WOMEN AND ECONOMICS
It will be evident that the writer of the foregoing chapter must have something to say on the question of women and economics, but though what must be said seems to me to be very important, it can be stated at no great length.
If we turn to the most widely-read and applauded of the feminist books on this subject, Women and Economics, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we are by no means encouraged to find it stated in the first chapter that woman's present economic inferiority to man is not due to "any inherent disability of sex." Wherever Mrs. Gilman may be right, here the biologist knows that she is wrong. The argument has been fully stated in earlier pages, and need not here be restated. But we shall not be surprised if a premise which denies any natural economic disadvantage of women leads to more than dubious conclusions.
Only a few pages later, Mrs. Gilman refers to the argument that the economic dependence of women upon their husbands is defensible on the ground that they perform the duties of motherhood, and the following is her comment thereon:
"The claim of motherhood as a factor in economic exchange is false to-day. But suppose it were true. Are we willing to hold this ground, even in theory? Are we willing to consider motherhood as a business, a form of commercial exchange? Are the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love, commodities to be exchanged for bread?
"It is revolting so to consider them; and if we dare face our own thoughts, and force them to their logical conclusion, we shall see that nothing could be more repugnant to human feeling, or more socially and individually injurious, than to make motherhood a trade."
Surely this is special pleading and not very plausible at that. It may be replied, "Is not the labourer worthy of his hire?"—however noble the labour. If we choose to call society's or a husband's support of motherhood "a form of commercial exchange," it is indeed "revolting" so to see it; let us then look at the case as it is. We applaud the "cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love"; but the more assiduous her maternity, and the more admirable, the more certainly will she require to be fed. If she cannot simultaneously feed her child and forage for herself, somebody must forage for her; and to say that therefore the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love, become commodities to be exchanged for bread, is simply to cloud a clear case with question-begging epithets. Always, everywhere, if motherhood is to be performed at its highest, the mother must be supported. It is not a question of commercial exchange, but of obvious natural necessity. The foregoing chapter with its argument for the rights of mothers as a great and neglected social principle, may be unsound throughout, but it will certainly not be refuted by sentences such as these.
Briefly, Mrs. Gilman proposes to "do away with the family kitchen and dining-room, to transform all domestic service from the incapable, hand-to-mouth standard of untrained amateurs to that of professional experts, to raise the work of child nursing and rearing to a scientific and skilled basis, to secure the self-support of the wife and mother through skilled labour, so that she may be economically independent of her husband."
But if her child nursing and rearing are to be scientific and skilled, and she is simultaneously to support herself through skilled labour, she clearly requires to be two women or one woman in two places at the same time. This, in effect, is what Mrs. Gilman expects. We have seen that Mr. H. G. Wells's proposed help for motherhood consists in discharging fatherhood from its duties: Mrs. Gilman's idea is to double the mother's work. Both come to much the same thing.
All women, mothers or other, are to become economically independent, instead of being "parasitic on the male," our author's unpleasing way of recognizing that fatherhood has reached high and responsible estate amongst mankind. Now if Mrs. Gilman's solution be feasible, we must return to our fundamentals and see whether they are compatible with it. She has no doubt of it. Thus:—
"If it could be shown that the women of to-day were growing beards, were changing as to pelvic bones, were developing bass voices, or that in their new activities they were manifesting the destructive energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the male, then there would be cause for alarm. But the one thing that has been shown in what study we have been able to make of women in industry is that they are women still, and this seems to be a surprise to many worthy souls ... 'the new woman' will be no less female than the 'old' woman ... she will be, with it all, more feminine.
"The more freely the human mother mingles in the natural industries of a human creature, as in the case of the savage woman, the peasant woman, the working-woman everywhere who is not overworked, the more rightly she fulfils these functions."[20]
We may not be so sure that there is not some evidence for "growing beards," "developing bass voices," and "manifesting the destructive energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the male"; and in our brief attempt to make a first study of womanhood in the light of Mendelism, we have seen good reason to understand why masculine characters may come to the surface in the female whose femininity has worn thin. Several of the lower animals definitely show us the possibilities.
