The Forerunner Part 89

The maternal ones, of course. The s.e.x instincts of the male are of a preliminary nature, leading merely to the union preceding parenthood.

The s.e.x instincts of the female cover a far larger field, spending themselves most fully in the lasting love, the ceaseless service, the ingenuity and courage of efficient motherhood. To feminize education would be to make it more motherly. The mother does not rear her children by a system of prizes to be longed for and pursued; nor does she set them to compete with one another, giving to the conquering child what he needs, and to the vanquished, blame and deprivation. That would be "unfeminine."

Motherhood does all it knows to give to each child what is most needed, to teach all to their fullest capacity, to affectionately and efficiently develop the whole of them.

But this is not what is meant by those who fear so much the influence of women. Accustomed to a wholly male standard of living, to masculine ideals, virtues, methods and conditions, they say--and say with some justice--that feminine methods and ideals would be destructive to what they call "manliness." For instance, education to-day is closely interwoven with games and sports, all of an excessively masculine nature. "The education of a boy is carried on largely on the playground!" say the objectors to women teachers. Women cannot join them there; therefore, they cannot educate them.

What games are these in which women cannot join? There are forms of fighting, of course, violent and fierce, modern modifications of the instinct of s.e.x-combat. It is quite true that women are not adapted, or inclined, to baseball or football or any violent game. They are perfectly competent to take part in all normal athletic development, the human range of agility and skill is open to them, as everyone knows who has been to the circus; but they are not built for physical combat; nor do they find ceaseless pleasure in throwing, hitting or kicking things.

But is it true that these strenuous games have the educational value attributed to them? It seems like blasphemy to question it. The whole range of male teachers, male pupils, male critics and spectators, are loud in their admiration for the "manliness" developed by the craft, courage, co-ordinative power and general "sportsmanship" developed by the game of football, for instance; that a few young men are killed and many maimed, is nothing in comparison to these advantages.

Let us review the threefold distinction on which this whole study rests, between masculine, feminine and human. Grant that woman, being feminine, cannot emulate man in being masculine--and does not want to.

Grant that the masculine qualities have their use and value, as well as feminine ones. There still remain the human qualities shared by both, owned by neither, most important of all. Education is a human process, and should develop human qualities--not s.e.x qualities. Surely our boys are sufficiently masculine, without needing a special education to make them more so.

The error lies here. A strictly masculine world, proud of its own s.e.x and despising the other, seeing nothing in the world but s.e.x, either male or female, has "viewed with alarm" the steady and rapid growth of humanness. Here, for instance, is a boy visibly tending to be an artist, a musician, a scientific discoverer. Here is another boy not particularly clever in any line, nor ambitious for any special work, though he means in a general way to "succeed"; he is, however, a big, husky fellow, a good fighter, mischievous as a monkey, and strong in the virtues covered by the word "sportsmanship." This boy we call "a fine manly fellow."

We are quite right. He is. He is distinctly and excessively male, at the expense of his humanness. He may make a more prepotent sire than the other, though even that is not certain; he may, and probably will, appeal more strongly to the excessively feminine girl, who has even less humanness than he; but he is not therefore a better citizen.

The advance of civilization calls for human qualities, in both men and women. Our educational system is thwarted and hindered, not as Prof.

Wendell and his life would have us believe, by "feminization," but by an overweening masculization.

Their position is a simple one. "We are men. Men are human beings.

Women are only women. This is a man's world. To get on in it you must do it man-fashion--i.e., fight, and overcome the others. Being civilized, in part, we must arrange a sort of "civilized warfare," and learn to play the game, the old crude, fierce male game of combat, and we must educate our boys thereto." No wonder education was denied to women. No wonder their influence is dreaded by an ultra-masculine culture.

It will change the system in time. It will gradually establish an equal place in life for the feminine characteristics, so long belittled and derided, and give pre-eminent dignity to the human power.

Physical culture, for both boys and girls, will be part of such a modified system. All things that both can do together will be accepted as human; but what either boys or girls have to retire apart to practice will be frankly called masculine and feminine, and not encouraged in children.

The most important qualities are the human ones, and will be so named and honored. Courage is a human quality, not a s.e.x-quality. What is commonly called courage in male animals is mere belligerence, the fighting instinct. To meet an adversary of his own sort is a universal masculine trait; two father cats may fight fiercely each other, but both will run from a dog as quickly as a mother cat. She has courage enough, however, in defence of her kittens.

