A condition so long established, so wide-spread, so permanent as the
sexuo-economic relation in the human species could not have been
introduced and maintained in the course of social evolution without
natural causes and uses. No wildest perversion of individual will could
permanently maintain a condition wholly injurious to society. Church and
State and social forms move and change with our growth, and we cannot
hinder them long after the time has come for further progress. Once it
was of advantage to society that the sexuo-economic relation should be
established. Now that it is no longer of advantage to society, the
“woman’s movement” has set in; and the relation is changing under our
eyes from year to year, from day to day, in spite of our traditional
opposition. The change considered in these pages is not one merely to be
prophesied and recommended: it is already taking place under the forces
of social evolution; and only needs to be made clear to our conscious
thought, that we may withdraw the futile but irritating resistance of
our misguided will.
The original necessity for this distinctive human phenomenon lies very
deep among the primal forces of social life. The relations required to
develope individual organisms failed in the further development of the
social organism of organization. Co-ordination requires first a common
interest, and then the establishment of a common consciousness. It was
for the common interest of the individual cells to obtain food easily,
and this drew them into closer relation. That relation being
established, their co-existence became a unit, an entity, a thing with a
conscious life of its own. In the fullest development of the most
elaborate organisms, this holds good. There must be a common interest to
be served by all this co-ordinate activity; and there must be a common
consciousness established, whereby to serve most easily the common
interest. When the component cells in our tissues shrink and fail for
lack of nutrition, when the several organs weary of inaction and
fretfully demand their natural exercise, the man does not say, “My
tissues need replenishment” or “My organs need exercise”: he says, “I am
hungry.” And that “I,” the personal consciousness directing the smooth
interaction of all its parts, goes to work to get food. Social evolution
rests on this common interest. Individual men are profited by social
relation; and, therefore, they enter into social relation. Such relation
requires a common consciousness, through which the co-ordinate action
may take place; and the whole course of social development is marked by
the constant extension of this social consciousness and its necessary
vehicles. Language is our largest common medium, and leads on into
literature, which is but preserved speech. The brain of man is the
social organ, the organ of communication. Through it flows the current
of thought, whereby we are enabled to work together. By so much as our
brains hold in common, we can understand each other; and, therefore,
some degree of common education is essential to free social development.
At the very beginning of this process, when the human animal was still
but an animal,—but an individual,—came the imperative demand for the
establishment of a common consciousness between these hitherto
irreconcilable individuals. The first step in nature toward this end is
found in the relation between mother and child. Where the young, after
birth, are still dependent on the mother, the functions of the one
separate living body needing the service of another separate living
body, we have the overlapping of personality, the mutual need, which
brings with it the essential instinct that holds together these
interacting personalities. That instinct we call love. The child must
have the mother’s breast. The mother’s breast must have the child.
Therefore, between mother and child was born love, long before
fatherhood was anything more than a momentary incident. But the common
consciousness, the mutual attraction between mother and child, stopped
there absolutely. It was limited in range to this closest relation; in
duration, to the period of infancy.
The common interest of human beings must be served by racial faculties,
not merely by the sex-functions of the female, or the duties of mother
to child. As the male, acting through his natural instincts, steadily
encroached upon the freedom of the female until she was reduced to the
state of economic dependence, he thereby assumed the position of
provider for this creature no longer able to provide for herself. He was
not only compelled to serve her needs, but to fulfil in his own person
the thwarted uses of maternity. He became, and has remained, a sort of
man-mother, alone in creation in his remarkable position. By this common
interest, existing now not only between mother and child, but between
father, mother, and child, grew up a wider common consciousness. And, as
the father served the child not through sex-function, but through
race-function, this service was open to far wider development and longer
duration than the mother’s alone could ever have reached. Maternal
energy is the force through which have come into the world both love and
industry. It is through the tireless activity of this desire, the
mother’s wish to serve the young, that she began the first of the arts
and crafts whereby we live. While the male savage was still a mere
hunter and fighter, expressing masculine energy, the katabolic force,
along its essential line, expanding, scattering, the female savage
worked out in equally natural ways the conserving force of female
energy. She gathered together and saved nutrition for the child, as the
germ-cell gathers and saves nutrition in the unconscious silences of
nature. She wrapped it in garments and built a shelter for its head as
naturally as the same maternal function had loved, clothed, and
sheltered the unborn. Maternal energy, working externally through our
elaborate organism, is the source of productive industry, the main
current of social life.
