Publisher: Henry and Holt Company (New York)
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An Excerpt from Athletic Games in the Education of Women
1909
Gertrude Dudley and Frances Kellor
Foreword
In offering to the public the results of our investigation, experience and observation, we have purposely set ourselves certain limitations. For a period of ten years we have carefully studied the educational value of organized games and have tested with all classes of girls—in university, high school, private school and social institutions—the theories and suggestions which we have now put into tangible form, in the hope that those interested in social education and group welfare, based on the highest individual efficiency, will find some value in them. Our experiments with many hundreds of students and players have demonstrated repeatedly that athletic games are real factors in education.
We have attempted no study or discussion of gymnastics or sports, for there are many volumes which deal with these subjects. Furthermore, sports are individual, their purpose is primarily recreative and they do not depend upon the co-operation of any other individual. Walking, riding, swimming, golf, bowling, archery and track events are types of such sports. On the other hand, athletic games are social in their nature and may be used for both education and recreation. These games consist of a set of actions performed according to prescribed rules and depend for their success upon the co-operative action of two or more persons. They include the highly organized games of basketball, indoor baseball, hockey, lacrosse, cricket, etc., as well as such minor games as captain-ball, volley-ball, long-ball and drive-ball. We have confined our discussion to more highly organized games, since Mr. Johnson in his excellent work on "Education by Games" includes kindergarten and primary games and brings the discussion up to the point from which we have started. Throughout we have maintained the educational point of view which we believe is the only plane upon which athletics for women can be wisely conducted.
It may seem in our emphasis on athletics as a training for citizenship and as a part of general education, that we have neglected their physical value to the individual. While we do not underestimate this value, we believe that it is more generally recognized and that there are so many advocates in its favor that it is unnecessary to emphasize it here.
Although we have restricted this discussion to women, our experience in teaching boys shows the need in this field to be hardly less apparent. Among men the commercial and competitive spirit predominates and there is only a dawning consciousness on the part of comparatively few men instructors of the larger educational worth of athletics. Notwithstanding this, athletics as now used do tend to develop among men, in some measure, a group consciousness as well as admirable personal qualities. This goes far to show that they possess an intrinsic educational value.
Many instructors who sent us information and suggestions requested that they should not be quoted. Owing to these requests and the rivalry existing among many schools and instructors, we have omitted many of the references. It has not been our purpose to criticise any school or instructor as such, but to present the data in such a way as to make them generally useful, and suggestive to schools, instructors, parents, players and those interested in community welfare.
We have included a technical discussion of some highly organized games now widely used by women because there are some who would be willing to teach athletics as a part of general education if there were a way to master the details.
We acknowledge a deep indebtedness to the instructors, schools and organizations that have cooperated by answering the questionnaire, making suggestions, and sending us information about their equipment, facilities and systems of work; also to the social workers who have gone over the material and have made clearer its practical social significance.
The Authors
Citizenship and Social Education
Ch. I of Athletic Games in the Education of Women (pp. 3-18)
However much individuals may differ in their opinions as to the position of women in society, their rights, their capabilities, their future activities, or the thousand and one other phases of their lives and character which form topics for discussion of seemingly never-ending interest, there are certain existing conditions and well-defined tendencies in society today which cannot be properly met by opinions or prejudices but which demand and should receive judicial analysis, and to meet which women need to be adequately prepared.
Perhaps the most significant change in society's demand upon women to-day is the substitution of cooperative effort for individualistic effort and the development of group consciousness beyond the family circle. This has been a gradual process, so gradual that many women in the more secluded walks of life do not see the need of a change in the training of women to meet a demand, the full meaning of which they fail to grasp.
Social Responsibility of Women
The most conspicuous change has been in the industrial world. In 1900 more than 6,000,000 women were found engaged in gainful occupations. This by no means includes the many who earn money in their own homes or those who supplement their small incomes in one way or another. Neither does it include the many children who are at work. This entrance into the industrial world creates a more complex environment, requires more rapid adjustment, and above all increases greatly the necessity for co-operative work, outside the home.
