Chapter 11

IN CONCLUSION

I have tried to set down in these pages the collective opinion of women, as far as it has expressed itself through deeds. I have not succeeded if any reader lays down the book with the impression that he has merely been reading the story of the American club woman. I have not succeeded at all if my readers imagine that I have been writing only about a selected group of women. What I have meant to do is to show the instinctive bent of the universal woman mind in all ages, reflected in the actions of the freest group of women the world has ever seen.

I might have reanimated ages of stone and of bronze; might have shown you women, through slow centuries, inventing the arts of spinning and weaving, and pottery molding; learning to build, to till the earth, to grind and to cook grains, to tan skins for clothing against the cold. No one taught them these things. Out of their brains, as undeveloped and as primitive as the brains of men, they would never have conceived so much wisdom. The vague mind of the savage woman never sent her to the spider, the nesting bird, and the burrowing squirrel to learn to weave and to build and to store. When we find exactly what it was that taught primitive woman how to lay the first stones of civilization, we have a perfect philosophical understanding of all women.

I chose to interpret the woman mind through the modern American woman, partly because she has learned the great lesson of organization, and has thus been able to work more effectively, and to impress her will on the community more strikingly than other women in other ages. What she has done is apparent and easy to prove.

Also, I chose the American club woman because she represents, not an unusually gifted type, but the average intelligent, well-educated, energetic, wife-and-mother type of woman. The club woman is not radical, or at least not consciously radical. She has not, like the progressive German and Russian woman, theories of political regeneration or of family reconstruction. What she desires, what ideals she has formed, I think must fairly represent the desires and ideals of the great mass of women of the twentieth century.

When we survey the activities the club women have engaged in, when we discover why they chose exactly these activities, we have a perfect philosophical understanding, not only of the modern woman mind, but of the cave woman mind and all the woman mind in between.

The woman mind is the most unchangeable thing in the world. It has turned on identically the same pivot since the present race began. Perhaps before.

Turn back and count over the club women's achievements, the things they have chosen to do, the things they want. Observe first of all that they want very little for themselves. Even their political liberty they want only because it will enable them to get other things--things needed, directly or indirectly, by children. Most of the things are directly needed,--playgrounds, school gardens, child-labor laws, juvenile courts, kindergartens, pure food laws, and other visible tokens of child concern. Many of the other things are indirectly needed by children,--ten-hour working days, seats for shop girls, protection from dangerous machinery, living wages, opportunities for safe and wholesome pleasures, peace and arbitration, social purity, legal equality with men, all objects which tend to conserve the future mothers of children. These are the things women want.

In my introductory chapter I cited three extremely grave and significant facts which confront modern civilization. The first was the fact of women's growing economic freedom, their emancipation from domestic slavery. I believe that women would not wish to be economically free if their instinct gave them any warning that freedom for them meant danger to their children. But no observer of social conditions can have failed to observe the oceans of misery endured by women and children because of their economic dependence on the fortunes of husbands and fathers.

Whatever may be the solution of poverty, whatever be the future status of the family, it seems certain to me that some way will be devised whereby motherhood will cease to be a privately supported profession. In some way society will pay its own account. If producing citizens to the State be the greatest service a woman citizen can perform, the State will ultimately recognize the right of the woman citizen to protection during her time of service. The first step towards solving the problem is for women to learn to support themselves before the time comes for them to serve the State. Through the educating process of productive labor the woman mind may devise a means of protecting the future mothers of the race.

The second fact, the growing prevalence of divorce, on the face of it seems to menace the security of the home and of children. So deeply overlain with prejudice, conventionalities, and theological traditions is the average woman as well as the average man that it is difficult to argue in favor of a temporary tolerance of divorce that a permanent high standard of marriage may be established. But to my mind any state of affairs, even a Reno state of affairs, looks more encouraging than the old conditions under which innocent girls married to rakes and drunkards were forbidden to escape their chains. It is not for the good of children to be born of disease and misery and hatred. It is not for their good to be brought up in an atmosphere of hopeless inharmony. What is happening in this country is not a weakening of the marriage bond, but a strengthening of it. For soon there will grow up in the American man's mind a desire for a marriage which will be at least as equitable as a business partnership; as fair to one party as to the other. He will cease to regard marriage as a state of bondage for the wife and a state of license for the husband. He will not venture to suggest to a bright woman that cooking in his kitchen is a more honorable career than teaching, or painting, or writing, or manufacturing. Marriage will not mean extinction to any woman. It will mean to the well-to-do wife freedom to do community service. It will mean to the industrial woman an economic burden shared. When that time comes there will be no divorce problem. There will be no longer a class of women who avoid the risk of divorce by refusing to marry.

The third fact, the increasing popularity of woman suffrage, I disposed of in the preceding chapter. Nothing that the women who vote have ever done indicates, in the remotest degree, that they are not just as mindful of children's interests at the polls as other women are in their nurseries and kitchens.

On the contrary, wherever women have left their kitchens and nurseries, whenever they have gone out into the world of action and of affairs, they have increased their effectiveness as mothers. I do not mean by this that the girl who enters a factory at fourteen and works there ten hours a day until she marries increases her effectiveness as a mother. Industrial slavery unfits a woman for motherhood as certainly as intellectual and moral slavery unfits her.

Women who are free, who look on life through their own eyes, who think their own thoughts, who live in the real world of striving, struggling, suffering humanity, are the most effective mothers that ever lived. They know how to care for their own children, and more than that, they know how to care for the community's children.

The child at his mother's knee, spelling out the words of a psalm, stands for the moral education of the race--or it used to. A group of Chicago club women walking boldly into the city Bridewell and the Cook County Jail and demanding that children of ten and twelve should no longer be locked up with criminals; these same women, after the children were segregated, establishing a school for them, and finally these same women achieving a juvenile court, is the modern edition of the old ideal.

Woman's place is in the home. This is a platitude which no woman will ever dissent from, provided two words are dropped out of it. Woman's place is Home. Her task is homemaking. Her talents, as a rule, are mainly for homemaking. But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do the Home and the Family and the Nursery need their mother.

I dream of a community where men and women divide the work of governing and administering, each according to his special capacities and natural abilities. The division of labor between them will be on natural and not conventional lines. No one will be rewarded according to sex, but according to work performed. The city will be like a great, well-ordered, comfortable, sanitary household. Everything will be as clean as in a good home. Every one, as in a family, will have enough to eat, clothes to wear, and a good bed to sleep on. There will be no slums, no sweat shops, no sad women and children toiling in tenement rooms. There will be no babies dying because of an impure milk supply. There will be no "lung blocks" poisoning human beings that landlords may pile up sordid profits. No painted girls, with hunger gnawing at their empty stomachs, will walk in the shadows. All the family will be taken care of, taught to take care of themselves, protected in their daily tasks, sheltered in their homes.

The evil things in society are simply the result of half the human race, with only half the wisdom, and not even half the moral power contained in the race, trying to rule the world alone. Men's government rests on force, on violence. Everything evil, everything bad, everything selfish, is a form of violence. Poverty itself is a form of violence.

Women will not tolerate violence. They loathe waste. They cannot bear to see illness and suffering and starvation. Alone, they are no more capable of coping with these evils than men are. But they have the very resources that men lack. Working with men they could accomplish miracles.

Note the inventiveness of women, most of which goes to waste because they lack the wonderful constructive ability of men. Women invented spinning. They could never have harnessed the lightning to their wheels. Women established the first public playgrounds. Men extended the public playgrounds across the country.

Women established the juvenile court. Men took it over and worked out a new system of criminal jurisprudence for children. Women have cleaned up a hundred cities. Men are rebuilding them. Slowly men and women are learning to live and work together. Reluctantly men are coming to accept women as their co-workers.

