MRS. STETSON’S ECONOMIC IDEAL.
March, 1900.
The argument of Mrs. Stetson’s book, “Women and Economics,” may be briefly summed up as follows:—
(1) Man is the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food.
(2) The married woman’s living (i.e., food, clothing, ornaments, amusements, luxuries) bears no relation to her power to produce wealth, or to her services in the house, or to her motherhood.
(3) The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The man gets his wife by getting a living.
(4) Although marriage is a means of livelihood, it is not honest employment, where one can offer one’s labour without shame. To earn her living a woman must therefore make herself sexually attractive.
(5) The result of this is that, while men have been developing humanity, women have been developing femininity, to the great moral detriment of both men and women.
(6) The disastrous effects of this undue cultivation of sex differences can only be prevented by the wife being economically independent of her husband.
(7) This economic independence should be secured by the wife earning her living by performing paid work for some person or body other than her husband.
(8) The performance of maternal functions is not incompatible with the performance of such remunerative services outside the family.
(9) The servant functions of preparing food and removing dirt are not necessarily domestic functions, and could be better performed by professional cooks outside the home, and professional cleaners visiting the home or taking the work from the home.
(10) The nursemaid functions of minding small children can be better performed, with greater advantage to the children, in the crêche and kindergarten than in the domestic nursery.
(11) The wife can therefore advantageously be relieved from the continuous supervision of the kitchen, the living rooms, and the nursery, as she has already been relieved of the burden of the family washing, dressmaking, tailoring, and manufacture of underclothing.
(12) She will then be free to earn her own living outside the home.
(13) By so doing she not only will prevent the evils which have arisen from the wife’s economic dependence on her husband, but she will develop her human faculties. For what we do modifies us more than what is done for us.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh propositions are those on which the whole argument hinges. Mrs. Stetson’s energy of expression and her contempt for convention have deservedly secured for her a re-consideration of old problems thus presented in a new form. The ability with which she supports her conclusions is obvious. Her logic needs more careful examination.
Her first argument I dismiss as quite irrelevant. Granted that at least some men support their female kind, and that no brutes do, nothing follows. I trust that there are many thousand characteristics which may be predicated of man which must be denied of brutes.
Granted also her next argument, that what the wife obtains from her husband bears no relation to her power to produce wealth, or to her services in the house, or to her motherhood. Marriage, as Mrs. Stetson maintains, should not be a business transaction, and therefore the less commercial the relations of husband and wife to each other, the less will service on one side be balanced against service on the other side. The basis is the reverse of the economic basis; the honest business man tries to get the largest amount for himself obtainable without cheating his co-bargainer, trusting to the latter to guard his own interests, and to see that what he gets is worth to him what he gives for it. In any normal marriage the desire on each side is to secure to the other the greatest amount of good at a reasonable cost to themselves, the difference between persons determining more than anything else what they consider a reasonable cost. Stepniak, in a struggle with the English language, once gave a very happy definition, which most practical people would accept. “Marriage,” he said, “is to love and put up with.” Now these are just the two acts that no one expects from the parties to a commercial contract.
I therefore grant Mrs. Stetson’s second argument, and put it aside, as being, like the previous one, beside the question.
Thirdly, “The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The man gets his wife by getting a living.” Putting aside for the moment the question of the truth of this statement, I agree with Mrs. Stetson that in any social group of which such a statement is true the moral tone of women, and therefore of men, will be a low one. In such a state of society also it would be necessary, as Mrs. Stetson says, for a woman, in order to earn her living, to make herself sexually attractive. But before passing on I would point out that, at this stage of the argument, the only part of this result which I would on the face of it admit to be bad is that the woman in such a case frequently falsely assumes attractive qualities which she does not really possess, or conforms to a masculine standard of what is womanly which she at heart despises. It is, in fact, the development of the human qualities of fraud and hypocrisy which is to be deprecated, rather than the development of feminine attraction.
