Page images
PDF
EPUB

To pant for recognition, to yearn to impress one's personality deeply upon one's people or one's time, is the essence of ambition. The ambitious youth thinks he thirsts to "do something" or to "be somebody," but his thirst would not be slaked by a success nobody noticed or acknowledged. Really what he craves is to figure potently in the minds of others, to be greatly loved, admired, or feared. The mere notoriety-seeker is less nice and hankers to be read about or talked about even if the self reflected is far from impressive. This type that would rather be butt than cipher is kin to the lunatic with a mania for self-exhibition.

Less dependent than the ambitious is the power-seeker who slakes his thirst for self-effectuation by molding the destinies of others but cares nothing for recognition by them. The retiring financier or unofficial Warwick, who secretly pulls the wires that makes politicians dance, finds his pleasure in seeing the puppets obey his will. Beyond him is the achiever, careless whether the public he benefits ever learns of his existence; but even he needs an inner circle who understand and appreciate his achievement.

It is rather a fine type that is captivated by the idea of recognition by the unborn. A man who shrinks from newspaper publicity may revel in imagining his name in a stained glass window, carved on a portal, or attached to a street. As between wide fame and lasting fame the more imaginative prefer the latter, counting it better to be remembered by posterity than to be the popular idol of one's time.

In a time like ours, when money can work wonders, men are apt to exaggerate its power over souls. Just as there are fools who think they can buy true love and silly rich who actually find satisfaction in the deference paid them by their lackeys and onhangers, so there are some who think to insure commemoration of themselves by paying for it. One rears himself a useless monument or leaves money to build it. Another welds his name to the philanthropy he founds or with his benefaction stipulates a memorial. The sage has no such childlike faith in the power of money, but realizes that he must leave to the unforced gratitude of his fellows the cherishing of his name and service.

Uncurbed, the passion to fix and greaten one's social image leads to such evils as pomp, ostentation, fashion, heart-burning,

jealousy, fawning, and tuft-hunting. It is a paradox that the mania to impress others may lead to the worst forms of antisocial conduct—as when a king brings on a war for the sake of prestige, or a proprietor squeezes his tenants in order to make a splurge on the boulevards or a splash at Monte Carlo. Shakespeare has Coriolanus slaughter the Volscians just to vindicate himself as not a "boy of tears." The scheming social climber sacrificing old friends and risking countless snubs in the hope of ultimate recognition by people of high position is about as social as a lizard; others interest her only as looking-glasses to reflect a pleasing image of herself. In the evil trinity religion bids us renounce, "the world, the flesh, and the devil"; the "world" stands for the faults that spring from solicitude for one's social image, such as worldly ambition, affectation, vanity, vainglory, boastfulness, and arrogance.

The mirrored self is a poor thing to stake one's happiness on. Like one's image in a still pool one's pleasing reflection in the minds of others may vanish with a breath. Ambition, to be sure, may lift the sluggard from his bed, the clod from his rut, the sensualist from his sty; but it overstimulates the mettlesome while the sensitive fret themselves ill over their standing in the eyes of others. This is why "withdrawal from the world" has always found some favor among choice spirits. The woods, the sea, or the cell afford asylum from the sharp suggestions that prick the flanks of ambition. One wearied of perpetually scoring to keep his prestige alive, his credit from being smirched by jealous rivals, longs to quit the "world" at least for a season.

Professor Cooley observes:

To the impressible mind life is a theater of alarms and contentions, even when a phlegmatic person can see no cause for agitation—and to such a mind peace often seems the one thing fair and desirable, so that the cloister or the forest, or the vessel on the lonesome sea, is the most grateful object of imagination. The imaginative self may be more battered, wounded, and strained by a striving, ambitious life than the material body could be in a more visible battle, and its wounds are usually more lasting and draw more deeply upon the vitality. Mortification, resentment, jealousy, the fear of disgrace and failure, sometimes even hope and elation, are exhausting passions; and it is after a severe experience of them that retirement seems most healing and desirable.

