Woman in Modern Society Part 8

When it comes to estimating the effect of voting on the women themselves, it is still harder to form an opinion. A large majority of those reporting to Miss Sumner think that women have become more intelligent and more public-spirited, but some doubt it. Morally, they have shown themselves less corrupt than men; but a considerable number think women as a whole have suffered some deterioration. This is a question bound up with our deepest feelings and our most conservative ideals; and it is inevitable that some observers should find any change for the worse. On the whole, belief in equal suffrage seems to have increased in Colorado during the twelve years under survey. Probably the results are much what they would be if one were to study a group of the most intelligent and refined men in the same community.

During the summer of 1911, I spent a month in the State of Idaho; and as I had long been interested in the problem of equal suffrage, both in England and America, I seized eagerly on the opportunity to study its practical workings at first hand. On the streets and in the tram-cars, in hotel lobbies and in lecture halls, when dining out or when making a call, few people escaped inquisition. I interviewed working men and women, men of affairs, ranchers, sheep raisers and miners, doctors, lawyers, teachers, ministers and practical politicians, both men and women.

The thing that first impresses one who has been intimately in touch with the excited and turbulent condition of mind among the English suffragettes, and the sustained and often impa.s.sioned feeling of Eastern suffrage leaders, is the absence of any burning interest in the subject on the part of men or women in Idaho. In London or New York, a suffrage inquirer would constantly strike "live wires;" in Idaho, every one is insulated. The subject is no more an issue than civil service reform or state versus national control of banking systems. Most people have even forgotten the pa.s.sage of the const.i.tutional amendment conferring equal suffrage, in 1896. Since then, men and women have gone on voting and holding office until the woman's right has become as commonplace as, and no more interesting or questionable than, the vote of any busy citizen in New Jersey.

The first question that one raises, is naturally whether women do actually vote and hold office in Idaho. To answer this question, there is no body of statistics available. Every one, however, declares that they pretty generally vote. On account of long distances in the country side, they poll less votes than men, especially if the weather is bad.

Probably about three-quarters as many women as men go to the polls.

Often I met women who said that they did not care for the vote, and sometimes one who said she thought women ought not to vote; but these same women often added that since they had the responsibility they felt it their duty to cast a ballot; and no woman told me that she did not fulfil the obligation.

In the first legislature which met after the granting of equal suffrage, that of 1898, three women were seated, Mrs. Hattie F. n.o.ble, Clara L.

Cambell, and Mary A. Wright; Mrs. Wright afterward became chief clerk of the House. In 1908, another woman, Mrs. Lottie J. McFadden, was returned; but there was no woman in the last legislature, and so far as I can learn, only these four have taken part in law-making. When asked why, after the first ardor of emanc.i.p.ation, women have taken so little part in legislation, most people said it was because they had found the work and conditions surrounding it unsuited to them. It seems generally agreed, however, that a woman could be elected to the legislature at any time if she represented a cause which needed to be brought before the people through that body.

Theorists have always insisted that equal suffrage would greatly improve the material conditions which surround the polls on election day. One of the prominent political leaders in Idaho, who has been intimately in touch with conditions for a quarter of a century, said that of course there had been great improvement in the last fifteen years. "Things would have improved any way," he said, "but I am sure that the women have had a large influence. No woman has ever been insulted at the polls in Idaho and she runs no more danger of annoyance than she would in buying her ticket at a railway window. Men are not always sober in either place; but if a man made a remark to a woman that was not polite, or used annoying language in her presence, he would be mobbed by the men even in the roughest mining camp in the State." Doubtless women have helped to break the connection between the saloon and the polling-place, but no one claims that women have made voting into a drawing-room ceremony. On the contrary, women are very persistent workers at the polls, seeking to direct doubtful voters.

