Chapter IX: Part 9

We have used our brains while getting hold of money. We are going to use our brains while getting rid of it. We have studied banking, engineering, shop practice, cost systems, salesmanship. We are going to study food values, the hygiene of clothing, the sanitary construction and operation of living quarters, the mental reaction of amusements, the distribution of income, the art of making choices, according to our means, from among the millions of things, harmful and helpful, ugly and beautiful, offered to us by the producing world.

Mr. Devine ventures to hope that "we may look for a radical improvement in general economic conditions from a wiser use of the wealth which we have chosen to produce."

This enlarged view of the economic importance of Consumption brings with it a correspondingly enlarged view of the economic importance of the Home. "If the Factory," says Mr. Devine, "has been the center of the economics which has had to do with production, the Home will displace the Factory as the center of interest in a system which gives due prominence to Enjoyment and Use."

"There will result," continues Mr. Devine, "an increased respect on the part of economists for the industrial function which woman performs," for "there is no economic function higher than that of determining how wealth shall be used," so that "even if man remain the chief producer of wealth and woman remain the chief factor in determining how wealth shall be used, the economic position of woman will not be considered by those who judge with discrimination to be inferior to that of man."

Mr. Devine then lays out for the economist a task in the discharge of which the innocent bystander will sincerely wish him a pleasant trip and a safe return.

"It is the present duty of the economist," says Mr. Devine, "to accompany the wealth expender to the very threshold of the home, that he may point out, with untiring vigilance, its emptiness, caused not so much by lack of income as by lack of knowledge of how to spend wisely."

Mr. Deville's proposition therefore would seem finally to sanction some such conclusion as this:

Physical science and social science (and common sense) are making such important contributions to the subject of the rearing of children and to the subject of the maintenance of wholesome and beautiful living conditions and to the subject of the use of leisure that, while the home woman has lost almost all of the productive industries which she once controlled, she has simultaneously gained a whole new field of labor. Consumption has ceased to be merely PASSIVE and has become ACTIVE. It has ceased to be mere ABSORPTION and has become CHOICE. And the active choosing of the products of the world (both spiritual and material) in connection with her children, her house, and her spare time has developed for the home woman into a task so broad, into an art so difficult, as to require serious study.

We have quoted at length from Mr. Devine's discourse because it is recognized as the classic statement of the case and because it is warmly commended by such women as Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose skill as scientist and vision as philosopher have made her the most authoritative personality in the American Home Economics Association. (That association, by the way, has some fifteen hundred due-paying members.)

The scales fall from our eyes now and we see at least one thing which we had not seen before. We had supposed that sewing and cooking were the vitals of the Home Economics movement. Not at all! The home woman might cease altogether to sew and to cook (just as she has ceased altogether to spin, weave, brew, etc.) without depriving the Home Economics movement of any considerable part of its driving power. Sewing and cooking are productive processes. They add economic value to certain commodities; namely, cloth and food. But it is not Production, it is Consumption, which the Home Economics movement is at heart devoted to.

This is plainly set forth by some of its most zealous workers. Thus Edna D. Day, at the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics in 1908, was more or less sorry that "domestic science has come to be so largely sewing and cooking in our schools," was quite willing to look at the white of the eye of the fact that "more and more we are buying ready-made clothes and ready-cooked foods," and marked out the policy of her "Survey Course in Home Economics" at the University of Missouri in the statement that "sewing and cooking are decreasingly home problems, while the problems of wise buying, of adjusting standards of living to income, and of developing right feelings in regard to family responsibilities are increasingly difficult."

To choose and use the world's resources intelligently on behalf of family and community--in this Mr. Devine sees a new field of action, in this Mrs. Richards sees a new field of education.

Women will train themselves for their duties as consumers or else continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation pronounced upon them by Florence Nightingale. "Three-fourths of the mischief in women's lives," said she, "arises from their excepting themselves from the rule of training considered necessary for men."

But what, in this case, is the training proposed?

The answer to that question will cause some more scales to fall from our eyes. Just as we have seen that Home Economics does not consist essentially of sewing and cooking, we shall see that Consumption is not at all a specialized technique in the sense in which electrical engineering, department store buying, railroading, cotton manufacturing, medicine, and the other occupations of the outside world are specialized technigues. Home Economics will not narrow women's education but in the end will enlarge it, because Consumption, instead of being a specialty, is a generality so broad as almost to glitter.

III

AT Menomonie, Wisconsin, Mr. L. D. Harvey, lately president of the National Education Association, has established a Homemakers' School. It does not turn out teachers. Its course of instruction is solely for the prospective housewife.

The first grand division of study is The House.

