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.