when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a
while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected,
Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary.
But there had been no necessity in Marie's experience. They became
quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn. Marie talked about her mother and
her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.
For two years she inhabited Chunk's flat in the city and lived on
Chunk's monthly check.
She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. He was the man
nearest to her. Her father had once supported her. Her job then had
been Being Nice. Her father had supported her for that, even after she
had grown up. Well, she still was nice. And she still was, and
deserved to be, supported. Perfectly logical.
For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being
obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what
to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the
parties for Chunk's business friends, she did nothing but become more
and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hardship,
in her horror of pain.
When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that
she didn't want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the
world had capsized.
In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to
that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was
widespread.
Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just
once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a
diffusion of leisure.
The causes were similar.
The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have
conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of
despoiled peoples, just as we live on the products of exploited
continents. They had slaves in multitudes, just as we have machines in
masses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of
their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured
housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women
who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do.
Along with leisure and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences,
just as we have acquired them. And the sermons of Augustus Caesar,
first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are
perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of
ours.
Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered
into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons
identical with ours--the increased competitiveness of the modern
life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the
satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And
their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation,
divorce, and aversion to childbearing leave nothing to be desired,
in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric--or
for ineffectiveness in result.
Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence
through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to
child-bearing in the Roman world--for she did not exist. It could not
have been the woman who desires full citizenship--for _she_ did not
exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire
woman desired and achieved was parasitic--the economic power which
comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes
from the exercise of sexual charm.
The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern
world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the
emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for
equal economic and political opportunity.
The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her
girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her;
trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the
dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously
irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her
real work, going then into marriage with none of the discipline of
habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to
share his struggle but his prosperity--that sort of New Woman they
had, just as we have her, in smaller number, it is true, but in
identical character.
They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury
the _start_? Wasn't it only the means to the _finish_?
Eating a grouse destroys, in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a
ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider down or on straw,
arose Bismarck.
The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably
immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is
giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.
On the other hand, we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on
the luxury of stable floors and of free-lunch counters, just as
thoroughly as any nobleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the
luxury of castles and of game preserves.
It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham
sandwiches, of either eider down or straw, _without service rendered
and without fatigue endured_, that ultimately desiccates the moral
character and drains it of all capacity for effort.
Marie was enervated not by her luxury but by her failure to _pay_ for
her luxury. She wouldn't have had to pay much. Her luxury was petty.
But she paid nothing. And her failure to pay was just as big as if her
luxury had been bigger. Getting three thousand a year in return for
nothing leaves you morally just as bankrupt as if you had got three
million.
Marie came to her abdication of life's _greatest_ effort not by
wearing too many clothes or by eating too many foods but by becoming
accustomed to getting clothes and foods and all other things without
the _smallest_ effort.
She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the
_habit_ of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an
effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.
Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last,
in her negative, non-resistive mind, atrophied all the instincts of
that struggle, including finally the instinct for reproduction.
The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle
for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for
perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. Work, the
perpetuation of one's own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging
to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the
individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to
the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the
class, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no
more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to
live.
The detailed daily reasons for this social law stand clear in Marie's
life. It is a strong law. Its triumph in Marie could have been
thwarted only by the presence in her of a certain other social law.
Authority!
The woman who is coerced by Authority, the woman who is operated by
ideals introduced into her from without, will bear children even when
she does not feel the active wish to bear them. She will bear them
just because the authoritative expectation is that she _shall_ bear
them.
But Marie was free!
She was free from the requirement of an heir for the family estate.
The modern form of property, requiring no male warrior for its
defense in the next generation, had done that for her.
She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal
duty and unrestricted reproduction. Modern Protestantism had done that
for her.
She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband's
will. Modern individualism had done that for her.
She was free! Uncoerced by family authority, uncoerced by ecclesiastical
authority, uncoerced by marital authority, she was almost limitlessly
free!
There being no _external force_ compelling her to bear children, she
had to follow _internal instinct_.
That instinct, if it had existed in her, would have been a sufficient
guide. It would have been a commanding guide. It would have been the
best possible guide. Rising in her from the original eternal
life-power it would have driven her to child-bearing more surely than
she could have been driven to it by any external agency whatsoever.
