WOMAN'S CAUSE IS MAN'S: THEY RISE OR SINK TOGETHER ...
"But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ:
and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God
... but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of
the woman but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for
the woman; but the woman for the man."
Woman's position in the world, socially, politically, and economically
was profoundly altered by the Great War. Every contact with the affairs
of the world, save uxorially, was changed and I believe that one of the
aftermaths of the war will be further to change that relationship, to
extend her liberty, to enhance her privileges until every semblance of
the cage that has confined her since time immemorial is destroyed.
Eye-witnesses of the political and social emancipation of women do not
realize how extensively concerned with it the historian of the future
will be. Even less do they realize how directly certain social and
economic changes of the beginning of the twentieth century will be
traced to the entrance of women into the political arena. The individual
who would attempt to forecast the eventual effects of national
prohibition upon a people would have no respect whatsoever for his
reputation as a prophet. I assume there is little doubt that women
initiated and in large measure accomplished that legislation. Small
wonder they did. They had to bear the brunt and the pernicious effects
of alcohol consumption. Man drank it, but women paid; paid in privation,
in suffering, in disease, in ignominy--they and their children. There
are many habits, conventions, laws that deal with women differently than
they do with men. We may confidently anticipate that woman in full
possession of political privileges will soon turn her attention to
legislation whose purpose will be to change this, to effect a like
relationship of all human beings but especially of men and women.
The most ardent and pious Christian must admit that the practice of its
principles is inimical to woman's welfare or woman's full development,
using the terms welfare and development in the conventional sense of
to-day. There are undoubtedly many intelligent, honest, serious women
who subscribe to St. Paul's teachings of woman's duties and privileges
and who take no umbrage at his pronouncements. These were in a word that
she should be man's aid, his servant, and his ornament; that she should
minister unto his corporeal needs, and that she should be the instrument
through which God permitted man to reproduce his image and perpetuate
mankind. The Christian religion came gradually to be considered
figurative in its practicability, an ethical system strict conformation
to which would cause the individual to be looked upon as a victim of
mental aberration, but ideally quite perfect. With this conception the
restrictions put upon woman's activity gradually began to disappear, and
those that remained, such as, for instance, being obliged to cover her
head in church, were not only willingly accepted but were considered a
prerogative in so far as they facilitated personal adornment and thus
contributed to the realization of a fundamental, inherent ambition--to
be attractive.
Opponents of feminism have busied themselves with extraordinary industry
and tireless assiduity to point out the differences between man and
woman, always to the disadvantage of the latter. Their mental endowment
is inferior to man; their physical strength is less; their moral caliber
more attenuated; their emotional nature shallower. Why should any one
take the trouble to deny any of these? He who maintains that every
specimen of the human species endowed with average reasoning power
should live in the enjoyment of freedom and liberty should not allow
himself the trouble of denying them. He should admit it with the same
readiness that he admits that there are anatomical and physical
differences between the sexes. But the opponents of "rights of women,"
to use the phrase that has now come to have a sinister meaning, are not
satisfied with such admission. They want to have us admit that, in so
far as these qualities are at variance with those of man, so in
proportion is woman inferior. This no well-balanced, thoughtful,
unprejudiced man who has had much to do with men and women for a
sufficient period to entitle him to pass judgment upon the matter can
possibly admit. One may say dogmatically that woman has not the
potential or actual capacity of man in the field of politics and
statecraft, in the field of art and literature, in the field of science
and investigation, in the field of peace and strife. He may say it, but
he can furnish very little substantiation of his statement. Neither will
he be able to say it convincingly very much longer. It is not and will
not be fair or just that any one should make ex cathedra statements upon
such subjects until women have had the same freedom in fields of
activity that men have had for countless centuries. No weight or
credence need be given to statements that women are possessed of
intellectual and moral qualities that militate against their fitness to
occupy or adorn the important positions of life's constructive
activities. Possessions or infirmities which many of their ill-wishers
maintain unfit them for such places may disappear when they have had
opportunity to indulge their freedom. These alleged infirmities may be
merely reactionary to the restrictions of their environments since time
immemorial, since it is notorious that the place often develops the man.
No bird can tell how far it can fly until it tries its wings.
The American people are less astonished than any other nation to find
that women have invaded every field of human activity save that of
active warfare. They have long since thrown down the barriers that kept
women from entering such fields of activity, and welcomed their entrance
into them. They were encouraged to believe that they would give an
earnest of their activities and they have accomplished it without loss
of their sex attractiveness. The matter, however, is quite different in
the countries of Europe. There only the women of the lower classes have
earned their bread in the sweat of their brow, and particularly in the
fields, in the mills, and in the shops. But to-day all that is changed.
They drive tram-cars, load and unload ships, they till the soil and work
the mines, they make and deliver munitions; they have replaced the
porter and the ticket-taker at the stations; they are the
letter-carriers, cab-drivers, guardians of the peace; they direct and
administer great mercantile houses; and they are forcing their way into
every profession. They have not yet been in any of these activities a
sufficient length of time to enable any one to say whether or not they
can successfully compete with man. The prophets of old were stoned, and
he would be a daring one who would venture the statement that man will
successfully dislodge woman from all the positions she so satisfactorily
filled during the war. In some countries she will have gained, before
the end of the great social and economic adjustment which we are now
attempting, the political privileges which more than anything else will
put her on an equality with man, namely, the franchise. From such
vantage-point she will most successfully hold what she has gained. It is
too much to expect that woman will emancipate herself and come into the
arena of man's activities with her handicaps and lack of training and
not make mistakes prejudicial to her welfare. To expect it would be as
illegitimate as to expect that a strong man who had never trained for a
prize fight could enter the ring and successfully contend against a man
equally strong or stronger who had been training for the contest for a
long time.
No one was so fatuous as to believe in 1914 that the Central Powers,
after having devoted a quarter of a century to the most assiduous
training and preparation for the war that they thrust upon the civilized
world, would not jeopardize the liberty of the world. The Allied nations
had been content apparently to risk their fate without such preparation
merely because they had right on their side. They made many mistakes and
some of them were so flagrant and enormous as nearly to have cost them
their existence. Women likewise have right on their side in the struggle
which they have waged against the mandates of Christianity and the
usurpation of man. But right alone is not sufficient in such a contest.
They must combine might with it and might these days spells
organization. Without it nothing worth while can be accomplished. I
venture to prophesy that the striking legislation of our country of the
next generation will be accomplished largely by the influence of
organized women. This war has given them opportunity to display their
might and examples of what organization can accomplish. Unless I
misconstrue all signs, they will never again be deprived of the
privileges which they have at the present day. On the contrary, such
privileges will become larger and more comprehensive until they are upon
an absolute equality in every walk of life with man.
In the world of politics, society, economics, education, and religion
the question of rights of woman may not be given the constructive
attention to which it is entitled. In our country it is possible that
women are sufficiently organized to present their claims and insist upon
their being heard, and not only demand their rights, which are liberty
and equality, but they will get them. In England I am not so confident
of the result. In France and Italy I am still less confident; in fact,
their cause in these countries as things are at present seems to me
almost a hopeless struggle. The only thing that consoles me is history.
When one recalls that all that which we now speak of as democracy flowed
from one master mind in Cromwell's little army; that the Laocoön hold
which the church had upon the people in the Middle Ages was broken by
Luther and a few similar masters whose spirits successfully carried the
idea of liberty; that all that which is now spoken of as industrial
ascendancy flowed from the activities of one or two supermen in the mill
districts of northern England only three or four generations ago; then
one is lifted above his depression. Liberty and tolerance have taken on
a new significance. This is not due entirely to the war. The war minted
the meanings, but the gold was ready for the stamp. Liberty has come to
mean that woman and man are not only equal before God but that they are
equal before man. And, now that this admission has been wrung from
unwilling man and imposed upon governments one after the other, what
kind of a life do we wish? What are our visions? What are our sane and
legitimate aspirations? Are we willing to yield supinely to the tyranny
of state or of money? Are we content further to tolerate the infirmities
and impotency of present-day education? Shall we continue to close our
eyes to the hypocrisies of the church? Shall we be willing to submit to
the restrictions that are put upon us by law and covenant concerning
marriage and its entailments? Shall we bow down to autocratic
governments whose rulers claim, and apparently have their claims
allowed, to have divine guidance? Shall we be content with the
concentration of property or of private capitalistic enterprise? Shall
we be callous enough to see countless thousands of God's own, the poor,
deprived of the advantages of food and clothing, education and the gifts
of hygiene--in brief, of everything that makes life worth living? I
firmly believe that the rank and file of educated, thinking,
serious-minded persons who are not immediately concerned with the
possession or administration of any of these, will not tolerate them,
and in so expressing my belief I do not feel that I label myself
socialist. I feel that I enroll myself in the legion marching forward
under the banner of liberty and the belief that enlightenment is
followed by progress as unerringly as night is followed by day.
These things may be brought about by revolution, just as democracy was
brought about in France after the teachings of Voltaire, Rousseau, and
the French encyclopædists had blazed the way and the aftermath of the
American Revolution had reached that country; but I am firmly convinced
that one of the things that the World War will accomplish is that this
social reformation and reconstruction will be brought about without
violence and without revolution. Once a satisfactory integration of a
large number of individual lives is brought about, then integration of
the community and of the state is bound to follow. No one is so fatuous
or so blind as to hope that integration of individual life can come to
him whose creative impulses in any field are hampered or stultified, but
when these creative impulses, whatever they be, are encouraged,
nurtured, developed, facilitated, then the genus homo will reach its
full estate and we may confidently look forward to community and state
integration upon which lasting reform can be carried out socially and
politically. There is not the slightest advantage to be gained by what
is called political and economic reform unless at the same time there is
a reformation of the creative forces of life--education, sex relations,
and religion.
Any scheme of life that concerns itself only with life is bound to be a
failure. Man is so constituted that he must have a philosophy from which
he can form a creed that facilitates his craving for immortality. It is
this belief in immortality, as fundamental a demand as life itself,
which is the final conditioning impulse of all that is best in man and
which gives him an inexhaustible strength and a lasting peace.
How any intelligent person can believe that the teachings of Christ as
practised to-day, and I emphasize the word "practised," furnish such a
philosophy or a system of ethics, transcends my understanding. The chief
branch of the Christian religion stands for dogma to-day just as firmly
as it did before the Renaissance, and it pretends the humility of Christ
while maintaining the imperiousness of Cæsar. There is scarcely a
minister of the Protestant church who is not selling his birthright for
a mess of pottage by not daring to get up in his pulpit and tell his
flock that they must live up to the basic principles of Christ's
teachings. These ministers are just as cognizant as I am that their
branch of the Christian church has lost its hold upon the people except
in so far as its alleged teachings are reconcilable with their
pleasurable conduct in private and in public affairs. I do not mean to
say that there are not many wholly sincere and devout believers in these
churches who feel the inspiration of the teachings of Christ. But
because they are paid workers in the vineyard of the Lord they dare not
jeopardize their existence and take no heed for the morrow, and they
dare not insist that those to whom they minister should conform their
conduct to Christ's commandments, because it would hazard their very
existence and provoke the starvation of their children.
Do the meek inherit the earth? Have they inherited it? Does any one
rejoice and be exceeding glad when men revile him and persecute him and
say all manner of evil against him falsely? Is there any clergyman
to-day who is teaching and insisting that if any one shall break any one
of these least commandments and shall teach men to do so he shall be
called the least in the Kingdom of Heaven? Suppose we grant that the
Sermon on the Mount is not to be taken literally, but symbolically, of
what are these mandates symbolical? "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck
it out and cast it from thee. If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off
and cast it from thee." Why does one not give the same heed to these
commands as he does to "Thou shalt not kill; thou shall not commit
adultery"? The reason is that he who kills or commits adultery is liable
to be punished by the law, and he is deterred by the fear of such
punishment or of the social ostracism to which he would be subject.
Christ referred to the fact that "It hath been said that whosoever shall
put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement, but I say
unto you that whosoever shall put away his wife, save for the cause of
fornication, causeth her to commit adultery." But the present-day
mandates of Christianity are in no way in keeping with this.
As a matter of fact, every one must admit that the only conformation
which Christians make to the commands and counsel of the Sermon on the
Mount is a repetition of the verses following on "After this manner
therefore pray ye," and those commands which are at variance to-day with
statutory and conventional laws.
I am not railing against Christianity. I am of those who firmly believe
that if we were to conform our lives to the tenets of the ethical and
moral teaching of Christ we should not have the need of social
reconstruction which we have to-day. I am contending against the
hypocrisy of those who proclaim themselves Christians from the housetops
and who persecute others who do not conform to those trivial doctrinal
modifications which one sect maintains are the only true interpretations
of Christ's teachings. I am clamoring against the flimsy hypocrisy under
which half the people of the civilized world live in regard to marriage,
and who pretend to shudder and feel ill when you profess that you cannot
look upon marriage as a sacrament. I am railing against those who
believe that there should be one code of so-called morality for men and
an entirely different one for women. If the code that is practically
universally accepted to-day is proper for men, it is likewise proper for
women, and I want to live to see the day when women will have as much
freedom in their conduct in every walk of life as men have. The idea
that woman's life centres in motherhood and that all her instincts and
desires are directed, consciously or unconsciously, to that end is
buncombe. It would be just as legitimate to contend that all man's
instincts and desires centre in fatherhood and that his frenzied passion
to accumulate fortune, or his uncontrollable ambition to obtain fame, or
his insatiate appetite for power, or his insuppressible feeling to
externalize his thoughts in music, in art, in poetry, in invention, were
all secondary characteristics. The reproductive faculty of woman is
incidental to her existence. If any one desires to claim it was the
purpose of God in creating her, I shall not deny it, but as a student of
human nature, and as a physician whose life has been spent with
women--most of them, fortunately for me, honest and intelligent--I
maintain that civilized, cultivated, thinking women do not find that
motherhood satisfies their demands, their yearnings, their
aspirations--in brief, their personal development. The creative will has
other yearnings; not so imperative always in their demands for
satisfaction, but nevertheless insistent on being satisfied if the
possessor is to be spiritually content.
There are other reasons for the decline in the birthrate of the educated
and civilized people of every country than the fact that motherhood does
not completely satisfy the physical and mental demands of
women--financial reasons, social reasons, and reasons that partake of
both of them, yet not entirely of them, such as the occupation of women
and the celibacy which comes of enforcement or from choice. These must
be taken into consideration in our social renaissance when we shall
erect our ideals of justice and liberty. The time will never come again
when woman shall be man's willing or unwilling slave. The time has gone
by when society shall require that the wife be faithful while the
husband is faithless. Never again will the saintly, self-sacrificing
woman who never questions her husband's authority but who yields
supinely to his will be our ideal.
Woman may not be so strong as man. She may not be so truthful. She may
be more impressionable to sinister influences. She may be less capable
of erecting ideals and conforming her conduct to them. She may be less
steadfast in the pursuit of any plan of life, or less capable of
adhering to the ideal canons of conduct. She may or may not have any or
all of the sins of omission or commission of which she is accused by
man, but she is a human being made in God's image, of whom He may be
more proud than He is of man. She has been rocked in the cradle of
liberty and of freedom for the past five years, and to such purpose that
at the present moment she is not only able to walk but to stride. In the
future it will require the best effort of man to outdistance her, even
though he has the benefit of ages of experience and the advantage of a
start of forty thousand years.
We shall soon see whether Socrates was right when he said: "Woman once
made equal to man becometh his superior."