Part 28

What I frequently see in the faces of women, and especially in the faces of young girls of the wealthy classes, is as distressing to me as mysterious. It has been my rare good fortune to live among serene and companionable women, women whose graciousness has been rooted in character. Accordingly I am mystified by the hungry defiant faces I see about me wherever women congregate. They seem to be playing a part, to be desperately seeking something which they are getting in insufficient measure. They have the air of being ready to resent a slight while stubbornly maintaining a right. They are too intent. There is no ease in them and no fragrance. Now if these observations were of recent date or suddenly made, it would be prudent to set them down to the score of middle age and a growing disinclination from general society. It would be pleasant to believe that I am merely become old fashioned, mistaking Paris modes for inner characteristics, and particular cosmetic arts which the young girls of my youth happened not to employ, for a sign of degeneracy. Whereas, it may still be a true heart, the beating of which one observes too plainly at opera or dance, and rouge tinges nothing but the skin. So I would fain believe that the readiness with which our women assume the stigmata of the Paris half-world, is without significance. "The Ladies! God bless them!" it would be pleasant to end this ungracious discourse with the familiar toast. But the toast itself no longer is pledged with the old unction, and the modern woman is too intelligent to be satisfied with stale and perfunctory oblations. She knows that not all is well with her, and welcomes the probe. The satirists of our womenkind would starve but for women readers. I who am no satirist, but a simple observer of life, shall have my best reading from women, or shall go unread.

That defiant hungry look on our young girls' faces, so different from the shyness and wistfulness one generally notes in Europe, what is its ground? A complete answer would mean the writing of a considerable chapter of our history. One would trace the course of happy laborious partnerships in pioneer times, to the establishment of wealth, and the institution of a peculiar American cult of womanhood. This cult found expression in eloquent cant phrases. "Every American woman is a queen in her own household" was a favorite article of the liturgy. More economically expressive was the phrase "able to support a wife," a wife obviously being regarded as a luxury of the more expensive order. Along with the cult went a resolute practice of keeping all business or political cares from the women of the family. Such reticence as to the real issues of living, such exclusion from the usual means of education, was the lot of the American woman from early in the last century. She was, in another favorite liturgical phrase, exclusively, "The ornament of the home." Naturally her education was to consist wholly of accomplishments. Money poured into her hands and out. Whence it came, and the difficulty of getting it, were scrupulously concealed from her. To be a good provider was the cardinal masculine merit. For the husband the money grubbing realities; for the wife the decorative appearances. Very soon it became a tacit convention that, already separated in all ordinary business relations, husband and wife should be separated also in their pleasures. He was too dull or too tired for society, but from his fireside or club chair took a remotely conjugal satisfaction in the report of her brilliancy and social successes: for after all he was subsidizing her career. To be the husband of a very successful woman was like being the background angel for a theatrical star. It implied association and interest, but nothing like intimacy. Being reduced to a scintillant parasitic role, the American woman, to do her justice, played it pretty well. The literature and general discussions of the sixties and seventies abound in her laudation, while the American man is either charitably ignored or briefly commended for his self effacing virtues and unlimited generosity as a provider. It was in this black walnut era, which corresponds exactly with the high point of the cult of the American woman, that she became a familiar apparition in the hotels of Europe. Ostensibly she was cultivating some accomplishment, or, less specifically, her soul. In response to an abnormal social position she developed peculiar capacities. She devoured wholesale miscellaneous ill assorted information, and gave it back with interest. She acquired a brittle fluent manner of talk, but her idea of conversation was to be vivacious and assertive and above all merely to keep things going. She created a social atmosphere in which no thoughtful, unaggressive person could live. The American husband withdrew more securely into his social nonentity, while his place was taken by nondescript foreigners or by light footed and joyous young native male beings who also had the gift of keeping things up. These radiant young males for the most part flourished only for a space. In turn they became occulted husbands and tolerated good providers.

