The Masses (periodical)/Volume 1/Number 2/A Highbrow Essay on Woman

by Eugene Wood

A HIGHBROW ESSAY ON WOMAN

 

A Dissertation on the Economic Function of Woman with the Part Played Therein By Scientific
Bulletins and Deep Thinkers

 

By Eugene Wood

 

Illustrated by Horace Taylor

 

IF THERE is any one thing in the reading line that I dote upon more than another, it is a bulletin, a real Scientific Bulletin, whether it be on the Stomach Contents of Arctomys Miurus or The Method of Procedure in Making Salt-rising Bread. Those fellows go at it so thoroughly. Right up to the handle. They don't have to worry whether the editor will like it or not. They don't care whether it will hit the public or not. If anything, they'd a little rather it didn't. It can't be very scientific if people read it and enjoy it. They aren't like literary folks, who when they take hold of a subject must not do more than pull out a few of the prettiest tail-feathers. They pluck the subject as bare as a teacup. And then they take the hide off it. And then they cut it open and have a look at its insides, and dissect away every muscle from every bone, so that when they get all through, and washed up, that subject hasn't one secret left. They know it backwards and forwards, lenghtwise and crosswise, up and down, and outside and inside.

So, when I received a few days ago a Teachers' College Bulletin on "The Economic Function of Woman," by Edward T. Devine, Ph. D., Professor of Social Economy of Columbia University, I just knocked off work on that hurry job I had, part of the pay for which is going to reward the insurance company for my not dying this year, and settled myself to a really enjoyable intellectual sozzle. Here was something that nobody else could ever read clear through unless he was paid for it or had to read it in order to get a term-standing. And I'm interested in Woman. Most men are, if you'll notice. More or less. It is a subject that is brought to the male attention so often, so very often when you consider the whole period from the cradle to the grave. And then, again, this seemed a particularly promising viewpoint from which to consider Woman—what, if any account, is she?

There is not an extended piece of writing, however foolish it may seem, from which it is entirely impossible to get one good idea. And I will say for Dr. Devine that he sets forth some very sound and sensible things. I am sure of this because they're exactly what I think. When he says that students of the economic processes haven't paid as much attention to Consuming as they have to Producing, I think he's quite right. (I want the printer and the editor to let these capital letters stand as they are because I want to give the impression that I am a Deep Thinker. Nobody can be a Deep Thinker without capital letters sticking up through his copy like bristles on a cucumber. If I can't have any other symptoms of a Deep Thinker than Capital Letters, I must have them.)

That this thing of overlooking of Consumption in favor of Production is what ails Society is what I have contended all along. Society takes a lot of pains to produce automobiles and never turns a hand to see to it that I consume one. Doesn't pay any more attention to me in that respect than if I didn't exist. And, from what I can learn, there are many others in just my fix. It isn't that we can't use them or don't want to use them; the trouble is that Society doesn't pay us enough to buy them, and charges us far too much on things that we can't get along without, food and shelter and clothing and coal and carfare and such things. I can't consume near all I'd like to, just on that account. As a nation we can produce till you can't rest. No trouble in the world about that. But when it comes to getting all these things consumed so that, as a nation, we can keep the producing end of the enterprise running full-powered, why, we simply aren't there. The working-class doesn't get in wages what will buy back the things it produces. (I don't know if you ever heard that before. If not, you ought to write it down so that you won't forget it.) If we could rig up some kind of a scheme so that all the working-people could swap their products on an even-Stephen basis with each other, so many hours' time of the shoemaker's being exchanged for so many hours' time of the farmer, and the piano-maker, and the weaver, and the tailor, and so on, till we all got all we wanted, and no middleman cutting in between to grab off his profits, or his interest on the investment, or his cost of credit, or any of the charges we have to pay that represent no real use-value, why, then we'd come pretty close to having the Co-operative Republic, and all we'd need of political control would be to keep the predatory class's hands off what did not concern them.

