A Feminist Marries

I

AT the end of the third year of our ‘companionate marriage,’I prepared the way for an understanding of life as it is lived by the majority of women. I would have a baby. Having rid myself of the bugaboo lurking in old-fashioned minds that a woman could not have both a career and a husband, I would now exorcise the more ferocious one about the incompatibility of a profession and motherhood. Secretly, too, I wanted a small edition of my husband. He, already displaying those qualities that were to make him of importance in certain economic circles at twentyeight, had been retained by the government for a research job. I had become part-time secretary for a famous woman novelist. Financing a baby, even in New York, would not be too great a burden for us.

I spread before me the next half yard of the future and liked its color and texture. I would continue to write in the mornings, do my secretarial work in the afternoons. After the baby came, I would take a few weeks to recuperate, then hire a good nursemaid, whom I would pay, and life would go on as before, as smoothly, but with greater width and beauty.

So I became pregnant — and stupid. This state of mind I had not expected. I did not know that stupidity was a frequent accompaniment of pregnancy in women of my temperament. There had been no mention of it in my books.

But it was a blissful stupidity. I was placid, at peace with the world and myself, devoid of ambition. At first I sat at my typewriter as usual from nine to twelve, trying to write, but I wrote nothing I could take to an editor. In the third month, morning sickness began, and I lay flat until noon. At two, after a cup of tea and a cracker, I could go to my outside job feeling very well indeed. In my Notebook I tempered the statement I had set down earlier about the length of time required for a baby. With some women, I conceded, it might take a full year. For two nights after the two most difficult days of my life I lay awake listening to my Young One breathe, and at every unusual sound I was up and at him. The third night my husband put me on the living-room couch, he stayed with the baby, and we all slept.

From the fifth month until the last uncomfortable three weeks, I enjoyed my condition. Though I had an increasing fear of the confinement, remembering all the bits of old wives’ tales I had ever heard and feeling morbidly certain that, being a good feminist, I should die in childbirth, I was happier from day to day than I had ever been. I joined a cooking class and had the same sort of good time with the gas plate that I had had at the typewriter. My novelist-employer was right. All writers were cooks. Reconciled now to the fact that for a few months I must be a ‘kept woman,’I relaxed, went out more, had more people in, lived a woman’s fife entirely, and, being stupid, enjoyed it.

The day came on a cool, wet Sunday, the first of July. From the moment I awoke, at three in the morning, with that indescribable feeling that birth was imminent, until ten in the evening when it was accomplished, I was calm and intensely interested. Though the pain in a quite normal labor was greater than I should have thought it possible to bear, I refused all but a few whiffs of ether. I wanted to be aware of every moment, and I was. And through it all I kept wondering why no woman had ever been able to release in music or poetry that ineffable rhythm, and how gypsy women had ever managed all alone by that convenient stream! The pride of creation when I heard my doctor’s ‘A big, strong boy’ was akin, I am sure, to that of God on the Sixth Day. All women feel that pride, of course. It was ridiculously exaggerated in me because I had given undue importance to the functions of the mind, to the belittlement of those of the body. It did not seem possible that a woman who had thought as little of her physical self as I had could produce a perfect child in a perfectly normal way.

Not only for three days, — the customary time, I have since read, for some women to feel this abnormal exhilaration, — but for three weeks, I floated on a cloud. No dilatoriness of a floor nurse, no discomfort of living in bed, bothered me. To all who came to see me I told the truth about childbearing in a scientific age: either women had a bad time and were given enough anæsthetic to make them unconscious of it, or they had a normal time which they should find as interesting as I did. Women who could do nothing but have babies, who did not want to be anything but women, were playing on the sympathies of men when they made much of the discomforts and dangers of their lot. They did not need to! For the first time in my life I felt superior to men, even to my husband. Men, poor creatures, could not experience this ecstasy of creation.

II

And then we took the baby home.