We here observe that the housewife is going to be something of a Sanitary Engineer, since she studies Chemistry, Physics, and Bacteriology in their "application to such subjects as the heating, lighting, ventilation, and plumbing of a house." It is thought that knowledge of this sort "will go a long way toward improving the health conditions of the country."

We also observe that the housewife is going to be something of an Interior Decorator, since she studies "design, color, house planning and furnishing."

She also acquires some skill as Purchasing Agent, Bookkeeper, and Employer of Labor when she takes the course on Household Management and studies "the proper apportioning of income among the different lines of home expenditures, the systematizing and keeping of household accounts, and the question of domestic service."

The second grand division is Food Study and Preparation.

Here the housewife becomes, to some extent, a Dietitian, studying "the chemical processes in the preparation and digestion of foods," and considering the question "how she shall secure for the family the foods best suited to the various activities of each individual."

Here, likewise, she makes a start toward being a Pure Food Expert, through a study of "physical and chemical changes induced in food products by the growth of molds, yeasts, and bacteria," and a start toward being a Health Officer, through a study of "bacteria in their relation to disease, sources of infection, personal and household disinfection."

Nor does she omit to acquire some of the technique of the Physical Director through a course in Physiology bearing on "digestion, storage of energy, rest, sleep, exercise, and regularity of habits."

Of course, in her work in cookery, she pays some attention to special cookery for invalids.

The third grand division, that of Clothing and Household Fabrics, produces a Dressmaker, a Milliner, and an Embroiderer, as well as a person trained to see to it that "the expenditure for clothing shall be correct in proportion to the expenditure for other purposes."

The fourth grand division, the Care of Children, is of course limitless. The rearing of the human young is, as we all know and as Mr. Eliot of Harvard has insisted, the most intellectual occupation in the world. Here the homemaker applies all the knowledge she has gained from her study of the hygiene of foods and of the hygiene of clothes, and also makes some progress toward becoming a Trained Nurse and a Kindergartner by means of researches into "infant diseases and emergencies," "the stages of the mental development of the child," "the child's imagination with regard to truth-telling and deceit," "the history of children's books," and "the art of story-telling."

Passing over the fifth grand division, Home Nursing and Emergencies (in which the pupil learns simply "the use of household remedies," "the care of the sick-room," etc.), we come to the wide expanse of the sixth grand division, Home and Social Economics.

The work in this division begins with a study of the primitive evolution of the home and comes on down to the present time, when "the passing of many of the former lines of woman's work into the factory has brought to many women leisure time which should be spent in social service."

Note that last fact carefully. Home Economics is no attempt to drive women back into home seclusion. On the contrary, it is an attempt to bring the home and its occupants into the scientific and sociological developments of the outside world.

For this reason, in traversing the division of Home and Social Economics, the pupil encounters "an attempt to determine problems in civic life which seem to be a part of the duties of women."

Seventhly and lastly, there is a division dedicated to Literature, in which "a systematic course in reading is carried on through the two years." Indispensable! No degree of proficiency at inserting calories in correct numbers in to Little Sally's stomach could atone for lack of skill at leading Little Sally herself in morning strolls through the "Child's Garden of Verses," with trowel in hand to dig up the gayest plants and reset them in the memory.

Which brings us back to the observation that the Consumption of Wealth is a generality.

The homemaker may happen to be a specialist in some one direction, but it is clear that she cannot simultaneously know as much about food values as the real dietitian, as much about the physical care of her child as the real trained nurse, as much about the wholesomeness of her living arrangements as the real sanitarian, as much about music as the Thomas Orchestra, as much about social service as Mr. Devine, and as much about poems as Mr. Stevenson. Her peculiar equipment, if she is a good homemaker, is a round of experience and a bent of mind which make it possible for her to cooperate intelligently with the dietitian, the trained nurse, the sanitarian, the Thomas Orchestra, Mr. Devine, Mr. Stevenson, and the various other representatives of the various other specialized techniques of the outside world.

It follows that her school discipline cannot be too comprehensive. No other occupation demands such breadth of sense and sensibility. One could make a perfectly good cotton manufacturer on the basis of a very narrow training. One cannot make a good consumer without a really LIBERAL EDUCATION.

For this reason it becomes necessary to resist certain narrownesses in certain phases of Home Economics.

One of these narrownesses is the assumption that because a thing happens to be close to us it is therefore important. We have heard lecturers insist that because a house contains drain-pipes a woman should learn all about drain-pipes. But why? In most communities drain-pipes are installed and repaired and in every way controlled by gentlemen who are drain-pipe specialists. The woman who lives in the house has no more real need of a knowledge of the structural mysteries of drain-pipes than a reporter has of a knowledge of the structural mysteries of his typewriting machine. The office mechanic fixes all that for him, and, so far as his efficiency as a reporter is concerned, an investigation of his faithful keyboard's internal arrangements would be in most cases an amiable waste of time.

