CODFLICTIHG ID6ALS: 
 
 Two sides of the 
 Woman's Question. 
 
 Btj fc.L.HUTCHWS 
 
£>tate (folUge of Agriculture 
 
 At Ofantell MfttnetBitg 
 
 3tliaca. 2J. 5. 
 
 ffithranj 
 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 3 1924 053 973 818 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924053973818 
 
CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
CONFLICTING 
 
 IDEALS: Two Sides 
 of the Woman's Question 
 
 BY 
 
 B. L. HUTCHINS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 THOMAS MURBY & CO. 
 
 6, BOUVERIE STREET, E.C. 
 
 1913 
 
 rGre^Bri^aanJ 
 
ERRA TUM. 
 
 Page 15. For :t beginning of the nineteenth 
 century," read "end of the eighteenth century." 
 
INTRODUCTORY 
 
 There is in the minds of many a fixed idea 
 that women's work for wages is something 
 quite new, something that came in with the in- 
 dustrial revolution, or with the movement 
 called "Women's Rights." History shows 
 this to be untrue. Although the records of 
 women's employment are extremely meagre 
 and unsatisfactory, there is yet sufficient evi- 
 dence to show that women always have worked 
 and even worked extremely hard, that they 
 were employed in agriculture, and in most 
 kinds of industrial occupation, usually, it is 
 true, as assistants to the head of family, but 
 also in quite a number of cases, as wage- 
 earners for an employer. There remains a 
 further consideration. Although it is now 
 proved that women have always worked, that 
 does not settle the point whether it is desirable 
 v 
 
vi INTRODUCTORY 
 
 that they should do so. At present there is a 
 kind of chaos of warring views and opinions 
 on the subject. Some, we have said, view 
 women's work other than domestic as a modern 
 innovation, but others again view it as a relic of 
 barbarism-, which should be gradually got rid 
 of by social progress and by educating women 
 so that their interests centre in the family. 
 Others again see in woman the originator of 
 industry and manufactures (which probably 
 she was), and consider that she has been ex- 
 cluded from the skilled mechanic arts and 
 crafts of to-day, as well as from the learned pro- 
 fessions which grew out of those crafts, merely 
 by the jealousy and domineering spirit of man. 
 
 The acuteness of the problem consists largely 
 in the fact that, as in religious wars, each side 
 is fighting for something it profoundly believes 
 in and regards as a pure ideal which alone can 
 satisfy the deepest needs of the human soul in 
 society. 
 
 In considering the question, "Is it socially 
 desirable that women should work for money ?" 
 we shall find it of some assistance to consider 
 what is the origin in history of these widely 
 
INTRODUCTORY vii 
 
 diverse views, and how far they are due to the 
 pressure of economic needs and circumstances. 
 While fully conscious that a solution of the 
 controversy is not likely to be achieved in this 
 unpretending work, I venture to hope that a 
 statement of these opposed notions and views 
 may perhaps effect something : it may clear the 
 ground, and possibly even help the combatants 
 to think a little better of one another. 
 
 B. L. H. 
 
 Note. — The words " economic independence " 
 are used in the following pages for the 
 sake of convenience in their conventional or 
 popular meaning, as the state of a person who 
 owns property or earns an income. Going 
 deeper, it is, of course, true that there is no 
 such condition as economic independence in 
 civilised society, as no man can exist alone, and 
 each individually depends largely or entirely 
 upon the exertions of others. To discuss fully 
 this very interesting subject would have been 
 foreign to the purpose of the present small 
 volume, and appeared unnecessary, as the 
 words are commonly understood in the sense 
 here given them. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 I. THE MODERN PATRIARCHAL IDEAL 
 
 II. THE INDIVIDUALISTIC VIEW: THE 
 WEAK SIDE OF THE PATRIARCHAL 
 IDEAL 
 
 III. THE WEAK SIDE OF THE INDIVI 
 
 DUALISTIC IDEAL 
 
 IV. THE ANOMALY 
 
 V. THE YOUNG WOMAN 
 
 VI. THE MARRIED WOMAN 
 
 VII. THE MARRIED WOMAN WORKING 
 VIII. THE SOCIAL CARE OF CHILDREN 
 
 IX. CONCLUSION 
 
 AUTHORITIES CITED 
 
 15 
 
 35 
 41 
 56 
 63 
 7i 
 77 
 79 
 82 
 
I 
 
 THE MODERN PATRIARCHAL IDEAL 
 
 Let us first of all take the tradition of the upper 
 or governing classes of our own country, which 
 may be described as the patriarchal ideal. It 
 is not, I think, stating it too strongly to say that 
 the root of this ideal is the entire support of 
 women by the family, that is to say, in youth, 
 by the wealth or work of the father, in woman- 
 hood, by that of the husband, and failing hus- 
 band or father, by the nearest male relative. In 
 cases of bereavement or loss of money, women 
 of course may have to work, but such a neces- 
 sity was, until lately, viewed as something 
 abnormal, out of the natural order, as a trouble 
 and affliction meriting pity and sympathy. 
 Within the memory of many who are not 
 more than middle-aged, it was still a very rare 
 thing for a girl to leave her father's house to 
 work for her living unless under pressure of 
 necessity, and such necessity was mostly 
 
CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 viewed not only as a misfortune but even in 
 some degree as a slur; because it involved in 
 many cases " going about alone," passing from 
 one part of London to another, for instance, and 
 a certain amount of facing the rude contact of 
 the external world, from which a girl with more 
 conscientious or more fortunate male relatives 
 would be shielded as a matter of course. 
 
 We can trace a diminishing intensity of this 
 view through the 19th century. It was with 
 misery that Miss Austen'-s Jane Fairfax, in 
 Emma, faced the prospect of earning her own 
 living. In Charlotte Bronte's works we find a 
 sort of transition view. The governess's posi- 
 tion was still considered as highly pitiable, as 
 indeed in those days it probably was, but 
 Miss Bronte's quarrel is rather with' the 
 accidents than with the substance. By her 
 time a good many had got away from the 
 idea that dependence on family or friends 
 is the only desirable lot for a woman. Never- 
 theless the old notions lingered for many 
 a year. The present writer, when a child, 
 knew two young ladies who worked as daily 
 governesses, but took elaborate care to keep the 
 
PATRIARCHAL IDEAL 
 
 fact a secret from their acquaintances. Young 
 girls who wanted to go somewhere or do some- 
 thing that was not considered right or proper 
 might plead the case of Miss Smith or Miss 
 Brown, who, perhaps at barely eighteen, was 
 going out teaching and as a necessary conse- 
 quence, went about with some freedom; but 
 they would probably be met with the evasive 
 rejoinder that Miss Smith was " obliged to 
 earn her living," a condition which thus 
 appeared in some mysterious way to exempt 
 her from some of the ordinary troublesome 
 rules of right and wrong. Combined with 
 much lip-service in praise of women who were 
 " independent," or "self-reliant," there was a 
 very strong if less articulate tradition that in- 
 dependence and self-reliance were not desirable 
 qualities for one's own daughters or nieces. 
 There was an apprehension, tacit in some 
 families, out-spoken in others, that "men 
 didn't like it." In short, the ideal position for 
 women of any birth, breeding, or nurture 
 worthy of the name was held to be maintenance 
 by and in the family, just as in the very highest 
 classes it still is so Economic independence 
 
CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 could only come to women incidentally, by 
 inheritance. 
 
 Before we come to the partial disin- 
 tegration of this tradition that is obviously 
 going on around us now, let us consider the 
 type of civilisation that it implied ; and in order 
 to understand it we must evidently approach it 
 sympathetically, for it is impossible to make a 
 subject intelligible by destructive criticism 
 alone. You Never Can Tell, or The Way of 
 All Flesh, may make it very plain that the 
 modern patriarchal family has been sometimes 
 intolerable, but they do not show us how it 
 came to be an effective institution. And in the 
 same way we cannot hope to understand why 
 generations of women in certain classes have 
 been and are maintained without working 
 unless we perceive and admit that the system 
 had certain advantages. 
 
 In the first place we cannot but admit that 
 the tradition of maintaining and providing for 
 a family by the ability and industry of the 
 father alone has had some selective value in 
 regard to men. It is not an ignoble motive 
 that impels a man to forsake the joyous inde- 
 
PATRIARCHAL IDEAL 
 
 pendence of bachelor-hood, and take upon 
 himself the responsibilities of offspring. As 
 Mrs. Bosanquet says: "Amongst those sec- 
 tions of society where a living is only to be 
 obtained by working for it ... it is the in- 
 stitution of the family which is the principal 
 motive to work." She adds a quotation from 
 Dr. Emanuel Herrmann: "How much of the 
 toil in workshops and factories is undergone 
 for the sake of making a home, and how much 
 for the sake of the family that follows. Enter- 
 prising journeys, daring speculations as well 
 as ceaseless industry, self-denial in consump- 
 tion, economy, and the fruitful application of 
 all the powers of mind and body, are due to 
 this impulse, ennobled and purified in the 
 family, and so guided and stimulated to 
 economic ends." Mrs. Bosanquet even says: 
 " Nothing but the combined rights and respon- 
 sibilities of family life will ever arouse the aver- 
 age man to his full degree of efficiency, and 
 induce him to continue working after he has 
 earned sufficient to meet his own personal 
 needs." It is characteristic of Mrs. Bosan- 
 quet's line of thought that she omits the idea of 
 
CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 any conflict of interest between the family and 
 society, as if it could not exist. She seems to 
 ignore the fact that the responsibility of a 
 family may mean to its head, not merely a 
 stimulus to efficiency, but at times a terrible 
 temptation to put gain before all else, to push 
 his business in any way he can, say by adver- 
 tising and puffery or various more or less illicit 
 methods, which, though commercially profit- 
 able, do not exactly promote the social welfare. 
 With these qualifications, however, there is 
 much cogency in Mrs. Bosanquet's remarks. 
 The thought of fiancee, wife or child is un- 
 doubtedly an incentive to many men to " stick 
 to work," it is not an egoistic or ungenerous 
 impulse that causes a man instinctively to try 
 and stand between a woman and the rough-and- 
 tumble struggle for livelihood. 
 
 The modern form of the patriarchal family as 
 it largely has been, and to some extent is still 
 maintained in the upper middle and middle 
 classes of England, has no doubt helped to 
 evolve qualities which are conspicuous in the 
 mental outfit of the Englishmen in those social 
 strata. Lester Ward thinks that : " There can 
 
PATRIARCHAL IDEAL 
 
 be no doubt that success in rivalry for female 
 favour became ever more and more dependent 
 upon sagacity, and that this led to brain 
 development . . . natural selection might 
 bring this about to some extent, but the greater 
 part of it is probably attributable to sexual selec- 
 tion, and the male brain has thus gained upon 
 the female." Business capacity, the power to 
 make a sufficient income, or to keep inherited 
 wealth together, is obviously all-important for 
 the maintenance of women in refinement and 
 "elegant leisure." Linked up with it is the 
 power to deal with men so far as necessary for 
 economic competence, and the power to guide 
 and control the family. The type may be lack- 
 ing in flexibility, still more in originality of 
 thought, its sense of duty being largely con- 
 centrated on the preservation of class tradition, 
 with a tendency to regard the maintenance of 
 law and order chiefly as a means to that end, 
 but no one will deny that it possesses a certain 
 value as a constituent of national life. 
 
