JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
OUTLINES FOR THE DISCUSSION OF THE MARRIED WOMAN IN BUSINESS
By
GRACE L. COYLE
THE WOMANS PRESS 600 LEXINGTON AVENUE NEW YORKCopyright, 1928, by the National Board of the Young Womens Christian Associations of the United States of America
Printed in the United States of America3'5\.‘V
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments .
Introduction	.....
These Married Women The Working Wife and Her Husband . What Happens to the Home?
What About the Children? .
How About the Woman Herself ? .
The Double Salary—Is It a Necessity? . In the Office	.....
What's the Answer? .... The Older Married Women in Business .
5
7
10
15
30
40
51
67
78
88
92ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Womans Press wishes to make acknowledgments to the following magazines for their kindness in permitting the use of material first printed in their pages: to The Atlantic Monthly for two extracts from “Continuity for Women,” by Ethel Puffer Howes, and for an extract from “Meditations of a Wage-Earning Wife,” by Jane Littell; to Collier's for a quotation from “This Wife Gets a Pay Check,” by W. T. Saunders; to The Family for quotations from “The Psychology of the Woman Who Works,” by Ernest R. Groves, and from “Some Industrial Management Aspects of Married Women’s Work and Their Bearing on the Family,” by Arthur J. Todd; to Harper's Magazine for permission to quote from “What About the Children? The Question of Mothers and Careers,” by Eva v.B. Hansl, and from “The Wife, the Home, and the Job,” by Nancy Barr Mavity; to The Independent for a quotation from “Young Wives in Industry,” by Simon N. Patten; to The Magazine of Business for several quotations from “What Is Happening to the White Collar Job Market?” by Paul Douglas; to The New Republic for a quotation from “The Professional Woman’s Baby,” by Helen Glenn Tyson; to The Survey for permission to quote from “Can Mother Come Back ?” by Mary Ross; to The Survey Graphic for permission to quote from “Home and Office,” by Katherine S. Angell, from “As Children See It,” by Dr. Ira S. Wile, from “The Parent’s Wages,” by Alice Beal Parsons, from “Shall We Join the Gentlemen?” by Mary Ross, from “Changing Marriage,” by Dr. Beatrice M. Hinkle ; to the Woman's Home Companion for quotations from “We Both Had Jobs,” by a Wage-Earning Wife, from “The Lure of the Double Salary,” by Anna Steese Richardson, and from “That 'Double Salary’ Lure—A True Story”; to The Woman's Journal for a quotation from “The Middle-Aged Woman in Business,” by Virginia Pope (printed in The Woman Citizen) ; to The World Tomorrow for a quotation from “The Possibilities of Marriage,” by F. Harris.
Thanks are also due to the following publishers and organizations: to the Bureau of Vocational Information for extracts from Marriage and Careers, by V. M. Collier; to the Thomas Y. Crowell Company for selections from Woman's Dilemma, by Alice Beal Parsons, and from Woman and Home, by Orison Swett Marsden; to the J. B. Lippincott Company for extracts from The Family and Its Members, by Anna Garlin Spencer, and from Women's Share in Social Culture (revised edition, 1925), also by Anna Garlin Spencer; to. The Macmillan Company for extracts from The Vocation of Woman, by Mrs. Archibald
l 5 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
Colquhoun, and from A History of the Family As a Social and Educational Institution, by Dr. Willystine Goodsell (copyright by The Macmillan Company, 1915) ; to the National Industrial Conference Board for a table reprinted from Clerical Salaries in the United States, 1926; to the Oxford University Press for two quotations from The Economic Position of the Married Woman, by Mrs. H. A. L. Fisher; to the W. B. Saunders Company for a quotation from The Family and the New Democracy—A Study in Social Hygiene, by Anna M. Galbraith; to the Frederick A. Stokes Company for a quotation from What Women Want, by Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale; to the University of Chicago Press for extracts from Wages and the Family, by Paul Douglas.
We wish also to make individual acknowledgments to Miss Katherine S. Angell, Dr. Beatrice M. Hinkle, Dr. Ira S. Wile, Mrs. Alice Beal Parsons, Mrs. Helen Glenn Tyson, and Miss Mary Ross.
Z 6 3INTRODUCTION
HESE outlines on the married woman in business have been pre-
pared at the request of a commission of the National Business
and Professional Women’s Department, and in response to a demand from groups of business women and girls for some material on this subject for use in discussion groups. There seem to be two reasons why this subject is of so much interest. Many business girls are personally facing the question, “Shall I go on with my job after I am married?” and all business girls are facing the more general problem, “What do I think about the employment of married women ?” The second question is one that is often answered without any careful consideration or any regard to the facts in the case.
While the outlines aim to be of service in answering both the personal and the general question, they must, since they are prepared for group use and for a varied constituency scattered all over the country, of necessity be directed primarily to the second more generalized question of “What am I to think about it?”
The importance of the answer to this question is not always understood by those who make it so glibly out of the experience of a few personal incidents, or accept it ready-made from their friends. Out of many individual answers is formed that public opinion which will be a large factor in determining how many women will answer it in its personal form. The pressure of public opinion makes itself felt in all the antagonisms and approvals which mean so much in the daily lives of us all. What husband cannot be moved by the obvious disapproval of his fellow workers when they discover that he “lets his wife work”? What woman is not tempted to apply as “Miss” rather than “Mrs.” when she knows that the boss does not approve of married women in the office?
When we recognize its potency, we cannot take casually the discussion out of which a sound opinion may emerge, one based on facts and formed out of clear thinking.
This does not, of course, mean that an opinion can be reached which can be applied to every case within the experience of the group. It is very necessary to realize that any such generalization is but a rough approximation, to which there will be many exceptions. Great injustice will be done to individual married women unless it is recognized that the merits of each case require individual attention, and that no generalization can be used as a blanket judgment to be applied to all women.
Making up one’s mind on such a subject always involves the scrutiny of personal experience if it has brought one into touch with the problem.
£ 7 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
Throughout these outlines, therefore, questions are asked which are designed to use whatever personal experience of the various phases of the problem there may be present in the group. The discussion, however, if it is valuable, will put that experience in a new light, encourage comparison with the experience of others, and make clear the need for further information in many cases.
No one's personal contacts can of themselves afford a broad enough base for an intelligent opinion on so complicated and large a subject as this one. Consequently there is inserted throughout this study material from various sources which will supply more data for the discussion. This material is of several kinds: (1) Accounts of the personal experience of those who have tried various ways of handling the question; (2) opinion of experts who have drawn together many personal experiences into a generalization; (3) the results of studies, statistical and otherwise.
One great difficulty in making up one's mind on this question is the lack of adequate studies, especially of the business women and girls included in this discussion. Professional women are studied by various college groups or vocational bureaus, and in addition they are very free in expressing themselves on the subject in magazines and books. Industrial workers are studied by the Department of Labor, the industrial personnel group, and others. Clerical and office workers are often omitted by all groups. Certain studies in this field have been made and more no doubt will be made, but in many cases it was necessary, for the purpose of this course, to draw on material about other groups and suggest its adaptation to the office worker’s situation. We are therefore still in the dark on many of the questions set forth in this outline, and our opinions can be only guesswork until more research has been done.
It may be asked why, if this is true, we bother to try to think the question out? The answer is, that while the group may, at the end of this discussion series, come out feeling that it has not settled anything, the members will at any rate know what is involved in having an opinion, and where they can depend on known facts, and where they have to hold their opinion subject to change as new material is brought to light.
As for the personal use of such a discussion in answering the question, “Shall I go on with my job?" it seems probable that the greatest benefit will come from the opening up of what is involved in the personal decision. Each situation will be different, and no generalization, however valid, will fit the particular circumstances of any one case. The discussion should, however, be valuable also in helping people to understand and to look carefully at all the sides of the question which must inevitably enter into a well-considered personal decision.
The material included here has been selected from books and articles
n s 3INTRODUCTION
of varying degrees of value, and in such a way as to present many sides of the question, in order not to prejudice the issue. Any such selection or its arrangement may reveal an unconscious bias, but this, if detected, can be remedied by the discussion leader. It is of course recognized that no such material can do more than touch the surface of the questions raised by this subject. There may appear in any group strong interests in certain directions, which the leader should follow rather than keep to the order suggested here; within any discussion also, if the leader is alive to the response of the group, it is likely that she will want to change the order of questions, omit some and add others. The material inserted throughout may be usable only by the leader in her preparation, or part of it may occasionally be read to the group or given to members for their preparation. The most important essential is to keep the discussion to the subjects of greatest interest to the group, and to see that these subjects are handled in a way to bring about a sound judgment.
For help on the discussion method itself the leader may find useful Creative Discussion and the introduction to The Worker and His Job, published by The Inquiry and available from the Womans Press, 600 Lexington Avenue, New York.
L 9 3I.	THESE MARRIED WOMEN
IT is of course necessary, before we can discuss the question of the married woman in business, to find out what the situation really is. This is a subject upon which everyone has an opinion and often a very decided one, based on one or two personal experiences in her office or among her friends. It is necessary at the beginning, therefore, to find out what we can about the married women who are now working, what the present attitude is toward their employment, and what we need to know if we are to have an intelligent opinion on the question.
I. What is the present situation?
A. What is your personal experience with regard to married women in business?
1. What proportion of the women in your office are married?
2.	What proportion of the girls you know who have married recently have gone back to work?
3.	What proportion of all the women you know have worked after marriage ?
4.	Is this proportion increasing among the younger girls who are marrying now?
B. What are the facts about women in the country as a whole ?
The United States census gives us two sets of facts about this situation: (1) The proportion of clerical workers who are married, and (2) the proportion of married women who are in the clerical occupations.
TABLE 1. PERCENTAGE OF ALL EMPLOYED WOMEN AND WOMEN WORKERS IN OFFICE OCCUPATIONS WHO ARE MARRIED
1910	1920
24.7	23.0
17.9	23.6
10.4	12.2
5.6	9.1
t 10]
All employed women
Trade ..............
Professions ........
Clerical positions ..,THESE MARRIED WOMEN
What does this mean? It means that in all these occupations the proportion of married women has been increasing. In clerical occupations it has nearly doubled in ten years. This is the more interesting because, among all women employed, the number of married women seems to have decreased slightly. (The time of year at which the census was taken changed in 1920 in such a way that fewer agricultural women were included. Since many of them are married this may account for the apparent decrease.) At any rate, it is evident that, although the number of married women in these three occupations is not so high in proportion as in the total number, it is on the increase.
TABLE 2. PERCENTAGE OF ALL THE MARRIED WOMEN AT WORK WHO ARE IN OFFICE OCCUPATIONS
1910	1920
Occupations of	all married women at work ..	100.0	100.0
Trade .........................................  4.4	8.1
Professional...................................  4.0	6.4
Clerical positions.............................. 1.7	6.7
It is evident from this that of all the married women at work in 1910, 10.1 per cent were in these three occupations, and by 1920, 21.2 per cent had gone into them. It is interesting that while the numbers of those not listed as married in all these occupations had increased (in the case of clerical workers it had about doubled), among married women the increase is proportionately greater. In the clerical group the percentage of married women has multiplied nearly five times. The total increase of all women in clerical occupations has risen in the ten years from 7.3 to 16.7 of all employed women. Evidently this opening of new opportunities has been seized by the married woman. The statistics used here are taken from “Facts About Working Women,” Bulletin No. 46, Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor.
Valuable as these figures are as showing the trends that are developing in the country as a whole, it should be remembered that the census is now (1928) more than eight years old. The figures therefore are not accurate for the present situation. Undoubtedly the next census will show a further increase in the number of married women at work, but there is no way of telling exactly how great it will be. It is likely also that many women who are married do not report themselves as such, so that all figures of this kind are not entirely accurate.
[If members of the study group live in a state or city which took a census in 1925, they might be interested to look the census up and see what it would show on this subject.]
t H 1JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
C What kinds of married women are in business ?
Married women are often lumped together, in talking about them, when in fact their circumstances are very different. List the different circumstances of married women, such as:
(1)	Young women with children—husband working.
(2)	Young women without children—husband working.
(3)	Older women with children—husband working.
(4)	Older women without children—husband working.
(5)	All these four groups, with husband ill, dead, unemployed, deserted, or in other ways not providing for the family.
Is it possible to discuss “the married woman in business” as a whole when we see such great differences in circumstances ? The group listed under (5), in which there is no support from the husband, may perhaps be eliminated for purposes of this discussion, since their problem is a different one altogether. The older women need to be given separate consideration also, and for those interested in that question, Discussion IX, page 92, is prepared. The rest of these discussions, however, are given to the consideration of the young woman who either has or may have children and whose husband is working.
II. What is the present attitude toward the employment of young married women in offices ?
[It is suggested that the accompanying attitude test, What Is the Effect on Their Families of the Paid Work of Married Women? might be given to the group at this point. It will provide the leader with an idea of where the center of interest is, as well as indicate the general attitude of the group on the subject. If there is great interest and difference of opinion, on (6) for instance, it will show a preponderance of concern on the economic issue; if on (2), (10), (11), a major interest in the children, and so on. This will be useful in helping the group to decide as to which one of the following outlines it wants to take up first and to which it will give the most time.
It will be necessary to avoid discussion of the questions raised in the test as far as possible, by suggesting that the other discussions will deal with all of them at some length.]
The value of the test here is to give a basis for the following questions:
A. How did you arrive at your present attitude ? How many cases have you known personally from which you could draw conclusions? What have you read on the subject? Where have you heard it discussed? t 12JTHESE MARRIED WOMEN
B. To arrive at a fair opinion on the subject, what do
you need to know?
Since opinions of this kind must be based on the consequences that follow from any action, it would seem that further light was needed on the following questions:
1.	How is the relation between husband and wife affected by her employment ?
2.	What happens to the home?
3.	How about the children?
4.	What does it do to the woman herself?
5.	How does it affect the economic foundation of the families?
6.	What does it do to the job and the other women in similar positions?
7.	What are its effects on society as a whole?
Degree of Truth Test
WHAT IS THE EFFECT ON THEIR FAMILIES OF PAID WORK OF MARRIED WOMEN ?
Directions
Please indicate your opinion about each of the following statements by placing parentheses around the letters in the margin which express your judgment. The meaning of each letter is as follows:
(T) PT D PF F
T (PT) D PF F T PT (D) PF F
T PT D (PF) F T PT D PF (F)
If you feel that the statement is utterly and unqualifiedly true, so that no one who had a fairly good understanding of the subject could sincerely and honestly believe it false.
If you feel that it is probably true, or true in a large degree.
If you feel that it is quite undecided, an open question, or one upon which you are not ready to express an opinion.
If you feel that it is probably false, or false in large degree.
If you feel that the statement is utterly and unqualifiedly false, so that no one who had a fairly good understanding of the subject could sincerely and honestly believe it true.
Work rapidly, but do not fail to circle one letter in each line.
C 13 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
True T	Probably True PT	Doubtful D	Probably False PF	False F	1.	No self-respecting man would
T	PT	D	PF	F	2.	let his wife work. The children of married
T	PT	D	PF	F	3.	women who work never turn out well. A woman needs to work for
T	PT	D	PF	F	4.	her own satisfaction because it gives her a chance to use her abilities. The only time when it is all
T	PT	D	PF	F	5.	right for a woman to work is when her husband cannot support her. It is all right for a woman to
T	PT	D	PF	F	6.	work after her children are old enough to go to school. Married women should be al-
T	PT	D	PF	F	7.	lowed to work when there are plenty of jobs but discharged when jobs are scarce. It upsets the authority of the
T	PT	D	PF	F	8.	husband if the wife has her own income. If the family can afford to
T	PT	D	PF	F	9.	employ expert help to take care of the children, there is no reason why the wife should not work. A wife is more interesting to
T	PT	D	PF	F	10.	her husband if she has a job. A woman cannot think
T	PT	D	PF	F	11.	enough about her children to bring them up right if her mind is taken up with a job. A woman ought to work
T	PT	D	PF	F	12.	when it is her only chance to provide more education for her children. The work of married women
T	PT	D	PF	F	13.	is breaking up the home and threatening family life. The married woman who
stays at home misses the companionship and approval of the women with whom she worked on the job.
C 14 3II. THE WORKING WIFE AND HER HUSBAND
\ NY discussion of this subject is likely to become involved with questions of the marriage relation itself. It is of course impossible to separate those aspects of the relationship which arise out of the fact of the wife’s employment from those which would be there in any case. The attempt of this outline, however, is to emphasize certain new elements which the work of the wife brings into the relationship. How they will affect it will depend largely on what the husband and wife are expecting of marriage and of each other, and in each case this will of course be different. Generalizations at present are obviously impossible because of the differences in each case, the lack of scientific study of the situation, and the present state of transition between old and new standards. This discussion should, however, serve the purpose of helping business women to realize from the experience of others what may be the result of adding this new factor to their marriage relationship, and also how other women are handling similar situations.
I. What new elements are injected into the relationship between husband and wife by the wife’s employment ?
[The group can perhaps list the most important changes that it feels are often produced. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it may suggest to the leader how to handle the elements which the group considers important.]
The attitude of the husband toward the work itself.
Greater independence of the wife because of having “her own money”; often a new attitude of equality.
Greater variety of interests for the wife and often more similarity in the experience of husband and wife.
[The group, after it has listed the new elements, will want to go on to a discussion of the way in which each of them affects the situation.]
A. What is the attitude of husbands toward their wives’ employment ?
1. What has been your personal experience in this matter? What have you heard said on this subject by your acquaintances? Have you ever noticed any difference of opinion on it among the men you know? What kind of men are opposed l IS 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
to it? What kind favor it? Do you know how the husbands of your married friends who are working feel about it?
[Some of the group might be interested in using the attitude test given in the previous outline with some of the men they know, and comparing their opinions.]
2. What facts are there on this matter of the opinion of husbands ?
The following quotations give different points of view.
1
Lorine Pruette, in Women and Leisure, gives the result of a study of 354 men made through an employment agency which placed men largely in clerical, commercial and professional positions (only 27 per cent professional). The men were asked to answer the following questions:
What view do you most favor ?
(1)	The married woman should devote her time to the home.
(2)	The married woman should work outside if she desires, except when the care of young children demands her time.
(3)	It should be expected that the married woman shall earn part of the family income, the husband assisting her with household duties and the care of children.
(4)	Housework and the care of children should be done by specialists or cooperative methods, the time of the married woman thus set free, as is her husband's, to be used in outside work.
The results were interpreted by the terms “apathetic,” “conservative,”— those favoring (1) ; “liberal,”—those favoring (2) ; “radical,”—those favoring (3) and (4). Results showed:
Apathetic ........
Conservative........
Liberal ............
Radical ............
Forty did not respond.
Conservative ......
Liberal ...........
Radical ............
.............................. 11.2	percent
.............................  57.6	percent
.............................. 27.7	percent
............................... 3.5	percent
If they are not counted, it shows:
................................ 65	per cent
................................ 31	per cent
................................. 4	per cent
Only seven marked (3), and five, (4). Of these men, 243 of the 314 were unmarried. No difference of opinion, however, was observed on these ques-
Z 16 3THE WORKING WIFE AND HER HUSBAND
tions between married and unmarried. The only trend evident is that the older married men, who had worked more years, had slightly higher tendency toward (2). The education of the group showed:
Less than grammar school ...................... 6 percent
Grammar school................................. 47 per cent
Two or more years of high school............... 36 per cent
College ....................................... 11 percent
The results showed that the more liberal were those who had more education.—Adapted from P mette, Lorine, “Women and Leisure,” E. P. Dutton and Co., New York, 1924.
2
A study of one hundred professional women was made by Mrs. Virginia Collier of the Bureau of Vocational Information, New York. All these women were carrying on their professions and their homes successfully. The contrast in the attitude of their husbands to those in Miss Pruette's study is interesting. According to their own or their wives1 testimony, eighty-six out of the hundred husbands represented in this study entertain a decidedly favorable attitude toward the wife's working; an attitude so favorable that it can be described as enthusiastic is held by twenty-six out of eighty-six men. Of the remaining fourteen, only one was found definitely to oppose his wife's work. His opposition, however, is directed against the kind of work she does and not against the fact that she does something in addition to her home jobs.—Collier, V. M., “Marriage and Careers,” Bureau of Vocational Information, New York, p. 85.
3
Professor Groves makes a distinction between different social groups on this matter.
There are class distinctions that one recognizes also as influencing the reactions of the woman who works. In the professional class, particularly among college teachers and newspaper officials, we find the greatest freedom. The wife of the minister, doctor or business man is more likely to meet with opposition from the husband if she goes out of the family to work, and is more likely to encounter a critical social attitude on the part of neighbors and friends. The skilled mechanic is even more unwilling to have his wife work outside the family. Among clerks, the working outside the home of women, whether wives or mothers, if the housekeeping tasks can be arranged so that they are free to accept employment, is taken as a matter of course, since from the beginning of marriage it was assumed, on account of financial pressure, that the women would work if they possibly could.
Generally speaking, ignoring the significance of section and class, the younger women are freer to marry and enter out-of-the-family employment
C 17 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
without meeting the opposition from husband or associates. The rapid trend during the last decade toward greater social equality of girls with boys is showing itself at this point of the social code unmistakably, and among the younger set a greater number of women are marrying who are accustomed to out-of-the-house employment and who insist after marriage upon going on with that kind of work which affords them more satisfaction than housekeeping.—Groves, Ernest R., “The Psychology of the Woman Who Works,” The Family, May 1927, p. 93.
It is evident that there are great divergencies of attitude among the husbands whose wives are working.
3. How does the attitude of the husband affect the relationship ?
From your personal experience and from that of your friends, what would you say on this question ?
The testimony from the studies that have been made (Marriage and Careers and College Wives Who Work) seems to show that unless the husband gives his cooperation to the plan of his wife's working they cannot work out a successful arrangement. Mrs. Collier reports that in many instances the husbands are distinctly proud of their wives' achievements and find them much more interesting because of their work.—Adapted from Collier, V. M., “Marriage and Careers,” Bureau of Vocational Information, pp. 81-90.
B. How does the economic independence of the wife affect the relationship between husband and wife ?
1. Does it put them on a more equal footing? How does that affect the husband? How does it affect the wife ? Can a relationship on a basis of equality be worked out between them ?
What personal experience has the group on this question?
The following quotations may throw light on it from various points of view.