The women were less fortunate. To be an American woman was an inexorable career that once undertaken could not be abandoned. A few escaped by marrying into the simple human conditions prevailing among the European aristocracy, some American queens were dethroned through failure of the exchequer, a few succumbed to an increasing group of children; these were the fortunate exceptions. Most of them continued the hopeless task of building up a satisfactory life without including the ordinary responsibilities and loyalties. Naturally the cardinal maxim of a life largely empty of real interests and devoted to self exploitation along social lines, was the right to be amused. That is what, by and large, the good looking American woman is taught to regard as her most peculiar and precious right. That is the meaning of the hungry and defiant faces of our young girls. They are the last logical stage in the American notion of womanhood. They are anxiously asserting a right which the world by no means always allows--the right to be amused.

Let me restore a perhaps tottering reputation for humor by admitting that the picture just sketched is somewhat overdrawn. There was sometimes a certain unity in grotesquely sundered families. The organizing and management of a household in days before the apartment hotel, the telephone, and the department store, involved an irreducible minimum of steadying duties. The cult of the American woman often produced a sense of _noblesse oblige_, not very logical but efficacious. The queen could in the better sense do no wrong. Then there were always happy backwaters of society where the family was still an alliance, and mutual understanding was the rule. What justifies me in blackening the picture, is the fact that the dogma of the right to be amused is as strong as ever, and more disastrous in its results. Few duties and educational offsets help the modern girl to see life clearly and see it whole. Increasingly detached from all imposed responsibilities, she is more in danger of regarding the world as her playground and other men and women as her toys. The inevitable weakness of her position is that she has little to give. Her beauty and the charm of her sex, a certain restless vivacity, are often her sole current coin. It is a currency subject to rapid depreciation. After girlhood she frequently is not amusing, has nothing to give for the amusement become necessary to her. Establishing no stable and self respecting relations, she flies about in search of new excitements. Isms and ologies claim her passing fealty. Messiahs alternate with neurologists. To the problems of life she brings the mind of a spoiled child. If she marries well, she may at least conduct satisfactorily an expensive will-o'-the-wisp existence. For amusement by this sort is very exactly graded by its expensiveness. Large motor cars or yachts, opera boxes, public dining and dancing--these are the surest evidence that one's right to be amused is duly conceded by one's husband and by the world. Whatever satisfactions the married butterfly commands are largely denied to her unwedded sister. I know of no more pitiful spectacle than that of women in the forties still conducting with a child's mentality the occupations of girlhood. These constitute the supporting public for all the charlatanisms--social, political, and religious.

Of course I am aware that all babies are born with the right to be amused--a right which child specialists have valiantly but vainly striven to abridge. In the case of a male baby that right is pretty soon abridged by the rough and tumble and give and take of school and games. The sense that he must be amused is soon knocked out of a normal boy. In a young man whatever may survive of it yields to the somewhat grim business of earning a living. In a rich and unoccupied young man, the problem of amusement is very much that of the woman, with the marked difference, however, that only a very perverse young man imagines that amusement is due him, or can be had on other terms than his paying for it. In comparison with this wholesome process of gradual enlightenment, how little is done for the education of a girl! Compare with the unconditioned freedom of a well to do American maiden, that stern subjection to the complicated interest of a clan which is the lot of an English girl, or better, the rational preparation for marriage and motherhood which every well born French girl receives. To submit, to play a social part, to discount pleasure in favor of duty, this is the very air girls breathe in the older civilizations. A study or a mere observation of the women of Europe and America will leave no doubt as to where the balance of happiness lies. The boasted freedom of the American woman is often her sorrow, and her joy is escape from freedom into some kind of service.

