The Women of Tomorrow Part 4

Isn't there, after all, something rather pleasant for John in knowing, _knowing_, that Mary isn't cleaving unto him simply because she can't s.h.i.+ft for herself? Something exquisitely gratifying in being certain, _certain_, that it isn't just necessity that keeps her a home woman?

"If I were a man living in wedlock," said Mary, "I should want the door of the cage always wide open, with my mate fluttering straight by it every minute to still nestle by me. And I should want her wings to be strong, and I should want her to know that if she went through the door she could fly."

"For keeping her," Mary went on, "I should want to trust to my own wings and not to bars."

"However," said Mary, looking farther into the future, "the process isn't complete. Freedom is not yet completely acquired. Children! We want them! We must have them! Yet how often they tie us to unions which have come to be unholy, vile, full of all uncleanness. Women will never be completely free till, besides being able to earn their bread when they are _not_ bearing children, they are relieved of dependence on the individual character of another human person while they _are_. Mr. H. G. Wells is clearly right about it. When women bear children they perform a service to the state. Children are important to the state. They are its future life. To leave them to the eccentricities of the economic fate of the father is ridiculous. The woman who is bringing up children should receive from the state the equivalent of her service in a regular income. Then, and then only, in the union of man and woman, will love and money reach their right relations.h.i.+p--love a necessity, money a welcome romance!"

"It's remote, very remote," concluded Mary. "And we can't dream it out in detail. But when it comes it won't come out of personal sentiment.

It will come because of being demanded by the economic welfare of the community. It will come because it is the best way to get serviceable children for the state. It will come because, after all, it is the final answer to the postponement of marriage."

II.

Learning for Earning

"Every Jack has his Jill." It is a tender twilight thought, and it more or less settles Jill.

When the census man was at work in 1900, however, he went about and counted 2,260,000 American women who were more than twenty-five years old and who were still unmarried.

It is getting worse (or better) with every pa.s.sing decade, and out of it is emerging a new ideal of education for women, an ideal which seems certain to penetrate the whole educational system of the United States, all the way from the elementary schools to the universities.

The census man groups us into age-periods. The period from twenty-five to twenty-nine is the most important matrimonially, because it is the one in which most of us get pretty well fixed into our life work. Out of every 1,000 women in that period, in the year 1890, the census man found 254 who were still unmarried. _In 1900, only ten years later, he found 275._

There is not so much _processional_ as _recessional_ about marriage at present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the realistic pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach the comparatively serene, landlocked years from forty-five to fifty-four that we find ourselves in an age period in which the number of single women has been reduced to less than ten per cent of the total.

The rebound from this fact hits education hard. As marriage recedes, and as the period of gainful work before marriage lengthens, the need of real preparation for that gainful work becomes steadily more urgent, and the United States moves steadily onward into an era of trained women as well as of trained men.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIMMONS COLLEGE, BOSTON, WHICH HAS FOUR-YEAR COURSES IN SECRETARIAL STUDIES, LIBRARY WORK, SCIENCE, AND HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS.

_Photograph by Baer_]

In Boston, at that big new college called Simmons--the first of its kind in the United States--a regular four-year college of which the aim is to send out every graduate technically trained to earn her living in some certain specific occupation--in Simmons there were enrolled last year, besides five hundred undergraduate women, at least eighty other women who had already earned their bachelor's degrees at other colleges, such as Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith, Va.s.sar, Radcliffe, Leland Stanford, and the University of Montana.

These eighty other women, after eight years in grammar school, four years in high school, and four years in college, were taking one year more in technical school in order to be--what? Not doctors or lawyers or architects. Not anything in the old "learned" professions. Their scholastic purpose was more modest than that. Yet, modest as it was, it was keeping them on the learner's bench longer than a "learned"

profession would have kept most of their grandfathers. _These eighty women were taking graduate courses in order to be "social workers" in settlements or for charity societies, in order to be library a.s.sistants, in order to be stenographers and secretaries._

The Bachelor of Arts from Va.s.sar who is going to be a stenographer, and who is taking her year of graduate study at Simmons, will go to work at the end of the year and then, six months later, if she has made good, will get from Simmons the degree of Bachelor of Science.

At that point in her life she will have two degrees and seventeen years of schooling behind her. A big background. But we are beginning to do some training for almost everything.

Did you ever see a school of salesmans.h.i.+p for department-store women employees? You can see one at the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. Under the guidance of Mrs. Lucinda W. Prince, the big department stores of Boston have come to think enough of this school to send girls to it every morning and to pay them full wages while they take a three months' course.

If you will attend any of the cla.s.ses, in arithmetic, in textiles, in hygiene, in color and design, in demonstration sales, in business forms, you will get not only a new view of the art of selling goods over the counter but a new vision of a big principle in education.

