Where the Woman Fails

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 1, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 13.

Where the Woman Fails

MISS IDA TARBELL, well known for gallant work in uncovering some of the wrongs in Big Business, now presents a book called “The Business of Being a Woman.” Here are passages that sharply arraign the new woman:

“The most essential obligation in a woman's business is establishing her household on a sound moral basis.

“If a child is anchored to basic principles, it is because his home is built on them. If he understands integrity as a man, it is usually because a woman has done her work well. If she has not done it well, it is probable that he will be a disturbance and a menace when he is turned over to society. Sending defective steel to a gun maker is no more certain to result in unsafe guns than turning out boys who are shifty and tricky is to result in a corrupt and unhappy community.

“Appalled by the seriousness of the task, or hurried from it by the joys of liberty and education, the woman has too generally shifted it to other shoulders which were waiting to help her work out the problem, but which could never be a substitute. She has turned over the child to the teacher, secular and religious, and fancied that he might be made a man of integrity by an elaborate system of teaching in a mass.

“It is not too much to say that the revelations of corruption in our American cities, the use of town councils, state legislatures, and even of the federal government in the interests of private business, have discredited the democratic system throughout the world. It has given more material for those other lands who despise democracy to sneer at us than anything else that has yet happened in this land.

“And this has come about under the régime of the emancipated woman. Is she in no way responsible for it? If she had kept the early ideals of the woman's part in democracy as clearly before her eyes as she has kept some of her personal wants and needs, could there have been so disastrous a condition? Would she be the uneasy woman that she is if she had kept faith with the ideals that forced her emancipation?—if she had not substituted for them dreams of personal ambition, happiness, and freedom!

“If our uneasy woman could grasp the full meaning of her place in this democracy, a place so essential that democracy must be overthrown unless she rises to it—a part which man is not equipped to play, and which he ought not to be asked to play—would she not cease to apologize for herself; cease to look with envy on man's occupations?

“Learning, business careers, political and industrial activities—none of these things is more than incidental in the national task of woman. Her great task is to prepare the citizen. The citizen is not prepared by a training in practical politics. Something more fundamental is required. The meaning of honor and of the sanctity of one's word, the understanding of the principles of democracy and of the society in which we live, the love of humanity, and the desire to serve,—these are what make a good citizen.”—Edwin Markham.