So, naturally enough, men do not want women “getting too smart.” I heard a carpenter working in my home say pontifically to his assistant about to be married, “And why would you want a woman eddicated? I says if I want eddication I can go to the public library. A woman should know just so much as when it rains she stands on the sheltered side of the street. It’s enough.” And after a moment he added solemnly, “You don’t want a woman what can talk smart. You want one what can keep quiet smart.”
The voice of America’s perennial boys, I thought, speaking out in a carpenter, but heard as clearly in the embarrassed reserves of an after-dinner circle in a drawing room. And yet I do not blame them. There are so many women who chatter without thought, who stop all attempts at conversation with continual commonplaces uttered with all the petty authority of ignorance. And the fetters of chivalry, once so gaily worn, today hang heavily upon American men. Foolish, haughty women, standing in crowded buses, staring at a tired man in a seat, accepting favors as their right; peevish, idle women, wasting their husbands’ money; dogmatic women talking ignorantly about practical important matters—men must try to be polite to them all alike. I do not blame American men for anything except for not seeing that not all women are the same—yes, and for not seeing what women could be.
We are so clever with machines, we Americans. But we have done a silly thing with our women. We have put modern high-powered engines into old, antiquated vehicles. It is no wonder the thing is not working. And there are only two courses to follow if we do want it to work: we must go back to the old simple one-horse-power engine, or else we must change the body to suit the engine-one or the other. If the first, then tradition must be held to from the moment a woman is born, not, as it now is, clamped upon her when, after a free and extraordinarily equal childhood and girlhood with boys, she attempts to enter into a free and equal adult life with men and finds it denied her, to discover then that her education has had nothing to do with her life. Either she must not be educated for freedom or else we must be willing to let her go on to being free. This means that American men must cease being “sweet boys” and must grow up emotionally as well as physically and face women as adult men. But they, poor things, have not been fitted for that either! Besides, of course they are afraid of what women might do. And women, inexperienced and eager, will probably do as many foolish things as men have until they have had as much practice.
Of one thing I am sure, however: there will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant, or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.
4. THE AMERICAN WOMAN
American women among others are not born all alike, whatever they achieve in this respect afterward. By nature they seem, indeed, among other possible classifications, to fall into three groups. The first is the talented women, or women with a natural vocation. This group is, naturally, a small one, for the women who are in it must have, besides their talent, an unusual energy which drives them, in spite of shelter and privilege, to exercise their own powers. Like talented men, they are single-minded creatures, and they cannot sink into idleness, nor fritter away life and time, nor endure discontent. They possess that rarest gift, integrity of purpose; and they can work, day upon day, mentally and spiritually as well as physically, upon the one necessity. Such women sacrifice, without knowing they do, what many other women hold dear—amusement, society, play of one kind or another—to choose solitude and profound thinking and feeling, and at last final expression.
“To what end?” another woman may ask. To the end, perhaps, of science—science which has given us light and speed and health and comfort and lifted us out of physical savagery; to the end, perhaps, of art—art which has lifted us out of mental and spiritual savagery.
I remark, however, in passing that it is notable in the United States when a woman of this talented group chooses to spare herself nothing of the labor which a similarly talented man performs for the same ends—though why should it be notable, unless perhaps it is because we are accustomed to expect so little from a woman?
The second group of women is, though far larger than this first one, yet like it in having a vocation; but here it is the vocation of the home. In this group is the woman who is really completely satisfied mentally and spiritually with the physical routine of motherhood and the activity of housekeeping. When her children grow up she begins again with her grandchildren. Her brain, literally, has been encompassed by the four walls of her home, and is engrossed and satisfied with its enclosed activities. As long as her four walls stand she is contented, busy, useful—a sweet, comforting, essential creature who perfectly fulfills her being and her function, who brings nothing but simple happiness to those about her, though only so long as she gives them freedom to come and go as they will and does not limit them by her own simplicity.
But both of these, the woman born talented and the woman born domestic, may be dismissed from mind. Their combined number in proportion to the whole number of women is very small, and in the second place they are safe and stable citizens, since they know what they want to do and are doing it—in short, they are contented, and any contented person is safe and relatively sane.
There remains the last group, a very large one, for in this are the rest of the women; and these are the ones I call the gunpowder women. Here are all of America’s millions of women who are not compelled to earn money to keep from starvation, who have no definite talent or vocation, who have only a normal interest in home and children, so that when these are adequately tended they still have surplus time, energy, and ability which they do not know how to use. To make conditions more difficult for them, they have usually a fair or even an excellent education and brains good enough at least to be aware of discontent.
It is the gunpowder women who suffer most under the burden of privilege which American women have been given to bear.