But we need not accept the issue on the grounds of such superficial manifestations as these, for there are others, more subtle and vastly more important, on which must be fought the question whether women in industry are women still, and whether the "new woman" is more feminine than the old. Let us dismiss the extremes in both directions. We need not adduce the members of the Pioneer Club, who show their increasing femininity by donning male attire; nor need we question that large numbers of women in industry continue to remain feminine still. The practical question which we must determine, if possible, is the average effect of industrial conditions and the assumption of the functions commonly supposed to be more suitably masculine, upon women in general. Here we definitely join issue with Mrs. Gilman.
It is impossible to discuss, as we might well do, the available evidence as to the effect of external activities upon that wonderful function of womanhood which, in its correspondence with the rhythm of the tides, hints, like many other of our attributes, at our distant origin in the Sea—the mother of all living. Reference was made in an earlier chapter to this function, and its use as, in most cases at any rate, a criterion of womanhood and a gauge of the effect of physical exercise or mental exercise thereupon. The writer of "Women and Economics" has nothing to say on this subject—less, if possible, than on the subject of lactation. The menstrual function would admirably and fundamentally illustrate the present contention, but it will be better to take the great maternal and mammalian function of nursing as a criterion of womanhood, and as a test of the contention that the more freely the mother works as do the savage woman and the peasant woman, the more rightly she fulfils the "primal physical functions of maternity."
Before we consider the actual evidence (and Mrs. Gilman does not deal at all in evidence on these fundamentals to her argument) let us meet the argument about the "savage woman," who works as hard as men do,—though much less hard than early observers of savage life supposed—and who is nevertheless a successful mother. It is completely forgotten that, just as parenthood, both fatherhood and motherhood, demands more of the individual as we rise in the scale of animal evolution, so, within our own species, the same holds good. In general, the mothers of civilized races are the mothers of babies whose heads are larger at birth (as they will be in adult life), than those of savage babies. It is true that the civilized woman has, on the average, a considerably larger pelvis than that of, for instance, the negress. There must be a feasible, practicable ratio between the two sets of measurements if babies are to enter the world at all. But the increasing size of the human head is a great practical problem for women. No one can say how many millions have perished in the past because their pelves were too narrow for the increasing demands thus made upon them, and doubtless the greater capacity of the female pelvis in higher races is mainly due to this terrible but racially beneficent process of selection, by which women with pelves nearer (e. g.) to negro type, have been rejected, and women with wider pelves have survived, to transmit their breadth of pelvis to their daughters and carry on the larger-headed races. But even now obstetricians are well aware that the practical mechanical problem for the civilized woman is much more serious than for her savage sister; and the argument that civilized women would discharge maternal functions as well as savage women if they worked as hard is therefore worthless.
Let us return now to the question of nursing capacity. "Bass voices" and "beards" are doubtless unlovely in woman, but their extensive appearance would be of no consequence at all compared with the disappearance or weakening of the mammalian function which, as everyone knows or should know, is the dominating factor in the survival or death of infancy. Now it may be briefly asserted that civilized woman, and more especially industrial woman, threatens to cease to be a mammal. If this assertion can be substantiated, and if the "economic independence of women" necessarily involves it, no biologist, no medical man, no first-hand student of life, will hesitate to condemn finally the ideal toward which Mrs. Gilman and those who think with her would have us go. Things may be bad, things are very bad: the lot of woman must be raised immensely, because the race must be raised, and cannot be raised otherwise; but progress is going forward and not backward, Mr. Chesterton notwithstanding. Woman will not become more than a mammal by becoming less, and going back on that great achievement of ascending life. Individuals may do so, and are doing so, lamentably misdirected as many of them now are; but that is the end of them and their kind. It is quite easy to stamp out motherhood and its inevitable economic dependence, but with it you stamp out the future.
It is generally admitted that our women nurse their babies less than they used to do. It is as generally admitted that this is often deliberate choice, and we all know that it is often economic necessity: the human mother "mingles in the natural industries of a human creature," such as the factory affords, and cannot simultaneously stay at home to nurse her baby, making men—for which, as a "natural industry" of women, even as against making, say, lead-glaze for china, there may be something to be said.
