Chapter TWENTY-TWO: The Self-Assertion of Women (1)

It is said that the United States is the only country in which parents are disappointed on the appearance of a boy baby, but will greet the arrival of a girl with undisguised pleasure. Who will blame them? What, after all, will a boy baby come to be? He will go to work early in life, while his sisters are left to go on and on with their education. He may work for a position in society, but it will be mainly in order to let his wife play a rôle; he may amass property, but most of all in order to provide bountifully for his daughter. He will have to stand all his life that she may sit; will have to work early and late, in order that she may shine. Is it really worth while to bring up a boy? But the little princess in the cradle has, indeed, a right to look out on the world with laughing eyes. She will enjoy all the privileges which nature specially ordained for woman, and will reach out confidently, moreover, for those things which nature designed peculiarly for man. No road is closed to her; she can follow every inclination of her soul, and go through life pampered and imperious. Will she marry? She may not care to, but nobody will think if she does not that it is because she is not able to realize any cherished desire. Will she be happy? Human destiny is, after all, destiny; but so far as nature and society, material blessings, and intellectual considerations can contribute toward a happy life, then surely the young American woman is more favoured by fortune than either man or woman in any other part of the world can hope to be. Is this advantage of hers also a gain to the family, to society, and the nation?

It is not perfectly correct to speak of the American woman as a type—the Southern girl is so different from the daughter of New England, the women of California so different from those of Chicago, and the different elements of population are so much more traceable in women than in men. And yet one does get a characteristic picture of the average woman. It may be too much influenced by the feminine figures which move in the better circles to be a faithful average likeness. Perhaps the young girl student has been too often the model, perhaps there is a reminiscence of the Gibson girl; and nevertheless, one discovers some general features of such youth in the fair women whose hair has turned grey, and there is something common to the daughters of distinguished families and the young women of the less favoured classes.

The American woman is a tall, trim figure, with erect and firm carriage; she is a bit like the English girl, and yet very different. This latter is a trifle stiff, while the American girl is decidedly graceful; the lines of her figure are well moulded, and her appearance is always aided by the perfect taste of her raiment. In the expression of her face there is resolution and self-control, and with the resolution a subtle mischievous expression which is both tactful and amiable. And with her evident self-control there is a certain winsome mobility and seemingly unreserved graciousness. The strength appears not to contradict the grace, the determination not to be at variance with the playfulness; her eyes and play of expression reveal the versatile spirit, fresh enthusiasm, and easy wit; yet her forehead shows how earnestly she may think and desire to be helpful in society, and how little contented simply to flirt and to please men.

And then her expression may change so suddenly that one asks in vain whether this energy was, perhaps, merely put on; was perhaps a whimsical caprice; perhaps her intellectual versatility was merely an elegant superficiality. Is she at bottom only in search of enjoyment? Is this show of independence real moral self-assertion, and this decision real courage, or does she emancipate herself merely out of ennui; is it a search for excitement? And is her eagerness to reach out for everything merely an effect of her environment which is ready to give everything? But could this slim figure really be so wonderfully seductive, if her eyes and features did not awaken doubt and unsolved questions; if everything were clear, simple, and obvious? Woman is everywhere full of contradictions; and if the American woman is different from all her sisters, it is because the contradictions in her face and mien seem more modern, more complex and unfathomable.

But it is vain to speak of the American woman without considering her relations to her environment—the background, as it were, of her existence, the customs and institutions under which she has grown up and continues to live. We must speak of the education and schooling, the studies and occupations of women, of their social and domestic position, their influence, and their organized efforts; and then we shall be better able critically to evaluate that in the American woman which is good, and that which is perhaps ominous.

The life of the American girl is different from that of her European sisters from the moment when she enters school. Public school instruction is co-educational, without exception in the lower grades, and usually in the upper. Of the six hundred and twenty-eight cities of the country, five hundred and eighty-seven have public schools for boys and girls together, from the primary to the most advanced classes; and of those cities that remain, only thirteen, and all of them are in the East, separate the boys and girls in every grade. In the country, boys and girls are always together at school. In private schools in cities, the instruction is more apt to be apart; but the public schools educate 91 per cent. of the youth—that is, about 7,700,000 boys and 7,600,000 girls.

Co-education has been adopted to a different extent in the different states, and even in the different grades of school has not developed equally. The instruction of boys and girls together has spread from the elementary classes, and while the idea took the West by storm, it was less immediately adopted by the conservative East. Practical exigencies, and especially the matter of economy, have greatly affected this development; and yet, on the whole, it has been favoured by principle. There is no doubt that, quite apart from the expense, a return to separate instruction for boys and girls would be regarded by the majority of the people to-day as an unallowable step backward: there has been considerable theoretical discussion of the matter; but the fact remains that the nation regards the great experiment as successful. This does not mean that the American thoughtlessly ignores sex differences in education; he is aware that the bodily, moral, and intellectual strength of the two sexes is different, and that their development proceeds along different lines. But firstly, the American school system, as we have seen, leaves in general great freedom in the selection of studies. The girls may take more French, while the boys in the same class more often study Latin; and many subjects are introduced in the curriculum expressly for one or the other sex—such as sewing, cooking, and type-writing for the girls, and carpentry for the boys.

