A New Atmosphere

by Gail Hamilton

III.

I do not design to sketch any Utopia for woman; but there are certain things which can be done in this world, in this country, in this generation, at this moment,—simple, practical, practicable measures, which can be accomplished without any change in laws, without any palpable revolution or disruption of society, but by which women shall be relieved of the indignity that is constantly put upon them, even by the society which considers itself, and which perhaps is, the most civilized and chivalric in the world.

First, every man who has daughters is either able to support them or he is not. If he is, he ought to do it in a way that shall make them feel as little trammelled as possible. He should so treat them, from first to last, that they shall feel that they are dear and pleasant to him, his delight and ornament. So far from wishing to be rid of them, he finds his balm and solace and zest of life in their society, their interests, and their ministrations. While he contemplates the contingency of their marriage, and makes what preparations such contingency may require, it should be well understood that he contemplates it only as a contingency; and that all his wishes and hopes will be best met by their happiness, whether it is to be promoted by a life away from him or with him. If they are so deficient in amiability, capability, or adaptability that his home cannot be comfortable with them in it,—that, so far from being a reason why he should be eager to part with them, is the strongest reason why he should earnestly endeavor to keep them with him. Almost without fail, their faults lie at his door; and it is just and right that, if any home is to be made miserable by them, it should be the one which has made them miserific. On the other hand, if they wish to go from his roof to follow paths of their own, he ought to aid and encourage them as far as lies in his power. It matters not that he is able and willing to supply their every want. He is not able, if they have immortal wants,—wants which the parental heart and purse cannot satisfy,—want of activity, want of a plan, want of some work which shall engage their young and eager energies. However liberal, kind, and fond he may be, in their father’s house their position must be subordinate, and it may well happen that they shall wish to taste the sweets of an independent, self-helping, self-directing life. They wish to feel their own hands at the helm; they wish to know what responsibility and foresight and planning mean. They are drawn by a strong, inexplicable attraction in certain directions; and as he values not only their happiness, but their salvation,—their love for him, their health of body and mind,—he shall give them ample room and verge enough. He shall not abate one jot or tittle of fatherly affection. He shall not attempt to persuade them from their inclination till he finds persuasion of no avail, and then in a fit of angry petulance bid them go, and leave them to their own destruction. He shall give them such aid as can be made available. He shall surround them with his love, if not with his care. He shall, above all, show them that his arms are always open to them, if through weakness or weariness they faint by the way. His sympathy and protection, and fatherly cherishing, shall be new every morning and fresh every evening. If they quickly tire in their new paths, they will come back to him with stronger love and faith. Their life abroad will have only endeared their happy home. The enlargement of their experience will have intensified their appreciation of their blessings. If their call was indeed from above, and their first feeble explorations opened for them a new world, through which they learn to walk with ever firmer tread, they will return from time to time to lay at his feet with unutterable gratitude the treasures which he enabled them to discover. He will know that he has contributed to the world’s wealth, and his happy children will rise up and call him blessed.

But if they do not incline to such a life, he shall not force them, however strongly he may be persuaded of its propriety, wisdom, and dignity. Because they are obliged to grow under the whole superincumbent weight of society, he must not be severe if they attain but a partial growth. With boys the preponderance of influence is overwhelmingly on the side of an active, positive life. With girls, it is against it. If a boy does not do something in the world, he must show cause for it; a girl must show cause if she does. Therefore, if the father is not able, by precept and persuasion, to induce his daughters to embrace an active life, he must lay it to society, and do the next best thing by protecting them as far as possible from the resultant evils of their situation; not quite all to society either, for, as a general thing, if his own precept and example have been right, his children will be right; the influence of father and mother, by its nearness, intensity, and continuity, very often more than balances the superior bulk of society’s influence. Parents say things which they ought to mean, and which they wish to be considered to mean, and which they suppose they do mean, but which they are really the farthest in the world from meaning, and then marvel that their children should disregard their instructions and go wrong; but such instructions are but as the dust in the balance. The ideal which they actually, though perhaps unconsciously, hold up to their children, is the model upon which the children form themselves. What they are, not what they say, is the paramount influence. So if a father heartily believes in womanly work, his daughters will hardly fail to be woman-workers.

