What Eight Million Women Want | Page 2

divorces have been granted in the United States. Two thirds
of these divorces were granted to aggrieved wives. In spite of the
anathemas of the church, in the face of tradition and early precept, in
defiance of social ostracism, accepting, in the vast majority of cases,
the responsibility of self support, more than six hundred thousand
women, in the short space of twenty years, repudiated the burden of
uncongenial marriage. Without any doubt this is the most important

social fact we have had to face since the slavery question was settled.
Not only in the United States, but in every constitutional country in the
world the movement towards admitting women to full political equality
with men is gathering strength. In half a dozen countries women are
already completely enfranchised. In England the opposition is seeking
terms of surrender. In the United States the stoutest enemy of the
movement acknowledges that woman suffrage is ultimately inevitable.
The voting strength of the world is about to be doubled, and the new
element is absolutely an unknown quantity. Does any one question that
this is the most important political fact the modern world has ever
faced?
I have asked you to consider three facts, but in reality they are but three
manifestations of one fact, to my mind the most important human fact
society has yet encountered. Women have ceased to exist as a
subsidiary class in the community. They are no longer wholly
dependent, economically, intellectually, and spiritually, on a ruling
class of men. They look on life with the eyes of reasoning adults, where
once they regarded it as trusting children. Women now form a new
social group, separate, and to a degree homogeneous. Already they
have evolved a group opinion and a group ideal.
And this brings me to my reason for believing that society will soon be
compelled to make a serious survey of the opinions and ideals of
women. As far as these have found collective expressions, it is evident
that they differ very radically from accepted opinions and ideals of men.
As a matter of fact, it is inevitable that this should be so. Back of the
differences between the masculine and the feminine ideal lie centuries
of different habits, different duties, different ambitions, different
opportunities, different rewards.
I shall not here attempt to outline what the differences have been or
why they have existed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in Women and
Economics, did this before me,--did it so well that it need never be
done again. I merely wish to point out that different habits of action
necessarily result, after long centuries, in different habits of thought.
Men, accustomed to habits of strife, pursuit of material gains,

immediate and tangible rewards, have come to believe that strife is not
only inevitable but desirable; that material gain and visible reward are
alone worth coveting. In this commercial age strife means business
competition, reward means money. Man, in the aggregate, thinks in
terms of money profit and money loss, and try as he will, he cannot yet
think in any other terms.
I have in mind a certain rich young man, who, when he is not
superintending the work of his cotton mills in Virginia, is giving his
time to settlement work in the city of Washington. The rich young man
is devoted to the settlement. One day he confided to a guest of the
house, a social worker of note, that he wished he might dedicate his
entire life to philanthropy.
"There is much about a commercial career that is depressing to a
sympathetic nature," he declared. "For example, it constantly depresses
me to observe the effect of the cotton mills on the girls in my employ.
They come in from the country, fresh, blooming, and eager to work.
Within a few months perhaps they are pale, anaemic, listless. Not
infrequently a young girl contracts tuberculosis and dies before one
realizes that she is ill. It wrings the heart to see it."
"I suspect," said the visitor, "that there is something wrong with your
mills. Are you sure that they are sufficiently well ventilated?"
"They are as well ventilated as we can have them," said the rich young
man. "Of course we cannot keep the windows open."
"Why not?" persisted the visitor.
"Because in our mills we spin both black and white yarn, and if the
windows were kept open the lint from the black yarn would blow on
the white yarn and ruin it."
A quick vision rose before the visitor's consciousness, of a mill room,
noisy with clacking machinery, reeking with the mingled odors of
perspiration and warm oil, obscure with flying cotton flakes which
covered the forms of the workers like snow and choked in their throats

like desert sand.
"But," she exclaimed, "you can have two rooms,