The Women of Tomorrow Part 11

The fact is that science and sociology are so constantly amending and enlarging their teachings that a knowledge of what they taught twenty years ago is inadequate and a knowledge of the minutiae of what they taught twenty years ago is futile. The housekeeper of the future will have to keep on studying while housekeeping.

Several hundred housekeepers come each winter to the University of Wisconsin to attend the "Women's Course in Home Economics." They hear Professor Hastings talk about the "Production and Care of Milk." They hear Dr. Evans talk about the "Prevention of Infant Mortality." They hear Professor Marlatt talk about "Diets in Disease." In each case they hear something very different from what they would have heard in their girlhood. For this reason alone, even if the gap between girlhood and motherhood did not exist, the machinery of home economics instruction for adults would have become necessary.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ONE-WEEK COURSES IN HOME ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.]

It is for adults that the United States Government issues such bulletins as "Modern Conveniences for the Farm Home." It is for adults that Cornell University sends out its Farmers' Wives' Bulletins in editions of twenty thousand. It is for adults that Columbia University prints pamphlets like "The Feeding of Children in a Family with an Income of $800 a Year."

For adults, again, are such inst.i.tutions as the American School of Home Economics, in Chicago, which, in the few years of its life, has enrolled more than 10,000 pupils in its correspondence courses.

For adults, finally, are the Homemakers' Conferences held in conjunction with Farmers' Inst.i.tutes as well as the extension-course lectures given to local groups in city and in country by teachers sent out from state universities and agricultural colleges.

All this machinery, which here we do not attempt to describe but only to indicate, will some day find its scattered units a.s.sociated and harmonized through the work of a Federal Bureau of Domestic Science and Art. Bills for the establishment of such a bureau have already been introduced into Congress. It will not be a cooking and sewing school for children. It will be a technical continuation school for adults. The National Congress of Mothers discerned one of its functions when it said: "The time has come when every nation through a special department should provide data concerning infants which may be used by mothers everywhere."

At the end of chapter two of this book we asked whether or not, in the field of education, the training for the home and the training for self-support would impose a double burden on the girl pupil. If our interpretation of the spirit of the home economics movement has been correct we may now say that the training for the home is so largely a training for life in general and is so distributed through different life-periods that it will not be felt to be burdensome at all. We may even go on to suggest that self-support and housekeeping, world and home, and the trainings for them, will merge for the girl into a progressive unified experience.

First. That part of home economics which can profitably be taught to the ma.s.s of pupils in elementary and high school and in the colleges, with its manual arts, its Right Living and its money-sense, will be helpful, much of it, to boys as well as to girls and will actually, since it develops the whole personality of the pupil, be part of the training for self-support itself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARRIED WOMEN AND WOMEN WHO WORK DURING THE DAY ATTEND THE EVENING COOKERY CLa.s.sES IN THE ST. LOUIS HIGH SCHOOLS.]

Second. The years spent in self-support, in learning the world, will be part of the training for the home, because hereafter, as the Mary of our first chapter remarked, the mother who does not know the world cannot wisely rear boys up into it.

Third. After the period of self-support, when marriage comes, what further technical instruction the housekeeper and mother may need will be furnished to her by a system of adult education limitless in its possible growth.

IV.

The Wasters

It got talked around among Marie's friends that she didn't want children.

This was considered very surprising, in view of all that her father and husband had done for her.

Here is what they had done for her:

They had removed from her life all need, and finally all desire, to make efforts and to accomplish results through struggle in defiance of difficulty and at the cost of pain.

Work and pain were the two things Marie was on no account to be exposed to. With this small but important reservation:

She might _work_ at _avoiding_ pain.

When the cook had a headache she took Getting Breakfast for it. When Marie had a headache she worked not at breakfast but at the headache.

It was a social ceremony of large proportions, with almost everybody among those present, from the doctor down through Mother and Auntie to Little Sister. The decorations, which were very elaborate, comprised, besides the usual tasteful arrangement of thermometers, eau-de-Karlsbad, smelling-salts bottles, cracked ice, and chocolate creams, a perfect shower of tourmaline roses, the odor of which, alone among all the vegetable odors in the world, had been found after long experimentation to be soothing to Marie on such occasions. It was not thought that Marie could vanquish a headache except after a plucky fight of at least one day's duration.

Actresses go on and do their turns day after day and night after night with hardly a miss. Marie's troubles were no more numerous than theirs. But they were much larger. Troubles are like gases. They expand to fill any void into which they are introduced. Marie's spread themselves through a vacuum as large as her life.

