly edu- 
 cated ' it commonly turns out that she speaks several
 
 226 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 languages admirably, and plays on the piano well, or 
 sketches well. It is not needful for such an indorse- 
 ment that she should have the slightest knowledge of 
 mathematics, of logic, of rhetoric, of metaphysics, of 
 political economy, of physiology, of any branch of natural 
 science, or of any language or literature or history ex- 
 cept those of modern Europe." 
 
 The progress of education for girls was 
 further checked by the deference which local 
 communities paid to the opinions of the ministers 
 of their churches. They continually emphasized 
 the idea that the mission of women in the world 
 was exclusively moral, not intellectual, and that 
 the possession and pursuit of worldly knowledge 
 was incompatible with the higher womanly 
 destiny. Their line of reasoning was carefully 
 presented in the preface to the Woman's Record, 
 a biographical compilation published soon after 
 the close of the Civil War. The author, after 
 disclaiming all sympathy with the woman's rights 
 movement, assures her readers that the book is 
 not designed to assert any intellectual equality 
 with man, but to demonstrate her distinctively 
 moral mission by means of historical examples: 
 
 " I believe and I trust I shall make it apparent, that 
 woman is God's appointed agent of morality, the teacher 
 and the inspirer of those sentiments and feelings which 
 are termed the virtues of humanity ; and that the progress 
 of these virtues and the permanent improvement of our
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 227 
 
 race, depend upon the manner in which her mission is 
 treated by man. . . . Man by the fall was rendered in- 
 capable of cultivating by his own unassisted efforts, any 
 good propensity or quality of his nature. Left to him- 
 self his love becomes lust; patriotism, policy; and religion, 
 idolatry. He is naturally selfish in his affections . . . but 
 woman was not thus cast down. To her was confided, by 
 the Creator's express declaration, the mission of disinter- 
 ested affection ; her ' desire ' was to be to her husband 
 not to herself. . . . Truly she was made ' for man ' . . . 
 she was not made to gratify his sensual desires, but to refine 
 his human affections, and to elevate his moral feelings 
 . . . and her soul was to help him where he was deficient 
 namely, in his spiritual nature." 
 
 This " covert glory of the womanly nature," as 
 the Reverend Horace Bushnell called it, was to be 
 the compensation of women for mental inferi- 
 ority and for the denial of freedom and oppor- 
 tunity. 
 
 But in this, as in many other instances in his- 
 tory, while the most plausible arguments were 
 being invented to prevent the admission of an- 
 other class to an equal opportunity, social and 
 economic forces were steadily undermining the 
 accepted tradition. As the public-school system 
 expanded under the impetus of national pros- 
 perity, the demand for teachers could not be sup- 
 plied from the ranks of pioneer young men, who 
 saw a thousand better openings. The religious 
 awakening, which found expression in foreign
 
 228 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 and home missionary enterprises, could not be 
 carried on without the aid of the missionary wife, 
 who must add, to housewifely and motherly cares, 
 the duties of teacher, nurse, and exemplar to 
 heathen women and children. Even temperance 
 leaders were compelled to call in the assistance of 
 female organizers and financiers. Then sud- 
 denly it was perceived that the demand for 
 women of some education in social work outside 
 the home was increasing faster than their educa- 
 tional opportunities. And at the same time it 
 began to be realized that, even for a purely 
 moral career, women needed something more by 
 way of training than ethical platitudes deduced 
 from distorted Scripture lessons. 
 
 The demand for better educated teachers 
 found response in the establishment of Normal 
 schools and in the general admission of girls 
 to high schools, to Oberlin Collegiate Institute, 
 and to the small denominational schools called 
 colleges founded chiefly by the highly demo- 
 cratic sect of the Methodists. While the pio- 
 neers of the Middle West were thus preparing 
 the way for the acceptance of co-education in the 
 state colleges which arose after the Civil War, 
 Emma Willard and Mary Lyon were struggling 
 to provide girls with an education approaching 
 that open to boys, but free from the dangers of 
 defeminization. The Troy Female Seminary
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 229 
 
 laid especial emphasis on " domestic instruc- 
 tions " adapted to the softer sex; and it was 
 pointed out that women, if given a proper train- 
 ing, could teach children better and cheaper than 
 men, thus releasing them to pursue " the thou- 
 sand occupations from which women are neces- 
 sarily debarred." Mt. Holyoke Seminary, more 
 than any other school, expressed the passion for 
 knowledge and for the conversion of the souls 
 of mankind of which its founder, Mary Lyon, 
 was possessed. When the General Association 
 of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts 
 refused to indorse her plan for the higher educa- 
 tion of girls, her clerical friends advised her to 
 see in the rejection "The hand of the Lord;" 
 but Mary Lyon replied: 
 
 " I may be fifty years in advance of the age, but the 
 work is of God and must surely go on." 
 
 In all the increasing provisions for the educa- 
 tion of girls there was as yet no hint of courses 
 identical with those offered to young men. The 
 studies required of girls, though sometimes nom- 
 inally equal, were neither so severe nor so re- 
 spected as the classical trilogy. Even in co- 
 educational institutions, " female " courses and 
 " ladies' ' courses were substituted for the 
 straight classical requirements, and often meas-
 
 230 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 ured by inferior standards. The War, in this as 
 in every phase of national life, made an abrupt 
 cleavage in the lives of women. They came 
 across it with minds broadened by nursing ex- 
 perience, and by the economic necessity they were 
 under of replacing men in industry. Whereas all 
 forms of culture had hitherto been emasculated 
 to fit women, they now began to demand for 
 themselves truly equal opportunities. With the 
 foundation of the state colleges under the Mor- 
 rill Act of 1862, and of the separate woman's 
 colleges, there was definitely precipitated a 
 struggle to make the standards of women's edu- 
 cation not only equal to but identical with those 
 of men's institutions. At the same time, and in- 
 terwoven with it, arose a conflict of social ideals 
 between co-education and segregate instruction, 
 in which the phantom of the intellectual woman 
 returned to terrorize anew the believers in strict 
 feminine tradition. The sarcasm and hostility 
 endured by Mary Lyon and the ridicule suffered 
 by Mrs. Willard and other pioneers in the sem- 
 inary movement, were as nothing when compared 
 with the scorn and violence aroused by the at- 
 tempt of women to prove themselves equal to 
 men in the field of classic learning. 
 
 When the first few generations of college 
 women, in spite of many limitations, had demon- 
 strated their ability to reach a higher average
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 231 
 
 standard than their competitors, there was still 
 to be overcome the Giant Dreadful of Physical 
 Incapacity. That strange old book, Clarke's 
 Sex in Education, which proves conclusively that 
 a woman is by virtue of her feminine functions a 
 semi-invalid one week out of every month, and 
 that she must, therefore, be unfitted for mother- 
 hood by the strain of systematic mental training, 
 had a wide approval in the third quarter of the 
 century. Dr. Clarke dwelt at length on the ex- 
 istence of a great number of " weak, neural- 
 gic, dyspeptic, hysterical, menorrhagic, dysmen- 
 orrheic " girls and women, assuming that the 
 chief cause of these conditions was their educa- 
 tion by the same methods as boys. He declared 
 that the identical education of the two sexes was 
 " a crime before God and humanity, that 
 physiology protests against and experience weeps 
 over ... it emasculates boys, stunts girls, 
 makes semi-eunuchs of one sex and agenes of the 
 other." After devoting a whole chapter to the 
 clinical details of seven cases of educated women 
 who had come under his treatment for female 
 diseases, he concludes: 
 
 " Physiology declares that the solution of it will only 
 be possible when the education of girls is made appropriate 
 to their organization. A German girl yoked with a 
 donkey and dragging a cart, is an exhibition of monstrous 
 muscular and aborted brain development. An American
 
 232 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 girl, yoked with a dictionary, and laboring with the cata- 
 menia, is an exhibition of monstrous brain and aborted 
 ovarian development." 
 
 At the height of this controversy, it was cus- 
 tomary for the college woman to be spoken of as 
 " hemaphrodite in mind," and " divested of her 
 sex," and to predict that she would lose not only 
 her feminine attractions, but become incapable of 
 performing her essential functions. All these 
 predictions were quite a priori, and founded on 
 fears rather than facts; for of the eight colleges 
 in the Eastern States which at this time admitted 
 women, only one had been open as long as four 
 years, and of the separate institutions of col- 
 legiate rank, Vassar alone had been in existence 
 as much as seven years. But the belief in the 
 physical inability of girls to endure a regimen of 
 regular, hard study, was so general that it com- 
 pelled the promoters of their education to disarm 
 it by special measures. Wellesley College an- 
 nounced at its opening in 1875 tnat ^ was not 
 hard study, but violation of law, which injured 
 young women, and that it would offer oppor- 
 tunities, equal to those of the best colleges for 
 young men, " but with due regard to health." 
 
 Just as the word " female " had been super- 
 seded by the less suggestive term " woman," so 
 the old ideal of physical delicacy as an essential
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 233 
 
 and desirable feminine characteristic now began 
 to be set aside. A systematic effort began to be 
 made to develop women into beings robust 
 enough for whatever family and social functions 
 they might undertake. But even when it came to 
 be evident, in the latter part of the century, that 
 college girls were, on the whole, healthier than 
 other girls of the same social station, the ghost 
 of that same unsexed lady that had haunted us 
 for a hundred years rose again. It was mourn- 
 fully prophesied that such learned and vigorous 
 creatures would not marry, and if, perchance, 
 they did, they would not bear children. But 
 even this later Shade had to vanish when, after 
 a full generation, it was discovered that many 
 such women had been marrying just like ordinary 
 folk, and had produced, if anything, rather a 
 larger proportion of healthy children than other 
 women of their class. 
 
 There are always in any society a large num- 
 ber who prefer to trust what has been good 
 rather than attempt what might be better. To 
 such people co-education was a veritable bogie- 
 woman of the most hideous sort. Though it had 
 long been adopted from motives of economy and 
 social convenience in the Middle and Western 
 States, the discussion was continued by Eastern 
 educators, who feared it might seriously endanger 
 that fragile veneer of womanhood, the habits of
 
 234 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 femininity. When it could no longer be as- 
 serted that co-education involved more scandals 
 than segregation; or what was then regarded 
 as almost equally scandalous more marriages; 
 when co-educated girls could not easily be distin- 
 guished from graduates of the separate colleges 
 by any stigmata; yet again a feeble old Spook 
 came back to whisper tormentingly, that schools 
 and colleges were being " feminized," and young 
 men deprived of their birthright, unhampered 
 masculinity, by the presence of so many females. 
 The century which began with a complete 
 " masculinization " of education ended in shrill 
 and ineffectual protests on the part of a small 
 class of left-over males, because their mo- 
 nopoly of opportunity and opinion had been 
 broken. 
 
 During all this period every pioneer woman 
 who attempted to enlarge her intellectual horizon 
 or to prepare herself for a profession was met 
 with ridicule and hostility. When reluctantly 
 admitted to partake of the crumbs which fell 
 from scholarly tables, she knew herself unwel- 
 come, and was constantly reminded that her sex 
 must forever prevent her from full participation 
 in the feast. It should not surprise any one that 
 her attitude was, more often than not, an- 
 tagonistic to men. Like other self-made beings 
 she often understood, but would not acknowledge,
 
 the crudity of her half-trained powers; and in- 
 evitably she bore about her the marks of the 
 hardships through which she had come. Where 
 one pioneer survives with scars, a hundred fall 
 by the way, and the hardier survivor, however 
 strengthened by the experience, is likely to be an 
 exceptional, if not an eccentric, person. 
 
 Among these early women graduates, a few 
 came out arrogant and aggressive, with a chip on 
 the shoulder and a conviction that sex ranged 
 against sex was the only way for women to win 
 an equal chance. Some who had not the fighting 
 temper carried, nevertheless, a deep sense of 
 injury toward men who thought themselves en- 
 titled to the best, and would not admit women 
 willingly to share it. Others starved their 
 womanly natures in the devotion to learning, 
 vowing themselves to a sort of conventualism in 
 the Cause of Woman and narrowing their out- 
 look to purely feminine experiences. Those who 
 married sometimes dropped back into the ac- 
 cepted and limited conventions of femininity, and 
 wore an apologetic air for their collegiate temeri- 
 ties; or, finding no solution for their anomalous 
 position between the old and the new, agreed with 
 the alumna who said: 
 
 " To be intellectual is all right to be domestic is all 
 right but to try to be both is hell ! "
 
 236 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 But by far the larger number came out whole- 
 some and unperverted by opposition, and took 
 their place as leaders of succeeding generations. 
 Though not less womanly than their ancestors of 
 the domestic regime, they walked with a more 
 serious air, feeling themselves consecrated by 
 their own exceptional privilege to the help of 
 their sex. As the number of alumna increased 
 and opposition declined, their sense of responsi- 
 bility broadened to include the young, the weak, 
 the limited, and every class who, like themselves, 
 needed the equal chance. That feminization, 
 whose impalpable shade still hovers near, has 
 come to mean, in its large aspect, the 
 brooding of the maternal instinct over all man- 
 kind. 
 
 It will be remembered that Emma Willard, in 
 her petition to the New York Legislature in be- 
 half of state endowments for girls' schools, urged 
 that, among the sciences proper to the sex, " do- 
 mestic instructions " should be considered im- 
 portant; and suggested that housewifery might 
 be reduced to a system as well as other arts. 
 Though many girls' seminaries, and even some 
 of the women's colleges, at their foundation re- 
 quired a certain amount of domestic labor from 
 their students, it was rather to economize, and 
 to disarm prejudice, than for its educational 
 value. It gives a humorous aspect to the con-
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 237 
 
 trov 7 ersy between the segregate and the co-educa- 
 tional factions for the strictly feminine party to 
 be obliged to grant that the co-educational in- 
 stitutions, which were opposed because they 
 might defeminize young women, provided the 
 first and best equipment for training in the sub- 
 jects related to housekeeping and the family. 
 The tardiness of the women's colleges to offer 
 courses having a direct application to the do- 
 mestic occupations is to be explained partly by 
 the prevalence of the tradition that only the 
 classical training w r as real education. Only very 
 recently, for instance, have the sciences been ac- 
 cepted as equal in disciplinary and cultural value 
 to Greek and Latin. The difficulty with which 
 the applied sciences of Agriculture and Engineer- 
 ing were introduced into the curriculum along- 
 side of the classical courses, warned women 
 not to try to climb up by any such disputed 
 way. 
 
 What women had come to want was The Best, 
 and The Best was symbolized by the classics as 
 taught at Harvard and Yale. To this standard, 
 therefore, every woman's college must come be- 
 fore its degree would be accepted. With its stu- 
 dents prepared in inferior schools, with limited 
 resources, and hampered by the timidity of its 
 patrons, it was all that such a college could do 
 to teach the traditional requirements. It could
 
 238 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 not afford to jeopardize its reputation by any ex- 
 periments in coordinating its work with the 
 future lives of its students. 
 
 The classics were, in truth, as well adapted to 
 the average girl as to the ordinary boy, so far as 
 training and culture were concerned, and were 
 scarcely less related to the practical needs of life. 
 It was not until the exclusive domination of the 
 curriculum for gentlemen was supplanted by an 
 elective system broad enough to meet the cultural 
 and vocational needs of all classes, that the idea 
 of a modified curriculum for women could be 
 safely entertained. 
 
 Although this is essentially a man's world 
 since women have not yet had time to contribute 
 the full fruits of their freedom and belated op- 
 portunity yet every woman who reads the his- 
 tory of their slow emancipation must acknowl- 
 edge that the slowness was due as much to the 
 apathy of women themselves as to the reluctance 
 of men to endanger their traditional ideal of 
 female purity and competence by bringing it in 
 contact with their own strength and coarseness. 
 Nor should the modern woman fail to pay her 
 debt of appreciation to the few truly liberal- 
 minded men who primarily made that progress 
 possible. But for the vision of Joseph Emerson 
 of Byfield, Massachusetts, Mary Lyon would 
 perhaps not have set out on her mission of found-
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 239 
 
 ing a school where girls could be adequately pre- 
 pared to save the world. When Sophia Smith 
 who had herself been refused admission to the 
 public schools of her native town inherited a 
 fortune, her timid desire to do something for the 
 education of girls might not have ended in the 
 foundation of Smith College but for the encour- 
 agement of her pastor, Dr. John M. Green. Co- 
 education a method offensive to Old and New 
 England alike owed its prevalence in the West 
 to the democratic spirit of the Methodists, and 
 to the personal sacrifice and foresight of in- 
 dividual men. 
 
 All along the road, women have been led and 
 encouraged by the exceptional man. That they 
 have not even yet attained a truly equal oppor- 
 tunity for self-development is as much due to 
 outworn traditions of their own cultivation as 
 to the fact that men who wish to be just are still 
 in the minority. It is, indeed, a curious world 
 where mankind dreams always of perfection, yet 
 is afraid of the processes necessary to attain it; 
 and it is still haunted by many phantoms like that 
 of the Learned Lady who was to defeminize her- 
 self by the human exercise of systematic think- 
 ing. A strange world, indeed, where the light 
 from which all such shadows flee is regarded 
 with terror. Women have at last, however, ar- 
 rived at a stage where they may at any rate
 
 2 4 o PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 grapple directly with the reality of their own 
 conventionalized natures. 
 
 The results of women's education were re- 
 garded by many, at the end of the century, as dis- 
 appointing. It was said that the trained woman 
 was imitative rather than original; superficial, as 
 might have been expected, and lacking in concen- 
 tration of effort in short, the critics were aston- 
 ished that women had not succeeded in attaining 
 in three-quarters of a century what only the ex- 
 ceptional man had achieved in all the ages of 
 his own making. Without in the least discredit- 
 ing the remarkable achievements of individual 
 women, or overlooking the altogether higher 
 level which women in the mass have reached, it 
 must be granted that the depth and breadth of 
 their ideas has been limited by the narrowness 
 of their experience. Professor Thomas very 
 justly points out that women's attainments have 
 been to men's so far, as those of an amateur to a 
 professional, because of their intellectual seques- 
 tration. 
 
 Yet the scholars who have been most friendly 
 to women's mental advancement have not com- 
 prehended, apparently, that the petty traditions 
 of feminine duty have, after all, been the chief 
 hindrance to women's intellectual growth. The 
 male scholar of the past century did not darn, 
 cook, nurse his sister's children through the
 
 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 241 
 
 measles; make his own clothes in scanty vaca- 
 tions; play the church organ, teach a Sunday- 
 school class, or take his mother's place when she 
 fell ill. Nor was the lack of money any serious 
 difficulty to the clever young man. While many 
 a young girl was doing the work of a common 
 servant in order to earn the sixty dollars neces- 
 sary to pay her way through Mount Holyoke, 
 Harvard College was offering not less than 
 twenty-five thousand dollars a year in cash premi- 
 ums for study; and, as in the Chinese family, 
 mothers and sisters at home pledged themselves 
 for the support of the brilliant boy, who was to 
 be of the " literati " and reflect honor on the 
 household. 
 
 At the beginning of the Twentieth Century it 
 was perfectly apparent that not until women 
 ceased to be the pensioners of men; not until they 
 could command their own money and limit their 
 duties in the household; not until endowments and 
 scholarships for their use were as abundant and 
 as generously provided as for men, could any 
 considerable body of women attain an unques- 
 tioned intellectual status. Nor could their at- 
 tainments be justly appraised until the phantom 
 of the learned woman had vanished. So long as 
 men were reluctant to let their womenkind take 
 their chances in education, as they have to do in 
 matrimony; so long as they wavered between the
 
 242 PHANTOM OF THE LEARNED LADY 
 
 fear that young men will be inoculated with the 
 bacillus femimnus, and the theory that women 
 themselves will become immune to it, women dis- 
 trusted their own powers, and the legitimacy of 
 their commission. They have yet to learn to be 
 themselves, and to follow the inner vision 
 wherever it may lead.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 " In times like these every soul should do the work of a full- 
 grown man. When I pass the gate of the Celestials and good 
 Peter asks me where I wish to sit, I will say: 'Anywhere so 
 that I am neither a negro nor a woman. Confer on me, Great 
 Angel, the glory of white manhood, so that henceforth I may 
 feel unlimited freedom.' " Letter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton to 
 Susan B. Anthony. 
 
 " It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so ex- 
 orbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to 
 establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is the 
 same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as 
 just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may 
 usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust." Letter of 
 Susan B. Anthony to her brother. 
 
 " Whatever is morally right for a man to do, is morally right 
 for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights." 
 ANGELINA GRIMKE WELD. 
 
 DOUBTLESS nothing more surprised the ortho- 
 doxy and the social conventions of American 
 society in the earlier half of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury than the way in which a few hundred women 
 broke loose, so to speak; coming out from the 
 domesticated masses to demand all sorts of un- 
 precedented rights, to champion unpopular 
 causes, to enter activities where their labors 
 rather than their voices had hitherto been ac- 
 
 243
 
 244 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 ceptable. And yet the modern student of his- 
 tory sees in this ebullition simply the logical con- 
 sequences of the political and intellectual ferment 
 of the later Eighteenth Century, which left as its 
 principal residuum the doctrine of equal rights 
 and opportunities for all classes of men. 
 
