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CONCERNING
WOMEN
_by_
SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE
[Illustration: Logo]
ALBERT & CHARLES BONI
NEW YORK 1926
_Copyright, 1926, by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc._
_Manufactured in the United States of America_
_To_
ELLEN WINSOR
and
REBECCA WINSOR EVANS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE BEGINNINGS OF EMANCIPATION 1
II WOMAN’S STATUS, PAST AND PRESENT 19
III INSTITUTIONAL MARRIAGE AND ITS ECONOMIC ASPECTS 56
IV WOMAN AND MARRIAGE 93
V THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF WOMEN 157
VI WHAT IS TO BE DONE 207
VII SIGNS OF PROMISE 270
CONCERNING
WOMEN
_Let there be, then, no coercion established in society, and the common
law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper
places._
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF EMANCIPATION
It will be foolish to assume that women are free, until books about
them shall have ceased to have more than an antiquarian interest. All
such books, including this one, imply by their existence that women may
be regarded as a class in society; that they have in common certain
characteristics, conditions or disabilities which, predominating over
their individual variations, warrant grouping them on the basis of sex.
No such assumption about men would be thinkable. Certain masculine
qualities, so-called, may be singled out by amateur psychologists
and opposed to certain feminine qualities, so-called; but from books
about the sphere of man, the rights of man, the intelligence of man,
the psychology of man, the soul of man, our shelves are mercifully
free. Such books may one day appear, but when they do it will mean
that society has passed from its present state through a state of
sex-equality and into a state of female domination. In that day, in
place of the edifying spectacle of men proclaiming that woman is useful
only as a bearer of children, society may behold the equally edifying
spectacle of women proclaiming that man is useful only as a begetter
of children; since it seems to be characteristic of the dominant sex
to regard the other sex chiefly as a source of pleasure and as a means
of reproduction. It seems also to be characteristic of the dominant
sex--I judge from the world’s experience during the domination of
men--to regard itself as humanity, and the other sex as a class of
somewhat lower beings created by Providence for its convenience and
enjoyment; just as it is characteristic of a dominant class, such as an
aristocracy, to regard the lower classes as being created solely for
the purpose of supporting its power and doing its will. When once a
social order is well established, no matter what injustice it involves,
those who occupy a position of advantage are not long in coming to
believe that it is the only possible and reasonable order, and imposing
their belief, by force if necessary, on those whom circumstances have
placed in their power. There is nothing more innately human than the
tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been
divinely ordained.
Thus among the Hebrews the subordination of woman gave rise to the
notion that she was fashioned out of man’s rib. She was the result of
a divine afterthought, the _sexus sequior_ of the ancients and more
recently of Schopenhauer, “inferior in every respect to the first.”
Since the Divine Artist had had good practice in creating Adam, it
might logically have been expected that His second sex would turn out
even better than His first; we must therefore lay His failure to the
somewhat sketchy nature of the materials He chose to work with. This
Hebrew myth of the creation of woman has had considerable effect on
her status in the era known as Christian. Being “only a supernumerary
bone,” as Bossuet reminded her, she could naturally not aspire to a
position of equality with man. She must remember her origin, and be
humble and subservient as befitted a mere rib.
She was humble and subservient, as a matter of fact, for an incredibly
long time; so long that there exists a general suspicion even at the
present day that there is something in her nature which makes her want
to be subject to man and to live as it were at second hand. This
thought would be even more alarming than it is, perhaps, if it were
not true that men themselves have stood for a good deal of subjection
during the world’s known history. Chattel slavery and serfdom were
abolished from the civilized world only at about the time that the
subjection of women began to be modified; and men still endure, not
only with resignation but with positive cheerfulness, a high degree of
industrial and political slavery. The man who is entirely dependent for
his livelihood upon the will of an employer is an industrial slave, and
the man who may be drafted into an army and made to fight and perhaps
die for a cause in which he can have no possible interest is the
slave of the State; yet one can not see that this proves Aristotle’s
assumption that there are free natures and slave natures, any more than
the subjection of women proves that they want to be subjected. What the
slavery of men, as of women, implies is the existence of an economic
and social order that is inimical to their interests as human beings;
and it implies nothing more than this.
Nor does the opposition to the emancipation of women which still finds
expression in this country and in Europe, prove anything more than that
superstitious addiction to custom of which I have already spoken.
Those anxious critics who protest that women have got more freedom than
is good for Society make the mistake of supposing that Society can
exist only if its organization remains unchanged. The same conservatism
has opposed all the revolutionary adaptations which have fitted the
social order to the breakdown of old forms and their replacement by
new ones. Yet when the need for such adaptations ceases, the growth of
the social organism ceases with it, and we have such a spectacle of
arrested development as the civilization of India presents. Society, in
so far as it has become organic, is governed by the same rules as any
other organism: the condition of its health is growth, and growth is
change.
Certainly the present tendency of woman to assume a position of
equality with man involves, and will continue even more to involve,
profound psychic and material readjustments. But to assume that such
readjustments will injure or destroy Society is to adopt toward
Society an attitude of philosophical realism, to attribute to it a
personality, to suppose that it is equally capable of destruction with
the individual, and that it may in some mystical way derive benefit
from the sacrifice of the individual’s best interests. But what is
Society save an aggregation of individuals, half male, half female?
Where you have a handful of people forming a community, there you have
Society; and if the individuals are enlightened and humane it may be
called a civilized Society, if they are ignorant and brutal it will
be uncivilized. To assume that its “interests” may be promoted by
the enslavement of one-half its members, is unreasonable. One may be
permitted the doubtful assumption that this enslavement promotes the
welfare of the other half of Society, but it is obvious that it can
not promote the welfare of the whole, unless we assume that slavery
is beneficial to the slave (the classic assumption, indeed, where the
slaves have been women). When we consider the political organization
known as the State, we have a different matter. The State always
represents the organized interest of a dominant class; therefore the
subjection of other classes may be said to benefit the State, and their
emancipation may be opposed as a danger to the State.
It is evident from the very nature of the State[1] that its interests
are opposed to those of Society; and while the complete emancipation of
women, as I shall show later, would undoubtedly imply the destruction
of the State, since it must accrue from the emancipation of other
subject classes, their emancipation, far from destroying Society, must
be of inestimable benefit to it. Those critics, and there are many, who
argue that women must submit to restrictions upon their freedom for the
good of the State, as well as those advocates of woman’s rights who
argue that women must be emancipated for the good of the State, simply
fail to make this vital distinction between the State and Society; and
their failure to do so is one of the potent reasons why the nonsense
that has been written about women is limited only by the literature of
the subject.
Feminist and anti-feminist arguments from this standpoint centre in
the function of childbearing; therefore it should be noted that the
emphasis which is placed on this function by the interest of the State
is quite different from the emphasis that would be placed upon it by
the interest of Society; for the interest of the State is numerical,
while the interest of Society is qualitative. The State requires as
many subjects as possible, both as labour-motors and as fighters.
The interest of Society, on the other hand, is the interest of
civilization: if a community is to be wholesome and intelligent, it is
necessary not that the individuals who compose it shall be as numerous
as possible, but that they shall be as wholesome and intelligent as
possible. In general, the interest of the State is promoted by the
number of its subjects; that of Society by the quality of its members.
The interest of the State in this respect has been most concisely
expressed by Nietzsche. “Man,” said he, “shall be trained for war,
and woman for the re-creation of the warrior: all else is folly”,
and if one accept his premises he is exactly right. But there have
been many writers on women who have not accepted his premises--not at
least without qualification--and who have yet failed to observe the
antithesis between the interest which the State has, and the interest
which Society has, in the question of population. Hence, mingled
with the voices of those critics who have demanded the subjection
of woman for the sake of children, have been the voices of other
critics demanding her emancipation for the sake of children: and both
these schools of critics have overlooked her claim to freedom on her
own behalf. It is for the sake of humanity, and not for the sake of
children, that women ought to have equal status with men. That children
will gain enormously by the change is true; but this is beside the
issue, which is justice.
The argument that woman must be free for the sake of the race, is
an argument of expediency; as nine-tenths of the arguments against
her legal subjection have been, and indeed had to be. Unfortunately,
humanity is likely to turn a deaf ear to the claims of justice,
especially when they conflict with established abuses, unless these
claims are backed by the claims of expediency plus a good measure of
necessity. Adventitious circumstances have made the social recognition
of woman’s claims a necessity, and their political recognition a
matter of expediency. Otherwise she would have to wait much longer
for the establishment of her rights as man’s equal than now appears
likely. In the Western world her battle is very largely won; full
equality, social, industrial and legal, seems to be only a matter of
time and tactics. This she owes to the great political and industrial
revolutions of the eighteenth century.
The conscious movement towards freedom for women may be said to have
originated in the great emancipatory movement which found expression in
the American and French revolutions. The revolutionists did not succeed
in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in
equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some;
and it soured. But they did succeed in creating political forms which
admitted, in theory at least, the principle of equality. Their chief
contribution to progress was that they dramatically and powerfully
impressed the idea of liberty upon the minds of men, and thus altered
the whole course of human thought. Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, “A
Vindication of the Rights of Women,” revolutionary though it seemed in
its day, was a perfectly natural and logical application of this idea
of liberty to the situation of her sex. This remarkable book may be
said to have marked the beginning of the conscious movement towards
the emancipation of women.
The unconscious movement was the outgrowth of the revolution in
industry, brought about by the introduction of the machine. Women had
always been industrial workers, but their work, after the break-up of
the gilds, was for the most part carried on at home. When the factory
supplanted the family as the producing unit in society, the environment
of women was altered; and the change affected not only those women
who followed industry to the factories, but also those who remained
housewives, for where these had before been required to perform, or
at least to superintend, a large amount of productive work, they now
found their function, as the family became a consuming unit, reduced to
the superintendence of expenditures and the operation of the household
machinery--a labour which was increasingly lightened by the progress of
invention. With domestic conditions so changed, what was more natural
than that the daughters should go into the factory; or, if the family
were well-to-do, into the schools, which were forced reluctantly to
open their doors to women? And what was more natural than that women,
as their minds were developed through education, should perceive the
injustice and humiliation of their position, and organize to defend
their right to recognition as human beings? “If we dared,” says
Stendhal, “we would give girls the education of a slave.... Arm a man
and then continue to oppress him, and you will see that he can be so
perverse as to turn his arms against you as soon as he can.”
Women in the factories and shops; women in the schools--from this it
was only a moment to their invasion of the professions, and not a
very long time until they would be invading every field that had been
held the special province of men. This is the great unconscious and
unorganized woman’s movement which has aroused such fear and resentment
among people who saw it without understanding it.
The organized movement may be regarded simply as an attempt to get this
changing relation of women to their environment translated into the
kind of law that the eighteenth century had taught the world to regard
as just: law based on the theory of equal rights for all human beings.
The opposition that the movement encountered offers ample testimony to
the fact that “acceptance in principle” is more than a mere subterfuge
of diplomats and politicians. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
resolutely clung to the theory of equality, and as resolutely opposed
its logical application. This is not surprising; most people, no doubt,
when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations
about the proper application of the word “human.” Women had hardly been
regarded as human in mediaeval Europe; they were considered something
a little more from the chivalrous point of view, and something a
little less from the more common, workaday standpoint. The shadow of
this old superstition still clouded the minds of men: therefore it
is hardly surprising that the egalitarians of the French Revolution
excluded women from equal political and legal rights with men; and
that the young American republic which had adopted the Declaration of
Independence, continued to sanction the slavery of negroes and the
subjection of women. How firmly rooted this superstition was, may be
seen in the following irresistibly funny excerpt from the writings of
that great American advocate of freedom, the author of the Declaration,
Thomas Jefferson.
Were our State a pure democracy, in which all its inhabitants
should meet together to transact all their business, there would
yet be excluded from their deliberations (1) infants until arrived
at years of discretion. (2) Women, who, to prevent depravation of
morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the
public meetings of men. (3) Slaves.
Thus does superstition cast out logic. Nor does superstition die
easily. The masculine assumption, usually quite unconscious, that women
are unfit for freedom, bids fair to persevere as stubbornly as the
feminine assumption that marriage offers a legitimate and established
mode of extortion.[2]
If the conscious feminists bore the brunt of the resentment aroused
by woman’s changing relation to the world about her, it was because
their opponents did them the honour of believing that they were
responsible for the change. It was a strangely incurious attitude that
permitted such an assumption to be held; for it really takes a very
feeble exercise of intelligence to perceive that a handful of feminist
agitators could hardly coax millions of women into industry--under
conditions often extremely disadvantageous--into business, the schools
and the professions. I believe the cause of this incuriousness lay in
the very fear aroused by these changes and the social revaluations
which they implied; fear for a relation between the sexes which,
having been established for so long, seemed the only reasonable, or
indeed possible, relation. Filled as they were with this fear of
change, which is one of the strongest human emotions, the opponents of
woman’s emancipation were incapable of objectivity. Their intellectual
curiosity was paralyzed. This accounts, perhaps, for the utterances of
two such eminent philosophers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They came
to the subject strongly prejudiced: the idea of any claims on behalf of
women filled them with disgust; therefore, as one may take a certain
malicious pleasure in observing, their thought on the subject was
hampered by that “weakness of the reasoning faculty” which Schopenhauer
found characteristic of women. If, when discussing woman, they had
not been as “childish, frivolous and short-sighted” as they believed
women to be, they might, along with lesser minds, have arrived at some
understanding of a subject which has always been thought much more
mysterious and baffling than it really is. The woman of their day may
have been the poor creature they pronounced her to be, but if she was,
the obvious question was, Why? Was she a poor creature by nature, or
because of centuries of adaptation to a certain kind of life? This
question neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche took the trouble to ask.
They weighed her as she was--or as they thought she was--and arrived
at the sage conclusion that the West had much to learn from the Orient
concerning the proper attitude toward her.
It would be a very desirable thing [says Schopenhauer] if this
Number Two of the human race were in Europe also relegated to
their natural place [which he conceives to be the harem of a
polygamous household] and an end put to this lady-nuisance, which
not only moves all Asia to laughter but would have been ridiculed
by Greece and Rome as well.
Nietzsche, in the same vein, remarks that
a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has
also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and
harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of
woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession,
as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and
accomplishing her mission therein.
Such a view of the “weaker sex” of course proves nothing about women,
but it proves a good deal about the effect that their subjection
has had on the minds of men. It is a significant fact that both
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were Germans, and that in their day the
status of women was lower in Germany than in any other important
country of the Western World, except Italy.
The corruption of both sexes that results from the subjection of
one, has been too convincingly dealt with by other writers to need
discussion here. What I should like to emphasize is the futility
of approaching the so-called “woman question” with any sort of
pre-conceived notion concerning the nature of woman, or her sphere, or
her duty to the State or to Society; and above all, of approaching it
with the idea--the idea that obsesses all reformers--that she is a more
or less passive creature about whom something either ought or ought
not to be done, or, for that matter, about whom something can be done.
What she should and can do for herself is a different matter; and to
that question I intend to address myself before I leave this subject.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] For a most enlightening treatment of the genesis and nature of
the State, I refer my readers to Franz Oppenheimer’s short treatise
on the subject (“The State,” B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York). It is
sufficient here to define it as an organization primarily designed to
perpetuate the division of Society into an owning and exploiting class
and a landless, exploited class. In its genesis it is an organization
of a conquering group, by means of which that group maintains its
economic exploitation of those subjugated. In its later stages, when
the conquering class has become merely an owning class, the State is an
organization controlled by this class through its control of wealth,
for the purpose of protecting ownership against the propertyless
classes and facilitating their exploitation by the owning class. The
State is thus the natural enemy of all its citizens except those of the
owning class.
[2] I shall take up this question later; but I might remark that this
point is well illustrated by a suit recently brought in the State
of New York. The former wife of a wealthy man, whom he had divorced
twenty years before, brought action against him for separation and
maintenance. When asked why she had waited twenty years before
questioning the validity of the divorce and her husband’s subsequent
remarriage, her lawyer stated that _she had never been in need of money
before_, but that she had been swindled out of the money settled upon
her by her husband at the time of the divorce. The italics are mine;
and no comment, I think, is needed.