The extension of the property rights of women in many of the states, and the many estates held by them, have enlarged the group of women investors, capitalists and employers. This has created for them broader social responsibilities and the necessity for group judgments. Such unavoidable responsibility is seen in the wide use which women necessarily make of middlemen. Their interests and activities are so varied that numerous agents are employed to carry out their orders. This removal from the result of their acts—for instance, when they receive rents from tenements but know nothing of conditions existing in them because of their entire reliance upon agents—frequently makes them "tolerators but not necessarily practitioners" of anti-social acts.
The political field also has been greatly widened. Not only have women the franchise in several of the states, but in others they vote upon educational questions and other public matters such as taxation. The number who now hold political positions of trust or who are engaged in lines of activity which have a far-reaching influence upon political affairs is greatly increased.
In the field of social service, including professional charity and philanthropy, the ranks are filled with women and many others are seeking positions. Religious activity in many of its forms of ministration is increasingly in the hands of women.
Social life is no longer limited to the entertainment of friends or families, the self-culture club or simple home function. These are varied in a thousand ways by more impersonal and highly organized social activities, such as card parties with their competitive element; club-meetings with their co-operative element; civic activities with their public welfare element; and auxiliary organizations for great state and national movements. Mothers, teachers and workers all have some form of organized effort which calls for co-operation.
This increased participation in industrial life and in public affairs and variation of social responsibility tends at the present time to make women take life too seriously, live too strenuously, and results in a diminution of rest and relaxation. The play-spirit is yielding to the work-spirit and the loss of individual play-spirit has not yet found its counterpart in the proportionate increase of the group play-spirit—an essential thing to the best social activity and balance.
Even in the home the demand for co-operative work is growing. In the cities the complexities have so increased that its successful maintenance means dependence upon others in a thousand forms—for service, for food, for protection; and in return additional community burdens are laid upon the housewife—adjustment to her workers, maintenance of a higher standard of living and observance of laws which are made for the equal protection of all. The housewife in the apartment or tenement cannot make as much noise, or dispose of her garbage, or use her fire-escapes, as she will, without reference to the comfort of others. Moreover, such are the problems presented by our cities that many live in the closer union of the co-operative home or apartment hotel where an even greater degree of co-operation is required.
But it is not only girls who marry or who earn their own living who are confronted with a greater necessity for adjustment. There is in every community a small group of girls who have just a bit too much money to need to work for a living and too much family to make it easy to become useful. Many of these have been well educated and along with abundant vitality possess the spirit of wishing to do or become something worth while from the point of view of efficiency in the community. Parents, whose goal for their girls is so frequently marriage or social success, cannot understand this new community sense which is a part of the spirit of the age and the resulting moral, social and economic waste is a serious loss to community life. There is enough to do, but neither the training nor freedom with which to do it.
The point is that women can no longer live in such a way that they influence only their own homes, family and immediate circle. The mother who chats with a few neighbors over a cup of tea has not the influence that the club-woman has when she gambles with a party of fifty or a hundred; or who attends huge conventions and runs off elections; or that the business and professional woman has who meets hundreds of patrons and must often decide their moral as well as business problems; or that the thousands of clerks and stenographers have who form a part of the mesh of industrial and political life; or that the factory worker has when she toils with a thousand others.
Upon the completion of her education, the girl thus has no longer the simple choice of marriage, teaching or missionary work. She has before her a wide range of vocations and a great array of opportunities in almost every field—all of which offer her a livelihood and practically all of which, while demanding individual efficiency, demand increasingly the power to work harmoniously and effectively with the group.
Influence upon Social Control.
Irrespective of women's occupational opportunities, broad as these are becoming, there are certain forms of social control which they help to create and in a great degree to sustain. Such are the customs, beliefs and traditions which make society stable. The growing publicity given to the doings of women has largely increased their power over the various forms of social control and both by suggestion and example each individual appeals to and influences a much wider circle than in the past.