Another possible narrowness is the attempt to manufacture "cultural backgrounds" for various important but quite safe-and-sane household tasks.

For instance, in the books and in the courses of instruction (of college grade) on "The House" we have sometimes observed elaborate accounts of the evolution of the human home, beginning with the huts of the primitive Simianians. And in pursuing the very essential subject of "Clothes and Fabrics" we have not infrequently found ourselves in the midst of spacious preliminary dissertations on the structure of the loom, beginning with that which was used by the Anthropenguins.

Now we would not for the world speak disparagingly of looms or huts. We have ourselves examined some of them in the Hull House Museum in Chicago and in the woods of Canada, and have found them instructive. We suggest only that college life is short, that the college curriculum is crowded, and that (except possibly for those students who are especially interested in anthropology or in industrial evolution) it would surely be a misfortune to learn the Simianian hut and to miss Rossetti's "House of Life," or to get the impression that as a "cultural background" for shirtwaists the Anthropengruinian loom can really compete with Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus."

If this occasional tendency toward exaggerating the importance of drain-pipes, window-curtains, and door-mats were to grow strong, and if girls, as a class, should be required to spend any large proportion of their time on the specialized history and sociology of feminine implements and tasks while the boys were still in the current of the affairs of the race, we should indeed want President Thomas of Bryn Mawr to repeat on a thousand lecture platforms her indignant assertion of the fact that "nothing more disastrous for women, or for men, can be conceived of than specialized education of women as a sex."

These parenthetical observations, however, amount simply to the expression of our personal opinion that Home Economics, like every new idea, carries with it large quantities of dross which will have to be refined out in the smelter of trial. The real metal in it is its attempt to establish the principle that intelligent Consumption is an important and difficult task. For that reason it will not only desire but demand the utmost equality of educational opportunity. And women, like men, will continue to get their "cultural backgrounds" in the great achievements of the whole race, where they can hold converse with Lincoln and Darwin and the makers of the Cologne Cathedral and George Meredith and Pasteur and Karl Marx and Whistler and Joan of Arc and St. John.

The woman voiced a great truth who said that the soul which can irradiate the numberless pettinesses of home management (and it is folly to deny that there ARE numberless pettinesses in it) is the soul "nourished elsewhere." Think it over. It tells the story. Whether that "elsewhere" is the deep recesses of her own religious nature or the wide stretches of the great arts and sciences, it is always an "elsewhere."

Let that be granted, as it must be granted. Let us say that there shall be no abridgment of the offerings of so-called academic education. What does a course of study like that of Mr. Harvey's Homemakers' School attempt to add to academic education?

Principally three things.

First: Certain manual arts.

Second: Certain domestic applications of the physical and sociological sciences.

Third: Money Sense in Expenditure (in the course on Household Management).

The last of these three things is appearing in many places. At the University of Illinois, for instance, Professor Kinley, now delegate from the United States to the Pan-American Congress, has given courses in Home Administration for women which he has regarded as of equal importance with his courses in Business Administration for men.

At the University of Chicago, in the Department of Household Administration, Course 44 is on "The Administration of the House" and includes "the proper apportionment of income."

The business man says: "My sales cost, or my manufacturing cost, or my office-force cost, is such and such a per cent. of my total cost. When it goes above that, I want to know why; and I find out; and, if there isn't a mighty good reason for its going up, I make it go down again to where it was." Shall we come to the day when in spending the money which has been earned in business we shall say: "Such and such a per cent. to food; and such and such a per cent. to clothes; and such and such a per cent. to shelter; and such and such a per cent. to health and recreation; and such and such a per cent. to good works; and such and such other per cents. to various other purposes?" Shall we come to the day when we shall consume wealth with as much forethought and with as much balance of judgment between conflicting claims as we now exhibit in acquiring wealth?

They are trying to develop this "Costs System for Home Expenditures" in many of the schools and departments of Home Economics to-day. They believe that most people, because of not looking ahead and because of not making definite plans based on previous experience, come to the contemplation of their bills on the first of each month with every reason to confess that they have bought those things which they ought not to have bought and have left unbought those things which they ought to have bought. But it is not only a matter of reaching a systematic instead of a helter-skelter enjoyment of the offerings of the world. It is also a matter of reaching, by study of money values, a mental habit of economy. And it comes at a time when that habit is needed.

We are just beginning to realize in the United States that we cannot spend all our annual earnings on living expenses and still have a surplus for fresh capital for new industrial enterprises. We are on the point of perceiving that we are cramping and stunting the future industrial expansion of the country by our personal extravagance. We shall soon really believe Mr. James J. Hill when he says that "every dollar unprofitably spent is a crime against posterity."

