Women As World Builders Part 3

"Just"--it is Mrs. Robins that speaks--"as under a despotic church and a feudal state the possible power and beauty of the common people was denied expression, so under industrial feudalism the intellectual and moral powers of the workers are slowly choked to death, with incalculable loss to the individual and the race. It is easy to kill; it requires a great spirit as well as a great mind to arouse the dormant energies, to vitalize them and to make them creative forces for good."

One is reminded of the words of John Galsworthy, addressed to workingwomen: "There is beginning to be a little light in the sky; whether the sun is ever to break through depends on your constancy, and courage, and wisdom. The future is in your hands more than in the hands of men; it rests on your virtues and well-being, rather than on the virtues and the welfare of men, for it is you who produce and mold the Future."

There are 6,000,000 working women in the United States, and half of them are girls under 21. One may go out any day in the city streets, at morning or noon or evening, and look at a representative hundred of them. The factories have not been able to rob them of beauty and strength and the charm of femininity, and in that beauty and strength and charm there is a world of promise. And that promise already begins to be unfolded when to them comes Mrs. Robins with a gospel germane to their natures, saying, "Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams."

CHAPTER VII

ELLEN KEY

In these chapters a sincere attempt has been made not so much to show what a few exceptional women have accomplished as to exhibit through a few prominent figures the essential nature of women, and to show what may be expected from a future in which women will have a larger freedom and a larger influence.

It has been pointed out that the peculiar idealism of women is one that works itself out through the materials of workaday life, and which seeks to break or remake those materials by way of fulfilling that idealism; it has been shown that this idealism, as contrasted with the more abstract and creative idealism of men, deserves to be called practicalism, a practicalism of a n.o.ble and beautiful sort which we are far from appreciating; and as complementing these forms of activity, the play instinct, the instinct of recreation, has been pointed out as the parallel to the creative or poetic instinct of men.

Woman as reconstructor of domestic economics, woman as a destructive political agent of enormous potency, woman as worker, woman as dancer, woman as statistician, woman as organizer of the forces of labor--in these it has been the intent to show the real woman of today and of tomorrow.

There have been other aspects of her deserving of attention in such a series, notably her aspect as mother and as educator. If she has not been shown as poet, as artist, as scientist, as talker (for talk is a thing quite as important as poetry or science or art), it has not been so much because of an actual lack of specific examples of women distinguished in these fields as because of the unrepresentative character of such examples.

Here, then, is a man's view of modern woman. To complete that view, to round off that conception, I now speak of Ellen Key.

Her writings have had a peculiar career in America, one which perhaps prevents a clear understanding of their character. On the one hand, they have seemed to many to be radically "advanced"; to thousands of middle-cla.s.s women, who have heard vaguely of these new ideas, and who have secretly and strongly desired to know more of them, her "Love and Marriage" has come as a revolutionary doc.u.ment, the first outspoken word of scorn for conventional morality, the first call to them to take their part in the breaking of new paths.

On the other hand, it must be remembered that America is the home of Mormonism, of the Oneida Community, of the Woodhull and Claflin "free-love" movement of the '70s, of "Dianism" and a hundred other obscure but pervasive s.e.xual cults--in short, of movements of greater or less respectability, capable of giving considerable currency to their beliefs. And they have given considerable currency to their beliefs. In spite of the dominant tone of Puritanism in American thought, our social life has been affected to an appreciable extent by these beliefs.

And these beliefs may be summed up hastily, but, on the whole, justly, as materialistic--in the common and unfavorable sense. They have converged, from one direction or another, upon the opinion that s.e.x is an animal function, no more sacred than any other animal function, which, by a ridiculous over-estimation, is made to give rise to jealousy, unhappiness, madness, vice, and crime.

It is a fact that the Puritan temperament readily finds this opinion, if not the program which accompanies it, acceptable, as one may discover in private conversation with respectable Puritans of both s.e.xes. And it is more unfortunately true that the present-day rebellion against conventional morality in America has found, in Hardy and Shaw and other anti-romanticists, a seeming support of this opinion. So that one finds in America today (though some people may not know about it) an undercurrent of impatient materialism in matters of s.e.x. To become freed from the inadequate morality of Puritanism is, for thousands of young people, to adopt another morality which is, if more sound in many ways, certainly as inadequate as the other.