But whilst popular preachers and castigators of the sins of society fulminate against the fine lady who asks for belladonna and refuses to do her duty, we must enquire to what extent, if any, women no longer nurse their babies because they cannot, try they never so patiently and strenuously. It is the general belief amongst those whose daily work qualifies them for an opinion, that women are tending to lose the power of nursing. Professor von Bunge, whose name is honoured by all students of the action of drugs, has satisfied himself that alcoholism in the father is a great cause of incapacity to nurse in daughters. However that interpretation may be, the fact seems clear; and the change in this direction is evidently much more rapid than might be accounted for by the improvement in artificial feeding of infants leading to the survival of daughters of mothers unable to nurse, and transmitting their inability to their children. Mrs. Gilman—having ignored menstruation altogether—makes only one allusion to this vastly important subject, and we shall see to what extent her sanguine assumption is justified. According to her, "A healthy, happy, rightly occupied motherhood should be able to keep up this function (of nursing) longer than is now customary—to the child's great gain." There can be no question about the child's great gain; but what is the evidence for supposing that a mother earning her own living in free competition with men—which is what a "healthy, happy, rightly occupied motherhood" means in this connection—can thus spend her energies twice over, unlike any other source of energy known?
According to official statistics, maternal lactation is steadily decreasing in several German cities, notably in Berlin, where only 56.2 per cent. of infants under one month were suckled by their mothers in 1905, as against 65.6 per cent. in 1895, and 74.3 per cent. in 1885. At nine months of age 22.4 per cent. were suckled in 1905, 34.6 per cent. in 1895, 49 per cent. in 1885. Other towns show more favourable results; a general decrease, however, is marked. These facts cannot be ascribed, according to the author,[21] to a growing disinclination to breast-feeding, nor to the employment of mothers (in Prussia only 5 per cent. of the married women are employed in manufacture). The question whether the decrease in breast-feeding is due to the industrial employment of women before marriage, or to (inherited) degeneration, remains to be determined.
According to a recent statement by Professor von Bunge, the conditions are very similar now in Switzerland, where only about one mother in five can nurse her children.
Similar evidence could be cited from other sources, and the fact being admitted must evidently be reckoned with.
That the modern development of infant feeding will serve to replace natural lactation, must be denied, and this without prejudice to the magnificent work of the late Professor Budin of Paris and Professor Morgan Rotch of Harvard. These pioneers and their followers have devised some admirable second bests—admirable, that is, relatively to some of the pitiable methods which they have superseded, but relatively to the mother's breast not admirable at all. At the beginning of the campaign against infant mortality, the crèche and the sterilized milk dépôt and the fractional analysis of cow's milk and its recomposition in suitable proportions of proteid, fat, etc., as devised by Rotch, were rightly acclaimed and admitted to save vast numbers of infant lives. All this is mere stop-gap, wonderfully effective, no doubt, but only stop-gap nevertheless. In France they are going ahead, and public opinion in London is being slowly persuaded to follow along the more recent French lines. The modern principle upon which we should act is Nature's principle—saving the children through their mothers. Expectant motherhood must be taken care of; we must feed, not the child, but the nursing mother, and the child through her. If we rightly take care of her, she will construct a perfect food for the child. There is no other path of racial safety. It is not our present concern to deal with the problems of infancy and childhood as they require, and surely we need not wait to prove that nursing motherhood cannot safely be superseded, but must be retained and safeguarded.
If this postulate be granted, we have to determine how it comes about that the German figures, for instance, are showing this extraordinarily rapid decline in maternal lactation. As has already been noted in passing, we must reject the suggestion that the natural type of women is changing. Such a change of natural type in any living race can occur only through selection for parenthood, and such selection in the case in question can scarcely be imagined to occur in the direction of choosing women who are naturally less capable of nursing. On the contrary, the tendency of the selective principle must always be toward the greater survival of infants whose mothers can nurse them, and who in their turn, if they are to be women, will be more likely to be able to nurse their children. Further, the action of selection cannot demonstrate itself more quickly than is permitted by the length of human generations. It must therefore be rejected as any interpretation of this case. If women are ceasing to be able to nurse their babies, and if this change is occurring with such extraordinary rapidity as the German figures indicate, plainly the explanation must be found in the action of some recent and novel condition or conditions upon womanhood.
