A Short History of Women's Rights Part 29

The blaze of truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half-blind in the house of bondage. But let them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it. In a few years men learn to reason. The extreme violence of opinion subsides. Hostile theories correct each other. The scattered elements of truth cease to conflict, and begin to coalesce. And at length a system of justice and order is educed out of the chaos.

"Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim.

If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever."

The speedy dissolution of family and state was prophesied by men when first a girl took a public examination in geometry; whenever women have been given complete control of their own property; when they have been received into the professions and industries; and now in like manner people dread the condition of things that they imagine might follow if women are given the right to vote and to hold office. We may well believe, with Lecky, that there are "certain eternal moral landmarks which never can be removed." But no matter what our views may be of the destinies, characteristics, functions, or limitations of the s.e.x, certain reforms are indispensable before woman and, through her, family life can reach their highest development. Of these reforms I shall speak briefly and with them close my history.

I. The double standard of morality for the s.e.xes must gradually be abolished.[423] Of all the sad commentaries on Christian nations none is so pathetic or so tragical as the fact that for nineteen centuries men have been tacitly and openly allowed, at least before marriage, unrestrained liberty to indulge in s.e.xual vice and intemperance, while one false step on the part of the woman has condemned her to social obloquy and, frequently, to a life on the street. This strange system, a blasphemy against the Christ who suffered death in order to purify the earth, has had its defenders not merely among the uneducated who do not think, but even among the most acute intellects. The philosopher Hume justifies it by commenting on the vastly greater consequences attendant on vice in women than in men; divines like Jeremy Taylor have encouraged it by urging women meekly to bear the sins of their husbands. This subject is one of the great _taboos_ in modern society. Let me exhort the reader to go to any physician and get from him the statistics of gonorrhea and syphilis which he has met in his practice; let him learn of the children born blind and of wives rendered invalid for life because their husbands once sowed a crop of wild oats with the sanction of society; let him read the Report of the Committee of Fifteen in New York (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1902) on _The Social Evil_, the records of the Watch and Ward Society in Boston, or the recent report of the special jury in New York which investigated the "White Slave Traffic."[424]

The plain facts are not pleasant. A system which has been in vogue from the beginning of history cannot be changed in a decade; but the desired state of things will be more speedily achieved and immediate good will be accomplished by three reforms which may be begun at once--have begun, in fact. In the first place, the "age of legal consent" should be uniformly twenty-one. In most States to-day it is fourteen or sixteen.[425] To the ordinary mind it is a self-evident proposition that a girl of those ages, the slippery period of p.u.b.erty, can but seldom realise what she is doing when she submits herself to the l.u.s.t of scoundrels. But the minds of legislators pa.s.s understanding; and when, a few years ago, a woman in the Legislature of Colorado proposed to have the age of consent raised from sixteen to twenty-one, such a storm of protest came from her male colleagues that the measure had to be abandoned. In the second place the public should be made better acquainted with the facts of prost.i.tution. When people once realise thoroughly what sickness and social ulcers result from the presence in the city of New York of 100,000 debauched women (and the estimate is conservative)--when they begin to reflect that their children must grow up in such surroundings, then perhaps they will question the expediency of the double standard of morality and will insist that what is wrong for a woman is wrong for a man. It is a fact, to be borne carefully in mind, that the vast majority of prost.i.tutes begin their career below the age of _eighteen_ and usually at the instigation of adult _men_, who take advantage of their ignorance or of their poverty. If the miserable Thaw trial did nothing else, it at least once more called public attention to conditions which every intelligent man knows have existed for years. Something can also be done by statute. New York has made adultery a crime; and the State of Was.h.i.+ngton requires a physical examination of the parties before marriage. In the third place, physicians should take more pains to educate men to the knowledge that a continent life is not a detriment to health--the contrary belief being more widely spread than is usually suspected.

II. In the training of women, care should be taken to impress upon them that they are not toys or spoiled children, but fellow-citizens, devoted to the common task of advancing the ideals of the nation to their goal.

The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink Together, dwarf'd or G.o.dlike, bond or free: If she be small, slight-natured, miserable, How shall men grow?

TENNYSON, _The Princess_.

A Being breathing thoughtful breath, A Traveller between life and death; The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; A perfect Woman, n.o.bly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of an angel light.

WORDSWORTH.

Towards a higher conception of their duties, women are steadily advancing. It often happens that the history of words will give a hint of the progress of civilisation. Such a story is told by the use of _lady_ and _woman_. Not many decades ago the use of the word _woman_ in referring to respectable members of the s.e.x was interpreted as a lack of courtesy. To-day, women prefer to be called _women_.

III. Women should be given the full right to enter any profession or business which they may desire. As John Stuart Mill says:

"The proper sphere for any human being is the highest sphere that being is capable of attaining; and this cannot be ascertained without complete liberty of choice."

"We are, as always, in a period of transition," remarks Mr.

Bjorkman,[426] "the old forms are falling away from us on every side.