 When once the doctrine had been implanted it 
 was inevitable that reasoning minds should soon 
 begin to ask: Why not for women, too? Acute 
 and just-thinking men could not but see the in- 
 consistencies involved in a career like that of 
 Mercy Warren, whose satirical poems and 
 dramas were of as great service to the revolu- 
 tionary cause as that contributed by many a 
 fighting man; but whose status remained that of 
 an inferior and childish being: 
 
 " Noble and understanding as this lady of '76 was in 
 fact, and recognized by the men of her day to be, in 
 theory she was anything but that. She was a person of 
 inferior mind, unable to master the strong meat of edu- 
 cation, unfit to be trusted with the guardianship of her 
 property or her children, lest both suffer, not to be al- 
 lowed free speech in public lest her tongue run away with 
 her and disorder and loose doctrines be encouraged, not to 
 be allowed to mix in the gatherings or deliberations of 
 men lest her household, her manners, and public morals 
 suffer. The greatest men of New England are on rec- 
 ord on these points, and the Church and the Law upheld 
 them." * 
 
 Tarbell, American Magazine, vol. 69, p. 14.
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 245 
 
 The appreciation of human rights engendered 
 by the struggle for independence was quickened 
 by the teachings and social experiments of Rob- 
 ert Owen, and by the socialistic propaganda of 
 the early forties. In the wake of the extraor- 
 dinary prosperity following the panic of 1837, 
 and as a result of all these economic and humani- 
 tarian theorizings, two movements arose which 
 were destined to precipitate a concrete feminine 
 protest. Temperance and the abolition of 
 slavery were calculated by their very nature to 
 appeal to the highly developed sympathies of 
 womenkind; and, as moral issues, might naturally 
 have been deemed suitable to their sphere in life. 
 The instinctive interest of women was not in so- 
 cial or religious theory; rather, there were many 
 like Lucretia Mott, the Quaker preacher, who 
 wrote of herself: 
 
 " The highest evidence of a sound faith being the prac- 
 tical life of a Christian, I have felt a far greater interest 
 in the moral movements of our age than in any theological 
 discussion." 
 
 Inspired, therefore, by the humaner aspects of 
 religion, women organized temperance meetings, 
 raising the money and doing the largest part of 
 the work, only to be excluded not merely from 
 the rostrum, but even from the debates on the 
 floor. The spectacle of Antoinette Brown, the ac-
 
 246 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 credited delegate of two societies to a temper- 
 ance convention in New York, standing for an 
 hour and a half, while the men delegates 
 wrangled and fought over her right to speak, and 
 the clergymen cried, " Shame on such women! " 
 is incredible in our day. One must enter into it 
 from the standpoint of a woman to comprehend 
 the effect of such injustices and insults repeated 
 again and again upon women whose only offense 
 was that they wished to share in a philanthropic 
 movement. 
 
 The denial of free speech, based on Paul's in- 
 junction that women should keep silence in the 
 churches, was, in fact, the exciting cause of the 
 first and most extreme phase of the woman's 
 rights movement. The women delegates who 
 accompanied William Lloyd Garrison and Wen- 
 dell Phillips to the National Anti-Slavery Con- 
 vention in London in 1840, were refused seats 
 and the right of taking any active part in the 
 meeting. Eight years afterward the first 
 woman's rights convention met, at which the 
 most extreme anti-man resolutions ever pro- 
 duced in the history of the movement were 
 adopted. Wholly untrained in the underlying 
 historical causes of their situation, and accus- 
 tomed to dealing with the concrete in domestic 
 life, they made a violent attack on mankind in 
 the tone of slaves denouncing their masters.
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 247 
 
 " The history of mankind is a history of repeated in- 
 juries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, 
 having in direct object the establishment of an absolute 
 tyranny over her. 
 
 " He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable 
 right to the elective franchise. 
 
 " He has compelled her to submit to laws in the forma- 
 tion of which she has had no voice. 
 
 " He has withheld from her rights which are given to 
 the most ignorant and degraded men. 
 
 " He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law 
 civilly dead. 
 
 " He has taken from her all right in property, even in 
 the wages she earns. 
 
 " He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall 
 be the proper causes, and, in the case of separation, to 
 whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to 
 be wholly regardless of the happiness of woman. 
 
 " After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, 
 if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to 
 support a .government which recognizes her only when 
 her property can be made profitable to it. 
 
 "He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thor- 
 ough education, all colleges being closed against her. 
 
 " He has created a false public sentiment by giving 
 to the world a different code of morals for men and 
 women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude 
 women from society are not only tolerated, but deemed 
 of little account in man. 
 
 " He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, 
 claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, 
 when that belongs to her conscience and her God. 
 
 " He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to de- 
 stroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-
 
 248 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and 
 abject life." 
 
 One of the most characteristic human tend- 
 encies is for the aggrieved of any class not to stop 
 with the mere enumeration of their grievances, 
 but to place the blame for their condition upon 
 those in power. The historian, however, having 
 divested any protest of this inevitable and bitter 
 tone, must determine whether the wrongs alleged 
 did in truth exist. If they did, the violence of 
 expression is explained, if not always fully justi- 
 fied. The grievances for the first time categori- 
 cally stated by women in 1848 were not exag- 
 gerated, although the blame for their existence 
 could not justly be laid upon men then living; 
 for even now, after the lapse of more than half a 
 century, four of the dozen complaints still stand, 
 and others have been only partially remedied. 
 
 It is not surprising, therefore, that a class so 
 limited in education and social experience, and 
 awakened all at once to the injustices of their 
 position, should allow their indignation to get 
 away with reason and prudence, nor that their 
 tactics should be amusingly feminine. Perhaps 
 they were not the less effective on that account. 
 For thirty years after this declaration, Mrs. Stan- 
 ton and Miss Anthony were partners in agita- 
 tion " pertinacious incendiaries " their contem-
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 249 
 
 poraries called them having no compunction in 
 harassing the most dignified bodies of men. Mrs. 
 Stanton confessed: 
 
 " Whenever we saw an annual convention of men, 
 quietly meeting year after year, filled with brotherly love, 
 we bethought ourselves how we could throw a bombshell 
 into their midst, in the form of a resolution to open the 
 doors to the sisters outside. ... In this way, we assailed 
 in turn, the temperance, educational, and church conven- 
 tions, agricultural fairs, and halls of legislation." 
 
 Yet, if the picture of these insistent methods 
 brings now a smile, it brings, too, contradictory 
 feelings of pity and respect pity that educated 
 men should have been the most narrow-minded of 
 all; and respect for feminine conviction and cour- 
 age which led women to risk, in behalf of their 
 sex, all that they had been taught was most lovely 
 and respectable. 
 
 The denial of an active and recognized share 
 in the temperance and educational reforms of the 
 time was by no means the most serious of the 
 grievances of thoughtful women. The married 
 woman was still under the status of the Common 
 Law, which gave her no control of her children, 
 no matter what her husband's treatment of her 
 or of them might be; and which made her almost 
 wholly dependent on her father, her husband, or 
 her son in affairs of property. Lockwood states
 
 2 5 o WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 correctly the position in which women found 
 themselves : 
 
 " Till the late forties the Common Law provisions re- 
 specting the property rights of married women obtained 
 in every state except Louisiana. These provisions wrested 
 from women all property rights. If an unmarried woman 
 through gift or inheritance came into possession of prop- 
 erty, real or personal, she forfeited all claim to it and all 
 right to its management and control when she married. 
 It then at once became the property of her husband, and 
 if he died, leaving no children, it passed to his nearest 
 kin, leaving the widow with but a dower in real estate 
 and a small share in the personal property." 
 
 Owen, in The Free Inquirer, put in less dis- 
 passionate terms the bitterness which women 
 themselves no doubt felt: 
 
 " She can inherit nothing, receive nothing, earn nothing, 
 which her husband cannot at any time legally wrest from 
 her. All her rights are swallowed up in his. She loses, 
 as it were, her legal existence. She may be thanks to 
 occasional and gratuitous generosity she sometimes is 
 kindly and even rationally treated ; but she has no right to 
 demand I will not say kindness but even the most 
 common justice and humanity. A man may not beat his 
 wife too unmercifully, nor is he allowed to kill her. Short 
 of this he can scarcely transgress the law, so far as she is 
 concerned." 
 
 It is a truism of history to say that, to what- 
 ever degree there is unchecked power over help-
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 251 
 
 less or inferior persons, there will be a corre- 
 sponding degree of abuse. Susan Anthony pro- 
 tected and concealed a married woman, who ran 
 away from an abusive and unfaithful husband 
 a man of conspicuous station in order to keep 
 her child. Miss Anthony was persecuted by her 
 friends and the anti-slavery people because she 
 would not reveal the fugitive's hiding-place, but 
 she declared: 
 
 " As I ignore all law to help the slave so will I ignore 
 it to protect an enslaved woman." 
 
 The wife was able to earn her living in secret 
 for some years, but her husband finally drew the 
 income from her books, and stole the daughter 
 from her. Such cases were by no means un- 
 common at this period. One of my very earliest 
 recollections is a picture of a wretched and deter- 
 mined woman with a baby under her shawl, who 
 had taken refuge after nightfall behind our 
 kitchen stove, begging my father to help her run 
 away from a drunken husband, because there was 
 no safety for the child, nor help to be invoked 
 from the law. The little Elizabeth Cady saw 
 many frantic women appealing to her father for 
 legal protection, and when she was told that it 
 was " The Law " encased in the yellow volumes 
 on the shelves which prevented him from help-
 
 252 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 ing them, she began to cut the " woman laws " 
 out of his law books. 
 
 Alice Stone Blackwell has expressed dis- 
 passionately the attitude of thinking women with 
 regard to the legal view of women's services and 
 their property rights which was current in Amer- 
 ica at the time the woman movement began: 
 
 " Most men are better than the law, and few hus- 
 bands use the extreme and tyrannical power which the 
 law gives them; but there the law is, ready for any bad 
 husband to take advantage of it. ... This does not show 
 any special depravity on the part of men. If women 
 alone had made the laws no doubt the laws would have 
 been just as one-sided . . . only it would have been the 
 other way round. No doubt it would have taken a long 
 and arduous man's rights movement to bring about the 
 needed improvements, and . . . we may be sure that the 
 women would not have so far altered the old laws as to 
 make them glaringly unjust to women." 
 
 It required ten years of incessant attack in the 
 state of New York to get a modification of the law 
 giving the man sole control of the children; and 
 when the women agitators, diverted by the Civil 
 War, rested from their vigilance for one session, 
 the Legislature quietly put the law back on the 
 statute books in almost its original form and 
 the women had to begin all over again. And at 
 the time of this writing only thirteen states give 
 to women the joint guardianship of their children.
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 253 
 
 It is necessary constantly to remind ourselves 
 of such facts as these if we would comprehend 
 the bitterness with which the woman's rights 
 movement began. Nor must we forget that mar- 
 riage and motherhood was the only career held 
 open to women or deemed creditable to them; 
 that from the Pulpit and the Press their potential 
 motherhood was urged as the unalterable reason 
 for their protection and support by mankind. 
 Such inconsistency between doctrine and deed on 
 the part of men, though disguised under the veil 
 of religion and domestic purity, was too evident 
 to be missed even by the untrained female in- 
 tellect. Many a domestic woman, without the 
 courage or capacity of the exceptional leaders of 
 the woman's rights movement, had as great a 
 sense of injustice which she dared not express. 
 Very few men, even, have the courage to quarrel 
 with their bread and butter, or to disrupt their 
 family peace for the sake of a principle; how 
 much less, then, should women accustomed to 
 ages of subordination be expected to do so, al- 
 though it might ultimately bring them greater 
 freedom and happiness? 
 
 Besides the growing sense of human rights in 
 the air about them, and the social injustices of 
 which they were becoming keenly sensible, an- 
 other kind of limitation began to chafe women 
 who had to support themselves outside the home.
 
 254 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 The widespread movement for common-school 
 education, for better private schools, and, finally, 
 for people's universities, created a sudden de- 
 mand for teachers. Then, as now, men could 
 make more money and have more exciting careers 
 in other occupations than teaching. Moreover, 
 when the male population was reduced and fam- 
 ilies were impoverished by the Civil War, the 
 number of women who must earn wages was 
 greatly increased, and, for the educated woman, 
 teaching was the easiest and least unwomanly path 
 to self-support. 
 
 They found themselves compelled to accept 
 from one-half to one-third as much as men for 
 their work in the same positions. Miss An- 
 thony, for instance, taught twelve years before 
 she undertook her life-work as a reformer, dur- 
 ing most of which she received eight dollars a 
 month in positions where men had been paid from 
 twenty to thirty dollars. At a state teachers' 
 convention, held in Rochester in 1853, there were 
 five hundred teachers present, two-thirds of them 
 women. All of them had paid their fee, but not 
 one of them was allowed to speak or vote ex- 
 cept Miss Anthony, who, by her pertinacity, won 
 a grudging permission from the male minority to 
 make one short speech. At this time, in Roch- 
 ester, New York, a woman principal received two 
 hundred and fifty dollars a year in positions
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 255 
 
 where men received six hundred and fifty dollars; 
 while in the state at large there were eleven thou- 
 sand teachers, four-fifths of whom were women, 
 yet the women received only one-third of the total 
 salary fund. 
 
 No sooner did women begin to teach in consid- 
 erable numbers than they discovered the super- 
 ficial and inadequate character of their book edu- 
 cation, which they had to remedy as best they 
 might by night study and scanty courses in 
 schools invariably inferior to those provided for 
 young men. In this respect girls of good birth 
 who did not attempt to earn their living were 
 scarcely better off than their poorer sisters. 
 Elizabeth Cady went two years to a boarding- 
 school, which was then considered the best in the 
 country, but she records those years as " the 
 dreariest in her life." Lucy Stone's parents ex- 
 pected her to stay at home and work on the farm, 
 while her brothers went to college; but she re- 
 fused to do so, borrowed the money to go to 
 Oberlin the only college of good rank open to 
 her and there discovered her remarkable gift 
 for public speaking. Of Lydia Maria Child it is 
 recorded : 
 
 " She combined the authorship of more than thirty books 
 and pamphlets with a singular devotion both to public and 
 private philanthropies, and with almost too exacting a 
 faithfulness to the humblest domestic duties."
 
 256 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 Yet, although she had a superior mind as com- 
 pared with that of her brother, Convers Francis, 
 who became one of the most advanced thinkers 
 of the Unitarian body, she had 
 
 " a very unequal share of opportunities, having, in fact, 
 only such preparation as she could get in attending the 
 public schools and one year in a private seminary." 
 
 .Girls who, by their ambition and innate 
 capacity, could not help rising above the feminine 
 standards of the day, were pitied rather than en- 
 couraged to utilize their powers. The father of 
 Frances Gage, when she was helping him to make 
 barrels, used to be sorry for himself rather than 
 for her, because she was not a boy. After the 
 premature death of her brother at Union Col- 
 lege, the little Elizabeth Cady studied very hard 
 and won a Greek prize, with which she hoped to 
 surprise her father and comfort him somewhat 
 for the loss of his brilliant son. But when she 
 brought the trophy to him, he only bemoaned 
 the fact that she was not a boy. And, although 
 in later years she read law so as to entertain in- 
 telligently her father's legal guests, when she 
 joined the woman's rights movement he brought 
 all his authority to bear, and told his married 
 daughter, who was to prove herself as able as 
 he, that he would rather " see her under the 
 sod " than engaged in such an agitation.
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 257 
 
 When once the exceptional woman had mus- 
 tered courage for the hardships of getting an edu- 
 cation, or had jeopardized her social standing by 
 joining in some of the current reforms, her re- 
 sentment toward narrow-minded men was doubt- 
 less intensified by their refusal to acknowledge 
 her capacity, or to recognize ungrudgingly the 
 value of her service. The experience of An- 
 toinette Blackwell was certainly calculated to 
 make a beautiful and talented woman into an 
 iconoclast. Having partly worked her way 
 through Oberlin College, and taught for several 
 years, she returned there to study theology, and 
 at the end of her course was refused a license 
 to preach solely because she was a woman. Theol- 
 ogy was, indeed, a scandalous field of labor for 
 women from the standpoint of church con- 
 servatism, but in fields of social service far less 
 unusual, and in which the feminine gifts were cer- 
 tainly useful, women workers found just as little 
 appreciation. 
 
 The story of Frances Gage is an example of 
 the tardy and inadequate recognition of services 
 as valuable and far more exceptional than those 
 of many fighting men during the Civil War. Al- 
 though poor and in the midst of bearing and 
 rearing eight children, she yet found time to 
 read and write and speak of slavery, temper- 
 ance, and woman's rights; she suffered the loss
 
 2 5 8 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 of property because of her abolition principles; 
 and when, by reason of her husband's illness and 
 business failure, she had to support the family 
 as assistant editor of an agricultural paper, the 
 War destroyed the paper. She sent four sons to 
 the army, and she and a daughter went to the 
 South to give their unpaid services to the soldiers. 
 So terrible were the conditions there that she 
 came back, to travel through the North and speak 
 merely for her expenses, in order to rouse the 
 public to remedy them. When over fifty years 
 of age, she was still serving as unsalaried agent 
 of the Sanitary Commission; and, finally, after 
 the War, she still had ability enough to earn for 
 herself a home for her old age. In this woman 
 was combined the practical business ability of a 
 man, with the largest motherly and humane in- 
 stincts, and yet her life has been given slight 
 notice, except in woman's rights publications. 
 
 How deeply this lack of appreciation of the 
 sacrifices, the hardships, and the labors of the 
 women of the country incident to the great war 
 has cut, may be known from a single paragraph 
 in the Autobiography of Susan B. Anthony. 
 
 ' There can never be an adequate portrayal of the 
 service rendered by women of this country during the 
 Civil War, but none will deny that, according to their 
 opportunities, they were as faithful and self-sacrificing 
 as the men. . . Yet not one of these ever received the
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 259 
 
 slightest official recognition from the government. In the 
 cases of Miss Carroll, Dr. Blackwell, and Mrs. Griffing, 
 the honors and the profits were all absorbed by men. 
 Neither Clara Barton nor Dorothea Dix ever asked for a 
 pension. All of these women at the close of the war 
 asked for the right of suffrage. . . . 
 
 " What words can express her humiliation when, at the 
 close of this long conflict, the government which she had 
 served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its 
 councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of 
 all the noble women of the nation the negro men just 
 emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but 
 also densely ignorant of every public question." 
 
 Here was in truth a cause for humiliation even 
 to those women who had taken no part in the 
 woman's rights movement, and one which has 
 had its share in converting the conservative 
 women of our day to the necessity for self-asser- 
 tion. For the suffrage, extended to the negro 
 as a measure of protection, has inevitably been 
 given to foreigners of every race and class, until 
 there is presented the curious situation of a gov- 
 ernment, founded for the expression of demo- 
 cratic ideas, all of whose ignorant citizens may 
 vote, and nearly half of whose educated and 
 property-owning members are shut out from rep- 
 resentation or share in public issues. 
 
 It was customary for a generation after the 
 War to give as an unanswerable reason why 
 women should not be given the vote, that they
 
 260 WOiMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 could not fight for their country. Although this 
 is not so often heard in modern times, it was 
 none the less untenable even when it was in vogue. 
 The figures of the Provost Marshal's Bureau 
 during the War showed the physical condition of 
 more than a million men. Two hundred and 
 fifty-seven out of every thousand were declared 
 unfit for military service, and their unfitness was 
 in inverse proportion to their social and political 
 importance, as shown below: 
 
 Unfit: Unskilled laborers 348 out of each 1000 
 
 Tanners 216 "" " 
 
 Ironworkers 187 " " " 
 
 Lawyers 544 " " " 
 
 Journalists 740 " " " 
 
 Clergymen 954 " " " 
 
 In a time when these facts were familiar it was 
 no doubt galling to women to know that of the 
 divines, the editors, and the lawyers who filled 
 Congress, nearly all of whom were opponents of 
 women's rights, the majority could not them- 
 selves be defenders of their country. 
 
 Since the orthodox churches were the chief dis- 
 seminators of the traditional views of woman's 
 sphere, it was inevitable that exceptional women 
 should take refuge in the societies representing 
 newer and less conventional forms of religious 
 and social dogma. The Society of Friends put
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 261 
 
 no hindrance in the way of women becoming 
 preachers, and recognized their capacity as 
 human beings, regardless of sex. Lucretia Mott, 
 with a family of little children about her, felt the 
 call of the Spirit, and, in spite of delicate health 
 and many cares, became one of the rarest as well 
 as one of the keenest of the early women in pub- 
 lic life. It may be that the strong heart of Susan 
 B. Anthony would have failed but for the wise 
 and wholly sympathetic backing of her fine old 
 Quaker father. The incorrigibly honest, sensitive, 
 hungry-minded Anna Dickinson might, perhaps, 
 have been stunted to the stature of a mere Ish- 
 maelite instead of becoming a great political 
 speaker, had she not been born in a gentle and 
 earnest community of Friends. 
 
