The Business of Being a Woman

by Ida M. Tarbell

Changes she fears. She sees them as disturbers of her plans and her ideals. But the changes will not stay. They gather about her retreat, beat at the doors, creep in at the windows, win her husband and children from her very arms. The home on which she depended to keep them becomes impotent. While she stands an implacable guardian of a form of truth, truth has moved on, broadened its outlook, and clothed itself in new expressions.

It is entirely understandable that the woman who sees herself left behind with her dead gods should cry out against change as the ruin of her hopes. It is equally understandable that those who find themselves adrift should doubt the home as an institution. At the bottom of the revolt of thousands of our "uneasy women" of to-day lies this doubt. The home failed them, and with the logic of limited experience they cast it out of their calculations.

But the home is one of the unescapable facts of nature and society—unescapable because the child demands it. One of the earliest convictions of the child is that he has a right to a home. To him it appears as the great necessity. He cannot see himself outside of it. To be at large in the world throws him into panic. The sacrifices and pains very young children suffer uncomplainingly, particularly in great cities and factory towns, is a pathetic enough demonstration of what the word means to them. Mere children by the hundreds support families terrified by the thought of their collapse. The orphan forever dreams of the day when a home will be found for him. The child whose parents seek freedom, leaving him to school or servants, never fails to nourish a sense of injustice. Whatever one generation may decide as to the futility or burdensomeness of the home, the oncoming child will force its return.

To keep this permanent place abreast with growing truth, that is the obligation of the woman. It is the failure to do this that produces what we may call the homeless daughter; that girl who loved and often served to the point of folly, finds herself in a group where none of the imperative needs the day has awakened in her are met.

One of the first of these needs is for what we call "economic independence." The spirit of our day and of our system of government is personal, material independence for all. Under the old régime the girl had her economic place. The family was a small community. It provided for most of its own wants, hence the girl must be taught household arts and science, all of the fine traditional knowledge and skill which made, not drudges, but skilled managers, skilled cooks and needlewomen, skilled hostesses and nurses. She had a business to learn under the old régime, and there was an authority, often severely enforced no doubt, which made her learn it well. There was the same appraising of the efficiency of the girl for her business there was of the boy for his.

The girl of to-day rarely has any such systematic training for the material side of her business, nor is a dignified place provided for her in well-to-do families. Her place is parasitical and demoralizing. Take the young girl who has been what we call "educated"; that is, one who has gone through college and has not found a talent which she is eager to develop. The spirit of the times makes her less keen for marriage, puts no feeling of obligation of marriage upon her. She finds herself in a home which is not regarded as a serious industrial undertaking. Things go on more or less accidentally, according to traditions or conventions. Her ideas of scientific management, if she has any, are treated as revolutionary. Her help is not needed. There is no place for her.

The daughters of the very poor often have better fortune than she in this respect. They, from very early years, have known that they were necessary to the family. Almost invariably they accept heavy and sometimes cruel burdens cheerfully, even proudly. It is the pride of knowing themselves important to those whom they love. One of the difficult things to combat in enforcing the laws which forbid children under fourteen working, is the child's desire to help. He may hate the hardship, but at least there is in his lot none of that hopeless sense of futility which comes over the girl of high spirit when she realizes she has no practical value in the group to which she belongs. "Not needed"—that is one of the tragic experiences of the young girl in the well-to-do family. To save herself, to meet the truth of her day which has taken hold of her, she must seek a productive place; that is, leave home, seek work. If she has some special talent, knows what she wants to do, she is fortunate indeed. With the majority it is work, something to do, a place where they can be independently productive, that is sought.

The girl of the family in moderate circumstances is no better off. She must contribute in some way, and there is no scientific management in her home—no study of ways and means which enables her to contribute and remain at home. She is driven outside in order to support herself. I cannot but believe that here is one of the gravest weaknesses in our educational machinery, this failure to give the girl inclined to remain at home a training which would enable her to help make more of a limited income. Nothing is so rare to-day as the fine habit of making much of little. A dollar mixed with brains is worth five in every place where dollars are used. Particularly is this true in the household. The failure to teach how to mix brains and dollars, and to inspire respect for the undertaking, annually drives thousands of girls into our already overburdened industrial system who would be healthier and happier at home and who would render there a much greater economic service. Such work as is being done in certain Western agricultural colleges for girls, in the Carnegie School for Women in Pittsburg, in Miss Kittridge's Household Centers in New York City, is a recognition of this need of making scientific managers—trained household workers—of young women. There is no more practical way of relieving the industrial strain.

It is not always the dependent and so humiliating position a girl finds herself in that drives her from home. It is frequently the discovery that she is a member of a group that has no responsible place in the community; that regards itself as a purely isolated, unrelated, irresponsible unit,—an atom without affinities! The home can be, if it will, the most antisocial force in existence, for it can, if it will, exist practically for itself. That excessive individualism, which is responsible for so many evils in our country, has encouraged this isolation. The girl who finds herself without a productive place at home at the same time finds none of the fine inspiration which comes from fitting herself into a social scheme and helping to do its work. The spirit of the age is social. She feels its call, she sees how unresponsive, even antipathetic, to it her home is. She concludes that if she is to serve she must seek something to do in some remote city. The attraction the Social Settlement has for the girl finds its base here. The loss to communities of their educated young women, who find no response to their need, no place to serve in their own society, is incalculable.

It is not infrequent that a girl who may have by some chance of fortune a sufficient sense of independence in her home, who knows herself needed there, and is ready to perform the service, is driven out by the persistence of that spirit of parental authority, which looks upon it as a duty to rule the life, particularly of the daughter, as long as she is at home. There is nothing clearer than that the old domination of one person by another is a thing of the past. A new spirit of coöperation and friendly direction has come into the world. The home which it does not pervade cannot keep its young.