Naturally, this attitude does not tend toward domestic contentment, peace and happiness. The woman who marries in this frame of mind already has her face set toward Reno.
Yet the instinct for maternity is a force. Therefore the great desideratum in the opinion of George Bernard Shaw and Ellen Key is the satisfaction of the instinct without the inconvenience of a husband. But when he comes to deal with the facts Shaw’s courage fails him, and he turns tail and flees. In Getting Married he confesses that, in spite of all its horrors, he can invent no substitute for marriage. Ellen Key, on the other hand, in Love and Marriage, has the courage of her convictions.
And yet her relations to man cannot be entirely without satisfactions to woman. She cannot be quite the slave that the Feminists describe. Anna A. Rogers, in Why American Marriages Fail (Atlantic Monthly, September, 1907) speaks of
the present false and demoralizing deification of women, especially in this country, an idolatry of which we as a people are so inordinately proud. One of the evil effects of this attitude is shown in the intolerance and selfishness of young wives, which is largely responsible for the scandalous slackening of marriage ties in the United States.... Our women as a whole are spoiled, extremely idle, and curiously undeserving of the maudlin worship that they demand from our hard-working men.... The hair-dressers, the manicurists, the cafes at lunch time, are full to overflowing with women—extravagant, idle, self-centred.... She has not merged her fate with her husband’s, if married, nor with her father’s if not: she does not properly supplement their lives; she is striving for a detached, profitless, individuality.... The sacredness and mystery of womanhood are fast passing away from among us.
A successful woman dramatist, an interview with whom was published in The New York Times a few months ago, said:
The American man is a great deal more unselfish and chivalrous than is good for the woman. He often bears his own burden, and part of the woman’s. This is very excellent discipline for him, but it is hard on the woman. She doesn’t have a chance to learn sacrifice.
Miss Tarbell recognized that the Feminist was in revolt against the drudgery of the household. Edna Kenton, for the militants, is even more explicit. She says in Militant Women—and Women (The Century Magazine, November, 1913):
There is rising revolt among women against the unspeakable dullness of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world.... There is nothing in the home alone to satisfy woman’s longing for variety, adventure, romance.
How many men have any means of satisfying their longings for variety, adventure and romance? Miss Kenton’s notion that “the restrictions on men’s free-willing are comparatively few,” is mere silliness. In the business and professional classes woman’s opportunities of disposing of her time and cultivating her tastes are vastly greater than man’s, and among the less fortunate classes, the care of a three-room flat or a five-room house is a lighter servitude than that by which the man gets the bread for his wife and babies. There is more companionship in the children and the neighbors than there is in digging, in tending the lathe, and operating the loom. There is more social life in hanging out the clothes in the back yard, and talking to the woman who is doing the same thing in the next yard, than there is in making entries in a ledger, and adding up columns of figures. The kitchen utensils are as interesting as the saw and the monkey-wrench.
Ninety-five per cent of the work of men is drudgery, and few men have any choice in the selection of their drudgery. They do what as boys they were set at, or what they can get a chance at. A very small proportion of men have variety, adventure, romance, and no one who looks at our shopping streets and places of amusement will be in any doubt that women are less tied to their galley oars than men. Olive Schreiner, in Woman and Labor, ungenerously says that men have always been willing that women should do the coarse and ill-paid work; it is only when women demand admission to the higher and more intellectual occupations that men admonish them to keep within their sphere. Yet to women of genius the world of literature and art and music has long been open, and within recent years a multitude of occupations have been opened to women, with little if any objection from men; perhaps in consistency the Feminists should approve the many men who have been glad enough to shirk the support of their womankind and let their sisters and daughters take care of themselves.