 In all the Utopian and socialistic colonies char- 
 acteristic of this period of our history there were 
 women drawn from their home churches by the 
 larger and more prophetic atmosphere to be 
 breathed there. Frances Wright took refuge in 
 New Harmony with the followers of Owen. The 
 Unitarian societies received accessions both from 
 the less liberal Friends and from the Trinitarian 
 bodies, of women as well as men, who could no 
 longer endure the narrow and inhuman bonds 
 which they set. Such colonies as New Harmony 
 and Brook Farm, though founded from motives 
 far removed in the beginning from those which
 
 262 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 were precipitating the woman question, inevitably 
 promoted the development of exceptional women 
 whose careers were in themselves a contradiction 
 of the accepted views as to feminine capacity. 
 Then, as now, whenever a thinking man came to 
 know such a woman, he ever afterwards had an 
 enlarged idea of what women might become 
 under the stimulus of broadened opportunities. 
 
 Although a few of the most striking of the 
 early come-outers from domestic womenkind 
 were made so by some thwarting personal ex- 
 perience, by far the larger number were normal 
 women driven into publicity by the necessity of 
 self-support, or by their attachment to some 
 benevolent cause or social reform. The hus- 
 bands of some failed in business; others were 
 widows obliged to earn a living for their chil- 
 dren, or daughters helping their parents. In 
 such cases they were of necessity blindly doing 
 men's work, because they could not earn enough 
 in the purely domestic avocations. This unpre- 
 meditated escape from domesticity was often 
 made imperative by the change from an agri- 
 cultural to an industrial regime in the com- 
 munities about them, and by the exigencies of 
 war. Just as on the Continent of Europe women 
 have for ages been replacing in the fields of pro- 
 duction the men drawn from them for military 
 purposes, so many women in the United States,
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 263 
 
 during and after the War, replaced the men in 
 the field, the office, and the factory. 
 
 A modern novelist makes one of his characters 
 says: 
 
 " There have been thousands of Queens. Only a few 
 have been great. Do you know why those few were 
 great ? Because there was no King to meddle ; they had to 
 be queens, and so they became immortal." 
 
 In our day it is so common to see women who 
 have been released from the domestic routine by 
 loss of family, or childlessness, or failure to 
 marry, making themselves efficient in the same 
 fields as men, that it requires an effort to realize 
 the strength of character on the one hand, or the 
 social compulsion on the other, which was neces- 
 sary half a century ago to make a woman break 
 through the conventions. 
 
 If they had but known it, these women, who 
 formulated the Declaration of Sentiments in 
 1848, touched only lightly the basic question 
 which underlay all the struggles of the women of 
 the Nineteenth Century, when they declared: 
 
 " He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, 
 claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, 
 when that belongs to her conscience and her God." 
 
 Beneath the demand for specific rights and the 
 protest against definite injustice, lay something
 
 264 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 more fundamental which conditioned them all: 
 should women be allowed to judge for them- 
 selves what was right and wrong, and to act ac- 
 cordingly? Were they at last grown-up human 
 beings, or still only in tutelage to men? Without 
 being aware of it, these first come-outers were 
 arming themselves against the oldest traditions 
 of society the authority of the Church over the 
 human mind, and the authority of man over 
 woman. Dimly, and as yet by instinct, rather 
 than reason, the first exceptional women knew 
 that their case was analogous to that of the slave 
 for he, too, was caught in the meshes of a 
 tradition pegged fast at every point to the Chris- 
 tian Scriptures. The doctrine of plenary in- 
 spiration and the practice of literal interpretation 
 still gave to every man an unanswerable rebuttal 
 for every argument in behalf of female freedom. 
 In much of the literature of the woman move- 
 ment it is assumed that the women insurgents of 
 the last century set out to emancipate their kind 
 in a temper of sheer eccentricity and belligerency 
 but nothing could be further from the truth. 
 They were rather like the patriots of the Amer- 
 ican Revolution : for a long, long time conscious 
 of injustice, but unwilling to precipitate a 
 struggle; then, when the fight was suddenly im- 
 minent, a few went into it as into a joyous con- 
 test, but by far the larger number went re-
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 265 
 
 luctantly, at the call of duty, and shrinking from 
 the necessity of making themselves odd and con- 
 spicuous. Not one of the women who are now 
 recorded as the leaders of the movement began 
 as a deliberate promoter of female rights; all 
 were literally driven into the fight by the arrogant 
 complacency of reformers who were perfectly 
 sure that God had ordained them a chosen sex 
 for the guidance and control of the weaker 
 vessels. 
 
 Looking upon the pitiful beginnings of the 
 woman movement, it seems as if the Spirit of 
 Justice, wearily hovering for centuries about the 
 world, at last breathed upon the altar fires of 
 homekeeping women, and kindled them into 
 flame, until they were obliged to join in some of 
 the moral issues of their time, though it might 
 lead to social martyrdom. Of all the moral 
 questions bruited in the thirties and forties, 
 slavery was the most odious; but women who be- 
 gan to work most modestly for educational and 
 temperance reforms found themselves driven by 
 their very femininity to take part in it. Inas- 
 much as by their potential motherhood they were 
 sensitized to finer human issues, they could not 
 escape being caught up by the wave of humani- 
 tarianism which was engulfing the Western 
 World. 
 
 From whatever little islet of homekeeping
 
 266 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 traditions they came, no sooner did they set out 
 for a larger continent than they began to find 
 themselves tossed about on a stormy sea, and, 
 in the minds of their conservative friends, re- 
 garded as wholly lost. In an old book called 
 Eminent Women of the Age, the tone of which 
 is extremely conservative, I find the following 
 paragraph : 
 
 " The women who devoted themselves to the anti- 
 slavery cause in the early days, endured the double odium 
 of being abolitionists and ' women out of their sphere.' 
 . . . The Press and the Pulpit exhausted the English 
 language to find adjectives to express their detestation of 
 so horrible a revelation as ' a woman out of her sphere.' 
 A clerical appeal was issued and sent to all the clergy- 
 men of New England calling on them to denounce in 
 their pulpits this unwomanly and unchristian proceeding." 
 
 But when once they had faced and accepted 
 ostracism as the price of a share in social service, 
 it was natural, if not altogether wise, that they 
 should lend themselves to every other kind of 
 reform. They could not be satisfied to pursue 
 single-mindedly one chosen and greater cause 
 they must give their support to every small and 
 ill-advised one as well; bringing upon themselves 
 and upon higher issues the cumulative odium and 
 ridicule of them all. For three-quarters of a 
 century the fundamental human question, whether 
 woman was made " for man," or whether she
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 267 
 
 was an adult being with an " inalienable right " 
 to judge and act for herself, has been obscured, 
 distorted, and delayed by the opprobrium at- 
 tached to contemporary social reforms. From 
 infidelity and free-love, with which the Owenites 
 were charged, to the subversion of society by 
 abolition; from the derision heaped upon the 
 " water-cure " and transcendentalism, to the 
 Bloomer costume, every form of public ridicule 
 has been associated with the reforms demanded 
 by and for women. 
 
 Miss Anthony was one of the first to see clearly 
 that, so far as the solution of the woman ques- 
 tion was concerned, this policy was a mistake. 
 After reluctantly adopting the Bloomer costume, 
 she abandoned it, and wrote in explanation to a 
 friend : 
 
 " I found it a physical comfort but a mental crucifixion. 
 It was an intellectual slavery; one could never get rid of 
 thinking about herself, and the important thing is to for- 
 get self. The attention of my audience was fixed upon 
 my clothes instead of my words. / learned the lesson that 
 to be successful a person must attempt but one reform. 
 By urging two, both are injured, as the average mind can 
 grasp and assimilate but one idea at a time." 
 
 In our time the phrase " woman's rights " is 
 almost exclusively used to refer to woman 
 suffrage; but when the Declaration of Sentiments
 
 268 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 was made in 1848, the denial of suffrage was 
 only one, and by no means the most important, 
 of the twelve grievances enumerated. To-day it 
 remains the most important of those not yet 
 remedied, the others being already partially ac- 
 complished and fallen back to the normal posi- 
 tion of a few among many desirable reforms for 
 the public welfare. The extremely slow prog- 
 ress of opinion with regard to suffrage has been 
 due partly to the discredit shed upon it by its 
 connection with anti-slavery; but still more to 
 the decline of enthusiasm with respect to man- 
 hood suffrage, which was originally looked upon 
 as the democratic panacea for all political and 
 social ills. 
 
 The disappointing results of manhood suffrage, 
 attributed in part to the addition of the illiterate 
 negro and the unassimilated foreigner, has led 
 to a reaction against the extension of suffrage as 
 a means of social reform. The apathy of 
 women themselves and the conservatism of intel- 
 ligent men with regard to woman suffrage may 
 be assigned in great measure to the general feel- 
 ing that, since manhood suffrage has not 
 reformed the world, the calling in of women, 
 presumably less intelligent, would produce even 
 worse conditions. 
 
 As so often happens in the development of any 
 truth, the aspects deemed most important in the
 
 WOMEN INSURGENTS 269 
 
 beginning are gradually subordinated to broader 
 ones. The emphasis upon freedom from the 
 moral domination of men, made by the first fe- 
 male insurgents, is now transferred to a readjust- 
 ment of the marriage relations and the question 
 of economic responsibility. Because the tradi- 
 tion of feminine docility and tutelage is still in 
 possession of a majority of men's minds, the 
 woman who breaks through it anywhere pays a 
 penalty. Not so terrible, not so far-reaching as 
 the first fugitives paid for their venture outside 
 their sphere, but a very real one, neverthe- 
 less. 
 
 Miss Tarbell, in her History of the American 
 Woman, has summed up the debt which the world 
 owes to the militant type of womanhood: 
 
 " She was then, and always has been, a tragic figure, 
 this woman in the front of the woman's movement driven 
 by a great unrest, sacrificing old ideals to attain new, 
 losing herself in a frantic and frequently blind struggle, 
 often putting back her cause by the sad illustration she 
 was of the price that must be paid to attain a result. . . . 
 But there is no home in the land which has not a better 
 chance for happiness, no child which does not come into 
 a better heritage, no woman who is not less narrow, no 
 man who is not less bigoted, because of the impetus their 
 struggle and sacrifice gave to the emancipation of the sex." 
 
 To the first martyrs among women we owe 
 above all the fact that, however mistaken in a
 
 270 WOMEN INSURGENTS 
 
 particular cause or method, a woman may now 
 judge for herself; that she may now begin to 
 remake her own sphere, upheld and encouraged 
 by men of larger minds, and of sympathies which 
 are at last human, not simply masculine.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 " Even the most serious-minded women of the present day 
 stand, in any work they undertake, in precisely the same re- 
 lation to men that the amateur stands to the professional in 
 games. They may be desperately interested and may work to 
 the limit of endurance at times; but, like the amateur, they got 
 into the game late, and have not had a lifetime of practice, or 
 they do not have the advantage of that pace gained only by 
 competing incessantly with players of the first rank." THOMAS 
 Sex and Society. 
 
 " The chances are that, being a woman, young, 
 And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, 
 You write as well . . . and ill ... upon the whole, 
 As other women. If as well, what then? 
 If even a little better . . . still what then? 
 
 . . Women as you are, 
 Mere women, personal and passionate, 
 You give us doating mothers, and perfect wives, 
 Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints! 
 We get no Christ from you and verily 
 We shall not get a Poet, in my mind. 
 
 You never can be satisfied with praise 
 Which men give women when they judge a book 
 Not as mere work, but as mere women's work, 
 Expressing the comparative respect 
 Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent! 
 What grace! What facile turns! What fluent sweeps! 
 What delicate discernment . . . almost thought! 
 The book does honour to the sex, we hold. 
 271
 
 272 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 Among our female authors we make room 
 For this fair writer, and congratulate 
 The country that produces in these times 
 Such women, competent to ... spell. ' " 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 THE process of making any new tradition is 
 curiously hesitating and erratic. The new idea, 
 at first proposed in some extreme form, draws to 
 its support a few strong-minded people who be- 
 come martyrs for its sake; and is then likely to 
 be taken up by the freakish or the zealously un- 
 wise, and to become odious to the conventional 
 majority. Between the proponents of the theory 
 and the conservatives, however, there will always 
 be a third group who, while lacking the courage 
 of complete conversion, will, nevertheless, have 
 a sneaking sympathy with the venture. Such as 
 these will decline to identify themselves with the 
 movement so long as it is unpopular, but they 
 cannot avoid furthering it unconsciously by indi- 
 rect expressions of their own sympathies. 
 
 Many of the early women writers of the Nine- 
 teenth Century belong to this intermediate class. 
 While the radicals embraced woman's rights and 
 anti-slavery with uncalculating fervor, and were 
 getting themselves mobbed by the populace, re- 
 proved by the clergy, and ridiculed by the press, 
 many a clever woman of the more timid and do- 
 mesticated type was encouraged to break through 
 the domestic traditions by the demand for
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 273 
 
 popular reading matter, which had opportunely 
 opened a new avocation to women. It does not 
 appear that they entered it because they were 
 especially gifted, but rather because writing was 
 a ladylike occupation, which could be pursued 
 in the seclusion of the home, under the protection 
 of a nom de plume, and in the midst of domestic 
 duties. While a few, bolder or more talented, 
 tried to compete with men in the well-worn paths 
 of literature, the most of those who, by virtue 
 of personal inclination or of bread-and-butter 
 necessity, began to write, merely followed the line 
 of least resistance. Although they and their ad- 
 mirers abjured the taint of strong-mindedness, 
 they were really in some wise driven by the same 
 human and unfeminine impulse as their militant 
 sisters. They, too, in varying degree, were 
 " sports " from the traditional feminine type, and 
 their less extravagant departure from it makes 
 their characteristics and achievements all the 
 more significant. 
 
 Among men the first national impulse toward 
 expression took the form of oratory, but among 
 conventionalized women writing was the easier 
 outlet, and the one least disapproved of by so- 
 ciety. Out of six hundred women born after 
 1800, and listed in the biographical dictionaries 
 of the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, 
 more than half entered the life of the larger
 
 274 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 world outside the home through " literature " in 
 its varied forms through cookbooks, nursery 
 tales, journalistic letters, poetry, fiction, or his- 
 tory. Then, as now, a " facile " pen and a little 
 " inspiration " were thought to be sufficient equip- 
 ment with which to undertake this graceful and 
 ladylike profession; and the amount of copy 
 turned out by such women as Mrs. Sigourney and 
 Mrs. Child was exceeded by few of their mas- 
 culine contemporaries. 
 
 As might have been expected, they almost in- 
 variably began with subjects distinctively fem- 
 inine, partly because it was familiar ground, but 
 chiefly, no doubt, because it would not be deemed 
 "unwomanly" by their critics; or, as Higginson 
 caustically put it: " Any career you choose so you 
 begin it from the kitchen." Lydia Child, who 
 afterward wrote an anti-slavery argument, which 
 has become a classic, began with a cookery book, 
 The Frugal Housewife, which went to thirty- 
 three editions; and followed it up with A Biog- 
 raphy of Good Wives and The Family Nurse. 
 In all of these she was highly popular; and might, 
 perhaps, have been equally so with her romance 
 of ancient Greece, Philothea, but for her fatal 
 espousal of the anti-slavery cause, and her de- 
 fense of John Brown. Her " Letters from New 
 York " to the Boston Courier show a profound 
 insight into the social and political problems of
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 275 
 
 the time, and have a rarely " masculine " direct- 
 ness and grasp. There was scarcely a field of 
 writing except science to which she did not 
 contribute; and in all of them housewifery, his- 
 tory, biography, religion, reform, journalistic 
 correspondence, novels, and verse she made 
 a more than creditable showing. 
 
 But in Mrs. Child's performance, as in those 
 of most of the thinking women of her time, we 
 see both that diffusion of abilities characteristic 
 of the amateur and that tendency to subordinate 
 artistic talent to a philanthropic cause which, even 
 in our day, are conspicuous traits of intellectual 
 women. Higginson said of her: 
 
 " She is one of those prominent instances in our litera- 
 ture, of persons born for the pursuits of the pure intellect 
 whose intellects were yet balanced by their hearts, and both 
 absorbed in the great moral agitation of the age. ... In 
 a community of artists, she would have belonged to that 
 class, for she had that instinct in her soul. But she was 
 placed where there was as yet no exacting literary stand- 
 ard ; she wrote better than most of her contemporaries, 
 and well enough for the public. She did not, therefore, 
 win that intellectual immortality which only the very best 
 writers command and which few Americans have at- 
 tained." 
 
 The career of Lydia Sigourney, the versifier, 
 illustrates even more vividly the facility of those 
 early women writers as well as the way in which
 
 276 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 the domestic-feminine tradition pervaded and 
 perverted all their work. One of her earlier 
 biographers devoted ten out of his fifteen tedious 
 pages to a laudation of her womanly character, 
 ending with this paragraph: 
 
 " Yet even with the temptations which her literary 
 tastes might be supposed to offer, she could never justly be 
 reproached for neglecting any home duty . . . we find 
 her at the head of her household, which at times was 
 large, shrinking from no burden of self-denial needed in 
 her work living to see her two stepdaughters educated 
 and settled in life, and the brother, at the age of forty-five, 
 consigned to a consumptive's grave; to educate her own 
 daughter and son, and then, just on the verge of a prom- 
 ising manhood, to follow him, too, to his grave; to give 
 her own only daughter away in acceptable marriage; and 
 then to settle herself down, joyful and trustful yet, in her 
 own home . . . until her own change should come." 
 
 Having thus forestalled the criticism likely to 
 be brought against this harmless literary creature 
 he grudgingly and fearfully adds: 
 
 " But, doubtless, it will be as a literary woman that she 
 will be most widely known. And no estimate of her 
 career which leaves out of account the character and value 
 of her writings can do justice to her memory." 
 
 Then, at last, we learn why she should have a 
 place among the " Eminent Women of the Age " : 
 she had published fifty-seven volumes of prose
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 277 
 
 and verse; of newspaper and magazine articles 
 nearly as much more; and for several years had 
 averaged seventeen hundred letters per year, 
 amounting to more than all her published work; 
 while all this time she was also visiting reform 
 schools, orphanages, and deaf-and-dumb asylums, 
 attending to church duties, raising a family of 
 children, and performing every required fem- 
 inine task. In truth, the modern woman, when 
 she thinks herself busy, may well humble herself 
 before such a combination of orthodox woman- 
 liness, diluted talents, and prodigious industry. 
 
 If it was natural for the women writers of 
 America to enter romance and poetry via the 
 kitchen and nursery, it was not less inevitable for 
 them to experiment in the field of journalism. 
 Progressive newspapers and periodicals, if not 
 as sensational then as now, were just as eager 
 to get something novel. The chatty, effusive, 
 clever copy produced by women of quick but 
 superficial and untrained minds was immediately 
 recognized as having a popular value; while the 
 nom de plume under which they usually wrote 
 protected them from the direct criticism suffered 
 by women more conspicuously out of their 
 sphere. 
 
 Mrs. Parton, although three times married, 
 wrote a series of " Fern Leaves," which sold into 
 the second hundred thousand; and punctually fur-
 
 278 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 nished the New York Ledger with a weekly let- 
 ter for fourteen years. For fear " her practical 
 and democratic genius " should mislead a world 
 suspicious of women who did clever things, we 
 are told that she sacrificed the latter years of 
 her life to a little granddaughter, and that 
 " whatever masks of manly independence, pride, 
 or mocking mischief Fanny Fern may put on, she 
 is, at the core of her nature, pure womanly." 
 
 Mrs. Lippincott, likewise, wrote " Leaves " 
 under the name of " Grace Greenwood," and in 
 the forties was regarded as the most copious 
 and brilliant lady correspondent of the day. But 
 the manner in which she is supposed to have done 
 it assures us that she, too, was all feminine: 
 
 " As plain Sara Clarke, she had helped her mother 
 through the morning work, sweeping, dusting, watering 
 flowers, feeding chickens, sitting down for a few moments 
 to read two stanzas to that white-haired father of hers. 
 ... In the heat of midday she seeks her chamber, gazes 
 for a few moments with the look of a lover upon the 
 glorious landscape, then dashes off a column for The Home 
 Journal or The National Press." 
 
 Mary H. Dodge, better known as " Gail Ham- 
 ilton," although apparently as feminine in nature 
 as the others, made for herself a somewhat 
 unique position as a satirist. Her fluent and 
 vitriolic, but, on the whole, just satires on society,
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 279 
 
 dress, housekeeping, men, and manners, had the 
 quality, rather rare among the earlier advocates 
 of women's rights, of presenting the masculine 
 as well as the feminine side, and on that account, 
 perhaps, produced an effect quite out of propor- 
 tion to their literary value. 
 
 Two other women Lydia Child, who has al- 
 ready been mentioned, and Margaret Fuller 
 stand on a far more dignified plane, and their 
 writings constitute a part of the history of Amer- 
 ican letters in the transcendental epoch. Mar- 
 garet Fuller because of her now acknowledged 
 genius, her conspicuous position as the editor of 
 the Dial, her keen, prophetic estimates of her lit- 
 erary contemporaries, and her tragically prema- 
 ture fate exhibits more than any other the lim- 
 itations under which any woman of talent had to 
 struggle, in the first half of the Nineteenth 
 Century. 
 