This is a trite story. Robert Grant, Edith Wharton, Robert Herrick have expended the greatest artistry on the ungrateful theme of the egocentric American woman. More blatantly, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, and Owen Johnson have belabored the unfortunate creature. I venture to move matter so thoroughly familiar, only in the hope of setting it in something like historic perspective, and of pointing out remedial tendencies. And first of all, while this is primarily a woman's problem, it is emphatically of man's making. It would be a most curious and interesting historical study to ascertain just when and precisely how, the American notion of women as a luxury and ornament came into being. Until the quite recent revulsion against the theory, it passed for a beautiful expression of the innate chivalry of the American man. It is possible that it is indeed a product of that peculiar inept sentimentality--of that impotence in the field of the emotions--which frequently accompanies a life too narrowly devoted to business. In affairs involving the intelligence of the heart, there is notoriously no fool comparable with a certain type of millionaire. An unkinder view of this chivalric delusion of the American man as regards his womankind, is that it is not a delusion at all but a Machiavellian policy. He is overconcentrated in work, and socially inert. He bribes his women in order to be let alone. He dangles vanities before them in order to avoid a manly sharing of his life. The Undine Spraggs and her sisters in fiction are prone to take this view when they go to the rare pains of general reflection. Probably a mixture of the two motives would supply the real cause. Our forefathers did idolize their women, and doubtless wished to procure them happiness without first taking the trouble to learn where a woman's happiness really lies. Our forefathers were also over busy men, and willing to pay handsomely for immunity from ungrateful social duties. They may have quite honestly desired to simplify what is a delicate and complicated personal adjustment, but in so doing they ignored that broad community of interest which is the vitalizing principle of any successful marriage. The present iconoclasm concerning our once idolized women will do very little good until it be clearly perceived that what is very much the misfortune of the American woman is also very much the fault of the American man. When he begins to realize that he is not merely a provider or patron, but in the fullest sense a partner, the old sentimentalisms will give way to reality and common sense.

Meanwhile much is happening to make our women more capable of genuine partnership. The projection of millions of women from sheltered homes into business has been a rude process and fraught with evils, but it has given to these women some vision of the world of affairs. Much of our recent humanitarian endeavor has been hysterical and half-baked, but it has also left a considerable residuum of genuine new experience and wisdom. Suffragist and socialist agitation has wavered between gushing sentimentalisms and benighted fanaticisms, but it has also been an educational process, revealing, to hundreds of thousands of women even if in a hectic light, the real figure of the world. A great deal that is still raw in these fermentations may eventuate in clearer ideas of social justice and personal wisdom. In a very true sense much of the revolt of women has been an unconscious protest against the theory of man as paymaster general. When men understand that women cannot live by frocks and functions alone, however generously provided, but want companionship, less will be heard about feminism and more about humanity.

Meanwhile it is the duty of parents to disabuse their female offspring as to the existence of a right to be amused. To be amused is at best a privilege conditional upon one's desire to prove amusing to others. Amusement is necessary, but less necessary than it seems, and always has to be paid for fairly. It seems as if such ideas could be instilled into children, substituting a general morality and sense of fair play, for the old pseudo-chivalric notion of sex privilege. There was more to come of this argument when I was summoned to the telephone to command any one of a half a dozen little playmates to come and see my eight year old daughter. She is temporarily unoccupied and needs to be amused. When she is a little older she shall read this article. _Fiat justitia!_ But stop! When I consider her with many women of my acquaintance, I am amazed that so much sweetness and efficiency have after all survived so much false doctrine and so many unfair kindnesses. The stock is good, if much of the thinking and training has been bad. Quite sincerely I toast the Ladies, if not with the old sentimental unction, at least with the profound conviction that they are worthy of more substantial guerdon than can ever be compacted from mere profits, dividends, and coupons. I will be more of a companion to her who has ever been that to me, and more of a comrade too for the little girl who wants to be amused.

HOW WOMAN SUFFRAGE HAS WORKED

That the results of applied woman suffrage may stand out the more clearly, it will be expedient to show, first, the results achieved in behalf of woman without its help. All are agreed that during the sixty-five years that have elapsed since the suffragists, led by Lucretia Mott, posted their "Declaration of Sentiments" at Seneca Falls, N. Y., in 1848, woman has gained certain rights and privileges. That Declaration contained a bitter indictment by woman of man who had "oppressed her on all sides." He had made her, if married, "in the eye of the law, civilly dead," having taken from her "all right in property, even to the wages she earns." He had made her "morally an irresponsible;" she could commit many crimes with impunity, "provided they be done in the presence of her husband, he becoming to all intents and purposes her master--the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty and to administer chastisement." He had so framed the laws of divorce as to what should be the proper causes, and, in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children should be given, "as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women--the law in all cases going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands."