1
From the point of view of the man, woman's employment outside the home represents a distinct loss of power and is so interpreted by the average husband. In the past the supremacy of the male in the family rested upon his command of the family income and the prestige that has been his from being looked upon as the producer of the family funds. When the woman herself earns and her maintenance is not entirely at the mercy of her husband's will, diminishing masculine authority necessarily follows. The reac-
C 18 3THE WORKING WIFE AND HER HUSBAND
tions of men range from relief that they do not alone carry the burden of the family upkeep or satisfaction in knowing that their wives have attained a measure of practical equality, to the feeling of persistent irritation that their wives are not content with being housekeepers, and inner protest such as Anderson's hero in Dark Laughter feels regarding his journalistic wife, which eventually reaches such intensity that one night when his feelings have been especially violent, he walks out of the apartment, never to return.
There are men who are not at all averse personally to the idea of their wives' working for money outside the home, who nevertheless set themselves against such employment because they fear social criticism or are sensitive to the remarks that they assume others are passing with reference to the financial situation that requires the working of the wife. It is this, probably, that makes the business man so reluctant to have his wife engage in gainful occupation outside the family, even when he is quite willing that she should spend hours at a time in study, recreation, or charity. Such a man frequently cannot understand how difficult it is for his wife to content herself with intermittent and unsystematic activities when, like himself, she has a* human craving for competitive, gainful, and responsible employment. Fortunately for the happiness of many women, this sensitiveness of the husband is rapidly melting away, especially in the professional class.
It is not strange to find actual jealousy on the part of husbands regarding the out-of-the-home successes of their wives. Here, at least, appears an inferiority feeling such as some insist is characteristic of all men in their thinking of themselves in comparison with women. The intense jealousy that sometimes arises in husbands whose wives are working outside the home is so great as to make it necessary either for the wife to drop her occupation and return to the confines of the house or, by insisting upon her rights as she conceives them, to destroy the harmony of the household, perhaps even to the point of bringing about a divorce. Strangely enough, in the process of self-attainment some women hurt their affection for their husbands. Either because of her innermost character or as a consequence of early training, as soon as such a woman is able to rival her husband in the concerns of life he loses her admiration and even love. It is only fair to say that in these cases the woman is merely learning from outside experience the true value of her husband and his obvious inferiority in comparison with herself.—Groves, Ernest R., “The Psychology of the Woman Who Works ” The Family, May 1927, pp. 94, 96.
2
One woman who has experimented with economic independence gives the following account of its effect on the relation with her husband.
Now this is not to be a confession of abject failure. I don't want to delude any reader for an instant with the hope that I am now sitting solitarily at a shiny rolltop desk, lamenting a Jerry lost, a happiness lost through my insistence upon my right to an occupation outside my home. Neither do I want to delude anyone with the hope of finding me every afternoon
E 19]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
beside a neatly laid tea table, hating it because it isn't a typewriter and looking with hatred upon a white-capped maid because she isn't a bob-haired stenographer. No, we have pulled it off with fair success, Jerry and I, but there have been times when it has seemed that we weren't going to pull it off.
Unexpectedly enough it was that double income of which even our old-fashioned relatives had approved, that became our chief difficulty. If the economic dependence of women bred tyrants on the one hand and cowards on the other, the economic independence of women has its own dangers. Two people, each accustomed to earning his own living, to spending his own income, have a good deal of adjusting to do before they learn how to merge two incomes into one, and until that lesson is learned they flounder in a financial morass.
Now for reasons deep-rooted in his masculine tradition, I suppose, Jerry wished that his four thousand plus should be used for running expenses and that my twenty-five hundred should be put into the investment fund, the health emergency, and my own dress fund. He didn't, somehow, want to touch my money. But it caused a serious difference between us when he learned one day that I had impulsively interpreted “health emergency" so as to buy a second-hand car, a bargain, at three hundred and fifty dollars. (It really was a bargain!) And I found that my inner response to his angry “Have you any idea what the upkeep on that infernal thing will be?" was an equally angry, “It's my money; I earned it; I can do what I please with it."
There were a dozen such incidents of varying degrees of expensiveness but of uniform sort in the first three or four years of our marriage. And always that ugly thought framed itself in my mind: “It’s my money; I earned it; I can do what I please with it." Thank heaven I never uttered the ungracious words aloud. But Jerry did not need to have things shouted at him. I am sure that he said those words himself, though with a different emphasis: “It's her money; she earned it; she ought to be able to do what she pleases with it.” My expenditures were not patently selfish. I did not buy extravagant clothes for myself—indeed, I often borrowed from my dress allowance to make some purchase for the house—the old andirons to which I had succumbed at an auction; some glazed chintzes; or to pay for our symphony seats or for some English tweeds I had had sent in for Jerry. But I constantly disarranged the budget, and the result was that we squabbled, hurt each other, and burned with a rankling sense of injustice.
It was partly our “niceness" that made the trouble. We didn't like to discuss the sordid matter of money. Jerry, for all his conscientious modernness about my work, was old-fashioned when it came to maintaining his home—perhaps that is why I think that almost all fine men are so in the depths of their hearts! The instinct was strong to be what his father had been—sole provider for it. He could not bring himself to say to me, as he would have said to a brother with whom he was keeping house, or any man friend: “See here, you're holding out on me. You can't go off buying rugs
£ 20 3THE WORKING WIFE AND HER HUSBAND
until you’ve paid your shkre for the kitchen ceiling. Shell out.” It took us several years to reach that stage of frankness, to learn, in short, that we had to merge our two incomes into one, that we had to have a single direction for our spending.
By a single direction I do not mean, of course, the arbitrary, undisputed will of one individual. I mean a conscious singleness of aim reached by an honest, joint survey of needs—the singleness of aim which results from an intelligent committee meeting, for example.—“We Both Had Jobs’J by a Wage-Earning Wife, Woman’s Home Companion, August 1925.
3
Another woman states her view of the relationship in the following conversation.
I was discussing the subject of this paper with the husband I know best. “I agree with you that women should have the right to choose their work,” he said, “but I’m not so dead keen on a job as you are. I’d give up mine in a minute if I could afford to.”
“Well,” I asked, “would you be willing to accept an allowance from me— I, of course, to decide how much the allowance should be? Or I would pay the bills, and you could ask me for what you needed. I shouldn’t be niggardly; but I should decide for you whether you really needed it or not. And you could not change your mind and go back to work without my permission. Even with my permission, you might be told that you were restless and career-mad and belonged at home, or that you had no right to keep some unmarried man or some woman out of your job. By law you wouldn’t be entitled to control a penny of our income; on the other hand, the law would compel me to provide you with food, clothing, and shelter. The rest would depend on what kind of character your wife happened to have—and some have characters that don’t take kindly to independence for husbands. If I made enough money, you might gain in ease and luxury of living by the change. You would lose only the burden of self-responsibility. You would be subject to my final authority instead of your own. You have confidence in my affection and intelligence and magnanimity. Would you accept such a relation to me ?”
“No,” he said, “I wouldn’t.”
Neither would I.
—Mavity, Nancy Barr, “The Wife, the Home, and the Job,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1926, p. 199.
4
When the married business woman becomes a success, especially if she earns as much money as her husband, she has new problems. A man may be perfectly willing to have his wife work for money if her happiness lies in that direction, but he hates to have her earn as much money as he does. It touches his pride. He feels his crown as master of the household slipping. He acquires an inferiority complex that sometimes causes him to do all sorts of queer things. It takes a steady hand to keep a marriage off the rocks
n 2i nJOBS AND MARRIAGE?
at this period. The husband wants to be the strong one of the family. He wants his wife to look up to him, to admire his superior ability, and to come to him with a coaxing manner when she wants something, so that he may feel very magnanimous when he gives her what she wants. Really he wants her to keep her place as the minor part of the family. The wise wife learns, if necessary, to hide the facts of her progress, and always to give her husband the admiration he needs. If she fails as an admirer she can look for another woman in her husband's life—and the chances are the interloper will be an inferior sort of woman, one whose main hold on the husband is that of flattery.
The difference between the way a successful business woman and a stay-at-home wife will handle the problems of “a woman in the case” is vast, and typical of the difference in their lives. The business woman says in effect, “You can't give me anything but companionship anyway. If you don't want to give me that there is nothing left between us. We might as well be divorced.'' The stay-at-home wife sees her very bread and butter threatened by the other woman, and what a fuss she makes about it! The queer part of it is that there are fewer successful business women dragged through the divorce courts than there are so-called parasite wives.
When the married business woman comes to the place where she earns as much as her husband the sea of matrimony becomes strewn with rocks. There are plenty of women who become so ego-ridden over their successes that they are a trial to everyone. Such a woman does little to keep her marriage intact. Her income intoxicates her—and so does the deference shown her by business associates. She loses her perspective. Her conversations bristle with the pronoun—first person singular. She spends most of the time she is at home carefully balancing a chip on her shoulder. If her husband inadvertently brushes it off, there is another case for the divorce mills.
Business is too new to women for anyone to expect us to take it calmly. And when business success comes to a woman she needs a level head to keep cool about it. I was one of a group of business and professional women the other day when the talk turned to just this subject. Most of them admitted laughingly that they had gone through the “Look-at-me-see-what-I've-done!'' stage, which one of them attributed to growing-pains.
One of the good things that come to a home from which both the husband and the wife go forth to business every day is a new comradeship—a new sort of partnership. A working wife has a better chance of being friends with her husband than the stay-at-home wife. And being friends with someone to whom the law binds one is not so easy as it sounds. The wageearning wife meets her husbaiid on an equality basis. She is no longer a dependent. She is an equal partner. The chances for domestic happiness seem greater than in the old-fashioned marriage where a woman could be nothing but what her husband »made her.—Littell, Jane, “Meditations of a Wage-Earning Wife,,f The Atljantic Monthly, December 1924, pp. 732-734.
t 22 ]THE WORKING WIFE AND HER HUSBAND
5
Under the social conditions from which we are just emerging, marriage inevitably grew to be regarded by women as a means of livelihood. It is quite impossible to estimate the number of marriages held together and endured in the past by reason of the social demand or because of the economic dependence of the women and children upon the man.
Men have never pretended that monogamous marriage was for them a satisfactory condition. It was a social status that had to be accepted, but both by favoring laws and by individual action it was made to interfere as little as possible with the husband's desires and privileges.
Modern industrialism has produced a condition which has allowed the situation to come to the surface and be rendered articulate. It has given large numbers of women an opportunity to become independent of men and marriage as a means of livelihood. Marriage as a means of support has lost in popularity immensely since women discovered they are capable of supporting themselves at less cost to their self-respect. It has changed the significance of marriage itself.
Formerly the major purpose of marriage was to provide suitable conditions for the production and rearing of children. The family was the important factor, just as it is to the birds that mate to reproduce themselves, and build their nests to provide a place for their offspring. Large families were an asset and marriage was little concerned with the individual happiness of its members. In industrial society today large families are no longer an asset but a debit. The problem of nations now is how to limit the growth of population instead of to increase it. Therefore the founding of a family is not the dominant purpose of marriage today. Instead it is the personal satisfaction and completion of the individuals concerned.
These changed conditions have served to force the individualistic attitude upon the women, for one of the greatest effects on women of labor outside the home is to render them more conscious of themselves, and to awaken them to a sharper realization of their own outline. From an intensely personal and subjective attitude, entirely absorbed in the family, which has been characteristic of women's psychology, they have been forced by the demands of modern industry to a more objective and impersonal state.
It is safe to say that those who have done most for the growth of industrialism had no realization of the by-product which would arise from its development—the beginning of the awakening and individualization of women, the first step in emancipation from their age-long psychic bondage.
It is this change in women that is affecting marriage so profoundly. It is practically impossible to create a satisfactory adult relationship when one person is entirely dependent upon the other, and that other is forced to carry the sole economic responsibility for the lives of both as well as of the family. Neither is it possible for people to give much thought to relationships when they are consumed by endless toil to obtain the necessities of life. Mutual responsibility and mutual consideration are the necessary basis for any relationship, and the marriage relation is no exception.
123 1JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
For the first time in the history of mankind the economic condition is such that both men and women can consider their individual happiness and welfare as superior to the maintenance of the institution. Actually, what we are witnessing today is the diminution of the value and power of the institution as such, and in its place, the demand on the part of the individuals for a personally satisfying life. The great problem is, how is this to be brought about?—Hinkle, Beatrice M., “Changing Marriage,” Survey Graphic, December 1926, pp. 288-289.
2. Does the employment of the wife make the husband dependent, irresponsible or unnecessary to her?
What would you say in answer to the following statements?
1
A woman who began to work in a financial emergency gives her experience of the results as follows:
As I said, I am still helping—rather, I am more than helping. I have found each year that with the increases in my earning capacity, the opportunities have been given me to apply it in new and various ways to the family upkeep. I am, today, without any illusions in regard to my husband, therefore I can state plainly, yet without rancor, that he has stood in the way neither of my seeing nor of seizing these opportunities.
I firmly believe in, and admire men—don't imagine me as being in the least prejudiced by my experience. I think most of them are instinctively keen on providing for the woman of their choice, perhaps because nothing else so flaunts to the world the fact that she is “his"!
In the case of an emergency, I should expect any worth-while woman to “stand by” in whatever way she could. But I doubt the genuineness of the help that she becomes when she assumes part of the burden of support. Instead of helping, I seriously suspect her of weakening him. Incited by my own case, I have watched with interest some dozen of others, developing along identical lines, namely:
In most cases the girl, by her efforts to help, undermines the man's instinctive prerogative of supplying her needs; after the first few weeks the fine edge of his chagrin over having her help in the support, wears off. In time he accepts the situation complacently.
In my own case I feel assured that, with the necessity hounding him, my husband would have made a good provider for myself and my two children. As it is, I have so weakened him by my help that he no longer knows that there is such a word. He has needed the spur of our family wants to keep him awake to the fact that we are his dependents. To me, a man should thrill to the possibilities and responsibilities of that word. If in the hour of our adversity I could have foreseen this, I would have chosen to plan my “help” upon a different basis. I would not have proffered my helping hand
l 24 ]THE WORKING WIFE AND HER HUSBAND
quite so readily. I would have been wiser in denying the family and struggling along, than in adding to our family purse.
I stand today in the boots of an eminently successful woman—but my feet are weary of the blisters! My apartment is well kept by an efficient servant; my children are in a good school. I have fought religiously the tendency of people (men) with whom I have come in business contact to criticize my husband for “allowing” me to be in business: as long as I bear his name I prefer to assume the blame fors not being where I belong—in my home! I have met and turned aside and lived through the constantly recurring fact that each time I come in contact with new men I must “establish” myself, must satisfy their ill-concealed desire to know why, if I am a “Mrs.”, I am there; must either stand their assumption that I am divorced or separated—or must state that I am not! I have never outgrown certain wholesome old-fashioned notions—and they seem to be shared by my husband— so that we have been saved the wrangling over other men, or women, that so often occurs in cases like this.
I am now contemplating a change, an upheaval, a reconstruction. Unfortunately it comes too late to be really effectual. As I said before, I have no longer any illusions in regard to my husband, nor have I left any fairy shreds of romance hanging about myself for him to revel in. We are two busy workaday individuals, with sufficient respect and fondness for each other to enable us to live under one roof so far! But there our “common ground” stops—excepting, of course, our mutual very great love for our children.
Much like the “worm,” or perhaps just like a woman, Fm “turning.” At twenty-nine I find myself facing the “terrible age of thirty,” with all sorts of resolutions to get the utmost out of the rest of my existence. The tragedy of it is that by this time I do not need my husband, neither his support nor his companionship! My work has trained me to rely upon my own efforts for both; my one idea now of a really happy life is to have my children, a little house somewhere, and occasionally to do special work to eke out the money I've saved, so that I can have time to “keep house” again, to “make friends,” to read and sew; time to live quietly and lazily and thoroughly. But in none of my plans do I find him included—which scandalizes me hugely, and makes me feel very much as though Td been caught running off with someone’s family silver! Also, it raises the question of separating him from the children, and the children from him—they are devoted “pals.” I can imagine how he has the same thoughts about me; how, except for the children, he’d like to live his own life his own way.
Too bad, isn’t it, when one’s a bad loser! I’d like to trade the last five years for a couple more babies, my old pride in my “home-making,” my old feeling toward my husband, of “head-of-my-house-let-me-lean-on-you.” . . . Truly, I would! So, preach loud and long to all your little “Marjories” and your big “Berts.” Urge them to foster and care for the spirit of their little new homes wisely and well—she in it, preserving it; he out, providing for it; for, queerly enough, if left alone all day, and most
[25 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
indifferently tended in the evenings, it flies away—beyond recall.”—“That 'Double Salary’ Lure—A True Story ,” Woman's Home Companion, November 1920.
2
The wage-earning of married women with young children, under present conditions, gives such families less stability, less comfort, less moral protection, and less home feeling, than those families of very small income in which the father earns just enough to pay for the household expenses and the mother gives herself to the family work. Moreover, the husband and father in such cases is more easily tempted to shirk his family duties. Among a large section of the colored population, in places where race prejudice makes it hard for men to get work, the wives and mothers often support the entire family by laundry work or other personal service, and the man grows flabby in character and lazy in habit because it is easy for him thus to depend upon his wife. It must not be forgotten by any student of domestic problems that the father settled down to steady work for the family long after the mother had been drilled in self-sacrifice for the child.—Spencer, Anna Garlin, uWomen's Share in Social Culture ,” J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, rev. ed., 1925, pp. 165-166.
C. How do the interests of the wife affect their relationship ? Does her work mean more common interests ?
The personal relationship involved in marriage is on the way to success when the depth arid range of the interests shared between the two partners are sufficient to make the common enterprise significant and rewarding to both.—Harris, F., “The Possibilities of Marriage ” The World Tomorrow, June 1927.
1.	Do you think this statement is true? If so, how does a woman's work affect the interests she and her husband share ? Does it give her more understanding of his job and more interest in it?
In a study entitled Occupational Propinquity As a Factor in Marriage, by D. M. Marvin, it was found that girls often married men who were in similar occupations. For instance, of 2747 girls in clerical positions, 1155 married men in either clerical positions or retail trade.
2.	Does the holding of similar jobs make for more shared interest?
Do you agree with the following ?
C 26 JTHE WORKING WIFE AND HER HUSBAND
1
She who works away from home gains an appreciation of the point of view of the man of the house. With greater understanding comes naturally increased tolerance. The ‘woman who knows what it is to be exhausted after a day of trivial contacts with people is not likely to be annoyed by her husband's preference for a quiet evening at home; when her own daily contacts were mainly limited to the butcher, the grocer and the peddler she felt herself ill-used if her husband did not always respond to her suggestions for an evening with friends. The greater importance of an equable disposition and an unobtrusive household régime over the certainty that every housekeeping task is done thoroughly on schedule time is usually recognized by the woman who, like her husband, has work to be done outside the home.
The husband who is modern in his sympathies and well prepared to meet the testing of present-day matrimonial conditions sympathizes with his wife's desire to work (as does he) in more fascinating activities than she can discover in her housekeeping tasks. Not only does he feel the justice of her demand for satisfying normal self-expression in her labor, but he also rejoices that her business experiences may afford a better basis for comradeship. Even though housekeeping be one of the most necessary of occupations and motherhood the most important, an increasing number of women can find neither home-making nor motherhood completely satisfying as a means of self-expression, and there are husbands who appreciate this fact and squarely face it, eager because of their affection to cooperate with their wives in finding an adequate outlet for cravings that household responsibilities do not satisfy. Such a man recognizes that, though this modern type of woman may be a more difficult life-partner, she brings him a richer personality, better fitted to answer his own human yearnings. He sees that it is as contrary to true affection to coerce the wife by forcing upon her hindrances to her growth in the name of her household responsibilities, as it would be to reduce her to a status of inferiority by putting upon her legal or political handicaps. In matrimony as elsewhere we find different tastes, and just as there are men who prefer wives that reproduce a wife's status of the past, that most males no longer desire, so there are others who can find matrimonial satisfaction only in a life fellowship with women whose demands are in accordance with a stage of development which is prophesied but not yet attained by most women.—Groves, Ernest R., “The Psychology of the Woman Who Works ” The Family, May 1927.
2
And where does a wife who works fail her husband? Certainly she has not enough time free to perform small personal services for him. She must entrust to a mere servant this matter of holes in the socks (and such a husband has to put up with the annoyance of finding a button neglected occasionally). With us, on the evenings we do not go out to dinner or have guests, I often must work on manuscripts in order to have the free daytime
C 27 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
hours I have described as stolen from the office for the children. But my husband also often brings work home, and neither of us finds that working side by side is any less companionable than reading our separate novels, or even than playing bridge together.
Of course, for the husband of a wife with a gainful occupation there are the pulls of custom, the habits of his class, to overcome. He must of necessity compare himself to the man who has a woman to back him up, to hold up his hands at every turn; to the man whose wife is free to grease every wheel and organize his life so that he has the greatest possible number of hours free from domestic care of any sort in which to devote himself to the achievement of a successful career. It may be that famous careers are often so made, but they are more apt to be careers than lives. Such a man, we think in our family, does not necessarily have the largest or most rewarding life. To a certain group of people it might seem, too, that a professional woman would fail in her social duties to her family by not being free to pursue the daytime social activities that are supposed to lead to contacts valuable from the angle of business or delightful from the angle of friendship and happiness. I do not agree to this premise because children whose parents are active and occupied will have all the friends and “contacts” they need in life.
In the psychology of all marriages the subtle balance of values and emphasis is of the utmost importance, and women, who plunge emotionally so deeply into all their activities, open themselves to the danger of being too much wedded to their work. A certain masculine detachment is a virtue much to be sought.—Angell, Katherine S., “Home and Office” Survey Graphic, December 1926, pp. 318-320.
3
A curious short-sightedness seems to have affected men whenever they have turned their attention to considering women. They complain, and with justice, of her narrow-mindedness, her lack of intelligent interests, her uncertain temper and her frivolity. All these characteristics tend to make her a most trying partner to live with. The strange thing is that man has so seldom recognized that the remedy lies not in the complaint, but in admitting women into the higher interests and more invigorating intellectual vocational life. The new ideal is that the devotion of women would be greater not less if they had richer minds and wiser hearts to give; that the noblest harmonies of life arise when two disciplined and independent minds combine, and that the truest comradeship is found when men and women meet on the common grounds of intellectual respect. Innumerable happy homes bear witness to the truth of this ideal, and so the battle has been won, in principle at least.
When woman was wholly dependent on marriage for a livelihood she was compelled to cultivate those attractions which depend on sex, preventing her from engaging in the various physical activities and gainful pursuits that develop both physical and mental vigor, and her own resulting weakened bodily and mental condition reacted most unfavorably upon her offspring.
