Part 13 (1/2)
CHAPTER XIII
THE FUTURE OF WOMAN, THE HOME, AND MARRIAGE
No true sportsman ever prophesies. For the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the prophet. If he is right, he can brag the rest of his days of his seer-like vision. If he is wrong, no one takes the trouble to reproach or mock him.
Therefore I do not claim to be a prophet in discussing the future of woman, the home, and marriage. At any time just one invention may come along that will totally alter the face of things. Moreover we are now in the midst of great changes in industry, in social relations, in the largest matters of national and international nature. Men and women alike are involved in these changes, but it is impossible to judge the outcome. For history records many abortive reformations, many reactionary centuries and eras as well as successful reformations and progressive ages.
Whether or not it fits woman to be a housewife of the traditional kind, feminism is certain to develop further. Women will enter into more diverse occupations than ever before, they will enter politics, they will find their way to direct power and action. More and more those who work will be specialized and individualized--- the woman executive, the writer, the artist, the doctor, lawyer, architect, chemist, and sociologist--will resist the dictum ”Woman's place is the Home.” The woman of this group will either be forced into celibacy, or in ever-increasing numbers she will insist on some sort of arrangement whereby she can carry on her work. She will perhaps refuse to bear children and transform domesticity into an apartment hotel life, in which she and her husband eat breakfast and dinner together and spend the rest of the waking time separately, as two men might.
Such a development, while perhaps satisfying the ideas of progress of the feminist, will be bad eugenically. There will be a removal from the race of the value of these women, the intellectual members of their s.e.x. Whether the work this group of women do will equal the value of the children they might have had no one can say.
But after all, the number of women who will enter the professions and remain in them on the conditions above stated will be relatively small.
The main function of women will always be childbearing. If ever there comes a time when the drift will be away from this function, then a counter-movement will start up to sway women back into this sphere of their functions. Moreover, the bulk of women entering industry will enter it in the humbler occupations and they will in the main be willing enough to marry and bear children, even in the limited way. Yet since they enter marriage with a wider experience than ever before, the conditions of marriage and the home must change, even though gradually.
So on the whole we may look to an increasing individuality of woman, an increasing feeling of worth and dignity as an individual, an increasing reluctance to take up life as the traditional housewife. Rebellion against the monotony and the seclusive character of the home will increase rather than diminish, and it must be faced without prejudice and without any reliance on any authority, either of church or state, that will force women back to ”womanly” ways of thinking, feeling or doing.
Sooner or later we shall have to accept legally what we now recognize as fact,--the restriction of childbearing. Whether we regard it as good or bad, the modern woman will not bear and nurse a large family. And the modern man, though he has his little joke about the modern family, is one with his wife in this matter. With husband and wife agreed there seems little to do but accept the situation.
That this condition of affairs is leaving the peopling of the world to the backward, the ignorant, and the careless is at present accepted by most authors. One has only to read the serious articles on this subject in the journals devoted to racial biology to realize how deeply important the matter is. Yet there may be some undue alarm felt, for contraceptive measures are becoming so prevalent in Europe, America, and Asia that all races will soon be on the same footing, and moreover all cla.s.ses in society except the feeble-minded are learning the procedures. The prolificness of the feeble-minded is indeed a menace, and society may find itself compelled to lower their fertility artificially.
What will probably happen is that the one, two, or three-child family will be born before the mother's thirty-fifth year, and she will then or before forty become free from the severest burdens of the housewife.
What will she do with her time; what will the better-to-do woman do?
Will she gradually give her energies to the community, or will she while away her time in the spurious culture that occupies so many club women to-day?
It is safe to say that women will enter far more largely than ever before into movements for the betterment of the race. Though their way of life may breed neurasthenia for some, it will have this great advantage,--the mother feeling will sweep into society, will enter politics, and social discussions. That we need that feeling no one will deny who has ever tried to enlist social energies for race betterment and failed while politicians stepped in for all the funds necessary even for some anti-social activities. We have too much legalism in our social structure and not near enough of the humanism that the socially minded mother can bring.
Is the increasing incidence of divorce a revolt against domesticity? To some extent yes, but where women obtain the divorce it is mainly a refusal to tolerate unfaithfulness, desertion, incompatibility of temperament. It does not mean that the family is threatened by divorce,--rather that the family is threatened by the conditions for which divorce is nowadays obtained and which were formerly not reasons for divorce. In many countries adultery on the part of the man, cruel and abusive treatment, chronic intoxication, and desertion were not grounds for divorce. These to-day are the grounds for divorce, and in the opinion of the writer they should invalidate a marriage. I would go even further and say that wherever there was concealed insanity or venereal disease the marriage should be annulled, as it is in some States.
