It is not prophecy to say that, as more and more millions of women enter the industrial fields, these readjustments and redivisions, this absorption of some occupations by women and of other occupations by men, will go on apace. We may not like it; but we can no more stop it than we can stop the physical and mental development of woman, or the use of steam and electricity.

The missionary work for Democracy done by the women already understanding the values of work will undoubtedly eventually reach the “exclusive,” most distinctly leisure class. Its influence is seen on every hand, among the girls and young women of the very well-to-do, in families where the daughters are still persuaded to remain idly at home against their own inclinations. Probably every woman earning her own living, who has associates among women more or less comfortably supported in idleness, and in restraint, by men, is envied by not a few of them, by all not hopelessly corrupted by laziness and caste. And eventually they will be following her example. As the number of educated, valuable women forced to work for a living increases, the number of the same kind of women voluntarily going to work will increase.

And finally the richer women will be reached and impelled. Their yearning to do something will take tangible form. We may live to see the discontented, folly-chasing daughters of the rich stepping not down to, but up to a place beside the woman wage-earner, because they are sick and tired of having no sensible employment, tired of the pitiful wait for some man with the right qualifications of personal and pecuniary attractiveness; because they have sufficiently developed in intelligence to have not a theoretic but a practical envy of the joys of the woman who is absolute mistress of herself and is waiting for the right man only as a man now waits for the right woman.

There is no such simplifier of life as work. Its effect upon the dress, the home surroundings, the very expression and manners of women once accustomed to leisure, is enormous. It tends to make them far more attractive to their own sex and also to such men as are not afraid an intelligent, competent woman would at close range discover the shallowness of their posings and pretenses. Finally, it makes them democratic—all of them that have the wisdom to look on their work not as a sentence to drudgery from which they hope they can presently cajole some man into releasing them, but as a high dispensation of destiny in their favor. The “emancipation of woman” is no mere sonorous phrase. The new woman can, indeed must, retain all the virtues of the “old-fashioned” woman. Feminine is as eternal and immutable as masculine; and the other virtues of the old were the virtues inseparable from a life of busy usefulness. The new woman can and must, and therefore will, free herself from the vices of the old-fashioned woman—the vices of narrowness and irrationality, of artifice that harks back to the days when woman was the servant of man’s appetites and had to pander to them.

The decisive advantage the men have had in the fifty years since Democracy set its powerful forces to work upon woman has been not their superior strength or skill or faithfulness or industry, but that woman has worked merely as a temporary expedient. She has tenaciously assumed that she would presently “quit work” and be supported by some man. This dream has been largely fanciful, though none the less potent for that. The woman, married, has usually found that she has not stopped working, but has undertaken a far more laborious and ever grudgingly paid occupation. The delusion has made her wages smaller. Who will not pay more to a worker who expects to go on working than to a worker who expects presently to stop work, and is meanwhile giving at least half her energy to another occupation, that of catching a husband? The delusion has also destroyed or impaired her ambition. Why struggle to rise in an occupation which one hopes and intends presently to abandon for another that is wholly different?

But latterly a host of women have been coming into conspicuous positions because ambition drove them there. They have begun to work for work’s sake. They have seen the fraud in the silly and shallow twaddle about “woman and the home”—as if for centuries the mothers of the men most useful to society had not been for the most part working women who could not, if they would, have pleaded child-bearing and nursery and housework in excuse for doing nothing to add to the family income. The “new woman” is not a slovenly drudge waiting irritably for the advent of a husband that she may become a tenement “sill-warmer” or a palace parasite. She works until she is married; she continues to work after she is married. And there is no shadow of a taint of pecuniary interest in the love and affection she gives.

Disregard the negligible few women of the plutocracy and its environs, as we have disregarded the unimportant few men of the same class, and looking at all over eight millions, you find that the American woman, like the American man, is developing in harmony with the ideal of Democracy. Democracy is no discriminator either among persons or between sexes. It respects the mothers of future generations as profoundly as it respects the fathers. And it has the same gifts for all—freedom, intelligence, the joy of work.

CHAPTER XVII
AS TO SUCCESS

It has often been said, and written, that we are about the most unhappy people on the face of the earth, that our unhappiness increases with our Democracy. That our unhappiness is caused by our Democracy. Democracy and discontent, despotism and discontent, constitutional monarchy and content—so runs the argument.