The Living Present Part 16

Nothing can be more certain than that girls, once haughty and exacting, will marry these young men and be glad to get them.

A student of his race said to me one day: "France is the most conservative country in Europe. She goes on doing the same thing generation after generation paying no attention to rebellious mutters, hardly hearing them in fact. She believes herself to have been moulded and solidified long since. Then, presto! Something sudden and violent happens. Old ideas are uprooted. New ones planted. Is there a struggle? Not for a moment. They turn an intellectual somersault and are immediately as completely at home with the new as the old."

During the second year of the war a feminist was actually invited to address the graduation cla.s.s of a fashionable girls' school. She told them that the time had come when girls of all cla.s.ses should be trained to earn their living. This war had demonstrated the uncertainty of human affairs. Not a family in France, not even the _haute finance_, but would have a curtailed income for years to come, and many girls of good family could no longer count on a dot if the war lasted much longer. Then there was the decrease in men. Better go out into the world and make any sort of respectable career than be an old maid at home. She gave them much practical advice, told them that one of the most lucrative employments was retouching photographs, and implored them to cultivate any talent they might have and market it as soon as possible.

The girls sat throughout this discourse as stunned as if a bomb had dropped on the roof. They were still discussing it when I left Paris.

No doubt it is already beginning to bear fruit. Few of them but have that most dismal of all fireside ornaments, a half-effaced old-maid sister, one of the most tragic and pitiable objects in France. The n.o.ble attributes which her drab and eventless life sometimes leave un-withered were superbly demonstrated to the American audience some years ago by Nance O'Neil in "The Lily."

X

One of the new officers I happened to hear of was a farmer who not only won the _Croix de Guerre_ and the _Croix de la Legion d'Honneur_ very early in the war but rose in rank until, when I heard the story, he was a major. One day a brother officer asked him if he should remain in the army after peace was declared.

"No," he replied, and it was evident that he had thought the matter over. "My wife is not a lady. She is wholly unfitted to take her place in the officers' cla.s.s. There is no democracy among women. Better for us both that I return whence I came."

This is a fair sample of the average Frenchman's ironic astuteness, that clear practical vision that sees life without illusions. But if the war should drag on for years the question is, would he be willing to surrender the position of authority to which he had grown accustomed, and which satisfies the deepest instincts of a man's nature after youth has pa.s.sed? After all there may be a new "officers'

cla.s.s."

I heard another story, told me by a family doctor, equally interesting. The son of a wealthy and aristocratic house and his valet were mobilized at the same time. The young patrician was a good and a gallant soldier but nothing more. The valet discovered extraordinary capacities. Not only did he win the coveted medals in the course of the first few months, but when his shattered regiment under fire in the open was deprived of its officers he took command and led the remnant to victory. A few more similar performances proving that his usefulness was by no means the result of the moment's exaltation but of real however unsuspected gifts, he was rapidly promoted until he was captain of his former employer's company. There appears to have been no mean envy in the nature of the less fortunate aristocrat.

Several times they have received their _permission_ together and he has taken his old servant home with him and given him the seat of honor at his own table. His mother and sisters have made no demur whatever, but are proud that their menage should have given a fine soldier to France. Perhaps only the n.o.blesse who are unalterably sure of themselves would have been capable of rising above the age-old prejudices of caste, war or no war.

XI

French women rarely emigrate. Never, if they can help it. Our servant question may be solved after the war by the manless women of other races, but the Frenchwoman will stay in her country, if possible in her home. All girls, the major part of the young widows (who have created a panic among the little spinsters) will marry if they can, not only because marriage is still the normal career of woman but because of their sense of duty to the State. But that social France after the war will bear more than a family resemblance to the France that reached the greatest climax in her history on August second, nineteen-fourteen, has ceased to be a matter of speculation.