Perhaps it need scarcely be insisted that the distinction here sought to be made is of the utmost importance. If the natural type of womanhood were actually changing, we could scarcely do more than observe and despair, but if it be merely that the capacities of this generation of women are being modified by the particular conditions to which they are subjected, plainly we who have made those conditions can modify them—"What man has made, man can destroy."
If we come to ask ourselves what these recent and novel conditions are, the answer is only too ready at hand. The principles which will guide us toward discovering it have been set forth at length in the earlier chapters of this book. Let us recur to our Geddes and Thomson, and at once we have the key. The production of milk is an act of anabolism or building-up, such as we have seen to be characteristic of the female sex, involving the accumulation and storage of quantities of energy so large that if they were stated in the units of the physicist they would astonish us. If we consider what the child achieves in the way of movement and development and growth, and if we realize that at the most rapid period of development and growth, all the energy therefor has been gathered, prepared, and is dispensed by the nursing mother, we shall begin to realize what an astonishing feat that is which she performs. It is in reality, of course, the same feat which is performed by the expectant mother, only that it is slightly less arduous, since after birth the child can breathe and digest for itself.
Perhaps the reader will begin to realize what Mrs. Gilman and those who think with her are asking us to believe when they say that the primal physical functions of maternity will be best fulfilled by the mother who "mingles in the natural industries of a human creature." This statement is either ridiculously false or can be rendered true by rendering it as a truism. The primal physical functions of maternity are the natural industries of the particular human creature we call a mother; and the better she fulfils them, the better she fulfils them, certainly. But the so-called natural industries in which the modern mother is desired to be engaged whilst she is bearing or nursing her children are as unnatural as anything can be. As at present practised, they are morbid products of civilization which it will require to cast off if it is to survive.
It is the student of life and its laws who must have the last word in these matters. If he utters it wrongly or is unheeded, Nature is not mocked, but will be avenged. The writer who can lay down a new principle on which our life is to be based, without paying any more attention to lactation than is to be found in the argument we have been considering, has left out the beginning, has omitted the foundations. No measure of earnestness or literary skill can save her case.
Of course the reply will be that the biological criticism is simply the ancient and oriental idea of woman as a helpless dependent, reasserted for male advantage in our own day. One cannot believe that it is necessary to rebut that accusation. It is necessary, however, to examine somewhat the words "economic dependence" and "economic independence" which are employed with such naïve antithesis in this controversy.
When we examine Mrs. Gilman's proposal for the salvation of woman, we find it to mean that in future mothers are to do double work. The glorious consummation is to be that woman is no longer "parasitic on the male," which is Mrs. Gilman's way of expressing the great truth that the mother for whom the father works, represents the future supported by the present.
But the future is always supported by the present. Woman, we began by saying, is Nature's supreme organ of the future, and the present must live for her and die for her. When we say the future, we mean childhood. If childhood is to appear and to survive, womanhood must be dedicated to it, and manhood, which stands for the present, must supply its own link in the chain. The following paragraph from an unsigned article which appeared some years ago in the Morning Post states the case in a form which may convince the reader. It was headed "Repairs and Renewals of the People," and ran as follows:—
"It is, indeed, seldom sufficiently realized how much a nation, so to speak, lives always in and for the future. Broadly speaking, of every ten persons living in the United Kingdom now, four are less than twenty years of age, while three of the rest are women (two of them married women)—that is to say, people also mainly concerned, through the care of children, with the future rather than with the present. Upon the remaining three men, one of whom be it noted is over fifty-five, falls the bulk of the work of providing for immediate needs and so releasing the others to provide for the continuance of the race. A definite large share of all the present activities of a people is required and, as it were, pledged to provide for its renewal. If it fails to allow sufficient, it may, just like a company or a municipal concern with an inadequate depreciation fund, show large profits and great prosperity for a time; it cannot be regarded as a sound concern."