C 28 ]THE WORKING WIFE AND HER HUSBAND
Men are manifestly less healthful and vigorous than they would have been if they had been born of robust and vigorous mothers.
Very many years ago John Stuart Mill, realizing the deteriorating influence on the face of woman’s intellectual inferiority, contended that in order to render woman a real companion to man in his struggle for existence, intellectual training and economic emancipation were necessary instead of subjection and ignorance, which always degraded the character of the husband as well as her own, since there is hardly any situation more unfavorable to character or forces of intellect than living in the society and seeking by preference the sympathy of mental inferiors. Affection depends to a very high degree upon sympathy, each mutually strengthening the other. Community of interests, sentiments, culture and mode of life are essential to close sympathy and therefore favorable to warm affection.—Galbraith, Anna M., “The Family and the New Democracy—A Study in Social Hygiene,” W. B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia, 1920, pp. 366-367.
II. Do these new elements injected by the wife’s employment mean certain new attitudes in both husband and wife if the result is to be satisfactory?
A.	What changes in the traditional attitude of the husband must a man make if he is to adjust himself happily to his wife’s working?
B.	What changes will the wife have to make in her traditional attitudes ?
C.	Are such changes desirable enough to attempt, or would it be better for the relationship between them if she would return to the home ?
[Care should be taken here to keep the discussion to the matter of these relationships and not get involved with the other aspect of the case—the children, the home, and so on.]
1291III. WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HOME?
IT is of course not possible in one discussion even to touch upon all the voluminous material that deals with the changing home. It is only possible to suggest how those changes have affected women's work and what her employment in business is now doing to the home itself. These effects will differ very much with the income of the family. For this reason suggestions that depend upon an income which makes possible domestic service beyond a very limited amount are omitted.
I. What has been happening to the home?
A. Compare the homes in which you now live with those of your grandparents.
What things which were done in the home by your grandmother does your mother still do? What do your friends who have homes of their own still do that their mothers did ?
B. What has made these changes in women's work at home?
In addition to the knowledge and experience of the group on this subject, the following material may be useful.
1
The home has suffered far more radical changes. Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it not only housed a picturesque assortment of crafts, it was also the school, to some extent the church, and very largely the social club. Not until the American colonists first established public schools for their children was home education supplanted to any considerable extent by public education. And as the home was full of interesting activities, the education picked up in that way was often far from negligible. Yet we can imagine that it seemed a radical change indeed when children were sent away from home, from the mother who was their “natural” guardian and teacher, to sit all day in the rooms of some public building and learn instead from a teacher hired by the community and having no personal interest in them. Compared with so radical a departure from traditional practice, any discussion as to where the family's meals are to be cooked seems trivial indeed. Yet after comparatively few generations we are now so accustomed to public education for children that it seems a part of the natural order, and, in America at least, the occasional family that educates its children in the home is looked upon as a curiosity.
C 30 3WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HOME?
From earliest time worship was conducted in the home. The French name for home, foyer, is reminiscent of the days when the hearthfire was held to be sacred and when ancestor worship played an important part in various religions. The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages did not, though they represented a step in the direction of taking worship out of the home, by any means entirely supplant home worship. Great houses still maintained a chapel, where members of the family and its retainers worshiped. And long after every little town had its half-dozen churches, morning and evening prayers were read in devout families. Yet gradually the trend toward socialization has made itself felt, and worship is now conducted almost entirely in public places.
Within the memories of middle-aged people today, most social activities were carried on in private homes. Dances were given in homes, card parties, teas, spelling bees, quilting parties, according to the condition and the geographical location of the people concerned. Now, although the transfer is still not complete, and probably never will be entirely complete, it is not exaggeration to say that there is a marked departure of social activities to places outside the home—clubs, lodges, hotels. The town that used to have one theatre and one or two dance halls, now has a dozen movies, a half-dozbn club houses, scores of lodges. There are public skating rinks, tennis courts and golf links. There are country clubs, motor clubs, dining clubs, dancing clubs.
So that not only have the processes formerly performed in the home largely gone out of it, but many aspects of the life formerly lived in the home have been transferred elsewhere, to the school, to the church, the club and the theatre. In fact, just enough of the home’s activities have been left in it to require the fairly continuous presence of the average mother, who finds herself baffled both by the triviality and the nagging insistence of the tasks that keep her there, since from being teacher, doctor, nurse, maker of clothes, producer of food, she has become simply the person who cooks a little, washes dishes, sweeps, scrubs, dusts, and, where her children are concerned, tries to carry out the doctor’s orders when they are ill, but, if she is financially able, hires a more competent nurse to do this, just as she pays taxes to the community to hire a more competent teacher to instruct them. She finds herself more than a little jealous of the outside activities of her continually departing family, and all too often, confronted as she is with vacuity, she loses both zest for doing things and efficiency in doing them.— Parsons, Alice Beal, “Woman’s Dilemma,” Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, 1926, pp. 191-194.
2
It is necessary to rehearse briefly the physical changes the modern home has very recently undergone. For many years it retained the proportions which had been necessary when it housed all the family industries and all the social activities of the family. But recently it has grown continually smaller and more convenient, a change that was given a very great im-
C 31 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
petus by the high cost of building and building materials during the war and after it. Instead of many useless rooms which wore a woman out with cleaning, fighting moths and so forth, we find now in new houses, as a rule, only the rooms that are actually needed—a larger, more beautiful, more useful living room, a kitchen ranging from a fifth to a tenth the size of its back-breaking predecessors, enough small bedrooms to go around, a bathroom, porches, possibly a study. An hour or less a day keeps such a house in perfect order, when the cooking and laundry are done outside, while we have seen that two to four hours a week suffice for the city apartment. Obviously, if the working mother preferred she could give that hour herself. Women who really like housekeeping, and so do it well, would probably choose to do it themselves. Of the four business women and one man living in the same house with me, three of the women have their housework done for them, and one woman and the man do their own. This difference is not due to a lesser income on the part of the latter, but to the fact that they like to use some of their surplus energy that way, and that the rest of us prefer to use it otherwise.—Parsons, Alice Beal, “Woman’s Dilemma Crowell, pp. 234-235.
3
We came from country or spacious town life of parents who were never so poor as to be stripped of radiating communal opportunities in that locality where each had his responsible and individual position. Home was the complete unit, a beloved feudal power . . . within were the income-earning husband, the income-dividing wife, and the income-dependent children. . . . The men were glad to marry young because a wife was a valuable factor in the work they had to do, and desire ran hand in hand with self-interest. The wife, placed at once in the current of production, broadened with the power which the education of the time denied to the non-producing girl. She was the quality in this order around whom the home ideal revolved. She is still the base and center of our sentiment and we think of her as the type of homemaker by which to test the right and wrong of other married women’s activities. She retains the title won generations past, because of her economic usefulness in her husband’s house, because of her function of director of its necessary businesses taken over by her to the general convenience. They have now been taken away from her and given to the market gardener, dairyman and poultry dealer. Will the modifications of her utility which must follow the new classifications imperil her supremacy as a home builder or insure it?—Patten, Simon N,, “Young Wives in Industry/’ The Independent, December 1,1904, p. 1244.
4
It is true that the impoverishment of home life consequent on the decline of home arts and industries has left for those still engaged in practical domestic work chiefly the more monotonous and repugnant tasks—particularly the everlasting cleaning which is the substratum of all such work. The
l 32 ]WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HOME?
demand for greater variety both in work and play, which is the result of brain stimulation (not always of brain cultivation), renders these tasks intolerably irksome to the vast majority of women, and they are performed more and more perfunctorily by a class who are driven by economic pressure and who confine themselves as far as possible to the mechanical performance of routine tasks. The work of a household must have involved a liberal education for the efficient housewife in old days; at present, it can be carried on, under the departmental system, with a minimum of knowledge in the head of the house. It is, therefore, not to be wondered at if the younger generation of women, growing up under such conditions, find the machinery of home life very uninteresting—just machinery, working well or ill, but in any case offering apparently no outlet to their building powers.—Colquhoun, Mrs. Archibald, “The Vocation of Woman ” The Macmillan Co., 1913, pp. 188-189.
C. What essential things are there still to be done in the home?
[The group might list those things it feels are necessary to the making of a good home.]
II. How does the employment of the mother in business affect the essentials of the home?
[Since the next outline is to be given to a discussion of the results for children, it would be well to keep this one to a consideration of those aspects of the home covered by “housekeeping.” The group will want to take up what it has listed as the essentials, and discuss how they are affected by the wife’s employment and what other alternatives to the wife at home may be feasible in handling them.]
A. Who will do the managing? How can the details of housekeeping be planned and carried out? Is that the woman’s responsibility alone, if she is working?
Is it a joint responsibility? Can it be shared? If so, how?
In addition to the opinions of the group, the following give various opinions on the matter. In several cases the instances are drawn from actual experience.
1
The second obstacle to satisfaction is less concrete and more elusive. When husband and wife are away from home during business hours, joint housekeeping or sharing household tasks night and morning is rarely success-
[ 33 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
ful. Yet if the wife has regular hours in business, it is manifestly unfair that at home she should bear alone the burden of such household tasks as must be done. And so in this home supported by the double salary one of two conditions exist: With open or secret unwillingness the husband shares the household tasks, or the wife bears the entire burden to her physical and nervous undoing. And neither is content.
Waiting recently in a friend’s office I heard one of her staff workers answer a telephone call. First she frowned, then she gave a little gasp; finally she spoke in a tone which betrayed jangling nerves:
“Why didn’t she let us know she was coming? I didn’t even have time to make the bed this morning. . . . No, I can’t leave before five. . . . Well, that will help. Smooth things up the best you can, and build a fire in the grate. Oh, yes—and take in some bread and nice deviled crabs from the delicatessen.”
Much relieved she concluded sweetly:
“Billy, you are a duck. I’ll tell you the rest when I see you.”
But the smile faded as she flung round to her desk. Probably she was visualizing the untidy apartment, which had been tastefully furnished with wedding presents, and she must have disliked the thought of her mother-in-law finding “Billy” enveloped in an apron, clearing up.
And what of Billy’s feeling?
If he is the average man, the sort of man worth marrying, he will not be happy in the situation.—Richardson, Anna Steese, “The Lure of the Double SalaryWoman’s Home Companion, May 1920.
2
Of course, we had had to make scores of other adjustments, besides the financial ones. For example, we wanted a home—a home together. We wanted two jobs apart in the world outside, but we wanted a home together.
We proceeded to the making of one. We found the sort of apartment we wanted—comfortable rooms, large and sunny, with an old-fashioned fireplace or two, with a pleasant outlook upon a city park and a satisfying proximity to the baker and candlestick-maker. And there was actually within easy reach a day nursery established by a woman doctor for the babies of well-to-do professional mothers.
At first we had a simply wonderful time buying, installing, arranging. Jerry seemed as keen about it all as I, as busy, as resourceful. He listened entranced to my inspiration for doing over my bedroom furniture in robin’s egg blue enamel. And he put up extra kitchen shelves where Mrs. Maguire, our incredibly neat, competent, amiable cook-housekeeper, wished them.
But Jerry’s home-making ardor cooled before mine. When the place was rather delightfully livable, he settled down to live in it. I still worked at it, experimented—a picture on that wall or a rug? The lounge facing the fireplace or at right angles with it ? A silk shade or a parchment for the study lamp? Jerry came gradually to grunt his answers when I plied him
Z 34 JWHAT HAPPENS TO THE HOME?
with such questions. And I resented it, resented it two or three times as much as the indoor, home-her-only-job wife would have done. For I was as tired as Jerry, although all those ancestresses of mine who couldn’t rest until their houses satisfied them wouldn’t let me rest, and I said to myself things like this:
“It’s his home as much as it is mine, and he might take an interest in it. I am quite as fatigued as he is. Chasing down the deserting father of the Cammatini family is harder work, if you come to that, than lunching with Monsieur Edouardes and outlining the kind of article you’d like to have him do. And I’d enjoy reading ‘Punch’ as much as he does, if I didn’t know that we ought to settle about the linoleum tonight.”
The little foxes that spoil the grapes!
I didn’t tell my husband how I felt about his indifference concerning the linoleum. I caught at a subterfuge and scolded violently about his not having told the little tailor at the corner to call for his evening clothes to be pressed. “You promised—I can’t attend to everything,” I stormed. “They’ve got to be done for tomorrow night. It’s a shame—I simply can’t be your valet as well as your housekeeper and interior decorator.”
But we had a quarrel based upon man’s age-long expectation that his wife will attend to domestic detail and upon a working wife’s sense of the unfairness of any such burden.
There are, roughly speaking, one billion grounds in the ordinary domestic routine for this sort of disagreement. Who is to stay at home to receive the plumber and explain about the ice-box leak? Not the Jerrys, I assure you! Who is to telephone the laundry about the missing collars? Again, not the Jerrys. Who, when the incomparable Mrs. Maguires rush off at an hour’s notice for their sick daughters’ bedsides, is to slam down the desk lid two hours before office closing time and hurry home to oversee two strange maids preparing for a dinner party? Never the Jerrys.—“We Both Had Jobs,” by a Wage-Earning Wife, Woman’s Home Companion, August 1925.
3
It is interesting to see where the father of such a family must make his adjustments to meet the problem of a working wife. In our family we divide considerably the responsibilities of the household. While I regulate the domestic end, my husband has time and I believe énjoys being responsible for the garden in the summer, the repairs to the city house, and in mutual matters we share and share alike, taking turns at paying bills, keeping the checkbooks, making arrangements for moving, travel and so on. And, most important of all, he takes an equal responsibility in regard to the children, visiting their schools as I do, going on expeditions with them on Saturdays and Sundays, and he has even been known to encroach on the sacred duties of the mother to the point of taking a child to a dentist or a doctor, although he is still to come to the point of purchasing their clothes!—Angelí, Katherine S., “Home and Office,” Survey Graphic, December 1926, pp. 318-320.
C 35 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
4
But the problem of simplification goes far beyond mere elimination. It requires organizing intelligence, the breaking down of habits and their revaluation. It requires the invention of new ways to perform old tricks. It involves the paradox of concentrating attention on the technique of housekeeping in order to free attention for another occupation. This in itself is a specific aptitude which the professional woman may not have. Yet it is the problem which she is required to solve.
At present new equipment, new technique, and the socialization of domestic processes belong in the realm of hope and not of accessibility for most of us. Cooperative kitchens, nursery schools, the care of children by experts— all of these are familiar as projects. The difficulty is to find them in existence. We must prove our ability to work with the imperfect tools we have before we can obtain more adequate ones. There is waste and fatigue and heartache and disappointment in doing things that way. But that is the way things are done. Nothing is made easy until it has first been accomplished when it was difficult.
In our own case, there were crises, of course. Our housekeeper was obliged to leave for a week. Someone had to stay at home with the baby. We took turns, keeping house on alternate days. This was a fair and obvious arrangement. And yet when a neighbor coming in on an early morning errand found my husband, pipe in mouth, attacking the baby’s washing while I waved the morning paper in farewell and called, “Goodby, dear, I’m off to the office,” she regarded it as an astonishing procedure.
If we had both been clerks in a big organization we could not have alternated so easily—though we still should have found a way. If a man asked for time off in such an emergency the request would be taken as proof that his wife ought to be at home instead of interfering with the demands of her husband’s business. If a woman made the same request it would be used by many employers as evidence that she could not be relied on to stick to her job, and therefore should not hold the job at all.—Mavity, Nancy Barr, “The Wife, the Home, and the Job ” Harper’s Magazine, July 1926, p. 197.
5
From the beginning we regarded the home as a part of our joint enterprise. Neither one of us had any taboos about “man’s work” and “woman’s work.” We had the initial advantage of simple tastes and an aversion to being owned by our possessions or to holding any given routine sacred through habit. We got breakfast, washed the dishes, and “tidied” the apartment together in the morning. Then we went uptown together, met for the lunch hour, and marketed on the way home in the evening. The exhaustion which is supposed to be the fate of the woman who carries out such a program did not follow, because I did not carry a double responsibility—merely a half-share of certain simple tasks.—Mavity, Nancy Barr, “The Wife, the Home, and the Job,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1926.
136 1WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HOME?
B. What shall we eat and how? In your personal experience, how are the meals managed in the families when the wife works? Does this seem to be satisfactory ?
The following proposals are made by various people who have tried them. Which do you prefer?
(1)	Eating in restaurants.
(2)	“Delicatessen meals” prepared at home by wife.
(3)	Attempt at regular cooking “the way mother used to do” by the wife.
(4)	Joint planning, shopping, cooking and clearing up by the husband and wife.
(5)	Meals cooked outside and sent in.
In addition to the opinions of the group on their own proposals, the following material gives descriptions and reasons for and against them.
1
If women are, at the same time, to be wives and mothers on the one hand, and independent workers outside the home on the other, there must be “a change in the home and family relation. . . . This will, of course, require the introduction of some other form of living than that which now obtains. It will render impossible the present method of feeding the world by means of millions of private servants, and bringing up children by the same hand.” The “segregation of an entire sex” to the function of food preparation has not been an unmitigated success. “The art and science of cooking involves a large and thorough knowledge of nutritive values and of the laws of physiology and hygiene.” Few women have received the necessary training which would make them skillful food providers and cooks. The same holds true of housekeeping and the expert work of rearing and educating children. Such large tasks should be performed by specialists, leaving the woman free “for full individual expression in her economic activities and in her social relations . . . .” At this point Mrs. Gilman paints a glowing picture of the apartment-house home of the future.
The apartments would be without kitchens; but there would be a kitchen belonging to the house from which meals could be served to families in their rooms, or in a common dining room as preferred. It would be a home where the cleaning was done by efficient workers, not hired separately by the families, but engaged by the manager of the establishment; and a roof garden, day nursery, and kindergarten, under well-trained professional nurses and teachers, would insure proper care of the children.” If “housekeeping” were taken out of our homes, the union of individuals in marriage would not compel the jumbling together of all the external machinery of their lives —a process in which much of the delicacy and freshness of life, to say nothing of the power of mutual rest and refreshment, is mutually lost.—
Z 37 1JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
Goodsell, Willystine, Ph. D., “A History of the Family As a Social and Educational Institution” The Macmillan Co., copyright 1925, pp. 516, 517.
2
Mrs. Alice Beal Parsons suggests that kitchens for the providing of food service sent to homes could be established and made to pay. In order to do this at a reasonable price, families would have to content themselves with few choices—at least at first, until the business was well started. She points out that it is no more difficult to transport hot food than to deliver ice cream. The growth of bakeries to the place where very few people now make their own bread is one proof of the possibility of this sort of wholesale food production. Such enterprises have sometimes been run cooperatively, but if an active demand arose for them it is probable that they would appear on a profit basis. She says: “In considering whether or not the last few processes in the preparation of food still performed within the home by methods a hundred years out of date might not better be performed outside the home by modern methods. We are concerned here with the calling into existence of kitchens adapted to give that service, and experience goes to show that as soon as the demand is felt such kitchens will appear, provided families are able to pay for the increased cost of the food made necessary by the fact that the labor that goes into its preparation must be compensated by actual money.”—Adapted from Parsons, Alice Beal, “Woman’s Dilemma,” Crowell.
C. What is the price of cleanliness for the married women in business? In the experience of the group, how is the cleaning, dish washing and so forth managed by the married business women they know ?
Various women who have tried it suggest the following:
(1)	A part-time worker for a few hours a day or week.
(2)	Work done by husband and wife together.
(3)	Companies of household cleaners employed by the hour.
The following material gives a suggestion on these alternatives.
1
Another sight that has become familiar is that of the vacuum cleaner, which does the annual spring housecleaning for many of those housewives who still indulge in that largely banished institution. It probably paved the way for those various companies of household cleaners one or another of which leaves a card at the door of my New York apartment every few weeks. For a specified charge an hour they send in men or women trained in all the niceties of household tasks, the dusting, sweeping, and scrubbing that must still be done in the house. The large dusty women in mob caps, who used to unite all these faculties under the comprehensive title of “cleaning
C 38 3WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HOME?
women/’ and the mere sight of whose blundering untrained movements made us fear for the safety of our belongings, while their whole persons seemed to sprinkle germs in the air, these victims of lack of training, who in turn involuntarily victimized their employers, may not yet be gone, but they are going, superseded by the trim new workers who know how, with two hours' work twice a week, to keep the two floors of my city home beautifully clean and orderly. I happen to pay at the rate of sixty cents an hour, and so the whole service costs me $2.40 a week. In the average-sized apartment once or twice a week, or $1.20 suffices. Prices range from fifty cents an hour, but there is no necessity for paying more than I do unless to receive quicker service, and if it is proportionately quicker the higher price will cost no more.—Parsons, Alice Beal, “Woman’s Dilemma,” Crowell, pp. 231, 232.
D.	Can the home atmosphere be created?
Mrs. Parsons has said that a home is a “little oasis of humanity” to which one can return in order to “reassemble his personality”; the coordinating agency by which the “dearly bought legacy of social morals” is passed on to the future. Can this function of the home be performed when the woman is away during the day? (It is, of course, obvious that this aspect of the home especially will be very different when there are no children or in which they are no longer small.)
On what is this “oasis” dependent ? How can it be produced ? Is it the responsibility of the woman alone, or chiefly? Is it a joint responsibility ? How could it be maintained with the woman at work ?
E.	Do you think the essentials of a home can be preserved when the wife is working? What changes will have to be made:
1.	In our ideas of what home is?
2.	In the management and control of the home ?
3.	In the attitudes of husband and wife toward it?
Do you think these changes are desirable? If not, how can we preserve the essentials ?
C 39 3IV. WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?
THE most serious question raised by everyone interested in the married woman in business is as to the results for the children. As in the discussion about the home, the income of the family will be an important factor here. We are assuming for purposes of this discussion that the business woman’s family falls in a middle income group—not so low as that of many unskilled workers and not so high as to make possible the employment of expert child nurses, or the placing of the children in private nursery schools.
I. What effect does the employment of the mother in business have on children?
A. Does the woman’s employment mean fewer children or none at all ?
1. Would you say, from your observation of the girls you know, that they tend to have fewer children because they are at work? What do they give as their reasons for not having them? Are they merely postponing them? If so, for what reasons ?
2. What broader experience is there on this ?
No statistics have been collected which show a comparison of the number of children of married women in business with the number of children of other business girls who have married and not stayed at work. The following facts about college women are significant, even though they are probably not true to the same extent among other employed women.
