[i]

Woman’s Voice

[ii]

[iii]

Woman’s Voice
AN ANTHOLOGY

By
JOSEPHINE CONGER-KANEKO

BOSTON
The Stratford Company
1918

Copyright 1918
The STRATFORD CO., Publishers
Boston, Mass.

The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A.

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[vi]

Just now, when the world is going through the most significant period of human history, it is well that woman’s voice be heard above the tumult. For upon woman’s activity may rest the salvation of the race.

This Anthology is not an attempt at literary effects so much as it is an attempt to present seriously woman’s viewpoint of life to a nation standing on the verge of—it knows not what!

So new is the voice of woman in the affairs of life, that in time of stress or panic it must become insistent to be heard or heeded. One book, by one woman, regardless of its strength or purpose, could not have the effect that one book by “crowds” of women could have. That is why this volume has come into existence. It literally is the voice of “crowds of women.”

Those whose words are quoted here are representative women, leaders in their various organizations, representing hundreds of thousands of individuals. Many of them are among our foremost writers, artists, teachers, actors, orators and organizers—some of them combining several of these qualities.

“Woman’s Voice” might easily have been two or three times its present size, but that would have meant a publication too expensive to reach the thousands of readers of moderate means to whom this[viii] work is an immediate, special appeal. Future editions of this Anthology will be revised and enlarged until we finally shall have a perfect volume which will take its place in every home as a standard household classic, along with those other books of strong human appeal which every home possesses.

Much of the material in “Woman’s Voice” is covered by copyright, and special permission has been granted the editor to reproduce it here. Many very good things were taken from exchanges (more or less obscure publications), and in such cases the original source of their appearance was difficult to trace. However, in each instance attempt has been made to give credit where it is due, and the editor hopes she has made no serious failures in this respect.

The many publishers and publications, as well as authors and artists represented here, have been very kind in their co-operation to make “Woman’s Voice” a success, by granting permission to use these selections from their output. Special mention is given them elsewhere.

It is the editor’s hope that this volume will circulate very largely in the small towns and country districts of our nation. I want the millions of women who are feeling, and thinking, but who are as yet inarticulate upon the larger affairs of life, to find their need and their voice in this volume. I want that great isolated sisterhood, many of whom have never read a book by a woman on social questions, to have this volume in their homes—and always near at hand; on the sewing table, or in the kitchen cabinet, where it may be referred to between cake-baking and[ix] bread-making times. I hope the children in these homes will memorize the verses in this book, and recite them at the Friday afternoon “Literaries,” in their schools.

I hope the club women will make constant use of this volume in their club work—in the preparation of programs, and in roll calls. For the things quoted here deal with the most vital issues of the times, as well as with the most intimate personal emotions and needs of the individual, and are presented by responsible and capable women. Also, they show the growth of race progress through woman’s efforts—how she has struggled and won educational rights; how she has struggled and won political rights; how she has struggled and won matrimonial rights, and rights for her children, and for the world’s workers. How she is struggling still to bring about an ever higher and fuller life for today and for the future.

And in all this she needs your help, you in your isolated corners; for not until every nook and cranny is active and comes to the front, can our nation attain to those heights for which our womankind is so valiantly working.

When woman’s voice is heard the world around, mankind will hearken to her cries and heed them.

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[xxxii]

The American people today may be likened to the onlookers of a great drama. A drama so tremendous, so spectacular, so tragic, that it surpasses anything the mind of man has hitherto conceived. The onlookers of this drama naturally are absorbed with its immediate movements. With its broad meanings they are intensely concerned, but beyond these they have no interest. Their vision for detail is clouded by the flare and vastness of the apparent. What lies beneath, above, about, are only incidentals and of no immediate consequence to them.

But the “incidentals” of the present war are, for the careful observer, to say nothing of the professional drama critic, the chips which show what is taking place as the result of the flare and the noise, and the tragedy. One of these incidents is the coming of woman into realms of activity which not for a million years—that is to say, never before—have been opened to her.

Under the stress involved in winning a world peace, this fact is scarcely noted, and is not understood in its full meaning. But the moment peace is declared it will become a question of vital importance, involving as it does all lines of human endeavor—labor, commerce, philosophy, literature, agriculture, law, education, and the crafts as well as the arts.

The conservative mind, freed from the absorption[xxxiv] of war, will turn with startled gasp to discover that one half of the race has been shaken out of the rut of ages, and is spilling itself helter-skelter, into every department of social achievement. And the conservative mind will ask with child-like frankness if the women are equal to the responsibility and the opportunity which has been thrust upon them.

“Woman’s Voice” has been compiled in anticipation of this awakening on the part of the multitude, as an answer to its wondering inquiry.

That women have themselves long yearned toward the broader paths of effort and usefulness is manifest in the utterances of those who have learned the art of self-expression. That they fully comprehend the meaning, hardships and blessings of the broader life, is plainly shown in their wide-spread printed word. “Woman’s Voice” is an effort to collect, in what may be called at once a brief and an exposition of woman’s entrance into the world of general endeavor, the wisdom of the women who have studied conditions with an earnestness and efficiency which renders them peculiarly fitted to speak for themselves upon the questions most closely touching themselves and their children.

For ages untold only the voice of man has dictated the conditions under which the rest of the world should live, including women and children. All the poetry, all the philosophy, all the wisdom of the ages was presented in man’s words, and from man’s standpoint. Woman, dumb, untutored, and handicapped by an adverse public opinion, another creation of the solely masculine mind, held to her chimney corner[xxxv] as helpless in the face of petty and colossal injustices as the children she bore.

“Woman’s Voice” portrays the effort of women to get away from this now apparent social mistake. Women have spoken and will continue to speak, for, if we are to proceed speedily and with the least possible resistance into the new order of things, education is still essential. There are millions to whom the apparent is not apparent, and whose eyes must be opened before the democracy for which the world is paying in blood and agony can become a reality.

I believe “Woman’s Voice” should be in every home in the nation, and in all nations where society is affected by the conditions which have brought women away from the hearth-stone into the market-place. As a digest of the best thought of representative women the world over, it will be read when the multiplicity of volumes from which it is quoted are passed by. It will be read not only for its seriousness, but for its poetic sentiment, and its sprightly comment on the every-day things of life. Its usefulness to club members and to workers in the equal suffrage campaigns will be invaluable, but it is to the average housewife and mother that I trust it will make its strongest appeal. To the women who have more or less dimly felt, but who have not as yet found a voice or an avenue through which to develop or express this feeling about things which so much concern them and their children. I am hoping, also, that it will fall into the hands of thousands of theorists who are opposing, for no reason except their[xxxvi] own ignorance about it, the advance of women in the coming world-democracy.

Briefly, but earnestly, I wish to thank the publishers, editors and writers who have made this Anthology possible through their permission to reprint from books, magazines and articles the matter contained herein. I have endeavored in all instances to give full credit to all of these, and if errors happen to occur in this regard they are unintentional, and only the result of the initial publishing of a work as new and comprehensive as this one. Also, if any name has been omitted whose observations should have appeared in this book, it is only because it was impossible for a very busy editor to fail to miss some very worthy writers. In future editions these can be gathered up, until we have a volume or many volumes which may be perfectly representative of the woman’s voice of the world.

Josephine Conger
Compiler “Woman’s Voice”

The winning of the suffrage states, the work in the states not yet won, the conventions, gatherings and international councils in which women of every nation have come together, have all combined to make this quarter of a century the most brilliant period for women in the history of the world.

The awakening of women to the low social status of their sex is the most encouraging fact of the century.

The woman movement of the civilized world wants much the same thing in whatever language its demands are expressed. In more or less unconscious cooperation, the women of the civilized nations have from the first worked for similar ends and common interests. Beyond all superficial differences and incidental forms, the vision of the[2] emancipated woman wears the same features whether she be hailed as frau, fru, or woman. The disfranchisement of a whole sex, a condition which has existed throughout the civilized world until a comparatively recent date, has bred in half the population an unconscious internationalism. The man without a country was a tragic exception; the woman without a country was the accepted rule. The enfranchisement of the women now under way has come too late to inculcate in them the narrow views of citizenship which were once supposed to accompany the gift of the vote. Its effect will rather be to make the unconscious internationalism of the past the conscious internationalism of the future.

The Christian world reckoned by centuries is just coming of age. Therefore women are beginning to put away childish things and to realize the greatness of womanhood.

Not until the suffrage movement had awakened woman to her responsibility and power, did she[3] come to appreciate the true significance of Christ’s pity for Magdalene as well as of his love for Mary; not till then was the work of Pundita Ramabai in far away India as sacred as that of Frances Willard at home in America; not till she had suffered under the burden of her own wrongs and abuses did she realize the all-important truth that no woman and no class of women can be degraded and all womankind not suffer thereby.

The whole human race is involved in the results of the present revolt and reaction amongst women; if turned back upon itself by mockery it will burn and bite on unseen, and find its issue in mad sins, wild frivolity, and all the anarchy of voluptuous abandonment; if rightly met, if rightly guided, it may become the noblest and highest revolution that has ever broken the chains of effete prejudices, and let out human souls from the darkness of ignorance into the light and glory of a day of liberty.

Twenty years ago I did not think that women were qualified for suffrage, but the strides they[4] have made since then in the acquirement of business methods, in the management of their affairs, in the effective interest they have evinced in civic matters, and the way in which they have mastered parliamentary methods, have convinced me that they are eminently fitted to do men’s work in all purely intellectual fields.

Woman’s place in the crowd of a generation ago was immediately back of her masculine kinsfolk. Here she enjoyed protection from the rough elbowing of the crowd, though in return for this shelter she forfeited her liberty and was expected to devote all of her physical strength and mental energy to pushing some particular masculine protector to the front. Some times her efforts were appreciated, frequently they were taken for granted, since etiquette favored a covert manner of pushing. But the rules of the game have changed. Partners and co-laborers are taking the place of lords and masters. Farmers, professors, clergymen, politicians, in fact, husbands of every calling are coming to see the advantage of having a wife beside, instead of behind, them. They now take pride in a wife who enjoys an outlook on the world which enables her to help far more intelligently and effectively than did the wife of a generation ago.

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The attitude of men toward women, economic, social, political, reacts upon man and society. In recognizing this, the man with the scythe is a length ahead of the man with the cap and gown, the cassock or the check book. The awakening to a sense of the economic interdependence and fellowship of men and women, has made the trade unionist the first to recognize the justice and wisdom of “universal suffrage,” and annually in convention the American Federation of Labor declares:

“That the best interests of labor require the admission of women to full citizenship—not only as a matter of justice to them, but also as a necessary step toward insuring and raising the American standards of life for all.”

The most obvious effect of the vote is that it puts women upon a plane of political equality with other normal adults.... Universal suffrage stands for a certain recognition of the stake that all human beings, irrespective of sex, have in the general welfare, and destroys a false sense of sex limitations. By virtue of their new standing in the community women assume an equal responsibility with men, for both good and bad legislation.

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You see, when her country called her, it was destiny that spoke. Though no nation knew. Governments have only thought they were making women munition workers and women conductors and women bank-tellers and women doctors and women lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I doubt if there is a statesman anywhere who has learned to unlock a door of opportunity to let the woman movement by, who has realized that he was but the instrument in the hands of a higher power that is re-shaping the world for mighty ends, rough-hewn though they be today from the awful chaos of war.

But there is one who will know. When the man at the front gets back and stands again before the cottage rose-bowered on the English downs, red-roofed in France and Italy, blue-trimmed in Germany, or ikon-blessed in Russia, or white-porched off Main Street in America, he will clasp her to his heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at arm’s length and look long into her eyes and deep into her soul. And lo, he shall see there the New Woman. This is not the woman whom he left behind when he marched away to the Great World War. Something profound has happened to her since. It is woman’s coming of age.

[7]

Woman suffrage is first of all a woman’s question. We cannot remain indifferent. The issues involved are so overwhelmingly important, first of all, to us as women caring as we must for all other women’s welfare, and second, to us as citizens of the modern industrial state. I am sure as the result of repeated experiment that it is only necessary for generous and unprejudiced women to realize the present economic independence of millions of women workers, and the swiftly coming economic independence of millions upon millions more women workers for woman suffrage to seem to them inevitable from that moment.

No one can maintain by serious arguments—that is, by arguments that are not pure and simple distortion of fact—that the ballot will not aid women workers, as it has aided men workers, to obtain fairer conditions and fairer wages. All working men and all men of every class regard the ballot[11] as their greatest protection against the oppression and injustice of other men. It is only necessary to ask ourselves what would be the fate of any political party whose platform contained a plank depriving laboring men of the right to vote.

Industrial organization and political activity constitute the two powerful arms of the labor movement. Men are free to use both their arms. Women are struggling with one arm tied.

My eight days’ license had expired. The police were massed outside the Bromley Public Hall where I was speaking, waiting to arrest me. Numbers of detectives in plain clothes within were amongst the audience; the people hissed and howled at them and they threatened them with sticks. At the close of the meeting, the people, declaring that I should not be arrested, crowded down the stairs and out in a thick mass with men in the center of them all. The police rushed at us, striving to break our ranks and to force a way through to me.... Policemen were on every side of me. Two of them gripped and bruised my arms, dragging me along. The crowd followed, calling to me.... The policemen dug their fingers into my flesh. One of them took out his truncheon and grasped it tight against my hand and arm. The back of my left hand was bruised[13] from it all next day. Several women rushed up to me and were arrested, and one girl who did not know any of us, or what the trouble was about, called out: “Oh, you should not hurt her,” and was taken into custody. They dragged me into a Cannon Row police station....

So, hatless, and without so much as a brush or comb, I was taken back to gaol to begin my hunger, thirst and sleep strike. When I reached my cell, the same cell in the hospital in which during February and March I had been forcibly fed for five weeks, I began to pace up and down.

A woman officer came to me and said I must not make a noise.... I took a blanket from the bed and spread it on the floor to deaden the sound of my footsteps, lest any of the other women prisoners should hear them and be kept awake.

Then I walked on and on, five short steps across the cell and five short steps back, on and on, and on.... As the hours dragged their slow way I stumbled often over the blanket that wrinkled up and caught in my feet. Often I stooped with dizzy brain to straighten it. The walking, the ceaseless walking, when I was so tired, made me grow sick and faint. I was stumbling, falling to my knees, clutching, as one drowning, at the bed or chair. Sometimes I think I slept an instant or two as I lay, for sleep seemed to be dogging as I walked.

It was cold, cold and colder, as the morning came, as the sombre yellow faded and the gray sky turned to violet—such a strange brilliant violet,[14] almost startling it seemed through those heavy bars. Then the violet died into the bleak white chill of early day.

In the day time I still walked, but sometimes I had to rest in the hard, wooden chair, and then I would be startled to feel my head nod heavily to one side. My legs ached, the soles of my feet were swollen. They burned, and I thought of the women of the past who were made to walk on red hot plough shares for their faith. After the first few days I remembered that tramps rubbed soap on their feet to prevent their getting sore. I rubbed soap on mine and found that it eased them a good deal. Each time I took my stocking off to do this I noticed that my feet had grown more purple. My hands, too, were purple as they hung at my sides. My throat was parched and dry. My lips were cracked. On Wednesday I fainted twice, and afterwards there came and stayed till I was released, a strange pressure in the head, especially in the ears. There was a sharp pain across my chest. That evening I asked to see a doctor from the home office. On Thursday afternoon he came. On Friday there was no more likelihood of my sleeping. I lay on the bed most of the day burning hot, with cold shivers that seemed to pass over me as though a cold wind was blowing on my face. In the afternoon I was released and came back to the little red-roofed house under St. Stephen’s church and the kind hearts of Bow.

[15]

Although England was Christianized in the fourth century, it was not until the tenth that the Christian wife of a Christian husband acquired the right of eating at table with him.

Woman suffrage is a war on ignorance, prejudice and vice. To attack certain gigantic forces, a people must take any and every line open to them. If the Germans had attacked Warsaw from but one side, that great city would still be under Russian rule. I believe, therefore, that women in fighting for their suffrage should use all lines approaching the enemy. I personally am working along all roads of attack, for I feel that where one method may fail, another may succeed.

Suffragists are born, not made. There are many women whose brains will never respond to suffrage argument.... And yet I am convinced[16] that these women, when they do receive the vote, will not only use their power judiciously and conscientiously, but will eventually glory in it.

... Feminism is a tree, and woman suffrage merely one of its many branches. Some of these branches are essential to the life of the tree, others are not. Some grow strong and put forth shoots in their turn, others blossom prematurely, wither young, and drop from the trunk. Meanwhile the tree towers up into the sun with its crown of sturdy growths, and its abortive shoots lie forgotten in the shadow below, leaving hardly a scar upon the great stem to mark their death. Only few people see this tree as a unit. All who do know that woman suffrage is one of its essential growths. But the majority still concentrate their gaze upon one branch or another, whichever seems to them most fair, and the parent tree is lost to sight amid the multiplicity of its offspring’s leaves. Suffrage has rallied to its march thousands of conservative women who are indifferent, or even opposed, to some newer branches of the tree, while those who are absorbed in certain later and eccentric growths are sometimes amusingly contemptuous of the older limbs. They forget that the topmost crown could not flourish if the wide boughs below did not help the tree to breathe. They are sometimes, too, in[17] danger of forgetting that if the great roots of the trees were not anchored deep in the soil of woman’s nature itself, in her motherhood, her strong tenderness, and her service, the whole growth would perish.

Notwithstanding her false position, woman has struggled through all disabilities and degradations, has justified the intentions of Nature in her behalf, and demonstrated her claim to share in the moral agency of the world. In all outbursts of mind, in every forward rush of the great march of improvement she has borne a part; permitting herself to be used as an instrument, without hope of reward, and faithfully fulfilling her mission, without expectation of acknowledgment. She has, in various ages, given her secret service to the task-master, without partaking in his triumph, or sharing in his success. Her subtlety has insinuated views which man has shrunk from exposing, and her adroitness found favor for doctrines which he had the genius to conceive, but not the art to divulge. Priestess, prophetess, the oracle of the tripod, the sibyl of the cave, the veiled idol of the temple, the shrouded teacher of the academy, the martyr or missionary of a spiritual truth, the armed champion of a political cause, she has been covertly used for every purpose, by which man, when he has failed to reason his species into truth, has endeavored[18] to fanaticize it into good; whenever mind has triumphed by indirect means over the hearts of the masses.

In all moral impulsions, woman has aided and been adopted; but, her efficient utility accomplished, the temporary part assigned her for temporary purposes performed, she has ever been hurled back into her natural obscurity, and conventional insignificance.... Alluded to, rather as an incident, rather than a principle in the chronicles of nations, her influence, which cannot be denied, has been turned into a reproach; her genius, which could not be concealed, has been treated as a phenomenon, when not considered as a monstrosity!

But where exist the evidences of these merits unacknowledged, of these penalties unrepealed? They are to be found carelessly scattered through all that is known in the written history of mankind, from the first to the last of its indited pages. They may be detected in the habits of the untamed savage, in the traditions of the semi-civilized barbarian! And in those fragments of the antiquity of our antiquity, scattered through undated epochs,—monuments of some great moral debris, which, like the fossil remains of long-imbedded, and unknown species, serve to found a theory or to establish a fact.

Wherever woman has been, there has she left the track of her humanity, to mark her passage—incidentally impressing the seal of her sensibility and wrongs upon every phase of society, and in every region, “from Indus to the Pole.”

[19]

The need of the ballot for the wage-earning woman is a vital one. No plea can be made that we have the protection of the home or are represented by our fathers or brothers....

What of the working girls, who through unemployment are no longer permitted to sell the labor of their hands and are forced to sell their virtue?

I met Katie Malloy under peculiar circumstances. It was because of this that she told me of her terrible struggles during the great garment workers strike in Chicago. She had worked at H——’s for five years and had saved $30. It was soon gone. She hunted for work, applied at the Young Women’s Christian Association and was told that so many hundreds of girls were out of work that they could not possibly do anything for her. She walked the streets day after day without success. For three days she had almost nothing to eat. “Oh,” she said, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, “there is always some place where a man can crowd in and keep decent, but for us girls there is no place, no place but one, and it is thrown open to us day and night. Hundreds of girls—girls that worked by me in the shop—have gone into houses of impurity.”

Has Katie Malloy and the five thousand working girls who are forced into lives of shame each month no need of a voice in a Government that should protect them from this worse than death!

[20]

What is this government that we women have been taught to think of as something so remote from our interests, so unrelated to the immediate personal preoccupations of our daily lives? There are three great matters in which we are all concerned: religion, education and government. In religion men and women share equally (indeed, men sometimes are content that women should do more than their share). In education it has come to pass that both men and women participate equally, though that was not always so. It is less than two generations that our universities and even our high schools have been open to women upon the same terms as to men.

But government is considered as man’s exclusive province—a limitation that has narrowed the lives of the women, that has robbed the children, and that has reacted most injuriously upon the State. For with what matters does government concern itself? Why, with matters that touch intimately home happiness[23] and home prosperity, with laws and regulations that guard and further human lives.

Woman always has figured prominently in every movement and transformation that has changed the conditions of human life.

Every argument in behalf of man suffrage applies with equal force to woman suffrage. Men and women have more in common as members of the same species, belonging to the same human family, than they have differences, because of the incident of sex. To deny woman the ballot because of her sex is virtually to repudiate her right and claim as a human being. That a difference does exist between men and women is on the other hand a strong argument in behalf of woman suffrage. The giving of the ballot to woman will not rob man of his just rights. The admission of woman into the political arena will do away with male supremacy, which is injurious to man, breeds tyranny and results in injustice to woman. Justice to woman does not mean injustice to man. Our common interests as human beings, and our differences as men and women both demand political power and social rights for women the same as for men.

[24]

“Wimmin haint no business with the laws of the country,” said Josiah.

“If they haint no business with the law, the law haint no business with them,” said I warmly. “Of the three classes that haint no business with the law—lunatics, idiots and wimmin—the lunatics and idiots have the best time of it,” says I with a great rush of ideas into my brain that almost lifted up the border of my head-dress. “Let a idiot kill a man; ‘What of it?’ says the law. Let a luny steal a sheep; again the law murmurs in a calm and gentle tone,[26] ‘What of it? They haint no business with the law, and the law haint no business with them!’

“But let one of a third class, let a woman steal a sheep, does the law soothe her in those comfortin’ tones? No; it thunders to her in awful accents: ‘You haint no business with the law, but the law has a good deal of business with you, vile female; start for state’s prison! You haint nothin’ at all to do with the law, only to pay all the taxes it tells you to, embrace a license bill that is ruinin’ to your husband, give up your innocent little children to a wicked father if it tells you to, and a few other little things, such as bein’ dragged off to prison by it, chained up for life, and hung, and et cetery.”