The reader must decide whether there is more light and leading in the interpretation that upon men falls the bulk of the work of providing for immediate needs, and so enabling women to provide for the continuance of the race, or, in Mrs. Gilman's version that woman is parasitic upon the male. The future, if she likes to state it in that way, is parasitic upon the present, always has been and always will be. The case which she imagines to be unique and morbid, peculiar to civilized mankind, is precisely the case of the hen bird who sits upon her eggs, incubating the future, whilst the male goes and forages for her. She is parasitic upon the male, as Mrs. Gilman would put it.
The truth is that, like many other women dominated by sex antagonism—which glares ferociously from such paragraphs as that which was quoted regarding "the brutal combative instinct or the intense sex-vanity of the male"—Mrs. Gilman, in seeking to further the interests of her sex, proposes to dispense with the help of its best friend, which is the other sex. It is not easy to speak with patience of those who thus seek to set the house of mankind against itself, to the injury of men, women and children alike.
No doubt it is true that Mrs. Gilman's attitude is engendered by sex antagonism as we see it everywhere in men—though for some obscure reason it is only so labelled when displayed by women. No doubt, also, a much better case can be made out for Mrs. Gilman's proposals, up to a point, than could be made out for corresponding proposals on the other side. No one who thinks for a moment can question that all proposals whatsoever to make either sex independent of the other are stark madness; yet there is a certain short-lived plausibility in the argument that women are to be independent of men, and this depends upon the fact which we have already attempted to demonstrate and interpret by means of Mendelism, that women are more than men, and that womanhood includes latent manhood. If, therefore, we are careful with the argument and boldly rush past the really crucial places, such as the conditions and needs of expectant and nursing motherhood, we can make out what looks like a case for the economic dependence of women. Each sex is to work for itself, and then there need be no more quarrelling.
But we could not go even so far with any theory for making men independent of women without seeing that we were no less wrong on that side than Mrs. Gilman is on the other. Man's apparent economic independence of women is as complete a myth as women's projected economic independence of men. In the last resort, when we come down to realities, and remember that both men and women are mortal, and that unless they are replaced, everything ends, we see that the introduction of the word economic into this question simply serves to confuse thought, just as the older political economy confused thought and laid itself open to the mercilessly magnificent attacks of Ruskin. Economy is literally the law of the house or the home—where life begins. Of all economies, life is the last judge, because there is no wealth but life. In the last resort the economic dependence of the sexes means nothing because the sexes cannot independently reproduce themselves.
If Mrs. Gilman is to be arraigned for her error let us see to it most carefully that we do not fail to arraign the men who, with not one-thousandth part of her excuse and with no iota of her ability, fall into the corresponding error on their side. When Women's Suffrage is being debated, there never fails a supply of men who write to the papers to say that men must vote and not women because men and not women "made the State." How much simpler our problems would be if there were some means of distinguishing children who will grow up into men of this type, and carefully refraining from teaching them to read or write! Make the State, indeed!—they can make nothing but fools of themselves, and without women's assistance could not even reproduce their folly. Of course the retort to all this nonsense is that neither sex ever yet created anything without the other. Every human act and achievement is the product of both sexes. When some friend of the past assures us that women should not vote because they cannot bear arms, he is of course reminded that women bear the soldiers. It is true and it is unanswerable. In just the same way, when Mrs. Gilman wishes women to be economically independent of men, whom she considers as animals distinguished by their destructive energy, brutality and intense sex vanity, she is simply ignoring half the truth. Let either sex try to run the earth alone till Halley's comet returns, and what would be left for it to see? Of all follies uttered on this subject, and they are many, the cry, each sex for itself, is the wickedest and worst.
The reader may well declare that such criticism is easy, but of little worth unless it be accompanied by some kind of constructive proposals for the amelioration of present conditions. Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced. If the present economic conditions of women involve the most hideous wickedness and cruelty and injure the entire progress of mankind, as they assuredly do, and if they therefore must be destroyed, we must have something to replace them with; and if Mrs. Gilman's proposals would simply make the difficulty a thousand times worse by depriving women of men's help, what proposals are there to offer instead?