What this world most needs to-day in both men and women, is the power to recognize our public conditions; to see the relative importance of measures; to learn the processes of constructive citizenship. We need an education which shall give its facts in the order of their importance; morals and manners based on these facts; and train our personal powers with careful selection, so that each may best serve the community.

At present, in the larger processes of extra-scholastic education, the advantage is still with the boy. From infancy we make the gross mistake of accentuating s.e.x in our children, by dress and all its limitations, by special teaching of what is "ladylike" and "manly." The boy is allowed a freedom of experience far beyond the girl. He learns more of his town and city, more of machinery, more of life, pa.s.sing on from father to son the truths as well as traditions of s.e.x superiority.

All this is changing before our eyes, with the advancing humanness of women. Not yet, however, has their advance affected, to any large extent, the base of all education; the experience of a child's first years. Here is where the limitations of women have checked race progress most thoroughly. Here hereditary influence was constantly offset by the advance of the male. Social selection did develop higher types of men, though s.e.x-selection reversed still insisted on primitive types of women. But the educative influence of these primitive women, acting most exclusively on the most susceptible years of life, has been a serious deterrent to race progress.

Here is the dominant male, largely humanized, yet still measuring life from male standards. He sees women only as a s.e.x. (Note here the criticism of Europeans on American women. "Your women are so s.e.xless!"

they say, meaning merely that our women have human qualities as well as feminine.) And children he considers as part and parcel of the same domain, both inferior cla.s.ses, "women and children."

I recall in Rimmer's beautiful red chalk studies, certain profiles of man, woman and child, and careful explanation that the proportion of the woman's face and head were far more akin to the child than to the man.

What Mr. Rimmer should have shown, and could have, by profuse ill.u.s.tration, was that the faces of boy and girl differ but slightly, and the faces of old men and women differ as little, sometimes not at all; while the face of the woman approximates the human more closely than that of the man; while the child, representing race more than s.e.x, is naturally more akin to her than to him. The male reserves more primitive qualities, the hairiness, the more pugnacious jaw; the female is nearer to the higher human types.

An ultra-male selection has chosen women for their femininity first, and next for qualities of submissiveness and patient service bred by long ages of servility.

This servile womanhood, or the idler and more excessively feminine type, has never appreciated the real power and place of the mother, and has never been able to grasp or to carry out any worthy system of education for little children. Any experienced teacher, man or woman, will own how rare it is to find a mother capable of a dispa.s.sionate appreciation of educative values. Books in infant education and child culture generally are read by teachers more than mothers, so our public libraries prove. The mother-instinct, quite suitable and sufficient in animals, is by no means equal to the requirements of civilized life.

Animal motherhood furnishes a fresh wave of devotion for each new birth; primitive human motherhood extends that pa.s.sionate tenderness over the growing family for a longer period; but neither can carry education beyond its rudiments.

So accustomed are we to our world-old method of entrusting the first years of the child to the action of untaught, unbridled mother-instinct, that suggestions as to a better education for babies are received with the frank derision of ma.s.sed ignorance.

That powerful and brilliant writer, Mrs. Josephine Daskam Bacon, among others has lent her able pen to ridicule and obstruct the gradual awakening of human intelligence in mothers, the recognition that babies are no exception to the rest of us in being better off for competent care and service. It seems delightfully absurd to these reactionaries that ages of human progress should be of any benefit to babies, save, indeed, as their more human fathers, specialized and organized, are able to provide them with better homes and a better world to grow up in. The idea that mothers, more human, should specialize and organize as well, and extend to their babies these supreme advantages, is made a laughing stock.

It is easy and profitable to laugh with the majority; but in the judgment of history, those who do so, hold unenviable positions. The time is coming when the human mother will recognize the educative possibilities of early childhood, learn that the ability to rightly teach little children is rare and precious, and be proud and glad to avail themselves of it.

We shall then see a development of the most valuable human qualities in our children's minds such as would now seem wildly Utopian. We shall learn from wide and long experience to antic.i.p.ate and provide for the steps of the unfolding mind, and train it, through carefully prearranged experiences, to a power of judgment, of self-control, of social perception, now utterly unthought of.

Such an education would begin at birth; yes, far before it, in the standards of a conscious human motherhood. It would require a quite different status of wifehood, womanhood, girlhood. It would be wholly impossible if we were never to outgrow our androcentric culture.

