Autobiography of an Ex-Feminist: I. Before Marriage

VOLUME 152

NUMBER 6

DECEMBER 1933

BY WORTH TUTTLE

CÉCILE: . . . Do you think it wrong for a girl to know Latin? PIERRE: Not if she can cook a hare or a partridge as well as Mademoiselle Auclair! She may read all the Latin she pleases. - WILLA CATHER, Shadows on the Rock

AT twenty, when I was secretary of a vocational bureau for women, I was a feminist. As a first premise, I thought with the founders of our best-known women’s colleges that young women should have ‘opportunities for education equivalent to those provided for young men.’ There was no sex to the mind. There should be no sex in education.

At thirty, when I was mistress-housewife-mother-cook-laundress-chauffeur, I thought this whole business of educating the middle-class girl a tragic mistake. It was well that I could read recipes, labels, and Peter Rabbit, count change, and compute the milk bill. Beyond that, my education was an irritant. It had created desires that for years I should have no time to satisfy. If the aim of education is to prepare one for life, it had failed for me. I should have left school at the eighth

grade and spent the next several years learning to cook and mend, to run a house, and to do practical nursing. I should have learned to serve rather than to be served. Those years in college and graduate school, years in which I used my mind as a man uses his, — always with a table set for me and food prepared for me, — years in which the individual flourished at the expense of the woman, were wasted years.

At thirty-six, I am one with Pierre. If a woman can do a woman’s work well, — God knows, it is a skilled job! — then, and then only, let her be as much of an individual as she pleases.

I

My desire to write out all of this, every word that I write, is the result of my own experience. How general that experience is I do not know. I suspect it is true, to some degree, of and for all women with a little talent, who in the care of a home and children cannot perfect that talent to the point of self-support and domestic freedom during their most creative years.

Copyright 1933, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Certainly my experience and the conclusions evolved from it are not true for the woman of genius. Genius, like murder, will out. The woman of genius, if she has been unwise enough to marry and have children, will commit her household to God and the neighbors and get to her work. For the woman of mere talent there is no such abdication and release.

Nor are they true for the inherently domestic woman. Even if such a woman spends four years in college and several in an office or school faculty, she waits for marriage and steps into its duties gracefully, dropping her temporary job and picking up her permanent one without the blink of an eye. She does not want anything else. Her ambition is to succeed as a woman, — to have a husband, children, a house, — and her domestic tranquillity is not threatened by suppressed longings to become an artist, a writer, or a reformer. Either she goes through her household chores as a matter of course, or she makes an axiomatic profession of housekeeping. The problem that was mine is not hers.

Like many other girls with a bit more intelligence than the average, I was reared as an individual with no regard to sex. And both geographical and domiciliary environment so worked against my learning the ancient and enduring occupation of being a woman that at the time of my marriage I was as ignorant of domestic routine as any man. Had my husband not been the son of a wise New England mother who had taught him more than mothers usually teach boys, we should have starved during the three months of a camping honeymoon.

I was next to the youngest of seven children. My mother, having been ‘spoiled’ in her youth by too many colored servants and a too efficient elder sister on an eastern Carolina farm, had found housekeeping and child rearing so irksome that she wanted to ‘shield’ her girls as long as possible. An aunt, who had protected my mother, lived with us and did all of our sewing and mending. There was always a servant or two about, and, at the time I might have learned to cook, three older sisters ran me out of the kitchen whenever they made beaten biscuits and fancy desserts.

My father, whether from disappointment over the failure of achievement on the part of two gifted sons or because of the possession of five daughters, was a feminist. And toward me his feminism was emphasized, consciously or unconsciously. He sent all of his daughters to college, but I think he spoke only to me about ‘the future.’ Compared to my sisters, I was decidedly homely, and, in addition to his pride in my literary turn of mind, he had a fear, I suspect, that I should never marry and, without a definite profession, might be a bit of a nuisance. I could not have been more than eleven when the idea of being Something, of doing Something, other than what girls ordinarily were and did, became a part of me.

