With the young women we are considering there is this eternal variation from John Knox and his hysterical kin, Celt, Saxon, or Latin—she does not assume authority. Consequently she makes dictionaries at so much a mile. Such word-spinning was at one time done by drudge men—men who had failed mayhap in the church, or in law, or had distaste for material developments or shame for manual work. Now, with women fortified by the learning their colleges afford, it is oftenest done by drudge women. The law of commerce prevails—women gain the task because they will take much less a mile than men. Men offer them less than they would dare offer a man similarly equipped.
But why should our brothers who teach sophomores at so much a year fleer? even if the woman has got the job! Does not this arrangement afford opportunity for a man to affix his name to her work? In unnumbered—and concealed—instances. We all remember how in the making of the —— dictionary the unauthoritative woman did the work, and the unauthoritative man wrote the introduction, and the authoritative man affixed his name to it. We all remember that, surely. Then there is the — — —; and the — —. We do not fear to mention names, we merely pity and do not—and we nurse pity because with Aristotle we believe that it purifies the heart. With small knowledge of the publishing world, I can count five such make-ups as I here indicate. In one case an authoritative woman did her part of the work under the explicit agreement that her name should be upon the title-page. In the end, by a trick, in order to advertise the man’s, it appeared only in the first edition. Yet this injustice in nowise deprived her of a heart of oak.
The commercial book-building world, as it at present stands—the place where they write dictionaries and world’s literatures at so much a mile—is apt to think a woman is out in its turmoil for her health, or for sheer amusement; not for the practical reasons men are. An eminent opinion declared the other day that they were there “to get a trousseau or get somebody to get it for ’em.” Another exalted judgment asserted, “The first thing they look round the office and see who there is to marry.”
This same world exploits her labor; it pays her a small fraction of what it pays a man engaged in the identical work; it seizes, appropriates, and sometimes grows rich upon her ideas. It never thinks of advancing her to large duties because of her efficiency in small. She is “only a woman,” and with Ibsen’s great Pillar of Society the business world thinks she should be “content to occupy a modest and becoming position.” The capacities of women being varied, would not large positions rightly appear modest and becoming to large capacities?
For so many centuries men have estimated a woman’s service of no money value that it is hard, at the opening of the twentieth, to believe it equal to even a small part of a man’s who is doing the same work. In one late instance a woman at the identical task of editing was paid less than one-fortieth the sum given her colaborer, a man, whose products were at times submitted to her for revision and correction. In such cases the men are virtually devouring the women—not quite so openly, yet as truly, as the Tierra del Fuegians of whom Darwin tells: when pressed in winter by hunger they choke their women with smoke and eat them. In our instance just cited the feeding upon was less patent, but the choking with smoke equally unconcealed.
The very work of these so-called unauthoritative women passes in the eyes of the world uninstructed in the present artfulness of book-making as the work of so-called authoritative men. It is therefore authoritative.
Not in this way did the king-critic get together his dictionary. Johnson’s work evidences his hand on every page and almost in every paragraph. But things are changed from the good old times of individual action. We now have literary trusts and literary monopolies. Nowadays the duties of an editor-in-chief may be to oversee each day’s labor, to keep a sharp eye upon the “authoritative” men and “unauthoritative” women whose work he bargained for at so much a mile, and, when they finish the task, to indite his name as chief worker.
Would it be reasonable to suppose that—suffering such school-child discipline and effacement—those twentieth century writers nourished the estimate of “booksellers” with which Michael Drayton in the seventeenth century enlivened a letter to Drummond of Hawthornden?—“They are a company of base knives whom I both scorn and kick at.”
It is under such conditions as that just cited that we hear a book spoken of as if it were a piece of iron, not a product of thought and feeling carefully proportioned and measured; as if it were the fruit of a day and not of prolonged thought and application; as if it could be easily reproduced by the application of a mechanical screw; as if it were a bar of lead instead of far-reaching wings to minister good; as if it were a thing to step upon rather than a thing to reach to; as if it could be cut, slashed, twisted, distorted, instead of its really forming an organic whole with the Aristotelian breath of unity, and the cutting or hampering of it would be performing a surgical operation which might entirely let out its breath of life.
Until honor is stronger among human beings—that is, until the business world is something other than a maelstrom of hell—it is unmanly and unwomanly to gibe at the “unauthoritative” young woman writing at so much a mile. She may be bearing heavy burdens of debt incurred by another. She may be supporting a decrepit father or an idle brother. She is bread-earning. Oftenest she is gentle, and, like the strapped dog which licks the hand that lays bare his brain, she does not strike back. But she has an inherent sense of honesty and dishonesty, and she knows what justice is. Her knowledge of life, the residuum of her unauthoritative literary experience, shows her the rare insight and truth of Mr. Howells when he wrote, “There is no happy life for a woman—except as she is happy in suffering for those she loves, and in sacrificing herself to their pleasure, their pride, and ambition. The advantage that the world offers her—and it does not always offer her that—is her choice in self-sacrifice.”