WOMEN’S MEMORIES--CHALLENGING WAR
I was sharply reminded of an obvious division between high tradition
and current conscience in several conversations I held during the
great European war with women who had sent their sons to the front
in unquestioning obedience to the demands of the State, but who,
owing to their own experiences, had found themselves in the midst of
that ever-recurring struggle, often tragic and bitter, between two
conceptions of duty, one of which is antagonistic to the other.
One such woman,[1] who had long been identified with the care of
delinquent children and had worked for many years towards the
establishment of a Children’s Court, had asked me many questions
concerning the psychopathic clinic in the Juvenile Court in Chicago,
comparing it to the brilliant work accomplished in her own city through
the coöperation of the university faculty. The Imperial government
itself had recently recognized the value of this work and at the
outbreak of the war was rapidly developing a system through which the
defective child might be discovered early in his school career, and
might not only be saved from delinquency but such restricted abilities
as he possessed be trained for the most effective use. “Through all
these years,” she said, “I had grown accustomed to the fact that the
government was deeply concerned in the welfare of the least promising
child. I had felt my own efforts so identified with it that I had
unconsciously come to regard the government as an agency for nurturing
human life and had apparently forgotten its more primitive functions.
[1] The following conversation is a composite made from several talks
held with each of two women representing both sides of the conflict.
Their opinions and observations are merged into one because in so many
particulars they were either identical or overlapping. Both women
called themselves patriots, but each had become convinced of the folly
of war.
“I was proud of the fact that my son held a state position as
professor of Industrial Chemistry in the University, because I knew
that the research in his department would ultimately tend to alleviate
the harshness of factory conditions, and to make for the well-being of
the working classes in whose children I had become so interested.
“When my son’s regiment was mobilized and sent to the front I think
that it never occurred to me, any more than it did to him, to question
his duty. His professional training made him a valuable member of the
Aviation Corps, and when, in those first weeks of high patriotism his
letters reported successful scouting or even devastating raids, I felt
only a solemn satisfaction. But gradually through the months, when
always more of the people’s food supply and constantly more men were
taken by the government for its military purposes, when I saw the state
institutions for defectives closed, the schools abridged or dismissed,
women and children put to work in factories under hours and conditions
which had been legally prohibited years before, when the very
governmental officials who had been so concerned for the welfare of the
helpless were bent only upon the destruction of the enemy at whatever
cost to their fellow-citizens, the State itself gradually became for me
an alien and hostile thing.
“In response to the appeal made by the government to the instinct of
self-preservation, the men of the nation were ardent and eager to
take any possible risks, to suffer every hardship, and were proud to
give their lives in their country’s service. But was it inevitable,
I constantly asked myself, that the great nations of Europe should
be reduced to such a primitive appeal? Why should they ignore all
the other motives which enter into modern patriotism and are such an
integral part of devotion to the state that they must in the end be
reckoned with?
“I am sure that I had reached these conclusions before my own tragedy
came, before my son was fatally wounded in a scouting aëroplane and
his body later thrown overboard into a lonely swamp. It was six weeks
before I knew what had happened and it was during that period that I
felt most strongly the folly and waste of putting men, trained as my
son had been, to the barbaric business of killing. This tendency in
my thinking may have been due to a hint he had given me in the very
last letter I ever received from him, of a change that was taking
place within himself. He wrote that whenever he heard the firing of
a huge field-piece he knew that the explosion consumed years of the
taxes which had been slowly accumulated by some hard-working farmer or
shopkeeper, and that he unconsciously calculated how fast industrial
research would have gone forward, had his department been given once
a decade the costs of a single day of warfare, with the government’s
command to turn back into alleviation of industrial conditions the
taxes which the people had paid. He regretted that he was so accustomed
to analysis that his mind would not let the general situation alone
but wearily went over it again and again; and then he added that this
war was tearing down the conception of government which had been so
carefully developed during this generation in the minds of the very men
who had worked hardest to fulfill that conception.
“Although the letter sounded like a treatise on government, I knew
there was a personal pang somewhere behind this sombre writing, even
though he added his old joking promise that when their fathers were no
longer killed in industry, he would see what he could do for my little
idiots.