It is said, moreover, that just as boys and girls eat the same food at the family table, although it goes to make very different sorts of bodies, so too the same intellectual nourishment will be digested in a different way, and not work against the normal intellectual differences. It is important only for the instruction like the nourishment to be of the best sort, and it is feared that the girls’ school would drop below the level of the boys’ school if the two were to be made distinct. Equal thoroughness is assured only by having one school. Opponents of the idea affirm that this one school is virtually nothing but a boys’ school after all, with girls merely in attendance, and that the school is not sufficiently adapted to the make-up of the young girls.

The main point, however, lies not in the similarity of instruction, but in the bringing together of boys and girls. It is true that the success of expensive private schools in large cities proves that there is considerable desire among parents to have their sons go to school with boys and their daughters only with girls; but the nation, as a whole, does not take this point of view, but believes that boys and girls, growing up as they do together in the home and destined to live together as adults, should become accustomed to one another during the formative period of school instruction. The girls, it is said, are made stronger by actually working with the boys; their seriousness is emphasized and their energy developed, while the boys are refined by contact with the gentler sex—induced to be courteous, and influenced toward æsthetic things. And if theorists were actually to fear the opposite result—that is, that the boys should be made weak and hysterical and the girls rough and coarse—they would need only to look to practical experience, which speaks unanimously to the contrary.

A still less well-grounded fear is that of those who wish to separate the sexes especially during the adolescent period. So far as this exceedingly complicated question admits of a brief summing up, the nation finds that the sexual tension is decreased by the contact in the school; the common intellectual labour, common ambitions, and the common anxieties awaken comradeship and diminish all ideas of difference. Boys and girls who daily and hourly hear one another recite their lessons, and who write together at the black-board, are for one another no objects of romantic longing or seductive mystery. Such a result may be deplored from another point of view—namely, that for reasons not connected with the school, such romanticism is desirable; but one must admit that the discouragement of unripe passion in the years of development means purer and healthier relations between the sexes, both physically and mentally. All regrettable one-sidedness is done away with. Just as in the stereoscope a normal perception of depth is brought out by the combination of two flat pictures, so here the constant combination of the masculine and feminine points of view results in a normal feeling of reality.

Then, too, the school in this wise prepares the way for later social intercourse. Boys and girls are brought together without special supervision, innocently and as a matter of course, from the nursery to early manhood and womanhood. It is only the artificial separation of the two sexes, the American says, which produces that unsound condition of the fancy that makes the relation of the sexes on the European Continent so frivolous and dubious. The moral atmosphere of the United States is undoubtedly much freer from unhealthful miasms. A cooler and less sensual temperament contributes much to this, but the comradely intercourse of boys and girls from the early school days to the time of marriage is undoubtedly an equally purifying force. The small boy very early feels himself the natural protector of his weaker playmate, and the girl can always, whether in the nursery or as a young lady in her mother’s parlour, receive her friends alone, even when her parents are not at home. A little coquetry keeps alive a certain sense of difference, always, but any least transgression is entirely precluded on both sides. The boy profoundly respects his girl friend as he does his own sister, and she could not be safer than in his protection. The gallantry of the European is at bottom egotistic. It is kind in order to win, and flatters in order to please; while the gallantry of the American is not aimed to seduce, but to serve; it does not play with the idea of male submission, but sincerely and truly gives the woman first place.

The only logical consequence, when boys and girls enjoy not only equivalent but absolutely equal school training, is that their further education shall go on parallel. We have seen the peculiar position of the American college; how it is almost incomparable with any German institution, being a sort of intermediate member between the high school and true university—the scene of a four-year intellectual activity, resembling in some respects the German school, and in others the German university. We have seen how the college removes the young man from the parental influences from his eighteenth to twenty-second years, and places him in a new, small, and academic world of special ideals which is centred around some beautiful college yard. We have seen how two things happen in these years; on the one hand, he is prepared for his future occupation, especially if he is to enter a professional faculty of the university, and on the other he receives a broad, humanitarian training. We have seen also that these hundreds of colleges form a scale of very small gradations, whose different steps are adapted to the different social needs of various sections of the country; that the better colleges are like a German Prima, with three or four semesters in the philosophical faculty of a university, and that the inferior colleges hardly reach the level of the Unterprima. In such an institution, we have found the source of the best that is in American intellectual life. Now this institution opens wide its doors to women.