1
In a study made by Anna Byrd Kennon of 243 college wives who work, she reports the following:
Over one-half, or one hundred and thirty-nine of these gainfully employed wives had no children. The one hundred and four families with children range in size from one child, in forty-two families, to seven, in dne family. The average for the group is 2.21 children per family. J.n three recent studies of the size of families from which college students come, the average number of children per family was found to be 3.35, 3.66 and 4.32; thus these working wives have fewer children than other mothers of their class. —Kennon, Anna Byrd, “College Wives Who Work,” Journal of the American Association of University Women, June 1927.
£ 40 ]WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?
2
Mrs. Collier’s study, Marriage and Careers, shows the following facts about the children of the one hundred women she studied.
37	women	had	1	child
35	women	had	2	children
19	women	had	3	children
8	women	had	4	children
1	woman	had	6	children
Total	202 children
She says, “One commonly hears the charge that the married woman who takes time to do professional work does not find time to have children. . . * At any rate the fact that sixty-three, or practically two-thirds of the women studied, have more than one child would seem to indicate that professional interest on the part of the mother does not of itself tend to limit the number of children in the family.”—Collier, V. M.} “Marriage and Careers” Bureau of Vocational Information, pp. 60-61.
This study, however, shows only 2.02 children per family. The U. S. Department of Commerce, in a recent study of the number of children in families divided by occupation of husbands, gives 3.3 as the average number of living children in the families of professional men*. It would seem, therefore, as if Mrs. Collier’s group had considerably fewer than the average for women of their class.
3
There seems to be, among writers on the subject, an assumption, not based on statistical evidence, that the employment of the mother means a decreased birth rate; e.g. Arthur Calhoun in The American Family, Vol. Ill, pp. 250-252, gives as the eifect of employment on birth rate (1) that access to industry means an emancipation from economic dependence on the man which brings with it more consideration of the woman’s point of view as to the bearing of children, and (2) that if women remain at work children are an embarrassment to the job and so tend to be avoided.
B. Does the employment of the mother mean a higher infant mortality?
1. What experience has the group had in this matter? From their observation of their married friends who are at work, how does the health of Z 41 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
these women’s babies compare with that of the babies whose mothers stay at home ?
2. What do the figures tell us on this?
1
Several studies of infant mortality and its causes have been made by the government. In all of them the employment of the mother figures as one of the factors which increase the mortality rate. It is not by any means the only factor, however. In a study, Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, Vol. XIII, pp. 54-55, these other causes are given as also important: (1) The proportion of the foreign-born in the group, (2) the illiteracy, (3) a high birth rate, (4) the size of the community, (5) the sanitation and housing of the families, (6) the income, (7) the help given at birth, (8) the kind of feed-ing, (9) the kind of work done by the mothers, and (10) the time of employment before and after childbirth. In a more recent study, Causal Factors in Infant Mortality, Children’s Bureau, Bulletin No. 142, an especially close relation is found between the income of the father and infant mortality. When the father earns less than $450, 116.9 babies die in every thousand; when he earns $850-$1049, 82.8 babies die; when he earns over $1250, only 59.1 in every thousand die.
Miss Mary Winslow, speaking before the National Conference of Social Work in 1923, reports similar results from her studies in certain selected communities. While the death rate is higher in each case where the mother is working, it is lower in those communities where wages are high. For instance, in Manchester, N. H., it is 227.5 in the first year for infants whose mothers are working, and 133.9 for infants whose mothers are at home. In Akron, where wages are high, thIt figure is 88.2 for infants of working mothers and 77.2 for those of mothers staying at home.
Since the income of fathers in business women's families is usually over $1250 (see Discussion VI), it is likely that the death rate is fairly low in their families. It* is to be noted, however, that even with better income it is higher when the mother works. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly the necessity for artificial feeding. One report, Causal Factors in Infant Mortality, states that the death rate for infants artificially fed is three or four times that of breast-fed babies. An earlier report says that while it is higher for artificially-fed babies it can be reduced by proper care in the feeding.
2
We do not know how the office occupations will affect the health of the babies. Although it is known, for instance, that sedentary occupations
£ 42 ]WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?
are not good for women during pregnancy, no specific study has been made of office employments in that regard. The length of time taken from work before and after childbirth is recognized also as an important factor. We need to ask these questions therefore of business as well as of individual mothers.
3. What provision is made in business positions for leave of absence for childbearing? Are positions held or leave given with pay? What provision needs to be made?
C. Do the care and training of children suffer seriously
from the mother’s employment?
JB ■
1.	How do the mothers in* business whom you know provide for the care of their children?
2.	What ways might be provided?
1
Mrs. Parsons, in Woman's Dilemma (pp. 249-257), suggests several ways in which this problem could be met. For children of school age, only two innovations are necessary to make the child’s absence from home correspond with the mother’s—first, the installation of school lunches, and second, the filling in of the time after school by supervised play. Both these are already done in many private schools. For children under school age, the private nursery school is already developed in some communities. The extension of this idea to a public creche, where babies could be cared for by expert help, is all that is necessary to take care of the pre-school years. Mrs. Parsons believes that because the mother would call for her baby every day and take it home, she would be able to check up on its care in the creche. The objection to such a plan on the part of mothers who do not want to accept the charity of a day-nursery would disappear if it were conducted on a paying basis under private auspices or under the public school system.
2
At Smith College an experiment is being tried of running a cooperative nursery to which small children are brought for the day, to be given expert care and training. This is reported in detail in an article by Dr. Ethel Puffer Howes and E. H. Stock entitled “Cooperating Mothers,” in The Woman Citizen for February 1927.
Would such a plan be possible on a small scale for five or six business
[43 11JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
girls with babies? Why could they not employ a nurse to look after all the babies together in the home of one of them?
3. How do the children feel about it ?
In addition to the personal experience of the group, the following quotations give divergent points of view.
1
Let us concede the tremendous variations in homes. Differences in the number of children, their ages and natures, the economic status of the home and the differences in intellectual and cultural standards, profoundly affect the juvenile world and particularly the section within the home. The human relations in a home, with all their reactions of life upon life, are more potent in the determination of probable standards of conduct than any other single factor—and I am inclined to cast out the major claims of the dyed-in-the-wool hereditarians. The home is a potent synthesizer and weaver of character ends, when its atmosphere is fraught with affection, the spirit of cooperation, and a balanced mutual solicitude. The highest purpose of the home centers about children from birth to emancipation in the adolescent period. Many children are the unhappy victims of deficient home care and discipline long before society is forced to take notice of them because of delinquency, crime, dependency or physical or mental diseases.
What do some of the children think about their homes ? . . .
Mary is only twelve, but she is large, keen, determined and affectionate. She disapproves of the work that sends her mother home with tired feet and weary mind. She wants to influence her mother to give up this outside occupation, so she creates a nightly scene and berates and criticizes her severely. She will not help in the housework and only under paternal compulsion will she wash the dishes. Mary is disobedient, but she thinks and she acts in accordance with her thought: “I hate my mother to work and she doesn’t have to work. If I make the housework easy for her I encourage her to go on working.” Needless to say, the child is growing up to hate household occupations and her mother is saddened at Mary’s lack of cooperation and respect.
Perhaps Mary is not very different from tall, athletic Fred, who rebelled against all authority during early adolescence. He never came when called, remained out late, smoked and tried to be a sport. His mother worked only at shopping, social teas, bridge, Mah Jong, and the like, but she worked long hours and daily. Her children ate cold left-overs for lunch and often had to cook their own evening meals. Fred rarely saw his industrious father, whose necessary absence he did not resent. But his mother? “She ought to be home. That’s no way to treat kids.” He had gone on strike only after a parental lockout.
“My mother works and she comes home too tired to be interested in me. I don’t see her more than two hours a day. She hates housework and so do I. Why does she expect me to do it ? I want to go out to
C 44 ]WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?
work.” For this compelling reason, vigorous, friendly, affection-craving Alma is working hardest at failing in school. Her parents want her education to continue through high school but it is unlikely that their wish will be realized. This high school girl is able to be of assistance in the home, but the home does not exist for her. She desires to be free to earn, in order to escape household duties. Has she home duties ? Alma is willing to debate the question.
The legitimate desire for attention and personal care creates many difficulties when its complete satisfaction is denied. Frequently children resent being parked with nurseries, older sisters, or friends. Their conduct finds an outlet for their emotional distress. There may be something worthy of thought in the fact that Dr. Healy found that seventeen per cent of the delinquents studied came from homes whose mothers were employed outside.—Wile, Ira S., “As Children See It” Survey Graphic, December 1926, pp. 312-313.
2
Every reasoned choice in life is a matter of determining values. What is an extravagance for you may be a necessity for me. If I regard it as a necessity and think I must have it, I may be willing to make any sacrifice to get it. I know an able professional woman, the mother of two children, who regards a career as a necessity for one of her temperament, taste, education and experience. She is willing to make certain sacrifices for it, she admits, such as social gaieties and the trimmings of life, like window curtains and embroidered linens, for instance. But what, I sometimes wonder, about the other things she must miss which some of the rest of us consider essential to our happiness? What about the time she has to spend away from the children—is that nothing? Does she ever wish that she might be with them at mealtimes, when their sense of humor is usually at its best? Doesn't she ever envy the hired housekeeper who is there to hear the news when they come bursting in from school? I know no more important moment in the day than that in which my small son comes pelting into the house, shouting for “Mom” at the top of his lungs. “What is it?” I answer, thinking that something tremendously important has happened. “Oh, nothing,” he lets me down, “I just wanted to know if you were there.” “Being there” is the greatest contribution we mothers can make in the lives of our children. Being there, not to meddle or control, but to dispense comfort and consolation, to receive confidences, to share a joke or a sorrow, to straighten out a situation which may become very involved and have serious consequences later on; to scotch bad habits before they grow big, to build up good ones by tactful diversions, and to develop taste in the arts, in behavior and conversation. Perhaps the business-going mother can do all these things in her off hours, but, as these are the early morning and late evening ones, when people of all ages are least inclined to be amenable, I ha' me doots!— Hansl, Eva v. B., “What About the Children? The Question of Mothers and Careers” Harper's Magazine, January 1927, pp. 220-221.
C 45 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
3
From the point of view of the children, where does a mother with a job fail? I have just talked it over with my daughter.
“Would you like it better if I didn't have a job?" I asked her. After due consideration of all the pros and cons her verdict is: “No, with a job in winter you're home all the time that I am anyway, and in summer if you were home more during the week you and father might go away more at the week-ends, and that's when we have the most fun. And besides, it's fun to have you talk about the office. Of course," and here she tries to be very tactful, not knowing what answer I'd like her to make and not wishing to hurt my feelings, “of course, I don't mean I wouldn't like you to be home all the time. But I like it best this way."
After all, the real test of whether or not one is failing one's children is the degree of intimacy between parent and child. If the children are an integral part of the household, if they are companions and intimates, if the mother is entirely sensitive to their moods and changing needs, she need have no serious fear that she is neglecting them.—Angell, Katherine S., “Home and Office,” Survey Graphic, December 1926, pp. 318-320.
4.	Can adequate care be given to children outside of the home by child experts or other trained workers?
5.	Is the continuous personal attention of the mother necessary? Can enough attention be given after work is over? Can just as good care be given by teachers and nurses who are trained—probably better than the mother—to do it ?
These are questions upon which there is great difference of opinion. These quotations state the views of several authorities on the subject.
1
Up to date, the family has proved the best and most effective agency for the development of personality. It has so far furnished a breakwater, most vital and helpful, against the non-social forces that work against human progress. So far, that breakwater has consisted in large part of exclusive affection, selective and partial love, reserve of intimacy, and a prééminent devotion to the nearest beloved. The attempt to bring up children outside of home life, even a small class for a definite end, as in Sparta, has resulted in a few better soldiers or more, expert workers, but not usually, if at all, in a finer personality. The methods of child care in institutions, even good ones, generally dull originality and the power of the will, even if effective for special purposes of conformity to life's demands. The care of babies left without mothers is now seen to demand the personal care of a foster-mother
Z461WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?
for the best results.* Babies persistently adhere to the illogical position that “science” alone is not enough, but that “cuddling” and personal pride must be a portion of their “modified” daily food. The child seems to need, as a buffer against the indifference of the world at large, a certainty that he is an essential element in the social order; and such a certainty has, so far, not been given save through the parental partiality of affection. Moreover, so far in human development, this function of the family in the protection and development of personality as it struggles toward expression in the young child has demanded that someone in the family shall have and shall express a type of individuality which is not primarily concerned with, or showing itself through, specialized forms of vocational work, but is rather devoted supremely (at least for the time being) to the family unity and to the varying wants of members of the family group. If children are to gather themselves together “out of the everywhere,” it seems necessary that someone should be close at hand, when wanted, to help in the process. It has not so far worked well to have long hours or seasons when the child cannot get at anybody to whom it knows it belongs. So far, in the organization of the family, the mother has been the person readily at hand when the child’s needs, physical or spiritual, have demanded the steadying influence of a companionship on which it felt a rightful claim. This has been thought to be a natural arrangement, because the child is closer to the mother physically than to anyone else in the universe.
There is a deeper reason, however, underlying that physical relationship which determines the social value of the function of the average mother in this development of the child’s personality through constant companionship. Speaking generally, the feminine side of humanity is in the “middle of the road” of life. Biologically, psychologically and sociologically, women are in the central, normal, constructive part of the evolutionary process. On the one side and on the other, men exhibit more geniuses and more feeble-minded, more talented experts and more incompetents who cannot earn a living, more idealistic masters of thought and action and more cranks and ne’er-do-wells who shame their mothers. It is because to a woman is committed in a peculiar sense this function of bringing to consciousness from the “raw material of evolution,” through personal nurture and individual care, this personality of the child, that women are and have always been, and must, it would seem, always be, the practical and teaching half of the race.*
In the development of individuality, it seems clear that the most essential thing is that the conserving weight of the middle virtues and the mean of powers should be nearest the child and most constantly at his service. It is later, in the more formal educational processes, that the highly specialized “variation” which men exhibit (and which tend directly toward human progress along particular lines on the one side, and toward human degeneracy on the other side) have their functional use as example or as warning. It would seem, therefore, that no economic readjustment of society in accordance with modern specialization of effort can make it possible for
* See Lester F. Ward, Pure Sociology, chap. 14.
C47 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
the average mother of several young children to pursue a specialty of work with the same uninterrupted effort that the average man can do. That all women should be educated for self-support at a living wage is a social necessity; that women should be made as valuable now and in the future as they have been in the past as distinct economic factors is unquestionable; that women must reshape many of their activities to suit the general scheme of industry which has created the factory is certain; that women should, for their own best good and for the ends of social progress, keep their hands on some specialty of work, if only in selective interest, through the years when they cannot follow it as the first obligation is clear; that women should hold in mind steadily reentrance into their chosen vocation when the children are grown, in order that life may mean for them continual flowering of the stalk as well as the past season's scattered blossoms—this is coming to be perceived as the wise plan for all women who would achieve for themselves, as well as help others to achieve, full personality.—Spencer, Anna Garlin, “Women's Share in Social Culture ” J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia, rev. ed., 1925.
2
Certain duties the mother cannot delegate if she would hand on the torch of life the brighter for her handling. Dr. Devine has well said that “the only satisfactory method of getting the babies safely through the first years of life is the strictly individualistic plan of attention to each one by its own mother." The proof of this is in the death rate of infants in foundling asylums and in other forms of communal care even where scientific knowledge has been invoked and humane feeling exercised. To keep babies alive and well is a prerequisite to all later development, and happiness seems to be a necessary foundation for such preservation of their life and health. So far in human experience, babies have declined with one accord to be happy unless some one person was constantly devoted to their welfare. That person may be a “hired expert" it is true, but the successful nurse must have the mother feeling. Moreover, it is now agreed that the best possible stamina is secured by mothers' breast-feeding their own babies, and all manner of incentives, even to state subsidies, are being used to lead women to this personal office.—Spencer, Anna Garlin, “The Family and Its Members Lippincott, pp. 58-59.
3
There are children who thrive on the freedoms that the work of their mothers necessitates. They rejoice in the ability to come and go as they please. Other children find varying degrees of pleasure in serving as little mothers and fathers. Their characters expand and develop a richness that almost makes one grateful that mother works. Nevertheless, there is an element of child labor in casting responsibility upon young minds and immature bodies. There may be spiritual values in the home occupation of children but it is a diminishing return when it is mandatory and continuous.
1481WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?
The responsibility for the home, for the education, guidance and direction of children, remains parental, regardless of the social distress that transfers it to children. Many youngsters enjoy helping mother, washing dishes, sewing, cooking, doing housework, helping with the children. There is a vast difference in their attitudes when such duties are voluntary, occasionally requested, or demanded as a routine with the added burden of responsibility.— Wile, Ira S., “As Children See It” Survey Graphic, December 1926, pp. 335-336.
4
So far as the child is concerned, the woman who works outside the home may easily bring about one of two opposite reactions. The child may feel lonely, may crave a mother such as other children have—meaning a mother who has little interest outside her child—or he may have pride in his mother’s successes as he does in those of his father. If he is not emotionally neglected and the mother invites him constantly to share intensely her emotional experiences, he never comes to feel that her career outside the family is an obstacle to his happiness.
The fact that his mother has something besides himself to center her emotions upon may relieve the child of the dangerous role of being the recipient of boundless love and anxiety. He is better able to carve out his own life if the mother is not too fixedly considering his welfare.
If, however, he is emotionally neglected, left essentially to servants, and made to feel that his mother is too hard pressed by her work to have either time or strength to help in his crises, then he is paying a high price for the freedom his mother enjoys.
Instead of taking for granted the ministrations of the mother who works away from home, the child is forced to recognize definite limitations to the demands he may put upon her, and he therefore comes to see her as a person with wants and rights, like himself, rather than as a background that seems to exist for the sake of catering to him.
Since the mother who works outside the home is often the one whose mothering traits are undeveloped, there is grave risk of loneliness for the child of the working woman; had he the opportunity for constant daily association with his mother he might awaken in her the parental fondness that is drying up through disuse. Such a woman needs to be exposed to the appeal of her children’s dependence on her, that she may be educated in the ways of motherhood. More contact with her children rather than less would tend to strengthen her affection for them. Other women who care deeply for their young benefit both themselves and the children by periods of separation that relieve emotional supersensitiveness. Some there are who are very fond of children but cannot endure long-continued association with them on account of the nervous fatigue resultant on too close attention to their doings; the children of these women are as much refreshed as the mothers by being away from them for a part of every day, as their companionship is emotionally trying to both. Indeed, it is difficult
T49 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
to find a child that is not better off for at least an occasional hour of being upon his own resources.—Groves, Ernest R., “The Psychology of the Woman Who Works ” The Family, May 1927, p. 96.
D.	What are the results ?
Here is another place where we do not have sufficient facts to form an intelligent opinion. Until studies are made of the children of working mothers in business so that they can be compared with other children, we can drhw no conclusions. Many individual instances will occur to the group which illustrate results of all kinds.
The Children’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor has one study on this subject ( The Children of Wage-Earning Mothers, Bulletin No. 102). Six and six-tenths per cent of these mothers are in clerical occupations; the majority of the mothers are in manufacturing and domestic service. The result of this study led to the conclusions:
(a)	That the care of the children in the hours in which the mother was away from home was often unsatisfactory.
(b)	That their school records did not compare favorably .with those of other children.
(c)	That among older children there were certain behavior problems that were related to the employment of the mother, and that
(d)	The children suffered in less tangible ways from the strain of the mother, the untidy homes, and the pressure of housework left to them to do.
E.	How do these results compare with what might be expected if the mother stayed at home ?
1.	How would the decrease in the family income affect the opportunities of the children ?
2.	How would her presence at home affect the health and training of the children?
II. What would you do in the place of the married woman in business ?
A.	Would you give up having children?
B.	Would you stay at home and take care of them?
C.	Would you find some other way of caring for them and go on with your work? What way is there that you would consider satisfactory?
C 50 ]V. HOW ABOUT THE WOMAN HERSELF?
MUCH has been written and said about what makes the married woman with a good home and a husband to support her put on her hat in the morning and go down to the office to take dictation and pound a typewriter all day instead of making jelly and taking care of her children as her mother and many of her friends do. The previous discussion on the changes in the home will give a basis for this discussion also, showing how much of her job in the home has faded away from her into the factories and bakeries. In any group discussing this, many personal experiences can doubtless be given which will provide data on why women do it and on the effects on them either of staying at home or of keeping their jobs. After the previous discussions it will of course be evident that whatever the effect on the woman herself, she must consider as well the results for the other members of the family and the home.
I. What makes women do it?
A. In the personal experience of your group, why do the girls you know keep on with their jobs? List the reasons usually given by these girls.
1
Mrs. Collier found, in her study of professional women, three chief reasons for their working:
The need of an outlet for unused powers.
Financial necessity.
Desire to enrich their contribution to the lives of their husbands and children.
—Adapted from Collier, V. M., “Marriage and Careers ” Bureau of Vocational Information, p. 14.
2
A study of industrial mothers gives the following reasons of 628 mothers who work constantly.
160 work because of insufficient income of husband.
156 work because of death of husband.
97 work because of illness of husband.
82 work because of desertion of husband.
63 work because of personal preference.
70 work because of non-support by husband.
Of those who work from personal preference, most of them are using the
L 51 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
money for extras which in many families would be considered necessities, such as a high school education for a child, a piano, a vacation. They are “working because they felt an obligation to their families, not because they saw an opportunity to evade responsibilities at home.”—Adapted from Hughes, Gwendolyn S., “Mothers in Industry ” New Republic, 1925, pp. 22-31.
Of course every woman who stays at work after marriage does it for many reasons—some of which are more important to her than others. What are the principal reasons among business women ? How do these differ from those given by professional women? How do they differ from those of the industrial women?
[The economic factors are going to be considered in two later discussions in terms of the economic needs of the family and of the situation in offices. For purposes of this discussion it is suggested, therefore, that the group postpone the economic considerations and take up the ether factors that enter into the situation.]
II. What does a woman gain for herself by going back to the office after her marriage ?
A. Does it improve or injure her health?
1.	What is the personal experience of the group members as they have observed the effects upon their friends ?
2.	What other facts are there?
No studies apparently have been made of the effect of business occupations on the health of women who are also carrying home responsibilities. The following statements, however, give various opinions on the subject.
