What shall we say to this new economic equality in a great laboring class?  Some people within and without the race deplore it.  “Back to the homes with the women,” they cry, “and higher wage for the men.”  But how impossible this is has been shown by war conditions.  Cessation of foreign migration has raised Negro men’s wages, to be sure—­but it has not only raised Negro women’s wages, it has opened to them a score of new avenues of earning a living.  Indeed, here, in microcosm and with differences emphasizing sex equality, is the industrial history of labor in the 19th and 20th centuries.  We cannot abolish the new economic freedom of women.  We cannot imprison women again in a home or require them all on pain of death to be nurses and housekeepers.

What is today the message of these black women to America and to the world?  The uplift of women is, next to the problem of the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause.  When, now, two of these movements—­woman and color—­combine in one, the combination has deep meaning.

In other years women’s way was clear:  to be beautiful, to be petted, to bear children.  Such has been their theoretic destiny and if perchance they have been ugly, hurt, and barren, that has been forgotten with studied silence.  In partial compensation for this narrowed destiny the white world has lavished its politeness on its womankind,—­its chivalry and bows, its uncoverings and courtesies—­all the accumulated homage disused for courts and kings and craving exercise.  The revolt of white women against this preordained destiny has in these latter days reached splendid proportions, but it is the revolt of an aristocracy of brains and ability,—­the middle class and rank and file still plod on in the appointed path, paid by the homage, the almost mocking homage, of men.

From black women of America, however, (and from some others, too, but chiefly from black women and their daughters’ daughters) this gauze has been withheld and without semblance of such apology they have been frankly trodden under the feet of men.  They are and have been objected to, apparently for reasons peculiarly exasperating to reasoning human beings.  When in this world a man comes forward with a thought, a deed, a vision, we ask not, how does he look,—­but what is his message?  It is of but passing interest whether or not the messenger is beautiful or ugly,—­the message is the thing.  This, which is axiomatic among men, has been in past ages but partially true if the messenger was a woman.  The world still wants to ask that a woman primarily be pretty and if she is not, the mob pouts and asks querulously, “What else are women for?” Beauty “is its own excuse for being,” but there are other excuses, as most men know, and when the white world objects to black women because it does not consider them beautiful, the black world of right asks two questions:  “What is beauty?” and, “Suppose you think them ugly, what then?  If ugliness and unconventionality and eccentricity of face and deed do not hinder men from doing the world’s work and reaping the world’s reward, why should it hinder women?”