Part 9

In one hundred years the age of childish irresponsibility has been raised from six to about twelve, and in the extra six years thus granted imagination and individuality have been left free to develop themselves.

During the last twenty years another change has taken place. The duties of the young person have altered. Formerly at the age of eighteen, in the young person’s fiction, she was expected to relieve her invalid mother of household cares and brighten her aged father’s declining years. But mothers in 1899 refuse to become decrepit and take to the sofa merely because their daughters are grown up, and fathers only require to be amused occasionally in the evening. The new mother may be considerably over thirty-five, bordering on fifty perhaps, but she neither feels aged nor looks it, and is rather inclined to look beyond her home for full scope for her powers when thus set free from maternal cares. And, given intelligence, length of years guarantees experience.

One of the tortures of the Inquisition was to place the victim in a room, the walls of which grew nearer to each other every day until, at last, they closed in on him and crushed him to death. In the same way intelligent life gradually grows fainter and fainter as the brain decays for want of exercise. A daily mental constitutional is necessary to prevent the accumulation of what W. K. Clifford called mental fat; mental gymnastics are needed to prevent stiffening of the brain. When not only our habits but our ideas have become fixed, then we have grown old. An octogenarian may be young, if he has preserved the faculty of modifying his conceptions in correspondence with new evidence.

Mental activity, provided there is no overstrain of the nerves, gives freshness and interest to life, and to be fresh and interested is to be young. It is because girls have been taught to use their brains, and women have been encouraged to keep them in repair, that this old stereotyped conception of the necessary failure of power after thirty-five years of age has become absurd. At what age the value of a woman’s increased experience is counterbalanced by diminished physical power I do not pretend to judge. Women differ, and their social opportunities differ. I merely transpose my text and say, “Do not let your intellect lazily decline upon generalisations, formalised rules, and laws of nature; but rather let it remain braced and keen to watch the world accurately and take every appearance on its own merits.”

MRS. STETSON’S ECONOMIC IDEAL.

March, 1900.

The argument of Mrs. Stetson’s book, “Women and Economics,” may be briefly summed up as follows:--

(1) Man is the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food.

(2) The married woman’s living (i.e., food, clothing, ornaments, amusements, luxuries) bears no relation to her power to produce wealth, or to her services in the house, or to her motherhood.

(3) The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The man gets his wife by getting a living.

(4) Although marriage is a means of livelihood, it is not honest employment, where one can offer one’s labour without shame. To earn her living a woman must therefore make herself sexually attractive.

(5) The result of this is that, while men have been developing humanity, women have been developing femininity, to the great moral detriment of both men and women.

(6) The disastrous effects of this undue cultivation of sex differences can only be prevented by the wife being economically independent of her husband.

(7) This economic independence should be secured by the wife earning her living by performing paid work for some person or body other than her husband.

(8) The performance of maternal functions is not incompatible with the performance of such remunerative services outside the family.

(9) The servant functions of preparing food and removing dirt are not necessarily domestic functions, and could be better performed by professional cooks outside the home, and professional cleaners visiting the home or taking the work from the home.

(10) The nursemaid functions of minding small children can be better performed, with greater advantage to the children, in the crêche and kindergarten than in the domestic nursery.

(11) The wife can therefore advantageously be relieved from the continuous supervision of the kitchen, the living rooms, and the nursery, as she has already been relieved of the burden of the family washing, dressmaking, tailoring, and manufacture of underclothing.

(12) She will then be free to earn her own living outside the home.

(13) By so doing she not only will prevent the evils which have arisen from the wife’s economic dependence on her husband, but she will develop her human faculties. For what we do modifies us more than what is done for us.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh propositions are those on which the whole argument hinges. Mrs. Stetson’s energy of expression and her contempt for convention have deservedly secured for her a re-consideration of old problems thus presented in a new form. The ability with which she supports her conclusions is obvious. Her logic needs more careful examination.

Her first argument I dismiss as quite irrelevant. Granted that at least some men support their female kind, and that no brutes do, nothing follows. I trust that there are many thousand characteristics which may be predicated of man which must be denied of brutes.

Granted also her next argument, that what the wife obtains from her husband bears no relation to her power to produce wealth, or to her services in the house, or to her motherhood. Marriage, as Mrs. Stetson maintains, should not be a business transaction, and therefore the less commercial the relations of husband and wife to each other, the less will service on one side be balanced against service on the other side. The basis is the reverse of the economic basis; the honest business man tries to get the largest amount for himself obtainable without cheating his co-bargainer, trusting to the latter to guard his own interests, and to see that what he gets is worth to him what he gives for it. In any normal marriage the desire on each side is to secure to the other the greatest amount of good at a reasonable cost to themselves, the difference between persons determining more than anything else what they consider a reasonable cost. Stepniak, in a struggle with the English language, once gave a very happy definition, which most practical people would accept. “Marriage,” he said, “is to love and put up with.” Now these are just the two acts that no one expects from the parties to a commercial contract.

I therefore grant Mrs. Stetson’s second argument, and put it aside, as being, like the previous one, beside the question.

Thirdly, “The woman gets her living by getting a husband. The man gets his wife by getting a living.” Putting aside for the moment the question of the truth of this statement, I agree with Mrs. Stetson that in any social group of which such a statement is true the moral tone of women, and therefore of men, will be a low one. In such a state of society also it would be necessary, as Mrs. Stetson says, for a woman, in order to earn her living, to make herself sexually attractive. But before passing on I would point out that, at this stage of the argument, the only part of this result which I would on the face of it admit to be bad is that the woman in such a case frequently falsely assumes attractive qualities which she does not really possess, or conforms to a masculine standard of what is womanly which she at heart despises. It is, in fact, the development of the human qualities of fraud and hypocrisy which is to be deprecated, rather than the development of feminine attraction.

But Mrs. Stetson makes the universal statement that women have been developing femininity to a harmful degree, and to the injury of the human attributes which should be common to both sexes. At first imagining that Mrs. Stetson, like most women, was confining her attention to the present and the near past, I was extremely puzzled at this assertion. It seemed especially strange that it should come from America, where even more than in England women have been supposed to be developing their individuality in all kinds of occupations hitherto supposed to be only suitable for men. But suddenly Mrs. Stetson announces that after all she is only arguing in favour of what many women are already doing, and have been doing for the last half century or so.

Now to decide whether femininity has become excessive, we must first know what group of women we are studying, and also with what other group of women we are comparing them. Mrs. Stetson is not apparently describing the present century as ending with a great development of purely feminine qualities, and even if she were, we might fairly ask her to tell us whether she includes Americans, Turks, Hindoos, and Hottentots under the same category. But there is no hint given of any great differences between women rendering it necessary to limit the nations coming under review, nor do I find it possible to date exactly the epochs chosen for comparison. On p. 129 we have the following condonement of the treatment of woman in past ages:--

With a full knowledge of the initial superiority of her sex, and the sociological necessity for its temporary subversion, she should feel only a deep and tender pride in the long patient ages during which she has waited and suffered that man might slowly rise to full racial equality with her. She could afford to wait. She could afford to suffer.