Part 9
There are people in the world in this enlightened age who are worrying about the relation of the woman of to-morrow to the home. They argue that the new woman, with her opportunities, her relation to the business world, her college education, her mental development (which they delight in referring to as “so far ahead of their physical development”)—that this woman of the future is sure to cut asunder from all home ties; that we are to become a race of nomads, who roam desolately from one hotel or boarding-house or lodging-house to another, with no taste or desire for the old-fashioned home. But this is now, as it always was, sheer nonsense. Ever since Eve hugged her first baby to her heart women have been proud and happy mothers. Ever since she urged Adam to partake of the fateful apple woman has been enticing man with dinners, good or bad. Think you that after thousands of years we are going to change our natures entirely because of a little college training, a little “advanced thought”? Not while women are women.
Woman’s life for centuries has been narrowed to a compass bounded by four walls; it is true that she has now stepped out and demonstrated her fitness to do her part of the work beyond those confines. She has learned the beauty and usefulness of association, the part that sustains the great whole. She has found out the meaning of the word “coördination” and the beauty of community work. She knows how to make the right connection between home life and world interests, and her family are the better therefor. She realizes what relation a good home bears to the good school, the influential church and pure society. She even begins to comprehend the immense bearing a good home and an upright community have upon a healthy industrial system.
I suppose I am optimistic, but it seems to me that things are going very well for our sex and that we have very little to complain of; also, that the opposite sex has very little to complain of as well, for he is still far from a buttonless state, and he acts as if he enjoyed having intelligent companionship from or with his womenkind. Few women are yet so “advanced” as to wish to bring up their babies on the coöperative plan. Many young women persist in getting married every year, and also in having babies. And what do they do about it? In the beginning they pin a little band around them and see that their milk is maternally sweet, and look confidently to God for the rest. And so far as we can judge, they seem to enjoy motherhood. Oh, I know it is the fashion to cry out “race suicide,” and all that, but let us not take to heart too seriously the dismal state of affairs bewailed by certain sensational reformers. For the world is rolling on towards the good—still swinging out to the light.
The most enduring element of our national strength lies in the fact that our American life centres around the home fireside. We are proud to boast of the goodness and bravery of our men, the beauty and purity of our women, and they have these qualities because the home is their school and the mother their teacher. The wise Creator, when He made woman, gave her the two highest offices in His gift—those of wife and mother. Kings boast of reigning by right divine, and inscribe “Rex Dei Gratia” upon the laws of their land, but woman is the only creature who may truthfully use those words, and she may say, “I am a woman by the grace of God, and rule in a kingdom of kingdoms.” She makes no laws, leads no armies, governs no enterprises, but she forms those by whom laws are made, armies led, great enterprises managed. I often think the wife and mother who lives quietly at home and looks well to the ways of her household; who still pursues the simple art of making her husband happy (I trust I do not misuse the word “simple”) and of bringing up her children to be good citizens—I often think that this woman feels that her life is wasted. She reads and hears of the public work of women, and sighs that her life is being thrown away. Not so. This woman is fulfilling the mission of her being, and the old-fashioned wife and mother will not go out of fashion as long as the world stands. Neither do those of us who do not happen to be wives and mothers do right in belittling their work and arrogating unto ourselves all the glory. I have never known a more splendidly developed woman, spiritually and intellectually, than my mother; and I have chanced to know most of the prominent women of the last quarter of a century. And I cannot go back on her work, although had the Lord seen fit to place her in the ranks of the care-free, or in the present day and generation, she would have gained far wider recognition.
Collectively, women may have been weak, mistakenly zealous, or wofully deficient in method, but in this modern association of all grades in society they are coming to know themselves and their possibilities as well as their limitations. And they are beginning to realize that collectively they are only beginning their education.
The men and women who by their lives have influenced the world, have been those who lived simple, earnest, honest lives. What was it that endeared the late Queen of England to her humble subjects? It was her interest and participation in the common things of every-day life. Her love of children, tenderness toward animals, even her relish for oatmeal porridge was a virtue in their eyes. The homes of the nation mean the life of the nation. No stream can rise higher than its fountain, and as we build our homes so our land will prosper. God has given us a picture of what Heaven may be, and He has given it in the shape of a perfect home. When we learn to give our girls the training for home life which will give them such power over their work that each day’s tasks will come to willing and able hands, then we shall have solved many of the problems that confront us at the beginning of this twentieth century. And right here, although it may not seem apropos, how many mothers are educating their sons in the matter of newspaper reading? How many wives say to the husband who brings home a pink or a yellow or a green, or even some of the white newspapers, “Please do not bring such papers home for the children to read”? Some women do this, it is true, but more are utterly thoughtless about it. Hosts of good women read the sensational papers themselves—because, perchance they cost only a cent, while perhaps the better ones cost two; and hosts of others allow their children to read the sensational, unreliable paper without ever giving a thought to the fact that those young, eager minds are being subjected to a lowering of taste and a lowering of moral and mental tone. They are particular about the associates their children select; they are even particular about the books they read; but a newspaper is an ephemeral thing, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, and it does not occur to them that the effect upon the child’s taste is morally and intellectually the same as if they were allowed to come under the influence of a teacher with low morals.
I say this because the modern newspaper has a direct influence on the home and the people that dwell therein. The woman who used to spend her evenings picking out the rules for crocheting a cushion cover from the woman’s page has learned how to read good books, to write papers without a too free use of the encyclopedia, how to use her brains, how to think. Just as the woman who used to edit the page has come into her own and convinced the editor that women’s whole existence is not bounded on the north by angel cake, on the east by baby’s afghans, on the south by her pet dog, and on the west by her husband’s dinner; and that the magnetic needle which points her compass is not a crochet hook. Women everywhere are learning that scientific or simplified housekeeping is not beneath the attention of the refined nor beyond the comprehension of the uncultured. It is the duty of the rich and the salvation of the poor. We are all agreed that as our lives are now ordered we have too many things to care for, too much show and too little comfort.
“We have exchanged our stage coach for the electric motor, our tallow candles for the incandescent light, and our simple living for nervous prostration, so that inductive science, the new gospel, must come to our aid,” says a bright woman. “If we would save our bodies as well as our souls, and if the knowledge of household economics means anything to us, it means we must get back to nature’s heart and be content to live simpler lives.”
And we must remember that for every bad woman, every erratic woman, every cold and selfish woman in the world, there are a thousand good and true and faithful unto death. Only the cynic and the critic do not consider the latter worth talking about. They only emphasize the abnormal woman, thinking all the time they are holding the mirror up to nature and proving something; which they are not.
Domestic science is domestic sense, and domestic sense is common sense. Women should have the best and highest education they can obtain, and more especially if their lives are to be rounded out in the limited bounds of a four-room cottage; and while she may have caught the spirit of the times and become an expansionist by invading new territories, and may have been masquerading as the “eternal feminine” or the “new woman,” these little excursions and diversions only make her prize the more her old dominion, and the complexities of her nature find full play in the evolutions in the American home.
Statistics have already proved that the college-bred woman marries in the same proportion and infinitely better than the simpering sister who cares nothing for education. And she not only has as many children, but is manifestly better fitted to train them up to good citizenship. It is also evident that woman’s experience in the business world—while it makes her more cautious about marriage—renders her a more sympathetic, appreciative and sensible wife than the girl who waits at home for a husband, who, she has been taught to believe, must ever after be her body-slave. And although modern conditions make it possible for a woman to be self-supporting, and therefore not to marry unless she does it for that greatest reason in the world—_love_—the business of marrying and having children is going right on, age after age, generation after generation, long after you and I are forgotten. So there is no real cause for worry. Even the rankest pessimist may take heart if he will. And to all I commend the lamented Frank Norris’ definition of a “womanly woman,” a term we all love to use:
“To be womanly? It’s to be kind and well-bred and gentle mostly, and never to be bold or conspicuous; and to love one’s home and take care of it, and to love and believe in one’s husband, or parents, or children, or even one’s sister, above any one else in the world.”
XVI
ON GROWING OLD
It is often said that we have no old women nowadays, that modern conditions and modern dress keep us young until we drop into our graves. And when we look at women, marvelous women, indeed, like Julia Ward Howe and Susan B. Anthony, and Mary A. Livermore[1] and others whose activities and beneficences have kept them young, we are inclined to believe all this. But how is it with the most of us? Have we learned the true art of “growing old gracefully”? In this age of hurry-scurry let us give ourselves pause, once in awhile, long enough to remember that we owe ourselves something, and also those around us. I know a woman who broke down under the strain of club life a few years ago; she was one of those willing creatures who do everything anybody asks of them, and she finally had to withdraw from everything and remain in quiet seclusion for some years. I thought she had learned her lesson, but no. I met her again, almost breathless in her chase about the city on some mission or other.
“Why do you do it?” I asked. “You have broken down once under the strain of all this excitement. Why don’t you keep out of it now? Or, if you must be in the midst of things again, why not let others do the hard work?”
“Oh,” she replied, “I must do it. It has got to be done, and who else will do it?”
“My dear, good friend,” I asked her, “did you ever stop to ask yourself what would happen if you and I were to die?”
“Oh,” she exclaimed hurriedly, “nobody else will do my work; and it is very important—I really _have_ to do it.”
“No, you don’t have to,” I answered. “If we were to die to-night the waters would close right over our heads, and after saying the conventional things about us, and passing suitable votes of condolence, somebody else would take up our particular line of work; these things we think nobody else could possibly do so well would get done just as quickly and possibly a great deal better than if you and I kept wearing ourselves out with them. You just try it and see.”
She thought a moment and said: “You are right. I know you are right, and I am going to stop now.”
But she didn’t. And I suppose she will keep on, strong in the belief that the work she is doing could not possibly be done if she did not wear herself out with it, until she lands in a sanitarium again with nervous prostration. I see her now and then, always daintily dressed, always refined and delicate-looking, but with a wild air, a restless, hunted look, when she might be so pretty and attractive.
Are we not all overdoing this matter of public work? I have done my share of burning the candle at both ends—yes, and in the middle, too—and have had to “give myself pause.” And I have come to see that there is nothing to be gained by hurrying through life without a moment’s stop to consider the real meaning of it. It is sometimes a difficult thing to be in the midst of much work without overdoing. There is scarcely time enough to accomplish half what one sets out to do, is there? Then do not map out so much, but try to do your “stint” more leisurely. What is to be gained by rushing through life as though a whirlwind were on our path?
We get to a point where we feel ourselves so necessary. We find so many things that need to be done, and we are sure nobody else can do them so well as we. And so we go on straining every nerve until the tension becomes too great, and we either go under—and discover that the world can and does move just as well without us—or we become so arbitrary that our usefulness is ended. And then we discover that we are only one of many just as capable as ourselves.
I know of no one who has given better advice on this subject than Caroline Bartlett Crane, who also “speaks whereof she knows.” In talking once on the subject of overwork, she said:
“If we will not be forewarned against overwork, let us at least be certain that what goes by that name is the real thing. Above all, dear ladies, let us not make our lives vain, vainglorious and in vain, by fancying that all busyness is business; by hugging a merely cluttered existence with ecstatic and debilitating self-consciousness, which is one of the deadliest banes to be guarded against as long as ‘woman’s work,’ ‘woman’s mission,’ ‘woman’s institutions’ and the ‘woman question’ agitate the air. Let us strive for more of that poise which experience and a stable nervous organization has given men; let us remember that there are absolutely no safeguards against fussing and worry; and let us question whether, if the deeps of nervous prostration could give up its half dead, it would not thereby appear that lack of system and synthesis in what we do, apprehensions for what we are about to do, regrets for what we did or did not do, omnivorous yearning for what we have no call to do, fretting distaste for what fate ordains we shall do, doing all the little unimportant things first under the delusion that then we will get unencumbered leisure for the things really worth while, doing things a hundred times in imagination before they are done, and doing them as many times again in retrospect, with carking concern for how the doer appears in the doing—let us ask ourselves if such travesties upon the dignity and simplicity, the singleness and wholesomeness of real work are not responsible for a very considerable share of the evils we commonly lay at the door of overwork; and are not such things unworthy of us?
“Let us strive to realize that we influence more by what we are than by what we do or what we say; and that what we say and do derives its quality from our quality. And quality is felt _in toto_, while of quantity a census and appraisal must needs be made.
“And let us remember, too, that when we rob a day of order, beauty, peace, we rob life of these things. How can we live our days one way and talk of living our lives another way? ‘As thy days so shall thy strength be.’ We must live so as to praise God all the days of our lives, if we would praise Him. Let us find some time in every day to lift unencumbered hands and heart, and exclaim with the psalmist, ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.’”
It rests with us and no one else to strike the notes that give the purest melody. There is the life of pretence, with its artificial standards, and the life of honest endeavor, where every note rings true; in other words, a whole world of real people, where each man and each woman is measured by their own true work, where friendships are honest, where laughs are hearty and tears are real, where lives are happiest because they are lived simplest, where the air is pure and the clothes you wear do not signify.
Then, too, think what trouble might be avoided if we only mastered the power of silence. Especially is this true when some controversy arises. It is hard indeed to be at all interested in and to sit still when a heated discussion is on. But it is a good discipline. Next time just shut your teeth together and say to yourself, “After all, what does it matter?” You will soon find that other people are doing all the quarreling. It is wonderful how small a compass many controversies can be crowded into when you really stop to consider how much of them are worth while.
We all know how impossible it is to do our best in the home if we have to live in the spirit of criticism. If there is some one in the family whom it is impossible to please, who stands ready to ascribe to us motives unworthy of any good woman, and to deny that we have anything but self-seeking and selfishness behind all our actions, it becomes impossible for us to live out the best that is in us, or to keep anger and jealousy and suspicion out of our own hearts, after a time at least. Few women there are but know or have known what it means to have such an element somewhere in the family connections. But, even if some one says hard things about you, the most powerful weapon is silence. The most contemptuous or stinging retort has not the force nor the strength of simply saying nothing. For there is nothing which you could say that is so hard on your adversary as to ignore her argument.
Vanity enters so largely into the make-up of most mortals that it must be recognized. When a gossip brings a tale about some friend, there is no rebuke so keenly felt as a dignified and sober silence. When such a story is brought and you ask some question, or even seem to acquiesce, you are pretty sure to be reported as having told the story. We all have days, too, which seem to be filled with petty trials and miserable crosses. The woman at home as well as the man in business has to bear these until every nerve seems bare. Small things assume huge proportions, and life seems almost unendurable. We cannot see a bit beyond the little circle of our trials, and discouragements loom large on our horizon. Nothing is right simply because we are not right.
Do not give way to ill-temper and snap up those around you. Go where you can be alone—out-of-doors if possible; if not, in a room by yourself. Say a little prayer. Relax your muscles. Think of the country, the mountains, the sea, a starry night—anything but your troubles. Stay in the silence fifteen minutes. There is wonderful magic in it.