And it isn't wonderful, either, come to look at it, that more attention has been paid to the Productive Department of the Nation's housekeeping than to the Consuming Department. It has only been about half a century that we have really got to that stage of human progress where, if we wanted to run full-powered, we could produce such oodles and oodles of the things we'd like to.have that we don't know what to do with them all. (That is, some of us don't.) It is only quite recently that we have begun to produce more than we know what to do with until a large proportion of the people get over the notion that they are lucky to be alive. A great many of our citizens aren't educated up to believe that they are entitled to more than four things to eat, or more than two rooms to live in, or better clothes than what will do very well for a mop-rag. We are trying to educate them to live better, but oh, dear! It's an uphill job. The demagogue that goes about inflaming, the passions of the poor and making them envious of their more fortunate brethren has got his work all cut out for him, I tell you. But the fact remains that it is only the other day, so to speak, that we put in electricity, and scientific processes, and cut up industries into sets of two- and three-motion jobs, so that any kind of mud-heads could learn how to work at anything in a week. And now it's time we gave our attention a little to getting the good of all this. At Production we're a hickey; at Consumption we're a lot of thumb-handed dubs. Most of us.

Now here are two grand divisions in Economics, Production and Consumption. Singularly enough, there are two grand divisions in the human race, Male and Female. So Dr. Devine concludes—and what could be more natural? Why, it's almost providential, as you might say—that the Men-folks should have charge of the Productive end, and the Womenfolks of the Consumptive end of the job. Mr. Man puts on his hat, and takes his dinner-bucket, and starts off Monday morning when the whistle blows, and works till Saturday night, when he receives his little old pay-envelope, with $13.80 in the upper left-hand corner. He fetches it home to Mrs. Woman, who thereupon, begins to function. She throws her shawl over her head, and takes the market-basket on her arm,

 

If man is the producer and woman the consumer, will Prof. Devine kindly name the sex of the fat party in the middle?

 

"Who had the hammer last?"

 

and goes out to spend that $13.80 to the best advantage.

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Don't you begin to crow because you perceive that when Mrs. Woman fries the beefsteak she is also adding value to the raw material, and is also a productive laborer just the same as Mr. Man. Dr. Devine saw that, too. As a matter of fact, he beat you to it. Not only that, he also saw that Mrs. Woman not only works in the old-style hand-powered factory of the home, but very frequently in the new-style steam-powered factory away from the home. But if he saw, farther, that Mrs. Woman, with a frequency not known before in history, goes to the factory on Monday morning when the whistle blows, and works till Saturday night, while Mr. Man cooks the victuals, and sweeps the floor, and even minds the baby—— If Dr. Devine saw that also he has kept mighty still about it. In a case of that kind, what is the Economic Function of Man?

Now, in spite of all my capital letters, you are onto the fact that I am not a Deep Thinker, so I might as well own up to you that I have never been able to get my copy into any kind of a Scientific Bulletin. But poor and unworthy though I be, it yet appears to me that Dr. Devine hasn't even picked the feathers off his bird of a subject, let alone cut it open to see what's inside of it.

Maybe right now, in this year of grace, 1911, most men do bring in the pay-envelope, and most women try to make the poor, pitiful, little dab of money that it holds go as far as possible. (And I don't envy them their job, either.) But that's no sign of a duck's nest. It is no great effort of the imagination to figure "she-towns" becoming practically universal. Then will the Economic Function of Woman be to attend to the Consumption end of the job? (The pay-envelope will look rather consumptive, when that time comes, too. Believe me.)

Men have charge of the field of Production now, eh? What d'you suppose old Injun chief Walks-in-the-High-Grass would have to say if you asked him who ought to do the manual labor, men or women? And not to go so far back as the Garden of Eden and Mother Eve taking a bite out of the apple of knowledge of what was good and made folks wise, I have just returned from a trip to the Ozarks, where the women-folks wait on the men, and no more think of sitting down to the same table with them than niggers would think of sitting down to the same table with white folks. The women have always done productive work. See if you can think of one trade or profession that the women did not originate and now do practise. The laundry business? Medicine? Agriculture? Pottery? The men didn't turn their hand to anything in the way of productive labor until they, too, were enslaved. If you find men swinging the hammer while women fry the beefsteak, I can also show you women swinging the hammer and men frying beefsteak, both remaining essentially masculine and feminine. When it comes to cooking——

They tell the story of a man who stopped into a restaurant and asked: "What have you that's good?"

