Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

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]