“‘Methought I once heard the words,’ sithes the female, ‘True government consists in the consent of the governed. Did I dream them, or did the voice of a luny pour them into my ear?’

“‘Haint I told you,’ frowns the law on her, ‘that that don’t mean wimmin? Have I got to explain again to your weakened female comprehension, the great fundymental truth that wimmin haint included and mingled in the law books and statutes of the country, only in a condemnin’ and punishin’ sense as it were?’

“‘Alas!’ sithes the woman to herself, ‘would that I had the sweet rights of my wild and foolish companions, the idiots and lunys!’

“‘But,’ says she, ‘are the laws always just, that I should obey them thus implicitely?’

“‘Idiots, lunatics! and wimmin! Are they goin’ to speak?’ thunders the law. ‘Can I believe my noble[27] right ear? Can I, bein’ blindfolded, trust my seventeen senses? I’ll have you understand that it haint no woman’s business whether the laws are just or unjust; all you have to do is just to obey ’em. So start off for prison, my young woman.’

“‘But my housework,’ pleads the woman. ‘Woman’s place is the home. It is her duty to remain, at all hazards, within its holy and protectin’ precincts. How can I leave its sacred retirement to moulder in state’s prison?’

“‘Housework!’ and the law fairly yells the words, he is so filled with contempt at the idea. ‘Housework! Jest as if housework is goin’ to stand in the way of the noble administration of the law! I admit the recklessness and immorality of her leavin’ that holy haven long enough to vote; but I guess she can leave her housework long enough to be condemned, and hung, and so forth.’

“‘But I have got a infant,’ says the woman, ‘of tender days. How can I go?’

“‘That is nothin’ to the case,’ says the law in stern tones. ‘The peculiar conditions of motherhood only unfits a female woman from ridin’ to town in a covered carriage once a year, and layin’ her vote on a pole. I’ll have you understand it’s no hinderence to her at all in a cold and naked cell, or in a public court room crowded with men.’

“As the young woman totters along to prison is it any wonder that she sithes to herself—

“‘Would that I were an idiot! Alas is it not possible that I may become even now, a luny? Then I should be respected!’”

[28]

As I have been engaged for a number of years in various philanthropic undertakings, perhaps you will permit me, for only a few moments, to speak from experience. A good many women with whom I have been associated have initiated and carried forward philanthropic enterprises, which were later taken over by the city, and thereupon the women have been shut out from the opportunity to do the self-same work which they have done up to that time. In Chicago the women for many years supported school nurses who took care of the children, both made them comfortable and kept them from truancy. When the nurses were taken over by the health department of the city the same women who had given them their support and management were shut out from doing anything more in that direction. And I think Chicago will bear me out when I say that the nurses are not now doing as good work as they did before.

I could also use the illustration of the probation officers in Chicago who are attached to the juvenile court. For a number of years women selected and supported these probation officers. Later, when the same officers, paid the same salary, were taken over by the county and paid from the county funds, the women who had had to do with the initiation and beginning of the probation system, and with the primary and early management of the officers, had[29] no more to do with them. At the present moment the juvenile court in Chicago has fallen behind its former position in the juvenile courts of the world. I think the fair-minded men of Chicago will admit that it was a disaster for the juvenile court when the women were disqualified, by their lack of the franchise, to care for it.

The juvenile court has to do largely with delinquent and dependent children, and I think there is no doubt that on the whole women can deal with such cases better than men, because their natural interests lie in that direction....

The establishment of a sanitarium for the care of tubercular patients in Chicago was begun by some philanthropic women, and later on, when these also were put under the care of the city, these women were shut out, save as they were permitted to do some work through the courtesy of the officials. Sometimes the officials are very courteous to them and glad to have their assistance; sometimes they quite resent the suggestions from them, claiming it is “up to” them to take care of the city affairs, and that women are only interfering when they try to help.

So, it seems fair to say, if women are to keep on with the work which they have done since the beginning of the world—to continue with their humanitarian efforts which are so rapidly being taken over by the Government, and often not properly administered, that the women themselves will have to have the franchise.

The franchise is only a little bit of mechanism which enables the voter to say how much money shall[30] be appropriated from the taxes, of which women pay so large a part. When a woman votes, she votes in an Australian ballot box, very carefully guarded from roughness, and it seems to us only fair to the State activities which are so largely humanitarian that women should have this opportunity.

See the curious history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of a party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted political death. She was to spin[32] and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted no part in the largest interests, social, national, international. The blood with which she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins.... Women might be, and were, duly silenced when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gougas, they claimed a “right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of the laws,” but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gougas was guillotined. Robespierre then made her public and complete amends.

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

[33]

The claims we make at these conventions are self-evident truths. The second resolution affirms the right of human beings to their persons and earnings. Is that not self evident? Yet the common law, which regulates the relations of husband and wife, and is modified only in a few instances, gives the “custody” of the wife’s person to the husband, so that he has a right to her, even against herself. It gives him her earnings, no matter with what weariness they have been acquired, or how greatly she may need them for herself or her children. It gives him a right to her personal property, which he may will entirely away from her, also the use of her real estate, and in some of the states married women, insane persons and idiots are ranked together as not fit to make a will, so that she is left with only one right, which she enjoys in common with the pauper, the right of maintenance. Indeed, when she has taken the sacred marriage vows, her legal existence ceases. And what is our position politically? The foreigner, the negro, the drunkard, all are entrusted with the ballot, all are placed by men higher than their own mothers, wives, sisters and daughters!

The woman, who, seeing this, dares not maintain her rights is the one to hang her head and[34] blush. We ask only for justice and equal rights—the right to vote, the right to our own earnings, equality before the law: these are “the Gibraltar of our Cause.”

Those who follow the story of this life will confirm the assertion that every girl who enjoys a college education; every woman who has the chance of earning an honest living in whatever sphere she chooses; every wife who is protected by law in the possession of her person and property; every mother who is blessed with the custody and control of her own children—owes these sacred privileges to Susan B. Anthony beyond all others.

Suffrage is not an end in itself, but a means to an end....

The opposition of the liquor forces is not gauged by the number of women actively engaged in temperance work. That number is still comparatively small. It takes no comfort from the fact that suffrage associations are non-partisan on all questions[35] except suffrage. It would fear and fight off the enfranchisement of women if every temperance organization were to disband today. Therein it unconsciously pays its high tribute to woman and confesses its own lack of moral defense.... The forces of evil fear for woman’s vote.

Man cannot represent woman. They differ in their nature and relations. The law is wholly masculine; it is created and executed by man. The framers of all legal compacts are restricted to the masculine standpoint of observation, to the thoughts, feelings and biases of man. The law then can give us no representation as women, and therefore no impartial justice, even if the law makers were intent upon this, for we can be represented only by our peers.... When woman is tried for crime, her jury, her judges, her advocates, are all men; and yet there may have been temptations and various palliating circumstances connected with her peculiar nature as woman, such as man cannot appreciate. Common justice demands that a part of the law-makers and law-executors should be of her own sex. In questions of marriage and divorce, affecting interests dearer than life, both parties in the contract are entitled to an equal voice.

[36]

There can be no problem of women anywhere without aspects of universality.

The day is past when we deluded ourselves with the thought that our responsibilities ceased with the performance of our individual duties. We are jointly responsible for the existing conditions, and only by a joint effort can they be improved. Our neighbor’s welfare is our business, and our neighbor is mankind.

You say politics are too corrupt for women to mix up in? Well, they are pretty bad, there is no doubt about that. You have laid almost everything under heaven onto the women, but this one thing that has been under your own exclusive, masculine domain.

Don’t you know that the principal business of women, all down the ages, has been to go along after the men and clear up the everlasting muss they made? Well, we are still at the same task. Our politics are no more corrupt than our housekeeping would be if we let you run it alone.

[37]

In France or Italy have the women confined themselves to domestic life? Though they have not hitherto had a political existence, yet have they not illicitly had great sway, corrupting themselves and the men with whose passions they played? In short, in whatever light I view the subject, reason and experience convince me that the only method of leading women to fulfill their peculiar duties is to free them from all restraint by allowing them to participate in the inherent rights of mankind.

Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtuous, as men become more so, for the improvement must be mutual, or the injustice which one-half of the race are obliged to submit to retorting on their oppressors, the virtue of men will become worm-eaten by the insect whom he keeps under his feet.

The call to social service and action has brought the modern club woman along an ever broadening path to the high, wind-swept levels, where she sights limitless opportunity for expression and action; and two things she has come to see clearly, first, that she needs the ballot to do this, her natural work, more effectively; and second, that the Commonwealth needs her.

[39]

“I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.”

Patrick Henry, when he said that, was not asking that liberty come as a free gift. No race or class ever has attained it so cheaply. Fifty years[40] after the battle of Gettysburg, the negro is still fighting for the liberty which the bloodiest war in history could not confer on him. He must get it for himself.

Women have been fighting longer than that for freedom.

It is the glory of the women’s labor movement that working women struck the first blow for women’s liberty in this country.

For a hundred years, working women have made straight the way for all women to follow. It was the women in the mills and the shops and factories who made it possible sixty years ago for women to enter the schools and the professions.

Today, in the ultimate analysis, it is the women in the mills of commerce who gave women the ballot in the suffrage states. It is they who are paying the price. Their strikes are all hunger strikes; not a hunger for bread alone, but a hunger for life and the liberty of soul.

Not till these strikes end in victory, not till the last burning-factory martyr has rendered up her life as a sacrifice necessary to the destruction of the system which thrives on factory fires, can we count the price which working women have paid to make all women free.

“No people can long endure half slave and half free.”

If the working women had consented to be slaves, there would have been no woman movement. More than that—without the woman’s trade unions there could be no organized labor movement.[41] Theirs is the strategic point in the conflict in which the whole world is lining up. Around them will rage the fiercest fight; but the stars in their courses fight for them.

Thrown into strict logical form, our demand is this: We do not ask that the wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the stream of life flow backward. We do not ask that our ancient spinning wheels be again resuscitated and placed in our hands; we do not demand that our old grindstones and hoes be returned to us, or that man should again betake himself entirely to his province of war and the chase, leaving to us all domestic and civil labor. We do not even demand that society shall immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman may again be a child bearer (deep and overmastering as lies the hunger for motherhood in every virile woman’s heart!); neither do we demand that the children we bear shall again be put exclusively into our hands to train. This, we know, cannot be. The past material conditions of life have gone forever; no will of man can recall them. But this is our demand: We 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[42] 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. We demand nothing more than this, and will take nothing less. This is our WOMAN’S RIGHT!

What, women don’t want it? Are you worrying about a handful who think because they have been trained to like subservience everybody else ought to like subservience, too?... The women who are made to work over hours—they want the vote. To compel them to work over hours is illegal. But who troubles to see that laws are fairly interpreted for the unrepresented.... I know a factory where a notice went up yesterday to say that the women employed there will be required to work 12 hours a day for the next few weeks.... Much of woman’s employment is absolutely unrestricted except that they may not be worked on Sunday. And while all this is going on, comfortable gentility sit in arm chairs and write alarmist articles on the falling birth-rate and the horrible amount of infant mortality. Here and there we find a man who realizes that the main concern of the State should be its children, and that you can’t get worthy citizens when the[43] mothers are sickly and enslaved. The question of statecraft rightly considered always reaches back to the mother. That State is most prosperous that most considers her. No State that forgets her can survive. The future is rooted in the real being of women. If you rob the women, your children and your child’s children pay. Men haven’t realized it—your boasted logic has never yet reached so far. Of all the community the women who give the next generation birth, and who form its character, during the most impressionable years of its life—of all the community, these mothers now, or mothers to be, ought to be set free from the monstrous burden that lies upon the shoulders of millions of women.

We read that no person shall be denied any political rights, privileges, or powers on account of religion. The word sex should have been added. People may change their religion, but never their sex. Rights, privileges and capacities ought never to depend on color of eyes or hair, cast of features, sex or any other accident for which a person is not to be blamed and which a person can never overcome. Any other qualification demanded of a voter may be acquired by one’s own exertion, or the lapse of time. Property may be earned, minority out-grown,[44] education secured, sanity regained, alienage removed, imprisonment outlived. But no industry, no age, no brilliancy, no morality, can change sex. Sex should be made less a disgrace instead of more of a disgrace than poverty, minority, alienage, insanity and criminality.

Unconsciously, with closed eyes, driven, perhaps, by the herd instinct that makes her follow the others, the working woman is rising at last from her long slumber....

The solution of the problem of existence is pressing upon her more and more. Even the mantle of marriage does no longer save her from it. The patient sufferer cannot and will not see her children destitute and hungry. She wants some of the celestial promises to be realized here on earth. Hence this general unrest of womanhood the world over.

No wonder so few women had left an impression on history. How could any brain, even if endowed[45] with true genius, reach the highest order of development while the character remained placid in its willing dependence upon the reigning sex? And man had despised woman through the ages, even when most enslaved by her, knowing that on him depended her very existence. He had the physical strength to wring her neck, and the legal backing to treat her as partner or servant, whichever he found convenient.

[46]

The getting of votes has been to us like the saving of souls.

Of course, if women are either exactly like men, or simply men minus something or other, they could add no light to that already possessed by a male constituency, but I know of no one who seriously believes either of these things.

[48]

[50]

“The woman’s place is the home.”

Such is a very common reply to those who propound any new schemes for educating or helping women. No one would deny the statement. It is true that those who make it sometimes forget that now-a-days a considerable number of women have no homes, and that therefore the remark by no means meets the whole case.

By all means let most women choose the home for their sphere, if they will, and even severely avoid politics for the moment, if they be so minded. But whether in the home, or outside it, let all women consider well what be the spirit they are bringing into life—whether it be one which liberates and uplifts, or one which makes, instead, for bondage.

Every suffragist I have ever met has been a lover of home; and only the conviction that she is fighting for her home, her children, for other women, for all of these, has sustained her in her public work.

[52]

Have women done nothing which entitles us to equal rights with man? Our time on earth has been long—as long as his. Have we created nothing of incontestable worth to life and civilization? Besides this, that we have brought human beings into the world, have we contributed nothing of use to mankind?... I look at paintings and engravings, pictures of old women, of olden times. Their faces are haggard and stern; their hands rough and bony. They had their struggles and their interests. What have they done?

I place myself before Rembrandt’s old peasant woman, she of the thousand wrinkles in her intelligent face, and I ask myself why she lived? Certainly not to be worshipped by many men, not to rule a state, not to win a scholar’s degree! And yet the work to which she devoted herself could not have been of a trivial nature. She did not go through life stupid and shallow! The glances of men and women rest rather upon her aged countenance than upon that of the fairest young beauty. Her life must have had a meaning.

We all know what the old woman will reply to my question. We read the answer in her calm and kindly smile: “All that I did was to make a good home.”

And look you! That is what the women would[53] answer if they could rise from their graves generation after generation, thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions: “All that we strove for was to make a good home.”

We know that if we were to ask the men, could we line them up, generation after generation, thousands and millions in succession, it would not occur to one of them to say that he had lived for the purpose of making a good home....

We know that it is needless to seek further. We should find nothing. Our gift to humanity is the home—that, and nothing else....

For the home we have been great; for the home we have been petty. Not many of us have stood with Christina Gyllenstierna on the walls of Stockholm and defended a city; still fewer of us have gone forth with Jeanne D’Arc to battle for the Fatherland. But if the enemy approached our own gate, we stood there with broom and dish rag, with the sharp tongue and clawing hand, ready to fight to the last in defense of our creation, the home. And this little structure which has cost us so much effort, is it a success or a failure? Is this woman’s contribution to civilization inconsiderable or valuable? Is it appreciated or despised?

Woman’s sphere is the home, and the home, too, is the sphere of man. The home embraces everything[54] we strive for in this world. To get and maintain a decent home is the object of all our best endeavors. But what is the home? What are its boundaries? What does it contain? What must we do to secure and protect it?

In olden times the home was a private factory.... Home and industrial life were one.... Once the housewife made her own butter and baked her own bread; she even sowed, reaped, threshed, and ground the wheat. Now her churn has been removed to great cheese and butter factories. The village mill, where she used to take her corn, is today in Minneapolis; her sickle is in Dakota. Every morning the express company delivers her loaves to the local grocer from a bakery that employs a thousand hands. The men who inspect her winter preserves are chemists in Washington. Her ice box is in Chicago. The men in control of her pantry are bankers in New York. The leavening of bread is somehow dependent upon the culinary science of congressmen, and the washing of milk cans is a complicated art which legislative bodies, composed of lawyers, are trying to teach the voting population on the farms.

It would take a modern woman a lifetime to walk across her kitchen floor; and to keep it clean is an Augean labor. No wonder that she sometimes shrinks from the task and joins the company of timid, lazy women who do not want to vote. But she must manage her home; for, no matter how grievously incompetent she may be, there is no one else authorized or able to manage it for her. She must secure for her children clean food at honest prices. Through all[55] the changes of industry and government she remains the baker of bread, the minister of the universal sacrament of life.

In the days when such proverbs as “The woman, the cat and the chimney should never leave the house”, “Bonne femme est oiseau de cage”, “A wife and a broken leg are best left at home”, were current in every household, there was some reason why women should remain at home. For within the home were conducted—by women—all the industries of life. In those days women not only made jams and pickles, cured the hams and bacon, concocted wines and medicines, they also designed and embroidered all the curtains, tapestries and carpets; the making of beautiful laces, the spinning, the weaving, the sewing and the knitting of all the garments was committed to the charge of women. In those days when the control of all that made life worth living was with woman, she did not need, nor did she seek, outside occupations, which indeed consisted chiefly of the less intellectual pursuits of hunting and fishing. There was plenty of scope within doors for the intellectual, industrial, and artistic faculties of every active-minded woman. If it is true that woman was more honored at that time when she remained indoors than she is now, this was not because she remained[56] at home, but because all the arts and crafts of life were in her hands—within the home. But now all this is changed, through no fault of the woman herself, and, except for the young wife and mother who has plenty of occupation in the rearing of her family, there is not enough work within the home for additional active-minded and able-bodied women, the numerous daughters, sisters, cousins, aunts, who need occupation, but who have no family of their own because there are not enough men to go round.

Can children raised in Jail Bottom, whose only outlook is a mountain-like dump of rotting and rusty tin cans on the one side, and on the other a stream which is an open sewer, smelling to heaven from the filth which it carries along, or leaves here and there in slime upon its banks, have any but debasing ideas? Can parents inculcate high moral standards when across the street or down the block are houses of the “red light” district? Is the world so small that there is no room left for the amenities of life? Are ground space and floor space of more value than cleanliness and health and morality?... It is certainly a fallacy that the poor do not want good housing.

[57]

The cotton-mill “folks” wear unwittingly a badge which distinguishes them far and wide. As I came along down over the hillside I met a child holding in her arms another smaller child; both were covered, their hair, their clothes, their very eyelids, with fine flakes of lint, wisps of cotton, fibres of the great web in which the factories imprison their victims.

“Hello,” I said, “do you work in the mill?”

“Yes, meaum.” The voice was gentle and the manner friendly. And giving a sidewise hitch to the baby, who had a tendency to slip from her tiny mother’s arms, this little worker showed me one of her fingers done up in a loose, dirty bandage.

“I cut my finger right smart,” she drawled, “so I’m takin’ a day off.”

“How old are you?”

“Tweaulve.”

“Got any brothers or sisters?”

“I’ve got him.... And I’ve got one brother in the mill.”

“How old is he?”

“Tweaulve.”

“Twins?” I asked.

She smiled and shook her head. “He’s tweaulve in the mill, and he’s teayun outside.”

This little bit of humanity, taking a day off as mother of a still tinier being, seemed a promising[58] sponsor, and I suggested that we walk along together. She could not go to the mill with me, she explained, without first consulting her mother, so we proceeded to the settlement in which she lodged, along with eighty or a hundred families, who man the mill in which she was a hand.

“That’s where we live.”

Her fleet little bare feet picked a way deftly over the stony path, and she kept a hand free—when it was not laid on the baby’s back—to point out the turns in the road that led to “where she lived.” Her home was one of a group of frame one-story houses, perched on a slant of ground. Each house was encircled by a wooden veranda, and the order of the housekeeping described itself before the eyes, as a whisk of the broom which carried all the dirt from the kitchen onto the porch, and another whisk which landed it on the slant of ground, bedecked, in consequence, with old tin cans, decayed vegetables, pieces of dirty paper, rags and chicken feathers.

It was to the more intimate quarters, however, that I penetrated with my guide. The inside court, or square upon which these “homes” opened their back doors, was a large mud puddle overhung with the collective wash of the neighborhood. In and out of the mud puddle wallowed the younger members of the mill families, receiving from time to time admonition and reprimand from a gently irate parent, who swished her long cotton wrapper over the court, drawling to her offspring: “I sure will whip you if you-all don’t quit.”

“That-a-ways where we live,” said my little[59] companion, stepping onto the porch and depositing her load, as she opened the door to announce a visitor to her mother. The woman turned listlessly from her sewing machine over which she was bent.

“Won’t you come in?” she called to me, dragging out a chair by the fire, without getting up. “Lookin’ for work?” she asked.

I took a seat, glancing at the interior which my little friend called “home.” The outer room was a kitchen—though it might, except for the stove, have been mistaken for a hen coop. The chickens pecked their way about the dirty floor, venturing as far, even, as the table upon which stood the meagre remains of a noonday meal. The second and the inner room had each a bed;—an unmade bed, I was going to say, but how, indeed, could a bed be made without either sheets or pillows? Two grimy counterpanes were flung in disorder across the mattresses; a few chairs, a bureau and the sewing machine completed the house furnishings.

As the listless woman talked with me in a kindly manner about work, the baby, who had crawled in from the porch, and arrived as far as his mother’s skirts, now tugged at these, to be taken up. His tiny hands had served as propellers across the filthy floor. The piece of lemon candy had added to the general stickiness of the dirt, with which both hands and face were smeared. As a soldier shoulders a gun—the burden to which he is most accustomed—this mother swung her baby into her arms, and, while she talked on, giving items about the cost of living, and factory wages, she loosened her cotton jacket—evidently the[60] only garment she had on—and folding the baby to her breast, she lulled its whimperings.

“Yes,” she said, “we pay $1.50 a week for three rooms. That’s a little over six a month. I call it high. We don’t get no runnin’ water. Every drop we use’s got to be drawed in the yard; an’ we don’t get no light, either, nuthin’ but lamps.”

