It is evident that real economic equality between men and women must be impossible, if the women are to leave their work for long periods of time, in order to bear and rear children. It is normally impossible for a woman to earn her living by competitive labor, at the same time that she is bearing and rearing children. Either the doctrine of economic equality is largely illusory, therefore, or else it must be extended to making motherhood a salaried occupation just as much as mill work or stenography.
The feminists have almost universally adopted the latter alternative. They say that the woman who is capable of earning money, and who abandons wage-earning for motherhood, ought to receive from the state as nearly as possible what she would have received if she had not had children; or else they declare that the expense of children should be borne wholly by the community.
This proposal must be tested by asking whether it would tend to strengthen and perpetuate the race or not. It is, in effect, a proposal to have the state pay so much a head for babies. The fundamental question is whether or not the quality of the babies would be taken into account. Doubtless the babies of obviously feeble-minded women would be excluded, but would it be possible for the state to pay liberally for babies who would grow up to be productive citizens, and to refuse to pay for babies that would doubtless grow up to be incompetents, dolts, dullards, laggards or wasters? The scheme would work, eugenically, in proportion as it is discriminatory and graded.
But the example of legislation in France and England, and the main trend of popular thought in America, make it quite certain that at present, and for many years to come, it will be impossible to have babies valued on the basis of quality rather than mere numbers. It is sometimes possible to get indirect measures of a eugenic nature passed, and it has been found possible to secure the passage of direct measures which prevent reproduction of those who are actually defective. But even the most optimistic eugenist must feel that, short of the remote future, any attempt to have the state grade and pay for babies on the basis of their quality is certain to fail to pass.
The recent action of the municipality of Schönberg, Berlin, is typical. It is now paying baby bounties at the rate of $12.50 a head for the first born, $2.50 a head for all later born, and no questions asked. It is to be feared that any success which the feminists may gain in securing state aid for mothers in America will secure, as in Schönberg, in England, in France, and in Australia, merely a small uniform sum. This acts dysgenically because it is a stimulus to married people to have large families in inverse proportion to their income, and is felt most by those whose purpose in having children is least approvable.
The married woman of good stock ought to bear four children. For many reasons these ought to be spaced well apart, preferably not much less than three years. She must have oversight of these children until they all reach adolescence. This means a period of about 12 + 13 = 25 years during which her primary, though by no means her only, concern will be mothercraft. It is hardly possible and certainly not desirable that she should support herself outside of the home during this period. As state support would pretty certainly be indiscriminate and dangerously dysgenic, it therefore appears that the present custom of having the father responsible for the support of the family is not only unavoidable but desirable. If so, it is desirable to avoid reducing the wages of married men too much by the competition of single women.
To attain this end, without working any injustice to women, it seems wise to modify their education in general in such a way as to prepare women for the kinds of work best adapted to her capacities and needs. Women were long excluded from a higher education, and when they secured it, they not unnaturally wanted the kind of education men were receiving,—partly in order to demonstrate that they were not intellectually inferior to men. Since this demonstration is now complete, the continuation of duplicate curricula is uncalled for. The coeducational colleges of the west are already turning away from the old single curriculum and are providing for the election of more differentiated courses for women. The separate women's colleges of the east will doubtless do so eventually, since their own graduates and students are increasingly discontented with the present narrow and obsolete ideals. If the higher education of women, and much of the elementary education, is directed toward differentiating them from men and giving them distinct occupations (including primarily marriage and motherhood) instead of training them so the only thing they are capable of doing is to compete with men for men's jobs, the demand of "equal pay for equal work" will be less difficult to reconcile with the interests of the race. In this direction the feminists might find a large and profitable field for the employment of their energies.
There is good ground for the feminist contention that women should be liberally educated, that they should not be regarded by men as inferior creatures, that they should have the opportunity of self-expression in a richer, freer life than they have had in the past. All these gains can be made without sacrificing any racial interests; and they must be so made. The unrest of intelligent women is not to be lessened or removed by educating them in the belief that they are not different from men and setting them to work as men in the work of the world. Except where the work is peculiarly adapted to women or there is a special individual aptitude, such work will, for the reasons we have set forth, operate dysgenically and therefore bring about the decadence of the race which practices it.
The true solution is rather to be sought in recognizing the natural differentiation of the two sexes and in emphasizing this differentiation by education. Boys will be taught the nobility of being productive and of establishing families; girls will have similar ideals held up to them but will be taught to reach them in a different way, through cultivation of the intellectual and emotional characters most useful to that division of labor for which they are supremely adapted, as well as those that are common to both sexes. The home must not be made a subordinate interest, as some feminists desire, but it must be made a much richer, deeper, more satisfying interest than it is too frequently at present.