Surely the ideal toward which we must work is for the mother, during the period when she is bearing and rearing children, to be supported by the father of her children. Let her do the work meantime which will best care for her children, and at the same time conserve and strengthen her powers for the third period of her life.
This period, from fifty to seventy-five years, is now more shamefully wasted than any other of our national resources. If one attends a State federation of women's clubs one will find nearly every delegate of this age. They are women of mature understanding and of ripe judgment, still possessing abundant health and strength, and where relieved by economic conditions from the necessity of manual work, they have to live such irregular and uncertain relations to life as can be maintained by mothers-in-law, grandmothers, club secretaries, and presidents of town improvement societies. Remove all restrictions on woman's activity, and these strong matrons would vitalize our schools, give us decent municipal housekeeping, supervise the conditions under which girls and women work in shops and factories, and do much to clean up our politics. Debarred from direct power as they are, they are still making us decent in spite of ourselves.
For the future, then, it seems that we must accept working women in every path of life. We must remove all disabilities under which they labor, and at the same time protect them by special legislation as future wives and mothers. All girls must master some line of self-supporting work; and, except in the cases of those who have very special tastes and gifts, they should select work which can be interrupted, without too great loss, by some years of motherhood. During this time, the mother must be supported so that she can largely care for her own child, though she must also maintain outside interests through work, which will keep her in touch with the moving current of her time. Industries must be humanized and made fit for women. The last third of a woman's life must be freed from legal limitations and popular prejudices, so that we may secure these best years of her life for private and public service. And meantime, it is well to remember that every step we take in making this a fit world for woman to work in, makes it a fit world for her father, her brothers, her lover and her husband to work beside her.
VII
The Meaning of Political Life
It is a well-known fact that when words have been long and vigorously used they gather within and around themselves varied meanings. Some parts of these meanings are remnants of historic, and possibly outworn, experience; other parts are the result of more or less deliberate perversion under the stress of deep feelings aroused by opposition and fighting. This is especially the fate of words in any way associated with politics. Think how battered and useless for purposes of ordinary discussion "democrat" and "republican" or "socialist" have become in America!
In the struggle of the last fifty years over woman's suffrage, most of the words involved have undergone such transformations; and so many prejudices have become associated with them, that no one can think or speak clearly and fairly to-day in these terms. "Woman's Rights," "enfranchisement," "Votes for Women," "suffragette," "polls," "ballot," "political issues," and many other words, have gone through this destructive process.
To read some of the most popular literature on this subject one might imagine that women had all deserted home and fireside, babies and baking, and were lined up, struggling fiercely to deposit certain printed slips, called votes or ballots, dealing with esoteric mysteries understood only by men like Mr. Bryan or Mr. Roosevelt, in ballot-boxes. These receptacles are supposed to be behind, or very near, lawless saloons, where gangs of hoodlums are waiting to assault the bearers of these mysterious tickets. Thus Miss Seawell writes in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1910: "The trouble would begin with the mere attempt of women to deposit their ballots. A dozen ruffians at a single polling-place would prevent a single woman from depositing a single vote. There can be no doubt that this means would be used by the rougher element and that the polls would become a scene of preordained riot and disorder." Of course, such statements could not appear in a leading magazine, in a land where women have been voting quietly for many years, were it not for the perversity of the words which the author tries to use, but which really use her. In other periodicals, equally respectable, one learns that women, goaded on by the intolerable political tyranny of men, have agreed as one soul to advance, with ballots in their hands, and sweep graft and greed, drink and all other human wrongs, into the sea of oblivion forever. Of course, this is nonsense, or worse, and in this chapter I should like to turn away from this warfare, leaving even the battered and prejudiced-soaked words alone, as much as may be possible, and simply ask: What is political life, not as defined in books, but as actually lived by a self-respecting farmer or merchant of our acquaintance? What qualities does political life presuppose in a participant? How does its use affect him? What does it enable him to accomplish? What is the relation of a woman—not some militant or unsexed ogre, nor a female breeding animal in a harem, but our own sisters, wives and daughters as they really are—what is their relation to this mysterious process?
If one approaches the political life of our modern democracies in this simple spirit of inquiry it would seem that the first requisite for participation is the ability to form sound judgments concerning political matters; and all matters are now becoming political which affect the welfare of the community. Certainly the citizen cannot devise political machinery nor select candidates to work such machinery, much less "cast a ballot," until he knows what he wants done. What are some of the questions, then, on which he must form judgments?