AT THE GYMNASIUM.
Edith had come up on the house top in time to hear the last of our talk,
and now she said to her father:
"Considering what you have been telling Julian about women nowadays as
compared with the old days, I wonder if he would not be interested in
visiting the gymnasium this afternoon and seeing something of how we
train ourselves? There are going to be some foot races and air races, and
a number of other tests. It is the afternoon when our year has the
grounds, and I ought to be there anyway."
To this suggestion, which was eagerly accepted, I owe one of the most
interesting and instructive experiences of those early days during which
I was forming the acquaintance of the twentieth-century civilization.
At the door of the gymnasium Edith left us to join her class in the
amphitheater.
"Is she to compete in anything?" I asked.
"All her year--that is, all of her age--in this ward will be entered in
more or less events."
"What is Edith's specialty?" I asked.
"As to specialties," replied the doctor, "our people do not greatly
cultivate them. Of course, privately they do what they please, but the
object of our public training is not so much to develop athletic
specialties as to produce an all-around and well-proportioned physical
development. We aim first of all to secure a certain standard of strength
and measurement for legs, thighs, arms, loins, chest, shoulders, neck,
etc. This is not the highest point of perfection either of physique or
performance. It is the necessary minimum. All who attain it may be
regarded as sound and proper men and women. It is then left to them as
they please individually to develop themselves beyond that point in
special directions.
"How long does this public gymnastic education last?"
"It is as obligatory as any part of the educational course until the body
is set, which we put at the age of twenty-four; but it is practically
kept up through life, although, of course, that is according to just how
one feels."
"Do you mean that you take regular exercise in a gymnasium?"
"Why should I not? It is no less of an object to me to be well at sixty
than it was at twenty."
"Doctor," said I, "if I seem surprised you must remember that in my day
it was an adage that no man over forty-five ought to allow himself to run
for a car, and as for women, they stopped running at fifteen, when their
bodies were put in a vise, their legs in bags, their toes in thumbscrews,
and they bade farewell to health."
"You do indeed seem to have disagreed terribly with your bodies," said
the doctor. "The women ignored theirs altogether, and as for the men, so
far as I can make out, up to forty they abused their bodies, and after
forty their bodies abused them, which, after all, was only fair. The vast
mass of physical misery caused by weakness and sickness, resulting from
wholly preventable causes, seems to us, next to the moral aspect of the
subject, to be one of the largest single items chargeable to your system
of economic inequality, for to that primal cause nearly every feature of
the account appears directly or indirectly traceable. Neither souls nor
bodies could be considered by your men in their mad struggle for a
living, and for a grip on the livelihood of others, while the complicated
system of bondage under which the women were held perverted mind and body
alike, till it was a wonder if there were any health left in them."
On entering the amphitheater we saw gathered at one end of the arena some
two or three hundred young men and women talking and lounging. These, the
doctor told me, were Edith's companions of the class of 1978, being all
those of twenty-two years of age, born in that ward or since coming there
to live. I viewed with admiration the figures of these young men and
women, all strong and beautiful as the gods and goddesses of Olympus.
"Am I to understand," I asked, "that this is a fair sample of your youth,
and not a picked assembly of the more athletic?"
"Certainly," he replied; "all the youth in their twenty-third year who
live in this ward are here to-day, with perhaps two or three exceptions
on account of some special reason."
"But where are the cripples, the deformed, the feeble, the consumptive?"
"Do you see that young man yonder in the chair with so many of the others
about him?" asked the doctor.
"Ah! there is then at least one invalid?"
"Yes," replied my companion: "he met with an accident, and will never be
vigorous. He is the only sickly one of the class, and you see how much
the others make of him. Your cripples and sickly were so many that pity
itself grew weary and spent of tears, and compassion callous with use;
but with us they are so few as to be our pets and darlings."
At that moment a bugle sounded, and some scores of young men and women
dashed by us in a foot race. While they ran, the bugle continued to sound
a nerve-bracing strain. The thing that astonished me was the evenness of
the finish, in view of the fact that the contestants were not specially
trained for racing, but were merely the group which in the round of tests
had that day come to the running test. In a race of similarly unselected
competitors in my day, they would have been strung along the track from
the finish to the half, and the most of them nearest that.
"Edith, I see, was third in," said the doctor, reading from the signals.
