FEMINISM IN PEACE AND WAR
I
THE THREAT OF THE MATRIARCHATE
I
It is possible that if the European War had been averted the history
of Feminism would have made far different reading--say fifty years
hence. The militant suffragettes of England had degenerated from
something like real politicians into mere neurasthenics and not only
had lost what little chance they seemed for a time to have of being
taken seriously by the British Government, but had very nearly
alienated the many thousands of women without the ranks that were
wavering in the balance. This was their most serious mistake, for the
chief handicap of the militants had been that too few women were
disposed toward suffrage, or even interested. The history of the world
shows that when any large body of people in a community want anything
long enough and hard enough, and go after it with practical methods,
they obtain it in one form or another. But the women of Britain as
well as the awakening women of other nations east and west of the
Atlantic, were so disgusted and alarmed by this persisting lack of
self-control in embryonic politicians of their sex that they voted
silently to preserve their sanity under the existing régime. It has
formed one of the secret sources of the strength of the antis, that
fear of the complete demoralization of their sex if freed from the
immemorial restraints imposed by man.
This attitude of mind does not argue a very distinguished order of
reasoning powers or of clear thinking; but then not too many men, in
spite of their centuries of uninterrupted opportunity, face
innovations or radical reforms with unerring foresight. There is a
strong conservative instinct in the average man or woman, born of the
hereditary fear of life, that prompts them to cling to old standards,
or, if too intelligent to look inhospitably upon progress, to move
very slowly. Both types are the brakes and wheel-horses necessary to a
stable civilization, but history, even current history in the
newspapers, would be dull reading if there were no adventurous spirits
willing to do battle for new ideas. The militant women of England
would have accomplished wonders if their nervous systems had not
broken down under the prolonged strain.
It is probable that after this war is over the women of the
belligerent nations will be given the franchise by the weary men that
are left, if they choose to insist upon it. They have shown the same
bravery, endurance, self-sacrifice, resource, and grim determination
as the men. In every war, it may be argued, women have displayed the
same spirit and the same qualities, proving that they needed but the
touchstone of opportunity to reveal the splendor of their endowment,
but treated by man, as soon as peace was restored, as the same old
inferior annex.
This is true enough, but the point of difference is that never, prior
to the Great War, was such an enormous body of women awake after the
lethargic submission of centuries, and clamoring for their rights.
Never before have millions of women been supporting themselves; never
before had they even contemplated organization and the direct
political attack. Of course the women of Europe, exalted and worked
half to death, have, with the exception of a few irrepressibles, put
all idea of self-aggrandizement aside for the moment; but this idea
had grown too big and too dominant to be dismissed for good and all,
with last year's fashions and the memory of delicate _plats_ prepared
by chefs now serving valiantly within the lines. The big idea, the
master desire, the obsession, if you like, is merely taking an
enforced rest, and there is persistent speculation as to what the
thinking and the energetic women of Europe will do when this war is
over, and how far men will help or hinder them.
I have written upon this question in its bearings upon the women of
France more fully in another chapter; but it may be stated here that
such important feminists as Madame Vérone, the eminent avocat, and
Mlle. Valentine Thompson, the youngest but one of the ablest of the
leaders, while doing everything to help and nothing to embarrass their
Government, never permit the question to recede wholly to the
background. Mlle. Thompson argues that the men in authority should not
be permitted for a moment to forget, not the services of women in this
terrible chapter of France's destiny, for that is a matter of course,
as ever, but the marked capabilities women have shown when suddenly
thrust into positions of authority. In certain invaded towns the wives
of imprisoned or executed Mayors have taken their place almost
automatically and served with a capacity unrelated to sex. In some of
these towns women have managed the destinies of the people since the
first month of the war, understanding them as no man has ever done,
and working harder than most men are ever willing to work. Thousands
have, under the spur, developed unsuspected capacities, energies,
endurance, above all genuine executive abilities. That these women
should be swept back into private life by the selfishness of men when
the killing business is over, is, to Mlle. Thompson's mind,
unthinkable. In her newspaper, _La Vie Feminine_, she gives weekly
instances of the resourcefulness and devotion of French womanhood, and
although the women of her country have never taken as kindly to the
idea of demanding the franchise as those of certain other nations,
still it is more than possible that she will make many converts before
the war is over.
These are not to be "suffrage" chapters. There is no doubt in my mind
that the women of all nations will have the franchise eventually, if
only because it is ridiculous that they should be permitted to work
like men (often supporting husbands, fathers, brothers) and not be
permitted all the privileges of men. Man, who grows more enlightened
every year--often sorely against his will--must appreciate this
anomaly in due course, and by degrees will surrender the franchise as
freely to women as he has to negroes and imbeciles. When women have
received the vote for which they have fought and bled, they will use
it with just about the same proportion of conscientiousness and
enthusiasm as busy men do. One line in the credo might have been
written of human nature A.D. 1914-1917: "As it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be."
But while suffrage and feminism are related, they are far from
identical. Suffrage is but a milestone in feminism, which may be
described as the more or less concerted sweep of women from the
backwaters into the broad central stream of life. Having for untold
centuries given men to the world they now want the world from men.
There is no question in the progressive minds of both sexes that,
outside of the ever-recurrent war zones, they should hereafter divide
the great privileges of life and civilization in equal shares with
men.
Several times before in the history of the world comparatively large
numbers of women have made themselves felt, claiming certain equal
rights with the governing sex. But their ambitions were generally
confined to founding religious orders, obtaining admission to the
universities, or to playing the intellectual game in the social
preserves. In the wonderful thirteenth century women rivaled men in
learning and accomplishments, in vigor of mind and decision of
character. But this is the first time that millions of them have been
out in the world "on their own," invading almost every field of work,
for centuries sacrosanct to man. There is even a boiler-maker in the
United States who worked her way up in poor-boy fashion and now
attends conventions of boiler-makers on equal terms. In tens of
thousands of cases women have made good, in the arts, professions,
trades, businesses, clerical positions, and even in agriculture and
cattle raising. They are brilliant aviators, yachtsmen, automobile
drivers, showing failure of nerve more rarely than men, although, as
they are not engaged in these pursuits in equal numbers perhaps that
is not a fair statement. Suffice it to say that as far as they have
gone they have asked for no quarter. It is quite true that in certain
of the arts, notably music, they have never equaled men, and it has
been held against them that all the great chefs are men. Here it is
quite justifiable to take refuge in the venerable axiom, "Rome was not
made in a day." It is not what they have failed to accomplish with
their grinding disabilities but the amazing number of things in which
they have shown themselves the equal if not the superior of men.
Whether their success is to be permanent, or whether they have done
wisely in invading man's domain so generally, are questions to be
attacked later when considering the biological differences between men
and women. The most interesting problem relating to women that
confronts us at present is the effect of the European War on the whole
status of woman.
If the war ends before this nation is engulfed we shall at least keep
our men, and the males of this country are so far in excess of the
females that it is odd so many American women should be driven to
self-support. In Great Britain the women have long outnumbered the
men; it was estimated before the war that there were some three
hundred thousand spinsters for whom no husbands were available. After
the war there will be at best something like a proportion of one whole
man to three women (confining these unwelcome prophecies to people of
marriageable age); and the other afflicted countries, with the
possible exception of Russia, will show a similar dislocation of the
normal balance. The acute question will be repopulation--with a view
to another trial of military supremacy a generation hence!--and all
sorts of expedients are being suggested, from polygamy to artificial
fertilization. It may be that the whole future of woman as well as of
civilization after this war is over depends upon whether she concludes
to serve the State or herself.
While in France in the summer of 1916, I heard childless women say:
"Would that I had six sons to give to France!" I heard unmarried
women say: "Thank heaven I never married!" I heard bitterness
expressed by bereft mothers, terror and despair by others when the
curtain had rung down and they could relax the proud and smiling front
they presented to the world. Not one would have had her son shirk his
duty, nor asked for compromise with the enemy, but all prayed for the
war to end. It is true that these men at the front are heroes in the
eyes of their women, worshiped by the majority when they come home
briefly as permissionnaires, and it is also true that France is an old
military nation and that the brain-cells of its women are full of
ancestral memories of war. But never before have women done as much
thinking for themselves as they are doing to-day, as they had done for
some fifteen or twenty years before the war. That war has now lasted
almost three years. During this long and terrible period there has
been scarcely a woman in France, as in Britain, Russia, Italy,
Germany, who has not done her share behind the lines, working, at her
self-appointed tasks or at those imposed by the Government, for months
on end without a day of rest. They have had contacts that never would
have approached them otherwise, they have been obliged to think for
themselves, for thousands of helpless poor, for the men at the Front.
The Frenchwomen particularly have forced men to deal with them as
human beings and respect them as such, dissipating in some measure
those mists of sex through which the Frenchman loves to stalk in
search of the elusive and highly-sophisticated quarry. As long as a
woman was sexually attractive she could never hope to meet man on an
equal footing, no matter how entrancing he might find her mental
qualities. She must play hide-and-seek, exercise finesse, seduction,
keep the flag of sex flying ever on the ramparts. It is doubtful if
Frenchmen will change in this respect, but it is more than doubtful if
women do not.
There is hardly any doubt that if this war lasts long enough women for
the first time in the history of civilization will have it in their
power to seize one at least of the world's reins. But will they do
it--I am now speaking of women in mass, not of the advanced thinkers,
or of women of the world who have so recently ascertained that there
is a special joy in being free of the tyranny of sex, a tyranny that
emanated no less from within than without.
It is to be imagined that all the men who are fighting in this most
trying of all wars are heroes in the eyes of European women--as well
they may be--and that those who survive are likely to be regarded with
a passionate admiration not unmixed with awe. The traditional weakness
of women where men are concerned (which after all is but a cunning
device of Nature) may swamp their great opportunity. They may fight
over the surviving males like dogs over a bone, marry with sensations
of profound gratitude (or patriotic fervor) the armless, the legless,
the blind, the terrible face mutilés, and drop forever out of the
ranks of Woman as differentiated from the ranks of mere women. What
has hampered the cause of Woman in Great Britain and Europe so far is
the quite remarkable valuation put upon the male by the female. This
is partly temperamental, partly female preponderance, but it is even
more deeply rooted in those vanished centuries during which man
proclaimed and maintained his superiority. Circumstances helped him
for thousands of years, and he has been taken by the physically weaker
and child-bearing sex at his own estimate. It is difficult for
American women to appreciate this almost servile attitude of even
British women to mere man. One of the finest things about the militant
woman, one by which she scored most heavily, was her flinging off of
this tradition and displaying a shining armor of indifference toward
man as man. This startled the men almost as much as the window
smashing, and made other women, living out their little lives under
the frowns and smiles of the dominant male, think and ponder, wonder
if their small rewards amounted to half as much as the untasted
pleasures of power and independence.
It is always a sign of weakness to give one side of a picture and
blithely ignore the other. Therefore, let me hasten to add that it is
a well-known fact that Mrs. Pankhurst had borne and reared six
children before she took up the moribund cause of suffrage; and that
after a season's careful investigation in London at the height of the
militant movement I concluded that never in the world had so many
unattractive females been banded together in any one cause. Even the
young girls I heard speaking on street corners, mounted on boxes,
looked gray, dingy, sexless. Of course there were many handsome, even
lovely, women,--like Mrs. Cavendish-Bentinck and Lady Hall, for
instance--interested in "the movement," contributing funds, and giving
it a certain moral support; but when it came to the window smashers,
the jail seekers, the hunger-strikers, the real martyrs of that
extraordinary minor chapter of England's history, there was only one
good-looking woman in the entire army--Mrs. Pethick-Lawrence--and
militant extravagances soon became too much for her. There were
intelligent women galore, women of the aristocracy born with a certain
style, and showing their breeding even on the soap-box, but sexually
attractive women never, and even the youngest seemed to have been born
without the bloom of youth. The significance of this, however, works
both ways. If men did not want them, at least there was something both
noble and pitiful in their willingness to sacrifice those dreams and
hopes which are the common heritage of the lovely and the plain, the
old and the young, the Circe and the Amazon, to the ultimate freedom
of those millions of their sisters lulled or helpless in the enchanted
net of sex.
It is doubtful if even the militants can revert to their former
singleness of purpose; after many months, possibly years, of devotion
to duty, serving State and man, the effacement of self, appreciation
of the naked fact that the integrity of their country matters more
than anything else on earth, they may be quite unable to rebound to
their old fanatical attitude toward suffrage as the one important
issue of the Twentieth Century. Even the very considerable number of
those women that have reached an appearance which would eliminate them
from the contest over such men as are left may be so chastened by the
hideous sufferings they have witnessed or heard of daily, so moved by
the astounding endurance and grim valor of man (who nearest approaches
to godhood in time of war) that they will have lost the disposition to
tear from him the few compensations the new era of peace can offer. If
that is the case, if women at the end of the war are soft, completely
rehabilitated in that femininity, or femaleness, which was their
original endowment from Nature, the whole great movement will subside,
and the work must begin over again by unborn women and their
accumulated grievances some fifty years hence.
Nothing is more sure than that Nature will take advantage of the lull
to make a desperate attempt to recover her lost ground. Progressive
women, and before the war their ranks were recruited daily, were one
of the most momentous results of the forces of the higher
civilization, an evolution that in Nature's eye represented a
lamentable divergence from type. Here is woman, with all her physical
disabilities, become man's rival in all of the arts, save music, and
in nearly all of the productive walks of life, as well as in a large
percentage of the professional and executive; intellectually the
equal if not the superior of the average man--who in these days, poor
devil, is born a specialist--and making a bold bid for political
equality.
It has been a magnificent accomplishment, and it has marked one of the
most brilliant and picturesque milestones in human progress. It seems
incredible that woman, in spite of the tremendous pressure that Nature
will put upon her, may revert weakly to type. The most powerful of all
the forces working for Nature and against feminism will be the quite
brutal and obscene naturalness of war, and the gross familiarity of
civilization with it for so long a period. There is reversion to type
with a vengeance! The ablest of the male inheritors of the accumulated
wisdom and experiences and civilizing influences of the ages were in
power prior to August 1914, and not one of them nor all combined had
the foresight to circumvent, or the diplomatic ingenuity to keep in
leash the panting Hun. They are settling their scores, A.D. 1914-1917,
by brute fighting. There has been some brain work during this war so
far, but a long sight more brute work. As it was in the beginning,
etc.
And the women, giving every waking hour to ameliorating the lot of the
defenders of their hearth and their honor, or nursing the wounded in
hospital, have been stark up against the physical side: whether making
bombs in factories, bandages or uniforms, washing gaping wounds,
preparing shattered bodies for burial, or listening to the horrid
tales of men and women home on leave.
II
The European woman, in spite of her exalted pitch, is living a more or
less mechanical life at present. Even where she has revealed
unsuspected creative ability, as soon as her particular task is mapped
she subsides into routine. As a rule she is quite automatically and
naturally performing those services and duties for which Nature so
elaborately equipped her, ministering to man almost exclusively, even
when temporarily filling his place in the factory and the tram-car.
_Dienen! Dienen!_ is the motto of one and all of these Kundrys,
whether they realize it or not, and it is on the cards that they may
never again wish to somersault back to that mental attitude where they
would dominate not serve.
On the other hand civilization may for once prove stronger than
Nature. Thinking women--and there are a few hundred thousands of
them--may emerge from this hideous reversion of Europe to barbarism
with an utter contempt for man. They may despise the men of affairs
for muddling Europe into the most terrible war in history, in the very
midst of the greatest civilization of which there is any record. They
may experience a secret but profound revulsion from the men wallowing
in blood and filth for months on end, living only to kill. The fact
that the poor men can't help it does not alter the case. The women
can't help it either. Women have grown very fastidious. The sensual
women and the quite unimaginative women will not be affected, but how
about the others? And only men of the finest grain survive a long
period of war with the artificial habits of civilization strong upon
them.
The end of this war may mark a conclusive revulsion of the present
generation of European women from men that may last until they have
passed the productive age. Instead of softening, disintegrating back
to type, they may be insensibly hardening inside a mould that will
eventually cast them forth a more definite third sex than any that
threatened before the war. Woman, blind victim of the race as she has
been for centuries, seldom in these days loves without an illusion of
the senses or of the imagination. She has ceased, in the wider avenues
of life, lined as they are with the opulent wares of twentieth century
civilization, to be merely the burden-bearing and reproductive sex.
Life has taught her the inestimable value of illusions, and the more
practical she becomes, the more she cherishes this divine gift. It is
possible that man has forfeited his power to cast a glamour over all
but the meanest types of women. If that should be the case women will
ask: Why settle down and keep house for the tiresome creatures, study
their whims, and meekly subside into the second place, or be eternally
on the alert for equal rights? As for children? Let the state suffer
for its mistakes. Why bring more children into the world to be blown
to pieces on the field of battle, or a burden to their women
throughout interminable years? No! For a generation at least the
world shall be ours, and then it may limp along with a depleted
population or go to the dogs.
Few, no doubt, will reason it out as elaborately as this or be so
consciously ruthless, but a large enough number are likely enough to
bring the light of their logic to bear upon the opportunity, and a
still larger number to feel an obscure sense of revolt against man for
his failure to uphold civilization against the Prussian anachronism,
combined with a more definite desire for personal liberty. And both of
these divisions of their sex are likely to alter the course of
history--far more radically than has ever happened before at the close
of any fighting period. Even the much depended upon maternal instinct
may subside, partly under the horrors of field hospitals where so many
mother's sons are ghastly wrecks, partly under a heavy landslide of
disgust that the sex that has ruled the world should apparently be so
helpless against so obscene a fate.
They will reflect that if women are weak (comparatively) physically,
there is all the more hope they may develop into giants mentally; one
of man's handicaps being that his more highly vitalized body with its
coercive demands, is ever waging war with a consistent and complete
development of the mind. And in these days, when the science of the
body is so thoroughly understood, any woman, unless afflicted with an
organic disease, is able to keep her brain constantly supplied with
red unpoisoned blood, and may wax in mental powers (there being no
natural physical deteriorations in the brain as in the body) so long
as life lasts.
Certainly these women will say: We could have done no worse than these
chess players of Europe and we might have done better. Assuredly if we
grasp and hold the reins of the world there will never be another war.
We are not, in the first place, as greedy as men; we will divide the
world up in strict accordance with race, and let every nation have its
own place in the sun. Commercial greed has no place in our make-up,
and with the hideous examples of history it will never obtain
entrance.
How often has it been the cynical pleasure of mere ministers of state
to use kings as pawns? Well, we despise the game. Also, we shall have
no kings, and republics are loth to make war. Our instincts are
humanitarian. We should like to see all the world as happy as that
lovely countryside of Northeastern France before August 1914. We at
least recognize that the human mind is as yet imperfectly developed;
and if, instead of setting the world back periodically, and drenching
mankind in misery, we would have all men and women as happy as human
nature will permit, we should devote our abilities, uninterrupted by
war, to solving the problem of poverty (the acutest evidence of man's
failure), and to fostering the talents of millions of men and women
that to-day constitute a part of the wastage of Earth. Of course,
being mortal, we shall make mistakes, give way, no doubt, to racial
jealousies, and personal ambitions; but our eyes have been opened wide
by this war and it is impossible that we should make the terrible
mistakes we inevitably would have made had we obtained power before we
had seen and read its hideous revelations--day after day, month after
month, year after year! It is true that men have made these
resolutions many times, but men have too much of the sort of blood
that goes to the head, and their lust for money is even greater than
their lust for power.
Now, this may sound fantastic but it is indisputably probable. Much
has been said of the patriotic exaltation of young women during war
and just after its close, which leads them to marry almost any one in
order to give a son to the state, or even to dispense with the legal
formality. But although I heard a great deal of that sort of talk
during the first months of the war I don't hear so much of it now. Nor
did I hear anything like as much of it in France as I expected. To
quote one woman of great intelligence with whom I talked many times,
and who is one of the Government's chosen aids; she said one day, "It
was a terrible distress to me that I had only one child, and I
consulted every specialist in France. Now I am thankful that I did
have but one son to come home to me with a gangrene wound, and then,
after months of battling for his life, to insist upon going back to
the Front and exposing it every day. I used to feel sad, too, that
Valentine Thompson" (who is not only beautiful but an Amazon in
physique) "did not marry and be happy like other girls, instead of
becoming a public character and working at first one scheme or another
for the amelioration of the lot of woman. Now, I am thankful that she
never married. Her father is too old to go to war and she has neither
husband nor son to agonize over. Far better she live the life of
usefulness she does than deliberately take upon herself the common
burdens of women." No Frenchwoman could be more patriotic than the one
who made this speech to me, and if she had had many sons she would
have girded them all for war, but she had suffered too much herself
and she saw too much suffering among her friends daily, not to hate
the accursed institution of war, and wish that as many women could be
spared its brutal impositions as possible.
Nobody has ever accused me of being a Pacifist. Personally, I think
that every self-respecting nation on the globe should have risen in
1914 and assisted the Allies to blast Prussia off the face of the
Earth, but after this war is over if the best brains in these nations
do not at once get to work and police the world against future wars,
it will be a matter for regret that they were not all on the German
ship when she foundered.
