Woman in Modern Society | Page 5

another great change which affects her life to a
degree strangely ignored by those who have dealt with her possibilities
in the past.[14]
[14] KARIN MICHAËLIS, The Dangerous Age, John Lane Co., 1911,

is said to have sold 80,000 in six weeks when it first appeared in Berlin.
The Bride of the Mistletoe, by JAMES LANE ALLEN (Macmillan),
deals with the same period.
But the great element of uncertainty, always fronting the girl and young
woman, is marriage. Marriage for her generally means abandonment of
old working interests, and a substitution of new; it brings her
geographical change; new acquaintances and friendships; and the
steady adjustment of her personal life to the man she has married in its
relation to industry, religion, society and the arts. If children come to
her, they must inevitably retire her from public life, for a time, with the
danger of losing connections which comes to all who temporarily drop
out of the race.
A boy, industrious, observant, with some power of administration,
studies mining engineering, moves to a mining center and expresses his
individual and social powers along the lines of his work until he is sixty.
The women who impinge against his life may deflect him from the
mines in California to those in Australia, or from the actual work of
superintendence to an office; or from an interest in Browning to
Tennyson; or from Methodism to Christian Science. The girl with
industrious and observant interests studies stenography and
type-writing, moves to the vicinity of offices, but is then caught up in
the life of a farmer-husband who shifts her center of activity to a farm
in Idaho where she must devote herself to entirely different activities,
form new associations, think in new terms, respond to new emotions,
and adjust herself to her farmer-husband's personality. When, after
twenty-five years, she has reared a family of children, and when
improved circumstances enable them to move up to the county seat, she
confronts many of the conditions for which she originally prepared
herself, but with farm habits, diminishing adaptability and diminishing
power of appealing to her husband. His powers are still comparatively
unimpaired, and as a dealer in farm produce or farm machinery his
interests undergo slight change. In general, it may be said that a
woman's life falls into three great periods of twenty-five years each.
The first twenty-five years of childhood and girlhood is a time of
getting ready for the puzzling combination of her personal needs as a
human being, her needs as a self-supporting social unit, and her
probabilities of matrimony. The second twenty-five years, the domestic

period of her life, is a time of adjustments as wife and mother, which
may instead prove to be a period of barren waiting, or a time of
professional and industrial self-direction and self-support. The third
twenty-five years is a time of mature and ripened powers, of lessened
romantic interests, and if the preceding period has been devoted to
husband and children, it is often a time of social detachment, of
weakened individual initiative, of old-fashioned knowledge, of
inefficiency, of premature retirement and old age.
On the moral side, as Professor Thomas has so admirably pointed
out,[15] women have evolved a morality of the person and of the
family, while men have evolved a morality of the group and of property.
Since men have had a monopoly of property and of law-making they
have shaped laws mainly for the protection of property, and in a
secondary degree for the protection of the person. Under these laws a
man who beats another nearly to death is less severely punished than
one who signs the wrong name to a check for five dollars. Man's
katabolic nature and his greater freedom have given him almost a
monopoly of crime under these laws which he has made. Offences
against the coming generation, against health, social efficiency and
good taste have until recently been left to the tribunal of public opinion
as expressed in social usage; and here, as we have seen, women are
generally the judges and executioners. In this, her own field of moral
judgment, woman is idealistic and uncompromising. If one of her
sisters falls from virtue she will often pursue her unmercifully. If a man,
on the other hand, commits a burglary or forgery her sympathy and
mercy may make her a very lenient judge.
[15] WILLIAM I. THOMAS, Sex and Society, p. 149. University of
Chicago Press, 1907. ELLEN KEY, in _Love and Marriage,_ G.P.
Putnam's Sons, 1911, traces the same lines of growth.
In æsthetics, the differences follow the same general law. Women
express beauty in themselves; jewels are for their ornament; and rooms
are furnished as a setting for themselves. The lives of millions of
workers go to the adornment of women. In painting