When international industrial competition reaches its climax, that nation will have an advantage whose people feel most keenly that the wise expenditure of income is a patriotic as well as a personal duty.

But is this a matter for women alone? Do not men also consume? Are there no vats in Milwaukee, no stills in Kentucky, no factories wrapping paper-rings around bunches of dead leaves at Tampa? Are there no men's tailors, gents' furnishing shops, luncheons, clubs, banquets, athletics, celebrations? And as for home expenditures themselves, is the man simply to bring the plunder to the door, get patted on the head, and trot off in search of more plunder? We must doubt if economy will be reached by such a route. We find ourselves agreeing rather with the Home Economics lecturer who said: "There never yet was a family income really wisely expended without cooperation in all matters between husband and wife."

The Massachusetts legislature has passed a law looking toward the teaching of Thrift in the public schools. Boys and girls need it equally. And we venture to surmise that in so far as the new art and science of Consumption is concerned with wise spending, the bulk of its teachings ultimately will be enjoyed by both sexes. It will not be, to any great extent, a specialized education for women.

So much for the "Money Sense in Expenditure" which a full Home Economics course adds to "academic" education. The more we admit its value, the more convinced we must be that it ought to include every kind of expenditure and both kinds of human being.

A precisely similar conviction arises with regard to those "domestic applications of the physical and sociological sciences" which a full Home Economics course adds to an "academic" education.

Those "domestic" applications are most of them broadly "human" applications. They bear on daily living, exercise, fresh air, personal cleanliness, diet, sleep, the avoidance of contagion, methods of fighting off disease, general physical efficiency. They all amount to what Mrs. Ellen H. Richards calls Right Living. She would have four R's instead of three: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, and Right Living.

Now is Right Living to be only for girls?

Mr. Eliot of Harvard does not think so. In a recent "Survey of the Needs of Education," he said:

"Public instruction in preventive medicine must be provided for all children and the hygienic method of living must be taught in all schools. . . . To make this new knowledge and skill a universal subject of instruction in our schools, colleges, and universities is by no means impossible--indeed, it would not even be difficult, for it is a subject full of natural history as well as social interest. . . . American schools of every sort ought to provide systematic instruction on public and private hygiene, diet, sex hygiene, and the prevention of disease and premature death, not only because these subjects profoundly affect human affections and public happiness, but because they are of high economic importance."

A large part of Home Economics is simply Living Conditions. It is simply the lessons of Bacteriology, Chemistry, Physiology, and Sociology about the common facts of daily physical and social existence.

It may very well be, therefore, that what Mr. Eliot had in mind will not only come to pass but will even exceed his expectations. It may very well be that the educational policy of the future was correctly search-lighted by Miss Henrietta I. Goodrich (who used to direct the Boston School of Housekeeping before it was merged into Simmons College) when she said:

"We need to have courage to break the present courses in household arts and domestic science into their component parts and begin again on the much broader basis of a study of living conditions. Our plea would be this: that instruction in the facts of daily living be incorporated in the state's educational system from the primary grades through the graduate departments of the universities, with a rank equal to that of any subject that is taught, AS REQUIRED WORK FOR BOTH BOYS AND GIRLS."

We revert now finally to the "manual arts" which a full course in Home Economics adds to an "academic" education. In this matter, just as in the matter of Money Sense in Expenditure and in the matter of Right Living, we observe that the ultimate issue of the movement is not so much a specialized education for women as a practical efficiency in the common things of life for men and women both.

A reasonable proficiency in manual arts will some day be the heritage of all educated people. Mr. Eliot, in his "Survey of the Needs of Education," speaks appreciatingly of his father's having caused him to learn carpentry and wood-turning. He goes on to say:

"This I hold to be the great need of education in the United States--the devoting of a much larger proportion of the total school time to the training of the eye, ear, and hand."

It follows, then, that cooking and sewing for girls in the elementary schools must be made just as rigorous a discipline for eye and hand as wood-working is for boys. It even follows that boys and girls will often get their manual training together.

It will not be a case of "household drudgery" for the girls while the boys are studying civics.

Somewhere in this article (and as close to this paragraph as we can get the Art Director to put it) the reader will find a picture of the "living room" of the "model" house of the Washington-Allston Elementary School in Boston. The boys and girls of graduating grade in that school give four hours a week to matters connected with the welfare of that house. They have furnished it throughout with their own handiwork, the girls making pillow-cases, wall-coverings, window-curtains, etc., and the boys making chairs, tables, cupboards, etc. Succeeding classes will furnish it again. THE REASON WHY MR. CRAWFORD, THE MASTER OF THE SCHOOL, CHOSE TO HAVE A HOUSE FOR A MANUAL TRAINING LABORATORY WAS SIMPLY THAT A HOUSE OFFERS AMPLER OPPORTUNITIES THAN ANY OTHER KIND OF PLACE FOR INSTRUCTION IN THE PRACTICAL EFFICIENCIES OF DAILY LIVING FOR BOTH SEXES.