1
The most important consideration, however, is the health of the woman herself, and it must be remembered that, with the tradition of thousands of years behind her, and the compelling instincts of maternity ever with her, she will inevitably take upon herself a larger share of domestic tasks than a masculine breadwinner. The sick child she leaves at home, the fretful baby who keeps her awake at night—these are her intimate and peculiar preoccupations, and no departmentalising of her household will lift them from her heart when she goes out in the morning to her work. Nor can she easily acquire that somewhat impersonal attitude toward the comfort and cleanliness of the home which is man’s prerogative. In short, under no conceivable circumstances can a woman who is a mother place herself on the same domestic level as the average man. Her instincts are more domestic th^n his. The result will be that, if the home is not to be utterly neglected, or if family duties are not to be shirked altogether, she must be both breàd-
t 52 ]HOW ABOUT THE WOMAN HERSELF?
winner and housewife, and the higher her domestic standard the more will she refuse the duties of maternity with which she is unable to cope. The result of trying to combine two vocations will be that she will reduce her family duties to the minimum, but even so we surely have every reason to fear that by damaging her own health she must damage the race.—Col-quhoun, Mrs. Archibald, “The Vocation of Woman,” Macmillan, pp. 195-197.
2
The attempt to restrict the work of women to the household is insincere, since the industries which used to make of the home a varied workshop have dwindled to the gas stove and the duster, and since child-care involves only a few years out of the span of a woman's life. Not only is work essential to happiness, but it is essential to strength. With our false ideas of the division of work and leisure between the sexes, we have created in America today not merely the largest class of idle and extravagant women the world has ever seen, but, I venture to say, the largest class of delicate women. That the fruit of idleness is a decadence of physical no less than moral fibre, is a truth few doctors would be willing to deny. It is notable that nervous breakdowns are much less common among professional than among society women. In my ten years' experience on the stage—a profession making great demands upon the nervous system—I remember only one case of temporary nervous breakdown among my acquaintances, and that was attributable more to private unhappiness than to overwork. But in social life these breakdowns are a commonplace. It is only by rigidly adhering to a régime of athletic exercise that the unoccupied woman can keep herself in good* physical condition, and such a régime requires for its maintenance a tenacity of purpose which a life of idleness seldom develops. Idleness has produced" much decadence in the aristocracy of Europe, and were its growth not being. checked by the feminist movement, it would produce a decadent womanhood throughout the world's middle class* No jot of evidence has ever been forthcoming to prove that serious mental activity induces sterility in women, but the empty excitement, irregular hours, rich food, and consequent tendency to excessive adipose tissue common in social life, is exceedingly likely to do so.
* * * * *
Productive work, performed under proper conditions, might indeed be ’ called a requisite of health, self-respect and happiness. It is the antidote of inertia, parasitism and depression. It is the servant of love, for it frees love from the need of gain. * It is the servant of democracy, for those who live upon the toil of others cannot fxe*part of the world’s brotherhood. It is the servant of joy, for in work lies forgetfulness of self. It is the inheritance of women, and it- has helped to creafcé their strength and their courage. To deny a woman the work that her hands and brain may do is to deny her spiritual and mental life, while to force her creative ability into stereotyped and outworn channels is to stultify it. To deny her the functions of her sex is to deny her part in our common racial life. Either
£53 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
denial is fraught with cruelty and danger.—Hale, Beatrice Forbes-Robert-son, “What Women Want,” Frederick A. Stokes Co., New York, copyright 1914, pp. 179-181.
3
One of the most important discoveries in its bearing on women that our generation has made is the . . . discovery that the wages of mental and physical idleness is neurasthenia, for almost if not quite as important an effect of woman's subordination as the lack of opportunity to use her mind is the ill health produced by failure to find legitimate outlets for her energy. . . . They become the prey to nerves, to neurasthenia.
This comprehensive ailment, Dr. Myerson explains, manifests itself in numerous ways, by headaches, backaches, pains in feet, legs, arms, pains almost everywhere in fact, as well as by lack of control over emotional expression. But its keynote is increased liability to fatigue: fatigue of mind, bringing about lack of concentration or inattention, and hence an inefficiency that worries the patient; fatigue of purpose, which includes a listlessness of effort, a shirking of the strenuous; fatigue of mood, marked by mild depression, a liability to worry, and unenthusiasm for those we love, or for the things formerly held dearest.
These are the symptoms. But fundamentally, he says, neurasthenia is a deenergization. The human body is an instrument for the building up and discharge of energy. Unhappiness deenergizes. Profound deenergization may come from a failure of interest in one's work, a boredom due to monotony, a dropping out of enthusiasm from the mere failure of new stimuli, as occurs with loneliness. And an unexcelled combination of the conditions productive of neurasthenia is tt be f#und in the loneliness, purposelessness and idleness, of the average housewife's life.—Parsons, Alice Beal, “Woman's Dilemma,” Crowell, pp. 138-144.
4
One of the tragedies of contemporary society is the woman who through lack of an adequate occupational interest is chronically sickly and inefficient. Her unused abilities ferment and decay. A source of personal discomfort to herself, this lack of self-realization is a loss to society by just so much „as her latent talents fail of profitable employment or are turned to “unwholesome ends." A prominent physician of Boston (Dr. Richard Cabot) recently voiced the verdict of the medical profession when he declared that one-half of all the nervous people (chiefly women) who come to him are suffering from a want of an outlet. “They have/' he continued, “been going at half-pressure on half-steam with a fund of energy lying dormant. Much of the marital unrest of the period is traceable to this absence of serious occupational interest among married women of the professional classes."—Weatherby, V. G., “How Does the Access of Women to Industrial Occupations React on the Familyt” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XIV, pp. 748-749.
C 54 □HOW ABOUT THE WOMAN HERSELF?
5
The conscious inhibition of proved ability is also definitely harmful. A physician in a great institution for mental healing said to me: “A systematic effort in the direction of continuance of the individual vocation would cause a great improvement in the health and happiness of women.” For the trained woman, at least, real work in the field she has once made her own is a necessary vitamine.—Howes, Ethel Puffer, <f Continuity for Women,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. July-December 1922, p. 735.
B. What are the effects on personal development?
From personal observation, how would the group say that women were affected by remaining at work after marriage? Does it produce personal satisfactions not found in housekeeping? Does it produce difficulties ? Illustrate by personal instances known to the group.
Of course no generalizations can safely be made on this subject. Each individual will be different in her reaction and the study of that reaction would require expert psychological training. The following quotations give various points of view on it including two personal experiences of different kinds.
1
Probably no man who has not experienced it can conceive the ravages of financial dependence on character, the having nothing in the world he could call his own, except as a gift from someone else, even though he may have worked continually.
Of course there are many wholly generous husbands, and many others who work too hard and deny themselves rigidly in order to supply the family with material goods. But it is a matter of chance whether or not a woman has such a husband. She doesn't necessarily get him as a reward for doing her share of the work competently and conscientiously. And this lack of connection between the woman's performance and her reward militates disastrously against initiative and her sense of the importance of her work. So that just as the man who suddenly finds himself transported from hopeless drudgery to a position of boundless opportunity, becomes a new being, so ¿Iso the woman who finds herself able to select work worthy of her best energies and to achieve through it economic independence, the keys as it were of the city of life, becomes a new being.
Women who have been listless and unhappy become alert, brisk, hopeful. They find themselves possessed not only of the abilities they had always supposed were slumbering in them unused, but of others they had never dreamed they owned. They turn off with one hand work that would have seemed to them, when they were dragging about their household tasks, stupendous, and then instead of being sleepy or listless or stupid in the evening, find that they are eager for something else—the theatre or a concert or a dance, or friends or a book.
C 55 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
This statement is far from being based simply on what I think might safely be expected to be the case. I write from my own experience and from my observation of numerous women who manage to hold down responsible jobs in addition to maintaining successful homes, but who in spite of this double strain find themselves still young and vigorous at an age when their mothers were beginning to smile dubiously at jokes about fat, fair and forty, or were settling down to ornamental uselessness, or even to periodical attacks of “nervous prostration.”
First among the effects of economic independence, then, I would put vigor, confidence, physical and mental alertness, since these will completely revolutionize women's lives, and through them will affect society in general. And not a little of this well-being will derive from the second effect, the multiple satisfactions each individual will find in being free to develop her natural talents, instead of being forced by social pressure to be a cook when she ought to be a carpenter, or to spend much of her time clumsily constructing clothes that her children will be ashamed to wear, when she might be designing attractive textiles or doing an excellent job of housepainting.— Parsons, Alice Beal, “Woman’s Dilemma,” Crowell, pp. 293, 294.
2
Then, even more basic is the fact that the mother in professional work must face a mental conflict of her own. Her mind is a house divided against itself. Her convictions and interests are intellectual; they are based on fact and reason. But by how many thousands of years did the feelings precede the development of intelligence? Children establish their own value with terrifying force; the world is full of work, but no job, however satisfying, could possibly atone for the loss of a child through some negligence in personal care. Mothers will confess this, in their candid moments. “I am never free from fear,” said one friend recently. “I tremble at the thought of the school bus in a smash, or the boy in a sudden fever—and no one able to reach me. The worst of it is, all my relatives—perhaps even my husband —would blame me if anything happened. And I have a terrible misgiving that I might agree with them.”
And to fear is added another feeling—one which theorists scorn, but one which plays a very real part in the mental conflict of the mother. Professional women are apt to marry late, and to some of them motherhood comes as a kind of special dispensation, a gift of the gods which to the woman of thirty carries with it a value unknown to her younger sister. And with the sense of the wonder of childhood comes the knowledge that its fleeting years are as evanescent as a perfume. The rapidity of development in the very little child is amazing. “I have already lost a thousand sons,” said the mother in the old fable, when told of the death of her only son in battle. The crowded days carry our children to maturity with a speed that creates a wistful resentment in us for every hour we “lose” away from them.
This, then, is the dilemma of the modern mother, stated so often, in one way or another, and as often left unsolved: on the one hand, a keen in-
IT 56 ]HOW ABOUT THE WOMAN HERSELF?
terest in her professional work, a real need of income, the fear of mental stagnation, and the restlessness that comes from filling all her day with petty things; on the other hand, new demands in child-care that were unknown even a decade ago; a supply of domestic helpers that is fast diminishing both in quality and quantity; and, like a cloud over all her activities, her own emotional conflict that is rooted deep in her maternity. Nor is her peace of mind restored by the success of her childless sister. The feeling that the world is organized to her disadvantage alone is not conducive to resignation.—Tyson, Helen Glenn, “The Professional Woman's Baby," The New Republic, April 7,1926, p. 192.
3
I am the mother of four children; my husband is a business man with an income sufficient for every reasonable need of the family—and I work out.
As soon as the youngest of my children was old enough to go to school I got myself a job outside my home, and I have held it ever since.
For a time the neighbors said a lot of mean things about my neglecting my home and the children. Many spiteful insinuations that my husband was in financial distress and that I had to work to help him out reached his ears and made him furious. It took him a long time to get over his humiliation and reconcile himself to the idea of my working out, but he has my viewpoint now and we are happy.
In going out to work I simply swapped a job I didn’t like and never could like for a job that I could and did like. I hate housekeeping. To me it is the meanest, most irksome, most heart-breaking job in the world. I think if there had been such a thing as a housewives’ union I should have organized a housewives’ strike in my neighborhood. But I had no union to support me; I had to work out my own problem in my own way.
There just wasn’t any let-up in that job of housekeeping. The only regular hours were all hours. Picking up and cleaning up after four growing children from early morning until bedtime was just a part of it. I had never been trained in cookery, and I loathed the muss and odors of the kitchen. And there never was a maid who could be depended upon to do all the kitchen work. We couldn’t afford two servants, and the one servant we managed to hire from time to time did only a fraction of the work that had to be done. Life was just one endless round of petty, irritating chores and drudgery. When I thought I was through for a day I would find that everything had to be done all over again. When my husband came home at night all cheery and smiling and accepted everything as a matter of course, I was bitter and resentful because he didn’t seem to have the faintest idea of what the day had meant for me. And when he came home moody and cross because things had not gone well in his business that day, his gloom drove me almost mad.
I think I would have been a nervous and physical wreck in another year if I hadn’t quit when I did. There may be women who are born house-
C 57 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
keepers and for whom such drudgery has no terrors. I am not one of those women.
And the weekly allowance from my husband! That galled me. He didn't pay the bills for meat and groceries, fuel, lights, water, gas, telephone, laundry, and the various store accounts, and give me a sum I could call my own. No. He just gave me a lump sum on which to run things from week to week and seemed to assume that, after paying the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the ice-man and all the rest, I would have plenty left over to spend for myself. I never did have anything left over.
When I started out to find happier employment than that of housekeeping I had no previous business or professional knowledge or training. Getting a position under such circumstances was not easy and everybody wanted references that I could not give.
My first employment was as a saleswoman at the perfumery counter in a department store. It didn't pay much, but just to handle so many wonderful perfumes and powders and complexion aids and to deal face to face with scores and scores of other women in the surging crowds that flowed forever by my counter gave me the greatest thrill of my life. I was so absorbed in the crowds at first, trying to study every one who passed by, that I was actually nearly hysterical the first few days. And then I forgot the crowds and became interested only in the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the individuals who stopped to look or buy. I found a real interest in making helpful suggestions to women seeking individual perfumeries and beauty aids.
I didn't realize at first that this was the acme of good salesmanship, but the store management noticed it, and I was promoted to head of the toilet-goods department and have since become its head buyer. Oh, if housekeeping could only have been made as interesting as the buying and selling of goods; or if in return for one's efforts to please in the home one could get the same manifestations of pleasure and gratitude one gets from a pleased customer!
I make my own spending money, have money of my own in the bank; and when I want to indulge in some luxury or take a trip I don't have to worry my husband.
Of course the housekeeping is somewhat neglected, but things are not so bad as one would suspect. Going out in business has given me business ideas even about homemaking. I think my home is organized on a more business-like basis than it was.
But the best thing about it all is that when I get back home from the day's work, home is the same comfort and joy to me that it was to my husband alone when he worked downtown all day and had a happy haven to relax in when the day's work was over. I used to want to get away from home, go anywhere—just to be on the go—as soon as the supper dishes were cleared away. I couldn't understand why my husband was so content to slip into dressing gown and slippers and just sit and sit.
I shall never go back to the job of oldtime housekeeping so long as I
C 58 3HOW ABOUT THE WOMAN HERSELF?
enjoy my present good health and happy outlook on life. And I have no gloomy spells thinking of how I would manage should death or disability come to my husband.
I believe my husband is secretly proud of my success, and he hints at taking me into his own business, saying he has no doubt I could be worth more to him than to anyone else. But I am going in business for myself, having already spotted the location for a little shop of my own. You see, I am ambitious: even a wife may have ambitions and the same urge to get ahead in the world that husbands have. But husbands are not inclined to see it that way; they make excuse for their blindness to woman's true self by insisting that a woman is an enigma that can never be understood. If men would only measure us with the same yardsticks with which they measure themselves they would understand us much better, and there would be a great deal more fun and comradeship in life for both.
Of course I know there are just millions and millions of women who have no ambition for business or for getting ahead. The same holds true of men. There are men who are content to plod along through life in any rut an employer will make for them, just as many millions of women are perfectly content to nestle down in the nest a husband makes for them; but, fortunately or unfortunately, I wasn't built that way.—Saunders, W. T., “This Wife Gets a Pay Check ,” Collier's, November 19, 1925.
4
As [woman] becomes more individualized she suffers more from the primitive and undifferentiated conditions of the family life of earlier times. . . . The home cares and industries, still undeveloped, give no play for her increasing specialization. Where the embryonic combination of cook-nurse-laundress-chambermaid-waitress-governess was content to be “jack of all trades" and mistress of none, the woman who is able to do one of these things perfectly . . . suffers doubly from not being able to do what she wants to do and being forced to do what she does not want to do. To the delicately differentiated modern brain the jar and shock of changing from trade to trade a dozen times a day is a distinct injury ... a waste of nervous force.—Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, “Woman and Economics,” Small, Maynard & Co., Boston, 1899, p. 156.
5
There must be specialists; but shall no one behold the horizon ? Shall all mankind be specialist surgeons or peculiar plumbers? Shall all humanity be monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only half of humanity shall be monomaniac. It has decided that in every home there shall be a tradesman and ... a Jill-of-all-trades. . . . Cleverness shall be left for men and wisdom for women. . . . The woman is expected to cook ... to tell tales to the children ... to illuminate and ventilate . . . but she cannot be expected to endure anything like this universal duty if she is also to endure the cruelty of competitive or bureaucratic toil . . . she should have not one
L 59 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
trade, but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second-bests. . . . Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary ... in order to keep them broad.—Chesterton, G. K., “Whafs Wrong with the World?” quoted in Colquhoun, Mrs. Archibald, “The Vocation of Woman ',' Macmillan, p. 184.
6
No matter what method of division we finally adopt, the amount of wealth each family will secure will depend on the size of the divisible heap. With women economically unproductive in the home, this heap will be substantially less than if they worked. To justify such a universal deprivation, we should be very sure indeed that the family will fare better for having their queen bee in the hive. As far as my information goes, this is continually becoming more questionable. Idleness works havoc on the idler and to a lesser extent on those with whom he or she comes into contact. And work which one knows to have only the smallest value in proportion to the energy involved, work such as performing household processes by old-fashioned individual methods, can seem appreciably better than idleness only to an undemanding intelligence.
The havoc worked in women by idleness or by inefficiently applied work deserves a more detailed study than I can give it here. The woman who lives her life solely through others is as dangerous to them as she is to herself. If she is exclusively a mother she is unfitted to train her children to meet the thousand difficulties of the outside world. Intelligent parenthood, we are discovering, is an expert affair requiring community cooperation, and the home-staying mother is as a rule fitted to make little contribution to it. Her economic parasitism too often involves a loss of self-respect or discontent. Her intellectual inertia leads to fretfulness, jealousy, foolish habits of gossip, according to the individual. Women of other generations, permitted by circumstances to combine productive work with motherhood, had no such difficulties to face. Because many of them made successful mothers we are not to conclude that the dispossessed modern woman will do so.—Parsons, Alice Beal, “The Parent's Wages,”* Survey Graphic, December 1926, p. 285.
7
Most husbands seem to forget that self-unfoldment is a personal matter, sacred to the individual. No one has a right to interfere with it in a way which will narrow or stultify the personality. Who is man that he assumes the governorship or proprietorship of his wife? Where did he get the authority to rule her mind, to dictate what she shall or shall not be, so long as she fulfils the duties of her state? As a matter of fact, men do not seem to realize that before woman can render her maximum of service to
* This article is based upon a more detailed discussion which Mrs. Parsons gives in her book, Woman's Dilemma.
n 60 jHOW ABOUT THE WOMAN HERSELF?
the race, she must be liberated completely. She must have scope for self-expression within as well as without the marriage bond; she must be democratized before she can be properly socialized. The chief objection to wives’ having a business or profession that would take them outside the home has been that it would inevitably cause them to neglect the most sacred and binding of all woman’s duties, those she owes to husband, children and home. Like many another firmly rooted belief in woman’s inability to do a dozen and one things she is now^doing without any special effort, this old idea that she must give up exery other aspiration outside of being a faithful wife and parent and rear children is disappearing.
Many a married woman can shine and make a name and a place for herself, not only without injuring her home but actually improving it, because of her fuller life, more perfect development of her whole being. There are thousands of wives today who are practically dead in many parts of their nature, because what we do not exercise is taken away from us. “Use or lose” is nature’s motto. Cease to exercise your talent and no matter how great, nature will gradually remove it. Where the loss is involuntary on the part of the possessor, as when a talent is deliberately suppressed by the opposition of others, the whole body is affected. There is a very intimate relation between health and self-expression. Many good husbands are often perplexed because their wives lose their buoyancy and spirit, become depressed and melancholy and gradually droop like faded flowers. These young women had been graduated from school or college and were expressing themselves in a perfectly normal way in some special direction, when suddenly they were wrenched out of their orbit and taken into a home where they were forced to lead practically an idle purposeless existence, while their former means and facilities for evolving what was involved in them were cut off. Under such conditions it is impossible for an active, energetic, ambitious girl to be happy, no matter how much her husband may love her, or how kind he may be in all other respects but this most vital one.
It is useless for a husband to try to satisfy the soul’s craving with beautiful clothes, jewels, a palatial home, and the pleasures of society, as it is to try to satisfy the hunger of a healthy young animal with sawdust. It is a strange thing that even parents who think it a terrible thing for a wife to go outside to earn money to help support the family would consider it perfectly proper for her to do the same thing in the home. They would think it all right for her to wear herself out doing work she despised, when she could earn enough outside in a quarter of the time at her real vocation to pay a hired girl for doing the housework much better than she could do it. The inconsistency of this sort of thing is unaccountable. There is no reason why wives should not be allowed to earn money in their own way, any more than there is why husbands should not. A man would think it the height of tyranny to be compelled to make a slave of himself on a farm, when he hated farming, and when he could earn enough in a few hours a day at something he liked to pay for a week several hired farm hands, who knew how to do farm work much better than he did.
[61 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
The whole question of the economic independence of the wife is also largely bound up with this question. Whether she works inside or outside the home, the wife of the future is going to stand up, self-respecting, self-supporting, economically independent by the side of her husband. She will be perfectly capable of supporting herself under any circumstances. She is going to feel and assert her economic independence, and the husband of the future is going to respect her all the more for it.—Marsden, Orison Swett, “Woman and Home” Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York, 1915, pp. 273, 279, 283.
8
If, however, a woman, in return for her home and the privileges of being a monogamous wife, gives nothing in exchange but a few hours’ dilatory supervision of the household, she is really little more than a parasite, and the effect on her own character is bound to be disastrous, while it is difficult to believe that her relations with her husband will not eventually suffer. The discontent and restlessness of modern women is partly attributable to the underemployment of a large section of them, and the theory, steadily instilled into them for two generations, that their first duty is to themselves. —Colquhoun, Mrs. Archibald, “The Vocation of Woman,” Macmillan, p. 141.
9
Pounding a typewriter, running a machine, is no less monotonous than the daily dusting and dishwashing. But the office or factory job has the advantage of a social setting, of a touch-and-go companionship with others, a change of scene during the day.
The farmhouse with its large families who worked in and about the place, and with the neighbors or hired help in for the crises, and the pageant of the seasons passing outside the windows, was a far less lonely place than the empty flat with a panorama of roof-tops, or even the commuter’s bungalow after the man has gone for the day and the children are at school. It is this kind of loneliness that sends women out upon aimless window-shopping expeditions or bridge parties and matinees, if they have the price. Girls who have gone from school into the whirring activity of a large organization think longingly of peaceful days at home, but when they achieve them, they are likely to want to get back with the bunch, to have some contact with a busy and talkative world other than the grocer and a tired husband.
