The Unknown Quantity in the Woman Problem

I

IN all the discussions which I have heard on the nature of women, there are two main difficulties. First, it is very hard for us to talk at all without considerable heat. We may begin coolly enough, but in the end we are pretty sure to work up to a vehemence quite different from that with which we handle a purely academic question. The fact is, the question is not a purely academic one, it is an intensely practical and personal one, for it concerns itself in a very radical and searching way with one of the things we most deeply prize — family life in the home.

This is what is really involved in every answer to the question. Here is Mr. W. L. George ¹ telling us, that because woman is one kind of person, therefore the home has been and is her worst enemy. Here is Mr. J. L. Taylor ² assuring us that because she is another kind of person, therefore the home is and must be her salvation. Which are we to believe?

It is surely an odd situation. We are surrounded by women. Half of us are women ourselves, and yet we are in serious doubt as to what women essentially are. Perhaps, though, ‘serious doubt’ is the wrong phrase. ‘Distracting controversy ’ would be better. For few people seem really in doubt. Almost every one has very firm opinions, and yet no one appears to have the kind of knowledge which is readily transmissible to others. Argument does not change people’s opinions, therefore: it only heats them up just where they stand.

And even if we escape this heating process, and are able to regard the matter with some placidness of spirit, there is still a second difficulty to meet, in a lack of the right kind of data. I say the right kind, because we all have data enough, of a certain sort. Indeed, this is one trouble. On matters somewhat remote, knowledge of which has to be achieved with some effort, we are apt to be fairly teachable, ready to accept expert opinion — almost too ready. But where some of the facts are matter of daily observation, we are rather apt to make hasty judgments and then stick to them firmly — for have we not seen with our eyes? and are not our eyes as good as another’s? We draw sweeping conclusions from the instances which have happened to arrest our attention, and when others confront us we ignore them or dispose of them as exceptions. There is in particular a natural tendency to assume that the qualities we see in any species are qualities fixed in that species. For example, I may have become familiar with geraniums as I have seen them in window-gardens, where they have shown a lankiness of stem and prominence of pot that impresses me unpleasantly. I say, ‘I hate geraniums. They have lanky, rheumaticlooking stems, and yellowish leaves that fall off, and no blossoms to speak of.' But if I chance to see geraniums growing in California, I shall have to construct my idea of them de novo.

Now our ideas about women are very much in the condition of my postulated idea about geraniums. There are a good many different window-gardens where women are growing, and, according to those we happen to have observed, our conception of woman will vary. And though California, as it chances, is offering to women, as well as to geraniums, a new environment, it is too soon to look for any results by which to correct our impressions.

If, then, we turn from our own observations and appeal to scientific principles we are no better off. It is upon biological principles that the Feminists, according to Mr. George, base their assertion that ‘there are no men and there are no women,’ and therefore ‘ no masculine and feminine spheres.’ But it is also on biological principles that Mr. Tayler bases his contrary conclusions that the influence of sex is stamped deeply into the intellectual and spiritual nature of men and women. Evidently, biology has not reached a stage where it can help us.

On one point every one seems agreed: that at the present moment women are actually different from men. Therefore it would appear that the burden of proof rests upon those who maintain that they are potentially like them. But, the appeal to observation and that to biology having both failed, what is there left?

There is the appeal to experiment. The nature of the experiment would be determined by the nature of the argument. Now the argument of those radicals who stand for the alikeness of men and women is that women are at present different from men because of their different training. One might illustrate by another case from among the plants. Here are dandelions growing in deep grass. Their stems are as long as the grass-blades, so that the blossoms float in the sunshine they love. Suppose one were to say, ‘Dandelions have stems a foot and a half long. They need deep grass to grow in, otherwise their stems would flop over and lie on the ground.’ It would sound reasonable enough if we had not happened to notice what dandelions do on a close-shaved lawn — how their almost stemless blossoms star the green carpet and escape the closest-set blades of the mower. If one had seen the second condition instead of the first, one might have argued that dandelions could not grow at all in long grass because they would get no sunshine. There we have, in a figure, the gist of the radical argument. Society, it maintains, does not know what women are really like because it has never tried to find out. It has never tried to find out because it supposed that it knew. It has gone round and round in a circle, giving women the training that was sure to bring out certain so-called womanly attributes, and then claiming to discover in these attributes a reason for the training. Are these attributes, then, the cause or the result?

Experiment would answer. It might follow two lines: a group of boy-babies might be set apart and brought up precisely like girls, and a group of girlbabies might be brought up precisely like boys.

The first line is not likely to be tried. The use of criminals for experiment is defensible, but we do not recognize any class of infant criminals.

The second line of experiment has not thus far been tried except in the field of school studies. Here, indeed, there are already some results worthy of attention. Professor Thorndike of Columbia, in his little book called Individuality,³ gives the results which he has reached during his study of pedagogic problems. He finds that there is practically no difference ascertainable between the intellectual power of boys and that of girls so far as this is subject to school-tests. He concludes that individuality is the whole thing — that variations among individuals as such are enormous, while variations between men and women as such are much less important than has been popularly supposed.⁴

It ought to be noted that, women being still under such different conditions from men, all experiments which show likeness between them and men ought to be given great weight, since this likeness must be existent in spite of considerable discouragement. On the other hand, all experiments which show unlikeness ought to be given somewhat less weight, because this is only what was to be expected. For this reason Professor Münsterberg’s jury experiments with men and women are not to our purpose. He shows that eighteen women react differently from eighteen men. But even if this proved that all women react differently from all men, it would prove only what is generally accepted. Considering the way in which women’s reasoning powers have been discounted, and their powers of so-called ‘intuitive’ perception have been encouraged and even glorified, it would be strange if they showed much capacity for correcting their judgments through the avenue of discussion.

That women really are still under different conditions from men may perhaps be challenged. Many women, it will be argued, have had excellent opportunities for development — more opportunities than many a newsboy who has risen to eminence. True, but equality of condition is not determined by material advantages alone. Good physical and mental training, good economic environment, these are not enough unless they are backed by what I may call, for lack of a better phrase, a general attitude of expectancy. The newsboy will serve as illustration. Many a one has indeed risen to eminence. He has done this with the minimum of material opportunity and the maximum of material hindrance. He has had neither good physical training nor good mental training, but he has had one bit of knowledge — the knowledge that, if he ‘has it in him,’ he has a chance to become eminent. No matter what eminence means to him. It may mean being President, or being an inventor, or being a banker. Whatever his goal, he knows that being a newsboy, though it constitutes a handicap, does not throw him out of the race. He knows that the world of men whose standards matter to him, think of his chances in this way. They may not be actually thinking about him at all. But he knows that if, or when, they do think of him, this will be their attitude. This I call the attitude of expectancy. A sheaf of sermons might be written on its workings.

It is this which until very lately has been lacking to girls. With a girl, there has been no question whether or not she ‘has it in her.' It has been taken for granted that she has n’t it in her. Her being a girl is different from being a newsboy, because instead of constituting merely a heavy handicap, it has actually thrown her out of the race. I agree entirely with Mr. George in thinking that this attitude of society makes more difference than all the material things which it may bestow or withhold. I believe, too, that it will be the last thing to change. Not one of us, no matter what our opinions, is untouched by it. There are many people who are ready explicitly to admit the equality of women and men, but whose instinctive reactions are widely at variance with their deliberate theories. It is amusing or annoying as you happen to look at it. We are all in the grip of tradition — of what Professor William G. Sumner used to call the ‘ mores’; and they are stronger than we are because the momentum of the whole race is in them.

This attitude toward women, largely unconscious, implied rather than expressed, begins at birth and stacks the cards for the whole game. Over the cradle — or whatever now takes the place of the cradle — discussion begins as to whether the sex is not already plainly apparent in the embryonic features. ‘ You ’d know she was a girl, just to look at her,’ or, ‘He’s boy all over, already.’ Even the nursery rhymes carry out the ancient traditions: —

Here indeed is the gospel of the eternal feminine in all its baldness: ‘parasitism’ and the ‘sheltered life,’ the delicacy of the dependent nature, its beauty and its vanity and its patience.

It may be objected that these doggerels come out of a past which we have outgrown. But this is only partly true. We are indeed outgrowing that past, but we have not sloughed it off. We bear it about with us still, and, though we may smile at these quaint survivals of an earlier day we cannot disregard them. They are chips on the current showing how it sets, and though there are counter currents — even a great tide of new influences — yet these forces out of the past must be reckoned with.

II

As we go on from infancy into childhood there are more chips for us to watch. The little girl is surrounded with dolls and pretty trifles, the little boy with tools and games of strength and skill. When we see the girl crooning over her doll we call attention to the ‘natural mother,’ while perhaps the ‘natural father’ latent in the little boy beside her has never been called out. The persistent love of dolls on the part of very little boys is the occasion of much amusement among adults, or still oftener among older children in the ruthless stage of middle childhood. No wonder it is soon suppressed. The era of furry toy animals has been a great blessing to all little boys, because it has given them an outlet for the brooding maternalism — or let us call it paternalism — with which they are overflowing. The boy may not without self-consciousness take a doll to bed, but he may go to sleep with his arms about his ‘teddy bear.’

In the matter of children’s dress we are indeed working toward better things. The little girl is still decked with ribbons and dainty foot-gear while her brother is left ungarnished, but these differences are as nothing compared with those of the past. The present fashion of short hair and ‘ rompers ’ for girls and boys alike is in the nature of a revolution when we contrast it with the period of which Miss Austen’s novels have given us so intimate a knowledge, or the later period in which one of its victims — a bold and joyous spirit—Said that ‘little girls had no legs — they had only feet pinned to the bottoms of their pantalettes.’

Even in the realm of literature there is still something to be desired. We may smile at the assumption of our grandfathers that ‘female literature’ was in a class by itself, at the attitude which encouraged the production and tolerated the existence of such books as The Lady’s Keepsake. Yet the same tradition is carried on to-day in the magazines specifically for boys, for girls, for women, and for ‘ ladies.’

There is justification, then, for saying that the great experiment of equal conditions for men and women has not yet been tried. If, meanwhile, without such equal conditions, occasional women have been able to qualify, side by side with men, it may indicate that women as a body have certain things ‘in them’ which society has not believed them to have. But it may only indicate this for the occasional woman, which every one has always known. Until it is possible to point to more than an occasional woman, it might be well to regard the feminine nature as an unknown quantity, to be investigated with an open mind. It might be better still to let it alone; but we know very well that we shall not let it alone. We shall go right on, data or no data, debating whether women are really only ‘female men,’ as wonderful old Dr. Bushnell denied, or whether they are that mystic blending of subjection and inspiration which he believed them to be and which so fired his enthusiasm.

It has fired the enthusiasm of many other men too, — not small men either, nor brutal men, nor domineering men. And this suggests one consideration which it may be well to touch upon. It is an obvious fact, although one which people seem able to forget, that men and women, for at least part of their lives, want to attract and please each other more than they want almost anything else. One of the ways of doing this is through the challenge and the relief of contrast. Therefore men and women have at least thought that they liked the other sex for the things in which it differed from their own. Each has at times been glad of its own defects since these have brought out the qualities of the other. A man has smiled over the clumsiness of his hands because it has reduced him to joyful dependence upon the deftness of a woman’s fingers. A woman has been well content with her weakness because of a certain exquisite pleasure she has both given and received in resting on a man’s strength. This is not entirely a sex-instinct. It has its part in all deep friendship, but it seems most marked between the sexes, and it cannot be lightly brushed aside as sentimentality or affectation. It might conceivably interfere with the great experiment. For just as women and men began to discover that they were more alike than they had supposed, they might deliberately set about being different, just because it struck them as more interesting.

In men, this impulse, this admiration of what is different, has been balanced by another. For if a man, at certain periods and in certain moods, strongly desires to meet the standards set for him by women, he also desires, almost all the time, and in almost every mood, to meet the standards set for him by men. Often the two desires work together. Sometimes they run counter. One at its height is called love, the other honor.

In women, on the other hand, the corresponding impulse — to come up to the standards of other women — has been very faint, except in regard to clothes and conventions; but this is changing. Women are meeting one another in clubs, in institutions, in many kinds of associated work, they are doing things together in larger or smaller groups, and this is beginning to have its effect. Whereas among men there have always been recognized two sorts, the man’s man and the woman’s man, — among women also there are coming to be two sorts, the man’s woman and the woman’s woman. This fact, too, will have its influence in determining the future development of women’s nature and ideals.

There is so far, then, nothing very conclusive to be said as to the nature of women. We have opinions, but no proof— if we define as proof, evidence which carries conviction to all intelligent minds. For clearly it will not do to class as unintelligent all those whom our particular bundle of evidence fails to convince.

I said it might be better to let the whole matter drop. But, even if we were otherwise willing to, we could hardly do so, because, as we have seen, it is not an academic question. For there is this matter of the home pressing for adjustment. If woman is precisely like man, then perhaps home has been her worst enemy — or at least, is so now. And if this is true, we ought to know it, and do something about it.

King Alfred, watching the cakes baking before the fire, his mind on the welfare of a kingdom, is considered a touching picture of royalty debased. Is woman in the same situation? King Alfred let the cakes burn, and no one — except the narrow-minded housewife— seems to have blamed him. There are people to-day who think that if women let their cakes burn they are not to blame either. The men may eat burned cakes — it serves them right for making the women do all the tending of them. But it might be contended that King Alfred really was to blame, royal though he was. He promised to watch those cakes, and then he did not watch them — a clear case of breach of trust. So with us women. Here we are, with the cakes on our hands. Perhaps it is true that we have been debarred from our rights, from our kingdom. Perhaps we must anxiously plan, see visions and dream dreams, before we come into it. But meanwhile, have we any right to let the cakes burn?

III

The situation is this: owing to conditions so far in the past that we can only dimly guess at them, the institution of the home arose. It undoubtedly had certain real uses which at least in part justified its existence, one of the most obvious of these being the provision of a relatively peaceful environment for the rearing of children. Men can get along without homes. So can women. But children cannot. In the course of time, owing again to complex conditions, the home came to be woman’s peculiar charge. It still is. It has been handed down to her from age to age, and each generation of women has been held responsible for it. She may maintain it static, or she may improve it, but she must not let it go to pieces until she has provided something better. She is answerable for this, not to the men of the past, who were doubtless never consciously responsible for the condition of subjection in which women lived; not even to the men of the present, who, although perhaps somewhat more conscious, still feel themselves largely at the mercy of existing institutions; but to the children. She is bound to furnish them homes until she can give them something demonstrably better.

This is what she is trying to do. Not the feminists alone, or the suffragists alone; not even the anti-suffragists, who, in the name of the home, seem often to be darkening counsel rather than illuminating. Intelligent women of all creeds see that home-management needs reform.

But it does not appeal to me as a good start to begin by belittling the occupations of the home. This is what Mr. George does. ‘I contend,’ he says, ‘that her work is mainly sterile, that it is essentially humiliating. ... I contend too that labor in the home steals from woman her individuality, her originality, her opportunities for self-expression and self-development; that it makes her stupid, limited, harsh (or sentimental), that it deprives her of her beauty and her grace, divorces her from her true social function and generally unfits her to become the equal companion whom man could respect.

. . . Woman is preoccupied with infinite small cares, and it does not much matter what they are; most of them are sterile. ... A full half of woman’s time is absorbed by these domestic complexities. . . . Every care disturbs and deflects her from other pursuits and from thought. . . . The great mass of these cares is pure futility.’

This is a severe arraignment, but it loses some of its force when we realize that it is an arraignment, not of home life alone, but of human life, and more particularly of any administrative business. ‘ My occupation,’ says President Eliot.,⁵ ‘offers, I believe, more variety than that of most professional men: yet I should say that nine tenths of my work, from day to day, was routine work, presenting no more novelty or fresh interest to me than the work of a carpenter or blacksmith, who is always making new things on old types, presents to him.’

If the President of Harvard could say this of his work, it may probably be said with even greater emphasis of most other work. Everything depends on the spirit in which it is said. Often, to complain of the sterility of work is to arraign not the work but the worker. Every one knows that it is possible to go through the same routine in such a way as to make it either sterile or fruitful, and the habit of regarding home-management as a mass of sterile and stultifying detail is one to be regretted. It is perhaps inevitable. We tend to belittle whatever we have recently outgrown, and though women have, I hope, not altogether outgrown the home, they are in just the position where they see all its faults with the clearness born of a union of intimacy and detachment. Moreover, reformers seldom see the best side of what they are reforming. If they did they might not be reformers. But the result is that reforms are always misunderstood and often harmful. At present the home is in a hard position, suffering from attack on the part of the feminists, as though it, too, were an exclusively ‘man-made’ institution, and suffering equally from defense on the part of certain conservatives, who bring to the discussion a sentimentality and an obliviousness to facts that is singularly unhelpful.

The home is, of course, not entirely man-made. And the aspects of it which justify, if anything justifies, such criticism as this of Mr. George’s, are almost entirely woman-made. There are, to be sure, men who, just as they like their wives to dress showily, like also to have their homes managed showily. It is a form of ostentation that feeds their pride. But with most men, the simpler a home is, the better they like it. Were men ever the happier because the patchwork quilts in their houses took months to make? Maggie Tulliver, a feminist, of her own day, called it ‘ foolish work, cutting things apart and then sewing them together again,’ and so perhaps it was. So was a good deal of work done in the home. Whatever drove women into it, — whether a perverted inventiveness, a cramped and hedged-in zest for creation, or merely the ostentation of industry, — whatever it was, it was certainly not the urgency of the men.

But if the women of the past involved themselves and their homes in a tangle of self-imposed detail, the women of the future are in danger of going to the other extreme. The Germans have an expression, ‘to throw out the child with the bath,’ that is a very suggestive one, and seems to belong just here. What I mean is, that in simplifying the home, in eliminating, in delegating, we must be careful not to lose the home itself. And of this we are in much greater danger than were our grandmothers, in spite of their foolish patchwork. We sometimes allow ourselves to pity our great-grandmothers. I am not so sure that we are right. Materially their lives were harder, but spiritually, perhaps, they were easier.

The home, if it is anything, is a spiritual reality. But we are so constituted that we have to get at the spiritual through the physical. Generosity, courage, purity — it is only in the old Moralities that we meet these face to face, and we know how cold the meeting is. It is not generosity that stirs us, but a cup of water passed on by the dying gentleman to the poor soldier whose need appealed to him more strongly than his own desire. Courage is a name, but to get its thrill we think of the other English gentleman walking quietly out of the storm-bound tent into the Antarctic night, that by his death he might give his friends a better chance for life.

So with the other values of life. In proportion as they are spiritual they are not won by direct assault. Wealth may be won, but not happiness; bodily health, but not health of the soul. If we spend ourselves in clearing an open path to what we want, — cutting away the tangle of importunities that seem to hold us back, trampling down and hurling aside whatever threatens to trip us, — the more thoroughly we do this, the more likely is it that as we go forward briskly along the cleared way we shall discover that there is nothing ahead — the path leads nowhere. The things we most care for — the spiritual rewards — seem to come always as byproducts.

It is a little like this with the home. It is spiritual, but it arises through the vehicle of the physical. We may not be able to track it down to any one material aspect. Sleeping under one roof does not make a home; eating together does not make a home; gathering about a common lamp or a common fireplace does not; possibly even children in a nursery cannot make a home. We may eliminate one or another of these and still keep the spiritual thing that we prize. Sometimes we must eliminate, when the very multitude of its outward signs blur the real meaning — you cannot see the woods for the trees. But a proverb usually needs a supplementary gloss, and in this one it should be added that without trees there will be no woods. And so, in the case of the home, if in one extreme there is danger of submerging its significance in the mass of its physical expressions, there is at the other extreme the danger of dissipating significance through a paucity of physical expression. It is the second danger which would threaten the feminist home as described by Mr. George: —

‘I imagine the Feminist home rather as a large block of flats in a garden over a common restaurant; the staff is directed by an elected manageress and her deputy ... a competent kitchen staff, under a well-paid chef, prepares table d’hôte meals for the lazy and a lengthy àla carte bill for the fastidious. . . . Everything that can be done to throw the business of the household upon a salaried staff is done.’

To most people this proposition will seem a reductio ad absurdum for the whole feminist programme. ‘If this is what Feminism means, let us have no more of it.’ And it is not only the conservatives who will say this.

But let us hope that Mr. George’s bleak plan for us is not the only one possible. Even at a first glance one might almost predict that nothing so cheap and easy as his Feminist Flats could embody a solution of society’s problem. And the more I consider it, the more I feel sure that his solution of the home would be a betrayal of the home. ‘Clear the way for a real home,’ he says in effect, ‘with leisure to realize it.’ Very well. The way is clear: the kitchen is gone, the cookery is delegated, the cleaning is delegated, the nursery is eliminated. These things are in the hands of experts, and the family, having been marshaled by experts through its communal day, comes together, if at all, at its close (there seems no chance before), in the sittingroom of its own flat, and says, ‘Let us now, being at leisure, and free from petty cares, get a real sense of home.’

This is what I have called bleak. If I were confronted with the alternative of achieving a sense of home through leisure and no work or through work and no leisure, I should choose the second. I believe that you can give a child, and get for yourself, more of the feeling of home by going out with him and picking up wood for the fire, and coming in and making it, and sweeping up the floor afterwards, and then, perhaps, having only five minutes left in which to sit down by it and read him a story, than you will by sitting down with him in a dustless room before a steam-radiator heated, with no trouble to you, from a central plant, and having a whole hour of leisure in which to read him many stories.

And even if in the first case you had to use up all your time, so that you had to tell the child his story while you lugged in the wood, and even if you and the child were both very tired when all was done, whereas before the steam-radiator you would both have felt quite fresh — even so, I still believe the sense of home would be stronger and worth having at the price. That is one of the reasons why I do not think we need to pity our great-grandmothers.

It evidently comes down to our theory about life. One theory is, that there is, on the one hand, such a thing as ‘real life,’ and on the other ‘stultifying detail.’ Real life is desirable, stultifying detail is despicable. Therefore we must, so far as possible, get rid of detail, in order to make room for real life.

The other theory, which I find much more useful, is that life is felt only through detail. Detail is stultifying only if it is not vitalized. Our lives are enveloped in it as we are in the air we breathe; they express themselves through it; it is their medium. In one sense, then, there is no such thing as ‘real life’; but in another and truer sense, there is nothing else. Therefore, there is no point in trying to escape detail. The only escape is in turning to it, meeting it, using it. Concretely, the detail of home-management is not to be despised and evaded, it is to be valued and seized upon and made vital. Mr. George considers it an obstacle. I consider it both a means and an end.

But if his plan is a betrayal of the home it is so not through inadvertence. He means to betray it. He regards the individuality of the home as a fetter, the privacy of the home as a menace, the sacredness of the home as a fetich. But I hope it is possible to wish for women many of the things which he wishes, and yet to see in the individuality of the home a stimulus, in its privacy an opportunity, and in its sacredness an inspiration.

IV

There is, however, no use in blinking the fact that some of Mr. George’s reforms are in line with actual economic movement. It is more his spirit than his matter that gives offense. The communal flat is not yet here, but we are a good deal nearer to it than even our grandfathers would have deemed possible. The exodus of home occupations out of the home and into the hands of organized labor is a commonplace of daily observation. It began long ago, but is proceeding with gathering momentum. Not only light but heat, and even hot water, are being furnished from an outside plant. The vacuum cleaner, which comes at our summons, has revolutionized housecleaning. Probably one third of the kitchen work has gone, or, for households that patronize bakeries, perhaps one half. And this is the result, not of feminist-driven reform, but of general economic changes. Neither feminists nor reactionaries have either helped or hindered it. But what the final effect on the home is to be depends somewhat on the attitude of the homemakers — the men and the women and the children who are coming.

There is no question that the immediate result has been to lighten enormously the home labor of women, and either to send them out of the home in pursuit of other occupation, or to leave them in the home, high and dry, with hands idle or occupied only with work which has been rather artificially concocted to fill them. How this is affecting the home, whether it is helping it or destroying it, whether it is developing some group-form of social life other than the family form, and whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing these are questions which we cannot help debating even though we have as yet few data to go on.

But in this connection it might be worth while to scrutinize rather carefully one assumption, — the assumption that the best way for society to do things is through experts. I do not say, the best way for it to get things done. It does not require much scrutiny to discover that if we want any particular thing done in the best way we must go to the expert. The question is, whether this is the best way for society to do things. It is rather generally assumed that it is. And yet there is another theory which casts a doubt upon this: the theory that it is better for any one to do many things for himself, even if he does them rather badly, than for him to have them done — even better done — for him. We all recognize this about children. It is better for a child to wash his own hands, even though the thumbs are neglected and a grayish water-line is left at the wrist, than for him to have them washed for him, though they come out immaculate — and with no water-line. It all depends on whether your eyes are fixed on the people who are doing the things or on the things they are doing. If it is the things, go to the expert. If it is the people, don’t.

Possibly even the things suffer in the long run. Manufacturers here and there are beginning to suspect this. After having worked for years toward greater and greater specialization of labor, they are now beginning to suspect that they are suffering from a loss of quality in their laborers, who compare unfavorably with the ‘all-round ’ worker, and they are casting about for a remedy. In other words, specialization may be good for production but bad for the producer. If with this in mind we should review the question of home-management by experts, we might decide that, though something will be gained, something also may be sacrificed. It is not enough to prove that it would make for economy and efficiency in heating, lighting, cleaning, catering. It might do all this, and still the gain might be outweighed by the loss.

V

Just a word, finally, about fathers and husbands. It is not the fashion to talk about them much. Mr. George speaks of the child as the expression of ‘the feminine personality.’ He says, ‘The wife should die in child-birth, and the mother rise from her ashes.’ Why cannot the husband also die, and the father rise from his ashes? And there would be Father and Mother face to face, which is all of Husband and Wife, and something more. It is even better than a mother, with a father as ‘mere excrescence.’

Here is a curious bit of thinking. Beginning with the assertion that men and women are potentially alike and equal, Mr. George’s argument somehow slides off into an assumption of a difference incredibly great—the difference between a mother militant or triumphant, and a father excrescent. This is bewildering. For many of us have supposed that the development of fatherhood has been one of the main lines of social progress; that the goal which society has been working toward is the equal comradeship of man and woman. If it is important to achieve this as regards all other aspects of life, why should we deliberately throw it away in the one that touches us most deeply? It is worth any price, it is what spiritualizes passion, and makes of marriage something a thought more wonderful than friendship. And now to forget, —to be blind to the beauty, the infinite desirability of men and women standing together as regards the most precious thing they can create and possess, the child, — any one who can do this would seem to have strayed so far as to have forfeited all claim to be listened to.

How can we trust ourselves to such guidance? None of us sees the path clearly. We are hardly sure of the next step, but if we are not right about this, then we do not even know which way we are facing. This is why the note of sex-antagonism in suffrage argument ought to be deeply deplored and sternly repressed. It is a false note. Class-antagonism we have. Perhaps we shall have class-war. To some this seems inevitable, to others probable, to all it seems possible, because even with the extinction of one class, society could still go on. But it is not possible for one sex to wish the extinction of the other. The well-being of each is bound up with the well-being of the other, and we must distrust every leader who does not recognize first of all that, wherever safety lies, it does not lie in separation or hostility. Society is like a bird with two great wings, woman and man. It has not been able to fly very well because one of its wings has been broken. At last this wing is coming to its full strength. Will it help, then, to cripple the other wing?