The baby, comfortable and contented, let his hand stray over the mother’s throat, with little spasmodic caresses which left in their trail smears of dirt, flecked with tiny scarlet streaks where the sharp nails had caught in the pale, withered flesh.

“I reckon you-all might be cold,” she said, directing the older child to put more wood on the open grate fire, thinking apparently nothing of herself. “We don’t like it here first-rate. Maybe we’ll move on. I sure do crave traveling. Well, honey,” this was addressed to the baby, who had sat up with a jerk and began to whine. The candy picked up from the floor where it had fallen and restored to its owner’s mouth, did not seem the desired thing. The mother looked at me with a knowing smile.

“I reckon I can guess what ails him. He wants his babies.” And at this, always without getting out of her chair before the machine, she reached behind her and drew from a shelf over her head two white rats. These were apparently what the baby wanted. In the game that ensued between him and his pets, his chief delight seemed to be in seeing the rats disappear through the open throated gown of his mother, and making the tour of her bodice, wriggling, burrowing, crawling, to emerge finally from[61] her collar at the nape of her neck. Sometimes they diversified their gyrations, proceeding upward into her hair and down again by way of her ears onto easier climbing ground. Impassable, unmoved, she talked on in her gentle voice, giving no sign whatever that she noticed the animals. It was only when the baby plunged his short nails into the white rat’s side that she ejaculated mercifully:

“Quit that! You-all ’ll hurt them babies.”

I was somewhat dazed as I proceeded presently with my little girl guide from this interior to the mill. The squalor and disorder of what I had seen, the ignorance and the insensibility, contrasted strangely with the courtesy that had been shown me, the friendly concern about any intention I might have to get work, the desire to help me on my way, the strange lethargic tenderness which took the form of pity for even rats.

“Like animals,” my friend had told me. That we must wait to see.

This war is destroying the home unit in the most highly civilized countries in the world to an extent which is not less than appalling.... At the present moment women in Europe are being told: bring children into the world for the benefit of the nation; for the strengthening of future battle lines; forgetting everything that you are taught to hold dear; forgetting your struggles to establish the responsibilities[62] of fatherhood; forgetting all but the appetite of war for human flesh. It must be satisfied and you must be the ones to feed it, cost what it may; this is war’s message to the world of women.

It is the home, and specifically the mother, who, with taste and tact, experience and wisdom, and above all, with love and faith, must guide and steady and inspire these lives. If we want our boys and girls to be free from discontent, free from hard commercialism, free from vulgarity and false ideals, we must enter their lives and quietly guide them into a youthful brotherhood and sisterhood of service.

The homemaking of the future ... must be founded in this day and generation on financial independence. The girl of the past used to go from financial dependence in the girlhood home, to financial dependence as wife. She now goes from the independence of a wage earner to financial dependence as a wife, which relationship creates friction, and leads to incompatibility and divorce. There should be an adjustment of the responsibilities of home life before marriage on the basis of honest partnership. The children coming into the home should be taken[63] into partnership financially and occupationally. They should be paid for their work on the basis that “If you don’t work you can’t eat,” and held responsible for their share in the home-making.

Every home is perforce a good or bad educational center. It does its work in spite of every effort to shirk or supplement it. No teacher can entirely undo what it does, be that good or bad. The natural, joyous opening of a child’s mind depends on its first intimate relations. These are, as a rule, with the mother. It is the mother who “takes an interest,” who oftenest decides whether the new mind shall open frankly and fearlessly. How she does her work depends less upon her ability to answer questions, than her effort not to discourage them; less upon her ability to lead authoritatively into great fields than her efforts to push the child into those which attract him. To be responsive to his interests is the woman’s greatest contribution to the child’s development.

Search any woman’s heart, no matter how “emancipated”, how “modern”, she may be, and[64] you will find there the love of home, of a lover, of a child, either realized or hoped for. How far this love is being denied to women today needs no showing. Women are being forced from the home into industry at a faster rate than the birth rate. Those still in the home are beginning to realize the interdependence of the modern social order and to see that only by extending their home-making out into the larger life of the community are their own circles safe.

As they go out into this wider service and struggle, women will take the spirit of the home with them. There are already signs that the faith, honesty, cleanliness, kindness of the home are to become the qualities of future society. We are to forsake our present régime with its cruel hostilities, and to build an order which shall meet the needs of all its children with the tenderness of father and mother, which shall institutionalize sisterhood and brotherhood. In this reconstruction women, the home-makers, will do a valiant share.

Then, having battled for their emancipation and won, and having used their new powers to join in the crusade for a higher civilization and won, women will go back into the home. Back to the home! But it will be as free women to a free home, under whose roof justice, equality and security will be sheltered. At last there will be an era of peace, and the morning rays of the golden age will tint the hilltops.

[65]

We sat watching until we were weary, between 11 and 12, and then went to our bedroom. The same beds were reserved, and one woman who was said to work for her living, and had a very bad cough, was already in bed. We were speedily in bed also, and for awhile were quiet. The room was very stuffy, in spite of two ventilators; the sheets were not very clean, but still fairly so. The beds were filled by degrees all but one, that previously occupied by the Scotch woman. One girl who came in late said she was not on the streets; that she had begged money for her lodging, as she was out too late to return to her place. It was holiday time, being Whit week. One girl came in late and had had drink, which made her talkative, said she was a servant, and had just left a place where she had been ten months.... She meant to “enjoy herself” over the holiday and go to service again.

One girl who had been in before grumbled that her bed had been slept in and was dirty; but her own underlinen was far from clean. No one seemed to possess a nightgown; all slept in their underlinen.

We had the door a little ajar, and far into the night the doorbell kept ringing, and girls were admitted, and laughter and conversation drifted up the stairs. Our room settled down sometime past[66] midnight, but the girl who was drunk several times tried to begin a conversation. At last we all slept. Two, however, had bad coughs. I woke at intervals through the night, and finally at 6.30. I was longing for fresh air, so put on a skirt and went down to enquire the time, and decided to go out for a quiet stroll. The bath room was empty, the bath had old papers in it, and did not look as if it was often used. There was a table with a looking glass, and a good deal of rouge about. The wash basin was very small, and no soap was provided. There was a roller towel for everybody. We had learned by experience to take our own soap and towel, and we lent the soap several times....

I slipped out to the brightness of a May morning, and walked in the direction of the park. The park was not open, as it was not yet seven, but just outside I found a resting place. What a contrast to the fresh budding life of the trees was that perversion and decay of budding womanhood I had left behind me! A tree cut down in its prime to make way for building furnished me with a parallel. What artificial conditions of man’s making, are pressing on those young lives, sapping them off from true use to rottenness and decay?...

Is there even at the back an organized system, seeking victims and preying on them? This much is certain: that there is room for an allowance of greed and wickedness against defenseless womanhood. For if a woman cannot get work, where is she to go? What is she to do? Can all our homes and shelters together prevent many from drifting “on the[67] streets”? Do we not need a national provision for migration, and temporary destitution among women?

At present the chief reason I see for the fostering of a recreative social relationship among high school students is the inefficiency of the average home....

For instance, there is the home where the father may assume the attitude that after working all day at his own necessary pursuits, he cannot be annoyed by a riotous lot of youngsters all over the place in the evening. This is the short-sighted home....

There is the home in which the mother values her housekeeping above her home-making, the mother who cannot have her cherished lares and penates marred or displaced by visiting young people or indeed even by her own. This is the home of things, not of children....

And an especially pitiful type of inefficient home is that materially prosperous one in which the parents are too absorbed in their own affairs, social and business, to encourage home social life in their children. This type flourishes in many so-called exclusive suburban districts.

From whatever type of home a child goes to school, it is in that home that his standards of conduct and ideals of life are formed, and it is these that he carries to his association with his fellow-pupils.

[68]

What is the relation between domestic service and criminality and immorality? Between erring girls and their own homes as nurseries of weakness and wilfulness? It is this: housework as a sad majority of women perform it, is the most unsystematized, unstandardized, undisciplinary, unsocial and uninteresting work in the world. And family relations, as a sad majority of our citizens comprehend them, are the most unregulated relations in the world; there are a few standards below which the social conscience of the community will not allow a parent to fall in the treatment of a child, or a mistress to fall in the treatment of a maid; but they are standards so low that almost any other human relationship is better regulated by law and by public sentiment. The home is the most haphazard institution of our day.... Of the twelve or fifteen million homes in the country, probably not one million would pass an efficiency test based on the way they are run and the quality of their output.

If every man and woman held in their hearts a definite home ideal,—a lofty conception of their united lives, the highest function of parenthood would then, too, be perfect. There is little credit in simply perpetuating either a condition or a race.

[69]

If the labors which the great majority of women are putting in homes were estimated at market rates like those of men—and domestic arts are coming to have high values—husband’s incomes in a great majority of cases could not secure either the quality or the quantity. This, the largest single field of industries, is not enumerated by the census. Accurate valuation would put an end to the shibboleth, “The husband supports the wife”; would give self-respect to millions of women, and so inspire them; would remove the unsound impression of women’s comparative irresponsibility and men’s comparative dependability, whose psychologic effect is disastrous.

Where do we find strife amid civilization? In the homes where husband and wife have not had mutual interests, where they have grown apart, and one has outstripped the other in development.

In one of the letters of Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, to her mother, Queen Victoria, she writes: “I try to give my children in their home what I had[70] in my childhood’s home. As well as I am able, I copy what you did.”

There is something essentially British in this point of view. The English mother, whatever her rank, tried to give her children in their home what she had in her childhood’s home; as well as she is able, she copies what her mother did. The conditions in her life may be entirely different from those of her mother, her children may be unlike herself in disposition; yet she holds to tradition in regard to their upbringing; she tries to make their home a reproduction of her mother’s home.

The American mother, whatever her station, does the exact opposite—she attempts to bestow upon her children what she did not possess; and she makes an effort to imitate as little as possible what her mother did.... Her ambition is to train her children, not after the mother’s way, but in accordance with “the most approved method”. This is apt, on analysis, to turn out to be merely the reverse of her mother’s procedure.

We acknowledge the inability and the inefficiency of the parents and the home to control the fortunes of the child when we substitute for them the parental function of government; nevertheless, the strongest of education remains in the home, and the school and the settlement and other agencies that hover over it cannot replace that home.

[71]

There is a rising revolt among women against the unspeakable dullness of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life of servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world. No honest woman will deny—man’s opinion is valueless here—that there is nothing in the home alone to satisfy woman’s human longing for variety, adventure, romance. But any man will tell you strongly that home is not enough to fill a human being’s life—if that human being is to be himself.

As you know, the ancients believed that a mother had a great deal to do with the character of her children, and this is true, for no mother has the right to bring children into this world and not give them the best of care and attention. I believe that every child born into this world has the trinity of mental, physical and moral elements, and it is up to the mother to develop this trinity....

I believe more good can be accomplished by proper training right from the cradle than all the corporal punishment in the world. I have ten rules, and they are:

[72]

1. Never say “don’t.” The very atmosphere of some homes is fairly reeking with “don’t”.

2. Never scold. A scolding mother is worse than a spanking mother.

3. Never give corporal punishment.

4. Never say “must”.

5. Never allow a child to lose its self-respect or respect for its parents.

6. Never frighten a child.

7. Never refuse to answer questions.

8. Never ridicule a child or tease him.

9. Don’t banish the fairies.

10. Don’t let a child ever think there is any more attractive place than its own home.

I look forward to a time I believe to be rapidly approaching, when the home of the workingman, like everyone else’s home, will be truly a home, the happy resting-place, the sheltering nest of father, mother and children, and when, through the rearrangement of labor, the workingman’s wife will be relieved from her monotonous existence of unrelieved domestic drudgery and overwork, disguised under the name of wifely and maternal duties, when the cooking and the washing, for instance, will be no more part of the home life in the humblest home than in the wealthiest. The workingman’s wife will then share in the general freedom to occupy part of her time in whatever occupation[73] she is best fitted for, and, along with every other member of the community, she will share in the benefits arising from the better organization of domestic work.

The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from “art-exhibit” to dressmaker’s opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities; they themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of[74] life; yet they had no more real existence than the poet’s shades in limbo.

Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure.... The details of her existence were as strange to Lily as its general tenor. The lady’s habits were marked by an Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion. Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside the bonds of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed obligations existed: night and day floated into one another in a blur of confused and retarded engagement so that one had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner was often merged in the noisy after-theater supper which prolonged Mrs. Hatch’s vigil until daylight. Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng of hangers-on—manicures, beauty-doctors, hairdressers, teachers of bridge, of French, of “physical development”.... Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of interminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion-journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her companion’s ken.

We have seen how the ties of mutual interest and common experience are disrupted by the transference of industry from the home to the factory. We have seen members of the family forsake the roof-tree in[75] pursuit of work. We have seen the wife and child receiving their pay from the corporation, in definite, fixed wages.... The home shifts from time to time. Light, food, air, space, all are inadequate or polluted. The parents are irritable from the constant friction and anxiety of the predicament in which they live. Naturally, none of them can love “the home” very deeply. The children feel little reverence for the parents whose helplessness exposes the family to such a life. There are few common activities and interests between the members of the family, hence, there are few strong ties. The companions of the alleyways and streets form the social circle of the young, and the cheap theatres which offer their attractions at short intervals along the city streets fill up that vacuum in their experience which the nature of man abhors. Children living in these conditions do not have a reasonable chance to grow up with strong minds in sound bodies. Nor can this kind of youthful life develop those ideas of fair and right conduct, that honorable and dignified attitude of mind which are essential to good citizenship. Born into such a world, growing up in such an environment, why should they respect anything or any body? They do not. And the family disintegrates as soon as the children are old enough to declare their independence. Society has deprived the family of the means of securing normal living conditions for its future citizens. It is now confronted by the immediate and urgent problem of providing those conditions outside the family. The domestic home having been destroyed, a social one must be provided.

[76]

[78]

This is so emphatically the children’s age that a good many of us are thankful that we were not born in it. The little girl who said she wished she had lived in the time of Charles II because then “education was much neglected” wins our sympathy. It is a doubtful privilege to have the attention of the civilized world focussed upon us both before and after birth.

The child from its birth is more woman’s work than man’s.

[81]

If your child is rightly born, with no prenatal drapery to untangle from, you need concern yourself about his proper guidance, only past the infant age. He will educate, without your insistence. He will be showing you new points wherein your old rhetoric is at fault, or your mental philosophy behind the times. If you are wise, you will get vast lessons from him.

Froebel said: “The nursery was my university.” The child receives there indelible lessons, nor does he judge as to whether a thing is literal or figurative. It is all fact to him. Plato says it is most important that tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thought. The[82] highest and grandest that could be said of that strange phase of human experience, the Flesh-birth phase, was said by Friedrich Froebel, substantially as follows: “With the beginning of every new family there is issued to mankind and to each individual human being, the call to represent humanity in pure development; to represent man in his ideal perfection.” Froebel was broad in saying also, “The destiny of nations lies far more in the hands of women, the mothers, than in the possessors of power, or of those innovators who, for the most part, do not understand themselves! We must cultivate women, who are the educators of the race, else the new generation cannot accomplish its task.”

Now Froebel was not contending for woman’s rights, but for the race. He speaks of woman, because he saw that her element in the cause of civilization was in need of accentuation. He was seeking in the race that balance which is imperative in the promotion of perfect conditions.... Froebel spoke of women because men have held the reins of education in the past. Even in the matter of bringing children into the world....

Above all things do not encourage the child to occupy his time with trivialities, to the neglect of the grand phenomena of nature—the beauty and poetry everywhere, along the dewy borders of the country road, the hedges and fields, the rocks and imbedded fossils, insects and plants. To study botany, geology, physiology and even psychology in youth, is excellent occupation.

[83]

Children begotten under a sense of duty would ... be deprived of a number of essential conditions of life; among others that of finding in their parents beings full of life and radiating happiness which constitutes the chief spiritual nourishment of children—and it may be added that parents who live entirely for their children are seldom good company for them.

Our age, it is true, is not a very reverential age, a sceptical age, one questioning the traditions. It is doubting the dignity in the lot of a soldier driven to martial courage by conscription. It is finding attenuated beauty in unwilling motherhood, though submission be in the name of God or Social Duty. It has asked itself this question and the answers are perturbing—For what and for whom are we breeding humanity if it be not for humanity itself?... Indeed, it is unbelievable that there should be a cry for breeding, when children innumerable crowd the city slums, deprived of air and spiritual breathing place, or in small towns and little farm houses grow dull and vicious through lack of appeal to the imagination and the intellect. Society as a whole cannot be too thankful for those women, who, celibate in body, have given themselves to the rearing of this “child material below par”, in the belief that the world is not for its superman but for the many.

[85]

Is not the quality, rather than the quantity, of children the thing to be aimed at? If, then, by improving woman’s status the breed improves, as improve it must, is not this preferable to the “plenty” in their present very mixed condition? Has no one sufficient imagination to see in the mind’s eye a race that would be incapable of breeding this mass of “undesirable aliens”, who are tossed about from shore to shore, welcome nowhere, and a curse to themselves?

Slowly, how slowly, has dawned the thought that something more than mere numbers is the need of the family. Man found out long ago what laws must be studied and carried out in breeding for the high results in animal life; the brood mare or other animal rested and skillfully fed. For the woman, such thought never entered the mind of either husband or wife. The formula “God wills it”, lifted the burden of responsibility for defectives, or diseased, deformed or crippled children.... “Fewer and better”, has its own mission, till the day comes when a trained motherhood and fatherhood will ensure to the state an order of citizens for whom that war cry is no longer needed. The old phrase[86] “God’s will”, is to fill with new meaning. God’s will and man’s, more and more with every step forward in the knowledge of what life was meant to bring to every child of man.

It makes no difference to the child’s inheritance which parent is unfit. Neither should be. It makes no difference to the child whether, after birth, the ignorance, evil instruction, contagious blighting of him come from a man or from a woman; from domestic conditions (said to be women’s work), or from municipal conditions (said to be man’s work). The responsibility cannot be divided. Before this ideal—the child’s well being—these sexes are on an equal footing, nor is one sex justified in wronging the child because the other says or does so. Nature forgives no spurious reasoning. The child and the race suffer the consequences.

Never before in human history has the right of the young to pure living, the claim of the adolescent to guidance and restraint, the need of the child for nurture at the hands of father, mother, school and the community been recognized as in Colorado today.

[87]

Few parents think of addressing their children in the following manner, though it is in this reasonable way that Heaven seems to command the whole human race:—It is your interest to obey me till you can judge for yourself; and the Almighty Father of all has implanted an affection in me to serve as a guard to you whilst your reason is unfolding; but when your mind arrives at maturity, you must only obey me, or respect my opinions, so far as they coincide with the light that is breaking in on your mind.

A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind; and Mr. Locke very judiciously observes, that “if the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children; if their spirits be abased and broken much by too strict a hand over them, they lose all their vigor and industry.” ...

On the contrary, the parent who sets a good example, patiently lets that example work, and it seldom fails to produce its natural effect—filial reverence.

The Government’s interest in children shown to all the world has stimulated every nation to deeper study of its own conditions as they relate to child life[88] and the effect has been more far-reaching than can be estimated.

America, which is the Mecca for every nation, which has within its borders over 100,000 children of foreign birth and one-quarter of whose children are of foreign parentage, can claim a wider interest in the children of every nation than can any other nation on the globe, for within the boundaries of the United States may be found children of every race and every clime.

Only a mother counted her jewels yesterday, you see. Today, States count them, too. Even Jimmie Smith in, we will say, England, who before the war might have been regarded as among the least of these little ones, has become the object of his country’s concern. Jimmie came screaming into this troublous world in a borough of London’s East End, where there were already so many people that you didn’t seem to miss Jimmie’s father and some of the others who had gone to the war. Jimmie belongs to one of those three hundred thousand London families who are obliged to live in one- and two-room tenements. Five or six, perhaps it was five, little previous brothers and sisters, waited on the stair landing outside the door until the midwife in attendance ushered them in to welcome the new arrival. Now Jimmie is the stuff from which soldiers are made, either soldiers[89] of war or soldiers of industry. And however you look at the future, his country’s going to need Jimmie. He is entered in the great new ledger which has been opened by his government. The Notification of Births Act, completed by Parliament in 1915, definitely put the British baby on a business basis. Every child must now, within thirty-six hours of its advent, be listed by the local health authorities. Jimmie was.

And he was thereby automatically linked up with the great national child-saving campaign. Since then, so much as a fly in his milk is a matter of solicitude to the borough council. If he sneezes, it’s heard in Westminster. And it’s at least worried about there.

We should make a special effort to discover our children’s ideals, for several reasons. First of all, by knowing what the girl or boy has nearest the heart we shall be able to enter into closer sympathy with the child, we shall be able to understand much of the conduct that would otherwise baffle as well as annoy us....

It is very easy to ridicule the ideals and ambitions of children when they seem to us too high flown or futile. But a person’s ideals stand too close to the center of his character to be treated so rudely. It is better to ignore the many trifling flights of fancy[90] that are not likely to have any permanent effect, and to throw the child into circumstances that will force the emergence of more deep-seated or far-reaching ambitions.

A Frenchwoman to whom I once said that American parents treat their children in many ways as though they were their contemporaries remarked, “But does that not make the children old before their time?”

So far from this, it seems, on the contrary, to keep the parents young after their time. It has been truly said that we have in America fewer and fewer grandmothers who are “sweet old ladies,” and more and more who are “charming elderly women.” We hear less and less about the “older” and the “younger” generations; increasingly we merge two, and even three, generations into one.

A Japanese child is rarely punished and never whipped, but the strong influence of the home training makes the average child obedient and self-controlled at a comparatively early age. He is taught to conceal his grief with the thought that if he does not, he will give pain to others.

[91]

Infant mortality is a blot on civilization. If it is worth while to spend millions to safeguard farm products which are, after all, only raised to serve the needs of each generation of children in turn, is it not worth while to spend the necessary sums to popularize the methods by which the lives of children themselves may be safe-guarded?

One cannot begin too early to teach boys the duties of citizenship. There are many men who are educated, intelligent gentlemen who do not “take the trouble to vote,” and are not ashamed of the fact. When such things are true, is it any wonder that we have cause to complain of corruption or misgovernment? How can it be otherwise when some of our citizens neglect their duty to their country?

I was strolling through a neighboring park one breezy September day when it occurred. It took less[92] than ten minutes from beginning to end—but did it end then?

There had been a shower the night before, and the city’s dust had been washed from the leaves on trees and shrubbery. All nature seemed in fine mood and had filled me, along with the rest of the town-imprisoned mortals, with some of her exuberance and life.

This keen enjoyment of mere existence, which nature alone can give, was particularly noticeable in the buoyant movements of a little three-year-old child, who was dancing in and out of the shadows of the tall trees, now running, now skipping, now jumping in the joyous exhilaration of mere animal life. Ever and anon he looked back at his father and his father’s friend, who were strolling along in a more sedate enjoyment of the fresh air and glittering sunshine. The fact that each of them carried a tennis racket showed that they, too, were out for a holiday.

The child’s delight in all the freshness and freedom about him quickened his senses, as it always will quicken a healthy child. In a few moments his attention was attracted by the bending, swaying branches of a nearby clump of willow trees. The fascination of the lithe, graceful movement of the boughs was so strong that he stooped and stood with upturned face, gazing at them until the two men approached him. Then catching hold of his father’s hand he exclaimed, “See! See!” pointing to the nodding tree branches. His face was full of happiness, and his eyes were looking into his father’s eyes expecting sympathy in this new-found wonder of nature. But[93] the father gave no heed to what was interesting the boy. Instead, he began playfully slapping him on his skirts with the tennis racket, at the same time saying, “Will you be good?” “No,” answered the child in high glee. It was evidently a familiar pastime between them. “Will you be good?” repeated the father, in mock threat lifting the tennis racket as if to strike the child over the head. “No, I won’t! No, I won’t!” shouted the boy as he scampered off over the grass. This created a chase in which the father playfully spanked the captured boy as with make-believe wrath he dragged him back to the side-walk. Having returned to the starting point of the chase he released the boy with the words, “There now, I’ll spank you hard if you are not a good boy!” He had scarcely let go his hold on the youngster’s arm before the latter again ran off, shouting in high glee, “No, I won’t! No, I won’t be good!” Again came the chase and again the playful spanking and dragging back and the release with an admonition that he would get a beating this time if he was not a good boy. The tone in which the words were said were an invitation to the child to renew the game.

The third time he started off, however, the other man decided that he, too, would take part in the sport. So he quickly put his tennis racket in front of the boy, thus obstructing his path. The child manfully struggled to push it aside, but could not. Soon his “No, I won’t,” in answer to his father’s “Will you be good?” had in it a note of fretfulness or, rather, resentment. He was contending now with two grown men and his strength was not equal to the strain. He[94] pushed angrily against the racket in front while trying at the same time to avoid the light blows from the one in the rear. With cat-like agility the man in front would withdraw his obstructing tennis racket until the boy started forward and then check—would come the racket just in front of him. The very movement of his arm was like that of a cat regaining his hold on an escaping mouse. A peal of laughter from him each time he caught the exasperated child showed how much he was enjoying the sport. The father seemed equally amused and joined heartily in thwarting the efforts of the boy to escape. The little fellow’s face grew red, and he was soon short of breath from his struggles, and there was the angry sob of defeat in his voice. The scene ended by the child’s getting into a towering rage.

When they passed out of sight the father had seized him by the arm and was forcing him along, the boy kicking and struggling, but powerless to help himself. The two men were laughing heartily.

The child’s blood had been poisoned by the heat of anger, he had exhausted his physical vitality and his nervous system had been disarranged, not to speak of his moral standards—but then, the father and his friend had been amused.

The first child to whom I spoke stood waiting, without work, for the machinery to start up. He had on a cloth cap, overalls, and a blue cotton shirt open at the throat. His face was wan, his eyes blue, with an intense blue streak beneath them. His mouth was full of tobacco, which had collected in a dingy crust about his lips. As he leaned back, one foot crossed over the other, expectant for the spindles to begin their whirling, he presented in his attitude and gestures, the appearance, not of a child, but of a gaunt man shrunk to diminutive size. Going[97] over to where he sat, I started conversation with him about his work.

“How many sides do you run a day?” I asked.

“Three to four,” he answered.

“How much do you make?”

“About $2.40 a week.”

Then hastily I put the question: “How old are you!”

“Goin’ on tweayulve,” he responded. “I’ve been workin’ about four years. I come in here when I was seayvun.”

“Ever been to school?”

He shook his head. “No, meayum. I don’t know if I would like it. I reckon I’d as soon work here as be in school.”

“How many hours do you work here a day!”

“From six until six.”

The noise of the machine was distracting, and as I bent over him to catch his answer piped in a shrill, nasal voice, I could not but notice how fine and delicate his features were; the deep eyes, the high arched nose, the slender lips were placed in the oval face as features only can be placed by the unerring mold that breeding casts. Observing, also, the miniature shoulders that seemed to have been oppressed by some iron hand, I said:

“Don’t you get very tired?”

There was a pause which made more marked the honesty of his response.

“Why, I don’t never pay much attention whether I get tired or not.”

“You have an hour at noon?”

[98]

Here he brushed the cloth cap onto the back of his head, and sent a long, wet, black line from his mouth to the floor.

“Well,” he said (it was the man who spoke, his arms akimbo, his body warped in the long tussle for existence), “they aim to give us an hour, but we don’t never get more’n twenty-five minutes. We all live right up there.” He nodded toward the square of houses clustered around the mud-puddle on the brink of the slovenly hillside. Then the bobbins began to revolve slowly, and the boy started back to his work.

“You can’t loaf much,” he explained, “when the machine’s a runnin’.”

Up and down he plied on his monotonous beat—lone little figure....

Evidently waiting to join in the conversation, a small boy, I noticed, was standing beside me. His dark eyes sparkled merrily in his colorless face; he was dirty and covered with lint.

“What’s your job?”

“Sweepin’,” he grinned.

“How much do you make a day!”

“Twenty cents.”

“How old are you!”

“Seayvun.”

The boy at the machine, making bands for the spindles, was “goin’ on tayun.” He earned twenty cents a day. Others, I learned, were eight, nine and ten, and occasionally there was one as old as twelve.

As I walked on now through the mills talking with a twelve-year-old red-headed girl who had been four years at work, my eyes suddenly fell upon a[99] strange couple. I could not take my attention from the tinier of the tiny pair; the boy’s hands appeared to be made without bones, his thumb flew back almost double as he pressed the cotton to loosen it from the revolving roller in the spinning frame; they no longer moved, these yellow, anemic hands, as though directed in their different acts by a thinking intelligence; they performed mechanically the gestures which had given them their definite form.

The red-headed girl laughed and nodded in the direction of the dwarfs.

“He’s most six,” she said. “He’s been here two years. He come in when he was most four. His little brother most four’s workin’ here now.”

“Yes? Where?”

“Oh, he works on the night shift. He comes in ’beaout half-a-past five and stays till six in the mornin’.”

I went over to the other dwarf of the couple, older, evidently, than the boy “most six.” Below her red cotton frock hung a long apron which reached to the ground. Her hair was short and shaggy, her face bloated, her eyes like a depression in the flesh, and about her mouth trailed streaks of tobacco. It seemed absurd to question her. Oblivion was the only thing that could have been mercifully tendered—even the peace of death could hardly have relaxed those tense features, cast in the dogged mould of suffering.

“How old are you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“What do you earn?”

[100]

She shook her head again.

Her fingers did not for a moment stop in their swift manipulation of the broken thread. Then, as if she had suddenly remembered something, she said:

“I’ve only been workin’ here a day.”

“Only one day?”

“I’ve been on the night shift till neow.”

Dwarfs? Ah, yes; dwarfs indeed. But would that those who affirm it might catch sight of the expression that lowered under the brows of those two miniature victims. Like a menace, threatening, terrible, it seemed to presage the storm that shall one day be unchained by the spirits too long pent up in service to the greed of man.

[102]

Women need a vote for the sake of children. No state, modern or ancient, has ever cared properly[103] for its children. Children are at the present time horribly neglected in every country, even when they are not, as in many states of the United States, horribly abused. All women whatever their nationality care more than all men for the welfare of all children. This is true even of female animals in the animal world. It is supremely true in our human world. Children are, and always will be, the special interest of women. Wherever women already vote, their influence is felt immediately and persistently in ameliorative measures for the protection, reformation, and education of little children. No one with any knowledge of the facts can deny that the political power of women is exercised on behalf of children. We are now learning that children should be the chief concern of our present civilization because in them lies the hope of the future. For the sake of children, women must vote.

As woman has always mothered the race she should now refuse to be its child.

[108]

Generations of the past have been responsible for certain iniquitous practises, but it remained for the present century to shut the little ones up in factories, stunting physical and mental growth. Because of child labor today the future generation of men and women will suffer. Their career will bear the stamp of human brutality.

[110]

She has never ceased out of the land. That she seems to be more in evidence now than she was[113] sixty years ago may be but one more expression of Feminism....

In every well-appointed household the mother is the controlling influence. In a large percentage of homes her acknowledged sovereignty is a dictatorship. If she be a woman of intelligence and refinement, she virtually supervises her girl’s education and molds her views of life, morals and manners. The father is, at most, Prince Consort, playing an insignificant part in the selection of associates and instructors, and no part at all in the regulation of deportment, speech and dress. “My mother thinks,” and “My mother says,” are cast-iron formulas that make an end of all controversy while the girl is in short skirts and wears her unshorn locks between her shoulders. With the lengthened skirts, and trussed hair, comes entrance upon the school or college world, and the beginning of individual life.

When we reflect on the enormous weight which the woman’s influence has on the growing child; when we consider the incurable superstitions, the unreasonable fables, the illogical deductions, the warped and stifled judgments, which millions of young boys learn in education and religion at their[114] mothers’ knees in infancy,—it is impossible to over-rate the invaluable consequences of any introduction of geist into the minds of women. But for the backward pressure of woman—woman ever conservative, ever reculante, ever wedded to form and precedent, and to tradition—the world of men would have forsaken many a cultus built on fable, many a dominion of priestcraft, many a limbo of worn-out and oppressive credulity. The evil mental influence of women is fully as great as can be the good moral influence of the best of their sex. Wars hounded on; fetters freshly riveted; the withes of dead beliefs binding down the free action of living limbs; the pressure of narrow ties, and of egotisms deified to virtue, forcing men aside from paths of greatness or justice—all those, and much more, are due to the baleful intellectual influence of women.

Womanhood now as always recognizes motherhood as its highest duty, its greatest obligation; and the present awakened womanhood sees its mission of motherhood—not only in the narrowed home immediately about it, but in the large human family, in the world of activity, it sees how the affairs of men, women and children need the true mother instinct, which in every phase of nature is one of unselfish devotion, of unlimited service, of freedom from combat for financial, social and personal[115] supremacy. The inherent attributes of motherhood must combine with those of fatherhood to square the balance of justice for childhood.

The world needs woman, her ideas, her way of reasoning, her insight, her sense of justice, her tender hands and her loving heart. The children of the world need her; for a long time they have been governed by the masculine mind which has made laws for them, established educational plans for them, opened juvenile courts for them, founded factories, mills, mines, in which little hands have hardened, little bodies have dwarfed, young minds and hearts grown prematurely old—and this, not because the masculine mind and the masculine heart would intentionally be drastic, but because men are not women, and fatherhood cannot be motherhood.

What could atone to a multitude of children for the misfortune of having been born, but the passionate instinct that takes no account of lack of beauty, grace or intellectual gift, but clings to its own with deathless devotion?

In one respect, at least, the functions of mother and teacher should be identical.... The teacher and parent must take their charge “for better, for worse.”

It goes without saying that every mother has an imperative duty toward her son as he approaches[117] this important period in his development. Nature has done her part in preparing the boy’s body, the mother must be doing her part in preparing his mind for all of these new experiences. There are many things which a mother can do because she is the mother, and because her mind is mature while the mind of the boy is yet immature. The mother, through her study, comes to see that the adolescent boy is about to acquire new powers. Before, he was simply an individual. Now he is becoming a part of the race, because he is acquiring the power of conserving it. To the mother who has duly prepared herself for her child’s adolescence, its appearance will bring the same mysterious thrill which she felt when she first saw the child as a new-born babe. It has been said in this connection, “When a baby is to be born, preparations for its advent are carefully made. But when, in future years, the most critical time comes when the child is to be re-born, a man or a woman, it is rare that intelligent suggestions or wise words of counsel tell him or her of the importance of the period.”

[119]

We shall never have really good mothers until women cease to make motherhood the central idea of their existence. The woman who has no interest larger than the affairs of her children is not a fit person to train them.

I spent six months one winter in the various factories of New York in order to get information by actual experience. I can truthfully and conservatively say that not more than one out of two girls employed in the factory trades for a year or more are physically fitted to be wives and mothers, not considering their fitness mentally, morally or spiritually. There are six million women workers in the United States. If fifty per cent., not ninety, are made physically, mentally and morally unfit for wife and motherhood by doing work unsuited to their strength, then the wage-system must be weighed and “found wanting” indeed. Economic conditions which force women to work in unsuitable industrial occupations are not only a fruitful cause for divorce, but an outrage against humanity as well.

[120]

[121]

To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers; wanting their children to love them best, and take their part, in secret against the father, who is held up as a scarecrow. When chastisement is necessary, though they have offended the mother, the father must inflict the punishment; he must be the judge in all disputes; ... I ... mean to insist that unless the understanding of woman is enlarged, and her character rendered firm, but being allowed to govern her own conduct, she will never have sufficient sense or command of temper to manage her children properly.

Thoughts are the blocks out of which children are made.... Your child’s thoughts will flow in the trenches you open for it. During the impressible first few months it will cultivate that which you cultivate. If you love, it will love; if you hate, it will hate. If you have the measles, it will have it; the child will rejoice at your rejoicing, and will weep[122] when you weep. (This is one instance wherein if you “weep you will not weep alone”! Anger indulged in by you will make the foetus helpless in Anger’s toils! Love humanity, find and faithfully perform your work, and your unborn child will one day be a philanthropist....

Two brothers manifested the same criminality their father had been guilty of when begetting them, and they became even worse men, because their weak, unresisting mother took no control over them during the months most important, and their passions developed. Thus the design and form of temple unwittingly carved out in the brain of their two sons, developed the phrenological bumps, criminal protuberances to match the design marked out for them by their father in his unenlightened Temple of Thought. This condition could not have been altered by any process known except that of the mother’s thought-action during the period of pliability in the atom. But being incompetent, unable to systematize her thoughts and purify her heart, or cultivate the philosophical and rational, the begotten shape developed with all the qualities about it that had so blighted the begetter....

It is with pleasure I turn from the above picture and point out to you the laws leading up to the beautiful character of Elizabeth Cady Stanton—one of the bravest of leaders in the cause of woman’s emancipation. Daniel Cady was a distinguished lawyer, a New York judge, later elected to Congress. Though a man of fine qualities, unimpeachable integrity, he was sensitive and modest to a marked[123] degree; while her mother, Margaret Livingston, had the military idea of government, was tall and queenly, self-reliant and at her ease under all circumstances. She was the daughter of Colonel Livingston, who, at West Point, when Arnold made the attempt to betray that stronghold into the enemy’s hands, in the absence of his superior officer, took the responsibility of firing into the Vulture, a suspicious looking British vessel that lay at anchor on the opposite side of the river, leaving Andre, the British spy, with his papers to be captured.

The foregoing shows the result of the influence of two united energies in the production of a powerful woman. To modify the effect of her begetter’s modesty, the mother’s military ideas stood in good place; and to supplement his embarrassment, she was full of courage; so that even if her father had implanted the foundation for the cultivation of an over-modest child, the mother made up the happy balance during her supervision, and it resulted in the freedom of individuality in the beautiful woman who has blessed the race with light, in the dispelling of many clouds. The loving and faithful mother of seven children, she found time to fill a noble sphere in public, one in which they could rise up to call her blessed.

We have the ideal of collective motherhood expressing itself through the women’s clubs, through[124] consumer’s leagues, through mothers’ congresses, through a dozen like agencies. We have the ideal for a collective fatherhood also, but this is waiting to express itself through organizations, which can be formed only by men. Of the details of children’s lives the average man knows infinitely less than do women. Of the interrelationship of children and the whole structure of society most men know nothing at all.

Any stigma attached to women is really a stigma attached to their potentiality as mothers, and we can only remove it by beginning with the emancipation of the actual mother.

A woman never lived who did all she might have done to open the mind of her child for its great adventure. It is an exhaustless task. The woman who sees it knows she has need of all the education the college can give, all the experience and culture she can gather. She knows that the fuller her individual life, the broader her interests, the better for the child. She should be a better person in their eyes. The real service of the “higher education,”—the freedom to[125] take part in whatever interests or stimulates her—lies in the fact that it fits her intellectually to be a companion worthy of a child.

A mother happy in the friendship of her own daughter, said not long ago that she desired to erect an asylum for tormented daughters. Such an asylum would be as necessary as a protection against pampering parents as against those who are overbearing. Both alike torture their children though in different ways, by not understanding the child’s right to have his own point of view, his own ideal of happiness, his own proper tastes and occupations. They do not see that children exist as little for their parents’ sake as parents do for their children’s sake.... Family life would have an intelligent character if each one lived fully and entirely his own life and allowed the others to do the same. None should tyrannize over, none should suffer tyranny from, the other. Parents who give their homes this character can justly demand that children shall accommodate themselves to the habits of the household as long as they live in it. Children on their part can ask that their own life of thought and feeling shall be left in peace at home, or that they shall be treated with the same consideration that would be accorded to a stranger. When the parents do not meet these conditions they themselves are the greater sufferers.

[126]

The ancient mother and the modern mother are two very different beings. The very ancient mother fought for her child like the tigress for her young cubs. The mother of past generations gave her entire life to her children to the absolute neglect of her husband. The modern mother, although she sometimes neglects her children for her fads and frivolities is really a much more sane person, for she lives three lives; one part she gives to her husband, one part to her children, and a third part to herself. Instead of entirely obliterating herself, as the ancient mother did, she believes in self-culture, self-advancement, and is a thinking, human being; she is therefore more of a companion to her husband, and more capable of educating her offspring.

In a small room, dimly lighted, sat a woman making collars. Above the humming of her sewing machine the clock of a neighboring church struck ten. The woman lifted her head, and, gathering up her work, folded it together. She crossed the room and looked down upon the faces of two boys sleeping. “Christmas Eve!” she sighed.

[127]

She went back to cover up the machine. Sitting wearily, she leant her weight upon it and her head sank upon her arms. Last year it had all been so different! She had to be both father and mother now, since the bread-winner had been cut down by the hand of death falling with an awful suddenness. And within her body there slept, soon to waken to life, a child. “Pray God it be a boy,” she moaned. “If not, pray God it may die! It is too terrible to be a woman.”

She thought of the girl on the second floor who had been taken that day to the workhouse infirmary; she knew her story. The girl had been a waitress in a tea shop. She earned her food and five shillings a week. She could not live alone in the world on that wage. She had accepted the “protection” of a man more than twice her age. When her trouble came he had tired of her. He had left her. She did not know where he was now. Would that child who was to be born in the workhouse be a girl, too? She hoped not. She prayed that it might be a boy.

She remembered the old woman who had tried to drown herself last week. The old woman’s husband had died; that was a year ago. The widow had taken in work for an army clothing establishment. But the money she earned had hardly paid the rent. The case had made something of a sensation in the police court. The papers had taken it up for a day or two. The employer said it was the Government that was to blame. The Government would not allow its contracts to be carried out by the sweated labor[128] of men, but the sweating of women did not matter. Women did not seem to matter to anybody. When her husband was alive she had not realized it. She realized it now. She remembered, though, that even in these days—

Suddenly her room seemed full of light. Afar off she heard a burst of song. It came nearer. Never had she listened to such music. The woman lifted her head. The window was gone, the whole of the outside wall had fallen noiselessly away, and the sky was filled with a glory that was not of the sun nor of the moon. The light seemed to come from a cloud, and the singing, too. No, it was not a cloud, it was a host of radiant forms, for, as she looked, those shining ones came nearer to her, and she could hear their voices: “Good tidings of great joy!”

So that was what they were singing! Where had she heard it before? The words seemed so familiar to her that, though she wondered, she was not overwhelmed with surprise. Then came a rapturous outburst: “They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death—upon them hath the light shined.” The light! How wonderful it was! How amazing! It seemed to the woman like a glorious sea upon which her spirit floated—a flood which drowned her senses, so that for a moment or two she lost consciousness of all else. Then once again her attention was arrested by the singing, because she heard these words: “For unto us a child is born.” “Pray God it is a boy,” she murmured.

She wanted to hear more, and listened breathlessly[129] now. Nearer and nearer to her came the voices, and she heard a new refrain that seemed to fill both heaven and earth with ringing joy: “To set at liberty—them that are bruised.”

Suddenly that triumphant chanting became a lament. “No room! No room!” wailed that multitude of voices. “The door of the mother’s heart is shut. She prays that the child may die!” Then the woman knew that it was the child who stirred within her, whose coming the angels had heralded. The woman child! Yes, for she had prayed that it might die, and her heart stood still with fear.

And it seemed to the woman that the wall had been built up and the room was dark again, save for the light of one small lamp. But in her heart she heard still the echo of the song: “They that dwell in the land of the shadow of death”—that was the girl in the workhouse infirmary; that was the old woman in the police court charged with attempted suicide; that was herself—upon them “hath the light shined.” “For unto us a child is born, a Saviour, which”—Then she understood. It was her own child. The child that moved under her heart. What was it came next? Ah! It came back to her now; she seemed to hear again that burst of joy that filled the sky with song: “To set at liberty them that are bruised.”

Who were the bruised? Some one had told her a story a few hours ago. It was about the poor creature at the corner of the street; her husband had come back last Saturday and demanded money; had[130] knocked her down and kicked her; the magistrate had made a joke about it in court, and everybody had laughed except the woman. She had wept bitterly. But nobody seemed to care. “To set at liberty them that are bruised.” The poor thing was horribly bruised, they said. But was she not “at liberty?” No, she was in bondage—cruel bondage. Were all women in bondage? If so, some of the fetters were made of gold. Were fetters of gold light? Some one was going to break the fetters. And that some one was—her own child. “No! No!” she cried, in agony. “It is she—my child—who will be broken! Rather let her die now, before she has become acquainted with grief.”

Then the woman felt herself folded in a purple mantle, so that she could not see, but she was not afraid, rather comforted, as if with a sense of deep security. “I am destiny,” she heard; “your child will be safe with me. I will cover her with my arm. I will hide her in the secret place of the Most High. She shall break in pieces the fetters of those who are in bondage.”

“Then she shall not herself be broken?” faltered the mother.

“She shall be broken,” answered Destiny, “yet not her spirit. That shall return victorious to God, who sends it forth.”

“Tell me one thing,” pleaded the mother, “Shall the joy of my child outweigh her sorrow?”

“The angels sang at the birth of One who was destined to be crucified for the world. Did the joy of the crucified outweigh the sorrow?”

