Continuity for Women

I

THE existence of a deep-lying antinomy, or intrinsic self-contradiction, in the life of the well-trained woman to-day, was an idea thrown forth not long ago in these pages. Urged by a natural and wholly laudable impulse into productive work, mental or material, she nevertheless soon finds herself — of her own volition, from her inmost self—drawn from this systematic activity to the paramount interest of her children and her home life. The paths do diverge, they are not parallel, I averred, fortifying my argument with a bill of particulars from child-psychology, the daily life of mothers, and the ironclad requirements of ‘jobs.’ The ‘Career,’ the ‘full-time’ or ‘whole-self’ job, and the mother-function, at least, are not compatible; their combination is not, then, as has in recent times been held, a principle of progress and counsel of perfection for women.

That this was not an obvious platitude appeared from the wave of concurrence, even of gratitude, that came back from my plummet. It seemed almost as if, like the enfant terrible of the Hans Andersen tale, I had, by blurting out the truth, brought some relief to overburdened feminists. ‘But the king has nothing on!’ — ‘To be sure, that was what we were all thinking!’

When it came, however, to the solution of my antinomy, — reached in true philosophic fashion by pointing away from the accepted world of ambition and preferment to an ampler ether, a life beyond careers, — why, there, I thought, no one will follow me. Granted that Careers for Mothers (and so, in general, for women) are after all self-nullified, or at least selflimited— the old doctrine, of marriage as a quietus on the carlier vocation, will still prevail.

What I had ventured was this: Might it not have an epochal effect on the progress of science if one half of the able people in the world should consciously, explicitly, and proudly refuse to compete? My forecast of dissent was, however, wrong: supporters appeared. One from out of the least likely of groups — a practising woman lawyer and old-time suffragist — voiced a clear challenge to furnish the specifications for so seemingly utopian a régime. What, precisely, — it was asked, — was envisaged in this notion of women’s refusing to compete? What could they do?

Now the negative is notoriously a ticklish proposition. I could not safely expound my view of noncompeting for trained women without marking out what they would have to do in order positively to compete, and without clearing away what seemed to me the mistaken interpretations of their refraining.

II

For the woman educated and specially trained, the professional worker, in short, ‘competing’ must mean, at the very lowest, keeping up in the professional race. What does that involve?

An excellent answer is to be found in Miss E. K. Adams’s authoritative work on Women Professional Workers. Although the specific reference of the passage is to medicine, law, and divinity, it evidently fits also such applications of science as engineering, education, social-welfare work, and the practice of the abstract sciences and the arts as well. After naming several distinguishing marks of a profession, Miss Adams lists, finally, ‘practice of the profession as a permanent calling providing an adequate livelihood.’

This point is obviously the crux. Failing this relation of permanent calling and adequate livelihood, not only the highest professional achievements, but the ordinary attainment of place or rank, academic or other, is practically excluded.

But just this relation — it was my earlier effort to show — involves a kind of contract obligation and major responsibility with which real motherhood conflicts. That major responsibility to and for the adequate livelihood belongs to the father of the family; child nurture is the mother’s. Two prime responsibilities for her — unthinkable!

Parenthetically, it may be noted, the whole current discussion of economic independence for women must depend on dissembling this difficulty — of a permanent calling providing an adequate livelihood — for mothers. Supposing economic independence to be, indeed, desirable, some form of the endowment of motherhood is clearly required. The political slogan of ‘no discrimination,’ issuing in the ‘blanket’ amendment sponsored by the so-called ‘Woman’s Party,’ involves this same dissembling of a patent natural fact. The absurdity of ignoring the need, created by the mother-function, of the physical safeguarding of all women, and hence of fundamental legal adjustments to this differentiation, would seem to be obvious. As well have the ‘no discrimination’ principle invoked by the workers in a beehive, against the queen!

It would therefore seem more logical to speak merely of women’s recognizing their noncompetitive status, than of their ‘refusing to compete.’ But the attitude of will is of the greatest importance for the form their noncompetition takes, and for their whole adjustment to life, as I hope to show.

III

The traditional view of the scope and destiny of women’s talents is perfectly clear-cut and sentimentally acceptable. In the face of a hundred years of contravening actuality, it is still lèse majesté to question it. Like the doctrine of predestination, held side by side with free will by our elders, it is cherished by most persons simultaneously with precisely contradicting views — and actions. This is the doctrine that all talents may find their adequate expression in the uses of the home. Typical is this excerpt from the Atlantic letter-box: ‘To create a Home requires the proper use of all of her [the trained woman’s] abilities and “offers her opportunities and incentives for the highest achievements.”’