"We've got some very nice roast lamb to-day," the waiter said. "And the asparagus is extra good. And say, Captain, we've got coffee like your mother used to make!"

"Is that so? Well bring me a cup o' tea. And I'll try the lamb and asparagus."

Women do most of the cooking that's done, but there are some mighty good men cooks, and most men can cook nearly as badly as most women. Women do most of the marketing, but there are men who can shop expertly, and most men can buy with as little judgment as most women. (Present company, you understand, always included.)

No. You take a thousand men and a thousand women. Give to each batch an equal amount of intelligence, instruction and experience, and whether you put them on the Productive end or the Consumptive end, there won't be five cents' worth of difference between them. What small difference there may be in the matter of labor too hard for women is being rapidly done away with by machinery. Just as soon as it appears to be cheaper to install a machine and set a woman on the job, just that soon will the big, strong husky man get the blue envelope. Attending to the buying for the household is just about as much of a sex-characteristic as long hair.

But if you count Labor-Power as a Commodity, then Woman puts it all over Man as a Producer of Commodities. At that she is a specialist who stands unrivalled. And while shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, and many other things are of great importance to be produced, I submit that a good crop of children coming on is of importance the vitalest. If the world were full of nothing but grown-ups, all getting older every day, if not a finger of them ever were to be poked into a young mouth to feel the gritty edge of a new-cut lower front tooth, oh, what a no-account and dead-and-done-for thing this world would be! What would be the use of anything?

No, folks and friends, not Consumption of Commodities, not Production of Commodities, but Reproduction of Labor-Power is the maintop, all else being but side-shows of the snidest sort. This, which truly is the whole shooting-match, is The Economic Function of Woman. (Which anybody knows who is more than seven years old last birthday.)

But in this matter, you ask, aren't the men-folks entitled to some slight consideration?

Oh, yes, but not nearly so much as they think they are. For quite a good way up the scale of life, they get along pretty well without males at all. And when they do appear, they cut very little ice. When a plant has been cultivated as long, for instance, as the banana-plant, and knows it will be taken care of on its merits, it quits all that sex-foolishness. Males aren't such a much. It is a cheap experiment to try, to fancy a steady diminution of one sex while the other remains constant. If there were fewer and fewer women until finally there were only men, it would be fairly easy to figure out just about when human beings would cease to exist altogether. But up-end the proposition, and keep all the women, and gradually diminish the men until there are no more of them, it isn't so easy a problem in arithmetic.

Mind you, I am not advocating the extermination of the men-folks. While I have tongue or pen to raise in protest against such a procedure, I shall do so—unless, of course, I were one of the few left till the last, and it came about my time to go anyhow. I simply wish to point out that such a slew of us as now exists is far in excess of the real need. In heathen countries where they have never had the Gospel light, and women are in the way, they kill the girl babies. Some day, maybe, when the tidings comes: "It's a boy!" the instant response will be: "Who had the hammer last? Somebody go hunt for that hammer."

If Loeb and those fellows pry into Nature's secrets much farther, you know there mayn't be any need at all for that which so fondly thinks itself the Superior Sex. Coming up on the boat from Mobile, I had for fellow-passenger as far as Key West, an assistant at a biological experiment station on one of the Florida keys. He told me of sea-urchins, living and thriving, that never had a papa, unless an artificial mixture of certain chemical salts be called by that dear name. I listened with interest not unmixed with horror, for with the prophet's eye, I saw the finish of my sex!

No, Dr. Devine, there is no Economic Function peculiar to Woman but the one. Whatever the Man is able for, she also is able for, and then some.

But look at the paradox of Her! The more Woman is explained, the deeper grows the mystery. If she gain the Ballot, she will one day run everything, even to running Man off the earth, if necessary. Yet, while most men favor Votes for Women, most women do not.

After all, they're good to us.

 

"In such a case what is the economic function of man?"