And at the same time, far below any conscious desire for “economic independence” I believe that there is an impulse for partnership in marriage, for the feeling that the man and the woman are working together, both contributing to the support of the family (as they both did in pioneer families), which has been weakened by the new family economics in which one earns and the other spends; one creates leisure and the other enjoys it.—Ross, Mary, “Shall We Join the Gentlemen?” Survey Graphic, December 1926, p. 257.
E 62 3HOW ABOUT THE WOMAN HERSELF?
III. Are there other ways than full-time paid work in which some of these advantages can be secured?
A. Can housework and the care of children be made to provide them ?
1.	How would training in the scientific care of the home and of children affect the job?
It is of course obvious from the fact that the great majority of married women do devote their lives to taking care of their homes and children, and in most cases happily, that many satisfactions exist there for the finding. Many business girls who went to work immediately from school are, however, habituated to a different sort of life. The question for many of them, if they are to give up their old habits, becomes one of how to adjust themselves to an entirely new set of demands.
2.	What measures of cooperation such as cooperative nurseries, laundries, etc., would make the home situation more interesting to business girls?
3.	In what other ways can women used to business life make the housekeeping job a satisfactory one?
The functional services of home-making and motherhood have therefore not lessened, but increased, in their cost to women’s time and strength during the years when the children are in minority. They demand a deeper experience because they are the result of more conscious choices; and experience costs sometimes more than mechanical activity in strength and constitutional vigor. A closer and closer contact with, a finer and finer appreciation of, child nature is demanded by the new applications of the democratic ideal of government of the family; and close contact with a nature for the development of which one is vitally responsible costs in time and effort. The outer influences which contend with parental control, and often submerge it, demand a general knowledge of social conditions which in itself militates against the entire specialization of vocational work. All this nullifies the notion that, now that industry has gone out of the home to so great an extent, the house-mother has an easy job, and can go on with her own business outside the home, with only slight interruptions.
It is said, Of course she can’t now; but when we get all women rightly placed in specialties, and there are enough “substitutes” and “assistant” mothers to go around, and they are all well-trained and morally dependable, each woman, like each man, will be able to find the home a place of rest and not of work, and there will be no vital difference in vocational experience between men and women. The answer to this is both economic and
l 63 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
social; it deals with both the mechanism of living and the sources of life itself.
Jjt	sje	5ji	iji
In the first place, the economic value of the healthy, competent, expert house-mother has never yet been properly estimated. “Woman’s work” has been despised and therefore its value unknown, because, and only because, women for long ages have themselves been considered inferior to men and held in law and custom as perpetual minors. Just as the position of disadvantage which Afric-Americans hold in the United States is due not to the color of their skin but to the fact that they were once held as slaves, with a Supreme Court decision that they “had no rights which a white man was bound to respect” scourging them like a whip, so the real cause of the disrespect shown toward the house-mother’s task is due to the fact that the house-mother herself has but just emerged to the position of independent personality. All the fine talk about the “sacredness of motherhood” and the “inestimable value of the woman in the home” has but added hypocrisy or unthinking compliment to injustice, so long as men were ashamed to be caught tending their own babies, or washing dishes or clothes they had themselves soiled, because such things were “women’s work.”—Spencer, Anna Garlin, “Women's Share in Social Culture ” Lippincott, pp. 159-161.
B.	Is part-time work the way out?
Many people have suggested part-time work as the solution. There seems to be a common agreement among employment workers, however, that it is feasible chiefly for the few in certain occupations like writing, music, etc., with flexible hours and individual creative work. In office work, with business run as it is at present, the supply of such positions is very limited. A few may be found in any community in doctors’ and dentists’ offices, with writers or professors, or in some libraries, but there seems to be a consensus of opinion that the supply does not in any way equal the demand.
C.	Does volunteer work provide the necessary outlet?
1.	What volunteer work is available in your community ?
2.	How does it compare with paid work in the satisfactions it gives the worker?
D.	What other activities and interests are there open to business girls who have married?
List the spare-time activities carried on by girls you know. How do they compare with these other alii 64 JHOW ABOUT THE WOMAN HERSELF?
ternatives in the quality and extent of the satisfactions derived from them ?
Do you agree with the point of view of the following quotations ?
1
f ^ The time that was not spent in entertaining one another, most of us spent v\n club activities. Housework is a desperately lonely occupation, each woman in her solitary kitchen doing her task and meeting her problems in complete isolation. Women do not associate with one another in their work. When the work is done they are inevitably hungry for social intercourse. Their husbands, on the contrary, usually have worked all day among other people and want rest and solitude. The division of labor according to sex tends to prevent husband and wife from sharing not only their work interests but their play interests as well. In this separation the woman's club arose to meet a real need for social recreation.
But the women I knew were not inwardly convinced that they had done a full job by caring for the household and that they were ready only for play when that job was done. Even when woman's direct responsibility is limited to the home, her interest has ranged afield. She wants to know the larger world—to look upon it even though she does not enter it. Hence the “study sections" of the women's clubs devoted to current events, music, art, literature, or social service. Through them the woman's club provides the illusion of individual work related to individual aptitudes.
It is an illusion, because the purpose of these sections, like the “pick-up work" of the afternoon sewing circle, is not to get something done but to give the members something to do. They are unwilling to go to the hard work of delving into any subject, because there is no incentive for the digging. No wonder the mood of these study sections is consummate dilettantism ! There is no reason why it should be anything else. The professional in one field may be frankly dilettante in another field for the sheer fun of it. But his acquaintance with strict professional standards keeps the distinction clear in his mind. Women who have the professional attitude toward any subject will not be confused as to the value of amateur culture.— Mavity, Nancy Barr, “The Wife, the Home, and the Job ” Harper's Magazine, July 1926, pp. 192-193.
2
I soon discovered that my state of mind was far too general to be put down to an unusually egoistic, ambitious, misdirected, or “masculine" personality. I was out of a job, but I had professional training and experience. And one by one the women whom I had thought content with marriage as an occupation told me how they envied me. Strange as it sounds, not one of them found in wifehood, motherhood and housekeeping a completely satis-* fying “mission." They were not women of leisure. They had children and they kept house either single-handed or with, the aid of one servant.
I 65 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
But their husbands were not manual laborers, and the wives were not domestic drudges. They had a margin of time and energy. J
Many of them spent most of that margin in exchanging entertainment with their women friends. These entertainments were in the nature of friendly competition as well as hospitality. The hostess always tried to serve some dish which, for complete success, must be both delicious and novel. And it usually was both. I discovered also (what I had never guessed before) that the styles in tea napkins, in bridge table covers, in sofa cushions, in window draperies, changed frequently. When everything embroiderable had been embroidered in cross-stitch, the lot was discarded, and everything embroiderable was embroidered in Bulgarian peasant style. They did these things, not because they were either frivolous or fickle, but because of a deep human need to give meaning and focus and interest to a routine. They were not trying to create beauty so much as they were trying to find work.—Mavity, Nancy Barr, “The Wife, the Home, and the Job,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1926, p. 192.
IV. In making up your own mind on whether or not to stay at work after your marriage, what personal satisfactions would you want which an office position would give you? What satisfactions that the home would give you?
A noble task for the women of this generation is to evaluate their own conscious purposes. I believe their ideal will take shape somewhat thus. First: to order their lives for the loving companionship and nurture of children. Second: to find and establish in public esteem the right ways to continue their trained vocations in harmony with home ties. Third: to make all these things practically possible by reducing, through inventions and organization in mutual aid, the present feudal proportions and absurd overstressing of the household mechanism.—Howes, Ethel Puffer, “Continuity for Women,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. July-Dee ember 1922, p. 736.
C 66 :VI. THE DOUBLE SALARY—IS IT A NECESSITY?
THE aim of this discussion is to open up the question of the economic basis of the business woman’s family and its relation to the work of the wife. Accusations against working wives as promoters of unnecessarily luxurious living, pitiful tales of the “lure” of the double salary and its effect on the home, are frequently heard from opponents of the married woman in business. On the other hand, stories of the insuperable difficulties of cutting one’s income nearly in half by marriage come pouring in from those who have tried it. While it is impossible to settle here what is a luxury or what amount of money any particular couple can live on, it may be possible to get some light on certain aspects of this much-discussed question which will make its consideration more intelligent.
I. What will the family live on ?
Do you know other girls like these two ?
Gladys ran a switchboard for five years after high school until Harry came along. His $45 a week looked almost twice as large as her $25, and think of not having to get in the subway jam at 8: 30! So she retired to her neat, varnished little flat, and bought some cute bungalow aprons and studied cooking for two with fervor. The girls came to see her evenings and on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, but all day long, after the beds were made and the breakfast dishes washed, there wasn’t much to do except shop and dash home to a solitary but economical lunch on the laundry tub, rather than to invest in expensive sociability at the soda counter. Then her successor at the office was taken ill, and she came back “temporarily.” The temporary job stretched on; Gladys found that $70 a week was a lot pleasanter than $45. It was grand, too, to be back with the bunch. Now a much-desired baby is imminent. Everyone expected that Gladys would make another and final disappearance. But not so. “If you’ll hold my job for four months,” said Gladys, “I’m coming back. My mother’s just crazy about taking care of kids, and the money I can give her means a lot at home. And say, I spent my vacation at home cleaning up the place and making baby clothes, and for me there’s nothing in it.”
Lucy is unlike Gladys in that she really likes to potter around the house. She is never happier than in the moment when she places a superlatively roasted chicken on the table, or buttons one of her offspring into a new, home-made dress. Had she been trained, Lucy’s talent for designing clothes might easily bring high sums, but she married young and her only marketable skill is stenography. Lucy and her husband want to hear good music,
l 67 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
see good plays, and read the new books. But his excellent education does not seem to be translatable in market terms; the fair salary he earns has never been more than enough to cover routine needs, and in crises, when a child has been seriously ill, it falls lamentably short.
So Lucy brushes up the shorthand and goes back to a job, as she has done three or four times before in her ten years of married life. The children are in school now and her mother can help some. Even if she had to pay for all the help, she figures that her $30 a week when she works leaves the family better off financially than if she stayed at home to save. She would rather stay at home, if it could be done with provision for necessities and a modest margin for emergencies and recreation and sociability; but when it means anxiety, insecurity, and isolation—well, she is glad she can get a job. She wants the children to have more opportunity than she had—she guesses that now she is back at work for good, or at least until they are educated.— Ross, Mary, “Shall We Join the Gentlemen?’ Survey Graphic, December 1926, p. 265.
A. Can a business girl and her husband live on the salary of one of them?
1. What salaries are business girls and their husbands getting?
Standards of living and salaries vary among different groups, different sections of the country, kinds of jobs, and so forth.
A recent study of clerical salaries gives the following facts about a selected list of occupations, The figure used here is the median which gives the mid-point of all the salaries earned by men in a certain position. That is, if the median salary for mail clerks is $14.68, it means that, taking the whole range of salaries earned by mail clerks, $14.68 is the salary at the mid-point of the range. Half the mail clerks get less than $14.68 and half get more.
The following table shows the difference between men’s and women’s salaries in the same positions. It also gives an idea as to what salaries are being received.
I 68 1THE DOUBLE SALARY—IS IT A NECESSITY?
	Median salary	
Relative position of men and	for men and women	
women in clerical positions	in certain clerical occupations	
	Men	Women
Mail clerks			 $14.68	$17.16
Labor-saving machine operators ... .	.... 22.31	21.82
Junior clerks 				 24.31	18.61
General clerks			 25.75	17.36
Ledger clerks 			 29.81	22.88
Pay roll clerks	....		 30.68	21.12
Senior clerks			 36.41	24.16
Cashiers 			 41.69	31.19
Head bookkeeper 			 44.08	33.21
—“Clerical Salaries in the U. S., 1926,” National Industrial Conference Board, 247 Park Ave., New York, pp. 30, 34.
If annual incomes of fifty-two weeks’ full-time employment are computed on this basis it gives the following:
	Men	Women
Mail clerks 		.. $ 763.36	$ 892.32
Labor-saving machine operators ..	.. 1,160.12	1,134.64
Junior clerks 		.. 1,264.12	947.72
General clerks		.. 1,339.00	902.72
Ledger clerks 		.. 1,550.12	1,189.76
Pay roll clerks		.. 1,595.36	1,098.24
Senior clerks		.. 1,893.32	1,256.32
Cashiers 		.. 2,167.88	1,621.88
Head bookkeeper 		.. 2,292.16	1,726.92
2. What does it cost to live ?
Standards of living as well as salaries differ so that it is impossible to answer this question for any one case.
It is interesting, however, to compare the salaries just given with some of the estimates on the cost of living.
1
In 1919 the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics made a study of what it cost a family of five (man, wife and three children—the average family) to maintain a decent standard of living. A digest of that study and others of the same sort can be found in Bulletin No. 7 of the Bureau of Applied Economics, Inc., Washington, D. C. That budget, which
C 69 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
allowed for an inexpensive but decent standard of living, was made up as follows:
Food ................................................. $ 773.93
Clothes................................................... 513.72
Housing, fuel	and light ................................. 428.00
Miscellaneous	........................................... 546.82
$2,262.47
With the exercise of great economy this could be reduced to $2,015.56.
The cost of living as reported in the Monthly Labor Review, February 1927, has changed since this study was made in 1919. It was then 199.3 of what it was in 1913. It is now (December 1926) 175.6 of the 1913 level. This means that the same money that was needed in 1919 for the standard studied would buy more, or that only $1,987.03 would be required for that same level.
2
Another report on the standard of living, by Paul Douglas in his Wages and the Family* makes a division into four levels on the following basis:
(1)	The poverty level:
On this standard the family is not on a basis of permanent self-support because of inroads which it makes upon its ryyn health or upon its supply of furniture and goods. The family dietary is generally appreciably below the standard of 3,300 calories which are needed for an adult male at moderately heavy labor. The family is badly overcrowded and has no resources with which to meet any unexpected expense. . . . It is probable that it would cost a family of five between $1,000 and $1,100 to live on this scale in the larger American cities at the present time.
(2)	The minimum of subsistence level:
Families living on this level receive enough to maintain themselves physically but not enough to meet the major emergencies or to enjoy social pleasures that cost money. At present, families of five in larger American cities would need somewhere between $1,100 and $1,400 to live on this level.
* Douglas, Paul, Wages and the Family, University of Chicago Press, 1925, PP• 5-6.
C 70]THE DOUBLE SALARY—IS IT A NECESSITY?
(3)	The subsistence plus or the minimum health and decency level:
A sufficient surplus is accumulated to enable the standard family to house itself decently in five rooms, or at worst four, to purchase food with sufficient calories to meet the needs of the family, and to buy cheap but neat cldthing. In addition, a modest balance is available for recreation and sundries. Such a standard would seem to cost from $1,500 to $1,800 in most of the large American cities.
(4)	The minimum of comfort level:
“It is this that is commonly thought of where one speaks of the ‘American standard of living.’ A much more liberal standard of clothing, housing and sundries now becomes possible. Adequate insurance against industrial risks may be purchased and an appreciable amount of amusement and recreation may be enjoyed. The cost of such a standard for a family of five at the present time would probably range somewhere between $2,000 and $2,400 in our large cities.”
It is interesting to compare these estimates of the cost of living with the salaries reported here and with those received by members of the group. In the National Industrial Conference Board’s report only the men cashiers and head bookkeepers come over the first estimate ($1987.03) or in the last or comfort level of Professor Douglas’s report. In a study in Massachusetts, 32.2 per cent of the men get over the $40, or $2080 annually, which makes the comfort level possible.
It must be remembered, however, that a large percentage of the families do not have three children. In a study made in England recently it was found that only 9 per cent of the married men had three children and only 10 per cent had four or more.*
A study of family budgets shows that the joint expenses of a man and his wife come to 65 per cent of the total budget for a family of five. For business girls and their husbands who have no children, therefore, 65 per cent of the amount quoted for families of five will give them a standard on the level stated (Douglas, Paul, Wages and the Family, p. 197). For instance, the so-called “American standard of living” is $2000 to $2400 for a family of five. For a family of man, wife and no children the same standard would take only from $1300 to $1625.
* Quoted in Douglas, Paul, “The Family Allowance System As a Protector of the Child,” The Annals, Vol. 121-2.
I 71 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
3.	On the basis of these figures and from your own experience, are the husbands of business girls getting sufficient salary to support the family ?
a.	What bearing have the following facts on this question?
Business girls’ salaries are evidently from two-thirds to three-quarters that of men. (See former figures.) They have of course adapted their standard of living to those salaries.
“It costs a man and wife 30 per cent more to live than it does a single man living away from home.”*
b.	Can girls and their husbands adjust themselves to the decrease in their own individual incomes which will result for both from marriage ?
c.	Can the wife reduce expenses sufficiently by her work at home to make up for this cut in income ?
d.	Can she reduce expenses more by working herself and employing a less skilled person to do her housework?
4.	Do the married women in business work for luxuries and not for necessities?
This is often said about married women. Mrs. Collier’s study, Marriage and Careers, makes the following statement about the expenditures of the professional women she studied.
When financial necessity does not mean the grim pressure for bread and shelter and clothing, how is it defined by these women? To the great number it means such things as music lessons, a summer home to take the children out of the city heat, or “help with the dishes” to free the mother for bedtime reading with the children. These women want money in order to give better homes, better education and greater advantage of all sorts to their children. They seem to believe that their children would not be better off in an apartment with one less room, in crowded schoolrooms, in the hot city during the summer months.—Collier, V. M., “Marriage and Careers ” Bureau of Vocational Information, p. 22.
a. Would you consider these things mentioned by Mrs. Collier luxuries or necessities?
* Douglas, Paul, Wages and the Family, p. 197.
C 72 JTHE DOUBLE SALARY—IS IT A NECESSITY?
b. Who is to decide what makes a legitimate expense for a family in any individual case ?
(The studies given above of the cost of living show how much can be obtained for certain amounts of money. They do not, of course, in any way determine whether a family will maintain itself on a subsistence level or whether it will raise its standard to a comfort level by the work of the wife or some other means.)
II. Should the husband's salary support both?
Mrs. Parsons makes this interesting statement.
The economic contribution the mother formerly made to the support of the home has diminished as the industries formerly conducted by her within the home have gone out of it to the factory. As her economic contribution has decreased, the father’s financial responsibility has necessarily increased, and the assumption has come to prevail that “although raising a family is the joint responsibility of husband and wife, the husband alone supplies the money income. He earns a wage by working outside the home while the wife produces economic and spiritual values within the home.”*
The question arises—is the husband’s wage adequate as a family wage? The increasing proportion of married women who enter industry . . . seems to suggest that it may not be adequate.
The inadequacy of the husband’s wage as a family wage is further shown by the numerous efforts being made here and abroad to secure addition to it in the shape of subsidies or pensions, either from the industry for which the father of the family works, or from the state which is presumably enriched by the existence of his children. Other approaches to the problem are based on the belief that if all women were forced out of industry, the husband’s wage could be raised high enough to give the family adequate support. And still others attempt to secure a legal minimum wage for men adequate to the support of a family.—Parsons, Alice Beal, “Woman’s Dilemma ” Crowell} pp. 194-195.
Two important questions arise out of this :
A.	If the wife is making little or no economic contribution to the family by her work at home, can the husband alone be expected to bring in enough income for both?
B.	If the husband's income cannot do it, how could it be done?
* Hughes, Gwendolyn S., Mothers in Industry.
I 73 1JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
[The discussion of the first question will give some idea of whether, in the case of business girls’ families, the income of the husbands is actually covering the family needs. As Mrs. Parsons suggests, the fact of the increasing employment of wives in all kinds of positions would seem to indicate that it was not proving sufficient, especially in the lower income groups.]
Besides the employment of the wife, what other ways are there in which the income might be increased?
In addition to the suggestions of the group on this matter, the following current proposals should be discussed.
(1)	Raising the salaries of the men by removing the competition of the women.
It is often suggested that if the women would stay at home, the salaries of the men would go up because of the competition for workers. The economic basis for this proposal is to be discussed somewhat in the next outline. In addition to the question as to soundness, there is the further practical question:
How could women be withdrawn or kept out of the positions ? What measures would be necessary practically? Could it be done at present ?
(2)	Redistributing salaries by a system of family allowances that would give men with families an additional income in proportion to their responsibilities.
This proposal, advocated in America by Dr. Paul Douglas and others, is already in effect in many places in Europe and is under consideration in England and Australia. An adequate idea of the plan can be secured from Professor Douglas’s book, Wages and the Family, University of Chicago Press, 1925, and from Bulletin No. 401 of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, entitled Family Allowances in Foreign Countries.
The following summary of the plan is entirely inadequate for the discussion if the group is interested in it especially, and wants to understand its details.
Digest of the Proposal for Family Allowances
A study of the income of American industries and of the budgets established as necessary for a decent standard of living shows that the present
C 74 ]THE DOUBLE SALARY—IS IT A NECESSITY?
wealth of the country is not enough to provide an income to each working man sufficient to support a family of five, on which the budgets are established. Moreover, such an expenditure is not necessary, since from 70 to 80 per cent of the families are smaller than that, and only 15 per cent are larger. To pay men for imaginary dependents up to five is an economic waste.
A living wage is of course greatly to be desired but “should not the real principle be that as needs are not uniform but variable, so the minimum wage should not be uniform but should vary according to the needs of the worker and his family?” The proposal for family allowances, therefore, is that such variation should be brought about by reducing the wages of single men to an amount found to be adequate to his support with an allowance for saving, and then adding to his income after he marries, amounts necessary to care for his dependents. For instance, instead of a man’s earning $1600 for an imaginary family of five, he would receive $800 until he married. He would then receive about $250 more, representing the extra 30 per cent additional cost of a wife, and $200 annually for each child as it came along. The money to pay these allowances would be collected from a group of employers, either those belonging to one industry or those in one locality, on a pro-rated basis according to what was necessary to cover the families. Each employer would pay a certain amount for every employee whether married or single, or a certain percentage of his pay roll, and so would have no temptation to discriminate against married men.
Should such an allowance be paid to a childless wife? Professor Douglas thinks that there is some justice in the contention that a wife without children should support herself. But in view of the “widely held belief that a wife’s chief duty is to make a home” for her husband and the difficulties of finding part-time work he thinks she should be given the allowance. Of course it would be smaller than she could earn, and “while the household expenses would be somewhat higher because of her absence from home, the net gain in income would be appreciable” if she worked.