The system will be complete when the girls get a bigger training in design by making more of the chairs, and when the boys get a bigger training in diet by doing more of the cooking.

IV

LAST month's article ended with the inquiry whether the new education for homemaking would clash seriously with the modern young woman's necessary education for money-earning. We conclude that it will not.

Such developments as the long, specialized, four-year course in Household Economics at Simmons College in Boston are not here in point. That Simmons course is more than an education for home-making. It is an education for earning money by teaching home-making or by becoming (among other things) a dietitian in a hospital, or a manager of a lunch-room, or an interior decorator.

Our subject is not Home Economics as a money-earning occupation for a few women, but Home Economics as part of the education of all women.

In that aspect it does not seem likely to result in any "special feminine education" of such bulk as to withdraw women, in any serious degree, from the general education of the race. This is undeniably true, provided our observations have been correct that----

1. Home Economics is at heart Consumption, and must be so because the home woman is more and more purely a consumer.

2. Consumption is the broadest of generalities, requiring the broadest of liberal educations.

3. So far as manual arts are concerned, the "non-academic" cookery of the girl is balanced by the "non-academic" carpentry of the boy.

4. Right Living and Wise Spending will, to a great extent, get diffused throughout the whole educational system for boys and girls, men and women, alike.

If there remains (and there does remain) certain further specialization which the average girl needs in order to be a good wife, mother, and home-maker, she will get it in "finishing courses" furnished at the various levels of the educational system, when she leaves school, or else (better still) she will get it in "continuation schools" for adults to which she may resort when she is actually going to be a wife, mother, or home-maker.

Why learn really technical specialized things years and years before they are needed? Why learn them at a time when it is not certain that they will be needed at all?

The modern postponement of marriage is here a controlling element.

The fact that in Boston, among women from thirty to thirty-four years of age, 297 out of every 1,000 (more than a quarter) are still unmarried is usually put down to a scarcity of men. That scarcity is exaggerated.

Observe the comparative numbers of unmarried women and of unmarried men in that age-period in Boston:

Unmarried Women 8,081
Unmarried Men 10,651.

Observe further:

The total number of men of all conjugal conditions in the age-period in question is 28,603.

A little work with pencil and paper will now still further weaken the scarcity theory by revealing the fact that in Boston, among men from thirty to thirty-four years of age, 372 out of every 1,000 are still single.

Social conditions in rural communities tend to approach those of urban communities. Social conditions in the West tend to approach those in the East. Boston is not eccentric. It is only ahead.

"Continuation School" instruction in Home Economics for engaged and married women is a form of education beginning to appear in every part of the world.

But it lies beyond the woman's period of money-earning. How long is that period? And what are the social and racial consequences of the fact that (speaking generally) the more highly prepared modern men and women are to transmit intelligence to posterity, the more steadily do they tend to give their most vigorous years to singleness?

----I'LL NIVER GO HOME AGAIN!

By ARTHUR STRINGER

I'll niver go home again,
Home to the ould sad hills,
Home through the ould soft rain,
Where the curlew calls and thrills!

For I thought to find the ould wee house,
Wid the moss along the wall!
And I thought to hear the crackle-grouse,
And the brae-birds call!

And I sez, I'll find the glad wee burn,
And the bracken in the glen,
And the fairy-thorn beyont the turn,
And the same ould men!

But the ways I'd loved and walked, avick,
Were no more home to me,
Wid their sthreets and turns av starin' brick,
And no ould face to see!

And the ould glad ways I'd helt in mind,
Loike the home av Moira Bawn,
And the ould green turns I'd dreamt to find,
They all were lost and gone!

And the bairns that romped by Tullagh Burn
Whin they saw me sthopped their play--
Through a mist av tears I tried to turn
And ghost-like creep away!

And I'll niver go home again!
Home to the ould lost years,
Home where the soft warm rain
Drifts loike the drip av tears!

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 486-496 part 3.}

By

WILLIAM HARD

III LOVE DEFERRED

Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away on a career, he were going away on a comet.

She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time she was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn't got angry and insisted on marrying him.

Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance put most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama, "Love Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any other drama can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a thin, high note of fine pain.

We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too professional. He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough and more commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which are the two big elements in the life of Modern Man.

When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one more year to go in engineering school.

How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the last century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen months. The present professors require three years.

In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend classes for four months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for nine months in each of four years.

