Chapter XII
The Constituent Parts of the Family
II. The Woman in the Family
With respect to the proper position and function of the woman in the Family there is general agreement up to a certain point. If the husband is the head of the Family, the wife is the centre. It is she who is primarily responsible for the care of the children; to the utmost extent of which the family means will allow, it is her duty to see that they are well cared for, both physically and morally; and it is generally agreed that this duty can only be properly fulfilled by personal attention. The wealthy mother who hands over her children to the care of nurses and governesses, however highly she may pay these, without constant and adequate supervision, fails just as reprehensibly of her duty as the poorer mother whose carelessness or ignorance leaves them wholly neglected. It is a duty which cannot be delegated.
Further, she is responsible for so ordering the household that every member of it may have a home life which is physically healthy and morally wholeIt is more especially her business to watch over the interests of the weaker members, whether it is the backward child in the nursery, or the kitchen-maid in the scullery, and to see that all have a fair chance of developing whatsoever capacities lie in them.
With regard to finance, again, she has most important functions. She may have little to do in determining the amount of the family income, but even more important than its amount is its right distribution, and this should lie mainly within her powers. It is for her to judge what things are necessaries and must come first, and what things are luxuries and may be postponed; and she alone can have such an intimate knowledge of the needs of each member of the household as to be able to judge which are most pressing. And it should be noted that in thus determining the distribution of the family income she is also performing a national function, for by laying down the lines of consumption she is also laying down the lines of production and directing industrial and commercial enterprise.
Perhaps it is here also that her influence, when rightly used, most makes for peace and order in the household. When all know that their needs are duly appreciated and cared for, there will be little selfish clamouring of individuals; and most people will cheerfully go without full satisfaction of their wants when they know that their claims have been subordinated only to claims which are greater.
And a well-ordered household in this sense is a woman's first duty towards the predominant partner, her husband. It is this which she tacitly undertakes when she enters into partnership with him for the important business of carrying on family life; and in so far as his own personal comfort is involved in this, he has a right to expect it. But that does not carry the right to expect that his personal comfort shall be the first consideration, and that the woman's duty is primarily to minister to him. The partnership was formed for mutual help and support in a serious undertaking, and when either partner tries to make it subserve his private ends alone he is virtually guilty of breach of contract.
It is at this point, the question of how far the woman in the Family is to be subservient to man's personal needs, that controversy has generally arisen ; and it has its root in the assumption, wholly erroneous as I believe, that the interests of men and women are in some way inevitably opposed. Whenever the question rises of extending or improving women's education, or of giving them wider opportunities of work in the outside world, the supporters of the movement find themselves confronted by what we may call the pseudo-domestic school, who cry out that the peace and safety of home life is being endangered. Against the argument that women would be healthier and happier, both in mind and body, if their minds were set free to healthy exercise instead of being confined in brooding ignorance, is set the argument that man would suffer, that woman's true function is to subordinate herself to him, to spend her hours in tending him, or—since this might become tiresome—in waiting to tend him when he should be inclined for it, to "create an atmosphere" for his activities, and to be a passive receptacle for such of his opinions as he might care to impart. The most consistent exponents of this view have always been the Germans:—
Dienen lerne bei Zeiten das Weib nach ihrer Bestimmung
Denn durch Dienen allein gelangt sie endlich zum Herrschen
Zu der verdienten Gewalt, die doch ihr im Hause gehöret.
Dienet die Schwester dem Bruder doch früh, sie dienet den Eltern,
Und ihr Leben ist immer ein ewiges Gehen and Kommen,
Oder ein Heben und Tragen, Bereiten und Schaffen für Andre.
Wohl ihr, wenn sie darum sich gewöhnt, dass kein Weg ihr zu sauer
Wird und die Stunden der Nacht ihr sind wie die Stunden des Tages,
Dass ihr niemals die Arbeit zu klein und die Nadel zu fein dünkt,
Dass sie sich ganz vergisst und leben mag nur in anderen1
This ideal, it was thought, could no longer be maintained if once women should assert the right of independent intellect; and with it the autocratic life of the man would be shattered. There would cease to be only one will in the home, and where there are two wills there is the possibility of conflict. Few saw what many now realise, that the old ideal with all its beauty and strength could only be cast down by one still higher and more beautiful; that the devotion of women could be greater, not less, when they had richer minds and wiser hearts to give; that the noblest harmonies of life arise when two disciplined and independent wills combine; and that the truest comradeship is found when man and woman meet on the common ground of mutual intellectual respect. Innumerable happy homes bear witness to-day to the truth of this higher ideal, and so far the battle has in principle been won for ever.
But it must be admitted that in practice there are still many who hold that man can only reach his highest by making a stepping-stone of woman. Germany, men, though not regardless of women's welfare, are still eager to prove to them that their true welfare lies within the four walls of the home, and that real greatness consists in the daily routine of household duties. And yet they weary of the poor Hausfrau who puts her trust in their teaching and faithfully confines her life within the narrow limits laid down by them. One of the most plausible and convincing of these teachers is Riehl, the sociological historian, who in his book, Die Familie, strenuously advocates the purely domestic theory of woman; and it is not a little amusing to find him remarking in a surprised sort of way how on the occasion of some international conference the English and Americans brought their wives with them: "A German of culture would rejoice on such an occasion to be free of his family, and would certainly leave his wife at home." Of course he would; no one wants his holidays to be burdened and clouded with an epitome of household drudgery; but it does not seem to occur to the writer that a wife capable of intelligent comradeship might even add to the pleasures of a holiday.
But the same curious shortsightedness seems to have affected men whenever they have turned their attention to considering woman. They complain, and with justice, of her narrow-mindedness, her lack of intelligent interests, her uncertain temper, her frivolity. These all make her a most trying partner to live with. But the strange thing is that they have so seldom recognised that the remedy is not in complaint, but in admitting her to wider interests and a more invigorating mental life. "It is false," writes Plutarch, "to say that idle people are cheerful; if so, women would be more cheerful than men, as they mostly stay at home; but as it is 'though the north wind may not touch the tender maid,' yet vexation and distraction and ill-feeling, owing to jealousy and superstition and innumerable empty fancies, find their way into the boudoir." To my mind there is something very naïve in the way in which men have constantly pointed out the ill effects upon women of idleness and untrained faculties; they have seldom realised that the discomfort they experience from these ill effects is, after all, only the natural consequence of their own theories about women's education. One would think there had been time enough for them to have learned the lesson between the days of Plutarch and the eighteenth century; but in 1710 we find a writer in the Guardian repeating Plutarch's complaint almost verbally: "I could name you twenty families where all the girls hear of in their life is that it is time to rise and come to dinner, as if they were so insignificant as to be wholly provided for when they are fed and clothed. It is with great indignation that I see such crowds of the female world lost to human society, and condemned to a laziness which makes life pass away with less relish than in the hardest labour. Palestris in her drawing-room is supported by spirits to keep off the return of spleen and melancholy before she can get over half of the day for want of something to do, while the wench in the kitchen sings and scowers from morning to night." He proposes as a remedy that "those who are in the quality of gentlewomen should propose to themselves some suitable method of passing away their time. This would furnish them with reflections and sentiments proper for the companions of reasonable men."
Here we have some slight recognition of the fact that the interests of men and women are not really hostile in this respect, and that a woman is likely to be a more amiable as well as a more intelligent companion if she is not forced to confine her activities within the four walls of home and the narrow, if absorbing, duties of domestic life.
But though this recognition is an important step forward, the real issue lies deeper still. Granting that a wider range of life and thought makes woman a pleasanter companion for men, does it do this at the cost of her effectiveness as mother and housewife? Is she made less fit for her duties towards the Family by taking a greater share in the intellectual and practical life of the world? This is the ground upon which the question is now being argued by those who have advanced beyond the sphere of man's merely personal welfare; and the position of the woman in the modern Family cannot be fairly stated without considering the point. The further question of whether woman's influence in the outside world is for good or for evil does not concern us here.
It is hard to believe that the practical woman of trained intelligence should not be a more efficient mother and housekeeper than the peevish, hysterical creature so often described by men. But considerations of great weight have been brought forward on the other side, and although some of them are, by their nature, incapable either of verification or refutation, they must be presented. The following quotation from Blüntschli represents what we may call the purely dogmatic statement of the pseudo-domestic theory. He is arguing against allowing women any participation in public affairs :— "Her proper sphere is the life of the family, for which she would be unfitted by mixing largely in public duties and political struggles. Womanly virtues would suffer,— woman's love as mother and wife, her housewifely skill, her fine sensibility and sweetness of character,— and there would be no gain in political capacity to make good the loss." 2
This is, of course, purely dogmatic assertion; there is no experience forthcoming to show a posteriori that the exercise of the franchise or even active service in a public capacity would affect women's power of loving, and no a priori reason to be shown why it should; while the housewifely skill might often be improved by a better business training. The statement is as incapable of refutation as of proof, and must stand simply as an illustration of the attitude of mind in which so many able men approach the subject. As a more thoughtful exponent of a similar view we may turn to Professor Münsterberg, who has made a careful study of the position of American women, in his book upon America. Some allowance must probably be made for the fact that the German and the American mind are of all others the most opposed upon this issue, and it must have been difficult for him to interpret what he saw as an American, or even as an Englishman, would do. He himself points out that in America the whole principle of woman's life is different from what it is in Germany: "In Germany the fundamental principle is that woman is meant for marriage, while for man marriage is only a side issue in life, and this involves from the first an inequality which can only be slightly lessened by those new movements which approximate woman to man. In the American, fundamental equality is the starting-point." Hence it comes that in America a woman's life is regarded as an end in itself; she is educated with a view to her own development and enjoyment, with the result that she no longer seeks in marriage the necessary content and completion of life. Her disinclination to marriage is often intensified by the fact that she feels herself mentally superior to the man whose education has stopped short with his entry into practical life, while she has continued her studies in school and college. Add again a growing distaste for the routine of household duties, and we have a formidable array of causes which tend to reduce women's inclination for married life, and which have doubtless something to do with the remarkable fall in the rate of increase of the native American population. But our author warns us against the theory of the unattractive bluestocking. "Her life at college may make the average marriage less attractive to many a young American girl; but it certainly has not made her less attractive to the men."
It seems necessary in considering this position to distinguish two points. There is, first, the alleged effect of education in making women less inclined for marriage; and, secondly, whether it makes her less competent for the duties of married life when she does assume them.
It seems to me highly probable, and for the most part wholly to the good, that as women begin to have wider interests they will cease to regard marriage as the one fact in life which preserves it from being a failure. Amongst a people where there is a large majority of women there must always be a considerable number who do not marry, and for the sake of these alone it would be well that as rich a life as possible should be opened up to women in other directions. But for the sake also of those who do marry, and indeed, of the whole community, it must be right that when a girl decides to accept an offer of marriage she should not do so simply because she sees no other escape from a life of intolerable boredom, or because " old maids" are looked down upon, or because she has no means of earning an independent living. It does not follow that her disinclination to marriage is any greater than in the days when she did these things, but merely that she is no longer driven to it in face of disinclination. And it matters comparatively little if the number of marriages is fewer if those which are entered upon are better assorted and more capable of a strong family life.
But does not this education also unfit the girls who do marry for the "womanly" duties which are essential to the welfare of the Family? One is tempted to answer with Sydney Smith's question : "Can anything be more absurd than to suppose that the perpetual solicitude a mother feels towards her children can depend upon her ignorance of Greek and mathematics, or that she would desert an infant for a quadratic equation?"
Of course a woman will constantly be driven to choose between pursuing her intellectual studies and attending to Family claims from sheer want of time to carry on both; but in nine cases out of ten her choice will fall upon home and children, and both she and they will reap the full advantage of a trained and disciplined intelligence to guide her affection. An American writer, with a more intimate and understanding knowledge of the situation than could be attained by a foreigner, writes: "It is true of America, as it is not true of any other nation of the world, that any pursuit which a woman shows herself desirous and capable of following, she is free to follow. And American women have proven themselves very able in very many directions, but in small towns—and three-fifths, at least, of the women of America are in small towns—it is in the making of homes that they are most able, that they do their part best. They make their homes, as artists make great pictures, not so much because they will as because they must. Like great artists, they give to the making themselves; and out of their renunciation, out of their travail, and out of their joy are builded up and welded together these households, simple, happy, and good, which are our greatest national strength, as well as our most typical national achievement. Whatever America may be in the future, it is to-day a nation of small communities; and these communities are merely groups of homes made by American women."3
If this is still true in America, notwithstanding the counter-attractions of life in boarding-houses and hotels of which we hear so much, it is even more true of England. Amongst the great middle classes the home, presided over and managed in every detail by married women, is practically universal. And just in proportion as the education of the women is better, wider, more thorough, the homes lose the aspect of narrowness and self-absorption and conventionality which has been too apt to characterise them in the past, and become fitting nurseries for a nobler generation to follow. Perhaps the fundamental change may be described like this: in a home where the mother takes an active part or intelligent interest in the wider life of the community, the children will from the first hear matters of public interest mentioned and discussed from a disinterested point of view and with reference to the common welfare. The whole growth and bent of their minds will thus be influenced towards themselves exercising a deliberate and disinterested judgment when they themselves are called upon to meet political or social problems. But in homes where woman's interests are narrowed and her judgment untrained, they will never hear of outside matters except when their father dogmatises or their mother complains that the spread of education is making the servants useless. And so they too learn to dogmatise and to measure all social and political movements by their own personal convenience. The first and essential step towards an enlightened democracy, a people able to rule the nation wisely, and to find their own interests in the common welfare, is a generation of women fit to be the mothers of such a people, and to make the homes in which wisdom and self-control may be the ruling spirits.
How far can we apply the same thoughts to the position of women in working-class Families? To a large extent the woman who is not in a position to employ servants, and has the actual work of house and children to do, is saved from the dangers to health and temper which lie in wait for the woman of leisure. Moreover, their early contact with the realities and responsibilities of life has developed in them a natural shrewdness and power of judgment which is in many respects of a higher quality than that produced by education. But there can be no doubt that a higher standard of education for women, and a wider habit of taking an interest in outside affairs, would do more than anything to increase the happiness and efficiency of many a working-class home. ". Labourers' wives are often greatly their husband's superiors in general education. Superiority of education on the part of the wife never causes any alienation; the man shows no jealousy, the woman no conceit. When, on the other hand, this superiority falls to the man, in addition to his greater knowledge of the outside world, as occurs in the case of highly skilled artisans, non-commissioned officers in both services, the men who rise in the police force, etc., great estrangement results. woman can share her advantages with a man, and a curious gentleness and refinement is often found among labourers who 'occupy the seat of the unlearned.' Every woman is a possible mother, and therefore to some extent a born teacher, but a man can impart little to his wife. The whole unhappiness of the private lives of 'risen' men lies in the inferior education of the women they have married."4
But the difference made by education comes out most strikingly in the effects upon the home life of the different occupations followed by the girls before marriage. In some respects service in a well-managed but not wealthy Family is the best possible preparation for family life. A girl who has taken part under skilled direction in the work of keeping a home clean and healthy, and a Family of children well trained and well fed, will be able to apply her experience to her own home and her own Family when the time comes. In wealthy Families where large numbers of servants are kept the lessons she learns are too often those of waste and self-indulgence, and attention to appearance rather than essentials. Then she will marry the footman or the butler, and they will keep a public-house or a lodging - house, and will not belong to the working class at all.
Domestic service is still the largest industry for women, but there are of course many others; and it is most noticeable that those girls who are engaged in skilled industries, earning fairly good wages, are better fitted for their home duties afterwards than the girls engaged in rough and unskilled work. Partly, no doubt, it is due to the fact that they are likely to have come from better homes themselves; but just in proportion as their work calls for more intelligence, skill, and patience, and is carried on under better discipline and conditions, it is also a better preparation for the skilled and difficult work of managing a home.
It is noticeable also, and this is a point of utmost importance, that the girls who work at skilled trades under fair conditions are far more careful in the choice of a husband—and it must be remembered that this is the choice of a father for their children—than the girls who earn low wages at unskilled work. It is sometimes said that to train a girl to earn high wages will only mean that she will have to support her husband. Experience shows, on the contrary, that it is the rougher and less skilled girls who marry the loafers who will afterwards live on their wives' meagre earnings; while the girl who has learned to respect herself as a capable wage-earner will marry a man who knows that his wife's first duties lie in the home.
The most striking exception to this general rule is to be found in some of the textile districts, where men and women have for so long worked side by side as wage-earners, that they have failed to grasp the importance of a redistribution of functions when the wife takes upon herself the additional duties of a mother and housewife. The results of the failure are disastrous from the point of view of the Family, and nothing could so well emphasise the importance of the woman in the Family as the miserable condition of home and children when she is not in the Family but in the mill. Fortunately it is a lesson which the working man himself is apt to learn, and the diminishing proportion of married women who are also wageearners is an indication of a movement towards a better division of labour. It need not mean, of course, that women will cease altogether to be wage-earners, but only that they will cease to be so during the years when a young Family is dependent upon their care.
There is another point of view from which it has been contended that the modern education of women works through the family for evil upon the human race as a whole. The biologist argues that the race is strong in proportion as male and female differ in their qualities; and he is supported by the sociologist, who maintains that in the course of human evolution every forward step sees a greater differentiation between the functions of man and woman. One of Riehl's arguments in favour of emphasising the difference between the occupations of men and women is that the further back you get in the development of culture the less marked you find that difference to be. He points out that amongst the least cultivated peasants, men and women share the same work, and are but slightly differentiated even in dress and appearance; it would even seem, he says, as if the curse of the Old Testament were removed from women of this class, who suffer hardly at all from the pains of childbirth. One would have thought that this undoubted fact would have made him pause in his argument, and suspect something amiss in a form of progress which involves an increasing curse upon half the human race; but the inveterate belief of the average man that it is more womanly to suffer than to act, is too strong for him, and we are left with the uncomfortable proposition that as greater womanliness involves greater suffering, and more progress involves more womanliness, so more progress involves greater suffering.
We may find this fact of the comparative immunity of the women whose occupations approximate to those of men illustrated amongst the costermongers and others of their way of living. It depends, of course, upon the occupation being in itself a healthy one, and preferably in the open air; but given those conditions it seems a mistake to suppose that work, even hard work, is detrimental either to mothers or their infants. A friend who has lived amongst these people for twenty years writes that as her husband "completed his 5000 confinement cases last Christmas, I asked him what he thought of women working up to the end of their 'time,' and he said that he would unhesitatingly say that the woman who worked up to the last had a better time than the woman who rested, as in the case of the worker all the muscles of the body were in good sound condition, so that a quick and easy labour ensued. With regard to working whilst the infant is at the breast, if the work be done at home it does not appear to be detrimental to the mother's health, but if working after childbirth means weaning the infant, and bringing it up by hand, then the evil to both child and mother is very considerable."
From the point of view of the Family, and more especially the children, it seems thus beside the mark to insist either that women shall do no work, or that their work shall be different in kind from that of the men. Work in itself is beneficial if it is under healthy conditions, no matter whether it is what is ordinarily called "womanly" or not, and if it does not involve the separation of the mother from her young children.
It is probable that much more conscious experience and study of the facts is required before we can arrive at any really scientific conclusion as to the effects of the present development of women's education upon future generations. I for one find it impossible to believe that any movement of differentiation between men and women which involves either a stunted mental life or greater physical suffering for the mothers of the race can really be in the right line of progress. If more differentiation is necessary, then we must seek it in some new form, and not, as hitherto, in arbitrarily narrowing the scope of women's activities. But if what is required is merely a large amount of difference between the two parents of a child, it would seem that this is far more effectually secured by the natural law which attracts people of unlike dispositions and physical characteristics together, than by any artificial attempts to sunder the human race into two dissimilar groups, unlike in such a way as to resemble different species rather than the two sexes of the same species. And as we have already seen, a strong family life seems the most potent and natural means for producing and preserving strongly marked differences of character and disposition within a people.
Meanwhile, as usual, facts are rushing ahead of theories, and all we can do is to attempt to interpret them, and to understand them so far as to be able to conform to them wisely. If my reading of the present position of woman in the most representative Families is right, then it is both stronger and more devoted than ever it has been before, just because she is able to bring to it the physical and moral strength which she has gained from contact with the real world. And as this type becomes universal we shall see all questions of rivalry between men and women become antiquated and disappear, and personal self-seeking and aggressiveness be lost in their mutual helpfulness towards a common end.
What is that common end? Primarily, of course, it is the Family; but ultimately it can be nothing less than the welfare of the community of which the Family itself forms a constituent part. And it is just here that we may look, I think, for the solution of the age-long rivalry between the Family and the State. That the Family should exercise a narrowing and selfish influence over its members is inevitable so long as one of the partners responsible for it is excluded from intelligent participation in the work of the State, and sees in public services only rival claims to those of the Family. Get rid of that narrowing and selfish influence and the Family will become to an extent never known before the source and inspiration of noble and enlightened service to the State. And, on the other hand, in proportion as this is true, the State will recognise the infinite importance of the Family and cease from those insidious attacks upon it which arise mainly from ignorance of its true function.