[131]

“I do not know,” she answered.

“According to her strength her joy shall be like unto His joy, and her sorrow like unto His sorrow.”

And the mother said, “God’s will be done.”

And when the veil was removed it seemed as though the little room was full of those shining presences who had drawn near to her from the singing hosts of heaven.

“I am Wisdom,” said one, and laid a hand upon the woman’s head. “I give to your child what is mine.” “I am Vision,” cried another, kissing her eyes, saying, “For the child’s sake.” And Love was revealed, as Love reverently touched the child where she lay beneath the mother’s heart, saying: “It is I who give to women the courage that amazes strong men.” “Take from me for the child that shall be born, my double-edged sword, the spirit and the word,” said one: “My name is Inspiration.”

Then once more there was wafted upon the air the singing of the heavenly host—and the outside wall had disappeared again, and the garret was open to the sky. And the heart of the woman sang with the joy of the angels: “For unto us a child is born.” ...

A peal of bells rang out from the church. One of the boys stirred, sat up, and cried out, “Mother!” She lifted her head. “Hush!” she said, “Hush, the angels are singing.” She rose and walked to the window, drawing aside the curtain. A star shone brilliantly; it seemed to shoot a shaft of light into the room. The Christmas chimes clamored their tidings.[132] She went back and knelt by the startled child. “Kiss mother,” she said, as she put her arms about him. “It is Christmas morning.”

I am the Mother-heart of this nation.

I have loved and nourished its little ones in age-long mother fashion; have swelled with pride when the nation has protected them from disease; come nearly to bursting with unuttered gratitude when happiness has come to the youth of the land.

I have spent many long, sleepless nights weeping over the fate of millions of my babies, forced from home, school and mother, to the factories and shops of the cities, and all night have wondered “why” and “how long?”

I am haunted by the childish protestations, desirous glances from faded, childish eyes, and bleed anew when I see my children marching from the factory door, their bent and bony figures clad in rags.

I, the Mother-heart of the nation have been deceived, tricked and defrauded.

I believed that modern industry, with all the improvements, could provide for my infants; believed the mighty labor-saving machines would not require the help of my babies to feed the world; believed the children would be given plenty of time in which to grow healthy bodies.

[133]

I have, however, awakened to existing conditions. No longer will I be submissive.

I have ever been a power for good, but seldom rebellious.

I am now pulsing red blood. I will temper my mother-love with human justice and stand only for right.

I will help restore to my babies the privileges of their years.

I can labor for justice and hover my young flock.

I no longer send out purely love throbs, but send warnings to those who have been blinded by gold.

I beat in harmony with the masses struggling for freedom, feeling confident of results. I beat with will and determination, a glorious future before me.

I know the day will come when the Mother-heart of all nations will be content because of the reign of justice.

I realize my responsibility and beat the faster.

I am the Mother-heart of this nation.

Let no one fear the loss of womanliness so long as woman is a willing slave to her mother instinct.

[134]

[136]

[138]

Only one in the whole world recognizes my claim to the personality, and does not wish merely to use and swallow up some part or other of me; loves me as nature created me, and fate distorted me; understands[139] this fate; is willing to leave me the remainder of my life, and to gladden it and draw it nearer to heaven; and, for the happiness of being my friend, will be, do, and leave all for me. This is the man who is called my bridegroom.

“I mean to have a swell home, if I am a bachelor,” boasted Timmy. “I feel like I wanted it. It’s just another game, I guess. But I’ll play a lone hand—I don’t reckon a man can be ready for matrimony when it sends cold shivers down his spine just to think of it, do you?”

Kid lowered his voice.

“Timmy, listen a minute. I’ll tell you something—a man never gets over feelin’ that way about it. He just has to kind of chloroform them feelings and hurry along with it. Because there ain’t no doubt it’s the thing to do.”

[142]

There is a sense in which marriage is a contract, at the same time business, moral and social....

Marriage is looked upon often as the consummation of the romance of life, whereas, it is simply its beginning. It is called a matter of the heart, which it should be, but it should also be an affair of the intellect. It is fortunate that the day of early marriage has passed, since the early marriage implied a choice guided almost wholly by the emotions, as the intellect is slower in its development than the heart. But marriage should involve both heart and brain and fulfill the chief desire of both.

If marriage laws are wrong, mend them. If marriage customs offend, change them. If other people’s marriages do not please, improve on them. But marriage itself remains a good thing—one of the best things in the world.

Every developed modern woman wishes to be loved not enmale, but en artiste. Only a man whom she feels to possess an artist’s joy in her, and who shows this joy in discreet and delicate contact with her soul as with her body, can retain the love of the modern woman.

[144]

As concerns marriage, if it should indeed be true that women, who can find practical work in life outside marriage, would no longer be so eager to marry, this would not necessarily be an evil, for it would probably act as an additional incentive to man to desire marriage. Marriage has been regarded for women as a profession in which failure involves, as in other professions, humiliation. Women are trained, therefore, under the present régime, to employ all the arts at their disposal to ensure success in their profession.... If women were absorbed in professions and occupations, such as farming, architecture, territorial service, and the like, and only desired marriage when and because they loved, we would have the loss in the woman of the wiles and artificialities which formerly stimulated the man, and marriage would be counterbalanced by a more healthy emulation on the part of the man, who would be desirous to obtain something of value which was difficult to get.

A very important question in this connection is whether, in promising fidelity to one woman, a lover is really undertaking more than he can perform. When he postpones marriage to the latest possible moment man is certainly not offering to his bride that gift of a life-long devotion which is part of the ideal of true love.

[146]

In the Marriage union, no ministerial or other official aid is required to consecrate or legalize the bond. After due care in making known their intentions, the parties, in presence of their friends, announce their covenant, with pledge of fidelity and affection, invoking Divine aid for its faithful fulfilment. There is no assumed authority or admitted inferiority, no promise of obedience. Their independence is equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal. This of course has had its influence on married life and the welfare of families. The permanence and happiness of the conjugal relation among us have ever borne a favorable comparison with those of other denominations.

Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation. But Rousseau, and most of the male writers who have followed his steps, have warmly inculcated that the whole[147] tendency of female education ought to be directed to one point—to render them pleasing.

Let me reason with the supporters of this opinion who have any knowledge of human nature. Do they imagine that marriage can eradicate the habitude of life? The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is past and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? Or is it not more rational to expect that she will try to please other men, and, in the emotions raised by the expectations of new conquests, endeavor to forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover, and the time will inevitably come, her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps the most evanescent of all passions, gives place to jealousy or vanity.

The common law, which regulates the relation of husband and wife, and is modified only in a few instances by the statutes, gives the “custody” of the[148] wife’s person to the husband, so that he has a right to her even against herself. It gives him her earnings, no matter with what weariness they have been acquired, or how greatly she may need them for herself or her children. It gives him a right to her personal property which he may will away from her, also the use of her real estate, and in some of the states, married women, insane persons and idiots are ranked together as not fit to make a will; so that she is left with only one right, which she enjoys in common with the pauper, the right of maintenance. Indeed, when she has taken the sacred marriage vows, her legal existence ceases.

Nothing is permanent, there is going on always a continual shuffling of the cards of public opinion; trends of thought, standards of conduct come and go; and so when the day comes that women are more economically independent, then they will go on strike and sweep away all the unworthy suitors and declare that they will only mate with the physically and mentally sound, and then all considerations but love and respect will go by the board. This will appear but a distant and unrealizable Utopia to many who read this; nevertheless it will happen; all changes seem incredible from the distance, but when they crystallize themselves in fact nothing appears more natural or suitable. Every prophecy since the commencement[149] of history has been scouted in its first inception, but when in time it has fulfilled itself it is seen to be the very thing awaited, natural and obvious, and a direct result of the past sequence of events.

Recent investigations of the after lives of college women and of their sisters who have not been to college have shown us that only about one-half of the daughters of men of the professional business classes who do not inherit independent fortunes can look forward to marriage. Statistics seem to prove that only fifty per cent. of the women of these classes marry. What are the other fifty per cent. to do except work or starve? Most women of independent means marry because their inherited fortunes enable them to contribute to the support of the family. Women of the working classes marry because they too, can help by their labor to support the family. It is only the dowerless women who are prevented by social usage from engaging in paid work outside the home, or in manual labor inside the home, after marriage, who remain unmarried. All other women are married and at work.

Is it well for the great middle classes of our civilized nations that is, for the classes that are not very poor or very rich, to contain these ever increasing number of celibate men and women? To such a[150] question there can be only one reply. If it is ill, as we all admit, why do we not encourage the women of these middle classes to work and marry like the women of the poorer classes who are practically all married? Why in England and Germany and the United States are there these thousands upon thousands of unmarried women teachers, a celibate class like the monks and nuns of the Middle Ages, and like them an ever present menace to the welfare of the state? Why in Italy, on the other hand, are so many of the women public school teachers married? Because in Germany and England and the United States women teachers lose their positions when they marry, and marry and starve they cannot. Because in Italy women teachers are allowed to marry and teach. Is it inconceivable that the state of the future in which women as well as men will vote will deprive women of bread because they wish to marry?

If a wife is compelled to get a divorce on account of the infidelity of the husband, she forfeits all right to the property which they have earned together, while the husband, who is the offender still remains the sole possession and control of the estate. She, the innocent party, goes out childless and portionless by decree of law, and he, the criminal, retains the home and children by favor of the same law. A drunkard[151] takes his wife’s clothing to pay his rum bills, and the court declares that the action is legal because the wife belongs to the husband.

And here we come to the most potent of all causes of divorce—the conventionally enforced idleness of many married women—parasitism, Mrs. Schreiner calls it—and the overwork of many of our men.... The rush of our present life comes to bear most heavily on our most chivalrous. It wears them out physically and mentally and discourages them spiritually before they are fifty years of age. It gives them only time enough to nourish a vague doubt of the womanhood that is content to fatten their toil, instead of laboring staunchly with them as healthy women should do. They find their usefulness limited, their powers exhausted, and wonder why. And then, sometimes in utter weariness they throw off the yoke and try to begin again. But the women are not always wholly to blame for this condition. Sometimes with a perfectly unreasoning “I can support a wife” pride, a man will insist that a woman give up once and forever the only work in which she takes an interest, and leaves her a choice between idleness and housework in his home (which always, with or without fitness, a man will permit a woman to do)! But if a woman should say to her husband before, or[152] soon after marriage, “John, it does not please me that you should be a lawyer—you must become a stock broker,” or “James, when you marry me you must give up the art you love and become a carpenter,” would we not be quick to decry her injustice? Yet there are men who still say to their wives, “The work you love you must give up. You may do the work I provide or none at all.”

Of course, motherhood brings to women certain limitations, but the thing we do not recognize is that these limitations are temporary. And, if, in the ages past, women were able to combine with motherhood the most arduous physical labors, it seems probable, that, in the present and future when the demands of maternity are less rigorous, women should be able, with gain to the race, to enter new fields of labor and accomplish laudable results.

Surely there is no greater safeguard for man and woman than the work in which mind and body can delight.

Once upon a time all the men in the world gathered together to make the laws of marriage. And the women, learning of this, gathered also, protesting and saying:

“A woman is one of the parties to every contract of marriage. Why do we also not make the laws of marriage?”

[153]

“Woman’s place is at home,” said the men.

“But,” said the women, “the marriage agreement is the very basis of the home.”

“Yes,” said the men, “but woman’s place is at home. It is not her place to create the conditions that make the home.”

“For how long is the marriage contract?” asked the women.

“Forever,” said the men. Then the women said:

“Suppose we should insist upon helping to make the contracts we enter into?”

“It wouldn’t be lawful,” said the men.

“Who makes the laws?” said the women.

“We do,” said the men.

“And do the men make the laws concerning the rights of children?” asked a woman with a babe in her arms, and another at her heels.

“Oh yes,” said the men.

“And the laws concerning a woman’s rights with respect to her own child?”

“Yes,” said the men, “the women bear the children, but the men determine their legal control.”

“Can the marriage contract ever be broken?” asked the bravest one of the women.

“No,” said the men, “it can’t be broken except upon facts that can’t be proved.”

“Do the men keep the marriage vows?” softly asked a woman ’way at the rear.

“Hush,” said a portly landlord who owned a “restricted district;” “no respectable woman would ask such a question.” Then a thoughtful woman earnestly asked:

[154]

“Will there not be more murders, and more suicides and more insanity if the women have not part in settling the terms of marriage?”

But the Lombrosos and the Allen McLane Hamiltons and all the other criminologists and insanity experts paid no heed to this question. Finally the women said:

“But suppose we don’t enter into these contracts that you make?”

“Oh, but you will,” said the men.

And they did. But some of the women got even.

The cry of man to woman under the patriarchal system has been, and still for the most part is, “Your value in our eyes is your sexuality; for your work we care not.” But mark this! The penalty of this false adjustment has fallen upon men. For women, in their turn, have come to value men first in their capacity as providers for them, caring as little for man’s sex value as men for women’s work-value. From the moment when women had to place the economic considerations in love first, her faculties of discrimination were no more of service for the selection of the fittest man. Here we may find the explanation of the kind of men girls have been willing to marry—old men, the unfit fathers, the diseased.... And it is the race that has suffered.

[155]

What dignity can there be in the attitude of women in general, and toward men, in particular, when marriage is held (and often necessarily so, being the sole means of maintenance) to be the one end of a woman’s life, when it is degraded to the level of a feminine profession, when those who are soliciting a place in this profession resemble those flaccid Brazilian creepers which cannot exist without support, and which sprawl out their limp tendrils in every direction to find something—no matter what—to hang upon; when the insipidity or the material necessities of so many women’s lives make them ready to accept almost any man who may offer himself? There has been a pretense of admiring this pretty helplessness of women. But let me explain that I am not deprecating the condition of dependence in which God has placed every human being, man or woman,—the sweet interchange of services, the give and take of true affection,[158] the mutual support and aid of friends or lovers, who have each something to give and to receive. That is a wholly different thing from the abject dependence of one entire class of persons on another and a stronger class. In the present case such a dependence is liable to peculiar dangers by its complication with sexual emotions and motives, and with relations which ought, in an advanced and Christian community, to rest upon a free and deliberate choice,—a decision of the judgment and of the heart, and into which the admission of a necessity, moral or material, introduces a degrading element.... Cordelia ... declared, “Love is not love when it is mingled with respects that stand aloof from the entire point.” Truly, the present condition of society ... leaves little room for the heart’s choice.

Dere ain’t nothin’ dull in bein’ married, and dere ain’t no sameness ’bout havin’, a husband which I reckon is de main reason dat most of us wants one. Hits de ole maids an’ de ole bachelors what ain’t got nobody to boss ’em an’ dispute ’em, an’ rile ’em, an’ fight wid ’em, dat gets dull an’ lonesome lak. Not married folks.... Life in one of dese ole bachelor clubs, or spinsters’ retreats makes me think of my batter puddin’s. Hit sets well on a weak stomach, but hit aint got no flavor to hit. Matrimony, hits lak one of de fruit cakes what I bakes at Christmas. Hits full of ginger an’ spice, an’ plums, an’ raisins, an’ hits mighty apt to give dem a night mare what partakes of hit, but hit sho has got taste to hit.

[160]

It often happens that marriage in course of time proves to be anything but an assurance of support. Early widowed, the young mother herself may have to earn her children’s bread. Or the husband may become crippled, or an invalid, or he may turn out a drunkard or spendthrift. In any of these circumstances, the responsibility and burden of supporting the family usually falls upon the wife. Is it strange that the group so often drifts into undeserved pauperism, sickness and misery, perhaps later on even into those depths of social maladjustment that bring about crime?

“But love,” Valda insisted, ... “should be free.”

“If it is, Nature didn’t make it so. Automatically the end of loving ties up with it those who love and the unborn.

“No sooner do we begin upon it than we enter upon certainties of effecting the happiness of the one who loves with us, and the potential third. It is so little free, that we can neither go out of it nor into it on the mere invitation, nor abate by saying so one of the widening circles of its disaster. Whether for better or worse, love is irrevocably tied to its consequences.”

[161]

By Mme. de Girardin

It is not easy to be a widow; one must resume all the modesty of girlhood without being allowed even to feign ignorance.

By Comtesse d’ Houdetot

I have seen more than one woman drown her honor in the clear water of diamonds.

By De Maintenon

Before marriage woman is a queen; after marriage, a subject.

By de l’Enclos

The resistance of a woman is not always a proof of her virtue, but more frequently of her experience.

By Anne Morton Barnard

A prison, plus “love”, is tyranny with its crown carefully hidden.

Mrs. W. K. Clifford

Why should man, who is strong, always get the best of it, and be forgiven so much; and woman who is weak, get the worst, and be forgiven so little?

By George Eliot

The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.

[162]

By Marguerite de Valois

There are few husbands whom the wife cannot win in the long run by patience and love, unless they are harder than the rocks which the soft water penetrates in time.

By Countess Natahlie

Love is the association of two beings for the benefit of one.

George Eliot

We look at one little woman’s face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our yearnings.

By “Ouida”

What is it that love does to woman? Without it, she only sleeps; with it alone, she lives.

By Mme. de Lambert

It is only the coward who reproaches as a dishonor the love a woman has cherished for him.

By Amelia E. Barr

The truth is, women are lost because they do not deliberate.

By Mrs. Alec Tweedie

(See page 126)

There will be more marriages, and happier marriages, when women are on an equal footing with men in education and income.

[163]

By Mme. du Bocage

The coquette comprises her reputation, and sometimes even her virtue; the prude, on the contrary, often sacrifices her honor in private, and preserves it in public.

By George Sand

A woman cannot guarantee her heart, even though her husband be the greatest and most perfect of men.

By Mme. de Rieux

In all ill-mated marriages, the fault is less the woman’s than the man’s, as the choice depended on her the least.

By Marguerite de Valois

There are women so hard to please that it seems as if nothing less than an angel will suit them; hence it comes that they often meet with devils.

By Mme. Bachi

Men bestow compliments only on women who deserve none.

By Mme. de Rieux

Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty, and women their happiness.

By Mme. de Flahaut

Manners, morals, customs change; the passions are always the same.

[164]

By Mme. Necker

The quarrels of lovers are like summer showers that leave the country more verdant and beautiful.

By Mme. Reyband

To continue love in marriage is a science.

By Anna Jameson

How many women since the days of Echo and Narcissus have pined themselves into air for the love of men who were in love only with themselves.

By Amelia E. Barr

Cruelly tempted, perplexed and bewildered, when passion is stronger than reason, women do not think of consequences, but go blindfolded, headlong to their ruin.

By Louise Colet

Better to have never loved, than to have loved unhappily, or to have half loved.

By De Pompadour

Love is the passion of great souls; it makes them merit glory, when it does not turn their heads.

Mme. de Stael

I am glad I am not a man, as I should be obliged to marry a woman.

By Mme. de Motteville

A woman can be held by no stronger tie than the knowledge that she is loved.

[166]

It is generally conceded that woman lives in a state of subordination to man, and nowhere is this more apparent than in that sphere which is said to be distinctly her own, the home.

The woman in the home renders service which the male wage-earner could not buy. She is the family[169] economist. She mends and makes the garments, buys the food and clothing, and by her intelligence and thrift maintains the head of the house in a state of physical efficiency which enables him to go out and sell his labor power. The service she renders is priceless. But, because she brings in no actual money, she is considered an economic dependent, and treated as a subordinate because of this dependence.

The lot of this woman is desolately pitiable, much worse in many cases than that of the woman who has gone out into industry.

There seemed to be a widely prevailing idea that modern industrial conditions, which take women and girls out of the home are responsible for a great increase in criminality and immorality. The Government investigation shows that exactly the reverse is true. The traditional pursuits of women—housework, sewing, laundry work, nursing, and the keeping of boarders furnish more than four-fifths of all the feminine criminals, compared with only about one-tenth furnished by all the newer pursuits, including mills, factories, shops, offices, and the professions; and the number of criminals who have never been wage-earners in any pursuit, but who come directly from their own homes into the courts and penal institutions, is more than twice as large as that coming from all the newer industrial pursuits together.

[170]

There is an immense amount of feminine talent and energy wasted in the world every day. This is not due to the indifference or the laziness of woman, for she is eager to do, to accomplish, to go out into the field of life and achieve for herself and her kind. But she simply does not know how. One of the most important movements of the day, therefore, is the reawakening of woman, the building her up on a new basis of self-help and work for others. That movement will set loose an amount of talent that will revolutionize our social life.

Women have failed to see that the work of every woman touched that of every other woman. The woman who works with the hand helps her who works with the brain. Today we know there could be no choice of work until there was freedom of choice to work.

Women are going to work, and they are not going to limit their work to house service. Let us cease[171] to attempt to make marriage and childbearing a check upon their work, thereby strengthening their tendencies toward celibacy and race suicide.... Let us rather adjust work and marriage and childbearing to a minimum of incompatibility by lifting inherited taboos on education in sex facts.

More and more must we demand that woman be freed from unmeaning drudgery—and from the enervating influences of support in return for sex, in marriage or out of it. Only by self-assertion and by self-development through the work which she may elect, will woman come into her own.

A woman’s place is like a man’s place. It is where her work is, wherever she can do the most good; wherever she serves herself best without invading any one else.

The demand of the women of the humbler classes for bread may be more pressing, but it is not more sincere[172] than that of the women of the leisure classes for work. And these two demands coming together, it seems to me, point to an end so plainly to be discerned, that I marvel that any should remain blind to it. The latter demand is the attestation of the collective human conscience that God does not permit any to live as cumberers of the earth, and that the very conditions of their moral existence is, that efforts and pains taken by them should answer to some part of the needs of the community.

It is practically certain that every discussion on the vocation of woman, whether among feminists or their opponents, will ultimately lead to the following problem: woman was obviously intended by nature to become a mother; modern social requirements make it obligatory that she should be legally married before doing so; there are not enough husbands to go round. What do you propose to do with the women who are left over?

The position of the unemployed modern female is one wholly different. The choice before her, as her ancient fields of domestic labor slip from her, is not generally or often at the present day the choice between[173] finding new fields of labor, or death; but one far more serious in its ultimate reaction on humanity as a whole—it is the choice between finding new forms of labor or sinking slowly into a condition of more or less complete and passive sex parasitism!

Again and again in the history of the past, when among human creatures a certain stage of material civilization has been reached, a curious tendency has manifested itself for the human female to become more or less parasitic; social conditions tend to rob her of all forms of active conscious social labor, and to reduce her, like the field-bug, to the passive exercise of her sex functions alone. And the result of this parasitism has invariably been the decay in vitality and intelligence of the female, followed by a longer or shorter period by that of her male descendants and her entire society.

We must accustom ourselves to another new idea that as marriage is no longer a duty, for all women, so it is no longer a trade or profession, requiring all the time and labor of all married women. Some confusion has arisen on this point because certain labors have been associated with marriage in the popular mind. But these labors may, in the near future, come to be considered as trades in themselves, not inseparably connected with marriage, and the wives of the days to come may be found performing diverse tasks. For we know that in our own times[174] women may be the best of wives and good mothers, but with small knowledge of spinning, weaving, basket-making, pottery-making, agriculture or even baking, although all of these trades used to be inseparably connected with the lives of married women. And tomorrow, owing to changed conditions, the woman doctor or lawyer may seem to be as desirable of a mate as the cook or seamstress today. So much is possible!

If the economic interest is the important one, then woman’s work has always been the important work. The loom and the hand mill were strictly feminine implements, so long as their product was used only to supply the wants of the people. Only when the products of the loom and the mill became useful in competition did man take them up; and then for purposes of exploitation. For thousands of years man has devastated the earth and drenched it in blood to further that exploitation. Now he is beginning to find out that, after all, the only safe and proper use that can be made of goods is in supplying the needs of the people. Man has not yet begun to learn humility, but he will learn it.

Isn’t it time for women to begin to defend their work, and their way of doing it? And to make a sober and critical estimate of the part that man has played in history? I think that women may well take pride in doing their work in a woman’s way.

[175]

It was in New England that women and girls first went out in large numbers to work with their husbands and fathers and brothers in the mill. They followed the industries from the fireside to the factory. It was a natural movement stimulated in many cases by necessity. At that time public opinion frowned on the idle girl, and work was considered a crowning virtue; so the factory girl was not commiserated but commended. Things have changed in the last century, and now we find most people of humanitarian instincts looking with regret at the spectacle of young girls marching to the mills. The procession is a long one in the old New England towns, and it is growing longer with the years....

When Charles Dickens came to America, it was to Lowell he went to see the cotton-mills in operation, and it was of those mills he wrote his glowing picture of factory life for women. “They look like human beings,” he said, “not like beasts of burden.” If he were to come to us to-day to see the cotton workers, he would, in all probability, be taken to Fall River first and asked to behold the product of the evolution of two generations. He would see no beautiful window boxes, no smiling girls making poetry as they worked, or moving about with songs on their lips. Life is grim in the Fall River mills, and the women come perilously near having the mien of “beasts of burden.” The semi-idyllic conditions of the early[176] New England cotton-mill have given way to a system brutalized by greed and the exigencies of modern industry.

Unheralded, with no blare of trumpets, reluctantly emerging into the light, are millions of women wage-earners thronging every trade and profession, multiplying themselves beyond all calculation from census to census in every country of the civilized world. Even in the United States where fewer women are at work than in any other country about five millions of women, or about one-fifth of all women of[177] working age, are supporting themselves outside the home. It is because this industrial revolution has taken place in our own lifetime that we do not as yet realize it. Women of my own age, however, need only refer to their own experience. I can remember when no women at all were employed in business offices, when the business streets of New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore were practically deserted by women. Now all the great office buildings are like rabbit hutches swarming with women typewriters, women bookkeepers, women secretaries, and business women of every sort, kind and description. Already everyone who studies the subject is compelled to recognize that whether we wish it or not the economic independence of women is taking place before our eyes. Men of the poorer classes have long been unable to care for their families without the assistance of women, and men of the classes which formerly supported their wives and daughters in comfort are now unable to do so and are becoming increasingly unwilling to marry and assume responsibility which they cannot meet....

[180]

Why must young girls pay the price of their youth and forfeit their right of motherhood at the machine—why must thousands of men and women endure hardships and sufferings to secure the primitive demands of a living wage and the right to self-government, to which we as a people stand pledged? What power makes necessary these terrible struggles for the simple right to live?

Woman’s industrial life is inseparable from her civic and social status. The only way to earn equal pay for equal work is to win equal political rights, equal influence with the legislature.

[182]

If woman is to be normally the economic partner of man in the home, it is a question of first importance that she should be his economic equal.

Upon how the woman worker of today is housed, depends, very largely, the efficiency and productiveness of her work. But, more impelling still, upon how she is housed depends the efficiency and productiveness of the future generation. For we must not forget that we have many married and widowed industrial women, and that large numbers of our working girls will rear the children of the coming race.

Woman labor in itself is not bad; it is good. It is woman wage-labor which is the curse. It is not labor, but exploited labor that is a menace to the womankind of the race.

If you work five minutes, you succeed five minutes’ worth; if you work five hours, you succeed five hours’ worth. Plenty have natural voices equal to mine, but I have worked.

[184]

Social economics is preeminently a woman’s problem, especially if Münsterberg’s assertion is widely true that in America it is the women who have the leisure and the cultivation to direct the development of social conditions. With this opportunity comes corresponding responsibilities.

The rich may say that women should stay at home and cook the dinner; the poor know that if women did stay at home there would often be no dinner to cook.

The typical lady everywhere tends to the feudal habit of mind.... She can renounce the world more easily than she can identify herself with it. A lady may become a nun in the strictest and poorest order without the moral convulsion, the destruction of false ideas, the birth of character that would be the preliminary steps toward becoming an effective stenographer.

[185]

Obviously, if all women did their share of the world’s work, there would be no need for the seamstress to slave sixteen hours at a stretch; there would be no starvation among the poor, and no hysteria among the rich.

Feminists would hold that it is neither desirable nor necessary for women, when they become mothers, to leave their chosen, money-earning work for any length of time. The fact that they do so, largely rests on tradition which has to be worn down. In wearing it down vast changes must take place in social conditions in housing, nursing, kindergarten—in the industrial world and in the professional.

We know now that the girl without occupation is the girl without mental growth.

[188]

Any one who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems. The latter finds an impassable thicket of folly, prejudice, and mistakes, where each point is open to attack, but where each attack fails because of the inadequate means at the reformer’s command.

The master of the old school looked askance at the master of the new school, and the following conversation is recorded:

“Young man, in my day, in your day, in the present day, and in the future day, the three R’s were, are, and will be, the necessary and most efficient training for our school children. Can you deny the evidence of generations trained in this way?”

“Nay, my master, I do not dispute that the three R’s are a necessity to the mental development of the race, but my contention is that besides this literary culture, and theoretical knowledge, a training for the[190] hands, and practical ability should be fostered, and included within the curriculum of our schools. Can you deny the evidence of the present day, testifying to the need of efficient training in all branches of industry and business, as well as in the professions and arts? How, dear sir, are we to meet this pressing need, and prepare our people for a life of useful labor, if we do not begin to train them from the primary class?”

“And so, sir, you would join the ranks of those who are commercializing all the fine arts, who are forgetting all else but money in capital letters?”

“You do not understand, my master. Under the great economic pressure of the times, waste-labor must be avoided, and training is the only means of avoidance. Think of the mass of immigrants that flock to our cities, to be amalgamated with our race. It is a laboring class, and self-preservation demands that we provide suitable living and working centers for it and its posterity. And our own people demand the same consideration in view of the fact that the great majority, poor, middle-class, and rich, are employed in some art, industrial or fine. All fine arts, they, if we provide efficient training for skill and fine workmanship.”

“I am grieved that one of my former pupils should so forget the ideals of education. If you must, build schools for those who wish industrial training, but keep our cultural schools undisturbed.”

“Ah, that would not be democratic, my master, and neither would it be effective. Our idea is to develop both the brain and the hand—in this way[191] opening the door to the life work which appeals most to each individual.”

And the master of the old school answered, “Well.”

In the above we find the prevailing controversy between the old and the new, a controversy which must cease with the progression of thought, and understanding of the times.

Certainly some essential is missing. Children are not dull about significant truths. They wish to know how to read and to write and to manipulate number processes. They have wholesome and often keen interest in the movements and experiences of people and the great figures in history; they work hard and cheerfully to know somewhat of the countries of the earth. Musical expression satisfies and delights them. Art entices them up to the point where they find that it misses practical application, and then interest dies and with it expression. Then they begin to reach after further reality with passionate earnestness. They long to express themselves in tangible ways. They have a right consciously to experience the sensations of knowing that they know and knowing that they can do. If opportunity for “doing” has been opened to them, they will have gained in strength of character through their authoritative wills commanding their powers, and the purposive and co-ordinate[192] work of the motor phases of education will have furnished a kind of test of progress, a mental verification of accomplishment that can never come through any academic work. They have many measuring rods in the evaluation of the finished task—the eye, the muscular tension, judgment, comparison, trial. There is necessary integrity since no amount of vanity will make the tangible result reveal anything but truth. William James, with ever brilliant insight, said that manual training did more for the moral strength of youth than any other subject in the curriculum.

No one before him so ably demonstrated the civic and spiritual wisdom of Christ’s teachings as did Froebel, in discovering—not devising—the ways and means of developing man into a self-governed being, obeying the inner voice of conscience in the face of every temptation to which flesh is heir, and becoming a voluntary, law-abiding citizen of both the individual and the national home.

It seems a rather hard condition that though the years when a mother feels most deeply her need for more knowledge of children she should usually have least time for reading and study. This would not be[193] so disastrous if school and college curricula were not framed to embrace even the slightest preparation for home life. That profession which demands a knowledge of sanitation, dietetics, and chemistry of cooking, careful and economic purchasing, artistic and hygienic furnishing, to say nothing of the care of children, is surely of sufficient dignity to deserve some preparation.... We can learn no science or art entirely from books, but when good trails have been blazed by those who have gone before us, it is foolish to attempt our own untried paths. Every mother can hang a little book-shelf in her busiest corner, and put on it from time to time a few books, which will be to her what his Blackstone is to a lawyer, his Baedeker to a traveler.

What do we imagine to be the end and aim of education? Most people will say, the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge of what? Of oneself, of humanity, of life? If this was the ideal, as conceived by the builders of the present system, it has not been attained; or perhaps the system, like a Frankenstein creation, has grown beyond all intent of its sponsors, exhibiting a diabolic and independent will....

Let us examine the effect of public school education upon the psychology of the child; then we shall see if we are “wasting our energies.”

In the first place, no gardener would think of[194] giving each plant the same amount of air and sun, and the same quality of soil. Yet this is exactly what you are doing to your children, and there are as many different kinds of children as there are different kinds of flowers. Why pay more attention to the cultivation of a vegetable than to the development of a human being? Each child requires individual attention, individual understanding, and individual mental food.

It is due to the perseverance of the women in their poorly paid duty that teaching is gradually emerging into a regular profession with a proper stipend and respectable standing, and now when such is the result, we have men crowding back into the profession grumblingly, complaining of the poor pay, and throwing up their hands in “holy horror” at the “woman peril.”

And after all, of what does “the woman peril” consist? That boys are being feminized; that is, that boys are being trained to decenter standards of living? That they do not so much drink, or smoke, or, we hope, “sow wild oats,” that they do not so much regard these acts as manly, or a necessary part of their upbringing? That war is not a regular occupation; that peace is desirable and to be sought after?

“That abnormal families in which the mother’s influence is too long continued and not sufficiently[195] counteracted by masculine control are notoriously productive of decadence and degeneracy.”

That is certainly a grave charge! “A mother’s influence”! that which has been the theme of poets, artists, scholars, essayists, the clergy, for centuries, “productive of decadence and degeneracy.”

It would appear that logically as the masculine mind may think, its logic is not unassailable.

What shall we say, then, when the question before us is that of educating children?

We know only too well the sorry spectacle of the teacher, who, in the ordinary school room, must pour certain cut and dried facts into the heads of the scholars. In order to succeed in this barren path she finds it necessary to discipline her pupils into immobility and to force their attention. Prizes and punishments are ever ready and efficient aids to the master who must force into a given attitude of mind and body those who are condemned to be his listeners.

A woman never lived who did all she might have done to open the mind of her child for its great adventure. It is an exhaustless task. The woman who sees it knows she has need of all the education the[196] college can give, all the experience and culture she can gather. She knows that the fuller her individual life, the broader her interests, the better for the child. She should be a person in their eyes. The real service of the “higher education,” the freedom to take part in whatever interests or stimulates her—lies in the fact that it fits her intellectually to be a companion worthy of a child.

The object of this address is to convince the public that a reform with respect to female education is necessary; that it cannot be effected by individual exertion, but that it requires the aid of the Legislature; and, further, by showing the justice, the policy and the magnanimity of such an undertaking, to persuade that body to endow a seminary for females as the commencement of such reformation.

The idea of a college for males will naturally be associated with that of a seminary, instituted and endowed by the public; and the absurdity of sending ladies to college may, at first thought, strike every one to whom this subject shall be proposed. I therefore hasten to observe that the seminary here recommended will be as different from those appropriated to the other sex as the female character and duties are from the male. The business of the husbandman is not to waste his endeavors in seeking to make his[197] orchard attain the strength and majesty of his forest, but to rear each to the perfection of its nature....

1. Females, by having their understandings cultivated, their reasoning powers developed and strengthened, may be expected to act more from the dictates of reason, and less from those of fashion and caprice.

2. With minds thus strengthened, they would be taught systems of morality enforced by the sanctions of religion; and they might be expected to acquire juster and more enlightened views of their duty, and stronger and higher motives in its performance.

3. This plan of education offers all that can be done to preserve female youth from a contempt of useful labor. The pupils would become accustomed to it, in conjunction with the high objects of literature and the elegant pursuits of the fine arts; and it is to be hoped that both from habit and association they might in future life regard it as respectable.

To this it may be added that if housekeeping could be raised to a regular art, and taught from philosophical principles, it would become a higher and more interesting occupation; and ladies of fortune, like wealthy agriculturists, might find that to regulate their business was an agreeable employment.

4. The pupils might be expected to acquire a taste for moral and intellectual pleasures which would buoy them above a passion for show and parade, and which would make them seek to gratify the natural love of superiority by endeavoring to excel others in intrinsic merit rather than in the extrinsic frivolities of dress, furniture, and equipage.

[198]

By being enlightened in moral philosophy, and in that which teaches the operation of the mind, females would be enabled to perceive the nature and extent of that influence which they possess over their children, and the obligation which this lays them under to watch the formation of their characters with unceasing vigilance, to become their instructors, to devise plans for their improvement, to weed out the vices of their minds, and to implant and foster the virtues. And surely there is that in the maternal bosom which, when its pleadings shall be aided by education, will overcome the seductions of wealth and fashion, and will lead the mother to seek her happiness in communing with her children, and promoting their welfare, rather than in a heartless intercourse with the votaries of fashion, especially when with an expanded mind she extends her views to futurity, and sees her care to her offspring rewarded by peace of conscience, the blessing of her family, the prosperity of her country, and, finally, with everlasting pleasure to herself and them....

In calling on my patriotic countrymen to effect so noble an object, the consideration of national glory should not be overlooked. Ages have rolled away; barbarians have trodden the weaker sex beneath their feet; tyrants have robbed us of the present light of heaven, and fain would take its future. Nations calling themselves polite have made us the fancied idols of a ridiculous worship, and we have repaid them with ruin for their folly. But where is that wise and heroic country which has considered that our rights are sacred, though we cannot defend them? that, though[199] a weaker, we are an essential part of the body politic, whose corruption or improvement must affect the whole? and which, having thus considered, has sought to give us by education that rank in the scale of being to which our importance entitles us? History shows not that country. It shows many whose legislatures have sought to improve their various vegetable productions and their breeds of useful brutes, but none whose public councils have made it an object of their deliberations to improve the character of their women.

In the summer of 1847, with my carefully hoarded earnings, I resolved to seek an entrance into a medical school. Philadelphia was then considered the chief seat of medical learning in America, so to Philadelphia I went; taking passage in a sailing vessel from Charleston for the sake of economy....

Applications were cautiously but persistently made to the four medical colleges of Philadelphia for admission as a regular student. The interviews with their various professors were by turns hopeful and disappointing....

The fear of successful rivalry which at that time often existed in the medical mind was expressed by the dean of one of the smaller schools, who frankly replied to the application, “You cannot expect us to[200] furnish you with a stick to break our heads with;” so revolutionary seemed the attempt of a woman to leave a subordinate position and seek to obtain a complete medical education. A similarly mistaken notion of the rapid practical success which would attend a lady doctor was shown later by one of the professors of my medical college, who was desirous of entering into partnership with me on condition of sharing profits over $5,000 on my first year’s practice.

During those fruitless efforts my kindly Quaker adviser, whose private lectures I attended, said to me: “Elizabeth, it is no use trying. Thee cannot gain admission to these schools. Thee must go to Paris and don masculine attire to gain the necessary knowledge.” Curiously enough, this suggestion of disguise made by good Dr. Warrington was also given me by Dr. Pankhurst, the Professor of Surgery, in the largest college in Philadelphia. He thoroughly approved of a woman’s gaining complete medical knowledge; told me that although my public entrance into the classes was out of question, yet if I would assume masculine attire and enter the college he could entirely rely on two or three of his students to whom he should communicate my disguise, who would watch the class and give me timely notice to withdraw should my disguise be suspected.

But neither the advice to go to Paris nor the suggestion of disguise tempted me for the moment. It was to my mind a moral crusade on which I had entered, a course of justice and common sense, and it might be pursued in the light of day, and with public sanction, in order to accomplish its end.

[201]

Female amanuenses, or secretaries, or “writers out of books,” were by no means unusual in Rome. Vespasian had a female amanuesis, Antonio, whom he greatly esteemed and confided in. Even the Christian fathers adopted this fashion; and Eusebius asserts that Origen had not only young men, but young women to transcribe his books, which “they did with peculiar neatness.” Among the accusations brought against the Roman women of his own time by Juvenal, is that of their learning; he bitterly attacks their presumption in studying Greek, their interlarding even their most familiar conversations with its elegant idioms and phrases; and, among their other crimes of acquirement, he further accuses them of encroaching on the exclusive male prerogative of mind, by discussing philosophical subjects, quoting favorite authors and scholiasts, their purism in affected exactness of grammar, and by their antiquarian researches in language. On the word antiquarian, an ancient commentator observes:—“Antiquaria, one that does refine or preserve ancient books from corruption, one studious of the old poets and historians, one that studies ancient coins, statues, and inscribed stones: lastly, such as use obsolete and antiquated words. All which, though they might be counted an overplus and curiosity in a woman, yet only the last is absolutely a fault.”

[202]

That women should, however tardily, awaken to a desire for greater intellectual light is of the utmost promise. Education cannot confer genius, but it can do an infinite work in the refinement, the strengthening, and the enlightening of the mind; in the banishment of prejudice, and in the correction of illogical judgment. In view of the manifold superstitions, intolerances and ignorances that prevail in the feminine intelligence, and of the fearful influence which these in turn bring to bear upon the children committed in such numbers to their charge, no crusade that can find favor with them, towards a New Jerusalem of Culture, can be too early encouraged.

When the sweet faced New England woman, living her quiet life in the old town of Halfield, stretched out her strong, helpful hands to all the generations of girls to come, by making a woman’s college a possibility, she was called a dreamer, a visionary woman, who had better be looked after by some strong-minded man who could put her money to some practical use. That vision realized has given to hundreds of women ideals and standards which have made life full and rich.

[203]

Harvard was opened in 1636. Two hundred years elapsed before there was any institution offering corresponding advantages to girls....

If these women have always lagged in the rear as increasing educational advantages of a literary or professional character have been provided or procured for boys, it is not strange, when, in reading over the records of work on the few lines of industrial, educational trade training and apprenticeship we detect the same influences at work, sigh before the same difficulties, and recognize the old, weary, threadbare arguments too, which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before to be at least in this connection....

In such an age of transition as ours, any plan of vocational training intended to include girls must be a compromise with warring facts, and will therefore have to face objections from both sides, from those forward looking ones who feel that the domestic side of woman’s activities is over emphasized, and from those who still look back, who will fain refuse to believe that the majority of women have to be wage-earners for at least a part of their lives. These latter argue that by affording to girls all the advantages of industrial training, granted, or which may[204] be granted to boys, we are “taking them out of the home.” As if they were not out of the home already!

The reaction that women show today to their educational freedom upsets a lot of the notions we have inherited about the atmosphere of seclusion in which womanly natures have been supposed to thrive.... Whatever fault may be found with our educational system, it has at least provided a belated opportunity for women to share in the social stimulus that men have found and prized in academic institutions.

The history of the education of women from the early days, when to educate “shes” was viewed with horror as an immoral proposition, to the present time when more “shes” graduate from the high schools than “hes”, is an interesting record in itself. Even more significant, however, is the fact that both “hes” and “shes” are educated largely by women in the secondary schools which are the schools of “the people.”

[205]

The habits of application, of concentration and of regularity which professional training requires will never be out of place in any kind of life, and women will be the more capable of doing, not only their own particular kind of work, but all work, better for the experience they have passed through. It is simply a continuation of their education, which now very unreasonably ends at eighteen.

All the world knows of the foundation of the great modern career of sick-nursing; of the more bitter and prolonged struggle of women to study medicine and surgery and qualify as practitioners therein.... All these changes had, to a greater or less degree, to be fought for by those who desired them.... People resisted them with more or less tenacity, and used against the reformers the sort of arguments they are still using against further emancipation.... There are, of course, some Orientalists, even in England, who think in their hearts that it was a great mistake to teach women to read. But most people now accept the principle that women should have the best education available, and only differ as to what that education should be.

[206]

Should not all women, living in states where they have the right to hold property, refuse to pay taxes so long as they are unrepresented in the governments?...

Man has pre-empted the most profitable branches of industry, and we demand a place at his side; to this end we need the same advantages of education, and we therefore claim that the best colleges of the country be opened to us.... In her present ignorance, woman’s religion, instead of making her noble and free, by the wrong application of great principles of right and justice, has made her bondage but more certain and lasting; her degradation more helpless and complete.

A pretty woman has the first innings, but an intelligent woman gets the most runs. A clever woman catches out her opponents.

That this enlargement of the educational horizon of women in Britain means necessarily “Votes for[207] Women” may or may not be inferred. Certain it is that the advancing social and economic arrangements of modern society will add continually to the allotment to women of tasks and responsibilities unknown to them in the past. Women will accept such responsibilities in accordance with their ability and training in competition with men, and their trained intelligence will become year by year a more widely recognized fact in the minds of University authorities and in the adjustment and enlargement of curriculum and University life.

Two processes of “democratization” are conceivable in the educational system of a nation; one consists in lowering educational standards and aims to the level that makes them readily acceptable and accessible to the masses; the other consists in gradually raising the intellectual level of the masses to the level of high and efficient educational standards. The admission of too early specialized “vocational training” in a public school system has a dangerous leaning towards the first process of democratization, which is apt ultimately to defeat its own end. That the second is of necessity a far lower and more laborious one, does not invalidate its superiority.

[208]

The day has now arrived when nature and fairness are proclaiming that the same expenditure of time and money must be bestowed on the girl as on the boy, and she should be regarded as an investment in the same way as the boy now is. It has always been realized that unless he is given a good education and then started properly in life, that is, given a “shove off,” as it were, he won’t do much, and so all efforts in a family of small means are concentrated toward helping launch the boy in life. The idea, of course, being that he must support himself, and very likely keep a wife and children, therefore it is more important for him to get on well than for the girl, who has her parents to keep her until she marries. There would be nothing against this theory if it were sound; but where the theory breaks down is that girls and women now do have to earn their own living, and this necessity is on the increase, and the point is that the women have often to do it on inadequate material; the girl earns her living without the previous training, without the school or college training, without any capital having been spent on her as a premium, without all the advantages the boy started with.

Fifty years ago the world of scholarship was a man’s world in which women had no share. Now[209] although only one woman in one thousand goes to college, even in the United States, where there are more college women than in any other country, the position of every individual woman in every part of the civilized world has been changed because this one-tenth of one percent. has proved beyond possibility of question that in intellect there is no sex. Unwillingly at first but inevitably and irresistably men have admitted women into intellectual comradeship. The opinions of educated women can no longer be ignored by educated men.

Social ignorance is at the bottom of our miseries, and if the function of education is to correct ignorance, social education is at this hour the most important kind of education.

The educated woman, then, is she who knows the social basis of her life, and of the lives of those whom she would help, her children, her employers, her employees, the beggar at her door, and her congressman at Washington....

It is for the American woman to know why millions are shut out from the full benefits of such education, art, and science as the race has thus far[210] achieved. We women have to face questions that men alone have evidently not been able to solve....

We must educate ourselves and that without delay. We cannot wait longer for political economists to solve such vital problems as clean streets, decent houses, warm clothes, wholesome food, living wages, safeguarded mines and factories, honest public schools. These are our questions. Already women are speaking and speaking nobly, and men are speaking with us. To be sure, some men and some women are speaking against us; but their contest is with the spirit of life. Lot’s wife turned back; but she is an exception. It is proverbial that women get what they are bent on getting, and circumstances are driving them toward education.

Froebel learned to recognize in each child a new educational problem, to be solved according to its nature.... He therefore demands a methodical unification in education, in order to reach the divine through a unification of action.

There is no education except self-education, no government but self-government.

[211]

To assume, as Schopenhauer and so many others have done ... that woman, on account of her womanhood is incapable of intellectual and social development, paying her sole debt of Nature in bearing and caring for children, is really to state a belief in decay for mankind.

[212]

[214]

HOFFMAN: When we are gone—the best of us,—what will the country do if it has no children?

HEDWIG: Why didn’t you think of that before?—before you started this wicked war?

HOFFMAN—I tell you it is a glory to be a war bride. There!

HEDWIG (with a shrug): A breeding machine![216] (They all draw back). Why not call it what it is? Speak the naked truth for once?

...

HOFFMAN: That isn’t the question now. We are going away—the best of us—to be shot, most likely. Don’t you suppose we want to send some part of ourselves into the future, since we can’t live ourselves? There, that’s straight; and right, too.

HEDWIG: What I said—to breed a soldier for the empire; to restock the land. (Fiercely). And for what? For food for the next generation’s cannon. Oh, it is an insult to our womanhood! You violate all that makes marriage sacred! (Agitated, she walks about the room). Are we women never to get up out of the dust? You never asked us if we wanted this war, yet you ask us to gather in the crops, cut the wood, keep the world going, drudge and slave, and wait, and agonize, lose our all, and go on bearing more men—and more—to be shot down! If we breed the men for you, why don’t you let us say what is to become of them? Do we want them shot—the very breath of our life?

HOFFMAN: It is for the fatherland.

HEDWIG: You use us, and use us,—dolls, beasts of burden, and you expect us to bear it forever dumbly; but I won’t! I shall cry out till I die. And now you say it almost out loud, “Go and breed for the empire.” War brides! Pah!

HOFFMAN: I never would dream of speaking to Amelia like that. She is the sweetest girl I have seen for many a day.

[217]

HEDWIG: What will happen to Amelia? Have you thought of that? No; I warrant you haven’t. Well, look. A few kisses and sweet words, the excitement of the ceremony, the cheers of the crowd, some days of living together,—I won’t call it marriage, for Franz and I are the ones who know what real marriage is, and how sacred it is,—then what? Before you know it, an order to march. No husband to wait with her, to watch over her. Think of her anxiety if she learns to love you. What kind of a child will it be? Look at me. What kind of a child would I have, do you think? I can hardly breathe for thinking of my Franz, waiting, never knowing from minute to minute. From the way I feel, I should think my child would be born mad, I’m that wild with worrying. And then for Amelia to go through the agony alone! No husband to help her through the terrible hour. What solace can the state give then? And after that, if you don’t come back, who is going to earn the bread for her child? Struggle and struggle to feed herself and her child; and the fine-sounding name you trick us with—war-bride! Humph! That will all be forgotten then. Only one thing can make it worth while, and do you know what that is? Love! Well struggle through fire and water for that, but without it....

Said Prince Bismarck with a shrug of his shoulder to a comment on the great number of men killed[218] in one of the Franco-Prussian battles, “Oh, well, we will have another crop in twenty years!”

It is crops of men that governments depend upon. At the outbreak of the war the military nations of Europe took immediate steps to provide for the next crop of soldiers. Before the ranks mobilized the seed of warriors was sown. In Germany all soldiers were urged to marry before leaving for the front. In many churches hundreds of couples were married simultaneously that no time might be lost. One of the Emperor’s own sons set the example which thousands of marriageable men immediately followed. In some villages “holy matrimony” was recognized as the equivalent of an engagement. Everywhere throughout the fatherland distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate have become indistinct. An illegitimate son receives the support of the government. To bear children for the fatherland is of greater virtue than that they shall be born of wedlock, for thrones are greater than altars and exigencies greater than ceremonies.

France says little and does much. She is proud; she is heroic; she fights on. But the heart and life of France is being crushed. It is impossible to see this and do nothing. I offer my services as assistant nurse at the American ambulance and am accepted....

On the second morning as I hurry down a long[219] hospital corridor I see a familiar face. A short, dark-haired, dark-eyed young man is coming toward me. He is one of the wounded and his right arm is gone. His eye catches mine. He stops bewildered. Then comes recognition. It is Zeni Peshkoff—Maxim Gorki’s adopted son. Eight years ago when this man was a boy I had known him in America. I grasp the left hand, and my eyes drop before the empty right sleeve. But Zeni Peshkoff is still gay, laughing Zeni. He makes light of his trouble. Not until later do I understand the terrible suffering there is from the missing arm or realize how he struggles to use what is not. Peshkoff had been in the trenches for months. He had been through battles and bayonet charges and escaped unhurt, but at last his day had come. A bursting shell destroyed the right arm. He knew the danger, and struggling to his feet, walked from the battlefield. With the left hand he supported the bleeding, broken right arm. As he stumbled back past trenches full of German prisoners his plight was so pitiful, his pluck so great, that instinctively these men saluted. At the Place de Secours eight hundred wounded had been brought in. There were accommodations for one hundred and fifty.

All night young Peshkoff lay unattended, for there were others worse hurt. Gangrene developed, and he watched it spread from fingers to hand and from hand to arm. In the morning a friendly lieutenant noticed him. “There’s one chance,” he said, “and that’s a hospital. If you can walk, come with me.” Slowly young Peshkoff arose. Half fainting[220] he dressed and went with the lieutenant—first by taxi to the train and then twelve torturing hours to Paris. As the hours passed the gangrene crept higher and higher. The sick man grew giddy with fever. At each station his carriage companions, fearing death, wished to leave him upon the platform. But the lieutenant was firm. The one chance for life was the hospital. Finally, Paris was reached; a waiting ambulance rushed him to the hospital. Immediately he was taken to the operating room and the arm amputated. A half hour more and his arm could not have been saved. But this dramatic incident is only one of many. The pluck of the average soldier is unbelievable. Operations are accepted without question. There are no protests—only the murmured “C’est la guerre, que voulez-vous.”

I asked Zeni Peshkoff, Socialist, what his sensations were when he went out to kill. “It didn’t seem real, it doesn’t now. Before my last charge the lieutenant and I were filled with the beauty of the night. We sat gazing at the stars. Then the command came, and we rushed forward. It did not seem possible I was killing human beings.” It is this unreality that sustains men. Germans are not human beings—only the enemy. For the wounded French soldier will tell you he loathes war and longs for peace. He fights for one object—a permanent peace. He fights to save his children from fighting.

[221]

Above the horror of this dark hour do we not see the light of certainty that the longing of the poor and weak for free humanity must again unite the peoples[223] in one ideal and effort? We women hear the voices which in this time of blood and iron speak low and painfully, but nobly, of and for the future. Let us interpret them for our children. Let us guard against the hollow din which fills our streets today, when cheap racial pride defeats humanity. In our children we must have a pledge that this most fearful of all wars is the last racial struggle. The blood of dead and wounded must have become a stream to divide what present need and future hope unite. It must be a chain to bind eternally.

One of the sad sights is the early morning funeral to be met almost daily in the streets of Paris—the lonely journey of a dead hero from his bed of suffering to the Garden of Sleep.

One sunny morning as I turned from the wide Champs Elysees into a side street, I found waiting near the back entrance of a large hotel hospital a small company of gendarmes with bowed heads, their banner bearing the crêpe ribbons of mourning. Near them a few passers-by were standing reverently looking on. I waited. The hearse drove closer to the door, and later bore away the coffin. No military pomp or display! A splendid hero had given his life for his country, and this was his simple funeral. Above, on the window balconies, some maids stood looking down, crying, and wiping their tears away[224] with their aprons. This “colonel” had lain only four days in the house of suffering, but in so short a time had been beloved enough to be missed. The gendarmes followed slowly, and in the rear a motor car bore a military official. That was all!

The sun seemed to cease shining, and the world looked cold and gray. A taxi cab hovered in sight. I hailed it, and, entering, bade the driver accompany the solemn cortage slowly. I had a sudden wish to follow this soldier to his last resting place, and as I did so, my thoughts were sad ones. How many thousands of such deaths could this war already account for, and how many thousands of hearts had it broken?

It is not for nothing that the Russian peasant woman is respected by her men and counted as their equal in all labor. She plows and sows and reaps with them, rising before the sun and ceasing work only when the day fades. And the work she has to undertake when her men have gone to war is no light one. Each family has at least five or six acres to cultivate. The pasture land the village holds is common. It is usually the custom in time of stress for the workers to do all the field work in common. At three in the morning the women, and even the children, turn out to work; at eleven they have a meal[225] of dry black bread and perhaps a small cucumber. Then, while the sun is high, they sleep; and from four o’clock they work again, till sunset.... There is other work for the women to do—shoeing horses, mending plows, scythes, wheels, and so on. The blacksmith has gone to the war, the wheelwright also; so the peasant woman wields the hammer and sends the chips flying with the ax. In the summer she fells the trees and shears the sheep. And all the winter she spins and weaves, waiting for her men to come back, hoping always, and teaching her children to love their country and their father, who has gone to defend them against a strange foe.

[226]

Thus is explained quite simply over the world to-day the rising value of a baby. Civilization is running short in the supply of men. We don’t know exactly how short. There are Red Cross returns that say in the first six months alone of the war there were 2,146,000 men killed in battle and 1,150,000 more seriously wounded. Figures, however, of cold statistics, as always, may be challenged. There is a living figure that may not be. See the woman in black all over Europe, and to-morrow we shall meet her in Broadway. There are so many of her in every belligerent land over there that her crêpe veil flutters across her country’s flag like the smoke that dims the landscape in a factory town. It is the mourning emblem of her grief, unmistakably symbolizing the dark catastrophe of civilization that has signaled Parliaments to assemble in important session. Population is being killed off at such an appalling rate at the front that the means for replacing it behind the lines must be speeded up without delay. To-day registrar-generals in every land, in white-faced panic, are scanning the figures of the birth-rates that continue to show steadily diminishing returns. And in every house of government in the world, above all the debates on aeroplanes and submarines and shipping and shells, there is the rising alarm of another demand. Fill the cradles! In the defense of the State, men bear arms. It is women who must bear the armies.

[227]

Wars will cease when the conditions which cause them are abolished. The present war is no more of an “accident” than have been the wars of the past. But it is terrible and far-reaching enough in its effects to warrant a reconstruction of our political and industrial systems.

“Manya did not come when I rang—for Jacob.... A long time afterward my cook came. She had difficulty in controlling herself, but finally made me understand. The doctor had taken Manya—not yet seventeen! God help her!...

“Four days after Manya’s disappearance, news was brought that she was in the house of an old Jewess, a cigarette maker. Leaving the cook with the children, and hardly able to drag myself along, I went with Jacob to find her.... After many difficulties we finally found the place, and paying no attention to the soldiers about, pushed our way into the room where Manya was—what had been Manya. When she, poor creature, saw us, she threw herself[228] on the floor sobbing. An officer came in to ask our business with the girl.

“She is my maid—stolen! This is her father. I have come to take her home.

“‘I am very sorry, but you are not allowed to take her, she belongs to the soldiers.’

“Don’t you see, Herr Officer, the girl is dying?

“‘Ill she is, and shall have the best of care. We have doctors to attend just such cases.’ And I had to leave her! Jacob’s face was without expression, he seemed to have lost the power to think or feel—his little girl—!”

When he could stand it no longer, he fired a revolver up through the roof of his mouth, but he made a mess of it. The ball tore out his left eye, and then lodged somewhere under his skull, so they bundled him into an ambulance and carried him, cursing and screaming, to the nearest field hospital. The journey was made in double quick time, over rough Belgian roads. To save his life, he must reach the hospital without delay, and if he was bounced to death jolting along at break-neck speed, it did not matter. That was understood. He was a deserter, and discipline must be maintained. Since he had failed on the job, his life must be saved, he must be nursed back to health, until he was well enough to[229] be stood up against a wall and shot. This is War. Things like this also happen in peace time, but not so obviously.

At the hospital he behaved abominably. The ambulance men declared that he had tried to throw himself out of the back of the ambulance, that he had yelled and hurled himself about, and spat blood all over the floor and blankets—in short, he was very disagreeable. Upon the operating table he was no more reasonable. He shouted and screamed and threw himself from side to side, and it took a dozen leather straps and four or five orderlies to hold him in position, so that the surgeon could examine him. During this commotion his left eye rolled about loosely upon his cheek, and from his bleeding mouth he shot great clots of stagnant blood, caring not where they fell. One fell upon the immaculate white uniform of the Directrice, and stained her from breast to shoes. It was disgusting. They told him it was La Directrice, and that he must be careful. For an instant he stopped his raving, and regarded her fixedly with his remaining eye, then took aim afresh, and again covered her with his cowardly blood. Truly it was disgusting.

To the Medecin Major it was incomprehensible, and he said so. To attempt to kill oneself, when, in these days, it was so easy to die in honour upon the battlefield, was something he could not understand. So the Medecin Major stood patiently aside, his arms crossed, his supple fingers pulling the long black hairs on his bare arms, waiting. He had long to wait, for it was difficult to get the man under the[230] anesthetic. Many cans of ether were used, which went to prove that the patient was a drinking man. Whether he had acquired the habit of hard drink before or since the war could not be ascertained; the war had lasted a year now, and in that time many habits may be formed. As the Medecin Major stood there, patiently fingering the hairs on his hairy arms, he calculated the amount of ether that was expended—five cans of ether, at so many francs a can—however, the ether was a donation from America, so it did not matter. Even so, it was wasteful.

At last they said he was ready. He was quiet. During his struggles he had broken out two big teeth with the mouth gag, and that added a little more blood to the blood already choking him. Then the Medecin Major did a very skillful operation. He trephined the skull, extracted the bullet that had lodged beneath it, and bound back in place that erratic eye. After which the man was sent back to the ward, while the surgeon returned hungrily to his dinner, long overdue. In the ward, he was a bad patient. He insisted upon tearing off his bandages, although they told him that this meant bleeding to death. His mind seemed fixed on death. He seemed to want to die, and was thoroughly unreasonable, although quite conscious. All of which meant that he required constant watching and was a perfect nuisance. He was so different from the other patients, who wanted to live. It was a joy to nurse them. By expert surgery, by expert nursing, some of these were to be returned to their homes again, reformes, mutilated for life, a burden to themselves and to society;[231] others were to be nursed back to health, to a point at which they could again shoulder eighty pounds of marching kit, and be torn to pieces again on the firing lines. It was a pleasure to nurse such as these. It called forth all one’s skill, all one’s humanity. But to nurse back to health a man who was to be court-martialled and shot, truly that was a dead-end occupation....

Dawn filtered in through the little square windows of the ward. Two of the patients rolled on their sides, that they might talk to one another. In the silence of early morning their voices rang clear.

“Dost thou know, mon ami, that when we captured that German battery a few days ago, we found gunners chained to their guns?”

The Junior Lieutenant: Children crying—hungry, freezing, tortured. Hundreds of ’em. Poor little devils! Old women—starving, stumbling, driven, mumbling their prayers that nobody minds. Mothers crying over the smashed-up things that were their kids. Ah-h! That’s the horses screeching. Don’t you hear them? When a shell rips them up they look at you beseeching. But you can’t waste shot on them.... That’s the chaps in the hospital now—drying up with typhoid, rotting with dysentery—chaps on the battlefield, torn and smashed and mangled, two days of it, three days of it, and the wheels of the big guns grinding them to pulp. Ah-h! That’s some chaps caught in the granary. It’s burning. The flames are at them. That’s a train load of wounded, smashing through a bridge, stifling, drowning, helpless, rats in a trap. Men and women and children,—hundreds of ’em, thousands of ’em, millions[234] of ’em—O my God! My God! Why don’t you stop it? Why don’t you stop it?

The Master of the House: Did you do anything to stop it? It’s drifted through here, that wail of the world, for a long time now. Years. Centuries. Ages. God hears it. It repented Him that He made the world. Always the crying comes up to us. Always misery and to spare. But it’s worse when you are making your righteous wars. For they’re all righteous. There’s never a man comes here but says, as you said, that his cause is just and God is on his side. It’s wonderful how many ages through, as you reckon time, you men have fought your righteous wars to advance civilization, and you’re advancing it today just the same way you did when Attilia was king.

If war should stand as an eternal phantom against the horizon of the world, then all social work for the elevating and purifying of humanity might as well be laid down forever.

[236]

[240]

Nowhere more than in London does the blazing shield show a dark reverse. For, along with the splendors of life, that ancient city brought me, too, the first overwhelming sense of the world’s misery. For sometime my life took me daily through a large stretch of London. It seemed to me that I was wandering through vast tides of woe. Age-long tyrannies of ignorance and vice and suffering have welded a fixity of type in the flesh, binding enormous segregations into more or less uniform kinds of peoples. The misery-sodden “lower classes,” as I heard them called, seemed narrowed and fixed and starved and warped forever. The “lower middle classes” gave the impression of being jammed in between walls from above and below, as if all broad or wholesome feeling, or generous enjoyment of beauty were kept from penetrating to them or issuing from them. The “upper middle classes” and the “higher classes” appeared to look with horror upon any real contact with the others, while intermarrying with them was impossible.... It was the vast crowds of the others, “the wholesale lot”, that reflected their discouragement in my mind.

[241]

[242]

Outside the Rotunda of the Fine Arts Building of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition is hunched a gripping, sorrowful figure—a figure that crouches back amidst the foliage as if humbly seeking to escape the eye of the passer. Meekly it bears the name of Outcast. About it, fountains ripple; beyond, the sun joyfully sets agleam the somber greens of olive; chuckling, sprightly Pans, with uptilted pipes, laugh to scorn the chill atmosphere of the sorrowful one, set so far into the shadows that the sun never reaches it, leaving its marble surface ghastly.

The figure, with arms clenched and head bowed,[246] in its shadow seclusion indomitably symbolizes the disowned of the ages—the iron-collared slave, the branded thief, the wandering disbeliever, the woman scorned, the helpless debtor. It symbolizes those passive sufferers, who, after tilling and sowing the fields of life, so that they grow green and cool, wander begrimed and thirsty in the waste desert stretches. Pitifully it speaks of those who confidently threw their heart’s sweetest flowers in the world they loved, receiving no return, living forevermore with barren hopes. It whispers of those who flung their cries of joy to the winds, and heard them wafted back as taunts. It speaks of builders, of whose dream houses no cornerstone or cornice has been realized. Voicelessly it proclaims the Slave of the Past.

And as I looked at it, so hopelessly resigned, I hated it, for all its powerful symbolism.

Did the world know no other Outcast than this shrinking, unreproachful figure? Was this symbolism the whole truth? Were there no Outcasts who dared accuse?—who dared fight for their inheritance? None to cry dauntlessly, “We will not be cast aside, we who have builded and tilled and dreamed!” Were there no outcasts with hope—with fighting blood?

In the far recesses of the Japanese Section, where only a few errant footfalls echo solemnly through the spacious silence, I found that for which I searched. There I found the symbol of the Outcast I dared hope to see. A truly courageous figure it is, with Hope and the Spirit to be Free stamped large[247] upon it. It is the very antithesis of that bowed figure out among the green vines and laughing Pans, which seem to beg forgiveness for its very existence. This other figure is called “Strike”, and proudly it bears its insignia of rebellion. The gaunt outlines and the eyes overshadowed with a terrible fatigue brand this figure of a man, as the other, with the marks of the Outcast. A woman leans upon him, and in turn, a brood of young cling to her skirts. But this Outcast is no craven. He neither cringes nor sorrows. He stands erect, and through the shadows of fatigue, his eyes flash defiance out upon the world of the Self-Satisfied. He seems to cry aloud:

“I suffer, my mate suffers, and our young; but you shall pay—pay in full! You who stand between us and our inheritance, your time is drawing near—prepare! For we declare that we, too, shall live, we, the sufferers!”

This Outcast, springing from the depths, flings a challenge where others have only wept; dares where others have cowered in self-debasement. This man of courage, standing erect under the scourges of suffering and deprivation, gazing so steadfastly into the Beyond through overshadowed eyes—he dares aspire to walk in the green fields of his making; already he treads them in his imagination. He has sent a barely whispered hope of joy out upon the winds and it is rushing back to him a mighty symphony of realization. He dreams of a beautiful world, and builds it as he dreams.

[248]

He heralds the day when there will be no Outcasts, but all will be Well-Beloved.