Here, in truth, co-education is less prominent. The conservative tendency of Eastern colleges has worked against the admission of women into the better of them, and the advantages of colleges for none but women are so well attested that the East at least will hardly make a change, although the Middle and Western States look on it virtually as a sin against inborn human rights, to establish colleges for anything but the education of both sexes alike. It was easier to oppose mixed education in the college sphere than in the school, because the common elementary training was needed at the outset for both sexes, while the demand for college training for women came up much later, when the tradition of colleges for men was already well established. Harvard College was already two hundred years old when, for the first time, an American college as an experiment admitted women; this was Oberlin College in Ohio, which began the movement in 1833. The first women’s college was established, three years later, in Georgia—a pioneer institution in the South.

But progress was slow. It was not until 1862 that the government gave ten million acres of land for educational institutions; and then higher institutions became much more numerous, especially in the West, and from that time it was agreed that women should have equal privileges with men in these new colleges. Since then co-education in college and university has grown to be more and more the rule, except in the East. All state colleges and universities are open to women, and also the endowed universities—Brown, Chicago, Cornell, Leland Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania; some few others, as Yale, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins, allow women to attend the graduate schools or the professional faculties, but not the college. Statistics for all the colleges in the country show that, in the year 1880, only 51 per cent. were co-educational; in 1890 there were 65 per cent., and in 1900, 72 per cent. Practically, however, the most significant form of female college education is not the co-educational, but one which creates a special college paradise for young women, where there are no male beguilements and distractions.

There are six principal institutions which have taken the lead in making the college life of women the significant thing that it now is. Vassar College was the first, established on the Hudson River in 1861; then came Wellesley College, near Boston; Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia; Smith College, in Northampton; Radcliffe College, in Cambridge; Barnard, in New York. There is a large number of similar institutions, as Holyoke, Baltimore, and others in ever-diminishing series down to institutions which are hardly distinguishable from girls’ high schools. The number of girls attending strictly women’s colleges in the whole country, in 1900, was 23,900; while in mixed colleges and in the collegiate departments of universities there were 19,200 women students—just a quarter of the total number of college students. It is notable here that the students in women’s colleges since 1890 have increased by 700, and in mixed colleges by 9,000. It may be mentioned, in passing, that there are 35,000 women students in normal schools.

The instruction in women’s colleges is mostly by women, who number 1,744—that is, about 71 per cent. of the instructors—while in mixed colleges the 857 women are only 10 per cent. of the teaching staff. In the leading co-educational universities, like Chicago, Ann Arbor, Leland Stanford, Berkeley, and others, the women are almost wholly taught by men. The leading women’s colleges pursue different policies. Wellesley has almost exclusively women; Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Smith have both; Radcliffe and Barnard are peculiar, in that by their by-laws Radcliffe is taught only by Harvard instructors, and Barnard only by instructors in Columbia University. This identification with the teaching staffs of Harvard and Columbia assures these two women’s colleges an especially high intellectual level. And the same thing is accomplished, of course, for women by their being admitted to full privileges in Chicago, Stanford, and in the large state universities, such as Ann Arbor. But one can realize the whole charm and poetry of women’s colleges only on a visit to the quiet groves of Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, or Smith.

In broad, handsomely kept parks there lie scattered about attractive villas, monumental halls of instruction, club-houses and laboratories; and here some thousand girls, seldom younger than eighteen nor older than twenty-five, spend four happy years at work and play, apart from all worldly cares. They row, play tennis and basket-ball, and go through gymnastic exercises; and, as a result, every girl leaves college fresher, healthier, and stronger than when she entered it. And the type of pale, over-worked neurasthenic is unknown. These girls have their own ambitions in this miniature world—their positions of honour, their meetings, their clubs and social sets; in which, however, only personality, talent, and temperament count, while wealth or parental influence does not come in question. The life is happy; there are dancing, theatrical performances, and innumerable other diversions from the opening celebration in the fall to the festivities in June, when the academic year closes. And the life is also earnest. There is no day without its hours of conscientious labour in the lecture hall, the library or study, whether this is in preparation for later teaching, for professional life or, as is more often the case, solely for the harmonious development of all the student’s faculties. One who looks on these fresh young girls in their light costumes, the venerable English mitre-caps on their heads, sitting in the alcoves of the library or playing in the open air, or in their formal debates, in the seminary or in the festive procession on class-day,—sees that here is a source of the purest and subtlest idealism going out into American life.

On such a foundation rests the professional training of the real university. Since the girl students in all the colleges of the country outdo the men in their studies, win the highest prizes, and attend the most difficult lectures, the old slander about deficient brain substance and mental incapacity can no longer serve as a pretext for closing the university to competing womanhood. In fact, the graduate schools, which correspond to the advanced portion of a German philosophical faculty, and the legal and medical faculties of all state universities and of a few private universities are open to women. But one is not to suppose that the number of women who are thus preparing for the learned professions, as that of medicine, law, or the ministry, is very large. There are to-day 44,000 women college students, but only 1,253 women graduate students; and in 1890 there were only 369. There are hardly more than a thousand in the purely professional faculties, and these form only 3 per cent. of the total number of students. The American women study mostly in colleges, therefore, and their aim is generally to get a well-grounded, liberal education, corresponding to a Gymnasium training, together with a few semesters in the philosophical faculty. But there are no limitations by principle; woman as such is denied no “rights,” and the verdict is unanimous that this national experiment is technically successful. There is no indication of moral deterioration, of a lowered level of instruction, or of a mutual hindrance between men and women in the matter of study. The university, in short, opens the way to the learned professions.