 Although brought up in the most cultivated 
 city in America, among men whose literary ideals 
 have dominated our literature for two genera- 
 tions, she had no systematic advantage of the 
 higher learning, but educated herself while per- 
 forming the petty duties of her father's house- 
 hold. Just as she was about to undertake writ- 
 ing seriously, her father died, leaving her the 
 practical head of a family of six, and with very 
 small means. Foreign languages being the most
 
 280 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 salable of her accomplishments, she began to 
 teach, and at the same time to translate and to 
 publish foreign masterpieces. Then followed 
 the establishment of her " Conversations," the 
 brief editorial work on the Dial, and a variety 
 of other literary products travels, romance, and 
 criticism. According to Professor Bates, her 
 literary significance does not chiefly depend upon 
 her actual writings, which were creditable and 
 suggestive rather than symmetrical, but rather 
 upon her " inspirational personality," which 
 counted for more than her best paragraphs. 
 
 " She was not an artist born, and her education, though 
 pursued at high pressure, had been solitary and partial. 
 It is no part of Lowell's greatness to-day that he show- 
 ered with sneering witticisms the ' Miranda ' of his 
 Fable for Critics, and Hawthorne's harsh detractions have 
 redounded to his discredit rather than to hers; but it is 
 permanently to the praise of Emerson, Higginson, and 
 James Freeman Clarke, that, beyond plain face and re- 
 pellent bearing, they discerned what the English poet 
 Landor was to hail as ' a glorious soul.' ' 
 
 Margaret Fuller's estimates of men and lit- 
 erature have been justified for the most part by 
 the standards of a later time, and her own rela- 
 tive position as a writer has risen rather than 
 declined. But one aches with pity to see the 
 paucity of tools, of training, of opportunity, and 
 of appreciation under which a creature of so
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 281 
 
 much power had to find expression. Self-made 
 and marvelous she was, indeed, but perverted and 
 far short of her best ability for want of a normal 
 medium. What was said of her might well be 
 applied to most of the talented women of that 
 time: 
 
 " Literary work being as yet crude and unorganized in 
 America, the public takes a vague delight in seeing one 
 person do a great many different things. It is like hear- 
 ing a street musician perform on six instruments at once; 
 he plays them all ill, but it is so remarkable that he 
 should play them together." 
 
 Whatever controversy there may be about the 
 incubation of genius, the conditions necessary to 
 the development of talent are tolerably well 
 settled. Among men, literary achievement has 
 usually had a prepared, one might say a 
 prophetic, atmosphere; it has found somehow its 
 opportune moment; for, as Professor Lester 
 Ward long ago pointed out, there may have been 
 many Napoleons born, but the capacity of all but 
 one remained latent for want of the right con- 
 junction of circumstances. Talent, indeed, needs 
 training in technique and the habit of mental 
 concentration, while literary gifts, above all, 
 need emotional stimulation and experience of 
 life. 
 
 Of all the literary women before the Civil
 
 282 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 War, Harriet Beecher Stowe attained the highest 
 mark; yet the conditions under which her talent 
 came to fruition were by no means favorable. 
 Born in New England, if she had remained there 
 she would have been an abolitionist, no doubt, 
 says Higginson; but she would probably not have 
 written Uncle Tom's Cabin! Although reared 
 in a cultivated and brilliant family, it was an at- 
 mosphere far more congenial to philosophical 
 discussion than to the creative imagination. 
 Married early, and heavily weighted with poverty 
 and motherhood; without any chance for isola- 
 tion or continuous thinking; she found only one 
 thing to give her talent impetus the moral issue 
 of slavery. Compare the equipment and the con- 
 ditions of Mrs. Stowe with that of her distin- 
 guished contemporaries, Lowell, Emerson, or 
 Longfellow, who lived in an atmosphere of high- 
 est culture and liberal letters, undistracted by 
 babies, cooking, dishwashing, and family nurs- 
 ing; who were, moreover, encouraged by their 
 fellows, and in line with the accepted conventions 
 of the masculine world! But for the exceptional 
 and almost accidental circumstance that Pro- 
 fessor Stowe sympathized with his wife's literary 
 aspirations, it is probable that Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin could not have been written. Even so, we 
 are told that it had to be produced " under griev- 
 ous burdens and disadvantages . . . much of it
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 283 
 
 actually written as she sat with her portfolio on 
 her knee by the kitchen fire in moments snatched 
 from domestic cares." 
 
 But Mrs. Stowe, above all the women of her 
 day, was fortunate in having a subject that burned 
 within her a topic not purely feminine, but of 
 tremendous and world-wide interest. For this 
 once she emerged into one of the luminous mo- 
 ments of history, and not even her conventional 
 sex limitations could suppress the power of her 
 moral vision. In spite of an uncertain touch, 
 and though her mind was, perhaps, neither very 
 strong nor profound, the conjunction of an 
 artistic impulse and vital emotion with the golden 
 moment of her opportunity makes her still, after 
 more than half a century, one of the foremost 
 literary figures of her time. Nor does it lessen 
 her preeminence that the picturesqueness of the 
 negro and the evangelical flavor of her chief 
 story have carried it among readers to whom the 
 moral issue of slavery was of minor interest. 
 Cooper and Helen Hunt Jackson both owed as 
 much to the Indian; and many a best-seller of 
 modern times would drop dead on the market but 
 for its conventional religious appeal. 
 
 The majority even of the best equipped 
 women of that earlier day had so little intellectual 
 stimulus and so little experience of life outside of 
 domesticity, that they were perforce confined to
 
 284 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 purely feminine topics or to the current plati- 
 tudes of ethics and religion. The tradition that 
 a thinking, and still more a speaking, woman was 
 dangerous to society, checked any natural tend- 
 ency to choose more vital and picturesque sub- 
 jects. While educated men in the more refined 
 circles sometimes encouraged their women friends 
 to write, they rarely urged them to go farther 
 than the fields of harmlessly " pure " literature. 
 Indeed, one of the striking and almost uniform 
 characteristics of these early literary amateurs, 
 is their dependence upon a father or a husband 
 for their " atmosphere." Those who married 
 educated men like Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Lamb, 
 Helen Hunt Jackson, Mrs. Howe, Luella Smith, 
 Maria Child found in the backing given by their 
 husbands something to neutralize the unfriendly 
 attitude of a world which still looked coldly upon 
 an unprotected woman who undertook any un- 
 usual work. 
 
 The married woman whose husband was sym- 
 pathetic and encouraging to her intellectual aims 
 was, by so much, better off than those who faced 
 the disapproval of the world alone. For self- 
 doubt is infinitely more dangerous to the creative 
 faculty than any public censure, and the women 
 of the Nineteenth Century were brought up in 
 the belief that for a woman to compete with 
 credit in the world of art and intellect was as ab-
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 285 
 
 normal as for a dog to walk erect and far less 
 possible. 
 
 " The literary women of America before Mar- 
 garet Fuller," says Professor Bates, " pursued 
 their quest of truth or beauty with all feminine 
 timidity;" and then, with humorous touch, she 
 describes " the craven air of Hannah Adams, 
 who had toiled over bookmaking all her apolo- 
 getic days, who, with eyes grown dim, was look- 
 ing wistfully toward heaven as a place where she 
 might find her thirst for knowledge fully grati- 
 fied." Anything was easier for the unprotected 
 woman than to combat the age-long standards of 
 her world, and therefore only those driven by ir- 
 repressible talent or by economic necessity were 
 likely to make a venture into fields hitherto un- 
 traversed by their sex. It is a striking fact that a 
 very considerable number of the first feminine at- 
 tempts in American literature were made under 
 the menace of poverty into which women of 
 talent were thrown by the loss of a father or 
 husband. The avenues of self-support for cul- 
 tivated women were so thorny and so few that 
 plain necessity drove such as Mrs. Southworth, 
 Amelia Barr, Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, the two 
 Carys, Maria Wright, and many others, to writ- 
 ing as a means of livelihood. 
 
 Sometimes women of ability were diverted into 
 writing merely because they could get no training
 
 286 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 or opportunity for the development of less com- 
 mon talents; as in the case of the energetic and 
 versatile Amanda Douglas who, after a hard 
 life on the farm and without a chance to study 
 designing and engraving which she loved, wrote 
 a lot of poor novels and stories. Or, like Mrs. 
 Dodge who, diverted by marriage from the study 
 of sculpture, afterwards produced a children's 
 classic in the little book, Hans Brinker, and, while 
 editor of St. Nicholas, much other prose and 
 verse. 
 
 The current histories of American literature, 
 dealing chiefly with the writers who attained dis- 
 tinction before the last quarter of the Nineteenth 
 Century, differ widely both quantitatively and 
 qualitatively in their estimate of the place of 
 women; but they are substantially agreed that no 
 woman had reached first rank in any line of 
 literature at the National Era. One author men- 
 tions only a scant half-dozen in seventy-five 
 years, granting to two of them, Margaret Fuller 
 Ossoli and Harriet Beecher Stowe, exceptional 
 merit; another expands the list to a dozen, giv- 
 ing them a creditable place in the second and 
 third ranks of literary achievement. A third, 
 both more inclusive and more discriminating, 
 finds no more than thirty women before 1890 
 whose productions contributed anything of real 
 significance to the history of American Letters.
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 287 
 
 Measured quantitatively, women writers were 
 from one-tenth to one-fourth as many as men; 
 qualitatively, few reached even the secondary 
 rank, and none at all the first. Among the 
 greater names in the National Era of our litera- 
 ture Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, 
 Emerson, and Whittier no woman appears; and 
 yet fifty years afterward there was scarcely a 
 field of writing in which some woman had not 
 attained an excellent secondary rank, and in a few 
 they were standing side by side with men. 
 
 Looking back over that period in which the 
 domestic-feminine traditions were being broken 
 down, it is easy to see why amateurs of both 
 sexes produced at first so much that was crude 
 and trivial, sentimental and unreal, stilted in 
 tone and lacking in form. All the criticisms on 
 the writings of women before 1875 had been 
 applied with equal force two generations earlier 
 to the productions of American men of letters. 
 English and American critics vie with each 
 other in pointing out the provincialism, the lack 
 of originality and power. In truth, precisely the 
 same causes which had delayed the development 
 of men in literature, operated through a longer 
 period and with greater force to prevent women 
 from producing anything of permanent value. 
 It was said that American men lacked contact with 
 the great minds of all ages but women experi-
 
 288 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 enced the lack to a far greater degree. Harvard 
 College alone educated three out of five of the 
 foremost literary men of the Nineteenth Century, 
 and opened the door into the wider atmosphere of 
 universal thought to a thousand more, long be- 
 fore any woman had so much as put her foot upon 
 the threshold of any real seat of higher learning. 
 Although nearly all the women writers were 
 credited by their biographers with an unusual love 
 of books, their writings show, as did those of men 
 who made the first attempts, a painful deficiency 
 in literary technique. It is certainly not without 
 significance that only sixty of the four hundred 
 and eighty-seven women authors who attained 
 mention in the Who's Who of 1901-2 had a col- 
 lege training, while among the distinguished men 
 of every class, two-thirds had taken college de- 
 grees. The literary women, therefore, must 
 have been educated if at all, beyond the gram- 
 mar grade by self-trained teachers in inferior 
 schools, where the " ornamental " were sub- 
 stituted for the " solid " branches. Most of 
 them satisfied their intellectual hunger by miscel- 
 laneous reading and study, and missed entirely 
 the give-and-take by which men whetted their 
 minds on each other's knowledge. The taste for 
 serious reading and culture which must be ac- 
 quired early in life, if at all, was encouraged in 
 boys destined for a profession but never in
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 289 
 
 girls. We are told that Emerson, Longfellow, 
 Holmes, and Lowell were " bred to cultivation 
 by cultivated parents," and had " tumbled about 
 in libraries." It illuminates, if it does not wholly 
 explain, the voluminous and relatively feeble re- 
 sults achieved by the earlier women, to remem- 
 ber that the very few who attained a place, also 
 lived in the atmosphere of higher culture. Mar- 
 garet Fuller and Lydia Child shared to some ex- 
 tent, though indirectly, the inspirational influences 
 of Cambridge; Harriet Beecher was reared in 
 the stimulating circle of a brilliant family and an 
 intellectual coterie; and Emily Dickinson, recluse 
 though she was, could not escape the mental im- 
 petus of a professor's household. 
 
 They were all deficient in technique in propor- 
 tion to their deficiencies in mental training; still 
 more, in breadth of view in consequence of their 
 narrow life experience. " Words wait on 
 thought and thought on life." The difference be- 
 tween the occasional woman who reached a kind 
 of literary eminence, and the larger number who 
 are quite forgotten now by all but the literary his- 
 torian, seems to lie rather in the degree of cul- 
 ture and of life experience than in any perceptible 
 difference in native ability. It may be that we 
 owe Uncle Tom's Cabin to the fact that a New 
 England woman was transplanted to a Western 
 border state, and set down where the tragedies of
 
 290 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 the fugitive slave law gave her talent a concrete 
 impulse; and, perhaps, the accidental circum- 
 stance of life in California gave to the author of 
 Ramona her first effective contact with the real 
 life of the world. Certain it is that, in addition 
 to the artistic gift and the hunger for ideal ex- 
 pression in words, there must be the stuff of 
 vital experience with which to work; and of this, 
 women, by the very stationary and domestic con- 
 dition of their lives, had almost nothing as com- 
 pared with men, and even yet have immeasurably 
 less. 
 
 The early female writers were, too, like their 
 masculine forerunners, caught fast in a saccharine 
 slough of sentiment and piety which in itself de- 
 stroyed all freedom of thought and originality 
 of method. The cheerful Carys wrote dismal 
 stanzas of death and despair, affecting what they 
 could not feel. The " exemplary " Mrs. Sigour- 
 ney, " phenomenon rather than an author," com- 
 posed verse while knitting socks for the family 
 in which were commemorated in the approved 
 lachrymose phrases, the funerals, baptisms, and 
 weddings in the circle of her friends. The most 
 successful of the women story-writers invariably 
 combined sentiment and religious emotionality 
 upon a commonplace domestic background. As 
 Professor Trent has pointed out, there was not a 
 trace of romantic interest, and the style was in-
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 291 
 
 evitably mediocre and didactic; but whether they 
 portrayed the fortunes of an orphan girl rescued 
 from low life, or the conscientious struggles of a 
 schoolgirl vibrating between tears and prayers, 
 such fiction could be safely recommended by 
 pastors to their flocks as proper mental and 
 spiritual pabulum. 
 
 Though women writers had no monopoly of 
 this " milk and water " literature, the middle- 
 class standard set for them was one more weight 
 to hold them back from beholding or attempting 
 better things. In writing, as in every other 
 effort, though less consciously, they were coerced 
 by the tradition of the inferiority of the fem- 
 inine intellect. Since the province of women- 
 kind was feeling rather than thinking, they felt 
 themselves incompetent outside the realm of 
 didactic poetry and fiction. The literary men of 
 an earlier time had been under a similar thrall 
 through Puritanism, but they had been sooner 
 emancipated into the air of world-culture with- 
 out which literature is seldom created. 
 
 In addition to all the other limitations of su- 
 perficial education, and absence of intellectual 
 atmosphere, opportunity, and stimulus, women 
 of the Nineteenth Century had still another, self- 
 distrust, which in itself would almost account for 
 their meager representation in the literature of 
 the national era. To man all things are sup-
 
 292 LITERARY AMATEURS 
 
 posedly possible, but nothing intellectual was then 
 believed to be possible to woman; and when, here 
 and there, against great odds, some woman rose 
 above her sex-limitations, compelling recognition, 
 it was set down as merely exceptional, not char- 
 acteristic nor attainable by her kind. The very 
 essence of genius is supreme confidence in what 
 one has to say. A distinguished actress, in dis- 
 cussing the fact that plays are generally written 
 by men, has lately said: 
 
 " Because they are so tremendously clever and such tre- 
 mendous egotists that's why men write greater things 
 than women they are capable of such limitless belief in 
 themselves. All the great creators were so egotists all." 
 
 To all the disadvantages under which men of 
 literary talent had risen and sunk in America, 
 women added self-distrust created by the hostil- 
 ity of a society pervaded by the strict domestic 
 traditions of femininity. And, moreover, the 
 woman of talent was often paralyzed not merely 
 by the common assumption that her mind must 
 be inferior, but by her own fear that she was 
 morally wrong in feeding her slender flame. 
 
 No sooner had the tradition of mental inferi- 
 ority been broken, the doors of culture opened 
 into the universe, and the attention of a reading 
 public attained, than there appeared talented 
 women by the score who, in a single generation,
 
 LITERARY AMATEURS 293 
 
 and though still handicapped, earned a wide and 
 creditable reputation for serious literary work. 
 As yet, it does not appear how far they may go, 
 nor to what degree their achievements will be 
 colored by sex-experience. But in the space of 
 half a century they have gone so far that the 
 tale of such crude, effeminate, and imitative ef- 
 forts as their sex once timidly made, already 
 sounds far off and strange.
 
 SECTION IV 
 
 FROM FEMININITY TO WOMAN- 
 HOOD
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 " I consider it presumptuous in any one to pretend to decide 
 what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural con- 
 stitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as re- 
 gards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state that 
 their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and dis- 
 guised, and no one can safely pronounce, that if woman's nature 
 were left to choose its direction as freely as men's, and if no 
 artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that re- 
 quired by the conditions of human society, and given to both 
 sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or, perhaps, 
 any difference at all, in the character and capacities which 
 would unfold themselves." JOHN STUART MILL. 
 
 " We are probably in about the same position and stage with 
 reference to the questions of sex as were the men of the 
 eighteenth century with reference to the question of evolution." 
 LESTER F. WARD. 
 
 IN discussing the difference between men and 
 women, the words " male " and " female " are 
 perfectly definite, but in the related terms " mas- 
 culine " and " feminine " there is included a large 
 number of physical, mental, and social character- 
 istics which are variable and unstable, sometimes 
 capable of a precise description, but oftener as 
 accidental and temporary as the fashions of the 
 times. The scientists who have tried to measure 
 
 297
 
 298 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 women by the physical and mental standards of 
 men quite frankly admit that, beyond the primary 
 sex differences, and a very few permanent sec- 
 ondary qualities, there is a vast debatable area 
 of variation which must engage the attention of 
 future investigators. There is no debate about 
 the significance of a smooth face in women and 
 of a beard in men, nor about the contrasting 
 timbre of their voices, but whether the fact that 
 women have fewer red corpuscles than men sig- 
 nifies that they are a feebler race, or merely less 
 developed than men in our age and time, is an 
 open question. 
 
 Whether less sensitiveness to pain and greater 
 sensitiveness to emotions on the part of woman 
 indicates an ineradicable difference of nerve 
 centers, or merely of conventional training; 
 whether she was born unstable and changeable, 
 or made so by the limitations of her life these 
 and similar disputes have been settled, only to be 
 unsettled soon afterward by equally scientific 
 authority. In such a conspicuous matter as men- 
 tality the dogmatisms of research with regard 
 to the inferior brain capacity and intellectual 
 products of women, were scarcely uttered before 
 they became untenable by reason of the achieve- 
 ments of women themselves at first of a few 
 brilliant exceptions only, and shortly afterwards, 
 of an increasing number as education and oppor-
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 299 
 
 tunity were extended to them. As a current 
 journal humorously puts it: women have lived to 
 do everything that it was said they could not do, 
 except grow whiskers. 
 
 It is only a short time as progress goes 
 since men as far-seeing as Darwin and Huxley 
 held that the " intuitive " or " womanly " quality 
 of mind, the quick perception, and rapid imita- 
 tion characteristic of women, put them in the 
 same category with bygone civilizations and the 
 lower races. But from the time that Buckle 
 showed that the most important discoveries of 
 modern time have resulted from the deductive 
 method, that is, from the feminine habit of mind, 
 there has been an increasing tendency to believe 
 that imagination and intuition were effecting 
 quite as much progress as the logical understand- 
 ing. Certainly there is a consensus of opinion 
 among modern psychologists and sociologists in 
 placing higher value upon the very mental quality 
 which was not long ago held to establish finally 
 woman's inferiority. 
 
 The ground of the disputes over the qualities 
 and capacity of women has come to lie quite out- 
 side the primary sex-functions, or even the sec- 
 ondary sex characters, which were evolved ap- 
 parently to insure reproduction. Indeed, the 
 characteristics in dispute range from the sig- 
 nificance of the larger thyroid gland in the human
 
 300 'SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 female to the effect of voting on her loyalty to 
 domestic duty from the investigation of her 
 senses to the causes of divorce. In short, it is 
 no longer a question of what women could or 
 could not do if they had an equal chance, but of 
 what is likely to be the effect of their trying to do, 
 under a handicap, whatever they have the cour- 
 age to attempt. In our present stage, the con- 
 clusions as to the permanence or significance of 
 any feminine peculiarity at which any observer 
 will arrive are in accordance usually with his 
 habitual anti- or pro-feminine bias. In this re- 
 spect, the discussion resembles the attempt to de- 
 termine species and sub-species in natural history. 
 In any large number of specimens there are al- 
 ways some on the border-line; whether these will 
 be named as new species or relegated to a lower 
 place as sub-species or varieties, depends almost 
 wholly on the personal idiosyncrasy of the 
 naturalist. 
 
