because in matters of sex, whatever he may be in other things, man is
certainly the giver and woman the receiver of the gift. This fact has
led to the assumption that man is, therefore, responsible for all the
sins of sex, and this would undoubtedly be true were instinct and
passion matters quite beyond our personal control, but they are not. The
instinct of self-preservation is the most fundamental feeling that we
have, and yet in the sinking of the "Titanic" and the horror of the
"Lusitania," we saw this instinct controlled--how gloriously--by the
highest manhood of men, not only of those from whom we should have
expected the utmost consideration, but also of those who, we might have
thought, had forfeited their manhood by lives of uncontrolled and sodden
self-indulgence, lives full of injury to women, and to children born
through them. Their manhood was not lacking when the call to protect the
women and the children came in terms which they could understand. Why
were they not taught to control the other fundamental instinct of life
at a time when such a thing was possible? Are men responsible for the
evil of their upbringing? Is it not their mothers rather, who should
bear the heaviest burden of blame?
Every man is born of woman and almost every man is cared for by a woman
throughout his earliest years. The Jesuits, in their wisdom, founded on
much experience, have said: "Give me a child until he is seven and after
that you may do what you like with him!" It is these early years that
count most in a man's future. What have the mothers done in these years?
Have they taught their children the laws of the transmission of life in
their sacredness and their beauty, or, while willingly telling them of
all the other facts of life, have they let this one, by far the most
important, go untold, fear tying their tongues, and given to themselves
the excuse of ignorance unequal to its task--an ignorance which in a
mother is culpable--I had almost said criminal? Moreover, the
responsibility of women for the moral standards of men does not end with
their boyhood, for each sex is ultimately what the other demands of it
to be. Men have demanded purity of their women, but women have not
demanded it of men. Have not good women been in the habit of receiving
into their society men whose past they know to have been bad--yes, and
even of encouraging their daughters to marry such men for the sake of
money or of social position? Women's responsibility for the social evil
is greater than that of men, and those who are most responsible are the
good women of the community. The arraignment is severe, but is it not
deserved?
It is in childhood that the teaching of the sex relation must be
given,--with the children that the training of self-control must begin.
If men and women are started right in childhood, the later time will
take care of itself. I would not belittle the father's influence, nor
his teaching of his children; but of the two the mother is the more
important, for the man who has talked of all things with his mother, to
whom the sacredness of motherhood is indissolubly bound up with the
great instinct of reproduction, will find it very hard to go far wrong.
The girl, too, who understands the laws of her own nature and that of
the young men whom she meets, will be in a position not only to choose
her mate more wisely, but in the things that come up every day among
young people of opposite sexes she will not excite in him, by word and
gesture, through mere careless ignorance, as is so often done, a
passion, which, though she go free and ignorant of harm, may bring to
him much needless suffering, and may sometimes end in ruin both for him
and for some other.
Women, through their training of their sons and daughters, hold the
future of the world in their keeping. This training cannot be given by
the enactment of laws; we cannot legislate the control of human passion.
The law-maker bears no relation to the character builder.
"They're no more like than hornet's nests and hives
Or printed sarmons be to holy lives."
Law can only prevent wrongdoing, it is negative at best, for its appeal
in the end must be to fear, and a people ruled by fear becomes a race of
slaves. In a free country it is impossible to enforce a law unless the
will of the people is behind it; and the moulding of this will, its
training and development, must come in early childhood and must be done
by its women. There is no greater sophistry than that women need the
vote to protect themselves and one another from evil men. Were most men
libertines today, no law could be enforced against them. Were all men
self-controlled and pure in heart, no law would be required. The failure
of the women--the good women of the community--to bring up their sons to
be such men cannot be corrected by any short and easy road, nor can
their responsibility for the present evil be obliterated by talk. Women
have failed to do their duty, and the only way to prevent further evil
is to do that duty now.
XVII
SUFFRAGE A STEP TOWARD FEMINISM
LILY RICE FOXCROFT
_Lily Rice Foxcroft, daughter of the late Rev. Dr. Charles B.
Rice of Danvers, Mass., for nearly twenty years Secretary of the
Congregational Board of Pastoral Supply; wife of Frank Foxcroft,
editor of "The Living Age." Frequent contributor to the religious
press, the author of a volume entitled, "While You Are a Girl,"
and a well-known speaker in opposition to woman suffrage._
_J. A. H._
The strongest motive for anti-suffrage action is the deepening dread of
woman suffrage as a menace to the home. The radical suffragists have
little use for the home, and the radical suffragists are young and
brilliant, and their following grows rapidly. It is they who are in the
public eye; whom the reporters interview; who, far more than the
conservatives, are really influencing the thought of the day. They claim
to be the consistent thinkers, reasoning from the common premise to
conclusions from which "older women" shrink. They welcome with
whole-hearted enthusiasm the theory of "economic independence."
This theory was first popularized by the _Woman's Journal_, in a notable
series of articles by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an associate
editor, which appeared weekly in 1904, and of which the central thought
was, "The woman should be in the home as much as the man is, no more."
She urged women to "come out of their little monogamous harems,"
promised that "when _all_ women are in industry, the conditions of
industry will be compelled to suit the conditions of maternity," and
predicted the time when "a man would no more think of having a woman
become his house servant than a woman would think of marrying her butler
and retaining him in that capacity." Mrs. Gilman summarized these ideas,
again, in a lecture in New York last year: "The home of the future is
one in which not one stroke of work shall be done except by professional
people who are paid by the hour."
This theory meets so well the anti-suffrage argument that the woman,
while spending most of her time within the home, cannot be expected to
attain outside it a degree of efficiency equal to that of the man, that
it naturally becomes part of the creed of the logical and consistent
suffragist. Miss Henrietta Rodman--a wife who, like Miss Fola La
Follette, retains her maiden name, because taking that of a husband
"dwarfs individuality"--gave to a reporter of the _Boston Herald_ last
year her opinion that "a house is as demoralizing a place to stay in all
day as a bed," and assured him that the ideal feminist apartment-house,
with its co-operative nursery on the top floor, had its plans actually
drawn, its site chosen. "Trained staffs are to relieve women of the four
primitive industries--care of houses, clothes, food and children." "By
real motherhood," said Miss Rodman, "I do not mean washing the baby's
clothes, preparing its food, watching over its sleep, nursing it through
its baby illnesses, nor, in later years, darning the children's
stockings, making or even mending their clothes, preparing their food or
supervising their education. All these things can be done better by
experts."
No one can follow the utterances of this group of suffragists without
noting the constant slight cast on "domestic drudgery," and the
eagerness to prove other lines of activity better adapted to women.
"There is rising revolt among women," wrote Miss Edna Kenton, in _The
Century_ for November, 1913, "against the unspeakable dullness of
unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life-servitude
imposed on her for ages in a man-made world."
General Rosalie Jones, of "hiking fame," who is now breaking into the
automobile business, says: "There are idiot asylums in every state whose
inmates are expert at darning and mending. Any one of those idiots
sitting by the fireside could do the family mending, while the woman of
education, ingenuity and common sense, could utilize her faculties to
the betterment of her family and the country.... After suffrage is
granted, women will no longer be content to waste their brains in this
manner." Miss Inez Boissevain's "Ten Minutes-a-Day Housekeeping" is
well known, as is her declaration to the reporter that she "should go
crazy if she had to do housework one whole day." "Young children," she
admitted, "need their mother. But," she added hopefully, "the age at
which they can be left with others is much less than it was formerly
supposed to be." Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, Mrs. Pankhurst's closest
companion on her last United States tour, says: "Men are not yet used to
seeing their wives in the role of wage-earners. They'll have to get used
to it, that's all.... I don't say that every married woman must go to
work outside her home. I should commit suicide if I had to spend my life
doing housework, but some women probably like to do it. Let them do it
then. All I ask is that every woman, married or single, should be
allowed to choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure."
