The Business of Being a Woman

by Ida M. Tarbell

The American woman has played an honorable part in the making of our country, and for this part she should have full credit. If she had been as poor a stick, as downtrodden and ineffective as sometimes painted, she would not be a fit mate for the man beside whom she has struggled, and she would be as utterly unfit for the larger life she desires as the most bigoted misogynist pictures her to be.

Moreover, all things considered, she has been no greater sufferer from injustice than man. I do not mean in saying this that she has not had grave and unjust handicaps, legal and social; I mean that when you come to study the comparative situations of men and women as a mass at any time and in any country you will find them more nearly equal than unequal, all things considered. Women have suffered injustice, but parallel have been the injustices men were enduring. It was not the fact that she was a woman that put her at a disadvantage so much as the fact that might made right, and the physically weaker everywhere bore the burden of the day. Go back no further than the beginnings of this Republic and admit all that can be said of the wrong in the laws which prevented a woman controlling the property she had inherited or accumulated by her own efforts, which took from her a proper share in the control of her child,—we must admit, too, the equal enormity of the laws which permitted man to exploit labor in the outrageous way he has. It was not because he was a man that the labor was exploited—it was because he was the weaker in the prevailing system. Woman's case was parallel—she was the weaker in the system. It had always been the case with men and women in the world that he who could took and the devil got the hindermost. The way the laborer's cause has gone hand in hand in this country the last hundred years with the woman's cause is a proof of the point. In the 30's of the nineteenth century, for illustration, the country was torn by a workingman's party which carried on a fierce agitation against banks and monopolies. Many of its leaders were equally ardent in their support of Women's Rights as they were then understood. The slavery agitation was coupled from the start with the question of Women's Rights. It was injustice that was being challenged—the right of the stronger to put the weaker at a disadvantage for any reason—because he was poor, not rich; black, not white; female, not male,—that is, there has been nothing special to women in the injustice she has suffered except its particular form. Moreover, it was not man alone who was responsible for this injustice. Stronger women have often imposed upon the weak—men and women—as strong men have done. In its essence, it is a human, not a sex, question—this of injustice.

The hesitation of this country in the earlier part of the nineteenth century to accord to women the same educational facilities as to men is often cited as a proof of a deliberate effort to disparage women. But it should not be forgotten that the wisdom of universal male education was hotly in debate. One of the ideals of radical reformers for centuries had been to give to all the illumination of knowledge. But to teach those who did the labor of the world, its peasants and its serfs, was regarded by both Church and State as a folly and a menace. It was the establishment of a pure democracy that forced the experiment of universal free instruction in this country. It has met with opposition at every stage, and there is to-day a Mr. Worldly Wiseman at every corner bewailing the evils it has wrought. He must, too, be a hopeless Candide who can look on our experiment, wonderful and inspiring as it is, and say its results have been the best possible.

It was entirely logical, things beings as they were, that there should have been strong opposition to giving girls the same training in schools as boys. That objection holds good to-day in many reflective minds. He again must be a hopeless optimist who believes that we have worked out the best possible system of education for women. But that there was opposition to giving women the same educational facilities as men was not saying that there was or ever had been a conspiracy on foot to keep her in intellectual limbo because she was a woman. The history of learning shows clearly enough that women have always shared in its rise. In the great revival of the sixteenth century they took an honorable part. "I see the robbers, hangmen, adventurers, hostlers of to-day more learned than the doctors and preacher of my youth," wrote Rabelais, and he added, "why, women and girls have aspired to the heavenly manna of good learning." Whenever aspiration has been in the air, women have responded to it as men have, and have found, as men have found, a way to satisfy their thirst.

To come down to the period which concerns us chiefly, that of our own Republic, it is an utter misrepresentation of the women of the Revolution to claim that they were uneducated. All things considered, they were quite as well educated as the men. The actual achievements of the eminent women produced by the system of training then in vogue is proof enough of the statement. Far and away the best letters by a woman, which have found their way into print in this country, are those of Mrs. John Adams, written late in the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth. They deserve the permanent place in our literature which they have. But it was a period of good letter writing by women—if weak spelling and feminine spelling was, on the whole, quite as strong as masculine!