Woman's place is Home, and she must not be forbidden to dwell there. Who would be so selfish, so blind, so reactionary, as to forbid her her fullest freedom to do her work, must surrender opposition in the end. For woman's work is race preservation, race improvement, and who opposes her, or interferes with her, simply fights nature, and nature never loses her battles.

INDEX

Aberdeen, Countess of, Addams, Jane, Alabama, Aladyn, Alexis, Albert Hall, London, Albion House of Refuge, N.Y., Aldrich, Mrs. Richard, Allegheny, Pa., Allgemeinen Deutschen Frauenbund, American, Sadie, American Federation of Labor American women and common law Arbitration, Argentine, Arizona, Arkansas Arthur, Mrs. Clara B., Association of Collegiate Alumnae, Association of Working Girls' Clubs, Augsberg, Anita, Australia, Austria

Balliett, Thomas M., Barnum, Gertrude Barrett, Mrs. Kate Waller, Bedford Reformatory, N.Y., Belmont, Mrs. O.H.P., Berlin, Birmingham, Ala., Blackstone Blackwell's Island, Blatch, Harriot Stanton, Bluhm, Agnes, Boston, Mass Boston Central Labor Union, Boswell, Helen V., Brandeis, Louis D. Brewer, Justice, Brooklyn, N.Y., Bullowa, Emilie,

California Carlisle, Pa., Carnegie, Andrew, Casey, Josephine, Catt, Mrs. Carrie Chapman, Cauer, Minna, Chicago Child, Lydia Maria, Church, the Christian, its relation to social problems, Civic Club of Allegheny County Civic Club of Philadelphia, Cleveland, O. Cliff Dwellers' remains, Cobden Sanderson, Mrs., Code Napoleon Cole, Elsie College Settlements Association, Colony Club, Colorado, Colorado State Federation of Clubs, Columbia University, Columbus, Ohio, Common law, Coney Island Conine, Mrs. Martha A.B., Consumers' League of N.Y., Consumers' Leagues Conventions of women's clubs, Corpus Juris, Cotton mills, women and girls in Council of Women Cranford, N.J., Cutting, Fulton,

Dallas, Tex., Dance halls, Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Confederacy, Davis, Mrs. Jefferson, Decker, Mrs. Sarah Platt, Delaware, Denver, Colo., Department stores, Detroit, Devine, Edward T., Dewey, Mrs. Melvil, Dineen, Governor, District of Columbia, Divorce Dock, Lavinia, Domestic service, _Domestic Service_, Professor Salmon's, Donnelly, Annie, Dreier, Mary, Dutcher, Elizabeth,

Eight-hour day, Ely Bates Settlement, Employment agencies, England Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, Europe, European women, Evans, Mrs. Glendower,

Factories, Fall River, Mass. Festivals, play, Feudalism Filene system, Finland Florida Flowerton, Maud, Folks, Homer, France, Franks, Salian French Code,

Gad, Elizabeth, General Federation of Women's Clubs, Georgia Gerberding, Mrs. Elizabeth, German Woman Suffrage Association, Germany, Gillespie, Mabel, Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, her _Women and Economics_, "Girls' Bill," Girls' Friendly Association, Golden, John, Goldmark, Josephine, Goldmark, Pauline, Gompers, Samuel Grannis, Mrs. Elizabeth, Greece, Greece, Queen of, Greeley, Helen Hoy, Greenbaum, Sadie, Grenfell, Mrs. Helen, Gulick, Luther H.,

Harper, Ida Husted, Harrisburg, Pa., Hearn, Henry, Alice, Holland,

Housekeepers' Alliance, Hughes, Governor, Hundred Years' War,

Iceland, Idaho, Illinois, Inheritance, Intermunicipal Committee on Household Research, International Council of Women, International Woman Suffrage Alliance Iowa, Israels, Mrs. Charles M. Italy, Janes, Elizabeth, Jefferson Market Court, Jordan, Gertrude,

