They share with man the joy of work, the desire of creation, delight in beauty, ideas, and freedom in love. Nothing would be more unwelcome to them than possible consequences of their “love,” which passes from one relation to another, with a growing sense of emptiness, fatigue, and prostration. Unfruitfulness in every respect, that is their lot and their condemnation; for life has no use for the solitary unfruitful. Sometimes indeed they are not even capable of continuing to live—only to prove again and again that their soul cannot love, cannot create, cannot suffer, and has no other will but to free itself from the tree of life like a damaged bud, a spoilt fruit.
The right to an exceptional destiny belongs only to one whose happiness it provides for; in other words, one whom it places in such an agreement between the needs of his own life and the surrounding conditions that the powers of the individual thus attain their highest possible development. And as this is seldom the case when the individual creates for himself a position which places him in conflict with society, no thoughtful person can thus refer to an exceptional destiny the majority of young women now oppressed by compulsory labour, who wish to improve their lot. The most immediate possibility to begin with is to improve the character and conditions of their labour.
Women must be more eager to discover or invent for themselves departments of work which will give them the opportunity of expressing something of their feminine nature, their human personality. It is one of the gladdening signs of the times that this is beginning to be done. Thus, for instance, in Denmark a distinguished lady mathematician—determined by precisely the reasons given above—has abandoned her science and become the first female inspector of factories in Scandinavia. Thus in Germany a lady chemist, for the same reasons, has chosen the same career. A lady lawyer in the same country is devoting herself entirely to the protection of children; another—in France—to the profession of advocate for the assistance of poor women. But there are still to be found far too many women whose fortunate situation has given them free choice in their work and who, nevertheless, have sought the profession which offers them the surest income or the largest pension, not the most liberal use of their personal powers.
But even the possibility of the choice belongs to exceptional ability or exceptional circumstances. The majority of women, who must work or wish to work, have difficulty in finding a calling which really gives them a backbone, not merely a stick to hold them up. To render possible a greater organic connection between woman and her work, nothing is more necessary than a business and professional agency or exchange, to which reports would be sent from different places as to local needs of practical or ideal work, and then, in connection therewith, a new kind of mortgage bank, but one in which the mortgages would be upon young women’s courage, industry, and invention; a bank, in fact, which would advance on easy terms of repayment the loans which would be necessary to enable these at present unutilised assets to be invested in the wealth of the nation. The sum of happiness of unmarried women would rise if their creative instinct were thus at least directed into a strong and healthy activity, by means of which they could in some measure satisfy their need of having something to care for, of evoking around them comfort and beauty.
No fund would be more worthy of the subscriptions of enlightened patrons than such a one as this.
It is important, again, that all those women who are forced to continue working for wages should enter into the social question at least as much as is necessary to make them understand the duty of solidarity and the need of organisation if they would obtain the higher wages, the shorter hours, the summer holiday, and the better conditions in other respects which they must win in order to preserve in some degree their spiritual and bodily powers and with them that measure of joy in life which everyone may thus possess. The first condition for this is that girls who live with their parents should cease to take work at other rates of pay than those which the wholly self-supporting can live on; and that women in general should cease to think themselves meritorious merely because they work—without troubling about the harm their underpaid labour may do to the whole community.
But it is not only the will to elevate their own lives, but above all a more lively feeling for social organisation as a whole that these working women need. Their personal demands for education, rest, beauty, love, motherhood, must be placed in connection with those of everyone else, so that they may begin to claim also for others what they desire for themselves. Instead of making their own existence poorer by unfortunate experiments, they ought to fill the souls of other women with their dreams of a more beautiful life. And to be able to do this they must be constantly active and on the watch, giving and taking on every hand.
Thus innumerable little streams swell the flood of wills, which shall one day remove the old landmarks between the power to wish and the compulsion to renounce. Thus shall the woman deprived of love be able to forget her own little lot in the destiny of the many, and in spite of the limitations of her own life to feel that she lives by feeling the beat of humanity’s heart in her own.