Woman in Modern Society

Woman in Modern Society

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Title: Woman in Modern Society
Author: Earl Barnes
Release Date: April 23, 2005 [EBook #15691]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR:_
STUDIES IN EDUCATION (IN TWO VOLUMES)
WHERE KNOWLEDGE FAILS

WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY
BY
EARL BARNES
AT ONE TIME PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY IN THE

STATE UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA, AND LATER PROFESSOR
OF EDUCATION IN LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK B.W. HUEBSCH

COPYRIGHT, 1912 BY B.W. HUEBSCH PRINTED IN U.S.A.

This volume is dedicated to a woman endowed by her ancestors with
health and strength, reared by a wise mother, trained to earn her own
living, and university bred, at one time an independent wage-earner and
now equal partner in the business of a home, a social force in the life of
her community, member of a woman's club, a suffragist, the devoted
and intelligent mother of a group of fine children, and the center of a
family which loves and reverences her and finds the deepest meaning
of life in her presence.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
I. WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A WOMAN 9 II. WOMAN'S
HERITAGE 31 III. WOMEN IN EDUCATION 57 IV. THE
FEMINIZING OF CULTURE 85 V. THE ECONOMIC
INDEPENDENCE OF WOMEN 107 VI. WOMEN IN INDUSTRY
123 VII. THE MEANING OF POLITICAL LIFE 150 VIII.
WOMAN'S RELATION TO POLITICAL LIFE 173 IX. THE
MODERN FAMILY 207 X. FAMILY LIFE AS A VOCATION 231
XI. CONCLUSION 251

WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY
I
What it Means to be a Woman
If we go back to the earliest forms of life, where the unit is simply a
minute mass of protoplasm surrounded by a cell wall, we find each of
these divisions to be a complete individual. It can feed itself, that its
life may go on to-day; it can fight or run away, that it may be here to

fight to-morrow; and by a process of division it can create a new life so
that its existence may continue across the generations. With such units
it is quite conceivable that life might go on through all eternity, death
following birth, were it not that protoplasm contains within itself a
principle of change. Life and change are synonymous.
And this change moves ever toward a complexity, which we call
development, where cells unite in a larger life, and functions and
organs are specialized. Thus there comes a time when the part split off
carries with it power to eat and digest, to fight or run away, but only
half the power of procreation. This half unit, this incomplete individual,
is either male or female, and from this time on, the epic of life gathers
around the search of these half-lives for their complements. The force
that impels to this search, while at first valuable only for the
perpetuation of the generations, gathers into itself modifying feeling
and desires and, at a later period, ideas and ideals, which finally, when
men and women appear, make it the greatest of all the shaping forces in
life.[1]
[1] The fact that sexual selection does not play the part in organic
evolution which Darwin assigned it does not affect this statement. See
chapter on Sexual Selection in YVES DELAGEE and MARIE
GOLDSMITH, The Theories of Evolution, New York: Huebsch, 1912.
Of course, in such a sweeping statement as this, one must include under
sex hunger all the forces that drive men and women to seek each other's
society, rather than that of their own sex. In this sense, it can be truly
said that it gives a motive for our care of offspring, and for all our other
most self-forgetful devotions, our finest altruisms, our most polished
expressions in language, manners and dress. It justifies labor, ambition,
and at times even self-effacement. It underlies nearly all the lyric
expressions in art; furnishes almost the only theme for that delineation
of modern life which we call the novel; and is a main support for music,
painting, statuary and belles-lettres. It gives us the institution of the
family, which is the parent of the state; it is closely allied to religion;
and in our individual lives it lifts us to the heights of self-realization
and happiness, or plunges us down