IS WOMAN EMBODIED OBSTRUCTION?

BY HELEN CAMPBELI

It may be objected by the readers of the ARENA, that the above title hardly covers the ground expected in an article on coöperation on which I am asked to give my view with its special bearing on women. As a student of general conditions for women, from that of the wage-earner in factory or shop or any of the myriad avenues of earning now open, to that of the wageless but no less hard-working farmer's wife, in lonely New England hill town and on lonelier western prairie, I have formed my own opinion as to how far women are ready for the type of progress involved in genuine coöperation, and it will have its own place before my portion of space is filled. In the meantime, I propose to give one on the same subject, which took form unexpectedly to all concerned, and produced an excitement from which the listeners of that day have not yet fully recovered.

It was in a well-known woman's club not far from one of the great centres, and a hundred women or so had been devoting the afternoon to a summary of woman's progress, congratulating themselves that in all fields an open way lay before her; four hundred trades at her option and artistic and professional life receiving each year a larger and larger number of recruits. Name after name came up, and for each was some soft and silky word, the apparently very honest feeling of admiration and good will.

A stranger sat in the background, a woman in middle life, with a benevolent face, and eyes in which the kindliness was mingled with gleams of humor that came and went swiftly. It was the face of a woman who had lived, and to whom wide experience had brought the power of cool, dispassionate judgment of this problem of living. Her lips had curled now and then, the sarcasm followed instantly by a smile that meant compassion certainly; though why should compassion be in order of that assembly of comfortable, well-todo women?

"Friends," she said, suddenly rising to her feet as a pause came in the proceedings, "I am a stranger, yet I am certain that some of you know me. I am '; and she

gave a name so familiar that a general stir of interest went through the assembly. "I want the right to speak to you for few moments if I may."

"We shall be only too happy to hear any word you have for us," said the president, and folded her hands expectantly.

"In all the congratulations the afternoon has held," began the speaker, "there has been a note now and then of sorrow and dismay at the disabilities that still hedge about the woman in trades. Nobody has gone back of the present era or asked how it is that for thousands of years she let every industry that had belonged to her pass into the hands of man, and is but just beginning to reclaim her natural activities. We know if we read any study of prehistoric times, like Tylor's 'Primitive Culture' or Mason's 'Woman's Place in Primitive Culture'-the latest word on this subject that all arts and trades began with her. Read Drummond's chapter in his 'Ascent of Man,' on 'The Evolution of a Mother,' and you will see how this must have been inevitable. To make things better for the child was the instinct of all mothers then as now. One by one, arts and industries developed because of its needs, and as they developed passed into the hands of man, who, from a hunting and fighting animal only, was gradually taking on civilized characteristics, and discovering not only how to do things better, but now to do them more easily. So far as invention has a history, it is always the man who forces the woman to give up her heavy stones for grinding and try the mill; to use an improved loom, to accept the cook-stove instead of the open fire and its back-breaking system of crane and pots, the sewing machine instead of the needle; in short, all modern conveniences.

"What woman has done with the sewing machine she has done with most other inventions for her benefit-turned them into new instruments of torture. The sewing machine has enabled her to put a hundred tucks where once she put three, and every garment is made to hold a wilderness of stitching. Complication and always more and more complication has become the order of living, and laborsaving inventions crowd houses, and demand a new form of skilled labor to take care of them.

"From the beginning of homes or workshops, women have steadfastly labored at complication and men at simplification. The fact that a man is successful in business means that he knows how to adapt means to ends. His office is a model of compactness; everything at hand that can make

work swift and easy.

In every trade, the worker, as dentist or carpenter, has his tools in perfect order and arranged close at hand so that every motion will tell. The kitchen of a dining car or of a great ocean-liner is a model of condensed convenience. And while the man worker in these lines is condensing his space and making every step and stroke tell, the woman worker in the same field has only in scattered instances planned to the same ends, but goes on in the old helter-skelter fashion. Day by day life complicates. The daily paper brings the ends of the earth to our door. We must learn the lesson that all mankind is one, whether we will or no. More work to be done; less and less time to do it in. Complexity is the law of being for this complex creature we call man, nor do I believe that a return to primitive simplicity is either possible or desirable. Men have found out many inventions. They have not yet found out how to make their uses a unit and let all share the benefit alike.