Chief among these forms of social control is public opinion, which even more than laws makes for the happiness or unhappiness of individuals and for the welfare or disadvantage of the community. When women judge within a prejudiced, circumscribed horizon, as where they condemn murderers but not adulterators of food or officials of a trust who put up the price of ice so that babies in tenements die for lack of it, they fail to see that they are condemning the lesser rather than the greater offender, simply because the connection of cause and effect is not so apparent in the latter cases.
While women as a rule are indifferent to any form of morality other than virtue in their own sex, small wonder is it that infractions of public morality are slowly and uncertainly punished by public opinion. It does not change the consequences that women's false social judgments are due not so much to evil thoughts and feelings as to perplexities due to incomprehension of the given elements in a situation or to a defective sense of justice. There can be no efficient social control by public opinion without a deep sense of justice. Sympathy has long been accepted as a substitute for this in women. But the increasingly varied demands made upon them shows it to be an inadequate substitute. Mr. E. A. Ross well states this:1
"It is obedience that articulates the solid, bony framework of social order; sympathy is but the connective tissue. As well build a skeleton out of soft fiber as construct social order out of sympathies.
"Not friendly aid, but reliable conduct, is the cornerstone of great organization. Now, sympathy will stay the hand of the wife-beater, but it will not spurn the bribe or spare the lie. It will snatch a child from trampling hoofs, but it will not keep the watchman awake, or hold the contractor to the terms of his agreement. It will nerve the rescuing fireman, but it will not stimulate the official to do his duty. It will relieve the beggar, but it will not stop the adulteration of goods. It will man the lifeboat, but it will not lead men to give just weight, to make true returns of their property, or to slay their country's enemies. . . . A person may be tender-hearted, and yet do vast harm by dodging quarantine, or smuggling in coolies, or falsifying news, or stuffing ballot boxes. . . .
"Sympathy, then, breaks down at just the point where we are increasingly in need of security. For our social development is marked by the progressive substitution of fixed impersonal relations for transient personal relations. . . . With the advent of the time when the most momentous actions will present no more obvious relation to their remote social consequences than does the fingering of the train despatcher to the fate of distant passengers, it will, no doubt, be realized that intermittent sentiment is unable to cope with the problem of subordination, and that other motives must be called in."
Relation to Rules of the Game.
Women then, whether approved or not, are striving for success in almost every field of life and are of growing importance in making forms of social control. Every field, like every game, has its established rules and regulations, be it domestic, social, professional or industrial. The fact that women have had no large direct part in formulating these rules does not excuse them from sustaining them. It is a mistake to think that the selfish individualist, whether man or woman, can enter any field or game and play fair without a knowledge of the rules and penalties and without training. The welfare of society depends upon the rules being upheld or changed only with the full knowledge of all. Competition is the prevailing spirit and the development of co-operation is the problem in every field of activity in which society is concerned. Good clean success requires fair, economical and co-operative rules in order that players may be equal before them and individual waste may be avoided through team work. This being true, is there any reason why women, in their respective fields of activity and thought, should not abide by the rules of the game or contribute to their enforcement and improvement? If they are defective in the qualities which make for rapid adjustment, is it not reasonable to include in their education such training as will increase their social understanding and efficiency?
Personal Morality and Social Ethics
What is the need? Social problems to-day are ethical rather than economic. There is enough food and shelter for all, such is our control over the forces of nature, if only some of the unethical interferences, prohibitions and inequalities be removed. It is in the matter of social ethics that women are most undeveloped and uninstructed. Their sense of morality is personal rather than social and passive rather than active. To be virtuous is to be good. Vice and crime may be a matter of gossip, but their treatment as problems is considered to be proper only for men. Personal duty obscures civic duty and there is an absence of social courage when community interest conflicts with personal comfort.