When a European hears of the independent careers of American women, he is apt to imagine something which is unknown to him—a woman in the judicial wig or the minister’s robe; a woman doctor or university professor. Thus he represents to himself the self-supporting women, and he easily forgets that their number is vanishingly small beside the masses of those who earn their living with very much less preparation. The professional life of the American woman, her instinct to support herself, and so to make herself equal to the man in the social and economic worlds, cannot be understood merely from figures; for statistics would show a much larger percentage of women in other countries who earn their living, where the instinct for independence is very much less. The motive is the main point. One might say that the European woman works because the land is too poor to support the family by the labour of the man alone. The American woman works because she wants her own career. In travelling through Europe, one notices women toiling painfully in the fields; this is not necessary in America, unless among the negroes. Passing through New England, one sees a hammock in front of every farm-house, and often catches the sound of a piano; the wives and daughters have never thought of working in the fields. But women crowd into all occupations in the cities, in order to have an independent existence and to make themselves useful. They would rather work in a factory or teach than to stay on the farm and spend their time at house-work or embroidery.

As a matter of course, very many families are actually in need, and innumerable motives may lead a woman to the earning of a living. But if one compares the changes in the statistics of different employments, and looks into the psychology of the different kinds of occupation, one sees clearly that the spirit of self-determination is the decisive factor, and that women compete most strongly in the professions which involve some rational interest, and that they know where it pays to crowd the men out. There is no male profession, outside of the soldiery and the fire department, into which women have not felt themselves called. Between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans there are 45 female locomotive engineers, 31 elevator attendants, 167 masons, 5 pilots, 196 blacksmiths, 625 coal miners, 3 auctioneers, and 1,320 professional huntresses.

Apart from such curiosities, and looking at only the large groups, we shall discover the following professional activity of women: In 1900, when the last census was made, there were 23,754,000 men and 5,319,000 women at paid employment—that is, only 18 per cent. of the bread-winners were women. Of these, only 971,000 were engaged in agriculture as against 9,404,000 men, while in the so-called professions, the intellectual occupations, there were 430,000 women against 828,000 men. In domestic positions, there were 2,095,000 women against 3,485,000 men; in trade there were 503,000 against 4,263,000, and in manufactures 1,313,000 against 5.772.000. The total number of wage-earning women has steadily increased. In 1890 it amounted to only 17 per cent., and in 1880 to only 15 per cent. The proportions in different parts of the country are different, and not only according to the local forms of industry, but also to the different stages of civilization; the more advanced the civilization, the more the women go into intellectual employments. Among a hundred wage-earning women, for instance, in the North Atlantic States, there are only 1.9 per cent. engaged in agriculture, but 7.6 per cent. in intellectual occupations, 37.5 per cent. engaged in domestic service, 12.9 per cent. in trade, and 40.1 per cent. in manufactures. In the Southern Middle States, on the other hand, out of a hundred women only 7.2 per cent. are in manufactures, 2.6 per cent. in trade, and 4.4 per cent. in intellectual professions.

Of these occupations, the most interesting are the intellectual, domestic, and trading activities of women. The great majority in intellectual employments are teachers; the whole story of American culture is told by the fact that there are 327,000 women pedagogues—an increase of 80,000 in ten years—and only 111,000 male teachers. The number of physicians has increased from 4,557 in 1890 to 7,399 in 1900; but this is not ominous in comparison with their 124,000 male colleagues. There are 52,000 musicians and music teachers, 11,000 teachers in drawing, 5,984 authors—a figure which has doubled since 1890; and in the newspaper world the troup of women reporters and journalists has grown in ten years from 888 to 2,193. There are 8,000 women officials employed by the state, over I,000 architects produce feminine architecture, and 3,405 ministers preach the gospel.

