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WOMEN AS WORLD BUILDERS
Women
as
World Builders
Studies in
Modern Feminism
BY
FLOYD DELL
[Illustration]
CHICAGO
FORBES AND COMPANY
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
FORBES AND COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Feminist Movement 7
II Charlotte Perkins Gilman 22
III Emmeline Pankhurst and Jane Addams 30
IV Olive Schreiner and Isadora Duncan 41
V Beatrice Webb and Emma Goldman 52
VI Margaret Dreier Robins 65
VII Ellen Key 76
VIII Freewomen and Dora Marsden 90
Women as World Builders
CHAPTER I
THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT
The feminist movement can be dealt with in two ways: it can be treated
as a sociological abstraction, and discussed at length in heavy
monographs; or it can be taken as the sum of the action of a lot of
women, and taken account of in the lives of individual women. The latter
way would be called "journalistic," had not the late William James used
it in his "Varieties of Religious Experience." It is a method which
preserves the individual flavor, the personal tone and color, which,
after all, are the life of any movement. It is, therefore, the method I
have chosen for this book.
The ten women whom I have chosen are representative: they give the
quality of the woman's movement of today. Charlotte Perkins Gilman--Jane
Addams--Emmeline Pankhurst--Olive Schreiner--Isadora Duncan--Beatrice
Webb--Emma Goldman--Margaret Dreier Robins--Ellen Key: surely in these
women,[see also the chapter "Freewomen and Dora Marsden."] if anywhere,
is to be found the soul of modern feminism!
One may inquire why certain other names are not included. There is
Maria Montessori, for instance. Her ideas on the education of children
are of the utmost importance, and their difference from those of Froebel
is another illustration of the difference between the practical minds of
women and the idealistic minds of men. But Madame Montessori's relation
to the feminist movement is, after all, ancillary. A tremendous lot
remains to be done in the way of cooperation for the management of
households and the education of children before women who are wives and
mothers will be set free to take their part in the work of the outside
world. But it is the setting of mothers free, and not the specific kind
of education which their children are to receive, which is of interest
to us here.
Again, one may inquire why, since I have not blinked the fact that the
feminist movement is making for a revolution of values in sex--why I
have not included any woman who has distinguished herself by defying
antiquated conventions which are supposed to rule the relations of the
sexes. This requires a serious answer. The adjustment of one's social
and personal relations, so far as may be, to accord with one's own
convictions--that is not feminism, in my opinion: it is only common
sense. The attempt to discover how far social laws and traditions must
be changed to accord with the new position of women in society--that is
a different thing, and I have dealt with it in the paper on Ellen Key.
Another reason is my belief that it is with woman as producer that we
are concerned in a study of feminism, rather than with woman as lover.
The woman who finds her work will find her love--and I do not doubt will
cherish it bravely. But the woman who sets her love above everything
else I would gently dismiss from our present consideration as belonging
to the courtesan type.
It is not very well understood what the courtesan really is, and so I
pause to describe her briefly. It is not necessary to transgress certain
moral customs to be a courtesan; on the other hand, the term may
accurately be applied to women of irreproachable morals. There are some
women who find their destiny in the bearing and rearing of children,
others who demand independent work like men, and still others who make a
career of charming, stimulating, and comforting men. These types, of
course, merge and combine; and then there is that vast class of women
who belong to none of these types--who are not good for anything!
The first of these types may be called the mother type, the second the
worker type, and the third--the kind of women which is not drawn either
to motherhood or to work, but which is greatly attracted to men and
which possesses special qualities of sympathy, stimulus, and charm, and
is content with the more or less disinterested exercise of these
qualities--this may without prejudice be called the courtesan type. It
will be seen that the courtesan qualities may find play as well within
legal marriage as without, and that the transgression of certain moral
customs is only incidental to the type. Where circumstances encourage
it, and where the moral tradition is weakened by experience or
temperament, the moral customs will be transgressed: but it is the human
qualities of companionship, and not the economic basis of that
companionship, which is the essential thing.
When a girl with such qualities marries, and she usually marries, much
depends upon the character of her husband. If her husband appreciates
her, if he does not expect her to give up her career of charming
straightway, and restrict herself to cooking, sewing, and the incubating
of babies; and, furthermore, if he does not baffle those qualities in
his wife by sheer failure in his own career, then there is a happy and
virtuous marriage. Otherwise, there is separation or divorce, and the
woman sometimes becomes the companion of another man without the
sanction of law. But she has been, it will be perceived, a courtesan all
along. And while I do not wish to seem to deprecate her comfortable
qualities, she does not come in the scope of this inquiry.
But there is another figure which I wish I had been able to include.
Not wishing to involve my publisher in a libel suit, I refrain. She is
the young woman of the leisure class, whose actions, as represented to
us in the yellow journals, shock or divert us, according to our
temperaments. I confess to having the greatest sympathy for her, and in
her endeavor to create a livelier, a more hilarious and human morale,
she is doing, I feel, a real service to the cause of women. Our American
pseudo-aristocracy is capable to teach us, despite its fantastic
excesses, how to play. And emancipation from middle-class standards of
taste, morality, and intellect is, so far as it goes, a good thing. "Too
many cocktails," a lady averred to me the other day, "is better than
smugness; risque conversation far better than none at all." And that
celebrated "public-be-damned" attitude of the pseudo-aristocracy is a
great moral improvement over the cowardly, hysterical fear of the
neighbors which prevails in the middle class.
