Educated working women: Essays on the economic position of women workers in the middle classes

by Clara E. Collet

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.