The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

Where European societies had a very complex organization, our society had from the beginning simplicity as its chief characteristic. We were really all toilers—until recently almost all toilers at occupations close to manual labor. The women and the men were throughout on that equal basis which in Europe was, and to a great extent is yet, found only among the peasant and shopkeeping classes. And as the new era—the era of steam and electricity—developed with us, our women and our men naturally remained side by side.

Our government was founded in war. Its founders assumed, from the history of all other nations, that offense and defense were to be its main functions. And the barbaric theory is still ignorantly or carelessly assented to. This explains the lagging of the political rights of women behind their industrial and civil rights—or, rather, industrial and civil necessities; for no right has ever been, or probably ever will be, recognized until recognition becomes a necessity. The development with us of a class of women who are housekeepers only and are most of the time idle or half idle, is foreign to the spirit of our democratic era. That development cannot, therefore, long survive, any more than an equatorial plant can long survive in our zone. The new departures are in harmony with Democracy; they mean increased efficiency and usefulness of the human race; they must persist and expand and prevail.

To three causes we owe the American woman of the class that only pretends to contribute, or at best half-heartedly contributes, toward the support of our social system:

First, to the survival of the Old World, old era ideas of “woman’s sphere,” of the coarsening effect of labor upon her “finer nature,” of the “aristocratic flavor” and “high breeding” of uselessness and idleness.

Second, to the simpler tastes of our ancestors, and the comparative ease with which at an early period in our national life the labor of the men in the family could provide money enough to satisfy those tastes.

Third, to the very tardy development of the domestic laborers and providers that now relieve woman of the confining cares of household and nursery.

As a result of these three causes a class of idle women sprang up—not only among the rich and well-to-do, but even among artisans, small farmers and shopkeepers. And this class came to be regarded as typical and exemplary. In reality it is neither. It has no place in our tradition of mothers and grandmothers who spun and made preserves, did their own housework, and were busy every waking moment about matters which are now attended to in shops and factories. It has no place in common sense—the women who insist most strenuously that child-bearing and home-making are woman’s whole duty are the women who, as a class, leave the care of the home to servants and bear few children and consign them to nurses at the earliest possible moment. And manifestly it has no place in our future; it must inevitably go the way of all else that is undemocratic and parasitic. Our society is founded upon the two ideas—work and equal opportunity to all to work. It abhors the idler as nature abhors a vacuum. And as the old-time occupations of woman are carried on in a different way, she must find other occupations. Must, because man will be unable both to support himself in the comfort he ever more exactingly demands and also to support her in idleness as well as she insists upon being supported. Must, because her own increasing aversion to restraint will not let her rest content with the slavish and shameful position of a cajoler and dependent.

The sex instinct is powerful enough to triumph over even the instinct of self-preservation for a time; but it cannot withstand the steady, day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year pressure of that instinct of self-preservation incessantly stimulated by the operations of economic forces. The old order, bulwarked by tradition and by the sex-passion and by woman’s ingenuity and man’s weakness where women are concerned, will survive long, will disintegrate gradually. But how can it be saved?

Thus we have a social organization which is in process of revolutionary change. The women are rapidly pushing out or are rapidly being pushed out into occupations which have been transferred from the domestic to the general sphere; they are entering upon occupations new and old which it was thought a few years ago would be for the men only. The men on their part not only are working as formerly, but also are entering occupations once followed exclusively by women. Some of the new employments of women have already been enumerated. The new employments of men in this country include laundry work, cooking, general housework, nursing, keeping boarding-houses, teaching primary and kindergarten pupils, dressmaking, millinery. The list is far shorter and, from the old viewpoint where the equal dignity of all honorable labor was denied, seems far less dignified than the women’s list. The reason for this is of course that the men had small room to expand their already multiform activities, while the women had all the room in the world.

The underlying principle of this redistribution of activities is the common-sense principle that every unit in a society should do the work at hand for which it is best fitted. This principle explains every case. Where we find a man dusting, scrubbing and doing laundry work it is because he could find nothing more remunerative to do and could outbid the women applying for that particular task. Wherever we find a woman plastering, or keeping books, or driving a street-car, or managing a store or corporation, it is for the same reason. And this modern principle wholly ignores sex and looks only at the work to be done and at the comparative fitness of the male and female applicants for it. We are being taught by destiny that parasitism and dependence are no more essentials of the feminine than the brands and manacles which at one time most men wore were essentials of the masculine.