A HIGHBROW ESSAY ON WOMAN
A Dissertation on the Economic Function of Woman with the Part Played Therein By Scientific
Bulletins and Deep Thinkers
By Eugene Wood
Illustrated by Horace Taylor
IF THERE is any one thing in the reading line that I dote upon more than another, it is a bulletin, a real Scientific Bulletin, whether it be on the Stomach Contents of Arctomys Miurus or The Method of Procedure in Making Salt-rising Bread. Those fellows go at it so thoroughly. Right up to the handle. They don't have to worry whether the editor will like it or not. They don't care whether it will hit the public or not. If anything, they'd a little rather it didn't. It can't be very scientific if people read it and enjoy it. They aren't like literary folks, who when they take hold of a subject must not do more than pull out a few of the prettiest tail-feathers. They pluck the subject as bare as a teacup. And then they take the hide off it. And then they cut it open and have a look at its insides, and dissect away every muscle from every bone, so that when they get all through, and washed up, that subject hasn't one secret left. They know it backwards and forwards, lenghtwise and crosswise, up and down, and outside and inside.
So, when I received a few days ago a Teachers' College Bulletin on "The Economic Function of Woman," by Edward T. Devine, Ph. D., Professor of Social Economy of Columbia University, I just knocked off work on that hurry job I had, part of the pay for which is going to reward the insurance company for my not dying this year, and settled myself to a really enjoyable intellectual sozzle. Here was something that nobody else could ever read clear through unless he was paid for it or had to read it in order to get a term-standing. And I'm interested in Woman. Most men are, if you'll notice. More or less. It is a subject that is brought to the male attention so often, so very often when you consider the whole period from the cradle to the grave. And then, again, this seemed a particularly promising viewpoint from which to consider Woman—what, if any account, is she?
There is not an extended piece of writing, however foolish it may seem, from which it is entirely impossible to get one good idea. And I will say for Dr. Devine that he sets forth some very sound and sensible things. I am sure of this because they're exactly what I think. When he says that students of the economic processes haven't paid as much attention to Consuming as they have to Producing, I think he's quite right. (I want the printer and the editor to let these capital letters stand as they are because I want to give the impression that I am a Deep Thinker. Nobody can be a Deep Thinker without capital letters sticking up through his copy like bristles on a cucumber. If I can't have any other symptoms of a Deep Thinker than Capital Letters, I must have them.)
That this thing of overlooking of Consumption in favor of Production is what ails Society is what I have contended all along. Society takes a lot of pains to produce automobiles and never turns a hand to see to it that I consume one. Doesn't pay any more attention to me in that respect than if I didn't exist. And, from what I can learn, there are many others in just my fix. It isn't that we can't use them or don't want to use them; the trouble is that Society doesn't pay us enough to buy them, and charges us far too much on things that we can't get along without, food and shelter and clothing and coal and carfare and such things. I can't consume near all I'd like to, just on that account. As a nation we can produce till you can't rest. No trouble in the world about that. But when it comes to getting all these things consumed so that, as a nation, we can keep the producing end of the enterprise running full-powered, why, we simply aren't there. The working-class doesn't get in wages what will buy back the things it produces. (I don't know if you ever heard that before. If not, you ought to write it down so that you won't forget it.) If we could rig up some kind of a scheme so that all the working-people could swap their products on an even-Stephen basis with each other, so many hours' time of the shoemaker's being exchanged for so many hours' time of the farmer, and the piano-maker, and the weaver, and the tailor, and so on, till we all got all we wanted, and no middleman cutting in between to grab off his profits, or his interest on the investment, or his cost of credit, or any of the charges we have to pay that represent no real use-value, why, then we'd come pretty close to having the Co-operative Republic, and all we'd need of political control would be to keep the predatory class's hands off what did not concern them.
And it isn't wonderful, either, come to look at it, that more attention has been paid to the Productive Department of the Nation's housekeeping than to the Consuming Department. It has only been about half a century that we have really got to that stage of human progress where, if we wanted to run full-powered, we could produce such oodles and oodles of the things we'd like to.have that we don't know what to do with them all. (That is, some of us don't.) It is only quite recently that we have begun to produce more than we know what to do with until a large proportion of the people get over the notion that they are lucky to be alive. A great many of our citizens aren't educated up to believe that they are entitled to more than four things to eat, or more than two rooms to live in, or better clothes than what will do very well for a mop-rag. We are trying to educate them to live better, but oh, dear! It's an uphill job. The demagogue that goes about inflaming, the passions of the poor and making them envious of their more fortunate brethren has got his work all cut out for him, I tell you. But the fact remains that it is only the other day, so to speak, that we put in electricity, and scientific processes, and cut up industries into sets of two- and three-motion jobs, so that any kind of mud-heads could learn how to work at anything in a week. And now it's time we gave our attention a little to getting the good of all this. At Production we're a hickey; at Consumption we're a lot of thumb-handed dubs. Most of us.
Now here are two grand divisions in Economics, Production and Consumption. Singularly enough, there are two grand divisions in the human race, Male and Female. So Dr. Devine concludes—and what could be more natural? Why, it's almost providential, as you might say—that the Men-folks should have charge of the Productive end, and the Womenfolks of the Consumptive end of the job. Mr. Man puts on his hat, and takes his dinner-bucket, and starts off Monday morning when the whistle blows, and works till Saturday night, when he receives his little old pay-envelope, with $13.80 in the upper left-hand corner. He fetches it home to Mrs. Woman, who thereupon, begins to function. She throws her shawl over her head, and takes the market-basket on her arm,
If man is the producer and woman the consumer, will Prof. Devine kindly name the sex of the fat party in the middle?
