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Page 17
At the same time, however, when a woman has given fourteen years of her
life to preparation for teaching, eight years in an elementary school,
four in a high school, and from two to four in professional training,
she has made an investment and formed habits which will make her
hesitate before turning to matrimony. The independence and income will
prove attractive during young maidenhood; and matrimony can hardly yield
its best results to the woman who enters it after she is thirty. It is
certainly true that women are decreasingly willing to enter the teaching
profession; and in many parts of the country there is a chronic dearth
of trained teachers.
Meantime, for good or ill, women have eaten, and are eating of the tree
of knowledge as they will. If this has driven them out of the little
paradise of the past, they are in a fair way to make the whole world
into a paradise of the present. Only through training their minds could
they have broken away from an outworn past. In this time of readjustment
there must be many mistakes and many tragedies.[26] The fool-killer will
gather a rich harvest, but if we are open-minded and eager to see the
truth, each martyr will teach her sisters, and the future generations
of women will conserve the values of the past and add to them new
treasures and new graces of knowledge and understanding.
[26] See chapter on Education of Adolescent Girls, in _Adolescence_, by
G. STANLEY HALL. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904.
It is most unfortunate that these real issues should be obscured by sex
rivalry. There can be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his body,
between science and religion, between man and woman. Such antagonisms
rest back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman
alone, for any purposes of life. And there is, too, that evil notion
which still affects economics, that when two trade one must lose. The
fact is that in all honest exchange buyer and seller gain alike, and all
who participate become rich. It is so in all honest relations between
these half-creatures we call men and women. In agreement, association,
co�peration, lies strongest significant life for both. In separation,
competition and antagonism lie arid, poor, mean lives, conceited and
egotistic, vapid and contemptible.
IV
The Feminizing of Culture
With the weakening of sex prejudices and the removal of legal
restrictions on women's freedom it was inevitable that they should
invade fields of activity where formerly only men were found. Since
women must eat every one knew that they must work, and the sight of a
woman at work was no new experience. Even in the days when they were
most secluded and protected, the number kept in ease was always very
small compared with the women slaves and servants who spun, cooked and
served. Hence men were used to seeing women at work; and while
industrial adjustments have not been easily made, they have still been
accepted as a matter of course. But who, fifty years ago, could have
imagined that to-day women would be steadily monopolizing learning,
teaching, literature, the fine arts, music, the church and the theater?
And yet that is the condition at which we have arrived. We may scoff at
the way women are doing the work, and reject the product, but that does
not alter the fact that step by step women are taking over the field of
liberal culture as opposed to the field of immediately productive work.
Some of the reasons for this change are so clear that it seems as though
they might have been anticipated. In a comparatively few years the
greater part of Western Europe and all of America has become rich, not
this time through the enslavement of other peoples and the confiscating
of their wealth, but through the enslaving and exploitation of the
material forces of nature. This wealth is not well distributed, but
large numbers of families have received enough so that the women do not
have to work constantly with their hands. At this point all historic
precedent would have turned these women into luxury-loving parasites and
playthings. A good many of them have taken this easiest way and entered
the peripatetic harems of the rich. But several million women refused to
repeat the old cycle of ruin; they knew too much.[27] What then should
they do? Faith in the value of conventual life for women had passed;
industrial changes had transformed their homes so that the endless
spinning, weaving, sewing and knitting were no longer there, even to be
supervised. Penelope's tasks had passed to foremen, working under trades
union agreements, in the factories of Fall River and Birmingham. Even
the function of the lady bountiful who looked after the spiritual and
family affairs of her tenants and servants and distributed doles and
Christmas baskets was gone. Her tenants owned their own farms, and her
chauffeur resented her interference with his personal life. What should
she do?
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