Title: Women as World Builders - Studies in Modern Feminism
Author: Dell, Floyd, 1887-1969
Language: English
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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 café, 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.



CHAPTER II

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN


Of the women who represent and carry on this many-sided movement today,
the first to be considered from this masculine viewpoint should, I
think, be Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For she is, to a superficial view,
the most intransigent feminist of them all, the one most exclusively
concerned with the improvement of the lot of woman, the least likely to
compromise at the instance of man, child, church, state, or devil.

Mrs. Gilman is the author of "Women and Economics" and several other
books of theory, "What Diantha Did" and several other books of fiction;
she is the editor and publisher of a remarkable journal, The Forerunner,
the whole varied contents of which is written by herself; she has a
couple of plays to her credit, and she has published a book of poems.
If in spite of all this publicity it is still possible to misunderstand the
attitude of Mrs. Gilman, I can only suppose it to be because her poetry
is less well known than her prose. For in this book of verse, "In This
Our World," Mrs. Gilman has so completely justified herself that no man
need ever be afraid of her--nor any woman who, having a lingering
tenderness for the other sex, would object to living in a beehive world,
full of raging efficient females, with the males relegated to the
position of drones.

Of course, I do but jest when I speak of this fear; but there is, to
the ordinary male, something curiously objectionable at the first glance
in Mrs. Gilman's arguments, whether they are for coöperative kitchens or
for the labor of women outside the home. And the reason for that
objection lies precisely in the fact that her plans seem to be made in a
complete forgetfulness of him and his interests. It all has the air of a
feminine plot. The coöperative kitchens, and the labor by which women's
economic independence is to be achieved, seem the means to an end.

And so they are. But the end, as revealed in Mrs. Gilman's poems, is
that one which all intelligent men must desire. I do not know whether or
not the more elaborate coöperative schemes of Mrs. Gilman are practical;
and I fancy that she rather exaggerates the possibilities of independent
work for women who have or intend to have children. But the spirit
behind these plans is one which cannot but be in the greatest degree
stimulating and beneficent in its effect upon her sex.

For Mrs. Gilman is, first of all, a poet, an idealist. She is a lover
of life. She rejoices in beauty and daring and achievement, in all the
fine and splendid things of the world. She does not merely disapprove of
the contemporary "home" as wasteful and inefficient--she hates it
because it vulgarizes life. In this "home," this private food-preparing
and baby-rearing establishment, she sees a machine which breaks down all
that is good and noble in women, which degrades and pettifies them. The
contrast between the instinctive ideals of young women and the sordid
realities into which housekeeping plunges them is to her intolerable.
And in the best satirical verses of modern times she ridicules these
unnecessary shames. In one spirited piece she points out that the
soap-vat, the pickle-tub, even the loom and wheel, have lost their
sanctity, have been banished to shops and factories:

    But bow ye down to the Holy Stove,
      The Altar of the Home!

The real feeling of Mrs. Gilman is revealed in these lines, which voice,
indeed, the angry mood of many an outraged housewife who finds herself
the serf of a contraption of cast-iron:

    ... We toil to keep the altar crowned
      With dishes new and nice,
    And Art and Love, and Time and Truth,
    We offer up, with Health and Youth
      In daily sacrifice.

Mrs. Gilman is not under the illusion that the conditions of work
outside the home are perfect; she is, indeed, a socialist, and as such
is engaged in the great task of revolutionizing the basis of modern
industry. But she has looked into women's souls, and turned away in
disgust at the likeness of a dirty kitchen which those souls present.

Into these lives corrupted by the influences of the "home" nothing can
come unspoiled--nothing can enter in its original stature and beauty.
She says:

    Birth comes. Birth--
    The breathing re-creation of the earth!
    All earth, all sky, all God, life's sweet deep whole,
    Newborn again to each new soul!
    "Oh, are you? What a shame! Too bad, my dear!
    How well you stand it, too! It's very queer
    The dreadful trials women have to carry;
    But you can't always help it when you marry.
    Oh, what a sweet layette! What lovely socks!
    What an exquisite puff and powder box!
    Who is your doctor? Yes, his skill's immense--
    But it's a dreadful danger and expense!"

And so with love, and death, and work--all are smutted and debased. And
her revolt is a revolt against that which smuts and debases
them--against those artificial channels which break up the strong, pure
stream of woman's energy into a thousand little stagnant canals, covered
with spiritual pond-scum.

It is a part of her idealism to conceive life in terms of war. So it is
that she scorns compromise, for in war compromise is treason. And so it
is that she has heart for the long, slow marshaling of forces, and the
dingy details of the commissariat--for these things are necessary if the
cry of victory is ever to ring out over the battlefield. Some of her
phrases have so militant an air that they seem to have been born among
the captains and the shouting. They make us ashamed of our vicious
civilian comfort.

Mrs. Gilman's attitude toward the bearing and rearing of children is
easy to misapprehend. She does seem to relegate these things to the
background of women's lives. She does deny to these things a tremendous
importance. Why, she asks, is it so important that women should bear and
rear children to live lives as empty and poor as their own? Surely, she
says, it is more important to make life something worth giving to
children! No, she insists, it is not sufficient to be a mother: an
oyster can be a mother. It is necessary that a woman should be a person
as well as a mother. She must know and do.

And as for the ideal of love which is founded on masculine privilege,
she satirizes it very effectively in some verses entitled "Wedded
Bliss":

    "O come and be my mate!" said the Eagle to the Hen;
        "I love to soar, but then
        I want my mate to rest
        Forever in the nest!"
        Said the Hen, "I cannot fly
        I have no wish to try,
    But I joy to see my mate careering through the sky!"
    They wed, and cried, "Ah, this is Love, my own!"
    And the Hen sat, the Eagle soared, alone.

Woman, in Mrs. Gilman's view, must not be content with Hendom: the sky
is her province, too. Of all base domesticity, all degrading love, she
is the enemy. She gives her approval only to that work which has in it
something high and free, and that love which is the dalliance of the
eagles.



CHAPTER III

EMMELINE PANKHURST AND JANE ADDAMS


A few months ago it was rather the fashion to reply to some political
verses by Mr. Kipling which assumed to show that women should not be
given the ballot, and which had as their refrain:

    The female of the species is more deadly than the male!

But it seems that no one pointed out that this fact, even in the limited
sense in which it is a fact in the human species, is an argument for
giving women the vote.

For if women are, as Mr. Kipling says, lacking in a sense of abstract
justice, in patience, in the spirit of compromise; if they are violent
and unscrupulous in gaining an end upon which they have set their
hearts, then by all means they should be rendered comparatively harmless
by being given the ballot. For it is characteristic of a republic that
its political machinery, created in order to carry out the will of the
people, comes to respond with difficulty to that will, while being
perfectly susceptible to other influences. Republican government, when
not modified by drastic democratic devices, is an expensive, cumbrous,
and highly inefficient method of carrying out the popular will; and
casting a vote is like nothing so much as casting bread upon the waters.
It shall return--after many days. By voting, by exercising an
infinitesimal pressure on our complex, slow-moving political mechanism,
one cannot--it is a sad fact--do much good; but one cannot--and it
should encourage the pessimistic Mr. Kipling--one cannot, even though a
woman, do much harm.