III
It is to be remembered that woman has, in her subconscious
brain-cells, ancestral memories of the Matriarchate. It is interesting
to quote in this connection what Patrick Geddes and G. Arthur
Thompson have to say on the mooted question of the Mother-Age:
"Prehistoric history is hazardous, but there is a good case to be made
out for a Mother-Age. This has been reconstructed from fossils in the
folk lore of agriculture and housewifery, in old customs, ceremonies,
festivals, games; in myths and fairy tales and age-worn words.
"Professor Karl Pierson finds in the study of witchcraft some of the
fossils that point back to the Matriarchate. In the older traditions
'the witch resumes her old position as the wise-woman, the medicine
woman, the leader of the people, the priestess.' 'We have accordingly
to look upon the witch as essentially the degraded form of the old
priestess, cunning in the knowledge of herbs and medicine, jealous of
the rights and of the goddess she serves, and preserving in spells and
incantations such wisdom as early civilization possessed.'
"The witch's weather wisdom is congruent with the fact that women were
the earliest agriculturists; her knowledge of herbs with that of the
ancient medicine women; her diablerie with that of the ancient group
relations of the sexes so different from what we call marriage to-day;
her nocturnal dances with the ancient choruses of marriage-ripe
maidens. The authority and magic circle kept by the broom are those of
the hearth and floor in her primeval roundhut; and her distaff and
pitchfork, her caldron, her cat and dog, are all in keeping with the
rôle of woman in the Mother-Age.
"But there is another way, and that certainly not less reliable, by
which we can arrive at some understanding of the Mother-Age, and how
it naturally came about, namely, by a study of our 'contemporary
ancestors,' of people who linger on the matriarchal level. Such
people, as well as others on the still lower nomad stage of
civilization, are to be found at this day in Australia.
"While the purely nomad stage lasted, little progress could be made,
because the possessions of a group were limited by the carrying powers
of its members. But in a favorite forest spot a long halt was
possible, the mothers were able to drop their babies and give a larger
part of their attention to food-getting. As before, the forest
products--roots and fruits--were gathered in, but more time and
ingenuity were expended in making them palatable and in storing them
for future use. The plants in the neighborhood, which were useful for
food or for their healing properties, were tended and kept free of
weeds, and by and by seeds of them were sown in cleared ground within
easy reach of the camp. Animals gathered about the rich food area, and
were at first tolerated--certain negro tribes to-day keep hens about
their huts, though they eat neither them nor their eggs--and later
encouraged as a stable source of food-supply. The group was anchored
to one spot by its increasing possessions; and thus home-making,
gardening, medicine, the domestication of animals and even
agriculture, were fairly begun. Not only were all these activities in
the hands of women, but to them, too, were necessarily left the care
and training of the young.
"The men meanwhile went away on warlike expeditions against other
groups, and on long hunting and fishing excursions, from which they
returned with their spoils from time to time, to be welcomed by the
women with dancing and feasting. Hunting and war were their only
occupations, and the time between expeditions was spent in resting and
in interminable palavers and dances, which we may perhaps look upon as
the beginnings of parliaments and music halls.
"Whether this picture be accurate in detail or not there is at any
rate a considerable body of evidence pointing to the 'Matriarchate' as
a period during which women began medicine, the domestication of the
smaller animals, the cultivation of vegetables, flax and corn, the use
of the distaff, the spindle, the broom, the fire-rake and the
pitchfork.
"In the Mother-Age the inheritance of property passed through the
mother; the woman gave the children her own name; husband and father
were in the background--often far from individualized; the brother and
uncle were much more important; the woman was the depository of
custom, lore, and religious tradition; she was, at least, the nominal
head of the family, and she had a large influence in tribal affairs."
For some years past certain progressive women have shown signs of a
reversion to the matriarchal state--or shall we say a disposition to
revive it? In spite of human progress we travel more or less in
circles, a truth of which the present war and its reversions is the
most uncompromising example.
In the married state, for instance, these women have retained their
own name, not even being addressed as Mrs., that after all is a polite
variation of the Spanish "de," which does not by any means indicate
noble birth alone, women after marriage proudly announcing themselves
as legally possessed. For instance a girl whose name has been Elena
Lopez writes herself after marriage Elena Lopez de Morena, the "de" in
this case standing for "property of." It will be some time before the
women of Spain travel far on the Northern road toward pride in sex
deliverance, but with us, and in Britain, the custom is growing
prevalent.
Then there is the hyphen marriage, more common still, in which the
woman retains her own name, but condescends to annex the man's. Once
in a way a man will prefix his wife's name to his own, and there is
one on record who prefixed his own to his wife's. But any woman may
have her opinion of him.
So far as I have been able to ascertain these marriages are quite as
successful as the average; and if the woman has a career on hand--and
she generally has--she pursues it unhampered. The grandmother or aunt
takes charge of the children, if there are any, while she is at her
duties without the home, and so far, the husband has been permitted
the compensation of endowing the children with his name.
The reversion to the prehistoric matriarchate can hardly be complete
in these days, but there are many significant straws that indicate the
rising of a new wind blown by ancient instincts. To look upon them as
shockingly advanced or abnormal is an evidence of conservatism that
does not reach quite far enough into the past.
A still more significant sign of the times (in the sense of linking
past with present) is the ever-increasing number of women doctors and
their success. Men for the most part have ceased to sneer or even to
be more than humanly jealous, often speaking in terms of the warmest
admiration not only of their skill but of their conscientiousness and
power of endurance. When I went to live in Munich (1903) a woman
surgeon was just beginning to practice. This, to Germany, was an
innovation with a vengeance, and the German male is the least tolerant
of female encroachment within his historic preserves. The men
practitioners threw every possible obstacle in her way, and with no
particular finesse. But nothing could daunt her, and two or three
years later she was riding round in her car--a striking red one--while
the major number of her rivals were still dependent upon the ambling
cab-horse, directed off and on by a fat driver who was normally
asleep. Jealousy, however, for the most part had merged into
admiration; for your average male, of whatever race, is not only
philosophical but bows to success; she was both recognized and called
in for consultation. Hang on! Hang on! should be the motto of all
women determined to make their mark in what is still a man's world.
Life never has denied her prizes to courage and persistence backed by
ability.
A curious instance of man's inevitable recognition of the places of
responsibility women more and more are taking is in the new reading of
the Income Tax papers for 1917. Heretofore only married men were
exempted taxation on the first $4000 but from now on, apparently,
women who are also "heads of families" are likewise favored. As
thousands of women are supporting their aged parents, their brothers
while studying, their children and even their husbands, who for one
reason or other are unequal to the family strain, this exemption
should have been made coincidentally with the imposing of the tax. But
men are slow to see and slower still to act where women are concerned.
As we all know, women have invaded practically every art, trade, and
industry, but--aside from the arts, for occasionally Nature is so
impartial in her bestowal of genius that art is accepted as
sexless--in no walk of life has woman been so uniformly successful as
in medicine. This is highly significant in view of the fact that they
invented and practiced it in the dawn of history, while man was too
rudimentary to do anything but fight and fill the larder. It would
seem that the biological differences between the male and the female
which are so often the cause of woman's failure in many spheres
preëmpted throughout long centuries by man, is in her case
counteracted not only by her ancestral inheritance, but by the high
moral element without which no doctor or surgeon can long stand the
exactions and strain of his terrible profession. No woman goes
blithely into surgery or medicine merely to have a career or to make a
living, although ten thousand girls to her one will essay to write, or
paint, or clerk, or cultivate her bit of voice, with barely a thought
expended upon her fitness or the obligations involved.
But the woman who deliberately enters the profession of healing has,
almost invariably, a certain nobility of mind, a lack of personal
selfishness, and a power of devotion to the race quite unknown to the
average woman, even the woman of genius when seeking a career.
During the Great War there have been few women doctors at the Front,
but hundreds of women nurses, and they have been as intrepid and
useful as their rivals in sex. They alone, by their previous
experience of human suffering, bad enough at best, were in a measure
prepared for the horrors of war and the impotence of men laid low. But
that will not restore any lost illusions, for they took masculine
courage for granted with their mothers' milk, and they cannot fail to
be imbued to the marrow with a bitter sense of waste and futility, of
the monstrous sacrifice of the best blood of their generation.
II
THE TRIUMPH OF MIDDLE-AGE
I
Certain doctors of England have gone on record as predicting a
lamentable physical future for the army of women who are at present
doing the heavy work of men, particularly in the munition factories.
They say that the day-long tasks which involve incessant bending and
standing and lifting of heavy weights will breed a terrible reaction
when the war ends and these women are abruptly flung back into
domestic life. There is almost no man's place in the industrial world
that English women are not satisfactorily filling, with either muscle
or brains, and the doctors apprehend a new problem in many thousand
neurotics or otherwise broken-down women at the close of the war.
Although this painful result of women's heroism would leave just that
many women less to compete for the remaining men sound of wind and
limb, still, if true, it raises the acute question: Are women the
equal of men in all things? Their deliverance from the old marital
fetish, and successful invasion of so many walks of life, have made
such a noise in the world since woman took the bit between her teeth,
more or less en masse, that the feministic pæan of triumph has almost
smothered an occasional protest from those concerned with biology; but
as a matter-of-fact statistics regarding the staying power of women in
what for all the historic centuries have been regarded as avocations
heaven-designed and with strict reference to the mental and physical
equipment of man, are too contradictory to be of any value.
Therefore, the result of this prolonged strain on a healthy woman of a
Northern race evidently predestined to be as public as their present
accomplishment, will be awaited with the keenest interest, and no
doubt will have an immense effect upon the future status of woman. She
has her supreme opportunity, and if her nerves are equal to her nerve,
her body to her spirit, if the same women are working at the severe
tasks at the end of the war as during the first months of their
exaltation, and instead of being wrecks are as hardened as the
miserable city boys that have become wiry in the trenches--then,
beyond all question woman will have come to her own and it will be for
her, not for man, to say whether or not she shall subside and attend
to the needs of the next generation.
Before I went to France in May 1916 I was inclined to believe that
only a small percentage of women would stand the test; but since then
I have seen hundreds of women at work in the munition factories of
France. As I have told in another chapter, they had then been at work
for some sixteen months, and, of poor physique in the beginning, were
now strong healthy animals with no sign of breakdown. They were more
satisfactory in every way than men, for they went home and slept all
night, drank only the light wines of their country, smoked less, if at
all, and had a more natural disposition toward cleanliness. Their bare
muscular arms looked quite capable of laying a man prostrate if he
came home and ordered them about, and their character and pride had
developed in proportion.[F]
[F] Dr. Rosalie Morton, the leading woman doctor and surgeon of New
York, who also studied this subject at first hand, agrees with
me that the war tasks have improved the health of the European
women.
It is not to be imagined, however, that the younger, at least, of
these women will cling to those greasy jobs when the world is normal
again and its tempered prodigals are spending money on the elegancies
of life once more. And if they slump back into the sedentary life when
men are ready to take up their old burdens, making artificial flowers,
standing all day in the fetid atmosphere of crowded and noisy shops,
stitching everlastingly at lingerie, there, it seems to me, lies the
danger of breakdown. The life they lead now, arduous as it is, not
only has developed their muscles, their lungs, the power to digest
their food, but they are useful members of society on the grand scale,
and to fall from any height is not conducive to the well-being of body
or spirit. No doubt, when the sudden release comes, they will return
to the lighter tasks with a sense of immense relief; but will it last?
Will it be more than a momentary reaction to the habit of their own
years and of the centuries behind, or will they gradually become aware
(after they have rested and romped and enjoyed the old life in the
old fashion when off duty) that with the inferior task they have
become the inferior sex again. The wife, to be sure, will feel
something more than her husband's equal, and the Frenchwoman never has
felt herself the inferior in the matrimonial partnership. But how
about the wage earners? Those that made ten to fifteen francs a day in
the _Usines de Guerre_, and will now be making four or five? How about
the girls who cannot marry because their families are no longer in a
position to pay the dot, without which no French girl dreams of
marrying? These girls not only have been extraordinarily (for
Frenchwomen of their class) affluent during the long period of the
war, but they order men about, and they are further upheld with the
thought that they are helping their beloved France to conquer the
enemy. They live on another plane, and life is apt to seem very mean
and commonplace under the old conditions.
That these women are not masculinized is proved by the fact that many
have borne children during the second year of the war, their tasks
being made lighter until they are restored to full strength again.
They invariably return as soon as possible, however. It may be, of
course, that the young men and women of the lower bourgeoisie will
forswear the dot, for it would be but one more old custom giving way
to necessity. In that case the sincere, hardworking and not very
humorous women of this class no doubt would find full compensation in
the home, and promptly do her duty by the State. But I doubt if any
other alternative will console any but the poorest intelligence or the
naturally indolent--and perhaps Frenchwomen, unless good old-fashioned
butterflies, have less laziness in their make-up than any other women
under the sun.
The natural volatility of the race must also be taken into
consideration. Stoical in their substratum, bubbling on the surface,
it may be that these women who took up the burdens of men so bravely
will shrug their shoulders and revert to pure femininity. Those past
the age of allurement may fight like termagants for their lucrative
jobs, their utter independence; but coquetry and the joy in life, or,
to put it more plainly, the powerful passions of the French race, may
do more to effect an automatic and permanent return to the old status
than any authoritative act on the part of man.
II
The women of England are (or were) far more neurotic than the women of
France, as they have fewer natural outlets. And the struggle for legal
enfranchisement, involving, as it did, a sensationalism that affected
even the non-combatants, did much to enhance this tendency, and it is
interesting to speculate whether this war will make or finish them.
Once more, personally, I believe it will make them, but as I was not
able to go to London after my investigations in France were concluded
and observe for myself I refuse to indulge in speculations. Time will
show, and before very long.
No doubt, however, when the greater question of winning the war is
settled, the question of sex equality will rage with a new violence,
perhaps in some new form, among such bodies of women as are not so
subject to the thrall of sex as to desert their new colors. It would
seem that the lot of woman is ever to be on the defensive. Nature
handicapped her at the start, giving man a tremendous advantage in his
minimum relationship to reproduction, and circumstances (mainly
perpetual warfare) postponed the development of her mental powers for
centuries. Certainly nothing in the whole history of mankind is so
startling as the abrupt awakening of woman and her demand for a
position in the world equal to that of the dominant male.