COMMENT AND REVIEW

With the May issue of the American Magazine closes the first set of papers on "The American Woman," by Miss Ida Tarbell. She has to a high degree the historian's power to collate facts and so marshall them as to give a clear picture of the time and scenes in question. I always read her work with admiration and respect, also with enjoyment, personal and professional. The strong, far-seeing mind at work; the direct style; and the value of the subject matter, place this writer high among our present day teachers.

For these reasons I was wholly unprepared for the painful shock caused by reading the opening page in the March number of these articles.

Preceding issues had treated of the rise of the Equal Suffrage movement in this country; while not wholly sympathetic, these were fair, and ably treated.

The March number begins: "What was the American Woman doing in the '40's and '50's that she went on her way so serenely while a few of her s.e.x struggled and suffered to gain for her what they believed to be her rights?" And she goes on to show for what reason she kept out of the Woman's Rights Movement, "reasons, on the whole, simple and n.o.ble."

Here are the reasons.

"She was too much occupied with preserving and developing the great traditions of life she had inherited and accepted. . . . She was firmly convinced that these traditions were the best the world had so far developed, not merely for women, but for society. She did not deny that women had not the full opportunity they should have; but as she saw it, no more did men. She saw civil and educational and social changes going on about her. She feared their coming too fast rather than too slow.

"And it was no unworthy thing that she was doing. Take that part of her life so often spoken of with contempt--her social life. Those who would pa.s.s society by as a frivolous and unworthy inst.i.tution are those who have never learned its real functions--who confuse the selfish business of amus.e.m.e.nt with the serious task of providing _an intimate circle for the free exchange of ideals and of service,_ for stimulus and enjoyment.

"It is through society that _the quickening of mind and heart best comes about--that the nature is aroused, the fancy heightened. It is the very foundation of civilization--society. The church and state work through it. Morals are made and unmade in it. Ideas find life or death there."_

The italics are mine.

For so clear-headed a woman as Miss Tarbell to commit herself to statements like these was a keen disappointment to a sincere admirer. I have quoted at length that there may be no mistake as to her meaning.

The "society" referred to is unmistakably that business of exchanging entertainments which most of us do pa.s.s by as "a frivolous and unworthy inst.i.tution;" but which some find the sufficient occupation of a lifetime.

That human intercourse is profoundly important no one will deny; we know that contact and exchange does quicken the mind and heart, does give stimulus and enjoyment. It is even true in a large sociological sense that human intercourse is the foundation of civilization. But to call "society" the foundation of civilization does seem like putting a very long train of carts before the horse.

Women who work for suffrage, like other women, and men also, need to meet other people, need relaxation, need the stimulus of contact with differing minds, and get it. Being a suffragist is not like being a leper--or a pauper--or excommunicated. There is nothing about the belief itself to cut off the believer from her kind, and make it impossible to invite her to dinner.

"Society" is of course averse to meeting persons who talk seriously of important things. We are all taught as children that religion and politics must not be discussed in society--and the cause of woman suffrage is often both.

"The selfish business of amus.e.m.e.nt" is so predominant in "society" that amusing people are the preferred guests; and if some earnest and noteworthy person is drawn into "society" as a temporary exhibit, he is expected to be amusing if he can, and not talk "shop."

It may be admitted at once that Miss Tarbell's main contention is true.

It was of course because most women were so occupied in "preserving and developing the great traditions of life" that they could not open their minds to new convictions. They were of course suspicious of change, so is the ma.s.s of people at all times, in proportion to their ignorance.

The deadening effect of a ceaseless round of housework keeps most women from grasping general issues of importance; and the deadening effect of a ceaseless round of entertainments does the same thing to the few who represent "society." But to have that "society" presented to us as a n.o.ble soul-satisfying rightfully exclusive occupation, is a shock.

If it is a natural, simple right form of meeting together it is in no way forbidding to woman suffragists. If it is the "round of gaieties"

to which our newspapers give columns--how does it accomplish all those invaluable achievements Miss Tarbell enumerates?

What are the occupations of "society?" Its members are always getting together in expensive clothes, to visit and receive, to eat and drink, to ride and drive, to dance and play games, to go to the opera; and to travel from town to country, from beach to mountain, from land to land, to repeat these things or to hire some one to invent new ones. But these pleasures cannot be in themselves the foundation of civilization!

The "exchange of ideals and service" alleged to take place in "society"

must be in conversation! It is by this medium that we get our minds and hearts quickened--our natures aroused--our fancy heightened--that the ideas find life and death, and morals are made and unmade.