 It is surely unnecessary to infer that this type 
 of family life was created by man for his own 
 aggrandizement and exaltation over his depen- 
 
8 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 dent womenkind. Under the ancient patriar- 
 chal family, it is true, woman was merely an 
 object of possession, a mere chattel; but the 
 more modern forms of the family appear to be 
 due largely to influences exercised by the rela- 
 tives of the woman given in marriage, requir- 
 ing, e.g., that her children should be preferred 
 to those of slaves, and laying down other con- 
 ditions for her and their welfare. The interest 
 of women in the maintenance of the family is so 
 strong that, once initiated, the system would be 
 backed up by persistent suggestion and in- 
 fluence on the part of women themselves. But 
 to that subject we shall return later. 
 
 What is the place of woman in the modern 
 patriarchal home? In the 18th century, per- 
 haps earlier, she lost many of the old household 
 occupations that were formerly part of her hon- 
 ourable claim to subsistence and consideration. 
 Textile industries have long since left the home 
 of the well-to-do for, first, the weaver's cottage, 
 latterly the factory. Brewing, baking, the 
 compounding of medicines or perfumes, and 
 many other such offices have passed out of the 
 hands of those who did them for use, into the 
 
PATRIARCHAL IDEAL 
 
 hands of those who do them for wages or profit. 
 The care of children becomes more and more a 
 skilled and comparatively well paid occupation, 
 the nurse in many households now being 
 reckoned equal in status to the governess, 
 or even superior. There remains to the 
 mother and such of the grown-up daughters 
 as do not marry but stay at home merely 
 a general supervision of the paid work of 
 others, an office which is onerous in very vary- 
 ing degrees according to the sufficiency of the 
 income for the standard of life maintained, and 
 the variety and complexity of social relations 
 and engagements. Veblen is not too severe in 
 asserting that " Much of the services classed as 
 household cares in modern every-day life, and 
 many of the ' utilities ' required for a comfort- 
 able existence by civilised man, are of a cere- 
 monial character." But the special feature of 
 the economic position of women of this class is 
 that, however much they differ in personal bent 
 or characteristics, whether their life be gay or 
 sombre, strenuous, empty, or filled with " busy 
 idleness," they are, in the old-fashioned ex- 
 pression for servants, "all found." They 
 
io CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 have not to provide a penny of their income, 
 which comes to them apparently from the 
 heavens above, or from the earth beneath, for all 
 they know about it, and accrues without any 
 effort of their own. They are supposed invari- 
 ably to be " paid for," not only in the serious 
 expenses of life, but in the little outings and 
 amusements, a tradition, however, which 
 women's clubs and other circumstances are 
 tending in some degree to break up. In so far 
 as they are wise or unwise in the spending of 
 money, a considerable difference may be felt in 
 the comfort of the household and the amenity of 
 home conditions. In the use of money they 
 may perchance acquire a considerable degree of 
 expertness, in certain cases almost amounting 
 to science, but of the acquiring of money they 
 normally know nothing. In early times the 
 women manufactured stuffs for household use, 
 without any view to a market, and at the present 
 day, though she no longer spins or weaves, the 
 domesticated woman still has her mind turned 
 to doing things for use, for consumption, as 
 economists say, and neither makes nor does 
 anything for sale. 
 
PATRIARCHAL IDEAL n 
 
 This last point is perhaps the strongest that 
 can be urged in favour of the dependence of 
 women on the family. It is hardly necessary to 
 insist on the immense importance of this condi- 
 tion to the expectant mother. For here we have 
 the root problem of the antagonism between use 
 value and exchange value in its sharpest form. 
 No one can deny that the service of the child- 
 bearing mother is that which is most indispens- 
 able to the continued existence of the nation and 
 the State. But it is one which has no exchange 
 value whatever, and which interposes, tem- 
 porarily, at least, a considerable obstacle 
 between the woman and the carrying on of any 
 ordinary work, no matter how strong or skilled 
 she may normally be. The device most gener- 
 ally adopted in civilised societies for securing to 
 women the protection and maintenance neces- 
 sary for the existence of themselves and their off- 
 spring has been that of the patriarchal family. 
 Just as in primitive communities the man 
 hunts, or captures, or seizes wealth, so in 
 modern times he produces or works for the mar- 
 ket, and is supposed to give to the mother of his 
 children what is necessary for her and for them. 
 
12 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 We need not stop at this point to question the 
 completeness of the generalisation; we all 
 know, of course, that exceptions are many, 
 startling, and even tragic. The point to bring 
 out here is that the ideal is by no means with- 
 out relevance to the needs of human life, and 
 that so far from being a mere result of male 
 selfishness, as some would have us think, the 
 reverse is the case. Considering how easily 
 man can have most of the pleasure and amuse- 
 ment that women and children can give him, 
 without burdening himself with the permanent 
 responsibility of their charge and maintenance, 
 it is not a little remarkable that the latter course 
 should have become so largely the norm and 
 type of family life.* 
 
 In the working classes, of course, the respon- 
 sibility for children, either boys or girls, does 
 not usually extend more than a very few years 
 beyond school age, if at all, and the question of 
 the wife's employment is mainly one of income. 
 
 * It is, however, noticeable that in the class where the 
 economic dependence of women is most completely crystal- 
 lised, that is to say, among the wealthy, the numbers of 
 children are relatively small. 
 
PATRIARCHAL IDEAL 13 
 
 In the upper and professional classes, however, 
 the responsibility for daughters was, until lately, 
 held in theory to rest upon the father until their 
 marriage or his death ; provision after the latter 
 event having been less fixed a custom here than 
 in France. 
 
 Whatever the weak points of this arrange- 
 ment, in theory at all events it does set free a 
 certain number of women for work that " does 
 not pay," viz. : for the care of home and chil- 
 dren, the training of character, the development 
 of social traditions and of a standard of life. In 
 an age when so many things are bought and 
 sold that formerly were without price, it is well 
 to remember that the most important things in 
 life have no exchange value. A certain class of 
 persons thus relieved from the higgling of the 
 market, from bargaining for the price of their 
 own labour, are able to turn their attention 
 inwards to the education of demand, to the 
 spiritual values, to the things that really matter. 
 This should be a valuable social asset. But 
 the degree in which a class so situated is really 
 socially useful will be largely determined by 
 
14 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 the degree in which the members of it are accus- 
 tomed to realize themselves as members of a 
 community. 
 
 Whether that idea does as yet form part of 
 the mental and moral outfit of any considerable 
 portion of the class of women we have been 
 considering, is a question to which we shall 
 return presently. 
 
II 
 
 THE INDIVIDUALISTIC VIEW: THE 
 
 WEAK SIDE OF THE PATRIARCHAL 
 
 IDEAL 
 
 In contrast to the view of woman as having her 
 existence bound up with the family and her 
 economic needs supplied by a male guardian, 
 comes the modern demand for the right of 
 women to work, the claim for equality of oppor- 
 tunity, equal pay for equal work, and an un- 
 restricted field of employment. This demand 
 can be traced onwards from the beginning of 
 the 19th century, when Mary Wollstonecraft 
 voiced it with considerable moderation : — 
 
 " How many women thus waste life away, the 
 prey of discontent, who might have practised as 
 physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and 
 stood erect, supported by their own industry, in- 
 stead of hanging their heads surcharged with the 
 dew of sensibility. . . . How much more respect- 
 able is the woman who earns her own bread by ful- 
 
 15 
 
16 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 filling any duty, than the most accomplished 
 beauty !" 
 
 Increasing in urgency and persistence as the 
 century went on, held back for a time by certain 
 reactionary forces of the Victorian era, this 
 desire found what is, perhaps, its strongest and 
 boldest, certainly its most brilliant and inspired 
 expression in Olive Schreiner's book, the 
 watchword of which is, " We claim the whole 
 field of labour for our province." 
 
 It is not, of course, correct to assume that 
 this demand involves the abolition of the family 
 as a social institution, an ideal which does not 
 appear to be contemplated by more than a few 
 extremists. What is intended by Mrs. 
 Schreiner, Mrs. Gilman, and others appears 
 rather to be the abolition of the economic 
 dependence of woman on the family. In their 
 view every girl should be brought up as a 
 matter of course to a trade or profession, just as 
 her brothers are ; and work need not be dropped 
 on marriage. The husband and wife should be 
 jointly responsible for the economic resources 
 of the home, instead of, as in the patriarchal 
 home, the husband providing for both ; and the 
 
, INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 17 
 
 needs of the woman before and after the times 
 of her confinements should be provided either 
 from savings, by insurance, or by State endow- 
 ment. The home duties of household manage- 
 ment, etc., now usually devolving on the wife 
 and mother, would, it is argued, be better per- 
 formed by someone who made them her special 
 work and was trained as for a profession. It is 
 a great mistake to conceive that writers who 
 hold this view despise the work of caring for 
 home and children ; on the contrary their aim is 
 to raise the work to a much higher standard of 
 skill, efficiency, and payment. Whereas at 
 present household work is carried on with 
 much waste, weariness and ineffective toil, by a 
 multitude of women isolated in their little 
 homes, it is hoped that in the progress of social 
 evolution these now unskilled tasks may 
 become skilled trades, carried on for re- 
 latively short hours and high pay. The 
 main point is that women should be trained 
 to earn their own living and should be 
 allowed the opportunity of doing so. Favour 
 is not asked ; " equal pay for equal work " and 
 a fair field are all that this school demands. 
 
18 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 Woftlen are now, they say, disqualified from 
 some classes of work because they are too hard 
 for them, and from others because they are too 
 responsible, and from yet others because they 
 are " unwomanly." By these impalpable bar- 
 riers of convention or prejudice women are 
 excluded from all but the worst paid occupa- 
 tions. We cannot know what woman is cap- 
 able of, says Olive Schreiner, until we let her 
 try. Give her freedom and opportunity, and 
 she will find out for herself what she can do. 
 