Advocates of equal suffrage have pretty generally held the belief that if women were given the ballot their superior moral standards would lead to a marked change in the handling of such problems as the liquor traffic and the control of red light districts. Of woman's superior moral standards there can be no doubt; of the actual effect of her vote upon these questions there is a great deal of doubt. While I was in Idaho, the question of local option came up before the voters of Salt Lake City, in the neighboring equal suffrage State of Utah, and the "wets" won by a vote of 14,775 to 9,162. Thousands of women must have voted for license to bring about this result. In April, 1911, the question of license or no license was voted on in Boise. In this case again the "wets" won by a considerable majority.

Take another case. For several years in Boise, until 1909, the red light district was segregated in two alleys in the heart of the city. In the munic.i.p.al election of that year this issue came fairly before the voters, and the democratic nominee for mayor, who was pledged to break up the system, was elected by a considerable majority, though the city is strongly republican. This result was undoubtedly due to the women's vote. After two years, the issue came up again; and the republican nominee, who was opposed to the scattering policy though not pledged to segregation, was elected; and this result must again have been due to the woman's vote. Prominent women of the city told me that during the two years when the scattering policy prevailed, the evil was very conspicuous, and women going about alone felt far less comfortable than under the older system.

There are two ways to explain the fact that, after fifteen years of political experience, the women of Boise voted in large numbers for license and for a policy in handling the red light district which they knew would mean a return to police control. In the first place, it may be said that fifteen years of steady contact with political life had blunted the sensibilities of women and dulled their moral feeling. On the other hand, it may be held that practical experience, under the steady pressure of responsibility, had made them realize the difficulties involved in the handling of these great social problems and had made them feel that a law which could command the support of public opinion, even though it regulated these difficulties, was better than a law which they might consider ideal, but which was incapable of execution.

In Idaho, as in Colorado, the payment of women political workers seems to have become a rather wide-spread abuse. Under the conditions of the State, with many new settlers constantly arriving, it has long been thought necessary to employ paid workers to register voters, get them out on election-day and influence those who are uncertain. After 1896, women were often hired to do this work, and were paid from three to five dollars a day. With their weak sense of party affiliation, it is claimed that they will work for the party that pays best. A candidate with plenty of money may hire so many workers that it becomes a system of wholesale bribery. It is universally conceded that this is an abuse, and that many women look upon election service as a source of pin money to a degree that is undesirable. Meantime, practical politicians a.s.sured me that it was a system the women found in operation when they came in; that far more men than women were paid; and that the abuse could be corrected by proper legislation.

To summarize the matter, we may say that equal suffrage in Idaho has simply accentuated the movement toward setting women free to live their individual lives which general education and partic.i.p.ation in industrial life has already carried so far all over the country. Equal suffrage is accepted there, as the higher education of women is accepted in Ma.s.sachusetts, and the results in the two cases have been much the same.

Surely these reports carry the matter beyond the experimental stage.

Conditions in Colorado and Idaho are not identical with those in the East, but they are similar enough to make the experience of these States amount to a demonstration. Meantime the new obligation resting on women is profound. They must learn to "sweat their tempers and learn to know their man." They must become students of public affairs and of inst.i.tutional life. Old issues are past; and equal suffrage will soon prevail everywhere. Women, like men, have more "rights" in our modern democracies than they can use. Woman's Rights are largely realized; from now on we must front Woman's Duties.

IX

The Modern Family

The most powerful influence in shaping our lives to-day is the s.e.xual impulse which has created the inst.i.tution we call the family. Few of us, at least in our modern democracies, live in daily fear that our neighbors will attack and kill us, or carry us off into slavery. Even the hunger for food, that once forced men into action, plays little direct part in the shaping of the lives of most of us. None of those who read these pages would starve if they never did any more work. If they tried to starve, they would be arrested and sent to jail; and if they persisted, they would be fed by force.

Meantime it is s.e.x hunger, manifesting itself in a hundred forms of beauty and ugliness, courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive indecencies, honor and dishonor, self-repression and prost.i.tution, love and l.u.s.t, children of gladness and children of shame, that lifts us to such heights as we attain, or plunges us into the h.e.l.ls we create for ourselves. If one could insure one good thing in life for the child one loves, one would ask, not money nor fame, but a continuously happy marriage.