At fourteen I left high school for the last two years of preparatory work in a junior college for girls in Virginia. The curriculum there must have provided courses in domestic science, but I do not remember hearing of them. They were not required, and they would have been beneath my notice as extras, my English teacher having assured me I was to be another Jane Austen. Thereafter, my three years at the best coeducational college in my part of the South were divided about equally between the academic and the social life. In the Woman’s Building there were colored maids who cared for our rooms, and, for an occasional dime, they darned and mended for us.

II

I graduated at twenty, and, to the distress of my family and the town, went immediately to Richmond — in the summer time! — to work in the Bureau of Vocations for Women. In April I had seen a note about it in a magazine and had written to the founder. She was so touched at the desire for a career in a girl coming from farther South than Virginia that, after an exchange of letters, she offered me the secretaryship.

From nine to five for fifteen months I was at a desk in that little office, corresponding with and interviewing women who wanted to work — spinster graduates of the best Eastern colleges; childless wives; women with grown-up children; widows who needed money; and ‘older girls ’ tired of staying at home who wanted to do something different, but were unwilling to invest either time or money in training because, secretly, they still hoped to marry.

My own determination to have a profession hardened into a rampant feminism for all God’s female creatures. In the evenings I evaded the efforts of the charming F. F. V. in whose home I was a ‘paying guest’ to get me out with young people; I had wasted enough time at that sort of thing, so I sat in my room reading Conrad or Samuel Butler, and writing in my Notebook (1916-1917); —

Marriage should be an incident, not the raison d’être of either a man’s or a woman’s life. . . .

I hate that expression, ‘marry and settle down.’ It can’t be done. Too many women have tried to do it, only to find themselves very much unsettled in middle life. . . .

Many men are feminists toward their daughters. Toward their wives it is quite another matter. . . .

It is hardly conceivable how utterly the average woman gives herself, her little ambitions, her very life, to one man, to rise or fall by him. If he be a success in his occupation, she will be a success in her social aspirations. If he fail, she will become a woman of small affairs. Always the man sets the stage and the woman adapts her role to it. . . .

The division of labor can no longer be made with sex the divisor. . . .

Yesterday, after a tirade of mine on feminism, the young man who has come to direct the new School of Social Work the Bureau has started asked me: ‘But don’t you think a woman who wants to make her profession home-keeping has a social right to do it?’ I said, ‘Ye-es,’ doubtfully, never having thought of keeping one’s own home as a real job. Now that I think it over, I don’t believe a woman does have that right! It is too wasteful. If a woman has the home instinct and wants to develop it, she should manage a home for the children of women who want to do other work. . . .

No longer, with their modern education, have women the right to allow their emotional, their love life to mean all in all to them. What an inconsequential man he is who lives only for his family! So long as love-and-marriage fills a need in a man’s or a woman’s life without crowding out all else, it is right. But when it usurps too much, it should be cast aside. Love should be an ally to the intellectual life, an aid to achievement. It should n’t consider life made for it. It was made for life. . . .

If Southern man has put woman on a pedestal, he has so arranged things that he can upset her at will. . . .

Women who wait for men to be able to support them before they marry are waiting to sell their love. . . .

So long as women are dependent upon men for support, so long will men rule most feminine opinion. Economic independence of women and equal suffrage should come simultaneously. Maybe this is why I can’t get excited about suffrage. It will be nice to have woman’s mental equality with man’s publicly recognized, but, as a Cause in itself, suffrage does n’t interest me. . . .

It gives a man a deep-seated satisfaction, I suppose, to have a being in his home whose sole purpose is to satisfy his physical self. No wonder feminism makes such snail’s progress! And what progress we see is only external, occupational. Here in the office we do not realize how many women, every day, are continuing to supply that desired physical comfort — nor how many who are not would like to! . . .

How cruel it is that women undesired by men for lifelong companions must live such sexually unsatisfied lives — that is, of course, moral women — while the women chosen a wives have to make sex so paramount. This is, of course, the crux of the wrong in the woman problem. Women must straighten it out by changing matrimonial laws and customs; but how?

III

The following September, having found the graduates of Vassar and Bryn Mawr, of Wellesley and Holyoke and Barnard, as wishy-washy in their vocational trends as the girls from Virginia finishing schools and the middle-aged ladies from the shabby old houses on Grace Street, I refused a scholarship which my employer had secured for me at Bryn Mawr, borrowed three hundred dollars, and left for New York.

There would be nothing wishywashy about my plans. My future lay clear and shining before me. I would make no crazy quilt of my working life, tacking on a job here and a ‘position ’ there to hold body and soul together until I had a husband — or had given up hope of one. An intelligent woman could have as consistent a career as an intelligent man, if she would go about it in the right way: lay down a design and make no digressions from it.

I wanted to become a writer. I would get a part-time job in New York that would take care of my bed and board. With the money I had borrowed, I would pay my tuition at the Pulitzer School of Journalism. Then I would go to work on a newspaper or magazine. Later, I would travel, write feature stories, short stories, novels. Then — oh, in fifteen or twenty years, perhaps — I might marry if I were sufficiently attracted. But marriage would be purely incidental. It would in no way interfere with my work, my career, my Self.

When I found the part-time job as Red Cross director in the Neighborhood House of the American Parish, which Mr. Norman Thomas then directed, my life was wholly my own. I did not have a personal tie of any sort to deflect me from my course. For, in spite of the matrimonial hellfire I had preached on my brief visits home, my sisters were ‘marrying and settling down’ near my parents.

But unfortunately for that future famous writer, if not for me, there were living at the House and studying at Columbia two young men. All fall and winter we had what would now be termed a ‘swell time’ together, exploring the polyglot Upper East Side, standing at the Metropolitan, sitting on the kitchen table, after the evening club hour, listening to Mr. Thomas and his brother, Evan, hold informal forums on the war and the Kerensky régime, on India, on the New York City government, on anything and everything in which human wellbeing and human happiness were at stake.

In the early spring I realized I was wondering a bit too much whether one of the young men — the tall junior from Savannah — would be at the House for dinner. I had been much attracted to him from the first. We spoke the same language. I felt myself slipping, and put on the brakes. Except for a greater intelligence, he was like many Southern men I had known. Certainly I would not come all the way to New York and let myself be turned from my purpose by a man who thought my feminism ‘cute’!

But a little later, when the buds and birds were appearing in the trees of Morningside Park, I fell in love — with the other young man, the one of New England ancestry who was a sophomore at Columbia after a freshman year at Williams. Had I ever fallen completely in love before, I might have warded this off; but it took me by surprise. I knew nothing about it until one morning when I found myself flying up those interminable steps that connect Morningside Avenue with the Drive; found myself at the top, still talking blithely, with none of the shortness of breath that had been so painful on all former ascents — with the other young man, or alone.

It was overwhelming.

A few evenings later, when we sat on a bench watching the twilight make even the Harlem River romantic, I discovered that he was in love with me. We would marry, of course, some day. When two people felt as we did, they married. But marriage would not make a great difference to either of us. It could n’t. We had too much to do. He was more than a year younger than I, and several years younger in social experience and background. That he was then and forever will be my superior and elder intellectually, I had no idea. He made no display of his remarkable mental powers, for he was unusually quiet.

That quietness, I think, attracted me as much as did his eyes and his smile. I had never known a quiet person. All my life I had been with garrulous people.

He listened, entranced, to my garrulous feminism. He had never known a Southern girl. And feminism as a personal religion was as interesting to him as Mr. Thomas’s socialism. He took me as seriously as I took myself, agreed with me, believed in me.

IV

We decided a few weeks later to be married as soon as he had finished college. That would depend on the duration of the war. In spite of a prohibitive heart condition, he hoped to enlist. Meanwhile I would continue to support myself. I would give up only the travel part of my life plan. We could travel together, later. Surely marriage could not interfere with my writing. It would make me much better. We ’d have children, too — five, maybe. Children would be easy. Women made too much fuss about having babies. Gypsy women had them by any convenient stream. As for the care of them — well, with our combined incomes we could hire a nurse, or they could be put in a day nursery.

