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Page 24
This conception is well illustrated by the case of a woman in western
New York, who married about 1850, and went to live on a farm with her
husband. They had small means, but she brought seven hundred dollars to
the altar, which was more than he possessed in ready capital. Her part
was, however, soon swallowed up in the general business, and while there
was a tacit agreement, voiced at long intervals, that she had put
something into the business, her part never increased, though the man
with whom she worked grew well-to-do. Certain feudal rights in the
butter the woman made and in the chickens she raised, yielded her small
sums, which often escaped her, but which she sometimes secured and put
into a few silver spoons and dishes for her table, a square of Brussels
carpet, three lace curtains, a marble topped stand, and six horsehair
covered chairs for her parlor. These articles were considered in a very
special sense her own. The man might have sold them and used the money,
but public opinion would have condemned him had he done so.
Meantime the woman cooked for the family and the hired men, scrubbed
and washed and mended. She strained and skimmed the milk from a dozen
cows, and churned the butter; she fed the calves; cared for the hens;
dug in the garden; gathered the vegetables; did the family sewing; and
stole fragments of time for her flower-beds. Her hours were from five in
the morning until nine at night, three hundred and sixty-five days in
the year, with no half-days or Sundays off.
Incidentally she read her Bible, maintained religious exercises in the
village, provided the church with a carpet by methods of indirection and
kept the church clean. She upheld a moral standard toward which men only
weakly struggled; hunted down and drove away all other women who refused
equal service to their lords; ministered to the neighboring sick; and
doled out alms in winter-time. Her home was a social and industrial
microcosm which she conducted as a feudal holding under the protection
of her lord. It would be an interesting study to work out the rules of
this feudal relation between husband and wife in any agricultural
community. They would be found as varied, as unjust and arbitrary, and
as generous, as those of the old r�gime in France.
A woman in a home is supposed to furnish three kinds of service. She
must be a housekeeper, a wife and a mother. As housekeeper, her services
can be estimated in current values running from three to twenty-five
dollars a week with board and lodging. The other two kinds of service
have never been reduced to monetary values.
As a wife, a woman is supposed to give her love, her person, her
sympathy and inspiration; the personal care of a husband, including his
clothes, attention to his relations and friends and general management
of his social position and reputation. If she fills this position well,
she is mistress, valet, confidential adviser and public entertainer.
Possibly these services can be rated except the first, and even here the
divorce courts scale alienated affections all the way from five hundred
to twenty-five thousand dollars, according to the appearance of the
woman and the skill of contending lawyers.
As a mother, the woman is supposed to give children a good heritage,
nurse them, care for them, doctor them and train them. We have
established values for these services as wet-nurse, nurse-maid,
governess, doctor and teacher, but who can estimate a woman's value in
giving a child a good heritage?
It is no wonder that such a difficult problem has remained thus far
unsolved. Here and there a man gives his wife a household allowance,
from the money they earn in common, and she struggles to save from it
some fragments for her individual needs; others put their wives on a
salary; and some others divide the income on a fractional basis. But the
slightest study of existing conditions must convince any one that women
are everywhere deeply dissatisfied with their economic relations to the
family. On referring recently to this fact before an audience almost
equally divided between suffragists and anti-suffragists, I found every
woman present applauding the statement. Another time when I asked more
than sixty of the wealthiest women in one of our cities how many were
dissatisfied with their relations to the family property, explaining
that I was not asking how many wanted more money but how many wanted a
different relation to the family money, all the women raised their
hands except three and they all had private property.
Meantime, economic changes, to be described in the next chapter, have
transformed our homes and nearly eight million women have gone outside
to earn money. The gladness with which they have gone shows that they
were not afraid to work, though at first the money did not belong to
them, but to their families. Almost everywhere in the United States the
money women now earn is their own; only in Louisiana can the husband
collect his wife's wages. Any one who reads Mrs. Gilman's masterly study
of the evil effects accompanying woman's economic independence must feel
how far-reaching are not only the discontent but also the evil
influences of our present system through over-emphasizing sex and
through corrupting the public thinking and feeling concerning services
and wages in general.[32]
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