Ruth Whitney Lyman, wife of Herbert Lyman; studied two years at Bryn Mawr; a member of the Woman's Municipal League of Boston and of the Board of Directors of the North End Diet Kitchen.J. A. H.
Ruth Whitney Lyman, wife of Herbert Lyman; studied two years at Bryn Mawr; a member of the Woman's Municipal League of Boston and of the Board of Directors of the North End Diet Kitchen.
J. A. H.
Women today find their sex disquieted by deep unrest. Our sex is seeking to adjust itself to new conditions. Suffrage, feminism, militancy, have been the symptoms of the first phase of modern woman's attempt to adjust herself to twentieth century conditions. That phase was the outgrowth of hasty judgment, and is rapidly giving place to the second phase, wherein the sober second thought of the normal woman is repudiating the false values preached by those women who impulsively leaped to the conclusion that man's sphere was more potent than woman's and therefore more desirable.
The struggle over woman suffrage presents the spectacle of two camps of women arrayed against each other with opposing ideals. Let no one be so simple as to suppose that the issue is one between men and women. It is not a "woman's rights" question; it is awhichwoman's rights question. Two types of women are at war, for although both desire the same end—namely, a better world to live in—they differ fundamentally as to the method of attaining it.
The fundamental difference is this—that the suffragist (like the socialist) persists in regarding the individual as the unit of society, while the anti-suffragist insists that it is the family. Individualism is the all-important thing to the suffragist; to the anti-suffragist it is soundness of family relationships. Suffragism is founded upon a sex-conscious individualism and sex antagonism, which leads it to say that woman can only be represented by herself, and that women now are a great unrepresented class. As a matter of fact, women are not a class, but a sex, pretty evenly distributed throughout all the various classes of society.
Anti-suffrage is founded upon the conception of co-operation between the sexes. Men and women must be regarded as partners, not competitors; and the family, to be preserved as a unit, must be represented by having one political head. The man of the family must be that representative, because government is primarily the guarantee of protection to life and property and rests upon the political strength of the majority, which should be able in times of need to force minorities to obey their will. That is the only basis on which a democracy can endure. Suffragism says that in order to attack existing evils women must organize for participation in law making. It stakes its faith on more government (a second resemblance tosocialism), upon control by law. The anti-suffragist sees the evils of society as fundamentally resulting from the evil in individuals, and calls on women to check it at its source. They emphasize the power of individual homes to turn out men and women, who, trained to self-control, will not necessitate control by law. Knowing well that the great training school for private morality is family life, the anti-suffragist seeks to preserve conditions making for sound family life, the sum total of private morality being public morality, the conscience of the people.
Moreover, the twentieth century has given us its watchword, which is, differentiation or division of labor. Anti-suffragists by accepting it, and applying to their sex the new demands of specialization, put themselves abreast of the times; but suffragists lag behind, still harping on the exploded theories of equality and identity. The strikingly progressive message the new century presents us is this: Give equal opportunity to men and women for expression along theirdifferentlines. Government, law making, law enforcement, with all the allied problems of tariff, taxation, police, railroads, interstate and international relationships, etc., must still be the business of men. The business of women must be to work out a national ideal of domestic life and juvenile training. They must standardize the family life with their new understanding of the importance of the product of every separate family to the state.
The suffragist, who is so often the unmarried orchildless woman, here objects that women could also vote. But it is practically impossible for women as a sex to undertake the regular and frequent political duties. If the highest efficiency in private life is to be striven toward, women must regard themselves as a sort of emergency corps, prepared to meet the unexpected; for illness, accidents, temptation, sorrow—all the disturbances of domestic life—do not come at stated intervals. Anyone can readily see that for women private duty would constantly conflict with public duty. To become an efficient political unit, a woman would have to set aside much time and strength upon organizing and bringing out the woman's vote. There would be the splitting up of women into rival political groups on class, race, or religious lines, the dissipation of energies and strain of contention for women who in America already reach with sad frequency the breaking point of nerves and body.
In contrast to such obligatory activity for all women, consider the field of voluntary non-partisan activity now open to the single woman, the woman of leisure, and to every woman at such times as her family duties permit. Indeed the germ of the true woman's movement lies in the activities of such organizations as education societies, playground associations, municipal leagues, and so forth, which are only in their first stages of usefulness. Here is ample scope and outlet for talents and energy.
Our sex, if kept out of politics, has the opportunity in these days when we prate so much about peace, toset about disarming distrust and discord within our own borders. Shall we not dream of a united American womanhood? We twentieth century women may take a noble stride toward it, if we will, by working for those causes that disregard the divisions of race, religion, and politics. Is it surprising that the anti-suffragist sees a vast, unexhausted field for woman's influence outside the political? No wonder that to the suffragist's craving for a new sphere and new rights she opposes the plea of old duties unfulfilled and existing opportunities neglected.
To contrast the opposing ideals of the two groups of women, let me quote from what a great Frenchman said in the time of the French Revolution: "You have written upon the monuments of your city the words Liberty—Fraternity—Equality. Above Liberty write Duty; above Fraternity write Humility; above Equality write Service; above the immemorial creed of your Rights inscribe the divine creed of your Duties." I truly believe that the women who, perceiving present duties imperfectly performed, refuse to take up the cry for more rights, are following the more Christ-like ideal. I do not think that twentieth century American women have outgrown His peerless example, which urges them to be faithful first over a few things as He commanded. God made us women; and if we are told that women suffer more than men in peace and war, let us answer, "Very likely—Christ Himself found His cross heavy—let us bear the cross and crown of womanhood in His name."
MRS. HORACE A. DAVIS
Anna Hallowell Davis, wife of Horace Davis; was educated in Boston private schools and is a graduate of Radcliffe College; was a member of Local School Board No. 46, New York City, for eight years; is a member of Brookline Civic Society, the North Bennett Street Industrial School Association, and of the Massachusetts Peace Association.J. A. H.
Anna Hallowell Davis, wife of Horace Davis; was educated in Boston private schools and is a graduate of Radcliffe College; was a member of Local School Board No. 46, New York City, for eight years; is a member of Brookline Civic Society, the North Bennett Street Industrial School Association, and of the Massachusetts Peace Association.
J. A. H.
The whole question of suffrage and anti-suffrage is significant chiefly as it affects the married woman with children and a home; for if there is any elemental fact on which to plant our feet, it is that the normal woman is a wife and mother and home-maker. But is not the contention of the suffragists fundamentally based upon the circumstances of the woman who is not leading this normal life,—who is unmarried, who has no children, or who is not making a home and bringing up her children herself? It is in planning for these exceptional women, as I think they do, that the suffragist leaders tend to ignore the truly representative women—the majority. Do we not suspect, indeed,that they are turning to new ideals, because they have never tried the old? As Chesterton says: "The ideal house, the happy family, is now chiefly assailed by those who have never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfil it. Numberless modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory, because they have never known it in practice."
"But," the suffragists ask, "granting that your woman of 'normal' life is in the majority, and doesn't want the vote,oughtn'tshe to want it? Casting a ballot takes next to no time, and that is all she needs to do. Most men do no more than that."
But men ought to do more. That is just the point. That is just why corrupt government has been fastened on our cities. The Tammany leaders do more. They give all their time to politics; but the "reform" vote cannot, except occasionally, be got to the polls in sufficient numbers; and too few of the best men will run for office. If women are simply going to aggravate these conditions, if the "normal," representative woman isn't going to vote and hold office, and the non-representative, exceptional woman is, where is the advantage to the state of adding women to the electorate? Probably, however, rather than have this happen, the representative woman would feel that she must enter the lists. In competition with "abnormal" or unscrupulous women, she would be forced to vote and to hold office. More than just going to the polls, she would have to think, read, and talk politics, as men do, or ought to do. The whole question here is: Is it betterfor her to do this, or to do the things which men don't do?For one person can't do it all well.A good mother of three or four children already has more than she can do well. If she takes up this whole new department of life and thought, I am convinced she will have to let something else go, and already under the influence of the feminist movement, that "something else" seems to be her home. So, this is what the anti-suffragists feel most keenly—that once the franchise is imposed as a duty, they would have to do the things which men already are doing (and doing as well as the women could do them); that they would no longer be free to do what they think is the higher work for them, as women. Therefore, when a suffragist tells me she has a "right" to vote, I say that, in the name of the best interests of the community, I have the rightnotto vote.