This is not, however, a disquisition on woman suffrage. There is only
one argument for woman suffrage: women want it; there are no arguments
against it. But one may profitably inquire, What will be the effect of
the emergence of women into politics upon politics itself? And one may
hope to find an answer in the temperament and career of certain
representative leaders of the woman's movement. Let us accordingly turn
to the accredited leader of the English "votes for women" movement, and
to the woman in the American movement who is best known to the public.

That Miss Jane Addams has become known chiefly through other activities
does not matter here. It is temperament and career in which we are
immediately interested. What is perhaps the most outstanding fact in the
temperament of Miss Addams is revealed only indirectly in her
autobiography: it may be called the passion of conciliation.

Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst has by her actions written herself down for a
fighter. She has but recently been released from Holloway jail, where
she was serving a term of imprisonment for "conspiracy and violence." In
a book by H. G. Wells, which contains a very bitter attack on the
woman's suffrage movement (I refer to "Ann Veronica"), she is described
as "implacable"; and I believe that it is she to whom Mr. Wells refers
as being "as incapable of argument as a steam roller broken loose." The
same things might have been said of Sherman on his dreadful march to the
sea. These phrases, malicious as they are, contain what I am inclined to
accept as an accurate description of Mrs. Pankhurst's temperament.

No one would call Mrs. Pankhurst a conciliator. And no one would call
Miss Addams "implacable." It is not intended to suggest that Miss Addams
is one of those inveterate compromisers who prefer a bad peace to a good
war. But she has the gift of imaginative sympathy; and it is impossible
for her to have toward either party in a conflict the cold hostility
which each party has for the other. She sees both sides; and even though
one side is the wrong side, she cannot help seeing why its partisans
believe in it.

"If the under dog were always right," Miss Addams has said, "one might
quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but
obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong,
but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly
reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession
of prejudice to the other almost insuperable difficulties in
understanding him."

Miss Addams has taken in good faith the social settlement ideal--"to
span the gulf between the rich and the poor, or between those who have
had cultural opportunities and those who have not, by the process of
neighborliness." In her writings, as in her work, there is never sounded
the note of defiance. Even in defense of the social settlement and its
methods of conciliation (which have been venomously assailed by the
newspapers during Chicago's fits of temporary insanity, as in the
Averbuch case), Miss Addams has not become militant. She has never
ceased to be serenely reasonable.

But when one comes to ask how powerful Miss Addams' example has been,
one is forced to admit that it has been limited. There are two other
settlement houses in Chicago which are managed in the spirit of Hull
House. But all the others--and there are about forty settlement houses
in the city--have discarded almost openly the principle of conciliation.
They are efficient, or religious, or something else, but they are afraid
of being too sympathetic with the working class. They do not, for
instance, permit labor unions to meet in their halls. The splendid
social idealism of the '80s, of which Miss Addams is representative, has
disappeared, leaving two sides angry and hostile and with none but Miss
Addams believing in the possibility of finding any common ground for
action. One event after another from the Pullman strike to the Averbuch
case has brought this hostility out into the open, with Miss Addams
occupying neutral ground, and left high and dry upon it.

It is the fact that Miss Addams has not been able to imbue the movement
in which she is a leader with her own spirit. Her career has been
successful only so far as individual genius could make it successful. If
one compares her achievement to that of Mrs. Pankhurst, one sees that
the latter is startingly social in its nature.

For Mrs. Pankhurst has called upon women to be like herself, to display
her own Amazonian qualities. She called upon shop girls and college
students and wives and old women to make physical assaults on cabinet
ministers, to raid parliament and fight with policemen, to destroy
property and go to prison, to endure almost every indignity from the
mobs and from their jailers, to suffer in health and perhaps to die,
exactly as soldiers suffer and die in a campaign.

And they did. They answered her call by the thousands. They have fought
and suffered, and some of them have died. If this had been the result of
individual genius in Mrs. Pankhurst, transforming peaceful girls into
fighters out of hand, she would be the most extraordinary person of the
age. But it is impossible to believe that all this militancy was created
out of the void. It was simply awakened where it lay sleeping in these
women's hearts.

Mrs. Pankhurst has performed no miracle. She has only shown to us the
truth which we have blindly refused to see. She has had the insight to
recognize in women generally the same fighting spirit which she found in
herself, and the courage to draw upon it. She has enabled us to see what
women really are like, just as Miss Addams has by her magnificent
anomalies shown us what women are not like.

Can anyone doubt this? Can anyone, seeing the lone eminence of Miss
Addams, assert that imaginative sympathy, patience, and the spirit of
conciliation are the ordinary traits of women? Can anyone, seeing the
battle frenzy which Mrs. Pankhurst has evoked with a signal in thousands
of ordinary Englishwomen, deny that women have a fighting soul?

And can anyone doubt the effect which the emergence of women into
politics will have, eventually, on politics? Eventually, for in spite of
their boasted independence the decorous example of men will rule them at
first. But when they have become used to politics--well, we shall find
that we have harnessed an unruly Niagara!

In women as voters we shall have an element impatient of restraint,
straining at the rules of procedure, cynical of excuses for inaction;
not always by any means on the side of progress; making every mistake
possible to ignorance and self-conceit; but transforming our politics
from a vicious end to an efficient means--from a cancer into an organ.

This, with but little doubt, is the historic mission of women. They
will not escape a certain taming by politics. But that they should be
permanently tamed I find impossible to believe. Rather they will subdue
it to their purposes, remold it nearer to their hearts' desire, change
it as men would never dream of changing it, wreck it savagely in the
face of our masculine protest and merrily rebuild it anew in the face of
our despair. With their aid we may at last achieve what we seem to be
unable to achieve unaided--a democracy.

Meanwhile let us understand this suffrage movement. Let us understand
that we have in militancy rather than in conciliation, in action rather
than in wisdom, the keynote of woman in politics. And we males, who have
so long played in our politics at innocent games of war, we shall have
an opportunity to fight in earnest at the side of the Valkyrs.



CHAPTER IV

OLIVE SCHREINER AND ISADORA DUNCAN


I hope that no one will see in the conjuncture of these names a mere
wanton fantasy, or a mere sensational contrast. To me there is something
extraordinarily appropriate in that conjuncture, inasmuch as the work of
Olive Schreiner and the work of Isadora Duncan supplement each other.