Although I went to France to examine the work of the Frenchwomen only, it would be ungracious, as well as a disappointment to many readers, not to give the names at least of some of the many American women who live in France or who spend a part of the year there and are working as hard as if this great afflicted country were their own. Some day their names will be given to the world in a full roll of honor. I do not feel sure that I know of half of them, but I have written down all I can recall. The list, of course, does not include the names of Americans married to Frenchmen:

Mrs. Sharp, Miss Anne Morgan, Mrs. Tuck, Mrs. Bliss, Miss Elisabeth Marbury, Miss Elsie de Wolfe, Mrs. Robert Bacon, Mrs. W.K. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Whitney Warren, Mrs. Wharton, Mrs. Canfield Fisher, Miss Grace Ellery Channing, Mrs. Blake, Mrs. Carroll of Carrollton, Mrs. Sherman, Mrs. Cooper Hewett, Miss Holt, Mrs. William H. Hill, Mrs. Shaw, Mrs.

Frederick H. Allen, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, Miss Fairchild, Mrs.

Younger, Mrs. Morton Mitch.e.l.l, Mrs. Fleury, Mrs. Sales, Mrs. Hyde, Mrs. William Astor Chanler, Mrs. Ridgeley Carter, Miss Ethel Crocker, Miss Daisy Polk, Miss Janet Scudder, Mrs. Lathrop, Miss Vail, Mrs.

Samuel Watson, Mrs. Armstrong Whitney, Mrs. Lawrence Slade, Miss Yandell, Mrs. Greene, Mrs. Duryea, Mrs. Depew, Mrs. Marion Crocker, Miss Mary Eyre, Mrs. Gros, Mrs. Van Heukelom, Mrs. Tarn McGrew, Mrs.

Schoninger, Miss Grace Lounsbery, Mrs. Lawrence, the Princess Poniatowska, and Isadora Duncan.

BOOK II

FEMINISM IN PEACE AND WAR

I

THE THREAT OF THE MATRIARCHATE

I

It is possible that if the European War had been averted the history of Feminism would have made far different reading--say fifty years hence. The militant suffragettes of England had degenerated from something like real politicians into mere neurasthenics and not only had lost what little chance they seemed for a time to have of being taken seriously by the British Government, but had very nearly alienated the many thousands of women without the ranks that were wavering in the balance. This was their most serious mistake, for the chief handicap of the militants had been that too few women were disposed toward suffrage, or even interested. The history of the world shows that when any large body of people in a community want anything long enough and hard enough, and go after it with practical methods, they obtain it in one form or another. But the women of Britain as well as the awakening women of other nations east and west of the Atlantic, were so disgusted and alarmed by this persisting lack of self-control in embryonic politicians of their s.e.x that they voted silently to preserve their sanity under the existing regime. It has formed one of the secret sources of the strength of the antis, that fear of the complete demoralization of their s.e.x if freed from the immemorial restraints imposed by man.

This att.i.tude of mind does not argue a very distinguished order of reasoning powers or of clear thinking; but then not too many men, in spite of their centuries of uninterrupted opportunity, face innovations or radical reforms with unerring foresight. There is a strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards, or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheel-horses necessary to a stable civilization, but history, even current history in the newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits willing to do battle for new ideas. The militant women of England would have accomplished wonders if their nervous systems had not broken down under the prolonged strain.

It is probable that after this war is over the women of the belligerent nations will be given the franchise by the weary men that are left, if they choose to insist upon it. They have shown the same bravery, endurance, self-sacrifice, resource, and grim determination as the men. In every war, it may be argued, women have displayed the same spirit and the same qualities, proving that they needed but the touchstone of opportunity to reveal the splendor of their endowment, but treated by man, as soon as peace was restored, as the same old inferior annex.

This is true enough, but the point of difference is that never, prior to the Great War, was such an enormous body of women awake after the lethargic submission of centuries, and clamoring for their rights.

Never before have millions of women been supporting themselves; never before had they even contemplated organization and the direct political attack. Of course the women of Europe, exalted and worked half to death, have, with the exception of a few irrepressibles, put all idea of self-aggrandizement aside for the moment; but this idea had grown too big and too dominant to be dismissed for good and all, with last year's fashions and the memory of delicate _plats_ prepared by chefs now serving valiantly within the lines. The big idea, the master desire, the obsession, if you like, is merely taking an enforced rest, and there is persistent speculation as to what the thinking and the energetic women of Europe will do when this war is over, and how far men will help or hinder them.