But not until this giant force could ally itself with others and work
co-operatively, overcoming the destructive action of male energy in its
blind competition, could our human life enter upon its full course of
racial evolution. This is what was accomplished through the suppression
of the free action of maternal energy in the female and its irresistible
expression through the male. The two forces were combined, and he was
the active factor in their manifestation. It was one of nature’s calm,
unsmiling miracles, no more wonderful than where she makes the
guileless, greedy bee, who thinks he is merely getting his dinner, serve
as an agent of reproduction to countless flowers. The bee might resent
it if he knew what office he performed, and that his dinner was only
there that he might fulfil that office. The subjection of woman has
involved to an enormous degree the maternalizing of man. Under its bonds
he has been forced into new functions, impossible to male energy alone.
He has had to learn to love and care for some one besides himself. He
has had to learn to work, to serve, to be human. Through the
sex-passion, mightily overgrown, the human race has been led and driven
up the long, steep path of progress, over all obstacles, through all
dangers, carrying its accompanying conditions of disease and sin (and
surmounting them), up and up in spite of all, until at last a degree of
evolution is reached in which the extension of human service and human
love makes possible a better way.
By the action of his own desires, through all its by-products of evil,
man was made part mother; and so both man and woman were enabled to
become human. It was an essential step in our racial progress, a means
to an end. It should not be considered as an extreme maternal sacrifice,
but as a novel and thorough system of paternal sacrifice,—the male of
genus homo coerced by sex-necessity into the expression of maternal
energy. The naturally destructive tendencies of the male have been
gradually subverted to the conservative tendencies of the female, and
this so palpably that the process is plainly to be observed throughout
history. Into the male have been bred, by natural selection and unbroken
training, the instincts and habits of the female, to his immense
improvement. The female was dependent upon the male in individual
economic relation. She was in a state of helpless slavery. She was
treated with unspeakable injustice and cruelty. But nature’s processes
go on quite undisturbed among incidents like these. To blend the
opposing sex-tendencies of two animals into the fruitful powers of a
triumphant race was a painful process, but that does not matter. It was
essential, and it has been fulfilled. There should be an end to the
bitterness of feeling which has arisen between the sexes in this
century. Right as is the change of attitude in the woman of to-day, she
need feel no resentment as to the past, no shame, no sense of wrong.
With a full knowledge of the initial superiority of her sex and the
sociological necessity for its temporary subversion, she should feel
only a deep and tender pride in the long patient ages during which she
has waited and suffered, that man might slowly rise to full racial
equality with her. She could afford to wait. She could afford to suffer.
It is high time that women began to understand their true position,
primarily and eternally, and to see how little the long years of
oppression have altered it. It was not well for the race to have the
conservative processes of life so wholly confined to the female, the
male being merely a temporary agent in reproduction and of no further
use. His size, strength, and ferocity—admirable qualities in maintaining
the life of an individual animal—were not the most desirable to develope
the human race. We needed most the quality of co-ordination,—the
facility in union, the power to make and to save rather than to spend
and to destroy. These were female qualities. Acting from his own nature,
man could not manifest traits that he did not possess. Throned as
woman’s master, chained as her servant, he has, through this strange
combination of functions, acquired these traits under the heavy law of
necessity. Originally, the two worked on divers lines, he spending and
scattering, she saving and building. She was the deep, steady, main
stream of life, and he the active variant, helping to widen and change
that life, but rather as an adjunct than as an essential. Races there
were and are which reproduce themselves without the masculine
organism,—by hermaphroditism and parthenogenesis.
As the evolution of species progressed, we find a long series of
practical experiments in males,—very tiny, transient, and inferior
devices at first, but gradually developed into fuller and fuller
equality with the female. In some of the lower forms, as in rotifers,
insects, and crustaceans, are found the most inferior males, often none
at all; and, where they do exist, they have no use save as an agent in
reproduction. The most familiar instance of this is among the bees,
where the drone, after fulfilling his functions, dies or is destroyed by
the sturdy co-mothers of the hive. The common spider, too, has a tiny
male, who tremblingly achieves his one brief purpose, and is then eaten
up by his mate. She is the spider, a permanent flycatcher. He is merely
a fertilizing agent. The little green aphis, so numerous on our
rose-bushes, can reproduce parthenogenetically so long as conditions are
good,—while it is warm and there is enough to eat; but, when conditions
grow hard, males are developed, and the dual method of reproduction is
introduced.
