Stern Moralist, being propelled down corridor: "Well, if the way
to restore women to womanliness is to make them do drudgery which
they can hire somebody else to do, why isn't----"
His voice dies away.
Jim asks where Dora is. Loud chorus tells him. Details of Dora's
divorce begin to fly about. Harry orders a round of drinks.
Somebody praises the drawn butter sauce at the Suddington. This
is met with the merits of the pineapple parfait at the La
Fontaine. Jim thinks Dora's divorce was her husband's fault.
Margaret gets up and goes back to the Purple Parlor and cries.
Bessie begins to tell Jim how attentive Ned is to Margaret. This
is so helpful that Jim gets up to find Margaret and tell her what
he thinks of her. Finds her crying and thinks she is crying
because Ned is away with Dora. Terrible row in Purple Parlor.
Bessie starts in to explain. Everybody stands about in couples
explaining. Waiter runs around trying to find gen'l'man to pay
for undrunk drinks. Poor Frank, being the only member of the
party who hasn't been drinking, is so sober that he pays. He
finally corrals the whole crowd into a couple of taxi-cabs. They
go down the street with everybody's head out of the cab-window
and everybody's voice saying "The Suddington," "The Grunewurst,"
"Max's," "The Royal Gorge," "Perinique's."
The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of
full-every-night leisure is balanced to some extent by a
revulsion toward activity of a useful sort. This latter revulsion
has two phases: Economic Independence, which has been spoken of
in former articles; Social Service and Citizenship, which will be
spoken of next month.
Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is
the one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected
against the current which, in carrying women out of the struggle
for existence, carries them out of the world's mental strife. If
it is the one toward frivolity, we shall see simply an
acceleration of that current and a quicker and larger departure
from all those habits of toil and service which produce power and
character.
With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get
back into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real
work. And it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort--to
and beyond all other effort! The carrying of new life in fear,
the delivery of it in torture, the nourishing of it in
relinquishment f all the world's worldliness, the watching over
it in sleeplessness, the healing of its sickness in
heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong, its
mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle
for existence! What a work!
But what a preparation for it had Marie!
She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the
ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage
she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.
She became a woman of the future--OF HER TYPE.
From the facts of modern idleness the positive character reacts
toward new-found activity: toward an enormous,
never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on
children; toward self-support; toward civic service. The
character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a
neutral mixture of modern facts and of old ideals of casual
idling and of casual child-rearing. The negative character--like
Marie's--just yields to the facts and is swept along by them into
final irresponsibility and inutility.
Marie wasn't negative enough--she wasn't positive enough in her
negativeness--to plunge into dissipation. It wasn't in her nature
to do any plunging of any kind. Good, safe, motionless sponging
was her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and
scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her
very much. She is charming.
When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an
apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was
on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.
No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig
on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that
Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as
to be the barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every
city you can see lots of such barometers giving themselves an
artificially high reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of
success which is a recognized commercial asset.
Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the
dinner-table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew
how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined
down-town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and
engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed
the "front" of his life, and he not only supported her but, as
Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly and seriously says, he
"sported" her as he might a diamond shirt stud.
No struggle in Marie's life so far! No HAVING to swim in the cold
water of daily enforced duty or else sink. NO BEING ACCUSTOMED TO
THE DISAGREEABLE FEEL OF THAT WATER.
She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being
HARDENED to work. That was everything.
The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort
came 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. Her father
used to support her. Her job then was being nice. That was her
job now. And she was nice. And she was still 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 child-bearing 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 childbearing 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 game preserves.
It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham
sandwiches, of either eiderdown 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 as reasonable a proposition as that two and two make
four.
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 ultimate social law stand
clear in Marie's life. And remember what sort of woman she was.
The woman who is coerced by external, authoritative ideals will
bear children even when the wish to bear them is really absent.
She will bear them without thinking. She will bear them because
she has never thought that anything else was possible. But Marie
(and this means millions of women throughout the modern world)
was free, wonderfully, unparalleledly free.
She was free, though a leisured woman, from the requirement of an
heir for a great family estate. She was free from the dictates of
historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted
reproduction. She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance
with a husband's will.
Modern life had done all this for her. She was uncoerced by
family authority, ecclesiastical authority, or marital authority.
She was limitlessly free, limitlessly irresponsible, a creature
of infinite opportunities and no duties.
All social coercion toward childbearing having been withdrawn
from her, the only guide she had left (and it would have been her
best one) was instinct and impulse.
But with the cessation from struggle, with the cessation from
effort and from fatigue and from discipline, and from the sorrow
of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, that instinct and
impulse had disappeared. With the petrifaction of its soil, it
had withered away.
She had been sedulously trained to sterility.
Nevertheless, when it got talked around among her friends that
she didn't want children, everybody thought it very surprising,
in view of all that had been done for her.
In the January number Mr. Hard will discuss "The Women of
To-morrow" in "Civic Service."
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Vol. XXIII December 1910 No. 6
{pages 778-783 are NOT numbered in the printed copy!}
THE WATCHMAN
"And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead
men." Matthew xxviii. 4