I use the word abrupt, because in spite of the scattered instances of
female prosiliency throughout history, and the long struggle beginning
in the last century for the vote, or the individual determination to
strive for some more distinguished fashion of coping with poverty than
school-teaching or boarding-house keeping, the concerted awakening of
the sex was almost as abrupt as the European War. Like many fires it
smouldered long, and then burst into a menacing conflagration. But I
do not for a moment apprehend that the conflagration will extinguish
the complete glory of the male any more than it will cause a revulsion
of nature in the born mother.
But may there not be a shuffling of the cards? Take the question of
servant-girls for instance. Where there are two or more servants in a
family their lot is far better than that of the factory girl. But it
is quite a different matter with the maid-of-all-work, the household
drudge, who is increasingly hard to find, partly because she, quite
naturally, prefers the department store, or the factory, with its
definite hours and better social status, partly because there is
nothing in the "home" to offset her terrible loneliness but
interminable hours of work. In England, where many people live in
lodgings, fashionable and otherwise, and have all meals served in
their rooms, it is a painful sight to see a slavey toiling up two or
three flights of stairs--and four times a day. In the United States,
the girls who come over from Scandinavia or Germany with roseate hopes
soon lose their fresh color and look heavy and sullen if they find
their level in the household where economy reigns.
Now, why has no one ever thought of men as "maids" of all work? On
ocean liners it is the stewards that take care of the state-rooms, and
they keep them like wax, and make the best bed known to civilization.
The stewardesses in heavy weather attend to the prostrate of their
sex, but otherwise do nothing but bring the morning tea, hook up, and
receive tips. Men wait in the diningroom (as they do in all
first-class hotels), and look out for the passengers on deck. Not the
most militant suffragette but would be intensely annoyed to have
stewardesses scurrying about on a heaving deck with the morning broth
and rugs, or dancing attendance in a nauseous sea.
The truth of the matter is that there is a vast number of men of all
races who are fit to be nothing but servants, and are so misplaced in
other positions where habit or vanity has put them, that they fail far
more constantly than women. All "men" are not real men by any means.
They are not fitted to play a man's part in life, and many of the
things they attempt are far better done by strong determined women,
who have had the necessary advantages, and the character to ignore the
handicap of sex.
I can conceive of a household where a well-trained man cooks, does the
"wash," waits on the table, sweeps, and if the mistress has a young
child, or is indolent and given to the rocking-chair and a
novel-a-day, makes the beds without a wrinkle. He may lack ambition
and initiative, the necessary amount of brains to carry him to success
in any of the old masculine jobs, but he inherits the thoroughness of
the ages that have trained him, and, if sober, rides the heavy waves
of his job like a cork. I will venture to say that a man thus employed
would finish his work before eight P.M. and spend an hour or two
before bed-time with his girl or at his club.
Many a Jap in California does the amount of work I have described, and
absorbs knowledge in and out of books during his hours of leisure.
Sometimes they do more than I have indicated as possible for the white
man. Energetic boys, who want to return to Japan as soon as possible,
or, mayhap, buy a farm, make a hundred dollars a month by getting up
at five in the morning to wash a certain number of stoops and sweep
sidewalks, cook a breakfast and wash up the dinner dishes in one
servantless household, the lunch dishes in another, clean up generally
in another, cook the dinner, wait on the table, clean up in still
another. As white men are stronger they could do even more, and
support a wife in an intensive little flat where her work would be
both light and spiritually remunerative. Domestic service would solve
the terrible problem of life for thousands of men, and it would
coincidentally release thousands of girls from the factory, the
counter, and the exhausting misery of a "home" that never can be their
own. At night he could feel like a householder and that he lived to
some purpose. If he is inclined to complain that such a life is not
"manly," let him reflect that as he is not first-rate anyhow, and
never can compete with the fully equipped, he had best be
philosophical and get what comfort out of life he can. Certainly the
increased economic value of thousands of men, at present slaving as
underpaid clerks and living in hall bedrooms, would thin the ranks of
the most ancient of all industries, if, according to our ardent
reformers, they are recruited from the ranks of the lonely
servant-girl, the tired shop-girl, and the despairing factory hand.
III
For it is largely a question of muscle and biology.
I have stated elsewhere that I believe in equal suffrage, if only
because women are the mothers of men and therefore their equals. But I
think there are several times more reasons why American women at least
should not overwork their bodies and brains and wear themselves out
trying to be men, than why it is quite right and fitting they should
walk up to the polls and cast a vote for men who more or less control
their destinies.
To digress a moment: When it comes to the arts, that is quite another
matter. If a woman finds herself with a talent (I refrain from such a
big word as genius, as only posterity should presume to apply that
term to any one's differentiation from his fellows), by all means let
her work like a man, take a man's chances, make every necessary
sacrifice to develop this blessed gift; not only because it is a duty
but because the rewards are adequate. The artistic career, where the
impulse is genuine, furnishes both in its rewards and in the exercise
of the gift itself far more happiness, or even satisfaction, than
husband, children, or home. The chief reason is that it is the supreme
form of self-expression, the ego's apotheosis, the power to indulge in
the highest order of spiritual pride, differentiation from the mass.
These are brutal truths, and another truth is that happiness is the
universal goal, whatever form it may take, and whatever form human
hypocrisy may compel it to take, or even to deny. Scientific
education has taught us not to sacrifice others too much in its
pursuit. That branch of ancestral memory known as conscience has
morbid reactions.
To create, to feel something spinning out of your brain, which you
hardly realize is there until formulated on paper, for instance; the
adventurous life involved in the exercise of any art, with its
uncertainties, its varieties, its disappointments, its mistakes; the
fight, the exaltations, the supreme satisfactions--all this is the
very best life has to offer. And as art is as impartial as a microbic
disease, women do achieve, individually, as much as men; sometimes
more. If their bulk has not in the past been as great, the original
handicaps, which women in general, aided by science and a more
enlightened public, are fast shedding, alone were to blame. Certainly
as many women as men in the United States are engaged in artistic
careers; more, if one judged by the proportion in the magazines.
Although I always feel that a man, owing to the greater freedom of his
life and mental inheritances, has more to tell me than most women
have, and I therefore prefer men as writers, still I see very little
difference in the quality of their work. Often, indeed, the magazine
fiction (in America) of the women shows greater care in phrase and
workmanship than that of the men (who are hurried and harried by
expensive families), and often quite as much virility.
No one ever has found life a lake. Life is a stormy ocean at best, and
if any woman with a real gift prefers to sink rather than struggle,
or to float back to shore on a raft, she deserves neither sympathy nor
respect. Women born with that little tract in their brain sown by
Nature with bulbs of one of the arts, may conquer the world as proudly
as men, although not as quickly, for they rouse in disappointed or
apprehensive men the meanest form of sex jealousy; but if they have as
much courage as talent, if they are willing to dedicate their lives,
not their off hours, to the tending of their rich oasis in the general
desert of mind, success is theirs. Biological differences between the
sexes evaporate before these impersonal sexless gifts (or whims or
inadvertencies) of conservative Nature.
