Part 71

The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic Independence, which has been spoken of in former articles; Social Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of next month.

Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence, carries them out of the world's mental strife. If it is the one toward frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and service which produce power and character.

With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort--to and beyond all other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery of it in torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment f all the world's worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong, its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle for existence! What a work!

But what a preparation for it had Marie!

She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.

She became a woman of the future--OF HER TYPE.

From the facts of modern idleness the positive character reacts toward new-found activity: toward an enormous, never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on children; toward self-support; toward civic service. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a neutral mixture of modern facts and of old ideals of casual idling and of casual child-rearing. The negative character--like Marie's--just yields to the facts and is swept along by them into final irresponsibility and inutility.

Marie wasn't negative enough--she wasn't positive enough in her negativeness--to plunge into dissipation. It wasn't in her nature to do any plunging of any kind. Good, safe, motionless sponging was her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She is charming.

When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.

No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a recognized commercial asset.

Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner-table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined down-town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt stud.

No struggle in Marie's life so far! No HAVING to swim in the cold water of daily enforced duty or else sink. NO BEING ACCUSTOMED TO THE DISAGREEABLE FEEL OF THAT WATER.

She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being HARDENED to work. That was everything.

The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort came when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected, Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary. But there had been no necessity in Marie's experience. They became quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn. Marie talked about her mother and her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.

For two years she inhabited Chunk's flat in the city and lived on Chunk's monthly check.

She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. Her father used to support her. Her job then was being nice. That was her job now. And she was nice. And she was still supported. Perfectly logical.

For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the parties for Chunk's business friends, she did nothing but become more and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hardship, in her horror of pain.

When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that she didn't want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the world had capsized.

In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was widespread.

Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a diffusion of leisure.

The causes were similar.

The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of despoiled peoples just as we live on the products of exploited continents. They had slaves in multitudes just as we have machines in masses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do. Along with leisure and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences, just as we have acquired them. And the sermons of Augustus Caesar, first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of ours.

Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons identical with ours--the increased competitiveness of the modern life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation, divorce, and aversion to child-bearing leave nothing to be desired, in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric--or for ineffectiveness in result.

Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to childbearing in the Roman world--for SHE did not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full citizenship--for she did not exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was parasitic--the economic power which comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of sexual charm.

The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.

The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity--that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.

They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury the START? Wasn't it only the means to the FINISH?

Eating a grouse destroys in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider-down or on straw, arose Bismarck.