Kansas Kellor, Frances, Kennard, Beulah, Kirby, John, Jr., Kusserow, Anna

Lafferty, Mrs. Alma, Laidlaw, Mrs. James Lees, Lake City, Minn., Laughlin, Gail, Laundries, Law, American Legal Aid Society of N.Y. City, Legal disabilities of women Leipzig, Lemlich, Clara, Libraries, Los Angeles, Cal., Louisiana Lowell, Mrs. Josephine Shaw, Luxemburg,

MacLean, Annie Marian, Maloney, Elizabeth, Marot, Helen Massachusetts Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics McEwans, the, Men, their attitude toward women Mercantile Employers' Bill Merchants' Association of N.Y., Mercy, Anna, Meredith, Ellis Milholland, Inez, Mills, Mills, Enos, Miner, Maude E., Miner, Stella, Missouri, Mitchell, John, Montana, Moore, Mrs. Philip N., Morgan, Anne Mott, Lucretia, Muller, Curt

Napoleon, Napoleon Code Nathan, Mrs. Frederick National Civic Federation, National Congress of Mothers, National Manufacturers' Association National Society of Collegiate Alumnae, National Woman Suffrage Association Nebraska Nestor, Agnes, Nevada, New England, New Haven, Conn. New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, New York, N.Y., New York Telephone Co., New Zealand, Night Court. See _Jefferson Market Court_ Night work of women, North Carolina North Dakota,

Ohio, Oklahoma, Orange, House of, Oregon, Oregon case, Oregon Standard,_Out of Work_, Miss Kellor's

Palisades of the Hudson, Panama Canal, Pankhurst, Mrs., Paris, Peace Pennsylvania, Persia, Philadelphia, Pike, Violet, Pittsburg, Playgrounds, Playgrounds Association of America Portland, Ore., Portugal Potter, Virginia, Probation Association of N.Y., Property Law, Married Women's, Public Service League of Denver, Colo. Puritans

_Resurrection_, Tolstoy's, Revere Beach, Rheinhard Commission, Rhode Island "Rights of Man," Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, Robins, Mrs. Raymond, Robinson, Mrs. Helen Ring, Rochester, N.Y., Industrial School, Roxbury, Mass., carpet mill strike, Russia,

Sage, Mrs. Russell, St. Louis, Mo. Salic Law, Salmon, Prof. Lucy Maynard Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Schoenfeld, Julia, Scranton, Pa., Seneca Falls convention, Servant problem. See _Domestic Service_ Shaw, Dr. Anna, Shirt-waist makers' strike, Smith, "Gypsy," Snowden, Mrs. Philip, Social evil, Social purity Socialist party South Africa, South Carolina, South Chicago, South Dakota, Spain Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stover, Charles B., Succession to throne by women, Sweat shop, the Switzerland

Teacher's Federation of Chicago Ten-hour day, Tennessee Texas, Tillman case, Turkey, Tuthill, Judge R.S., Twentieth Century Club of Detroit,

United States Government United States Industrial Commission, United Textile Workers Utah

Vassar College, Victoria, Queen, Virginia, Voters' League for Equal Suffrage,

Wage earning, women in, Washington (state), Waverley House, White, Mrs. Lovell, "White Slave" traffic Whitman, Charles S., Wilhelmina, Queen, Windeguth, Dora Winthrop, Mrs. Egerton, _Woman and Economics_, Gilman's, Woman suffrage, Woman Suffrage Party Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Woman's Municipal League of N.Y., Women, their ideals, in Europe, in America, in industry, their fight against the social evil, in domestic service, collective opinion of, Women's Civic Club of San Francisco, Women's Club, of Lake City, Minn., of Dallas, Tex., of San Francisco, of Pittsburg of Detroit, of Philadelphia, of Harrisburg, Pa., of Birmingham, Ala., of Carlisle, Pa., of Cranford, N.J., Women's Clubs Women's Educational and Industrial Union of BostonWomen's League of Justice, Women's Political Equality Union, Women's Property Act, Women's Trade Union League Working Women's Society Wyoming,

Yonkers, N.Y., Young Women's Christian Association

End of Project Gutenberg's What eight million women want, by Rheta Childe Dorr