It is generally conceded that the standard of personal morality, based upon virtue, is higher among women than among men and it has long been the practice to excuse many of the anti-social acts of women so long as they remain virtuous. But greater individual freedom, without a commensurate increase of the sense of responsibility for the welfare of the community, has led to an alarming increase of immorality. Among races where the percentage was small, this has become common when they have come to our American cities to live. The leisure class with not enough outlet for its energy, and industrial workers with too much of a drain upon their energy, both show the increase. It thus becomes clear that this problem of immorality is no longer one for men to solve alone or where the single standard of personal morality will prove all-sufficient. The temptations present themselves in a hundred varied, attractive forms, half hidden under general industrial or social conditions, and the training of the girl, which should enable her to understand and guard against force, brutality and lust, does not readily recognize these in their modern insidious forms.
The Non-Ethical Group
The socially nonethical group includes women in every station of life. There is the social representative of the family, who maintains an elaborate establishment or who is hospitable, chiefly in order to surpass a rival. There are the mothers, wives and daughters of some of the great financiers, who enjoy the advantages of wealth won under unfair, uneconomic and non-co-operative rules. Women are frequently the cause of the pursuit of great wealth and accept it, without sense of responsibility, without inquiry or protest, indeed often without interest, so long as they are comfortable and their husbands' reputations remain unsullied. There are women who inherit property which they administer without any sense of social obligation, indeed without any desire to know whence it came or whither it goes. There are others who enter professional life and become a part of bitter professional jealousies and strife and think that an increase of practice constitutes success, whether won by fair rules or foul. The field of politics and government service also contains many who belong to this group. Among these, wages and individual preferment are placed above service to the community and they do not hesitate to recommend themselves and strive for positions of honor and trust which should be the unsought gift of the public. There are working women who take the places of their fellow-workers at lower wages or accept wages and conditions which compel them to supplement their earnings in doubtful ways, because they work for themselves alone rather than for the cause of working women.
The Non-Ethical Organization.
Not only this, but women combine in organizations for which they set the standard and which they alone maintain, and there are thus formed socially non-ethical organizations. Clubs of this order are those which exist simply for the entertainment of their members. Many are willing to pay to have a speaker interrupt his busy hours of social service to come and entertain them with "stories of humanity"; but by no means with the idea of doing anything or of sharing the burden, as their shocked expressions reveal when they are asked to render active service. There are other clubs whose public-spirited leaders do the work, while the members pay their dues and only come to hear about the "club's work" at special and annual meetings. There are others which undertake public work but cherish it chiefly for the credit or reputation it brings to the organization. Such jealously guard their "own interests." The bridge whist club which utilizes time and energy out of proportion to the rights and needs of society, and fosters the gambling spirit, falls into this group of organizations. When it averages from four to ten hours of play daily, the same number of hours required of working women in order that they may even live, society has a right to be interested in the consequent waste.
Non-Ethical Acts and Attitude.
The effects of socially non-ethical acts are not so easily detected. A little disparaging remark in an efficient democracy may put some one out of the game or limit her opportunities. A lie may place some one in a position where her efforts become non-productive. A cheat may displace a better person and retard progress. Never having a good word for any one else may discourage others from working for humanity. Disregard of the rights of others and selfishness set an example productive of endless evil. Jealousy may distort the whole horizon and break the best of fellowship bonds. Cowardice may leave wrongs unrighted and make friendship a mere gainful occupation. And when enough women are daily guilty of these things and they are distorted and magnified, there is created an atmosphere of cheating, lying, suspicion and unfairness, which vitally affects every interest—the home, society and the nation, for these can be no better than the citizens who make them.