The married woman having no rights, the single woman was "taxed to support a Government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it." Man had "monopolized nearly all the profitable employments;" and from those woman was permitted to follow, "she receives but a scanty remuneration." Man had closed to woman "all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself: as a teacher of theology, in medicine, or law, she is not known." Moreover, man had "denied to her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her." In the Church, too, she was subordinated, and apostolic authority was invoked "for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church." Men acted by a different code of morals from women, "by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in men." By such means, the indictment declared, man had discriminated against woman, endeavoring in every way he could to "destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her lead a dependent and abject life." And because of these things the drawers of the indictment demanded for women "immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."

It was first of all as voters that the women should gain the rights denied them. Deprivation of the vote was the fundamental evil. The first item of their grievances named the ballot as their "inalienable right." It was primarily because this had been wrested away, the Declaration said, that man had been able to oppress woman on all sides.

But it needs only the restatement of the original suffragist grievances to show how completely woman has been emancipated since they were formulated, and chiefly without the vote. Nowhere in the United States is the married woman, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead. Nowhere is she bereft of the right in property and wages. In that year 1848 when the "Declaration of Sentiments" was drafted, New York State, still withholding the franchise from woman, expressly permitted married women to hold property for their sole and separate use. By a law of 1861, married women in New York received power to control property, including wages, and authority to will property was given them in 1867. By 1887 the property rights of married women in this State were more complete than those of their husbands, who could not convey real estate without their wives' consent. Woman now has a right of action for injuries to person or property, and she is liable for her own wrongful acts; that is, she is no longer "morally an irresponsible." Women are joint guardians with their husbands of their minor children, and, in case of divorce, the custody of the children is decreed reasonably to the innocent party without discrimination as to sex. The laws of divorce and separation, too, though differing widely in the several States, are impartial, applying equally to men and women. New York's women taxpayers have the right to vote on questions of local taxation in all towns and villages, and they are eligible to nearly all political offices, and to various positions of trust and responsibility. Moreover, all the professions are open to them.

In these respects, the case of New York is fairly typical of all the States in the Union, whether suffragist or non-suffragist. As for men's monopolizing "nearly all the profitable employments," the Federal census of 1900 showed that women were engaged in 295 out of the 303 masculine occupations. The original complaint that they were not admitted to men's pursuits on equal terms with men has changed to a demand for laws which shall discriminate in favor of women in industry because of their weaker physique. Only in Massachusetts, Indiana, and Nebraska, however, three male-suffrage States, have laws been passed prohibiting night work for women in factories and machine shops. The eight-hour law for women in California was enacted before they had the suffrage there, but it still exempts the great canning industry of that State from its operation, and it does not prohibit night work. The doubtful minimum wage act, and the maternity act for the protection of women were first copied from anti-feminist Europe by male-suffragist Massachusetts. Massachusetts, also, is generally credited by child labor experts and by woman suffragists with having the best child labor law in the Union, applied in her great textile industries. It would seem, therefore, that the added complaint of the latter-day suffragists of lack of discrimination in favor of working women may be satisfied without resort by them to the ballot.

The facilities for acquiring a thorough education are now in no State denied to woman. In the argument of Mrs. A. J. George to the woman suffrage committee of the Federal Senate on April 19, 1913, this anti-suffragist authority noted the fact that there are "to-day more institutions which grant degrees to women in this country than there are institutions which grant degrees to men." The foundation of Vassar, of Wellesley, of Smith, of Mount Holyoke, was "in no way connected with the suffrage movement," while the opening of the Harvard examinations to women and the opening of the graduate departments of Yale University to women were due to the activities of men and women who were avowed anti-suffragists. In the universal granting of this great privilege to woman, therefore, the ballot was not used or needed.

The grievance that woman is subordinated in the Church was one that, by its nature, could not be settled by the suffrage, since in this country Church and State are irrevocably separate. As a matter of fact, however, woman has steadily gained rights and privileges in most denominations of the Protestant Church, including admission to the ministry and public participation in their affairs. For example, Dr. Anna Shaw, the President of the National Woman's Suffrage Association, is a clergywoman. As in religion, so in morals. The legal prohibitions of immorality are in most cases the same for both men and women; it is only outside the domain of legislation and within the sphere of social custom that divergencies appear, and here the discrimination is exercised notoriously by woman against her erring sisters.