In the past, women have always looked upon marriage and family life as a career; and the majority of men have found their most significant life in the building up of the family inst.i.tution. To-day, however, family life as a career is everywhere called in question. Many women claim to prefer educational opportunity, professional recognition or an independent bank account to husband and children. Social service is exalted; domestic service is debased. Why is it so much n.o.bler to care for other people's children in a social settlement, or in a school, than to care for one's own in a home? Why should women ma.s.s themselves together in vast groups as industrial workers, as teachers, as suffragettes? We hear of women's work, of women's careers, of women's clubs, a.s.sociations and parties, of women's interests, movements, causes. In November, 1911, two hundred and twenty women were arrested in London for a.s.saulting the English government in the supposed interest of women. Why do women prefer social to domestic service?

Two reasons spring at once to the mind of any intelligent observer of the life about him. The first is the complexity of our modern life; the second is the nature of the inst.i.tution of marriage.

A man or woman wishes to live with the one he or she loves. s.e.xual love is in its very nature restricted, circ.u.mscribed, monopolistic--in a word, monogamic. As has been said repeatedly in this volume, the human unit is neither a man nor a woman; it is a man and a woman united in a new personality through the unifying and blending power of love. To say that this unit is exclusive and monogamic is simply saying that it respects its own personality. It can no longer act simply as a man or a woman; it is a family and it must act as such in order to satisfy its own demands. A man can no more act independently of the woman he loves than the heart can act independently of the lungs. The man and woman who compose the new unit are not only flesh of one flesh, but they are one soul, one life; they are a complete organism. And the life of this organism must be persistent to realize its own aims. In all the higher forms of existence, processes move slowly. For nine months a woman carries her baby as a part of her own body; then for three years the father and mother carry the child in their arms; for a score of years they must support, protect and train it before they let it go to seek its own. Hence s.e.xual love must be persistent as well as monogamic.

From all this it follows that each half of the human unit must find the major part of its adult life in devotion to the one it has chosen as its complement. This is no hardship; it is divine opportunity, if love binds the lives in harmonious unity. If love is lacking, then there is no new organism; and such a case falls outside this discussion.

Under the simpler forms of civilization that have prevailed in the past, it was comparatively easy to find the complement for any particular man or woman. With physical sympathy and desire, little more was needed than common race and the same general social position. With simple personalities even the marriage of convenience was apt to prove happy.

But, to-day, not only have men become infinitely more complex and self-conscious than formerly, but women have ceased to be a general cla.s.s; and, in becoming individuals, they have developed wide ranges of individual needs. Instead of fitting at the two or three points of physical desire, race and social position, a man or woman, to live strongly and well in this close union of body and soul, must fit each other at many points. To the older sympathies must be added a common att.i.tude toward religion, education, artistic tastes, social ambitions, industrial apt.i.tudes, and a score of other living sympathies, if the days are to pa.s.s in happiness, and each is to maintain his fair share of the life of the new unit. Physical desire still remains the paramount thing, but these other sympathies tend to strengthen it, or their absence may weaken and ultimately destroy it. It is comparatively easy for a person to find a complement to two or three of his, or her, qualities; it is very difficult for a person to find fulfilment for a score of his personal needs in another personality.

In earlier times, too, the individual reached such maturity as he or she was to attain much earlier than now, when education has become a life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively little danger that pa.s.sing years would develop latent tastes that might prove dissimilar. To-day, complete union at twenty may mean many oppositions at forty, if each half of the unit goes on developing its powers. And we must add to this individual complexity and slower development of the present-day men and women the intense self-consciousness of modern times which makes it impossible for us to forget our conditions and go on living in a world once significant and true but now empty or false.

A second cause for the unrest of the present is doubtless to be found in the inflexibility of the inst.i.tution of the family, under which lovers are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of mediaeval disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism, culminating in absolute monarchy, which gave them political security.

They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic Church that they might worship in peace. They shaped the guilds that they might work quietly, and enjoy the fruits of their labors. The family, with its civil and ecclesiastical sanctions, was formed to protect the personal lives of men and women who wished to live together and rear children.

But with peace, life grew stronger and more intense; and the bonds which the people had shaped, and which had given them security, reached their limits of growth, became painful, and threatened to prevent all further development. The rising cities bought their freedom from feudal lords; even the serfs won better conditions; and the rising national units beat down the older political inst.i.tutions with their swords. Finally the movements that gather around the French Revolution opened the way for us into the democratic freedom and security which we enjoy to-day. The guilds were broken up and a measure of freedom was secured, though the industrial inst.i.tution which shall give us freedom and security in our work is yet to be formed. The Protestant Revolution led us by devious ways into religious freedom where men can worship as they will.

Of all these older inst.i.tutions, shaped under iron necessity, the only one that remains practically unchanged is the family. Dealing with the most powerful of all our human hungers, as it does, we have not dared to make it fit our modern life. Not only is this true, but the forces of the older state and church which survived, fastened themselves upon this inst.i.tution and strengthened its resisting power. The church increasingly made marriage into a holy sacrament, so that it not only protected lovers, but became a subtle, inviolable and indissoluble mystery. The state sanctioned the family, and made it an instrument for regulating political and property rights. Formal society proclaimed the family and made it the standard for respectability.

Two centuries hence, our family, with its sacramental significances, its lack of a eugenic conscience, its financial subordination of women, its frequent lack of love and sympathy, its primogeniture, and its determining power over social opportunity, will be as incomprehensible to students of inst.i.tutional forms as the Holy Roman Empire is to us to-day. Who will then understand how church and state could have licensed and consummated marriages between young and inexperienced people, marriages which were to be binding on their thought, feeling and action for life without requiring some time, however brief, between the application for a license and the final binding of vows? Who will be able to understand how church and state could have sanctioned marriage between a broken-down old n.o.ble and a young and inexperienced girl of seventeen? How will the future student explain the fact that in New Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148 feeble-minded children to curse the state.[50]

[50] See _The Kalikak Family_, by HERBERT H. G.o.dDARD, New York: Macmillan Company, 1912.

Who will then understand why a man and woman who had not only ceased to love each other but had come to feel a deep repugnance for each other should have been compelled to share bed and board, even when there were no children, until even murder seemed preferable to such slavery of soul and body? How can this student understand woman's economic dependence, her uncertain income, her insecure rights in property for which she toiled side by side with her husband? Who will then believe that in the year 1911 an English citizen could go before a court and secure an order for legalized rape, under the name of rest.i.tution of marital rights?

Meantime every issue of the daily press counts as its choicest items stories of the shameful and soul-destroying ways in which men and women are trying to live their lives in spite of this mediaeval inst.i.tution. So far-reaching is the unrest, that at each new revelation of marital heresy, society feels constrained to rush forward and frantically denounce the heretic in order to prove its own orthodoxy.

Our own att.i.tude toward marriage as a sacrament to be directed by a church, or as a pleasure to be exploited by individuals, must be changed if the life of the family is to be re-established as the great vocation of earnest men and women. Intelligence must be turned upon this problem as upon all others that vitally affect our lives. What President Eliot has called "the conspiracy of silence touching matters of s.e.x"

must be broken, and when it is, I believe honest men will agree with Ellen Key that "In love humanity has found the form of selection most conducive to the enn.o.blement of the species."[51]

[51] ELLEN KEY, _Love and Marriage._ New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911

In this field, at least, a eugenic conscience must take the place of the older theological conscience.[52] We must recognize the infamy of knowingly bringing defective children into existence. We must agree that under no conditions should people tainted with syphilis be allowed to marry; and that those subject to imbecility or insanity should not be allowed to live together unless they are uns.e.xed.[53] Justice to future generations, and protection of the state, demands at least this much.

[52] See the publications of the Eugenic Education Society, especially files of _The Eugenics Review_, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, London.

[53] Indiana has an admirable law on this subject, and New Jersey has just added the same to her statutes.

Whether alcoholics, those suffering from congenital sense defects, and near relatives, should be allowed to marry may still be an open question; but it should be recognized that the state has the right and the duty to inquire into these conditions and to impose restrictions.