Now, without question, the ultimate value of every human effort whatever is in the purposes of the home; just as the first concern of every woman is for its great issues. But O for some power to transfix once for all that persistent fallacy which confuses the application of knowledge to a single concrete use, with the normal practice of the science (or art) itself! It seems to be a sophism peculiar to the feminine topic; I have not met it elsewhere. And, strangely enough, it is just those arts most prized in the home, which have come nearest to escaping from this misconception. Everyone understands that specific gifts in music, painting, sculpture, literature, do not find their ‘proper’ use or practice in the home, even though they greatly minister to it, or give way before it at need; but that they require an integral development and exercise of their own, in order to exist, in any true sense, at all.

Executive, scientific, or intellectual gifts, however, are not less specific, and are far more widespread among women; yet here we blur the distinction between the systematic thought or activity dealing with a whole field of particulars, and the unique act of the individual in her personal relations. The activity in which scientific ability is expressed does not even occur, much less attain to its ‘proper use,’ if its function is not thus systematic. One of the great uses of entomology, for example, is to guard society against noxious insects; but would an entomologist find the full expression of his science in keeping his household free from insect pests? Would he continue to be an entomologist at all if that were the extent of his activity? Would an engineer be justified of his profession in confining his bridge-building to his own estate? Is it to be supposed that the woman physician finds the proper fulfillment of her training in healing the members of her own family, even though her personal happiness be thereby assured? Suppose the case of a psychologist: is it assumed that she continues the psychological function in simply applying her existing fund of knowledge as a guide in her warm human relations with husband and children ?

That, of course, is exactly what the quoted pronouncement does mean. But it shows a lamentable confusion of mind as to the nature of the great human disciplines.

Everyone who has achieved anything in one of these, whether it be a poem written, a star or a chemical compound isolated, a viewpoint of criticism established, a principle of mental function or of social welfare traced, knows that the character of that activity has absolutely nothing in common with the series of single willacts by which the health, welfare, and moral harmony of a family are established. It may be — for the wife and mother undoubtedly is — a secondary activity; but at least it is an incommensurable one.

The Home is a unique creation, in which a thousand different elements of knowledge, power, and skill blend — and disappear, as flavors in ambrosia. For any one of these, ‘nothing too much’ must be the maxim. It can demand no separate existence within the home. Who wants to turn loving uses to material for science, or seek to find therein occasions for practising one’s specialty? What mother will — or can, effectively — use her own children for psychological experiments? The home cannot be a laboratory; and as a field of application, its range is exceedingly narrow for any given subject.

When I imagine trained and able women I have known, or known about, seeking within the home the proper exercise of their abilities, — the auditor, the patent lawyer, the astronomical computer, the palæontologist, the insurance statistician, the specialist on the lymphatic system, the microscopist in electrometallurgy, the archæologist for prehistoric Greeks, the consulting entomologist attached to an agricultural experiment station, — well, ‘the sense faints picturing them’!

This truth it is, I believe, dimly apprehended, which has held back many women’s colleges from founding those related courses, so long overdue, in education for parenthood. That training surely ought to be as much a part of every woman’s equipment as the ability to use her native tongue. But many of its advocates¹ have fallen into this same confusion between the special uses and the scientific pursuit of the subjects covered. Educators subconsciously flinch at this. They retort simply that such subjects do not train the mind; whereas the fact is that the systematic disinterested pursuit of any subject whatever is antithetical in its intrinsic nature to the personal adjuster’s, general contractor’s, or, in fine, statesman’s job of mother and homemaker.

If training for parenthood could be taken simply for what it is, women’s supreme personal need, like training for health, and delimited from the pure and applied sciences alike, the colleges might abandon their protective inertia.

IV

One regrettable corollary or variation of the ‘home-use’ theory of training is to admit no other motive for the systematic pursuit of a subject than the desire on the part of women for an interesting occupation. How often have we heard from our elders, in homiletic tones, ‘Even Miss So-and-so’ — naming some able woman —‘says she ’d give it all up in a moment if the right man came along’! Well, indeed, that it should be so, if such is the alternative; yet the intended inference is all wrong. Probably the proportion among women of those who feel the single-hearted urge to use their skill is as great as among men. This truth, of the passionate hunger of certain minds for systematic disinterested activity, even Mr. H. G. Wells has at last reached as a truth for women’s minds as well, after sapping up to it through twenty years of half-blocked-out psychology.

