Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 408
The new status of women, then, will be a part of the new world. So we can only understand it by first asking what will this new world be which we are to build up out of the debris of the war. The interest in it does not centre on how to organize it politically. We know all about that. A League of Nations is a Rope of Sand, a Concert of Europe is worse than Grand Opera, and a diplomat is a liar. Our new political world will have all the outward dignity and show of International Leagues, and Committees, and Covenants and Concerts, but all that will be just what the French call “façade,” just shop-front. Step inside the shop and there you’ll see John Bull and Uncle Sam running the show over a big ledger, with Russia drinking tea (Satisfaction Brand) out of a samovar in an adjoining parlour, and China smoking opium in the corner, all smiles. Out in the Concert Room, there’ll be music and refreshments (all free) for the Latin American Nations. The Italians will check the coats.
The real problem will be not the international outlook, but the outlook of the nation inside. For us in Canada the question will be what happens in Canada, not what happens in Germany. There will be those who will see to it that nothing happens in Germany.
Now as to social organization inside. Already there is a certain general consensus about things that must never happen again, and about things to which even the humblest have a birthright. This is focused in a widespread opinion that the world must be made a better place after the war and a wide-spread determination that it shall be. This is the belief, the hope, the resolve of all truly religious people, of all ardent social reformers, and is the essential creed of all political parties earnest for public welfare. All interests, parties and organizations other than these will go on the scrap heap. The only problem is, to what extent are we to use government action and to what extent are we to trust to individual interest to form our new world? In my own opinion both of them must be used and both must be animated by the spirit of righteousness, without which all government is a choice of tyrannies and all self-interest sinks to rapacity.
The programme thus envisaged has been worked out in general terms to mean that there shall be work and pay for all — decent work and hours of labour, and conditions and pay that permit a decent life of comfort and cultivation, home and shelter for all, care for all in illness and adversity and old age, and, for all, proper holiday vacation and leisure time.
The proof that this is possible is found in the war itself. We look back to the years before the war. What a mockery on our social guidance! What an exhibition of our ignorance and ineptitude! To tell four million people in Britain that there was no work for them, to let twelve million in the United States and half a million in Canada stand idle on the ground that there was nothing to do, that already too much was done; that they must be content with a meagre dole of charity, just enough to keep them from revolt, just enough to keep them alive and breed revolution in their hearts! Now comes war, with food and work and shelter for all, while half, more than half of us, are fighting or contriving death, and all of it taken — where else came it from, than from the annual produce of the nation’s work? Don’t talk of the people’s annual food and clothes and shelter coming out of debt. People don’t eat debt, and by debt no coat is made.
All that is plain. Our present question is, where do women come in, in this remade world?
Now here enters another great element of coming social change. The new society will not only alter its way of living but its place of living. A large part of it, probably the larger part, will move out of the “city,” as we now know it, to what will be half-city, half-country. This decentralization of industry has already begun in Britain as a safety precaution against bombing. The gregarious human clustering, part instinct, part necessity, that made the congested districts and the slums a blot on our civilization, scattered when the bombs fell. Many will never come back. Our typical factories of the future will be out in the country with very rapid transport at national expense; to every one his home, his “little bit of garden,” his “three acres and a cow,” that was once the dream of the British artisan. Three acres and a cow! Bread and work for all! How humble were the aspirations of the past.
Not all working people will want to live in the country. In this matter of preference there are two classes of people, those who can’t stand the city and those who can’t stand the country. There are types of working people, men and women, evoluted by two hundred years of factory operation, who prefer at any price, even in mean streets, the bright lights, the noise, the human company of the city, and for whom the open fields and the dull silence and the dark nights of the country breathe monotony and despair. Factory women, we are told, often lost their minds in the early days of prairie settlement.
Some workers therefore will, by choice if not of need, still work and sleep in the big cities. For them, and them only, will survive the “apartment house,” the greatest enemy of childhood ever contrived. The stork flies past it, the baby clutched under its wing, looking for a country cottage.
But most people still love the country, and dream of it — at office desks and among the turning wheels of the workroom. That’s why rich men go tarpon fishing in Florida; they’ve gone crazy and think they’re in the country; and why poor people crowd in thousands to any cow pasture called a summer park.
Hence, ever so many people will live in the new industrial country centres where babies are as welcome as the flowers of spring, and sit dozing in their sunbonnets in the back gardens.