He is the Master of the Future.

The co-operative will remodel codes and constitutions, creeds and catechisms, social customs and conventionalism, the curriculum of schools and colleges. It will give a new sense of justice, liberty and equality in all the relations of life....

The few have no right to the luxuries of life while the many are denied its necessities.

Men and women, upper and lower classes, are walking on different sides of a wall. They can stretch their hands over it; the important thing to be done is to break the wall down.

Age-class, caste group, family, and race, each has its own closed circle—but each of these vicious circles the modern spirit has begun to invade and break down. In the spirit of our time fear of the unlike is waning and pari passu intolerance.

[249]

Any nation that accepts the idea of servitude and believes that it is an advantage for man to be served by man admits servility as an instinct, and indeed we all too easily lend ourselves to obsequious service, giving to it such complimentary names as courtesy, politeness, charity.

In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence. This concept will be the foundation of the dignity of the man of the future; “I do not wish to be served because I am not impotent.” And this idea must be gained before men can feel themselves to be really free.

However earnestly we may deplore the fact that women are in factories instead of homes, we must squarely face conditions as they exist. There are hundreds of thousands of helpless, untrained, unorganized women without the power of legislating for themselves, who are forced by the stress of circumstances to earn their livelihood, and it is of vital importance that they be given the chance to be decently self-supporting under conditions which will unfit them for wifehood and motherhood and the care of the homes.

[250]

Thousands of women today are working under conditions unfit for human beings. At unguarded machinery they are risking their nimble fingers, the only source of income they possess. In firetrap buildings they are risking their lives. Badly ventilated workrooms, filled with particles of flying dust, weaken their lungs and make them susceptible to tuberculosis. Long working hours sap their strength and vitality. Dangerous occupations make them physical wrecks in a few years and render them unfit for wifehood and motherhood. In the case of married women workers an appalling infant mortality is a concomitant of women’s labor. But with all these sacrifices even the woman who performs a man’s work does not get a man’s wages. Everywhere we find unequal pay for equal work. The voteless sex is cheap.

Look about you; the products of labor are on every hand; you could not maintain for a moment a well-ordered life without them; every object in your room has in it, for discerning eyes, the mark of ingenious tools and the pressure of labor’s hands.[251] But is it not the cruelest injustice for the wealthy, whose lives are surrounded and embellished by labor’s work, to have a superabundance of the money which represents the aggregate of labor in any country, while the laborer himself is kept so steadily at work that he has no time to acquire the education and refinements of life that would make him and his family agreeable companions to the rich and cultured?...

I believe that competition is doomed. The trust, whose single object is to abolish competition, has proved that we are better without it, than with it, and the moment corporations control the supply of any product, they combine. What the Socialist desires is that the corporation of humanity should control all production. Beloved comrades, this is the frictionless way; it is the higher way; it eliminates the motives for a selfish life; it enacts into our every-day living the ethics of Christ’s gospel. Nothing else will do it; nothing else can bring the glad day of universal brotherhood.

All those who work are aware of the fact that conditions today—insofar as the working girl is concerned—are not what they should be....

Now, what is wrong? To begin with, the work day is too long, the wages are too low. Good sanitary conditions are a rarity. Laws to protect the lives[252] of women and children workers are scarce—in reality.... There are enough laws on the statute books, but very few are enforced. Labor laws intended to protect women are constantly being violated. Why? Simply because the women have, thus far, failed to cooperate with one another in order to enforce them.

Nearly eight million working women are subjected to the conditions described above. According to investigators—the writer of these lines having been one of these—the average wage of these women does not exceed seven dollars a week. A wage proven insufficient to live on. Such wages shape the lives of the women, and those dependent upon them. What kind of a life, then, can they lead? A life which is a mere existence, that is all. Because they are compelled to do so, they substitute cheap amusement for something more refined. They live on a five-cent breakfast, ten-cent lunch, and a twenty-cent dinner; live in a dingy room without air and without comfort; wear clothes of cheap material, trying hard to imitate those who are more fortunate than they. Their whole life is cheap from beginning to end. Deprived of sunshine and fresh air, no time for recreation, no time for rest, they have only time for work.

Almost every constructive statute of the past two decades that touches the protection and prevents the exploitation of women and children, owes its initiation and passage largely to the organized women.

[253]

At present women are the most enslaved part of the human race. They are paid lower wages even than the average working man. When they are not in the wage market as industrial workers, or clerks or civil servants, then they are usually in the unsatisfactory position of being a wife who is, economically speaking, a dependent on the wishes and purse of her father or husband. They may work all day at the management of the children and the home—much harder often, than the worker in the factory—but in return these wives and mothers do not get, in the ordinary case, a fixed salary or wage which they can call their own. Neither are the working hours of the wife and mother fixed, as even in the case of factory workers. There is in the life of the housewife of the manual laboring class scarcely an hour a day when she is entirely free to go where she pleases or do what she pleases. The woman who has not a private income of her own is, in the general case, the economic dependent of the man, and in that class is the large majority of my sex.

Here and there throughout history occur instances of women who have been received as equals[254] by men, but for the mass of women equality could only be procured by civilization.

[255]

Out of the waters of the Nile, Pharaoh’s daughter drew a Hebrew babe, condemned to die. As her adopted son, he was taught at court all the wisdom of the Egyptians. As an Egyptian prince he might have lived and died in splendor, and his gold-cased mummy might have been on some museum shelf today, a dead curiosity. An aristocrat, a lawyer, a capitalist—these are what he was brought up to be.

Egypt was in the full afternoon of her grandeur. A Pharoah was on the throne whose soul was filled with the ambition to build palaces and temples and cities such as the world had never seen. His heavy hand fell upon the free Hebrews in his kingdom, and sent them to the quarries and the brick-yards to toil with slaves under the lash of merciless foreman. And as his cities and monuments grew, he became drunk with his own glory, and the slaves were flogged to ever more inhuman exertions in the quarries.

“And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown up, that he went out to his brethren, and looked on their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew. And he looked this way, and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he smote the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”

I do not believe this was the first time he had[256] walked abroad to view his brother slaves toiling. His wrath had been long smouldering in him. You notice he did not attack the Egyptian with blind rage. “He looked this way and that”, and when he saw he was unobserved he deliberately slew the oppressor and buried the body in the desert sands.

Thus the greatest law-giver in history began his career by committing the greatest crime known to the law. He was not young. He was forty years of age. He became a law-breaker only because the laws of Egypt no longer protected the man who worked from the tyrant who confiscated his labor. His soul was in rebellion against “the system”.

How did the workers take this “direct action”? Just as the workers of today would. When he went back the next day, instead of being greeted as a deliverer, he was repudiated by the Hebrews. They were justly suspicious of a member of the system who eased his conscience for a living in the royal family by killing a brutal foreman. “Who made thee a prince and a judge over us?” was a very pertinent question. Who, indeed, but Pharoah himself?

But Pharoah on his part was deeply incensed at this rebel in his own family and Moses fled for his life into the deserts of Arabia, carrying with him the consciousness of having made his brethren’s lot worse by his blundering attempt to mend it....

At last, amid the frowning precipices and lonely crags of Mount Sinai, the cry of his race became too strong for him to resist.... And so Moses turns his face once more toward the Nile country, and the great moment of his life is upon him.... From now[257] on the magnificent story represents the struggle of the enslaved Hebrews for freedom as a duel between two men—Pharoah on the throne, and Moses, the desert wanderer. The one stands for entrenched tyranny, the other is a strike leader. Behind Pharoah is all the power of Egypt, upheld by the armies of the empire. Behind Moses is the mysterious pillar of cloud and of fire—the destiny of the race. Between these two colossi cower the race of slaves whose destiny is at hand....

Just as the Pharoahs of the Colorado coal fields are doing today, Pharoah of Egypt hardened his heart, until the climax of the struggle came in his cry of rage, “Get thee from me, take heed to thyself, see my face no more: for in the day thou seest my face, thou shalt die!” And Moses said, “Thou hast spoken well, I will see thy face no more.” ...

So Moses leads his people out into the wilderness of freedom....

Years passed, and the wilderness was whitened with the bones of the slaves, whose free-born children grew up to higher manhood under their aged leader’s constant counsels and warnings. At last the time came when they were fit to take a place among the nations of the earth, and the pillar of fire and of cloud turns and drifts toward Canaan.

With what longing the old man’s heart looked toward the land of promise, the first fixed abiding place life seemed to offer, we can gather from his own confession. But it was not to be. His course was run. He was a strike leader, a nation-molder, a law-giver, not a military conqueror. When the[258] tribes reach the desert and look down into the green valley of the Jordan, they are called together to hear his parting words. On the slopes of Mount Nebo in the land of Moab, after the antiphonal chanting of the blessings and curses, and the sounding of the trumpets of the Levites, the dying leader stands for the last time before his people, delivers the matchless farewell address recorded in Deuteronomy, blesses them, and passes from their sight forever, up into the solitude of the mountain peaks....

“And the children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab, but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. And there hath not arisen a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses....”

[260]

[262]

In the past we have no single instance of any class of men with the ballot legislating fairly for any other class of men without the ballot. How then can the men of the world all working and all voting protect the special interests of the voteless women of the world who are emerging as workers millions strong on the surface of our human bee-hive? They cannot. If they have in the past done injustice to the disfranchised classes of their fellow men, they will do far more terrible injustice in the future to disfranchised classes of working women. If the vote has been indispensable as a protection in the past, it will be still more indispensable in the future because modern socialistic legislation will increasingly control employers and employed. Thousands of English women are to-day banded together in their suffrage unions demanding with desperate courage from a reluctant parliament a vote to protect their labor and their children for whom they labor.

Other movements toward freedom have aimed at raising the status of a comparatively small group or class. But the woman’s movement aims at nothing less than raising the status of an entire sex—half of the human race—to lift it up to the freedom and valor of womanhood.

[264]

Women are notoriously the poor sex. Even a woman who figures as a rich woman is often merely an article de luxe for the man who provides for her, and though he may band her neck with jewels, he does not readily give her a check for her suffrage society.

If a patient for whom a surgeon orders a back brace starves herself to pay the bill?

If a workman, cured of rheumatism, goes back to his job in the damp cellar which caused it?

If a clerk fitted to glasses, returns to the dim desk which crippled her sight?

If an unmarried girl, delivered of her child, goes from the maternity ward back to the neighborhood that ruined?

There must be a check on the ever-widening inequality between the richest and the poorest, or our social structure will not endure; we shall have revolution, not evolution; cataclysm, not growth.... In some of the old world countries the inequality is of[265] such long growth that one can hardly imagine its breaking up without violence. With us it is not yet adamantine. Pray God it never may be.

Their cause is my cause. If they are denied a living wage, I also am defrauded. While they are industrial slaves, I cannot be free. My hunger is not satisfied while they are unfed. I cannot enjoy the good things of life which come to me, if they are hindered and neglected. I want all the workers of the world to have sufficient money to provide the elements of a normal standard of living—a decent home, healthful surroundings, opportunity for education and recreation. I want them to have the same blessings I have. I, deaf and blind, have been helped to overcome many obstacles. I want them to be helped as generously in a struggle which resembles my own in many ways.

Surely the things that the workers demand are not unreasonable. It cannot be unreasonable to ask of society a fair chance for all.... Until the spirit of love for our fellow men, regardless of race, color or creed, shall fill the world, making real in our lives and our deeds the actuality of human brotherhood—until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social injustice can never be attained.

[266]

Already there are signs that the woman’s labor organizations are willing to recognize the inherent dignity of household service—and this is as it should be. The woman who labors should be the one to recognize that all labor is per se equally honorable—that there is no stigma in honestly performed, useful service.

If she is to bring to the labor world the regeneration she dreams, she must begin not by saying that the shop girl, the clerk, the teacher, are in a higher class than the cook, the waitress, the maid, but that we are all laborers alike, sisters by virtue of the service we are rendering society. That is, labor should be the last to recognize the canker in the caste.

I object to the term “dependent classes,” unless in speaking of the insane. That such a class, not included among the insane, does exist among us is a fact; in more than one county of this great, rich state, there are families, as you know, who for five generations have been more or less dependent on their fellow citizens and such families constitute a class; but yet I protest against the use of this phrase in a way to suggest that the existence of such a class should be recognized except to be abolished.

There will always be persons who must be helped, individuals who must depend upon public relief or on private charity for maintenance, it is true, but it is a disgrace to any community to have a dependent class, and the fact of its existence is a proof that the community has done its duty neither to those who compose it, nor to those who maintain it.

[268]

Women are thinking at last, not in men’s terms, but in their own, and that in a slave class is always dynamic.... Because it has vision where the other has archaism, the “lower class” is become the higher class, self-conscious and self-poised. Not only youth, but childhood, is rebel. Art has become anarchic, and as mysteriously as Nature works everywhere, so has she worked with the servant half of the human race, stirring it to self-consciousness and action; helping to keep alive the tiny torch of revolt.

We put on peasant dress, to elude the police and break down the peasant’s cringing distrust. I dressed in enormous bark shoes, coarse shirt and drawers, and heavy cloak. I used acid on my face and hands; I worked and ate with the peasants; I learned their speech; I travelled on foot, forging passports. I lived ‘illegally!’

By night I did my organizing. You desire a picture? A low room with mud floors and walls. Rafters just overhead, and still higher thatch. The room was packed with men, women and children. Two big fellows sat up on the high brick stove, with their dangling feet knocking occasional applause. These people had been gathered by my host, a brave peasant whom I picked out, and he in turn had chosen only those[271] whom Siberia could not terrify. I now recalled their floggings; I pointed to those who were crippled for life; to women, whose husbands died under the lash; and when asked if men were to be forever flogged, then they would cry out so fiercely that the three or four cattle in the next room would bellow and have to be quieted. Again I would ask what chances their babies had of living, and in reply some peasant woman would tell how her baby had died the winter before. Why? I asked. Because they had only the most wretched strips of land. To be free and live, the people must own the land! From my cloak I would bring a book of fables written to teach our principles and stir the love of freedom. And then far into the night, the firelight showed a circle of great, broad faces and dilated eyes, staring with all the reverence every peasant has for that mysterious thing—a book.

These books, twice as effective as oral work, were printed in secrecy at heavy expense. But many of us had libraries, jewels, costly gowns and furs to sell; and new recruits kept adding to our fund. We had no personal expenses....

In that year of 1874, over two thousand educated people traveled among the peasants. Weary work, you say. Yes, when the peasants were slow and dull and the spirit of freedom seemed an illusion. But when that spirit grew real one felt far from weary....

We may die in exile, and our children may die in exile, and our children’s children may die in exile, but something must come of it at last.

[272]

The voice of labor is a roar, deep as though it came from a throat of iron, penetrating as though it came through lips of silver. One day that voice will silence all the great guns of the world.

[273]

Instead of laying away their sense of social supremacy in old rose and lavendar, our new aristocracy of wealth is often haughty and frigid in manner, and not only ostentatious in expenditure, but arrogantly assertive of what it believes to be its superior rights ... frivolity, selfishness and pride and the constant exercise of these qualities hardens what, for convenience, we call the heart, and breeds indifference for the feelings and rights of others. I have been interviewed by women reporters in almost every country I have visited, and it is only in America—in New York, to be exact—that they have spoken of their dread of approaching fashionable or merely rich, women.... Those we have of ancient lineage,—who have framed their family tree and proved their seven generations, whose fortunes have kept pace with the times, and who from the somewhat attenuated backbone of society, in New York, for instance—are more objectionable in some respects, than the new-rich. While they ought to know better, they are so uneasily conscious of their position as real aristocrats in a country too large to give them a universal recognition, that anxious pride has bleached their very blood, attenuated their features, narrowed their lips, and practically deprived them of any distinctive personalities, the best that can be said of them is that they are not, with one notorious exception, vulgar in the common use of the word.

[274]

The glitter and magnificence of society can exist only against a background of misery and starvation.

It is the pestiferous purple which renders the progress of civilization a curse, and warps the understanding, till men of sensibility doubt whether the expansion of the intellect produces a greater proportion of happiness or misery.

We have a civilization that is bloated at the top and bleeding at the bottom, and there is decay in both.

[276]

[278]

Two storks were nesting.

He was a young stork—and narrow minded. Before he married he had consorted mainly with striplings of his own kind, and had given no thought to the ladies, either maid or matron.

After he married his attention was concentrated on his all-satisfying wife, upon that triumph of art, labor and love—their nest, and upon those special creations—their children. Deeply was he moved by the marvelous instincts and processes of motherhood. Love, reverence, intense admiration, rose in his heart for her of the well-built nest; her of the gleaming treasure of smooth eggs; her of the patient brooding breast, the warming wings, the downy, wide-mouthed group of little ones.

Assiduously he labored to help her build the nest, to help her feed the young; proud of his impassioned activity in her and their behalf; devoutly he performed his share of the brooding, while she hunted in her turn. When he was a-wing he thought continually of her as one with the brood—his brood. When[281] he was on the nest he thought all the more of her, who sat there so long, so lovingly, to such noble ends.

The happy days flew by, fair spring—sweet summer—gentle autumn. The young ones grew larger and larger; it was more and more work to keep their lengthening, widening beaks shut in contentment. Both parents flew far afield to feed them.

Then the days grew shorter, the sky grayer, the wind colder; there was large hunting and small success. In his dreams he began to see sunshine, broad, burning sunshine, day after day; skies of limitless blue; dark, deep, yet full of fire; stretches of bright water, shallow, warm—fringed with tall reeds and rushes, teeming with fat frogs.

They were in her dreams, too, but he did not know that.

He stretched his wings and flew farther every day; but his wings were not satisfied. In his dreams came a sense of vast heights and boundless spaces of the earth streaming away beneath him; black water and white land; gray water and brown land, blue water and green land, all flowing backward from day to day, while the cold lessened and the warmth grew.

He felt the empty sparkling nights, stars far above, quivering, burning; stars far below quivering more in the dark water; and felt his great wings wide, strong, all-sufficient, carrying him on and on!

This was in her dreams, too, but he did not know that.

“It is time to go,” he cried one day. “They are coming! It is upon us! Yes,—I must go! Goodbye,[282] my wife! Goodbye, my children!” For the passion of wings was upon him.

She, too, was stirred to the heart. “Yes, it is time to go!” she cried. “I am ready! Come!”

He was shocked, grieved, astonished. “Why, my dear!” he said, “How preposterous! You cannot go on the great flight! Your wings are for brooding tender little ones! Your body is for the wonder of the gleaming treasure.—Not for days’ and nights’ ceaseless soaring! You cannot go!”

She did not heed him. She spread her wide wings and swept and circled far and high above,—as, in truth, she had been doing for many days, though he had not noticed it.

She dropped to the ridge pole beside him, where he was still muttering objections. “Is it not glorious?” she cried. “Come! They are nearly ready!”

“You unnatural mother!” he burst forth. “You have forgotten the order of nature! You have forgotten your children! Your lovely, precious, tender, helpless little ones!” And he wept, for his highest ideals were shattered.

But the precious little ones stood there on the ridge pole and flapped their strong young wings in high derision. They were as big as he was, nearly; for as a matter of fact, he was but a young stork himself.

Then the air was beaten white with a thousand wings; it was like snow and silver and sea-foam; there was a flash, a whirlwind, a hurricane of wild joy and then the army of the sky spread wide in due array and streamed southward.

[283]

Full of remembered joy and more joyous hope, finding the sunlight better than her dreams, she swept away to the far summerland; and her children, mad with the happiness of the first flight, swept beside her.

“But you are a mother!” he panted, as he caught up with them.

“Yes,” she cried, joyously, “but I was a stork before I was a mother! and afterward!—and all the time!”

And the storks were flying.

[285]

[286]

I feel that if all of us were less slaves to fashion we would be nobler women, for both our bodies and minds are now rendered weak and useless from the unhealthy and barbarous style of dress adopted, and from the time and thought in making it attractive. A change is demanded and if I have been the means of calling the attention of the public to it and of leading only a few to disregard old customs and for once to think and act for themselves, I shall not trouble myself about the false imputations that may be cast upon me.

Another handicap that falls to the lot of woman is in her loss of individuality and family through giving up her own name in marriage.

[289]

To the male, the giving of life is a laugh; to the female, blood, anguish and sometimes death. Here we touch one of the few yet important differences between man and woman as such.

Under French law, woman is a perpetual minor under the guardianship of her own, or that of her husband’s family. Only in the case of the birth of an illegitimate child is she treated as a responsible being, and then only that discomfort and punishment may fall upon her.

[291]

[292]

Of all the theories current concerning women, none is more curious than the theory that it is needful to make a theory about them. That a woman is a Domestic, a Social, or a Political creature; that she is a Goddess, or a Doll; the “Angel in the House,” or a Drudge, with a suckling of fools and a chronicaling of small beer for her sole privileges that she has, at all events, a “Mission,” or a “Sphere,” or a “Kingdom,” of some sort or other, if we could but agree on what it is,—all this is taken for granted. But, as nobody ever yet sat down and constructed analogous hypotheses about the other half of the human race, we are driven to conclude, both that a woman is a more mysterious creature than a man, and also that it is the general impression that she is made of some more plastic material, which can be advantageously manipulated to fit our theory about her nature and office, whenever we have come to a conclusion as to what that nature and office may be. “Let us fix our own Ideal in the first place,” seems to be the popular notion, and then the real Woman in accordance thereto will appear in due course of time. We have nothing to do but to make round holes and women will grow round to fill them; or square holes, and they will become square. Men grow like trees, and the most we can do is to lop or clip them, but women run in molds, like candles, and we can make them long-threes, or short-sixes, whichever we please.

[293]

By Mme. Necker

Woman’s tongue is her sword which she never lets rust.

By Marguerite de Valois

A woman of honor should never suspect another of things she would not do herself.

By Mme. de Sonza

It is vanity that renders the youth of women culpable and their old age ridiculous.

By Mdlle. de Lespinasse

A woman would be in despair if Nature had formed her as fashion makes her appear.

Mme. Fee

Do not take women from the bedside of those who suffer; it is their post of honor.

By Eugenie de Guerin

A mother’s tenderness and caresses are the milk of the heart.

[294]

By Margaret Deland

The best things of our nature fashion themselves in silence.

By Edith Wharton

Life’s just a perpetual piecing together.

By Agnes H. Downing

(In “The Progressive Woman.”)

The woman is censured with the idea of protecting morality. And the man is let go; why? Nobody knows why. Because he is a man and no one ever thought of punishing a man for a little thing like that.... Would you avoid tragedies? Then advocate sex-equality. We will always have individual and social tragedy so long as the woman is stoned and the man goes free.