In the two great activities of life, self-preservation and
race-preservation, the female in these lower species is better equipped
than the male for the first, and carries almost the whole burden of the
second. His short period of functional use is as nothing compared to her
long period of gestation, and the services she performs, in many cases,
in providing for her young after their birth. Race-preservation has been
almost entirely a female function, sometimes absolutely so. But it has
been proven better for the race to have two highly developed parents
rather than to have one. Therefore, sexual equality has been slowly
evolved, not only by increasing the importance of the male element in
reproduction, but by developing race-qualities in the male, so long
merely a reproductive agent. The last step of this process has been the
elevation of the male of genus homo to full racial equality with the
female, and this has involved her temporary subjection. Both her
physical and psychical tendencies have been transplanted into the
organism of the male. He has been made the working mother of the world.
The sexuo-economic relation was necessary to raise and broaden, to
deepen and sweeten, to make more feminine, and so more human, the male
of the human race. If the female had remained in full personal freedom
and activity, she would have remained superior to him, and both would
have remained stationary. Since the female had not the tendency to vary
which distinguished the male, it was essential that the expansive forces
of masculine energy be combined with the preservative and constructive
forces of feminine energy. The expansive and variable male energy,
struggling under its new necessity for constructive labor, has caused
that labor to vary and progress more than it would have done in feminine
hands alone. Out of her wealth of power and patience, liking to work, to
give, she toils on forever in the same primitive industries. He,
impatient of obstacles, not liking to work, desirous to get rather than
to give, splits his task into a thousand specialties, and invents
countless ways to lighten his labors. Male energy made to expend itself
in performing female functions is what has brought our industries to
their present development. Without the economic dependence of the
female, the male would still be merely the hunter and fighter, the
killer, the destroyer; and she would continue to be the industrious
mother, without change or progress.
“What the children of Israel delighted in making
The children of Egypt delighted in breaking,”
runs the old rhyme; but there is small gain in such a process. In her
subordinate position, under every disadvantage, through the very walls
of her prison, the constructive force of woman has made man its
instrument, and worked for the upbuilding of the world. As his energy
was purely individualistic, and only to be controlled by the power of
sex-attraction, it needed precisely this form of union, with its
peculiar exaggeration of sex-faculty, to hold him to his task. Woman’s
abnormal development of sex, restrained and imprisoned by every law, has
acted like a coiled spring upon the only free agent in society,—man.
Under its intense stimulus he has moved mountains. All the world has
seen it; and we have always murmured admiringly, “Oh, ’tis love, ’tis
love, ’tis love that makes the world go round.” It has done so, indeed,
or, at least, has driven man round the world in one long range of
struggle and conquest, of work and war. And every man who loves, and
says, “I am yours: do with me what you will,” knows the power, and
honors it.
Human development thus far has proceeded in the male line, under the
force of male energy, spurred by sex-stimulus, and by the vast storage
battery of female energy suppressed. Women can well afford their period
of subjection for the sake of a conquered world, a civilized man. In
spite of the agony of the process, the black, long ages of shame and
pain and horror, women should remember that they are still here; and,
thanks to the blessed power of heredity, they are not so far aborted
that a few generations of freedom will not set them abreast of the age.
When the centuries of slavery and dishonor, of torture and death, of
biting injustice and slow, suffocating repression, seem long to women,
let them remember the geologic ages, the millions and millions of years
when puny, pygmy, parasitic males struggled for existence, and were used
or not, as it happened, like a half-tried patent medicine. What train of
wives and concubines was ever so ignominiously placed as the extra
husbands carried among the scales of the careful female cirriped, lest
she lose one or two! What neglect of faded wives can compare with the
scorned, unnoticed death of the drone bee, starved, stung, shut out,
walled up in wax, kept only for his momentary sex-function, and not
absolutely necessary for that! What Bluebeard tragedy or cruelty of
bride-murdering Eastern king can emulate the ruthless slaughter of the
hapless little male spider, used by his ferocious mate “to coldly
furnish forth a marriage breakfast”! Never once in the history of
humanity has any outrage upon women compared with these sweeping
sacrifices of helpless males in earlier species. The female has been
dominant for the main duration of life on earth. She has been easily
equal always up to our own race; and in our race she has been subjugated
to the male during the earlier period of development for such enormous
racial gain, such beautiful and noble uses, that the sacrifice should
never be mentioned nor thought of by a womanhood that knows its power.
For the upbuilding of human life on earth she could afford to have her
own held back; and—closer, tenderer, lovelier service—for the raising of
her fierce sex-mate to a free and gentle brotherhood, for the uplifting
of the human soul in her dear son, she could have borne not only this,
but more,—borne it smilingly, ungrudgingly, gladly, for his sake and the
world’s.