All social dreamers — and what is better than a dream? — dream of a classless society. I plead guilty to being one of them. Even at its best a class society, one in which there are “gentlemen and ladies” matched off against the “working class,” the “common people,” the “poor,” and “the lower class,” et cetera, is a poor business, the worse the more you look at it. For it carries in itself by its lack of opportunity the perpetuation of its sins. In past times it may have seemed necessary, except in a few favoured spots such as Evangeline’s Acadia, where “even the richest was poor and the poorest had in abundance.” In the past, perhaps it was hard to survive without a class system, and to maintain culture, art and science, except at the price of supporting a privileged few. Even at that one looks back, appalled at the “class” of Victorian England, the easy assumption of merit, the easy tolerance of other people’s misery, and the magic lantern of established religion with its peep show for the poor, offering the next world as a substitute for this.
The great legacy given us by the class society is the institution of the domestic servant class. That has got to go. There is no room in our new world for “domestic service” as we knew it in the world that is being ushered out. I have always been surprised how little the women advocates of the emancipation of women have concerned themselves about this. Being mostly women fortunately above the servant class, they have always taken it for granted in their demands for privilege and rights and economic emancipation, that they would have “servants” in their homes. Indeed, their emancipation partly depended on it. But the status of a domestic servant as we have known it — the long indefinite hours, the grudging “evening off,” the perpetual menial position — this is not service of a fair contract, this is degradation, just one degree above the domestic slavery which it so closely resembles. If the time comes when all boys and girls are educated up to the age of eighteen, when they all have decent homes (or the chance to make them decent), recreation, the culture of libraries and meetings and social organizations — where among them will you find a “servant”?
In our better world the servant will be replaced by the domestic worker, coming and going under fixed hours, with a status as good as that of — we must not say her “mistress” — let us say with Negro politeness, of the “other lady.” In these terms, working as a nurse does, many a girl might prefer paid housework to paid office work, provided the pay and the hours and the status are just as good. Status, you know, is all in your eye. The time was when a “nurse,” wet or dry, had the status of Mrs. Gamp. The time was (it seems unbelievable now) when people of quality in England never asked a doctor to dinner. He seemed something like a barber. It’s a fact. Read in the latest Victorian biography (“Lord Ponsonby”) of how Queen Victoria at last admitted the Balmoral doctor to dine with the quality.
Hence in the destruction of class, many of our views will turn upside down. Girls who finish their education and take up housework will actually seem like educated girls doing housework, and not like servants at all.
In and through all this new complex there will be plenty of women training to be doctors and lawyers and bishops, and running for Parliament; and plenty of women going into offices as girls and staying in business on their own, not as paid employees, but on their own risk and capital, “business women” — as we say “businessmen.” These will seem plenty if looked at by themselves and added up as a simple total, but will seem very few at all as added up beside all the women in the nation.
What then will ordinary women be doing, after having finished their eighteen years, and perhaps more, of education, and trying two or three years in office work and housework and schoolteaching? The answer is “Home and Mother.” They will do this because under the new conditions they will want to. In the society that is coming, all the costs that go with illness and disability will be removed from the individual to the nation at large. Most of all will this be true of all the financial burden that goes with the birth and raising of children. Maternity may have its terrors, but the doctor’s bill will not be one of them. Parents will not need to save their pennies to give their children a better education than their own, because they’ll get it, anyway; and they’ll get all of it, not just part of it, as is given now. Those of us who have dealt with education all our lives know that if you end it at twelve, or fourteen, or even sixteen years of age, you haven’t got it all. But you can turn out an educated, cultivated boy or girl of eighteen who has had all the education needed for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; a girl fit to talk to, and a boy fit to talk about. On top of that, college represents merely the special turn of the general road that leads into particular alleys.
College is grand for those for whom it is grand: unnecessary for others, provided they all had the real thing up to eighteen years of age. College education for girls, it seems to me, has been vastly overdone. They crowd into it in thousands, having nowhere else to crowd into; then are turned out at the other end of it to crowd into schoolteaching in numbers that keep swamping the profession. Schoolteaching is properly a profession for old men. The only schoolmaster figures I can idealize are those of the old Scottish dominie, devoted and self-important, and Monsieur Hamel of Daudet’s pathetic story of the Last Class (the last class taught in French in Alsace in 1871), and Mr. Chips dying over tea and toast after sixty years of service.
Girls went to college and then to teaching because — it is a simple truth — office work was for years thought beneath them and only now is being made good enough for them. In reality, office work, beginning with a mere routine but advancing to a position of trust and responsibility, offers a girl a better salary, better conditions and a more interesting life than most schoolteaching does. Fetch the old dominie back; dust him off and prop him up in his chair again.
We are saying, then, that the financial burden of maternity and the costs of children’s education — the whole of it, a clear eighteen years of it — will be all gone. Even the maintenance of the children at home during their years of education will be, of necessity, in part defrayed by the government. A married woman with children must draw a government salary for being a married woman with children, just as at present an old maid, an old one, without children, draws a salary for being an old maid without children.