I set this sentence alone because the cause for the existence of these gunpowder women is this heritage of privilege which so oppresses American woman. The talented woman can ignore oppression and go on doing what she was made to do, as man does. And a born housekeeper, if her disposition is amiable—as, thank God, it more often is than not—is a comforting and comfortable soul who cannot be spoiled by privilege since she is happy in her work. But here is this other and far more frequent woman, able, free, educated, who quite often really wants to contribute something directly to her world and not merely through husband and children. She seldom can, however. Privilege denies it—she is so privileged that her world makes no demand upon her. More than this, no one even expects anything of her. Her very friends discourage her, though they be her fellows in discontent. If she tries tentatively to do something a little more serious than her fellows are doing they cry at her, “My dear, aren’t you wonderful!” meaning, “Why on earth do you do it?” meaning, “Aren’t you queer?” meaning, “You think you’re smart!” meaning, indeed, all those things which discontented, helpless women do mean when they see one of their number behaving as the rest of them do not and being therefore a reproach to those who do nothing.
For the vicious result of privilege is that the creature who receives it becomes incapacitated by it as by a disease. Privilege is a serious misfortune anywhere, and the more serious because American women do not realize that the privilege they boast is really their handicap and not their blessing. I am sure they do not realize it because in the agreement and disagreement I have had with what I have written about this, nearly all the women said, reproachfully if they disagreed, “You seem to forget that women in America are the most privileged on earth,” and apologetically if they agreed, “Of course, I know women in America are the most privileged on earth, but—”
And every time this was said, in either fashion, a certain bit of Chinese history came warningly into my mind. This is the history:
Centuries ago, when astute China
was about to be conquered by the naïve and childlike though physically stronger Manchu, the Chinese used a weapon which gave them the final and actual victory, though the Manchus never knew it. When they were conquered, the Chinese said in effect to the Manchus, “You are our superiors. Therefore we will perform all unpleasant tasks for you. You shall live in palaces apart, and there enjoy yourselves. Sums of money will be set aside for you. You need not labor or strive. We will do everything for you. We want you only to be happy and enjoy yourselves.”
The Manchus were delighted with this. They laid aside their weapons, went joyfully to the fine palaces the Chinese gave them, and began to spend their lives in pleasure. In a short time the Chinese were ruling their own country again, as they always had, and the Manchus were as good as dead. Easy food and drink and plenty of leisure had reduced them to complete ineffectuality, just as the Chinese had planned it.
Now, therefore, whenever I hear an American woman begin brightly, “Well, anyway, we are the most privileged—” I remember the Manchus and am troubled. There is something too sinister in this matter of privilege.
And yet it is true—I cannot deny it, though I wish I could—the women of the United States are the most privileged in the world. We have never even had a very serious struggle to achieve our privileges, at least any struggle comparable to that of women in other enlightened countries. Privileges have been bestowed upon us, thanks largely to the inflated value which pioneer times gave to American women. That inflation still lasts, although happily it is decreasing. For the moment when American women hit what commercially is called an all-time low, they will be forced to wake up, and then perhaps they will put an honest value on themselves as human beings, and thus the struggle which other women have made or are making will begin and the result ought to be valuable to everybody. But that moment has not yet arrived, and meanwhile women go on under the handicap of privilege.
Of course, many women in other countries, not understanding any more than we do the effect of unearned privilege, envy American women. I suppose hundreds of Oriental women have said to me at one time or another, “How lucky you are to be an American woman! You have freedom and equality with men. Your parents do not groan when you are born, and your brothers do not look down on you as less than they. You can go to school. You need not even marry if you do not wish to—at least you need never marry someone you do not like.”
I agreed to all of this, and I still agree to it. I had rather be an American woman than a woman of any other country in the world, not because of anything we have, but because everything lies ahead of us still, as women. But if I had a chance now at those Oriental women, after these years spent among my own countrywomen, I would answer something like this:
“It’s true we are very free. We can be anything we like, we American women—lawyers, doctors, artists, scientists, engineers, anything. But, somehow, we are not!”
“You’re not!” the Oriental woman would say, astonished. “Why not? Do you mean the doors are open and you don’t go out?”
“Well, we go out—” I would have to acknowledge. “I suppose most of us go out in some sort of work, if we don’t marry first; but we secretly hope to marry first so that we need not, or we want to work just a year or two and then come back into the home and shut the door and be secure in the old way.”
“Don’t you want to be independent, to be free to come and go as you like?” the Oriental woman cries. “Ah, if I could support myself, know I need not obey father, mother, husband, son—all my life—”
“Oh, we American women don’t obey anyone,” I tell her quickly. “Our husbands support us in the home, but we don’t obey them. We do come and go as we like. Of course, we work in our own way at house and children, and for a few years we are even quite busy. But we have a great many ways to save labor, and the schools take our children early, and then we have a great deal of leisure—at least, you would think us very leisured.”