As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill by informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be generally recognized that a four-year technical course following the high-school course is not an adequate preparation for those who are to fill important positions; and the University would urge all those who can afford the time to extend their studies over a period of five or six years."

John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in the College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique courses in the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of Science.

He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen cents an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total income was about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he was raised to fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of Science.

The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of those institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John didn't. He didn't get married so early nor become a widower so often. He didn't carry so many children to the christening font nor so many to the cemetery.

Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.

Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at random, run your finger down the column and pick any class. The class of 1671!

It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don't be too severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining ten, four were married twice and two were married three times. For ten husbands, therefore, there were eighteen wives.

Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very competently remarks: "The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children."

The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their eighteen wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They also filled the churchyards.

TWENTY-ONE OF THOSE SEVENTY-ONE CHILDREN DIED IN CHILDHOOD.

This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of only 2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.

In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the unfair frequency with which it had more than one wife-and-mother to help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of young wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the hideous frequency with which it killed them.

Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from 1701 to 1745.

The girls they took in marriage were most of them under twenty-one and were many of them down in their 'teens, sometimes as far down as fourteen.

May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap-kettles and candle-molds and looms and smokehouses and salting-tubs and spinning-wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn't domestic. He was domestic.

Our young engineering friend, John, when HE looked forward to HIS future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it at all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very little real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to "give" Mary a home.

Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages of mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of things. On the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the other hand, he was prevented from wanting anything in his marriage except just Mary.

The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous toil (complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of result:

Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701 to 1745, there were

Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;

Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;

Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five years old.

Those 418 Yale husbands lost 147 wives before full middle age. It ceases, therefore, to be surprising, though it remains unabatedly sickening, that the stories of the careers of colonial college men, of the best-bred men of the times, are filled with such details as:

"----First wife died at twenty-four, leaving six children."

"----Eight children born within twelve years, two of them feeble-minded."

"----First wife died at nineteen, leaving three children.

"----Fourteen children. First wife died at twenty-eight, having borne eight children in ten years."

From that age of universal early marrying and of promiscuous early dying we have come in two centuries to an age of delayed (and even omitted) marrying and of a settled determination to keep on living.

The women's colleges are so new and they attracted in their early days so un-average a sort of girl that their records are not conclusive. Nevertheless, here are some guiding facts from Smith College, of Northampton, Massachusetts:

--> We are taking college facts not because this article is confined in any respect to college people but merely because the matrimonial histories in the records of the colleges are the most complete we know of.)

In 1888, Smith College, in its first ten classes, had graduated 370 women.

In 1903, fifteen years later, among those 370 women there were 212 who were still single.

This record does not satisfy Mr. G. Stanley Hall, who figured it out. The remaining facts, however, might be considered more cheering:

The 158 Smith women who had married had borne 315 children. This was two for each of them. And most of them were still in their childbearing period. Compare this with the colonial records. But don't take the number of children per colonial father. Be fair. Take it per mother.

We have the matrimonial histories of colonial Yale and Harvard men grouped and averaged according to the decade in which they graduated. We will regard the graduates of each decade as together constituting one case.

In no case does the average number of children per wife go higher than 3.89. In one case it goes as low as 2.98.

Perhaps the modern wife's habit of going on living and thereby protracting her period of childbearing will in time cause her fertility record to compare not unfavorably with that of the colonial wife, who made an early start but a quick finish.

In the year 1903, among all the 370 Smith graduates in those first ten classes, only twenty-four had died. And among all the 315 children, only twenty-six had died. On the whole, between being the wife of a Yale or Harvard colonial graduate and being a member of one of the first ten Smith classes, a modern girl might conclude that the chances of being a dead one matrimonially in the latter case would be more than offset by the chances of being a dead one actually in the former.

This deplorable flippancy would overlook the serious fact that permanent or even prolonged celibacy on the part of large numbers of young men and young women is a great social evil. The consequences of that evil we shall observe later on.[1]

[1] In speaking about celibacy we refer wholly to secular and not at all to religious celibacy.

In the meantime we return to John and Mary.

While John was doing his last year in engineering school, Mary did a year of technical study in the New York School of Philanthropy, or in the St. Louis School of Social Economy, or in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, or in the Boston School for Social Workers.

They won't even let you start in "doing good" nowadays without some training for it. This is wise, considering how much harm doing good can do.

But how the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

Mary took a civil service examination and got a job with the State Bureau of Labor. She finished her first year with the Bureau at the same time when John finished his first year with the electrical firm. She had earned $600. He had earned $480.

There were several hundred other apprentices in the shops along with John. When he thought of the next year's work at fifty a month and when he looked at the horde of competing Bachelors of Science in which he was pocketed, he whitened a bit.

"I must get out of the ruck," he said to himself. "I must get a specialty. I must do some more preparing.

