ctor, lawyer, architect, chemist, and
sociologist--will resist the dictum "Woman's place is the Home." The
woman of this group will either be forced into celibacy, or in
ever-increasing numbers she will insist on some sort of arrangement
whereby she can carry on her work. She will perhaps refuse to bear
children and transform domesticity into an apartment hotel life, in
which she and her husband eat breakfast and dinner together and spend
the rest of the waking time separately, as two men might.
Such a development, while perhaps satisfying the ideas of progress of
the feminist, will be bad eugenically. There will be a removal from the
race of the value of these women, the intellectual members of their
sex. Whether the work this group of women do will equal the value of
the children they might have had no one can say.
But after all, the number of women who will enter the professions and
remain in them on the conditions above stated will be relatively small.
The main function of women will always be childbearing. If ever there
comes a time when the drift will be away from this function, then a
counter-movement will start up to sway women back into this sphere of
their functions. Moreover, the bulk of women entering industry will
enter it in the humbler occupations and they will in the main be willing
enough to marry and bear children, even in the limited way. Yet since
they enter marriage with a wider experience than ever before, the
conditions of marriage and the home must change, even though gradually.
So on the whole we may look to an increasing individuality of woman, an
increasing feeling of worth and dignity as an individual, an increasing
reluctance to take up life as the traditional housewife. Rebellion
against the monotony and the seclusive character of the home will
increase rather than diminish, and it must be faced without prejudice
and without any reliance on any authority, either of church or state,
that will force women back to "womanly" ways of thinking, feeling or
doing.
Sooner or later we shall have to accept legally what we now recognize as
fact,--the restriction of childbearing. Whether we regard it as good or
bad, the modern woman will not bear and nurse a large family. And the
modern man, though he has his little joke about the modern family, is
one with his wife in this matter. With husband and wife agreed there
seems little to do but accept the situation.
That this condition of affairs is
|