Part 1

Chapter 13,914 wordsPublic domain

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The Women of Tomorrow

By William Hard

New York THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 1911

THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK

CONTENTS

PAGE I Love Deferred 3 II Learning for Earning 41 III Learning for Spending 89 IV The Wasters 135 V Mothers of the World 179

I inscribe this book to Mrs. Peter Christian Lutkin. She said I might, a long time since. I was a boy then. Now I come to keep her to her promise and I lay this, my first book, on her knees, knowing that it is full of the sounds of controversy but hoping that her gentleness, somehow, may harmonize all harshnesses to the love I meant.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE John Simmons, Founder of Simmons College Frontispiece Simmons College, Boston 42 Edna D. Day, the First Woman to Become a Doctor of Philosophy in the Field of Home Economics 76 Mary Schenck Woolman, Founder of Manhattan Trade School 76 Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois 82 Children in the Francis Parker School, Chicago 84 Household Arts Building, Columbia University 97 Household Arts Building, California Polytechnic School 97 Mary D. Chambers, Rockford College 104 Mr. L. D. Harvey, Homemakers' School 104 Practical Experience in Serving Breakfasts, Dinners and Suppers, Cleveland Schools 120 Girls in Cleveland Learn to Make Pottery as Well as Design 120 Class in Food Adulterations, University of Wisconsin 122 Model House in Washington-Allston School 122 One-Week Courses in Home Economics, University of Wisconsin 128 Evening Cookery Classes in the St. Louis High Schools 130 Interests of Chicago Women's Club: Domestic Science Classes; Instruction for the Blind; Orchestral Concerts; Suffrage Campaigns 186 Interests of Chicago Women's Club: Park Attendants; Mothers' Clubs; Hospital Kindergartens; Vacation Schools 190 Interests of Chicago Women's Club: Improvement of City Square; Neighborhood Organizations; Industrial and Agricultural Education for Girls 197

WHENCE AND WHY

The chapters of this book were originally articles in _Everybody's Magazine_. I have not embellished them with footnotes nor given them any other part of the panoply of critical apparatus. It could be done. I have preferred to leave them in the dress I first gave them,--a fighting dress. They owe much of their structure, it is true, to facts and ideas out of the dust of libraries. But they owe much more to facts and ideas exhumed out of the much more neglected dust of daily circumstance. Either dust, by itself, is lifeless. When the two cohere they establish the current of existence. At their meeting-place this book has tried to stand. And so, while it hopes to have added to knowledge, it will have failed unless it has merged into conduct.

The reader will forgive the abruptness of the shift of attention from the subject of one chapter to the subject of the next. Each chapter, because of having been a separate magazine article, is still an isolated unit. Its isolation, however, is only that of form. In thought there is a sequence both logical and temporal.

Devoting themselves to five critical phases in the mental development of the modern woman, the five chapters of this book accompany her through five successive stages in her personal life. The postponement of marriage, the preliminary period of self-support, the new training for motherhood, the problem of leisure, the opportunity for civic service,--these subjects, treated in turn, follow one another in the order of their appearance in a normal life-history. They are further unified by the proof (I hope it is proof) throughout adduced that even the most diverse of the phenomena observed, the female parasite equally with the female suffragist, the domestic-science-and-art enthusiast equally with the economic-independence enthusiast, are all of them products of the one same big industrial unfoldment which is exposing all women, willing or unwilling, to the winds of the social process, which is giving to all women, whether home-keepers or wanderers, in place of the old home-world, the new world-home.

WILLIAM HARD.

_Chicago, Dec., 1911._

INTRODUCTION

The woman of to-morrow will not differ from the woman of yesterday in femininity or physique or capacity, in her charm for men, or her love of children, but in the response of her eternally feminine nature to a changed environment. The environment is bound to alter the superficial characteristics of woman as every change has done. Man, in his turn, will be a beneficiary of this new womanliness as he has been the ready victim of the old-womanishness.

The reader will find in this book a dramatic picture of the gap between girlhood and motherhood which causes both girls and men to go wrong, and which can only be filled adequately by work--work even more suitably performed after marriage than before. Postponed childbearing, if not postponed marriage, is justified by the superiority of the younger children or the children of older parents. A declining birth rate may be redeemed by a declining death rate and the superior progeny of mature marriage.

The life of great-grandmamma fills us with wonder and pity. Her labors were legion, and, while no longer necessary in the house, their equivalent must be found or girls become parasites. Notwithstanding her incredible labors great-grandmamma died young, having sacrificed herself on the altar of masculine egotism and prerogative. Her life was a short but not a merry one, but our virtuous forefather's life was a long and sensual one.

To-day woman is beginning to be educated for the new era and man must go with her. She is learning homemaking with new implements and new opportunities. She need no longer be a drudge and she must not continue to be a doll. Since the days of John Ruskin, even the academic economists have had to put spending before saving in the logical exposition of their science,--consumption and thrift can only be adjusted by those who work and live. Hence, the new mother, alert to the larger needs of her household, is more competent than great-grandmamma and must even supplant "the tired business man" in municipal housekeeping, until he can learn to be her equal and himself deserve the suffrage.