It is the drawback of the woman's movement that in any one of its
aspects (heightened and colored as such an aspect often is by the
violence of propaganda) it may appear too fiercely narrow. That women
should make so much fuss about getting the vote, or that they should so
excite themselves over the prospect of working for wages, will appear
incomprehensible to many people who have a proper regard for art, for
literature, and for the graces of social intercourse. It is only when
the woman's movement is seen broadly, in a variety of its aspects, that
there comes the realization that here is a cause in which every fine
aspiration has a place, a cause from which sincere lovers of truth and
beauty have nothing really to fear.

Mrs. Olive Schreiner stands, by virtue of her latest book, "Women and
Labor," as an exponent of the doctrine that would send women into every
field of economic activity; or, rather, the doctrine that finds in the
forces which are driving them there a savior of her sex from the
degradation of parasitism. In behalf of this doctrine she has expended
all that eloquence and passion which have made her one of the figures in
modern literature and a spokesman for all women who have not learned to
speak that hieratic language which is heard, as the inexpressive speech
of daily life is not heard, across space and time.

Miss Isadora Duncan stands as representative of the renaissance in
dancing. She has brought back to us the antique beauty of an art of
which we have had only relics and memento in classic sculpture and
decoration. She has made us despise the frigid artifice of the ballet,
and taught us that in the natural movements of the body are contained
the highest possibilities of choregraphic beauty. It has been to many of
us one of the finest experiences of our lives to see, for the first
time, the marble maiden of the Grecian urn come to life in her, and all
the leaf-fringed legends of Arcady drift before our enamored eyes. She
has touched our lives with the magic of immemorial loveliness.

But to class Olive Schreiner as a sociologist and Isadora Duncan as a
dancer, to divorce them by any such categories, is to do them both an
injustice. For they are sister workers in the woman's movement. They
have each shown the way to a new freedom of the body and the soul.

The woman's movement is a product of the evolutionary science of the
nineteenth century. Women's rebellions there have been before, utopian
visions there have been, which have contributed no little to the modern
movement by the force of their tradition and ever-living spirit. No Joan
of Arc has led men to victory, no Lady Godiva has sacrificed her
modesty--nay, even, no courtesan has taught a feeble king how to rule
his country--without feeding the flame of feminine aspiration. But it is
modern science which, by giving us a new view of the body, its
functions, its needs, its claim upon the world, has laid the basis for a
successful feminist movement. When the true history of this movement is
written it will contain more about Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman,
perhaps, than about Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. In any
case, it is to the body that one looks for the Magna Charta of feminism.

The eye--that is to say--is guarantor for the safety of art in a future
régime under the dominance of women; and the ear for poetry. These have
their functions and their needs, and the woman of the future will not
deny them.

It is the hand that Olive Schreiner would emancipate from idleness. She
knows the significance of the hand in human history. It was by virtue of
the hand that we, and not some other creature, gained lordship over the
earth. It was the hand (marvelous instrument, coaxing out of the
directing will an ever-increasing subtlety) that made possible the human
brain, and all the vistas of reason and imagination by which our little
lives gain their peculiar grandeur.

And this hand, if it be a woman's in the present day, is doomed to the
smallest activities. "Our spinning wheels are all broken ...Our hoes and
grindstones passed from us long ago.... Year by year, day by day, there
is a silently working but determined tendency for the sphere of women's
domestic labors to contract itself." Even the training of her child is
taken away from the mother by the "mighty and inexorable demands of
modern civilization." That condition is to her intolerable; and it is on
behalf of women's empty hands that she makes her demand: "that, in that
strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman,
where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and
relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of
honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of
the Children of Woman."

And what of Miss Duncan--what is her part in the woman's movement? In
her book on "The Dance" she tells a story: "A woman once asked me why I
dance with bare feet, and I replied, 'Madam, I believe in the religion
of the beauty of the human foot'; and the lady replied, 'But I do not,'
and I said: 'Yet you must, Madam, for the expression and intelligence of
the human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of man.'
'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in the evolution of man.' At
this said I, 'My task is at an end. I refer you to my most revered
teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel--' 'But,' said the
lady, 'I do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel--' At this point I could
think of nothing more to say. So you see that, to convince people, I am
of little value and ought not to speak."

But rather to dance! Yet it is good to find so explicit a statement of
the idea which she nobly expresses in her dancing. For, as the hand is
the symbol of that constructive exertion of the body which we call work,
so is the foot the symbol of that diffusive exertion of the body which
we call play. Isadora Duncan would emancipate the one as Olive Schreiner
would emancipate the other--to new activities and new delights.

And if such work is not a thing for itself only, but a gateway to a new
world, so is such play not a thing for itself only. "It is not only a
question of true art," writes Miss Duncan, "it is a question of race, of
the development of the female sex to beauty and health, of the return to
the original strength and the natural movements of woman's body. It is a
question of the development of perfect mothers and the birth of healthy
and beautiful children." Here we have an inspiriting expression of the
idea which through the poems of Walt Whitman and the writings of various
moderns, has renovated the modern soul and made us see, without any
obscene blurring by Puritan spectacles, the goodness of the whole body.
This is as much a part of the woman's movement as the demand for a vote
(or, rather, it is more central and essential a part); and only by
realizing this is it possible to understand that movement.

The body is no longer to be separated in the thought of women from the
soul: "The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have
grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul
will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not belong to
a nation, but to all humanity. She will dance, not in the form of nymph,
nor fairy, nor coquette, but in the form of woman in its greatest and
purest expression. She will realize the mission of woman's body and the
holiness of all its parts. She will dance the changing life of nature,
showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of
her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the
message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall
dance the freedom of woman.

"She will help womankind to a new knowledge of the possible strength and
beauty of their bodies, and the relation of their bodies to the earth
nature and to the children of the future. She will dance, the body
emerging again from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, emerging not
in the nudity of primitive man, but in a new nakedness, no longer at war
with spirituality and intelligence, but joining itself forever with this
intelligence in a glorious harmony.

"Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future; the free spirit, who will
inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet
been; more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the Greek, the early
Italian, than all women of past centuries--the highest intelligence in
the freest body!"

If the woman's movement means anything, it means that women are
demanding everything. They will not exchange one place for another, nor
give up one right to pay for another, but they will achieve all rights
to which their bodies and brains give them an implicit title. They will
have a larger political life, a larger motherhood, a larger social
service, a larger love, and they will reconstruct or destroy
institutions to that end as it becomes necessary. They will not be
content with any concession or any triumph until they have conquered all
experience.



CHAPTER V

BEATRICE WEBB AND EMMA GOLDMAN


The careers of these two women serve admirably to exhibit the woman's
movement in still another aspect, and to throw light upon the essential
nature of woman's character. These careers stand in plain contrast.
Beatrice Webb has compiled statistics, and Emma Goldman has preached the
gospel of freedom. It remains to be shown which is the better and the
more characteristically feminine gift to the world.

