Chapter TWENTY-TWO: The Self-Assertion of Women (2)

While, therefore, there are neither novel social advantages nor any emotional urgency, nor yet intellectual inducements, to persuade women to marry, there are other circumstances which urge her strongly not to do so. In the first place, marriage may interfere directly with the life career which she has planned for herself. A woman who has taken an occupation to save herself from misery looks on marriage with a man who earns enough to support a family as a sort of salvation; while the woman who has chosen some calling because her life means so much more if it is useful to the world, who is earnestly devoted to her work, truly ambitious and thoroughly competent, ponders a long time before she goes into a marriage which necessarily puts an end to all this. She may well prefer to sacrifice some sentimental inclination to the profound interest she feels in her work.

The American girl is, moreover, not fond of domestic cares. It would not be fair to say that she is a bad house-keeper, for the number of wives who have to get along without servants is much greater than in Germany. And even in spite of the various economic advantages which she enjoys, it is undeniable that the American woman takes her home duties seriously, looks after every detail, and keeps the whole matter well in hand. But nevertheless, she feels very differently toward her capacities along this line. The German woman feels that her household is a source of joy; the American woman, that it is a necessary evil. The American woman loves to adorn her home and tries to express in it her own personality, not less than her German sister; but everything beyond this—the mere technique of house-keeping, cleaning, purchasing, repairing, and hiring servants—she feels to be, after all, somewhat degrading. The young woman who has been to college attacks her household duties seriously and conscientiously, but with the feeling that she would rather sacrifice herself by nursing the suffering patients in a hospital. The perfect economic appliances for American house-keeping save a great deal of labour which the German wife has to perform, and perhaps just on that account the American woman feels that the rest of it is vexatious work which women have to do until some new machines can be devised to take their places. This disinclination to household drudgery pervades the whole nation, and it is only the older generations in country districts that take a pride in their immaculate house-keeping, while the younger generations even there have the tendency to shirk household work. The daughters of farmers would rather work in a factory, because it is so much more stimulating and lively, than ironing or washing dishes or tending baby brother and sister at home; for the same reason, they will not become domestic servants for any one else. And so, for the upper and the lower classes, the disinclination to house-work stands very much in the way of marriage.

This disinclination affects marriage in still another way. Families are tending more and more to give up separate houses and live in family hotels, or, if more modestly circumstanced, in boarding-houses. The expense of servants has something to do with this, but the more important factor is the saving of work for the wife. The necessary consequence is the dissolution of intimate family life. When a dozen families eat year in and year out in the same dining-room, the close relations which should prevail in the family take on a very different shading. And thus it is that the intellectual self-assertion of women works, in the most diverse ways, against the formation of marriages and against family life. There is one argument, however, which is always urged by the opponents of woman’s emancipation which is not valid—at least, not for America. It is the blue-stocking bugbear. This unattractive type of woman is not produced by higher education in America. Many a young American girl, who has arrived at years of personal independence during her college life, may have lost her interest in the average sort of marriage; but she has by no means lost the attraction she exerts on men.

The tendency of woman’s self-assertion against marriage appears to go even further; the exaggerated expression, “race suicide,” has sometimes been used. It is true that the increase of native population, especially in the more civilized parts of the country, is ominously small; this is probably the result of diverse factors. There are physicians, for instance, who claim that the intellectual training of women and the nervous excitement incident to their independent, self-reliant attitude are among the main causes; but more important, others say, are the voluntary precautions which are dictated by the desire of ease and comfort. This last is a serious factor, and there lies behind it again the spirit of self-assertion; the woman wants to live out her own life, and her individualistic instinct works against the large family. But there is nothing here which threatens the whole nation; since, even aside from the very large immigration which introduces healthy, prolific, and sturdy elements, the births of the whole country exceed those of almost any of the European nations. In Germany, between 1890 and 1900, for every thousand inhabitants the births numbered annually 36.2 and the deaths 22.5—so that there were 13.7 more births; in England the births were 30.1 and deaths 18.4, with a difference of 11.7; in the United States the births were 35.1 and deaths 17.4, with a difference of 17.7 more births.