"To choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure"--there is the
real individualistic note, sounded so often by the radical suffragists.
It is struck still more clearly when to the reporter's question: "What
about the argument that the wife with a business career is apt to
deprive her husband of the joys of fatherhood?" Mrs. Dorr replies: "No
one but the individual woman herself has any right to decide whether or
not she shall have children. That is a question which she alone is
entitled to settle."
In the same tone of contempt for the domestic round in which the average
wife and mother has been accustomed to find her fair share of human
satisfaction, Mrs. Susan Fitzgerald wrote in the opening number of
"_Femina_": "Of course, some women don't want to do independent work;
some prefer the quiet routine and detail of the home and are satisfied
to make a profession of its many little refinements, even as many men
have not the ambition to go into business for themselves.... But the
creative artist, whether in a profession or business, gets most of the
joy of living out of the satisfaction that comes to him in his work, and
so I say, do away with the prejudice against married women working
outside their homes."
Miss Alyse Gregory--who has campaigned for suffrage in Connecticut and
New Jersey with striking success--says: "Girls should be self-supporting
up to the time of their marriage, and after marriage up to the time when
they begin to bear children. During the child-bearing period there might
be some provision made for mothers by the State, as is now done in
France; then all women who have reared families and who again find
themselves with leisure on their hands, should again be
self-supporting." This, of course, is the Socialist view, and Miss
Gregory, like so many of the younger suffragists, is presumably a
Socialist.
Another pronounced advocate of economic independence is Mrs. Havelock
Ellis--an English suffragist much feted on her visits to this
country--of whom an admirer writes in the _Chicago Herald_, that "she
has never accepted a penny from her husband since they were married." It
will be noticed that all these women are in professional work, in which
their earnings may reasonably be expected to provide "expert" care for
their children. Incidentally, does not that support the anti-suffrage
claim that the suffrage movement is gauged to the talents and habits of
exceptional, rather than average, women, and that its principles are not
those under which the average woman's life finds its best development?
This tendency away from domestic life fosters the very evils which
conservative suffragists hope to remedy by the vote. Even more startling
is the tone taken in the discussion of "sex problems." Interviewed on
the subject of "war babies" last summer by an enterprising syndicate
which spread her views all over the country, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr
said: "There are always war babies at a time when normal restraints are
removed and slackened. After a great religious revival in any town there
is an increased number of illegitimate children.... The government
endowed immorality when it entered the war.... The government made war,
the war made war babies--then let the government take care of them."
To the same interviewer, Miss Eleanor Gates, of the Empire State
Campaign Committee, said: "It's unfortunate that the parents of these
babies did not take out licenses to be parents.... But more unfortunate,
to my mind, than an omission of the license, is the fact that motherhood
should ever be counted a crime.... And, when all is said and done, I,
myself, respect the unmarried woman with a child more than I do the
married woman with a poodle."
These are the utterances of conspicuous leaders of the younger, more
radical wing of the woman suffrage movement; and no one who follows with
any care their speeches and writings can claim that they are out of
character. Is it unfair to say such utterances confuse moral values and
weaken the sense of individual responsibility?
This regret that "motherhood should ever be counted a crime" is often
more tersely expressed in the phrase "right to motherhood," first made
fashionable, I believe, by Mr. Bernard Shaw. It was given publicity last
June through an address made by Prof. W. I. Thomas of the University of
Chicago at the banquet held by the Chicago Equal Suffrage Association in
honor of the National Executive Council. Professor Thomas said, "in
substance"--I quote the _Woman's Journal_--"that many women who could
not marry were earnestly desirous of children, and that it ought to be
recognized that monogamy was not the only relation in which it was
respectable for a woman to have a child." The National Association, as
is well known, is the conservative wing of the wrangling suffragist
army, and contains most of those "middle-aged reformers" whom the
"younger generation" dispose of so easily by saying that they have not
kept up with the times. Miss Alice Stone Blackwell promptly combatted
the speaker's opinions, and the _Woman's Journal_ reports that she was
heartily applauded.
But Professor Thomas is not so easily disavowed. A ten-page pamphlet,
"Votes for Women," published by the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage
Association, is of his authorship. In _The Case for Woman Suffrage_, a
bibliography with critical comments, published by the National College
Equal Suffrage League in 1913, eighty-eight lines are given to
quotations from Professor Thomas's works, while Miss Blackwell's receive
only forty. Such comparisons may seem trifling, but they are
significant. If any one doubts the hold of the feminist ideas upon many
of the most influential suffragists, he may be convinced by himself
examining _The Case for Woman Suffrage_. Anti-suffragists are often
accused of arguing from isolated, casual utterances. For my part, I find
it impossible to reproduce, by any quotations, the impression of
recklessness left by habitually reading publications, both American and
English, in sympathy with suffrage.
Our age is not one that can afford to trifle with recklessness. Its own
problems are of the sort that call for prudence and restraint. The
International Purity Congress in San Francisco has laterly drawn
attention to the spread of immorality among school girls. Suffragists
offer to "mother the community." It is the individual girl that needs
mothering. She is not helped to self-control by reading in her favorite
news-paper that Inez Haynes Gilmore, interviewed as to the use of "obey"
in the marriage service, has said: "To me the promise to love and honor
is more extraordinary--it's easier to promise to obey. It's impossible
to promise to control the emotions." The lesson the girl draws from a
play like Hindle Wakes, when Inez Milholland, in _McClure's_, calls her
attention to it, is not that men must be as chaste as women, but that
it is one of women's rights to be as lax as men.
Professor Thomas' views called forth resolutions from the Executive
Board of the National Suffrage Association, which took a curious form.
They read: "While we do not wish to criticise the speaker's remarks as
such, we heard them with profound misgivings as to their effect upon the
cause of suffrage in the campaign states." The anti-suffrage majorities
in the campaign states certainly proved the misgivings well-timed. But,
however such remarks may have been received, is it not a significant
fact that they were ventured, by a reputable man, at a reputable
gathering? Can anyone doubt that radical views are startlingly on the
increase?
Two years ago Mrs. Winifred Harper Cooley wrote in _Harper's Weekly_ of
the "single standard": "There is a violent altercation going on
continually, within the ranks of feminists in all countries, regarding
this question. The conservative women reformers think the solution is in
hauling men up to the standard of virginal purity that has always been
set for women. The other branch, claiming to have a broader knowledge of
human nature, asserts that it is impossible and perhaps undesirable to
expect asceticism from all men and women." In the _Forum_, of April,
1915, a correspondent from California signing herself "Lottie
Montgomery," expanded in revolting detail what was, after all, pretty
much the same idea. "On every hand," she remarked, "we hear of the
'single standard of morals,' by which the 'purists' mean a strict
monogamous life for both men and women, and by which the feminists mean
an opportunity to express themselves sexually whenever they see fit
without the interference and permission of the Church and State, and
this neither constitutes promiscuity, nor yet polyandry, but an
opportunity to live your own life in your own way and not to have to
sacrifice your name, privacy, self-respect and income in order to
gratify the sex instinct." And, passing from theory to practical
observation, she asserts: "Whether we like to admit it or not, the fact
remains that women today, from the mansion to the tenement, are
acquiring sex experience outside of marriage, which accounts for the
great mental strides they have made with the past two decades." In the
publication, by a leading editor, of such sentiments, we have an
alarming sign of the times.
There are too many such signs. Do we not all know long-established
magazines which have published, within the last five years, serials that
they would not have considered fifteen years ago?
Says _Punch's_ reviewer of a recent heroine: "Her point of view was
typified in her attitude toward the illicit and incidental motherhood of
one of her acquaintances. Without hearing the facts, she pronounced it
to be 'a courageous stand against conventional morality,' which it just
possibly might have proved to be upon enquiry, and by no means a weak
surrender to immediate desires, as much more probably it was in fact."