“At the very end of the letter he wrote, and they were doubtless the
last words he ever penned, that he felt as if science herself in this
mad world had also become cruel and malignant.
“I learned later that it was at this time that he had been consulted
in the manufacture of asphyxiating gases, because the same gases
are used in industry and he had made experiments to determine
their poisonousness in different degrees of dilution. The original
investigation with which he had been identified had been carried on
that the fumes released in a certain industrial process might be
prevented from injuring the men who worked in the factory. I know how
hard it must have been for him to put knowledge acquired in his long
efforts to protect normal living to the brutal use of killing men. It
was literally a forced act of prostitution.”
As if to free her son’s memory from any charge of lack of patriotism,
after a few moments she continued: “These modern men of science are
red-blooded, devoted patriots, facing dangers of every sort in mines
and factories and leading strenuous lives in spite of the popular
conception of the pale anæmic scholar, but because they are equally
interested in scientific experiments wherever they may be carried on,
they inevitably cease to think of national boundaries in connection
with their work. The international mind, which really does exist in
spite of the fact that it is not yet equipped with adequate organs
for international government, has become firmly established, at least
among scientists. They have known the daily stimulus of a wide and free
range of contacts. They have become interpenetrated with the human
consciousness of fellow scientists all over the world.
“I hope that I am no whining coward--my son gave his life to his
country as many another brave man has done, but I do envy the mothers
whose grief is at least free from this fearful struggle of opposing
ideals and traditions. My old father, who is filled with a solemn pride
over his grandson’s gallant record and death, is most impatient with
me. I heard him telling a friend the other day that my present state
of mind was a pure demonstration of the folly of higher education for
women; that it was preposterous and more than human flesh could bear
to combine an intellectual question on the function of government with
a mother’s sharp agony over the death of her child. He said he had
always contended that women, at least those who bear children, had no
business to consider questions of this sort, and that the good sense
of his position was demonstrated now that such women were losing their
children in war. It was enough for women to know that government
waged war to protect their firesides and to preserve the nation from
annihilation; at any rate, they should keep their minds free from silly
attempts to reason it out. It’s all Bertha von Suttner’s book and other
nonsense that the women are writing, he exploded at the end.”
Then as if she were following another line of reminiscence she
began again. “My son left behind him a war bride, for he obeyed the
admonition of the statesmen, as well as the commands of the military
officers in those hurried heroic days. But the hasty wooing betrayed
all his ideals of marriage quite as fighting men of other nations
did violence to his notions of patriotism, and the recklessness of a
destructive air raid outraged his long devotion to science. Of course
his child will be a comfort to us and his poor little bride is filled
with a solemn patriotism which never questions any aspect of the
situation. When she comes to see us and I listen to the interminable
talk she has with my father, I am grateful for the comfort they give
each other, but when I hear them repeating those hideous stories of
the conduct of the enemy which accumulate every month and upon which
the war spirit continually feeds itself, I with difficulty refrain from
crying out upon them that he whose courage and devotion they praise so
loudly would never have permitted such talk of hatred and revenge in
his presence; that he who lived in the regions of science and whose
intrepid mind was bent upon the conquest of truth, must feel that he
had died in vain did he know to what exaggerations and errors the
so-called patriotism of his beloved country had stooped.
“I listen to them thinking that if I were either older or younger
it would not be so hard for me, and I have an unreal impression
that it would have been easier for my son if the war had occurred
in the first flush of his adventurous youth. Eager as he had been
to serve his country, he would not then have asked whether it could
best be accomplished by losing his life in a scouting aëroplane or
by dedicating a trained mind to industrial amelioration. He might
then easily have preferred the first and he certainly would never
have been tormented by doubts. But when he was thirty-one years old
and had long known that he was steadily serving his country through
careful researches, the results of which would both increase the
nation’s productivity and protect its humblest citizens, he could not
do otherwise than to judge and balance social values. I am, of course,
proud of his gallant spirit, that did not for a moment regret his
decision to die for his country, but I can make the sacrifice seem in
character only when I place him back in his early youth.
“At times I feel immeasurably old, and in spite of my father’s
contention that I am too intellectual, I am consciously dominated
by one of those overwhelming impulses belonging to women as such,
irrespective of their mental training, in their revolt against war.
After all, why should one disregard such imperative instincts? We
know perfectly well that the trend of a given period in history has
been influenced by ‘habits of preference’ and by instinctive actions
founded upon repeated and unrecorded experiences of an analogous kind;
that desires to seek and desires to avoid are in themselves the very
incalculable material by which the tendencies of an age are modified.
The women in all the belligerent countries who feel so alike in regard
to the horror and human waste of this war and yet refrain from speaking
out, may be putting into jeopardy that power inherent in human affairs
to right themselves through mankind’s instinctive shifting towards
what the satisfactions recommend and the antagonisms repulse. The
expression of such basic impulses in regard to human relationships may
be most important in this moment of warfare which is itself a reversion
to primitive methods of determining relations between man and man or
nation and nation.
“Certainly the women in every country who are under a profound
imperative to preserve human life, have a right to regard this maternal
impulse as important now as was the compelling instinct evinced by
primitive women long ago, when they made the first crude beginnings
of society by refusing to share the vagrant life of man because they
insisted upon a fixed abode in which they might cherish their children.
Undoubtedly women were then told that the interests of the tribe, the
diminishing food supply, the honor of the chieftain, demanded that they
leave their particular caves and go out in the wind and weather without
regard to the survival of their children. But at the present moment
the very names of the tribes and of the honors and glories which they
sought are forgotten, while the basic fact that the mothers held the
lives of their children above all else, insisted upon staying where the
children had a chance to live, and cultivated the earth for their food,
laid the foundations of an ordered society.
“My son used to say that my scientific knowledge was most irregular,
but profound experiences such as we are having in this war throw
to the surface of one’s mind all sorts of opinions and half-formed
conclusions. The care for conventions, for agreement with one’s
friends, is burned away. One is concerned to express only ultimate
conviction even though it may differ from all the rest of the world.
This is true in spite of the knowledge that every word will be caught
up in an atmosphere of excitement and of that nervous irritability
which is always close to grief and to moments of high emotion.
“In the face of many distressing misunderstandings I am certain
that if a minority of women in every country would clearly express
their convictions they would find that they spoke not for themselves
alone but for those men for whom the war has been a laceration,--‘an
abdication of the spirit.’ Such women would doubtless formulate the
scruples of certain soldiers whose ‘mouths are stopped by courage,’
men who months ago with closed eyes rushed to the defence of their
countries.
“It may also be true that as the early days of this war fused us all
into an overwhelming sense of solidarity until each felt absolutely
at one with all his fellow-countrymen, so the sensitiveness to
differences is greatly intensified and the dissenting individual has
an exaggerated sense of isolation. I try to convince myself that this
is the explanation of my abominable and constant loneliness, which is
almost unendurable.
“I have never been a Feminist and have always remained quite unmoved
by the talk of the peculiar contribution women might make to the
State, but during the last dreadful months, in spite of women’s
widespread enthusiasm for the war and their patriotic eagerness to
make the supreme sacrifice, I have become conscious of an unalterable
cleavage between Militarism and Feminism. The Militarists believe that
government finally rests upon a basis of physical force, and in a
crisis such as this, Militarism, in spite of the spiritual passion in
war, finds its expression in the crudest forms of violence.
“It would be absurd for women even to suggest equal rights in a world
governed solely by physical force, and Feminism must necessarily assert
the ultimate supremacy of moral agencies. Inevitably the two are in
eternal opposition.
“I have always agreed with the Feminists that, so far as force plays
a great part in the maintenance of an actual social order, it is
due to the presence of those elements which are in a steady process
of elimination; and of course as society progresses the difficulty
arising from woman’s inferiority in physical strength must become
proportionately less. One of the most wretched consequences of war is
that it arrests these beneficent social processes and throws everything
back into a coarser mould. The fury of war, enduring but for a few
months or years, may destroy slow-growing social products which it
will take a century to recreate--the ‘consent of the governed,’ for
instance....
“But why do I talk like this! My father would call it one of my
untrained and absurd theories about social progress and the functions
of government concerning which I know nothing, and would say that I
had no right to discuss the matter in this time of desperate struggle.
Nevertheless it is better for me in these hideous long days and nights
to drive my mind forward even to absurd conclusions than to let it
fall into one of those vicious circles in which it goes round and round
to no purpose.”
In absolute contrast to this sophisticated, possibly oversophisticated,
mother was a simple woman who piteously showed me a piece of shrapnel
taken from her son’s body by his comrades, which they had brought
home to her in a literal-minded attempt at comfort. They had told
her that the shrapnel was made in America and she showed it to me,
believing that I could at sight recognize the manufactured products
of my fellow-countrymen. She apparently wished to have the statement
either confirmed or denied, because she was utterly bewildered in her
feeling about the United States and all her previous associations with
it. In her fresh grief, stricken as she was, she was bewildered by a
sudden reversal of her former ideals. Many of her relatives had long
ago emigrated to America, including two brothers living in the Western
states, whom she had hoped to visit in her old age. For many reasons,
throughout her youth and early womanhood, she had thought of that
far-away country as a kindly place where every man was given his chance
and where the people were all friendly to each other irrespective of
the land in which they had been born. To have these same American
people send back the ammunition which had killed her son was apparently
incomprehensible to her.
She presented, it seemed to me, a clear case of that humble
internationalism which is founded not upon theories, but upon the
widespread immigration of the last fifty years, interlacing nation to
nation with a thousand kindly deeds. Her older brother had a fruit
ranch which bordered upon one of those co-operative Italian colonies
so successful in California, and he had frequently sent home presents
from his Italian neighbors with his own little cargoes. The whole had
evidently been prized by his family as a symbol of American good-will
and of unbounded opportunity. Her younger brother had attained some
measure of success as a contractor in an inland town, and when he had
written home of the polyglot composition of the gangs of men upon
whose labors his little fortune had been founded, she had taken it as
an example of all nationalities and religions working happily together.
He had also served one term as mayor, obviously having been elected
through his popularity with the same foreign colonies from which his
employes had been drawn.
For many reasons therefore she had visualized America as a land
in which all nationalities understood each other with a resulting
friendliness which was not possible in Europe, not because the people
still living in Europe were different from those who had gone to
America, but because the latter, having emigrated, had a chance to
express their natural good-will for everybody. The nations at war
in Europe suggested to her simple mind the long past days of her
grandmother’s youth when a Protestant threw stones at a Catholic just
because he was “different.” The religious liberty in America was
evidently confused in her mind with this other liberalism in regard to
national differences.
Holding this conception of actual internationalism as it had been
evolved among simple people, crude and abortive though it was, she had
been much more shocked by the fact that friendly Americans should make
ammunition to be used for killing any human being than by the actual
war itself, because the war was taking place in Europe, where it was
still quite natural for a German to fight against a Frenchman or an
Italian against an Austrian.
Her son had been a Socialist and from the discussions he sometimes held
with his comrades in her house, she had grown familiar with certain
phrases which she had taken literally and in some curious fashion had
solemnly come to believe were put into practice in her El Dorado of
America.
The arguments I had used so many times with her fellow-countrymen
to justify America’s sale of ammunition, ponderously beginning with
The Hague conventions of 1907, I found useless in the face of this
idealistic version of America’s good-will.
She was evidently one of those people whose affections go out to groups
and impersonal causes quite as much as to individuals, thus often
supplementing and enlarging harsh and narrow conditions of living. She
certainly obtained a curiously personal comfort out of her idealization
of America. Her conversation revealed what I had often vaguely felt
before when men as well as women talked freely of the war, that her
feelings had been hurt, that her very conception of human nature had
received a sharp shock and set-back. To her the whole world and America
in particular would henceforth seem less kind and her spirit would be
less at home. She was tormented by that ever recurring question which
perhaps can never be answered for any of us too confidently in the
affirmative, “Is the Universe friendly?” The troubled anguish in her
old eyes confirmed her statement that the thought of the multitude of
men who were being killed all over the world oppressed her day and
night. This old woman had remained faithful to the cause of moral unity
and bore her humble testimony to one of the noblest and profoundest
needs of the human spirit.