Of course, these figures would make all anxiety seem ridiculous, if the proportions were equally distributed over the country, and through all the elements of the population. As a matter of fact, however, there are the greatest differences. In Massachusetts, for instance, we may distinguish three classes of population; those white persons whose parents were born in the country, and those whose parents were foreigners, and the blacks. This negro population of Massachusetts has the same birth and death rate as the negro elsewhere; for every thousand persons there are 17.4 more births than deaths. For the second class—that is, the families of foreign parentage—there are actually 45.6 more births than deaths; while in the white families of native parentage there are only 3.8. In some other North Atlantic States, the condition is still worse; in New Hampshire, for instance, the excess of births in families of foreign parentage is 58.5, while in those of native parentage the situation is actually reversed, and there are 10.4 more deaths than births. So it happens that for all the New England States, the native white population, in the narrower sense, has a death preponderance of 1.5 for every thousand inhabitants; so that, in the intellectually superior part of the country, the strictly native population is not maintaining itself.

Interesting statistics recently gathered at Harvard University show that its graduates are also not holding their own. Out of 881 students who were graduated more than twenty-five years ago, 634 are married, and they have 1,262 children. On the probable assumption that they will have no more children, and that these are half males, we find that 881 student graduates in 1877 leave in 1902 only 631 sons. The climatic conditions cannot be blamed for this, since the surplus of births in families born of foreign parents is not only very great, but is far greater than in any of the European countries from which these immigrant parents came. Of European countries, Hungary has the greatest excess of births—namely, 40.5, as compared with 13.7 in Germany. That population of America which comes from German, Irish, Swedish, French, and Italian parentage has, even in New England, a birth surplus of 44.5. The general conditions of the country seem, therefore, favourable to fecundity, and this casts a greater suspicion on social conditions and ideals. And the circumstance must not be overlooked, that the increased pressure of women into wage-earning occupations lessens the opportunities of the men, and so contributes indirectly to prevent the man from starting his home early in life. In short, from whatever side we look at it, the self-assertion of woman exalts her at the expense of the family—perfects the individual, but injures society; makes the American woman perhaps the finest flower of civilization, but awakens at the same time serious fears for the propagation of the American race.

There are threatening clouds in other quarters of the horizon. The much-discussed retroactive effect of feminine emancipation on the family should not distract attention from its effect on culture as a whole. Here the dissimilarity to the German conditions is obvious. The German woman’s movement aims to give the woman a most significant rôle in general matters of culture, but still does not doubt, as a matter of course, that the general trend of culture will be determined by the men. Just as it is a dogmatic presupposition in Germany that marriage is the most desirable occupation for women, so it is tacitly presupposed that intellectual culture will take its actual stamp from the men. In America not only this view of marriage, but even this view of culture, has been opposed for a long time; and the people behave as if both were antiquated and superstitious notions, devised by the stronger sex for its own convenience, and as if their reversal would benefit the entire race.

Anybody who looks the matter squarely in the face is not left to doubt that everything in America is tending not only to sacrifice the superiority of man and to give the woman an equal position, but to reverse the old situation and make her very much the superior. In business, law, and politics, the American man is still sovereign, and in spite of the many women who press into the mercantile professions he is still in a position where he serves rather than directs. And it is very characteristic of the moral purity of the people that, in spite of the incomparable social power of women, they have not a trace of personal influence on important political events. On the other hand, they dictate in matters of education, religion, literature and art, social problems, and public morals. Painting, music, and the theatre cater to woman, and for her the city is beautified and purified; although she does not do it herself, it is her taste and feeling which decide everything; she determines public opinion, and distributes all the rewards at her good pleasure. If the family problem is shown in a lurid light by the decrease of births in the native New England population, the problem of culture comes out into broad daylight only in those figures which we have seen before; the 327,614 women teachers and the 111,710 men.