The making of that vacuum and the inserting of Marie into it cost her father and her husband prodigious toil and was a great pleasure to them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Cla.s.s. Socially, she was therefore distinctly superior to her father and her husband.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WORK? FOR MARIE? FOR MY DAUGHTER? SHOCKING!]

President Thomas of Bryn Mawr had Marie in mind when she said:

"By the leisured cla.s.s we mean in America the cla.s.s whose men work harder than any other men in the excitement of professional and commercial rivalry, but whose women const.i.tute the only leisured cla.s.s we have and the most leisured cla.s.s in the world."

Marie's father wasn't so very rich, either. He was engaged in a business so vividly compet.i.tive that Marie's brother was hurried through college as fast as possible and brought into the game at twenty-two with every nerve stretched taut.

Nothing like that was expected of Marie. She was brought up to think that leisure was woman's natural estate. Work, for any girl, she regarded as an accident due to the unexpected and usually reprehensible collapse of the males of the poor girl's family.

This view of the matter gave Marie, _unconsciously to herself_, what morality she had. Hard drinking, "illegitimate" gambling, and excessive dissipations of all sorts are observed commonly to have a prejudicial effect on male efficiency and on family prosperity.

Against all "vices," therefore (although she didn't catch the "therefore"), Marie was a Moral Force of a million angel-power.

Aside from "vices," however, all kinds of conduct looked much alike to her. Ethics is the rules of the game, the decencies of the struggle for existence. Marie had no part in the struggle. She violated its decencies without being at all aware of it.

All the way, for instance, from stealing a place in the line in front of a box-office window ahead of ten persons who were there before her, up the tiny scale of petty aggressions within her narrow reach to the cool climax of spending three months every summer in a pine-wood mountain resort (thus depriving her city-bound husband of the personal companions.h.i.+p which was the one best thing she had to give him in return for what he gave her), she was as competent a little grafter as the town afforded.

But she was a perfectly logical one. Her family had trained her to deadhead her way through life and she did it. Finally she went beyond their expectations. They hadn't quite antic.i.p.ated all of the sweetly undeviating inertia of her mind.

Nevertheless she was a nice girl. In fact, she was The Nice Girl. She was sweet-tempered, sweet-mannered, and sweet-spoken--a perfect dear.

She never did a "bad" thing in her life. And she never ceased from her career of moral forcing. She wrote to her husband from her mountain fastness, warning him against high-b.a.l.l.s in hot weather. She went twice a month during the winter to act as librarian for an evening at a settlement in a district which was inhabited by perfectly respectable working people but which, while she pa.s.sed out the books, she sympathetically alluded to as a "slum."

It is hardly fair, however, to lay the whole explanation of Marie on her father, her husband, and herself.

A few years ago, in the churchyard of St. Philip's Church at Birmingham, they set up a tombstone which had fallen down, and they reinscribed it in honor of the long-neglected memory of the man who had been resting beneath it for a century and a half. His name was Wyatt. John Wyatt. He had a good deal to do with making Marie what she was.

What toil, what tossing nights, what sweating days, what agonized wrenching of the imagination toward a still unreached idea, have gone into the making of leisure--for other people!

Wyatt strained toward, and touched, the idea which was the real start of modern leisure.

In the year 1733, coming from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and millions of them.

It was only about two feet square. But it accomplished a thing never before accomplished. It spun the first thread ever spun in the history of the world without the intervention of human fingers.

On that night woman lost her oldest and most significant t.i.tle and function. The Spinster ceased to be.

The mistress and her maid, spinning together in the Hall, their fingers drawing the roving from the distaff and stretching it out as the spindle twisted it, were finally on the point of separating forever.

We all see what Wyatt's machine did to the maids. We all understand that when he started his mill at Birmingham and hired his working force of _ten girls_, he prophesied the factory "slum."

We do not yet realize what he did to the mistresses, how he utterly changed their character and how he marvelously increased their number.

But look! His machine, with the countless machines which followed it, in the spinning industry and in all other industries, made it possible to organize ma.s.ses of individuals into industrial regiments which required captains and majors and colonels and generals. It created the need of leaders.h.i.+p, of _mult.i.tudinous_ leaders.h.i.+p. And with leaders.h.i.+p came the rewards of leaders.h.i.+p. And the wives and daughters of the leaders (a race of men previously, by comparison, nonexistent) arose in thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions to live in leisure and semi-leisure on the fruits of the new system.

While the maids went to the "slums," the mistresses went to the suburbs.

What did Wyatt get out of it? Imprisonment for debt and the buzz of antiquarians above his rotted corpse.