The Forerunner Part 170

The feminine att.i.tude in life is wholly different. As a female she has merely to be herself and pa.s.sively attract; neither to compete nor to pursue; as a mother her whole process is one of growth; first the development of the live child within her, and the wonderful nourishment from her own body; and then all the later cultivation to make the child grow; all the watching, teaching, guarding, feeding. In none of this is there either desire, combat, or self-expression. The feminine att.i.tude, as expressed in religion, makes of it a patient practical fulfillment of law; a process of large sure improvements; a limitless comforting love and care.

This full a.s.surance of love and of power; this endless cheerful service; the broad provision for all people; rather than the compet.i.tive selection of a few "victors;" is the natural presentation of religious truth from the woman's viewpoint. Her governing principle being growth and not combat; her main tendency being to give and not to get; she more easily and naturally lives and teaches these religious principles. It is for this reason that the broader gentler teaching of the Unitarian and Universalist sects have appealed so especially to women, and that so many women preach in their churches.

This principle of growth, as applied and used in general human life will work to far other ends than those now so painfully visible.

In education, for instance, with neither reward nor punishment as spur or bait; with no compet.i.tion to rouse effort and animosity, but rather with the feeling of a gardener towards his plants; the teacher will teach and the children learn, in mutual ease and happiness. The law of pa.s.sive attraction applies here, leading to such ingenuity in presentation as shall arouse the child's interest; and, in the true spirit of promoting growth, each child will have his best and fullest training, without regard to who is "ahead" of him, or her, or who "behind."

We do not sadly measure the cabbage-stalk by the corn-stalk, and praise the corn for getting ahead of the cabbage--nor incite the cabbage to emulate the corn. We nourish both, to its best growth--and are the richer.

That every child on earth shall have right conditions to make the best growth possible to it; that every citizen, from birth to death, shall have a chance to learn all he or she can a.s.similate, to develop every power that is in them--for the common good--this will be the aim of education, under human management.

In the world of "society" we may look for very radical changes.

With all women full human beings, trained and useful in some form of work; the cla.s.s of busy idlers, who run about forever "entertaining" and being "entertained" will disappear as utterly as will the prost.i.tute.

No woman with real work to do could have the time for such petty amus.e.m.e.nts; or enjoy them if she did have time. No woman with real work to do, work she loved and was well fitted for, work honored and well-paid, would take up the Unnatural Trade. Genuine relaxation and recreation, all manner of healthful sports and pastimes, beloved of both s.e.xes to-day, will remain, of course; but the set structure of "social functions"--so laughably misnamed--will disappear with the "society women" who make it possible. Once active members of real Society; no woman could go back to "society," any more than a roughrider could return to a hobbyhorse.

New development in dress, wise, comfortable, beautiful, may be confidently expected, as woman becomes more human. No fully human creature could hold up its head under the absurdities our women wear to-day--and have worn for dreary centuries.

So on through all the aspects of life we may look for changes, rapid and far-reaching; but natural and all for good. The improvement is not due to any inherent moral superiority of women; nor to any moral inferiority of men; men at present, as more human, are ahead of women in all distinctly human ways; yet their maleness, as we have shown repeatedly, warps and disfigures their humanness. The woman, being by nature the race-type; and her feminine functions being far more akin to human functions than are those essential to the male; will bring into human life a more normal influence.

Under this more normal influence our present perversities of functions will, of course, tend to disappear. The directly serviceable tendency of women, as shown in every step of their public work, will have small patience with h.o.a.ry traditions of absurdity. We need but look at long recorded facts to see what women do--or try to do, when they have opportunity. Even in their crippled, smothered past, they have made valiant efforts--not always wise--in charity and philanthropy.

In our own time this is shown through all the length and breadth of our country, by the Woman's Clubs. Little groups of women, drawing together in human relation, at first, perhaps, with no better purpose than to "improve their minds," have grown and spread; combined and federated; and in their great reports, representing hundreds of thousands of women--we find a splendid record of human work. They strive always to improve something, to take care of something, to help and serve and benefit. In "village improvement," in traveling libraries, in lecture courses and exhibitions, in promoting good legislation; in many a line of n.o.ble effort our Women's Clubs show what women want to do.

Men do not have to do these things through their clubs, which are mainly for pleasure; they can accomplish what they wish to through regular channels. But the character and direction of the influence of women in human affairs is conclusively established by the things they already do and try to do. In those countries, and in our own states, where they are already full citizens, the legislation introduced and promoted by them is of the same beneficent character. The normal woman is a strong creature, loving and serviceable. The kind of woman men are afraid to entrust with political power, selfish, idle, over-s.e.xed, or ignorant and narrow-minded, is not normal, but is the creature of conditions men have made. We need have no fear of her, for she will disappear with the conditions which created her.

In older days, without knowledge of the natural sciences, we accepted life as static. If, being born in China, we grew up with foot-bound women, we a.s.sumed that women were such, and must so remain. Born in India, we accepted the child-wife, the pitiful child-widow, the ecstatic _suttee_, as natural expressions of womanhood. In each age, each country, we have a.s.sumed life to be necessarily what it was--a moveless fact.

All this is giving way fast in our new knowledge of the laws of life.