In that case, what is to stop early and easy marriage, as fresh and free and willing as the war marriages that blossom out like flowers to brighten the wasted field of war? Why not marry and why not have children? Why not that little sub-suburban cottage, among the love bees, with the baby in the sunbonnet in a perambulator in the back garden, chuckling at father’s attempts to plant beans?
The rearing of children in a house fit to rear them in, not an apartment house, is a full-time job, but it is one that we have to get done for us somehow, or else our nation, all that is best in it, and our civilization, all that holds it, must go under within a hundred years. We have got to have the right people brought into the world, our world. The right people to keep the world safe and decent and fair, for all the people, decent or not, are the English-speaking peoples. These are mainly in the British Empire and in the United States. And the really right part of them, the part that animates and inspires all the others, are the people in Britain, in British countries and in the United States — of British stock and traditions and institutions.
These are our own people irrespective of political boundaries. With these are closely associated people of such kindred descent, traditions and ideas — the Scandinavians and the Dutch — that their families amalgamated with ours and became of one blood. Call this stock British, remembering that it includes the United States, and the meaning is clear. With this stock goes for us in Canada the fixed bloc of French Canada, in no danger of racial diminution. But in Canada, unless we maintain this British stock, we are lost. For the truth is that, relatively, this British stock has been weakening for two generations. The birth rate has fallen low among the people with whom we most need it high. Migration has replaced the birth of new children, and not the old-fashioned migration of early days, the incoming of British people to a British colony, but a polyglot migration out of Central Europe. Nothing can restore the balance except children and more children. North America can easily take in two million people a year and we need them all British. And when they come they must bring their own stork with them.
That is how I see the situation of women in North America. But I am trying to present this status of women in our nation of tomorrow, not as what women ought to do, but as what women are going to do, what they want to do if they get a chance. After all what better in the long run? People who have never married have not really lived. People who have married and had no children have only half-lived. People who have one child only are a long way from the crown of human life. Old age with nothing to look back upon, nothing to lean upon, is poor stuff as compared with the old age that renews its youth and life and interests in its children and grandchildren. Ask a few lonely old people going out with the tide.
The School Is the Lever
ARCHIMEDES ONCE SAID, “Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum strong enough, and single-handed I can move the world.”
We have come to a time when we want to move the whole world, to make it socially better. And I know of a lever that we can use to move it — the school.
Everybody knows that there has gone abroad all over the face of the world a determination to make the world a better place to live in, to abolish the poverty and want. The war has revealed that this place is possible. It has shown us the enormous power of co-ordinated production. We must turn this vast mechanism of death into the maintenance of life.
But how do we begin? If we want to make a new people, we find that most of us, all but the very young, are already unfitted for the new “class-less” world of our dreams. Some of us had no chance. Some had too much. For some of the brightest minds the doors of school closed with childhood. A life of overwork and under-holidays has battered most people out of their true shape. There is little to love in them at sight, but we can read the meaning that lies in the face that’s all wrinkled with furrows and care.
So we must begin with the children, the school. We must have real schools that mean a beginning of life to the point where an assured step may be taken on firm ground — till a boy of eighteen can say with pride and confidence, “Now, I’m ready. Leave the rest to me.”
School education should go on till it’s finished. Any teacher knows what I mean. It should carry on till it has given a mental training and imparted an orbit of information that is sufficient for the work and leisure of life. College training is a special thing. It is or should be only for specialized purposes of distinct professions or for research and further scholarship or for teaching. The kind of general slush given as general courses for students at college, starting with no purpose and heading nowhere, is about as nourishing as bran mash. You might as well put a poultice on their feet.
But a real education can be given to boys and girls and be finished at the age of eighteen, provided they are set free from all other work and have all the proper facilities. And this means a long step more than mere teaching. It means medical care, the cult of fresh air and exercise, the use of leisure, the pleasure of entertainment. It should mean free books given forever to any boy or girl who has earned them with recitations and to be carried away later and kept as trophies of school, as little Iroquois learned to keep a scalp.
I would go further. I would supply school meals, of which one, the midday meal, would be eaten, by custom, in common by the rich and the poor. It would not be “the thing” for rich parents to keep their children from it. I would go as far as I could with the giving of school clothes to poorer children, given somehow, if one could, to avoid the hurt feelings of a charity gift — and if possible I would obliterate, at least for a few short hours of school, the social differences of the home. I often think of the good old college gown which was discarded all too stupidly here in Canada at the bidding of foolish people who confounded aristocracy with antiquity and lost from sight the original purposes of the things they threw aside. The college gown covered, for the poorer ones among us, a multitude of patches and made us all, as we sat on the benches of the college of sixty years ago, as equal each to each as triangles in Euclid.
If I were King — as they used to say — or if I were society at large — I would give all this, education, health and sunshine, up to the age of eighteen or so — and then I would say to the world:
