Woman's Place in the Future World Order
Everyone is talking about the post-war world; wondering what his own status in that world will be. And no one is looking forward with more concern than the woman of the United States whose life has been so greatly altered by the demands of war.
Already the economists are making plans for her future without consulting her. Apprehensively she wonders if her co-operation with the production leaders during the war is to be rewarded with less and less freedom to direct her own life in the future.
Already there have been suggestions thrown out about forcing some sort of work for the state on her. Some personages whose speeches are deemed sufficiently important to be printed in the daily papers have mentioned casually that women will be expected to work in even greater numbers outside their homes after the war than they are doing now.
Looking at the situation as it actually exists, without the gloss of wishful feminists with their inexplicable, sustained self-delusion as to the nature of women, or the equally unreal, gilded memories of the beautiful days when mother was a girl (after all, it was mother who made this working outside the home respectable and even social), one ordinary working girl who is neither philosopher nor economist, theologian nor professional reformer, formulates her theory for a world a woman would want to live in.
Here is the situation as it really is:
Working girls, quite frankly, are tired of work. Women in their fifties and sixties, contemporaries of the militant feminists, still talk of women's right to work in factories and shipyards but the younger women know better than to believe in the remedial properties of women's extra-domestic labors on a sick economy. They know that the majority of jobs opened to women as a result of manpower shortages have been the dirty jobs, the dull jobs, the jobs that will never provide a means to advance toward independence. Welding, riveting, elevator-operating, truck driving, delivery work of all kinds, assembly line work, inspection work—well paid or not, they are essentially static jobs. Managerial jobs are definitely closed to them. Office workers have seen how reluctant owners are to surrender responsible jobs to them. They know that secretarial positions have been glamorized and made the best paying because private secretaries are nothing more than first class maids to executives, real or would-be.
When managers have been obliged by circumstances to advance any woman to a desk formerly handled no matter how incompetently by a man, they can scarcely conceal their eagerness for the war to be over so as to be able to bring back a man.
That is one side of the girl's life.
On the other hand, she sees that working, far from being a matter of choice, has become inevitable. She has grown up in a civilization where chivalry is dead and unremembered. Fathers take it for granted that their daughters will work once they are through school; and more and more husbands take it for granted that their wives earn a little less than half the family income. Social life has deteriorated to such an extent that even moderately wealthy girls are forced into offices in order to meet marriageable men.
In our high school days we laughed at the quaint old-fashioned stories of the men who married women for their generous dowries. Then we went out into this brave new modern world to discover that our men were marrying the girls who had good jobs or whose fathers were superintendents or vice-presidents.
Starting to work in this topsy-turvy world of modern business, young women find themselves forced to compete for work and wages with men when they do not want to compete. They want to be partners, not rivals. But what can they do? All the traditional work of women has been taken over by machines operated by men. The virtues for which she used to be esteemed are no longer regarded with respect. The one function for which no substitute has yet been found is no longer welcome.
But what of the future? What will happen when the war is over and the soldiers return? What will be our place in the world of tomorrow when our present status is so unsatisfactory? What should our status be and what would we ask for if we were given a voice in the master plans for the new world?
Not most important, but first, is the belief that every woman should be allowed to work outside her own or her parents' home if she wants to. To blame all the social evils on women's acceptance of such work is to find too facile an explanation of them. Nor is it in accordance with facts. To attempt to enforce such an attitude by legislation would be especially dangerous, for it would arouse to immediate action all the professional feminists, the demagogues looking for an issue on which to use all their excess wordage about freedom, equality, etc., and would make an emotional issue of what is only one of the many involved in the pressing need for a reorganization of society.
There are, moreover, very grave reasons why women should be allowed to work at her choice until a better world comes. There must be some means of livelihood, some respectable outlet for the energy of those women who do not wish to marry. I read somewhere that a society which does not have a place for such women is barbarous. I agree. Women who have been thrown on their own resources by circumstances or misfortune should have some means of supporting themselves. Ability to work is a protection against the tyranny of men. That sounds foolish but there it is. What men can do to women can best be understood by reading some of the novels and biographies of that most barbarous period, the latter half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century in England. The glimpses we get in Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, in the lives as well as the novels of the Brontes, make women hesitant about surrendering themselves completely into the hands of men.
In a Christian society there is a modifying factor in the form of what might be called a public conscience. I know at least among the Irish of a generation or so ago that the man who mistreated his wife and children was liable to public humiliation and boycott by the outspoken Irish, and a man's personal life was as public as the city hall in those days.
Now, when such a thing as a common standard of morals is no longer existent and a belief in objective morality is rare, maltreatment of any human being, wife, child, aged, sick or crippled, arouses less public indignation than the beating of a mongrel pup or the willful murder of a gnu in the city zoo. In such a society women must have the safeguard of possible financial independence.
Again, women must not be forbidden to work in order that those gifted with special talents be not smothered. A hundred mediocrities in any field must have existence for any genuine great talent. For without the hundred, the one is impossible. Then there is that curious characteristic of human nature that makes forbidden territory seem desirable. Wives are happier doing housework if they know that it is work of their own choice. Lastly work outside the home is not necessarily incompatible with family life.
Taking for granted, then, that business and the professions should remain open to women, the question then becomes: Should the average woman work and under what circumstances? I think levelheaded observers agree with Mr. Schuyler's conclusions in the April Catholic World that when women maintain jobs outside their homes, they weaken family life, endanger their own marital happiness, rob themselves of man's protective capabilities and, by consequent decrease in the number of children, weaken society and condemn the nation to gradual extinction.
Why, then, do women work? As I suggested before, it is partly a question of suction. Once any marriageable woman starts to work, she can force her fellows into it either by dressing better and thereby attracting the other sex more readily; or, simply by being around men for longer periods of time, have more opportunities for marriage or whatever is its equivalent among moderns. Formerly, as women married, they quit working, but they found again the same situation. Women who continued to work after they married had better clothes, bigger cars, more parties than those who remained at home. For the size of a salary check is based not on how many people are dependent on it, but on how much that individual's own labor contributes to the owner's profits.
It takes heroic courage in these times for a couple to surrender that extra check and share the remaining one with three, four or more children. The wage system based thus on an individual's work time instead of on his social status as head of a family must bear a considerable share of the blame for the present conditions in which marriage is a liability, children a misfortune multiplied with each additional child and a stay-at-home is regarded as a parasite.
Another powerful force drawing women into business and keeping them there is the deceptive ease of housework. The work involved in maintaining a house or apartment, without children or with one child, is, as most working women know, too much to do in one's spare time. But it is not enough to keep an active woman busy or, as a government economist would state it, "occupied at her highest skill." It can be done in a few hours a day, if necessary and, up until a few months ago, it was easy to obtain the services of a maid one or two days a week to do the major part of the regular cleaning.
A third factor in women's work is one which I have never seen stated anywhere and yet, to me, seems obvious and of paramount importance in dealing with the situation. It is this: it is impossible for a girl to go straight from school where she had few responsibilities to an office or factory where she has none at all and, in that period which is the crystallizing stage of her adult life, develop a taste for responsibilities or even an ability to manage her own life. Thoughtless people repeat parrot-like what they see in the papers written by wishful thinkers—that by spending her salary a girl learns to handle money. It simply is not true.
Few girls learn to save, few have anything prepared for marriage, most develop early a taste for expensive clothes and pay-as-you-go furs. It would be interesting and enlightening to champions of the modern girl's money-sense to examine the credit files of any of the women's ready-to-wear specialty shops and department stores.
And really astonishing is the number of women who have become so deadened in their mental life by the gruelling monotony of typing, sewing, copying figures, filing, that they cannot bear to be by themselves for long or to adapt themselves to the independence of housework. If society is to be reorganized on a stable basis, all these factors must be taken into consideration. The urgent need is for measures which will make it easier to marry than not to marry, more advantageous to have children than not to have them.
After the war there will be a period of confusion and uncertainty so great, I think, as to preclude the feasibility of any attempt to overturn the existing social system except by voluntary readjustment. During that time the many thousands of spinsters and widows with no possibility of normal married life will have to continue working because there' will be nothing else for them to do. They will then act, whether they realize it or not, as a stabilizing factor in this urgently needed change-over to a better society.
I agree with the suggestion that widows of soldiers who have small children should be pensioned by the government. I would go further and suggest that women whose husbands are partially or wholly incapacitated during the war should be paid by the government to take care of them.
The principal reason for women working outside their own homes is that the modern factory system has taken away from them all responsibility for the production of food and clothing, the education of children, and, by the same token, has rendered them impotent to help their husbands build anything for the future. Housework as it is practiced in most families, is simply a matter of maintenance and women are not to be blamed too much for wanting to leave it to the hired help. The principal evil in women's work outside their own home is that it alienates the life of the wife from the life of the husband and gives marriage as much permanence as the room-sharing of two freshmen at boarding school.
