The woman of to-morrow

by Helen M. Winslow

“The making of homes and cherishing those in them is not going out of fashion, and the club husband would be the first to agree to it.”

The club is meant, primarily, for all classes of women. The constitution of about every club in the land will tell you that it is banded together for the elevation of women in its own community and for the purpose of bringing them together for moral and social advancement—or words to that effect. If this means anything, it means that the butcher’s wife and the baker’s wife and the candlestick-maker’s wife are on a level in the club with the wives and daughters of millionaires, should the latter condescend to become members; though, for that matter, in these latter days some of our greatest millionaires are butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers, dignified by the names of pork-packers, biscuit producers and silver manufacturers. And yet in our clubs are a great many women who find it hard to make both ends meet. Many of these are quite as well educated as any member of the club to which they belong; others are not; but in any case the club idea places all on an equality, and it is in every club member’s power to contribute something to the permanent happiness of all the others.

There are some women to whom the club brings all of social life they ever know; indeed, in these days of hurry and worry this is coming to be more and more true of all of us. Therefore let us give out all the sunshine on club days that we possibly can. Let us then radiate sweetness and light, and cease from taking our pleasures too sadly or too seriously. And the paragrapher who looks to women’s clubs for material for his never-satisfied hopper, finds here the same attitude and converts it into cause for mirth. We should take life seriously, because it is a solemn thing; but on the other hand there is no need of letting our Puritanic inheritances of mind and training tinge all existence with gloom. When we set out to have a good time, let us have it. And let us have it all the time. Happiness is more a habit of the mind than anything else. If we keep ourselves in that mental frame, admitting nothing but the sunlight of existence, sunshine will become such a habit with us that we can no more help shedding sunlight around us than we can help breathing. Isn’t that worth while? And the club, where we come to meet our sisters who have the same kind of trials and difficulties as we do, is one of the places where we should not only seek to gather up sunshine, but to scatter it. For we cannot reap what we do not sow, nor reflect what is not in the soul.

Above all, let us cease here all sorts of petty criticism. The club should be so charged with the atmosphere of kindliness and good-will that those who come to it shall receive a new baptism of love for their fellow-creatures. Have you ever belonged to a club where the very spirit of things was so charged with wrangling and petty criticism and smothering hatred that you have gone home feeling that nothing but a Turkish bath and an old-fashioned revival prayer-meeting could ever get you clean again, body and soul? Alas, that there are such clubs and women enough in them to keep them alive. But if you or I belong to such an one, it is our duty first to try to improve matters, and failing in that, to resign membership in it. We owe it to our immortal souls not to smirch them with hatred and wrangling and ill-temper, whenever we can help it; and we usually can.

It is so easy to see the faults or the ridiculous side of other people. In the average club, the actual working force is seldom over ten per cent. of the membership. The thinking for the club is done by a few, while the remainder come in to reap the results of what has been prepared, often by actual “sweat of the brow” and almost the life-blood of that small remnant which constitutes the working force and is rewarded only by having its several names recorded as a committee. Would it not seem, then, that the least we could do—those of us who leave the work to others—is to be lenient to the shortcomings of the committee, if there seem to be any? It is so easy to criticise. The duty of extracting motes from other people’s eyes is very attractive, but there is excellent advice on the subject of neglecting the beam in our own eye which the average woman may well read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

If the club is not making us better women in every way, broader-minded and more liberal in our judgment towards the rest of the world, more tolerant of other people’s views, more fond of our home and more interesting to those who have to live with us in it, more hopeful of the future and less satisfied with our present mental and spiritual acquirements, more interested in the uplifting of humanity, yet less willing to cut off our home ties, more loving in our relations with each other, more tolerant of the failings of our fellow-members and more intolerant of gossip pertaining thereto; if the club does not mean all these things and more, then we would better give up our membership and take up the duties of home exclusively.

If we are not the more attractive at home for the broadening and developing influence of the club, then are we failing to grasp the significance of what the club should mean. If a woman comes home fresh and smiling from a club meeting, full of interest in matters outside the four walls of her home and ideas regarding them, she can do so much more for her family. The woman who was heard to say that she was saving her money to go and hear a performance of Mozart’s Twelfth Mass because that was the regiment her husband enlisted in, was not a club woman and had lacked the opportunities which the club affords for picking up knowledge on subjects which her previous education had lacked. We need more perfectly rounded and thoroughly developed characters, and that is exactly what the club should mean to us as individuals.