 Now, in regard to the individualistic, as in 
 regard to the patriarchal ideal, it seems to me 
 impossible to understand it unless we approach 
 it with sympathy. And if we so approach it 
 and ask what has evoked the claim for equality 
 of opportunity, it can be seen at once that there 
 is an immense deal of evidence in the facts of 
 common every-day life to show that many 
 women do need to be in a position to support 
 themselves. As a matter of fact the theory of 
 the dependence of women on the family breaks 
 down in quite a large number of instances even 
 in the upper circles of society, and of course 
 more frequently still in the upper-middle and 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 19 
 
 middle classes. Commercial losses or changes 
 in the channels and methods of trade, ill-health, 
 failure in character or ability of husband or 
 father, or his early death, these and other 
 causes leave women unprovided or inade- 
 quately provided for life, frequently faced 
 with the fact that there is very little they can do 
 that will earn them a livelihood in open 
 market. These are not new features peculiar 
 to modern life. In the old-fashioned religious 
 or sentimental novel the heroine who is com- 
 pelled by need to go out as a governess was a 
 well-known figure. Mary Wollstonecraft 
 . wrote with the keenest sympathy of the position 
 of girls, who, 
 
 " Weakly educated, are often cruelly left by their 
 parents without any provision, and, of course, are 
 dependent on not only the reason, but the bounty of 
 their brothers." 
 
 Supposing the brother to be unable or unwill- 
 ing thus to set aside an income sufficient for his 
 sister, how miserable is their position as a 
 burden on the family means. 
 
 " Who can recount the misery which many un- 
 fortunate beings, whose minds and bodies are 
 
20 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 equally weak, suffer in such situations — unable to 
 work, and ashamed to beg?" 
 
 Nearly ninety years ago an American writer 
 on education put the matter quite plainly : 
 
 " That old, well-known maxim of thrift — ' get 
 money ; get it honestly, if you can, but at all events 
 get money, ' is paraphrased for the special use of all 
 single girls, and they never hear the last of : — ' get 
 married; well, if you can; but at all hazards get 
 married ' ; until they actually take the decisive all 
 important step, at any and every hazard whatever. 
 . . . How far preferable would it be to teach them 
 from the moment they are susceptible of moral in- 
 struction, that although more happiness may be en- 
 joyed in married, than in single life, yet that more 
 wretchedness may be, and often is, endured in the 
 first than in the last." 
 
 This writer was an American; it was many 
 years before any appreciable number of Eng- 
 lishmen had learnt the lesson of facing facts. 
 Until a few years back girls in the English 
 upper classes, for the most part, had no future 
 but marriage, no other chance of making a 
 home for themselves, no other escape from 
 failure in life. Thackeray probably did not 
 foresee a " woman's movement," but he had a 
 very keen eye for the economic position. Who 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 21 
 
 does not remember Ethel Newcome's visit to a 
 picture gallery with her grandmother, Lady 
 Kew? Ethel, instead of looking at the pic- 
 tures, became fascinated by the little green 
 ticket indicating that a picture was successful 
 in finding a purchaser. 
 
 " ' I think, Grandmamma,' said she,' ' we young 
 ladies in the world, when we are exhibiting, ought 
 to have little green tickets pinned on our backs, 
 with " Sold " written on them. . . . Then at the 
 end of the season the owner would come to carry 
 us home. " And the girl actually stole a ticket, 
 pinned it on her frock, and wore it down to dinner, 
 to the astonishment of her family. 
 
 Or take the statement of the position made 
 by Charlotte Bronte, in a letter written to a 
 friend about a career for his daughter. 
 
 " Your daughters — no more than your sons — 
 should be a burden on your hands. Your daugh- 
 ters — as much as your sons — should aim at making 
 their way honourably through life. Do you not 
 wish to keep them at home ? Believe me, teachers 
 may be hard worked, ill-paid, and despised, but the 
 girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off 
 than the hardest wrought and worst paid drudge of 
 a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in 
 humble, but in affluent houses, families of daugh- 
 
22 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 ters sitting waiting to be married I have pitied them 
 from my heart. It is doubtless well — very well — if 
 Fate decrees them a happy marriage ; but if other- 
 wise, give their existence some object, their time 
 some occupation, or the peevishness of disappoint- 
 ment, and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly 
 degrade their nature. ... I wish all your daugh- 
 ters — I wish every woman in England, had also a 
 hope and a motive." 
 
 With a blunter disregard of Victorian ideals, 
 Meredith wrote of the upper-class parent of 
 daughters: " I think yonder old thrush on the 
 lawn who has just kicked the last of her lank 
 offspring out of the nest to go shift for itself, 
 much the kinder of the two, though sentimental 
 people do shrug their shoulders at these unsen- 
 timental acts of the creatures who never wander 
 from nature." 
 
 No one could accuse Mr. Howells of cynicism 
 towards women; yet this is how he describes 
 one of the most delightful of his heroines, as 
 she appears at the moment of financial 
 disaster : — 
 
 " All that Helen had learnt and done had merely 
 had the effect that was meant : to leave her a cul- 
 tivated and agreeable girl, with bright ideas on all 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 23 
 
 sorts of pleasant subjects. She was, as the sum of 
 it, mainly and entirely a lady, the most charming 
 thing in the world, and as regards anything but a 
 lady's destiny, the most helpless." 
 
 Apart from the economic question, the desire 
 for economic independence has its ethical side, 
 and this probably is one cause of the great 
 bitterness often found at the present day 
 between the upholders of the patriarchal and 
 the independent views respectively. The old- 
 fashioned man clings to his ideal of woman- 
 hood as men cling to the religious ideals that 
 are part of their very existence. On the other 
 hand, the modern thinking woman finds in the 
 revolt against parasitism also a directly fe- 
 ligious appeal. The growth and development 
 of women's character and initiative that is so 
 noticeable to-day, cannot be reconciled with the 
 galling inferiority of her economic position in 
 the family. 
 
 We may believe that the family is generally 
 the best place for small children (though with 
 the experience of A Montessori Mother 
 before us, even that is not so certain); we may 
 unquestionably hold it to be a valuable element 
 
24 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 in the control and development of young 
 people, certainly in their teens, possibly rather 
 later. But it does not at all follow that it is 
 best for single grown-up women to be entirely 
 dependent on their families for subsistence and 
 home life. There are all sorts of direct or 
 subtle influences making for deterioration in 
 such an arrangement. Girls used to be, some 
 still are, treated as children up to an absurdly 
 late age, in some cases do not even have an 
 allowance ; while through lack of training they 
 have no possibility of working for what they 
 want, and are turned back on the good nature 
 of some relative or friend who may be moved to 
 make them a present. The artificial conditions 
 of their lives offer little opportunity for forming 
 good habits of mind or gaining any knowledge 
 of the realities of life. They have no ex- 
 perience of business or industry, and know 
 little or nothing of the actual machinery of 
 civilised life that provides them with the where- 
 withal of existence. The isolation of women 
 in the home, their lack of experience in co- 
 operation on equal terms with their fellows, has 
 often resulted in the production of types, on the 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 25 
 
 one hand like Thackeray's Amelia, lacking 
 energy and self-reliance, on the other like 
 Trollope's Mrs. Proudie or Pinero's Mrs. 
 Porcher, so obsessed with their own authority 
 and position that they become a terror to their 
 family and friends. 
 
 Nor does the upper-class family at pre- 
 sent seem to have much significance as the 
 sphere of training of the young woman for 
 domestic life. In very few well-to-do leisured 
 families, so far as my observation goes, are girls 
 at all consciously or purposely trained for hav- 
 ing homes of their own. The degree in which 
 marriage is, or is not, deliberately made the 
 object of a girl's life, varies very much from 
 one family to another, and in the nature of 
 things it is difficult to know much about so in- 
 timate a matter in regard to more than a very 
 few homes or families. But my impression is 
 that where marriage is definitely aimed at, 
 either by girls for themselves or their parents 
 for them, domestic training is not by any means 
 viewed as the means thereto. Why should it? 
 A knowledge of domestic arts may help a girl 
 when she is married, but it certainly will not 
 
26 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 help her to be married. Whether for good or 
 for evil, the normal young Englishman does 
 not choose his wife for her proficiency in these 
 matters.* Indeed, so curiously do social forces 
 work out, so unexpected are their reactions, that 
 at the present time the college girl or the pro- 
 fessional worker often seems to know more of 
 practical household matters than the girl who 
 has hardly stirred away from home. Girls who 
 live in college or in rooms, or lodge together, 
 on what is usually by no means an ample in- 
 come, soon find out the way to economise by 
 doing little jobs of cooking or the lighter kinds 
 of laundry work for themselves. Some find 
 this a great fatigue, added on to strenuous brain 
 work, but others seem rather to enjoy it, and it 
 may be expected that when the hours of work 
 (whether of men or women) are devised on a 
 saner and more scientific method than at pre- 
 sent, many brain workers will voluntarily per- 
 form some amount of manual work, and may 
 even find in it a change and recreation. At 
 
 • This was written before reading Mr. Arnold Bennett's 
 article, " Case of a Plain Man," in the Strand, April, 1913. 
 I note with gratification that Mr. Bennett's observation 
 confirms mine. 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 27 
 
 the present time the well-to-do grown-up family 
 is the last place to serve as a school for wives, 
 the scale of living being usually too generous 
 to be instructive to the prospective bride, unless 
 she is marrying a wealthy man. 
 
 Nor, on the whole, does home life seem to 
 tend towards efficiency in social work. This 
 must, of course, be largely a matter of opinion 
 and individual observation, but so far as that 
 goes, to the present writer, after a somewhat ex- 
 tended and varied service on committees and so 
 forth, it certainly appears that the professional 
 woman is more efficient, more ready, more 
 accurate, and by no means less willing to give 
 time and energy, than the woman of no fixed 
 occupation. The prolonged period of tutel- 
 age and subordination undergone by the 
 home-bred girl or woman often unfits her 
 for work requiring decision, initiative, and 
 responsibility, and makes it more difficult for 
 her to become detached from class views and 
 prejudices. 
 
 Veblen points out that women in the leisured 
 class have been very slow in waking up to their 
 position : — 
 
28 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 " After the stage of universal female drudgery is 
 passed, and a vicarious leisure without strenuous 
 application becomes the accredited employment of 
 the women of the well-to-do classes, the prescrip- 
 tive force of the canon of pecuniary decency, which 
 requires the observance of ceremonial futility on 
 their part, will long preserve high-minded women 
 from any sentimental leaning to self-direction and a 
 sphere of usefulness." 
 
 In other words, the sense of duty was for so 
 long turned inwards to home work that it 
 continues to act mechanically in that direc- 
 tion when much home work has become 
 economically useless. Miss Ferrier, in Mar- 
 riage, makes fun of the old ladies who, in her 
 day, still went on diligently spinning as they 
 had been taught to do in their youth, although 
 the industrial revolution had destroyed the 
 value of their work; but two or three genera- 
 tions later girls were still taught that long 
 pieces of needlework were of a virtuous nature, 
 even if of no particular use when completed. 
 It was wrong to sit with idle hands, but many 
 a woman passed through a long and blameless 
 life without ever using her mind for five conse- 
 cutive minutes, and apparently only a few 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 29 
 
 adventurous souls dared to ask whether their 
 brains should not be occupied as well as their 
 fingers. 
 
 Girls' education till lately was dominated by 
 the ideals of the drawing-room, languages, 
 especially French, unfortunately, being taught 
 mainly with the hope of acquiring an " accent," 
 and with little vision of the new world of 
 thought, wit and culture, so especially stimu- 
 lating to the slower Anglo-Saxon brain, that 
 might be opened to the student. As to music 
 much might be said, but happily the institution 
 of the after-dinner " piece " or song is dying a 
 natural death — let it rest in peace! Even 
 dress, which might have been some aid to the 
 young mind in its awakening search for 
 beauty, for individuality, for self-expression, 
 before all things had to be subject to " le qu'en 
 dira-t-on," to the restless endeavour to achieve 
 distinction in the eyes of others, and at all costs 
 to follow the fashion. This exaggerated fear 
 of public opinion, the excessive injunction of 
 seeking approval, admiration, and considera- 
 tion, is perhaps one of the very worst features 
 
3 o CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 in the parasitic life of woman. It is quite 
 obviously a result of the fact that under the 
 given conditions a girl had ho hope or prospect 
 of achieving anything in life, of making any 
 position or niche in the world by her own 
 efforts. She must please, if she was to be any- 
 body or do anything, and to this wonderful end 
 of pleasing her education must be subordinated ; 
 her whole natural bent, if she was unlucky 
 enough to have one, deflected; her opinions, if 
 she happened to form any that were unpopular, 
 falsified and hidden away. " Women . . . 
 cannot act honestly so long as they depend for 
 subsistence on father, brother, husband or 
 lover, and not on their own labour " (Pearson). 
 It is in the economic dependence of women 
 on men that we should look for the cause of such 
 sex-antagonism as we see to-day; an antagon- 
 ism greatly exaggerated by some nervous 
 folk, but certainly existing here and there. 
 Girls have been brought up on intensely insin- 
 cere ideals. They were taught by rote that it 
 was unmaidenly to look out for marriage, but 
 by facts that it was the only chance in life for 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 31 
 
 them,* and this in a class where women are 
 largely in excess of men and cannot possi- 
 bly all marry. It is not very surprising 
 that girls and women have begun to stir against 
 such a position, and to lay the blame, whether 
 justly or unjustly, on " man-made laws." 
 
 From some time back in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury a small but growing proportion of women 
 have therefore set themselves against the idea 
 that they must be, or pretend to be, grown-up 
 children all their lives, have everything given 
 them, and be completely dependent on another 
 person. Economic independence is their 
 watchword. Handicapped as they are by the 
 supposition (frequently erroneous) that women 
 are partly supported at home, or will shortly 
 marry and be supported by a husband, and 
 therefore need not be paid a living wage, these 
 women put their powers and skill to the test of 
 competition and exchange. The step forward 
 that they are taking in the evolution of social 
 ideals seems to me quite incalculable in its im- 
 portance. In their honesty, their fearlessness, 
 
 * Compare Mrs. A. Webster's A Housewife's Opinions, p. 234 : 
 " People think women who do not want to marry, unfeminine ; 
 people think women who do want to marry, immodest." 
 
32 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 their self-respect, how poor appear the little 
 arts of "getting round people," coaxing for 
 presents and the like, practised by the woman 
 who relies on her attractions. It is extra- 
 ordinary how much more sensitive we are all 
 becoming on these points. Take a little scene 
 in Granville Barker's Voysey Inheritance. 
 Ethel is the younger daughter, the " baby of 
 the family," aged 23 : — 
 
 Mr. Voysey (taking Ethel on his knee) : Come 
 here, puss, have you made up your mind yet 
 what you want for a wedding present? 
 
 Ethel (rectifying a stray hair in his beard) : After 
 mature consideration, I decide on a cheque. 
 
 Mr. Voysey : Do you ! 
 
 Ethel: Yes, I think a cheque will give most scope 
 to your generosity. Of course, if you desire to 
 add any trimmings in the shape of a piano or a 
 Turkey carpet you may . . . and Denis and I 
 will be very grateful. But I think I'd let your- 
 self go over the cheque. 
 
 Mr. Voysey : You're a minx. 
 
 Ethel : What is the use of having money if you 
 don't spend it on me? 
 
 Imagine this little scene, or something like 
 it, in a play of the ordinary type fashionable 
 not so very many years ago. Should we not 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 33 
 
 all have accepted it as a charming picture of 
 well-to-do English domesticity? The petted 
 daughter — the adoring father— of course he 
 will " let himself go over the cheque." Is it not 
 for that that he passes strenuous days in the 
 City, chasing exchange values that his lady re- 
 lations will transmit into the values that cannot 
 be exchanged : the domestic hearth, the family, 
 a standard of life, particular modes of amenity 
 and fitness that appeal to them? But some- 
 how our consciences have been disturbed, and 
 we are no longer quite so sure of the beauty of 
 these ideals. There are women who have 
 come out, faced the ordeal, measured them- 
 selves against the labour market, and asked for 
 nothing more than the wages due to their work. 
 Perhaps Mr. Voysey, even, somewhere in a 
 back office, has a typist whom he pays con- 
 siderably less than the ^300 a year he is to 
 allow Ethel on her marriage. And the dark 
 background of wrong and impending disaster 
 that was already overshadowing the Voysey 
 family in the play causes uncomfortable mis- 
 givings as to the desirability of arrangements 
 
34 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 that keep women still "babies" at twenty- 
 three. 
 
 More tragic is the break-down of the 
 patriarchal ideal in the case of the deserted 
 wife, the wife of an invalid or unemployed 
 man, of a worthless idler or drunkard, or of 
 a man who, though employed, does not for 
 various reasons earn sufficient for the upkeep of 
 the home and the maintenance of the children. 
 In such cases as these the traditional ethics of 
 the family are confronted with the plain 
 economic fact that the domestic virtues, how- 
 ever highly developed in the wife and mother, 
 have no earning power, and will not put bread 
 on the table or coal in the fireless grate. It 
 may be quite true that women are more valu- 
 able to the community when taking Care of the 
 home than when working for an outside 
 employer for a more or less inadequate wage. 
 But dogmatic statements of this kind are use- 
 less to women faced with the practical problem 
 of sustaining life. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE WEAK SIDE 
 OF THE INDIVIDUALISTIC IDEAL 
 
 The individualistic ideal, therefore, lays great 
 stress on the training and preparation of 
 women for the competitive struggle and on the 
 securing for them what is called " full equality 
 of opportunity," which seems to mean the re- 
 moval of every barrier excluding women from 
 occupations which are open to men. Progress 
 in these directions, as we have seen, is desirable 
 and necessary, but there is a tendency to ex- 
 aggerate its importance and to concentrate too 
 exclusively on the effort to assimilate the posi- 
 tion of women to men. There is no doubt that 
 the present position of women, whether in the 
 industrial, professional, or leisured classes, is 
 anomalous to some extent, and though some 
 part of the anomaly is due to out-of-date 
 methods of education and to unreasonable and 
 35 
 
36 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 outworn prejudice and fashion, yet some part 
 of it seems to lie deeper still. 
 
 Although the majority of women appear, 
 according to the Census, to leave work on mar- 
 riage, an important minority continue work- 
 ing, and an unknown proportion, having 
 given up work, find themselves compelled to 
 resume it in middle age to earn money for their 
 children and themselves. The conflict between 
 industry and the home here appears in a sharp 
 form, but it noticeably works out differently 
 with different types of women. In some cases 
 the motive of the children's support operates 
 as an inducement to industrial efficiency. But 
 this is not the case with all women, and it would 
 be very surprising if it were. Supposing a 
 woman is married at twenty-five, and widowed 
 at forty-five, and finds she has to go back to 
 work ; for twenty years she has got out of the 
 habit of industrial work for wages; she may 
 have worked nearly as hard or harder at home, 
 but it has been work on different lines, work 
 done for use, for love, not for wages, not in 
 competition, and work done more or less 
 at her own time and in her own way. 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 37 
 
 She must have lost some of the old readi- 
 ness, the old lightness and deftness of touch, 
 which seem to be generally the special skill of 
 women. It is an immense handicap to have 
 lost the twenty best years of life. The amaz- 
 ing thing is, not that many women fail, but that 
 some more or less succeed in these circum- 
 stances. Again, the episodical nature of 
 women's work lowers the value of their work 
 in the market. Many women would rather 
 stay at home, but in a time of bad trade the hus- 
 band gets out of work, the wife tries to get work 
 instead — just at the most unfavourable oppor- 
 tunity. Again, many women who are 
 domesticated and fond of their children detest 
 going out to work. The Charity Organisation 
 Society has made efforts to train middle- 
 aged widows for industrial life. Some 
 of these women, we are told, lack professional 
 ambition. They are distracted by the idea that 
 the children are tumbling into the fire or under 
 horses' hoofs. They do not train well—they 
 would rather do a little charing or washing in 
 an irregular way. Are we to blame them? 
 The handicap of status, much more than lack 
 
38 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 of physical strength or incapacity for skilled 
 work, is often at the bottom of the low wages 
 and comparative ill-success of women in 
 industry. 
 
 This reaction of the family on industry and 
 vice versa, we may pause to notice, is the 
 strongest of all arguments for scientific regula- 
 tion of the conditions of industry. Women 
 are especially liable to be exploited under the 
 stress of competition, because they do not com- 
 bine so well as men do, and because they so 
 often go into industry either as a meanwhile 
 employment before marriage or to make money 
 for their children afterwards. 
 
 Mr. Gould, describing the West End 
 milliners and dressmakers, wrote in 1880 : — 
 
 " Of the thousands of young and delicate girls 
 who are engaged in trying to earn a bare sub- 
 sistence in a deleterious atmosphere no one can tell 
 how many go down in the struggle. No statistics 
 can be formed of the percentage of deaths, of en- 
 feebled constitutions, of the amount of disease 
 engendered, in the first instance, by the deadly 
 atmosphere of the workrooms in second and third 
 class establishments. . . . 
 
 " Nothing is more surprising than to hear the 
 
INDIVIDUALIST IDEAL 39 
 
 advocates of ' women's rights ' of both sexes, in 
 full knowledge, apparently, of the hardships under- 
 gone by the very class whose battle they profess to 
 fight, cry out for absolute liberty of action to all 
 females employed in labour ! For their own sakes 
 let us hope that they do so in ignorance, at all 
 events, of the state of the particular industry under 
 notice. The necessity of the working dressmaker 
 is the opportunity of the needy employer and 
 ' middleman ' ; it is a condition calling aloud for 
 help and redress." 
 