In the cla.s.s on color, for instance, you will at first be puzzled by the vivid interest taken by the pupils in the _theory_ of color. You have never before observed in any cla.s.sroom so intimate a concern about rainbows, prisms, spectra, and the scientific sources of aesthetic effects. Your mind runs back to your college days and returns almost alarmed to this unacademic display of genuine, spontaneous, unanimous enthusiasm. At last the reason for it works into your mind.

These girls are engaged in the _practice_ of color every afternoon, over hats, ribbons, waists, gloves, costumes. When you begin once to _study_ a subject which reaches practice in your life, you cannot stop with practice. A law of your mind carries you on to the theory, the philosophy, of it.

Just there you see the reason why trade training, broadly contrived, broadens not only technique but soul, trains not only to _earn_ but to _live_. "Refined selling" some of the girls call the salesmans.h.i.+p which they learn in Mrs. Prince's cla.s.s. They have perceived, to some extent, the relation between the arts and sciences on the one hand and their daily work on the other.

To a much greater extent has this relation been perceived by the young woman who has taken the full four-year course in, say, "Secretarial Studies" in Simmons and who, throughout her English, her German, her French, her sociology, and her history, as well as throughout her typewriting, her shorthand, and her commercial law, has necessarily kept in view, irradiating every subject, the beacon-light of her future working career.

"Ah! There, precisely, is the danger. Every Jack should have his Jill; but if every Jill has her job, why, there again the wedding day goes receding some more into the future. Let them stop all this foolishness and get married, as their grandparents did!"

Poor Jack! Poor Jill! We lecture them, all the time, for postponing their marriage. We ought not to stop there. We ought to go on to lecture them for doing the thing which makes them postpone their marriage. We ought to lecture them for postponing their _maturity_. We ought to lecture them for prolonging their mental and financial infancy.

The big, impersonal, unlectureable industrial reasons for the modern prolongation of infancy were glanced at in chapter one of this book.

In the present chapter we shall glance at them again, more closely.

Just now, however, for a moment, we must revert to the Census, and we must take one final look at the amount of marriage-postponement now existing in this country.

It was in the United States as a whole that the census man found 275 out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period unmarried. But the United States consists of developed and of undeveloped regions. The cities are the high points of development.

Look at the cities:

In Chicago, out of every 1,000 women in the age-period from twenty-five to twenty-nine, there were 314 who were unmarried. In Denver there were 331. In Manhattan and the Bronx there were 356. In Minneapolis there were 369. In Philadelphia there were 387.

Southern New England, however, is the most industrially developed part of the United States, the part in which social conditions like those of the older countries of the world are most nearly reached.

In Fall River, out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period, the unmarried were 391. In New Haven they were 393. In Boston they were 452.

Therefore:

If, in educating girls, we educate them only for the probability of ultimate marriage and not also for the probability of protracted singleness, we are doing them a demonstrably grievous wrong.

But how is their singleness occupied?

We all know now that to a greater and greater degree it is getting occupied with work, money-earning work.

The unmarried women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period const.i.tute more than one-fourth of the total number of women in that age-period in the United States. In the large cities they const.i.tute usually more than one-third of the total number of women in that period. Wouldn't it have been remarkable if their families had been able to support them all at home? Wouldn't it have been remarkable if the human race had been able to carry so large a part of itself on its back?

We now admit the world's need of the labor-power of women. If women aren't laboring at home (at cooking, laundering, nursing, mothering, _something_), they will be (or ought to be) laboring elsewhere.

In the smaller cities and country districts of America home-life is still (by comparison) quite ample in the opportunities it offers the unmarried daughter for partic.i.p.ation in hard labor. Nevertheless the Census finds that the percentage of women "breadwinners" in the "smaller cities and country districts" is as follows:

Age-Periods Breadwinners

From 16 to 20 years of age 27 women out of every 100 From 21 to 24 years of age 26 women out of every 100 From 25 to 34 years of age 17 women out of every 100

"Smaller cities," to the Census, means cities having fewer than 50,000 inhabitants. In the larger cities, in the cities which have _more_ than 50,000 inhabitants, in the urban environment in which home-life tends most to contract to an all-modern-conveniences size, in the urban environment in which the domestic usefulness of unmarried daughters tends most to contract to the dimensions of "sympathy" and "companions.h.i.+p," the Census finds that the percentage of women breadwinners is as follows:

Age-Periods Breadwinners

From 16 to 20 years of age 52 women out of every 100 From 21 to 24 years of age 45 women out of every 100 From 25 to 34 years of age 27 women out of every 100

Therefore: