WOMEN’S MEMORIES--DISTURBING CONVENTIONS
In sharp contrast to the function of woman’s long memory as a
reconciler to life, revealed by the visitors to the Devil Baby, are
those individual reminiscences which, because they force the possessor
to challenge existing conventions, act as a reproach, even as a
social disturber. When these reminiscences, based upon the diverse
experiences of many people unknown to each other, point to one
inevitable conclusion, they accumulate into a social protest, although
not necessarily an effective one, against existing conventions, even
against those which are most valuable and those securely founded upon
cumulative human wisdom. But because no conventionalized tradition is
perfect, however good its intent, most of them become challenged in
course of time, unwittingly illustrating the contention that great
social changes are often brought about less by the thinkers than by “a
certain native and independent rationalism operating in great masses of
men and women.”
The statement is well founded that a convention is at its best,
not when it is universally accepted, but just when it is being so
challenged and broken that the conformists are obliged to defend it and
to fight for it against those who would destroy it. Both the defenders
of an old custom and its opponents are then driven to a searching of
their own hearts.
Such searching and sifting is taking place in the consciences of
many women of this generation whose sufferings, although strikingly
influencing conduct, are seldom expressed in words until they are
told in the form of reminiscence after the edges have been long since
dulled. Such sufferings are never so poignant as when women have
been forced by their personal experiences to challenge the valuable
conventions safeguarding family life.
A woman whom I had known slightly for many years came to Hull-House
one day escorted by her little grandson. Her delicate features, which
were rather hard and severe, softened most charmingly as the little boy
raised his cap in good-by from the vanishing automobile. In reply to
my admiring comment upon the sturdy lad and his affectionate relation
to her, she startled me by saying abruptly, “You know he is really not
my grandson. I have scarcely admitted the doubt before, but the time
is coming when I must face it and decide his future. If you are kind
enough to listen, I want to tell you my experience in all its grim
sorrow.
“My husband was shot twenty-seven years ago, under very disgraceful
circumstances, in a disreputable quarter of Paris; you may remember
something of it in the newspapers, although they meant to be
considerate. I was left with my little son, and with such a horror of
self-indulgence and its consequences, that I determined to rear my
child in strict sobriety, chastity, and self-restraint, although all
else were sacrificed to it. Through his school and college days, which
I took care should be far from his father’s friends and associations,
I always lived with him, so bent on rectitude and so distressed by any
lack of self-control that I see now how hard and rigorous his life
must have been. I meant to sacrifice myself for my child, in reality I
sacrificed him to my narrow code.
“The very June that he took his master’s degree, I myself found him,
one beautiful morning, lying dead in his own room, shot through the
temple. No one had heard the report of the revolver, for the little
house we had taken was so on the edge of the college town that the
neighbors were rather remote, and he must have killed himself while I
sat in the moonlight, on the garden bench, after he had left me, my
mind still filled with plans for his future.
“I have gone over every word of our conversation that evening in the
garden a thousand times; we were planning to come to Chicago for his
medical course, and I had expressed my exultant confidence in him to
withstand whatever temptation a city might offer, my pride in his
purity of thought, his rectitude of conduct. It was then he rose rather
abruptly and went into the house to write the letter to me which I
found on his table next morning. In that letter he told me that he was
too vile to live any longer, that he had sinned not only against his
own code of decency and honor, but against my lifelong standards and
teachings, and that he realized perfectly that I could never forgive
him. He evidently did not expect any understanding from me, either for
himself or for ‘the young and innocent girl’ about to become the mother
of his child, and in his interpretation of my rigid morals he was quite
sure that I would never consent to see her, but he wrote me that he
had told her to send the little baby to me as soon as it was born,
obviously hoping that I might be tender to the innocent, although I was
so harsh and unpitying to the guilty. I had apparently never given him
a glimpse beyond my unbending sternness, and he had all unwittingly
pronounced me too self-righteous for forgiveness; at any rate, he
faced death rather than my cold disapprobation.
“The girl is still leading the life she had led for two years before
my son met her. She is glad to have her child cared for and hopes
that I will make him my heir, but understands, of course, that his
paternity could never be established in court. So here I am, old and
hard, beginning again the perilous experiment of rearing a man child. I
suppose it was inevitable that I should hold the girl responsible for
my son’s downfall and for his death. She was one of the wretched young
women who live in college towns for the express purpose of inveigling
young men, often deliberately directing their efforts toward those
who are reputed to have money. I discovered all sorts of damaging
facts about her, which enabled me to exonerate my son from intentional
wrong-doing, and to think quite honestly that he had been lured and
tempted beyond his strength. The girl was obliged to leave the little
town, which was filled with the horror and scandal of the occurrence,
but even then, in that first unbridled public censure against the ‘bad
woman’ who had been discovered in the midst of virtuous surroundings,
there was a tendency to hold me accountable for my son’s death,
whatever the girl’s earlier responsibility may have been.
“In my loathing of her I experienced all over again the harsh and
bitter judgments through which I had lived in the first years after
my husband’s death. I had secretly held the unknown woman responsible
for his end, but of course it never occurred to me to find out about
her, and I certainly could never have brought myself to hear her name,
much less to see her. I have at least done better than that in regard
to the mother of my ‘grandson,’ and Heaven knows I have tried in all
humility and heartbreak to help her. She fairly hated me, as she did
anything that reminded her of my son--the entire episode had seemed to
her so unnatural, so monstrous, so unnecessary--she considered me his
murderer, and I never had the courage to tell her that I agreed with
her. Perhaps if I had done that, really abased myself as I was willing
she should be abased, we might have come into some sort of genuine
relation born of our companionship in tragedy. But I couldn’t do that,
possibly because the women of my generation cannot easily change the
traditional attitude towards what the Bible calls ‘the harlot.’ At any
rate, I didn’t succeed in ‘saving’ her. She so obviously dreaded seeing
me, and our strained visits were so unsatisfactory and painful, that I
finally gave it up, and her son has apparently quite forgotten her. I
am sure she tries to forget him and all the tragic scenes associated
with his earliest babyhood, when I insisted not only upon ‘keeping
mother and child together’ but also on keeping them with me.”
After a moment’s pause she resumed: “It would have been comparatively
easy for me to die when my child was little, when I still had a
right to believe that he would grow up to be a good and useful man,
but I lived to see him driven to his death by my own stupidity. I
have encountered the full penalty for breaking the commandment to
judge not. I passed sentence without hearing the evidence; I gave up
the traditional rôle of the woman who loves and pities and tries to
understand; I forgot that it was my mission to save and not to judge.
“As I have gone back over my unmitigated failure again and again,
I am sure at last that it was the sorry result of my implacable
judgment of the woman I held responsible for my husband’s sin. I did
not realize the danger nor the inevitable recoil of such a state of
self-righteousness upon my child.”
As she paused in the recital I rashly anticipated the conclusion,
that her bitter experiences had brought the whole question to that
tribunal of personal conduct whose concrete findings stir us to our
very marrow with shame and remorse; that she had frantically striven as
we all do, to keep herself from falling into the pit where the demons
of self-reproach dwell, by clinging to the conventional judgments
of the world. I expected her to set them forth at great length in
self-justification, and perhaps, belonging, as she so obviously did,
to an older school, she might even assure me that the wrong to those to
whom it was now impossible to make reparation had forever lifted her
above committing another such injustice. I found, however, that I was
absolutely mistaken and that whatever might be true of her, it still
lay within me to commit a gross injustice, when she resumed with these
words: “It is a long time since I ceased to urge in my own defence that
I was but reflecting the attitude of society, for, in my efforts to get
at the root of the matter I have been convinced that the conventional
attitude cannot be defended, certainly not upon religious grounds.”
She stopped as if startled by her own reflections upon the subject of
the social ostracism so long established and so harshly enforced that
women seem to hold to it as through an instinct of self-preservation.
She was, perhaps, dimly conscious that the tradition that the unchaste
woman should be an outcast from society rests upon a solid basis of
experience, upon the long struggle of a multitude of obscure women
who, from one generation to another, were frantically determined to
establish the paternity of their children and to force the father to
a recognition of his obligations; and that the living representatives
of these women instinctively rise up in honest rebellion against
any attempt to loosen the social control which such efforts have
established, bungling and cruel though the control may be.
Further conversation showed that she also realized that these stern
memories inherited from the past have an undoubted social value and
that it is a perilous undertaking upon which certain women of this
generation are bent in their efforts to deal a belated justice to the
fallen woman. It involves a clash within the very mass of inherited
motives and impulses as well as a clash between old conventions and
contemporary principles. On the other hand, it must have been obvious
to her in her long effort to get at “the root of the matter” that the
punishment and hatred of the bad woman has gone so far as to overreach
its own purpose; it has become responsible for such hardness of heart
on the part of “respectable” women towards the so-called fallen ones,
that punishment is often inflicted not only without regard to justice,
but in order to feed the spiritual pride, “I am holier than thou.”
Such pride erects veritable barricades, deliberately shutting out
sympathetic understanding.
The very fact that women remain closer to type than men do and are
more swayed by the past, makes it difficult for them to defy settled
conventions. It adds to their difficulty that the individual women,
driven to modify a harsh convention which has become unendurable
to them, are perforce those most sensitive to injustice. The sharp
struggle for social advance, which is always a struggle between ideas,
long before it becomes embodied in contending social groups, may thus
find its arena in the tender conscience of one woman who is pitilessly
rent and pierced by her warring scruples and affections. Even such a
tentative effort in the direction of social advance exacts the usual
toll of blood and tears.
Fortunately the entire burden of the attempt to modify a convention
which has become unsupportable, by no means rests solely upon
such self-conscious women. Their analytical efforts are steadily
supplemented by instinctive conduct on the part of many others. A
great mass of “variation from type,” accelerating this social change,
is contributed by simple mothers who have been impelled by the
same primitive emotion which the Devil Baby had obviously released
in so many old women. This is an overwhelming pity and sense of
tender comprehension, doubtless closely related to the compunction
characteristic of all primitive people which in the earliest stage
of social development long performed the first rude offices of a
sense of justice. This early trait is still a factor in the social
struggle, for as has often been pointed out, our social state is like a
countryside--of a complex geological structure, with outcrops of strata
of very diverse ages.
Such compunction sometimes carries the grandmother of an illegitimate
child to the point of caring for the child when she is still utterly
unable to forgive her daughter, the child’s mother. Even that is a step
in advance from the time when the daughter was driven from the house
and her child, because a bastard, was conscientiously treated as an
outcast both by the family and by the community.
Such an instance of compunction was recently brought to my attention
when Hull-House made an effort to place a subnormal little girl twelve
years old in an institution in order that she might be protected from
certain designing men in the neighborhood. The grandmother who had
always taken care of her savagely opposed the effort step by step. She
had scrubbed the lavatories in a public building during the twenty-five
years of her widowhood, and because she worked all day had been unable
to protect her own feeble-minded daughter who, when barely fifteen
years old, had become the mother of this child. When her granddaughter
was finally placed in the institution, the old woman was absolutely
desolated. She found it almost impossible to return home after her
day’s work because “it was too empty and lonesome, and nothing to come
back for. You see,” she explained, “my youngest boy wasn’t right in his
head either and kept his bed for the last fifteen years of his life.
During all that time I took care of him the way one does of a baby,
and I hurried home every night with my heart in my mouth until I saw
that he was all right. He died the year this little girl was born and
she kind of took his place. I kept her in a day nursery while she was
little, and when she was seven years old the ladies there sent her
to school in one of the subnormal rooms and let her come back to the
nursery for her meals. I thought she was getting along all right and I
took care never to let her go near her mother.” The old woman made it
quite clear that this was because her daughter was keeping house with
a man with whom there had been no marriage ceremony. In her simple
code, to go to such a house would be to connive at sin, and while she
was grateful that the man had established a control over her daughter
which she herself had never been able to obtain, she always referred
to her daughter as “fallen,” although no one knew better than she how
unguarded the girl had been. As I saw how singularly free this mother
was from self-reproach and how untouched by any indecisions or remorses
for the past, I was once more impressed by the strength of the stout
habits acquired by those who early become accustomed to fight off black
despair. Such habits stand them in good stead in old age, and at least
protect them from those pensive regrets and inconsolable sorrows which
inevitably tend to surround whatever has once made for early happiness,
as soon as it has ceased to exist.
Many individual instances are found in which a woman, hard pressed by
life, includes within her tenderness the mother of an illegitimate
child. A most striking example of this came to me through a woman
whom I knew years ago when she daily brought her three children to
the Hull-House day nursery, obliged to support them by her work in a
neighboring laundry because her husband had deserted her. I recall her
fatuous smile as she used to say that “Tommy is so pleased to see me at
night that I can hear him shout ‘Hello, ma’ when I am a block away.”
I had known Tommy through many years; periods of adversity when his
father was away were succeeded by periods of fitful prosperity when
his father returned from his wanderings with the circus with which “he
could always find work,” because he had once been a successful acrobat
and later a clown, and “so could turn his hand to anything that was
needed.”
Perhaps it was unavoidable that Tommy should have made his best friends
among the warm-hearted circus people who were very kind to him after
his father’s death, and that long before the Child Labor Law permitted
him to sing in Chicago saloons, he was doing a successful business
singing in the towns of a neighboring state. He was a droll little
chap “without any sense about taking care of himself,” and in those
days his mother not only missed his cheerful companionship but was
constantly anxious about his health and morals. When he grew older and
became a professional he sent his mother money occasionally, although
never very much and never with any regularity. She was always so
pleased when it came that the two daughters supporting her with their
steady wages were inclined to resent her obvious gratification, as they
did the killing of the fatted calf on those rare occasions when the
prodigal returned “between seasons” to visit his family.
It is possible that his mother thus early acquired the habit of
defending him, the black sheep, against the strictures of the good
children who so easily become the self-righteous when they feel “put
upon.” However that may be, five years ago, after one daughter had been
married to a skilled mechanic and the other, advanced to the position
of a forewoman, was supporting her mother in the comparative idleness
of keeping house for two people in three rooms, a forlorn girl appeared
with a note from Tommy asking his mother “to help her out until the
kid came and she could work again.”
The steady daughter would not permit “such a girl to cross the
threshold,” and the little household was finally broken up upon the
issue. The daughter went to live with her married sister, while the
mother, having moved into one room with “Tommy’s girl,” went back to
the laundry in order to support herself and her guest.
The daughters, having impressively told their mother that she could
come to live with them whenever she “was willing to come alone,”
dropped the entire situation. In doing this, they were doubtless
instinctively responding to a habit acquired through years of “keeping
clear of the queer people father knew in the circus and the saloon
crowds always hanging around Tommy,” in their secret hope to come
to know respectable young men. Conscious that they had back of them
the opinion of all righteous people they could not understand why
their mother, for the sake of a bad girl, had deserted them in this
praiseworthy effort in which hitherto she had been the prime mover.
Tommy had sent his “girl” to his mother on the eve of his departure
for “a grand tour to the Klondike region,” and since then, almost four
years ago, she has heard nothing further from him. During the first
half of the time the two women struggled on together as best they
could, supporting themselves and the child who was brought daily to the
nursery by his grandmother. But the pretty little mother, gradually
going back to her old occupation of dancing in the vaudeville, had
more and more out-of-town engagements, and while she always divided
her earnings with the baby, the grandmother suspected her of losing
interest in him, a situation which was finally explained when she
confessed that she was about to be married to a cabaret manager who
“knew nothing of the past,” and to beg that the baby might stay where
he was. “Of course, I will pay board for him, but his father can be
made to do something, too, if we can only get the law on him.”
It was at this point that I had the following conversation with the
grandmother, who was shrewd enough to see that the support of the
baby was being left upon her hands, and that she could expect help
from neither his father nor his mother, although she stoutly refused
the advice that the whole matter be taken into the Court of Domestic
Relations. “If I could only see Tommy once I think I could get him to
help, but I can’t find out where he is, and he may not be alive for
all I know; he was always that careless about himself. If he put on
a new red necktie he’d never know if his bare toes were pushing out
of his shoes. He probably didn’t get proper clothes for ‘the Klondike
region’ and he may have been frozen to death before this. But whatever
has happened to him, I can’t let his baby go. I suppose I’ve learned
to think differently about some things after all my years of living
with a light-minded husband. Maggie came to see me last week, for she
means to be a good daughter. She said that Carrie and Joe were buying a
house way out on the West Side, that they were going to move into it
this month, and that she and I could have a nice big room together. She
said, too, that Carrie would charge only half rate board for me, and
would be glad to have my help with her little children, for they both
think that nobody has such a way with children as I have. The night
before, when she and Carrie were playing with the little boys, they
remembered some of the funny songs father used to teach Tommy, and how
jolly we all were when he came home good-natured and would stand on his
head to make the candy fall out of his pockets. I know the two girls
really want me to come back, and that they are often homesick, but when
I pointed to the bed where the baby was and asked, ‘What about him?’
Maggie turned as hard as nails and said as quick as a flash, ‘We’re
all agreed that you’ll have to put him in an institution. We’ll never
have any chance with the nice people in a swell neighborhood like ours
if you bring the baby.’ She looked real white then, and I felt sorry
for her when she said, ‘Why, they might even think he was my child,
you never can tell,’ although she was ashamed of that afterwards and
cried a little before she left. She told me that she and Carrie, when
they were children, were always talking of what they would do when they
got old enough to work, how they would take care of me and move to a
part of the city where nobody would know anything about the outlandish
way their father and Tommy used to carry on. Of course, it was almost
telling me that they didn’t want me to come to see them if I kept the
baby.”
My old friend was quite unable to formulate the motives which underlay
her determination, but she implied that clinging to this helpless child
was part of her unwavering affection for her son when, without any
preamble, she concluded the conversation with the remark, “It’s the way
I always felt about him,” as if further explanation were unnecessary.
It was all doubtless a manifestation of Nature’s anxious care--so
determined upon survival and so indifferent to morals--that had induced
her long devotion to her one child least equipped to take care of
himself; and for the same reason the helpless little creature whose
existence no one else was deeply concerned to preserve had become so
entwined in her affections that separation was impossible.
From time to time a mother goes further than this, in her determination
to deal justly with the unhappy situation in which her daughter is
placed. When the mother of a so-called fallen girl is of that type
of respectability which is securely founded upon narrow precepts,
inherited through generations of careful living, it requires genuine
courage to ignore the social stigma in order to consider only the moral
development of her child, although the result of such courage doubtless
minimizes the chagrin and disgrace for the girl herself.
In one such instance the parents of the girl, who had been prevented
from marrying her lover because the families on both sides objected
to differences of religion, have openly faced the situation and made
the baby a beloved member of the household. The pretty young mother
arrogates to herself a hint of martyrdom for her faith’s sake, but the
discipline and responsibility are working wonders for her character.
In her hope of earning money enough for two, she has been stirred to
new ambition and is eagerly attending a business college. She suffers
a certain amount of social ostracism but at the same time her steady
courage excites genuine admiration.
In another case a fearless mother exacts seven dollars a week in
payment of the board for her daughter and the baby, although the
girl earns but eight dollars a week in a cigar factory and buys such
clothing for two as she can with the remaining dollar. She admits that
it is “hard sledding,” but that the baby is “mighty nice.” Whatever
her state of mind, she evidently has no notion of rebelling against
her mother’s authority, and is humbly grateful that she was not turned
out of doors when the situation was discovered. It is possible that
the mother’s remorse at her failure to guard her daughter from wrong
doing enables her thus grimly to defy social standards which, although
they are based upon stern and narrow tenets, nevertheless epitomize the
bitter wisdom of generations. Such mothers, overcoming that timidity
which makes it so difficult to effect changes in daily living, make a
genuine contribution to the solution of the vexed problem.
In spite of much obtuseness on the part of those bound by the iron
fetters of convention, these individual cases suggest a practical
method of procedure. For quite as pity and fierce maternal affection
for their own children drove mothers all over the world to ostracize
and cruelly punish the “bad woman” who would destroy the home by
taking away the breadwinner and the father, so it is possible that,
under the changed conditions of modern life, this same pity for little
children, this same concern that, even if they are the children of the
outcast, they must still be nourished and properly reared, will make
good the former wrongs. There has certainly been a great modification
of the harsh judgments meted out in such cases, as women all over the
world have endeavored, through the old bungling method of trial and
error, to deal justly with individual situations. Each case has been
quietly judged by reference to an altered moral standard, for while the
ethical code like the legal code stands in need of constant revision,
the remodeling of the former is always private, tacit and informal in
marked contrast to the public and ceremonious acts of law-makers and
judges when the latter is changed.
Such measure of success as the organized Woman’s Movement has attained
in the direction of a larger justice has come through an overwhelming
desire to cherish both the illegitimate child and his unfortunate
mother. In addition to that, the widespread effort of modern women
to obtain a recognized legal status for themselves and their own
children has also been largely dependent upon this desire, at least in
the beginnings of the movement. Women slowly had discovered that the
severe attitude towards the harlot had not only become embodied in the
statutory law concerning her, as thousands of court decisions every
day bear testimony, but had become registered in the laws and social
customs pertaining to good women as well; the Code Napoleon, which
prohibited that search be made for the father of an illegitimate child,
also denied the custody of her children to the married mother; those
same states in which the laws considered a little girl of ten years
the seducer of a man of well-known immorality, did not allow a married
woman to hold her own property nor to retain her own wages.
The enthusiasm responsible for the worldwide Woman’s Movement was
generated in the revolt against such gross injustices. The most
satisfactory achievements of the movement have been secured in the
Scandinavian countries, where the splendid code of laws protecting
all women and children was founded on the instinct to defend the
weakest, and upon a determination to lighten that social opprobrium
which makes it so unreasonably difficult for a mother to support a
child born out of wedlock. In Germany, when the presence of over a
million illegitimate children under the age of fourteen years made
the situation acute, the best women of the nation, asserting that
all attempts to deal out social punishment upon the mothers resulted
only in a multitude of ill-nourished and weakened children, founded
“The Mutterchutz” Movement. Through its efforts to secure justice and
protection for these mothers, it has come to be the great defender of
the legal rights of all German women.
Many achievements of the modern movement demonstrate that woman deals
most efficiently with fresh experiences when she coalesces them into
the impressions Memory has kept in store for her. Eagerly seeking
continuity with the past by her own secret tests of affinity, she
reinforces and encourages Memory’s instinctive processes of selection.
If she develops her craving for continuity into a willingness to
subordinate a part to the whole and into a sustained and self-forgetful
search for congruity and harmony with a life which is greater than
hers, she may lift the entire selective process into the realm of Art;
at least so far as Art is dependent upon proportion and so far as
beauty hangs upon an ineffable balance between restraint and inclusion.
Hungry for this finely proportioned living, she may at length become a
disciple of Diotema, the wisest woman of antiquity, who asserted that
the life which above all we should live, must be discovered by faithful
and strenuous search for ever-widening kinds of beauty.
In woman’s search for “the eternal moment,” balanced independently of
time itself because so melted both into memories of the past and into
surmises of new beauty for the future of her children’s children, she
may recognize as one of the universal harmonies the touching devotion
of the endless multitude of mothers who were the humble vessels for
life’s continuance and who carried the burden in safety to the next
generation.
Maternal affection and solicitude, in woman’s remembering heart,
may at length coalesce into a chivalric protection for all that is
young and unguarded. This chivalry of women expressing protection for
those at the bottom of society, so far as it has already developed,
suggests a return to that idealized version of chivalry which was the
consecration of strength to the defence of weakness, unlike the actual
chivalry of the armed knight who served his lady with gentle courtesy
while his fields were ploughed by peasant women misshapen through toil
and hunger.
As an example of this new chivalry, the Hungarian women have recently
risen in protest against a proposed military regulation requiring that
all young women in domestic service, who are living in the vicinity
of barracks, be examined each week by medical officers in order to
protect the soldiers from disease. The good women in Hungary spiritedly
resented the assumption that these girls, simply because they are the
least protected of any class in the community, should be subjected to
this insult.
An instance of this sort once again illustrates that moral passion
is the only solvent for prejudice, and that women have come to feel
reproached and disturbed when they ignore the dynamic urgency of
memories as fundamental as those upon which prohibitive conventions are
based.