 | The Women of Tomorrow |  |
I
LEANING over a tiled parapet, we looked down at the streak of street so far below. Motor-cars, crawling-crawling, glossy-backed beetles. "Drop a pin and impale that green one." One couldn't, from up there, give motor-car and motor-car owner the reverence rightly theirs. A thousand miles of horizontal withdrawal into majestic forest recesses may leave one's regard for worldly greatness unabated. A perpendicular vantage of a hundred and fifty feet destroys it utterly.
"But look at that!" she said.
In the east, dull red on the quick blue of Lake Michigan, an ore-boat. Low and long. A marvelously persistent and protracted boat. Might have been christened The Eel. Or The Projectile. No masts. And, except at her stern, under her deferred smoke-stack, no port-holes. Forward from that stack her body stretched five hundred feet to her bow without excrescences and without apertures. Bare, blind, stripped, and shut-eyed for the fight, grimmer than a battleship, not a waste line nor a false motion in her, she went by, loaded with several thousand tons of hematite, down to the blast furnaces of South Chicago.
"But," she said, "but look at this."
She turned me from the lake. We crossed the roof's tarred gravel and looked north, west, and south abroad at the city.
Puffs of energy had raised high buildings over there; over there an eccentric subsidence had left behind it a slum. Queer, curling currents of trade and of lust here, there, and everywhere, were carrying little clutching eddies of disease and of vice across the thoroughfares of the wholesome and of the innocent. Sweet unused earth lay yonder in a great curve of green; within two miles of it stood clotted houses in which children were dying for air; brown levels of cottage and tenement, black bubbles of mill and factory, floating side by side, meeting, mingling, life and light merged into filth and fume-uncalculated;
"Not so clever as the ore-boat, is it? " she said. "That was making wealth, conquering. Well done. This is using wealth, living. Done ill. A city. Better than many. Worse than many. But none of my business. I'm emancipated."
She waved her hand and blotted out the city from before me. In its place I saw now only an uninhabited wilderness plain. In a moment, however, in the side of a distant ridge, there appeared a tiny opening. A woman sat near it, plaiting a grass mat. A mile away a man stood, mending a bow.
It was the scene Mr. Kipling once reported:
"The man didn't begin to be tame till he met the woman. She picked out a nice dry cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail down, across the opening of the cave; and she said: 'Wipe your feet, dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.'"
As we looked, we saw the man fit an arrow to his bow, take aim, and bring down a deer. He carried it to the cave. The woman rose to meet him, the mat in her hand. He pushed her away savagely, took the mat from her, and threw the deer on the ground. She picked herself up and began to skin the deer with a knife which she slipped from her belt. He lay down on the mat and went to sleep.
I heard my companion say: "I did all the housekeeping of thatcamp. It was woman's work. But now-"
She waved her hand and restored the city to my gaze.
"Now, of this camp you are the real housekeeper. The arranging of it, the cleaning of it, the decorating of it, on the big scale, as a total, all masculine, all yours! How you have expanded your duties, you who were once just hunter and fighter, principally fighter! How your sphere is swollen! You do not realize it. You are familiar enough with the commonplace fact that most primitive industry in its origin owed little to you except (a big 'except') the protection of your sword against enemies. You are familiar with the fact that the plaiting of mats and the tanning of hides and every other industrial feature of housekeeping have passed from my control to yours in precise proportion as each has ceased to be individual and has become collective. You dominate everything collective. You understand that. What you don't understand is this:
"It is not only the industrial features of housekeeping which tend to become collective. It is also its administrative features. I will give you just one illustration. I cannot now keep my premises clean, beautiful,
"Further!
"Even the tenderer phases of housekeeping, those which are more subtle than mere administration, move steadily toward becoming yours. I will give you an illustration of that. The very children, now no longer always at their mother's knees, but spread abroad through school and park and playground and street and factory, are now much in your hands, for school and park and playground and street and factory are essentially controlled hy you. You are increasingly housekeeper, and even mother. You not only control Working. You also control Living. But who are you, you that now control Living? You are-"
She tapped my shoulder and laughed.
"You are the Tired Business Man. Yes, whether manufacturer, financier, scholar, or poet, you are the Tired Business Man. You always were. You still arc. You are a fighter still, by nature. You conquer steel and steam-and make a boat that will carry a mountain of ore. You conquer mounds of stock certificates and masses of men and organize armies for the production of wealth. You conquer knowledge-and write your treatise. You conquer the sources of emotion-and write your poem. Then you're through. You lie down on your mat and go to sleep. To be housekeeper, to be homemaker, to take from each part of life its offerings of value and patiently to weld them into a coherent, livable whole that is not your faculty. You are a specialist. Produce, produce, produce-a certain thing, a one certain thing, any one certain thing, from corkscrews to Madonnas-you can do it. But to make a city a home, to elicit from discordant elements a harmonious total of warm, charming, noble, livable life-you'll never do it, by yourself."
She paused.
"Well," she said, "why don't you ask me to help you a bit? Even aside from any special qualities of my sex, don't you know that the greatest reserve fund of energy in any American city to-day is the leisure and semi-leisure of certain classes of its women? "
"But they can give their leisure to 'good works' now if they want to," I answered.
"Yes," she said, "but if they do that, they'll want to go farther. Look!"
And this is what she showed me what she told me:
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