Divorce will not then diminish, despite the campaign against it, until the conditions for which it is sought are removed. Until that time comes, to bind two people together who are manifestly unhappy simply encourages unfaithfulness and cruelty, and is itself a cruelty.
Whether we can devise a system where woman's individuality and humanness can have scope and yet find her willing to accept the roles of mother and homekeeper, is a serious question. It seems to me certain that woman will continue to demand her freedom, regardless of her status as wife and mother. She will continue to receive more and more general and special education, and she will continue to find the role of the traditional housewife more uncongenial. Out of that maladaptation and the discontent and rebellion will arise her neurosis.
In other words what we must seek to do--those of us who are not bound by tradition alone but who seek to modify inst.i.tutions to human beings rather than the reverse--is to find out what changes in the home and matrimonial conditions are necessary for the woman of to-day and to-morrow.
That there has been a huge migration to the cities in the last century is one of its outstanding peculiarities. This urban movement has meant the greater concentration of humans in a given area, and it is therefore directly responsible for the apartment house. That is to say, there has been a trend away from individual homes, completely segregated and individualized, to houses where at least part of the housework was eliminated, in a sense was cooperative. This cooperation is increasing; more and more houses have janitors, more and more houses furnish heat.
In the highest cla.s.s of apartment house the trend is toward permanent hotel life, with the exception that individual housekeeping is possible.
Because of the limited s.p.a.ce and the desire of the modern well-to-do woman to escape as much as possible from housekeeping, because of the smaller families (which idea has been fostered by landlords), the number of rooms and the size of the rooms have grown less. The kitchenette apartment is a new departure for those who can afford more room, for it is well known that the poor in the slums have long since lived in one or two rooms serving all purposes. The huge modern apartment house, the huge modern tenement house, are part first of the urban movement and second of that movement away from housekeeping which has been sketched in the Introduction.
The home has been praised as the nucleus of society, its center, its heart. Its virtues have been so unanimously extolled that one need but recite them. It is the embodiment of family, the soul of mother, father, and children. It is the place where morality and modesty are taught. In it arise the basic virtues of love of parents, love of children, love of brothers and sisters; sympathy is thus engendered; loyalty has here its source. The privacy of the home is a refuge from excitement and struggle and gives rest and peace to the weary battler with the world. It is a sanctuary where safety is to be sought, and this finds expression in the English proverb, ”Every Englishman's home is his castle.” It is a reward, a purpose in that men and women dream of their own home and are thrilled by the thought. Throughout its quiet runs the scarlet thread of its s.e.x life. Home is where love is legitimate and encouraged.
Yet the home has great faults; it is no more a divine inst.i.tution than anything else human is. Without at all detracting from its great, its indispensable virtues, let us, as realists, study its defects.
On the physical-economic side is the inefficiency and waste inseparable from individual housekeeping. Labor-saving machinery and devices are often too expensive for the individual home, and so small stoves do the cooking and the heating, each individual housewife or her helper washes by hand the dishes of each little group. Shopping is a matter for each woman, and necessitates numberless small shops; perhaps the biggest waste of time and energy lies here. The cooking is done according to the intelligence and knowledge of nutrition of each housewife, and housewives, like the rest of the world, range in intelligence from feeble-mindedness to genius, with a goodly number of the uninformed, unintelligent, and careless. Poets and novelists and the stage extol home cooking, but the doctors and diet.i.tians know there are as many kinds of home cooking as there are kinds of homekeepers. The laboratory and not the home has been the birthplace of the science of nutrition, and we have still many traditions regarding the merits of home cooking and feeding to break from.
Take as one minor example the gorging encouraged on Sunday and certain holidays. The housewife feels it her duty to slave in a kitchen all Sunday morning that an over-big meal may be eaten in half an hour by her family. She encourages gluttony by feeling that her standing as cook is directly proportional to the heartiness of her meal. Thanksgiving, Christmas,--the good cheer of gluttony is sentimentalized and hallowed into poetry and music. The table that groans under its good cheer has its sequence in the diners who groan without cheer.
While we might further dilate on the physical deficiencies and inefficiencies of the segregated home, there is a disadvantage of vaster importance. After all, inst.i.tutionalized cooking is rarely satisfactory, because it lacks the spirit of good home cooking, the desire to meet individual taste without profit. It lacks the ideal of service.