Beatrice Potter was the daughter of a Canadian railway president. Born
in 1858, she grew up in a time when revolutionary movements were in the
making. She was a pupil of Herbert Spencer, and it was perhaps from him
that she learned so to respect her natural interest in facts that the
brilliancy of no generalization could lure her into forgetting them. At
all events, she was captured permanently by the magic of facts. She
studied working-class life in Lancashire and East London at first hand,
and in 1885 joined Charles Booth in his investigations of English social
conditions. These investigations (which in my amateur ignorance I always
confused with those of General Booth of the Salvation Army!) were
published in four large volumes entitled "Life and Labor of the People."
Miss Potter's special contributions were articles on the docks, the
tailoring trade, and the Jewish community. Later she published a book on
"The Coöperative Movement in Great Britain." Then, in 1892, she married
Sidney Webb, a man extraordinarily of her own sort, and became
confirmed, if such a thing were necessary, in her statistical habit of
mind.

Meanwhile, in 1883, the Fabian Society had been founded. But first a
word about statistics. "Statistics" does not mean a long list of
figures. It means the spreading of knowledge of facts. Statistics may be
called the dogma that knowledge is dynamic--that it is somehow operative
in bringing about that great change which all intelligent people desire
(and which the Fabians conceived as Socialism). The Fabian Society was
founded on the dogma of statistics as on a rock. The Fabians did not
start a newspaper, nor create a new political party, nor organize public
meetings; but they wrote to the newspapers already in existence, ran for
office on party tickets already in the field, and made speeches to other
organizations. That is to say, they went about like the cuckoo, laying
their statistical eggs in other people's nests and expecting to see them
hatch into enlightened public opinion and progressive legislation.

Some of them hatched and some of them didn't. The point is that we have
in this section of Beatrice Webb's career something typical of herself.
She has gone on, serving on government commissions, writing (with her
husband) the history of Trades Unionism, patiently collecting statistics
and getting them printed in black ink on white paper, making detailed
plans for the abolition of poverty, and always concerning herself with
the homely fact.

At the time that Beatrice Potter joined Mr. Booth in his social
investigations there was a 16-year-old Jewish girl living in the
German-Russian province of Kurland. A year later, in 1886, this girl,
Emma Goldman by name, came to America, to escape the inevitable
persecutions attending on any lover of liberty in Russia. She had been
one of those who had gone "to the people"; and it was as a working girl
that she came to America.

She had, that is to say, the heightened sensibilities, the keen
sympathies, of the middle class idealist, and the direct contact with
the harsh realities of our social and industrial conditions which is the
lot of the worker. Her first experiences in America disabused her of the
traditional belief that America was a refuge where the oppressed of all
lands were welcome. The treatment of immigrants aboard ship, the
humiliating brutalities of the officials at Castle Garden, and the
insolent tyranny of the New York police convinced her that she had
simply come from one oppressed land to another.

She went to work in a clothing factory, her wages being $2.50 a week.
She had ample opportunities to see the degradations of our economic
system, especially as it affects women. So it was not strange that she
should be drawn into the American labor movement, which was then, with
the Knights of Labor, the eight-hour agitation, and the propaganda of
the Socialists and the Anarchists, at its height. She became acquainted
with various radicals, read pamphlets and books, and heard speeches. She
was especially influenced by the eloquent writings of Johann Most in his
journal Freiheit.

So little is known, and so much absurd nonsense is believed, about the
Anarchists, that it is necessary to state dogmatically a few facts. If
these facts seem odd, the reader is respectfully urged to verify them.
One fact is that secret organizations of Anarchists plotting a violent
overthrow of the government do not exist, and never have existed, save
in the writings of Johann Most and in the imagination of the police: the
whole spirit of Anarchism is opposed to such organizations. Another fact
is that Anarchists do not believe in violence of any kind, or in any
exercise of force; when they commit violence it is not as Anarchists,
but as outraged human beings. They believe that violent reprisals are
bound to be provoked among workingmen by the tyrannies to which they are
subjected; but they abjure alike the bomb and the policeman's club.

There was a brief period in which Anarchists, under the influence of
Johann Most, believed in (even if they did not practice) the use of
dynamite. But this period was ended, in America, by the hanging of
several innocent men in Chicago in 1887; which at least served the
useful purpose of showing radicals that it was a bad plan even to talk
of dynamite. And this hanging, which was the end of what may be called
the Anarchist "boom" in this country, was the beginning of Emma
Goldman's career as a publicist.

Since 1887 the Anarchists have lost influence among workingmen until
they are today negligible--unless one credits them with Syndicalism--as
a factor in the labor movement. The Anarchists have, in fact, left the
industrial field more and more and have entered into other kinds of
propaganda. They have especially "gone in for kissing games."

And Emma Goldman reflects, in her career, the change in Anarchism. She
has become simply an advocate of freedom--freedom of every sort. She
does not advocate violence any more than Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated
violence. It is, in fact, as an essayist and speaker of the kind, if not
the quality, of Emerson, Thoreau, or George Francis Train, that she is
to be considered.

Aside from these activities (and the evading of our overzealous police
in times of stress) she has worked as a trained nurse and midwife; she
conducted a kind of radical salon in New York, frequented by such people
as John Swinton and Benjamin Tucker; she traveled abroad to study social
conditions; she has become conversant with such modern writings as those
of Hauptmann, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Zola, and Thomas Hardy. It is stated
that the "Rev. Mr. Parkhurst, during the Lexow investigation, did his
utmost to induce her to join the Vigilance Committee in order to fight
Tammany Hall." She was the manager of Paul Orlenoff and Mme. Nazimova.
She was a friend of Ernest Crosby. Her library, it is said, would be
taken for that of a university extension lecturer on literature.

It will thus be seen that Emma Goldman is of a type familiar enough in
America, and conceded a popular respect. She has a legitimate social
function--that of holding before our eyes the ideal of freedom. She is
licensed to taunt us with our moral cowardice, to plant in our souls the
nettles of remorse at having acquiesced so tamely in the brutal artifice
of present day society.

I submit the following passage from her writings ("Anarchism and Other
Essays") as at once showing her difference from other radicals and
exhibiting the nature of her appeal to her public:

"The misfortune of woman is not that she is unable to do the work of a
man, but that she is wasting her life force to outdo him, with a
tradition of centuries which has left her physically incapable of
keeping pace with him. Oh, I know some have succeeded, but at what cost,
at what terrific cost! The import is not the kind of work woman does,
but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage
or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that
will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her
independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting
herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by
refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children
unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State,
society, the husband, the family, etc.; by making her life simpler, but
deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance
of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of
public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot,
will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the
world; a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine
fire, of life giving; a creator of free men and women."

