The Women of Tomorrow Part 1

The Women of Tomorrow.

by William Hard.

WHENCE AND WHY

The chapters of this book were originally articles in _Everybody's Magazine_. I have not embellished them with footnotes nor given them any other part of the panoply of critical apparatus. It could be done.

I have preferred to leave them in the dress I first gave them,--a fighting dress. They owe much of their structure, it is true, to facts and ideas out of the dust of libraries. But they owe much more to facts and ideas exhumed out of the much more neglected dust of daily circ.u.mstance. Either dust, by itself, is lifeless. When the two cohere they establish the current of existence. At their meeting-place this book has tried to stand. And so, while it hopes to have added to knowledge, it will have failed unless it has merged into conduct.

The reader will forgive the abruptness of the s.h.i.+ft of attention from the subject of one chapter to the subject of the next. Each chapter, because of having been a separate magazine article, is still an isolated unit. Its isolation, however, is only that of form. In thought there is a sequence both logical and temporal.

Devoting themselves to five critical phases in the mental development of the modern woman, the five chapters of this book accompany her through five successive stages in her personal life. The postponement of marriage, the preliminary period of self-support, the new training for motherhood, the problem of leisure, the opportunity for civic service,--these subjects, treated in turn, follow one another in the order of their appearance in a normal life-history. They are further unified by the proof (I hope it is proof) throughout adduced that even the most diverse of the phenomena observed, the female parasite equally with the female suffragist, the domestic-science-and-art enthusiast equally with the economic-independence enthusiast, are all of them products of the one same big industrial unfoldment which is exposing all women, willing or unwilling, to the winds of the social process, which is giving to all women, whether home-keepers or wanderers, in place of the old home-world, the new world-home.

WILLIAM HARD.

_Chicago, Dec., 1911._

INTRODUCTION

The woman of to-morrow will not differ from the woman of yesterday in femininity or physique or capacity, in her charm for men, or her love of children, but in the response of her eternally feminine nature to a changed environment. The environment is bound to alter the superficial characteristics of woman as every change has done. Man, in his turn, will be a beneficiary of this new womanliness as he has been the ready victim of the old-womanishness.

The reader will find in this book a dramatic picture of the gap between girlhood and motherhood which causes both girls and men to go wrong, and which can only be filled adequately by work--work even more suitably performed after marriage than before. Postponed childbearing, if not postponed marriage, is justified by the superiority of the younger children or the children of older parents. A declining birth rate may be redeemed by a declining death rate and the superior progeny of mature marriage.

The life of great-grandmamma fills us with wonder and pity. Her labors were legion, and, while no longer necessary in the house, their equivalent must be found or girls become parasites. Notwithstanding her incredible labors great-grandmamma died young, having sacrificed herself on the altar of masculine egotism and prerogative. Her life was a short but not a merry one, but our virtuous forefather's life was a long and sensual one.

To-day woman is beginning to be educated for the new era and man must go with her. She is learning homemaking with new implements and new opportunities. She need no longer be a drudge and she must not continue to be a doll. Since the days of John Ruskin, even the academic economists have had to put spending before saving in the logical exposition of their science,--consumption and thrift can only be adjusted by those who work and live. Hence, the new mother, alert to the larger needs of her household, is more competent than great-grandmamma and must even supplant "the tired business man" in munic.i.p.al housekeeping, until he can learn to be her equal and himself deserve the suffrage.

Mr. Hard has produced a brilliant volume, as might have been expected.

Mr. Hard could write a book in the dark; but it may not have been known that he could illumine with such scholarly sagacity the shadows cast on the woman question by man's huge egotism and woman's carefully coddled superst.i.tion. Originally magazine articles, Mr. Hard's chapters are a unit in being sound economics and sociology on the woman question, but they will probably not secure him a doctor's degree from his alma mater for they are also humorous, intelligible and inspiring.

CHARLES ZUEBLIN.

I.

Love Deferred

Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away on a career, he were going away on a comet.

She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time she was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn't got angry and insisted on marrying him.

Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance put most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama, "Love Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any other drama can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a thin, high note of fine pain.

We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too professional.

He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough and more commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which are the two big elements in the life of Modern Man.

When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one more year to go in engineering school.

How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the last century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen months. The present professors require three years.

In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend cla.s.ses for four months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for nine months in each of four years.

As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill by informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be generally recognized that a four-year technical course following the high-school course is not an adequate preparation for those who are to fill important positions; and the University would urge all those who can afford the time to extend their studies over a period of five or six years."

John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in the College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique courses in the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of Science.

He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the a.s.sembling of machines before they were s.h.i.+pped, and he overheard wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen cents an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total income was about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he was raised to fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of Science.

The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of those inst.i.tutions married almost immediately on graduation. John didn't. He didn't get married so early nor become a widower so often. He didn't carry so many children to the christening font nor so many to the cemetery.

Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.

Pick out any of the early Harvard cla.s.ses. Honestly and truly at random, run your finger down the column and pick any cla.s.s. The cla.s.s of 1671!

It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don't be too severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining ten, four were married twice and two were married three times. For ten husbands, therefore, there were eighteen wives.

Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very competently remarks: "The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children."

The ten husbands of the Harvard cla.s.s of 1671, with their eighteen wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They also filled the churchyards.

_Twenty-one of those seventy-one children died in childhood._

This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of only 2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.

In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the unfair frequency with which it had more than one wife-and-mother to help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of young wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the hideous frequency with which it killed them.

Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from 1701 to 1745.

The girls they took in marriage were most of them under twenty-one and were many of them down in their 'teens, sometimes as far down as fourteen.

May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and salting tubs and spinning wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn't domestic. He was domestic.

Our young engineering friend, John, when _he_ looked forward to _his_ future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it at all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very little real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to "give" Mary a home.

Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages of mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of things. On the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the other hand, he was prevented from wanting anything in his marriage except just Mary.

The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous toil (complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of result: