Apropos of Faculty Wives

WHILE the college professor, budget in hand, is occupying the centre of the stage for a brief moment, his wife listens to the hubbub of economic discussion, smiling merrily or maliciously, as her temperament leans to philosophy or pessimism. For, hark ye, my masters, this question of collegiate salary versus collegiate expenditure, so picturesquely presented in the May Atlantic, is a petticoat matter, and she knows it. The salary is earned by the head of the house, but the proportion devoted to each need, the extent of saving, the management of details, in a word, the manner of living, is left, in the majority of cases, to the wife.

The reason lies not at all in any superior ability in the “faculty wife,” but simply in the circumstances. A college professor must attend to class-work, prepare his lectures, and give numberless personal interviews to students. In most institutions he has also a certain amount of administrative detail to answer for, as a member of committees, “student adviser,”et cetera, the extent and importance of this depending usually on the degree of his executive ability. Since it has been fairly well established that the profession is not, and never has been, overpaid, he presumably loves his work and puts in his evenings and any other spare hours in digging his own corner of the appallingly large field of knowledge, perhaps somewhat spurred thereto by the understanding that the faculty “must publish.” His programme is manifestly full, and any digging done meantime in his suburban lot is usually directed by his wife. It is a most exceptional college man who combines with the theory of plant growth the practice of the spade and lawn mower.

In the institution with which I am most familiar, one of the larger universities of the middle West, this state of affairs has created or developed an admirable amount of practical ability among the professors’ wives, but if this were all the case would present no special interest, since many hard-worked professional men have little time for domestic detail. The real complications of Mrs. Professor’s existence arise from the combination of this responsibility with two other factors: the peculiar conditions of social life in a university community, and the intellectual pressure constantly at work.

In the matter of social conditions the first point which strikes the observer is the democracy of spirit and theory; the second, that in this democracy of letters, like that of politics, money does form a dividing line. I know of no other community of cultured people whose feeling is so entirely democratic as the faculty of such an institution as the one referred to above. Within its bounds every one is accepted at a certain face value of equality. Scholarship, in a broad sense, is taken for granted, everybody calls on everybody else, there are many “all-faculty” functions, and clubs of various sorts unite the women who are inclined clubward. On this general basis the first division is the inevitable one rising from personal “likability;” the second —alas, not less inevitable — is founded on differences in salary.

The wife of a young instructor who has eight hundred to a thousand dollars a year must do her own housework, and can hardly offer her friends even tea and thin bread-and-butter. She is probably gently bred, often college trained, almost always plucky and independent. Even if she could leave the baby, she will not, after the first year or so, accept a great deal of hospitality while the pleasure of returning it is entirely out of reach. Nor is there in this any commercial element of social barter. She simply knows that friendships may be spoiled by having all the favors on one side, and wisely avoids the danger. She keeps her friends, and has, probably, a pleasant neighborhood life, but that does not prevent her missing the larger opportunities. Carried on in various lines, this certainly makes a “difference,” and the difference is felt the more keenly just because of the general democracy of sentiment, and because a faculty of say two hundred and fifty members may easily embrace all the degrees between a two-maid establishment with wine-cellar attachment, and a nomaid establishment with corn meal mush for dinner and salt-cellar attachment.

So much for filthy lucre! There is another phase, far worse on the whole. She is expected, nay, forced, to be intelligent. The university world is vibrant with intellectual interests. Libraries and laboratories are the tools of daily life. Every third man has just published a book or has one in drydock, and every second man is preparing a paper for a learned society. The truth or falsehood of every new theory, the value of every new discovery, is first battled over on academic ground. What woman can help responding to such influences ? How many wives come to physical bankruptcy through the auxiliary arts of proofreading, stenography, or index-making! How many more stray from the happy paths of ignorance into the sinuous byways of modern thought!

It is not enough that the faculty wife combine culinary skill with the shifts and shortcuts of the home dressmaker. She must study the balanced ration, and the bases of design. Neither does it suffice that she bring up her offspring in the way she went herself. Around her stand the exponents of the latest theory of infant psychology, mostly childless, but frightfully alert, and she shakes off their baneful influence with difficulty. She may never have a new skirt and a new waist at once, but she saves money to go to Europe, that being a recognized necessity.

And the lightning changes which an hour may necessitate, — to be ready to discuss Nietzsche with a famous foreigner over the dinner she has just cooked; to spend a day putting reserved seats into her lord’s tennis trousers, and yet share his joy over a “complete edition, only thirty dollars;” to play Portia in public and Cinderella in private! — Surely her mission is hardly less diversified than that of the Yale alumni, who are said to go out into the world “to preach the gospel and raise hell generally.” And it’s great fun, after all, — when the baby is well and the slavey decides to stay. Only at times of unusual depression does the faculty wife say with the Preacher, “Of making books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”