 Under such circumstances the demand for 
 mere " equality of opportunity," voiced by in- 
 dividualist feminists, is illusory. As Professor 
 Karl Pearson pointed out in 1889, " equality 
 of opportunity " is as fallacious in the case of 
 women as "freedom of contract" in the case 
 of labour. The organisation of women's 
 labour, which had only just begun when Pro- 
 fessor Pearson wrote, has, as he prophesied, 
 increased considerably in recent years, and 
 " the demand for special legislation and special 
 protection" is fast replacing "the cry for equality of 
 opportunity which marked the earlier stages of the 
 emancipation movement." 
 
 We do not find the Women's Trade Union 
 League or the Anti-Sweating League, or the 
 
40 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 Women's Co-operative Guild, agitating for a 
 repeal of the regulation of women's labour in 
 the Factory Acts. It is now abundantly recog- 
 nised that " equality of opportunity is idle 
 when one party has alone to bear a peculiarly 
 heavy part of the social burden." " Free- 
 dom," as it is called with unconscious irony, 
 means freedom to the employer to exploit the 
 weaker class of worker, to " grind the faces of 
 the poor," to take advantage of the youthful 
 energy and docility of the girl worker, or of the 
 failing strength of the widowed mother. 
 
IV 
 THE ANOMALY 
 
 "What^are we to resist, and what are we to be friends 
 with ? ' ' 
 
 In the cases we have described the position of 
 woman is seen to be anomalous, and the ten- 
 dencies of what may be called educated public 
 opinion are uncertain and contradictory. Girls 
 are alternately told that they must become 
 trained, and skilled, and organised for industrial 
 efficiency, and, on the other hand, that they 
 should devote their youth to domestic arts and 
 preparation for motherhood. Some tell the 
 poor destitute woman that her highest duty is 
 at home, but that, as we have seen, does not 
 help her much, the domestic virtues being en- 
 tirely unproductive of the means of keeping the 
 home together. Others preach training, 
 energy, self-dependence, to women whose chief 
 desire is for home and children. While it is 
 impossible to over-estimate the value of the 
 4i 
 
42 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 woman's movement towards better education, 
 wider outlook, and increased development of 
 character and intelligence, it has had the weak- 
 ness of insisting on a limited and one-sided 
 view of woman's nature and capacity. 
 
 The reactionaries on the one hand, and the 
 feminists on the other, are apt to ignore some 
 essential elements. The difference between a 
 young man and a young woman at the outset of 
 their respective industrial careers is very largely 
 this : that while his main prospect in life centres 
 round getting on in his trade or craft, hers has 
 all the excitement of uncertainty, and depends 
 in a comparatively small degree on her own 
 technical proficiency. In other words, at the 
 time of life when a man normally attains his 
 highest strength and efficiency, the highest 
 point of his wage-curve, and when his work 
 is most remunerative both to himself and 
 his employer, most women withdraw from 
 industry and devote themselves to work 
 that does not pay at all in the ordinary 
 sense. There are all sorts of reasons for 
 this. Some women, most women let us 
 hope, marry for affection, others because they 
 
THE ANOMALY 43 
 
 desire children, many probably from the almost 
 overwhelming desire for a home of their own, 
 many again from an uncompromising dislike 
 of work under ordinary commercial circum- 
 stances. If we generalise these motives to- 
 gether and treat them broadly as one, they can 
 be summarised as " the pull of the family." It 
 is needless to elaborate here what has been 
 so often demonstrated that it is now common 
 knowledge, that the uncertainty of the girl's 
 career tends to lessen her interest in technical 
 training and in trade-union organisation. 
 
 This does not mean that any particular 
 woman need fail to attain a point of efficiency 
 equal to or even higher than that reached by 
 most men ; it does mean that the average woman 
 cannot attain as high a point of industrial 
 efficiency as the average man, because many 
 naturally-gifted women retire from the race, 
 and the general level is thereby lowered. 
 
 This brings us to another point. There is 
 not only the difficulty of women combining in- 
 dustrial work with family life; there is the 
 attitude of women themselves towards outside 
 work. It is sheer sentimentality to try 
 
44 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 and disguise the fact that a large propor- 
 tion of women abhor the competitive struggle 
 and feel in themselves no turn for creat- 
 ing exchange-values. They may or may 
 not want to work — some do in fact work really 
 hard — but they do not want to work in the 
 labour markets; they want to live for the use- 
 values that are their tradition, children, hearth 
 and home, a standard of life, particular modes 
 of conduct that appeal to them. In another 
 play by the author already quoted, Mr. Barker, 
 we get a certain aspect of the situation set forth 
 with much point and sympathy. The 
 Huxtable family, in the Madras House, are 
 socially not on a very high plane. Their 
 wealth has been imperfectly assimilated, and 
 they do not know how to put into life even as 
 much beauty and amenity as the Voyseys 
 achieve. The six daughters are ill-educated, 
 well-intentioned, not very attractive, and have 
 almost nothing to do. Ominous signs of 
 "nerves" are beginning to appear. The 
 girls have no trade or marketable accomplish- 
 ment with which they could earn their living, 
 nor does anyone in their circle expect them to 
 
THE ANOMALY 45 
 
 do so. Mr. Huxtable, as a matter of course, 
 shoulders the burden of six grown-up, incom- 
 petent daughters, unless some other man pro- 
 poses to relieve him of one. The man pays, 
 and strange to say, has got so accustomed to 
 paying that in large sections of society the 
 economic dependence of women is unquestion- 
 ingly maintained and regarded as sacred even 
 unto this day. It has somehow or other be- 
 come accepted and set up as the norm or 
 standard of domestic life that man must pay for 
 both. 
 
 And, strangely again, this device is common 
 to women of the best type and to women of a 
 much lower sort also. The best women make 
 men work, because they know their children 
 won't have enough unless he does; the others 
 because they want more conspicuous hats or 
 more brilliant jewellery than they can other- 
 wise compass, for themselves, it may be, or per- 
 haps for their daughters. In either case they 
 use their attraction and influence to induce men 
 to get on, to achieve success in producing ex- 
 change values. Thus women of very different 
 characters and tastes may find themselves 
 
46 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 curiously united on this point. They are 
 "womanly women," in that they dread the 
 world of competition and exchange. They 
 dread economic independence because they 
 fear, not without reason, that it may mean 
 economic self-dependence. Nor is the 
 womanly woman altogether wrong. She is 
 right in perceiving that, for her, the production 
 of use-values is far more important than any 
 exchange-values she can achieve. 
 
 The importance of the womanly woman as 
 the creator of use-values, however, hinges upon 
 the will and capacity of the man most nearly 
 concerned to provide her with exchange 
 values ; a fact which tends to give her a strong 
 bias in favour of the present position of woman 
 and the organisation of the family. And here 
 we find a formidable obstacle in front of the 
 woman's movement, viz., the immense conser- 
 vatism and immense power of the womanly 
 woman ; immense power, I say quite advisedly, 
 because after all it is she who largely decides 
 what the next generation is to think and feel, 
 and what the accepted code of duty and stan- 
 dard of life are to be. Much is said about 
 
THE ANOMALY 47 
 
 "man-made laws"; but, after all, the whole 
 human race at its most impressionable age does 
 in fact pass through the hands of women — 
 women as mothers, women as nurses, servants, 
 teachers, and so forth — and women in this way- 
 are responsible for a very large share in mould- 
 ing society into the shape and form it assumes, 
 as well as the institutions that hold it together. 
 When any large proportion of women really 
 want economic independence, and are ready to 
 face economic self-dependence — not quite the 
 same thing ! — they will be able to get it through 
 persistent influence on the youth of both sexes, 
 and probably with no very great difficulty on 
 the man's side. 
 
 At present the womanly woman's per- 
 ception of the strength of her position 
 may and does work out in various forms of 
 passive resistance by women to any idea of 
 standing on their own feet, using their minds, 
 thinking or acting for themselves. As we saw, 
 a generation or so ago girls were still often 
 brought up to think it wrong to go out alone, or 
 do anything giving even the appearance of self- 
 reliance. The childishness of speech and 
 
48 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 manner still affected by some women indicates 
 the persistence of the idea that man must be 
 hypnotised into thinking of women as neces- 
 sarily helpless, and of himself as their protector. 
 Another expedient, unconsciously or sub-con- 
 sciously adopted to justify their existence as 
 non^earning women, is to multiply home activi- 
 ties, often in a perfectly useless and superfluous 
 manner. Some women will cover their draw- 
 ing-room with trinkets and think they have 
 done quite a day's work when they have dusted 
 and arranged them. Others spend hours, 
 months, years in fancy work, which may, but 
 more often may not, justify itself by the beauty 
 of the result. Others attribute immense im- 
 portance to the use of the needle, and make a 
 great deal of its place in girls' education. All 
 these attitudes of mind betoken a somewhat 
 anxious desire to justify the position that there 
 is full occupation for women in the home ; and 
 the real motive is probably the wish to 
 differentiate the sphere of man and woman as 
 sharply as possible, to keep the man up to his 
 work and restrict woman to the sphere of use- 
 values alone. 
 
THE ANOMALY 49 
 
 That there are cogent reasons for such 
 an ideal of life who will deny? But it 
 is also true that the whole policy has its weak 
 side, and is often made an excuse for extreme 
 slackness, not to mention downright idleness 
 and doing nothing. The old occupations that 
 sharpened the wits and occupied the energy of 
 the mediaeval women have left the home, for 
 good and all, as far as we can see. Dr. Lionel 
 Tayler, Mr. and Mrs. Whetham and others, 
 sing the praises of the old-fashioned woman, 
 and can hardly find words sufficiently strong to 
 condemn the modern trend towards higher 
 education and work outside the home. It seems 
 almost indelicate to remind, writers who have 
 this bias of the plain fact that after all it was 
 the much praised womanly woman who used to 
 constrict her own and her daughters' waists to 
 eighteen inches, or whatever the fashionable 
 limit was; whereas it is the severely criticised 
 " advanced " woman who, having used her in- 
 fluence for better education, has therewith 
 brought in fresh air and physical exercise, and 
 freed the modern girl from the senseless trap- 
 pings that fettered her mother's movements 
 
50 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 and hindered healthy development. Again, 
 the empty futility of the life led by many 
 women who stay in the home, excessive depen- 
 dence on servants, luxury, extravagance, and a 
 straining after a needlessly high standard of 
 comfort, are doing more to demoralise the 
 modern home than the mere fact that some 
 women have trained themselves for outside 
 work could ever do. " Those who would up- 
 hold the family ideals of the past," says Pro- 
 fessor Earl Barnes, " have less cause to fear the 
 militant agitator than they have to fear the idle 
 parasitic wife, who relies on her legal rights to 
 give her luxuries without labour, position with- 
 out leadership, and wifehood without the care 
 and responsibility of children." Dr. Saleeby 
 writes : — 
 
 " Everyone knows how the standard of luxury 
 has risen during the last few decades, both in Eng- 
 land and in the United States. All history lies if 
 this be not an evil omen for any civilisation. It 
 means, among other things, that more effectively 
 than ever the forces of suggestion and imitation 
 and social pressure are being brought to bear, to 
 vitiate the young girl's natural judgment, deceiv- 
 ing her into the supposition that these things which 
 
THE ANOMALY 51 
 
 seem to make other people so happy are the first 
 that must be sought by her." 
 
