But while both men and women have this three-fold function, the differences in their racial life involve far-reaching economic consequences. Motherhood is an occupation as fatherhood is not, and this deeply affects woman’s industry. Even in the primitive world, where industry is largely a household matter for all, woman’s activity is bound to the hearthstone more closely than man’s, for the bearing and rearing of children is intertwined with all her other business, and conditions it. This makes housework with all its ramifications and outlying branches the great feminine profession throughout the ages.
Consequently when industry, passing from the control of the worker to that of the owner of the business, assumed its modern specialized form and took work and workers out of the home into the factory and workshop, this change, carried out with no regard for the results on the workers themselves, affected the lives of women in ways which are not paralleled in those of men. Besides other consequences, it greatly lessened woman’s efficiency both as mother and as worker.
Under the old régime there was an effective unity in women’s lives, an organic harmony of function with function. The claims of motherhood and of work upon woman harmonized, because she herself was in control and arranged the conditions of her industry to fit her duties and disabilities as wife and mother. For herself and for her household she planned the various tasks with a view to strength, convenience and training for development. Besides the unity of motherhood and industry, there was unity of education and industry, of preparation and practise. The girl was essentially an apprentice of the housekeeper, whether mother or mistress. Her lessons were indistinguishable from her labor. From a little child she was working as well as learning, and also till she was at the head of her own home she was learning as well as working. Read Solomon’s description, or even better, Xenophon’s charming sketch in his Economicus, for a picture of feminine household industry on a rather large scale. We need not conceive this stage as ideal. The point is that there was a natural adjustment of work to worker which modern industry undermines in three ways—in separating work from the home, in separating work from education, and in shaping the conditions and concomitants of work without regard to the powers, tastes, or needs of the workers.
Before endeavoring to analyze these effects let us consider various types of modern women in whose lives all the different difficulties interact, shaping their fate, too often, in most strange and inharmonious fashion.
First let us take the professional woman. If she leads a single life she cuts the Gordian knot of the incompatibility of work and marriage. This is simple, certainly, but quite abnormal. While it is doubtless a happy solution in many cases, it is certainly undesirable that large numbers of women should adopt it, especially if we may suppose that a class of celibate professional women withdraw from the race the inheritance of some degree of picked intellectual ability. It has been argued, by Sidney Webb if I remember rightly, that the rule disqualifying married women for public-school teaching tends to keep a selected group of women out of marriage; a practical exclusion from marriage of women who succeed in medicine, law, architecture, art and business would be, from this point of view, at least an equally serious loss as regards quality if not quantity.
If a woman is able to combine professional activity with marriage and motherhood, as some have been so brilliantly successful in doing, this is because professional work is often more like the old housework than is factory work as regards elasticity and the possible adjustment of time and amount of work to personal convenience.
As our second group let us take well-to-do married women who command domestic service and nursery assistance. Such a woman has the maximum of freedom in ordering her own life, yet, even so, under the mould of the general situation, how chaotic her life history is likely to be. Suppose that she is at a finishing school till she “comes out” in society, or that she goes to college and at twenty-two comes home again to live, not choosing a professional career. Although she is only half conscious of the situation she practically waits for a few years to see whether or not marriage is to be her lot. Probably her natural mates are not yet financially able to offer marriage, and, again, more or less conscious of her rather humiliating situation, she becomes seriously and definitely interested in some specialized activity. By distinct preparation or simply by practise she fits herself for the work that she has found to do; then, just as she is well engaged in this work, the critical moment arrives and she marries. For some years her profession is motherhood, though this is the last thing for which she has thought of fitting herself; and then again her life takes a new turn. Her children are no longer children; they are at college or at work or married; or her daughter at home, perhaps without liking to say so, yearns to be intrusted with the home administration, for a while at least. Whether or not the mother resigns any of her housekeeping duties, motherhood is no longer a business that fills her days and gives adequate employment to her powers; again she seeks for occupation.
Such women, with the unmarried women of leisure, make the most disposable force in our society, but one very variously disposed. Some of them, the spenders, live purely parasitic lives, absorbing the services of others and consuming social wealth without rendering any return. Others, at the opposite extreme, perform work that is unpaid and that could not be paid for, work that demands experimentation, initiative and devotion. The work of a man or woman who combines with the chance gift of economic freedom the chance gift of genius consecrated to service—the work of a Charles Darwin, a William Morris, a Josephine Shaw Lowell, or a Jane Addams—is a pearl beyond price, but probably common people (that is, most of us) work better under a reasonable degree of pressure.
Our next social class is the married women who do their own work, as we say. For them life retains in the main its primitive harmony, except that they are less likely than women of old to come to their life work adequately prepared to carry on a household on the highest plane practicable with the resources available under contemporary conditions.
Our last class is the working women. The woman who does her own work is not, in the curious development of our phraseology, a working woman, though we may believe that the mother of a brood of children for whom she cleans, cooks, sews, washes and nurses does some work. On the other hand, the working woman is not, in our common phrase, occupied in “doing her own work,” and truly, the work at which she is set might appear to be almost anybody’s rather than hers, if its unsuitability to her needs and powers is any criterion. While her school, however imperfect it may have been, was designed to meet her needs, was administered with the object of advancing her interests, her workshop, on the contrary, seeks quite a different end—the owner’s profits. If she prospers or suffers through its conditions, that is a wholly alien consideration. The work is not her own, both because the product is not hers and because the conditions under which the work is carried on have no relation to her needs.