The truth of the matter is that there is a vast number of men of all races who are fit to be nothing but servants, and are so misplaced in other positions where habit or vanity has put them, that they fail far more constantly than women. All "men" are not real men by any means. They are not fitted to play a man's part in life, and many of the things they attempt are far better done by strong determined women, who have had the necessary advantages, and the character to ignore the handicap of sex.
I can conceive of a household where a well-trained man cooks, does the "wash," waits on the table, sweeps, and if the mistress has a young child, or is indolent and given to the rocking-chair and a novel-a-day, makes the beds without a wrinkle. He may lack ambition and initiative, the necessary amount of brains to carry him to success in any of the old masculine jobs, but he inherits the thoroughness of the ages that have trained him, and, if sober, rides the heavy waves of his job like a cork. I will venture to say that a man thus employed would finish his work before eight P.M. and spend an hour or two before bed-time with his girl or at his club.
Many a Jap in California does the amount of work I have described, and absorbs knowledge in and out of books during his hours of leisure. Sometimes they do more than I have indicated as possible for the white man. Energetic boys, who want to return to Japan as soon as possible, or, mayhap, buy a farm, make a hundred dollars a month by getting up at five in the morning to wash a certain number of stoops and sweep sidewalks, cook a breakfast and wash up the dinner dishes in one servantless household, the lunch dishes in another, clean up generally in another, cook the dinner, wait on the table, clean up in still another. As white men are stronger they could do even more, and support a wife in an intensive little flat where her work would be both light and spiritually remunerative. Domestic service would solve the terrible problem of life for thousands of men, and it would coincidentally release thousands of girls from the factory, the counter, and the exhausting misery of a "home" that never can be their own. At night he could feel like a householder and that he lived to some purpose. If he is inclined to complain that such a life is not "manly," let him reflect that as he is not first-rate anyhow, and never can compete with the fully equipped, he had best be philosophical and get what comfort out of life he can. Certainly the increased economic value of thousands of men, at present slaving as underpaid clerks and living in hall bedrooms, would thin the ranks of the most ancient of all industries, if, according to our ardent reformers, they are recruited from the ranks of the lonely servant-girl, the tired shop-girl, and the despairing factory hand.
III
For it is largely a question of muscle and biology.
I have stated elsewhere that I believe in equal suffrage, if only because women are the mothers of men and therefore their equals. But I think there are several times more reasons why American women at least should not overwork their bodies and brains and wear themselves out trying to be men, than why it is quite right and fitting they should walk up to the polls and cast a vote for men who more or less control their destinies.
To digress a moment: When it comes to the arts, that is quite another matter. If a woman finds herself with a talent (I refrain from such a big word as genius, as only posterity should presume to apply that term to any one's differentiation from his fellows), by all means let her work like a man, take a man's chances, make every necessary sacrifice to develop this blessed gift; not only because it is a duty but because the rewards are adequate. The artistic career, where the impulse is genuine, furnishes both in its rewards and in the exercise of the gift itself far more happiness, or even satisfaction, than husband, children, or home. The chief reason is that it is the supreme form of self-expression, the ego's apotheosis, the power to indulge in the highest order of spiritual pride, differentiation from the mass. These are brutal truths, and another truth is that happiness is the universal goal, whatever form it may take, and whatever form human hypocrisy may compel it to take, or even to deny. Scientific education has taught us not to sacrifice others too much in its pursuit. That branch of ancestral memory known as conscience has morbid reactions.
To create, to feel something spinning out of your brain, which you hardly realize is there until formulated on paper, for instance; the adventurous life involved in the exercise of any art, with its uncertainties, its varieties, its disappointments, its mistakes; the fight, the exaltations, the supreme satisfactions—all this is the very best life has to offer. And as art is as impartial as a microbic disease, women do achieve, individually, as much as men; sometimes more. If their bulk has not in the past been as great, the original handicaps, which women in general, aided by science and a more enlightened public, are fast shedding, alone were to blame. Certainly as many women as men in the United States are engaged in artistic careers; more, if one judged by the proportion in the magazines.
Although I always feel that a man, owing to the greater freedom of his life and mental inheritances, has more to tell me than most women have, and I therefore prefer men as writers, still I see very little difference in the quality of their work. Often, indeed, the magazine fiction (in America) of the women shows greater care in phrase and workmanship than that of the men (who are hurried and harried by expensive families), and often quite as much virility.
No one ever has found life a lake. Life is a stormy ocean at best, and if any woman with a real gift prefers to sink rather than struggle, or to float back to shore on a raft, she deserves neither sympathy nor respect. Women born with that little tract in their brain sown by Nature with bulbs of one of the arts, may conquer the world as proudly as men, although not as quickly, for they rouse in disappointed or apprehensive men the meanest form of sex jealousy; but if they have as much courage as talent, if they are willing to dedicate their lives, not their off hours, to the tending of their rich oasis in the general desert of mind, success is theirs. Biological differences between the sexes evaporate before these impersonal sexless gifts (or whims or inadvertencies) of conservative Nature.