Of course women have worked themselves to death in their passionate
devotion to art. So have men. Women have starved to death in garrets,
their fine efforts rejected by those that buy, and sell again to an
uncertain public. So have men. The dreariest anecdotes of England and
France, so rich in letters, are of great men-geniuses who died young
for want of proper nourishment or recognition, or who struggled on to
middle-age in a bitterness of spirit that corroded their high
endowment. I do not recall that any first-rate women writers have died
for want of recognition, possibly because until now they have been few
and far between. The Brontës died young, but mainly because they lived
in the midst of a damp old churchyard and inherited tubercular
tendencies. The graves and old box tombs crowd the very walls of the
parsonage, and are so thick you hardly can walk between them. I spent
a month in the village of Haworth, but only one night in the village
inn at the extreme end of the churchyard; I could read the
inscriptions on the tombs from my windows.
Charlotte had immediate recognition even from such men as Thackeray,
and if the greater Emily had to wait for Swinburne and posterity it
was inherited consumption that carried her off in her youth. Although
much has been made of their poverty I don't think they were so badly
off for their times. The parsonage is a well-built stone house, their
father had his salary, and the villagers told me that the three girls
looked after the poor in hard winters, often supplying whole families
with coal. Of course they led lives of a maddening monotony, but they
were neither hungry nor bitter, and at least two of them developed a
higher order of genius than was possible to the gifted Jane Austin in
her smug life of middle-class plenty, and, to my mind, far more
hampering restrictions.
Even if the Brontës had been sufficiently in advance of their times to
"light out" and seek adventure and development in the great world,
their low state of health would have kept them at home. So impressed
was I with the (to a Californian) terrible pictures of poverty in
which the Brontes were posed by their biographers that I grew up with
the idea that one never could develop a gift or succeed in the higher
manner unless one lived in a garret and half starved. I never had the
courage to try the regimen, but so deep was the impression that I
never have been able to work except in austere surroundings, and I
have worked in most abominably uncomfortable quarters with an
equanimity that was merely the result of the deathless insistence of
an old impression sunk deep into a mind then plastic.
Let me hasten to add that many successful authors work in the most
luxurious quarters imaginable. It is all a matter of temperament, or,
it may be, of accident. Moreover this outer evidence of prosperity
makes a subtle appeal to the snobbery of the world and to a certain
order of critic, by no means to be despised. Socially and in the arts
we Americans are the least democratic of people, partly because we are
so damnably unsure of ourselves; and if I were beginning my career
to-day I doubt if I should be so unbusiness-like as to take the lowly
Brontes as a model.
If I have digressed for a moment from the main theme of this book it
has been not only to show what the influence of such brave women as
the Brontes has been on later generations of writers, but that biology
must doff its hat at the tomb in Haworth Church. Their mental virility
and fecundity equalled that of any man that has attained an equal
eminence in letters, and they would have died young and suffered much
if they never had written a line. They had not a constitution between
the four of them and they spent their short lives surrounded by the
dust and the corruption of death.
IV
But when it comes to working like men for the sake of independence, of
avoiding marriage, of "doing something," that is another matter. To my
mind it is abominable that society is so constituted that women are
forced to work (in times of peace) for their bread at tasks that are
far too hard for them, that extract the sweetness from youth, and
unfit them physically for what the vast majority of women want more
than anything else in life--children. If they deliberately prefer
independence to marriage, well and good, but surely we are growing
civilized enough (and this war, in itself a plunge into the dark ages,
has in quite unintentional ways advanced civilization, for never in
the history of the world have so many brains been thinking) so to
arrange the social machinery that if girls and young women are forced
to work for their daily bread, and often the bread of others, at least
it shall be under conditions, including double shifts, that will
enable them, if the opportunity comes, as completely to enjoy all that
home means as falls to the lot of their more fortunate sisters. Even
those who launch out in life with no heavier need than their driving
independence of spirit should be protected, for often they too, when
worn in body and mind, realize that the independent life per se is a
delusion, and that their completion as well as their ultimate
happiness and economic security lies in a brood and a husband to
support it.
There used to be volumes of indignation expended upon the American
mother toiling in the home, at the wash-tub for hire, or trudging
daily to some remunerative task, while her daughters, after a fair
education, idly flirted, and danced, and read, and finally married.
Now, although that modus operandi sounds vulgar and ungrateful it is,
biologically speaking, quite as it should be. Girls of that age should
be tended as carefully as young plants; and, for that matter, it would
be well if women until they have passed the high-water mark of
reproductivity should be protected as much as possible from severe
physical and mental strain. If women ever are to compete with men on
anything like an equal basis, it is when they are in their middle
years, when Nature's handicaps are fairly outgrown, child-bearing and
its intervening years of lassitude are over, as well as the recurrent
carboniferous wastes and relaxations.
Why do farmers' wives look so much older than city women of the same
age in comfortable circumstances? Not, we may be sure, because of
exposure to the elements, or even the tragic loneliness that was
theirs before the pervasion of the automobile. Women in city flats are
lonely enough, but although those that have no children or "light
housekeeping" lead such useless lives one wonders why they were born,
they outlast the women of the small towns by many years because of the
minimum strain on their bodies.[G]
[G] The French are far too clever to let the women in the munition
factories injure themselves. They have double, treble, and even
quadruple shifts.
As a matter of fact in the large cities where the struggle of life is
superlative they outlast the men. About the time the children are
grown, the husband, owing to the prolonged and terrific strain in
competing with thousands of men as competent as himself, to keep his
family in comfort, educate his children, pay the interest on his life
insurance policy, often finds that some one of his organs is breaking
down and preparing him for the only rest he will ever find time to
take. Meanwhile his prospective widow (there is, by the way, no nation
in the world so prolific of widows and barren of widowers as the
United States) is preparing to embark on her new career as a club
woman, or, if she foresees the collapse of the family income, of
self-support.
And in nine cases out of ten, if she has the intelligence to make use
of what a combination of average abilities and experience has
developed in her, she succeeds, and permanently; for women do not go
to pieces between forty and fifty as they did in the past. They have
learned too much. Work and multifarious interests distract their mind,
which formerly dwelt upon their failing youth, and when they sadly
composed themselves in the belief that they had given the last of
their vitality to the last of their children; to-day, instead of
sitting down by the fireside and waiting to die, they enter resolutely
upon their second youth, which is, all told, a good deal more
satisfactory than the first.
Every healthy and courageous woman's second vitality is stronger and
more enduring than her first. Not only has her body, assisted by
modern science, settled down into an ordered routine that is
impregnable to anything but accident, but her mind is delivered from
the hopes and fears of the early sex impulses which so often sicken
the cleverest of the younger women both in body and mind, filling the
body with lassitude and the mind either with restless impatience or a
complete indifference to anything but the tarrying prince. To blame
them for this would be much like cursing Gibraltar for not getting out
of the way in a storm. They are the tools of the race, the chosen
mediums of Nature for the perpetuation of her beloved species. But the
fact remains--that is to say, in the vast majority of girls. There is,
as we all know, the hard-shell division of their sex who, even without
a gift, infinitely prefer the single and independent life in their
early youth, and only begin to show thin spots in their armor as they
approach thirty, sometimes not until it is far too late. But if you
will spend a few days walking through the department stores, for
instance, of a large city and observing each of the young faces in
turn behind the counters, it will be rarely that you will not feel
reasonably certain that the secret thoughts of all that vast army
circle persistently about some man, impinging or potential. And
wherever you make your studies, from excursion boats to the hour of
release at the gates of a factory, you must draw the same conclusion
that sex reigns, that it is the most powerful factor in life and will
be so long as Earth at least continues to spin. For that reason, no
matter how persistently girls may work because they must or starve,
it is the competent older women, long since outgrown the divine
nonsense of youth, who are the more satisfactory workers. Girls,
unless indifferently sexed, do not take naturally to work in their
youth. Whether they have the intelligence to reason or not, they know
that they were made for a different fate and they resent standing
behind a counter all day long or speeding up machinery for a few
dollars a week. Even the highly intelligent girls who find work on
newspapers often look as if they were at the end of their endurance.