But the instinct toward child-bearing could not now be revived in
Marie. With the cessation from struggle and from effort and from
fatigue and from discipline and from the sorrow of pain that brings
the joy of accomplishment, with that cessation the instinct toward
child-bearing had reached cessation, too. With the petrifaction of its
soil it had withered away.
Nobody had ever tried to bring Marie back to the soil of struggle.
Nobody,--not her father, not her mother, not her husband, not one of
her friends, not one of her teachers had ever taught her to return to
life by returning to labor.
The greatest wrong possible to a woman had been wrought upon her.
She had been sedulously trained out of the life of the race into
race-death.
Yet when it got talked around among her friends that she didn't want
children, people blamed her and said it was very surprising, _in view
of all that had been done for her_.
V.
Mothers of the World
Leaning over a tiled parapet, we looked down at the streak of street
so far below. Motor-cars, crawling--crawling, glossy-backed beetles.
"Drop a pin and impale that green one." One couldn't, from up there,
give motor-car and motor-car owner the reverence rightly theirs. A
thousand miles of horizontal withdrawal into majestic forest recesses
may leave one's regard for worldly greatness unabated. A perpendicular
vantage of a hundred and fifty feet destroys it utterly.
"But look at that!" she said.
In the east, dull red on the quick blue of Lake Michigan, an ore-boat.
Low and long. A marvelously persistent and protracted boat. Might have
been christened _The Eel_. Or _The Projectile_. No masts. And, except
at her stern, under her deferred smokestack, no portholes. Forward
from that stack her body stretched five hundred feet to her bow
without excrescences and without apertures. Stripped and shut-eyed for
the fight, grimmer than a battle ship, not a waste line nor a false
motion in her, she went by, loaded with seven thousand tons of
hematite, down to the blast furnaces of South Chicago.
"But," she said, "look at this."
She turned me from the lake. We crossed the roof's tarred gravel and
looked north, west, and south abroad at the city.
Puffs of energy had raised high buildings over there; over there an
eccentric subsidence had left behind it a slum. Queer, curling
currents of trade and of lust, here, there, and everywhere, were
carrying little clutching eddies of disease and of vice across the
thoroughfares of the wholesome and of the innocent. Sweet unused earth
lay yonder in a great curve of green; within two miles of it stood
clotted houses in which children were dying for air; brown levels of
cottage and tenement, black bubbles of mill and factory, floating side
by side, meeting, mingling, life and light merged into filth and
fume--uncalculated; uncontrolled; fortuitous swirls and splutters on
senseless molten metal; a reproduction in human lives of the phantom
flurry which on simmering ladles in the steel mills they call the
Devil's Flower Garden.
"Not so clever as the ore-boat, is it?" she said. "That was making
wealth, conquering. Well done. This is using wealth, living. Done ill.
A city. Better than many. Worse than many. But none of my business.
I'm emancipated."
She waved her hand and blotted out the city from before me. In its
place I saw now only an uninhabited wilderness plain. In a moment,
however, in the side of a distant ridge, there appeared a tiny
opening. A woman sat near it, plaiting a grass mat. A mile away a man
stood, mending a bow.
It was the scene Mr. Kipling once reported:
"The man didn't begin to be tame till he met the woman. She picked out
a nice dry cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and
she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood
at the back of the cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail
down, across the opening of the cave; and she said: 'Wipe your feet,
dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.'"
As we looked, we saw the man fit an arrow to his bow, take aim, and
bring down a deer. He carried it to the cave. The woman rose to meet
him, the mat in her hand. He pushed her away savagely, took the mat
from her, and threw the deer on the ground. She picked herself up and
began to skin the deer with a knife which she slipped from her belt.
He lay down on the mat and went to sleep.
I heard my companion say: "_I_ did all the housekeeping of _that_
camp. It was woman's work. But now----"
She waved her hand and restored the city to my gaze.
"Now, of _this_ camp _you_ are the real housekeeper. The arranging of
it, the cleaning of it, the decorating of it, on the big scale, as a
total, all masculine, all yours! How you have expanded your duties,
you who were once just hunter and fighter, principally fighter! How
your sphere is swollen! You do not realize it. You are familiar enough
with the commonplace fact that most primitive industry in its origin
owed little to you except (a big 'except') the protection of your
sword against enemies. You are familiar with the fact that the
plaiting of mats and the tanning of hides and every other industrial
feature of housekeeping has passed from my control to yours in precise
proportion as it has ceased to be individual and has become
collective. You dominate everything collective. You understand that.
What you don't understand is this:
"It is not only the _industrial_ features of housekeeping which tend
to become collective. It is also its _administrative_ features. I will
give you just one illustration. I cannot now keep my premises clean,
beautiful, livable, except through the collective control of smoke,
garbage, billboards, noise. And that control is yours.
"Further!
"Even the tenderer phases of housekeeping, those which are more subtle
than mere administration, move steadily toward becoming yours. I will
give you an illustration of that. The very children, now no longer
always at their mothers' knees, but spread abroad through school and
park and playground and street and factory, are now much in your
hands, for school and park and playground and street and factory are
essentially controlled by you. You are increasingly housekeeper, and
even mother. You not only control Working. You also control Living.
But who are you, you that now control Living? You are----"
She tapped my shoulder and laughed.
"You are the Tired Business Man. Yes, whether manufacturer, financier,
scholar, or poet, you are the Tired Business Man. You always were. You
still are. You are a fighter still, by nature. You conquer steel and
steam--and make a boat that will carry a mountain of ore. You conquer
mounds of stock certificates and masses of men--and organize armies
for the production of wealth. You conquer knowledge--and write your
treatise. You conquer the sources of emotion--and write your poem.
Then you're through. You lie down on your mat and go to sleep. To be
housekeeper, to be homemaker, to take from each part of life its
offerings of value and patiently to weld them into a coherent, livable
whole--that is not your faculty. You are a specialist. Produce,
produce, produce--a certain thing, a one certain thing, any one
certain thing, from corkscrews to madonnas--you can do it. But to make
a city a home, to elicit from discordant elements a harmonious total
of warm, charming, noble, livable life--you'll never do it, by
yourself."
She paused.
"Well," she said, "why don't you ask me to help you a bit? Even aside
from any special qualities of my sex, don't you know that the greatest
reserve fund of energy in any American city to-day is the leisure and
semi-leisure of certain classes of its women?"
"But they can give their leisure to 'good works' now if they want to,"
I answered.
"Yes," she said, "but if they do that, they'll want to go farther.
Look!"
And this is what she showed me--what she told me:
* * * * *
Over there on Michigan Avenue, occupying the whole front part of the
ninth floor of the Fine Arts Building, are the quarters of the Chicago
Woman's Club. Twenty-seven years ago, in the Brighton public school,
northwest of the Yards, that club started a kindergarten, providing
the money, the materials, the teacher, the energy--everything but the
room.
[Illustration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: DOMESTIC SCIENCE
CLASSES; INSTRUCTION FOR THE BLIND; ORCHESTRAL CONCERTS; SUFFRAGE
CAMPAIGNS.]
It was a "good work," one might think, quite within "woman's sphere."
But it wasn't entered into lightly and unadvisedly. In one of the
club's old pamphlets you'll find it set down that Goethe had said that
activity without insight is an evil. Accordingly, the club had spent
its youth, from 1876 to 1883, reading, considering, discussing. But
certain topics were excluded. _Particularly woman's suffrage._
But kindergartens! Something for children! Could anything be more
womanly? So on the fifth of December, 1883, the long-apprehended
question arose: "Shall Our Club Do Practical Work?" There was much
hesitation. But the vote was affirmative.
Seems strange to-day, doesn't it, that there should have been any
hesitation at all?
There beneath us, on the Lake Front, in the Art Institute, on Sunday
afternoons, there are excellent orchestral concerts to which you will
be admitted on payment of ten cents. A work of this club.
Out over the city, if your eyes could compass it, you would see a
blind man going from place to place, North Side, West Side, South
Side, seeking out other blind people, entering their homes, teaching
them how to read the books published in Braille and Moon raised
characters, teaching them how to weave, teaching them how to use the
typewriter, teaching them even how to make stenographic notes on a
little keyboarded machine which impresses raised characters on a
tape to be read off afterwards with the finger tips, giving his
fellow-dwellers in darkness an occupation to be their solace, and
even an occupation to be their support. A work of this club.
And the interval between these two kinds of work could be filled up
with hundreds of entries. You have grown accustomed to all this. The
Chicago Woman's Club, the scores of other woman's clubs in this city,
the thousands in this country--you expect them to be active. But you
do not perceive the consequences.