“Then what do you do?” the Oriental woman asks blankly.
“Some of us work, the rest of us amuse ourselves somehow,” I reply.
“Women are fed and clothed for that?” she asks.
“Yes,” I reply. “Many of us—”
She cannot understand this, and indeed it is difficult to understand, and I cannot explain it to her. Why, in a country where everything is free to women and women are so privileged, is it remarkable when a woman is first-rate in anything? But it is. Thanks to our privileges, which compel us to no effort, it is the truth that men excel us, numerically as well as actually, at everything except childbearing, and doubtless if men had to bear children they would soon find some better way of doing it. And women, seeing themselves outstripped without understanding why they are, and yet feeling themselves as able as men, grow discontented and join the crowded ranks of the gunpowder women.
The home, of course, has been the stronghold of this privilege. Behind its sheltering walls too many women have taken full advantage of every privilege—the privilege of security, the privilege of noncompetitive work, the privilege of privacy. Yes, of privileges women have had plenty, and yet most of them have been denied the one great blessing of man’s life—the necessity to go out into the world and earn their bread directly. And this one blessing is worth all privileges put together, for by it man has been compelled to put forth his utmost effort, whetting his brain and sharpening his ambition; and so he has accomplished much.
For Nature is not unjust. She does not steal into the womb and like an evil fairy give her good gifts secretly to men and deny them to women. Men and women are born free and equal in ability and brain. The injustice begins after birth. The man is taught that he must develop himself and work, lest he and his woman starve. But the woman is taught merely to develop such things as will please the man, lest she starve because he does not want to feed her. Because of this one simple, overwhelming fact, men have been the producers, the rulers, and even the artists.
For necessity makes artists, too. Many a talent is born without its mate, energy, and so comes to nothing unless energy is somehow created to develop the talent. Necessity is the magic of this creation for the man, for if he has talent he will, if driven desperately enough, apply his compelled energy to his talent and become at least a fair artist—for genius still remains the combination of highest natural talent and highest natural energy of a quality which functions without outside stimulus or compulsion.
“But,” a gunpowder woman retorted to this yesterday, “a man can combine his talent with his breadwinning.” She looked around the walls of her comfortable prison. I could feel her thinking, “If I had been free, I might have been a great painter.”
To which I retorted, “How do you know it is not as easy to combine housekeeping and art as it is to make art a business? You have never tried it because you have never had to.”
No, the man is lucky. By compulsion of society and public opinion, if he has any ability and pride he simply must work. Nothing excuses him. Home cannot be his escape. And in desperation he somehow begins to try to make a living by what he wants to do. And whether he succeeds or fails in it, he has no refuge from work, hard and endless and full of insecurity. He bears, indeed, the brunt of that heaviest load of all—insecurity.
The curse of women has been that they have this privilege of refuge in the home. Behind closed doors they may or must work, it is true, but according to their own hours and ways. They escape all the discipline of concentration upon one task, often uncongenial, hour after hour, year after year, the mental discipline of hard creative thinking, the ruthless discipline of social organization. I have been both breadwinner and housekeeper, and I know that breadwinning is infinitely more tedious, more taxing, more nerve-racking than housekeeping. Indeed, cooking, cleaning, caring for children, if you know necessary bills are pretty certainly going to be paid, is almost a soporific and as good as play after the insecurity of competition in business and the arts. For safe in the home a woman becomes used to flitting from one thi
ng to another, and her mind forgets or never learns how to concentrate or perhaps to work at all. There, leaning upon another’s efforts, she becomes lazy—if not physically lazy, lazy in that core of her being which is the source of life and development so that when her children are grown, and in a few years they are, and her mechanical tasks are over, she is fit for nothing more. She has excused herself from a life of labor because of these short-lived tasks which, necessary as they are for a time, should never have been considered adequate for her whole self.
The truth is that, although women are needed today in every sort of life in the United States, they do not even see that they are needed. So many women have become so corrupted by privilege that they stare out on events and conditions around them with the same unseeing, lackluster eyes with which Hindu women have looked out of the windows of their zenanas. The Hindu woman was not educated, and she could not pass out of her door uncovered, and this American woman is free to come and go, and she has been given what education she wanted; and yet there is the same look of defeat in her eyes that there is in the Indian woman’s. Neither is fulfilling that for which she was born, but the American’s discontent is keener because she knows it, whether she will acknowledge it or not; and the more clever she is, the more educated, the more of a gunpowder woman she is.
Of Men and Women Page 6