These efforts at spiritual adjustment necessitated by the war are
attempted by many people, from the simple souls whose hard-won
conceptions of a friendly universe have been brought tumbling about
their ears, to the thinking men who are openly disappointed to find
civilized nations so irrational. Such efforts are encountered in all
the belligerent nations as well as in the neutral ones, although in
the former they are often inhibited and overlaid by an overwhelming
patriotism. Nevertheless, as I met those women who were bearing their
hardships and sorrows so courageously, I often caught a glimpse of an
inner struggle, as if two of the most fundamental instincts, the two
responsible for our very development as human beings, were at strife
with each other. The first is tribal loyalty, such unquestioning
acceptance of the tribe’s morals and standards that the individual
automatically fights when the word comes; the second is woman’s
deepest instinct, that the child of her body must be made to live.
We are told that the peasants in Flanders, whose fields border upon
the very trenches, disconsolately came back to them last Spring and
continued to plough the familiar soil, regardless of the rain of
shrapnel falling into the fresh furrows; that the wine growers of
Champagne last Autumn insistently gathered their ripened grapes, though
the bombs of rival armies were exploding in their vineyards; why should
it then be surprising that certain women in every country have remained
steadfast to their old occupation of nurturing life, that they have
tenaciously held to their anxious concern that men should live, through
all the contagion and madness of the war fever which is infecting the
nations of the earth.
In its various manifestations the struggle in women’s souls suggests
one of those movements through which, at long historic intervals, the
human spirit has apparently led a revolt against itself, as it were,
exhibiting a moral abhorrence for certain cherished customs which, up
to that time, had been its finest expression. A moral rebellion of this
sort was inaugurated three thousand years ago both in Greece and Judea
against the old custom of human sacrifice. That a man should slay his
own child and stand unmoved as the burning flesh arose to his gods was
an act of piety, of courage, and of devotion to ideals, so long as he
performed the rite wholeheartedly. But after there had gradually grown
up in the minds of men first the suspicion, and then the conviction,
that it was unnecessary and impious to offer human flesh as a living
sacrifice, courage and piety shifted to the men who refused to conform
to this long-established custom. At last both the Greeks and the Jews
guarded themselves against the practice of human sacrifice with every
possible device. It gradually became utterly abhorrent to all civilized
peoples, an outrage against the elemental decencies, a profound
disturber of basic human relations. Poets and prophets were moved to
call it an abomination; statesmen and teachers denounced it as a
hideous barbarism, until now it is so nearly abolished by the entire
race that it is no longer found within the borders of civilization and
exists to-day only in jungles and hidden savage places.
There are indications that the human consciousness is reaching the same
stage of sensitiveness in regard to war as that which has been attained
in regard to human sacrifice. In this moment of almost universal
warfare there is evinced a widespread moral abhorrence against war,
as if its very existence were more than human nature could endure.
Citizens of every nation are expressing this moral compunction, which
they find in sharp conflict with current conceptions of patriotic duty.
It is perhaps inevitable that women should be challenged in regard
to it, should be called upon to give it expression in such stirring
words as those addressed to them by Romain Rolland, “Cease to be the
shadow of man and of his passion of pride and destruction. Have a clear
vision of the duty of pity! Be a living peace in the midst of war--the
eternal Antigone refusing to give herself up to hatred and knowing no
distinction between her suffering brothers who make war on each other.”
This may be a call to women to defend those at the bottom of society
who, irrespective of the victory or defeat of any army, are ever
oppressed and overburdened. The suffering mothers of the disinherited
feel the stirring of the old impulse to protect and cherish their
unfortunate children, and women’s haunting memories instinctively
challenge war as the implacable enemy of their age-long undertaking.