Thus three-quarters of American education is administered by women; and even in the high school where the boys go till they are eighteen or nineteen years old, 57.7 per cent. of the teachers are women; and in those normal schools where both men and women go to fit themselves for teaching, 71.3 per cent. of the instructors are women. It appears, then, that the young men of the country, even in the years when boyhood ripens to youth, receive the larger part of their intellectual impetus from women teachers, and that all of those who are going to be school teachers and shape the young souls of the nation are in their turn predominantly under the influence of women. In colleges and universities this is still not the case, but soon will be if things are not changed; the great number of young women who pass their doctorial examinations and become specialists in science will have more and more to seek university professorships, or else they will have studied in vain. And here, as in the school, the economic conditions strongly favour the woman; since she has no family to support, she can accept a position on a salary so much smaller that the man is more and more crowded from the field. And it may be clearly foreseen that, if other social factors do not change, women will enter as competitors in every field where the labour does not require specifically masculine strength. So it has been in the factories; so it is in the schools; and so, in a few decades, it may be in the universities and in the churches.

Even although the professorial chairs still belong for the most part to men, the presence of numerous women in the auditorium cannot be wholly without influence on the routine of work. The lecturer is forced to notice, as is the speaker in any public gathering, that at least two-thirds of his hearers present the cheerful aspect of gay millinery and lace collar, so that intellectual culture and public opinion on non-political questions come more and more to be dominated by women—as many persons are beginning to see. Most of them greet this unique turn in human history as the peculiar advantage of this nation; the man looks after the industry and politics, and the woman after moral, religious, artistic, and intellectual matters. If there is any doubt that she is competent to do this, most Americans are satisfied to observe the earnestness and conscientiousness with which the American woman attends to her duties, at the zeal and success with which she applies herself to her studies, and at her victory over men wherever she competes.

Here and there, however, and their number is increasing every day, men are feeling that earnestness is not necessarily power, zeal is not mastery, and that success means little if the judgment is pronounced by those who are partial to the winners. The triumph in industrial competition is no honour if it consists in bidding under the market price. In fact, it is not merely a question of the division of labour, but a fundamental change in the character of the labour. An impartial observer of the achievements of American women as teachers or as university students, in professional life or social reform or any other public capacity, is forced to admire the performance, and even to recognize certain unique merits; but he has to admit that it is a special sort of work, and different from the achievements of men. The emancipation of the American woman and her higher education, although carried almost to the last extreme, give not the slightest indication even yet that woman is able to accomplish in the intellectual field the same that man accomplishes. What she does is not inferior, but it is entirely different; and the work which, in all other civilized countries, is done by men cannot in the United States be slipped into the hands of women without being profoundly altered in character.

The feminine mind has the tendency to unify all ideas, while a man rather separates independent classes. Each of these positions has advantages and drawbacks. The immediate products of the feminine temperament are tactfulness and æsthetic insight, sure instincts, enthusiasm, and purity; and, on the other hand, a lack of logical consecutiveness, a tendency to over-hasty generalization, underestimation of the abstract and the deep, and an inclination to be governed by feeling and emotion. Even these weaknesses may be beautiful in domestic life and attractive in the social sphere; they soften the hard and bitter life of men. But women have not the force to perform those public duties of civilization which need the harder logic of man. If the entire culture of the nation is womanized, it will be in the end weak and without decisive influence on the progress of the world.

The intellectual high life in colleges and universities, which seems to speak more clearly for the intellectual equality of women, brings out exactly this difference. That which is accomplished by the best women’s colleges is exemplary and admirable; but it is in a world which is, after all, a small artificial world, with all rough places smoothed over and illumined with a soft light instead of the hard daylight. Although in the mixed universities women often do better than men, it is not to be forgotten that the American lecture system, with its many examinations, puts a higher value on industry, attention, and good-will than on critical acumen or logical creativeness. It cannot be denied that, even a short time since, the American university cultivated in every department the spirit of learning rather than of investigation—was reproductive rather than productive—and that the more recent development which has laid the emphasis on productive investigation has gone on for the most part in the leading Eastern universities, such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton, where women are still not admitted, while the Western universities, and most of all the state universities, which are found only in the West, where women are in a majority, belong in many respects to the old type. To be sure, there are several American women whose scientific work is admirable, and to be classed with the best professional achievements of the country; but they are still rare exceptions. The tendency to learn rather than to produce pervades all the great masses of women; they study with extraordinary zeal up to the point where critical production should begin, and there they are all too apt to stop. And unless one persistently looks at the very few exceptions, one would hardly assert that the true spirit of science could unfold and grow if American women were to be its only guardians.