It is doubtful if the world ever can run along without the work of
women but the time will surely come when society will be so
constituted that no woman in the first flush of her youth will be
forced to squander it on the meager temporary reward, and forfeit her
birthright. If she wants to, well and good. No one need be deeply
concerned for those that launch out into life because they like it.
Women in civilized countries are at liberty to make their own lives;
that is the supreme privilege of democracy. But the victims of the
propelling power of the world are greatly to be pitied and Society
should come to their rescue. I know that the obvious answer to this is
"Socialism." But before the rest of us can swallow Socialism it must
spew out its present Socialists and get new ones. Socialists never
open their mouths that they do not do their cause harm; and whatever
virtues their doctrine may contain we are blinded to it at present.
This war may solve the problem. If Socialism should be the inevitable
outcome it would at least come from the top and so be sufferable.
V
It is all very well to do your duty by your sex and keep up the
birth-rate, and there are compensations, no doubt of that, when the
husband is amiable, the income adequate, and the children are dears
and turn out well; but the second life is one's very own, the duty is
to one's self, and, such is the ineradicable selfishness of human
nature after long years of self-denial and devotion to others, there
is a distinct, if reprehensible, satisfaction in being quite natural
and self-centered. If, on the other hand, circumstances are such that
the capable middle-aged woman, instead of living entirely for herself,
in her clubs, in her increasing interest in public affairs, and her
chosen work, finds herself with certain members of her family
dependent upon her, she also derives from this fact an enormous
satisfaction, for it enables her to prove that she can fill a man's
place in the world, be quite as equal to her job.
Instead of breaking down, this woman, who has outlived the severest
handicap of sex without parting with any of its lore, grows stronger
and more poised every year, retaining (or regaining) her looks if she
has the wisdom to keep her vanity alive; while the girl forced to
spend her days on her feet behind a counter (we hear of seats for
these girls but we never see them occupied), or slave in a factory
(where there is no change of shift as in the munition factories of
the European countries in war time), or work from morning until night
as a general servant--"one in help"--wilts and withers, grows pasée,
fanée, is liable to ultimate breakdown unless rescued by some man.
The expenditure of energy in these girls is enormous, especially if
they combine with this devitalizing work an indulgence in their
natural desire to play. Rapid child-bearing would not deplete them
more; and it is an intensely ignorant or an intensely stupid or, in
the United States, an exceptionally sensual woman who has a larger
family than the husband can keep in comfort. Moreover, unless in the
depths of poverty, each child means a period of rest, which is more
than the girl behind the counter gets in her entire working period.
These women, forced by a faulty social structure to support themselves
and carry heavy burdens, lack the intense metabolism of the male, his
power to husband his stores of carbon (an organic exception which
renders him indifferent to standing), and the superior quality of his
muscle. Biologically men and women are different from crown to sole.
It might be said that Nature fashioned man's body for warfare, and
that if he grows soft during intervals of peace it is his own fault.
Even so, unless in some way he has impaired his health, he has
heretofore demonstrated that he can do far more work than women, and
stand several times the strain, although his pluck may be no finer.
If one rejects this statement let him look about among his
acquaintance at the men who have toiled hard to achieve an
independence, and whose wives have toiled with them, either because
they lived in communities where it was impossible to keep servants, or
out of a mistaken sense of economy. The man looks fresh and his wife
elderly and wrinkled and shapeless, even if she has reasonable health.
It is quite different in real cities where life on a decent income (or
salary) can be made very easy for the woman, as I have just pointed
out; but I have noticed that in small towns or on the farm, even now,
when these scattered families are no longer isolated as in the days
when farmers' wives committed suicide or intoxicated themselves on tea
leaves, the woman always looks far older than the man if "she has done
her own work" during all the years of her youth and maturity. If she
renounces housekeeping in disgust occasionally and moves to an hotel,
she soon amazes her friends by looking ten years younger; and if her
husband makes enough money to move to a city large enough to minimize
the burdens of housekeeping and offer a reasonable amount of
distraction, she recovers a certain measure of her youth, although
still far from being at forty or fifty what she would have been if her
earlier years had been relieved of all but the strains which Nature
imposes upon every woman from princess to peasant.
It remains to be seen whether the extraordinary amount of work the
European women are doing in the service of their country, and the
marked improvement in their health and physique, marks a stride
forward in the physical development of the sex, being the result of
latent possibilities never drawn upon before, or is merely the result
of will power and exaltation, and bound to exhibit its definite limit
as soon as the necessity is withdrawn. The fact, of course, remains
that the women of the farms and lower classes generally in France are
almost painfully plain, and look hard and weather-beaten long before
they are thirty, while the higher you mount the social scale in your
researches the more the women of France, possessing little orthodox
beauty, manage, with a combination of style, charm, sophistication,
and grooming, to produce the effect not only of beauty but of a unique
standard that makes the beauties of other nations commonplace by
comparison.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that these girls and young women
working in the _Usines de Guerre_, are better looking than they were
before and shine with health. The whole point, I fancy, lies in the
fact that they work under merciful masters and conditions. If they
were used beyond their capacity they would look like their sisters on
the farms, upon whom fathers and husbands have little mercy.
When girls in good circumstances become infected with the microbe of
violent exercise and insist upon walking many miles a day, besides
indulging for hours in games which permit no rest, they look like
hags. Temporarily, of course. When they recover their common sense
they recover their looks, for it is in their power to relax and
recuperate. Men will walk twenty miles, take a cold shower, a good
meal, a night's rest, and look as well as ever the next day--or at the
end of the walk, for that matter. They can afford the waste. Women
cannot. If women succeed in achieving hard unyielding muscles in the
wrong place they suffer atrociously in childbirth; for Nature, who is
as old-fashioned and inhospitable to modern ideas as a Tory statesman,
takes a vicious pleasure in punishing one sex every time it succeeds
in approaching the peculiar level of the other, or which diverges from
the normal in any way. Note how many artists, who are nine-tenths
temperament and one-tenth male, suffer; not only because they are
beset with every sort of weakness that affects their social status,
but because the struggle with life is too much for them unless they
have real men behind them until their output is accepted by the
public, and themselves with it.
Some day Society will be civilized enough to recognize the limitations
and the helplessness of those who are artists first and men
afterwards. But meanwhile we can only rely upon the sympathy and the
understanding of the individual.
Far be it from me to advise that girls refrain from doing their part
in the general work of the home, if servants are out of the question;
that won't hurt them; but if some one must go out and support the
family it would better be the mother or the maiden aunt.
Better still, a husband, if marriage is their goal and children the
secret desire of their hearts.