There are three-quarters of a million women in Germany who are independent owners and heads of establishments of different kinds, and some ten million who are bread-winners. Of the increase in the number of women students I have written in another chapter, and of their increasing participation in the political, economical, literary, and scholarly life of the nation there are many examples. Once or twice I have even heard them speak in public, and speak well, while if my memory serves me, this was practically unknown in my university days here. The problem of domestic apprenticeship is also being worked out by the women of Germany. In Munich, in Frankfurt-am-Main and elsewhere this most difficult and delicate question is being partially answered at least. Girls are apprenticed to families needing them, under the supervision of a committee of women. The girls and their families agree to certain terms, and the families agree also to teach them household duties, give them proper food, eight hours’ sleep, their Sunday out, and so on. The German women’s societies who have thus boldly tackled this problem are plucky indeed, and prove easily enough that there is a large and growing body of women in Germany, who have minds and wills of their own and great executive ability.
Let me suggest to some of our idle women that they pay a visit to the Hausfrauenbund at Frankfort and the Frauenverein-Arbeitererinnenheim at Munich, before they pass judgment upon this chapter. For I should be sorry to leave the impression that all the women of Germany are listless, oppressed, and without any feeling of civic responsibility.
All these things have been accomplished by women in Germany with far less sympathy from the men than they receive in America or in England. Cato wrote of women’s suffrage: “Pray what will they not assail, if they carry their point? Call to mind all the principles governing them by which your ancestors have held the presumption of women in check, and made them subject to their husbands. ... As soon as they have begun to be your equals they will be your superiors.” It is an older story than the unread realize, this of the rights of women. The bulk of Germany’s male population still hold to Cato’s view. It is not so much that they are antagonistic, except in the case of the teachers, where the women have become active competitors; they are in their patient way impervious. Nor can it be said that any very large number of the women themselves are eager for more rights; rather are they becoming restless because they receive so little consideration.
Their pleasures are simple and restricted, regular attendance at the theatre, at concerts, an occasional dinner at a restaurant to celebrate an anniversary, excursions with the whole family to a beer restaurant of a Sunday, and the endless meeting together for reading, sewing, and gossip - no German woman apparently but what belongs to a verein or circle, meeting, say, once a week.
The women and the men are gregarious. Vae soli is the motto of the race. They love to take their pleasures in crowds, and I am not sure that this does not dull the enthusiasm for personal rights and gratifications, and for individual supremacy and dignity. It is rare to find a German who would subscribe to Andrew Marvell’s misogynist lines:
“Two paradises are in one
To live in Paradise alone.”
It is typical of this love of being together that an independent member of the Reichstag, owing allegiance to no party, is called a Wilde, and this same word Wilde, or wild man, is applied to the student at the university who belongs to no corps or association of students. This love of being together, of touching elbows on all occasions, makes them more easily led and ruled. They hate the isolation necessary for independence and revolt.
Of the relations between men and women I long ago came to the conclusion that this is a subject best left to the scientific explorer. It is, however, open to the casual observer to comment upon the monstrous percentage of illegitimacy in Berlin, 20 per cent. or one child out of every five, born out of wedlock; 14 per cent. in Bavaria; and 10 per cent. for the whole empire. This alone tells a sad tale of the attitude of the men and women toward one another. There is a long journey ahead of the women who propose to lift their sisters on to a plane above the animals in this respect. In the matter of divorce Prussia comes fourth in the list of European nations. Norway, with the cheapest and easiest, and at the same time the wisest, divorce law in the world, has almost the lowest percentage of divorce. In 1910 there were 390 divorces out of 400,000 existing marriages, of which 14,600 had taken place that year. The percentage is thus only about 2 1/2 per year. The total per 100,000 of the population in Switzerland is 43; in France 33; in Denmark 27; and in Prussia 21. In industrial Saxony there are 32 and in Catholic Bavaria 13. The number of married people in Germany according to the last census shows an increase, the number of bachelors and widowed persons a decrease. Since 1871 the number of married persons has increased by 2 per cent. The birth rate shows a proportional decline. The problem that bothers all social economists is to the fore in Germany as elsewhere, for the people between sixty and seventy years of age number 14.65 per cent. of the population, while the young people under ten number only 11.12, and those between twenty and thirty 10.93 per cent. The birth rate therefore shows the same tendency as in France, England, and America. A recent investigation on a small scale seems to show that bureaucracy has a certain influence here. Of 300 officials questioned, only 10, or 312 per thousand, had more than two children. It is not an impossible, but certainly a laughable, outcome of state interference carried too far, should it result, in the state’s becoming an incubator for the unfit, in a country where the pensions for officers and employees of the state have risen from 50,000,000 marks in 1900 to 111,000,000 marks in 1911.
Even in higher circles in Germany there is a gushing idealism about the relations of the sexes. In their songs and sayings, as well as in their mythology, there is a laudation of love that is overstimulating. The lines of that inconsequential philosopher, that irresponsible moralist, that dreamy Puritan, Emerson,
“Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good fame,
Plans, credit and the Muse-
Nothing refuse”