The author of _Angela's Business_ depicts precisely the same mental
attitude in the crimson-faced woman at the Redmantle Club, who demands
of Charles in an angry sort of way, "Don't you favor a public reception
immediately to splendid Flora Travenna? Don't you think she's struck a
great blow for freedom?"--Flora Trevenna having just returned home after
an absence of two years in the company of another woman's husband.
One of Robert Herrick's heroines prophesies--in line with Professor
Thomas--"The time will come when single women like me, who work as men
work, will have the courage to love and bear children if they need--and
men will respect them."
Will it be believed that an English magazine of fine literary quality,
in which the work of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett has often appeared,
has printed an article by a woman pleading for a public sentiment in
favor of irregular unions? "Women will go a step further toward freedom
than men have dared to go," says Mrs. Walter Gallachan. "I believe that
if there were some open recognition of these partnerships outside of
marriage, not necessarily permanent, there would be many women who would
be willing to undertake such unions gladly; there would even be some
women, as I believe, who would prefer them to the present system that
binds them permanently to one partner for life."
To many women these views seem so shocking that they cannot believe them
to be widespread. I can only say that such women are leading "sheltered
lives." Said a conspicuous young feminist in an interview given to a
Boston Sunday paper, "It is both cruel and foolish (eugenically and
ethically) to prevent people from trying more than once to find their
ideal comrade for race propagation." The fiction of today is full of the
disgusting experiences of young persons trying to find their ideal
comrades. And an appalling number of these books bear marks of brilliant
talent, utterly unconscious of moral standards, "studies of
adolescence," many of them are. Illicit relations are entered on in the
most casual way and dropped as casually, and yet glorified as marking
new eras of "development."
I know, of course, the answer made by thoughtful, conscientious
suffragists who believe as strongly as I do in the integrity of the
home, when facts like these are brought to their attention. "All
suffragists are not feminists. All feminism is not of this extreme sort.
Feminism is nothing but a theory, anyway."
Each of us must judge from her own observation; but it should be
observation, not merely of the lives of one's personal acquaintance, but
of current thought and tendency. Many of us are convinced that an
increasing and influential number of suffragists are feminists, that a
great deal of feminism is of this extreme sort, and that it is a
"theory" which, through channels direct and indirect, is poisoning our
literature and our social life.
IMPORTANT ANTI-SUFFRAGE PUBLICATIONS
(For pamphlets and leaflets on the various aspects of the question
address the Secretary of the Women's Anti-Suffrage Association,
Kensington Building. 687 Boylston Street, Boston.)
BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS
_James M. Buckley_, THE WRONG AND PERIL OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE. (Fleming H.
Revell Co., New York.) Not a recent book, but contains a good deal of
permanently useful matter not found elsewhere.
_Helen Kendrick Johnson_, WOMAN AND THE REPUBLIC. (25c; The Woman's
Protest, 237 West 39th Street. New York.) Especially valuable for its
information about the history of woman suffrage in relation to the
political and social development of the nineteenth century.
_Ida M. Tarbell_, THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WOMAN. ($1.25; The Macmillan
Company, New York.) The book which best expresses the anti-suffrage view
of woman's place in modern society. See also Miss Tarbell's THE WAYS OF
WOMAN; (The Macmillan Company,) and THE BOOK OF WOMAN'S POWER. ($1.25;
do).
_J. Lionel Tayler_, THE NATURE OF WOMAN. ($1.25; E. P. Dutton & Company,
N. Y.) The best treatment of biology and sex in their relation to the
question.
_E. S. Martin_, THE UNREST OF WOMEN. (D. Appleton & Company, New York.)
A good-natured, but shrewd, analysis of manifestations of feminism in
Miss Thomas, Mrs. Belmont, Miss Millholland, etc., by the genial editor
of _Life_.