Concerning the new ones we are still uncertain and divided. Whether woman shall vote or not, is not the main issue. She will do so sooner or later if it suits her. No, the imperative question confronting us is this: What are we to do that her life once more may be full and useful as it used to be? That question cannot be answered by anybody but herself. Furthermore, it can only be answered on the basis of actual experience. And urged onward by her never-failing power of intuition, woman has for once taken to experimenting. She has, if you please, become temporarily catabolic. But it means merely that she is seeking for new means to fulfil her nature, not for ways of violating it. And the best thing--nay, the only thing--man can do to help her is to stand aside and keep his faith, both in her and in life. Whether it be the franchise, or the running of railroads, or public offices, that her eager hands and still more eager soul should happen to reach out for, he must give her free way. All she wants is to find herself, and for this purpose she must try everything that once was foreign to her being: the trial over, she will instinctively and unfailingly pick out the right new things to do, and will do them."

The opening up of professions and industries to woman has been of incalculable benefit to her. Of old the unmarried woman could do little except sit by the fire and spin or make clothing for the South Sea Islanders. Her limited activities caused a corresponding influence on her character. People who have nothing to do will naturally find an outlet for their superfluous energy in gossip and all the petty things of life; if isolated from a share in what the world is doing, they will no less naturally develop eccentricities of character and will grow old prematurely. To-day, by being allowed a part in civic and national movements, women can "get out of themselves"--a powerful therapeutic agent. Mrs. Ella Young, a woman of sixty, was last year made Superintendent of the great Public School System of Chicago. Fraulein Anna Heinrichsdorff is the first woman in Germany to get an engineer's diploma, very recently bestowed upon her; an "excellent" mark was given Fraulein Heinrichsdorff in every part of her examination by the Berlin Polytechnic Inst.i.tute. Miss Jean Gordon, the only factory inspector in Louisiana, is at present waging a strong fight against the attempt to exempt "first-cla.s.s" theatres from the child-labour law. Mrs. Nellie Upham, of Colorado, is President and General Manager of the Gold Divide Mining, Milling, and Tunnel Company of Colorado and directs 300 workmen.

These are a few examples out of some thousands of what woman is doing.[427] And yet there are men who do not believe she should do anything but wash dishes and scrub.

Much more serious is the glaring discrepancy in the wages paid to men and to women. For doing precisely the same work as a man and often doing it better, woman receives a much lower wage. The reasons are several and specious. We are told that men have families to support, that women do not have such expensive tastes as men, that they are incapable of doing as much as men, that by granting them equal wages one of the inducements to marry is removed. These arguments are generally used with the greatest gravity by bachelors. If men have families to support, women by the hundreds support brothers and sisters and weak parents.

That they are incapable of doing as much sounds unconvincing to one who has seen the work of sweat-shops. The argument that men have more expensive tastes to satisfy is too feeble to deserve attention. Finally, when men argue that women should be forced to marry by giving them smaller wages, they are simply reverting to the time-honoured idea that the goal of every women's ambition should be fixed as matrimony. If the low wages of women produced no further consequence, one might dismiss the matter as not of essential importance; but inadequate pay has been found too frequently to be a direct cause of prost.i.tution. No girl can well keep body and soul together on four dollars a week and some business managers have been known to inform their women employees with frankness that a "gentleman friend" is a necessary adjunct to a limited income.

The women who suffer most from low wages are probably the teachers in our primary schools. They start usually on a salary of about three hundred and fifty dollars a year. For this each teacher performs all the minute labour and bears all the nervous strain of instructing sixty pupils six and a half hours a day and of correcting dozens of papers far into the night. And when crime increases or the pupils are not universally successful in business, the school teacher has the added pleasure of getting blamed for it, being told that she ought to have trained them better. These facts lend some colour to Mark Twain's sage reflection that G.o.d at first made idiots--that was for practice; then he made school boards.

One of the most interesting examples of recent evolution in the industrial status of women is the decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois in the so-called Ritchie Case. The last Legislature of Illinois pa.s.sed a law limiting to ten hours the working day of women in factories and stores. Now, as far back as 1893, the Legislature had pa.s.sed a similar law limiting woman's labour to _eight_ hours; but the Supreme Court in 1895 declared it unconst.i.tutional on the ground that it was an arbitrary and unreasonable interference with the right of women to contract for the sale of their labour. When, therefore, this year a ten-hour bill was tried, W.C. Ritchie, who had secured the nullification of the act of 1893, again protested. The decision of the Court, rendered April 21, 1910, is an excellent proof of the great advance made within two decades in the position of women. Reversing completely its judgment of 1895, the Court left far behind it mere technicalities of law and found a sanction for its change of front in the experience of humanity and of common sense. These are its conclusions:

"It is known to all men, and of what we know as men we cannot profess to be ignorant as judges:

"That woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a great disadvantage in the battle of life.

"That while a man can work for more than ten hours a day without injury to himself, a woman, especially when the burdens of motherhood are upon her, cannot.

"That while a man can work standing upon his feet for more than ten hours a day, day after day, without injury to himself, a woman cannot.