Let no one here throw in a scornful ‘Oh, self-expression!’ Alas, poor selfexpression! How many precious uses have been stifled in thy name! The parable of the buried talents is far more applicable. That any human being should have a specific capacity, found, proved, trained, developed, and exercised, and then smother it, is to my thought no less than sinful. It is not poets only, or men, but women also, who can cry with Milton,—

The element of mental health itself is not to be ignored. I believe the victims of sex-suppression are no more in number than those of the frustration of capacity. ‘Sublimation,’ in current jargon, is as likely to be the setting free into action of some human endowment, hitherto repressed, as it is to be the transmuting of an original sex-impulse into a different expression. To talk with the authorities on mental disorders is to be confirmed in this view. Thrillingly moving are the record histories of women in whom an inhibited or only half-sensed talent, once called to life, has proved the rescuer of the whole personality. On the æsthetic and executive sides alone, the really exquisite weaving and tapestry-work, bookbinding, jewelry-work, and carving, of certain hospitals, have not only bridged the way to mental health, but, for some, have uncovered the sore spot itself — a suppressed faculty for artistic expression. True, it is not often that the ‘complex’ is simple, or the ‘conflicts’ confined to frustrated capacity alone; yet the way out has been through the single path of this developed and exercised gift.

The conscious inhibition of proved ability is also definitely harmful. A physician in a great institution for mental healing said to me: ‘A systematic effort in the direction of continuance of the individual vocation would cause a great improvement in the health and happiness of women.’ For the trained woman, at least, real work in the field she has once made her own is a necessary vitamine.

V

Our outline figure of ‘ refusing to compete’ has begun to fill in. In resisting the traditional ‘home-use’ theory of the destiny of talents; in showing that this, indeed, means their actual eclipse, we have come round, it seems, full circle, to a positive demand for some continuity in women’s use of their powers and their training.

All considerations of social economy as to investments in time, energy, money, and educational facilities demand it, also. The present waste in labor turnover, and in the scrapping of costly mental equipment, among women, would not be tolerated for a moment were it not obscured by the casual optimism of the ‘home-use’ theory. As it is now, every young woman in the full tide of her effort is under sentence of death, professionally, with indefinite reprieve. The ever-imminent break ought to be enough to take much of the patience and forethought out of her work. As a matter of fact, women do seem to be far less inclined than men to enter on a project à longue haleine.

Much has been said of the woman’s ‘second leisure,’ as affording the desired usefulness. But there are two obstacles hardly to be overcome.

First, the long interruption spells for most occupations a fatal weakening in knowledge, skill, and energy. Literary work is possibly one of the exceptions; we may think of others. But, in general, for women past their children’s youth, the outlay of vitality required to recover lost ground is too great. The hand, the eye, the scientific flair have failed, as with Andrea del Sarto: —

For the arts, this needs no argument. Paderewski declared that, if he failed to practise for a single day, he noticed it; if for three days, his public noticed it. In any science, and in most technical services, the fifteen years before any woman’s ‘second leisure’ almost transform the scene. Certainly the last fifteen years have done so obviously for the automotive sciences, for telegraphy and telephony; for medicine, through the progress of endocrinology and the theory of vitamines; for physics and chemistry, through the new theories of matter and relativity; for psychology, education, and psychiatry through the mushroom growth of mental measurements of all kinds and their implications, and through Freudian interpretations and remouldings; for social work, through its penetration by psychology and psychiatry. I do believe it would be easier, for a lapsed psychologist, at least, to begin again at the beginning, than to try to make use, after fifteen years’ interruption, of her out-moded wares.

Scientific flair is only another name for creative imagination. But creative imagination, as every psychologist knows, — or indeed any expert as regards his own field, — depends, first of all, on fertility of hypotheses, rich, freely flowing alternatives — ‘accumulated experience which augments the chances of original association of ideas ’ (Ribot). The price of scientific flair is continued immersion in one’s subject.

Last of all, the foothold of opportunity is lost. Chances for work of any kind depend for the most part on unbroken relations with the source of supply. These are not lightly to be renewed.