There is little in this that Ibsen would not have said amen to. But--and
this is the conclusion to which my chapter draws--Ibsen has said it
already, and said it more powerfully. Emma Goldman--who (if among women
anyone) should have for us a message of her own, striking to the
heart--repeats, in a less effective cadence, what she has learned from
him.

The work of Beatrice Webb is the prose of revolution. The work of Ibsen
is its poetry. Beatrice Webb has performed her work--one comes to
feel--as well as Ibsen has his. And one wonders if, after all, the prose
is not that which women are best endowed to succeed in.

A book review (written by a woman) which I have at hand contains some
generalizations which bear on the subject. "This is a woman's book [says
the reviewer], and a book which could only have been written by a woman,
though it is singularly devoid of most of the qualities which are
usually recognized as feminine. For romance and sentiment do not
properly lie in the woman's domain. She deals, when she is herself, with
the material facts of the life she knows. Her talent is to exhibit them
in the remorseless light of reality and shorn of all the glamour of
idealism. Great and poetical imagination rarely informs her art, but
within the strictness of its limits it lives by an intense and
scrupulous sincerity of observation and an uncompromising recognition of
the logic of existence."

If that is true, shall we not then expect a future more largely
influenced by women to have more of the hard, matter-of-fact quality,
the splendid realism characteristic of woman "when she is herself"?



CHAPTER VI

MARGARET DREIER ROBINS


The work of Margaret Dreier Robins has been done in the National Women's
Trade Union League. It might be supposed that the aim of such an
organization is sufficiently explicit in its title: to get higher wages
and shorter hours. But I fancy that it would be a truer thing to say
that its aim is to bring into being that ideal of American womanhood
which Walt Whitman described:

    They are not one jot less than I am,
    They are tann'd in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
    Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
    They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,
      retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
    They are ultimate in their own right--they are
      calm, clear, well-possessed of themselves.

When Whitman made this magnificent prophecy for American womanhood the
Civil War had not been fought and its economic consequences were
unguessed at. The factory system, which had come into England in the
last century, bringing with it the most unspeakable exploitation of
women and children, had hardly gained a foothold in this country. In
1840, of the seven employments open to women (teaching, needlework,
keeping boarders, working in cotton mills, in bookbinderies, typesetting
and household service) only one was representative of the new industrial
condition which today affects so profoundly the feminine physique. And
to the daughters of a nation that was still imbued with the pioneer
spirit, work in cotton mills appealed so little that they undertook it
only for unusually high pay. Anyone of that period seeing the
red-cheeked, robust, intelligent, happy girl operatives of Lowell might
have dismissed his fears of the factory as a sinister influence in the
development of American womanhood and gone on to dream, with Walt
Whitman, of a race of "fierce, athletic girls."

But two things happened. With the growing flood of immigration, the
factories were abandoned more and more to the "foreigners," the
native-born citizens losing their pride in the excellence of working
conditions and the character of the operatives. And all the while the
factory was becoming more and more an integral part of our civilization,
demanding larger and larger multitudes of girls and women to attend its
machinery. So that, with the enormous development of industry since the
Civil War, the factory has become the chief field of feminine endeavor
in America. In spite of the great opening up of all sorts of work to
women, in spite of the store, the office, the studio, the professions,
still the factory remains most important in any consideration of the
health and strength of women.

If the greatest part of our womankind spends its life in factories, and
if it further appears that this is no temporary situation, but
(practically speaking) a permanent one, then it becomes necessary to
inquire how far the factory is hindering the creation of that ideal
womanhood which Walt Whitman predicted for us.

As opposed to the old-fashioned method of manufacture in the home (or
the sweatshop, which is the modern equivalent), the factory often shows
a gain in light and air, a decrease of effort, an added leisure; while,
on the other hand, there is a considerable loss of individual freedom
and an increase in monotony. But child labor, a too long working day,
bad working conditions, lack of protection from fire, personal
exploitation by foremen, inhumanly low wages, and all sorts of petty
injustice, though not essential to the system, are prominent features of
factory work as it generally exists.

People who consider every factory an Inferno, however, and have only
pity for its workers, are far from understanding the situation. Here is
a field of work which is capable of competing successfully with domestic
service, and even of attracting girls from homes where there exists no
absolute necessity for women's wages. Yet at its contemporary best, with
a ten-hour law in operation, efficient factory inspection, decent
working conditions and a just and humane management, the factory remains
an institution extremely perilous to the Whitmanic ideal of womanhood.

But there are women who, undaunted by the new conditions brought about
by a changing economic system, seize upon those very conditions to use
them as the means to their end: such a woman is Mrs. Robins. Has a new
world, bounded by factory walls and noisy with the roar of machinery,
grown up about us, to keep women from their heritage? She will help them
to use those very walls and that very machinery to achieve their
destiny, a destiny of which a physical well-being is, as Walt Whitman
knew it to be, the most certain symbol.

The factory already gives women a certain independence. It may yet give
them pleasure, the joy of creation. Indeed, it must, when the workers
require it; and those who are most likely to require it are the women
workers.

It is well known that with the ultra-development of the machine, the
subdivision of labor, the régime of piecework, it has become practically
impossible for the worker to take any artistic pleasure in his product.
It is not so well known how necessary such pleasure in the product is to
the physical well-being of women--how utterly disastrous to their
nervous organization is the monotony and irresponsibility of piecework.
This method--which men workers have grumbled at, but to which they seem
to have adjusted themselves--bears its fruits among women in
neurasthenia, headaches, and the derangement of the organs which are the
basis of their different nervous constitution. It is sufficiently clear
to those who have seen the personal reactions of working girls to the
piecework system, that when women attain, as men in various industries
have attained, the practical management of the factory, piecework will
get a setback.

But not merely good conditions, not merely a living wage, not merely a
ten or an eight hour day--all that self-government in the shop can bring
is the object of the Women's Trade Union League.

"The chief social gain of the union shop," says Mrs. Robins, "is not
its generally better wages and shorter hours, but rather the incentive
it offers for initiative and social leadership, the call it makes,
through the common industrial relationship and the common hope, upon the
moral and reasoning faculties, and the sense of fellowship, independence
and group strength it develops. In every workshop of say thirty girls
there is undreamed of initiative and capacity for social leadership and
control--unknown wealth of intellectual and moral resources."

It is, in fact, this form of activity which to many thousands of factory
girls makes the difference between living and existing, between a
painful, necessary drudgery and a happy exertion of all their faculties.
It can give them a more useful education than any school, a more vital
faith than any church, a more invigorating sense of power than any other
career open to them.

To do all these things it must be indigenous to working-class soil. No
benefaction originating in the philanthropic motives of middle-class
people, no enterprise of patronage, will ever have any such meaning. A
movement, to have such meaning, must be of the working class, and by the
working class, as well as for the working class. It must be imbued with
working-class feeling, and it must subserve working-class ideals.

