"Who had the hammer last?"
and goes out to spend that $13.80 to the best advantage.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Don't you begin to crow because you perceive that when Mrs. Woman fries the beefsteak she is also adding value to the raw material, and is also a productive laborer just the same as Mr. Man. Dr. Devine saw that, too. As a matter of fact, he beat you to it. Not only that, he also saw that Mrs. Woman not only works in the old-style hand-powered factory of the home, but very frequently in the new-style steam-powered factory away from the home. But if he saw, farther, that Mrs. Woman, with a frequency not known before in history, goes to the factory on Monday morning when the whistle blows, and works till Saturday night, while Mr. Man cooks the victuals, and sweeps the floor, and even minds the baby If Dr. Devine saw that also he has kept mighty still about it. In a case of that kind, what is the Economic Function of Man?
Now, in spite of all my capital letters, you are onto the fact that I am not a Deep Thinker, so I might as well own up to you that I have never been able to get my copy into any kind of a Scientific Bulletin. But poor and unworthy though I be, it yet appears to me that Dr. Devine hasn't even picked the feathers off his bird of a subject, let alone cut it open to see what's inside of it.
Maybe right now, in this year of grace, 1911, most men do bring in the pay-envelope, and most women try to make the poor, pitiful, little dab of money that it holds go as far as possible. (And I don't envy them their job, either.) But that's no sign of a duck's nest. It is no great effort of the imagination to figure "she-towns" becoming practically universal. Then will the Economic Function of Woman be to attend to the Consumption end of the job? (The pay-envelope will look rather consumptive, when that time comes, too. Believe me.)
Men have charge of the field of Production now, eh? What d'you suppose old Injun chief Walks-in-the-High-Grass would have to say if you asked him who ought to do the manual labor, men or women? And not to go so far back as the Garden of Eden and Mother Eve taking a bite out of the apple of knowledge of what was good and made folks wise, I have just returned from a trip to the Ozarks, where the women-folks wait on the men, and no more think of sitting down to the same table with them than niggers would think of sitting down to the same table with white folks. The women have always done productive work. See if you can think of one trade or profession that the women did not originate and now do practise. The laundry business? Medicine? Agriculture? Pottery? The men didn't turn their hand to anything in the way of productive labor until they, too, were enslaved. If you find men swinging the hammer while women fry the beefsteak, I can also show you women swinging the hammer and men frying beefsteak, both remaining essentially masculine and feminine. When it comes to cooking
They tell the story of a man who stopped into a restaurant and asked: "What have you that's good?"
"We've got some very nice roast lamb to-day," the waiter said. "And the asparagus is extra good. And say, Captain, we've got coffee like your mother used to make!"
"Is that so? Well bring me a cup o' tea. And I'll try the lamb and asparagus."
Women do most of the cooking that's done, but there are some mighty good men cooks, and most men can cook nearly as badly as most women. Women do most of the marketing, but there are men who can shop expertly, and most men can buy with as little judgment as most women. (Present company, you understand, always included.)
No. You take a thousand men and a thousand women. Give to each batch an equal amount of intelligence, instruction and experience, and whether you put them on the Productive end or the Consumptive end, there won't be five cents' worth of difference between them. What small difference there may be in the matter of labor too hard for women is being rapidly done away with by machinery. Just as soon as it appears to be cheaper to install a machine and set a woman on the job, just that soon will the big, strong husky man get the blue envelope. Attending to the buying for the household is just about as much of a sex-characteristic as long hair.
But if you count Labor-Power as a Commodity, then Woman puts it all over Man as a Producer of Commodities. At that she is a specialist who stands unrivalled. And while shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, and many other things are of great importance to be produced, I submit that a good crop of children coming on is of importance the vitalest. If the world were full of nothing but grown-ups, all getting older every day, if not a finger of them ever were to be poked into a young mouth to feel the gritty edge of a new-cut lower front tooth, oh, what a no-account and dead-and-done-for thing this world would be! What would be the use of anything?
No, folks and friends, not Consumption of Commodities, not Production of Commodities, but Reproduction of Labor-Power is the maintop, all else being but side-shows of the snidest sort. This, which truly is the whole shooting-match, is The Economic Function of Woman. (Which anybody knows who is more than seven years old last birthday.)
But in this matter, you ask, aren't the men-folks entitled to some slight consideration?
Oh, yes, but not nearly so much as they think they are. For quite a good way up the scale of life, they get along pretty well without males at all. And when they do appear, they cut very little ice. When a plant has been cultivated as long, for instance, as the banana-plant, and knows it will be taken care of on its merits, it quits all that sex-foolishness. Males aren't such a much. It is a cheap experiment to try, to fancy a steady diminution of one sex while the other remains constant. If there were fewer and fewer women until finally there were only men, it would be fairly easy to figure out just about when human beings would cease to exist altogether. But up-end the proposition, and keep all the women, and gradually diminish the men until there are no more of them, it isn't so easy a problem in arithmetic.
Mind you, I am not advocating the extermination of the men-folks. While I have tongue or pen to raise in protest against such a procedure, I shall do so—unless, of course, I were one of the few left till the last, and it came about my time to go anyhow. I simply wish to point out that such a slew of us as now exists is far in excess of the real need. In heathen countries where they have never had the Gospel light, and women are in the way, they kill the girl babies. Some day, maybe, when the tidings comes: "It's a boy!" the instant response will be: "Who had the hammer last? Somebody go hunt for that hammer."
If Loeb and those fellows pry into Nature's secrets much farther, you know there mayn't be any need at all for that which so fondly thinks itself the Superior Sex. Coming up on the boat from Mobile, I had for fellow-passenger as far as Key West, an assistant at a biological experiment station on one of the Florida keys. He told me of sea-urchins, living and thriving, that never had a papa, unless an artificial mixture of certain chemical salts be called by that dear name. I listened with interest not unmixed with horror, for with the prophet's eye, I saw the finish of my sex!
No, Dr. Devine, there is no Economic Function peculiar to Woman but the one. Whatever the Man is able for, she also is able for, and then some.
But look at the paradox of Her! The more Woman is explained, the deeper grows the mystery. If she gain the Ballot, she will one day run everything, even to running Man off the earth, if necessary. Yet, while most men favor Votes for Women, most women do not.
After all, they're good to us.
"In such a case what is the economic function of man?"
