Women and Economics : Part 5

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 24 of 26)

The reader may well declare that such criticism is easy, but of little worth unless it be accompanied by some kind of constructive proposals for the amelioration of present conditions. Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced. If the present economic conditions of women involve the most hideous wickedness and cruelty and injure the entire progress of mankind, as they assuredly do, and if they therefore must be destroyed, we must have something to replace them with; and if Mrs. Gilman's proposals would simply make the difficulty a thousand times worse by depriving women of men's help, what proposals are there to offer instead?

The reply is that we must go back to first principles. We must drop all our phrases about economic independence or dependence. They have urgent and real meanings for each one of us at any given time, but when applied to the problems of the reconstruction of society as a whole, they mean nothing because they are based upon no vital truths whatever. A man may be economically secure when he is producing absinthe or whisky, or he may die of starvation because he is producing the songs of Schubert. Economic independence and dependence mean very much to the prosperous distiller whom men pay for poison, and to the immortal composer whom men do not pay at all, but who yet produces that which nourishes the life of all the future. The maker of death may live, and the maker of life may die; we see it every day and history is the continuous record of it.

These economic dependences and independences consist only in the relations of one man or woman to the others. They have nothing to do with the real issue, which is the relation of mankind as a whole to Nature. These economic questions are simply concerned with money - the means whereby one man has more or less claim upon another: society may have to be reconstructed in such a fashion that economic independence and dependence, as at present understood, would have no meaning whatever. Yet all the real economic questions would remain, even though money or private property were abolished. The real economy is the making and preserving of life and the means of life. We live in a chaos where the elementary conditions of human existence are constantly forgotten. The real politics, the real economy, the real political economy, are the questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply - the relations not between man and man, or class and class or gender and gender, but mankind, living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live. The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern industrialism. The products of men's labor and women's labor will be appraised and paid for in proportion to their real value, their strength or availableness for life.

In "Unto This Last" and "Munera Pulveris," Ruskin has laid down, on what are really unchallengeable biological grounds, the foundations of the political economy of the future. We are going to have done with the industries which eat up men. We cannot much longer afford to grow whiskey where we might grow wheat, for there are ever more mouths to be fed, and wheat is running short. Cheap and dear mean nothing when we get down to realities. Is a thing vital or is it mortal? - that is the only question. It may be vital and costless, like air, or mortal and dear, like alcohol. The question is not how much money can you get from another man for your product, but how much life can mankind get from Nature for it.

Therefore we should return to a sane appreciation of the primary importance of agriculture as against manufacture, of food as against anything else, - for unless one is fed, of what use is anything else? And as nations gradually begin to discover that the means of life are the really valuable things, they will go on to learn, what primitive races, hard-pressed races, races making their way in the world against heavy odds, have always known - that at all costs the insatiable destructiveness of Death must be compensated for by Birth. If the means of life are the real wealth, the life itself is more real still, and unless we abolish death, the makers and bearers and nourishers of life are at all times and everywhere the producers, the manufacturers, the workers of the community above and beyond all others. And these are the women in their great functions as mothers and foster-mothers, nurses, teachers.

The economics of the future will be based upon these elemental and perdurable truths. No writer in his senses will then be guilty of such immeasurable folly as to place the "natural industries of a human creature" in antithesis to "the primal physical functions of maternity." The gender which came first and remains first in the immediacy and indispensableness of its relations to the coming life will base its economic claims - in the vulgar and narrow sense of that term - upon the worth of those relations. The society which cannot afford to pay for - that is, to sustain - the characteristic functions of womanhood, cannot continue; and societies have continued and will continue in proportion as they hold hard by these first conditions of their lives. The case of Jewish womanhood is the supreme illustration of a thesis which requires no experimental demonstration, but is necessarily true.

Here, then, is the solution, as the future will prove, of the problem of the economic status of woman. At present, though Ellen Key is the only feminist writer who recognizes it, women can compete successfully with men only at the cost of complete womanhood, - and that is a price which society as a whole cannot afford to pay, if it wishes to continue. Therefore we must, in effect, pay women in advance for their work, the actual realization of the value of which is always necessarily deferred. The case is parallel to that of expenditure upon forestry. In the planting of trees or the nurture of babies the State will get value for its money in the long run, but it must be prepared to wait. States are slowly becoming more provident, and already we are coming to see this about trees. Soon we should see it about babies, and the problem of the economic status of woman will then be solved in practice as it is assuredly soluble in principle.

Mankind must first learn to renounce Mammon and set up Life as its God; but to that also we should come - or perish, for Life is a jealous God and visits the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.