If a father is not able to support his daughters in a manner compatible with comfort and refinement, he should see to it that they have some way opened in which they can do it, or help do it, for themselves, in a manner consistent with their dignity and self-respect. It is very rarely that a human being is born without possible power in some one direction. The field which is traversable to women is much more circumscribed than that which is traversed by men, yet I have somewhere read a statement that the number of employments in which women of the United States are actually engaged is, I think, greater than five hundred. If this is so, or anything nearly so, men surely have no need to “marry off” their daughters as an economical measure. Out of five hundred occupations, a woman can certainly choose one which, though not perhaps that which enlists her enthusiasm, is yet better than the debasement of herself which an indifferent marriage necessitates. It is better to be not wholly well-placed than to be wholly ill-placed. Indeed, there are many chances in favor of the assumption that she may find even a suitable employment. Literature and art are open to her on equal terms with men. Teaching is free to her, with the disadvantage of being miserably, shamefully, wickedly underpaid, both as regards the relative and intrinsic value of her work; but this is an arrangement which does not degrade her, only the men who employ her. Many mechanical employments she is at perfect liberty to acquire, and the greater delicacy of her organization gives her a solid advantage over her masculine competitors. In factories, in printing-offices, and in all manner of haberdashers’ shops, she is quite at home; and this branch of trade she ought to monopolize, for surely a man is as much out of his sphere in holding up a piece of muslin at arm’s length, and expatiating on its merits to a bevy of women, as a woman is in the pulpit or before the mast. Especially do private houses invite her over all the country. The whole land groans under inefficient domestic assistance; and if healthy, intelligent, well-behaved American girls would be willing to work in kitchens which they do not own one half as hard as most women work in kitchens which they do own, thousands of doors would fly open to them. There is a foolish pride and prejudice which rises up against “going out to service.” But everybody in this world, who is not a cumberer of the ground, is out at service. If it is true service and well performed, one thing is as honorable as another. The highest plaudit mortal can hope to receive is, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” It is the absence of moral dignity and character, not, as is often supposed, its presence, which causes this reluctance. A nobleman ennobles his work. A king among basket-makers is none the less a king. How women can be so enamored of the needle as to choose to make a pair of cotton drilling drawers, with buckles, button-holes, straps, and strings, for four and one sixth cents, or fine white cotton shirts with fine linen “bosoms” for sixteen cents apiece, rather than go into a handsome house in the next street to make the beds, and scour the knives, and iron the clothes for a dollar and a half a week,[1] besides board and rent, I do not understand. That so many are ready to brave the din of machinery, and the smells of a factory for ten hours a day, with only a great, dreary, unhomelike boarding-house to go to at night, while there are so very few, if any, who are willing to preside over a comfortable and plentiful kitchen, with at least a possibility of home comforts, pleasant association, and true appreciation, is equally inexplicable.

But enough has been said to show, that, if women have a desire, or are under the necessity, of getting an honest living, ways and means may be found; not so stimulating, not so lucrative, not so varied as might be desired, but honest and honorable. Girls, however, make the mistake of rushing pell-mell into school-houses, as if that were the only respectable path to independence. I heard a man the other day speaking about the High School of his native city. It was a good school,—he had nothing to say against its conduct,—it gave girls a good education; and yet he sometimes thought it did more harm than good. Every year a class was graduated, and they were all ladies and did not want to work, but must all teach, and there were no schools for so many; what could be done with them? It was an evil that seemed to be growing worse every year. The implied grievance was, that educated women were a drug in the market; and the implied remedy, that girls should be left more uncultivated that they might be turned to commoner uses. I pass over that accurate knowledge of things shown in the unconscious contrast between working and teaching,—over the gross utilitarianism implied in both grievance and redress,—simply remarking, that, if the excess of supply over demand would justify the breaking up of High Schools, the domestic education of this generation should be largely discontinued for the same reason, and that in fact there seems to be no real and adequate resource, except to manage with girl babies as you do with kittens, save the fifth and drown the rest,—to say that girls do very wrong in regarding teaching as the sole or the chief honorable employment. That occupation is the one for them to which a natural taste calls them, no matter what may be its rank in society. In fact, let it not be forgotten that society looks with a degree of disfavor on any remunerative employment for women. To be entirely beyond the reach of cavil, they must be consumers, and not producers; and since, to turn into producers will forfeit somewhat their caste, let them make capital out of the rural and remote adage, that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and while they are about it, follow the thing that good is to them. If girls of wealth and standing, who also possess character and decision, would act upon their principles when they have them, and follow the lead of their tastes when their taste leads them into a milliner’s shop, or a watch factory, or a tailor’s room, they would do much more than satisfy their own consciences. They would do a service to their sex, and through their sex to the other, and so to the whole world, which would outweigh whatever small sacrifice it might cost them. For the world is so constituted that to him that hath shall be given. If he have power, he shall have still more. Those who are independent of the world’s sufferance are tolerably sure to get it. Let a poor girl go to work, and it is nothing at all. She is obliged to do it, and society does not so much as turn a look upon her; but let a girl go out from her brown-stone five-story house, from the care and attendance of servants, to work for three or five hours a day, because she honestly believes that the accident of wealth does not relieve her from moral responsibility, and because, of all forms of labor practicable to her, that seems the one to which she is best adapted, and immediately there is a commotion. The brown-stone friends are shocked and scandalized, which is probably the best thing that could happen to them. Desperate cases can only be electrified back into life. But it is the first girl alone that will cause a shock. The second will make but a faint sensation. The third will be quite commonplace, and when things come to that pass, that if a woman wishes to do a thing she can do it, and that is the end of it, there is little more to be desired in that line.