Turning to domestic activity, we find of course the international corps of house-servants to include the greater part; they number 1.283.000, and the statistics do not say whether, perhaps, one or two of these who have a white skin were born in the country. This number was 1,216,000 in 1890, so that it has increased only 5.5 per cent.; while during the same time population has increased 20.7 per cent., and the increasing wealth has greatly raised the demand for service. Let us compare with this the increased number of trained nurses, whose occupation is an arduous but independent and in itself useful career. The number of trained nurses has increased from 41,000 to 108,000—that is, by 163 per cent. The figures for all such domestic employments as admit of social independence have also increased. The female restaurant keepers have increased from 86,000 to 147,000; the boarding-house proprietresses number 59,455, double the figure of ten years ago. The independent profession of washer-woman attracts 325,000, while there are only 124,000 independent domestic labourers as compared with 2,454,000 men in the same occupations. The increase in the figures for such free professions as are classed under trade and commerce is in part even more striking. The number of female insurance agents, which in 1890 was less than 5,000, is now more than 10,000; book-keepers have increased from 27,000 to 74,000; sales-women, from 58,000 to 149,000; typists and stenographers from 21,000 to 86,000—that is, fourfold—and there are now 22,000 telephone and telegraph operators. The number of shop-keepers at 34,000 has not increased much, and is relatively small beside the 756,000 men. There are only 261 women wholesale merchants against 42,000 men, 946 women commercial travellers against 91,000 men; the profession of lady banker has decreased shamefully from 510 to 293, although this is no ground for despairing of the future of American banking, since the number of bankers other than women has increased in the same time from 35,000 to 72,000.

Finally, let us look at industry and manufactures. The number of seamstresses has been the same for ten years with mathematical exactitude; that is, 146,000. Since the population has increased by one-fifth, it is clear that this form of work has been unpopular, doubtless because it involves personal abasement and exposure to the arbitrariness of customers, and is therefore unfavourable to self-assertion. At the same time the workers in woollen and cotton factories have increased from 92,000 to 120,000, in silk factories from 20,000 to 32,000, and in cigar factories from 27,000 to 43,000. There are 344,000 garment-workers, 86,000 milliners, 15,000 book-binders, 16,000 printers, 17,000 box-makers, and 39,000 in the shoe industry. The whole picture shows a body of women whose labour is hardly necessary to support the families of the nation, but who are firmly resolved to assert themselves in economic and intellectual competition, who press their way into all sorts of occupations, but avoid as far as possible anything which restricts their personal independence, and seek out any occupation which augments their personality and their consciousness of independence. If all women who were not born on American soil, or if so were born of coloured parentage, were omitted from these statistics, then the self-asserting quality of American women who earn their living would come out incomparably more clearly.

The bread-winning activity of women is, however, only a fraction of their activity outside of the home. If of the 39,000,000 men in the country, 23,754,000 have an occupation, and of the 37,000,000 women only 5,319,000 work for a living, it is clear that the great majority of grown-up women earn nothing. But nobody who knows American life would take these women who earn no wages from the list of those who exert a great influence outside of the family circle, and assert themselves in the social organization. Between the two broad oceans there is hardly any significant movement outside of trade and politics which is not aided by unpaid women, who work purely out of ideal motives. Vanity, ambition, self-importance, love of diversion, and social aspirations of all kinds, of course, play a part; but the actual labour which women perform in the interests of the church or school, of public welfare, social reform, music, art, popular education, care of the sick, beautification and sanitation of cities, every day and everywhere, represents incontestably a powerful inborn idealism.

Only one motive more, which is by no means unidealistic, dictates this purely practical devotion; it is the motive of helping on this very self-assertion of women. Work is done for the sake of work, but more or less in the consciousness that one is a woman and that whatever good one does, raises the position of the sex. Thus, in women’s clubs and organizations, through noisy agitation or quieter feminine influences, the American woman’s spirit of self-assertion impresses itself in a hundred thousand ways. Women are the majority in every public lecture and in every broadly benevolent undertaking; schools and churches, the care of the poor and the ill are enlivened by their zeal, and in this respect the East and the West feel quite alike. Certainly this influence beyond the home does not end with direct self-conscious labour; it goes on where there are no women presidents, secretaries, treasurers, and committee members, but wherever women go for enjoyment and relaxation. Women form a large majority in art exhibitions, concerts, theatres, and in church services; women decide the fate of every new novel; and everywhere women stand in the foreground, wide awake and self-assertive.

It is incredible to the European how very much the unselfish and high-minded women of America are able to accomplish, and how so many of them can combine a vast deal of practical work with living in the midst of bustling social affairs, and themselves entertaining perhaps in a brilliant way. Such a woman will go early in the morning to the committee meeting of her club, inspect a school or poor-house on the way, then help to draw up by-laws for a society, deliver an address, preside at some other meeting, and meet high officials in the interests of some public work. She expends her energy for every new movement, keeps in touch with every new tendency in art and literature, and is yet a pleasant and comfortable mother in her own home. This youthful freshness never succumbs to age. In Boston, the widow of the zoölogist Agassiz, although now eighty years of age, is still tirelessly active as honourary president of Radcliffe College; and Julia Ward Howe, the well-known poetess, in spite of her eighty-four years, presides at every meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club, still with her quiet but fresh and delightful humour.