Out of that early system of education came the woman who was to write the book which did more to stir the country against slavery than all that ever had been written, Harriet Beecher Stowe. That system produced the scientist, who still represents American women in the mind of the world, Maria Mitchell, the only American woman whose name appears among the names of the world's great scholars inscribed on the Boston Public Library. It produced Dorothea Dix, who for twenty years before the Civil War carried on perhaps the most remarkable investigation of conditions that has ever been made in this country by man or woman,—the one which required the most courage, endurance, and persistency,—her investigation of the then barbaric system for caring—or not caring—for the insane. State after state enacted new laws and instituted new methods solely on the showing of this one woman. If there were no other case to offer to the frequent cry that women have never had an influence on legislation, this would be enough. Moreover, this is but the most brilliant example of the kind of work women had been doing from the beginning of the Republic.

To my mind there is no phase of their activities which reveals better the genuineness of their training than the initiative they took in founding schools of advanced grades for girls, and in organizing primary and secondary schools on something like a national scale. Mary Lyon's work for Mt. Holyoke College and Catherine Beecher's for the American Woman's Education Association are the most substantial individual achievements, though they are but types of what many women were doing and what women in general were backing up. It was work of the highest constructive type—original in its conception, full of imagination and idealism, rich in its capacity for growth—a work to fit the aspiration of its day and so full of the future!

Now, when conditions are such that a few rise to great eminence from the ordinary ranks of life, it means a good general average. The multitude of women of rare achievements, distinguishing the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods of American history are the best evidences of the seriousness, idealism, and intelligence of the women in general. Their services in the war are part of the traditions of every family whose line runs back to those days. Loyal, spirited, ingenious, and uncomplaining, they are one of the finest proofs in history of the capacity of the women of the mass to respond whole-heartedly to noble ideals,—one of the finest illustrations, too, of the type of service needed from women in great crises. But the rank and file which conducted itself so honorably in the Revolution was not a whit more noble and intelligent than the rank and file of the succeeding period. It would have been impossible ever to have established as promptly as was done the higher and the general schools for girls if women had not given them the support they did, had not been willing, as one great educator of the early part of the nineteenth century has recorded—"to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of the most rigid economy, that their daughters might be favored with means of improvement superior to what they themselves possessed." And back of this self-denial was what? A desire that life be made easier for the daughter? Not at all—a desire that the daughter be better equipped to "form the character of the future citizen of the Republic."

It is not alone that justice is wounded by denying women a part in the making of the civilized world—a more immediate wrong is the way the movement for a fuller, freer life for all human beings is hampered. A woman with a masculine chip on her shoulder gives a divided attention to the cause she serves. She complicates her human fight with a sex fight. However good tactics this may have been in the past, and I am far from denying that there were periods it may have been good politics, however poor morals, surely in this country to-day there is no sound reason for introducing such complications into our struggles. The American woman's life is the fullest in its opportunity, all things considered, that any human beings harnessed into a complicated society have ever enjoyed. To keep up the fight against man as the chief hindrance to the realization of her aspiration is merely to perpetuate in the intellectual world that instinct of the female animal to be ever on guard against the male, save in those periods when she is in pursuit of him!

But complicating her problem is not the only injury she does her cause by this ignoring or belittling of woman's part in civilization. She strips herself of suggestion and inspiration—a loss that cannot be reckoned. The past is a wise teacher. There is none that can stir the heart more deeply or give to human affairs such dignity and significance. The meaning of woman's natural business in the world—the part it has played in civilizing humanity—in forcing good morals and good manners, in giving a reason and so a desire for peaceful arts and industries, the place it has had in persuading men and women that only self-restraint, courage, good cheer, and reverence produce the highest types of manhood and womanhood,—this is written on every page of history.