“I’d like to ask a few questions first, then you can expound by the hour. Do give me the long and short of this ‘women-waked-up’ proposition. What does it mean—to a man?”
Owen stroked his chin.
“No loss,” he said at length; “at least, no loss that’s not covered by a greater gain. Do you remember the new biological theory in regard to the relative position of the sexes that was beginning to make headway when we were young?”
I nodded. “Ward’s theory? Oh, yes; I heard something of it. Pretty far-fetched, it seemed to me.”
“Far-fetched and dear-bought, but true for all that. You’ll have to swallow it. The female is the race type; the male is her assistant. It’s established beyond peradventure.”
I meditated, painfully. I looked at Owen. He had just as happy and proud a look as if he was a real man—not merely an assistant. I though of Jerrold—nothing cowed about him; of the officers and men on the ship; of such men as I had seen in the street.
“I suppose this applies in the main to remote origins?” I suggested.
“It holds good all through life—is just as true as it ever was.”
“Then—do you mean that women run everything, and men are only helpers?”
“Oh, no; I wasn’t talking about human life at all—only about sex. ‘Running things’ has nothing to do with that. Women run some businesses and are in practically all, but men still do the bulk of the world’s work. There is a natural division of labor, after all.”
This was pleasant to hear, but he dashed my hopes.
“Men do almost all the violent plain work—digging and hewing and hammering; women, as a class, prefer the administrative and constructive kinds. But all that is open yet, and settling itself gradually; men and women are working everywhere. The big change which Nellie is always referring to means simply that women ‘waked up’ to a realization of the fact that they were human beings.”
“What were they before, pray?”
“Only female beings.”
“Female human beings, of course,” said I.
“Yes; a little human, but mostly female. Now they are mostly human. It is a great change.”
“I don’t follow you. Aren’t they still wives and mothers?”
“They are still mothers—far more so than they were before, as a matter of fact; but as to being wives—there’s a difference.”
I was displeased, and showed it.
“Well, is it polygamy, or polyandry, or trial marriages, or what?”
Owen gazed at me with an expression very like Nellie’s.
“There it is,” he said. “You can only think about women in some sort of relation to men, of a change in marriage relations as merely a change in kind; whereas what has happened is a change in degree. We still have monogamous marriages, on a much purer and more lasting plane than a generation ago; but the word ‘wife’ does not mean what it used to.”
“Go on—I can’t follow you at all.”
“A ‘wife’ used to be a possession; ‘wilt thou be mine?’ said the lover, and the wife was ‘his.’ ”
“Well—whose else is she now?” I asked with some sharpness.
“She does not ‘belong’ to anyone in that old sense. She is the wife of her husband in that she is his true lover, and that their marriage is legally recorded; but her life and work does not belong to him. He has no right to her ‘services’ any more. A woman who is in a business—like Hallie, for instance—does not give it up when she marries.”
I stopped him. “What! Isn’t Hallie married?”
“No—not yet.”
“But—that is her flat?”
“Yes; why not?” He laughed at me. “You see, you can’t imagine a woman having a home of her own. Hallie is twenty-three. She won’t marry for some years, probably; but she has her position and is doing excellent work. It’s only a minor inspectorship, but she likes it. Why shouldn’t she have a home?”
“Why doesn’t she have it with you?”
“Because I like to live with my wife. Her business, and mine, are in Michigan; Hallie’s in New York.”
“And when she marries she keeps on being an inspector?” I queried.
“Precisely. The man who marries that young woman will have much happiness, but he will not ‘own’ her, and she will not be his wife in the sense of a servant. She will not darn his socks or cook his meals. Why should she?”
“Will she not nurse his babies?”
“No; she will nurse her babies—their babies, not ‘his’ merely.”
“And keep on being an inspector?”
“And keep on being an inspector—for four hours a day—in two shifts. Not a bit more difficult than cooking, my dear boy.”
“But—she will not be with her children—”
“She will be with her children twenty hours out of the twenty-four—if she wants to. But Hallie’s not specially good with children. … You see, John, the women have specialized—even in motherhood.”
Then he went on at considerable length to show how there had arisen a recognition of far more efficient motherhood than was being given; that those women best fitted for the work had given eager, devoted lives to it and built up a new science of Humaniculture; that no woman was allowed to care for her children without proof of capacity.
“Allowed by whom?” I put in.
“By the other women—the Department of Child Culture—the government.”
“And the fathers—do they submit to this, tamely?”
“No; they cheerfully agree and approve. Absolutely the biggest thing that has happened, some of us think, is that new recognition of the importance of childhood. We are raising better people now.”
I was silent for a while, pulling up bits of grass and snapping small sticks into inch pieces.
“There was a good deal of talk about eugenics, I remember,” I said at last, “and—what was that thing? Endowment of motherhood?”
“Yes—man’s talk,” Owen explained. “You see, John, we couldn’t look at women but in one way—in the old days; it was all a question of sex with us—inevitably, we being males. Our whole idea of