Society must come to feel that it is at least as shameful for a broken old n.o.ble to live with a young girl under the forms of marriage as for two young lovers to live together outside them.

As to what the personal, social and industrial relation of man and wife should be, we have widely different views and practices. The older view, still embodied in the practice of most nations, and best seen in Germany and England, is that the woman's duty is to complement the husband. He does what he wishes, so far as he can, and the wife rounds out the whole. It is the old ideal of later savagery, that the man should provide and protect, and the woman should breed children, care for the home, pray and wait.

This is really the same ideal that dominated our political life until a hundred and fifty years ago. It was the duty of the lords to direct and fight; the peasants should work and wait. In politics there gradually grew up a middle cla.s.s which combined with the peasants to overthrow the older privileges; and now all cla.s.ses direct, fight, wait and watch together. Whether this democratic idea is finally to prevail, we may not know; but it is well worth trying, and the results so far are full of promise.

In the same way, in the family, a great middle cla.s.s of wives has grown up, largely since 1870, through education and industry, as the burgers did in political life, and these emanc.i.p.ated women are insisting that the peasant of the family, the _Hausfrau_, shall join with them and dethrone the husband so that all shall share life's responsibilities together as free and equal partners. In fact, in America, the revolution has already come; and, as in the earlier stages of political revolutions, those deposed are having a hard time to maintain even their equal share of opportunity.

But the parallel between political and domestic life is not complete, and if pushed too far the a.n.a.logy is mischievous. The a.s.sumption of physical, intellectual and social superiority on the side of political lords and domestic lords was the same. It is possible, however, rightly or wrongly, to reduce all the people to the same political level and set them all at work doing the same things. But between men and women there was not only the a.s.sumption of physical and mental difference, but there was and must always be the infinite difference of s.e.x. In domestic life, the women cannot live without men nor the men without women. Not only would the generations fail, but the present generation would lose its deepest meaning, if either s.e.x were banished or debased.

In their reactions against old abuses, writers like Mrs. Gilman or Olive Schreiner try to create a world for women alone, on the political a.n.a.logy. Men might be tolerated as fathers; but, to secure political freedom, these leaders would turn to that nebulous creation of social reformers, the state; and it should subsidize the mothers in their periods of need. But there are only two ingredients out of which a nation can be formed: one is women; the other is men. Shall woman in her time of need turn to a state made up of other women, or to a state made up of men? Obviously it must be to both; and if woman is to depend on men, she might as well depend on man. No, in the political revolutions we broke up artificial, outworn and unjust combinations; but in this domestic revolution we are breaking up and must readjust the fundamental unit of life.

Men and women must live and work together in the domestic unit, and they cannot do the same things. Nature has specialized their functions and each must supplement the other. Even in Germany, the _Hausfrau_ is not going back to an exclusive service of children, cooking and church; nor in America will man continue to be merely the breadwinner and the father of children. With the enlightenment that is on the way, we shall see that husband and wife can have no antagonistic differences. Each profits in all that really benefits the other; and slowly we shall shape a new inst.i.tution based on absolute equality, and at the same time on complementary service.

In this adjustment, legal forms can help or hinder; but they cannot prevent nor compel the final action of human beings. s.e.x instinct is stronger than any human law. The law can, however, help us in regulating conditions of marriage, in settling disputes about common property and children, and in determining how the contract may be set aside when that becomes necessary.

The right of the church to sanction or regulate the family, rests in a belief that marriage involves spiritual changes and obligations that make it a sacrament, in its nature inviolable, and to be administered only by the church, like the sacrament of baptism. This is a belief resting not in eugenic considerations, nor in the human needs of the persons involved, but in theological dogmas with which this chapter cannot deal. Hence we shall maintain that the church has no more right to control matters of marriage than it has to interfere in business or political relations.

The state, on the other hand, meaning by the state the whole community, must concern itself with the marriage of its individuals. The commonwealth must have future citizens, and these should be strong and intelligent; hence it must prevent the breeding of the unfit. If parents die, or fail in obligations, the community must care for the children.