VI

Conceded, then, the well-trained woman’s need of carrying on after marriage; conceded, the mother’s inability for an output of a certain quantity, deliverable without interruption; problem, to establish means and methods to keep some thread of her original endeavor, integral in character if limited in scope.

What I am trying to get at might be illustrated by the modern case of the ‘Contributing Editor.’ Was it not Theodore Roosevelt for whom that institution was invented? The contribution is small in amount, but so notable in character, that its message enters into the policy of the magazine. Not full editorial duty, rank, or emoluments, is the contributing editor’s, but editorial quality alone.

So the woman who has another, a primary, responsibility, must hold to the thought that granting the right of way does not mean being crowded off the path. She is not falling short of her professional ideals in contracting the scope, or modifying the type, of her work. That this conception of the ‘contributing professional’ means wide changes in public opinion, in the actual mechanics of the professions, and in women’s education for the professions, is not denied.

First of all, the continuity of women’s occupations, being foreseen, can be provided for from the beginning. Education of all women for wifehood and parenthood will be parallel to the specialized individual training. This professional education can be planned to allow a later concentration on certain phases, pursuable within the limits of marriage and motherhood. Any inventive lover of her vocation can multiply the possibilities in, say, intensive experiment, special fields, borderline subjects; consulting work, group work, text work (that is, comparative or historical research, criticism, and reviewing).

For every field of effort whatever there is, in fact, a fringe of specialized research, experiment, or invention, publicity, graphics, statistics, criticism, review, or bibliography, which may engage the woman professional, in case the physical conditions of work in the central field are prohibitive for her. Here it is that that admirable institution, the Bureau of Vocational Information, has an infinite field in the United States for study and counsel. The colleges and professional schools, both, can make, in coöperation, broad constructive changes in curriculum, in aid of the woman who seeks to ‘carry on’ in marriage.

The professions themselves, through their official arbiters, must point out the subdivisions where women can do independent work. Architecture and engineering, for example, are notoriously inhospitable to women members; yet in both there are scores of special fields which women might exploit.

Taking the engineers as quite the most unfavorable case, I computed, as an enheartening adventure, the varieties of work which might come within the purview of the woman ‘contributing professional.’ The interesting ‘Report of Engineering Council on the Classification and Compensation of Engineers’ gives twelve different kinds as in the service of the Federal Government, from aeronautical to ordnance, including civil, which has twenty-three varieties of its own, or thirty-four in all. In at least three of the five professional grades contemplated, independent work is possible, including the preparation of reports, — I quote from the Report — studies, or computations necessary for these; cost estimates, valuations, designs; data for specific items of engineering studies; specific tests or investigations of apparatus, material, or processes; designing of details from sketches or specifications; also general consulting or independent research. To cut short a story already too long, I arrived at the figure of three hundred and fifty, as a conservative estimate of the number of engineering variations possible for the woman doing ‘piece work.’ Truly ‘Atalanta, Limited,’ was well chosen as a firm name by certain British women engineers!

The married partnerships, of which I have already written, point another way to circumvent intractable professions. Moreover, increasing specialization in every profession is opening the way to the woman aid, or free lance. In the field that I know best, psychology, new varieties of occupation are springing up thick on the borderlines between psychology, psychiatry, medicine, sociology, and social work. And this is true of all the other fields.

That academic institutions will only gain by making such place for able women as their personal situations let them fill, would seem to go without saying. Yet, incredible as it seems, there are still some whose policy forbids the ‘faculty wife,’ though equal in attainments to her husband, to take any part whatever in its work.

It is clear that a protracted period of ventilating the question and arguing it through, with institutions and professions alike, not on general grounds but in concrete details, must precede all these constructive changes. ‘Explore, experiment, educate, agitate!’ must be the war cry. Women have only themselves to blame, if, having once worked out to the end the possible and right course for them, they do not effectively promulgate it.

VII

The issue comes back, after all, to women’s own attitude toward their own spade-work. Do women take objective values seriously enough? One who has long frequented the purlieus of academic life knows that, on the whole, the actual scientific matter bulks less to women’s view than the ‘achievement’ of place. This natural enough feminist tendency has been reinforced by the extraordinary exploitation of everything which has publicity value, during these last strenuous years of ‘college funds.’ A case in point is the virtual submergence, not only from the public eye, but also from that of their academic fellows, of the work of the able women scientists in Government service. A college magazine in which I was interested maintained a popular department on alumnæ achievements. When, however, it was desired to illustrate their work in productive scholarship, we had the greatest difficulty in disinterring any information, even from the scholars themselves, when finally we had tracked them down.