But Mrs. Stetson makes the universal statement that women have been developing femininity to a harmful degree, and to the injury of the human attributes which should be common to both sexes. At first imagining that Mrs. Stetson, like most women, was confining her attention to the present and the near past, I was extremely puzzled at this assertion. It seemed especially strange that it should come from America, where even more than in England women have been supposed to be developing their individuality in all kinds of occupations hitherto supposed to be only suitable for men. But suddenly Mrs. Stetson announces that after all she is only arguing in favour of what many women are already doing, and have been doing for the last half century or so.
Now to decide whether femininity has become excessive, we must first know what group of women we are studying, and also with what other group of women we are comparing them. Mrs. Stetson is not apparently describing the present century as ending with a great development of purely feminine qualities, and even if she were, we might fairly ask her to tell us whether she includes Americans, Turks, Hindoos, and Hottentots under the same category. But there is no hint given of any great differences between women rendering it necessary to limit the nations coming under review, nor do I find it possible to date exactly the epochs chosen for comparison. On p. 129 we have the following condonement of the treatment of woman in past ages:—
With a full knowledge of the initial superiority of her sex, and the sociological necessity for its temporary subversion, she should feel only a deep and tender pride in the long patient ages during which she has waited and suffered that man might slowly rise to full racial equality with her. She could afford to wait. She could afford to suffer.
Searching carefully to find at what period of the world’s history the initial superiority of the woman was obvious prior to its temporary subversion, I find on page 70 the approximate date given in the following passage:—
The action of heredity has been to equalise what every tendency of environment and education made to differ. This has saved us from such a female as the gypsy moth. It has held up the woman and held down the man. It has set iron bounds to our absurd effort to make a race with one sex a million years behind the other.
Clearly, then, the decline and fall of woman dates back at least one million years. In practical retrospection there must be a Statute of Limitations. Neither Mrs. Stetson nor any one else knows what men or women were like a million years ago, or even ten thousand years ago. Nor is it permissible to turn, as Mrs. Stetson frequently does, to feeble-minded contemporary savages. Darwin, unlike the majority of those who quote him, did not profess to know everything, or to be able to supply the history of events of which no record has been left. We have no reason whatever for imagining that our ancestors were lacking in fortitude and intellectual vigour, and we have much for believing that no highly civilised race will ever be developed from the savage tribes with which we are acquainted. “From the good and brave are born the brave.” Horace knew probably as much about heredity as most of us do, and the average person’s principal debt to Darwin is his emancipation from the bondage of Hebrew mythology.
While declining, therefore, to follow Mrs. Stetson in her wonderful flights of fancy with regard to unknown times and races of mankind, and acknowledging myself incapable of judging whether women have become more or less feminine as compared with prehistoric times, I agree with Mrs. Stetson, so far as regards a section of American and English society, when she says (p. 149) that “women are growing honester, braver, stronger, more healthful and skilful and able and free—more human in all ways,” and that this improvement has been at least coincident with, and to some extent due to, the effort to become at least capable of economic independence.
But Mrs. Stetson takes a flying leap when from these premisses she jumps to the conclusion that the wife’s economic independence of the husband is necessary to prevent the evils consequent on women being dependent on marriage for a living.
Mrs. Stetson makes no distinction between the effects of economic dependence before marriage and economic dependence after marriage. But provided that before marriage a woman is able to support herself with sufficient ease to render her a free agent, and that she retains the power of being self-supporting should economic necessity from any cause arise after marriage, what is the objection to pecuniary dependence on the husband? I see none whatever.
So that I find myself obliged to put aside all Mrs. Stetson’s stirring appeals for a moral advance as very interesting, but as having really no bearing on her proposed reforms, which must therefore be considered on their own merits.
Criticism of the proposed reorganisation of domestic arrangements I leave to the practical housewife.
It is only the fitness of the mother, or perhaps, for anything the employer can tell, the about-to-become mother, for regular work away from home that I wish to consider. Her own physical condition, to say nothing of the liability of her children to get measles, whooping-cough, croup, and mumps, will prevent her services from being warmly appreciated in most skilled occupations. Then Mrs. Stetson leaves us in the dark as to what these remunerative occupations are in which mothers may earn a living in their leisure hours.
