The following article by Joseph Schumpeter was published in the Washington Post (March 22, 1914) along with four other short articles by different writers on the subject of women’s suffrage. While Schumpeter briefly indicates where he ultimately stands, “…the gallant fight for equality which our women are waging,” he displays all the passion of an early twentieth century “feminist of the chair”. Still an interesting tidbit of an artifact.
_______________________
Suffrage Coming, says Economist, Because of Changing Family Life
Institution of Marriage Modified, Declares Prof. Schumpeter, and Women Have Lost Their Old Employment—Traces History.
By Prof. Joseph Schumpeter
Austrian Exchange Professor to Columbia University,
Professor of Political Economy at the University of Gratz
If any public question is in process of being thrashed out, people soon cease to do any thinking of their own about it and have a way of settling down to repeating indefinitely sets of arguments which from the very fact of their logical weakness seem to derive an emotional force.
This we can always observe when large issues are fought out. What we think about them is only handmaid to what we feel about them. But this is specially true in the particular case of the gallant fight for equality which our women are waging, for hardly anywhere else is there so much room for vague hopes and fears, and hardly another issue has so nasty a spike for the feelings of many of us.
Now, I do not wish to argue on either side. All I want is to point out that all ideas and social institutions and habits which have anything to do with the relations and relative positions of the sexes are determined by, or have a tendency to adapt themselves to the general conditions under which a nation lives. We cannot hope—much as we may want to—to keep any social institutions—marriage, for instance—what it is at a given point of the long road of social evolution, if those conditions change. As a matter of fact, though the name may remain the same, the institution of marriage and what it really means and implies is forever changing.
Facts Change Faster Than Ideals.
There is as much difference between what it is to be married now and what it was to be married a few hundred years ago as there is between the Twentieth Century Limited and a saddle horse, although our legal definitions and our ideals of marriage have changed much less rapidly and thoroughly than the facts have. And there is some use in glancing over the historical evolution of the position of women to see how the necessities under which we have lived have sharpened, together with everything else, also this particular element of our lives.
Women in Primitive Times.
In primitive conditions the precariousness of the existence of the small clans that roamed about very much like herds of deer imposed on them the necessity of the strongest members of the group being always ready to fight an enemy or to hunt for food, specializing, as it were, in the profession of warrior and hunter and leaving everything else to the women.
This accounts for the position of women in primitive times. It is not quite exact to speak of their “subjection” or to style them “beasts of burden.” They simply had a sphere of activity cut out for them, from which men were debarred just as much as they were debarred from joining his hunting expeditions.
Family life as we know it came into existence only much later, when people settled down on the land. It owes its origin to the fact that the house had become an economic point, and that the ties of clanship lost steadily in importance. This, by the way, disposes of the argument that the family is the “cell” of the social group. The contrary is true. The family evolved out of a bigger group, it appeared comparatively late, and social groups have been able to get along without it for a very long spell of time.
No Old Maids Then.
Well, when the family, in our sense of the word, did come into existence, the place of the wife was again determined by inexorable necessities. And this meant, at that time, that the social position of women in general was so determined, for practically all of them were wives, a spinster being just as exceptional a phenomenon as a bachelor then was. They were, indeed, most unhappy exceptions, because married life was then the necessary basis of everything outside the walls of a convent. In their homes wives were supreme rulers.
They managed the whole of all those industrial functions which the rural household of the Middle Ages implied. They did what manufacturers and tradesmen do for them today.
Needless to say, those conditions have passed away or are passing away, and they will never return. What I have called their industrial function has been taken away from women and has been reduced, or is being reduced, to fussing about menus, table decorations, and similar problems. The peasant’s wife is happier in this respect, for she still lives, to some extent, under those old conditions. The laborer’s wife has never had much of a home. But all these women who have not got to go out to work now offer the most tragic case of unemployment ever witnessed, with all its effects on happiness and character.
Suffrage Bound to Come.
Whatever our works and ideals, it is absurd to call the women’s movement a whim, which will pass, provided only it is not taken seriously and provided its symptoms are sternly put down. It is a movement which it may be possible to guide, but which it is imperative to guide only toward its goal, for it will get there, anyway. Let us apply this to the particular question of suffrage, which is only one element of the much broader problem I have been speaking about and a comparatively insignificant one. Yet it is a step on a long road—a step which is absolutely unavoidable. The more men fight the suffrage the better the cause will prosper. All the resistance is good for is to show the power of the trend of things and to make the victory—which is sure to come—the more significant and dramatic.
Source: The Washington Post, 22 March 1914. Copy in the on-line Schumpeter Archive.
Image Source: Josef Schumpeter portrait. Austrian National Library. Bildarchiv und Grafiksammlung.