I had no idea where there was a day nursery, but in my Bible, Essays on the Woman Question, day nurseries were spoken of as a matter of course.

In June my young man, awaiting action on his application to enlist, went to work in an airplane factory. I went South. My third sister wanted me for her maid of honor. I had no intention of accepting, and made this entry in my Notebook: —

March 1918. — A marriage is too personal to be public. Formal weddings, with crowds of curious people, are relics of barbarism.

But I wanted to put my young man’s photograph on the dressing table among those of my youngest sister’s suitors, and I wanted time to read and write.

It was fun for a while, but in the middle of August I began to be alarmed. None of my letters, with my recommendations and photograph enclosed in the best Bureau of Vocations tradition, had brought me even a hope of a job. I wrote to the professor who had taken the keenest interest in my work. He knew of no magazine openings, but he was moving his family to a farm near New York, and if I wanted to come and tutor the children a few hours a day and put the rest of my time on writing, he and his wife would be delighted to have me.

I accepted the offer and went to work on stories about Negroes — the last one of the group to be published in September of this year! Mr. Thomas’s talk had opened my eyes, and for the first time, that summer, I had seen cotton-mill people as men, women, and children who worked in mills; poor whites as people who lived as tenants on farms; colored people as individuals with varitinted skins who worked in kitchens, hauled tobacco, and mended roads. And I wrote in my Notebook : —

Not until I donned trousers [riding breeches for country wear] did I see the reason for wearing skirts. It is purely a matter of feminine convenience. . . .

Decided contentment is fatal to creative work. It is not best for a woman to marry a man she both loves and reveres and to whom she feels inferior intellectually, because she will bury herself in him and let her own ambitions sicken and die. . . .

I wonder whether children and adults would not be better off if they lived separately. Adults would be necessary as instructors, but as for sharing the same house intimately — when socialism rules, some system will have to be worked out whereby women can be free, as men are free. . . .

When feminism comes into its own, the economic motive in marriage will be removed and the spiritual one, in-loveness, have its rightful place. . . .

Here is the meaning of love: Before one falls in love, one thinks he can love many persons, each of a different nature. When he finds one person who has a mood for each of his own, he discovers that he can love that person only. It takes two to make a real love. A one-sided passion or affection is not love. Love is built on sympathetic understanding. Unless one person returns the love proffered by another as proof that such sympathetic qualities do exist, there is no love. Love between a man and a woman is the fulfillment of the sex instinct added to friendship. . . .

Men become indifferent to wives they have married in youth more than wives to husbands because men are out in the world where their ideas and ideals are constantly changing. Women form theirs at marriage, and in the cloisters of home rarely change them. It is not a matter of innate sexual differences, but of environment. When, under a socialistic government, women go out to work, something will have to be done to make less rigid the prevailing marriage laws.

In June a job with the Red Cross Home Service in New York fell into my lap, and I did not look for work on a magazine. Was I, too, making a crazy quilt? I persuaded myself that I was not. My encompassing design was still intact. So long as I continued to write, it made no difference what I did from nine to five to earn my living. I still held my future in my hands — or thought I did.

V

In February my young man came down from Williams for a week-end, and, in the gloom of a Y. W. C.A. boarding-house parlor, we decided to be married in the summer — a decision due as much, I imagine, to our mutual pleasure in separate readings of Mrs. Carleton Parker’s An American Idyll, then appearing in the Atlantic, as to our own romance. We were in love as the Parkers had been in love. There was no reason why we should not be together when we could be. We wanted a ceremony as quiet as possible, anyway, whenever we had it.

So one day toward the end of July, 1919, I left the Red Cross office for the City Hall and the Little Church Around the Corner. But when we admitted to the pleasant-faced young curate that we had not ‘acquainted our parents with our intention to marry,’ he was ready, regretfully, to turn us away. Then on the would-be groom’s vest he espied a new and glittering key. ‘Oh! You’re a Phi Beta Kappa! Then I am sure you know what you are doing.’ So he married us, quietly and beautifully, in a most civilized way, with only the incurious janitor and the parish clerk as witnesses.

