Business+of+Being+a+Woman

=The Business of Being a Woman? Hear Our Voice(s)=

Lillian Hansberry, Library and Archives Assistant, Penn State Abington Library
//“People change, customs change, the whole world changes, but through it all the business of being a woman remains essentially the same. It is the only stable occupation in a universe filled with shifting and unstable occupations. Without doubt, every woman has her own ideas about how this particular business should be carried out, but in the end it is shown to be the same business that it always has been and always will be. And it resolves itself into several facts that will be true as long as there are women in the world. A woman’s business is to marry, to bring up children, and to manage the home.” --- Virginia Landon, student at the Ogontz School for Young Ladies, in her winning essay “The Business of Being a Woman,” 1925, in the contest’s third year.// || On March 3, 1913, women organized and marched on Washington in the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, planned for the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration to maximize exposure. Though women had been fighting for the right to vote for some time, this marked the first national suffrage event. Although it would be another seven years until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, the march brought women from all over the country and world together, signaling unequivocally that their voice would be heard.

Not all women were in support of suffrage, naturally. Just one-year prior, Ida Tarbell, nationally known journalist and muckraker who had successfully taken on big oil and John D. Rockefeller, published //The Business of Being a Woman//, a book of her essays which sought to highlight the nobility of woman doing what nature and society intended her to do. Despite being a highly educated single woman and having gained much success in the male-dominated profession of journalism, Tarbell, nonetheless, although she believed in women's liberation, to the abhorrence of many, did not believe that women should have the vote. In the book’s eponymous essay, she writes that the “Uneasy Woman” fighting her alleged male tyrants for equality of education, speech, and voting, were inferring that “the Business of Being a Woman, as it has been conducted heretofore by society, is of less importance than the Business of Being a Man.” 1 To Tarbell, women were simply different, and to fight for what men had was both unnatural and misguided; rather using their new found freedoms and education in the reverential and sacred work of marriage, motherhood, and homekeeping was where women would achieve true liberation.

A decade later in 1923, Ada Pierce McCormick, an heiress and national lecturer on homemaking and marriage, met Tarbell, which began her unrelenting worshipful pursuit of friendship with the famous journalist. 2 That same year McCormick wrote to Abby Sutherland, principal at The Ogontz School for Young Ladies in Rydal, PA, where McCormick had been a student. She proposed in a letter dated February 26, 1923 the idea of giving a “cup at Ogontz to the girl each year who wrote the best essay on the ‘Business of Being a Woman’” based on her suggested readings, which included Tarbell’s book as its chief title. 3 She herself would judge the essays and award the cup to the girl whose essay fit the merits of “sincerity and originality.”3 At one point in the contest’s duration she wrote that she “would much rather have them write perfectly scandalous ideas so long as they are really their own.” 4 But her comments in a draft of the letter to the “Dear Girls at Ogontz,” about the first year’s essays are much more restrictive and contradictory in their guidelines and come closer to the opinions of Tarbell:

//The first year the girls who wrote for the cup all seemed to feel that the main business of being a woman consisted in choosing the right husband, bringing up one’s children well and running a house. One intrepid spirit wrote that one couldn’t sit around with folded hands waiting till a husband fell off a Christmas tree and she thought a girl had a right to some sort of work of her own. And she certainly has. Since then we asked the girls to go on where these girls left off. Please divide your essays each year into four parts. Tell me, first what things you would require in a man before considering him as a possible husband. Remember, you’ll live with him forty years or more, and your children will inherit his traits, too. Second, how you’d bring up your boys and girls. Third, how you want to run a house, what is the distinction between housekeeping and home making. Fourth. [sic] What should a girl do until she gets married, or in case she never gets married at all. Has she a responsibility to the world and to herself as well as to her family [sic]// 5

Thirty-two of these student-written essays and McCormick’s correspondence and comments on the content of those essays are housed in the archives of the now-closed Ogontz School, located at Penn State Abington’s Library. Many of those essays reflect McCormick’s prescriptive directions. In fact, according to the girls themselves, “most of our answers naturally perhaps, kept woman far from the so-called business world—in a home with husband and children.”6 Whether the girls really felt that way or were simply writing what McCormick clearly expected is difficult to know. But doing so certainly gave a greater chance of winning the cup, as the first four winners were hardly filled with those scandalous ideas which McCormick had claimed she hoped for.

The first winning essay, in 1923, written by Alice Browning Smith, is an allegorical play, wherein Man tries to find a woman to raise The Child. He judges various women; a Feminist, a plumberess, she who Sports, she who is Unnecessary, etc. but finally he finds “the blithe person who is sitting there quite quietly. She is still, but she is giving, giving with such infinite art that only the nice things know she’s giving—giving of herself to the Boy and the Man. She is a clever, blithe person—woman, wife, and mother.” 7 The cup’s second winner is a dialogue between a young woman and her grandmother, who gives her granddaughter cheeky, yet still traditional advice on what kind of husband to seek out, how to raise her children, and how to run her house. When the young woman inquires about what she should do while “waiting for this most perfect man to come my way so that I may choose him and we may have a perfect home in which to bring up our perfect children,” she is advised by her grandmother to take a course in home-making and in the event no husband appears, to “go down into the slums and teach those poor ignorant mothers how to care for their babies; how to make a home and keep it.” 8 The introductory quote at the beginning of this article is from the contest’s third winner and the fourth cup winner argues that “nearly every bit of education acquired can be utilized in the home,” and for those that remain unmarried “it is her place to look after motherless children and to help better conditions among the needy.” 9

But by this time in history, more women than ever before had been pulled into the workforce as a result of World War I. For upper class white women, such as those that attended Ogontz, who in some ways were the embodiment of the New Woman of the 1920s—well-educated and athletic, there was nonetheless the societal expectation to marry, raise children, and care for a home. Those that remained unmarried were expected to mother in other ways as is reflected in the essays, and entering a profession often meant choosing to remain unmarried.