"You wonder what I am driving at. It i the terrible waste of force that modern housekeeping represents-waste not only in expenditure, but in results. Each kitchen has its Moloch in the cook-stove, the shrine before which 'a passing train of hired girls' incessantly does homage. The coal that cooks for six could as well cook for sixty. The anguish of the wash-day, the weekly martyrdom of the housekeeper, has no more place under the civilized roof than the weaving of cloth or the salting and curing of meats. For the poor it is an even more wasteful system, since they must buy in quantities so small that they pay double and treble the sum the article is worth. We have no time for anything,' is the cry of all women, yet not one of you is willing to submit to the personal trouble that might be involved in a new experiment, or to work out for the world, as it must be worked out, all that belongs to this business of coöperation. Every sign of the times shows that it must come. It is part of every great business; it is the secret of success in trusts and combinations of every order.

"I do not ask anyone to give up the home. That is no part of coöperation. But it is time that this business of cooking and cleaning for humanity should be transferred to the hands of experts. The woman will still find occupation in genuinely caring for her family, teaching and training as to-day she cannot. As to cooking, the kind which too many of us have been made to know is warranted to kill and not to cure. The kitchen is not an essential part

of the home. But the coöperative kitchen and laundry, no matter on how simple a scale, mean not only more time for the higher aspects of living but more money to spend in real things. Living, as we get it in our isolated, individual system, is organized waste and destruction; and women who oppose and refuse to even listen to rational talk as to possibilities, what are they but organized ob struction? This is a bomb in your midst. I see it in your faces. You would vote for any suggestion under heaven rather than a deep and earnest consideration of the real place of coöperation.

"The preciousness of home? I know all about it. You women with comfortable homes forget that you represent only a fraction of the myriad to whose homes only the hard side of life comes. The tenement house home is a torture chamber, and the kitchen of the farmer's wife no less so. "Objection? A thousand if you choose, but not one that cannot be met and made to change its face.

"I have heard women say with a gasp, 'It does look as if we should have to come to coöperation, and how awful it is! Awful? Yes, as the angel of death is called awful till we find that its coming is deliverance into the larger life. Precisely so with this business of coöperation. Till you have tried it you know nothing of its real meaning, and once tried you will marvel that you delayed so long. And so, as I have listened I have longed that you should at least study the meaning of the word, and see if your way into all that you crave does not lie in this path and no other. You have had almost a generation now of study and of all that has come in with the woman's club. That has been all right. But now you are beginning to think of something beside mere literary and artistic questions. You admit that there are problems, and of them all not one is greater or more compelling than this, as to how our system of living for ourselves, for our poor, may be bettered. And the thinker knows that this one word holds it all, and waits for women to put away the inertia that is part of their life, it would seem, and think till they can work, and work till the way is clear, and coöperation is the simple, natural, heaven-ordained method of life. I beg you to think of it."

The speaker paused and looked around-a look that seemed to hold a sort of divine compulsion-then sat down and for a moment closed her eyes and bent her head almost as if in prayer. Then she smiled, for the eyes met hers

blankly, and only here and there was there token of sympathy or approval.

"I said they were organized obstruction," she murmured, and gave cheerful attention to the remaining proceedings, which included a vote of thanks for her protest, but no suggestion to pursue the subject.

In every woman's club in the United States, the members' chat before the programme opens turns on the terrors of domestic service and the problems hedging about all housekeeping. When it turns on the real way out and how to find it, the human race will be by that much nearer the millennium. Till then, why should I not agree with my friend and make my own the title I have chosen, since, till that day dawns, woman stands, and must stand, as "organized obstruction"?