The Women of Tomorrow

by William Hard

Science has done part of it.

By the invention of power-driven machines and by the distribution of the compact industries of the home out and into the scattered, innumerable business enterprises of the community, Science has given us, in place of a simple and near world, a complicated and distant one. It takes us longer to learn it.

Simultaneously, by research and also by the use of the printing-press, the locomotive, and the telegraph wire (which speed up the production as well as the dissemination of knowledge), Science has brought forth, in every field of human interest and of human value, a mass of facts and of principles so enormous and so important that the labors of our predecessors on this planet overwhelm us, and we grow to our full physical development long before we have caught up with the previous mental experience of the race. This is true first with regard to 63 what is commonly called General Culture and next with regard to what is commonly called Specialization. Growth into General Culture takes longer and longer. And then so does the specialized mastery of a specialized technique. The high-school teacher must not only go to college but must do graduate work. The young doctor, after he finishes college and medical school, is found as an interne in hospitals, as an assistant to specialists, as a traveler through European lecture rooms. The young engineer, the young architect, the young specialist of every sort, finds his period of preparation steadily extending before him.

A complicated and distant world instead of a simple and near one, a large mass of human experience to assimilate instead of a small one, a long technique to master instead of a short one,—for all this part of the extension of immaturity we may thank Science. For the remaining part of it we may thank System.

The world is getting organized. Except in some of the professions (and often even in them) we most of us start in on our life work at some small subdivided job in a large organization of 64 people. The work of the organization is so systematized as to concentrate responsibility—and remuneration—toward the top. In time, from job to job, up an ascent which grows longer as the organization grows bigger, we achieve responsibility. Till we do, we discharge minor duties for minimum pay.

Thus the mental immaturity resulting from Science is supplemented by the financial immaturity resulting from System.

Both kinds of immaturity last longest among the boys and girls who come from that large section of society which is neither rich nor poor.

This is not to say that rich and poor escape unaffected. Shall we ever again, from the most favored of homes, see a William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, by merit, at 23? And, in the mass of the people, shall we ever again see that quickness of development toward adulthood which gave us the old common-law rule validating the marriage of a male at 14 and of a female at 12? The retardation of adulthood is observable in all social groups. But it comes to its climax in what is commonly called the “middle” group. For it is in that group that 65 the passion for education is strongest, or, at any rate, most effective. It is from the families of average farmers, of average business men and of average professional men that we get our big supply of pupils for the most prolonged technical training of our schools and universities.

In this matter, as in many other matters, the historian of the nineteenth century may possibly find that while public attention was being given principally to the misery of the poor and to the luxury of the rich it was in the “middle” part of society that the really revolutionary changes in family life were happening.

It is with the financial reason for prolonged immaturity just as it is with the mental. The rich boy may be supported into marriage by his family. The son of the laborer soon reaches the wage-earning level of his environment. But the son of the average man of moderate means, after his years of scholastic preparation, must spend yet other years in a slow climb out of the ranks into a position of commercial or professional promise of “success” before he acquires what is regarded in his environment as a marrying income.