It is the distinction of Mrs. Robins that she has seen this. She has
gone to the workers to learn rather than to teach--she has sought to
unfold the ideals and capacities latent in working girls rather than
impress upon them the alien ideals and capacities of another class.

"Just"--it is Mrs. Robins that speaks--"as under a despotic church and
a feudal state the possible power and beauty of the common people was
denied expression, so under industrial feudalism the intellectual and
moral powers of the workers are slowly choked to death, with
incalculable loss to the individual and the race. It is easy to kill; it
requires a great spirit as well as a great mind to arouse the dormant
energies, to vitalize them and to make them creative forces for good."

One is reminded of the words of John Galsworthy, addressed to
workingwomen: "There is beginning to be a little light in the sky;
whether the sun is ever to break through depends on your constancy, and
courage, and wisdom. The future is in your hands more than in the hands
of men; it rests on your virtues and well-being, rather than on the
virtues and the welfare of men, for it is you who produce and mold the
Future."

There are 6,000,000 working women in the United States, and half of
them are girls under 21. One may go out any day in the city streets, at
morning or noon or evening, and look at a representative hundred of
them. The factories have not been able to rob them of beauty and
strength and the charm of femininity, and in that beauty and strength
and charm there is a world of promise. And that promise already begins
to be unfolded when to them comes Mrs. Robins with a gospel germane to
their natures, saying, "Long enough have you dreamed contemptible
dreams."



CHAPTER VII

ELLEN KEY


In these chapters a sincere attempt has been made not so much to show
what a few exceptional women have accomplished as to exhibit through a
few prominent figures the essential nature of women, and to show what
may be expected from a future in which women will have a larger freedom
and a larger influence.

It has been pointed out that the peculiar idealism of women is one that
works itself out through the materials of workaday life, and which seeks
to break or remake those materials by way of fulfilling that idealism;
it has been shown that this idealism, as contrasted with the more
abstract and creative idealism of men, deserves to be called
practicalism, a practicalism of a noble and beautiful sort which we are
far from appreciating; and as complementing these forms of activity, the
play instinct, the instinct of recreation, has been pointed out as the
parallel to the creative or poetic instinct of men.

Woman as reconstructor of domestic economics, woman as a destructive
political agent of enormous potency, woman as worker, woman as dancer,
woman as statistician, woman as organizer of the forces of labor--in
these it has been the intent to show the real woman of today and of
tomorrow.

There have been other aspects of her deserving of attention in such a
series, notably her aspect as mother and as educator. If she has not
been shown as poet, as artist, as scientist, as talker (for talk is a
thing quite as important as poetry or science or art), it has not been
so much because of an actual lack of specific examples of women
distinguished in these fields as because of the unrepresentative
character of such examples.

Here, then, is a man's view of modern woman. To complete that view, to
round off that conception, I now speak of Ellen Key.

Her writings have had a peculiar career in America, one which perhaps
prevents a clear understanding of their character. On the one hand, they
have seemed to many to be radically "advanced"; to thousands of
middle-class women, who have heard vaguely of these new ideas, and who
have secretly and strongly desired to know more of them, her "Love and
Marriage" has come as a revolutionary document, the first outspoken word
of scorn for conventional morality, the first call to them to take their
part in the breaking of new paths.

On the other hand, it must be remembered that America is the home of
Mormonism, of the Oneida Community, of the Woodhull and Claflin
"free-love" movement of the '70s, of "Dianism" and a hundred other
obscure but pervasive sexual cults--in short, of movements of greater or
less respectability, capable of giving considerable currency to their
beliefs. And they have given considerable currency to their beliefs. In
spite of the dominant tone of Puritanism in American thought, our social
life has been affected to an appreciable extent by these beliefs.

And these beliefs may be summed up hastily, but, on the whole, justly,
as materialistic--in the common and unfavorable sense. They have
converged, from one direction or another, upon the opinion that sex is
an animal function, no more sacred than any other animal function,
which, by a ridiculous over-estimation, is made to give rise to
jealousy, unhappiness, madness, vice, and crime.

It is a fact that the Puritan temperament readily finds this opinion,
if not the program which accompanies it, acceptable, as one may discover
in private conversation with respectable Puritans of both sexes. And it
is more unfortunately true that the present-day rebellion against
conventional morality in America has found, in Hardy and Shaw and other
anti-romanticists, a seeming support of this opinion. So that one finds
in America today (though some people may not know about it) an
undercurrent of impatient materialism in matters of sex. To become freed
from the inadequate morality of Puritanism is, for thousands of young
people, to adopt another morality which is, if more sound in many ways,
certainly as inadequate as the other.

So that Ellen Key comes into the lives of many in this country as a
conservative force, holding up a spiritual ideal, the ideal of monogamy,
and defending it with a breadth of view, a sanity, and a fervor that
make it something different from the cold institution which these
readers have come to despise. She makes every allowance for human
nature, every concession to the necessities of temperament, every
recognition of the human need for freedom, and yet makes the love of one
man and one woman seem the highest ideal, a thing worth striving and
waiting and suffering for.

She cherishes the spiritual magic of sex as the finest achievement of
the race, and sees it as the central and guiding principle in our social
and economic evolution. She seeks to construct a new morality which will
do what the present one only pretends, and with the shallowest and most
desperately pitiful of pretenses, to do. She would help our struggling
generation to form a new code of ethics, and one of subtle stringency,
in this most important and difficult of relations.

Thus her writings, of which "Love and Marriage" will here be taken as
representative, have a twofold aspect--the radical and the conservative.
But of the two, the conservative is by far the truer. It is as a
conservator, with too firm a grip on reality to be lured into the
desertion of any real values so far achieved by the race, that she may
be best considered.

And germane to her conservatism, which is the true conservatism of her
sex, is her intellectual habit, her literary method. She is not a
logician, it is true. She lacks logic, and with it order and clearness
and precision, because of the very fact of her firm hold on realities.
The realities are too complex to be brought into any completely logical
and orderly relation, too elusive to be stated with utter precision.
There is a whole universe in "Love and Marriage"; and it resembles the
universe in its wildness, its tumultuousness, its contradictory quality.
Her book, like the universe, is in a state of flux--it refuses to remain
one fixed and dead thing. It is a book which in spite of some attempt at
arrangement may be begun at any point and read in any order. It is a
mixture of science, sociology, and mysticism; it has a wider range than
an orderly book could possibly have; it touches more points, includes
more facts, and is more convincing, in its queer way, than any other.

"Love and Marriage" is the Talmud of sexual morality. It contains
history, wisdom, poetry, psychological analysis, shrewd judgments,
generous sympathies, ... and it all bears upon the creation of that new
sexual morality for which in a thousand ways--economic, artistic, and
spiritual--we are so astonishing a mixture of readiness and unreadiness.

