 | The Women of Tomorrow |  |
III
WE crossed the roof's tarred gravel once more, and once more leaned over the tiled parapet and looked abroad at the city.
"I told you," she said, "that women cannot give their leisure to useful activity without verging toward citizenship. That is the rule. There are exceptions, caused by individual temperament. But that is the rule. Make one group of the women who use their leisure to good purpose. Make another of the women who use their leisure to no purpose. You'll find a growing desire for citizenship in the former. You'll find little such desire in the latter. The conflict that is going on among women who have any leisure at all is between the spirit which drives them toward a union with the life of the world and the spirit which drives them toward complete detachment and irresponsibility.
"So let's say no more about the suffrage agitation. It's simply a sequel to women's interest in the world's housekeeping. The broader question is, 'Will that interest grow?'
"One would think it could hardly help growing. The hosts of women who art earning their living they are immersed in the world even as men. But the women who are at home, with little children about them. They're abstracted from the world, aren't they? Yes, physically, just as much as ever. But mentally they come closer and closer to the world all the time.
"Have you read the Home Economics books? The day is coming, you know, when every girl will have the training these books suggest. It will make her a home woman, you say. Yes, it will help to do that. But it will help even more to make her something else, too.
"Do you know that the Home Economics literature has more in it about civic service than any other one general kind of educational literature you can lay your hands on?
"Does that seem odd to you? I'll tell you the reason for it.
"Home Economics is the study of Right Living, the study of the importance, the utility, and the possible beauty of the common things of daily existence. Now one cannot study sanitation, fresh air, pure food, adequate housing, the care of children, the protection of the family from disease, the maintenance of a proper environment and regimen for health and efficiency, without instantly perceiving the closeness of the relationship between the life of the individual and the life of the community.
"The so-called bread and butter studies, now being inserted into Women's education, have the merit, superficially paradoxical, of raising the mind to the duties of citizenship. The simplest mother, immured in her home with her small children, will in the days to come realize, as she does not now at all realize, what the freshness of the milk supply, what the purity of the city water, what the efficiency of the health department, mean to those children. She will know and when she knows she will care.
"Let me give you one illustration of the extent to which certain teachers of Home Economics recognize the future civic responsibilities of their pupils.
"In a little town far up in the Northwest there's a famous Homemakers' School. It is far from the social pressure of packed populations. Nevertheless, along with all the housekeeping details which crowd its two-year course, you'll find a series of lectures on 'Home and Social Economics' based on a theory which I'll try to give in almost the very words used by the school itself in its public announcements of policy. It's this:
"'The growing wealth of different communities, the application of modern inventions to home industries, the passing of many of the former lines of women's work into the factory have brought to many women leisure time which should be spent in social service. Civic cleanliness, the humane treatment of children, the city-beautiful, education, civic morality, the protection of children from immoral influences, child labor, the organizations to protect neglected children and to reform delinquent children-all are legitimately within the province of motherhood, and the attempt to improve conditions is a part of the duty of the modern woman.'
"Is that radical ? Surely not. Surely it's conservative. There's not a suggestion in it of any change in woman's interests. There's only an awakening to the fact that her interests are now diffused throughout the community, that what could once be comprehended in a wilderness cave is now spread abroad through all the lands of all the world.
"I said I taught housekeeping in that cave. I wonder if I could teach better housekeeping to the whole world.
"I know I could if I would. But-
"I'm thinking now of the millions of women who, after all their home duties are done, still have some time they could give me for a more livable world life. Will they? I can't say. But I will say this:
"Either their public spirit will grow or their private character will decline. One of the two. Because they carry, along with that leisure of theirs, not only its blessings but also its curse. They must sanctify it or perish by it.
"Leisure! Culture! Emancipation! All nothing unless there is something more. Culture without action is an ingrowing disease which first debilitates and then dissolves the will to live. Emancipation without duty is a mirage of pleasure which raises thirst but never quenches it. The Romans emancipated their women, in the days of their degeneration, but with no result except a completer collapse of family life and of personal virtue.
"But perhaps there will be a new issue of events this time. It looks as if there might be.
"That weary ancient world recoiling from its luxuries, its dissipations, its surfeits, turned to pessimistic mysticism, to the theory that the flesh and the things of the flesh are vile, to monastic withdrawal into the desert and the mountains, to the life of inward searchings.
"This modern world is turning to optimistic materialism, to the theory that the flesh and the things of the flesh can be made noble, to anti-tuberculosis societies and juvenile courts, to the life of outward workings.
"That world found peace in renunciation. This world seeks peace in Service.
"It is going to be an era of the importance, the utility, and the possible beauty of the common things of daily existence. It is going to be an era of Right Living.
"Ought not woman to have a particular part in it?
"I have watched her every hour from the beginning from the very first beginning of any life that had any warmth of love in it. I have seen her make the hearth the symbol of the stability of the individual life. Now, when the duties of the home, the stones of which that hearth was made' are scattered far and wide, shall I not see her reassemble them on a grander scale to make a total of stability for all life whatsoever? Shall I not?"
"But who?" I said, "who are you?"
"I," she said, "I am the spirit that made woman love her child, and that shall yet make her love her kind."
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