I have written upon this question in its bearings upon the women of France more fully in another chapter; but it may be stated here that such important feminists as Madame Verone, the eminent avocat, and Mlle. Valentine Thompson, the youngest but one of the ablest of the leaders, while doing everything to help and nothing to embarra.s.s their Government, never permit the question to recede wholly to the background. Mlle. Thompson argues that the men in authority should not be permitted for a moment to forget, not the services of women in this terrible chapter of France's destiny, for that is a matter of course, as ever, but the marked capabilities women have shown when suddenly thrust into positions of authority. In certain invaded towns the wives of imprisoned or executed Mayors have taken their place almost automatically and served with a capacity unrelated to s.e.x. In some of these towns women have managed the destinies of the people since the first month of the war, understanding them as no man has ever done, and working harder than most men are ever willing to work. Thousands have, under the spur, developed unsuspected capacities, energies, endurance, above all genuine executive abilities. That these women should be swept back into private life by the selfishness of men when the killing business is over, is, to Mlle. Thompson's mind, unthinkable. In her newspaper, _La Vie Feminine_, she gives weekly instances of the resourcefulness and devotion of French womanhood, and although the women of her country have never taken as kindly to the idea of demanding the franchise as those of certain other nations, still it is more than possible that she will make many converts before the war is over.

These are not to be "suffrage" chapters. There is no doubt in my mind that the women of all nations will have the franchise eventually, if only because it is ridiculous that they should be permitted to work like men (often supporting husbands, fathers, brothers) and not be permitted all the privileges of men. Man, who grows more enlightened every year--often sorely against his will--must appreciate this anomaly in due course, and by degrees will surrender the franchise as freely to women as he has to negroes and imbeciles. When women have received the vote for which they have fought and bled, they will use it with just about the same proportion of conscientiousness and enthusiasm as busy men do. One line in the credo might have been written of human nature A.D. 1914-1917: "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be."

But while suffrage and feminism are related, they are far from identical. Suffrage is but a milestone in feminism, which may be described as the more or less concerted sweep of women from the backwaters into the broad central stream of life. Having for untold centuries given men to the world they now want the world from men.

There is no question in the progressive minds of both s.e.xes that, outside of the ever-recurrent war zones, they should hereafter divide the great privileges of life and civilization in equal shares with men.

Several times before in the history of the world comparatively large numbers of women have made themselves felt, claiming certain equal rights with the governing s.e.x. But their ambitions were generally confined to founding religious orders, obtaining admission to the universities, or to playing the intellectual game in the social preserves. In the wonderful thirteenth century women rivaled men in learning and accomplishments, in vigor of mind and decision of character. But this is the first time that millions of them have been out in the world "on their own," invading almost every field of work, for centuries sacrosanct to man. There is even a boiler-maker in the United States who worked her way up in poor-boy fashion and now attends conventions of boiler-makers on equal terms. In tens of thousands of cases women have made good, in the arts, professions, trades, businesses, clerical positions, and even in agriculture and cattle raising. They are brilliant aviators, yachtsmen, automobile drivers, showing failure of nerve more rarely than men, although, as they are not engaged in these pursuits in equal numbers perhaps that is not a fair statement. Suffice it to say that as far as they have gone they have asked for no quarter. It is quite true that in certain of the arts, notably music, they have never equaled men, and it has been held against them that all the great chefs are men. Here it is quite justifiable to take refuge in the venerable axiom, "Rome was not made in a day." It is not what they have failed to accomplish with their grinding disabilities but the amazing number of things in which they have shown themselves the equal if not the superior of men.

Whether their success is to be permanent, or whether they have done wisely in invading man's domain so generally, are questions to be attacked later when considering the biological differences between men and women. The most interesting problem relating to women that confronts us at present is the effect of the European War on the whole status of woman.

