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Title: Women as World Builders
Author: Floyd Dell
Date: 1913
Language: en
Topics: feminism, history
Source: Retrieved on 26th April 2021 from https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33584

Floyd Dell

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.

top

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.

top

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.

top

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.

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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”?

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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.”

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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!

top

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!