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Page 68
But "every woman knows" that housekeeping, when it is a labor of love and
not a paid profession, goes far deeper than ordering meals or keeping
refrigerators clean, or making an invalid's bed with hospital precision.
We are more than cooks. We furnish power for the day's work of men, and
for the growth of children's souls. We are more than parlor maids. We are
artists, informing material objects with a living spirit. We are more even
than trained nurses. We are companions along the roads of pain, comrades,
it may be, at the gates of death. Back of our willingness to do our full
work must lie something profounder than lectures on bacteria, or interior
decoration, or an invalid's diet or a baby's bath. Specific knowledge can
be obtained in a hurry by a trained student. What cannot be obtained by
any sudden action of the mind is _the habit_ of projecting a task against
the background of human experience as that experience has been revealed in
history and literature, and of throwing into details the enthusiasm born
of this larger vision. She is fortunate who comes to the task of making a
home with this habit already formed. Her student life may have cast no
shadow of the future. When she was reading �schylus or Berkeley, or
writing reports on the Italian despots, or counting the segments of a
beetle's antenn�, she may not have foreseen the hours when the manner of
life and the manner of death of human beings would depend upon her. She
was merely sanely absorbed in the tasks of her present. But in later life
she comes to see that in performing them, she learned to disentangle the
momentary from the permanent, to prefer courage to cowardice, to pay the
price of hard work for values received. Age may bring what youth
withholds, a sense of humor, a mellow sympathy. But only youth can begin
that habitual discipline of mind and will which is the root, if not of all
success, at least of that which blooms in the comfort of other people.
Carry the logic of the vocation-mongers to its extreme. Grant that every
girl in college ought someday to marry, and that we must train her, while
we have her, for this profession. Then let the college insist on honest
work, clear thinking and bright imagination in those great fields in which
successive generations reap their intellectual harvest. Captain Rostron of
the Carpathia once spoke to a body of college students who were on fire
with enthusiasm for the rescuer of the Titanic's survivors. He ended with
some such words as these: "Go back to your classes and work hard. I
scarcely knew that night what orders were coming out when I opened my
mouth to speak, but I can tell you that I had been preparing to give those
orders ever since I was a boy in school." Many a home may be saved from
shipwreck in the future because today girls are doing their duty in their
Greek class rooms and Physics laboratories.
But this fallacy of domesticity probes deeper than we have yet indicated.
It is, in the last analysis, superficial to ticket ourselves off as
house-keepers or even as women. What are these unplumbed wastes between
housekeepers and teachers, mothers and scholars, civil engineers and
professors of Greek, senators and journalists, bankers and poets, men and
women? A philosopher has pointed out that what we share is vastly greater
than what separates us. We walk upon and must know the same earth. We live
under the same sun and stars. In our bodies we are subject to the same
laws of physics, biology and chemistry. We speak the same language, and
must shape it to our use. We are products of the same past, and must
understand it in order to understand the present. We are vexed by the same
questions about Good and Evil, Will and Destiny. We all bury our dead. We
shall all die ourselves. Back of our vocations lies human life. Back of
the streams in which we dabble is that immortal sea which brought us
hither. To sport upon its shore and hear the roll of its mighty waters is
the divine privilege of youth.
If any difference is to be made in the education of boys and girls, it
must be with the purpose of giving to future women more that is
"unvocational," "unapplied," "unpractical." As it happens, such studies as
these are the ones which the mother of a family, as well as a teacher or
writer, is most sure to apply practically in her vocation. The last word
on this aspect of the subject was said by a woman in a small Maine town.
Her father had been a day laborer, her husband was a mechanic. She had
five children, and, of course, did all the house-work. She also belonged
to a club which studied French history. To a foolish expression of
surprise that with all her little children she could find time to write a
paper on Louis XVI she retorted angrily: "With all my children! It is for
my children that I do it. I do not mean that they shall have to go out of
their home, as I have had to, for everything interesting." But the larger
truth is that the value of a woman as a mother depends precisely upon her
value as a human being. And it is for that reason that in her youth we
must lead one who is truly thirsty only to fountains pouring from the
heaven's brink. It might seem cruel if it did not merely illustrate the
law of risk involved in any creative process, that the more generously
women fulfil the "function of their sex" the more they are in danger of
losing their souls to furnish a mess of pottage. The risk of life for life
at a child's birth is more dramatic but no truer than the risk of soul for
body as the child grows. In the midst of petty household cares the nervous
system may become a master instead of a servant, a breeder of distempers
rather than a feeder of the imagination. The unhappiness of homes, the
failure of marriage, are due as often to the poverty-stricken minds, the
narrowed vision of women as to the vice of men.
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