The Business of Being a Woman

by Ida M. Tarbell

I doubt if there is to-day a more disintegrating influence at work—one more fatal to sound social development—than that which belittles the home and the position of the woman in it. As a social institution nothing so far devised by man approaches the home in its opportunity, nor equals it in its successes.

The woman's position at its head is hard. The result of her pains and struggles are rarely what she hopes, either for herself or for any one connected with her, but this is true of all human achievement. There is nothing done that does not mean self-denial, routine, disillusionment, and half realization. Even the superman goes the same road, coming out at the same halfway-up house! It is the meaning of the effort, not the half result, that counts.

The pain and struggle of an enterprise are not what takes the heart out of a soldier; it is telling him his cause is mean, his fight in vain. Show him a reason, and he dies exultant. The woman is the world's one permanent soldier. After all war ceases she must go daily to her fight with death. To tell her this giving of her life for life is merely a "female function," not a human part, is to talk nonsense and sacrilege. It is the clear conviction of even the most thoughtless girl that this way lies meaning and fulfillment of life, that gives her courage to go to her battle as a man-in-line to his, and like him she comes out with a new understanding. The endless details of her life, its routine and its restraints, have a reason now, as routine and discipline have for a soldier. She sees as he does that they are the only means of securing the victory bought so dearly—of winning others.

From this high conviction the great mass of women never have and never can be turned. What does happen constantly, however, is loss of joy and courage in their undertaking. When these go, the vision goes. The woman feels only her burdens, not the big meaning in them. She remembers her daily grind, not the possibilities of her position. She falls an easy victim now to that underestimation of her business which is so popular. If she is of gentle nature, she becomes apologetic, she has "never done anything." If she is aggressive, she becomes a militant. In either case, she charges her dissatisfaction to the nature of her business. What has come to her is a common human experience, the discovery that nothing is quite what you expected it to be, that if hope is to be even halfway realized, it will be by courage and persistency. It is not the woman's business that is at fault; it is the faulty handling of it and the human difficulty in keeping heart when things grow hard. What she needs is a strengthening of her wavering faith in her natural place in the world, to see her business as a profession, its problems formulated and its relations to the work of society, as a whole, clearly stated.

Quite as great an injustice to her as the belittling of her business has been the practice, also for campaigning purposes, of denying her a part in the upbuilding of civilization. There was a time "back of history," says one of the popular leaders in the Woman's movement, "when men and women were friends and comrades—but from that time to this she (woman) has held a subsidiary and exclusively feminine position. The world has been wholly in the hands of men, and they have believed that men alone had the ability, felt the necessity, for developing civilization, the business, education, and religion of the world."

Women's present aim she declares to be the "reassumption of their share in human life." This is, of course, a modern putting of the List of Grievances with which the militant campaign started in this country in the 40's, reënforced by the important point that women "back of history" enjoyed the privileges which the earlier militants declared that man, "having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her," had always usurped.

Just how the lady knows that "back of history" women and men were more perfect comrades than to-day, I do not know. Her proofs would be interesting. If this is true, it reverses the laws which have governed all other human relations. Certainly, since history began, the only period where I can pretend to judge what has happened, the records show that comradeship between men and women has risen and fallen with the rise and fall of cultivation and of virtue. The general level is probably higher to-day than ever before.

Moreover, from these same records one might support as plausibly—and as falsely—the theory of a Woman-made World as the popular one of a Man-made World. There has been many a teacher and philosopher who has sustained some form of this former thesis, disclaiming against the excessive power of women in shaping human affairs. The teachings of the Christian Church in regard to women, the charge that she keep silent, that she obey, that she be meek and lowly—all grew out of the fear of the power she exercised at the period these teachings were given—a power which the saints believed prejudicial to good order and good morals. There is more than one profound thinker of our own period who has arraigned her influence—Strindberg and Nietzsche among them. You cannot turn a page of history that the woman is not on it or behind it. She is the most subtle and binding thread in the pattern of Human Life!

For the American Woman of to-day to allow woman's part in the making of this nation to be belittled is particularly unjust and cowardly. The American nation in its good and evil is what it is, as much because of its women as because of its men. The truth of the matter is, there has never been any country, at any time, whatever may have been their social limitations or political disbarments, that women have not ranked with the men in actual capacity and achievement; that is, men and women have risen and fallen together, whatever the apparent conditions. The failure to recognize this is due either to ignorance of facts or to a willful disregard of them; usually it is the former. For instance, one constantly hears to-day the exultant cry that women finally are beginning to take an interest and a part in political and radical discussions. But there has never been a time in this country's history when they were not active factors in such discussion. The women of the American Revolutionary Period certainly challenge sharply the women of to-day, both by their intelligent understanding of political issues and by their sympathetic coöperation in the struggle. It was the letters of women which led to that most important factor in centralizing and instructing pre-revolutionary opinion in New England, the Committee of Correspondence. There were few more powerful political pamphleteers in that period than Mercy Warren. We might very well learn a lesson which we need very much to learn from the way women aided the Revolutionary cause through their power as consumers. As for sacrifice and devotion, that of the woman loses nothing in nobility when contrasted with that of the man.

If we jump fifty years in the nation's history to the beginning of the agitation against slavery, we find women among the first and most daring of the protestants against the institution. It was for the sake of shattering slavery that they broke the silence in public which by order of the Christian Church they had so long kept—an order made, not for the sake of belittling women, but for the sake of establishing order in churches and better insuring the new Christian code of morality. The courage and the radicalism of women of the 30's, 40's, and 50's in this country compare favorably with that of the men and women in any revolutionary period in any country that we may select.