In 1927, the contest now in its fifth year, McCormick writes to Sutherland to say that “none have complied with the conditions of that cup” and that she will be skipping awarding it that year. 10 And yet it is in that year that one of those non-compliant essays, written by Eleanor Waddell, later Eleanor Waddell Libby, stands out. The only comment McCormick deemed to write on it was “anti-masculine” and yet it was chosen to be read at commencement where, according to the editor of the //Ogontz Mosaic//, in which the majority of the original essay was published, it “excited considerable comment owing to its vigorous and piquant originality.” 11 Entitled “Man and Super-Woman,” Waddell, an accomplished writer and artist while a student at Ogontz, wrote that women were tired at their place as the quiet concealers of their abilities upon whom men were supported, “rebelling at her present location at the foot of the throne steps, even though it is softly cushioned and luxurious. . .she insists on looking face to face”. Waddell had little sympathy for men, who she wrote, would “resort to the meanest of weapons to protect their pedestals from the guerrilla attacks of their feminine adversaries” and who heaped terrible wrath “upon her who refuses to burn incense on the altars of ‘manly superiority,’ or dares to run against him as a nominee for the ‘Goddessy’ on her own individual ticket.” 12

She spent no time addressing any of McCormick’s suggestions on marriage, children, or homemaking other than to acknowledge, in accordance with Tarbell’s belief, that “women are not physically strong enough, at present to do both, that is, give to the world both children and service” but she hoped that in the future woman will have evolved “from her present condition so that she will be mentally and physically capacitated to accomplish both” of which she expresses confidence women will reach that point. 11

Waddell herself went on to do both. She married Scott L. Libby, Jr in 1932, adopted a child, and according to her obituary learned to drive, service military vehicles, and became a dispatcher during World War II. She went on to run the family charitable foundation, donating millions of dollars to cancer research and was extremely active in many Arizona civic, cultural, and healthcare institutions. 13 Though she never entered politics, it was on that topic that her essay concluded and she made her most resolute predictions regarding the future of women who she saw as being on a “warpath of revolt” since the beginning of the century:

//The men allowed their lady folk to explore the realm of art and literature, even to dabble in them as a harmless pastime, but politics were affairs of a serious nature, into which they were forbidden to probe. But in twenty-five years a few women have been able to prove themselves equal to men, in matters pertaining to state and country. There is no question that they have gained a recognized position in the Arts. Therefore I urge mankind to beware of this lithe force that is creeping upon him. If it takes a woman only twenty-odd years to run neck and neck with men who have been racing toward the goal twenty centuries, how quickly is she going to overtake her contestants? Even the great philosopher Socrates said, “Woman once made equal to man becometh his superior.”// 11

100 years later, the United States has finally had its first female presidential nominee from a major political party, and women hold approximately 20% of political seats at the local, state, and federal level. 14 Yet here women are, on the warpath of revolt again, organizing and marching for their rights in the Women’s March on Washington and in cities and countries around the world. Like a century ago, this march is timed for maximum exposure, the day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump. And yet women are still divided, over some of the same issues and rights that they were a century ago. What if the Business of Being a Woman, a century after woman fought for suffrage, and two centuries after Abigail Adams petitioned congress with her List of Female Grievances, is just that: Voices, loud and clear, that cannot be ignored any longer.

1 Ida Tarbell, //Business of Being a Woman//. (New York: Macmillan Company, 1919), 16.

2 McCully, E.A., //Ida M. Tarbell//. (New York: Clarion Books, 2014), 221-221. 3 McCormick, A., Letter to A. Sutherland. 1923. February 26. Series 14, Abington, Ada Stetson Pierce McCormick Papers, The Ogontz School Archives, Abington College Library, Penn State University. 4 McCormick, A., Letter to A. Sutherland. 1924. November 29. Series 14, Abington, Ada Stetson Pierce McCormick Papers, The Ogontz School Archives, Abington College Library, Penn State University. 5 McCormick, A., Letter to A. Sutherland. 1924. April 15. Series 14, Abington, Ada Stetson Pierce McCormick Papers, The Ogontz School Archives, Abington College Library, Penn State University. 6 Editor, “The Ada Peirce McCormick Cup Competition,” //Ogontz Mosaic// 39, no. 6 (1923): 13. 7 Smith, A., “The Business of Being a Woman,” //Ogontz Mosaic// 39, no. 7 (1923): 39. 8 Briggs, B., “The Business of Being a Woman,” //Ogontz Mosaic// 40, no. 6 (1924): 20. 9 Younger, J., “The Business of Being a Woman,” //Ogontz Mosaic// 43, no. 12 (1925): 16-17. 10 McCormick, A., Letter to A. Sutherland. 1927. May 23. Series 14, Abington, Ada Stetson Pierce McCormick Papers, The Ogontz School Archives, Abington College Library, Penn State University. 11 Editor, “Man and Super-Woman,” Ogontz Mosaic 44, no. 6 (1927): 10. 12 Waddell, E., Essay entitled Man and Super-Woman. 1927. Series 14, Abington, Ada Stetson Pierce McCormick Papers, The Ogontz School Archives, Abington College Library, Penn State University. 13 Eleanor Waddell Libby obituary. 2002. //Arizona Republic//. 14 “Women in Elective Office 2017,” //Rutgers.edu//, 2017, http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/women-elective-office-2017.