When the Chicago Woman's Club started its work in the Brighton School,
there wasn't any such work in Chicago maintained by public funds. The
town's pioneer kindergarten had been founded in 1867, by a woman.
There had then grown up an association called the Chicago Froebel
Association, which established and operated kindergartens in public
school buildings out of its own resources. The Board of Education
provided space, but nothing more. The Froebel Association was composed
entirely of women, and many of its members were also members of the
Chicago Woman's Club. The steam in the cylinders of the kindergarten
movement in Chicago was the enthusiasm of women.
Well, in 1892, the Board of Education took the kindergartens over. The
kindergarten system became thoroughly public, civic, collective. The
control of it had lain with women. The control of it now passed to
men. Oh, there's no complaint. It's what the women wanted. They asked
the men to do it. But I say--No, I'll postpone saying it till I've
told you another story or two.
In the late nineties the Chicago Woman's Club took the leading role in
the formation of what was known as the Vacation Schools Committee.
More than sixty woman's organizations finally sent delegates to it.
Its object was to give city-street children, in summer time, some
sort of experience resembling, if not reproducing, the activity and
the knowledge of nature which comes with summer life in the country.
The vacation school, with its play and its nature study, turned out to
be both useful and popular. For a decade or more the Vacation Schools
Committee, composed entirely of women, raised large sums of money and
extended its efforts from school to school till there came to be an
established and recognized vacation schools system. The women whose
energy carried it forward year after year were, in fact, school
directors. Now the vacation schools system has been adopted by the
Board of Education. Those women are school directors no longer. Nor
have they any voice in the _selecting_ of school directors.
Almost immediately the women changed the name of the Vacation Schools
Committee to Permanent School Extension Committee. Its objects now are
to extend the use of school buildings and to extend the educational
system itself. Its work may be seen in many parts of town.
Ten miles to the south, near the mouth of the Calumet River, where
that ore-boat was turning in, the "Johnson Cubs" and the "South
Side Stars" and other organizations of boys, principally from the
Thorp School, have been getting manual training and football and
cross-country hikes and gymnastic skill under the direction of a
salaried representative of the Permanent School Extension Committee,
who has been trying to make their hours out of school count for
something in their development.
[Illustration: INTERESTS OF CHICAGO WOMEN'S CLUB: PARK ATTENDANTS;
MOTHERS' CLUBS; HOSPITAL KINDERGARTENS; VACATION SCHOOLS.]
Southwest of us, far over, back of the Yards, at the Hamline School,
for five years the Committee has maintained a "social worker" who,
through clubs and classes and entertainments and festivals in the
evenings as well as in the afternoons, for adults as well as for
children, has been trying to write over the doors of the school the
words which appear frequently enough elsewhere: "Family Entrance."
Trifling? Dreamy? Just the sort of thing woman's club women would do?
Well, it seems to be about to lapse. But why? Because the Board of
Education, at last half-convinced, has appropriated $10,000 for
social-center work of its own in the school buildings.
The rest of the present work of the Permanent School Extension
Committee will lapse, too--in time.
Last spring, in the Hamline School, for six weeks eighteen children
who needed the treatment did their work in a room in which the windows
were kept open. The Permanent School Extension Committee provided
special chairs, blankets, milk and eggs for morning and afternoon, a
hot meal for lunch.
During the summer, in three school yards--the Lake View on the North
Side, the Penn on the West, the Libby on the South--there were
vacation schools for six weeks in the open air, with special teaching
and special feeding. The Permanent School Extension Committee provided
the meals and the cooks.
The gain made in physical and mental condition by the children so
treated was such that the time is sure to come when the principle of
extra air and extra food for below-par pupils, like the principle of
kindergartens, the principle of vacation schools, and the principle of
school social centers, will be absorbed into the general policy of the
public school system.
And now I will say the things I hesitated to say a few moments ago.
First. Is it likely that women who have helped to add element after
element of value to the public school system would fail to acquire an
interest in the public school system itself? Is it likely that women
who have had a voice in certain important matters would relinquish all
personal concern about them immediately upon their absorption into the
city government? In other words, is it strange that the topic of
woman's suffrage is now tolerated on the floor of the Chicago Woman's
Club?
Second. Might not one unwarily imagine that among the women who for so
many years have given so much thought and action to school affairs
there would be found many whose experience _and whose leisure_ would
be draughted (with a press gang, if necessary) into the public
service?