He began to perceive how long it takes the modern man to grow up, intellectually and financially. He began to perceive what a tedious road he must travel before he could arrive at maturity--and Mary!

But he had pluck. "I'll really prepare," he said, "and then I'll really make good."

A western university offered a scholarship of $500 a year, the holder of which would be free to devote himself to a certain specified technical subject. John tried for the scholarship and got it, and spent a year chasing electrical currents from the time when they left the wheels of street cars to the time when they eventually sneaked back home again into the power-house, after having sported clandestinely along gas mains and water pipes, biting holes into them as they went.

It was a good subject, commercially. At the end of the year he was engaged as engineer by a street-car company which was being sued by a gas company for allowing its current to eat the gas company's property. He was to have a salary of $1,000 a year. He was going strong.

One thousand dollars! Millions of married couples live on less than that. But John didn't even think of asking Mary to share it with him.

Mary, when married, was to be supported in approximate accordance with the standards of the people John knew. Every John thinks that about it, without really thinking about it at all. It's just in him.

It bothered Mary. How much money would John want to spend on her before he would take her? It made her feel like a box of candy in a store window.

Still, a social standard is a fact. Just as much so as if it could be laid off with a tape. And there is sense in it.

"After all," thought Mary, "if we had only $1,000 a year we couldn't live where any of our friends do, and John would be cut off from being on daily intimate terms with people who could help him; and if we had children--Well, there you are! We surely couldn't give our children what our children ought to have. That settles it."

The influence of social standards is greatly increased and complicated in a world in which women earn their living before marriage and have a chance to make social standards of their own in place of the ones they were born to.

We here insert a few notes on cases which are not compositely imagined--like Mary and John--but are individually (though typically) existent in real life in one of the large American cities:

R----J----. Makes $6,500 a year. Only man she was ever "real sweet on" was a teamster. When she was selling in the perfumes at five a week he used to take her to the picnics of the Social Dozen Pleasure Club. They would practice the Denver Lurch on Professor DeVere's dancing platform. At midnight he would give her a joy-ride home in his employer's delivery wagon. He still drives that wagon. She is in charge of suits and costumes and has several assistant buyers under her. She has bought a cottage for her father, who is an ingrain weaver in a carpet factory. She wears a stick-pin recently presented to her by her teamster. "I like him all right," is her notion about it, "but I ought to have took him ten years ago. Now he can't support me."

S----V----. Makes twelve dollars a week as a manicurist. Thinks a man ought to have at least thirty dollars a week before marrying.

T----V----. Sister of S----V----, who doesn't think much of her. She works in a paper-box factory at five dollars a week and is engaged to a glove cutter who makes eleven.

T----A----. Saleswoman. Thinks women ought to be paid as much as men. "Then they wouldn't be so ready to marry ANYBODY." Works in the cloak department. Is a star. Makes about eighteen dollars a week. Says that most of the men she knows who could support her would certainly get in a terrible row at home if they married a cloak-department girl. Families are stuck up. "But I don't care; let it run awhile. Tell you something. I was born in the steerage. I've been right where the money isn't. I'm not taking any chances on getting there again. Let Georgina do it."

R----B----. Sub-bookkeeper. Seven dollars a week. Engaged to clerk who earns thirteen. Says: "Of course I'm not earning much, but I'm living with my folks and when we're married I'll have to give up a lot of things. Kinda wish I hadn't got used even to the seven."

This last case, of the bookkeeper engaged to the clerk, is the modern situation at its happiest normal. The modern marriage, except among the rich, is a contraction of resources. It is just the reverse, in that respect, of the colonial marriage.

The colonial bride, marrying into Industry, brought her full economic value to her husband.

The modern bride, marrying out of Industry, leaves most of her economic value behind. And the greater that value was, the sharper is the shock of the contraction of resources.

Of course, the case of the department-store buyer and the teamster is irrelevantly extreme. But aren't there thousands and thousands of cases which, while less advanced, are pointed in the same direction? The more a woman earns, the fewer become the men who can support her. How can the clerk support the cloak saleswoman who has had eighteen dollars a week of her own? How can the barber support the manicurist who has had twelve?

The cloak saleswoman may talk flippantly about it, but, at heart, isn't she seriously right? She has pulled herself up to a certain level. Except in response to a grande passion she will not again drop below it. She will bring up her children at a point as close to her present level as she can. That is instinct.

Meanwhile, she isn't married. But what can you do about it? She went to work, like almost every other working woman, because she had to. And you can't pass a law prohibiting her from earning more than five dollars a week.

"It's all economic," thought Mary. "Nothing else." She had much reason for thinking so.