If the war ends before this nation is engulfed we shall at least keep our men, and the males of this country are so far in excess of the females that it is odd so many American women should be driven to self-support. In Great Britain the women have long outnumbered the men; it was estimated before the war that there were some three hundred thousand spinsters for whom no husbands were available. After the war there will be at best something like a proportion of one whole man to three women (confining these unwelcome prophecies to people of marriageable age); and the other afflicted countries, with the possible exception of Russia, will show a similar dislocation of the normal balance. The acute question will be repopulation--with a view to another trial of military supremacy a generation hence!--and all sorts of expedients are being suggested, from polygamy to artificial fertilization. It may be that the whole future of woman as well as of civilization after this war is over depends upon whether she concludes to serve the State or herself.

While in France in the summer of 1916, I heard childless women say: "Would that I had six sons to give to France!" I heard unmarried women say: "Thank heaven I never married!" I heard bitterness expressed by bereft mothers, terror and despair by others when the curtain had rung down and they could relax the proud and smiling front they presented to the world. Not one would have had her son shirk his duty, nor asked for compromise with the enemy, but all prayed for the war to end. It is true that these men at the front are heroes in the eyes of their women, worshiped by the majority when they come home briefly as permissionnaires, and it is also true that France is an old military nation and that the brain-cells of its women are full of ancestral memories of war. But never before have women done as much thinking for themselves as they are doing to-day, as they had done for some fifteen or twenty years before the war. That war has now lasted almost three years. During this long and terrible period there has been scarcely a woman in France, as in Britain, Russia, Italy, Germany, who has not done her share behind the lines, working, at her self-appointed tasks or at those imposed by the Government, for months on end without a day of rest. They have had contacts that never would have approached them otherwise, they have been obliged to think for themselves, for thousands of helpless poor, for the men at the Front.

The Frenchwomen particularly have forced men to deal with them as human beings and respect them as such, dissipating in some measure those mists of s.e.x through which the Frenchman loves to stalk in search of the elusive and highly-sophisticated quarry. As long as a woman was s.e.xually attractive she could never hope to meet man on an equal footing, no matter how entrancing he might find her mental qualities. She must play hide-and-seek, exercise finesse, seduction, keep the flag of s.e.x flying ever on the ramparts. It is doubtful if Frenchmen will change in this respect, but it is more than doubtful if women do not.

There is hardly any doubt that if this war lasts long enough women for the first time in the history of civilization will have it in their power to seize one at least of the world's reins. But will they do it--I am now speaking of women in ma.s.s, not of the advanced thinkers, or of women of the world who have so recently ascertained that there is a special joy in being free of the tyranny of s.e.x, a tyranny that emanated no less from within than without.

It is to be imagined that all the men who are fighting in this most trying of all wars are heroes in the eyes of European women--as well they may be--and that those who survive are likely to be regarded with a pa.s.sionate admiration not unmixed with awe. The traditional weakness of women where men are concerned (which after all is but a cunning device of Nature) may swamp their great opportunity. They may fight over the surviving males like dogs over a bone, marry with sensations of profound grat.i.tude (or patriotic fervor) the armless, the legless, the blind, the terrible face mutiles, and drop forever out of the ranks of Woman as differentiated from the ranks of mere women. What has hampered the cause of Woman in Great Britain and Europe so far is the quite remarkable valuation put upon the male by the female. This is partly temperamental, partly female preponderance, but it is even more deeply rooted in those vanished centuries during which man proclaimed and maintained his superiority. Circ.u.mstances helped him for thousands of years, and he has been taken by the physically weaker and child-bearing s.e.x at his own estimate. It is difficult for American women to appreciate this almost servile att.i.tude of even British women to mere man. One of the finest things about the militant woman, one by which she scored most heavily, was her flinging off of this tradition and displaying a shining armor of indifference toward man as man. This startled the men almost as much as the window smashing, and made other women, living out their little lives under the frowns and smiles of the dominant male, think and ponder, wonder if their small rewards amounted to half as much as the untasted pleasures of power and independence.

