And this conviction has urged women to transform their social work from an often injudicious “Christian” compassion into an organised charity in order to anticipate and prevent need and to facilitate self-help. But also in this new phase of their philanthropic work many women of the middle class are arriving at an understanding of the necessity of a social reform in accordance with socialistic demands. A larger number of women join the suffragist movement, less owing to individual demands for rights than out of despair over the hopeless social work to which their feeling of solidarity still impels them. For without suffrage (this they experience every day) their work of relief is like seed sown in a morass.
A by-product of the social relief work is that many single women have found, in voluntary social work, an occupation and often also, in remunerative social work, a livelihood; in both cases through service in which certain feminine qualities can be of value.
Yes, exactly in the above mentioned fields of work, which so often bring the modern woman in contact with the finest and most delicate as well as with the coarsest and hardest sides of life; which place her before conflicts of the most exceptional as well as of the most universally human kind—there woman has nothing new to give except her motherliness. That means protecting tenderness, gentle patience, glad readiness to help, the interest embracing each one in particular, the fine and quick vibration in contact with the feelings of others which we, in a word, call “tact.” If, however, a woman has not been endowed with motherliness, or has none remaining, then she reverts to impersonal devotion to duty, hard formalism, dry routine; then all the talk about the social significance of woman’s entrance into the field of medicine or jurisprudence or the ministry or social work remains only empty phrases. In all these spheres a good man is much more valuable than a hard woman. And that woman’s hands can be rough, woman’s eyes cold, woman’s soul base or cruel—this many suffering and crushed, sorrowing and sinful, small and defenceless have already experienced. If woman is to keep her superiority as the alleviator of the suffering of others, the protector of others, solicitous for the welfare of others, then she must not only acquire certain universal human qualities in which man is often superior to her; she must also carefully guard and cultivate the best capacities which her sex gained in and through the hundred thousand years’ activity as that half of mankind which created the home and reared the children.
Although the woman movement has multiplied and extended the social relief work of woman in innumerable directions, still it has not yet opened to her the field in which formerly deaconesses, and much earlier still nuns, were engaged. But what is new as result of the woman movement is that more and more single cultured women now devote themselves to the occupations of governess, nurse, midwife, and kindred callings; as well as that more special training is demanded for these vocations to which women turned earlier with downright criminal carelessness.
Simultaneously with the need of the middle-class woman for new fields of work, came the extraordinarily rapid development of commerce and business, which occasioned the need of new working forces. Feminine honesty, orderliness, and devotion to duty—alas, also her modest demands of compensation—made the state as well as private employers favourably disposed to employ women in increasingly greater numbers in the different branches of commerce: in the post-office, railroads, telegraph, telephone, as also in banks, counting houses, agencies or stores, as secretaries, stenographers, and clerks. In cases where the wife or daughter was the husband’s or father’s assistant such work then received a personal interest, and what woman’s labour in this form can signify for national wealth can be seen in France especially. But as a rule no real joy in work could illuminate the days and years of the generation of women who in all these vocations have grown gray and at best have been pensioned. Nevertheless, in these offices one always sees fresh faces bending over the desk to fade away in their turn.
Lack of courage or means often deters the European woman from more independent business activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom to choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant examples of successful undertakings of women, in photography, hotel or boarding-house management, dress-making, etc. In America, on the contrary, there is no masculine occupation, from that of butcher and executioner to real estate speculator and stock-exchange gambler that women have not practised.
But while the women of the older generation were thankful if only they succeeded in obtaining “a work and a duty,” however monotonous and wearing it might be, the will of the younger generation for a pleasurable labour has fortunately increased. Partly alone, partly co-operatively, women began to venture into the applied arts, handwork, farming, or kindred work. And since corresponding special training schools quickly arise to meet the awakening of the desire for a vocation, we can hope for good results for these, as yet rare, enterprising spirits. For special education is, in our time, the essential condition of success, especially in agriculture, where the women often succeeded without other help than their personal efficiency and the “farmer’s customary practice.”
Since I know America only at second hand I have no claim to a final judgment regarding the influence of business life and modern methods of production upon the soul life of woman. In the women who have succeeded in securing affluence through commercial life one finds probably the same antichristian effects of this life as among men. Recently in America a number of men and women endeavoured to live for fourteen days, as Christ would have lived. The decision of most of those who were engaged in business life was that either they must cease to follow in the footsteps of Christ—or must resign their positions. And since, with due consideration for the number of woman employers in America, many of these experiences must surely have been made under feminine supervision, the experiment does not lack a certain significance for the forming of a judgment in the direction referred to.
The zeal of women’s rights advocates to open to women all of man’s fields of labour, and not only this but to prove that these fields are as well adapted to woman as man—this zeal has unfortunately had as result that the woman movement has turned the aptitude of many women in a wrong direction and has fettered a great amount of woman’s misused working power to thankless or galling tasks. But, on the other hand, how the woman movement has elevated woman’s work, since it has raised the standard of qualification in many fields and increased the feeling of responsibility in all! How it has increased the honour of work and the capacity for organisation, developed the judgment, stimulated the will power, strengthened the courage! It has awakened innumerable slumbering talents, given freedom of action to innumerable shackled powers. And thus it has transformed hosts of women of the upper class, formerly the most useless burden of earth, into productive members of society, instead of mere consumers; made them self-supporting instead of dependent, joyful instead of weary of life.