William Hard

“ It is an immense map of the occupational world for educated women, in which every bay and headland, every lake and hill, is drawn to scale, from poultry farming to department-store buying, from lunch-room management to organized child-saving.
We here see the educational system, at its college academic level, moving not simply toward preparing girls for money-earning work but also toward actually putting them into that work and, in order to put them into it, finding it. ”

“ Marie’s view of the situation, however, is the usual one. We are billions of miles from really realizing that leisure is produced by somebody’s work, that just “Being a Good Woman” or “Being a Decent Fellow” is so far from being an adequate return for the toil of other people that it is just exactly no return at all. We are billions of miles from admitting that the virtuous parasite is just as much a parasite as the vicious parasite:—that the former differs from the latter in the use of the money but not at all in the matter of getting it in return for nothing. ”

“ The unmarried women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period constitute more than one-fourth of the total number of women in that age-period in the United States. In the large cities they constitute usually more than one-third of the total number of women in that period. Wouldn’t it have been remarkable if their families had been able to support them all at home? Wouldn’t it have been remarkable if the human race had been able to carry so large a part of itself on its back?
We now admit the world’s need of the labor-power of women. ”

“ The world is turning round and over and back to that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was widespread.
Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a diffusion of leisure.
The causes were similar.
The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of despoiled peoples, just as we live on the products of exploited continents. They had slaves in multitudes, just as we have machines in masses. ”

“ There’s little wisdom (in a city as large as Chicago) in paroling a wayward boy unless there’s a probation officer to follow him, to watch him, to encourage him, to keep him from relapsing into the hands of the judge. Some 3,500 children pass through the court every year. The judge cannot be father to many of them. The probation officers are the judge’s eyes and hands, giving him knowledge and control of his family. Without the probation officers the new system would have been an amiable reform, but not an effective agency for juvenile regeneration. ”

“ My dear sir, those early New Englanders not only studied in trade schools, but worked and played and slept in trade schools. They spent their whole lives in trade schools, from the moment when they began to crawl on the floor among their mothers’ looms and spinning-wheels. There were few homes in early New England that didn’t offer large numbers of technical courses in which the father and the mother were always teaching by doing and the sons and the daughters were always learning by imitating. ”

“ Make one group of the women who use their leisure to good purpose. Make another of the women who use their leisure to no purpose. You’ll find a growing desire for citizenship in the former. You’ll find little such desire in the latter. The conflict that is going on among women who have any leisure at all is between the spirit which drives them toward a union with the life of the world and the spirit which drives them toward complete detachment and irresponsibility.
“So let’s say no more about the suffrage agitation. It’s simply a sequel to women’s interest in the world’s housekeeping. ”

“ Nobody is innocent in the Mandarin Tea Room of the St. DuBarry, when not there. Dora, you soon learn, deserves to be looked at in any and all ways. It’s not for her that we’re worried. It’s for Jim.
At the name of Jim, Margaret begins to look uncomfortable and helpless. She sinks lower and lower into her chair; and says nothing; and keeps on saying nothing; and seems likely to drown in silence; but her friends start in to rescue her. You can’t help seeing some of the life-lines as they are thrown out. ”

“ Both kinds of immaturity last longest among the boys and girls who come from that large section of society which is neither rich nor poor.
This is not to say that rich and poor escape unaffected. Shall we ever again, from the most favored of homes, see a William Pitt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, by merit, at 23? And, in the mass of the people, shall we ever again see that quickness of development toward adulthood which gave us the old common-law rule validating the marriage of a male at 14 and of a female at 12? The retardation of adulthood is observable in all social groups. ”

“ Simultaneously, by research and also by the use of the printing-press, the locomotive, and the telegraph wire (which speed up the production as well as the dissemination of knowledge) , Science has brought forth, in every field of human interest and of human value, a mass of facts and of principles so enormous and so important that the labors of our predecessors on this planet overwhelm us, and we grow to our full physical development long before we have caught up with the previous mental experience of the race. ”

“ Before Wyatt, leisure had been the thinnest of exhalations along the very top of society. Since Wyatt, it has got diffused in greater and greater density through at least the upper third of it. And for all that magical extension of free time, wrested from the ceaseless toil with which God cursed Adam, we stand indebted (and so recently!) 145 to the machinery set going by that spontaneous explosion of artisan genius in England only a hundred and fifty years ago, kept going (and faster and faster) by the labor of men, women, and children behind factory windows, the world over, to-day. ”

“ Home Economics is the study of Right Living, the study of the importance, the utility, and the possible beauty of the common things of daily existence. Now one cannot study sanitation, fresh air, pure food, adequate housing, the care of children, the protection of the family from disease, the maintenance of a proper environment and regimen for health and efficiency, without instantly perceiving the closeness of the relationship between the life of the individual and the life of the community. ”

“ We have observed the contraction of the home as a field of adequate employment for daughters. We have observed the postponement of marriage in its effect on the occupational opportunities of those daughters. Deprived of adequate employment at home, we have seen them seek it elsewhere. Marriage and housekeeping and child-rearing, as an occupation, we have seen deferred to a later and later period in life. Let us now assume that every woman who has a husband is removed from money-earning work. ”

“ Just at this point, though, we encounter a curious conflict in women’s education. Just as we see their urgent need of a money-earning technique, we simultaneously hear, coming from a corner of the battlefield and swelling till it fills the air with a nation-wide battle cry, the sentiment: “The Home is also a technique. All women must be trained to it.”
At Rockford College, illustrating this conflict, there exists, besides the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home Economics. ”

“ There is not so much processional as recessional about marriage at present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the realistic pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach the comparatively serene, landlocked years from forty-five to fifty-four that we find ourselves in an age period in which the number of single women has been reduced to less than ten per cent of the total. ”

“ Every social group in which there is much leisure has its own smart set. There may be a million dollars a year to spend. There may be only a few thousands. But there is always a smart set.
How suddenly its smartness may follow its leisure, how accurately its plunge into luxury may duplicate the suddenness of modern luxury itself, you may observe with your own eyes almost anywhere. ”

“ Here is a woman whose acquaintance with educational developments of all sorts is of long duration, whose achievements in coöperation with the schools have been admittedly successful, whose time, now that her children are grown up, is much at her free disposal—here she is, working away on the edges and fringes of the school system, while some Tired Business Man is giving the interstices of his commercial preoccupation to the settlement of comprehensive questions of educational policy. ”

“ Their president, retiring from office, comprehended the history of the club and of thousands of other woman’s clubs thus:
“Goethe, who started with the theory that the highest life was to be gained by self-culture, in later years concluded that service was the way to happiness. So we have risen by stepping stones to higher things; through study, through interest in humanity, the supreme motive of this club has come to be service to humanity.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Are there no men’s tailors, 117 gents’ furnishing shops, luncheons, clubs, banquets, athletics, celebrations? And as for home expenditures themselves, is the man simply to bring the plunder to the door, get patted on the head, and trot off in search of more plunder? We must doubt if economy will be reached by such a route. We find ourselves agreeing rather with the home economics lecturer who said: “There never yet was a family income really wisely expended without coöperation in all matters between husband and wife.” ”

“ To choose and use the world’s resources intelligently on behalf of family and community—in this Mr. Devine saw a new field of action, in this Mrs. Richards saw a new field of education.
Women will train themselves for their duties as consumers or else continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation pronounced upon them by Florence Nightingale. “Three-fourths of the mischief in women’s lives,” said she, “arises from their excepting themselves from the rule of training considered necessary for men.” ”