So that Ellen Key comes into the lives of many in this country as a conservative force, holding up a spiritual ideal, the ideal of monogamy, and defending it with a breadth of view, a sanity, and a fervor that make it something different from the cold inst.i.tution which these readers have come to despise. She makes every allowance for human nature, every concession to the necessities of temperament, every recognition of the human need for freedom, and yet makes the love of one man and one woman seem the highest ideal, a thing worth striving and waiting and suffering for.

She cherishes the spiritual magic of s.e.x as the finest achievement of the race, and sees it as the central and guiding principle in our social and economic evolution. She seeks to construct a new morality which will do what the present one only pretends, and with the shallowest and most desperately pitiful of pretenses, to do. She would help our struggling generation to form a new code of ethics, and one of subtle stringency, in this most important and difficult of relations.

Thus her writings, of which "Love and Marriage" will here be taken as representative, have a twofold aspect--the radical and the conservative.

But of the two, the conservative is by far the truer. It is as a conservator, with too firm a grip on reality to be lured into the desertion of any real values so far achieved by the race, that she may be best considered.

And germane to her conservatism, which is the true conservatism of her s.e.x, is her intellectual habit, her literary method. She is not a logician, it is true. She lacks logic, and with it order and clearness and precision, because of the very fact of her firm hold on realities.

The realities are too complex to be brought into any completely logical and orderly relation, too elusive to be stated with utter precision.

There is a whole universe in "Love and Marriage"; and it resembles the universe in its wildness, its tumultuousness, its contradictory quality.

Her book, like the universe, is in a state of flux--it refuses to remain one fixed and dead thing. It is a book which in spite of some attempt at arrangement may be begun at any point and read in any order. It is a mixture of science, sociology, and mysticism; it has a wider range than an orderly book could possibly have; it touches more points, includes more facts, and is more convincing, in its queer way, than any other.

"Love and Marriage" is the Talmud of s.e.xual morality. It contains history, wisdom, poetry, psychological a.n.a.lysis, shrewd judgments, generous sympathies, ... and it all bears upon the creation of that new s.e.xual morality for which in a thousand ways--economic, artistic, and spiritual--we are so astonishing a mixture of readiness and unreadiness.

Ellen Key is fundamentally a conservator. But she is careful about what she conservates. It is the right to love which she would have us cherish, rather than the right to own another person--the beauty of singleness of devotion rather than the cruel habit of trying to force people to carry out rash promises made in moments of exaltation. She conserves the greatest things and lets the others go: motherhood, as against the exclusive right of married women to bear children; and that personal pa.s.sion which is at once physical and spiritual rather than any of the legally standardized relations. Nor does she hesitate to speak out for the conservation of that old custom which persists among peasant and primitive peoples all over the world and which has been reintroduced to the public by a recent sociologist under the term of "trial marriage"; it must be held, she says, as the bulwark against the corruption of prost.i.tution and made a part of the new morality.

It is perhaps in this very matter that her att.i.tude is capable of being most bitterly resented. For we have lost our sense of what is old and good, and we give the sanction of ages to parvenu virtues that are as degraded as the rococo ornaments which were born in the same year. We have (or the Puritans among us have) lost all moral sense in the true meaning of the word, in that we are unable to tell good from bad if it be not among the things that were socially respectable in the year 1860.

Ellen Key writes: "The most delicate test of a person's sense of morality is his power in interpreting ambiguous signs in the ethical sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line, sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality.

In our time, ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies.

The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which this implies in comparison with the code of so many men who, without responsibility--and without apparent risk--purchase the repose of their senses. The free union of love, on the other hand, gives them an enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring anyone. It answers to their idea of love's chast.i.ty, an idea which is justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement, with all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a common longing, then they consider that they have a right to full unity of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful struggle which would give them neither peace nor inner purity, and which would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the end--love--for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed."

