As soon as one comes to examine this subject of the “natural” sphere of woman and woman’s work with anything like an open mind, one discovers that in at least nine cases out of ten the word “suitable” or “artificial” must be substituted for the word “natural.” There are only two kinds of work natural to any human being: the labour by which, in fulfilment of the curse laid upon Adam, he needs to earn his bread; and what may be called the artistic or spontaneous labour which he puts of his own free will into his hobbies, his pleasures, and his interests. In some cases the two kinds—the bread-winning and the artistic or spontaneous form of labour—can be combined; and those who can so combine them, be they rich or poor, are the fortunate ones of the earth. To a person in actual need of the means of supporting existence any form of labour by which he or she can earn or obtain those means of existence is a perfectly natural one. A sufficiently hungry coal-heaver would do his best to hemstitch a silk pocket-handkerchief for the price of a meal, and a sufficiently hungry woman would wrestle with a coal-heaver’s job for the same consideration. In neither case could the action of the sufficiently hungry person be called unnatural; on the contrary, it would be prompted by the first and most urgent of natural laws—the law of self-preservation, which would over-ride any considerations of unsuitability. It does not, of course, follow from this example that certain forms of labour are not more suitable to women in general, and others not more suitable to men in general; all I wish to insist on is that suitable and natural are not interchangeable terms, and that what may be suitable at one place and under one set of conditions may not be suitable in another place and under another set of conditions.
The care of young children seems to be a department of labour so suitable to women that one may venture to assume that it is natural to a good many of them, though not by any means to all. (Not the least serious result of compulsory marriage has been the compulsory motherhood of women in whom the maternal instinct is slight—of whom there are many.) I do not mean that men should necessarily be excluded altogether from the tending of children; in many men the sense of fatherhood is very strong, in spite of the discouragement it receives under present conditions. If that discouragement were removed the paternal instinct might manifest itself in a more personal care of children; but on the whole one imagines that such personal care of children will always come more easily to woman. On the other hand, as most men are stronger muscularly than women, those departments of labour which require the exertion of considerable muscular strength must, under ordinary circumstances, naturally be monopolized by man. But between these two extremes there lies what may be called a neutral or debatable ground of labour requiring the exercise of qualities which are the exclusive property of neither sex. It is in this neutral field that the law to which I have alluded above comes into operation—the law under which the activities of women are confined to those departments of the labour market into which men do not care, or actively object, to enter. Thus, if there were no question of economic competition, it seems to me that the invasion by woman of these departments of the labour market which were formerly monopolized by men would be bound to awaken a certain amount of opposition; since her consequent desertion of the dull, unpleasant, and monotonous tasks assigned to her, might mean that these tasks would have to be performed by those who had hitherto escaped the necessity by shifting it on to her shoulders. Hence a natural and comprehensible resentment.
The average and unthinking man who passes his existence in a modern civilized town, if he were asked upon what principle the work of the world were shared between the men and the women who inhabit it, would very probably reply, in his average and unthinking way, that the idea underlying the division of labour between the sexes was the idea of sparing woman the hard bodily toil for which she was unfitted by her lack of physical strength. If that really were the principle upon which the division of labour was made, it is clear that the ordinary male clerk ought at once to change places with the ordinary housemaid or charwoman, the ordinary ticket-collector with the ordinary laundress. The physical labour of holding a pen or collecting tickets is infinitely less than the physical labour of carrying coals upstairs, scrubbing a floor, or wringing out a dirty garment. There is no particular or inevitable reason why such changes should not be made—and no further away than France housemaid’s duties are very commonly performed by men. Clerking, the duties of a ticket-collector, laundry-work and housework are all situated upon that neutral ground of labour to which I have alluded above; they are forms of work which do not call for the exercise of qualities peculiar to either sex, and which, therefore, can be equally well performed by persons of either sex.
To take another instance. In most civilized countries the rougher branches of agriculture are looked upon as work which is unsuited to women, because making too heavy demands upon their strength. Amongst primitive and semicivilized peoples, on the other hand, the tilling of the soil is often left entirely to women; while the dweller in towns—who usually has most to say about these matters—would probably be astonished if he realized how largely women’s work is employed, even in Europe, in the rougher processes of agriculture. (Within less than a twenty-four hours’ journey from London I have seen a woman yoked to a plough.) In certain small communities on the Breton coast I understand that the work of agriculture is carried on entirely by the women of the community; the men—fishermen by trade—occupying themselves during the long periods of enforced idleness between the fishing seasons by dressmaking for the household, and other forms of sewing. I have before me, as I write, a specimen of the needlework of one of these Breton fishermen: a penwiper, neatly cut and sewn, and quaintly ornamented with a design in yellow thread—the sort of trifle that we should regard as an essentially feminine production. To me such a division of labour does not seem in the least “unnatural.” Having regard to the circumstances, I can well understand that the man who took needle and scissors to produce my penwiper—and who had his fill of stormy and open air toil at other times—should prefer to set his hand to a restful occupation which would keep him in his home, rather than to the plough or the spade, which would take him out of it.
In the beginning of things, labour seems to have been divided between the sexes on a fairly simple plan. Man did most of the hunting and most of the fighting; and woman, only joining in the hunting and fighting if necessity arose, did all the rest. In savage tribes which have suddenly come under the domination of a civilized race—a domination which usually means not only the cessation of tribal warfare, but a rapid decrease in the raw material of the chase—the male, debarred from the exercise of his former avocations, frequently refuses to do anything at all. Deprived of the only work proper to man, and disinclined, at first, to undertake the work he considers proper to woman, he is apt to fold his hands and exist in idleness on what is, to all intents and purposes, the slave-labour of his female belongings. The distaste of certain South African races for what we esteem men’s work is well known, and has had political consequences before now; and it is said that in some primitive American tribes a man would consider that he demeaned himself by undertaking such strictly feminine work as the hewing and carrying of wood. (One is led to the conclusion that the idea of woman as a wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else must be of comparatively modern growth. “Natural” man did not think of her in that light at all; he had so many other uses for her. Or, perhaps, one might put it that his definition of the duties of a wife and mother was comprehensive.)
The early arts and the first processes of manufacture are supposed to have originated with that half of the human race which is now denied invention and initiative—arising naturally out of her more complicated duties and more settled habits of living. Woman was certainly, and all unknown to herself, the civilizing agent in the primitive community. The hut, clearing, or cave where she tended the hearth and carried on her rude industries, and whither her man returned from his roaming expeditions, was the germ and nucleus of the city where her descendants now dwell.
It was not until the world grew more crowded, less of a place to fight in, less of a place to hunt in, that man began to consider other means and take to other ways of earning his living—to dig and to engage in manufactures. In other words, he began to invade the sphere of woman (it is as well to remember this), and to parcel out and divide the industries hitherto monopolized by her. This process of parcelling out and division was carried out in accordance with the principle already mentioned—that woman was to keep those trades which men did not care to embark upon; and, roughly speaking, his preference in the matter has always been for those callings and professions which ensured him, in addition to his livelihood, and, if possible, a prospect of advancement, a certain amount of variety in his existence, and a certain amount of intercourse with his fellows. His tendency, therefore, has been to annex those trades which afforded him the desired amount of variety, intercourse, and prospect of advancement, and to leave to woman the monotonous, prospectless, and isolated callings—callings which were usually connected with the home; and that tendency seems to have continued with very little check until the beginning of the revolution in our social and industrial system which was brought about by the introduction of machinery—a revolution which, incidentally and amongst other things, is changing almost beyond recognition the institution known as the home, modifying the relations of the sexes, and completely altering the position of woman by forcing her, whether she likes it or not, to stand on her own feet.
I have dwelt at some length upon this tendency in the dominant sex—the outcome of no deliberate selfishness, but of the natural and instinctive human impulse to take the line of least resistance and get what one wants in the easiest way—because it seems to me to afford the only reasonable explanation of the customary hard and fast division of labour between an ordinary man and an ordinary wife. Fundamentally, I can see no reason why it should be the duty of the wife, rather than of the husband, to clean doorsteps, scrub floors, and do the family cooking. Men are just as capable as women of performing all these duties. They can clean doorsteps and scrub floors just as well as women; they can cook just as well as women, sometimes better. Why, then, should it be assumed that it is the natural thing for a married woman to take over these particular departments of work, and that when a bride undertakes to love, honour, and obey her husband, she also undertakes to scrub his floors and fry his steaks? The answer to that question seems to be, not that it is natural for a woman to like a form of labour which is usually monotonous and without prospect, but that it is quite natural for a man to dislike it—and therefore leave it to some one else.
One of the best examples, in a small way, of the tendency I have been speaking of I got not long ago from a friend of mine, a woman of the working-class. I happened to be one of an audience she was addressing, when she suddenly put to it the unexpected question—“Why does the father carve the joint in rich people’s houses, when in poor people’s houses it is the mother who carves it?” One, at least, of her audience was entirely at a loss for an answer to the conundrum until it was duly furnished by the speaker—running as follows: “In rich people’s houses the father carves the joint, because there is always enough to go round and the carver can help himself to the tit-bits. In poor people’s houses the mother carves the joint, because there mayn’t be always enough to go round and the carver gets the last helping.” I have no doubt that her explanation of the two customs is correct. Where the labour of carving is a pleasant duty, likely to bring its reward, it is performed by the head of the household; where it is an unpleasant duty, incurring penalty in the place of reward, the head of the household decides to pass it on to some one else. I do not mean that he decides it after due and selfish deliberation—he simply obeys a natural unthinking impulse.
It will be urged, of course, that motherhood and the care of children being the central point and fundamental interest in a woman’s life, the domestic duties and arts spring naturally from that central point and group themselves around it; and that this, and not any question of masculine likes and dislikes in the matter, is the real reason why, all over the world, certain forms of labour, some of them of a drudging and unpleasant nature, are thrust upon her—by the decree of Providence, and not by the will of her husband.
I am always suspicious of those decrees of Providence which run parallel to the interests of persons who have taken it upon themselves to expound Providential wisdom; and, as I have already explained, I am inclined to doubt that there exists in every woman an overpowering maternal instinct which swamps all other interests and desires. But even if, for the sake of argument, the universality of an overpowering maternal instinct be admitted, it is legitimate to point out that housework and its unpaid drudgery is not only performed in the interests of children. It is performed in childless households; it is expected, as a matter of course, by fathers from their daughters, by brothers from their sisters. It is performed, in short, in the interests of the man quite as much as in the interests of the child—perhaps more, since, in a busy household, the child, so far from being the central point and pivot of an establishment, is often attended to only incidentally, and in the time that can be snatched from other duties. Further, in the numerous households where husband and wife alike go out to work—perhaps at the same form of labour, as is the case in many factory districts—the woman on returning home (after working all day, just as her husband does, to contribute her share to the weekly expenses necessary for the support of household and children) has to cook, clean, sew, etc., in the time which her husband can employ as he chooses. In such instances the wife has taken her share in what are usually considered the typical duties of a husband, and it would be only reasonable to suppose that, in the consequent rearrangement of the domestic economy, the husband, as a matter of course, would take his share in the typical duties of a wife. In some cases, no doubt, he does; but as a general rule the household duties are left to the woman, in exactly the same manner as they would be left to her if she did not leave her house to work for a wage. And they are left to her simply because her husband considers them tiresome or unpleasant, and therefore declines to perform them.
I have laid stress on the conditions under which woman’s work as a wife, mother, and housekeeper is usually carried on, because it seems to me that the influence of those conditions has extended far beyond that narrow circle of the home to which, until comparatively lately, her energies have been confined. It was within the four walls of the home that man learned to look upon her as a being whose share of work was always the unpleasant share, and whose wages were the lowest wages that could possibly be given. And—which is far worse—she learned to look upon herself in the same light, as a creature from whom much must be demanded and to whom little must be given. Small wonder, then, with that age-long tradition behind her, that when she is forced out into the world, unorganized and unprepared, she finds it hard to get even a living wage for the work of her head and hands—and that when you speak of a sweated you mean a woman’s trade.
There is, so far as I can see, only one way in which woman can make herself more valued, and free herself from the necessity of performing duties for which she gets neither thanks nor payment. She must do as men have always done in such a situation—shirk the duties.
