The woman of to-morrow

by Helen M. Winslow

The position of woman seems to be worrying a lot of people a great deal nowadays. Whether she is or is not psychologically inferior to man, whether “emancipation” is a good thing for her, whether it is better for her to vote intelligently or stay at home and knit stockings mechanically, whether she should be mentally and physically capable of supporting herself or be content to be the more or less beautiful appendage of some man; these are questions that are considered weighty enough to fill newspapers, magazines and even books with arguments pro and con. And woman continues to spell herself with a capital W.

Dyspeptic men and dyspeptic women with a literary tendency are rushing into print, and both long and short-haired logicians are taking to the platform in the vain endeavor to put woman where she belongs—although the exact location of that place has not been clearly determined nor concisely defined. And there is considerable doubt extant as to her remaining there, when the learned disputants have succeeded in putting her in the right spot. The modern woman seems to be more uncertain, coy and hard to please than those, even, that puzzled the poet.

But the most encouraging thing about it is the position of the average woman on these questions. The world is made up—let us devoutly thank Heaven—of average women, and it is the sanity of these that will save the situation. Nothing ever interested me more than the discussion at a State Federation Convention a few years ago on this very topic. One afternoon was given up entirely to the discussion of the position of woman—not by experts and psychological students, but by the reading and thinking average club women themselves. And it was indeed “happifying,” as the good old Methodist used to say, to behold the good sense and sweet reasonableness of these women. The erratic notions of Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman, the erotic ideas of Mme. Marholm, the vagaries of Olive Schreiner, and the dyspeptic pessimism of some of our recent novelists all came up for consideration, and it was with pious joy that I noted that the distorted views of woman in the economic and the domestic world have little weight with the average woman who reads and who has fallen into the pernicious but enjoyable habit of thinking for herself and forming her own conclusions.

It may be that what we are told is true and not one woman in five thousand is fit to bring up her own children, but it looks to me as if the aforesaid average woman with a mind-which-doesn’t-hurt-her-because-she-knows-how-to-use-it, belongs to a class which makes a serious matter of child-study when God sends her children. It may be that woman’s place is still at the loom and the spindle and the mending-basket, but judging from the average woman’s remarks she has other duties of more importance in the economic world in these days of machinery.

Once upon a time a woman, writing for a foreign review, bewailed the absence of serious concentrated thought among women, and advanced as the reason therefor their gregarious habits and crowded life, and their utter disability to apply to themselves the benefits of solitude. Women as a class do depend on each other or upon the men of their acquaintance for their opinions, whether on social or political themes.

And yet women are not, all of them, so absolutely without properly correlated opinions as certain writers would have us believe. That she is often defective in consecutive mental training derives from influences beginning with the embryo woman in her cradle. She is tended by a nurse who is not allowed to “turn her off” in the slightest degree. As soon as she can talk she is provided with a nursery governess and later with chaperones and companions, tutors and governesses, and is finally sent to boarding-school, where she lives, moves and has her being in “her set.” A boy may be taught to amuse himself before he walks. A boy may play alone and his elders are only too thankful if he will. When older, a boy may go off alone for delightful half days in the woods or follow the bent of his nature or his own sweet will.

But the girl imbibes with her mother’s milk an indefinite idea that she must not be alone. Whether it be the effect of injudicious nursery tales or the early development of her social nature, she is trained with a certain deference to that idea, and instead of a healthy, natural being, capable of standing on her own feet, intellectually and morally, she grows up, unavoidably, with an unconscious habit of leaning on others. Is this solely due to the unbiased woman-nature? May it not be attributed, as we say in New England, to her bringing up?

Sometimes she never experiences, in her sheltered and measured existence, any lack, mental or spiritual. Sometimes, indeed, this great universe with all its mighty forces of life and death and love and passion and hatred, is nothing to her but a pretty background for the display of fashions. But sooner or later comes to more women than are dreamed of in the philosophy of the world a great crisis, a time when human nature stands stripped of all false, meretricious pretences and the disillusionment of life comes upon her.

“There is scarcely,” says our review writer, “one man in a thousand who at some time in his life has not felt and indulged the impulse to step out from the rank and file of his familiars and contemporaries, and envisage his own nature. Not a man, worthy of the name, but has searched for and found himself—has borne out his own convictions, and wrestled through the long nights of his own youth with the stern-browed angel of some revelation.”

The same thing, we venture to assert, happens to thousands of women. The dreary time of disillusionment comes and the cutting contrast between the real and the ideal makes itself painfully felt. Friends die, hopes are shattered, the inexorable facts of life force themselves upon us and we awake from the golden dreams of early life. The more delicately organized a woman is the deeper the springs of truth in her lie, and the more is it a necessity of her nature that, when the spell is broken, she shall stand face to face with the inner meaning of life, that she shall search and find herself. Long nights are spent in passionate protest, in earnest struggling for light, in eager searching for truth. Call it morbid, unhealthy, if you will; you do not say so of man. Many a thoughtful, earnest woman of to-day, under whose calm demeanor no one suspects an extinct crater, dates the development of her intellectual self from just such battles, which resulted in the conquest of self and petty aims. The soul-writhings of such women in books are overdrawn and unnatural. Not one woman in a thousand would be guilty of writing such self-accusing, self-revealing scenes; but hundreds of women readers recognize the state of mind, and although they may not have writhed bodily all night on the floor like some heroines of recent novels, they have bidden, after reading of such, long forgotten ghosts to be quiet.