On p. 9 Mrs. Stetson says:—
The making and managing of the great engines of modern industry, the threading of earth and sea in our vast systems of transportation, the handling of our elaborate machinery of trade, commerce, and government—these things could not be done so well by women in their present degree of economic development. This is not owing to lack of the essential human faculties necessary to such achievements, nor to any inherent disability of sex, but to the present condition of woman forbidding the development of this degree of economic ability.
While reducing maternal duties to a minimum, Mrs. Stetson admits no disposition to evade them, and if she nevertheless considers that women are hindered by no inherent disability of sex from equalling the industrial achievements of men, it must be because she thinks the interruption of work in early middle life is of no great importance. The fact that whereas marriage generally stimulates a man to work more strenuously, it lessens a woman’s power of concentrating her energies on her profession or industrial employment, must always handicap her in industrial competition with men.
Again, in advocating that the varied occupations of the housewife or house servant should be exchanged for specialised employment in large kitchens, in crêches, in the bedrooms of apartment houses, she is really condemning women to a worse servitude than anything necessarily imposed by domestic service. The girl who is successful with two-year-old babies is to manage babies all day long, and for life, for crêche experience does not qualify for admission to the kindergarten or the high school, and marriage is to offer no release. The good cook is to live in a restaurant kitchen, cooking meals for all hours in the day. The professional chambermaid is expected to look forward to being a charwoman always.
Mrs. Stetson has strange ideas about the effects of regular outside work:—
“The mother,” she says, “as a social servant instead of a house servant, will not lack in true mother duty. She will love her child as well, perhaps better, when she is not in hourly contact with it, when she goes from its life to her own life, and back from her own life to its life, with ever new delight and power. She can keep the deep thrilling joy of motherhood far fresher in her heart, far more vivid and open in voice and eyes and tender hands, when the hours of individual work give her mind another channel for her own part of the day. From her work, loved and honoured though it is, she will return to the home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and friction and weariness that so mar it now.”
This all sounds very beautiful, but is it true? This is not the frame of mind in which men generally return from their work, but perhaps that is because they are only fathers. Nor am I acquainted with any well-paid work that one can love and honour all day long; at best it is physically exhausting, and when it is not it is generally routine drudgery. Again, children have a way of choosing their own times for being affectionate, and the half hour or so their mother has to spare before it is their time to go to bed may be considered by them an inopportune time for endearments. The hardened babies who have found the day attractive enough without anybody’s hugs and kisses may perhaps find their sentimental mother’s embraces an irritating nuisance.
I see no reason for believing that either wife, husband, or children will be anything but worse off if the wife goes outside the home to earn a living; nor do I know of any skilled work for educated women, requiring daily assiduous attention for the whole day, in which maternity, or the possibility of maternity, would not be a drawback in the eyes of an experienced employer. It is conceivable that a married woman with capital might be successful as an employer herself, with the power to delegate her business supervision to others when necessary; but I doubt whether she has ever done so with much success, except in cases, as in France, where the wife has generally been the assistant of her husband, or assisted by him.
But the real value of Mrs. Stetson’s argument is that by its absurdity it brings home to us with striking force a fact of which most middle-class people have only a sub-conscious knowledge—that, unfortunately, in England at any rate, what Mrs. Stetson calls the economic independence of the wife is in too many cases not an ideal, but a reality.
Mrs. Stetson says that economic independence among human beings means that the individual pays for what he gets, works for what he gets, gives to the other an equivalent for what the other gives him. “As long as what I get is obtained by what I give,” says Mrs. Stetson, “I am economically independent.”
I do not accept this as a true definition of independence, but it is sufficient that this represents the ideal of independence that Mrs. Stetson desires.