 Socially, too, this class is a danger. Class 
 selfishness in politics, the lack of any under- 
 standing of labour questions or feeling of 
 citizenship, a patronising attitude toward the 
 manual working class, with pity and regret for 
 their ignorance ( !), all these are pitfalls for the 
 unoccupied, untrained, well-to-do woman of to- 
 day. If she is to make the future of the race, 
 well I — posterity has our most respectful 
 sympathy. 
 
 The position is thus very complex. On the 
 one side we have the woman's movement steer- 
 ing straight for economic independence, 
 apparently tending to turn women away from 
 home, marriage, and children, and to foster a 
 spirit of barren individualism ; yet, on a closer 
 survey, seen to be giving women that ex- 
 perience in association, knowledge of their 
 fellows, and appreciation of spiritual values 
 which are most needed in the home, and which 
 the home education of women often most 
 deplorably lacks. 
 
 On the other hand, we have the intense con- 
 
52 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 servatism of the womanly woman. She has 
 the future largely in her hands, yet td this 
 aspect her eyes are blinded and her heart 
 is cold. Her interests and influence are 
 arrayed on the side of family life, yet 
 she is continually impelled by her present 
 economic position to view marriage mainly as 
 a provision or promotion, and man as the pro- 
 ducer of exchange-values who can pay for what 
 she wants. This is the view that the facts of 
 life teach our upper-class girls, whether their 
 parents teach it them explicitly or not. Its re- 
 action on the woman's movement is, perhaps, 
 worth pointing out. As long as men are ex- 
 pected, on the one hand, to satisfy the demands 
 for luxurious expenditure set up by the women 
 of their family, it is not surprising that they 
 should, on the other hand, resent the claims of 
 other women to political and professional 
 equality. Men who oppose the suffrage, or 
 higher education, or measures for opening 
 the professions to women, naturally feel their 
 position to be strong, as long as the typical 
 woman for them, their mother, sister, sweet- 
 heart or wife, remains the woman who is power- * 
 
THE ANOMALY 53 
 
 less, and most unwilling to face the work-a-day 
 world for herself. 
 
 The central difficulty of the woman's ques- 
 tion seems to be the fact that, however hard 
 a woman may work at unpaid service in her 
 home, if she has no money of her own she 
 is formally dependent on another for support, 
 although she may create use-values equal to her 
 maintenance many times over, and her posi- 
 tion thus cannot be economically distinguished 
 from that of the purely parasitic woman who 
 lives only to spend what is given her. And the 
 two types, ethically and socially so eternally 
 different, nevertheless shade into one another 
 through infinite gradations. The difficulty of 
 the question appears in the quite pathetic 
 reluctance of writers of fiction to face the ques- 
 tion of women's dependence or independence. 
 When the heroine is confronted with the choice 
 of loveless marriage or single destitution, either 
 another man drops from the skies like Perseus 
 and saves her from the wicked rich man who 
 was going to appropriate her; or it somehow 
 turns out that the rich suitor is not really 
 objectionable , and that the heroine can quite 
 
54 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 comfortably and conscientiously fall in love with 
 him after all. Even Miss Cicely Hamilton did 
 not scorn to use this formula in her play " Just 
 to get Married," and resolved a situation of 
 poignant truth and tragedy in a fourth act with 
 a comically Victorian flavour. It would be 
 extremely interesting to know whether man- 
 agerial exigencies forced this sentimental 
 device on a writer otherwise so severely un- 
 compromising as Miss Hamilton, and still 
 more so to know how, left to herself, she would 
 have extricated the poor Georgina from her 
 dilemma. 
 
 Can any stream of tendency be detected in 
 this eddy and whirlpool of conflicting ideals, 
 warring economic forces? Is social progress 
 in the direction of an ever-increasing special- 
 isation of women for domesticity and the care 
 of children alone? Not only the re-action- 
 aries, but the biologists (e.g., Dr. Lionel 
 Tayler and Dr. Saleeby) and at least two 
 advanced women writers (Ellen Key and Laura 
 Hansson) think so. Or are women in general 
 to attain self-control and self-determination by 
 adopting a skilled trade or craft, becoming 
 
THE ANOMALY 55 
 
 economically independent, combining work 
 with motherhood? To me neither solution 
 appears inevitable or even desirable. The 
 variety of types and certain broad facts make it 
 impossible, or most improbable, that the result 
 can be so simple. 
 
THE YOUNG WOMAN 
 
 It is most unlikely that the ideal of complete 
 dependence and ignorance of the world for 
 women can possibly be re-established. Econo- 
 mic forces and the ethical impulse of the 
 modern movement are here pulling together. 
 It is coming more and more to be realised that a 
 girl should be able and willing to earn her 
 own living, and that to regard marriage as a 
 woman's economic provision for life is not only 
 extremely unwise from a prudential point of 
 view, but is degrading to that "honourable 
 estate," and probably the cause of such sex 
 antagonism as exists. Parents are beginning 
 to ask if their daughters cannot be taught some 
 occupation, initiated into some walk in life that 
 may help them in the time of need. The 
 schoolmistress is being confronted with a 
 demand for the re-organisation of girls' educa- 
 tion, with a view to professional life of one kind 
 56 
 
THE YOUNG WOMAN 57 
 
 or another. In short the idea of economic in- 
 dependence is beginning to take root. It is 
 thus likely that it will become more and more 
 common for girls to be self-dependent in all 
 grades, except perhaps the very rich — and 
 even here there is a perceptible tendency for 
 girls of higher spirit and more individuality 
 than the others to come out and choose some re- 
 gular occupation, even if they are living on 
 private means. There are fathers so public- 
 spirited as to make good allowances to 
 daughters who devote themselves to social 
 work, and lead practically the life of a pro- 
 fessional woman. 
 
 It is objected that the strain of the requisite 
 training and education is too great. But is it 
 not the educational methods that are at fault if 
 the strain is so great? It is often forgotten 
 that the old-fashioned drawing-room accom- 
 plishments were also the occasion of a good 
 deal of strain, when the teachers were ignorant 
 of physiology and of method in teaching.* 
 The avoidance of nervous strain in education is 
 
 • One of Mrs. Ewing's stories, Six to Sixteen, has an excellent 
 study of a mid-century boarding school, innocent of higher 
 education, but quite as provocative of " nerves." 
 
58 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 a question of hygiene, open air, physical exer- 
 cise and educational science, and of limitation 
 in number of subjects. It is difficult to obtain 
 exact information on such a matter, but my 
 own impression is that nervous break-down 
 occurs more frequently, and restlessness and 
 depression are more observable among girls 
 who are kept at home doing nothing than 
 among those who seek outside work. 
 
 Again, it is objected by Mr. and Mrs. 
 Whetham and others, that the attraction of 
 occupations and professions will operate as a 
 discouragement to marriage. To this it may 
 be replied that marriage is already much hin- 
 dered under the dominance of the traditions 
 long maintained. Figures have been collected 
 showing that the marriage rate of women in the 
 upper and professional classes is extremely 
 low, but there appears to be little if any ground 
 for the assumption that it is appreciably lower 
 among college women than among other 
 women of the same social grade. The segrega- 
 tion of women from affairs, the throwing the 
 whole burden of maintenance on the husband 
 and father, are responsible for a continual rise 
 
THE YOUNG WOMAN 59 
 
 in the standard of expenditure, and leave num- 
 bers of women with scarcely any interest in life 
 but dress and display. It thus becomes more 
 and more difficult to start conjugal housekeep- 
 ing on old-fashioned lines. 
 
 Greater economic security and mental 
 development and increased power of self- 
 determination are giving the young woman 
 more scope to follow her own inclinations, and 
 her increased self-respect and knowledge of life 
 will raise the ideal of marriage by weakening 
 the compulsion to marry for economic reasons ; 
 and the strain on men to put commercial suc- 
 cess before all things will be lessened. If she 
 does not marry she has a far better position, 
 and is of much greater social value and signi- 
 ficance than the "old maid" of previous 
 generations. 
 
 If she does marry it is surely of immense 
 advantage to husband, children and house, that 
 she should have had a period of outside work, 
 should have learnt to measure herself against 
 the world, to find out her strength and her 
 weakness. The old-fashioned girl who went 
 straight from a subordinate position in her 
 
60 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 father's home to the control of servants and 
 subsequently of children in her husband's, 
 made an abrupt transition from subjection to 
 authority. Experience in association, the most 
 human and valuable of any, was usually lack- 
 ing, and thus the home-bred woman tended 
 either to be deficient in energy and initiative, 
 afraid to think for herself, or else, slightly in- 
 toxicated by the sudden jump into responsi- 
 bility and authority, she attempted no 
 criticism of her own ideas, and innocently 
 assumed them to be infallible for the rest of her 
 life. 
 
 The modern young woman with her wider 
 experience, better training, increased self-con- 
 trol and power of seeing issues wider than her 
 immediate interests, is to me the most hopeful 
 feature in the situation. It is significant also 
 that while the young woman worker is 
 accused by the hostile observer of despising 
 domestic institutions, she is in reality often 
 animated by a craving to make a home of her 
 own, far stronger than any desire for money, 
 success, or distinction. This shows how 
 fundamental this instinct is in women, and 
 
THE YOUNG WOMAN 61 
 
 how little any external change of manners can 
 change the deepest feelings in human nature. 
 Miss Knowles, in The Upholstered Cage 
 (p ioo) says " The average girl . . . wants her 
 home more than anything else on earth, in 
 many cases without a great desire for marriage 
 or husband." Mr. Howells, in A Woman's 
 Reason, has brought out the same fact with the 
 delicately keen observation that is all his own. 
 Miss Louise Bosworth investigating conditions 
 in Boston, Mass., says that she found the long- 
 ing for a home, however modest and circum- 
 scribed, almost universal, and its recognition 
 essential to a sympathetic understanding of the 
 woman worker. 
 
 Moreover, the "womanly woman" has 
 a great deal to learn from her professional 
 sister in the matter of the ordering and 
 arranging the home. Considering that the 
 latter usually has much less to spend, it 
 is extraordinary how greatly she excels in 
 giving character and individuality to her 
 rooms. We all know the uninteresting draw- 
 ing-rooms of some London suburbs and other 
 districts where the well-to-do congregate; the 
 
62 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 furniture, china and pictures handsome and 
 expensive, are usually in far too great quanti- 
 ties, and apparently arranged with no reference 
 to the tastes and occupations of the inmates, 
 merely in mechanical obedience to a family 
 tradition, or to the dominant fashion, or as an 
 indication of the owner's worldly position. On 
 the other hand the young professional woman's 
 study may look a little bare ; she cannot afford 
 a profusion of useful and useless articles, but 
 everything is carefully chosen to supply a 
 want; the writing table may be plain, but it is 
 convenient; appliances are arranged to be at 
 hand when wanted, the one or two pictures, 
 casts, or ornaments are chosen for their own 
 sake, and not to satisfy public opinion, and 
 thus the whole room becomes an expression of 
 personality, the very essence of home in the 
 highest sense of the word. 
 