"She will be pleased to have done so well, seeing you were here."
The next event was a surprise. I had noticed a group of youths on a lofty
platform at the far end of the amphitheater making some sort of
preparations, and wondered what they were going to do. Now suddenly, at
the sound of a trumpet, I saw them leap forward over the edge of the
platform. I gave an involuntary cry of horror, for it was a deadly
distance to the ground below.
"It's all right," laughed the doctor, and the next moment I was staring
up at a score of young men and women charging through the air fifty feet
above the race course.
Then followed contests in ball-throwing and putting the shot.
"It is plain where your women get their splendid chests and shoulders,"
said I.
"You have noticed that, then!" exclaimed the doctor.
"I have certainly noticed," was my answer, "that your modern women seem
generally to possess a vigorous development and appearance of power above
the waist which were only occasionally seen in our day."
"You will be interested, no doubt," said the doctor, "to have your
impression corroborated by positive evidence. Suppose we leave the
amphitheater for a few minutes and step into the anatomical rooms. It is
indeed a rare fortune for an anatomical enthusiast like myself to have a
pupil so well qualified to be appreciative, to whom to point out the
effect our principle of social equality, and the best opportunities of
culture for all, have had in modifying toward perfection the human form
in general, and especially the female figure. I say especially the female
figure, for that had been most perverted in your day by the influences
which denied woman a full life. Here are a group of plaster statues,
based on the lines handed down to us by the anthropometric experts of the
last decades of the nineteenth century, to whom we are vastly indebted.
You will observe, as your remark just now indicated that you had
observed, that the tendency was to a spindling and inadequate development
above the waist and an excessive development below. The figure seemed a
little as if it had softened and run down like a sugar cast in warm
weather. See, the front breadth flat measurement of the hips is actually
greater than across the shoulders, whereas it ought to be an inch or two
less, and the bulbous effect must have been exaggerated by the bulging
mass of draperies your women accumulated about the waist."
At his words I raised my eyes to the stony face of the woman figure, the
charms of which he had thus disparaged, and it seemed to me that the
sightless eyes rested on mine with an expression of reproach, of which my
heart instantly confessed the justice. I had been the contemporary of
this type of women, and had been indebted to the light of their eyes for
all that made life worth living. Complete or not, as might be their
beauty by modern standards, through them I had learned to know the stress
of the ever-womanly, and been made an initiate of Nature's sacred
mysteries. Well might these stony eyes reproach me for consenting by my
silence to the disparagement of charms to which I owed so much, by a man
of another age.
"Hush, doctor, hush!" I exclaimed. "No doubt you are right, but it is not
for me to hear these words."
I could not find the language to explain what was in my mind, but it was
not necessary. The doctor understood, and his keen gray eyes glistened as
he laid his hand on my shoulder.
"Right, my boy, quite right! That is the thing for you to say, and Edith
would like you the better for your words, for women nowadays are jealous
for one another's honor, as I judge they were not in your day. But, on
the other hand, if there were present in this room disembodied shades of
those women of your day, they would rejoice more than any others could at
the fairer, ampler temples liberty has built for their daughters' souls
to dwell in.
"Look!" he added, pointing to another figure; "this is the typical woman
of to-day, the lines not ideal, but based on an average of measurements
for the purpose of scientific comparison. First, you will observe that
the figure is over two inches taller than the other. Note the shoulders!
They have gained two inches in width relatively to the hips, as compared
with the figure we have been examining. On the other hand, the girth at
the hips is greater, showing more powerful muscular development. The
chest is an inch and a half deeper, while the abdominal measure is fully
two inches deeper. These increased developments are all over and above
what the mere increase in stature would call for. As to the general
development of the muscular system, you will see there is simply no
comparison.
"Now, what is the explanation? Simply the effect upon woman of the full,
free, untrammeled physical life to which her economic independence opened
the way. To develop the shoulders, arms, chest, loins, legs, and body
generally, exercise is needed--not mild and gentle, but vigorous,
continuous exertion, undertaken not spasmodically but regularly. There is
no dispensation of Providence that will or ever would give a woman
physical development on any other terms than those by which men have
acquired their development. But your women had recourse to no such means.
Their work had been confined for countless ages to a multiplicity of
petty tasks--hand work and finger work--tasks wearing to body and mind in
the extreme, but of a sort wholly failing to provoke that reaction of the
vital forces which builds up and develops the parts exercised. From time
immemorial the boy had gone out to dig and hunt with his father, or
contend for the mastery with other youths while the girl stayed at home
to spin and bake. Up to fifteen she might share with her brother a few of
his more insipid sports, but with the beginnings of womanhood came the
end of all participation in active physical outdoor life. What could be
expected save what resulted--a dwarfed and enfeebled physique and a
semi-invalid existence? The only wonder is that, after so long a period
of bodily repression and perversion, the feminine physique should have
responded, by so great an improvement in so brief a period, to the free
life opened up to woman within the last century."
"We had very many beautiful women; physically perfect they seemed at
least to us," I said.
"Of course you did, and no doubt they were the perfect types you deemed
them," replied the doctor. "They showed you what Nature meant the whole
sex to be. But am I wrong in assuming that ill health was a general
condition among your women? Certainly the records tell us so. If we may
believe them, four fifths of the practice of doctors was among women, and
it seemed to do them mighty little good either, although perhaps I ought
not to reflect on my own profession. The fact is, they could not do
anything, and probably knew they couldn't, so long as the social customs
governing women remained unchanged."
"Of course you are right enough as to the general fact," I replied.
"Indeed, a great writer had given currency to a generally accepted maxim
when he said that invalidism was the normal condition of woman."
"I remember that expression. What a confession it was of the abject
failure of your civilization to solve the most fundamental proposition of
happiness for half the race! Woman's invalidism was one of the great
tragedies of your civilization, and her physical rehabilitation is one of
the greatest single elements in the total increment of happiness which
economic equality has brought the human race. Consider what is implied in
the transformation of the woman's world of sighs and tears and suffering,
as you know it, into the woman's world of to-day, with its atmosphere of
cheer and joy and overflowing vigor and vitality!"
"But," said I, "one thing is not quite clear to me. Without being a
physician, or knowing more of such matters than a young man might be
supposed to, I have yet understood in a general way that the weakness and
delicacy of women's physical condition had their causes in certain
natural disabilities of the sex."
"Yes, I know it was the general notion in your day that woman's physical
constitution doomed her by its necessary effect to be sick, wretched, and
unhappy, and that at most her condition could not be rendered more than
tolerable in a physical sense. A more blighting blasphemy against Nature
never found expression. No natural function ought to cause constant
suffering or disease; and if it does, the rational inference is that
something is wrong in the circumstances. The Orientals invented the myth
of Eve and the apple, and the curse pronounced upon her, to explain the
sorrows and infirmities of the sex, which were, in fact, a consequence,
not of God's wrath, but of man-made conditions and customs. If you once
admit that these sorrows and infirmities are inseparable from woman's
natural constitution, why, then there is no logical explanation but to
accept that myth as a matter of history. There were, however, plentiful
illustrations already in your day of the great differences in the
physical conditions of women under different circumstances and different
social environments to convince unprejudiced minds that thoroughly
healthful conditions which should be maintained a sufficiently long
period would lead to a physical rehabilitation for woman that would quite
redeem from its undeserved obloquy the reputation of her Creator."
"Am I to understand that maternity now is unattended with risk or
suffering?"
"It is not nowadays an experience which is considered at all critical
either in its actual occurrence or consequences. As to the other supposed
natural disabilities which your wise men used to make so much of as
excuses for keeping women in economic subjection, they have ceased to
involve any physical disturbance whatever.
"And the end of this physical rebuilding of the feminine physique is not
yet in view. While men still retain superiority in certain lines of
athletics, we believe the sexes will yet stand on a plane of entire
physical equality, with differences only as between individuals."
"There is one question," said I, "which this wonderful physical rebirth
of woman suggests. You say that she is already the physical equal of man,
and that your physiologists anticipate in a few generations more her
evolution to a complete equality with him. That amounts to saying, does
it not, that normally and potentially she always has been man's physical
equal and that nothing but adverse circumstances and conditions have ever
made her seem less than his equal?"
"Certainly."
