Part 1 (1/2)
The Business of Being a Woman.
by Ida M. Tarbell.
INTRODUCTION
The object of this little volume is to call attention to a certain distrust, which the author feels in the modern woman, of the significance and dignity of the work laid upon her by Nature and by society. Its ideas are the result of a long, if somewhat desultory, observation of the professional, political, and domestic activities of women in this country and in France. These observations have led to certain definite opinions as to those phases of the woman question most in need of emphasis to-day.
A great problem of human life is to preserve faith in and zest for everyday activities. The universal easily becomes the vulgar and the burdensome. The highest civilization is that in which the largest number sense, and are so placed as to realize, the dignity and the beauty of the common experiences and obligations.
The courtesy of the publishers of the _American Magazine_, in permitting the use here of chapters which have appeared in that periodical, is gratefully acknowledged.
THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN
CHAPTER I
The Uneasy Woman
The most conspicuous occupation of the American woman of to-day, dressing herself aside, is self-discussion. It is a disquieting phenomenon. Chronic self-discussion argues chronic ferment of mind, and ferment of mind is a serious handicap to both happiness and efficiency. Nor is self-discussion the only exhibit of restlessness the American woman gives. To an unaccustomed observer she seems always to be running about on the face of things with no other purpose than to put in her time. He points to the triviality of the things in which she can immerse herself--her fantastic and ever-changing raiment, the welter of lectures and other culture schemes which she supports, the eagerness with which she transports herself to the ends of the earth--as marks of a spirit not at home with itself, and certainly not convinced that it is going in any particular direction or that it is committed to any particular worth-while task.
Perhaps the most disturbing side of the phenomenon is that it is coincident with the emanc.i.p.ation of woman. At a time when she is freer than at any other period of the world's history--save perhaps at one period in ancient Egypt--she is apparently more uneasy.
Those who do not like the exhibit are inclined to treat her as if she were a new historical type. The rea.s.suring fact is, that ferment of mind is no newer thing in woman than in man. It is a human ailment.
Its attacks, however, have always been unwelcome. Society distrusts uneasiness in sacred quarters; that is, in her established and privileged works. They are the best mankind has to show for itself. At least they are the things for which the race has slaved longest and which so far have best resisted attack. We would like to pride ourselves that they were permanent, that we had settled some things.
And hence society resents a restless woman. And this is logical enough.
Embroiled as man is in an eternal effort to conquer, understand, and reduce to order both nature and his fellows, it is imperative that he have some secure spot where his head is not in danger, his heart is not hara.s.sed. Woman, by virtue of the business nature a.s.signs her, has always been theoretically the maker and keeper of this necessary place of peace. But she has rarely made it and kept it with full content. Eve was a revoltee, so was Medea. In every century they have appeared, restless Amazons, protesting and remolding. Out of their uneasy souls have come the varying changes in the woman's world which distinguish the ages.
Society has not liked it--was there to be no quiet anywhere? It is poor understanding that does not appreciate John Adams' parry of his wife Abigail's list of grievances, which she declared the Continental Congress must relieve if it would avoid a woman's rebellion. Under the stress of the Revolution children, apprentices, schools, colleges, Indians, and negroes had all become insolent and turbulent, he told her. What was to become of the country if women, ”the most numerous and powerful tribe in the world,” grew discontented?
Now this world-old restlessness of the women has a sound and a tragic cause. Nature lays a compelling hand on her. Unless she obeys freely and fully she must pay in unrest and vagaries. For the normal woman the fulfillment of life is the making of the thing we best describe as a home--which means a mate, children, friends, with all the radiating obligations, joys, burdens, these relations imply.
This is nature's plan for her; but the home has got to be founded inside the imperfect thing we call society. And these two, nature and society, are continually getting into each other's way, wrecking each other's plans, frustrating each other's schemes. The woman almost never is able to adjust her life so as fully to satisfy both. She is between two fires. Euripides understood this when he put into Medea's mouth a cry as modern as any that Ibsen has conceived:--
Of all things upon earth that grow, A herb most bruised is woman. We must pay Our store of gold, h.o.a.rded for that one day, To buy us some man's love; and lo, they bring A master of our fles.h.!.+ There comes the sting Of the whole shame. And then the jeopardy, For good or ill, what shall that master be; 'Tis magic she must have or prophecy-- Home never taught her that--how best to guide Toward peace this thing that sleepeth at her side.
And she who, laboring long, shall find some way Whereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray His yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath That woman draws!
Medea's difficulty was that which is oftenest in the way of a woman carrying her business in life to a satisfactory completion--false mating. It is not a difficulty peculiar to woman. Man knows it as often. It is the heaviest curse society brings on human beings--the most fertile cause of apathy, agony, and failure. If the woman's cry is more poignant under it than the man's, it is because the machine which holds them both allows him a wider sweep, more interests outside of their immediate alliance. ”A man, when he is vexed at home,”
complains Medea, ”can go out and find relief among his friends or acquaintances, but we women have none to look at but him.”
And when it is impossible longer to ”look” at him, what shall she do!
Tell her woe to the world, seek a soporific, repudiate the scheme of things, or from the vantage point of her failure turn to the untried relations of her life, call upon her unused powers?
From the beginning of time she has tried each and all of these methods of meeting her purely human woe. At times the women of whole peoples have sunk into apathy, their business reduced to its dullest, grossest forms. Again, whole groups have taken themselves out of the partners.h.i.+p which both Nature and Society have ordered. The Amazons refused to recognize man as an equal and mated simply that they might rear more women like themselves. Here the tables were turned and the boy baby turned out--not to the wolves, but to man! The convent has always been a favorite way of escape.
It has never been a majority of women who for a great length of time have s.h.i.+rked this problem by any one of these methods. By individuals and by groups woman has always been seeking to develop the business of life to such proportions, to so diversify, refine, and broaden it that no half failure or utter failure of its fundamental relations would swamp her, leave her comfortless, or prevent her working out that family which she knew to be her part in the scheme of things. It is from her conscious attempt to make the best of things when they are proved bad, that there has come the uneasiness which trails along her path from Eve to Mrs. Pankhurst.
When great changes have come in the social system, her quest has responded to them, taken its color and direction from them. The peculiar forms of uneasiness in the American woman of to-day come naturally enough from the Revolution of 1776. That movement upset theoretically everything which had been expected of her before.