Did you ever see Meitzen's diagram showing the relation between the price of rye and the number of marriages in Prussia during a period of twenty-five years?

Cheap rye, easy living conditions--number of marriages rises. Dear rye, hard living conditions--number of marriages drops. The fluctuations are strictly proportional. In the twenty-sixth year, given the price of rye, you could predict very closely the number of marriages.

It's like suicides. It's the easiest thing in the world to predict the number of men and women who will next year "decide" to take their own lives.

The marriage rate responds not only to the economic conditions of a whole country but to the economic conditions of its various parts.

You live in Vermont. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty in Vermont, there will be 279 out of every 1,000 of you who will still be single.

But you live in the state of New York. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty there will be 430 of you out of every thousand who will still be single.

In Vermont, 279. In New York, 430. A difference of 151 in every 1,000.

For those 151 persons, is it human volition? Is it a perverse aversion to the other sex?

Even at that, on the face of it, those who try to argue New Yorkers into marrying young are clearly taking the difficult route to their purpose. It would be more adroit simply to urge them to live in Vermont.

But isn't the real reason this--that New York, with its large cities, is farther removed than Vermont, with no large cities, from the primitive industrial conditions of colonial times?

The North Atlantic states, as a whole, are industrially more advanced than the South Central states. Compare them in this marriage matter:

Among all the wives in the South Central states, there are 543 out of every 1,000 who are under thirty-five years of age.

Among all the wives in the North Atlantic states those who are under thirty-five years of age are, in each thousand, only 428.

In the South Central states, 543. In the North Atlantic states, 428. A difference of 115!

Getting married early is imputed unto us for actual personal righteousness by innumerable clergymen, essayists, and editorial writers. Are there so many more righteous women along the Gulf of Mexico than along the Atlantic coast? One hundred and fifteen more out of every thousand? We cannot quite credit so great a discrepancy in relative human virtue.

You can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your vicinity.

Live on the Gold Coast of Africa. When you're thirteen, if you're a girl, they'll boil a yam and mash it and mix it with palm oil and scatter it on the banks of the stream and wash you in the stream and streak your body with white clay in fine lines and lead you down the street under an umbrella and announce your readiness to be a bride. Which you will be in a day or two.

Live in Russia, and if you're a girl you'll get married before you're twenty in more than fifty cases out of a hundred. It's the most primitive of civilized countries. It's half way between Africa and, say, Rhode Island.

These marriages before twenty tend to fall off rapidly in a rapidly developing industrial region like Rhode Island.

In 1860 the married persons in Rhode Island who had married before they were twenty were twenty-one in every 100.

In 1900 they were only nine in every 100.

A drop from twenty-one to nine in forty years!

And if you can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your vicinity, neither can you escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your social set.

Here's Bailey's book on "Social Conditions":

Live in England and be a girl and belong to the class of people that miners come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average, twenty-two. But belong to the class of people that professional men come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average, twenty-six.

This difference exists also in the United States. It is in the direct line of social and economic development.

The professional man is a farther developed type of man than the miner. It takes him longer to get through his educational infancy--longer to arrive at his mental and financial maturity. The professional man's wife is a farther developed type than the miner's wife. She has much more economic value (if she works) before marriage and much LESS economic value (in any case) after marriage.

Where these two lines of development, male and female, come to a meeting point; where the man's infancy is longest and the woman's economic value as a wife is least, there is, necessarily, altogether apart from personal preferences, the greatest postponement of marriage.

The United States, except possibly in certain sections, has not come to the end of its growth toward postponed marriage.

It is true that in Massachusetts, within the past forty-five years, the average age of women at marriage has risen from 20.7 to 24.6. That is a very "modern" and "developed" marriage age. But many of the older countries surpass it. In Belgium, for instance, which is a most intensely industrialized country, the average age of women at marriage is 28.19.

It is hard, indeed, to look at the advancing marriage age and to compare its varying rate of progress in different continents, different countries, different localities, and different social circles without admitting that, whatever whirling, nebulous mists of personal preferences it may create and carry with it, its nucleus is purely economic.

Early marriage was made by economic advantages. It was destroyed by economic changes. It will not be restored except by economic adjustments.

"Nevertheless," said Mary, "I want John."

John had finished being engineer for the electric railway company.

Out of his two years' experience he had saved a few hundred dollars. No, he hadn't. That isn't probable. The way he made his start into the next phase of his career was not by having any ready money. Having ready money is far from being characteristic of the young man of to-day.

John opened his office as a consulting electrical engineer not on his own resources but as an agent for an electrical supply company. Being agent for that company assured him enough money to pay the office rent and stenographer. For the rest, for his meals and his bed, he depended on his clients. Whom he didn't have. But he started out to get them.

He opened his office in the city in which Mary was.