Up in the north of England there is a factory town where the largest works in November, 1914, hung out a notice that any women who before their marriage had been employed there would be taken back. Mrs. Webber was. The regular weekly wage is so much better than the occasional charing which was all that she had been able to get to supplement her husband’s frequent unemployment. Her children are among those who have been since the war transferred at school from the free list to the paid dinners. Before the war there were 11,000 children in this town to be supplied with free school dinners. Now since their mothers work outside the home, this figure has dropped to 2,370. Mrs. Webber also is one of those women who have been shopping. All over Europe they have been doing it. From Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London, delighted shop keepers report that women who never had money before are spending it. The curate in the parish to which Mrs. Webber belongs—Mrs. Webber used to char for his wife, but is no longer available—told me that these working classes have gone perfectly mad about money and the reckless expenditure of it. And I asked him how and he said: “Why cheese, they all of them have it for supper now. And the woman in that house, the third from the end of the row,” he pointed it out from his study window, “has a fur coat.” It was Mrs. Webber’s house the curate mentioned.
HIS PERSONALITY—AND HERS
Well now, you see, to Elsa von Stuttgart in Berlin, it may be little satin evening slippers, and to Madelaine de Ranier in Paris it may be orphans of France, and to Dr. Edith Russell in London it may be the great reform for which the Malthusian League is organised, and to Mrs. Webber it may be school dinners and cheese and a fur coat—but to all of them it’s economic independence. Mrs. Webber says, “A shilling of your own is worth two that ’e gives you.” Edith Russell and the rest I have not heard say it. But from Countess to char woman, you see, this about the wage envelope is certain: It’s yours to burn if you care to—or to buy with it what you choose! There are millions of women over this war racked world who have it to-day, who never had it before. And the hand that holds this new wage envelope holds the future of the race in its keeping. Not since that magna charta that the barons wrested from King John, has so powerful a guarantee of liberty been won. It carries with it all the freedoms that the feminists have ever formulated. She who stepped out of the Doll’s House stands at the threshold of a new earth. Something very much more than little satin slippers and books and fur coats and their own money is coming to women!
Let us see. You would have been astounded, I believe, if Elsa von Stuttgart had attempted to dictate to her husband his hats or his slippers. Anyway, Herr von Stuttgart would. You would not have expected Edith Russell to have suggested across the breakfast table: “My dear, the propaganda of such and such a society to which you belong is not pleasing to me. I do not care to have you support it.” Why, either gentleman would have been a henpecked husband to have permitted any such interference with his personal liberty. Not even in America would any wife so presume to dare. It is quite likely that a lady living in New York could announce over the coffee cups, “My dear, we will move to Long Island to-day.” And the voice behind the newspaper would probably agree without a demurrer, “I’ll be out on the 4:30 train.” Probably also he has never heard how many pairs of slippers she has, and all he knows about her hats is their price. But after all, it is only by the privilege he permits her that the lady can put it over like this. At any moment that he cares to assert it, he still holds the balance of power in this household.
Because man and wife are one, he who carries the purse is the one. It’s only the new purse in the family that can alter the situation anywhere in the world. She who carries it is another one, with her personal liberty too. In the last analysis, it is only a person who can pay the rent who can talk with assertion about where “we” shall live and how.
No economist in any university chair understands this any more clearly than does Mrs. Webber, who once lived in two rooms and now lives in three because she can pay the rent! The new purse in her family has raised the whole scale of living for her and for her children. Yesterday her personality was merged and submerged in that of a husband to whose standard of maintenance she was limited. To-day she is emerging with a wage envelope in her hand and a personality of her own, as is likewise Elsa von Stuttgart and Edith Russell and Madelaine de Ranier. Society may be tremendously startled to find them at last counted so that one and one in the marriage relation shall make two. When in this great world war, that autocracy with its divine right of kings that has ruled and wrecked civilisation shall have been swept from the throne, there is another autocracy with its “divine” authority of one sex over the other that is going into the scrap-heap of old systems.
Through the events of these war days already it is clear that such an eternal purpose runs. Nobody thought of it when woman was called from the home in all lands. But there has really begun the casting off of that ancient chrysalis of “coverture.” Have you by chance yet met among your acquaintances the woman who is refusing to part with her own name? Mary McArthur, the great English labour leader, is the wife of Mr. Anderson, a member of Parliament and she is the mother of a baby. But she has never ceased to be herself. “You call yourself Miss McArthur,” a curious inquirer remarked to her one day, “and yet they say your cook tells that you are very respectable.”
There are numbers of women like this in London and in New York, who are preferring their own identity to that of their husbands. The German and Scandinavian women going a little farther say, “Let us at mature age take an adult title.” Master Jones, you know, does not wait for the day of his marriage to emerge from his adolescence as “Mr.” Jones, Fraulein is but a diminutive, “little Frau,” a prefix of immaturity. Rosika Schwimmer, touring America for a lecture bureau, assured inquiring reporters: “Of course I am Frau Schwimmer. Why shouldn’t I be? I have passed my 35th birthday.” The Imperial Union of Women Suffragists of Germany in convention assembled, not long ago decided to adopt the adult title Frau for all women of mature age, the “unity title,” they call it. In this first faint stirring, there is significance of wide changes.
She whose identity had so disappeared at the altar, that the law actually wrote her down on the statute books as civiliter mortua, one “civilly dead,” is about to be restored to the status of an individual. The long road, along which the woman movement of yesterday made its slow way, is now at the sharpest turning.
The struggle of women in all lands to be released from the discriminations that have limited their human activities set free the spinster some time ago. The point of view that is now generally accepted about her, and without contravention in the most advanced countries, was most definitely formulated some sixty years ago in Scandinavia. There they put on the statute books a law abolishing the previous male guardianship over unmarried women and permitting a person “of staid age and character” to manage her own affairs. At first this was a privilege to be granted only on special appeal to the king. But at last the right of self-government at 21 was established for all unmarried women. So radical a departure from custom was of course not accomplished without misgivings. There were those who feared that for a woman to manage her own affairs, was not in accordance with true womanly dignity and the dictates of religion. They said, The majority of women do not want it. Why, then, give them a responsibility they do not wish or ask for? But in spite of those objections, the spinster came to be recognised as a responsible individual.