It is always a sign of weakness to give one side of a picture and blithely ignore the other. Therefore, let me hasten to add that it is a well-known fact that Mrs. Pankhurst had borne and reared six children before she took up the moribund cause of suffrage; and that after a season's careful investigation in London at the height of the militant movement I concluded that never in the world had so many unattractive females been banded together in any one cause. Even the young girls I heard speaking on street corners, mounted on boxes, looked gray, dingy, s.e.xless. Of course there were many handsome, even lovely, women,--like Mrs. Cavendish-Bentinck and Lady Hall, for instance--interested in "the movement," contributing funds, and giving it a certain moral support; but when it came to the window smashers, the jail seekers, the hunger-strikers, the real martyrs of that extraordinary minor chapter of England's history, there was only one good-looking woman in the entire army--Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence--and militant extravagances soon became too much for her. There were intelligent women galore, women of the aristocracy born with a certain style, and showing their breeding even on the soap-box, but s.e.xually attractive women never, and even the youngest seemed to have been born without the bloom of youth. The significance of this, however, works both ways. If men did not want them, at least there was something both n.o.ble and pitiful in their willingness to sacrifice those dreams and hopes which are the common heritage of the lovely and the plain, the old and the young, the Circe and the Amazon, to the ultimate freedom of those millions of their sisters lulled or helpless in the enchanted net of s.e.x.

It is doubtful if even the militants can revert to their former singleness of purpose; after many months, possibly years, of devotion to duty, serving State and man, the effacement of self, appreciation of the naked fact that the integrity of their country matters more than anything else on earth, they may be quite unable to rebound to their old fanatical att.i.tude toward suffrage as the one important issue of the Twentieth Century. Even the very considerable number of those women that have reached an appearance which would eliminate them from the contest over such men as are left may be so chastened by the hideous sufferings they have witnessed or heard of daily, so moved by the astounding endurance and grim valor of man (who nearest approaches to G.o.dhood in time of war) that they will have lost the disposition to tear from him the few compensations the new era of peace can offer. If that is the case, if women at the end of the war are soft, completely rehabilitated in that femininity, or femaleness, which was their original endowment from Nature, the whole great movement will subside, and the work must begin over again by unborn women and their acc.u.mulated grievances some fifty years hence.

Nothing is more sure than that Nature will take advantage of the lull to make a desperate attempt to recover her lost ground. Progressive women, and before the war their ranks were recruited daily, were one of the most momentous results of the forces of the higher civilization, an evolution that in Nature's eye represented a lamentable divergence from type. Here is woman, with all her physical disabilities, become man's rival in all of the arts, save music, and in nearly all of the productive walks of life, as well as in a large percentage of the professional and executive; intellectually the equal if not the superior of the average man--who in these days, poor devil, is born a specialist--and making a bold bid for political equality.

It has been a magnificent accomplishment, and it has marked one of the most brilliant and picturesque milestones in human progress. It seems incredible that woman, in spite of the tremendous pressure that Nature will put upon her, may revert weakly to type. The most powerful of all the forces working for Nature and against feminism will be the quite brutal and obscene naturalness of war, and the gross familiarity of civilization with it for so long a period. There is reversion to type with a vengeance! The ablest of the male inheritors of the acc.u.mulated wisdom and experiences and civilizing influences of the ages were in power prior to August 1914, and not one of them nor all combined had the foresight to circ.u.mvent, or the diplomatic ingenuity to keep in leash the panting Hun. They are settling their scores, A.D. 1914-1917, by brute fighting. There has been some brain work during this war so far, but a long sight more brute work. As it was in the beginning, etc.

And the women, giving every waking hour to ameliorating the lot of the defenders of their hearth and their honor, or nursing the wounded in hospital, have been stark up against the physical side: whether making bombs in factories, bandages or uniforms, washing gaping wounds, preparing shattered bodies for burial, or listening to the horrid tales of men and women home on leave.

II

The European woman, in spite of her exalted pitch, is living a more or less mechanical life at present. Even where she has revealed unsuspected creative ability, as soon as her particular task is mapped she subsides into routine. As a rule she is quite automatically and naturally performing those services and duties for which Nature so elaborately equipped her, ministering to man almost exclusively, even when temporarily filling his place in the factory and the tram-car.

_Dienen! Dienen!_ is the motto of one and all of these Kundrys, whether they realize it or not, and it is on the cards that they may never again wish to somersault back to that mental att.i.tude where they would dominate not serve.