The leadership of women which is a problem to be discussed, as far as public life is concerned, is an absolute dogma which it would be sacrilege to call in question, so far as social and domestic life go. Just as Lincoln said that the American government is a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” so certainly American society is a government of the women, by the women, and for the women. The part which the wife plays determines so unconditionally the social status of every home, that even a man who has his own social ambitions can accomplish his end in no better way than by doing everything to further the plans and even the whims of his wife. And the luxury in which she is maintained is so entirely a symbol of social position that the man comes instinctively to believe that he is himself enjoying society when he worries and over-works in order to provide jewelry and funds for the elaborate entertainments of his wife

Just as the wife of the millionaire has her place arranged to suit herself, so the modest townswoman does in her small home, and so also the wife of the day labourer, in her still narrower surroundings. The man pushes the baby carriage, builds the kitchen fire, and takes care of the furnace, so that his wife can attend to getting fashionable clothing; he denies himself cigars in order to send her into the country for the summer. And she takes this as a matter of course. She has seen this done from her childhood by all men, and she would be offended if her husband were to do anything less. The American woman’s spirit of self-assertion would be aroused directly if social equality were to be interpreted in such a ridiculous way as to make the man anything but the social inferior.

The outward noise would make one believe that the self-assertion of the feminine soul were most energetically concerned with political rights; woman’s suffrage is the great watchword. But the general noise is deceptive; the demands for equal school and college education for young women, for admission to industrial positions on the same footing with men, for an independent existence and life career for every woman who wants it, and for social domination—all these are impulses which really pervade the national consciousness. But the demand for equal suffrage is not nearly so universal. In the nature of things, it is often put forth by radical lecturers on woman’s rights; and it is natural that some large societies support the efforts, and that even masculine logic should offer no objections in many cases. The familiar arguments known to all the world have hardly been augmented by a single new reason on the woman’s side. But the old arguments appear on the surface to be such sound deductions from all the fundamental political, social, and economic principles of America that they come here to have new force. If in spite of this their practical success is still exceedingly small, and the most energetic opposition is not from the stronger sex but from the women themselves, it shows clearly that there is some strong opposing impulse in the American public mind. The social self-assertion of women, in which every American believes with all his heart, is just as little likely ever to lead to universal political suffrage for women as American industrial self-assertion will ever lead to socialism.

But the irony of world history has brought it about that women began with just those rights which to-day some of them are demanding. When English law was brought across the ocean by the colonists in the seventeenth century, the women had the constitutional right to vote, and in exceptional cases made use of it; not one of the constitutions of the thirteen states limited the suffrage to men. The State of New York was the first to improve or to injure its constitution by adding the qualification “male,” in the year 1778. One state followed after another, and New Jersey was the last, in 1844. But just as the last door was closed, the hue and cry was raised that they all ought to be opened. The first woman’s convention to make an urgent appeal for the restoring of these rights was held in New York in 1848. There was a violent opposition; but the movement extended to a great many states, and finally, in 1866, a national organization was formed which asked for a national law. This was just after the Civil War, when the amendment giving the suffrage to the negroes was the chief subject of political discussion. A petition with eighty thousand signatures was gotten up urging that the Constitution should be interpreted so as to give women the right to vote. Two women brought legal action, which went up through all the courts to the Supreme Court, but was there decided against the women, and therefore the sex has not the suffrage.

No national movements have, therefore, to-day any practical significance unless three-quarters of all state legislatures can be induced to vote for an amendment to the Constitution in favour of woman’s suffrage—that is, to vote that no state be allowed to exclude women from the ballot. This is hardly more likely to happen than a Constitutional amendment to introduce hereditary monarchy. Meanwhile, the agitation in the various states has by no means entirely stopped. Time after time attempts have been made to alter the constitution of a single state, but unsuccessfully. The only states to introduce complete woman’s suffrage have been Wyoming in 1869, Colorado in 1893, and Utah in 1895. Kansas allows women to vote in municipal elections. The agitation has been really successful in only one direction; it has succeeded in getting from a majority of the states the right to vote for the local school committees.

Such experience as the country has had with woman’s suffrage has not been specially favourable to the movement. A good deal goes to show that, even if full privileges were granted, they would remain a dead letter for the overwhelming majority of women. The average woman does not wish to go into politics. It has been affirmed that in the modern way of living, with servants to do all the house-work, factories to do the spinning and weaving and every sort of economic convenience, the married woman has too little to do, and needs the political field in which to give her energies free play. But so long as statistics show that four-fifths of the married women in the country do all their house-work, and so long as such a great variety of ethical, intellectual, æsthetic and social duties lie before every woman, it is no wonder that very few are eager to take on new responsibilities at the ballot-box. Those, however, who would make most use of the suffrage would be, as the women who oppose the movement say, the worst female element of the large cities, and they would bring in all the worst evils of a low class of voters led by demagogues. Political corruption at the ballot would receive a new and specially dangerous impetus; the political machines would win new and disgusting strength from the feebleness of these women to resist political pressure, and instead of women’s ennobling and refining political ethics, as their partisans hope, they would be more apt to drag politics down to the very depths. Those who oppose the movement see a decided prejudice to political soundness even in the mere numerical doubling of the voting class.