Ellen Key is fundamentally a conservator. But she is careful about what
she conservates. It is the right to love which she would have us
cherish, rather than the right to own another person--the beauty of
singleness of devotion rather than the cruel habit of trying to force
people to carry out rash promises made in moments of exaltation. She
conserves the greatest things and lets the others go: motherhood, as
against the exclusive right of married women to bear children; and that
personal passion which is at once physical and spiritual rather than any
of the legally standardized relations. Nor does she hesitate to speak
out for the conservation of that old custom which persists among peasant
and primitive peoples all over the world and which has been reintroduced
to the public by a recent sociologist under the term of "trial
marriage"; it must be held, she says, as the bulwark against the
corruption of prostitution and made a part of the new morality.

It is perhaps in this very matter that her attitude is capable of
being most bitterly resented. For we have lost our sense of what is old
and good, and we give the sanction of ages to parvenu virtues that are
as degraded as the rococo ornaments which were born in the same year. We
have (or the Puritans among us have) lost all moral sense in the true
meaning of the word, in that we are unable to tell good from bad if it
be not among the things that were socially respectable in the year 1860.
Ellen Key writes: "The most delicate test of a person's sense of
morality is his power in interpreting ambiguous signs in the ethical
sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line,
sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality.
In our time, ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the
condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies.
The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which this
implies in comparison with the code of so many men who, without
responsibility--and without apparent risk--purchase the repose of their
senses. The free union of love, on the other hand, gives them an
enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring
anyone. It answers to their idea of love's chastity, an idea which is
justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement, with
all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their
soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a
common longing, then they consider that they have a right to full unity
of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society
render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful
struggle which would give them neither peace nor inner purity, and which
would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the
end--love--for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed."

It is almost impossible to quote any passage from "Love and Marriage"
which is not subject to further practical modification, or which does
not present an incomplete idea of which the complement may be found
somewhere else. Even this passage is one which states a brief for the
younger generation rather than the author's whole opinion. Still, with
all these limitations, her view is one which is so different from that
commonly held by women that it may seem merely fantastic to hold it up
as an example of the conservative instinct of women. Nevertheless, it is
so. It must be remembered that the view which holds that the chastity of
unmarried women is well purchased at the price of prostitution, is a
masculine view. It is a piece of the sinister and cruel idealism of the
male mind, divorced (as the male mind is so capable of being) from
realities. No woman would ever have created prostitution to preserve the
chastity of part of her sex; and the more familiar one becomes with the
specific character of the feminine mind, the more impossible does it
seem that women will, when they have come to think and act for
themselves, permanently maintain it. Nor will they--one is forced to
believe--hesitate long at the implications of that demolition.

No, I think that with the advent of women into a larger life our
jerry-built virtues will have to go, to make room for mansions and
gardens fit to be inhabited by the human soul.

It will be like the pulling down of a rotten tenement. First (with a
great shocked outcry from some persons of my own sex) the façade goes,
looking nice enough, but showing up for painted tin what pretended to be
marble; then the dark, cavelike rooms exposed, with their blood-stained
floors and their walls ineffectually papered over the accumulated filth
and disease; and so on, lath by lath, down to the cellars, with their
hints of unspeakable horrors in the dark.

It is to this conclusion that these chapters draw: That women have a
surer instinct than men for the preservation of the truest human values,
but that their very acts of conservation will seem to the timid minds
among us like the shattering of all virtues, the debacle of
civilization, the Götterdämmerung!



CHAPTER VIII

FREEWOMEN AND DORA MARSDEN


This is by way of a postscript. Dora Marsden is a new figure in the
feminist movement. Just how she evolved is rather hard to say. Her
family were Radicals, it seems, smug British radicals; and she broke
away, first of all, into a sort of middle class socialism. She went into
settlement work. Here, it seems, she discovered what sort of person she
really was.

She was a lover of freedom. So of course she rebelled against the
interference of the middle class with the affairs of the poor, and threw
overboard her settlement work and her socialism together. She was a
believer in woman suffrage, but the autocratic government of the
organization irked her. And, besides, she felt constrained to point out
that feminism meant worlds more than a mere vote. The position of woman,
not indeed as the slave of man, but as the enslaver of man, but with the
other end of the chain fastened to her own wrist, and depriving her
quite effectually of her liberties--this irritated her. Independence to
her meant achievement, and when she heard the talk about "motherhood"
by which the women she knew excused their lack of achievement, she
was annoyed. Finally, the taboo upon the important subject of sex
exasperated her. So she started a journal to express her discontent with
all these things, and to change them.

Naturally, she called her journal The Freewoman. "Independent"
expresses much of Dora Marsden's feeling, but that word has been of late
dragged in a mire of pettiness and needs dry cleaning. It has come to
signify a woman who isn't afraid to go out at night alone or who holds a
position downtown. A word had to be chosen which had in it some
suggestion of the heroic. Hence The Freewoman.

The Freewoman was a weekly. It lived several months and then suspended
publication, and now all the women I know are poring over the back
numbers while waiting for it to start again as a fortnightly. It was a
remarkable paper. For one thing, it threw open its columns to such a
discussion of sex that dear Mrs. Humphry Ward wrote a shocked letter to
The Times about it. Of course, a good many of the ideas put forth in
this correspondence were erroneous or trivial, but it must have done the
writers no end of good to express themselves freely. For once sex was on
a plane with other subjects, a fact making tremendously for sanity. In
this Miss Marsden not only achieved a creditable journalistic feat, but
performed a valuable public service.

Her editorials were another distinctive thing. In the first issue was
an editorial on "Bondwomen," from which it would appear that perhaps
even such advanced persons as you, my dear lady, are still far from
free.

"Bondwomen are distinguished from Freewomen by a spiritual distinction.
Bondwomen are the women who are not separate spiritual entities--who are
not individuals. They are complements merely. By habit of thought, by
form of activity, and largely by preference, they round off the
personality of some other individual, rather than create or cultivate
their own. Most women, as far back as we have any record, have fitted
into this conception, and it has borne itself out in instinctive working
practice.

"And in the midst of all this there comes a cry that woman is an
individual, and that because she is an individual she must be set free.
It would be nearer the truth to say that if she is an individual she
_is_ free, and will act like those who are free. The doubtful aspect in
the situation is as to whether women are or can be individuals--that is,
free--and whether there is not danger, under the circumstances, in
labelling them free, thus giving them the liberty of action which is
allowed to the free. It is this doubt and fear which is behind the
opposition which is being offered the vanguard of those who are 'asking
for' freedom. It is the kind of fear which an engineer would have in
guaranteeing an arch equal to a strain above its strength. The opponents
of the Freewomen are not actuated by spleen or by stupidity, but by
dread. This dread is founded upon ages of experience with a being who,
however well loved, has been known to be an inferior, and who has
accepted all the conditions of inferiors. Women, women's intelligence,
and women's judgments have always been regarded with more or less secret
contempt, and when woman now speaks of 'equality,' all the natural
contempt which a higher order feels for a lower order when it presumes
bursts out into the open. This contempt rests upon quite honest and
sound instinct, so honest, indeed, that it must provide all the charm of
an unaccustomed sensation for fine gentlemen like the Curzons and
Cromers and Asquiths to feel anything quite so instinctive and
primitive.