I know a young lady, the only daughter of a distinguished family, with abundant means at her command, with parents whose great happiness it is to promote hers,—a young lady who has only to fancy what a nice thing it must be to live in a bird’s-nest on a tree-top, and immediately the carpenters come and build her a bower in the tallest tree that overlooks the sea. This young lady has a strong inclination to surgery, a most perverted and unwomanly taste, of course; but so long as it is a womanly weakness to break one’s arms, perhaps it is as well that some woman should be unwomanly enough to set them. At any rate, there was the taste; nobody put it there, and something must be done about it. Being the sensible daughter of sensible parents, who looked upon tastes as hints of powers, instead of disregarding this hint and devoting her life to her garden, making calls, and a forced and feeble piano-worship,—all very nice things, but not quite exhaustive of immortal capacities,—she set herself down to the study of surgery and medicine. It was no superficial and sensational whim. Year after year, month after month, week after week, showed no abatement of enthusiasm. On the contrary, her interest grew with her growing knowledge. She left without regret, without any weak regrets, her luxurious home for the secluded and severe student’s life, and by patient and laborious application made herself master of the science. I look upon her almost as an apostle, though she is very far from taking on apostolic airs. She quietly pursues the even tenor of her way as if it were the beaten track. But in doing this she does ten thousand times more. She opens the path for a host of feet less strong than hers.

But one great obstacle in the way of woman’s attaining strength is her lack of perseverance. Of the many pursuits possible to women, few are embraced to any great extent, because girls are said to be, and probably are, unwilling to bestow upon a trade or a profession the study and thought which are necessary to insure skill. But this is a result as well as a cause, and must be removed by the removal of the cause. Promotion and political preferment shine before a man as a reward for whatever eminence of character or intelligence he may attain. His business is a separate department, and dispenses its separate reward. The first of these is entirely, and the second partially, wanting to women. A female assistant in a high school, a woman of education, refinement, accomplishments, tact, and sense, receives six hundred dollars, and if she stays six hundred years she will receive no more. A male assistant, fresh from a college or a normal school, thoroughly unseasoned, without elegance of manners, or dignity of presence, or experience, teaching only temporarily, with a view to the pulpit, or the bar, or a professorship, receives a thousand dollars. His thousand is because he is a man. Her six hundred is because she is a woman. Her little finger may be worth more to the school than his whole body, but that goes for nothing. In a certain “college” I wot of, the “Professors” have a larger salary than the “Preceptresses,” who perform double the amount of labor, and without any hope of promotion. Female assistants in a grammar school receive three or four hundred dollars where the male principal has ten or twelve hundred, and where the difference of salary bears no proportion to the difference of care and labor. No matter how assiduously they may devote themselves to their duties, nor how successful they may be in results, they have attained the maximum. Worse than this: since the increase of prices consequent upon the war, teachers’ salaries have been increased; but where two hundred dollars have been added to the salary of the male principal, only twenty-five have been added to those of the female assistants: so that the man’s salary is sixteen per cent higher, while the woman’s is only six per cent higher. This is done in Massachusetts. One excuse is, that it does not cost a woman so much to live as it costs a man. It costs a woman just as much to live as it does a man. If men would be willing to practise the small economies that women practise, they could live at no greater expense. There are some things in which women have the advantage; there are others in which it lies with the man. A woman’s calico gown does not cost so much as a man’s broadcloth coat, but her dress, the wardrobe through, costs just as much as his. He can be decent on just as small a sum as she. Another excuse is, that men have a family to support. I suppose, then, that women never have families to support. No female teacher ever has a widowed mother or an invalid father to assist, or brothers and sisters to educate. No widow ever had recourse to the school-room to provide bread for her fatherless children. Or if such things ever happen, the authorities make adequate provision for it. The school committee, of course, before it assigns the salary inquires into these background facts, and acts accordingly. The rich girl has indeed but a small income from her teaching, but the poor girl is paid according to the number of people dependent upon her, and the unmarried man is confined to narrower fortunes.