"That to require a woman to stand upon her feet for more than ten hours in any one day and to perform severe manual labour while thus standing has the effect of impairing her health.

"And as weakly and sickly women cannot be the mothers of vigorous children, it is of the greatest importance to the public that the State take such measures as may be necessary to protect its women from the consequences produced by long-continued manual labour in those occupations which tend to break them down physically.

"It would seem obvious, therefore, that legislation which limits the number of hours which women shall be permitted to work to ten hours in a single day in such employments as are carried on in mechanical establishments, factories, and laundries would tend to preserve the health of women and a.s.sure the production of vigorous offspring by them and would conduce directly to the health, morals, and general welfare of the public, and that such legislation would fall clearly within the police powers of the State."

IV. All phenomena that concern family life should be carefully studied and their bearing on the state ascertained as exactly as possible.

There is no subject, for example, from which such wild conclusions are drawn as the matter of divorce. The average moralist, but more particularly the clergy, seeing the fairly astonis.h.i.+ng increase in divorce during the last decade, jump to the conclusion that family life is decadent and immorality flagrantly on the increase. They point to the indubitable fact that a century ago divorces were insignificant in number; and they infer that morality was then on a much higher level than it is now. Such alarmists neglect certain elementary facts. The flippant manner in which marriage is treated by the Restoration dramatists and by novelists of the 18th century, the callous s.e.xual morality revealed in diaries and in the conversations of men like Johnson alone are sufficient to suggest the need of a readjustment of one's view regarding the standard of morality in the past. A century ago it was the duty of a gentleman to drink to excess; and it was presumed that a guest had not enjoyed his dinner unless he was at least comfortably the worse for liquor. This view of drunkenness is admirably depicted in d.i.c.kens's _Pickwick Papers_, where intoxication is treated throughout as something merely humorous.

There were just as many unhappy marriages formerly in proportion to the population as there are to-day; but the wife was held effectually from application for a divorce not only by rigid laws but by the sentiment of society, which ostracised a divorced woman, and furthermore by her lack of means and of opportunity for earning an independent livelihood.

To-day women are not inclined to tolerate a husband who is brutal or debauched. Alarmists make a mistake when they place too much emphasis on the seeming triviality of the reasons, justifying their course, which wives advance when applying for a separation. For example, the phrase "incompatibility of temperament" is in a great number of cases merely a euphemism for something much worse. The clergy will counsel a woman to bear with what they call Christian resignation a husband addicted to drink or scarred by the diseases that are a consequence of sin.

Abstractly considered, this may conceivably be good advice. But viewed in a common-sense way it is the duty of a woman to reflect on the consequences of conceiving children from such a man; and the researches of physicians will furnish her with incontrovertible facts regarding the impaired health of the offspring of such a union. A law which would permit of no divorce under such conditions, instead of benefiting the state, would injure it in its most vital a.s.set--healthy children, the coming citizens. Doubtless the divorce laws in many States are too lax.

But sweeping generalities based on theory will not remedy matters.

Divorce may simply be a symptom, not a disease; a revolt against unjust conditions; and the way to do away with divorce or reduce the frequency of it is to remedy the evil social conditions which, in a great many instances, are responsible.

The fact is, the inst.i.tution of marriage is going through a crisis. The old view that marriage is a complete merging of the wife in the husband and that the latter is absolute monarch of his home is being questioned.

When a man with this idea and a woman with a far different one marry, there is likely to be a clash. Marriage as a real partners.h.i.+p based on equality of goods and of interests finds an increasing number of advocates. There is great reason to believe that the issue will be only for the good and that from doubt and revolt a more enduring ideal will arise, based on a sure foundation of perfect understanding.

NOTES:

[415] See an excellent article on "The American Woman" by Miss Ida M.

Tarbell, in the _American Magazine_ for April, 1910.

[416] In 1893. "Be it resolved by the Second Legislature of the State of Wyoming:

"That the possession and exercise of suffrage by the women of Wyoming for the past quarter of a century has wrought no harm and has done great good in many ways; that it has largely aided in banis.h.i.+ng crime, pauperism, and vice from this State, and that without any violent and oppressive legislation," etc.

[417] Women in Colorado have been of greatest service in establis.h.i.+ng the following laws:

1--Establis.h.i.+ng a State Home for dependent children, three of the five members of the board to be women.

2--Requiring that at least three of the six members of the county visitors shall be women.

3--Making mothers joint guardians of their children with the fathers.

4--Raising the age of protection for girls to 18 years.

5--Establis.h.i.+ng a State Industrial School for girls. There had long been one for boys, but the women could not get one for girls until they had the vote.

6--Removing the emblems from the Australian ballots. This is a little, indirect step toward educational qualifications for voting.

7--Establis.h.i.+ng the indeterminate sentence for prisoners.

8--Requiring one physician on the board of the Insane Asylum to be a woman.

9--Establis.h.i.+ng truant schools.

10--Making better provision for the care of the feeble-minded.

11--For tree preservation.