"With the women opponents it is another matter. These latter apart,
however, it is for would-be Freewomen to realize that for them this
contempt is the healthiest thing in the world, and that those who
express it honestly feel it; that these opponents have argued quite
soundly that women have allowed themselves to be used, ever since there
has been any record of them; and that if women had had higher uses of
their own they would not have foregone them. They have never known women
to formulate imperious wants, this in itself implying lack of wants, and
this in turn implying lack of ideals. Women as a whole have shown
nothing save 'servant' attributes. All those activities which presuppose
the master qualities, the standard-making, the law-giving, the
moral-framing, belong to men. Religions, philosophies, legal codes,
standards in morals, canons in art, have all issued from men, while
women have been the 'followers,' 'believers,' the 'law-abiding,' the
'moral,' the conventionally admiring. They have been the administrators,
the servants, living by borrowed precept, receiving orders, doing
hodmen's work. For note, though some men must be servants, all women are
servants, and all the masters are men. That is the difference and
distinction. The servile condition is common to all women."

This was only the beginning of such a campaign of radical propaganda as
feminism never knew before. Miss Marsden went on to attack all the
things which bind women and keep them unfree. As such she denounced what
she considered the cant of "motherhood."

"Considering, therefore, that children, from both physiological and
psychological points of view, belong more to the woman than to the man;
considering, too, that not only does she need them more, but, as a rule,
wants them more than the man, the parental situation begins to present
elements of humor when the woman proceeds to fasten upon the man, in
return for the children she has borne him, the obligation from that time
to the end of her days, not only for the children's existence, but for
her own, also!"

When asked under what conditions, then, women should have children, she
replied that women who wanted them should save for them as for a trip to
Europe. This is frankly a gospel for a minority--a fact which does not
invalidate it in the eyes of its promulgator--but she does believe that
if women are to become the equals of men they must find some way to have
children without giving up the rest of life. It has been done!

Then, having been rebuked for her critical attitude toward the woman
suffrage organization, she showed herself in no mood to take orders from
even that source. She subjected the attitude of the members of the
organization to an examination, and found it tainted with
sentimentalism. "Of all the corruptions to which the woman's movement is
now open," she wrote, "the most poisonous and permeating is that which
flows from sentimentalism, and it is in the W. S. P. U. [Women's Social
and Political Union] that sentimentalism is now rampant.... It is this
sentimentalism that is abhorrent to us. We fight it as we would fight
prostitution, or any other social disease."

She called upon women to be individuals, and sought to demolish in
their minds any lingering desire for Authority. "There is," she wrote,
"a genuine pathos in our reliance upon the law in regard to the affairs
of our own souls. Our belief in ourselves and in our impulses is so
frail that we prefer to see it buttressed up. We are surer of our
beliefs when we see their lawfulness symbolized in the respectable blue
cloth of the policeman's uniform, and the sturdy good quality of the
prison's walls. The law gives them their passport. Well, perhaps in this
generation, for all save pioneers, the law will continue to give its
protecting shelter, but with the younger generations we believe we shall
see a stronger, prouder, and more insistent people, surer of themselves
and of the pureness of their own desires."

She did not stick at the task of formulating for women a new moral
attitude to replace the old. "We are seeking," she said, "a morality
which shall be able to point the way out of the social trap we find we
are in. We are conscious that we are concerned in the dissolution of one
social order, which is giving way to another. Men and women are both
involved, but women differently from men, because women themselves are
very different from men. The difference between men and women is the
whole difference between a religion and a moral code. Men are pagan.
They have never been Christian. Women are wholly Christian, and have
assimilated the entire genius of Christianity.

"The ideal of conduct which men have followed has been one of
self-realization, tempered by a broad principle of equity which has been
translated into practice by means of a code of laws. A man's desire and
ideal has been to satisfy the wants which a consciousness of his several
senses gives rise to. His vision of attainment has therefore been a
sensuous one, and if in his desire for attainment he has transgressed
the law, his transgression has sat but lightly upon him. A law is an
objective thing, laid upon a man's will from outside. It does not enter
the inner recesses of consciousness, as does a religion. It is nothing
more than a body of prohibitions and commands, which can be obeyed,
transgressed or evaded with little injury to the soul. With women moral
matters have been wholly different. Resting for support upon a religion,
their moral code has received its sanction and force from within. It has
thus laid hold on consciousness with a far more tenacious grip. Their
code being subjective, transgression has meant a darkening of the
spirit, a sullying of the soul. Thus the doctrine of self-renunciation,
which is the outstanding feature of Christian ethics, has had the most
favorable circumstances to insure its realization, and with women it has
won completely--so completely that it now exerts its influence
unconsciously. Seeking the realization of the will of others, and not
their own, ever waiting upon the minds of others, women have almost lost
the instinct for self-realization, the instinct for achievement in their
own persons."

Whether she is right is a moot question. Certainly in such matters as
testimony in court, the customs-tariff, and the minor city ordinances,
women show no particular respect for the law. Ibsen sought in "The
Doll's House" to show that her morality had no connection with the laws
of the world of men. Even in matters of human relationship it is
doubtful if women give any more of an "inner assent" to law than do men.
Woman's failure to achieve that domination of the world which
constitutes individuality and freedom--this Dora Marsden would explain
on the ground of a dulling of the senses. It may be more easily
explained as a result of a dulling of the imagination. The trouble is
that they are content with petty conquests.

There you have it! Inevitably one argues with Dora Marsden. That is her
value. She provokes thought. And she welcomes it. She wants everybody to
think--not to think her thoughts necessarily, nor the right thoughts
always, but that which they can and must. She is a propagandist, it is
true. But she does not create a silence, and call it conversion.

She stimulates her readers to cast out the devils that inhabit their
souls--fear, prejudice, sensitiveness. She helps them to build up their
lives on a basis of will--the exercise, not the suppression, of will.
She indurates them to the world. She liberates them to life. She is the
Max Stirner of feminism.

Freedom! That is the first word and the last with Dora Marsden. She
makes women understand for the first time what freedom means. She makes
them want to be free. She nerves them to the effort of emancipation. She
sows in a fertile soil the dragon's teeth which shall spring up as a
band of capable females, knowing what they want and taking it, asking no
leave from anybody, doing things and enjoying life--Freewomen!


       *       *       *       *       *

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Obvious punctuation errors have been repaired.
On p. 36 sucessful changed to successful (has been successful).





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