Mr. Hard has produced a brilliant volume, as might have been expected. Mr. Hard could write a book in the dark; but it may not have been known that he could illumine with such scholarly sagacity the shadows cast on the woman question by man's huge egotism and woman's carefully coddled superstition. Originally magazine articles, Mr. Hard's chapters are a unit in being sound economics and sociology on the woman question, but they will probably not secure him a doctor's degree from his alma mater for they are also humorous, intelligible and inspiring.

CHARLES ZUEBLIN.

Love Deferred

Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away on a career, he were going away on a comet.

She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time she was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn't got angry and insisted on marrying him.

Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance put most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama, "Love Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any other drama can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a thin, high note of fine pain.

We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too professional. He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough and more commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which are the two big elements in the life of Modern Man.

When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one more year to go in engineering school.

How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the last century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen months. The present professors require three years.

In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend classes for four months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for nine months in each of four years.

As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill by informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be generally recognized that a four-year technical course following the high-school course is not an adequate preparation for those who are to fill important positions; and the University would urge all those who can afford the time to extend their studies over a period of five or six years."

John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in the College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique courses in the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of Science.

He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen cents an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total income was about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he was raised to fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of Science.

The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of those institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John didn't. He didn't get married so early nor become a widower so often. He didn't carry so many children to the christening font nor so many to the cemetery.

Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.

Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at random, run your finger down the column and pick any class. The class of 1671!

It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don't be too severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining ten, four were married twice and two were married three times. For ten husbands, therefore, there were eighteen wives.

Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very competently remarks: "The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children."

The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their eighteen wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They also filled the churchyards.

_Twenty-one of those seventy-one children died in childhood._

This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of only 2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.

In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the unfair frequency with which it had more than one wife-and-mother to help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of young wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the hideous frequency with which it killed them.

Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from 1701 to 1745.

The girls they took in marriage were most of them under twenty-one and were many of them down in their 'teens, sometimes as far down as fourteen.

May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and salting tubs and spinning wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn't domestic. He was domestic.

Our young engineering friend, John, when _he_ looked forward to _his_ future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it at all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very little real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to "give" Mary a home.

Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages of mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of things. On the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the other hand, he was prevented from wanting anything in his marriage except just Mary.

The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous toil (complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of result:

Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701 to 1745, there were:

Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;

Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;

Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five years old.

Those 418 Yale husbands lost 147 wives before full middle age.

It ceases, therefore, to be surprising, though it remains unabatedly sickening, that the stories of the careers of colonial college men, of the best-bred men of the times, are filled with such details as:

"----First wife died at twenty-four, leaving six children."

"----Eight children born within twelve years, two of them feeble-minded."

"----First wife died at nineteen, leaving three children."

"----Fourteen children. First wife died at twenty-eight, having borne eight children in ten years."

From that age of universal early marrying and of promiscuous early dying we have come in two centuries to an age of delayed (and even omitted) marrying and of a settled determination to keep on living.

The women's colleges are so new and they attracted in their early days so un-average a sort of girl that their records are not conclusive. Nevertheless, here are some guiding facts from Smith College, of Northampton, Massachusetts:

(We are taking college facts not because this chapter is confined in any respect to college people, but merely because the matrimonial histories in the records of the colleges are the most complete we know of.)

In 1888, Smith College, in its first ten classes, had graduated 370 women.

In 1903, fifteen years later, among those 370 women there were 212 who were still single.

This record does not satisfy Mr. G. Stanley Hall, who figured it out. The remaining facts, however, might be considered more cheering:

The 158 Smith women who had married had borne 315 children. This was two for each of them. And most of them were still in their childbearing period. Compare this with the colonial records. But don't take the number of children per colonial father. Be fair. Take it per mother.

We have the matrimonial histories of colonial Yale and Harvard men grouped and averaged according to the decade in which they were graduated. We will regard the graduates of each decade as together constituting one case.

In no case does the average number of children per wife go higher than 3.89. In one case it goes as low as 2.98.

Perhaps the modern wife's habit of going on living and thereby protracting her period of childbearing will in time cause her fertility record to compare not unfavorably with that of the colonial wife, who made an early start but a quick finish.

In the year 1903, among all the 370 Smith graduates in those first ten classes, only twenty-four had died. And among all the 315 children, only twenty-six had died. On the whole, between being the wife of a Yale or Harvard colonial graduate and being a member of one of the first ten Smith classes, a modern girl might conclude that the chances of being a dead one matrimonially in the latter case would be more than offset by the chances of being a dead one actually in the former.

This deplorable flippancy would overlook the serious fact that permanent or even prolonged celibacy on the part of large numbers of young men and young women is a great social evil. The consequences of that evil we shall observe later on.[1]

[1] In speaking about celibacy we refer wholly to secular and not at all to religious celibacy.

In the meantime we return to John and Mary.

While John was doing his last year in engineering school, Mary did a year of technical study in the New York School of Philanthropy, or in the St. Louis School of Social Economy, or in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, or in the Boston School for Social Workers.