This distinction is much plainer in the lower walks of life. The half-educated American man refrains from judging what is beyond his scope; but an American woman who has scarcely a shred of education looks in vain for any subject on which she has not firm convictions already at hand, and her influence upon public opinion—politics always apart—spins a web of triviality and misconception over the whole culture. Cobwebs are not ropes, and a good broom can sweep them down; but the arrogance of this feminine lack of knowledge is the symptom of a profound trait in the feminine soul, and points to dangers springing from the domination of women in intellectual life. In no other civilized land is scientific medicine so systematically hindered by quack doctors, patent medicines, and mental healing; the armies of uneducated women protect them. And in no other civilized land are ethical conceptions so worm-eaten by superstitions and spiritualistic hocus-pocus; hysterical women carry the day. In no other country is the steady and sound advance of social and pedagogical reform so checked by whimsies and short-lived innovations, and good sound work held back by the partisans of confused ideas; here the women work havoc with their social and pedagogical alarms.

This does not mean, however, that a good deal of the work of American women is not better done by them than it would be by the men. In the first place, there is no doubt that the assistance of women in teaching has had very happy results on American culture. When it was necessary to tame the wild West of its pioneer roughness and to introduce good manners, the milder influence of women in the school-room was far more useful than that of men could have been; and so far as it is a question of making over the immigrant children of the large cities into young Americans, the patient woman teacher is invaluable. And the drama of the school-room is played in other more public places; in a thousand ways the participation of women in public life has refined and toned down American culture and enriched and beautified it, but not made it profounder or stronger. Woman’s inborn dilettanteism works too often for superficiality rather than profundity.

And it is indubitable that this undertaking of the burdens of intellectual culture by woman has been necessary to the nation’s progress—a kind of division of labour imperatively indicated by the tremendous economic and political duties which have preoccupied the men. No European country has ever had to accomplish economically, technically, and politically, in so short a time, that which the United States has accomplished in the last fifty years in perfecting its civilization. The strength of the men has been so thoroughly enlisted that intellectual culture could not have been developed or even maintained if the zeal and earnestness of women had not for a time taken up the work. But is this to be only for a time? Will the man bethink himself that his political and economic one-sidedness will in the end hurt the nation? This is one of the greatest questions for the future of this country. It is not a question of woman’s retrograding or losing any of her splendid acquirements; no one could wish that this fine intellectuality, this womanly seriousness, this desire for a meaning in her life should be thoughtlessly sacrificed, nor that the sisters and the mothers of the nation should ever become mere dolls or domestic machines. Nothing of this should be lost or needs to be lost. But a compensatory movement must be undertaken by the men of the country in order to make up for amateurish superficiality and an inconsequential logic of the emotions.

In itself, the intellectual domination of the women will have the tendency to strengthen itself, the more the higher life bears the feminine stamp. For by so much, men are less attracted to it. Thus the number of male school teachers becomes smaller all the time, because the majority of women teachers makes the school more and more a place where a man does not feel at home. But other factors in public opinion work strongly in the opposite direction; industrial life has made its great strides, the land is opened up, the devastations of the Civil War are repaired, internal disturbances have yielded to internal unity, recognition among the world powers has been won, and within a short time the wealth of the country has increased many fold. It will be a natural reaction if the energies of men are somewhat withdrawn from industry and agriculture, from politics and war, and once more bestowed on things intellectual. The strength of this reaction will decide whether the self-assertion of the American women will, in the end, have been an unalloyed blessing to the country or an affliction. Woman will never contribute momentously to the culture of the world by remaining intellectually celibate.