We went around to Fifth Avenue, had a soda, and separated. My husband had to get back to Paterson, where he was organizing for the Amalgamated Textile Workers, and I to the West Side settlement where I was boarding. The following Saturday we met again, however, and set off for a week’s camping in the wild heart of the Catskill woods.

I am afraid I was disillusioned both about life in the open — it poured rain every night into the pup-tent we had brought for shelter — and about the consummation of love. What I remember when I think about it is the pleasure of being with my young man steadily for a week, and the relief I felt when we stepped into the old Ford that was to carry us back to civilization. In my Notebook, immediately after my return to the comfort and loneliness of my settlement room, I made three jottings: —

The marital relation, shorn of all its sentimentalities, is much too simple and natural to have caused all the commotion it has.

Except in regard to children, — and in the Ideal State not even then, — marriage should have nothing to do with economics. It is n’t the close physical tie that kills love, but the economic one. One could vow truthfully, perhaps, to love another all his life if he did not have the daily, monotonous discussion of the price of meat and bread and shoe strings. Romance and economics have been enemies ever, and marriage is not the crucible in which they can be blended.

Marriage cannot and should not assume the same place in every person’s life. It is as though you said everyone must have the same attitude toward religion. To too many women marriage is a vocation, a religion. To others it need be nothing more than a pleasant and very personal relationship which fills the need for love and leaves one free for a larger outside life.

VI

Every day, for sixteen months, as I went up and down tenement stairs in Hell’s Kitchen, collecting biographical material to fill Red Cross case records, I was a part of one Street Scene after another, but their import drifted over my head. Feminism was still obscuring life for me. I was theorizing still, finding nothing that I could not fit into my Notebook, under ‘Women’ and ‘ Marriage ’: —

To-day I talked with a large-eyed, too made-up young woman, who has been married a year and a half and is pregnant for the first time, about another woman, my Case, who was married in September and confined in January. My Case, said this young woman, was no longer her friend. She would n’t speak to her. As I felt my way down those dark, garlicscented stairs I thought: ‘How much more

righteous is my Mrs. R-! She loved the

man she married. She loved him before she married him, and she loves him now, though he has deserted her. And the other woman — well, maybe she loves her husband, too, but it is at the price of three rooms and three meals a day.’ . . .

The marriage ritual should be left to the individuals concerned. The State might say that there must be a legal agreement between the man and the woman, but the details of it should be left to the participants. It is silly to have one ritual for rich and poor, feminist and stick-in-the-house, couples who do not want children and couples who do. Various suggestions as to the wording of the agreements might be laid out in the City Hall from which a couple could pick and choose and adapt to their own needs. It would lessen divorce, and make what divorce proceedings there were more easily managed. . . .

Men and women were meant to supplement each other in everything, though it is generally assumed that they should act as complements in the sexual act alone. They play better if they play together, they work better if they work together. An office full of women, or one full of men, is a deadly place, full of petty quarrels and backbiting.

In June, after my husband’s graduation, — with a consciously incorrect formality, but a formality which we felt in keeping with the dignity of our secret enterprise, — we announced our marriage ourselves on neatly engraved cards.

My family, aware of my feelings about ‘barbaric weddings,’ accepted our method for what it was — an intellectual gesture, an avowal of the place marriage should have in the life of a true feminist. If my parents smiled at my confusing the ceremony of marriage with its business, it was behind their hands. But to my husband’s family, at the time, it was merely an affaire du cœur, with the usual doubts as to its durability. Fortunately, I was then too high in the clouds to give an instant’s attention to what people on earth thought. Blithely we visited my husband’s family, blithely went off to an island in the Fulton Chain for three months of solitary bliss.

In September we parted. My husband went to work in a New England textile mill and I went to Louisiana to teach in a college for Negroes — that departure from the Southern norm being the hardest thing my family had to bear! I wanted to learn to know the ‘new Negro’ as I had always known the old, and there was no other source of information.