VI 
 
 THE MARRIED WOMAN 
 
 But what is to be the married woman's 
 ideal? Self-dependence for her is at pre- 
 sent usually difficult, if not impossible. It 
 is only in the case of exceptional and 
 picked women that the strain of carrying 
 on an occupation closely enough to pro- 
 duce an adequate income can be combined 
 with home and children. In the face of facts 
 that are all round us, the greater capacity of 
 men for producing exchange-values; the 
 greater efficiency of women in the realm of use- 
 value ; and the success of many homes and 
 households thus run upon the principle of 
 " division of labour," it appears extremely un- 
 likely that any large proportion of married 
 women will aim at earning their own living, as 
 the norm or standard of their lives. We 
 ought, indeed, to go further and recognise that 
 for the womanly domesticated woman to be 
 63 
 
64 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 forced by economic stress into the field of com- 
 petitive production or service is really a waste, 
 even a cruelty. Society is here in practice at 
 variance with all its own most cherished tradi- 
 tions, but the difficulty of devising any means 
 by which the married woman, not possessed of 
 property and not working in an occupation, can 
 become really or legally economically inde- 
 pendent of her husband is felt to be very great. 
 It is fortunately true that there are numbers of 
 cases in which no difficulty arises, especially, 
 perhaps, among the working classes. In 
 many marriages there is virtual community of 
 goods, and the wife has an equal, sometimes a 
 preponderant voice in expenditure. This is, 
 perhaps, nearest to an ideal state, the wife's 
 position as a creator of use-values, and not a 
 parasite, being fully defined. In others, per- 
 haps with more wisdom but less idealism, the 
 husband makes an allowance to the wife, pro- 
 portional to his earnings, for the expenses of 
 housekeeping and her own and the children's 
 dress. But undoubtedly many cases of hard- 
 ship arise, and also, apart from hardship, there 
 is evidence of a growing moral sensitiveness in 
 
THE MARRIED WOMAN 65 
 
 women, some of whom dislike dependence even 
 upon a husband with whom their relations are 
 Otherwise happy. This may be considered 
 very overstrained, but every moral or ethical 
 advance in civilisation is obtained by the 
 growth of new impulses in individuals, which 
 appear overstrained to others. It is felt, there- 
 fore, that on many grounds the married woman 
 needs a more stable economic position. Under 
 present conditions, inconsistently enough, we 
 talk a great deal about motherhood being the 
 noblest occupation for women, thus recognis- 
 ing by implication that value-in-use is the 
 highest principle, but in practice it is left to the 
 chance of her husband being able and willing 
 to create value-in-exchange sufficient for her 
 living ; if he cannot do so she may supplement 
 his earnings by working in a dangerous trade, 
 carrying heavy weights in a jam factory or a 
 sack factory, or working a treadle sewing 
 machine. 
 
 Lady Aberconway has suggested giving a 
 wife a precise and legal right to a certain por- 
 tion of her husband's earnings. Such an enact- 
 ment might have considerable value as setting 
 
66 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 up a norm and standard which might have the 
 force of suggestion or authoritative sanction, 
 but it is difficult to see how it could be enforced. 
 It also has to be remembered that in many cases 
 the difficulty is the absence of any earnings at 
 all, viz. : in cases of physical or mental in- 
 capacity of the husband, or sudden changes of 
 industrial processes. A very serious objection 
 is the tendency of such enactment to penalise 
 the legal tie. 
 
 The Maternity Insurance Clause of the In- 
 surance Act is an attempt on lines which very 
 probably will be further developed. Other 
 measures can be suggested to mitigate in some 
 degree the insecurity of the woman's position. 
 Better industrial training for the young woman 
 would help her to better paid work, to which, in 
 case of need, she might return after marriage, 
 with better economic prospects than in the un- 
 skilled factory or home work that so often 
 takes advantage of the cheap labour of 
 women, especially in places where men's work 
 is casual, dangerous or irregular, as in the 
 neighbourhood of docks; but industrial train- 
 ing would not help her when her chief need is 
 
THE MARRIED WOMAN 67 
 
 to be able to stay at home with a young infant. 
 It is conceivable, however, that as women's 
 wages rise, young girls might pay into a fund 
 which would give them a small dowry or por- 
 tion on marriage, and thus lift them out of 
 complete economic dependence. This actually 
 happens now in some of the factories run by 
 productive co-operative societies; the young 
 woman who marries and leaves work can draw 
 out the few pounds, which, as "bonus" or 
 shares, have accumulated to her credit. Such 
 a fund might possibly be State-aided under the 
 Insurance Act, as it would obviously tend to 
 promote efficiency in motherhood. It seems 
 indeed not unlikely that increasing wealth, a 
 falling birth-rate, and the insistent need of rais- 
 ing the standard of health and efficiency, will 
 bring us nearer and nearer to some form of 
 endowment of the mother, or of the children. 
 
 This conclusion will be uncongenial to 
 many. The responsibility of the father for 
 maintenance is a triumph of spirit over matter ; 
 the association of the man, the woman and the 
 young child is the most beautiful in human 
 society, and one is apt to feel that state endow- 
 
68 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 ment may vulgarise the family, over-feminise 
 the household, and by weakening the father's 
 position and influence lessen the breadth and 
 variety of life for the child. This is how many 
 instinctively feel about it, but it may well be 
 that sentiment and prejudice are blinding our 
 eyes. As the Minority Report of the Poor 
 Law Commission told us, parental responsi- 
 bility has not in reality been weakened by the 
 provision of education being thrown on the 
 State, nor is it being weakened by the increas- 
 ing degree in which education authorities are 
 being compelled to take thought for the medical 
 care and treatment of children. In these cases 
 there is no supersession of the parent by the 
 State of the authority ; there is rather a partner- 
 ship of the two which brings home to the parent 
 his or her duty to take advantage of the means 
 of health or education provided. There is a 
 real education of very poor parents in being 
 charged with the responsibility of sending 
 their children to school, and, if necessary, to 
 the doctor, or in following out the instructions 
 and injunctions of the visiting nurse as to treat- 
 ment. Child maintenance by the State seems 
 
THE MARRIED WOMAN 69 
 
 very much more remote than these measures 
 already in force, and it is quite conceivable that 
 if the working class secures better wages, and 
 effective provision is made against unemploy- 
 ment, there may never be any serious demand 
 for it. But if it does come, those who dislike 
 the idea may reflect that it need not necessarily 
 disintegrate the family any more than the Mar- 
 ried Women's Property Act did. It is not im- 
 possible that the family, so far from being 
 weakened by the relaxation of economic stress, 
 may be actually strengthened thereby. 
 
 The root of the matter is that it is almost 
 impossible to make any logical scheme or 
 theory that will fit the woman and the young 
 child exactly into a commercially organised 
 society, based on exchange-values. If we may 
 momentarily assume for the sake of argument, 
 a state of society in which it was decided by 
 the general will, or the collective government, 
 to use the existing productive forces for the 
 common good ; to produce first of all what was 
 needed for healthy existence, to endow the citi- 
 zens with the means of life and throw upon 
 them collectively the responsibility of co-opera- 
 
70 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 tive production of further goods, it is obvious 
 that the woman and the child would take a very 
 different position. As the touchstone of value 
 would have to be use, rather than exchange, 
 the mother would draw her endowment, and it 
 would obviously be the worst and most anti- 
 social course to separate her from her infant for 
 outside work, as long as it needed her, or her 
 health needed rest and recuperation. 
 
VII 
 
 THE MARRIED WOMAN WORKING 
 
 There remains the question of the married 
 woman whose heart is in her work, and who 
 objects to giving it up on marriage. At pre- 
 sent very nearly all the organised forces of 
 society are against her. Many education 
 authorities require women teachers to retire on 
 marriage ; in various branches of the Civil Ser- 
 vice the same injunction is enforced. In 
 industry some employers will not engage a 
 married woman. Over and above direct com- 
 pulsion there is the pressure of social opinion 
 and social sanctions, almost unitedly tending 
 towards the same end. We even hear from 
 time to time rumours of legal enactment to pro- 
 hibit married women's work. Measures with 
 this end would probably be supported, not 
 only by those who desire to maintain the tradi- 
 tion of the father as the sole supporter of the 
 family, but even by some of the single women 
 7i 
 
72 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 workers, who regard the married woman as to 
 some extent an "unfair" competitor, because 
 though herself maintained or partly maintained 
 by a husband, she comes into the field to take a 
 post which might otherwise be given to a single 
 self-dependent woman. It appears to the pre- 
 sent writer, nevertheless, that the opposition to 
 married women's work on these grounds is 
 mistaken. It is not a question of rivalry 
 between single and married women, but of 
 what is good for the nation and the community. 
 We may well believe that it is a national evil 
 that poor women should be compelled to leave 
 their children in order to earn a few shillings 
 for their support in some wretched underpaid 
 trade ; it is quite another thing to assert that no 
 women, no matter what their capacity, earning 
 power, tastes and experience, ought to do any 
 outside work after they marry. It is difficult, 
 in the present very imperfect state of know- 
 ledge on the subject of child psychology or 
 woman psychology, to lay down dogmatically 
 exactly what is the right course for a woman to 
 pursue in these matters. All women cannot be 
 run into the same mould. .There are many 
 
MARRIED WOMAN WORKING 73 
 
 who find their best interest and happiness, or 
 rather who find it absolutely inevitable, to make 
 their children the occupation of their lives. 
 There are others, who, though not work- 
 ing, if sufficiently well off invariably secure 
 paid help, in order to save trouble and 
 have more time for household supervision 
 and social engagements. There is a third 
 class, relatively small in number, but, per- 
 haps, more than relatively important in 
 calibre and personality, who wish not to be 
 excluded from either work or motherhood. 
 The policy of compulsory retirement on mar- 
 riage may be an extremely unfortunate one 
 from the point of view of society, if it operates 
 as a hindrance to marriage among a very picked 
 and specially able set of women. Teachers, 
 for instance, have a special knowledge of chil- 
 dren. Inspectors and others engaged in the 
 social work of the State have considerable know- 
 ledge of the facts of social and industrial life. 
 The special efficiency thus acquired is a fair 
 presumption of special fitness to bring up 
 children. In many cases women will them- 
 selves prefer to leave their vocation on mar- 
 
74 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 riage, but in cases where they do not so desire, 
 surely the wise policy for the State is to take 
 a broader view than that of mere administrative 
 convenience, to make honourable and adequate 
 provision for periods of retirement when neces- 
 sary, but not to force an extremely select class 
 of women to choose for good and all between 
 the one life and the other. At the present time 
 nothing is more clear than that we want the 
 valuable elements in the woman's movement to 
 perpetuate themselves, and we should consider 
 most seriously whether it is really wise, in the 
 case of a class of women who on grounds of 
 social expediency are specially desirable as 
 mothers, to weight the alternatives against 
 marriage. The present writer lately, in going 
 through a number of investigated cases of mar- 
 ried women's work, noticed that while a large 
 majority of the women disliked going out to 
 work and would have stayed at home but for 
 economic stress, a small but quite distinct and 
 considerable minority preferred to work. Apart 
 from the question of work, also, it seems prob- 
 able that some proportion of women, though 
 physically capable of having fine and healthy 
 
MARRIED WOMAN WORKING 75 
 
 children, are not psychologically fitted for tend- 
 ing and bringing them up. We overlook such 
 cases in the richer classes, because the 
 deficiencies are usually made up by paid help, 
 but visit them with moral blame and reproba- 
 tion in the case of working women. Surely it 
 would be wiser to admit that some women are 
 less suitable than others for the work of child- 
 tending, and if they prefer to find a substitute, 
 let them. Most women who are mothers of 
 small children prefer home life to industry; of 
 that there seems to be no doubt. It is by no 
 means equally certain that the minority who 
 would rather work for wages should be coerced 
 into staying at home. All that concerns 
 society is that the children should not be 
 neglected. 
 