It is on this count that the prevalent enthusiasm for federating college women internationally seems to me fraught with a certain danger. Emphasis on the formal and emotional aspects of federation, as such, beclouds the real excuse for it — creative scholarship. International scholars, on the other hand, have pushed their fraternizing only on the ground of common objectinterest, and recognized contributions to it. Therefore, the international congresses of medicine, physics, political science, psychology, archæology, have a deep-rooted, solid, and realistic character, lacking to the women’s groups.

Our project, on the contrary, requires an unlimited respect for the dull fact, and neglect of the honorific. It means labor with the eye on the object, pursued modestly, modestly paid, with negligible professional rank. Only the woman of keenest joy in her subject is going to be contented with such hard-won service. ‘Not unless your longing for it burns a hole in you!’ was the counsel of a woman of genius, who has sacrificed much to keep hold of her painter’s brush. It is the acid test, of course. For those whose interest is less intrinsic, it may well be that marriage and motherhood indeed dissolve it.

What of the bearing of all this on the case of the unmarried woman, in full progress? In what sense, if any, shall she, too, ‘not compete’? I know that this will be a hard saying, but it seems to me that she, too, must recognize that she is, as an actual fact, whatever her personal intentions or traits, in a class of extra-hazardous risk for any profession, and that she must pay insurance on that risk. Part of the payment will lie in a reduction of rate of promotion, and expectation of place.

To this extent she too undergoes a handicap, and cannot compete on even terms. Dignity, self-respect, and common sense will be served by her accepting, without apology to an unreasonable feminist ideal, whatever variety of noncompetition she individually chooses to espouse.

It would appear that emphasis on the free-lance aspect, on the actual separate pieces of work carried through, would tend to link all women, married and unmarried alike, in the solidarity of a profession, and to redound to their common advantage. It is, perhaps, well that women, in work as in affection, should, by Margaret Fuller’s precept, ‘not calculate too closely.’

If this view prevails, life will open many doors to the woman of trained intelligence, who puts first, as I believe every woman must, the brooding love and care for the little souls she has helped create, yet who would not waste the other treasures she has gained through years of effort. It seems to me that only some such early and farseeing adjustment as I have proposed can economically justify the wider and higher education of women, or suffice their sense of values. The consciousness of stability, of an increasing purpose capable of unbroken, ever-renewed fulfillment, is all that can give happiness to any life.

Of the drastic household reorganization which alone will enable women to accomplish this, I wrote at length in an earlier paper. Many women’s groups are awake to this need, and the next few years ought to see an evolution from the present household-factory into a simpler form, communityor group-administered.

A new code of ethics, then, is what is wanted — a code of ethics both on the part of, and toward, women, in the professions and in the home. A code of ethics for husbands is also indicated. If confidences are to be believed, there still exist loving husbands who truly prefer a wifely personality partly benumbed in its potential activities. Others would further the activity did it not touch their pride of purse — the wife must not be known to earn. But to make every occupation whatever a sweated trade, it needs only that women engage in it unpaid. That, of course, all professional ethics so clearly negatives that I have not thought it needful to enlarge on it. No — women must not, and will not, undersell their fellow workers; better that they be held in idleness. But, indeed, the only hope of banishing such refined mental cruelties as these, and of establishing the code of noble human beings in a partnership of their complete selves, is education of public opinion, through concerted systematic agitation on the part of individuals, and even of institutions. Architects and engineers, physicians and lawyers, spend years in council on their codes of professional behavior, and make many sacrifices to uphold them with the public. Shall women hope to enter the promised land of individual work, hedged about as it is with prior loves and loyalties and duties, without devoting at least as much effort to their own code of action as wives and mothers?

A noble task for the women of this generation is to evaluate their own conscious purposes. I believe their ideal will take shape somewhat thus: First: to order their lives for the loving companionship and nurture of children. Second: to find and establish in public esteem the right ways to continue their trained vocations in harmony with home ties. Third: to make all these things practically possible by reducing, through inventions and organization in mutual aid, the present feudal proportions and absurd over-stressing of the household mechanism.