If only mothers were reading this, — mothers who have taken home from a hospital their first-born without a nurse, — it would be unnecessary to say another word. To be sure, I had read three books on baby care, I had everything in the bathroom cabinet that could possibly be used on a baby, and I had been allowed to watch the nurse bathe mine on the last morning. She had bathed a dozen in an hour! I knew all the theory — but theory had no relation to this squirming, crying bundle of humanity we took across town that hot Saturday afternoon.

My days became a mad rush to get done, between the old-fashioned threehour feedings, all the usual apartment tasks and the new ones that had come with the boy. Every day I was grievously astonished at the work. Why had n’t somebody told me? Why had n’t I had common sense enough to suspect? I remembered, with a grimace, my feeling of scorn the year before when I had heard a young sister-in-law say, ‘The baby, you know, takes all my time.’ Compared to my secretarying and writing, it had seemed a little thing for a grown woman to be doing. Now I looked back on those days at the typewriter as beds of roses, fields of clover, oases of peace. The care of children, not the hours of birth, was what made motherhood difficult. Why had women so emphasized childbearing, said nothing about child-rearing?

By September I knew that we could not live in a small apartment during even the baby’s first year. My husband and I were completely submerged, our books and papers and typewriter lost beneath piles of infant equipment. We could not stand the sort of place we could afford far uptown. We would go to the country. So one afternoon I persuaded the boldest of my friends to stay with the baby, and we went out to Connecticut and fell in love with a little, old, hand-heated, inconvenient house half a mile from a New YorkNew Haven station. Of course we could manage there! It was so cheap and so charming, with old flagstones in the path, an old-fashioned garden, a Dutch door that opened on to a grape arbor. It would be a pleasure to hang out diapers here. We could be romantic here even with a baby!

We were not romantic.

At the end of six months I was suicidal, so great was my despair, my feeling of inferiority, my shame at making a mess of what I had undertaken. The baby was as perfect as any healthy eight-months-old baby should be, but my husband looked unhappy and underfed— and doubtless was; and I — well, I had rather not remember how I looked. All day long I was on my feet, without, it seemed, accomplishing much of anything. The two coal fires that had to be kept going were almost as much trouble as twin babies. I never had dinner ready when my husband got home, and the fun of seeing him was lost in the rush about the meal. All joy in cooking was gone. Even the pleasure of love was a memory. I went to bed after the ten o’clock feeding too tired to think of anything but sleep, and awoke with joints that creaked.

In February I heard of a capable colored woman with rheumatism who wanted work in a small household. I talked to her, and wrote to my former employer, the novelist. My job was still there if I could come in town four afternoons a week. I could not stretch my salary quite far enough to cover both my commutation and the maid’s low wages, but it was close enough, and now, of course, I could free-lance. Surely I could make enough to keep a maid and to protect me from a repetition of such another eight months as I had just experienced.

Within a week, still blinking at the unexpected deliverance, I was a working feminist again — and happy. Our little old house became what we had intended — a place to entertain our citybound friends. We had Long Island Sound and a canoe at our door, and guests all spring and summer. Though I do not remember much about that time except sitting at the typewriter three hours each morning, eating three meals I had not tried to cook, and pushing the baby carriage enthusiastically on my free afternoons, I suspect that I posed a good deal as the Wife-andMother who was making a success of a double job. I must have talked a lot, because my Notebook shows no entries at all for that period.

III

In March I sold, for one hundred dollars, a story I had written two years before, and I finished writing two others. They were my best work and I sent them forth with much pride and hope. Surely they would settle my financial worries for a while and prove that I had been right in dropping domesticity for a literary career. Both stories were accepted, subject to drastic cutting for one and a revision to bring about a happy ending for the other. Meekly I set to work on them. But my maid had a recurrence of her rheumatism, and my schedule was knocked askew for six weeks. About three months later I got both manuscripts off again. The story from the literary magazine came back in a month, shocking me speechless by the reconsideration of the editor that on second reading he found he did not like it after all, and the one from the woman’s magazine with regret that the delay in returning it had made its acceptance impossible.