"How, then, do you account for the fact that she has in all ages and
countries since the dawn of history, with perhaps a few doubtful and
transient exceptions, been his physical subject and thrall? If she ever
was his equal, why did she cease to become so, and by a rule so
universal? If her inferiority since historic times may be ascribed to
unfavorable man-made conditions, why, if she was his equal, did she
permit those conditions to be imposed upon her? A philosophical theory as
to how a condition is to cease should contain a rational suggestion as to
how it arose."
"Very true indeed," replied the doctor. "Your question is practical. The
theory of those who hold that woman will yet be man's full equal in
physical vigor necessarily implies, as you suggest, that she must
probably once have been his actual equal, and calls for an explanation of
the loss of that equality. Suppose man and woman actual physical equals
at some point of the past. There remains a radical difference in their
relation as sexes--namely, that man can passionally appropriate woman
against her will if he can overpower her, while woman can not, even if
disposed, so appropriate man without his full volition, however great her
superiority of force. I have often speculated as to the reason of this
radical difference, lying as it does at the root of all the sex tyranny
of the past, now happily for evermore replaced by mutuality. It has
sometimes seemed to me that it was Nature's provision to keep the race
alive in periods of its evolution when life was not worth living save for
a far-off posterity's sake. This end, we may say, she shrewdly secured by
vesting the aggressive and appropriating power in the sex relation in
that sex which had to bear the least part of the consequences resultant
on its exercise. We may call the device a rather mean one on Nature's
part, but it was well calculated to effect the purpose. But for it, owing
to the natural and rational reluctance of the child-bearing sex to assume
a burden so bitter and so seemingly profitless, the race might easily
have been exposed to the risk of ceasing utterly during the darker
periods of its upward evolution.
"But let us come back to the specific question we were talking about.
Suppose man and woman in some former age to have been, on the whole,
physically equal, sex for sex. Nevertheless, there would be many
individual variations. Some of each sex would be stronger than others of
their own sex. Some men would be stronger than some women, and as many
women be stronger than some men. Very good; we know that well within
historic times the savage method of taking wives has been by forcible
capture. Much more may we suppose force to have been used wherever
possible in more primitive periods. Now, a strong woman would have no
object to gain in making captive a weaker man for any sexual purpose, and
would not therefore pursue him. Conversely, however, strong men would
have an object in making captive and keeping as their wives women weaker
than themselves. In seeking to capture wives, men would naturally avoid
the stronger women, whom they might have difficulty in dominating, and
prefer as mates the weaker individuals, who would be less able to resist
their will. On the other hand, the weaker of the men would find it
relatively difficult to capture any mates at all, and would be
consequently less likely to leave progeny. Do you see the inference?"
"It is plain enough," I replied. "You mean that the stronger women and
the weaker men would both be discriminated against, and that the types
which survived would be the stronger of the men and the weaker of the
women."
"Precisely so. Now, suppose a difference in the physical strength of the
sexes to have become well established through this process in prehistoric
times, before the dawn of civilization, the rest of the story follows
very simply. The now confessedly dominant sex would, of course, seek to
retain and increase its domination and the now fully subordinated sex
would in time come to regard the inferiority to which it was born as
natural, inevitable, and Heaven-ordained. And so it would go on as it did
go on, until the world's awakening, at the end of the last century, to
the necessity and possibility of a reorganization of human society on a
moral basis, the first principle of which must be the equal liberty and
dignity of all human beings. Since then women have been reconquering, as
they will later fully reconquer, their pristine physical equality with
men."
"A rather alarming notion occurs to me," said I. "What if woman should in
the end not only equal but excel man in physical and mental powers, as he
has her in the past, and what if she should take as mean an advantage of
that superiority as he did?"
The doctor laughed. "I think you need not be apprehensive that such a
superiority, even if attained, would be abused. Not that women, as such,
are any more safely to be trusted with irresponsible power than men, but
for the reason that the race is rising fast toward the plane already in
part attained in which spiritual forces will fully dominate all things,
and questions of physical power will cease to be of any importance in
human relations. The control and leading of humanity go already largely,
and are plainly destined soon to go wholly, to those who have the largest
souls--that is to say, to those who partake most of the Spirit of the
Greater Self; and that condition is one which in itself is the most
absolute guarantee against the misuse of that power for selfish ends,
seeing that with such misuse it would cease to be a power."
"The Greater Self--what does that mean?" I asked.
"It is one of our names for the soul and for God," replied the doctor,
"but that is too great a theme to enter on now."