A finer remedy is to quit the game without withdrawing from that common life which is, after all, the place for most of the work

that is to better the world. Thus Thomas à Kempis exhorts: "Son, now I will teach thee the way of peace and of true liberty. Study to do another's will rather than thine own. Choose ever to have less rather than more. Seek ever the lower place and be subject to all; ever wish and pray that the will of God may be perfectly done in thee and in all. Behold such a man enters the bounds of peace and calm."

Being less aggressive in their make-up, women as a rule are more dependent than men on their immediate social image. They are more sensitive to present attitudes, cannot live so well on hoarded corroboration, and slow down sooner when opinion sets against them. How much gifted women will accomplish depends quite as much on the measure of encouragement they receive as on the degree of freedom they enjoy. American women have done so well, not chiefly because they are freer than their sisters in other lands, but because none cheer a woman's achievement so generously as American men.

While boys are taken up with what they are doing, girls live much in their imagination of how they appear to others. They blush more readily, until the arrival of adolescence they are more bashful than boys, and their clothes consciousness is more acute. It is no such task to get a girl in her early teens to keep herself presentable as to get a boy to do so. The girl catches subtle shades in the personal attitude of others which the boy misses, is more subject to affectation, falls more readily into acting rôles, will make greater sacrifices to convention, and lives more in terror of being "talked about." Women have too much divination to fall into certain egotistic attitudes common to men. Thus women are rarely pompous, and no one ever saw a woman strut. In mating the emotions of the sexes are not the same. "The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man." Woman's jealousy like her love is usually less physical in its object than man's. She is stung by the disloyalty of that which the average male resents as a trespass upon his property.

In many ways society formally recognizes the value to one of his mirrored self. Damages for libel allow for the "mental anguish" of 'Quoted by Cooley, op. cit., p. 221.

being brought into public contempt; for breach of promise to marry take into account the mortification of the jilted. Although the duel has been outlawed, insult not only goes a long way toward excusing violence but more and more it affords a ground of legal action, the German courts having gone farthest in this direction. It is contended that peaceful picketing does not exist, seeing that the pickets' tongue-lashing of the "scab" is a weapon of intimidation. The designating of workmen by numbers instead of their names is held to be intolerable. Many old punishments such as stocks, pillory, cucking-stool, scarlet letter-assumed social sensitiveness in the culprit. Like tar and feathers, whipping at the cart's tail hurt spirit more than body, and ears were cropped not so much to pain the offender as to make him a butt. The teacher may discard rod for dunce's cap and at a certain point in the child's development the parent can punish harder by looks and words than by thwacking. Malicious prison keepers "break" the more sensitive prisoners with indignities rather than hardships, while shrewd wardens offer the removal of stripes and numbers as an inducement to good conduct.

PROBABLE ECONOMIC FUTURE OF AMERICAN

WOMEN'

DAVID SNEDDEN

Teachers College, Columbia University

Any comprehensive program of vocational education must be designed primarily to prepare young persons for the effective exercise of productive vocations as now found; it may be designed secondarily and incidentally to anticipate probable social changes in the character and incidence of vocational activities; and, under some circumstances (taking due account of the relatively fundamental and only slightly controllable character of economic forces), to further desirable, and to restrain undesirable, economic tendencies by its emphasis on one or the other of different possible educational objectives.

[ocr errors]

It is well known that the economic position of women has already changed greatly during the last century, and conspicuously in communities in which productive work is chiefly of an industrial and commercial character. It is probable that many of the economic changes now in process will. continue along lines already established, some of their social, cultural, and physical consequences becoming increasingly evident. But it is also certain that societies in which concerted and intelligent action, looking toward conservation of the best in human resources and the promotion of higher social standards generally, has become an established policy, will insist on securing improved conditions for the development of the young, and with especial emphasis on sound family life. The mother of children is the logical primary custodian of children's well-being; and in their rearing will be found, inevitably, the best vocation for many women-best for the individual herself and best for the society which she serves.

'The substance of this paper constitutes a chapter in a forthcoming book on Vocational Education. The purpose here is to indicate the considerations which underlie the making of programs of vocational education for women and girls.

« PreviousContinue »