The Century's Progress of the American Woman

That the American woman has invaded new fields of activity during the century just closed is a matter of fact; whether or not this invasion has been a good thing for the woman and for the fields of activity which she has invaded is a matter of opinion. Mrs. Flora McDonald Thompson, who has herself been for years a regular contributor to some of the leading newspapers in America, and who is at present conducting the "News of the World" department in Harper's Bazar, thinks that woman's true place is in the home, and she deplores the American woman's departures from domesticity as a gloomy sign for the future of the country. It is not alone the large number of divorces in the United States (328,716 in twenty years) that arouses her foreboding. Writing in The North American Review she says:

"That the economically ideal organization of the American family has been overthrown by the aggressive spirit of the 'new' woman appears with amazing clearness.... Over seventeen percent of the whole number of persons employed in all occupations are women. Furthermore, the United States commissioner of labor has found the number of women so employed to be constantly increasing, and that at the expense of men: the percentage of increase of women, in every given instance, showing a corresponding decrease of men. In this connection, still another suggestive fact appears in the statistics of the United States Department of Labor. In proportion as women advance in men's industries, and thus cause the retirement of men, the latter engage in domestic labor and personal service. The American woman competes with man, not alone to his disadvantage, but to his degradation.

"Involved with this chaos in the industrial order, revolution with reference to sex constantly advances in the domain of American politics. We have woman-suffrage to some extent existing in a number of States and in several Territories of the United States, and absolutely unrestricted woman-suffrage in four States -- making a total of almost three fifths of the whole number of States in the Union which have in some way yielded political power to woman. Also we have the American woman clamoring for every office in the gift of the people, from President to police-court justice."

Mrs. Thompson's article was published in November, and another issue of the magazine was not allowed to pass without a reply. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who called the first Woman's Rights Convention (held in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848) and whose eightieth birthday was celebrated in 1895 in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City by 3,000 delegates from women's societies throughout the country, takes up her pen in answer, and in the December issue she champions the cause of the independent woman. "Mrs. Thompson," she says, "attributes the increasing number of divorces to the moral degeneracy of woman; whereas it is the result of higher moral perceptions as to the mother's responsibilities to the race.... With higher intelligence woman has learned the causes that produce idiots, lunatics, criminals, degenerates of all kinds and degrees, and she is no longer a willing partner to the perpetuation of disgrace and misery." Turning from this phase of the question she continues:

"Virtue and subjection, with this writer, seem to be synonymous terms. Did our grandmother at the spinning-wheel occupy a higher position in the scale of being than Maria Mitchell, professor of astronomy at Vassar College? Did the farmer's wife at the washtub do a greater work for our country than the Widow Green, who invented the cotton-gin? Could Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances E. Willard, Mary Lyon, Clara Barton have done a better work churning butter or weeding their onion-beds on their respective farms than the grand work they did in literature, education, and reform? Could Fannie Kemble, Ellen Tree, Charlotte Cushman, or Ellen Terry (if we may mention English as well as American women) have contributed more to the pleasure of their day and generation had they spent their lives at the spinning-wheel? No! Progress is the law, and the higher development of woman is one of the important steps that have been achieved."

Literary Digest 22 (Jan. 5, 1901).