Such experiences, I well know, are fairly common in the struggles of a literary novice. I include them here because of their influence on my life as a feminist. Had those two stories been accepted at that time, as they came so nearly being, the checks I should have received would have ensured my time for writing others, thus giving me a very definite start toward being a Writer as well as a Wife-and-Mother. But they did not ‘go,’ and before I could cast about for other possible publishers my maid’s rheumatism became so bad that she had to give up work entirely, my novelist-employer went to Europe, and I was back where I had been in the fall.

I got through the early autumn with little difficulty and a great deal of pleasure. I worked out a system of household chores in the morning, when I had to keep an eye on the boy, and literary work after lunch when he slept. From four to six we rambled about the countryside with the perambulator. I sold a few little essays, some book reviews, and finished the first draft of a novel. I felt very pleased with myself, very resourceful. I was doing the double job unaided! I felt too pleased about it. I decided that now was the time to have another baby. Psychologists predicted terrible things for an only child. I would have another; then, that chapter complete, I would devote myself whole-heartedly to writing.

I was a little disconcerted by the immediate consequences of that decision. I had expected a few months of careless romance, a few months of continuing with my pretty schedule. But just six weeks later I was again going without breakfast, was utterly placid and stupid.

That winter my husband’s salary was raised, and we felt that we should begin to save as much as possible for the education of our children. We decided to buy a little house in Westchester County. It would mean that until the second mortgage was paid off I should have to manage without help. In the abnormal calmness of pregnancy I thought I could. I had enjoyed cooking dinners again, after the boy was tucked in at six, and in such a convenient little house as we had looked at, surely I could be a good housewife and write a bit, too.

So the next spring I came home with my small daughter to an antiquated, ivy-clad, three-year-old Sussex cottage — and an eight-thousand-dollar mortgage. Unless I could write and sell what I wrote, my contribution to the fund would necessarily be limited to my time and labor. It seemed fair enough. I hoped for the best, but if it came to the worst — well, I could see it through.

Until cold weather set in, I was quite cheerful, though caring for a baby with a toddler about was four times as difficult as caring for a baby alone. All children, of course, are more trouble in winter than in summer, and, though I have heard of furnaces that respond to stoking twice a day by the man of the house, I have never tended one. In my Notebook I find this one entry: —

Girls should not be reared as boys are reared, as egotists, as beings who, after that initial choice to be or not to be mothers, can choose and direct their own fates — in the same degree as men can. Little girls should be brought up with handicaps. They should go about with a device on the right foot for a painless tripping-up at brief, irregular intervals, and they should wear this device until they can be interrupted without minding at all. Girl children, in other words, should be conditioned to little children. All mothers of two or more children know what I mean. I am astonished continually at the number of unfinished tasks I come back to after an hour, three hours, a day, when I had thought I was dropping them merely to tie a shoe or antisepticize a scratch. W. says he has the same trouble in his office. I hold that so long as he has an efficient secretary and deals with adults who can be told to sit and wait, and who can do it, he has not the same problem as a housewife-mother.

During the day, of course, there was no time for anything but the house, the meals, the children. My sole recreation that winter was in going to the dentist, and the struggle to find a woman to stay with the children and get myself to my appointment on time spoiled even that outing. So after Christmas I began to retire to the study under the caves in the evenings to work on the second draft of my novel. I saw no other escape from the slough of despond into which I was again sinking because of working too hard at a job for which, by temperament and by education, I was totally unsuited. Immediately my spirit became calm, my disposition fairly equable. The disagreeable housework, the hurry to get through a day, were of little consequence so long as I was putting dowm on paper something which I regarded as of permanent value.

IV

In March I had an invitation to return to my college for initiation as an honorary Phi Beta Kappa. I tacked the letter, and the local newspaper account of my simple achievements, over the kitchen sink, where the sight of them did more for the dishes than soap flakes and hot water, and a few weeks later I packed up the children and went South for a month’s rest.