Most of all, the conservative element can assert, with an excellent array of facts, that the healthy progress of woman’s self-assertion best proceeds by keeping away from politics and turning directly toward the improvement of the conditions of living and of instruction, toward the opening up of professions, the framing of industrial laws, and-other reforms. The radical political demands of women in all other fields, and most especially in the socialistic direction, inclining as they naturally do to be extreme, have worked rather to hinder than to aid the social progress of women. Even where the social independence of women is properly contested, there works the deterring consideration that politics might bring about differences between husband and wife. Taken all in all, the self-assertion of women in political matters is hardly a practical question. One who looks into their tracts and propaganda feels for a long while that the last one he has read, on which ever side it is, is wrong; but when he has come to a point where he meets only the old arguments revamped, he feels that on the whole the radical side has still less justice than the other. And the nation has come to the same conclusion. We may thus leave politics quite out of account in turning finally to the main question which relates to women; this is, How has this remarkable self-assertion of woman affected the life of the nation, both on the whole and in special spheres?

Let us look first at the sphere of the family. The situation here is often decidedly misinterpreted; the frequent divorces in America are cited very often in order to put American family life in an unfavourable light. According to the census report of 1900, the ratio of divorced to married men was 0.6 per cent., and of women 0.8 per cent.; while in 1890 the respective figures were only 0.4 per cent. and 0.6 per cent. Nevertheless, the total number of divorced persons is only 0.3 per cent. of the whole population, as compared with 5.1 per cent. who are widows, 36.5 per cent. who are married, and 57.9 per cent. of bachelors—with a small remainder unaccounted for. It is true that divorced persons who have remarried are here included among the married persons; but even if the number of dissolved marriages is somewhat greater than it appears in the statistics, that fact shows nothing as to the moral status of marriage in America.

Anybody familiar with the country knows that, much more often than in Europe, the real grounds which lead to divorce—not the mere legal pretexts given—are highly ethical ones. We have hinted at this when we analyzed the religious life; the main reason is the ethical objection to continuing externally in a marriage which has ceased to be spiritually congenial. It is the women especially, and generally the very best women, who prefer to take the step, with all the hardships which it involves, to prolonging a marriage which is spiritually hypocritical and immoral. Infidelity of the woman is the ground of divorce in only a vanishingly small number of cases, and the sexual purity of marriage is on a high plane throughout the people. The pure atmosphere of this somewhat unemotional people, which makes it possible for any woman to wend her way without escort through the streets of a large city in the evening and to travel alone across the Continent, and which protects the girl on the street from being stared at or rudely accosted, protects even more the married woman. Although French society dramas are presented on the American stage, one feels from the general attitude of the public that it really fails to understand the psychology of what is being performed, because all the ethical presuppositions are so entirely different. What the Parisian finds piquant, the New Englander finds shameless; and the woman over whom the Frenchman smiles disgusts the American.

And in still another sense American marriage is purer than the European; it lacks the commercial element. As characteristic as this fact is in economic life, it is even more significant in social life. This does not mean that the man who pays court to the daughter of a millionaire is entirely unconscious of the economic advantages which such a marriage would bring. But the systematic searching around for a dowry, with some woman attached to it, is unknown in the New World, and is thoroughly un-American. This may be seen in American plays; the familiar German comedies, in which the search for a rich bride is a favourite motive, strike the American public as entirely vapid and humourless. Americans either do not understand or else look down with pity on the marital depravity of the Old World, and such stage scenes are as intrinsically foreign as those others, so familiar to Europe, in which the rich young nobleman who after all marries the poor governess, is held up as a remarkable example of magnanimity.

The purely human elements are the only ones which count in marriage. It is a congenial affiliation of two persons, without regard to social advantage or disadvantage, if only the persons care for each other. And this idea is common to the whole nation, and gives marriage a high moral status. Moreover, the surpassing education of the young American woman, her college life, works in one way to exalt marriage. If she has learned anything in her college atmosphere, it is moral seriousness. She has gone there to face duties squarely and energetically, to account small things small, and large things large; and so, when she approaches the new duty of making a home, she overcomes all obstacles there with profound moral determination.

In spite of this, one may ask, Is her development in the right direction for subsequent events? While so much has contributed to the exaltation and purity of her marriage, has she not learned a great deal else which tends rather indirectly and perhaps unnoticeably to disorganize marriage, the home, the family, and the people? Is the increasing social self-assertion of woman really in the interests of culture? Let us picture to ourselves the contrast, say with Germany. There too the interests in the social advance of women is lively on all sides; but the situation is wholly different. Four main tendencies may be easily picked out. One relates to a very small number of exceptional women who have shown great talent or perhaps real genius. Such women are to be emancipated and to have their own life career. But the few who are called to do great things in art or science or otherwise, are not very apt to wait for others to emancipate them, and the number of these women is so small that this movement has hardly any social or economic importance in comparison with the other three which concern large numbers of women.