They won't even let you start in "doing good" nowadays without some training for it. This is wise, considering how much harm doing good can do.

But how the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

Mary took a civil-service examination and got a job with the State Bureau of Labor. She finished her first year with the Bureau at the same time that John finished his first year with the electrical firm. She had earned $600. He had earned $480.

There were several hundred other apprentices in the shops along with John. When he thought of the next year's work at fifty a month and when he looked at the horde of competing Bachelors of Science in which he was pocketed, he whitened a bit.

"I must get out of the ruck," he said to himself. "I must get a specialty. I must do some more preparing."

He began to perceive how long it takes the modern man to grow up, intellectually and financially. He began to perceive what a tedious road he must travel before he could arrive at maturity--and Mary!

But he had pluck. "I'll really prepare," he said, "and then I'll really make good."

A Western university offered a scholarship of $500 a year, the holder of which would be free to devote himself to a certain specified technical subject. John tried for the scholarship and got it, and spent a year chasing electrical currents from the time when they left the wheels of street cars to the time when they eventually sneaked back home again into the power house, after having sported clandestinely along gas mains and water pipes, biting holes into them as they went.

It was a good subject, commercially. At the end of the year he was engaged as engineer by a street-car company which was being sued by a gas company for allowing its current to eat the gas company's property. He was to have a salary of $1,000 a year. He was going strong.

One thousand dollars! Millions of married couples live on less than that. But John didn't even think of asking Mary to share it with him.

Mary, when married, was to be supported in approximate accordance with the standards of the people John knew. Every John thinks that about it, without really thinking about it at all. It's just in him.

It bothered Mary. How much money would John want to spend on her before he would take her? It made her feel like a box of candy in a store window.

Still, a social standard is a fact. Just as much so as if it could be laid off with a tape. And there is sense in it.

"After all," thought Mary, "if we had only $1,000 a year we couldn't live where any of our friends do, and John would be cut off from being on daily intimate terms with people who could help him; and if we had children--Well, there you are! We surely couldn't give our children what _our_ children ought to have. That settles it."

The influence of social standards is greatly increased and complicated in a world in which women earn their living before marriage and have a chance to make social standards of their own in place of the ones they were born to.

We here insert a few notes on cases which are not compositely imagined--like Mary and John--but are individually (though typically) existent in real life in one of the large American cities:

R---- J----. Makes $6,500 a year. Only man she was ever "real sweet on" was a teamster. When she was selling in the perfumes at five a week he used to take her to the picnics of the Social Dozen Pleasure Club. They would practice the Denver Lurch on Professor De Vere's dancing platform. At midnight he would give her a joy-ride home in his employer's delivery wagon. He still drives that wagon. She is in charge of suits and costumes and has several assistant buyers under her. She has bought a cottage for her father, who is an ingrain weaver in a carpet factory. She wears a stick-pin recently presented to her by her teamster. "I like him all right," is her notion about it, "but I ought to have took him ten years ago. Now he can't support me."

S---- V----. Makes twelve dollars a week as a manicurist. Thinks a man ought to have at least thirty dollars a week before marrying.

T---- V----. Sister of S---- V----, who doesn't think much of her. She works in a paper-box factory at five dollars a week and is engaged to a glove cutter who makes eleven.

T---- A----. Saleswoman. Thinks women ought to be paid as much as men. "Then they wouldn't be so ready to marry _anybody_." Works in the cloak department. Is a star. Makes about eighteen dollars a week. Says that most of the men she knows who could support her would certainly get in a terrible row at home if they married a cloak-department girl. Families are stuck up. "But I don't care; let it run a while. Tell you something. I was born in the steerage. I've been right where the money isn't. I'm not taking any chances on getting there again. Let Georgina do it."

R---- B----. Sub-bookkeeper. Seven dollars a week. Engaged to clerk who earns thirteen. Says: "Of course I'm not earning much, but I'm living with my folks and when we're married I'll have to give up a lot of things. Kinda wish I hadn't got used even to the seven."

This last case, of the bookkeeper engaged to the clerk, is the modern situation at its happiest normal. The modern marriage, except among the rich, is a contraction of resources. It is just the reverse, in that respect, of the colonial marriage.

The colonial bride, marrying into Industry, brought her full economic value to her husband.

The modern bride, marrying out of Industry, leaves most of her economic value behind. And the greater that value was, the sharper is the shock of the contraction of resources.

Of course, the case of the department-store buyer and the teamster is irrelevantly extreme. But aren't there thousands and thousands of cases which, while less advanced, are pointed in the same direction? The more a woman earns, the fewer become the men who can support her. How can the clerk support the cloak saleswoman who has had eighteen dollars a week of her own? How can the barber support the manicurist who has had twelve?

The cloak saleswoman may talk flippantly about it, but, at heart, isn't she seriously right? She has pulled herself up to a certain level. Except in response to a _grande passion_ she will not again drop below it. She will bring up her children at a point as close to her present level as she can. That is instinct.