I

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

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

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

'Books were to her a never-failing source of delight, and she was an example of the possibility of combining a fondness for elegant literature, for which she never lost her taste, with a faithful discharge of all the relative and domestic duties of a female; and so mingling, without interference or in

jury, that they heightened and reflected lustre on each other.'

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

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

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

Several thousand years ago, an enthusiast regarding the possibilities of women took pains to write out a description of his ideal woman. She was, of course, married. She had children.

She ruled a large and complicated household. She controlled it, not only as a home, but as a factory,—a centre for import, manufacture, and export. She was endowed, not merely with the conservative virtues of thrift and discipline, but with the liberal virtues of administration and enterprise. She was an untiring and effective worker, not self-effacing, but dominating, as effective workers must always dominate.

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

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

may help us is to look at the present situation squarely and see what it is. In doing this, it will make a good beginning if we stop trying to fit to it the formula of a different situation.

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

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

ried woman may at any moment become the married woman, this affects her too. Hence there really is a woman problem.

II

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

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

But, it may be objected, this uncertainty with regard to the 'making' of one's profession is a situation created by the woman herself. Any woman can marry if she wishes. True. But the difficulty here is that, whereas the man's choice of his profession is revocable, the woman's is not. And this

brings us to the second point of difference. For not only is marriage unlike a profession because it cannot be deliberately chosen: it is unlike a profession also because it cannot be relinquished. A man may leave the law and become a clergyman, he may leave the ministry and go on the stage, without rousing more criticism than is readily bearable; but a woman cannot do this with marriage. A clergyman unsuccessful in one parish may be called to another, but a woman, even though she is quite obviously making a bad muddle of her job with her present husband and children, cannot be called' to another more congenial parish, and thus leave the way clear for some one else to take up her work and better it. At least, though such things are done, and there are theories, and even laws, to cover them, they have not yet received the hearty sanction of society. They are contrary to the 'folk-ways."

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

But even where there are children, this fact does not necessarily make a woman's activity comparable to a

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

This statement will be challenged. It is often said that children take more time when they are big than when they are little. More thought, perhaps, but not more time. Little children's needs are, indeed, simple, but they are exigent. The needs of our older children become less and less physical. They need companionship, advice, sympathy - above all, love. Their problems of education, of life-equipment, have to be met; questions of social taste and social ethics arise, and the complications of friendship and love. All these are of the utmost importance and often of the utmost difficulty; but they are matters in whose solution the father ought to have and often does have as large a share as the mother, and in which the child's own share grows rapidly greater. The 'chaperoning' of the young, their social shepherding, is indeed done by some gifted women so skillfully, so efficiently, that it is put for them into the professional class. It is more than a profession, it is an art. But this is by virtue, not of their motherhood, but of their temperament. For the rest, not so endowed, these more formal duties must be judged as part of the social fabric of our present conventional life, which will be taken up later.

There is one more consideration. If marriage is a woman's profession, in a sense in which it is not a man's, — admitting for the sake of the argument that all women who wish to marry can do so and have children, then there should be some adequate preparation for it. This is being strongly urged, and it might be a very good plan if we could feel sure of two things, first, that all married women are enough alike to be treated as a class; and second, that their needs as married women are sufficiently uniform and predictable to be met by preliminary training.

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

The queen upon her throne
And the maiden in her dairy,
They're all alike in this,

They are contraʼry,

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

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

The real truth is that, whereas a man chooses his profession because of a certain rough temperamental fitness that he is more or less aware of in himself, a woman does not do this. She does not

choose, as such, the life of a diplomat's wife, or a minister's wife, or an engineer's wife. In fact, the girl who vows that she will never, never marry a minister or a doctor, or whatever she may choose for anathema, is as apt as not to do that very abhorred thing, for reasons which seem to her at the time satisfactory. As a result, we find women bored and wearied in the diplomat's circle, in the doctor's home, in the village parish, in the forester's camp, bungling their duties and missing their opportunities, when a little puss-in-the corner shifting would better things immensely. Such shifting is, of course, not practicable, but if marriage is to be regarded as a profession it ought to be made practicable.

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

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

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