Of these other three, the first concerns the women of the lower classes, who throughout Germany are so poor that they have to earn a livelihood, and are in danger of sacrificing their family life. The lever is applied to improve their social condition, to put legal limits to the labour of women, and to protect them, so that the poor man’s wife shall have more opportunities in the family. Another movement is to benefit the daughters of more well-to-do people, to give them when they marry, a more intellectual career, to elevate the wife through a broader education above the pettiness of purely domestic interests and the superficiality of ordinary social life, and so to make her the true comrade of her husband. And the last movement concerns those millions of women who cannot marry because women are not only the more numerous, but also because one-tenth of German men will not marry. They are urged to replace the advantages which they would have in marriage by a life occupation; and although women of the lower classes have had enough opportunity to work, those of the upper classes have until recently been excluded from any such blessing. A great deal has been done here to improve the situation and partly in direct imitation of the American example.

But the real background of all these movements in Germany has been the conviction that marriage is the natural destiny of woman. The aim has been to improve marriage in the lower classes by relieving the woman of degrading labour, in upper classes by giving the woman a superior education; and the other two movements are merely expedients to supply some sort of substitute for life’s profoundest blessing, which is found only in marriage. There is no such background in America; there is a desire to protect American marriage, but it is not presupposed that marriage is, in and of itself, the highest good for woman. The completion of woman’s destiny lies rather in giving to her as to the man an intrinsically high life content whether she is married or not married; it is a question of her individual existence, as of his. Marriage is thus not the centre, and an independent career is in no sense a compensation or a makeshift; even the betterment of marriage is only intended as a means of bettering the individual. Woman is on exactly the same footing as man. The fundamental German principle that woman’s destiny is found in marriage, while the man is married only incidentally, involves at once the inequality of the sexes; and this fundamental inequality is only slightly lessened by these four new German movements. It is a secondary consequence that the woman is growing to be more nearly like the man. But according to the American point of view, her fundamental equality is the foundation principle; both alike aim to expand their individual personalities, to have their own valuable life content, and by marriage to benefit each other. And only secondarily, after marriage is accomplished, does the consequence appear that necessarily the woman has her special duties and her corresponding special rights; and then the principle of equality between the two finds its limitations. Now when this takes place, the self-assertion of the American woman is found to be not wholly favourable to the institution of marriage; it gives the married woman a more interesting life content, but it inclines the unmarried woman much less toward marriage; it robs society of that great support of marriage—the feeling that it is woman’s destiny.

Here, again, the most diverse factors work together. The social freedom of communication between men and women, the secure propriety of associating with men, and the independent freedom to go about which is peculiar to the American girl’s education give to the unmarried girl all those rights and advantages which in Europe she does not have until she is married. The American girl has really nothing but duties to face, domestic cares and perhaps quite unaccustomed burdens, in case she marries a man in limited circumstances; externally she has nothing to gain, and internally she is little disturbed by any great passion. She flirts from her youth up, and is the incomparable mistress of this little social art; but the moving passion is apt to be neglected, and one may question whether all her mischievous roguery and graceful coquetry are anything more than a social accomplishment, like dancing or skating or playing golf—whether it in any way touches the heart. It is a diversion, and not a true life content.

Then, too, the girl has a feeling of intellectual superiority which for the most part is entirely justified. The European girl has been brought up to believe in the superiority of the man, accustomed to feel that her own gifts are incomplete, that they come to have real value only in conjunction with a man, and her inferior scientific training suggests to her unconsciously that she will be intellectually exalted when she allies herself to some man. That will fill out her intellectual personality. The American girl has hardly ever such an idea; she has learned in the school-room how foolish boys are, how lazy and careless, and then, too, she has continued her own education it may be years after the men of her acquaintance have gone into practical life. Many high schools have one-third of their pupils boys and two-thirds girls, and the ratio grows in favour of the girls. Moreover, everything tends to give the girl her own aspirations and plans independent of any man—aspirations which are not essentially furthered or completed by her marriage alliance. American women often laugh at the way in which German women introduce abstract questions at the Kaffeeklatsch: “Now my husband says—.” The intellectual personality of the American girl must develop so much the more independently of male influence as the distinction which commences in school years is even more actual in the years of maturity. The older the American man grows the more he concentrates himself on business or politics, while his wife in a certain way continues her schooling, devotes her entire time to every sort of intellectual stimulation; the wife reads books, while the husband reads newspapers. It is undeniable that in the average American home the woman makes the profounder intellectual impression on every visitor, and the number of women is continually growing who instinctively feel that there is no advantage in marrying a man who is intellectually an inferior; they would rather remain single than contract a marriage in which they have to be the intellectual head.