This plan is in operation extensively in France, Austria, Belgium, Germany and many other countries, both in government service and in private industries. In many cases the clerical force is included in its scope.—Adapted from Douglas, Paul, “Wages and the Family,” University of Chicago Press, 1925; and “Amount and Nature of Family Allowances,” Journal of Political Economy, VoL 33, p. 46.
What do you think of this proposal? What objections do you see to it? Many objections have been made to this plan: for instance, that it could be used against the workers in time of strike, that it would lead to an increase in population among the least desirable classes, that it would decrease the energy with which men worked, that it violates economic law by paying on the basis of need rather than productivity, and so forth. Professor Douglas has answers to these in the references given above.
I 7S ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
How do you think such a plan would work in the case of business employees ?
(3) Occasional assistance for family expenditures by mothers’ pensions, maternity insurance, and so forth.
A few other plans exist for supplementing family income but they are of less importance to this discussion.
(1)	The mothers' pension laws are aimed to assist families in which on account of the death or disability of the husband the man is unable to support his family. They are at present, therefore, largely relief measures. They still affect so few mothers and the relief is so small that they cannot be said to present a satisfactory solution of the problem they were designed to meet. They are in any case not pertinent to a discussion of the normal family. (Anyone interested in this subject can find material in Bureau Publication No. 63 of the Children's Bureau, United States Department of Labor, a pamphlet entitled “Laws Relating to Mothers' Pensions in the United States, Canada, Denmark and New Zealand.'')
(2)	Maternity insurance is provided in all of the large and most of the smaller countries of Europe under government control. By this, women are given a sum of money either in one payment or in weekly payments, medical service, and a small weekly sum while the mother herself nurses the child. The amount of the insurance and the number of workers included differ of course in different countries. Clerical workers are often but not always included in the plans. In this country we have no such plan but the first step has been taken in maternity protection by the Sheppard Towner Bill and the educational work in child-care done under its provisions.—Adapted from Johnsen, J. E., “Social Insurance," H. W. Wilson Co., London, 1922, pp. 233-242.
(3)	Mrs. Parsons (in Woman's Dilemma) suggests maternity insurance on a private commercial basis as one of the ways to provide for the expense of it.—Parsons, Alice Beal, Woman's Dilemma, pp. 242-246.
III. What would you do with your family budget?
A.	How much would you feel was necessary for your family to live on? Which level are you now living on?
B.	Would you marry only a man who could provide it all or would you marry one earning less, expecting to help in earning the remainder?
C 76 ]THE DOUBLE SALARY—IS IT A NECESSITY?
C.	If it was not absolutely necessary for you to work to pay current expenses, are there other reasons, such as buying a house, which you would feel justified your return to work ?
D.	Do you think that some of these other plans (mentioned under II) for supplementing the husband’s income are preferable to having the wife work?
C77 3VIL IN THE OFFICE
A GREAT deal of the resentment felt by unmarried girls against the work of married women is based on a feeling that they are l" taking jobs which are all too scarce and which should be given to those who need them more. The economic competition that is back of this resentment has, of course, appeared again and again as new groups have offered themselves for positions of all kinds. Men felt it when women began to compete with them in industry. Americans have said it about foreigners, white about black, and now the unmarried are saying it about the married newcomers who seem to be crowding into the market. This outline aims to clear up some of the assumptions that underlie this argument, so that the question may be discussed with more understanding of its economic background.
I. Are there enough jobs to go around?
A. Do you agree with this statement ? “Married women ought not to take jobs from single girls !”
(Back of this lies the assumption that there are not enough jobs to go around and that they ought to go to those who need them most. The idea of need as the basis for jobs will be discussed under II.)
B. Are the business occupations overstocked with workers?
This question is a difficult one to answer and could be answered satisfactorily only by a study of your community which would cover the number of business positions, the supply coming out of public and private commercial schools, and the state of unemployment at the moment. There are practically no places at present where any such information is available in accurate form. If we take a long-time view of the situation we can see from the census figures that the number of clerical positions held by women is on the increase. In the ten years from June 1910 to 1920 it increased from 593,224 to 1,426,116; from 7.3 per cent to 16.7 per cent of all the women employed. The same is true to a lesser extent of the women in trade, who increased from 468,-088 to 667,792 (Bulletin No. 46, “Facts About Working Women,” Women’s Bureau, United States Department of Labor). There is every reason to believe that the next census will show a continuance of this increase. It would seem, therefore, that the business occupations could
l 78 1IN THE OFFICE
absorb a growing number of workers. The question is, does the supply coming out of the commercial schools more than meet this demand? No studies of unemployment among clerical workers are available which give information about this.
However, Professor Paul Douglas, of the University of Chicago, gives the following facts about the “white collar job market.”
Moreover, there has been a great increase in the need for clerical employees in business. In the decade 1890-1899, approximately one person out of every thirteen employed in manufacturing was a clerical worker. In 1924 the proportion had risen until one in seven was clerical. This means obviously that the demand for clerical workers has virtually doubled in proportion to the demand for manual workers in manufacturing.
... If there had been no proportionate increase in the supply, clerical earnings might have been expected to increase at a considerable rate. Instead we find a condition materially at variance with this.
. . . As a fact, the situation of the clerical workers back in the nineties was considerably better than it is today, relatively speaking. In those days white collar jobs were pretty much reserved for members of white collar
families......With more dollars in the Saturday night pay envelope the
working man naturally tended to send his children to school longer. He saw the advantage to them in graduating with the white collar class. And a number of other factors helped the wage-earner to gratify this desire to educate his children.
First, as has been pointed out, comes the greater number of dollars he was earning every year. Next came a growth in free public educational facilities. Third was an increasing social sentiment in favor of educating the children, and fourth followed the legal restrictions, always raising the age at which children are required to remain in school. Altogether these factors brought about the rapidly increasing proportion of children of wage-earners who complete the grade schools or attend the high schools of the country. And since all eighth grade schooling may be considered the minimal requirement for office work, this increase in numbers has reflected itself in the increasing supply of white collar workers available for the available white collar jobs.
... So what has actually happened is this: Despite the increased proportion of office workers required, the supply has more than kept up with this demand because of higher educational standards. This increased number of salaried workers supplied has been sufficient to lower the salary scale in proportion to the wage scale. Moreover, women in clerical work have increased at a faster rate than have women in manufacturing, and the female wage or salary scale is always below the male. The increased use of mechanical appliances in offices has tended to lower the skill required. . . . Where formerly the skill used in bookkeeping was exercised by the bookkeeper, today that skill is exercised by the factory employees who utilize it to manufacture a machine which can do the job of keeping books when
C 79 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
operated by someone of skill far below that of the former bookkeeper. And because of this transfer of skill from the office to the factory, the rewards of skill are likewise transferred to the wage-earner in the plant.—Douglas, Paul H., “What Is Happening to the White Collar Job Market?” The Magazine of Business, Vol. 50, December 1926, pp. 719-722, 782-783.
C. Is there only a certain amount of work anyway?
Another assumption that often enters into this discussion is the belief that the amount of work is limited, not expansible, and that therefore if one woman has a job, there will necessarily be one less for someone else. This theory is very much like the wages fund theory which said that there was a certain amount of wealth available for wages and salaries and that if one group of workers got more someone else necessarily got less.
The following quotations state two points of view on this theory.
1
Should married women work? Of course they should. Every healthy, able-bodied person should work. No one doubts it. But should they work except at housekeeping in their own homes ? A large number of people will passionately answer, “No.” But why? It is not easy to get at the real reason underlying the general feeling that married women should not take paid employment. I have no doubt, myself, that one very strong reason is the belief, fallacious, unfortunate, but immensely widespread, in what may be called the work fund fallacy, the belief that there is only a certain amount of work to go round, and that if one person takes a job another loses it; the belief that leads upright men to spread their work out thin, to do far less than they are able to do or even wish to do; the belief that lies at the root of much of our economic trouble. A married woman is “supported by” her husband, she needn't work, she is doing some other woman out of a job if she takes employment. Now all this is patently wrong. If she earns, she also spends or saves her earnings and in either case employs others. There is no work fund, any more than there is a wage fund. What there is is a national dividend, made up of the results of national efforts, and upon its size depends the amount available for distribution. Economically, it is sheer waste to turn a school teacher, or designer or waiter or stenographer into an unskilled housekeeper. She can add more to the national wealth by doing the work for which she is best adapted, and for which she has been trained, than by doing work for which she may have neither experience nor knowledge. She will not get the job, whatever it may be, unless she is fitted for it, and presumably better fitted for it than her competitors. She may for the moment keep them out of employment, but, broadly speaking, only on the assumption that she is more efficient than they are. If she gives up her work and takes to domestic life, she is equally keeping someone else, who otherwise might have been her housekeeper, out of a job. On the assump-
£80 3IN THE OFFICE
tion which under present conditions I fear is not wholly warranted, that the said housekeeper is more efficient at housekeeping than the married professional woman, the net result of the married woman's giving up her professional work and doing housework is a net loss to the community. Someone less efficient than she does the work which she did before her marriage, she does work which some other woman could do better.
The work fund argument is to my mind thoroughly bad, but I believe it to be the real basis, not thought out, not perhaps expressed, of a great part of the prejudice against the employment of women.—Fisher, Mrs. H. A. L., tfThe Economic Position of the Married Woman,” The Stans field Trust Lecture, University of London, 1924, Oxford University Press, pp. 11-18.
2
On the other hand, some economists would point to the fact that there is a certain amount of unemployment in all industrial countries even in normal times. Exact figures are difficult to obtain but it is estimated that in the United States, on the average, the amount of unemployment ranges from 5 per cent in good years to 20 per cent in bad. This would seem to indicate that although the amount of work increases with the expansion of business and industry, the number of jobs does not keep up with the growing number of workers. The previous material has given some data on the oversupply of workers in clerical positions.—Adapted from Harrison, Shelby, tePublic Employment Offices,” Russell Sage Foundation, 1924, pp. 8-9.
II. Have married women a “right” to a job?
Reference should be made here to the first discussion and the classification that was made of the kinds of “married women.” How would the group answer this question for each classification? It is likely that not many in the group will question the “right” to work of women whose husbands are, for one reason or another, not supporting them. The question becomes then—not should “married women” work but should women with husbands at work take jobs that might be given to someone else. This raises the questions:
A. On what basis should jobs be held?
1. Can jobs be held on a basis of need?
Underlying this question of a “right” to a job is usually an unexpressed conviction that somehow those who need the jobs most should have them. What would such a plan do to business at present?
a. Should married men be given jobs before unmarried?
C 81 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
b.	Should girls whose fathers can support them be discharged before girls who are self-supporting?
c.	Should mothers of one child be discharged before the mothers of three?
d.	On what basis could “need” be established? Who is competent to decide between needs?
Who has the power to enforce such decisions? Do you think the employer is the one to decide it? Could the girls in an office decide it through their representatives? How could it be determined?
e.	Would you apply such a basis only in times of great unemployment or regularly in jaormal times?
The trade unions sometimes use this basis in time of emergency such as a strike or a period of unemployment in their decisions as to strike funds or jobs. Members with families are preferred to single men. In ordinary times, however, this factor does not figure in their policies.
2. Are competence, efficiency and skill a valid basis
for job holding?
a. Are married women in business as efficient as unmarried?
From your personal experience in your office have you observed any difference in competence, in regularity or in interest between married and unmarried women?
The following excerpts give some opinions.
1
Married women workers come in for their share of the general managerial concern about labor turnover. The figures so far have not been kept usually in such a way as to reveal sex or marital status, but in some industries voluntary “quits” show home duties as the largest reason given by women. The Hood Rubber Company in 1921 found less labor turnover among the married, whether men or women. This would of course be the case if women are working through necessity or if they are working with such a definite objective as providing better standards of living, better educations
182]IN THE OFFICE
for their children, and so on. On the other hand, it need occasion no great surprise to find that married workers, both men and women, show a higher absence rate from their employment. The Hood Rubber Company’s experience showed that widowed and divorced females lose 154 per cent more time, and married females 175 per cent more time than single males (married men lose two per cent more than single men). The rate of absence increases for women over the age of thirty. Many industries agree in the experience of Saturday absenteeism particularly among married women. This fact may have a very decisive bearing sometime upon the proposal for a five-day week.
In general, women workers are absent more frequently on account of sickness—in some cases 75 per cent more. There are usually no separate figures for married and unmarried women but it is safe to presume that pregnancy and childbirth increase the rate for the married. This particular phase of married women’s employment registers itself in several managerial problems. Frequently fellow employees protest against the presence of a pregnant woman and demand that she be excluded from the shop. This is particularly true among the foreign-born, who have brought with them a good many folk superstitions clustering around the phenomenon of birth.— Todd, Arthur J., “Some Industrial Management Aspects of Married Women’s Work and Their Bearing on the Family ” The Family, May 1927, p. 89.
2
Increasingly wives are working for wages rather than without them. The problem has come officially to the attention of a group of banking executives in New York who declare they will employ only single women or widows because they “get the most efficient service from women whose work is prompted by the urge of necessity” and that “women who have husbands to support them are too independent and hard to manage.”
. . . It is a fact and a pertinent one that a married woman who has been trained to hold a job has a certain amount of free choice which affects her attitude toward her office task. If a job becomes intolerable she can fall back on the home, a poor thing perhaps but her own, and take on the duties of dressmaker, cook, laundress, nurse and what not, imposed on the wife by the average budget of the family that depends on one wage-earner; when the nerve racking detail and isolation of home life prove too much she may again permit herself the luxury of specialization, of fixed hours, of luncheons which she herself has not cooked and hats which she herself has not trimmed, and return to the job. Naturally it upsets the employer to watch this kind of a dance from the frying pan into the fire and out again and he prefers the “unsupported” spinster or widow who must fry willy-nilly. . . .
One fear of the bankers is this: “A working wife often deadens ambition in a man. If he knows his wife is earning money just as he earns it, it encourages him to laziness. Her husband becomes a parasite without stamina or self-respect.” Is this a fair picture of an American husband?
C 83 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
Have the domestic tyrant and the upstanding hero of weekly fiction alike followed the trail of the dodo? And in any case is the parasitic husband more to be dreaded than the parasitic wife if we must assume that one spouse will become a parasite when the other can earn enough for two? The commonsense answer is that he rarely does.—“Working Wives ” Survey, Vol. 50, p. 317.
3
A recent article in The Outlook giving a summary of several interviews with employers contains the following reasons as given by them for one attitude or the other. It is interesting to note here the combination of reasons, some of them related to business efficiency in the office, and others giving expression to a social opinion not based on economic reasons. Those who were opposed to employing married women said it was (1) because a girl ought to be at home taking care of her children, (2) that a desire for a career is keeping many women from having children, (3) that married women are only working for pin money, (4) that a woman neglects her home if she works, (5) that her thoughts are always on her home or if they aren't they should be, (6) that she comes late and rushes off early, (7) that the husband may have a bad influence on her. Those who were employing them (married women) said they did so because they were more steady and mature.—Adapted from Lion, H. M., “The Boycott on Wives,” The Outlook, December 12,1923.
4
In a study of women in clerical and secretarial work in Minneapolis recently, employers were asked to state their preference in the matter of married women. In the group as a whole there was a feeling that married women could not do that type of work because their homes provided too many distractions. While there was no establishment that stated it preferred married women, 56 per cent definitely stated they did not want married women. Seventeen per cent had no preference and 23 per cent preferred single women but would employ married. In the group of women studied, 87 per cent were single, 9 per cent married, 4 per cent divorced or separated. —Adapted from Elmer, M. C., “A Study of Women in Clerical and Secretarial Work in Minneapolis, Minnesota,” Women's Occupational Bureau, 216 Myers Arcade, Minneapolis, 1925.
b. How much part is prejudice likely to play in such estimates and opinions as those given above in (2) and (3)? What place in a reasonable employment policy have such social opinions about women and the home as those given in (3) ?
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If a study such as that quoted in (1) shows more absenteeism on the part of married men as well as married women, is that a reason for preferring unmarried men in jobs?
3. Should jobs be held on a group or an individual basis ?
a.	Is it fair either to give to or to withhold jobs from women because they belong to a group such as “married women” “colored women/’ and so forth, or should they be given on the basis of individual ability?
There is often an assumption in this discussion that married women as a group should or should not be given jobs. Of course studies of the absenteeism, efficiency, and so forth of the group which showed a marked loss or gain over the unmarried would in any individual case give a certain presumption for or against the applicant. Many individuals, however, would, of course, be just as efficient as many of the unmarried.
b.	Should the individual woman, then, be treated as such, or should she be labeled as a member of this group and a uniform treatment given to all?
III. Do married women pull down salaries?
This argument is based on the belief that married women do not need the money so much and so will take less. Any adequate consideration of this would open up the whole matter of wage settlement, which it is not possible to go into here. As for the influence of married women as a group on the salary level of all office workers, it is well to remember that they are only 9.1 per cent of the clerical workers and 23.6 per cent of those in trade.
1
Professor Todd says that there is no evidence that the employment of married women has any effect on men’s wages other than that of women’s labor in general. If, with the cutting off of immigrant labor, a large influx of married women into industry occurred, there might be a more apparent effect.—Todd, Arthur	“Some Industrial Management Aspects of Married
Women's Work and Their Bearing on the Family ” The Family, May 1927, />, 90,
This other statement, however, gives another point of view.
C 85 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
2
It is well known that except in highly organized industries the general habit of work among married women is liable to lower the earning power of women. The usual standard of comfort demands a certain income. If part of this income can be obtained by the wife, the husband’s incentive is by that much diminished.
When the work is not highly skilled, the hours not too long, the standard of domestic comfort not high, the presence of married women in industry may be a drag upon wages. The man is possibly not very well looked after at home, though this is by no means always the case, but the fact that his wife earns seems to make him content to accept a lower wage. It is not an argument that can be pressed far, because it is equally applicable, other things being equal, whenever there is habitually more than one wage earner in the home—for instance, when the children begin to earn. . . . Other things are therefore not equal, for the earning power of the average man and his willingness to exert that earning power have become more or less established by the time his children begin to earn, whereas a man who marries an earning wife is probably still young and not firmly established in social habits. No one can doubt the immense amount of feeling that now exists against the employment of married women, except in districts, such as textile areas, where custom has broken it down. Part of this prejudice is almost certainly part of the general nervousness as to the danger of competition from the cheaper labor of women, competition which may lower the whole standard of living, so laboriously and slowly built up yet still so unsatisfactory, of the working community. Women are apt to be cheap labor, partly because of their lower standard of comfort, partly because of the idea so firmly rooted in most people’s minds that it is not right to pay a woman so much as a man, partly because so many women are more or less subsidized, and the married woman is, of course, the peculiarly obvious example of the subsidized worker, who can afford to take less than a standard or living wage, because she is not wholly dependent upon her earnings. She is thus a special danger to the maintenance of the standard rate. Here again, surely, the remedy is not to debar the married woman from earning, but to secure a standard rate by other means.—Fisher, Mrs. H. A. L., “The Economic Position of the Married Woman ” pp. 11-16.
The assumption that married women may lower salaries is based on the belief that only need gives adequate assurance that women will insist upon adequate salaries. It is well to remember that often extreme need which gives a girl no margin to live on forces her to accept what she can get at whatever salary. A margin of income may put married women in a position to bargain, which the single girl dependent entirely on herself cannot afford to do. The effectiveness of such bargaining will depend of course on the supply of workers for the positions at the time.
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It is well in this connection to ask ourselves these questions.
A.	Does the employment of married women have an effect on salaries different from the effect of the employment of a girl whose father could support her?
B.	Is it any different from the effect of the employment of the unmarried man on the salary of the married man?
C.	If we include the married women who are solely responsible for the support of their families, is there not likely to be as much or more pressure from them for adequate salaries as from single girls responsible only for their own support ?
D.	How can the competition of any new group be dealt with in a way to protect the standards of the occupation? In what way could the girls at present in positions uphold these standards? What has been effective in other occupations where new workers have threatened to pull down wages ? Could any of these methods be used in this case, if you feel it true that married women are liable to accept lower salaries ?
IV. Would you give a married woman a job?
If you were in charge of the employment in your office and a married woman applied for a job, what would you take into consideration in making up your mind whether or not to employ her?
What place would her need of a job have in your decision? What place would her efficiency have ?
What place would your views on her duty as a wife have? How much would you be influenced by the number of girls applying and the amount of unemployment ?
Would you offer her the same wage as the others ?
Would you be influenced by the attitude of the other girls in the office toward the employment of married women ?
What would you do if you found that one of your efficient workers had secured a job under her single name although she was married ?
£87 3VIII. WHAT’S THE ANSWER?
THE last discussion should be a summary of what has been covered in the preceding ones and an arrangement of the material in such a way as to help the group to come to a sound opinion. Here it would perhaps be valuable to refer to the two questions suggested in the introduction: Shall I go on with my job after I get married? What do I think about the employment of married women in business ?
I.	What does a girl need to consider in answering the personal question, “Shall I go on with my job after. I get married” ?
A.	What does she have to think of in the relations with her husband?
[In answer to these questions the leader will try to get from the group those considerations which the group members feel to be necessary. These questions ought to be the basis of a review and summary in personal terms of the discussion held on the subject. They would in each case include considerations like the following.]
1.	What attitudes of his must she consider?
2.	What attitudes of her own must she consider?
3.	Would her work add to the interests they have in common ?
4.	How would the essentials of their relationship be affected ?
B.	What does she need to consider about her home?
1. What do they both consider necessary to a home ?
What have they been used to ?
2.	How would these be affected by her work?
3.	What adjustments in the home are possible in her case? Would these meet the demands listed in
(i)?
C.	What does she need to consider about children?
1. Does she intend to have children? Immediately?
Eventually ? How will her work affect this ?
2. What provision can she make for their care?
I 88 3WHAT’S THE ANSWER?
What facilities are available in the family? In the community ?
3. What home conditions do she and her husband consider necessary for the care of their children? Can these be provided if she works? If she stays at home ?
D.	What will give her the most satisfaction personally?
1.	Does she like housework? Does she like the care of children? Does she know how to do these things ?
2.	Does she like her job? Has it a future for her if she stays in it ? Has she a skill especially needed in business?
3.	What will she do with her leisure time if she does not work? What is she interested in? What is open to her? Can she find necessary work to do which will be developing to her?
4.	Is she strong enough physically to carry both a job and home responsibilities?
E.	Is her salary needed to finance the family?
1.	Does her husband earn enough for both of them? How would the standards of living to which each of them is accustomed be affected by living on his salary ?
2.	If she worked what would her salary be spent for? What things beyond the reach of his salary do they want? Are they as valuable as the disadvantages listed under A, B, and C above?