I came home to learn that while, all winter, I had been absorbed in the housework I hated and the writing I loved, my young husband had not been the entirely contented creature that I, stupidly, had taken for granted he was. He had been seeking diversion elsewhere — innocent enough, I now realize, but at the time, cloistered as I was, alarming in its tendency. I had been totally blind. Because he had sufficed for me, a woman confined within the four walls of home, I had assumed that I had sufficed for him — while I cared for the house and children in the daytime and retired unto myself in the evenings! I felt that the world had gone from beneath my feet. I was floundering about in space.

I shall not include here all the notes that went helter-skelter into my Notebook for the next few months. The gist of them was this: the whole business was my fault. I had not been a good wife. I had thought only of myself, my wants, my plans — as I had been brought up to do. I had planned the details of our marriage arrangement, and had not lived up to them. I had decided to have the children, but instead of being the independent, self-supporting, interesting wife I had pictured myself being, I had been as uninteresting, as domestic, as dependent, as any of the suburbanites around me — without their skill or ability to make a man comfortable. I had scorned the care my mother had taken of my father, but I saw now that such subservience was necessary if I wanted to keep my husband happy. I loved him. The egotist in me had to go. He was of more importance to me than writing, than a career.

But I could not be a little wren of a wife. It was too late to learn that rôle, even if I could play it. I should have to get a job, and a capable maid. I should have to make my husband comfortable, make myself more of a companion to him. What I wanted, it finally evolved under my pencil, was freedom from housework, from constant child care; a chance to use my mind, to meet people to whom I could talk about things that interested me, to be Myself — just what I had always wanted. But, being a mature woman, I also wanted to have a husband and children to return to after an interesting day. A man’s attitude exactly! It was my husband’s attitude — though he did not want to come home every evening. Perhaps he would when he found me more stimulating.

In September I got a job and a paragon of a maid, a colored woman, comely, neat, efficient, a good cook. ‘Housework ain’t hard, honey, if you ’re naturally neat,’ she said. She was. And she followed my schedule for the children to the letter, never forgetting the apple sauce or letting it burn. From October until March neither child had a sniffle. My husband took on a little becoming fat from picturesque stuffed potatoes and lemon meringue pies, and I looked better than I ever had. From nine to five I was lost in research and writing, or I was meeting people I had always wanted to meet. The joy of sitting down to a perfect breakfast, of kissing the children’s shining faces, of hurrying down to catch the 8.28, of reading the paper before it was twelve hours old, of being out in the world, well groomed and poised, at 9 A.M., was new and surprising each day. No wonder men were more interesting, kept younger, than women!

The picture of the successful feminist, the wife and mother with a career, could not have been more graphically drawn, more beautifully colored. I was practising what I had preached in the days of my innocence. I was supporting myself and paying for the care of the children; my husband was providing food and shelter. But, for a reason I could not fathom, I did not go into enthusiasm about it except to my suburban housewife acquaintances. There was an indefinable feeling of insecurity beneath the surface solidity.

But that feeling, too, ceased to worry me, and by late spring it seemed that I, for myself, had settled all of woman’s problems. I felt superior, not only to the working housewives, but to the women with cooks and butlers and nursemaids around me. When my maid told me that the maid next door had said ‘how sorry her madam felt for poor Mrs. — having to go to work every day,’ I could only gasp.

V

At this time I noticed that my boy, who had had perfect health since birth, was not right. He was pale and he was speaking indistinctly. So I stayed home one Saturday morning to take him to the doctor. He would have to have a tonsillectomy immediately. I arranged for a two-day leave to get him through that — and my daughter developed an abscess in her ear. I was at home nursing two weeks instead of two days, discovering that a strange nurse, however efficient, would not do for two ailing children already a bit resentful of a too-absent mother. And after I was back at my desk a few weeks I was shocked speechless by my doctor’s cheerful statement that again I was pregnant.

After the first chagrin at having a child I had not planned for, I faced the facts of life: —

This nine-to-five concern with magazine material is not my job. Until the children are well past infancy, my place is at home. It’s all well and good to write when I can, but I have no justification for accepting a salary which pays for three fourths of my time and thought when, at any moment, the physical needs of three persons whose well-being depends on me might take all of my attention. If I were a widow, or if I had left W. last year when, for a few weeks, I thought my emotional equilibrium depended on my leaving him, an outside job would be a lesser evil. But, so long as W. makes enough for us to live on, my job for at least ten years is here.

So, for nearly four years now, I have lived the life of a typical suburban matron — except that I have three children instead of two, and write in the mornings instead of playing bridge in the afternoons. Since the birth of the third child, by doing without this and that and by such hackwork as book reviews and biographies for two encyclopædias, with the occasional sale of something I wanted to write, I have kept a competent maid. I am caterer, chauffeur, practical nurse, playground director, resident psychologist, interior decorator — and good-time girl.

I have recently completed the novel, a play about the Negro school, and two long short stories; and, although my literary agent assures me that I am ‘bound to come through,’ I care very little whether I do or not. The writing of them was important to me. The only advantage I can see from their publication is the possible renewal of acquaintance with people who write. I tire, sometimes, of hiding my Self, the literary me, behind this mask of ‘Mrs. —, who has everything a woman needs for happiness.’

Only the force with which my individuality, my feeling of wholeness, flows back and envelops me when my husband is out of town — perhaps his present absence in England has made possible the writing of this confession! — makes me realize how completely, since that conviction of selfishness five years ago, I have subordinated myself to him. The fact that we are now as contented with each other as it is well for two adults to be — have as happy a marriage as, I am sure, exists — is proof enough that the course I chose was the right one for a woman in my situation, genius or moron. Only on those evenings when I am alone in the house after the children are asleep can I become sufficiently detached from him and from domesticity to write in my Notebook: —

A practising wife-and-mother, it seems to me, is absolutely necessary in the present scheme of things; even in a possible communistic world to come she would still be preferable to the institutional matron. For, no matter how hackneyed the statement, — life is just a matter of discovering the truth in platitudes! — there is no bigger job, no better job, for woman as she is designed than the complex one of wife and mother. For women cannot utilize the mechanism they have for bearing children and live the lives of men. Only women who cannot or will not have children can have that freedom of mind and body that men have, can do their best mental work in those years during which a man does his. Women who can turn their children over to nursemaids or to state institutions can approach that freedom, but even they cannot achieve it. . . .

In a successful marriage, as in all other smoothly running combines, one person must be subordinate to the other, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is more expedient for the woman to be. . . .

Marriage-without-children is an entirely different institution from marriage-with-children. In this day, any woman without children can run a house and prepare meals with never a previous peep into a kitchen, and have a career — if her husband is n’t a fool. But no matter how many electrical devices a mother has, no matter how much prepared biscuit and gingerbread dough she can buy in cans, there is no machine for changing diapers and wiping noses, no automatic nurse for the sick. For a woman from twenty to forty or twenty-five to forty-five, motherhood, in the plural, is still a full-time job. . . .

Nothing irritates me so much as to pick up a newspaper and find an article by a man — and there’s usually one there — on the freedom modern woman has derived from machinery. Sometimes I think the spinning wheel could not have taken a great deal more time than the family car in a suburban community where everything is at a distance of at least a mile. I am quite sure I had as lief bake the family loaf or make a pair of homespun breeches as get three children ready for a winter’s ride and drive a car, thus loaded, into the shopping traffic. . . .

In the past, with housework and child care unsweetened by talk of electric washers and toxin-antitoxin, a woman with a bent toward mental creativeness — at least those women from whom we have heard — knew enough not to marry. To-day a girl who likes to paint or write or run an office goes glibly into marriage and motherhood and finds too late that there is no such thing as a permanent maid, and that, though diphtheria can be prevented, there is as yet no safeguard against the common and frequent cold which, for a child, usually means a temperature and bed. . . .

There is no job that looks so easy, and is so difficult for a conscientious woman, as bringing up a family. I used to think I was rather stupid not to have realized from such close observation as I had the winter I was tutoring in the country what motherhood entails. But I was no more stupid than F. is, and I think her rather bright. She comes out for week-ends. She sees the children come in and go out. To her they are children-running-in-and-out, a little annoying, but of no consequence. To me they are Dan and Page and Mark. Dan has on only a sweater. He has been sniffling; he must put on his windbreak. Page has on a heavy sweater under her coat. She must take it off. Mark would be running out without anything on if I did n’t watch him. He must have his extra orange juice and viosterol at eleven; all three must have calcium after lunch. There are frequent calls for me, frequent requests. But, because I can sit for sometimes as long as fifteen minutes on a Sunday morning and talk about books, F. says, ‘Well, but why can’t you write more with such a good maid in the kitchen?’ She does n’t see, any more than I once saw, that to a mother a general maid is no more than a secretary is to a busy man of affairs, even the best doing only the routine work of a house that does n’t necessarily touch the business of motherhood. . . .

Educators are waking up in this matter of the education of women. Vassar and a few other colleges have courses in Euthenics, the Dalton School in New York has instituted a course in baby and child care, and the American Association of University Women has sent to alumnæ a questionnaire, which, if other women answer as Idid, should bring about a revolution in the education of girls. What joy there was answering such queries as these: ‘Would you say that women’s colleges are now primarily interested in giving a “gentleman’s” education? Would you say that they try to give a woman a real understanding of her biological and emotional needs? Are women’s colleges concerned with the contemporary needs of women? Do women’s colleges educate for the unknown and unpredictable future of women?’

VI

I blush to think what that secretary of the Bureau of Vocations for Women would think of me and of the Creed I am writing below. I never think of her any more, but sometimes when a cough or a call for a drink of water awakens me at 3 A.M. I find her smiling enigmatically at my bedside. She wrote in this Notebook from theory. I write in it from experience — and for Page, whose seven-year-old mind is as keen as that of her nine-year-old brother, her interests as varied: —

I believe that a girl’s education is neither less important than a man’s nor equally important. It is twice as important.

I believe that modern woman has a double rôle to play, and if she be coached in only one part she is likely to make a failure of both.

I believe that motherhood is a profession, and housekeeping an occupation.

I believe in higher cultural education exclusively only for those young women who lack the desire, ambition, hope, or dream of becoming mothers.

I believe that all young women who have the desire, ambition, hope, or dream of becoming mothers should, in addition to any purely intellectual or specialized education they desire, have training also in domestic management, home nursing, child care. In other words, I believe in the cultivation of the mind or of a special talent only in conjunction with the cultivation of the spirit and the hands to domestic life and service.

I believe that the best wives and mothers are those women who have had domestic training, either in youth under the tutelage of a mother clever in household crafts, or later as adult students; who have had the broadening cultural experience of four years in college, and who have had some experience in the outside economic or professional world.

I believe that for a girl a few years of self-dependence in the economic world are more valuable than any amount of travel. A girl Who goes straight from home or college into marriage is curiously narrow-minded. Her view of life is too domestic or too ethereal. If she comes from a woman’s college, it is likely to be oversexed, perceiving only men and women in the world, not human beings. As a preparation for marriage, a walk along that wide highway of human understanding on which men and women working together intellectually walk as a matter of course is invaluable.

I believe that a woman who wants both a career and children should delay the children until she has achieved such permanence in her art that she can lay it aside temporarily without injury, or until she has had such success that she can ensure her future by the employment of capable household assistants. To care for a young career and a young child at the same time is to run the risk of making a weakling of each.