The socially non-ethical attitude, quite as much as the act, makes possible the continuance of many conditions detrimental to the welfare of society. One cause of the slow growth of social ethics is the individualistic attitude of women and their interpretation of Christian teaching along the narrow path of individual salvation rather than as an injunction to lose one's life in order to find it more abundantly through effort in behalf of the community. Within the family, fairness, co-operation and unselifshness are kept uppermost by the ties of affection. But once outside each member tends to become a bird of prey. The attitude is, what can I get out of to-day, or out of some one else, or what for my family, with little thought of what can be put into the day for the benefit of the larger group. Personal moral excellence may become so narrow as to be socially non-ethical, and while such a citizen may rank as "good" she no longer fulfils the requirements of American citizenship. If those who live in good homes and who know the value of fresh air, sanitation and cleanliness, do not lead the crusade against bad tenements, who will? If those who know the effect on children of hard hours of labor do not fight for child labor laws and the education of ignorant parents, who will? And if American-born women, with all the advantages of their native country, do not lend a hand to their immigrant sisters, who will make them into good citizens? Women do not protest against adulterated foods and medicines because they do not happen to use them. They do not inquire into the conditions in garment factories because cheapness is their standard or they can afford a dressmaker and tailor. They are not conscientious about their hours of shopping because they have no experience as clerks and have not enough imagination to put themselves in another's place. Irreproachable as their characters may be in their own homes and circle, is their social obligation met so long as they are indifferent to the welfare of the group?
There are many who mistake benevolent and philanthropic impulses for social ethics. To give to others out of an abundance or even at a sacrifice may be an impulse aroused through sympathy, sense of duty or sometimes through a desire for self-laudation and for personal power. The code of social ethics, on the other hand, is founded on justice and equality and has no more sense of giving than of receiving, no admission of superiority, no attitude of judgment, no consciousness of magnanimity, no reliance on patronage. One is highly personal, the other impersonal; one is individualistic and the other social. Furthermore, the benevolent person does not necessarily see inequalities and unfair application of rules as does the socially ethical person. Social ethics is essentially the result of team work according to the prescribed rules of the game, each player being equal, fair and co-operative, so that his team or class may also be these; each one being a necessary factor in the group and realizing that the whole group suffers if the enforcement of rules and penalties is not the same for all, and each being willing to insist upon such enforcement.
Social ethics can only be realized in a small measure through legislation. Stealing, homicide and arson are crimes which are dramatically punishable. These offenses are plainly immoral. But socially non-ethical acts may affect society as disastrously as does theft or homicide, though no legal punishment is provided. The most serious crimes, judged by results upon the whole community, are not necessarily on the statute books, and the awakening social conscience has begun to perceive this truth. Buying supplies (and women are the chief buyers) made under sweat-shop conditions makes it possible for many lives to be lost yearly because the workers are under-nourished. Respectable owners of houses which are used as dens of immorality make it possible for thousands of young girls to be led astray each year. Hiring a lawyer to help evade a law which was drawn to serve a great public purpose, but which has a technical flaw, may leave a whole group unprotected while securing the escape of one individual. Refusal by protective organizations to take in penniless and homeless women at night because they bring no references or because it is in violation of unwise rules, needs no statute to define its consequences.
While it may be granted that the social consciousness and conscience of women are not proportionate to the needs of society and while it may be admitted that much of their effort will for some time remain individualistic and their organized effort characterized by disorder and waste, there is no need to be discouraged or to neglect social education. Movements and organizations undertaken by women are not the only ones that are content with attacking superficial rather than fundamental evils, with using air guns where only cannon will suffice, and which are so lacking in courage that they retard civilization by a million pinpricks rather than by boldly destroying and rebuilding. The socially non-ethical groups and acts are human imperfections, and we have emphasized them in women because it is their position, influence and activities to which we have confined our attention, and because we believe so deeply in women's importance as factors in group expression and intelligence.
This glimpse of the unlovely picture of the socially non-ethical group has a very bright reverse side which we wish might be presented in as much detail, for it holds out abundant hope for the future. The increasing number of social moral leaders among women, and the growing intelligence, interest and activities of the mass, many of whom are consciously upholding the rules of the game in the group interest, give the courage and faith necessary to present the less hopeful conditions. There are many forces at work in the uplift, and the response, if still lacking in power, is sincere and enduring. This in itself refutes any conclusion that the present position of women as group factors is a question of incapacity rather than of ignorance and lack of opportunity.
Notes
- Ross: "Social Control," p. 12. ↩