Mobilizing Woman-Power

by Harriot Stanton Blatch

This Adamistic emotion takes command at the crisis, for when human beings are suddenly faced with a new and agitating situation, primitive ideas seize them. Mother, it is true, did create the goods for immediate consumption, and so the sons of Adam, in a spirit of admiration, doffing their helmets, so to speak, to the primitive woman, turn in this time of stress and call confidently upon Eve's daughters to create and save. The confidence is touching, but perhaps the feminine reaction will not be, and perchance ought not to be just such as Adam expects.

Women have passed in aspiration, and to some extent in action, out of the ultra-individualistic stage of civilization.

The food propaganda reflects the hiatus in Adam's thought. I have looked over hundreds of publications issued by the agricultural departments and colleges of the various States. They tell housewives what to "put into the garbage pail," what to "keep out of the garbage pail," what to substitute for wheat, how to make soap, but, with a single exception, not a word issued suggests to women any saving through group action.

This exception, which stood out as a beacon light in an ocean of literature worthy of the Stone Age, was a small pamphlet issued by the Michigan Agricultural College on luncheons in rural schools. Sound doctrine was preached on the need of the children for substantial and warm noon meals, and the comparative ease and economy with which such luncheons could be provided at the school house. Children can of course be better and more cheaply fed as a group than as isolated units supplied with a cold home-prepared lunch box. And yet with the whole machinery of the state in his hands, Adam's commissions, backed by the people's money, goad mother on to isolated endeavor. She plants and weeds and harvests. She dries and cans, preserves and pickles. Then she calculates and perchance finds that her finished product is not always of the best and has often cost more than if purchased in the open market.

It may be the truest devotion to our Allies to challenge the individualistic rôle recommended by Adam to mother, for it will hinder, not help, the feeding of the world to put women back under eighteenth century conditions. Food is short and expensive because labor is short. And even when the harvest is ripe, the saving of food cannot be set as a separate and commendable goal, and the choice as to where labor shall be expended as negligible. It is a prejudiced devotion to mother and her ways which leads Adam in his food pamphlets to advise that a woman shall sit in her chimney corner and spend time peeling a peach "very thin," when hundreds of bushels of peaches rot in the orchards for lack of hands to pick them.

Just how wide Adam's Eve has opened the gate of Eden and looked out into the big world is not entirely clear, but probably wide enough to glimpse the fact that all the advice Adam has recently given to her runs counter to man's method of achievement. Men have preached to one another for a hundred years and more and practiced so successfully the concentration in industry of unlimited machinery with a few hands, that even mother knows some of the truths in regard to the creation of wealth in the business world, and she is probably not incapable of drawing a conclusion from her own experience in the transfer of work from the home to the factory.

If they are city dwellers, women have seen bread and preserves transferred; if farm dwellers, they have seen the curing of meat and fish transferred, the making of butter and cheese. They know that because of this transfer the home is cleaner and quieter, more people better fed and clothed, and the hours of the factory worker made shorter than those "mother used to work." With half an eye women cannot fail to note that the labor which used to be occupied in the home in interminable hours of spinning, baking and preserving, has come to occupy itself for regulated periods in the school, in business, in factory or cannery. And lo, Eve finds herself with a pay envelope able to help support the quieter, cleaner home!

All this is a commonplace to the business man, who knows that the evolution has gone so far that ten percent of the married women of America are in gainful pursuits, and that capital ventured on apartment hotels brings a tempting return.

But the Adamistic theory is based on the dream that women are contentedly and efficiently conducting in their flats many occupations, and longing to receive back into the life around the gas-log all those industries which in years gone by were drawn from the fireside and established as money making projects in mill or work-shop. And so Adam addresses an exhortation to his Eve: "Don't buy bread, bake it; don't buy flour, grind your own; don't buy soap, make it; don't buy canned, preserved, or dried food, carry on the processes yourself; don't buy fruits and vegetables, raise them."

Not a doubt seems to exist in Adam's mind as to the efficiency of functioning woman-power in this way. According to the Adamistic theory, work as mother used to do it is unqualifiedly perfect. This flattering faith is naturally balm to women's hearts, and yet there are skeptics among them. When quite by themselves women speculate as to how much of the fruit and vegetables now put up in the home will "work."