 In some aspects the woman-questions are 
 analogous to race questions. We know tolerably 
 well what degree of civilization the darker races 
 have attained in their native habitats; but there is 
 very little accurate, unbiased information as to 
 the degree and conditions of the progress which 
 any of these races has made in other climates, 
 and under the stimulus of new environments. 
 Only two decades ago it was confidently predicted
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 301 
 
 on scientific grounds that the Hawaiian race 
 would shortly die out; but their increasing birth- 
 rate and decreasing death-rate may now portend a 
 chance of survival. Nor has the last word been 
 said concerning their ultimate contribution to 
 civilization, since the Hawaiian-Chinese half- 
 breed youth have lately surpassed all others in 
 the local schools. 
 
 An even more striking instance of premature 
 condemnation of an apparently static race is af- 
 forded by the Chinese. It is scarcely half a cen- 
 tury since China was an unknown country, and 
 the Chinese to our complacent view a weird, 
 incredible, uncivilized people; yet in that time 
 China has risen to be one of the greater powers, 
 and is, moreover, on the verge of developing sud- 
 denly, out of her village democracies, a mod- 
 ern constitutional government or republic. The 
 guesses as to the Chinese capacity for progress 
 have been favorable or unfavorable according to 
 the critic's degree of instinctive race prejudice, 
 and his equipment of hearsay or first-hand in- 
 formation. Surely, if in so short a time the 
 " Heathen Chinee " can rise to be a progressive 
 human being in our estimation, it is not impossible 
 that women may become social entities, whose ac- 
 quired " femininity " may be modifying faster 
 than the carefully digested ideas of scientific ob- 
 servers.
 
 302 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 After a round century of discussion and in- 
 vestigation, the real crux of the woman question 
 is still whether some of the so-called secondary 
 and all of the tertiary sex characters are inherent 
 and relatively permanent, or whether they are 
 merely temporary variations due to environ- 
 mental and social causes. Granting that male- 
 ness and femaleness are fundamental and, in the 
 higher orders of life, unchangeable after birth, 
 are the peculiarities comprised in what is called 
 "femininity" and "masculinity" equally fixed? 
 For a good many hundred years it has been 
 assumed that they were unalterable, but the 
 discoveries in biology and the rise of democratic 
 theory have together undermined this as well as 
 many other dogmas. 
 
 One of the most surprising results of this 
 change in thinking about women is, that while 
 the number of qualities denominated " strictly 
 feminine " has been rapidly diminishing, mas- 
 culinity has remained in the minds of most peo- 
 ple, until quite recently, a fixed congeries of char- 
 acteristics. Yet one has only to catalogue the 
 men of his acquaintance to realize that manliness 
 is scarcely a more definite conception than woman- 
 liness. Professor Sargent of Harvard Univer- 
 sity is quoted as having said recently that the 
 modern youth is rapidly approaching effeminacy 
 and the modern girl masculinity, in their physical
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 303 
 
 type. Professor Gayley of the University of 
 California about the same time characterized 
 the male college student as follows : 
 
 "Busy to no purpose, imitative, aimless; boastful but 
 unreliant; inquisitive, but quickly losing interest; fitful, 
 inconsequential, platitudinous, forgetful; noisy, sudden, in- 
 effectual." 
 
 Curiously enough, the adjectives with, per- 
 haps, the exception of u boastful " are precisely 
 the ones applied to women. Professor Wood- 
 worth, the entomologist of the University of 
 California, goes much farther in his views of the 
 possible changes in sex-function. He suggests 
 that we may be approaching a new social adjust- 
 ment like that of the ant-colony, where, in cer- 
 tain members of both sexes, the reproductive 
 function will be subordinated to other forms of 
 efficiency. Altogether, the present views of sci- 
 entific men are so contradictory and so revolu- 
 tionary, and the type of domestic womanhood 
 is differentiating so fast and in so many unex- 
 pected directions, that no one can safely commit 
 himself to any dogmatic statement beyond the 
 fact that whatever babies are born in the future 
 will still be born of woman. 
 
 To the discussion of feminine possibilities the 
 evolutionary scientists have made, so far, the
 
 304 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 most important contributions perhaps because 
 they may know better than other thinkers the 
 stultifying nature of dogmatism and the danger 
 of prophecy. The feminist movement, though 
 begun in a period when it was expected that 
 science would prove that woman had been and 
 eternally must be inferior to man, has ended by 
 showing that most of the things formerly as- 
 sumed are either not so or, at any rate, question- 
 able. Starting at this point, the Twentieth Cen- 
 tury observer must ask: why are women as they 
 are? The thoughtful person who sees what the 
 semi-feudal, almost unreasoning peasant of 
 Eighteenth-Century Europe has become in this 
 country, under the stimulus of wider economic 
 opportunities, and relieved from the pressure of 
 militarism, may properly hesitate to predict what 
 womankind might be with an equal liberation and 
 as strong an impetus. 
 
 It might, perhaps, be asserted that the distance 
 between the two extremes of opinion as to sex 
 capacity is now generally in inverse proportion to 
 the amount of exact knowledge of its mani- 
 festants. Certainly the sociologists who have 
 taken the most pains to test out their material 
 carefully are the least dogmatic as to what may 
 be expected of women. Mr. Havelock Ellis, 
 after a thorough examination of all the available 
 data on sex characters, reached most inconclusive
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 305 
 
 results, as may be seen from the following para- 
 graphs : 
 
 " We have to recognize that our present knowledge 
 of men and women cannot tell us what they might be or 
 what they ought to be, but what they actually are, under 
 the varying conditions of civilization. By showing us 
 that under varying conditions men and women are, within 
 certain limits, indefinitely modifiable, a precise knowledge 
 of the exact facts of the life of men and women forbids us 
 to dogmatize rigidly concerning the respective spheres of 
 men and women. It is a matter which experience alone 
 can demonstrate in detail. . . . The small group of 
 women who wish to prove the absolute inferiority of the 
 male sex, the larger group of men who wish to circum- 
 scribe rigidly the sphere of woman, must alike be ruled out 
 of court. . . . 
 
 ' The facts are far too complex to enable us to rush 
 hastily to a conclusion as to their significance. The facts, 
 moreover, are so numerous that even when we have ascer- 
 tained the precise significance of some one fact, we cannot 
 be sure that it is not contradicted by other facts. And so 
 many of the facts are modified under a changing environ- 
 ment that in the absence of experience we cannot pro- 
 nounce definitely regarding the behavior of either the 
 male or the female organisms under different conditions. 
 There is but one tribunal w r hose sentence is final and 
 without appeal. Only Nature can pronounce the 
 legitimacy of social modifications. The sentence may be 
 sterility or death, but no other tribunal, no appeal to com- 
 mon-sense, will serve instead." 
 
 The contemporary psychologists, as well, 
 speak in a very different tone from those of a
 
 3 o6 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 generation past both less dogmatically and more 
 hopefully as regards what the feminine mind is 
 capable of. Quite recently, in a discussion of 
 co-education, Professor John Dewey wrote: 
 
 " Upon no subject has there been so much dogmatic as- 
 sertion, based upon so little scientific evidence, as upon the 
 male and female types of mind. We know that traits are 
 transmitted from grandfather to grandson through the 
 mother, even the traits most specific in nature. This, with 
 other accessible facts, demonstrates that such differences 
 of mental characteristics as exist are those of arrangement, 
 proportion, and emphasis, rather than of kind and quality. 
 Moreover, it is scientifically demonstrable that the aver- 
 age difference between men and women is much less than 
 the individual difference among either men or women 
 themselves." 
 
 As the conclusion of a recent examination into 
 " The Mental Traits of Sex," Helen B. Thomp- 
 son says: 
 
 " The point to be emphasized as the outcome of this 
 study is, that, according to our present light, the psycho- 
 logical differences of sex seem to be largely due, not to 
 difference of average capacity nor to difference in type of 
 mental activity, but to the difference in the social in- 
 fluences brought to bear on the developing individual from 
 early infancy to adult years. The question of the future 
 development of the intellectual life of women is one of 
 social necessities and ideals rather than of the inborn 
 psychological characteristics of sex."
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 307 
 
 In the examination of female sex character- 
 istics, the working hypothesis of the early Nine- 
 teenth Century was that these were nearly all 
 fundamental, and, therefore, unchangeable; but 
 the scientists, in the course of developing the evo- 
 lutionary theory, have compiled a great array of 
 facts, showing that some of these are much less 
 fixed than others; and that some, once supposed 
 to be immutable, never existed except in abnormal 
 persons. Take, for instance, the conspicuous 
 case of women's respiration, declared by Dr. 
 Hutchinson in the Eighteenth Century to be 
 costal, and, therefore, quite different from the 
 abdominal type of man. For a hundred years this 
 was taught as a physiological fact; and yet, in 
 1896, Dr. Clelia D. Mosher of Stanford Uni- 
 versity, and Dr. Fitz of Harvard, overturned 
 simultaneously this " fact " by more accurate 
 data, and the physiologies now state that, 
 normally, women and men breathe alike. 
 
 The views of physiologists with regard to so 
 deep-seated a limitation as the menstrual func- 
 tion are rapidly changing. The idea of the 
 " curse upon woman," as developed by religious 
 dogma, and the vulgar superstitions arising from 
 it, have been displaced by the acceptance of men- 
 struation as a perfectly normal function; and the 
 incapacity which has often accompanied it in civ-
 
 3 o8 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 ilized woman is according to the latest medical 
 dictum as remediable by education and correct 
 habits as other functional disorders. 
 
 Between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth 
 Centuries, the ground of debate regarding women 
 has been gradually shifting from sex character- 
 istics to the effect of the social environment upon 
 women in producing perversion and limitation of 
 character. Now, in all this series of assump- 
 tions, re-examinations of data, discovery of new 
 facts, and making of new hypotheses, only a few 
 women have appeared to give direct testimony. 
 It has been an examination by men of phenomena 
 relating to women as they appear to men to be. 
 In the present state of conventional relations be- 
 tween men and women, men certainly know more 
 about their own sex than about women; and if 
 women are, in truth, the inexplicable and incon- 
 sistent creatures that they are commonly repre- 
 sented to be, they must know far more about each 
 other's processes than any man could hope to 
 find out. Only a human being combining all the 
 experiences of man's and woman's life could 
 really accurately describe the life history of either 
 sex. Weiniger, a morbid but keen observer, has 
 pointed out that every man has some feminine, 
 and every woman some masculine, attributes. 
 However true this may be, the differentiation of 
 sex habits and thought is so extreme that each sex
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 309 
 
 has lost in great measure the power to under- 
 stand the other. 
 
 In the discussion now going on of what 
 women have been, should be, and should not be 
 there is a missing factor. Not many men and, 
 perhaps, only a very clear-thinking woman, can 
 analyze and visualize the lives of women as they 
 are on the inside. While a few notably sympa- 
 thetic scientists, like Professor Ward and Pro- 
 fessor Thomas, have brought out the effect of 
 restriction and environment upon women, the full 
 weight of social tradition in over-developing 
 some of the superficial feminine qualities, and 
 suppressing other deep-seated ones, has not been 
 measured. Take, for instance, the assumption 
 that most women think superficially and with less 
 logic than men, which is probably a fact. Ward 
 says they reach conclusions by intuition, a sort 
 of short-cut method evolved by the emergencies 
 of their lives. Yet any woman knows from her 
 childhood that men prefer to do her thinking for 
 her, and will disapprove of her if she sets up an 
 opinion against theirs. In primitive ages not 
 only was thinking unnecessary for a woman be- 
 yond the narrow range of her traditional duties, 
 but it was an actual impropriety. Now only a 
 genius, a reformer, or a mad person does what 
 will be disapproved of. Until the last half- 
 century, marriage was the only career open to
 
 3 io SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 women a thinking woman was not attractive to 
 men therefore the astute young woman either 
 stopped reasoning as far as possible when she 
 came to years of discretion, or concealed her men- 
 tal operations. Many a woman who attains her 
 ends by coquetry and hysteria is, like the parrot 
 who couldn't talk, keeping up a " devil of a 
 thinkin' " all the while; and will confide to an- 
 other woman, who is in the secret, a keen analysis 
 of the issue involved. 
 
 At the same time a sort of compensatory 
 habitude has been acquired in her extraordinary 
 capacity for emotion. Many a man yields to 
 unreasonable demands on the part of some 
 woman because he is afraid she will cry or fly 
 into a tantrum. Women, not being so illogical 
 as they often seem, have concluded reasonably 
 enough to use the easiest method of getting what 
 they want. Indeed, throughout the ages there has 
 been as high a premium on tears and temper 
 in one sex, as on fighting and profanity in the 
 other. On the other hand, although men are 
 as a rule more self-controlled than women- 
 mothers rarely find marked differences in this re- 
 spect between little boys and girls, when held to 
 identical standards of self-restraint. 
 
 In short, tradition and convention have oper- 
 ated with much more force upon women than 
 upon men; and, until the Nineteenth Century in
 
 America, the opportunity for self-expression on 
 the part of women has been much less. So long 
 as a man was law-abiding and self-supporting, he 
 might be as eccentric as he chose in minor social 
 matters without incurring any disastrous social 
 penalty; but non-conformity to social conventions 
 on the part of women has always carried with it 
 a disproportionate disgrace. 
 
 The loosening up of all conventions and dog- 
 mas, social and religious, in the Twentieth Cen- 
 tury, is releasing an extraordinary variety of 
 human nature; but the predominant type of 
 womanhood still remains that of the middle Nine- 
 teenth Century, produced by a purely domestic 
 life and the now fast-vanishing standard of what 
 is properly feminine. Men are a sex and some- 
 thing more. If they were judged historically, 
 merely by their achievements in paternity, and if 
 their opportunities in life had been limited for an 
 incalculable time to the field of domesticity, they 
 also might show the marks of a confined and 
 stunted existence. This explains, from a wom- 
 an's standpoint, why women have been until 
 recently The Sex, and so little more. For 
 women are pretty much the product of what they 
 were taught they should be, modified by the op- 
 portunity they have had to be otherwise. 
 
 Quite recently there have been a few serious 
 books by men in which women are examined from
 
 312 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 the research standpoint: in which they are com- 
 pared with men, biologically, psychologically, 
 ethnologically. But, however useful as contribu- 
 tions to the natural history of the human fe- 
 male, they tend almost inevitably to over- 
 emphasize the sex characters and to revert to 
 them as the obvious explanation of feminine 
 character and conduct. It is plain that the study 
 of women by men alone is as one-sided and in- 
 complete as the studies of animals by the labora- 
 tory zoologist, when uncorrected by the field col- 
 lector and the observer of their habits in the 
 open. It may certainly be taken for granted 
 that to men the processes of womenkind seem 
 more complex and less consistent than their own; 
 and there is, in fact, a whole area of thought and 
 feeling in women of which not even husbands 
 catch more than a glimpse now and then, and 
 which has been described only indirectly, and 
 often morbidly, in the " problem " fiction, which 
 men as a class avoid reading. 
 
 Having assumed that women are inexplicable, 
 most men approach such subjects as woman's edu- 
 cation, or her economic status or suffrage, in a 
 confused state of mind, which is a mixture of 
 tradition and instinctive prejudice, modified in 
 each particular case, by the few female types they 
 happen to know most intimately. The most just- 
 minded, even, find it difficult to reason impartially
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 313 
 
 about any woman question as they would about 
 other purely economic or sociological problems, 
 because it is most closely allied to race questions, 
 and, therefore, involves the more sensitive human 
 relations; perhaps, also, in some cases, because 
 they find a personal application which is unwel- 
 come. 
 
 Again, although men may recognize among 
 themselves a thousand shadings in masculine ef- 
 ficiency and morality, they put the women whom 
 they respect and admire in one class, and those 
 whom they use or " have no use for " in another; 
 and, without reasoning at all, are apt to set 
 down those whose deference flatters them as 
 " womanly," and those who do not always agree 
 with them as " strong-minded." This men con- 
 tinue to do in spite of the obvious fact that there 
 have been evolved in the last century many differ- 
 entiations from the original domestic and com- 
 pulsorily chaste type, types whose desires and 
 functions both in the home and in society are cor- 
 respondingly varied. 
 
 Chronologically, the Nineteenth Century cov- 
 ers the lives of three distinct types of women: the 
 Colonial, born after the Revolution, but strictly 
 adhering to the traditions of pure maternity and 
 of domestic manufacture; the mid-century type, 
 born before the Civil War, and in process of 
 transition from a producing to a semi-ornamental
 
 314 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 class; and the later, transitional varieties, who, 
 though inheriting earlier traditions, were un- 
 consciously forced to break away from them by 
 industrial and social changes which they did not 
 comprehend. 
 
 The grandmothers of the middle-aged woman 
 of to-day of American stock belonged to the first 
 or left-over Colonial type; their mothers to the 
 mid-century transitional generation; while they 
 themselves are of many differentiating classes- 
 some still purely domestic and clinging to the 
 handicrafts of home production; others nom- 
 inally domestic, but largely ornamental; still 
 others struggling for a foothold in an economic 
 world for which they have had no adequate 
 preparation; and, finally, a few, better educated 
 or more fortunate in their opportunities, who 
 have successfully reached a degree of distinction 
 under physical and conventional handicaps far 
 greater than those usually suffered by their mas- 
 culine models. All of these and many other 
 variants were maternal in greater or less measure 
 as temperament and fate determined. To the 
 earlier type, marriage, maternity, and domesticity 
 were inevitable and inseparable. Hie confusion 
 of thinking in which both men and women now 
 find themselves arises in part from the fact that 
 many women in our day are seen to be maternal 
 without being in the least domesticated; while a
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 315 
 
 smaller number are essentially domestic without 
 being in the least maternal; and a third group, 
 both domestic in taste and maternal in instinct, 
 are, nevertheless, making a place in the industrial 
 world. 
 
 The fear which many intelligent men display at 
 any proposal to alter the sphere of women comes, 
 in some measure, from paucity of ideas. They 
 have not studied the feminist movement, and they 
 see the difficulty of readjusting the current ideas 
 of family duty and marriage relations to admit 
 women to larger liberty. They find it easier, 
 therefore, to continue to assume that, men having 
 made the world largely as it is, they should know 
 what is best for women, and that no reconsidera- 
 tion is necessary. 
 
 Furthermore, the conditions of modern social 
 life overstimulate the sexuality of men, and any 
 change in the lives of women which might result 
 in the limitation of their sex function is resented. 
 Modern women, on the other hand, resent equally 
 the pervasive belief that their sex functions repre- 
 sent their only really useful contribution to soci- 
 ety. Half a century ago Thomas Wentworth 
 Higginson voiced the views of a few whose num- 
 ber has now become legion: 
 
 " Every creature, male or female, finds in its sexual rela- 
 tions a subordinate part of its existence. The need of
 
 3i6 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 
 
 food, the need of exercise, the joy of living, these come 
 first and absorb the bulk of its life whether the individual 
 be male or female. . . . Two riders pass . . . my win- 
 dow; one rides a horse, the other a mare. The animals 
 were, perhaps, foaled in the same stable, of the same 
 progenitors. They have been reared alike, fed alike, 
 trained alike, ridden alike,; they need the same exercise, 
 the same grooming; nine tenths of their existence are the 
 same, and only the other tenth is different. Their whole 
 organization is marked by the distinction of sex; but, 
 though the marking is ineffaceable, the distinction is not 
 the first or most important fact, . . . This is not denying 
 the distinctions of sex, but only asserting that they are not 
 so inclusive and all-absorbing as is supposed. It is easy to 
 name other grounds of difference which entirely ignore 
 those of sex, striking directly across them, and rendering 
 a different classification necessary. It is thus with distinc- 
 tions of race or color, for instance. An Indian man and 
 woman are at many points more like one another than is 
 either to a white person of the same sex. A black-haired 
 man or woman, or a fair-haired man or woman, are to be 
 classed together in these physiological aspects. So of dif- 
 ferences of genius : a man and woman of musical tempera- 
 ment and training have more in common than has either 
 with a person who is of the same sex, but who cannot 
 tell one note from the other. . . . Nature is too rich, too 
 full, too varied, to be content with a single basis of 
 classification ; she has a hundred systems of grouping, ac- 
 cording to age, sex, temperament, training, and so on; 
 and we get but a narrow view of life when we limit our 
 theories to one set of distinctions." 
 