 It is quite worth considering, and a point 
 often overlooked in this connection, that child- 
 rearing is a far more complicated business than 
 it used to be, in that the need of good citizen- 
 ship is more insistent. It is not enough to 
 bring up a child to be a good member of a 
 family and earn his or her living. More and 
 more of civic virtue, the sense of being a mem- 
 
76 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 ber of a community and of the duties and 
 privileges linked up therewith, is asked of all 
 of us. Now the married woman who is also 
 voluntarily engaged in an occupation is, of all 
 women, likely to maintain in her home the 
 atmosphere of clear thinking, wide knowledge, 
 and deep social sympathy, which the comfort- 
 ably placed woman, who has no idea what it is 
 to earn a day's income, so often fails in. We 
 may quite admit that the double life, the double 
 strain, is impossible for many women. There 
 is, however, sufficient evidence that it is 
 possible for some, and those the gifted many- 
 sided women who are the very flower and per- 
 fection of our time. Though comparatively 
 few they are likely to have influence out of pro- 
 portion to their numbers, in the direction of 
 bringing new knowledge and higher ideals into 
 the "Englishwoman's castle," too often a 
 fortress of class selfishness and prejudice. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE SOCIAL CARE OF CHILDREN 
 
 The falling birth-rate seems likely, more than 
 any other social tendency of our time, to re- 
 verse the extreme emphasis on exchange-values 
 of the mid-century economists. We are slowly 
 coming to understand why Ruskin defined 
 value as ' ' that which avails towards life ' ' ; 
 even in these years of booming trade the very 
 richest may get their reminders that 
 " everything else is bought and sold for labour, 
 but labour itself cannot be bought or sold for any- 
 thing, being priceless." 
 
 The extraordinarily interesting literature 
 of the Montessori educational methods sug- 
 gests that the care of the children is probably 
 destined to become more and more a social 
 concern, for which the best knowledge in the 
 community must be made available. Even 
 children of the better-off classes will probably 
 receive more State attention in the future. The 
 77 
 
78 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 social care of children may also inter alia offer 
 some help towards the solution of the woman 
 question in other ways. New types of social 
 work are certain to open up for women and will 
 undoubtedly prove a congenial outlet for their 
 energy, answering in many ways to the deeper 
 needs of women which the arid monotony of 
 machine and clerical work cannot satisfy. As 
 more women thus become engaged in the care 
 of children, as school nurses, health visitors, 
 clinic doctors, sanitary inspectors, and in simi- 
 lar occupations, it will be possible for en- 
 lightened municipalities, if they choose, to 
 raise the standard of women's remuneration, 
 and indirectly influence the supply of labour in 
 other industries. 
 
IX 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 The woman's movement is attacked as being a 
 mere affirmation of the individual woman's 
 rights,' a demand for equality of opportunity, 
 and an assimilation of the position of woman to 
 that of man. To a certain extent these charges 
 are justifiable. It needs, however, to be 
 pointed out, as I have tried to do in the preced- 
 ing pages, that the individualism of the 
 woman's movement was a necessary and inevit- 
 able re-action against the position of women in 
 the modern patriarchal family, which is not 
 only insecure, economically speaking, but often 
 unsatisfactory from the point of view of racial 
 and spiritual development. Now the interests 
 of women are inevitably bound up with the in- 
 terests of society as a whole, and this fact, 
 momentarily obscured, was bound to re-emerge 
 in the activity of thought and emotion 
 generated by the movement. The dependence 
 of women on men may have had considerable 
 
 79 
 
80 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 survival value in the past, when the family, as 
 an economic organism, moved "all together if 
 it move at all." But this is no longer the case, 
 or only very rarely. The earning members of 
 the family go off to work, usually in different 
 directions, as independent wage-earners. They 
 may spend their earnings as a family, but they 
 seldom make them as such. The economic 
 subjection of woman is therefore no longer 
 valuable for the maintenance of the family, and 
 is positively harmful in view of the need for 
 building up a higher standard of human in- 
 telligence, character and citizenship. The 
 economic subordination of women tends to- 
 wards the predominance of the economic 
 motive in marriage, the growth of luxury and 
 a degraded type of education. In so far as the 
 woman's movement has helped to break up the 
 conception that " woman's sphere" was to be 
 merely ornamental and parasitic, and that 
 woman's education should keep her always 
 mentally immature, it has been of incalculable 
 benefit. The woman's movement has been not 
 merely an economic, but an ethical and religious 
 impulse, and its very mistakes have made us 
 think. To open careers for single women was 
 
CONCLUSION 81 
 
 all to the good, as far as it went, but a far 
 deeper and more vital problem lay in the educa- 
 tion and outlook of the "womanly woman," 
 specifically so-called. 
 
 We are getting past the stage of believing 
 that the care of children can be carried on suc- 
 cessfully by women who have been trained 
 never to think for themselves, but to follow 
 blindly the dictates of tradition, vanity and 
 prejudice. We are beginning to understand 
 that great possibilities lie latent in most 
 human beings, but are usually starved or 
 atrophied for want of the mental food or mental 
 exercise that would bring them into being. 
 Self-sacrifice has been preached to women for 
 centuries; is it not time to preach self-develop- 
 ment? Is not personality the greatest need? 
 " If women are to be fit wives and mothers," 
 says Mrs. Elsie Parsons, " they must have all, 
 perhaps more, of the opportunities of personal 
 development that men have." 
 
 The woman's movement has thus a profound 
 biological significance in so far as it tends to 
 break up the economic subordination of 
 women, and to develop a nobler and purer 
 tradition of social life and manners. 
 
82 CONFLICTING IDEALS 
 
 AUTHORITIES CITED 
 
 p. vi. For material as to woman the originator of 
 industry in prehistoric times, see Professor 
 Karl Pearson's essay " Woman as Witch," in 
 the Chances of Death, Vol. II ; and " Sex Rela- 
 tions in Germany," in his Ethic of Free- 
 thought; also Havelock Ellis, Man and 
 Woman (4th Ed.), Introduction and Chap. XIV. 
 Generally, for the idea of women's economic 
 independence, see Mrs. C. Perkins Gilman's 
 Woman and Economics , now published in a 
 cheap edition at 1/-, and Olive Schreiner's 
 Woman and Labour (Fisher Unwin, 8/6). 
 Frau Lily Braun's Die Frauenfrage is not here 
 directly quoted, but the writer cannot omit to 
 express her deep indebtedness to that work. 
 
 pp. 5, 6. The quotation from Mrs. Bosanquet is 
 from The Family, pp. 221-2. 
 
 p. 6. Lester Ward's Pure Sociology, p. 336. 
 
 p. 8. See Marianne Weber's Ehefrau und 
 Mutter, pp. 52 and 73. 
 
 pp. 15, 19. The quotations from Mary Wollstone- 
 craft will be found in the Rights of Women, 
 Scott Library, p. 210, p. 84. 
 
 p. 20. Lectures on Female Education, by James 
 Garnett, Richmond, U.S.A., 1824. 
 
 p. 21. The Newcomes, by W. M. Thackeray, 
 edition i860, p. 241. 
 
 p. 21. The Three Brontes, by May Sinclair. 
 
 p. 22. Ordeal of Richard Feverel, by G. Meredith, 
 ed. 1885, p. 275. 
 
 p. 22. A Woman's Reason, by W. D. Howells, 
 Tauchnitz ed. 1884, I. p. 160. 
 
 p. 28. "Vicarious Leisure," an expression in- 
 
AUTHORITIES CITED 83 
 
 vented by the American economist, Thorstein 
 Veblen, to denote the state of a dependent 
 maintained in idleness in order to enhance the 
 social distinction of his or her master. See 
 his Theory of a Leisure Class, p. 358-9. 
 p. 30. Karl Pearson, " Socialism and Sex," in the 
 
 Ethic of Freethought, p. 418. 
 p. 37. The observations on widows and C.O.S. are 
 taken from a Report to the Poor Law Com- 
 mission by T. Jones and C. Williams on Out- 
 door Relief and Wages, p. 4, 1909, Cd. 4690. 
 p. 38. Factory Inspector's Report for year ended 
 Oct. 31, 1880 (Pari. Papers, 1881. Vol. XXIII.) 
 p. 39. Pearson, "Woman and Labour," in the 
 
 Chances of Death, Vol. I. 
 p. 49. Whetham, W. and C. D., Heredity and 
 Society, Longman's; Tayler, J. L., The 
 Nature of Woman, Fifield, 1912. 
 p. 50. Earl Barnes, Woman in Modern Society, 
 p. 255, Cassell, 1912. Compare C. Saleeby's 
 Woman and Womanhood, p. 238. 
 p. 58. See " Higher Education and Marriage," 
 
 by B. L. Hutchins, Englishwoman, June, 1913. 
 p. 61. Living Wage of Women Workers, by 
 Louise Bosworth, Philadelphia, 191 1. Com- 
 pare Miss Phoebe Sheavyn's paper in The 
 Position of Woman, Real and Actual, p. 101 
 (Nisbet, 191 1). 
 p. 65. The Woman's Charter oj Rights and 
 Liberties, by Lady McLaren (now Lady 
 Aberconway), 1909. 
 p. 77. Ruskin, Munera Pulveris, p. 51. 
 p. 81. Elsie Parsons, The-Family, p. 346. Com- 
 pare Lester Ward's Pure Sociology, Chap. 
 XIV, p. 396, passim. 
 
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