The Modern Woman's Place in the Home
by MILDRED WELCH CRANSTON
1
I WAS in college during and just after the First World War, confident that my generation had fought the last battle in history. I returned from five years in China to find my friends’ faith in the League of Nations second only to their reliance on the stock market. I married, and my children were born as that League proved vulnerable and after stocks, with the whole financial structure of the country, had utterly collapsed. The Second World War began before those children had reached high school; like all other homes, ours has been irrevocably changed by the struggle.
With parents everywhere we have found our joy at the end of the conflict sobered by the thought that those who have taken up the sword or the atomic bomb may perish by it. Unless some means can be swiftly found to establish and keep peace here and everywhere our homes, our children, and all else may be destroyed. This urgency makes all other needs in the modern world appear secondary in importance, and the role which a modern woman plays in her home becomes the way in which she attempts by observation, study, understanding, and action to contribute to the peace of the world.
I remember attending a Christmas meeting in a school auditorium, the parents sitting around the four sides of the room, with the children performing in the center. Lighted candles played a part in the decorations, and it occurred to me suddenly that in case of a fire we should probably fail to act rationally; the instinct of every parent to rush towards the center and rescue his own child would menace the safety of all. Sometimes in this post-war period I think all parents are like the participants in that celebration, watching the play go on, mindful of danger, and ready to save their own without thought for the others who are threatened. We have to beware of a type of domestic isolationism. While we meet — I hope intelligently — the immediate threat of the atomic bomb, we must also plan ahead for the time, ten or twenty years from now, when our children will, if they survive the present crisis, be meeting the many tests to which the United Nations and other cooperative institutions will be subjected.
With other women of my generation, when we “got the vote,” I allied myself with organizations which studied and acted upon the issues of the day. I have signed petitions, passed resolutions, attended city council meetings, and bombarded Congressmen with protests, commendations, and suggestions. I do not discount such service; rather, I believe much of the credit for liberal legislation during the last thirty years belongs to women. I shall continue to sign, pass, attend, protest, commend, and suggest. But if the ushering in of the atomic age means that the one more chance to make and keep peace has in truth become the last chance, I am more than ever going to study this younger generation — the influences and attitudes brought to bear upon them — knowing that they are both the hope and the despair of the future. They are, in fact, the only means we have to keep the peace we now intend to make.
On the evening of the day President Roosevelt died, my husband and I were trying to help our thirteen-year-old son draw a picture map of South America. Our own education had been of the prepicture map era, and our son’s earlier schooling in California had not included this technique. So we three were sweating it out together. As the radio commentators announced in shocked tones, “The end came at Warm Springs. . . . Mrs. Roosevelt is flying South immediately. . . . The Vice-President will take the oath of office in a few minutes,” I was tracing uncertain coffee beans on Brazil while my son and husband were drawing a cooperative cow on Argentina!
It was the end of an era; my children remembered no other President; the most momentous six months in history had begun, and we were drawing pictures with crayons. Did education, I thought exasperatedly, prepare a child for understanding the present and for meeting intelligently an uncertain future? Or is it possible that a knowledge of Soulh America, its governments, its products, its surpluses, is in the long run more important than the events surrounding the death of one President and the inauguration of another? I am struggling with the answers to my own questions. Many parents believe that in the light of the world’s new and pressing needs even the curriculum of the elementary schools needs reexamination, to the end that what our children study and the way in which they behave in school shall contribute directly to understanding this country and all other peoples. This job must be done with insight and with speed.
2
WHEN V-E Day was proclaimed, our son, with eighth-graders the country over, was being classified for the studies he would follow through the remaining four years of high school. The nice little gangs that had come up together through elementary school were being divided into two groups on the basis of prospective college attendance. This year, consequently, we do not see much of Butch, our son’s liveliest pal. He is no longer one of the bunch, because he isn’t taking Latin, literature, and algebra; his curriculum is composed of shop mathematics, mechanical drawing, and business English, the subjects immediately useful for earning a living as a mechanic — and let it be noted that he is being more skillfully prepared for taking care of himself at seventeen than the members of the college preparatory group.
The truth is that the gap between the haves and the have-nots begins to open in school life when boys and girls are thirteen or fourteen years old. In good schools the division is made on the basis of aptitude tests, but more often it rests on economic privilege. Those who can afford it will go to college, and in high school will take the so-called cultural subjects; all the others learn directly how to make a living. Through the years the only leveling factors have come in wartime conscription and in the GI Bill of Rights, which allows college attendance to many who could not have afforded it otherwise.