VII

The following year my husband borrowed enough money to cover his tuition and living expenses, and studied at Columbia for his master’s degree. I returned to New York and kept our two-room-and-gas-plate apartment; I learned to brew a stew and to scrub a floor, to make pie crust and turn a shirt collar — and I wrote systematically for the World To-morrow, the New Republic, the Freeman, and a few newspapers, and had casual essays and stories in the Atlantic and Harper’s and less well-known magazines, all of which gave me more prestige than pennies. When my conscience hurt because we were not living entirely up to my fifty-fifty ideal, my husband soothed me by pointing out that without my enthusiastic if unskilled labor he would be paying more for his own room and board than we were spending together. I had never thought of housework in terms of economics. It had been just something uninteresting married women did. I felt better, and got out my Notebook: —

Marriage should mean nothing more to two people than the completion of love. It should be the freest relationship in the world. I do not mean that there should not be some sort of ceremony, a giving of each to each, but its only motive should be the fulfillment of love or the begetting of children, with economics entirely omitted.

Children should be a joint care. For a month preceding birth and for two months afterwards, the man should care for the woman and the child financially, as the woman does physically. After that they should share equally in the physical and financial care. If the woman wants to make her job the care of the child, then the man should care for both financially — No, that would n’t work. An educated woman would not want to live on a nursemaid’s wages and we should be right back where we were, with the man supporting the woman. The only solution is for the maternally-minded woman to make a profession of child care, and care for many children as well as for her own. . . .

There are two types of women — Female and Feminine, corresponding roughly to He-man and Man. For every Feminine woman there are a hundred Female ones. Female women are all much alike. They like to do the same things. They dress alike, talk alike. Their faces wear the same make-up and expressions. The Feminine woman has something above and beyond her sex. To begin with, a slight distinction in dress, and, finally, a humanity which she shares with the Man who is over and above the mere He-man type. Only Feminine women have any notion what feminism means. . . .

Feminism cannot be exactly defined. It is a feeling. It is the spirit of the individual, a sort of self-consciousness unmixed with sex. It is the desire to live for the expression of one’s personality, whether it be in the effort to free a people, as it was in Breshkovskaia, or in the conscious profession of rearing one’s own little brood of children. It may come through writing, doctoring, painting, preaching — it is of no matter, so long as the spirit is there to be an Individual rather than just a — female. . . .

Last night saw Henry Miller and Blanche Bates in The Famous Mrs. Fair, an antifeminist play. Mrs. Fair leaves her home for a temporary career — lecturing — and returns to find her son wedded to a ‘working girl,’ her adolescent daughter in a chorusgirl crowd, and her husband living with another woman. (None of these calamities would befall a home-keeping wife, of course!) So Mrs. Fair thrashes out the whole feminist question with Mr. Fair, and, after an inner struggle, goes back to his arms. He promises to find an outlet for her social energies that will allow her to stay at home — and the question is left unanswered for the other Mrs. Fairs of this world.

The only way to answer it for them, as I see it, is by some sort of legal arrangement for the care of children and the severing of marriage ties less tedious than divorce. Then, and then only, can a woman come as nearly as she can come to the freedom a man has. She will have, at least, the freedom of deciding whether self-expression through human or merely female lines shall be her lot. Then if love for her man is not stronger than love for her work, love for the man should go. There is no way for a woman to have both except in isolated cases. It is a shame.

I have still a few friends in downtown New York, women who are living the feminist life. They have never married, or, having married, have no children. But I dislike to visit them, because to do so I have to pass that little brick house on West Eleventh Street.

Life was simple then — easy to reduce to words, to write down in a book. To look back on the Me who lived there is as though I looked back on a previous embodiment. Actually, I was twenty-six and had been married three years. Emotionally, I was about twelve and had not been married at all — in the sense that I am married now.

(This autobiography will be concluded next month with an account of what marriage did to the author’s feminist convictions)