 The over-emphasis of sex functions, and the 
 domestic and family traditions which grew out
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF FEMININITY 317 
 
 of it, found expression chiefly in the Nineteenth 
 Century in America. The lives of hundreds of 
 women of the great, typical, middle, comfortable 
 classes, both living and dead, have been studied, 
 and are here interpreted as showing how coercive 
 the belated conventions of feminine duty and be- 
 havior have been. They serve to explain the in- 
 consistencies, the futility, the narrowness of the 
 great mass of such women at the present time. 
 To women who are struggling in the meshes of 
 their own mixed temperaments, and the fast- 
 changing conventions of the feminine world, here 
 is encouragement as well as revelation. When 
 men are able to free themselves from their tradi- 
 tional opinions about women, and to give as dis- 
 passionate thought to the efficiency of women as 
 to other social problems; and when women as a 
 class acquire the same belief in their own abil- 
 ities as men now possess, the " woman question " 
 will solve itself; for it will have become merely a 
 phase of general progress, in which both sexes 
 necessarily rise together.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 " Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the 
 intenser and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and 
 more heavily upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from 
 an earlier and less discriminating time. When the wife was 
 her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply and uncritically 
 for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic rela- 
 tionship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life almost 
 entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental 
 incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But now the 
 wife, and particularly the loving, childless wife, unpremedi- 
 tatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete association, 
 and the husband exacts unthought-of delicacies of understanding 
 and co-operation. These are stupendous demands. . . . 
 
 " No contemporary woman of education put to the test is 
 willing to recognize any claim a man can make upon her but 
 the claim of her freely-given devotion to him. She wants the 
 reality of choice, and she means ' family,' while a man too 
 often means only possession. This alters the spirit of the fam- 
 ily relations fundamentally. Their form remains just what it 
 was when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and, in- 
 cidentally, child-producing, chattel. . . ." From A New Machi- 
 avelli H. G. WELLS, 1910. 
 
 THE Twentieth-Century woman is in process of 
 transition from hyper-femininity to balanced 
 womanhood. This movement, represented in 
 the middle of the last century by sporadic, excep- 
 tional types; and since then by larger groups, 
 
 318
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 319 
 
 such as the college alumnae on the one hand, and 
 women in industry on the other, is steadily gath- 
 ering momentum. Of all the vocations listed in 
 the current census, there is not one which women 
 have not attempted. At the same time, house- 
 hold management is rapidly becoming an applied 
 science; and motherhood and the rearing of chil- 
 dren are taken with infinitely greater seriousness 
 and are measured by a rising standard of devo- 
 tion and intelligence. 
 
 While social conservatives point out what 
 cannot be denied that women grow less and less 
 domesticated and feminine in habit; and, while 
 the prophets of the feminists reply that they are, 
 nevertheless, more womanly and humane; plain, 
 thoughtful men and women are puzzled and ap- 
 prehensive in the face of the problems raised by 
 the change. The proud father who, at some 
 sacrifice, sends his clever daughter to college, is 
 surprised to find that when she returns home she 
 is not satisfied to be merely the ornament of the 
 house and the comfort of her parents until she 
 marries. He is troubled by her critical attitude 
 toward her suitors, her disdain of protection, and 
 her reserve toward marriage. The sweet, do- 
 mestic mother, whose whole life has been ab- 
 sorbed in domestic detail and in childbearing, 
 grieves that her daughter, just out of school, in- 
 sists on going to a business college, or to a train-
 
 320 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 ing-school for nurses, to learn to earn her living 
 " when it is quite unnecessary." 
 
 At the other extreme are the " emancipated " 
 parents who, because of their own limitations and 
 mistakes, have an intense desire to plant their 
 girls in a larger life than the old conventional 
 domesticity. They are often astonished and dis- 
 appointed to find their daughters relapsing into 
 traditional femininity under the fundamental im- 
 pulses of maternity. All the advantages of edu- 
 cation seem to have been thrown away; for the 
 higher culture seems to bear no essential relation 
 to the inevitable duties of the domestic woman. 
 
 After all, the confusion and doubts of parents 
 are of less account than the perplexities of the 
 marriageable young woman of this transitional 
 day. She sees that older women accepted as 
 right if not satisfactory the peculiar status 
 which was half-domestic, half-dependent; but she 
 has somehow acquired an instinctive sense, from 
 the social atmosphere, from the newspapers, 
 from the example of women who have " done 
 things," that she ought not to accept unquestion- 
 ingly such a plane for herself. She wants to 
 marry, but does not dare to say so, and must, 
 therefore, practise the ancient arts of conceal- 
 ment and coquetry; or, scorning to do so, is likely 
 to remain unmarried. 
 
 If she marries under the impetus of natural
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 321 
 
 passion and maternal instinct nothing having 
 been said to her of the real meaning of mar- 
 riage or the nature of men she invariably be- 
 gins with a romantic and unpractical idea of what 
 she ought to give and receive. The women of 
 former generations had to marry or fail utterly 
 in life, from the standpoint of their world. They 
 took, consequently, any kind of man, the best that 
 offered, blindly accepting whatever fate the al- 
 liance brought them. They considered them- 
 selves fortunate if the master of their destiny 
 was a good provider and a kind father to their 
 children. However mismated, they could not 
 face the horror of divorce; nor could they sup- 
 port themselves and their children in an in- 
 dustrial world which was not yet in need of un- 
 trained women. Duty to their husbands and re- 
 ligious sanction made child-bearing regardless 
 of the quality of the child or the need of pop- 
 ulation inevitable and involuntary. Although 
 purely instinctive parenthood produced large 
 numbers of undervitalized, defective human be- 
 ings that ought never to have been born, the 
 belief that these were providentially sent and 
 were useful to the state relieved the parents from 
 all responsibility for their uncertain quality. 
 
 The intelligent young parents of to-day, how- 
 ever, after a child or two has arrived if not be- 
 fore begin to calculate the cost and, perhaps,
 
 322 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 the inconvenience of children under the more 
 exacting standards of modern life. Professor 
 Amos G. Warner once calculated roughly that 
 even in a laboring man's family a baby two 
 months old cost not less than one hundred dol- 
 lars; while in fairly well-to-do families the ex- 
 pense of extra service while the mother was in- 
 capacitated, of nursing, of doctor's attendance, of 
 the layette, and of petty incidentals, amounted to 
 five hundred and sometimes to a thousand dol- 
 lars. With an ever-increasing emphasis on the 
 hygienic care of children, modern parents can- 
 not but count the cost of them in personal sacri- 
 fices as well as in money. The more intelligent 
 the population becomes, the more will married 
 people comprehend that society is not so much in 
 need of mere human beings as of well-born, well- 
 nurtured, competent, moralized citizens. Some 
 people may develop a larger paternity, like that 
 of Leland and Jane Stanford, who, when they 
 had lost their delicate only son, founded a uni- 
 versity with the motto : " The children of Cali- 
 fornia shall be my children." 
 
 Perhaps there is nothing which the thought- 
 ful married woman of the younger generation 
 resents more than the assumption on the part of 
 theorists that the decline in the birth-rate is due 
 chiefly to her selfishness and failure in maternity. 
 She knows, but cannot publicly explain, that in
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 323 
 
 not a few cases husbands are unwilling to sub- 
 ordinate their careers to unregulated instinct; 
 preferring few or no children, with a care-free, 
 comely partner and a quiet household. Some 
 modern men value their wives for companion- 
 ship more than for child-bearing, and it some- 
 times happens that the wife is only allowed to 
 have her baby as a sort of concession to 
 what the husband regards as an overdeveloped 
 maternal craving. And other men have a con- 
 science toward the unborn child and toward so- 
 ciety, wishing to bring into the world only those 
 that are fit and that can be properly brought up. 
 If husbands of these exceptional types were 
 men of dissolute habits and extreme selfishness, 
 or unintelligent, they might be set down as merely 
 abnormal; but they are, in fact, as a class, the 
 physically and morally fit, who would make good 
 parents. That they hesitate or decline to be 
 fathers of large families points not to the defi- 
 ciencies of women, but to a racial change which 
 is going on toward the whole problem of popula- 
 tion. By far the larger part of mankind are 
 fathers, not because they are consciously paternal, 
 but because they wish a home and a woman, and 
 must take its consequences. Even among these 
 families the onus of the childless household or 
 the single-child family no longer rests upon 
 women alone. Within a decade scientific medical
 
 324 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 research has transferred it largely to men. The 
 revelation of the direct causal relation between 
 venereal diseases among men and sterility and 
 physical degeneration among married women 
 has only just begun to take effect. In time it 
 must afford that new " sanction for pre-marital 
 chastity " in men which a modern German sci- 
 entist urges as the absolute essential of a self- 
 renewing and healthy population. 
 
 All this recent agitation against " the con- 
 spiracy of silence," this criticism of the childless 
 married woman, this modern emphasis on child- 
 care, this expose of the unchastity of the average 
 young man, cannot but reach in some form the 
 girl who thinks of marriage and children, how- 
 ever carefully she may be guarded. The girls 
 of leisure, who fill up the interval between school- 
 days and marriage with friendly visiting, hospital 
 and charity labors, church and settlement work 
 among the poor, must come upon the tragic origin 
 of defective children; and cannot fail to see 
 how many children are undesired and neglected. 
 Unlike the secluded and ignorant young creatures 
 of former times, who became wives before they 
 were physically grown, the modern young woman 
 sees and fears and questions the facts of sex; and 
 by so much as she does so, will wish to know 
 more and to exact more of any man who offers 
 himself to be the father of her children. Herein (
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 325 
 
 will lie many tragedies both for the man and the 
 woman. 
 
 Under the influence of contradictory impulses 
 many girls now go into wage-earning. The 
 ranks of school teaching and office workers are 
 filled up with young women of the comfortable 
 middle-class, who, in a former day, would have 
 remained at home waiting to be married. Since 
 these workers are likely to have more self- 
 respect and more initiative than those who accept 
 dependence without question, they are a strong 
 and selected class; and by that fact, therefore, 
 they are more fit to be mothers. The office 
 women, in the course of their work, are likely to 
 meet men of similar tastes and aims, and to 
 marry with every chance of happiness. But the 
 school teachers are, by the very conditions of 
 their trade, an isolated class; and thus it comes 
 about that thousands of young women of excep- 
 tional education and capacity find an outlet for 
 their maternal instincts in the task of doing for 
 children what their parents cannot do. 
 
 Nature, indeed, may have no use for child- 
 less people; and a society that is under the neces- 
 sity to breed vast numbers of soldiers abhors 
 them. But in the American world, where mili- 
 tarism plays small part in the lives of ordinary 
 citizens, and where there is an increasing effort 
 to preserve child-life, there is an immense need
 
 326 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 of those who have strong childward instincts, and 
 who can be satisfied with vicarious parenthood. 
 The tenderly maternal, patient women who carry 
 on the kindergartens, the orphan asylums, the 
 hospitals for crippled children, and the homes 
 for defectives; or who spend their lives among 
 the poor in settlements, have compensations for 
 their childlessness such as many unthinking par- 
 ents who take their children impatiently, in the 
 course of nature, never knew. And if there are 
 still some who cannot be fully satisfied to hold in 
 their arms any child except one of their own ful- 
 filled love, even such enforced denial is not so 
 great a tragedy as the mother who brings into 
 the world infants she cannot wish for and per- 
 haps finds it difficult to love. 
 
 Historians have pointed out that the Christian 
 celibacy of the Middle Ages prevented the re- 
 production of the most refined and the most in- 
 tellectual class in Europe; yet it was the monks 
 and nuns who kept alight the shrines of Faith, 
 who trimmed the lamp of learning, who pre- 
 served the gentleness of unselfish, humane re- 
 ligion. While the whole Continent of Europe was 
 drenched in blood and devastated by religious 
 wars, while plague and ignorance mowed down 
 the helpless people, the scholar and the devotee 
 cherished the seeds of civilization. So in our 
 day the childless, whether single or married, may
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 327 
 
 find a larger duty to their kind than the easy 
 gratification of instinct; and may make as great 
 contributions to society as those who follow na- 
 ture without question. 
 
 Undoubtedly the higher ideal of love as well 
 as of parental duty in our day prevents the mar- 
 riage of some of the best individuals, because " it 
 differs wholly from localized passion in being 
 selective." Although, in the readjustment of 
 higher ideals, there are now some women un- 
 married who would make superior mothers, and 
 many others, undeveloped and uneducated, who 
 make very poor ones, there are a few prophetic 
 of the many soon to come who deliberately and 
 joyously choose motherhood. At the time when 
 the women's colleges were founded and the co- 
 educational method was established in the state 
 universities, two main objections were made by 
 the conservatives. It was said that girls who 
 were to marry did not need such an education; 
 and that, if they took it, they would not wish to 
 marry. But in the forty years since then, thou- 
 sands of college women have disproved both of 
 these contentions, and have, besides, borne as 
 many and as vigorous children as the women of 
 the same social class who were educated in the 
 traditional feminine ways. Although they found 
 it extremely difficult to apply a classical training 
 devised by men for men of a special class
 
 328 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 to domestic needs, their mental culture has been 
 by no means wasted. They could, at any rate, 
 grasp the problems of their children's education. 
 To their experience and their effort is due, in 
 great measure, the demand for domestic train- 
 ing for girls in schools as well as colleges; and 
 also the growing emphasis upon sanitation, 
 hygiene, physiology, and physical training, to the 
 neglect of piano-playing, fancy needlework, and 
 the purely ornamental requirements for girls. 
 
 There is an increasing number of young women 
 who, in spite of a purely masculine culture, have 
 survived to be exceptionally happy and fortunate 
 mothers of strong, clever children. I have in 
 mind one who, after attaining the Phi Beta 
 Kappa, and making a brilliant record as a 
 teacher, married a college man, and is now the 
 mother of six fine children. When the third of 
 these was born within fifteen months of the sec- 
 ond, a friend suggested that this was rather too 
 precipitate. The mother smilingly and content- 
 edly replied: " But I married so late if I am 
 to have a family I must be quick about it." Yet 
 she had been a rich girl, had married a poor man, 
 and has never had more than eighteen hundred a 
 year to spend for the family. As the expense 
 of higher education for the children comes on, 
 she is returning to tutoring as a means of ful- 
 filling her parental ambitions. When they shall
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 329 
 
 have been launched in life, she will yet have many 
 years in which to recoup herself for all her sacri- 
 fices, by personal culture and in public service. 
 
 If it be thought that such a woman is excep- 
 tional, let it here be set down as a fact that 
 there is a daily growing roster of voluntary 
 mothers. Out of the confusions of domestic 
 readjustment there is emerging a new and higher 
 ideal of motherhood and family life. As the 
 delicate, prudish, ignorant girl of a former time 
 is replaced by those more robust, more sensibly 
 dressed, and more practically educated, more and 
 more of them will choose to marry poor young 
 men, not at all to be supported, nor solely under 
 the glamor of romantic love, but for the sake of 
 equal comradeship and for the sacrificial joys of 
 motherhood. They are neither afraid nor vic- 
 timized, but choosers of their fate and adequate 
 to meet it. 
 
 The most hopeful signs of our times are, on 
 the one hand, the increase of voluntary, conscious, 
 intelligent parenthood in the middle stratum of 
 society; and, on the other, the tendency to limit 
 degenerate procreation both by public sentiment 
 and by law. The marital tragedies of our time 
 are, to a considerable extent, due to the fact that 
 men are as yet lagging behind women in their 
 racial conscience. The more refined nature and 
 the intimate personal relation of women to pos-
 
 330 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 terity give them a clearer vision of the conse- 
 quences of indiscriminate and unregulated sexu- 
 ality. Men still associate sex-vigor with manli- 
 ness, and, having been brought up in the conven- 
 tional theory that the sex appetite is beyond con- 
 trol, and its gratification essential to health, they 
 have, as a class, no adequate motive for chastity 
 before marriage, nor for self-restraint after- 
 wards. 
 
 Since even engaged persons rarely have any 
 understanding on this fundamental matter, they 
 begin their married life in entire ignorance of 
 each other's views, and often with widely differ- 
 ing standards. The specious terms of the di- 
 vorce court, in a very large number of cases, 
 cover the tragic incompatibility on this primary 
 relation, which both partners have too much de- 
 cency to confess. The very innocence in which 
 girls are still enshrouded makes them, as wives, 
 unjust to their more primitive partners; and the 
 atmosphere of vulgarity in which the average 
 boy grows up makes it impossible for the man to 
 understand the shocks that the commonplaces of 
 sex experience bring to the idealistic woman. 
 Formerly, the woman had no future but mar- 
 riage, and no recourse after marriage but endur- 
 ance; but the modern woman who goes into social 
 work or wage-earning, senses dimly, if she does 
 not fully know, the animality of certain types of
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 331 
 
 men, whom she will not marry, while these men 
 themselves instinctively prefer a less critical and 
 more sensual partner. And if a refined woman 
 should marry such a man, it is evident that no 
 woman, however vital, is likely to satisfy one 
 who has acquired the habits of promiscuity. 
 
 A partial explanation of the changing attitude 
 of young women toward marriage must be sought 
 in the entirely altered conditions of courtship. 
 The girls of two and three generations ago were 
 courted briefly and married promptly before their 
 physique was mature or their characters crystal- 
 lized. It was far easier for a semi-child of 
 eighteen or less to accept a husband's rule than 
 it is for the modern woman, who marries at 
 maturity, and who has already had some life of 
 her own. In our day nearly two-thirds of all 
 girls in the whole country between sixteen and 
 twenty years of age are engaged in some gain- 
 ful occupation. The period of courtship, and 
 even of betrothal, is greatly prolonged, and mar- 
 riages are far less likely to be hastily made. If 
 the marital adjustments are more difficult because 
 the habits of the partners are more fixed, there is 
 compensation in the fact that they marry less 
 blindly and with better judgment. 
 
 Moreover, the conditions of courtship are 
 rapidly changing. It is less the game of pursuer 
 and pursued; more a preliminary excursion in
 
 332 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 which the young pair who are mutually attracted 
 try out each other's characters. Formerly court- 
 ship was carried on under abnormal circum- 
 stances, at parties, and when both boy and girl 
 were on their best behavior. But nowadays they 
 grow up seeing each other every day, in school 
 and college classrooms, in stores and offices, on 
 boats and cars, as they travel to and fro about 
 their work. There is constant opportunity for 
 them to learn each other's essential qualities, and 
 time enough for one or more trial engagements 
 before marriage is possible. 
 
 So far from this freedom resulting in laxity 
 of morals, it seems to operate the other way. 
 Jane Addams has pointed out that, in spite of 
 this modern army of girl wage-earners, whose 
 wages are below a decent living standard, the 
 price of " white slaves " is constantly rising, and 
 the procurers find it more and more difficult to 
 supply the market. It is certainly encouraging 
 that girls so hardly pressed in an inhuman in- 
 dustrial world, sell themselves less readily both 
 into marriages of convenience and into body- 
 slavery than ever before. With economic inde- 
 pendence there has come a higher degree of self- 
 respect. 
 
 In this period of transition the financial aspects 
 of married women's lives are certainly perplexing. 
 Although the law still entitles a wife to support,
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 333 
 
 there is an increasing group of thinking people 
 who believe that that right should be qualified, or 
 made in some degree reciprocal between hus- 
 band and wife. Some believe that childless 
 women ought to earn their own living, whether 
 married or single; or, at least, to give their 
 leisure to philanthropy and civic service. Others 
 go as far as Charlotte Perkins Gilman in re- 
 quiring even child-bearing women to definitely con- 
 tribute other services to society, except during the 
 small part of their lives when they are actually 
 bearing and nursing children. They point to 
 our grandmothers who, even with large families, 
 gave more than half their time to domestic 
 production. For the present, however, most 
 thoughtful people will feel that it is for the best 
 welfare of children, and therefore of society, 
 that mothers should be supported either by their 
 husbands or pensioned by society temporarily, 
 until the children themselves have been fitted for 
 some vocation and are old enough to earn a 
 living. 
 
 With the elimination of many processes from 
 the household, and the application of scientific 
 invention to others, the simple housekeeping 
 necessary to family life becomes steadily less and 
 the attention bestowed upon children constantly 
 greater. Domesticity is becoming relatively un- 
 important, while motherhood and child-nurture
 
 334 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 are rising in value. This change of emphasis 
 points to a fundamental modification of the ideals 
 of wifehood and motherhood. It is at last con- 
 ceivable that a woman may fulfil both duties ac- 
 ceptably without being able to darn her husband's 
 socks, to make buttonholes, or produce mince 
 pies. One of the most successful mothers of my 
 acquaintance judged by the product of her life, 
 two capable and morally superior sons can do 
 none of these things, and never did do them, al- 
 though she had only a moderate income. Left a 
 widow when she was scarcely more than a girl, 
 she concentrated her attention, not on feeding 
 and indulging her boys, and practising ex- 
 hausting economies to pamper their selfishness, 
 but on guiding their minds and morals. As she 
 herself says: "I had to be father as well as 
 mother to them," and her interpretation of that 
 was to make herself a delightfully sympathetic 
 companion in every thought and impulse of their 
 lives, interested in their school and athletic activ- 
 ities, and even in their sex problems. She is 
 still their chosen confidante in manhood, while 
 devoting herself to the personal culture for which 
 she had scant time formerly. 
 