And now that the long strain is over, now that the time has come when
neither he nor the world is any longer benefited by her subordination,
now that she is coming steadily out into direct personal expression,
into the joy of racial action in full freedom, of power upon the throne
instead of behind it, it is unworthy of this supreme new birth to waste
one regret upon the pain that had to be.
Thus it may be seen that, even allowing for the injury to the individual
and to society through the check to race-development and the increase of
sex-development in woman, with its transmitted effects; allowing,
further, that our highly specialized motherhood cannot be shown to be an
advantage to humanity,—still it remains true that our sexuo-economic
relation, with its effect of carrying on human life through the male
side only, in activities driven by intensified sex-energy, has reacted
to the benefit of the individual and of the race in many ways, as
already suggested: in the extension of female function through the male;
in the blending of faculties which have resulted in the possibility of
our civilization; in the superior fighting power developed in the male,
and its effects in race-conquest, military and commercial; in the
increased productivity developed by his assumption of maternal function;
and by the sex-relation becoming mainly proportioned to his power to pay
for it. Even motherhood has been indirectly the gainer in that, although
the mother herself has been checked in direct maternal service, serving
the race far more through her stimulation of male activities than
through any activities of her own; yet the child has ultimately profited
more by the materno-paternal services than he would have done by the
maternal services alone.
All this may be granted as having been true in the past. And many,
reassured by this frank admission, will ask, if it is so clear that the
subjection of woman was useful, that this evil-working, monstrous
sexuo-economic relation was after all of racial advantage, how we know
that it is time to change. Principally, because we are changing. Social
development is not caused by the promulgators of theories and by the
writers of books. When Rousseau wrote of equality, free France was being
born,—the spirit of the times thrilled through the human mind; and those
who had ears to hear heard, those who had pens to write wrote. The
condition of chattel slavery, working to its natural end, roused
Garrison and Phillips and Harriet Beecher Stowe. They did not make the
movement. The period of women’s economic dependence is drawing to a
close, because its racial usefulness is wearing out. We have already
reached a stage of human relation where we feel the strength of social
duty pull against the sex-ties that have been for so long the only ties
that we have recognized. The common consciousness of humanity, the sense
of social need and social duty, is making itself felt in both men and
women. The time has come when we are open to deeper and wider impulses
than the sex-instinct; the social instincts are strong enough to come
into full use at last. This is shown by the twin struggle that convulses
the world to-day,—in sex and economics,—the “woman’s movement” and the
“labor movement.” Neither name is wholly correct. Both make a class
issue of what is in truth a social issue, a question involving every
human interest. But the women naturally feel most the growing healthful
pain of their position. They personally revolt, and think it is they who
are most to be benefited. Similarly, since the “laboring classes” feel
most the growing healthful pain of their position, they as naturally
revolt under the same conviction. Sociologically, these conditions,
which some find so painful and alarming, mean but one thing,—the
increase of social consciousness. The progress of social organization
has produced a corresponding degree of individualization, which has
reached at last even to women,—even to the lowest grade of unskilled
labor. This higher degree of individualization means a sharp personal
consciousness of the evils of a situation hitherto little felt. With
this higher growth of individual consciousness, and forming a part of
it, comes the commensurate growth of social consciousness. We have grown
to care for one another.
The woman’s movement rests not alone on her larger personality, with its
tingling sense of revolt against injustice, but on the wide, deep
sympathy of women for one another. It is a concerted movement, based on
the recognition of a common evil and seeking a common good. So with the
labor movement. It is not alone that the individual laborer is a better
educated, more highly developed man than the stolid peasant of earlier
days, but also that with this keener personal consciousness has come the
wider social consciousness, without which no class can better its
conditions. The traits incident to our sexuo-economic relation have
developed till they forbid the continuance of that relation. In the
economic world, excessive masculinity, in its fierce competition and
primitive individualism; and excessive femininity, in its inordinate
consumption and hindering conservatism; have reached a stage where they
work more evil than good.
The increasing specialization of the modern woman, acquired by
inheritance from the ceaselessly specializing male, makes her growing
racial faculties strain against the primitive restrictions of a purely
sexual relation. The desire to produce—the distinctive human quality—is
no longer satisfied with a status that allows only reproduction. In our
present stage of social evolution it is increasingly difficult and
painful for women to endure their condition of economic dependence, and
therefore they are leaving it. This does not mean that at a given day
all women will stand forth free together, but that in slowly gathering
numbers, now so great that all the world can see, women in the most
advanced races are so standing free. Great advances along social lines
come slowly, like the many-waved progress of the tide: they are not
sudden jumps over yawning chasms.