To restore to women their rightful share in responsibility for the needs of the family and its future and, at the same time, to center the interests of both husband and wife on their common life, the most promising plan is that advocated by Mr. Borsodi and Monsignor Ligutti. This plan, known as subsistence farming, is designed to make every household, by the fullest possible use of modern household machinery, as nearly self-sustaining as possible; not in order to isolate it from the community but in order to preserve it from the fluctuations of modern business cycles and provide something permanent upon which to build for the future.
From the point of view of a woman, it is the nearest thing to an ideal solution. It would restore her to her old place as queen bee, doing what she likes to do best—managing people and things that are dear to her. She would have work that would take her highest skill, imagination, foresight and energy. Best of all, it would provide constructive, essential activity for the children of the house and would make larger families possible and desirable.
There are no substantial arguments against the subsistence farm way of living and it is immediately possible for the many families living in suburban areas and small towns. But first they must be convinced of the possibilities of such a way of life and be inspired with enthusiasm enough to alter their whole concept of what work is and to what purpose. In other words, how can women be persuaded to give up the uneasy luxury of war jobs for the uncertainty of work they know nothing about.
Perhaps if the mothers of young children who have been sufficiently sensitive to their responsibilities to remain at home in spite of war jobs and inflated salaries—if these and especially those among them who have ventured into victory gardening could be persuaded to continue and even plan on a more extensive undertaking next year and the next, they could form the nucleus from which a new, sounder society could develop.
In order to insure the continuance and growth of such a system, certain measures should be taken. Most imperative is that commercial subjects should be disestablished from their present pre-eminent position in secondary schools. School work should not be watered by long drawn-out courses in shorthand, typing, commercial arithmetic, which can be more effectively taught in a concentrated three-months' course. School classes cannot possibly approximate business experience, so why try? School should be a preparation for something considerably more important than business.
Instead, there should be established from the first years of school on through college, subjects that are really practical, like sewing, cooking, diatetics, canning, etc. Surely some sort of arrangement could be worked out by which the theory in school classes could be correlated with regular, continuous practice at home. The 4H clubs already manage it. In fact, it would not be impossible to entrust the teaching of domestic science to the person to whom it rightfully belongs—the mother—and leave to the state and its overworked school teachers only supervision and the maintenance of standards by a system of examinations.
Whatever the method of instruction, the courses should be made compulsory for both boys and girls, not because they are expected to do nothing else, but because such knowledge embodies the fundamentals of human existence and survival just as reading, writing, and arithmetic are the fundamentals of learning.
Thus trained for a real life, girls would be less likely to want those poorly paid, soul-deadening detail jobs in offices and factories that take so much and give so little in return.
There must be developed at the same time a strong neighborhood social life to allow young people to meet and marry and there should be means provided for young people to marry and have children while they are still young. I believe that both would inevitably arise from the stability of a small farm environment. Even an office boy could marry without anxiety if he knew how to grow his own food and his wife knew how to can it.
The chief sufferers from any plan such as this would be businesses and factories which have so long profited from the cheap labor of adolescents, and have been amazingly successful in convincing young people that their underpaid clerkships were doorways to opportunity with a capital O. Eventually, they, too, might bless the day that saw the Borsodi plan popularized. Because the scarcity of cheap clerks might, providentially, enforce the elimination of much of the absurd multiplicity of files and crossfiles, statistics and recaps that have made accounting departments such heavy drains on the productive earnings of industries. It might be that production departments would be restored to their rightful place now usurped by the accounting sections.
It sounds like a tremendous program to undertake, the transforming of a whole country's manner of living. But it no longer is a question of what can be done. It has become a question of what must be done. Society cannot possibly remain in its present state of imminent chaos for long. Women must be given a secure place in society.
Their present sorry condition might be attacked from another angle. They could demand legislation that would enforce equal rights with men and equal salaries. Then, obviously, the women who take time to have children, would be entitled to a subsidy to make up for man-hours lost and for man-hours contributed to the future. The government could set all wages and incidentally decide on the bounty for each child born. The bounty could be arranged on a sliding scale according as children were wanted that year or not. Government inspected nurseries could arrange to receive the children as soon as the mother is able to return to work.
Ridiculous as it sounds, this kind of plan or some variation of it, is gathering support from many intellectuals. Our great good land will be made as happy and as gay as a prison cell.
Those of us who long for a Christian order had better do something in a hurry or the enemies of Christianity will.
© The Catholic World, Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle.
This item 1319 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