The result of this early division is that in ten years’ time the white-collar workers are accusing the laborers of being greedy, materialistic, and dominated by unprincipled leaders; and the men and women who form the ranks of labor look upon employers as exploiters of the underprivileged. We try to correct these misunderstandings by promoting workers’ institutes, night schools, labor colleges, student-labor cooperative studies, and other devices which are acknowledgments of the shortcomings of the training in earlier years.
No one knows better than a housewife who does all her own work that there are values and dignity in manual labor, in spite of a tradition that has developed that working with your head is always preferable to working with your hands. I do not carry any banner for college education except as a long and difficult preparation for a useful life; the last three decades have witnessed the growth of too many snobbish ideas connected with college as a necessity for social prestige. I am as deeply concerned that my son shall not feel himself superior to Butch as I am that Butch shall have a fair chance to train all his capacities to the full.
My plea is twofold. First, all curriculum classifications should be in accordance with scientific aptitude tests, and every student should have an opportunity to develop his capacities. Sometimes this will necessitate persuasion of parents. In any case the divisions must not be based upon economic privilege. Secondly, although it may mean more weeks in school, there must be a fair chance for would-be laborers to study cultural subjects and for the potential college students to have real experience in learning some manual skill. There can be no economic peace as long as one class learns only the “practical arts" and the other concentrates exclusively on the ideas of the past and future. Educators are not to be blamed for the divisions which have long existed; they do very well what they have been directed to do. But every member of a community should exert himself to the full to eliminate undemocratic classifications in this most democratic of American institutions.
We were in Plymouth, Massachusetts, for Y-J Day and our little girls helped ring the church bell that proclaimed the three-day celebration in that historic town. The Aldens and Standishes have long been gone; the telephone book mainly lists names that end in i and o, for a century ago the Atlantic seaboard towns began to employ Portuguese and Italians in large numbers in the factories. We watched three generations celebrate in front of the town’s Honor Roll, a long list of names denoting ancestry from all corners of Europe. Under the shadow of Burial Hill, where sleep the Pilgrims and their children, a heterogeneous throng made merry. For those of Italian background the victory meant the utter defeat of their fatherland, but the realization did not seem obvious in the faces of the people who look upon America as their home and Plymouth as their town. Would this final victory mean for all the people of Plymouth and of this country a fair chance for a fuller life?
If we had been hopeful, we were to experience shortly a rude awakening; for in the months since V-J Day evidences of race prejudice have increased, and the alarming element is that in the last six months many of the mass demonstrations against Negroes and Jews have centered in educational institutions. Riots and near-riots have occurred in high schools, and the facts concerning race and color quotas in our colleges and universities are no more startling than the quiet but deadly anti-Semitism among college and university students themselves.
We used to think that education would cure race prejudice; we know now that animosities can breed anywhere. A student in a famous and traditionally liberal college for women reports that it is virtually impossible for a Jewish girl to achieve social success or win a campus office; a chaperone at a men’s university house party tells of the heartbreak of a girl appearing as a “ blind date,” attractive and personable but of Jewish ancestry, abandoned by her escort and his friends to the permanent exile of the powder room. Gentile girls have been equally unfeeling toward Jewish boys. These facts need airing.
Again, I have only praise for the teachers in the high schools and colleges who often give the first and only liberal teaching a boy or girl receives. The blame rather rests with early home and community attitudes, or with the mores of the school social groups. These have exerted long-lasting influence. I do not know the full story of discrimination among the youth of today, but I pledge myself to try to discover it.
Social distinctions, racial discriminations, class prejudices, misunderstandings, rivalries all the material for creating a war are present in our own communities. As we deal with the causes and cure of war on the international scale, so we must grapple with them in town, in school, and in home. There is, furthermore, a sense of urgency today, a reminder that there may be so little time in which to build a peace that will last. This gives us a new incentive which should develop additional insights and inspired techniques. It is a job for us all, but especially for women, whether as the mothers of the oncoming generation or as their teachers and friends. We may fail. Even if we correct the evils I have listed and many more, war may yet come and all of us be destroyed together — aristocrat, true democrat, employer, laborer, Jew, and Jew-baiter. This is a risk we must take, but it is worth the venture. What we modern women must do is to pursue our course with zeal, with intelligence, and with the hope that the outcome will vindicate our effort and our faith.