F.	How will her work affect other business women?
1.	Can she hold her job in competition with other women? Is she efficient? Do her home interests and responsibilities interfere with her work?
2.	Is she overcrowding the market? Is there an oversupply or an undersupply of workers of her kind at this time? How would she find out? If there is unemployment among office workers just
t 89 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
now, does she need the job as much as some others ?
3. Is she getting as good a salary as the unmarried girls in her office? Is she doing what she can to uphold the standard of salaries?
II. What is the answer to the second question: “What do I think about the employment of married women in business”?
A.	How is the work of married women in business affecting the relation between them and their husbands ?
1.	From your discussion and the facts given, what do you know about this ?
2.	What additional information do you need on this subject? Is it available? How can you get it?
B.	How is the work of married women in business affecting their homes ?
[Questions 1 and 2 under A above can be asked for this and the following summarizing questions.]
C.	How is the work of married women in business affecting their children ?
D.	What is it doing to the women themselves ?
E.	Is it necessary for the financial support of their families?
F.	Is there a place for the married woman in the business world?
These questions should be answered carefully, using the results of the previous discussions. The group will need also to recognize clearly to what extent its opinion is based on reliable facts and to what extent it must rely on inadequate information. It might be well for the group to list its unanswered questions and the points at which it feels more information is needed before an opinion can be formed. (It may have come to certain decisions in regard to the points discussed which will need now to be related to each other.) It will need therefore to answer these final questions.
I 90 ]WHAT'S THE ANSWER?
G. What is the relative importance of each of the various aspects of this question ?
(This involves the relation of each of these aspects to all the others.) The group will need to synthesize and balance the decisions it has reached in each discussion. If it has come out feeling that a woman often needs a job for her own satisfaction but that her children may suffer as a result, it will want to discuss how these two values can be preserved, or if one must be sacrificed, which one is the more important. Much of this balancing has no doubt been done all along, but it is probably well, in conclusion, to be sure that what integrations can be made of the various aspects of the problems, have been made.
SUMMARY: The leader will probably want to allow quite a little time at the end to Summarize the whole discussion, being sure to give opportunity to the group members to check her on her statements if they do not agree with her interpretation of whatever consensus has been reached.
Z 91 ]IX. THE OLDER MARRIED WOMEN IN BUSINESS (A Supplementary Discussion)
IT is often suggested that the way out of the difficulty for the married woman with home responsibilities and a business interest is for her to take the ten or fifteen years immediately after her marriage for her home and children and then return to her business when the children are grown up and she is free again. This discussion is prepared for older business women for whom this is a personal problem, or for other groups to whom it seems the best solution. The older married women who have never worked in business and wish to enter it are not included in this discussion, since that is a different problem and not of so much concern to business girls and women.
I. Can the older married woman come back?
A.	Can a married woman keep up her skill so that she is an efficient worker at her job ?
1. What experience has the group had with friends who were away from the job for some years? Are they able to keep or regain their skill with little difficulty? Have the group members ever known older women who have kept up their skill ?
2. How would it be possible for a woman to keep it up during her home-making years ?
B.	How does her home experience affect her attitude toward a job?
1. What is there in her experience as a mother, wife and housekeeper which will be an advantage to her if she returns to business? What will be a disadvantage ?
2. How will it affect her business habits, her self-confidence in her ability to do the job, her attitude toward her employer and her fellow workers ?
C.	Is her maturity an advantage or a disadvantage to her in business?
1. Does her greater experience in life make her more valuable in her position? In what ways would it 1192 ]THE OLDER MARRIED WOMEN IN BUSINESS
give her an advantage? In what ways would it be a handicap ?
The following quotations give various opinions on these questions. Several writers see in this possibility the solution of many of the difficulties of the married women.
1
“I can't work at my trade or my clerical work now, of course, for I can't be gone from the house all day." How often these and similar expressions are heard! It is true, of course, that competitive industry being arranged for all-day service most married women are unable to engage profitably or properly in the work they did before marriage. But there are few women who cannot keep at least a selective and constant interest, and some small practice to “keep the hand in," that will stand them in stead if there should be need of earning in case of widowhood or financial calamity, or when larger leisure from the upgrowing of the children makes it well for them to have some special interest of their own. Moreover, the period of life when a woman has the largest end of her activity fastened to the family need, and her economic position, therefore, properly secured by her husband's work for the family, is precisely the period when she may use her leisure, be it much or little, in preparation for some kind of work she wants to do but was not trained for as a girl.—Spencer, Anna Garlin, “Women’s Share in Social Culture,” Lippincott, p. 237.
2
Of all the wastes of human ignorance perhaps the most extravagant and costly to human growth has been the waste of the distinctive powers of womanhood after the child-bearing age. The absurd mistake of supposing that a woman's usefulness was ended when her last baby grew out of need for her personal ministrations was natural so long as women were held subject and inferior, and denied all mental training; but its lingering remnants in the modern mind are grotesque. . . .
When, however, the climacteric of middle life is reached, nature gives a new deal and starts a fresh balance of power between men and women. When the child-bearing age is passed woman's line of life becomes as “straight" as man's, and the “curves" that have required consideration at their weakest point are no longer a part of her experience. Moreover, at the point when the change comes in women's physical condition, there may be, and now increasingly is, a fresh start given to the mental and emotional life. It cannot be too soon realized that in the lives of women there is capacity for a Second youth. A second youth, that holds in reserve full compensation for any expenditure that a reasonable motherhood may have demanded. A second youth, when new thoughts blossom, when wishes and tendencies of personal development may flower into realization, when all that has gone into the sacrificial service to family life may add a peculiar
l 93 ]JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
and a special wisdom to personal achievement or to enlarged social service. . . . The trained and disciplined woman, however, is eager for work and for large enterprises at this period of life as never before. She seeks activity of whatever sort as native to her own desire, and if she is not sufficiently well educated or sufficiently in touch with the things best worth doing, in the lines most congenial to her natural capacity, she is likely to rush about from one to another busyness of interest, without plan or effectiveness and to a distraction of energy. To many women, also, whom life has used hardly in circumstance or relationship, there may come a childish restlessness before they cUn “settle down” to the true rejuvenescence of thought, of feeling and of power which is theirs by right. The old theories of women took no account of this rich and large possibility of later life. If the fact that more women than men lived to old age, and that more women than men seemed to relish life and wanted to engage in activities of moment after they were old, was at all perceived, it was laid to the natural perversity of women that they thus hung on to life when no longer desired and put themselves in the way when they could no longer do that for which they were made!—Spencer, Anna Garlin, “Women's Share in Social Culture/' Lippineott, pp. 230-231.
3
The mother who yearns over her children and the mother who earns are the two extremes. Here, as everywhere, the mean is golden. Every mother owes it to her family as well as to herself to have a very real interest outside of her home circle of activities. But, she also owes it to her children to keep that interest subordinated to her interest in them. Her aim, it seems to me, should be so to adjust her life as to be a full-time mother on a part-time job rather than a part-time mother on a full-time job. I would suggest that she reduce her vocation to the place of an avocation during the infancy of her children and then restore it to its full importance as a vocation when they are in school most of the day and no longer require so much of her time and attention.
It can be done. I know any number of women who have done it. They spent from six to ten years, after graduating from college, in the pursuit of their career. Then they began to produce children and they went into that inimitable experience with all the zest, all the enthusiasm and determination to make good with which ever they began a new piece of work. Their spare time and strength (which is often precious little when children are babies) they gave to “keeping their hand in” with their vocational interest. This meant, of course, giving up practically all social life in the daytime, and much of it in the evenings; substituting the reading of technical journals for magazines and of technical books for fiction. But that does not seem a hardship to the woman who really enjoys her careering.
And then, when their children were old enough to go to school or a nursery school, if one was near by, they had their innings. No sentimental weeping when “the last little one” went out the garden gate to school, no
IT94]THE OLDER MARRIED WOMEN IN BUSINESS
moaning “because the house seemed so empty/’ but a happy effort to see how they could best begin building up their careers so as to have them in full swing by the time they were put on the parents’ retired list.
Nothing is more pathetic than the middle-aged mother whose children have been her only interest in life. When they have left home to go to college, or to start homes of their own, she is left high and dry without anything to do or anybody to fuss over. So she joins a woman’s club or a lecture course to improve her mind, or she goes in heavily for social work for which she has had no previous training, or she goes into a decline in order to win back the attention of the family, which seems to be diverted in other directions. Sometimes being a grandmother and being allowed to bring up her grandchildren while her daughter pursues her career may keep her out of mischief for a while but, sooner or later, the woman who has had no interest in life outside of her children and her home becomes, if not a public charge, then a private one!—Hansl, Eva v. B., “What About the Children? The Question of Mothers and Careers,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1927, p. 224.
4
Others, however, some of whom have dealt especially with the employment of these women, have a different point of view.
Mrs. Hobart and Mrs. Epstein felt that except in unusual cases, six years away from a job made readjustment very difficult, ten years made it all but impossible. Specialized skill, such as shorthand, is quickly lost without practice; perhaps even more formidable is the loss of a professional attitude during the years at home, when attention is scattered over many and diverse duties. As it was put by Mrs. Marion T. Brockway, the only woman on the staff of the president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company: “Middle-aged women are terribly hard to place because they are so set in their ways. They think they can do anything because they have been in the habit of doing almost everything.” Even more drastic in her opinion of the speed at which personal marketability declines was Helen Winne of the Y. W. C. A., who felt that even six months away from a job was a decided handicap. Miss Winne believes, however, that many of the younger women who pass through her bureau are not planning to stop work when they marry.
In some firms the matter of age operates strongly against the employment of married women who have stayed at home with young children, since it affects group insurance and pension plans. One large business concern will not take on any new employee, man or woman, who is more than twenty-nine years old, since their calculations are based on the younger ages. . . .
The fundamental trouble on the employment side seems to be the readjusting of a worker who has been away from a specialized job, perhaps away from any definite work in a group of people, rather than a matter of marriage per se. The old prejudice against the married woman as an employee,
C 95 3JOBS AND MARRIAGE?
and the old prejudice of the married woman against an outside job, are breaking down. But a mechanism for bringing together again the job and the woman has still to be worked out. It is a problem analogous to that which presented itself on a large scale when hundreds of thousands of men came back from the war after months or years without definite and specific habits of work; the problem which comes in a minor and transitory way every autumn when people come back from vacations and take time to “settle down.”
On the married woman’s side, the chief difficulty, aside from her own psychological readjustment, may be the question of money. Except in rare though real personal instances, it seems hard for her to go back to work which is sufficiently well paid to replace work at home, unless she can afford an interval of training or re-training. She can supplement her husband’s income in her leisure time if she has relatives to help with the children and the housework without pay, or if the children are so far grown that they need little continuous supervision and kitchenette living has reduced the housework almost to zero. But it seems hard for women to earn a self-supporting wage in New York City outside of full-time continuous work.
The development of a professional attitude toward one’s own housework and one’s own children, such ^s Dr. Ethel P. Howes is creating through the Smitji College Institute, would certainly help in making the readjustments of women who “come back” after time at home. So will research to discover and create part-time jobs which are economically justifiable, such as present department store and cafeteria positions. Now there simply are not enough part-time jobs to go around among the women who cannot afford to relinquish all their responsibilities at home and yet wish to, or must, eke out an income as well. The great procession of professional or semi-professional work is marching in a full-time rhythm, and most of the adjustments of people who fall out of step rest squarely upon themselves.
This matter of attitude was stressed also by Miss Winne, who told as an illustration the story of one inexperienced, but charming applicant whom she chanced to know personally. One of those rare unspecialized jobs came along in which personality counts—the chance to serve as a receptionist and hostess in an art center. She called up Mrs. Blank’s home and found she was having tea with a friend, then called her at the friend’s house to urge her to apply at once. “But I can’t go today,” Mrs. Blank replied, “I’ve just got here and Elizabeth has tea all ready.” Miss Winne urged her to excuse herself and go at once, and finally she did so reluctantly. She got the job and has developed it into a really responsible and pleasant position. But without the urging she would have chosen tea.
If specialized skill is what matters in getting a good position, are there not techniques in the home which can be put on the employment market? The directors at the Part-Time Bureau made a clear distinction between older women who were proud of their ability as housewives and eager to use it in tea room or cafeteria, and younger women, many of whom had been employed before marriage, to whom the years at home had seemed to
[963THE OLDER MARRIED WOMEN IN BUSINESS
mean a disintegration of old interests without the addition of new skills. “They are so discouraged and so fearful when they come in. They doubt their ability to go back to any job. They have been lonely in their dark little flats, without enough interesting things to do, too far from their friends or too tied down with a baby to get what sociability they could afford.” Very few mothers express a desire for work involving other people’s children.—Ross, Mary, “Can Mother Come Back?” Survey, April 1927, pp. 38-39.
5
Would I, I wondered, be wise to do the same: hold the home job while the children were young, finding what substitutes I could, and then go back ? This is a solution often advanced and sometimes carried out. But it has some serious disadvantages. For one thin£, during those years the husband becomes used to having the home job carried on without him. His long-established habits, as well as the wife’s, must be broken in making the change.
Moreover, experience becomes almost valueless if it is long unused. The person in the world of jobs knows where jobs are, knows that so-and-so is moving on, knows that this or that organization is expanding. That person is naturally thought of when there is an opening. His work is known, and is in the field of attention. The maps of each job-world are constantly changing. To drop out of it for a period of years and then re-ejiter it is to find oneself a stranger in a strange land. The woman of forty who has spent fifteen years keeping house must start over again at the beginning, with a beginner’s ignorance of conditions and little more than a beginner’s opportunities. If a man who had just begun to make his way as a banker or a physician or a professor turned farmer for fifteen years, he would meet exactly the same difficulties in taking up his abandoned occupation. This situation must be faced by every woman who says, “I will drop out now while the children are young. Then I will go back.”
The other handicap is even more serious, because it is internal. The woman who “goes back” has not only limited her opportunities but has lost in real competence. She may start with the high resolve to “keep her hand in” with her music or mathematics or medicine. But these are relegated to the fringe of her time and attention. Her hands and brain are engaged in another and altogether different technic. Again, this difficulty is not sexual but human. We can keep on doing well only what we actually keep on doing better.
Part-time work offers a further compromise, but again with obstacles. The first problem is to catch your part-time job. From the employer’s point of view a break in continuity means a real loss of efficiency. One wholetime worker accomplishes more than two part-time workers, who must catch up each other’s threads and go over each other’s traces. If the business world were eager to solve the problem for married women workers, this disadvantage might be accepted. But it must be remembered that the business and a large part of the professional world is trying to exclude, not to admit, married women. When marriage itself is a disqualification for women
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in many banks, schools, public services and business houses, we can hardly expect employers in general to accept the disadvantages of part-time appointments in order to give us an opening. We are again face to face with the central fact that the opportunities of women will not be greatly enlarged without the cooperation of men.
The same difficulty applies to outside work done at home. Such work is, in the nature of things, available in only a few occupations. Most jobs require the presence of the job holder; for most work is not isolated but is closely related to the work of others. Moreover, if the work must be done at home because the woman’s time and attention are needed for home duties, that time and attention are not free to devote to the outside work. Competence in any pursuit is not achieved by the divided mind, at the mercy of constant interruption.
For all these reasons, I decided against dividing my time—either by years or by hours—between two occupations.—Mavity, Nancy Barr, “The Wife, the Home, and the Job,” Harp'er’s Magazine, July 1926, pp. 195-196.
6
All consideration of social economy as to investments in time, energy, money, and educational facilities demand it [the return of married women to work] also. The present waste in labor turnover, and in the scrapping of costly mental equipment, among women, would not be tolerated for a moment were it not obscured by the casual optimism of the “home-use” theory. As it is now, every young woman in the full tide of her effort is under sentence of death, professionally, with indefinite reprieve. The ever-imminent break ought to be enough to take much of the patience and forethought out of her work.
Much has been said of the woman’s “second leisure,” as affording the desired usefulness. But there are two obstacles hardly to be overcome. First, the long interruption spells for most occupations a fatal weakening in knowledge, skill, and energy. Literary work is possibly one of the exceptions; we may think of others. But, in general, for women past their children’s youth, the outlay of vitality required to recover lost ground is too great. The hand, the eye, the scientific flair have failed, as with Andrea del Sarto:
But all the play, the insight and the stretch—
Out of me, out of me!
—Howes, Ethel Puffer, “Continuity for Women,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. July-Dee ember, 1922, p. 735.
II. Are there positions at present for the older married woman in business?
A. What kinds of positions are these older women especially fitted for?
From the discussion of (I) what would you say were C 98 3THE OLDER MARRIED WOMEN IN BUSINESS
the special contributions these women have to make to business ? From your own experience what would you say was their value in an office ?
B. What kinds of positions are there open to them at present ?
1.	In your own experience what kinds of positions have you seen filled by such women ?
2.	Do you know what experience employment offices have with placing these women ?
The following quotations may give some further information on this.
1
Listen to the director of one of the leading employment agencies in New York City: “The finest type of women in business today are the married women, who have sweat blood with their husbands, who have laughed and cried with their children. They are the ones who make good. Years have contributed to their character, and life has given them balance. When such women seek employment it is generally because misfortune of one kind or another has forced them to join the wage-earners. They are in such deadly earnest about wanting their weekly pay check that they do not easily change. They put up with a great deal more discomfort than the younger girl who is quick to say, ‘Oh, I can find something else/ and move on. Parties, sweethearts and telephone calls do not disturb their thoughts; they attend strictly to business. The glamor of sex is gone. The middle-aged woman of the finer type has patience, understanding and judgment. All I can say is that there are not enough of her kind in business. The market, in my estimation, can absorb all that will come into it.”
“Practically every big concern has one key woman, well beyond middle life, who is a sort of anchor to windward,” said one man who has a nationwide cognizance of industrial conditions.—Pope, Virginia, “The Middle-Aged Woman in Business ” The Woman Citizen, April 1926, p. 10.
2
The -©pinion of the office employer is voiced in the Sunday newspaper advertisements; rarely, if ever, does he insert a notice that he wants a file clerk, a typist or a comptometer operator over twenty-five. Even as supervisors of clerical staffs I found they were not considered a success—the flapper prefers to be under the jurisdiction of a man.
“The clerical field is practically closed to the older woman,” is the dictum of the employment agent wherever one asks. “That is the girl's domain. She has quick fingers and an alert mind.”
“But there are older women who can type exceedingly well,” one protests, only to be told that they are in the minority and that it is almost impossible
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to combine them with a crowd of youngsters. "They just don’t fit in with the bunch.” More than one agent who has ventured to send a woman of middle years to an employer has been advised that said employer is not running an "old ladies’ home.” Men often prefer personality to experience, and find it easier, so they say, to suit the young and flexible mind to their way of doing than to divert the set mental processes into a new channel.
Beyond all doubt, too, in this and other lines, the middle-aged woman is up against man’s love of beauty. That is her age-old battle in and out of the business world, so why should she wonder when she inadvertently learns that some employer who rejected her asked for a girl with pretty ankles?
Part of all that may be prejudice. Part may be the obstacles which the older woman puts in her own path—considering now just the average run, not the exception. Rather harsh terms are sometimes applied to her by both employer and agent—often enough at any rate, that a warning might well be given. "Self-opinionated,” "obstinate” and "aggressive” are some of the epithets used to describe her. She has a preconceived idea of her own worth. Forgetting that it is the place of her "boss” to dictate, she likes to do it herself. If she has been previously employed she does not hesitate to lay down the law about how she did things in her last place. She becomes set in her ways and is not receptive to new ideas. Even a woman who had grown to middle years herself in a clerical post, in charge of other women, reluctantly bore testimony that this had often been her observation.—Pope, Virginia, “The Middle-Aged Woman in Business ” The Woman Citizen, April 1926, p. 43.
3
At the Vocational Bureau of the New York Exchange for Women’s Work, which was established almost fifty years ago to aid "distressed gentlewomen,” a special effort is made by Marguerite Rowe, the director, to help the older women without specialized training as well as women with professional or semi-professional experience. For the twenty per cent of their active cases who are more than fifty years old and untrained, the outlook is dark, though occasionally someone does want a companion of sixty or so. For the middle-aged women there are jobs as visiting housekeepers, housemothers in schools and institutions, social secretaries, selling positions in gift and antique shops, and the like, in which often their domestic and social experience is an asset. But when it comes to a really well-paid position, such as the managing housekeeper of a large establishment with eight or ten servants, or a cafeteria manager, of course a background of something more definite than one’s own home is required.
The one place that I hit upon in this series of interviews in which the home background really did seem to count was in the department stores. The store which I visited, Lord and Taylor’s, declared that there was no prejudice against employing married women on either executive or selling staff, or against the marriage of women while they are in the service of the store. Should a responsible woman executive marry, she is asked to
C 100 ]THE OLDER MARRIED WOMEN IN BUSINESS
train one of her assistants to take over her work if she wished a leave for a time to have a child or if her husband’s business necessitated a temporary absence from the city. Probably the majority of the women employees of Lord and Taylor are or have been married; many of them have children, sometimes left with relatives, sometimes old enough to be in school.
“With us personality counts at least 60 per cent,” said Mrs. Isabella Brandow, the director of the Department of Training. “We need first and foremost the ability to meet people pleasantly, and often the social experience of the married woman has seemed to help her in this respect.”
At this and other department stores in New York City there are two kinds of part-time work which fit in especially well with a domestic schedule —the corps of extra salespeople who come on daily from 11 to 4:30, and another group who are there three days in the week to relieve the peaks of trade. Hour for hour they earn as much as or a little more than fulltime employees. Almost all are married. In the opinion of Elizabeth Johnston of the Employment Department, who supervises the initiation of the women over eighteen years of age into non-executive jobs, most of the married women are working not as a matter of absolute necessity, but because they “could use the money” for the amenities of life, for new living-room curtains, or a summer vacation, or added education for the children.
Almost every woman knows something of the selling work of a department store, since she has stood repeatedly on the customer’s side of the counter. Perhaps tidiness in the home might be a useful background for keeping one’s stock in order. At any rate, almost all types drift into these selling positions and make good, with training, if they have the personality and interest in the work.—Ross, Mary, “Can Mother Come Back?” Survey, April 1927, pp. 38-39.
III. To what extent is the return of the older married woman a solution of the difficulty?
A.	In what ways could the business handicaps which result from her absence be overcome ? In what ways could the values of her home experience and her maternity be utilized?
B.	How could the market for her abilities be expanded?
C.	Are there other alternatives which would give her the same or equal satisfactions? (See Discussion V.)
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