In the later and farther development of the pecuniary culture, the
requirement of withdrawal from the industrial process in order to
avoid social odium is carried so far as to comprise abstention from
the emulative employments. At this advanced stage the pecuniary culture
negatively favors the assertion of the non-invidious propensities
by relaxing the stress laid on the merit of emulative, predatory,
or pecuniary occupations, as compared with those of an industrial
or productive kind. As was noticed above, the requirement of such
withdrawal from all employment that is of human use applies more
rigorously to the upper-class women than to any other class, unless the
priesthood of certain cults might be cited as an exception, perhaps
more apparent than real, to this rule. The reason for the more extreme
insistence on a futile life for this class of women than for the men
of the same pecuniary and social grade lies in their being not only an
upper-grade leisure class but also at the same time a vicarious
leisure class. There is in their case a double ground for a consistent
withdrawal from useful effort.
It has been well and repeatedly said by popular writers and speakers who
reflect the common sense of intelligent people on questions of social
structure and function that the position of woman in any community
is the most striking index of the level of culture attained by the
community, and it might be added, by any given class in the community.
This remark is perhaps truer as regards the stage of economic
development than as regards development in any other respect. At the
same time the position assigned to the woman in the accepted scheme of
life, in any community or under any culture, is in a very great degree
an expression of traditions which have been shaped by the circumstances
of an earlier phase of development, and which have been but partially
adapted to the existing economic circumstances, or to the existing
exigencies of temperament and habits of mind by which the women living
under this modern economic situation are actuated.
The fact has already been remarked upon incidentally in the course of
the discussion of the growth of economic institutions generally, and
in particular in speaking of vicarious leisure and of dress, that the
position of women in the modern economic scheme is more widely and
more consistently at variance with the promptings of the instinct of
workmanship than is the position of the men of the same classes. It
is also apparently true that the woman's temperament includes a larger
share of this instinct that approves peace and disapproves futility.
It is therefore not a fortuitous circumstance that the women of modern
industrial communities show a livelier sense of the discrepancy
between the accepted scheme of life and the exigencies of the economic
situation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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