They say women have no sense of humor. At least, they—and, of course, it was a masculine “they”—said it in former times. How would it work to put more humor into our meetings? Say, have a funny programme once in a month or a winter? Look at the year books, for instance. The subjects in some are appallingly heavy: “Slavery—Its Rise and Extinction,” “Rise of Political Parties,” “Evils That Menace a Republic.” Two-thirds of the women attending come from homes where there is constant care and worry. They need lightening and heartening. They need a hearty laugh. On the contrary, everything is planned to “stimulate thought” and improve the mind. Why not have one afternoon a month devoted to everyone telling the very funniest thing she ever read, saw, or heard? Or have one member relate some mirth-provoking story? There will surely be some one who, like Artemus Ward, was so “patriotic as to sacrifice all his wife’s relations to the cause of liberty”; and the funniest things that happen are not always told. Sometimes because there is no one to appreciate them. Somebody suggests that “if any sedate member object to such levity she could have the next meeting of a grim character and discuss ‘Whether the increase of cremation would affect the price of pottery’ or ‘Should a funeral be held in the morning or the afternoon?’ Women’s clubs are a good thing and their price is above rubies, but put a few pickles and salads in your solid repast, and let the drawn lines of thought relax over a little bit of nonsense.”

Anyone who has appeared on the platform before women’s audiences, with a strain of humor showing through the talk, can appreciate their plaint that we do not respond quickly to satire or to mild “hits.” Wit must be sharp to catch the average woman. Why is it that we do not laugh more, and laugh more heartily? “Have we gotten the idea in some cobwebbed corner of our brains that it is wicked to be merry,” says one club-woman on this subject, “or are we indeed the ‘serious sex,’ so called, and hopelessly so; or is our humor, as Mr. Harry Thurston Peck says it is, ‘entirely superficial’—that is, put on for the occasion? No one questions that there is plenty of laughter, at least of smile, among women, but it lacks sincerity; it has not the earnest ring of genuine merriment. If we stop to question the reason why, and if we are scientifically inclined we cannot fail to do so, as a lack of humor assigns a race to a lower order of development, we find the answer to be one of two causes. First, women, as a whole, look at life in all its relations from an intensely personal standpoint. For example, if you ask one to admire a gown, a carpet or a picture, she will do so, and then add (as a rule) either that she has or did have one almost exactly like it. If you tell her of some personal experience, she usually grows impatient with the desire to relate a corresponding one of her own. She does not seem to be able to put herself out of the equation. For this reason, when anything genuinely ludicrous occurs, she must first think of her own relation to it, whether by any possibility the laugh can be turned against herself, and by this time the spontaneity of the laughter, its genuineness, has vanished. This, I find to be one cause. Another is her persistent clinging to the small burdens of life. Men, most of them, seem able to drop even very heavy business cares when they enter the home life; but woman too often carries these everywhere—in her pleasure excursions, to her afternoon teas; even, and perhaps more often than anywhere else, to her couch. One woman told me that she arranged all her plans and all her meals for the next day after she was in her bed at night. How, then, can women help being serious, when the mind is always heavily burdened, when it carries about with it an unconscious, but real, weight, which it never discards, and which never leaves it free and open to impressions?”

Once in a while you find a woman who does not, like the snail, carry her house on her back. The ability to cast it off is certainly an accomplishment which every one should cultivate, and the more she gets interested in outside affairs—world interests—the less likely she is to become narrowed. That there are still clubs which devote themselves to the pursuit of culture as obtained from encyclopædias and who take their mental pabulum from the mouths of babes and sucklings, and that there are still women who make a fetish of their clubs, erecting false standards of life until their homes are left unto them desolate, must be admitted. It is a significant fact, however, that women are being called upon to consider problems, civic and social, which require a broader training than it was possible for them to obtain a generation or more ago. This training the woman’s college and the woman’s club, when properly conducted, supply, the latter, especially, giving to women who have missed a college training the opportunity of keeping up intellectual life and of putting newly acquired knowledge to practical use in some line of economic endeavor or social service, for the day has not yet passed when the woman’s club may be styled the “middle-aged woman’s university.”