It is almost impossible to quote any pa.s.sage from "Love and Marriage"

which is not subject to further practical modification, or which does not present an incomplete idea of which the complement may be found somewhere else. Even this pa.s.sage is one which states a brief for the younger generation rather than the author's whole opinion. Still, with all these limitations, her view is one which is so different from that commonly held by women that it may seem merely fantastic to hold it up as an example of the conservative instinct of women. Nevertheless, it is so. It must be remembered that the view which holds that the chast.i.ty of unmarried women is well purchased at the price of prost.i.tution, is a masculine view. It is a piece of the sinister and cruel idealism of the male mind, divorced (as the male mind is so capable of being) from realities. No woman would ever have created prost.i.tution to preserve the chast.i.ty of part of her s.e.x; and the more familiar one becomes with the specific character of the feminine mind, the more impossible does it seem that women will, when they have come to think and act for themselves, permanently maintain it. Nor will they--one is forced to believe--hesitate long at the implications of that demolition.

No, I think that with the advent of women into a larger life our jerry-built virtues will have to go, to make room for mansions and gardens fit to be inhabited by the human soul.

It will be like the pulling down of a rotten tenement. First (with a great shocked outcry from some persons of my own s.e.x) the facade goes, looking nice enough, but showing up for painted tin what pretended to be marble; then the dark, cavelike rooms exposed, with their blood-stained floors and their walls ineffectually papered over the acc.u.mulated filth and disease; and so on, lath by lath, down to the cellars, with their hints of unspeakable horrors in the dark.

It is to this conclusion that these chapters draw: That women have a surer instinct than men for the preservation of the truest human values, but that their very acts of conservation will seem to the timid minds among us like the shattering of all virtues, the debacle of civilization, the Gotterdammerung!

CHAPTER VIII

FREEWOMEN AND DORA MARSDEN

This is by way of a postscript. Dora Marsden is a new figure in the feminist movement. Just how she evolved is rather hard to say. Her family were Radicals, it seems, smug British radicals; and she broke away, first of all, into a sort of middle cla.s.s socialism. She went into settlement work. Here, it seems, she discovered what sort of person she really was.

She was a lover of freedom. So of course she rebelled against the interference of the middle cla.s.s with the affairs of the poor, and threw overboard her settlement work and her socialism together. She was a believer in woman suffrage, but the autocratic government of the organization irked her. And, besides, she felt constrained to point out that feminism meant worlds more than a mere vote. The position of woman, not indeed as the slave of man, but as the enslaver of man, but with the other end of the chain fastened to her own wrist, and depriving her quite effectually of her liberties--this irritated her. Independence to her meant achievement, and when she heard the talk about "motherhood"

by which the women she knew excused their lack of achievement, she was annoyed. Finally, the taboo upon the important subject of s.e.x exasperated her. So she started a journal to express her discontent with all these things, and to change them.

Naturally, she called her journal The Freewoman. "Independent"

expresses much of Dora Marsden's feeling, but that word has been of late dragged in a mire of pettiness and needs dry cleaning. It has come to signify a woman who isn't afraid to go out at night alone or who holds a position downtown. A word had to be chosen which had in it some suggestion of the heroic. Hence The Freewoman.

The Freewoman was a weekly. It lived several months and then suspended publication, and now all the women I know are poring over the back numbers while waiting for it to start again as a fortnightly. It was a remarkable paper. For one thing, it threw open its columns to such a discussion of s.e.x that dear Mrs. Humphry Ward wrote a shocked letter to The Times about it. Of course, a good many of the ideas put forth in this correspondence were erroneous or trivial, but it must have done the writers no end of good to express themselves freely. For once s.e.x was on a plane with other subjects, a fact making tremendously for sanity. In this Miss Marsden not only achieved a creditable journalistic feat, but performed a valuable public service.

Her editorials were another distinctive thing. In the first issue was an editorial on "Bondwomen," from which it would appear that perhaps even such advanced persons as you, my dear lady, are still far from free.

"Bondwomen are distinguished from Freewomen by a spiritual distinction.

Bondwomen are the women who are not separate spiritual ent.i.ties--who are not individuals. They are complements merely. By habit of thought, by form of activity, and largely by preference, they round off the personality of some other individual, rather than create or cultivate their own. Most women, as far back as we have any record, have fitted into this conception, and it has borne itself out in instinctive working practice.

"And in the midst of all this there comes a cry that woman is an individual, and that because she is an individual she must be set free.

It would be nearer the truth to say that if she is an individual she _is_ free, and will act like those who are free. The doubtful aspect in the situation is as to whether women are or can be individuals--that is, free--and whether there is not danger, under the circ.u.mstances, in labelling them free, thus giving them the liberty of action which is allowed to the free. It is this doubt and fear which is behind the opposition which is being offered the vanguard of those who are 'asking for' freedom. It is the kind of fear which an engineer would have in guaranteeing an arch equal to a strain above its strength. The opponents of the Freewomen are not actuated by spleen or by stupidity, but by dread. This dread is founded upon ages of experience with a being who, however well loved, has been known to be an inferior, and who has accepted all the conditions of inferiors. Women, women's intelligence, and women's judgments have always been regarded with more or less secret contempt, and when woman now speaks of 'equality,' all the natural contempt which a higher order feels for a lower order when it presumes bursts out into the open. This contempt rests upon quite honest and sound instinct, so honest, indeed, that it must provide all the charm of an unaccustomed sensation for fine gentlemen like the Curzons and Cromers and Asquiths to feel anything quite so instinctive and primitive.

"With the women opponents it is another matter. These latter apart, however, it is for would-be Freewomen to realize that for them this contempt is the healthiest thing in the world, and that those who express it honestly feel it; that these opponents have argued quite soundly that women have allowed themselves to be used, ever since there has been any record of them; and that if women had had higher uses of their own they would not have foregone them. They have never known women to formulate imperious wants, this in itself implying lack of wants, and this in turn implying lack of ideals. Women as a whole have shown nothing save 'servant' attributes. All those activities which presuppose the master qualities, the standard-making, the law-giving, the moral-framing, belong to men. Religions, philosophies, legal codes, standards in morals, canons in art, have all issued from men, while women have been the 'followers,' 'believers,' the 'law-abiding,' the 'moral,' the conventionally admiring. They have been the administrators, the servants, living by borrowed precept, receiving orders, doing hodmen's work. For note, though some men must be servants, all women are servants, and all the masters are men. That is the difference and distinction. The servile condition is common to all women."

This was only the beginning of such a campaign of radical propaganda as feminism never knew before. Miss Marsden went on to attack all the things which bind women and keep them unfree. As such she denounced what she considered the cant of "motherhood."

"Considering, therefore, that children, from both physiological and psychological points of view, belong more to the woman than to the man; considering, too, that not only does she need them more, but, as a rule, wants them more than the man, the parental situation begins to present elements of humor when the woman proceeds to fasten upon the man, in return for the children she has borne him, the obligation from that time to the end of her days, not only for the children's existence, but for her own, also!"

When asked under what conditions, then, women should have children, she replied that women who wanted them should save for them as for a trip to Europe. This is frankly a gospel for a minority--a fact which does not invalidate it in the eyes of its promulgator--but she does believe that if women are to become the equals of men they must find some way to have children without giving up the rest of life. It has been done!

Then, having been rebuked for her critical att.i.tude toward the woman suffrage organization, she showed herself in no mood to take orders from even that source. She subjected the att.i.tude of the members of the organization to an examination, and found it tainted with sentimentalism. "Of all the corruptions to which the woman's movement is now open," she wrote, "the most poisonous and permeating is that which flows from sentimentalism, and it is in the W. S. P. U. [Women's Social and Political Union] that sentimentalism is now rampant.... It is this sentimentalism that is abhorrent to us. We fight it as we would fight prost.i.tution, or any other social disease."

She called upon women to be individuals, and sought to demolish in their minds any lingering desire for Authority. "There is," she wrote, "a genuine pathos in our reliance upon the law in regard to the affairs of our own souls. Our belief in ourselves and in our impulses is so frail that we prefer to see it b.u.t.tressed up. We are surer of our beliefs when we see their lawfulness symbolized in the respectable blue cloth of the policeman's uniform, and the st.u.r.dy good quality of the prison's walls. The law gives them their pa.s.sport. Well, perhaps in this generation, for all save pioneers, the law will continue to give its protecting shelter, but with the younger generations we believe we shall see a stronger, prouder, and more insistent people, surer of themselves and of the pureness of their own desires."