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قراءة كتاب The Women of Tomorrow
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Schools
The chapters of this book were originally articles in Everybody’s Magazine. I have not embellished them with footnotes nor given them any other part of the panoply of critical apparatus. It could be done. I have preferred to leave them in the dress I first gave them,—a fighting dress. They owe much of their structure, it is true, to facts and ideas out of the dust of libraries. But they owe much more to facts and ideas exhumed out of the much more neglected dust of daily circumstance. Either dust, by itself, is lifeless. When the two cohere they establish the current of existence. At their meeting-place this book has tried to stand. And so, while it hopes to have added to knowledge, it will have failed unless it has merged into conduct.
The reader will forgive the abruptness of the shift of attention from the subject of one chapter to the subject of the next. Each chapter, because of having been a separate magazine article, is still an isolated unit. Its isolation, viii however, is only that of form. In thought there is a sequence both logical and temporal.
Devoting themselves to five critical phases in the mental development of the modern woman, the five chapters of this book accompany her through five successive stages in her personal life. The postponement of marriage, the preliminary period of self-support, the new training for motherhood, the problem of leisure, the opportunity for civic service,—these subjects, treated in turn, follow one another in the order of their appearance in a normal life-history. They are further unified by the proof (I hope it is proof) throughout adduced that even the most diverse of the phenomena observed, the female parasite equally with the female suffragist, the domestic-science-and-art enthusiast equally with the economic-independence enthusiast, are all of them products of the one same big industrial unfoldment which is exposing all women, willing or unwilling, to the winds of the social process, which is giving to all women, whether home-keepers or wanderers, in place of the old home-world, the new world-home.
William Hard.
Chicago, Dec., 1911.
The woman of to-morrow will not differ from the woman of yesterday in femininity or physique or capacity, in her charm for men, or her love of children, but in the response of her eternally feminine nature to a changed environment. The environment is bound to alter the superficial characteristics of woman as every change has done. Man, in his turn, will be a beneficiary of this new womanliness as he has been the ready victim of the old-womanishness.
The reader will find in this book a dramatic picture of the gap between girlhood and motherhood which causes both girls and men to go wrong, and which can only be filled adequately by work—work even more suitably performed after marriage than before. Postponed childbearing, if not postponed marriage, is justified by the superiority of the younger children or the children of older parents. A declining birth rate may be redeemed by a declining death rate and the superior progeny of mature marriage.
The life of great-grandmamma fills us with x wonder and pity. Her labors were legion, and, while no longer necessary in the house, their equivalent must be found or girls become parasites. Notwithstanding her incredible labors great-grandmamma died young, having sacrificed herself on the altar of masculine egotism and prerogative. Her life was a short but not a merry one, but our virtuous forefather’s life was a long and sensual one.
To-day woman is beginning to be educated for the new era and man must go with her. She is learning homemaking with new implements and new opportunities. She need no longer be a drudge and she must not continue to be a doll. Since the days of John Ruskin, even the academic economists have had to put spending before saving in the logical exposition of their science,—consumption and thrift can only be adjusted by those who work and live. Hence, the new mother, alert to the larger needs of her household, is more competent than great-grandmamma and must even supplant “the tired business man” in municipal housekeeping, until he can learn to be her equal and himself deserve the suffrage.
Mr. Hard has produced a brilliant volume, as might have been expected. Mr. Hard could write a book in the dark; but it may not have been known that he could illumine with such scholarly sagacity the shadows cast on the woman question by man’s huge egotism and woman’s carefully coddled superstition. Originally magazine articles, Mr. Hard’s chapters are a unit in being sound economics and sociology on the woman question, but they will probably not secure him a doctor’s degree from his alma mater for they are also humorous, intelligible and inspiring.
Charles Zueblin.
Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away on a career, he were going away on a comet.
She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time she was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn’t got angry and insisted on marrying him.
Into why she waited, and why she wouldn’t wait any longer, chance put most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama, “Love Deferred.” It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any other drama can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a thin, high note of fine pain.
We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that’s too professional. He was a civil engineer. That’s professional enough and more commercial. It combines Technique and Business, 4 which are the two big elements in the life of Modern Man.
When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one more year to go in engineering school.
How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!
When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the last century, he put