 In proportion as the meaning of the family 
 centers in the needs and companionship of chil- 
 dren rather than in physical luxury and wife- 
 service, the mentality of women is stimulated.
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 335 
 
 It has already been pointed out that for the 
 proper nurture and guidance of children some- 
 thing more is required in the mother than an 
 ornamental education and perfection in superflu- 
 ous domestic detail. We are at the beginning 
 of a movement to adapt public education to the 
 needs of ordinary men and women. The cul- 
 ture of common things is beginning to take prece- 
 dence of learning, which has often existed solely 
 " for its own sake," as a sort of personal luxury, 
 like diamonds or antiques. In this progress 
 women will share, and, in so doing, motherhood 
 will become something more than a blind obedi- 
 ence to nature and mankind. It will become 
 what it has always been potentially a high vo- 
 cation worthy of the best preparation and the pro- 
 foundest devotion. At the same time it will not 
 demand, as it used to do, the absolute surrender 
 of all personal life and liberty. It may even 
 happen very soon that nothing will be too good 
 for those whose chief task it is to raise the 
 quality of the race. And self-sacrifice, which has 
 long been the excessive virtue of maternal women, 
 may be reduced to a normal minimum, leaving 
 just enough to keep feminine conceit within 
 bounds, and masculine selfishness as well. The 
 time has certainly come when maternity is no 
 longer an excuse for keeping women within 
 " their sphere," but is rather an imperative rea-
 
 336 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 son for compelling them to enlarge it to the 
 periphery of the world. 
 
 Just now, the most serious perplexity of the in- 
 telligent married woman of middle age is what 
 to do with herself when her children are gone 
 from home, and when housekeeping, properly 
 systematized and modernized, ought not to en- 
 gage more than half her working-day. Dread- 
 ing the atrophy of premature age into which many 
 women fall for want of tasks commensurate with 
 their powers, she seeks to contribute something 
 more than mere manual busyness and social chit- 
 chat and hospitality to her neighborhood. She 
 is, however, seriously handicapped by the super- 
 ficial education of her youth, her lack of experi- 
 ence of the world, and by the disuse of her in- 
 tellect during the twenty or twenty-five years 
 given to family duties. While she may be strong 
 and capable, she has no vocation, and does not 
 know where to take hold on life. A large body 
 of women in this situation are trying to solve it 
 by the cultural opportunities of women's clubs, 
 where they are often led by those only a little 
 better equipped than themselves. Others devote 
 the time to charity councils and committees, and to 
 a thousand other unpaid social services. Yet 
 even for these tasks of citizenship their training 
 has been quite insufficient. Many, in default of 
 any proper chance for a belated education, and
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 337 
 
 without any necessity for self-support, relapse 
 into the conventional social pleasures in order 
 to fill up the time till old age comes upon 
 them. 
 
 The loss to society by this waste or partial use 
 of released human capacity is incalculable com- 
 parable only to the waste of human life in pris- 
 ons. It is a curious fact that we still cling to the 
 notion that education must be formal, and that 
 it is properly confined to the first third or quarter 
 of life. Whenever middle-aged persons attempt 
 to remedy the defects of earlier years, they are 
 commonly regarded with a mixture of pity and 
 amusement, instead of with the admiration which 
 their aspirations deserve. Formal education in 
 youth is in reality a sort of skeleton to be clothed 
 and filled out by personal experience and continu- 
 ous accretions. It is more convenient to begin 
 life with a skeleton to work upon, but there is 
 no reason why education should not be co- 
 extensive with the whole mental development. 
 When a house has been well built and the founda- 
 tions rot out, it is possible and very good economy 
 to jack it up and put new supports underneath 
 it need not be left to decay. When repaired, en- 
 larged, and perhaps refurnished, it is often more 
 interesting and comfortable than a new one. So 
 is it, likewise, with human beings. 
 
 These difficulties of the middle-aged woman
 
 338 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 point unquestionably to a reconstruction in 
 women's education. Since parents cannot know* 
 whether a daughter is to marry or not, they must 
 prepare her for marriage certainly, and for self- 
 support as well. No woman, even when married, 
 can be sure that she will never have to support 
 herself. These two aims are by no means in- 
 compatible, if the order of studies in the present 
 curriculum were readjusted so as to give first 
 the essentials and afterward as much culture as 
 there may be time for. There is really very little 
 dispute about what the ordinary girl needs to 
 know none at all, except with regard to sex 
 matters and since the majority of girls leave 
 school before they are sixteen years of age, there 
 is approximately only ten years in which to pre- 
 pare them for life. Yet our present program 
 takes this hardly at all into account, but assumes 
 that education is to make conventional gentlemen 
 and ladies rather than efficient citizens. It is in 
 thrall still to a tradition as strong as that which 
 has imprisoned women the idea that the object 
 of education is to attain gentility rather than to 
 develop industrial and moral capacity. 
 
 For the daughter of the laboring man, wage- 
 earning is usually imperative until she marries, 
 and, in many cases, afterward, since her husband 
 is liable to be out of work, to be ill, or to become 
 disabled. But she rarely stays in school long
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 339 
 
 enough to get training for self-support, even were 
 it offered. Among young women somewhat bet- 
 ter off, self-support is rapidly becoming the rule, 
 because they like the sense of economic independ- 
 ence; but as yet the common schools, and even 
 the high schools, only afford inadequate training 
 in a few limited lines. Vocational training is, 
 therefore, an expensive luxury, instead of an es- 
 sential preparation provided by the state. This 
 has brought about a terrible competition in all 
 the lines of work open to girls, which require only 
 a short apprenticeship, and from which there is 
 no possible promotion. 
 
 But when the readjustment of educational 
 methods to the real needs of youth shall have 
 been made, there will still remain the problem of 
 what to do with the married women when they 
 shall have fulfilled their maternal functions. 
 They must, somehow, begin to educate themselves 
 over again, and it is an interesting fact that the 
 agricultural colleges point out the way in which 
 it may be done. The " short courses " offered at 
 Cornell, Wisconsin, and other colleges, set a 
 model for the coming schools for re-education, 
 for the education of the middle-aged. Already 
 there are courses of reading and study for the 
 farmers' wives, and the time may come when the 
 ambitious mother and wife, partially liberated 
 from family cares, will neither be " laid on the
 
 340 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 shelf " nor be an object of jest when she under- 
 takes to develop her latent abilities. 
 
 The case of the able-bodied woman of fifty is 
 clear she ought to have something more to 
 do than that which housekeeping usually requires 
 in modern life but the solution of the restless- 
 ness of younger wives is not so easy. More and 
 more, trained nurses and nursemaids, mothers' 
 assistants, kindergartens, playgrounds, nurseries, 
 and primary schools remove children from their 
 mothers' care during several hours a day. The 
 preparation of many foods and the making of 
 garments are better and, oftentimes, more 
 economically done outside the home than they can 
 be in it. The pleasures of the family, which once 
 involved much labor for the housewife, are found 
 outside the house. Industrial changes on the one 
 hand, and household conveniences on the other, 
 continually release more and more domestic 
 women from really necessary and satisfying 
 labor. Thus the age limit of partial leisure for 
 this class is pushed back to, perhaps, thirty-five 
 or forty years, if there are not more than three 
 children in the family. 
 
 Not only does the intelligent married woman 
 of small family have more time in which to think, 
 but the ideal of the family bond itself has been 
 altered since women were exclusively domestic. 
 Until quite recently marriage had only two aims:
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 341 
 
 offspring and the regulation of the sex instinct. 
 It has now come to have another of profound 
 import: the comradeship of congenial tempera- 
 ments. At present this third motive is demanded 
 by the wife more than by the husband, partly 
 because she has time to think about it, and more 
 probably because the man's gregariousness finds 
 satisfaction in business association with other 
 men. Professor Thomas has expressed this ad- 
 mirably in the following paragraphs: 
 
 " An examination, also, of so-called happy marriages 
 shows very generally that they do not, except for the 
 common interest of children, rest on the true comradeship 
 of like minds, but represent an equilibrium reached 
 through an extension of the maternal interest of the 
 woman to the man, whereby she looks after his personal 
 needs as she does after those of the children cherishing 
 him, in fact, as a child or in extension to woman on the 
 part of man of that nurture and affection which is in his 
 nature to give to pets and all helpless (and preferably 
 dumb) creatures. . . . 
 
 " Obviously a more solid basis of association is necessary 
 than either of these two instinctively based compromises; 
 and the practice of an occupational activity of her own 
 choosing by the woman, and a generous attitude toward 
 this on the part of the man, would contribute to relieve the 
 strain and to make marriage more frequently successful." 
 
 For any one to suggest a solution for all these 
 family perplexities would require the assumption 
 of omniscience. It is sufficient here to show that
 
 342 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 
 
 many types of family and marital relations are 
 being evolved which give promise of greater 
 justice and more content to all concerned. Les- 
 ter Ward remarks that, while most persons sup- 
 pose that nothing is so certainly fixed by nature, 
 and even by divine decree, as the particular form 
 of marriage which happens to prevail in their own 
 country, there is, in fact, nothing which is so 
 purely conventional as just the way in which men 
 and women agree to carry on the work of con- 
 tinuing the race. Professor George Elliott 
 Howard boldly declares that the problems of the 
 family should be studied in connection " with the 
 actual conditions of modern social life;" that it 
 is vain to appeal to ideals born of old and very 
 different ones; and he urges that the moral lead- 
 ers of men should preach " actual instead of con- 
 ventional righteousness." 
 
 There can be no doubt that, with relative 
 economic independence, and with a broader and 
 more practical education, women are rapidly 
 passing from purely instinctive to conscious and 
 voluntary motherhood; nor that, as they do so, 
 they will set a higher standard of sex morality 
 for men. In this process there will inevitably be 
 some mal-adjustment and some unhappiness 
 whether more or less than our forbears endured 
 when conditions were even farther from the ideal 
 than now, there is no means of knowing. So far
 
 FAMILY PERPLEXITIES 343 
 
 as women are concerned, this growth means a 
 larger life, a life not exclusively domestic and 
 maternal; and by so much as mothers are more 
 than instinctively maternal, their children will be 
 better born and more intelligently nurtured.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 THE LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 " We're hungry . . . and since 
 We needs must hunger better for man's love, 
 Than God's truth ! better, for companions sweet, 
 Than great convictions! Let us bear our weights, 
 Preferring dreary hearths to desert souls." 
 
 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. 
 
 " We are discovering women . . . our modern world is 
 burdened with its sense of the immense, now half-inarticulate, 
 significance of women. . . . 
 
 " Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere 
 physical need, an aesthetic by-play, a sentimental background; 
 she is a moral and intellectual necessity in man's life. She 
 comes to the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citi- 
 zen? Is she a thing or a soul? She comes to the individual 
 man . . . and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal 
 mate, an unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or 
 guarded and controlled, bond or free? 
 
 " For if she is a mate, one must at once trust more and 
 exact more; exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, most neces- 
 sary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of un- 
 derstanding. . . . 
 
 " The social consciousness of women seems to me an un- 
 worked and almost untouched mine of wealth for the con- 
 structive purpose of the world." From A Neiu Machiavelli 
 H. G. WELLS. 
 
 THE survey of the life of the ordinary do- 
 mestic woman of the past century has brought us 
 to the conclusion that excessively feminine habits 
 
 344
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 345 
 
 were the most serious disadvantage under which 
 women struggled. By implication, also, men 
 were as much too " masculine " as women were 
 too " feminine " for the uses of modern life, and 
 the gulf between them made the adjustments of 
 marriage unduly difficult, besides reacting injuri- 
 ously upon the children. With the definite de- 
 cline of militarism and paternalism at the begin- 
 ning of the Nineteenth Century, new types of do- 
 mestic relations began to appear; but the tradi- 
 tional habits characteristic of the earlier regime 
 still persisted. 
 
 The restrictive theory of a female sphere or- 
 dained by God and controlled by men, culminated 
 in America about the time of the Civil War, and 
 was afterward rapidly broken down by vast 
 changes in industry and in religious thought, and 
 by the applications of science to common life 
 which have taken place since then. Yet even 
 now the conventional behavior associated with 
 hyper-femininity and hyper-masculinity is still af- 
 fected or unconsciously imitated in childhood, 
 and is deemed essential at least in women to 
 respectability. Evidently, so long as the stand- 
 ards of religion and conduct devised by men con- 
 tinue to be revised largely by them, progress 
 toward a common human as distinguished from 
 a bi-sexual basis of morals will be slow.
 
 346 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 No thoughtful person will deny that the aver- 
 age man needs refining and moralizing, nor that 
 the ordinary woman is lacking in strength and 
 largeness of mind; yet the vestigia of old social 
 ideas remain to make girls more foolishly girlish 
 and boys more brutally boyish from their child- 
 hood up. Though we know that half the misery 
 of modern life comes from living in daily in- 
 tensity, from sex-suggestion and indulgence, there 
 is yet very little intelligent attempt to abate it, 
 except by the negative process of suppression. 
 There is certainly nothing which the world needs 
 less at the present moment than emphasis on sex 
 and sex differences, nor more than preparation 
 for family duties. 
 
 Although co-education has now been estab- 
 lished in schools and colleges for more than a 
 generation, it is still regarded by most people as 
 a matter of convenience and economy, rather than 
 as an effective and rational opportunity for pre- 
 paring the young for family life. The entrance 
 of young women into industry is deprecated as 
 diverting them from marriage and motherhood, 
 rather than accepted as it should be as one of 
 the suitable means for marriageable young peo- 
 ple to become acquainted with each other on a 
 self-respecting basis of business association. Al- 
 though low wages, excessive hours of labor, and 
 unsanitary conditions threaten every young per-
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 347 
 
 son in industry, let us not forget that the girls 
 of two or three generations ago were physically 
 even less fit to be mothers than many modern 
 workers, in spite of the protection of a home. If 
 the health of girls is menaced by the inhuman ex- 
 actions of many occupations, it obviously points 
 to the alleviation of working conditions rather 
 than to a denial of the right of economic inde- 
 pendence. 
 
 The problems precipitated by the escape of 
 women from the purely domestic sphere are, in- 
 deed, not capable of immediate solution; but they 
 are relatively easy as compared to keeping them 
 within it. It would be too bold, perhaps, to say 
 that one of the best remedies for domestic in- 
 felicity is the feminization of men and the mas- 
 culinization of women; but if men could be do- 
 mesticated just a little more, and if women could 
 be persuaded to be a little less feminine in their 
 habits and more masculine in their minds, mar- 
 riage would be more practicable and the family 
 life somewhat nearer the ideal. 
 
 There is some alarm nowadays about the 
 " feminization " of the schools by women teach- 
 ers, but very little, apparently, about the " fem- 
 inization " of the family through the inattention 
 of men to their family duties. Yet, in practice, 
 the ordinary father an artisan, a clerk, or a 
 business man does very little fathering beyond
 
 348 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 providing support and playing with the children 
 a little, nights and Sundays. The constructive 
 work of bringing up the family is left largely to 
 mothers, whose education and experience are very 
 limited. As the hours of the working-day de- 
 crease, and as transportation facilities make it 
 possible for men to be more at home, it should be 
 possible to revive in a better form the coopera- 
 tive family, somewhat after the old-fashioned 
 rural type. Parents and children may come to 
 share not only the proceeds of their joint labors, 
 but educational opportunities and pleasures as 
 well. 
 
 It is one of the most hopeful signs of our times 
 that a certain class of men though only a small 
 and selected class take it for granted that their 
 paternal duties are as important as their business. 
 In every community, and particularly in college 
 towns, there are a good many young husbands 
 who spend at least a part of their leisure in baby- 
 tending, in dishwashing, and the heavier kinds of 
 household labor. They do these things in order 
 that their wives may escape the confinement and 
 monotony of domesticity for a part of each day; 
 they even help that their wives may have time 
 for culture clubs and social reforms. There are 
 families where the husband and wife divide the 
 household labors between them, and both go 
 out to work every day to earn and to share the
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 349 
 
 common income. In one family, the educated 
 wife, after having borne several children, left 
 them when they were out of babyhood to a rela- 
 tive of highly domestic traits, and herself ac- 
 cepted a salaried position. So far from disrupt- 
 ing the family, this unconventional procedure has 
 made fine men of these boys, men who have a 
 strong attachment to their home and their par- 
 ents, and who are peculiarly considerate toward 
 their young wives. This wife was maternal, but 
 not domestic; but so reasonable an arrangement 
 would not have been possible, had not the hus- 
 band possessed highly paternal qualities, and been 
 willing to take his full share in bringing up the 
 family. 
 
 There are, in truth, a thousand different ad- 
 justments of maternal and paternal relations, and 
 as many redivisions of domestic labor and family 
 finance. Perhaps the happiest as well as the 
 most uniformly competent family of my ac- 
 quaintance consists of ten persons. The parents, 
 both graduates of a good small college in the 
 Middle West, came to California for the hus- 
 band's health, and the wife for a time, and in 
 addition to child-bearing, chiefly supported the 
 family. They have always lived simply and on 
 the principle of all members of the family, re- 
 gardless of age and sex, sharing all there was 
 whether of labor, drudgery, domestic care, pleas-
 
 350 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 ure, or money. When the family grew too large 
 for the mother and the elder children to do all the 
 work, they brought in a young girl from the 
 Indian reservation near by, who is now, at middle- 
 age, almost as intelligent and as much a member 
 of the family as the adopted daughter. For, in 
 addition to raising six children of their own, 
 these warm-hearted people adopted another who 
 needed a home. 
 
 The children, one by one, have gone to college, 
 partly earning their own way; and the older ones, 
 as they got into the world, helping the younger. 
 Now the parents, at their prime of life, occupy 
 jointly a conspicuous public position. The eldest 
 daughter, who is of a maternal disposition, runs 
 the house and looks after her younger brothers 
 and sisters, and is compensated therefor by her 
 parents. It is, indeed, a very plain establishment, 
 but altogether sanitary and comfortable. Every 
 person in it is well fed, well clothed, industrious; 
 and nobody is drudging to give other members of 
 the family something they have not earned and 
 do not need. Every member of the household 
 is useful, happy, and loyal to the rest; and, 
 unitedly, they make sacrifices in order to con- 
 tribute service to the public welfare. Their hos- 
 pitality is proverbial, and seldom do their guests 
 hear elsewhere more interesting conversation 
 than in this jolly, cooperative family.
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 351 
 
 This might be called the ideal American fam- 
 ily, yet the parents were not exceptional, perhaps, 
 except in their sincere and simple insistence upon 
 the principle of family unity, regardless of the 
 sex, age, and condition of servitude of its mem- 
 bers. Consider the difference in the results if 
 the women had all stayed at home keeping a con- 
 ventionally elaborate house; pinching their pin- 
 money to be well-dressed, and hanging like dead- 
 weight on the males of the family. Suppose the 
 daughters, instead of working their way through 
 college with some help at home, had attained a 
 merely superficial education, and contributed 
 nothing to society but " good looks " until they 
 were married! As it is, there are ten persons, 
 eight of whom are already self-supporting and 
 well-educated, while the two younger ones give 
 promise of meeting the family standard. All of 
 them have had a larger life, all of them are bet- 
 ter citizens than under the old system of sex- 
 spheres and sex-duty; and even the head of the 
 family has had an easier time not to count in 
 the spiritual compensations of profound family 
 affection and the close comradeship of the hus- 
 band and wife. 
 
 Still another significant tendency of our time is 
 the emergence of a considerable class of men 
 whose personal ideals are neither patriarchal nor 
 military. In America, at any rate, the fighting
 
 352 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 man the bully, the pugilist, the war hero, the 
 fire-eater, the tyrannical husband and father, the 
 man who expects to be waited upon by all women 
 holds a much less honorable place than in 
 Europe. The predatory and the parasitic 
 whether men or women are slowly being dis- 
 credited. There is a reclassification going on 
 which tends somewhat towards that among the 
 Chinese, who rate people in the order of their 
 contribution to society: scholars, producers, 
 merchants, soldiers, et cetera. The humani- 
 tarians, once so exceptional, are a growing class 
 of men of personal cleanliness, abstemious habits, 
 fond of family life, and interested in political 
 and social reforms, and by no means physically 
 effeminate. They are, rather, men of a refined 
 but powerfully muscled athletic type, whose fight- 
 ing instincts find expression in the protection of 
 the weak by the exercise of their higher mental 
 shrewdness. These are the attorneys who fight 
 for poor clients and for just but unpopular 
 causes; politicians who wade into the muck of 
 partizanship, not for personal gain, but for the 
 joy of cleaning things up and making a better 
 world to live in; employers who try industrial 
 experiments for the solution of labor disputes, 
 and the lessening of unnecessary drudgery; doc- 
 tors who give as much time to unpaid preventive 
 work as to building up a lucrative practice; men
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 353 
 
 whose religion takes the form of settlement club 
 work for boys, or probation and prison reform; 
 and many others to whom some form of social 
 service is as necessary as the fulfilment of their 
 worldly ambition. 
 
