The Women of Tomorrow Part 14

The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work, going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity--that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her, in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.

They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury the _start_? Wasn't it only the means to the _finish_?

Eating a grouse destroys, in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider down or on straw, arose Bismarck.

The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.

On the other hand, we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on the luxury of stable floors and of free-lunch counters, just as thoroughly as any n.o.bleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the luxury of castles and of game preserves.

It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham sandwiches, of either eider down or straw, _without service rendered and without fatigue endured_, that ultimately desiccates the moral character and drains it of all capacity for effort.

Marie was enervated not by her luxury but by her failure to _pay_ for her luxury. She wouldn't have had to pay much. Her luxury was petty.

But she paid nothing. And her failure to pay was just as big as if her luxury had been bigger. Getting three thousand a year in return for nothing leaves you morally just as bankrupt as if you had got three million.

Marie came to her abdication of life's _greatest_ effort not by wearing too many clothes or by eating too many foods but by becoming accustomed to getting clothes and foods and all other things without the _smallest_ effort.

She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the _habit_ of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.

Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last, in her negative, non-resistive mind, atrophied all the instincts of that struggle, including finally the instinct for reproduction.

The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. Work, the perpetuation of one's own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the cla.s.s, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to live.

The detailed daily reasons for this social law stand clear in Marie's life. It is a strong law. Its triumph in Marie could have been thwarted only by the presence in her of a certain other social law.

Authority!

The woman who is coerced by Authority, the woman who is operated by ideals introduced into her from without, will bear children even when she does not feel the active wish to bear them. She will bear them just because the authoritative expectation is that she _shall_ bear them.

But Marie was free!

She was free from the requirement of an heir for the family estate.

The modern form of property, requiring no male warrior for its defense in the next generation, had done that for her.

She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted reproduction. Modern Protestantism had done that for her.

She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband's will. Modern individualism had done that for her.

She was free! Uncoerced by family authority, uncoerced by ecclesiastical authority, uncoerced by marital authority, she was almost limitlessly free!

There being no _external force_ compelling her to bear children, she had to follow _internal instinct_.

That instinct, if it had existed in her, would have been a sufficient guide. It would have been a commanding guide. It would have been the best possible guide. Rising in her from the original eternal life-power it would have driven her to child-bearing more surely than she could have been driven to it by any external agency whatsoever.

But the instinct toward child-bearing could not now be revived in Marie. With the cessation from struggle and from effort and from fatigue and from discipline and from the sorrow of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, with that cessation the instinct toward child-bearing had reached cessation, too. With the petrifaction of its soil it had withered away.

n.o.body had ever tried to bring Marie back to the soil of struggle.

n.o.body,--not her father, not her mother, not her husband, not one of her friends, not one of her teachers had ever taught her to return to life by returning to labor.

The greatest wrong possible to a woman had been wrought upon her.

She had been sedulously trained out of the life of the race into race-death.

Yet when it got talked around among her friends that she didn't want children, people blamed her and said it was very surprising, _in view of all that had been done for her_.

V.

Mothers of the World

Leaning over a tiled parapet, we looked down at the streak of street so far below. Motor-cars, crawling--crawling, glossy-backed beetles.

"Drop a pin and impale that green one." One couldn't, from up there, give motor-car and motor-car owner the reverence rightly theirs. A thousand miles of horizontal withdrawal into majestic forest recesses may leave one's regard for worldly greatness unabated. A perpendicular vantage of a hundred and fifty feet destroys it utterly.

"But look at that!" she said.

In the east, dull red on the quick blue of Lake Michigan, an ore-boat.

Low and long. A marvelously persistent and protracted boat. Might have been christened _The Eel_. Or _The Projectile_. No masts. And, except at her stern, under her deferred smokestack, no portholes. Forward from that stack her body stretched five hundred feet to her bow without excrescences and without apertures. Stripped and shut-eyed for the fight, grimmer than a battle ship, not a waste line nor a false motion in her, she went by, loaded with seven thousand tons of hemat.i.te, down to the blast furnaces of South Chicago.

"But," she said, "look at this."

She turned me from the lake. We crossed the roof's tarred gravel and looked north, west, and south abroad at the city.

Puffs of energy had raised high buildings over there; over there an eccentric subsidence had left behind it a slum. Queer, curling currents of trade and of l.u.s.t, here, there, and everywhere, were carrying little clutching eddies of disease and of vice across the thoroughfares of the wholesome and of the innocent. Sweet unused earth lay yonder in a great curve of green; within two miles of it stood clotted houses in which children were dying for air; brown levels of cottage and tenement, black bubbles of mill and factory, floating side by side, meeting, mingling, life and light merged into filth and fume--uncalculated; uncontrolled; fortuitous swirls and splutters on senseless molten metal; a reproduction in human lives of the phantom flurry which on simmering ladles in the steel mills they call the Devil's Flower Garden.

"Not so clever as the ore-boat, is it?" she said. "That was making wealth, conquering. Well done. This is using wealth, living. Done ill.

A city. Better than many. Worse than many. But none of my business.

I'm emanc.i.p.ated."

She waved her hand and blotted out the city from before me. In its place I saw now only an uninhabited wilderness plain. In a moment, however, in the side of a distant ridge, there appeared a tiny opening. A woman sat near it, plaiting a gra.s.s mat. A mile away a man stood, mending a bow.

It was the scene Mr. Kipling once reported:

"The man didn't begin to be tame till he met the woman. She picked out a nice dry cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail down, across the opening of the cave; and she said: 'Wipe your feet, dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.'"

As we looked, we saw the man fit an arrow to his bow, take aim, and bring down a deer. He carried it to the cave. The woman rose to meet him, the mat in her hand. He pushed her away savagely, took the mat from her, and threw the deer on the ground. She picked herself up and began to skin the deer with a knife which she slipped from her belt.

He lay down on the mat and went to sleep.

I heard my companion say: "_I_ did all the housekeeping of _that_ camp. It was woman's work. But now----"

She waved her hand and restored the city to my gaze.

"Now, of _this_ camp _you_ are the real housekeeper. The arranging of it, the cleaning of it, the decorating of it, on the big scale, as a total, all masculine, all yours! How you have expanded your duties, you who were once just hunter and fighter, princ.i.p.ally fighter! How your sphere is swollen! You do not realize it. You are familiar enough with the commonplace fact that most primitive industry in its origin owed little to you except (a big 'except') the protection of your sword against enemies. You are familiar with the fact that the plaiting of mats and the tanning of hides and every other industrial feature of housekeeping has pa.s.sed from my control to yours in precise proportion as it has ceased to be individual and has become collective. You dominate everything collective. You understand that.

What you don't understand is this:

"It is not only the _industrial_ features of housekeeping which tend to become collective. It is also its _administrative_ features. I will give you just one ill.u.s.tration. I cannot now keep my premises clean, beautiful, livable, except through the collective control of smoke, garbage, billboards, noise. And that control is yours.

"Further!