But, if I sympathize with the "hell raising" tendency--no other phrase
describes it--of the young woman of the leisure class, I have more pity
than sympathy for the one who is trying to realize the ideal of the
"salon." For she must, after sad experience and bitter disillusionment,
be content with the tawdry activities which, relieved by the orgiastic
outbreaks alluded to above, constitute social life in America.
The establishment of a salon is, in itself, a healthful ideal. If
civilization were destroyed, and rebuilt on any plan, the tradition of
the salon would be a good starting point for the creation of a medium of
satisfying social intercourse. Social intercourse we must have, or the
best of us lapse into boorishness. The ego only properly functions in
contact with other and various egos. So that, in any case, we should
have to have something in the nature of our contemporary "society."
All the more do we need "society" at present, since those ancient
institutions, the church and the cafe, have almost entirely lost the
character of real social centers.
Recognizing this need, and supposing the best intentions in the world,
what can people do at present in the creation of a "society" which shall
be useful to the community instead of a laughing stock for the
intelligent?
That is a fair question. Many an ambitious and idealistic young American
matron has tried to solve it. She has found that the materials were a
little scarce--the people who could talk brilliantly are very rare. But
brilliancy is always a miracle, and it can be dispensed with. The real
trouble lies elsewhere.
The fact is that in our present industrial system the need for social
life is in inverse ratio to the opportunity for it. The people who need
social intercourse are those who do hard work. The people who have most
money and leisure, the most opportunity for social life, are those who
have too much of it, anyway. Moreover--and this is an important
point--no one profits less by leisure and money than those who have a
great deal of it. Consequently, the basis of "society" today is a class
of people naturally and inevitably inferior. It is this class which
dominates "society," which gives the tone, and which sets the standard.
So long, then, as "society" is dominated by inferiors, intelligent men
and women will not be inclined to waste what time they have for social
intercourse in such stupid activities as those that "society" can
furnish. They will flock by themselves, and if they become undemocratic
and unsocial as a result, that will appear to them the lesser evil. So
that, however catholic our standards, the saloniere, as a bounden
failure, has no place in this transcript of feminism.
One thing will be observed with regard to these following
papers--though they are imbued with an intense interest in women, they
are devoid of the spirit of Romance. I mean that attitude toward woman
which accepts her sex as a miraculous justification for her existence,
the belief that being a woman is a virtue in itself, apart from the
possession of other qualities: in short, woman-worship. The reverence
for woman as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of her capacities
as friend or leader or servant--that is Romance. It is an attitude
which, discovered in the Middle Ages, has added a new glamour to
existence. To woman as a superior being, a divinity, one may look for
inspiration--and receive it. For those who cannot be fired by an
abstract idea, she gives to imagination "some pure light in human form
to fix it." She is the sustenance of hungry souls. Believe in her and
you shall be saved--so runs the gospel of Petrarch, of Dante, of
Browning, of George Meredith.
So runs not mine. I have hearkened to the voice of modern science, which
tells me that woman is an inferior being, with a weak body, a stunted
mind, poor in creative power, poor in imagination, poor in critical
capacity--a being who does not know how to work, nor how to talk, nor
how to play! I hope no one will imagine that I am making these charges
up maliciously out of my own head: such a notion would indicate that a
century of pamphleteering on the woman question had made no impression
on a mind saturated in the ideology of popular fiction.
But--I have hearkened even more eagerly to the voice of sociology,
which tells me of woman's wonderful possibilities. It is with these
possibilities that this book is, in the main, concerned.
But first the explanation of why I, a man, write these articles on
feminism. It involves the betrayal of a secret: the secret, that is, of
the apparent indifference or even hostility of men toward the woman's
movement. The fact is, as has been bitterly recited by the rebellious
leaders of their sex, that women have always been what man wanted them
to be--have changed to suit his changing ideals. The fact is,
furthermore, that the woman's movement of today is but another example
of that readiness of women to adapt themselves to a masculine demand.
Men are tired of subservient women; or, to speak more exactly, of the
seemingly subservient woman who effects her will by stealth--the pretty
slave with all the slave's subtlety and cleverness. So long as it was
possible for men to imagine themselves masters, they were satisfied. But
when they found out that they were dupes, they wanted a change. If only
for self-protection, they desired to find in woman a comrade and an
equal. In reality they desired it because it promised to be more fun.
So that we have as the motive behind the rebellion of women an obscure
rebellion of men. Why, then, have men appeared hostile to the woman's
rebellion? Because what men desire are real individuals who have
achieved their own freedom. It will not do to pluck freedom like a
flower and give it to the lady with a polite bow. She must fight for it.
We are, to tell the truth, a little afraid that unless the struggle is
one which will call upon all her powers, which will try her to the
utmost, she will fall short of becoming that self-sufficient, able,
broadly imaginative and healthy-minded creature upon whom we have set
our masculine desire.
It is, then, as a phase of the great human renaissance inaugurated by
men that the woman's movement deserves to be considered.
And what more fitting than that a man should sit in judgment upon the
contemporary aspects of that movement, weighing out approval or
disapproval! Such criticism is not a masculine impertinence but
a masculine right, a right properly pertaining to those who are
responsible for the movement, and whose demands it must ultimately fulfill.