The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

Organized as we are, there is absolutely no useful place for a leisure class. We do not purpose to be ruled, but, on the contrary, insist that our public administrators shall be chosen from the main body of toilers and shall execute, not direct, the popular will. Since leadership in public and private activity thus falls to the toiler in a Democracy, these fashionable “sets” provided by the women of the rich class are wholly alien and hostile to us as a democratic people. And they inevitably become a menace as their influence extends over the men and women of superior education or natural endowments who should be the leading exemplars of the American ideal. And this menace threatens to erect itself into what pessimists would call a “peril,” as the “community of interest” creates monopolies so intertwined with our individual structure that to assail them is to jeopardize it, and perpetuates wealth in certain families and groups.

Such is the anti-democratic woman. But over against her set the American woman. The plutocratic American man, being gaudy and conspicuous, distracts attention from the democratic American man, who outnumbers and outvotes and out-influences him into insignificance, except as an awful warning against flying in the face of the world’s democratic destiny. The plutocratic American woman is even more conspicuous than the plutocratic American man. But contrast her with the rest of the women, especially with the women who go forth from the homes to work. Great as is the influence against Democracy exerted by the women of the leisure class, it is weak in comparison with that exerted for Democracy by the professional and business women of the United States.

Ten years ago about one-fifth of all the wage and salary earners in the United States were women and girls. When these figures were published there was a great outcry of wonder and alarm—wonder at the changed conditions, alarm lest those changed conditions might be permanent and the old-fashioned woman of the fireside and the stoveside and the cradleside might be passing away. To-day about one-third of all the women in the United States not on farms earn their own living outside their own homes, and these women constitute more than one-fourth of all the persons in the United States engaged in gainful occupations other than agriculture.

It is evident that the changed conditions are not passing, but permanent; that the “new woman” is the woman of the future. Yet we still hear the old order talked of as if it were not a departing order, and the new order criticised as if it were abnormal, a fad of a few “freak” women.

Obviously, this change is most intimately associated with Democracy. Democracy, work, women; women, work, Democracy. Did any of those ancient republics we hear so much about, those whose decline and fall Europe and our own pessimists say we must inevitably imitate, ever number among its inhabitants a company of women wage and salary earners such as has been so swiftly evolved in democratic, work-compelling, work-exalting America?

In face of this army of women who work outside the home, the theory still is that man bears the brunt of the battle for food, clothing and shelter, while woman is sheltered and comparatively at her ease. This theory never was sound. It never would have been accepted had writers and thinkers kept clearly before their minds the fact that the human race does not consist of a luxuriously comfortable class, but of vast masses of laborious millions. From time immemorial, among the masses of the people everywhere, the men and the women have worked equally for the support of the family. But latterly, under the pressure of modern conditions, which are forcing all into the general service of society, the women have been drawn from the obscure toil of occupations within and around the household; and also into the ranks of women toilers have gone hundreds of thousands of women from the classes which, until recently, did try to keep their women at home. Is it illogical to say that we may presently see practically all the capable members of our society, regardless of sex, self-supporting? And in such circumstances, would not the family relations, the relations of mother to father, and both to children, necessarily undergo a radical transformation?

To-day the women vote in four States and hold public office in all the States and under the National Government. There are women policemen and firemen, women locomotive engineers, women masons and plasterers and gunsmiths, women street-car drivers and conductors, women blacksmiths and coopers and steel and iron workers, and even women sailors—to take only a few occupations which, on the face, would seem to exclude women. In fact, there is not in this country a single department of skilled or unskilled labor, except only soldier and man-o’-war’s man, which has not its women workers in swiftly increasing numbers. In the professions there are thousands of women doctors, lawyers, authors, professors, musicians, artists, decorators, journalists, public speakers, and more than a hundred thousand women teachers. In the trades there are thousands of women hotel and restaurant keepers, insurance and real estate agents, bookkeepers, clerks, merchants, officers in corporations, saleswomen, stenographers, telegraph and telephone operators. In manufactories the women operatives almost equal the men in numbers. There are thousands of women who hold responsible positions in the management of manufacturing corporations. All these occupations, with the exception of such as nursing and teaching school and music, were once exclusively in the hands of men.

The cause of the change is the same as that which has revolutionized every part of modern society—the amazing discoveries of science, creating an enormous number of new occupations and revolutionizing the method of all the old occupations, from housekeeping to national administration.

War was the department of human endeavor which not only excluded women from itself, but also kept her fast anchored at home. Until the second quarter of the last century war was the chief thought, the chief pursuit of the human animal. He was either just going to war or just coming home from war, or engaged in war or preparing for imminent war. Obviously, so long as war occupied this position in human affairs woman was inevitably in the background, in the secondary places, a household drudge or plaything. But war is no longer the principal business of the race, with peace tolerated as a breathing spell now and then. Peace and its arts have become the serious business of civilization, the settled order, with war as a dreadful nightmare. The wars, if not fewer, are briefer and are carefully concentrated and confined. Civilization has been forced upon a peace basis not by enlightenment, but by commerce growing out of discovery and invention. It clamors for skilled hands, not for brutal hands. Hence the vast opening for women and the vast inrush of women. It is a democratic tide. Out of discovery and invention comes commerce; out of commerce and its intercourse, which is death to all forms of provincialism, both mental and physical, comes enlightenment; in the train of enlightenment, as day in the train of the sun, comes Democracy.

This country was remote from other great nations and, therefore, from the ever present threat of the actuality of war. It was—perhaps through its freedom from war and war alarms—eagerest in seizing upon and using the mighty industrial machinery which science gave to the race. Thus it has come to pass with us that the abolition of the non-worker, the progress toward the industrial equality of the two sexes, has been most rapid.