 The relation of these new kinds of men to this 
 discussion lies in the fact that these are the men 
 who want wives as companions rather than do- 
 mestic subordinates; who call in women to help 
 them solve social problems; who join hands with 
 them in their efforts to obtain the guardianship of 
 their children, the control of their persons, prop- 
 erty, and earnings; to protect young girls and 
 boys; and even, and last, to help them secure 
 equal political rights. Unquestionably there is 
 an increasing number of thoughtful men to whom 
 the acceleration of progress seems to depend 
 largely on the emancipation of women from pet- 
 tiness, ignorance, idleness, and social pauperiza- 
 tion. At one end of our social scale there is a 
 great body of idle, dissolute men; at the other, a 
 group of selfish, luxuriously clothed, and econom- 
 ically dependent women. The men flock into the 
 cities and hang about the "slum" districts; the 
 women parade the fashionable quarters, exhibit- 
 ing themselves and their finery. The imagina- 
 tion can hardly compass what would happen if 
 such men stopped drinking, and such women 
 stopped talking about clothes, and all of them
 
 354 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 went to work at some really useful occupa- 
 tion. 
 
 Too often the arguments for the social libera- 
 tion and political enfranchisement of women are 
 based merely on what might happen if they were 
 achieved. There is scarcely anything which was 
 said in favor of the enfranchisement of the com- 
 mon man a century ago; or of the negro and the 
 foreigner in more recent times, which does not 
 now apply equally to women. But, aside from 
 the justice of it an unanswerable argument in 
 our day and without regard to the specious cry 
 of expediency, and omitting all prophecy, women 
 need and must have a larger life. Even when 
 motherhood shall have become, for all except the 
 most ignorant, a high and chosen vocation; and 
 even with every scientific assistance in the house- 
 hold, the life of the exclusively domestic woman 
 will still be too narrow. Although during the 
 earlier years of child-bearing the life of a mother 
 is necessarily confining, there remains to the 
 average woman from a third to a quarter of her 
 whole adult life in which these primary duties 
 occupy relatively very little time, and when, there- 
 fore, she might be a producer, or of public 
 service. 
 
 It is customary for many conservative persons 
 who are willing to grant so much as this, to point 
 out the unpaid honorary services in philanthropy
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 355 
 
 and charity in which women may now properly 
 engage, and to which they think it wise to limit 
 them. Let it be remembered that all philan- 
 thropy was once the province of the great lady, 
 the priest, and the religious orders who received 
 no pay, but it was not the more efficiently done 
 on that account. Consecration may reduce the 
 selfishness of the charitable, but it does not elim- 
 inate the human instinct to do that which brings 
 compensation better than that which does not. 
 The most faithful wifehood and motherhood on 
 the part of members of a woman's board do 
 not necessarily prepare them to solve the busi- 
 ness of charitable institutions and societies, nor 
 to comprehend and prevent the causes of poverty 
 and family desertion, of sickness and unemploy- 
 ment. The merely palliative, hand-to-mouth 
 methods of the charities of past generations were, 
 in a measure, due to the fact that they were car- 
 ried on chiefly by clergymen and domestic women. 
 The gulf between the old-time, classically trained 
 minister, and the modern clergyman, whose 
 preaching and praying are only a part of many 
 social and civic duties, is no greater than that 
 between the old-time charitable lady and the 
 trained charity worker of our day. 
 
 Nor are the men chosen for honorary service 
 boards those living at leisure, devoting their 
 time to clubs, personal culture, amusement,
 
 356 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 travel, society; but almost invariably those who 
 have made a conspicuous success in some other 
 field, and who, at the same time, are willing to 
 give their scant leisure for the public welfare. 
 The accepted measure of economic usefulness is 
 money; and the public justly values honorary pub- 
 lic service at what the giver would be valued at 
 in his industrial capacity. Many women of small 
 earning capacity are performing the honorary 
 services for their husband, and are measured 
 rather by the status of the man who supports 
 them than by anything they have done them- 
 selves. But more and more the services of 
 women, whether to the individual household or to 
 industry, or to the public welfare, must be reck- 
 oned in terms of money before they will be 
 thoroughly respected either by men or by other 
 women. 
 
 Women are demanding in their own leaders 
 intelligence and competence rather than wealth 
 and social position, and are beginning to be will- 
 ing to pay for them. The charity organizations 
 are officered largely by trained and salaried 
 women secretaries, and supported by wealthy men 
 and women, who recognize their superiority over 
 volunteer workers. The woman suffrage move- 
 ment illustrates the appreciation which domestic 
 women and women of leisure have of the abil- 
 ities of others who have held a place in the wage-
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 357 
 
 earning world. The campaign of political edu- 
 cation, financed by women of wealth, is carried on 
 almost wholly by speakers, writers, and or- 
 ganizers who have established their social value 
 in competition with men. 
 
 The financial measure of human ability may 
 not be the ideal one, but it is a necessary stage 
 before a higher one can be applied. The woman 
 who has earned a salary of a hundred a month 
 before her marriage, can accept support with self- 
 respect only if she does a hundred dollars' worth 
 of necessary labor afterward; or contributes a 
 child to society of a quality which justifies 
 her temporary release from labor. She can no 
 longer shilly-shally with her conscience by assum- 
 ing that, in managing servants, paying calls, dress- 
 ing herself becomingly, and making herself a 
 charming wife and hostess, she is fulfilling all 
 that society has a right to expect of her even if 
 her husband be satisfied. The efficiency test 
 alone is rapidly discrediting a class of personally 
 lovely women who spend their lives in consuming 
 rather than in producing; and, on the other hand, 
 it is setting a higher valuation on competent 
 mothers and on women workers. 
 
 From another aspect, the entrance of young 
 women into the economic world has an important 
 relation to marital happiness. Until girls have 
 as good an education and are as capable of self-
 
 358 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 support as young men, it will continue to be as- 
 sumed that a suitor does his fiancee a favor in 
 marrying her and relieving her of the necessity of 
 proving herself in serious competition. The 
 man who marries a woman who has already 
 proved herself in work as exacting as his own, 
 does not regard her as " a weaker vessel," but 
 instinctively respects her competence and her 
 opinions as he would those of another man. Both 
 she and her children rise in value in his eyes, by 
 so much as he is compelled to recognize the pain, 
 the peril, the limitation of life, and the incessant 
 labor which good mothering involves. 
 
 Jane Addams, in her Newer Ideals of Peace, 
 points out how women's lives have been restricted 
 by the arbitrary assumption that their contribu- 
 tion to society must be made solely through chil- 
 dren and the home : 
 
 " From the beginning of tribal life women have been 
 held responsible for the health of the community, a func- 
 tion which is now represented by the health department ; 
 from the days of the cave dwellers, so far as the home 
 was clean and wholesome it was due to their efforts, which 
 are now represented by the bureau of tenement house in- 
 spection ; from the period of the primitive village, the only 
 public sweeping performed was what they undertook in 
 their own dooryards, that which is now represented by the 
 bureau of street cleaning. Most of the departments in a 
 modern city can be traced to woman's traditional activ- 
 ity, but, in spite of this, so soon as these old affairs were
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 359 
 
 turned over to the care of the city, they slipped from 
 women's hands, apparently because they became matters 
 for collective action, and implied the use of the fran- 
 chise." 
 
 Miss Addams shows, further, that these outside 
 occupations develop in the immigrant workers 
 " an unusual mental alertness and power of per- 
 ception " which results in their breaking through 
 custom and habit, and in their acquiring the 
 power of association. 
 
 These are qualities which women as well as 
 immigrants need, and the domestic woman must 
 somehow be brought in touch with a larger life 
 for her own sake to liberate her from conven- 
 tional pettiness; for the children's sake that she 
 may be their intelligent guide; and for her hus- 
 band's sake, to relieve the marital tension which 
 inevitably rises between a man and woman so far 
 apart as the conventional married pair. Be- 
 cause of the intensely personal view which the 
 wifely and maternal life engenders, women are 
 emotionally exacting and expect of matrimony 
 satisfactions which only a connection with out- 
 side realities can give. Their problem is, then, 
 how to widen their view, how to keep abreast 
 with the great currents in which men are caught 
 by their very occupations, and yet how to re- 
 main the center and the mistress of the home and 
 family.
 
 One solution is already suggested in the fact 
 that girls now generally remain at school longer 
 than boys. There can be no question that the 
 woman who is to marry and, by her motherhood 
 cares, to be sequestered for a period of her life, 
 needs a better education a sort of anticipatory 
 fund of resources, as it were than the man 
 whose daily contact with the business world is a 
 continuous education in itself. The earlier years 
 of motherhood develop the emotions to the 
 neglect of the mind; and, because they must be 
 filled with a monotonous succession of petty and 
 imperative duties, tend to rob the woman of the 
 power of systematic thought. The early mental 
 training of girls should anticipate this heavy 
 draft, so that the mother may keep alive her mind 
 and soul in after years. It is necessary not alone 
 for herself, but for the children whose friend 
 and counselor she is destined to be through the 
 years when they will question her competence 
 and her authority. 
 
 It is curious that those who are quite willing 
 to grant the necessity of a broader education 
 and better physical development for girls who are 
 to marry; who acquiesce in their employment in 
 charities and the politer social reforms, balk 
 just at the barrier of suffrage. It is, no doubt, 
 because they are still unconsciously in thrall to 
 the rub-off-the-bloom theory of the past century.
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 361 
 
 The tradition that the essential qualities of 
 womanhood, like the veneer which has been 
 called " femininity," would somehow be de- 
 stroyed by the larger life, and particularly by 
 the exercise of political rights, is still lingering 
 in the minds of a majority of men. While they 
 are clinging to this time-worn apprehension, the 
 field of politics itself has come to include nearly 
 everything requiring collective action, and which 
 touches the life of every member of the family. 
 
 The chief function of every citizen who votes, 
 as distinguished from the politician and the office- 
 holder, is now to watch, to approve and disap- 
 prove by the ballot, their use of power and the 
 measures they promote. The regeneration of 
 democracy now going on in this country, which 
 takes, on the one hand, the form of breaking 
 down the machine, and, on the other, the direct 
 appeal to the people, throws into higher relief the 
 absurdity of refusing to women a share in de- 
 ciding upon officers and issues which concern them 
 quite as much as any other portion of the people. 
 
 Without reiterating the stock arguments in 
 favor of admitting women to suffrage, it is im- 
 portant to note that voting with the occasional 
 interest in political campaigns and large public 
 questions affords just that connection with the 
 larger world which the domestic woman needs; 
 and requires no more of her energy than it does
 
 362 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 of the ordinary male citizen. Many " strictly 
 feminine " women now spend more time away 
 from home in social teas and card parties, in 
 charities and bazars and aid societies, in clubs and 
 musicales, than would serve to make them in- 
 telligent voters and active citizens. They spend 
 their energy, moreover, with less compensation, 
 since they do not need encouragement in petti- 
 ness, futility, idleness, luxury, nor even in polite 
 begging to promote benevolences of which they 
 have no personal knowledge. They sorely need 
 the breadth of mind which the discussion of 
 impersonal issues trusts, tariff, and municipal 
 graft, police, school, and health measures- 
 would tend to produce. 
 
 In modern society the common interests of the 
 family group are all too few. The man en- 
 grossed in the economic struggle the children in 
 school and play the mother in housekeeping, so- 
 cial amenities, and benevolence though together 
 constituting the social unit, have slight mutual 
 concern in anything except the spending of the 
 income. If politics are discussed at all, it is by 
 the father and son, while the women give a bored 
 and superficial attention. But if the women were 
 conscious of a power in these matters, all would 
 have a common interest in being informed on 
 them, as they already have a common stake in 
 their proper conduct.
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 363 
 
 What, then, do women need? It must be clear 
 enough to the open-minded reader of the preced- 
 ing pages that, since the decline of home manu- 
 factures, the domestic woman has had less and 
 less means of justifying her existence except 
 through motherhood. 
 
 Under the spell of the idea that every woman 
 is a potential mother, whether married or not, 
 many people overlook the fact that at any par- 
 ticular time there are many hundred thousands 
 of women who are not mothers, and who must 
 make their claim to support by men on the ground 
 of being housekeepers. The wife who is doing 
 the work of the household is, at any rate, earning 
 her board and lodging, often something more. 
 And, as the number of children in the family is 
 likely to be in proportion to poverty rather than 
 riches, these working women probably contribute 
 throughout the whole of their lives as house- 
 keepers, mothers, and grandmothers more than 
 the equivalent for all they receive; and are, 
 therefore, in a self-respecting position. 
 
 But it would be easy to show that there are sev- 
 eral hundred thousand women in America whose 
 inactivity or quasi-domestic occupation makes 
 them dissatisfied, while at the same time society 
 is feeding and clothing them. As to the unmar- 
 ried ones, there can be no question that they
 
 364 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 ought either to be preparing themselves for use- 
 fulness, or to be giving something definite and 
 necessary to society. And as to the married 
 ones, only those who are fully occupied with chil- 
 dren and with really necessary not fictitious 
 household tasks, should be regarded as fulfilling 
 their whole duty. Even mothers of children, 
 when the children are grown up and gone, should 
 be able to give a portion of their time in mature 
 and useful service outside the home. In pro- 
 portion as women of all classes are transferred 
 from the consuming to the recognized producing 
 classes, they will gain in self-respect and content- 
 ment; while the world at large will be the richer 
 thereby. 
 
 The first thing women need is to see clearly 
 that it is disreputable to trade wifehood and 
 merely potential motherhood for the luxury of a 
 home and the protection of a husband. Indeed, 
 a very considerable number of women do realize 
 it, and are driven more and more into volunteer 
 social service by their discontent with a para- 
 sitic existence. Such discontent with the semi- 
 idle or relatively useless life is highly creditable 
 to them, and the effort to escape from the tradi- 
 tion which surrounds them should be encouraged 
 by men. When women have learned not to ex- 
 change their beauty and their sex-function for 
 luxury, and when they begin to try to do some-
 
 365 
 
 thing worthy of their human energies, then they 
 will begin to rate their labor in a truer perspec- 
 tive. Men, as a rule, work harder than women, 
 but they are not half so busy. A woman will tell 
 you she has no time to read but is meantime 
 doing beautiful and often quite superfluous needle- 
 work in all her spare moments. She has no time 
 to keep up her music, which she really loves, and 
 upon which she spent so many years of practice in 
 girlhood, but she will retrim her hats, remake her 
 dresses, taking infinite trouble to propitiate that 
 Juggernaut of womenkind Fashion. 
 
 In proportion as women go to work at exacting, 
 routine occupations outside the home, they are 
 dropping the habit of futile busyness; they buy 
 fewer, plainer, more substantial clothes, and wear 
 them longer. The standard street dress, repre- 
 sented by the separate waist and tailor suit, which 
 became the fashion for the first time about 1890, 
 is a historic landmark in the life of American 
 women. In spite of manufacturers and design- 
 ers, that type of dress, corresponding to the 
 man's business suit, has remained the standard- 
 ized dress of the modest woman. 
 
 This readjustment of values is in itself mak- 
 ing a wide differentiation in the varieties of do- 
 mestic women. Once all domestic women had 
 the same ideas, and their lives were spent in a 
 continuous effort to attain an ever greater elab-
 
 366 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 oration of clothes and housekeeping. While 
 now there is a larger and larger group of women 
 who are putting their housekeeping under their 
 feet, so to speak reducing it by appliances, 
 short-cut methods, elimination, systematization, 
 simplification, to a point where it is pleasurable 
 and good exercise, and where it leaves them the 
 greater part of their time and energy for the 
 higher interests of the home and for intellectual 
 comradeship with husband and children. 
 
 As soon as girls began to go into industry, they 
 began to learn anew the habits and the joys of 
 thoroughness, which had been the characteristics 
 of their manufacturing grandmothers. They be- 
 gan to test themselves by the achievements of 
 men and to take pride in meeting their busi- 
 ness requirements. But, as a rule, as Professor 
 Thomas so justly remarks, women are still to men 
 as amateurs to professionals, for they came late 
 into the economic game. But already the effect 
 upon their habits and modes of thought is strik- 
 ingly apparent. To do hard things, under trying 
 conditions, and under the supervision of men 
 upon whom the conventional tears, temper, and 
 coquetry have no effect, either by way of excuse 
 or increased wages; is a tremendous corrective to 
 the emotionalized feminine temperament. For 
 a pretty girl to discover that her male employer
 
 has no use for her unless she can spell and take 
 dictation correctly, is an education in itself. In- 
 stead of depending merely on her traditional sex 
 weapons, she will more and more depend upon 
 competence, and, in doing so, will gain self-con- 
 trol and an independent poise. 
 
 The entrance of young women into industry 
 is readjusting all the sex relations and making 
 mutual concealment between man and woman 
 more difficult. Two generations ago the whole 
 education of a girl was aimed to conceal her na- 
 ture from herself as well as to keep her ignorant 
 of the nature of men. The old-fashioned pri- 
 vate school reared girls to a kind of sexlessness, 
 with the result that they were morbidly fear- 
 ful and yet curious about sex matters. They 
 v/ere inevitably oversensitive, feeling themselves 
 stained, as Marholm says, " by everything 
 imaginable by the glances of indifferent men, 
 by their own thoughts, by physiological knowl- 
 edge." Such a state of mind is not possible to 
 voung women who meet men daily in business re- 
 lations. Nor can men much longer conceal from 
 the women whom they meet in business the un- 
 savory facts of their own social habits. Girls 
 who, in the seclusion of the home, might never 
 learn what their suitor's previous life had been, 
 cannot fail to see men somewhat as they are,
 
 368 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 and to exercise their judgment as never before. 
 The power of selection, so long almost wholly in 
 the hands of men, is gradually being transferred 
 to the potential mothers of the race. 
 
 But of all the modifications which economic and 
 political liberation will work in the characters of 
 women, the most important is the development 
 of a social conscience. The women of the past 
 century, having no responsibility for matters out- 
 side the home, and no direct knowledge of how 
 money was made, accepted all they could get 
 from their men-folk with a clear conscience. But 
 the woman who earns her own living in our day 
 however pleasantly sees young girls by the 
 thousands paid less than a living wage, to supply 
 the luxuries of society at a price below the proper 
 cost of production; or to furnish inordinate 
 profits for men to waste upon other and idle 
 women. The thoughtful woman who does vol- 
 unteer social work begins to measure her own 
 comforts in terms of others' need. Women are 
 thus acquiring a socialized conscience they no 
 longer willingly buy sweatshop lingerie; or ac- 
 cept unquestioningly jewels bought with money 
 made in predatory businesses. There is, per- 
 haps, no more touching and hopeful aspect of the 
 growing social conscience of women, than the 
 efforts of rich women to square their awakened
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 369 
 
 consciences by spending themselves and their 
 money in the service of mankind. 
 
 Of the unmarried woman, almost nothing has 
 been said in these pages, although there might 
 profitably have been inserted a chapter on " The 
 Superfluous Woman," in order to round out the 
 discussion of the tyranny of tradition. It is 
 enough for our purpose to note that she was once 
 regarded as superfluous: a poor, unfortunate, use- 
 less human creature, who had missed the only 
 worjthy vocation of woman, and for whom there 
 was no suitable niche in the home or the world. 
 In this better time we need not trouble ourselves 
 very much about her. She is neither superfluous 
 nor idle, as a rule, and, in spite of hampering 
 conditions, is working out her own ambitions. 
 Though often underpaid, as compared with men 
 of the same degree of efficiency, though handi- 
 capped by her over-feminized conscience and her 
 conventional habits, her future is solving itself 
 with encouraging rapidity and ease. When she 
 shall have caught up with the game, and when 
 she has acquired the same confidence in herself 
 that the ordinary man has, and an equal oppor- 
 tunity to exercise her abilities, she will be her- 
 self! Not a masculine female, nor a defemi- 
 nized anomaly, but just a competent, sensible 
 woman, for whose service the world already has 
 unlimited use.
 
 370 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 
 
 What, then, do women need? Above all, fair 
 play and freedom from interference. Havelock 
 Ellis has expressed the idea finely: 
 
 X 
 
 " We are not at liberty to introduce any artificial bar- 
 riers into sexual concerns. The respective fitness of men 
 and women for any kind of work or any kind of privilege 
 can only be attained by actual experiment; and as the 
 conditions for such experiment are never twice the same, 
 it can never be positively affirmed that anything has been 
 settled once for all . . . . An exaggerated anxiety lest 
 natural law be overthrown is misplaced. The world is 
 not so insecurely poised." 
 
 It is one of the most astonishing vagaries of 
 human thinking that, in spite of faith in God, in 
 the face of the demonstrated power of good, and 
 the progress of humanity, mankind continues to 
 balk at every change. The instinct of mother- 
 hood is as old as that of procreation, and more 
 fundamental to life; yet the world is in a state of 
 fright for fear women will forsake their calling. 
 If the last word has not yet been said of the Di- 
 vine Spirit or of Nature, why should it be sup- 
 posed that the family relations are finally deter- 
 mined, and the significance of woman to life 
 wholly fixed! Every liberation of women in any 
 direction has, so far in the world's history, tended 
 toward a higher civilization; yet women are still 
 heavily weighted with traditions which obscure
 
 LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP 371 
 
 their true nature and which hinder them and 
 their children. Let every man who has read 
 these pages ask himself whether he is really a 
 god, that he should presume to set for women the 
 limits of capacity and duty; and let every woman 
 take courage to develop all that is hidden within 
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 By J. R. MACDONALD. BY D. H. MACGREGOR. 
 
 The Science of Wealth Elements of English Law 
 
 By J. A. HOBSON. By W. M. GELDART. 
 
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