Well, nearly all unmarried women in England are self-supporting. The servant-keeping class is probably less than 12 per cent. of the population; a considerable number of unmarried women even in these classes support themselves. It is only in this servant-keeping class that it has ever been true that there was no means for a woman to get a living except by marriage. And if in the classes below women have married in order to be relieved from working for their living, they have found that the married woman’s life was harder, so far as work was concerned, than that of the unmarried woman. Domestic servants, accustomed to luxurious living and comparative ease as professional servants, willingly consent to marry artisans on 25s. a week, and to work harder than any maid-of-all-work would be asked to do. In factory districts a considerable percentage of the married women go out to work; and there is no greater slave to her husband than the woman who receives no support from him.
I am far from maintaining that a married woman should not do paid work. In all cases where a wife knows herself to be decidedly below par in housekeeping capacity, it is a natural enough thing that she should wish to make up for her expensiveness in this direction by earning some money by work for which she has more aptitude. But even in this case, unless she has some specially strong aptitude for some kind of highly-paid casual work, she would probably be wiser to spend her energies in trying to make herself better fitted for her position of house mistress.
“The development of any human labour requires specialisation,” says Mrs. Stetson. But the direction of human labour requires generalisation; and the married woman, by giving up her post of general, will go down several grades in the army of workers. As it is, she alone amongst skilled workers can watch the development of human beings of both sexes at every stage; the best fitted psychological laboratory in Germany cannot compete with the one that every married woman has at hand in which to study human nature, if only she has the intelligence to know it. Even the domestic servant system at its worst has at least one merit—that it prevents us from ever being able to shut our eyes to the great deficiencies in the education of the working classes. Dismiss our servants to the restaurant kitchen or the bedroom cleaners’ supply associations, and who knows what sham admiration of the working classes, and real apathy with regard to their welfare, may be developed?
The married woman who knows how to turn her experience to good advantage may eventually become a person of high industrial value. In a world where so many odd jobs which ought to be done are left undone, because all the experienced workers are permanently employed, the married woman with experience and judgment comes in as the right person in the right place. She is perhaps the only skilled casual worker. If there is no need for money, she should prove the best philanthropic worker, her position as mistress of a house making it possible for her to give a personal service in her own home which the official philanthropist must often regret she is unable to offer. And when her children really are old enough to be quite satisfactorily left to themselves and their teachers for the working day, I see no reason why the skilled married woman should not enter the labour market, and undertake the direction of one or other of those big institutions which Mrs. Stetson wishes to be universal, and which most of us regard as in some cases necessary. It is not permissible to serve two masters. The mother who thinks of earning her living must choose whether her children or the earning of an income shall be her first duty. If her children take the second place, she is worth nothing as a mother; if they take the first place, she is worth little as an outside worker. But in later life the two occupations need not clash. But although the elderly married woman may prove a valuable industrial organiser in the hotel, the residential chambers company, the hospital, the orphanage, or the college, it will only be by having served her apprenticeship, and taken honours as a house mistress and mother.
I have not cared to discuss Mrs. Stetson’s views on housekeeping. But I not only see room for improvement in the domestic organisation of working women’s homes, but feel very hopeful of the power of women in the working classes to arrive at, at least, a partial solution of their difficulties by co-operation in removing them. The most important result of the co-operative movement will, I believe, be the improvement of the conditions of home life, and the better organisation of the housework of the overtasked wives of our artisans and clerks.
There is much truth in Mrs. Stetson’s criticisms of women’s failures in every direction, but the remedy is better education and simpler tastes. It is only for the sake of her thesis that Mrs. Stetson finds fault with women or with men. She is generous in her estimate of the actual and possible capacities of both, and is full of high-minded delusions about them. “Woman holds her great position as the selector of the best among competing males; woman’s beautiful work is to improve the race by right marriage.”
And not once does it cross her mind that most women are neither particularly attractive nor particularly good, and that they have therefore neither the power nor the right to assume this lofty office.
She is never so childlike as when she imagines she is most daring. And the charm of the book is its excessive femininity. What she says, even when not absolutely absurd, may be of little importance; but her feeling is so genuine and strong as to merit respect and attention.