Women As World Builders Part 1

Women as World Builders.

by Floyd Dell.

CHAPTER I

THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

The feminist movement can be dealt with in two ways: it can be treated as a sociological abstraction, and discussed at length in heavy monographs; or it can be taken as the sum of the action of a lot of women, and taken account of in the lives of individual women. The latter way would be called "journalistic," had not the late William James used it in his "Varieties of Religious Experience." It is a method which preserves the individual flavor, the personal tone and color, which, after all, are the life of any movement. It is, therefore, the method I have chosen for this book.

The ten women whom I have chosen are representative: they give the quality of the woman's movement of today. Charlotte Perkins Gilman--Jane Addams--Emmeline Pankhurst--Olive Schreiner--Isadora Duncan--Beatrice Webb--Emma Goldman--Margaret Dreier Robins--Ellen Key: surely in these women,[see also the chapter "Freewomen and Dora Marsden."] if anywhere, is to be found the soul of modern feminism!

One may inquire why certain other names are not included. There is Maria Montessori, for instance. Her ideas on the education of children are of the utmost importance, and their difference from those of Froebel is another ill.u.s.tration of the difference between the practical minds of women and the idealistic minds of men. But Madame Montessori's relation to the feminist movement is, after all, ancillary. A tremendous lot remains to be done in the way of cooperation for the management of households and the education of children before women who are wives and mothers will be set free to take their part in the work of the outside world. But it is the setting of mothers free, and not the specific kind of education which their children are to receive, which is of interest to us here.

Again, one may inquire why, since I have not blinked the fact that the feminist movement is making for a revolution of values in s.e.x--why I have not included any woman who has distinguished herself by defying antiquated conventions which are supposed to rule the relations of the s.e.xes. This requires a serious answer. The adjustment of one's social and personal relations, so far as may be, to accord with one's own convictions--that is not feminism, in my opinion: it is only common sense. The attempt to discover how far social laws and traditions must be changed to accord with the new position of women in society--that is a different thing, and I have dealt with it in the paper on Ellen Key.

Another reason is my belief that it is with woman as producer that we are concerned in a study of feminism, rather than with woman as lover.

The woman who finds her work will find her love--and I do not doubt will cherish it bravely. But the woman who sets her love above everything else I would gently dismiss from our present consideration as belonging to the courtesan type.

It is not very well understood what the courtesan really is, and so I pause to describe her briefly. It is not necessary to transgress certain moral customs to be a courtesan; on the other hand, the term may accurately be applied to women of irreproachable morals. There are some women who find their destiny in the bearing and rearing of children, others who demand independent work like men, and still others who make a career of charming, stimulating, and comforting men. These types, of course, merge and combine; and then there is that vast cla.s.s of women who belong to none of these types--who are not good for anything!

The first of these types may be called the mother type, the second the worker type, and the third--the kind of women which is not drawn either to motherhood or to work, but which is greatly attracted to men and which possesses special qualities of sympathy, stimulus, and charm, and is content with the more or less disinterested exercise of these qualities--this may without prejudice be called the courtesan type. It will be seen that the courtesan qualities may find play as well within legal marriage as without, and that the transgression of certain moral customs is only incidental to the type. Where circ.u.mstances encourage it, and where the moral tradition is weakened by experience or temperament, the moral customs will be transgressed: but it is the human qualities of companionship, and not the economic basis of that companionship, which is the essential thing.

When a girl with such qualities marries, and she usually marries, much depends upon the character of her husband. If her husband appreciates her, if he does not expect her to give up her career of charming straightway, and restrict herself to cooking, sewing, and the incubating of babies; and, furthermore, if he does not baffle those qualities in his wife by sheer failure in his own career, then there is a happy and virtuous marriage. Otherwise, there is separation or divorce, and the woman sometimes becomes the companion of another man without the sanction of law. But she has been, it will be perceived, a courtesan all along. And while I do not wish to seem to deprecate her comfortable qualities, she does not come in the scope of this inquiry.

But there is another figure which I wish I had been able to include.

Not wishing to involve my publisher in a libel suit, I refrain. She is the young woman of the leisure cla.s.s, whose actions, as represented to us in the yellow journals, shock or divert us, according to our temperaments. I confess to having the greatest sympathy for her, and in her endeavor to create a livelier, a more hilarious and human morale, she is doing, I feel, a real service to the cause of women. Our American pseudo-aristocracy is capable to teach us, despite its fantastic excesses, how to play. And emanc.i.p.ation from middle-cla.s.s standards of taste, morality, and intellect is, so far as it goes, a good thing. "Too many c.o.c.ktails," a lady averred to me the other day, "is better than smugness; risque conversation far better than none at all." And that celebrated "public-be-d.a.m.ned" att.i.tude of the pseudo-aristocracy is a great moral improvement over the cowardly, hysterical fear of the neighbors which prevails in the middle cla.s.s.

But, if I sympathize with the "h.e.l.l raising" tendency--no other phrase describes it--of the young woman of the leisure cla.s.s, I have more pity than sympathy for the one who is trying to realize the ideal of the "salon." For she must, after sad experience and bitter disillusionment, be content with the tawdry activities which, relieved by the orgiastic outbreaks alluded to above, const.i.tute social life in America.

The establishment of a salon is, in itself, a healthful ideal. If civilization were destroyed, and rebuilt on any plan, the tradition of the salon would be a good starting point for the creation of a medium of satisfying social intercourse. Social intercourse we must have, or the best of us lapse into boorishness. The ego only properly functions in contact with other and various egos. So that, in any case, we should have to have something in the nature of our contemporary "society."

All the more do we need "society" at present, since those ancient inst.i.tutions, the church and the cafe, have almost entirely lost the character of real social centers.

Recognizing this need, and supposing the best intentions in the world, what can people do at present in the creation of a "society" which shall be useful to the community instead of a laughing stock for the intelligent?

That is a fair question. Many an ambitious and idealistic young American matron has tried to solve it. She has found that the materials were a little scarce--the people who could talk brilliantly are very rare. But brilliancy is always a miracle, and it can be dispensed with. The real trouble lies elsewhere.

The fact is that in our present industrial system the need for social life is in inverse ratio to the opportunity for it. The people who need social intercourse are those who do hard work. The people who have most money and leisure, the most opportunity for social life, are those who have too much of it, anyway. Moreover--and this is an important point--no one profits less by leisure and money than those who have a great deal of it. Consequently, the basis of "society" today is a cla.s.s of people naturally and inevitably inferior. It is this cla.s.s which dominates "society," which gives the tone, and which sets the standard.

So long, then, as "society" is dominated by inferiors, intelligent men and women will not be inclined to waste what time they have for social intercourse in such stupid activities as those that "society" can furnish. They will flock by themselves, and if they become undemocratic and unsocial as a result, that will appear to them the lesser evil. So that, however catholic our standards, the saloniere, as a bounden failure, has no place in this transcript of feminism.

One thing will be observed with regard to these following papers--though they are imbued with an intense interest in women, they are devoid of the spirit of Romance. I mean that att.i.tude toward woman which accepts her s.e.x as a miraculous justification for her existence, the belief that being a woman is a virtue in itself, apart from the possession of other qualities: in short, woman-worship. The reverence for woman as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of her capacities as friend or leader or servant--that is Romance. It is an att.i.tude which, discovered in the Middle Ages, has added a new glamour to existence. To woman as a superior being, a divinity, one may look for inspiration--and receive it. For those who cannot be fired by an abstract idea, she gives to imagination "some pure light in human form to fix it." She is the sustenance of hungry souls. Believe in her and you shall be saved--so runs the gospel of Petrarch, of Dante, of Browning, of George Meredith.

So runs not mine. I have hearkened to the voice of modern science, which tells me that woman is an inferior being, with a weak body, a stunted mind, poor in creative power, poor in imagination, poor in critical capacity--a being who does not know how to work, nor how to talk, nor how to play! I hope no one will imagine that I am making these charges up maliciously out of my own head: such a notion would indicate that a century of pamphleteering on the woman question had made no impression on a mind saturated in the ideology of popular fiction.

But--I have hearkened even more eagerly to the voice of sociology, which tells me of woman's wonderful possibilities. It is with these possibilities that this book is, in the main, concerned.

But first the explanation of why I, a man, write these articles on feminism. It involves the betrayal of a secret: the secret, that is, of the apparent indifference or even hostility of men toward the woman's movement. The fact is, as has been bitterly recited by the rebellious leaders of their s.e.x, that women have always been what man wanted them to be--have changed to suit his changing ideals. The fact is, furthermore, that the woman's movement of today is but another example of that readiness of women to adapt themselves to a masculine demand.

Men are tired of subservient women; or, to speak more exactly, of the seemingly subservient woman who effects her will by stealth--the pretty slave with all the slave's subtlety and cleverness. So long as it was possible for men to imagine themselves masters, they were satisfied. But when they found out that they were dupes, they wanted a change. If only for self-protection, they desired to find in woman a comrade and an equal. In reality they desired it because it promised to be more fun.

So that we have as the motive behind the rebellion of women an obscure rebellion of men. Why, then, have men appeared hostile to the woman's rebellion? Because what men desire are real individuals who have achieved their own freedom. It will not do to pluck freedom like a flower and give it to the lady with a polite bow. She must fight for it.

We are, to tell the truth, a little afraid that unless the struggle is one which will call upon all her powers, which will try her to the utmost, she will fall short of becoming that self-sufficient, able, broadly imaginative and healthy-minded creature upon whom we have set our masculine desire.

It is, then, as a phase of the great human renaissance inaugurated by men that the woman's movement deserves to be considered.

And what more fitting than that a man should sit in judgment upon the contemporary aspects of that movement, weighing out approval or disapproval! Such criticism is not a masculine impertinence but a masculine right, a right properly pertaining to those who are responsible for the movement, and whose demands it must ultimately fulfill.

CHAPTER II

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

Of the women who represent and carry on this many-sided movement today, the first to be considered from this masculine viewpoint should, I think, be Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For she is, to a superficial view, the most intransigent feminist of them all, the one most exclusively concerned with the improvement of the lot of woman, the least likely to compromise at the instance of man, child, church, state, or devil.

Mrs. Gilman is the author of "Women and Economics" and several other books of theory, "What Diantha Did" and several other books of fiction; she is the editor and publisher of a remarkable journal, The Forerunner, the whole varied contents of which is written by herself; she has a couple of plays to her credit, and she has published a book of poems.

If in spite of all this publicity it is still possible to misunderstand the att.i.tude of Mrs. Gilman, I can only suppose it to be because her poetry is less well known than her prose. For in this book of verse, "In This Our World," Mrs. Gilman has so completely justified herself that no man need ever be afraid of her--nor any woman who, having a lingering tenderness for the other s.e.x, would object to living in a beehive world, full of raging efficient females, with the males relegated to the position of drones.

Of course, I do but jest when I speak of this fear; but there is, to the ordinary male, something curiously objectionable at the first glance in Mrs. Gilman's arguments, whether they are for cooperative kitchens or for the labor of women outside the home. And the reason for that objection lies precisely in the fact that her plans seem to be made in a complete forgetfulness of him and his interests. It all has the air of a feminine plot. The cooperative kitchens, and the labor by which women's economic independence is to be achieved, seem the means to an end.

And so they are. But the end, as revealed in Mrs. Gilman's poems, is that one which all intelligent men must desire. I do not know whether or not the more elaborate cooperative schemes of Mrs. Gilman are practical; and I fancy that she rather exaggerates the possibilities of independent work for women who have or intend to have children. But the spirit behind these plans is one which cannot but be in the greatest degree stimulating and beneficent in its effect upon her s.e.x.

For Mrs. Gilman is, first of all, a poet, an idealist. She is a lover of life. She rejoices in beauty and daring and achievement, in all the fine and splendid things of the world. She does not merely disapprove of the contemporary "home" as wasteful and inefficient--she hates it because it vulgarizes life. In this "home," this private food-preparing and baby-rearing establishment, she sees a machine which breaks down all that is good and n.o.ble in women, which degrades and pettifies them. The contrast between the instinctive ideals of young women and the sordid realities into which housekeeping plunges them is to her intolerable.

And in the best satirical verses of modern times she ridicules these unnecessary shames. In one spirited piece she points out that the soap-vat, the pickle-tub, even the loom and wheel, have lost their sanct.i.ty, have been banished to shops and factories:

But bow ye down to the Holy Stove, The Altar of the Home!

The real feeling of Mrs. Gilman is revealed in these lines, which voice, indeed, the angry mood of many an outraged housewife who finds herself the serf of a contraption of cast-iron:

... We toil to keep the altar crowned With dishes new and nice, And Art and Love, and Time and Truth, We offer up, with Health and Youth In daily sacrifice.

Mrs. Gilman is not under the illusion that the conditions of work outside the home are perfect; she is, indeed, a socialist, and as such is engaged in the great task of revolutionizing the basis of modern industry. But she has looked into women's souls, and turned away in disgust at the likeness of a dirty kitchen which those souls present.

Into these lives corrupted by the influences of the "home" nothing can come unspoiled--nothing can enter in its original stature and beauty.

She says:

Birth comes. Birth-- The breathing re-creation of the earth!

All earth, all sky, all G.o.d, life's sweet deep whole, Newborn again to each new soul!

"Oh, are you? What a shame! Too bad, my dear!

How well you stand it, too! It's very queer The dreadful trials women have to carry; But you can't always help it when you marry.

Oh, what a sweet layette! What lovely socks!

What an exquisite puff and powder box!

Who is your doctor? Yes, his skill's immense-- But it's a dreadful danger and expense!"