But, besides this first plain perception that our strange relation is
coming to an end, we may see how in its own working it developes forces
which must end it or us. The method of action of our peculiar cat’s-paw
combination of the sexes—the mother-father doing the work of the
helpless creature he carries on his back; the parasite mate devouring
even when she should most feed—has been this, as repeatedly shown:
because of sex-desire the male subjugates the female. Lest he lose her,
he feeds her, and, perforce, her young. She, obtaining food through the
sex-relation, becomes over-sexed, and acts with constantly increasing
stimulus on his sex-activities; and, as these activities are made
economic by their relation, she so stimulates industry and all progress.
But,—and here is the natural end of an unnatural position, a position
that serves its purpose for a time, but holds in itself the seeds of its
own destruction,—through the unchecked sex-energy, accumulated under the
abnormal pressure of the economic side of the relation, such excess is
developed as tends to destroy both individual and race; and such psychic
qualities are developed as tend also to our injury and extinction.
A relation that inevitably produces abnormal development cannot be
permanently maintained. The intensification of sex-energy as a social
force results in such limitless exaggeration of sex-instinct as finds
expression sexually in the unnatural vices of advanced civilization,
and, socially, in the strained economic relation between producer and
consumer which breaks society in two. The sexuo-economic relation serves
to bring social development to a certain level. After that level is
reached, a higher relation must be adopted, or the lifting process comes
to an end; and either the race succumbs to the morbid action of its own
forces or some fresher race comes in, and begins the course of social
evolution anew.
Under the stimulus of the sexuo-economic relation, one civilization
after another has climbed up and fallen down in weary succession. It
remains for us to develope a newer, better form of sex-relation and of
economic relation therewith, and so to grasp the fruits of all previous
civilizations, and grow on to the beautiful results of higher ones. The
true and lasting social progress, beyond that which we have yet made, is
based on a spirit of inter-human love, not merely the inter-sexual; and
it requires an economic machinery organized and functioned for human
needs, not sexual ones. The sexuo-economic relation drives man up to
where he can become fully human. It deepens and developes the human soul
until it is able to conceive and fulfil the larger social uses in which
our further life must find expression. But, unless the human soul sees
these new forces, feels them, gives way to them in loyal service, it
fails to reach the level from which all further progress must proceed,
and falls back. Again and again society has so risen, so failed to grasp
new duties, so fallen back.
To-day it will not so fall again, because the social consciousness is at
last so vital a force in both men and women that we feel clearly that
our human life cannot be fully lived on sex-lines only. We are so far
individualized, so far socialized, that men can work without the tearing
spur of exaggerated sex-stimulus, work for some one besides mate and
young; and women can love and serve without the slavery of economic
dependence,—love better and serve more. Sex-stimulus begins and ends in
individuals. The social spirit is a larger thing, a better thing, and
brings with it a larger, nobler life than we could ever know on a
sex-basis solely.
Moreover, it should be distinctly understood, as it is already widely
and vaguely felt, that the higher development of social life following
the economic independence of women makes possible a higher sex-life than
has ever yet been known. As fast as the human individual rises in social
progress to a certain degree of development, so fast this primitive form
of sex-union chafes and drags: it is felt to be unsatisfying and
injurious. This is a marked feature in modern life. The long, sure,
upward trend of the human race toward monogamous marriage is no longer
helped, but hindered by the economic side of the relation. The best
marriage is between the best individuals; and the best individuals of
both sexes to-day are increasingly injured by the economic basis of our
marriage, which produces and maintains those qualities in men and women
and their resultant industrial conditions which make marriage more
difficult and precarious every day.
The woman’s movement, then, should be hailed by every right-thinking,
far-seeing man and woman as the best birth of our century. The banner
advanced proclaims “equality before the law,” woman’s share in political
freedom; but the main line of progress is and has been toward economic
equality and freedom. While life exists on earth, the economic
conditions must underlie and dominate each existing form and its
activities; and social life is no exception. A society whose economic
unit is a sex-union can no more develope beyond a certain point
industrially than a society like the patriarchal, whose political unit
was a sex-union, could develope beyond a certain point politically.
The last freeing of the individual makes possible the last combination
of individuals. While sons must bend to the will of a patriarchal
father, no democracy is possible. Democracy means, requires, is,
individual liberty. While the sexuo-economic relation makes the family
the centre of industrial activity, no higher collectivity than we have
to-day is possible. But, as women become free, economic, social factors,
so becomes possible the full social combination of individuals in
collective industry. With such freedom, such independence, such wider
union, becomes possible also a union between man and woman such as the
world has long dreamed of in vain.