The reply is that we must go back to first principles. We must drop all our phrases about economic independence or dependence. They have urgent and real meanings for each one of us at any given time, but when applied to the problems of the reconstruction of society as a whole, they mean nothing because they are based upon no vital truths whatever. A man may be economically secure when he is producing absinthe or whisky, or he may die of starvation because he is producing the songs of Schubert. Economic independence and dependence mean very much to the prosperous distiller whom men pay for poison, and to the immortal composer whom men do not pay at all, but who yet produces that which nourishes the life of all the future. The maker of death may live, and the maker of life may die; we see it every day and history is the continuous record of it. These economic dependences and independences consist only in the relations of one man or woman to the others. They have nothing to do with the real issue, which is the relation of mankind as a whole to Nature. These economic questions are simply concerned with money—the means whereby one man has more or less claim upon another: society may have to be reconstructed in such a fashion that economic independence and dependence, as at present understood, would have no meaning whatever. Yet all the real economic questions would remain, even though money or private property were abolished. The real economy is the making and preserving of life and the means of life. We live in a chaos where the elementary conditions of human existence are constantly forgotten. The real politics, the real economy, the real political economy, are the questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply—the relations not between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind, living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live. The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern industrialism. The products of men's labour and women's labour will be appraised and paid for in proportion to their real value, their strength or availableness for life.
In "Unto This Last" and "Munera Pulveris," Ruskin has laid down, on what are really unchallengeable biological grounds, the foundations of the political economy of the future. We are going to have done with the industries which eat up men. We cannot much longer afford to grow whisky where we might grow wheat, for there are ever more mouths to be fed, and wheat is running short. Cheap and dear mean nothing when we get down to realities. Is a thing vital or is it mortal?—that is the only question. It may be vital and costless, like air, or mortal and dear, like alcohol. The question is not how much money can you get from another man for your product, but how much life can mankind get from Nature for it. Thus we shall return to a sane appreciation of the primary importance of agriculture as against manufacture, of food as against anything else,—for unless one is fed, of what use is anything else? And as nations gradually begin to discover that the means of life are the really valuable things, they will go on to learn, what primitive races, hard-pressed races, races making their way in the world against heavy odds, have always known—that at all costs the insatiable destructiveness of Death must be compensated for by Birth. If the means of life are the real wealth, the life itself is more real still, and unless we abolish death, the makers and bearers and nourishers of life are at all times and everywhere the producers, the manufacturers, the workers of the community above and beyond all others. And these are the women in their great functions as mothers and foster-mothers, nurses, teachers.
The economics of the future will be based upon these elemental and perdurable truths. No writer in his senses will then be guilty of such immeasurable folly as to place the "natural industries of a human creature" in antithesis to "the primal physical functions of maternity." The sex which came first and remains first in the immediacy and indispensableness of its relations to the coming life will base its economic claims—in the vulgar and narrow sense of that term—upon the worth of those relations. The society which cannot afford to pay for—that is, to sustain—the characteristic functions of womanhood, cannot continue; and societies have continued and will continue in proportion as they hold hard by these first conditions of their lives. The case of Jewish womanhood is the supreme illustration of a thesis which requires no experimental demonstration, but is necessarily true.
Here, then, is the solution, as the future will prove, of the problem of the economic status of woman. At present, though Ellen Key is the only feminist writer who recognizes it, women can compete successfully with men only at the cost of complete womanhood,—and that is a price which society as a whole cannot afford to pay, if it wishes to continue. Therefore we must, in effect, pay women in advance for their work, the actual realization of the value of which is always necessarily deferred. The case is parallel to that of expenditure upon forestry. In the planting of trees or the nurture of babies the State will get value for its money in the long run, but it must be prepared to wait. States are slowly becoming more provident, and already we are coming to see this about trees. Soon we shall see it about babies, and the problem of the economic status of woman will then be solved in practice as it is assuredly soluble in principle.
Mankind must first learn to renounce Mammon and set up Life as its God; but to that also we shall come—or perish, for Life is a jealous God and visits the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation.