The Married Woman's Margin

I

‘MARRIED women, you know, — there is a sad story against them, in general. They are but too apt to give up music . . . really, when I look round among my acquaintance, I tremble. Selina has entirely given up music — never touches the instrument, though she played sweetly. . . . Upon my word, it is enough to put one in a fright. I used to be quite angry with Selina; but really, I begin now to comprehend that a married woman has many things to call her attention. I believe I was half an hour this morning shut up with my housekeeper.’

When Jane Austen put these words into the mouth of the incomparable Mrs. Elton, she was undoubtedly only using what she had many times heard, with the usual difference, that whereas in her books these opinions are diverting, in real life they are less so.

Mrs. Elton’s answer to the married woman’s problem has not been the only one. Other temperaments have made other responses, such, for example, as is implied in the obituary tribute to a certain Mistress Abigail, who died here in New England a hundred years ago: —

‘Books were to her a never-failing source of delight, and she was an example of the possibility of combining a fondness for elegant literature, for which she never lost her taste, with a faithful discharge of all the relative and domestic duties of a female; and so mingling, without interference or injury, that they heightened and reflected lustre on each other.’

Now in considering the attitude toward life of these two women, one cannot fail to be struck by one thing which they have in common: they both assumed that the leisure of a married woman, after the duties necessarily devolving upon her had been met, was a very narrow margin. Mrs. Elton, indeed, assumed that it was so narrow as to be negligible, and she neglected it accordingly. Mistress Abigail assumed that, though narrow, it was of priceless value, and she valued it accordingly. One is tempted to linger in meditation over the two temperaments and the two points of view, — one leading toward parasitism, as Olive Schreiner has arrestingly pointed out, the other leading toward self-development and service. If some of the women of our own day derive rather obviously from Mrs. Elton, most of them derive from Mistress Abigail.

But what I want to call attention to now is that, with regard to this one point, the theory of women’s married life, both for the parasite and the worker, was the same: it allowed a narrow margin and no more.

It was, of course, not theory merely. It grew out of fact, being based on conditions that had existed, almost without interruption, for many centuries.

Several thousand years ago, an enthusiast regarding the possibilities of women took pains to write out a description of his ideal woman. She was, of course, married. She had children. She ruled a large and complicated household. She controlled it, not only as a home, but as a factory, — a centre for import, manufacture, and export. She was endowed, not merely with the conservative virtues of thrift and discipline, but with the liberal virtues of administration and enterprise. She was an untiring and effective worker, not self-effacing, but dominating, as effective workers must always dominate.

Ever since the last chapter of Proverbs was written, with here and there curious exceptions which are for my present purpose negligible, the conditions and ideals which it sets forth have held good. That is to say, the situation of married women, as such, has laid upon them such requirements that when these were met there was little or no margin left. By the mere fact of being married the lines of their life were laid down for them. Anything done outside these lines was like a flower snatched and cherished by the runner as he runs. That many flowers were so snatched and cherished is but a proof of the unquenchable enterprise of the human spirit.

But at the present time conditions have changed. At least, this is true of what, for lack of a better name, may be called the middle and upper classes, — of the women who do not ‘ do their own work,’— to use a phrase more full of ironical implications than most of us realize. There may be plenty of work for women to do, but the mere fact of being married does not necessarily lay it upon them with any great degree of urgency; often, indeed, not with any urgency at all. This may have happened before. Our own period is doubtless not unique in the world’s history. It may have been paralleled, as some suggest, in Rome, possibly in Babylon, or in Egypt, or in civilizations that faded and crumbled before these arose. But that does not help us much. What may help us is to look at the present situation squarely and see what it is. In doing this, it will make a good beginning if we stop trying to fit to it the formula of a different situation.

The chapter of Proverbs assumed that for the married woman her tasks were assigned and her ideal set before her. She might do well or badly, but there it was. For our New England housewife, as for the Hebrew, it held good. They did really know what were ‘the relative and domestic duties of a female.’ This seems very restful, by contrast with the women of to-day, who feel no such certitude. For the women of an earlier time, their duties were not only well-defined, they were unescapable. For us, they are not only rather readily escapable, they are not even defined. This is, indeed, broadly true of all ethics, whose entire emphasis seems to have changed. The older moralists occupied themselves with the difficulty of doing one’s duty. The modern ones, if they want to hold our attention, must rather consider the preliminary difficulty of finding out what one’s duty is.

And so there are few men, however enthusiastic over women they may be, who could now sit down, serene in their admirations, to rewrite that chapter of Proverbs up to date. Now and then some one, bolder or less well-advised than the rest, makes an attempt, but it is a poor thing. One feels him hesitating, getting nervous, hedging a little here, broadening a little there, that he may, perchance, escape criticism or challenge from this side or that. If a conservative, he flings a sop to progressive opinion; if progressive, he trims a little to avoid rousing the conservatives. The fact is, the demands made by her situation upon the married woman as such, are not necessarily absorbing, nor are they sufficiently uniform to create a type. As the unmarried woman may at any moment become the married woman, this affects her too. Hence there really is a woman problem.

II

There are those who will deny this. They maintain that if the married woman does not encounter absorbing demands, it is her own fault for failing to recognize them. They persist in regarding marriage as a profession, a vocation, which, if it is not absorbing, ought to be.

This particular comparison, of marriage to a profession, will not bear examination. In the first place, all the professions and business callings have this in common: the candidate can at least count on ‘making’ his profession. The student in the law school, in the hospital, in the school of architecture or of engineering, feels this confidence. He may not become a good lawyer, but he is practically sure to become a lawyer. The minister cannot tell whether he will have a parish of fifty ‘ souls ’ or five thousand, but he is certain he can be a minister and preach the Gospel to somebody. But a woman has no such security. If marriage is her profession, she is in the curious situation of preparing herself for a position she may never fill. And even if she fills it for a time, she may, as it were, lose her position through widowhood. Even the most finished civilizations have found it hard to know what to do with widows, and none of their solutions — burning, or immuring, or marrying to the next of kin — has been wholly successful.

But, it may be objected, this uncertainty with regard to the ‘making’ of one’s profession is a situation created by the woman herself. Any woman can marry if she wishes. True. But the difficulty here is that, whereas the man’s choice of his profession is revocable, the woman’s is not. And this brings us to the second point of difference. For not only is marriage unlike a profession because it cannot be deliberately chosen: it is unlike a profession also because it cannot be relinquished. A man may leave the law and become a clergyman, he may leave the ministry and go on the stage, without rousing more criticism than is readily bearable; but a woman cannot do this with marriage. A clergyman unsuccessful in one parish may be called to another, but a woman, even though she is quite obviously making a bad muddle of her job with her present husband and children, cannot be ‘ called ’ to another more congenial parish, and thus leave the way clear for some one else to take up her work and better it. At least, though such things are done, and there are theories, and even laws, to cover them, they have not yet received the hearty sanction of society. They are contrary to the ‘folk-ways.’

The third point of difference is the uncertain element of children. It was largely on account of the children that the institution of marriage grew up at all; and if these are eliminated its character is radically changed. The childless woman is another factor which no earlier civilization has known what to do with. It is clear that, even if marriage followed by children is in some ways comparable to a profession, marriage without them is not. The task of making a home for one man may be all sorts of things — it may range all the varied way from many kinds of heaven to many kinds of hell — but there is nothing of the profession about it. Even in former days it would not, and did not, fill a woman’s time. Under present conditions, it does not offer enough to be called anything more than a respectable piece of fancywork.

But even where there are children, this fact does not necessarily make a woman’s activity comparable to a man’s professional life. Under some conditions it does keep her very much occupied for a few years; in these cases it might be compared to a rather long period of army service for a man; under other conditions it does not even do this, but engages her emotions and her thoughts rather than her time. In any event, after a period of ten to fifteen years — to make a liberal estimate — the needs of her children are increasingly merged in those of the community, and such service as she gives she gives, not primarily as a mother of her own children, but rather as a woman interested in all children — as a citizen and a member of her society.

This statement will be challenged. It is often said that children take more time when they are big than when they are little. More thought, perhaps, but not more time. Little children’s needs are, indeed, simple, but they are exigent. The needs of our older children become less and less physical. They need companionship, advice, sympathy — above all, love. Their problems of education, of life-equipment, have to be met; questions of social taste and social ethics arise, and the complications of friendship and love. All these are of the utmost importance and often of the utmost difficulty; but they are matters in whose solution the father ought to have and often does have as large a share as the mother, and in which the child’s own share grows rapidly greater. The ‘chaperoning’ of the young, their social shepherding, is indeed done by some gifted women so skillfully, so efficiently, that it is put for them into the professional class. It is more than a profession, it is an art. But this is by virtue, not of their motherhood, but of their temperament. For the rest, not so endowed, these more formal duties must be judged as part of the social fabric of our present conventional life, which will be taken up later. There is one more consideration. If marriage is a woman’s profession, in a sense in which it is not a man’s, — admitting for the sake of the argument that all women who wish to marry can do so and have children, — then there should be some adequate preparation for it. This is being strongly urged, and it might be a very good plan if we could feel sure of two things, — first, that all married women are enough alike to be treated as a class; and second, that their needs as married women are sufficiently uniform and predictable to be met by preliminary training.

But it is beginning to be recognized that women, even married women, are not a bit alike. Generalizations about them are falling into disrepute, though still made by men in moments of relaxation. Such easy statements as —

are admitted as pleasantries but not as arguments. It would appear, then, that if women are not all alike it is economically wasteful to force them all into the same groove.

It might, perhaps, be expected that, even though women are not all alike, the choice of a profession would in itself sort them out a little. If it were a real profession it would have this effect. Take any gathering of lawyers, of brokers, of ministers, of doctors, of engineers, of musicians, — there is a certain broad homogeneity about it. But when, as sometimes happens, these men are joined by their wives, only the broadest and tenderest Christian charity can discern even the common humanity that unites them.

The real truth is that, whereas a man chooses his profession because of a certain rough temperamental fitness that he is more or less aware of in himself, a woman does not do this. She does not choose, as such, the life of a diplomat’s wife, or a minister’s wife, or an engineer’s wife. In fact, the girl who vows that she will never, never marry a minister or a doctor, or whatever she may choose for anathema, is as apt as not to do that very abhorred thing, for reasons which seem to her at the time satisfactory. As a result, we find women bored and wearied in the diplomat’s circle, in the doctor’s home, in the village parish, in the forester’s camp, bungling their duties and missing their opportunities, when a little puss-in-the corner shifting would better things immensely. Such shifting is, of course, not practicable, but if marriage is to be regarded as a profession it ought to be made practicable.

For these reasons, the much-urged preparation for marriage is not quite what it purports to be, since what constitutes excellent preparation for one kind of marriage, does not constitute even fair preparation for some other kind, and no woman knows beforehand just what kind she is going to need. In the European countries, it is true, where society maintains a different attitude toward the individual, it is much more possible to prepare a girl adequately for her married position, because it is more possible to predict what this will be. The European plan has its advantages as well as its weaknesses, but it is not the American plan.

That these maladjustments in marriage are not more conspicuous than they are must be laid to the elasticity of human nature. Although each woman is naturally fitted to do some one kind of work better than any other, she may be able to do tolerably well a number of other quite different kinds of work, so that often neither she nor any one else is ever aware of the waste that has occurred, in the forcing of the powers she uses and the atrophy of the powers she does not use.

Let us, then, give up this notion that marriage is in itself a profession. Something is always lost when one muddles one’s categories. Marriage may once have been comparable to a profession. It is not now. It may once, for a woman, have been comparable to slavery. It is not now. Marriage, in fact, cannot be classed with anything but itself. It is marriage and nothing else, — a wonderful mixture of experiences and duties on many different planes. So far as its spiritual demands go, it may ask of a woman, as of a man, all she has in her, or it may not. So far as its material demands go, it may require everything or nothing. It may of necessity fill her life or leave it empty. To call it a profession is to blur its meaning, for it is much more than this and much less. To say of the home, which marriage ought to create, that it is ‘a man’s kingdom, a child’s paradise, and a woman’s world,’ is again to blur its meaning. The home is no one’s kingdom, no one’s paradise, and no one’s world. The only kingdom it resembles is the kingdom of heaven, because it is within you. Home is dependent for its reality — and its reality is as deep as anything we know — upon a condition of spirit. It is indeed embodied, or at least shadowed forth, in this or that physical symbol, — the sheltering roof, the fireplace, the common table, — but it is dependent on no one of these. For Omar, the symbol was the loaf, the jug, and the book; for Deirdre and Naisi it was the tent ‘as tidy as a beehive or a linnet’s nest,’ or the open sky ‘among the snipe and plover.’ Home means love and companionship and mutual dependence, the spirit of common service and of a common loyalty. It may be achieved by a husband and wife, or by a family, or by two friends, or even by a single person who has the home feeling toward the world without. To say it is the woman’s task to make the home, is to miss its most exquisite meaning. No one of the group can make it, though any one can mar it. It must be made by all, for the uses of all. What the physical share of each shall be will depend upon circumstance.

Doubtless, since for us physical circumstance is the vehicle of the spirit, spirit is dependent to some extent upon physical circumstance. Marcus Aurelius admitted, by implication, that living in a palace made it hard to keep a grip on spiritual things. So also, the spiritual thing which is at the heart of the home probably makes itself felt more readily in some circumstances than in others. The extremes of poverty and riches, some think, tend to clog its utterance. It is helped by the companionship of tasks shared; it is made articulate by a common misfortune; it is served by leisure that is not too much leisure; it responds vividly to outside pressure if this is not too great; it is stimulated by the forms of hospitality, though it may also be wearied by them. Sometimes we have an idea, though it may be a wrong idea, that the conditions of to-day, and yet more the conditions that are promised for to-morrow, are not quite so stimulating to the spirit of home as were the conditions of yesterday. Even if this is true, however, we cannot go back to those conditions. For that very reason, we ought, perhaps, to hold ourselves more than ever attentive to their spirit.

III

Now because the physical forms of the home arose in the first place through the needs of children, and because women were more concerned than men in meeting these needs, a woman’s physical share in the home came to be very great, — so great that it crowded out everything else; and it was right that it should be so. Her physical share will probably always be greater than a man’s, but it will never again be so great as it has been. For better or worse the physical circumstances of the home have been completely transformed, and women (especially of the class I am speaking of, but to some extent of all classes) find themselves in a new position. With the same devotion to their homes that they have had in the past, with the same ideals and the same loyalty, their material problems are very different from those that confronted their greatgrandmothers. In particular, they are possessed of a margin of time and energy so large that the name margin is no longer suitable, and the manner of its employment constitutes a very different issue from any which met the Mrs. Eltons and the Mistress Abigails of the past. Allowing for the more absorbing demands in the early years of marriage, with the gradual release from these in the later years, and insisting that these later years are among the richest, and ought to be among the most productive, in a woman’s life, we may say that she has at least half a life — half her mature life — to dispose of in other ways than those directly opened to her through marriage itself. As yet few women realize this. The tradition of Mrs. Elton and Mistress Abigail is still strong; it is still taken for granted that the married woman’s margin is a real margin, narrow and precarious, not to be counted upon. And because it is not to be counted upon, it is not really used.

The situation is rather curious. We are caught between an old tradition of married life, which insists that our time is fully occupied, and the new facts of married life, which bely the tradition. If we could forget the tradition and look at the facts, our whole attitude would change. As it is, this large margin of time, continually and increasingly ours, is, as it were, theoretically non-existent. It has not yet received official recognition. Therefore, being treated as something contingent and accidental instead of something expected and calculable, it has no dignity, no coherence in its uses. It is like the reading done in a doctor’s office while we wait. We are like children who receive frequent but unpredictable gifts of pocket-money, yet are given no stated allowance. The money is spent as it comes—casually, without special plan. It is the rare child who will make such accidental fortune serve any large ends. So it has been with women’s time. Having no theoretic leisure and much actual leisure, they have filled it with whatever chances to importune most insistently.

What the things may be which appear most importunate depends upon a woman’s environment. In the early 80’s, when the stern pressure of wartime conditions was yielding to the growing luxury attendant on ‘good business,’ and the flood of immigration was transforming domestic conditions, women branched out in many lines. There was a great increase of women’s organizations for charitable and social or semi-social ends. There was a keen interest in athletics and in education. In the leisure time still remaining, women did ‘artistic’ work. The need of making useful and necessary things having abated, women occupied themselves in making useless and unnecessary things, and there followed a flood of ‘knickknacks for the home’ such as the home, let us hope, will never see again. On this period, the ‘Bad Taste Exhibit’ held last year in New York was an illuminating comment.

Since the 80’s there have been various changes. The eagerness for organization has increased and is showing its results in a thousand ways. Fancywork has drooped; athletics have held their own among the young women and grown in favor among the older ones. They have been fostered by schools and colleges, and these have also tended to create a keen, if often vague, desire to share in the larger movements of the community.

The result is that the married woman of to-day has plenty to do. She has, in fact, a good deal too much to do. When I say that she has half a life to dispose of, I mean that she could have this if she only believed she had it. She does not really have it now. She is dragged hither and yon, by a multitude of demands posing as duties, until it sometimes seems to her that there will be nothing left of her but shreds and ravelings. Often there actually is nothing left of her but these. The fair garment of her life has been, little by little, covered with trimmings until it is concealed by them, and has quite lost the large and restful lines which should at once express and clothe the body within. The trimmings have become the garment itself. But if she could once rid herself of them, she would never wish them back.

If we look more closely at these trimmings of a woman’s life, we shall see that they group themselves mainly as society or as charity. I am tempted to make a third group and say ‘shopping’; but shopping, if we consider its genesis, is really not a part of a woman’s marginal occupations; it grows out of her share in the home-making. Some of it is necessary and legitimate. And if it has at present acquired such dimensions and such importance that it may properly be classed with the major sports, this is the result of a combination of influences too complex to be discussed here. It does, however, bear upon the problem of a woman’s margin, because it is one of the things that threaten to swallow up that margin.

Women’s charitable work is often disparaged, and with some reason. It must be admitted that, partly because it is done in the incidental, casual, uncalculated way that women’s theoretic circumstances seem to enforce, some of it reminds one of the little home-made trousers in Beatrice Herford’s monologue: ‘It’s a beautiful spirit — but, really, when you look at ’em, you can’t tell which way the child’s walking.’ Nevertheless, let us insist that it is a beautiful spirit, that it does represent really hard work, that it does do some good. Those of us who are optimistic believe that, with the progressive enlargement of women’s civic opportunities, all these disconnected efforts are finding their relation to a larger whole.

Of the other side of women’s activity it is harder to judge. With this theoretically narrow margin of their lives, women have somehow created what is called ‘society.’ Every one knows what it is, although to any one who did not it would be difficult to explain. Men laugh at it, but it is not to be laughed at. With a power as strong as the church, or stronger, it lies about us, impalpable, whimsical, almost irresistible. It may take all a woman has to give, and give little back; or it may give everything it has to give, and demand little. Whether it is woman’s highest duty, or her toy, has apparently not been decided. Whether those who give themselves to it most entirely do so in an abandonment of self-indulgence or in a spirit of high sacrifice, one cannot say. The inveterate habit, common to all people, of dressing up whatever they are doing in a cloak of morality, has in this case so confused all the phraseology of social rites that it is impossible to tell what is pleasure and what is crucifixion. Women dress, not because they like to look pretty, but because they ’owe it’ to their husbands, or their children, or to society. They make calls and givedinners, not because they like it but because they feel themselves obliged to, and they are glad when it is over. They go to parties, not because they expect to have a good time — they profess to be bored by them — but because for various reasons it seems necessary to. For the same reasons they give teas and go to them, give receptions, luncheons, house-parties, and every other form of social function. When closely pressed, the fundamental justification for the whole complicated structure is usually said to be the children. ’We are not in this for ourselves but for our children.’ ‘If I considered only myself, I should cut the whole thing, but I must think of the young people.’ And so we are apparently handing on to the next generation an institution from whose tyranny we should ourselves like to escape. We do not seem to realize that if a thing is not good in itself — good for us — it will probably not be good for our children. If our lives have no justification except that they are forming bridges for the next generation, then we have really nothing to give the next generation, and the bridges are useless because they lead nowhere. We are like a badly built card-house, — each card leaning on the one next it, and the last leaning on nothing but the builder’s finger: take the finger away and the whole line falls flat.

Now it may be that society is worth all it costs. It may be that women are right when they speak of it in the language of duty. But it sometimes seems rather the result of this anomalous condition which has overtaken some classes of women, where, met by the fact of leisure without the name of leisure, they have, as it were, with their left hand built up an engine which now it requires both hands to run. In many women’s lives society and not marriage occupies the place that a profession occupies in a man’s life, and its claims often conflict with those of the home more than do the claims of many professional callings. This may be a desirable condition, but I doubt if its desirability has been weighed, because I doubt whether the condition itself has been squarely faced. It is indeed true that some women carry out their social activity in a fine spirit of constructive sympathy that makes of it something very wonderful and very helpful, and perhaps in them the whole social fabric can claim its justification. Certainly for them it is justification enough. But there is no human institution that has not its times of flowering, and to point to the single achievements gained under any institution proves only that human life attains greatness under the most diverse conditions. What women have to consider is, whether this particular institution is worth quite all they are giving it; or, perhaps, whether they are not, through this bit of traditionalism in their theorizing, giving it a good deal more than they think they are.

This is no plea for the professionalizing of married women. It is merely a plea that the married woman shall realize what she is doing, and shall decide whether it is what she is obliged to do, and if not, whether it is what she wants to do. It is a plea for the simplification of life. This can be achieved negatively, by elimination; positively, by a more deliberate choice of interests according to our best endowments, and a persistent effort to mass our activities in accordance with this choice. Hard work, as such, is never to be avoided, but scattering work, work that never assembles itself either into a whole, or into definite relation with some larger whole, — such work is always disintegrating in its reaction upon the worker. For this reason, many semi-professional occupations would prove restful and healthfully stimulating, compared with the hodge-podge of tasks with which most women are now filling their life-margin.

The professionalizing, or semi-professionalizing, of married women is, however, coming. It is coming more slowly to them than it has come to unmarried women, because they have, in general, only half-time to offer, and the community is only beginning to wake up to the value of the half-time worker and the advantages of the half-time job, so that as yet it has very few such jobs to give. If it does come, it will, I believe, not threaten the home nearly so much as ‘society’ threatens it now.

The change is, however, not going to settle all difficulties. Like every change, it will settle some and create new ones. There is no escaping the fact that for the married woman of the future there is a grave difficulty facing her, in the reconciling of her interests with those of her husband. The growing individualism of women, their insistence on planning their own lives as men plan theirs, necessary and inevitable as this is, is not going to be an altogether comfortable element in married life, — not nearly so comfortable as the old way, though just as interesting. For its effect on the children there is little to fear. Anything which adds to the strength and interest of the mother’s life is in the long run good for the children. As for the idea that a woman exerts an influence on a child by hovering over him — there is as nearly nothing in it as there ever can be in any idea. But between the man and the woman, each of whom has an independent life calling for real adjustment and sacrifice, as all work does call, — between them the mutual adjustment and sacrifice that become necessary may seem to present difficulties very grave and very complicated. Upon the way in which these difficulties are met will depend the future of our social structure.