We find that Growth is the eternal law, and that even rocks are slowly changing. Human life is seen to be as dynamic as any other form; and the most certain thing about it is that it will change. In the light of this knowledge we need no longer accept the load of what we call "sin;"

the grouped misery of poverty, disease and crime; the c.u.mbrous, inefficatious, wasteful processes of life today, as needful or permanent.

We have but to learn the _real_ elements in humanity; its true powers and natural characteristics; to see wherein we are hampered by the wrong ideas and inherited habits of earlier generations, and break loose from them--then we can safely and swiftly introduce a far n.o.bler grade of living.

Of all crippling hindrances in false ideas, we have none more universally mischievous than this root error about men and women. Given the old androcentric theory, and we have an androcentric culture--the kind we so far know; this short stretch we call "history;" with its proud and pitiful record. We have done wonders of upward growth--for growth is the main law, and may not be wholly resisted. But we have hindered, perverted, temporarily checked that growth, age after age; and again and again has a given nation, far advanced and promising, sunk to ruin, and left another to take up its task of social evolution; repeat its errors--and its failure.

One major cause of the decay of nations is "the social evil"--a thing wholly due to the androcentric culture. Another steady endless check is warfare--due to the same cause. Largest of all is poverty; that spreading disease which grows with our social growth and shows most horribly when and where we are most proud, keeping step, as it were, with private wealth. This too, in large measure, is due to the false ideas on industry and economics, based, like the others mentioned, on a wholly masculine view of life.

By changing our underlying theory in this matter we change all the resultant a.s.sumptions; and it is this alteration in our basic theory of life which is being urged.

The scope and purpose of human life is entirely above and beyond the field of s.e.x relationship. Women are human beings, as much as men, by nature; and as women, are even more sympathetic with human processes.

To develop human life in its true powers we need full equal citizenship for women.

The great woman's movement and labor movement of to-day are parts of the same pressure, the same world-progress. An economic democracy must rest on a free womanhood; and a free womanhood inevitably leads to an economic democracy.

THE NUN IN THE KITCHEN

When you gaze upon a row of large, beautiful houses; those "residences"

to which the citizen "points with pride;" those "homes" which form our ideal of life's fulfillment; bear this in mind:

For every one of those proud, s.p.a.cious mansions must exist somewhere one or more huts or hovels or crowded city tenements.

Why? To furnish from the daughters of the poor the servants necessary to maintain such a domicile. So long as each woman performed with her own hands the labors of the home; there were physical limits to the size and splendor of that building.

The Palace has its slaves, the Castle its serfs, and the capacious mansions of today owe their splendor--yes, their very existence--to the nun in the kitchen.

"Why nun?" you will ask. Because in entering our service she is required to be poor, chaste and submissive; she gives up home and family; hers is a consecrated life--consecrated to the physical comfort of our families.

We expect our servants to be women as a matter of course: are not women made to serve? As a matter of fact, they are. That is, they are made to serve children, but we make them serve men. And since a married woman must serve her own husband exclusively, we must have unmarried women to serve other women's husbands! Hence the demand for maid service; hence the constant--though futile--effort to prevent our maids from marrying; and hence--this we have hitherto utterly overlooked--the continuous inadequacy of that service.

Thus an endless procession of incompetent young people--necessarily incompetent--is forever pa.s.sing in and out of our back doors; and our domestic life--its health and happiness--is built upon these shifting sands!

When slaves were owned we had a secure foundation, such as it was; but the present servant is not held by a chain or collar, and as she flits through the kitchen--either slowly or swiftly--the mistress of the mansion is drawn upon, in varying degree, to be a stop-gap.

The family and the home are far too important to our happiness to be left at the mercy of such a fleeting crowd of errant damosels.

Affection and obedience they may give--or may not--but competence does not come to ignorant youth. We need, to keep the world well fed and really clean, skilled, specialized, experienced, well-paid workers; and it is none of our business whether they are married or single.

LETTERS FROM SUBSCRIBERS

Being wholly unable to respond individually to the kind and helpful letters, I wish here to personally thank each friend for his or her really important contributions to the establishment of this magazine.

It is the rich response which gives a.s.surance that the work is worth doing, and that it reaches those for whom it is written.

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN.

COMMENT AND REVIEW

THE CENTURY OF THE CHILD

This is the well chosen t.i.tle for one of the most important books of this Twentieth Century, written by Ellen Key, that great Swedish woman who so intensely loves "the child," a book which has set all Europe thinking, has revolutionized the att.i.tude of mind of thousands of young women, and filled thousands of old ones with vain remorse.

In Germany a very considerable movement among girls of the upper cla.s.ses, involving a new att.i.tude towards marriage and maternity, has resulted from this one work.

I take a special, personal interest in it because my "Woman and Economics" was held to represent the opposite pole of thought regarding women from that of this book.

What is Miss Key's position?

She holds that "the child" is the most important of personages, that life should all be bent to its service, that the woman's one, all-inclusive purpose is the right bearing and rearing of children. She shows how painfully inadequate is our present provision for child culture, how unprepared is the average mother, how unsuitable the atmosphere of the average home and also of the average school; and makes searching comment on our methods of teaching--especially in teaching religion.