Another thing which the anti-suffragists feel is not recognized sufficiently by their opponents, is the essential and valuable difference between men and women in their manner of approach to any given human problem. "Law" to the antis seems a man's word. Man thinks of people in masses. He makes laws for the whole. He generalizes better than women. On the other hand, where woman is stronger than he is in her feeling for the individual person, and her use of love rather than of law, neither the masculine nor the feminine gift is better, the one than the other, but the two work together as necessary parts of one whole. As Ida Tarbell puts it: "Human society may be likenedto two great circles, one revolving within the other. In the inner circle rules the woman. Here she breeds and trains the material for the outer circle, which exists only by and for her. That accident may throw her into this outer circle is, of course, true, but it is not her natural habitat. Nor is she fitted by Nature to live and circulate freely there. What it all amounts to is that the labor of the world is naturally divided between the two different beings that people the world. It is unfair to the woman that she be asked to do the work of the outer circle. The man can do that satisfactorily if she does her part, that is, if she prepares him the material. Certainly, he can never come into the inner circle and do her work."
So, in claiming for women the right to take a part in the man's half of life, the suffragists, I think, lose sight of what the woman's half is. In urging that they must have a hand in law-making and government and public life generally, they do not see that woman's peculiar work is pretty independent of laws and of government, is rather in private life. For it is just where the law cannot reach that woman is supreme. It is just in the finer, more personal and intimate relationships of life, which government cannot include, that woman finds her work waiting for her, which she alone can do—what Octavia Hill calls "the out-of-sight, silent work."
That woman is today neglecting this, her own part of the world's work, I think is everywhere apparent. Surely we do not need more laws; what we do need ismore of the spirit which shall make people want to obey the laws which we have. What else does it mean when we say we cannot enforce the laws? The suffragists are clamoring for more laws, for more of the man-element in society; the anti-suffragists feel that it is the inner life and character, the mother's work, which everywhere needs strengthening. Settlement workers, doctors, ministers, and police commissioners, are beginning to feel this, too. They are telling us that in their work they find that no laws and no institutions can take the place of home teaching and influence with young people. The outer restraint and penalty are little effective unless they are met by the inner desire to do right.
On points like these I believe the accent should be laid today. The pendulum is swinging too far away from the things which our mothers and grandmothers made their chief concern. What is called "the rise of woman," her new feeling of influence and power, are blessings only as they help her to do better and of freer choice the things which are in tune with Nature and with the need of the world.
MRS. CHARLES BURTON GULICK
Anne Hathaway Gulick, wife of Professor Charles B. Gulick of Harvard University; graduated at the Framingham State Normal School; taught four years in Boston and Cambridge, and is Secretary of the Public Interests' League of Massachusetts.J. A. H.
Anne Hathaway Gulick, wife of Professor Charles B. Gulick of Harvard University; graduated at the Framingham State Normal School; taught four years in Boston and Cambridge, and is Secretary of the Public Interests' League of Massachusetts.
J. A. H.
In his address to the Associated Press on April 21, 1915, President Wilson said: "You deal in the raw material of opinion, and if my convictions have any validity,opinionultimately governs the world." This is exactly what the anti-suffragists believe and teach. They know that the vote merely registers public opinion, it does not make it. Therefore, they oppose laying the useless burden of the ballot on the shoulders of woman, who already has every opportunity in her own special province to mold public opinion by educating the inmates of her home to live right and to think right. From such homes, where high principles are inculcated, comes the public spirited, right minded man, whose vote registers the fact that the mother inthat home has done her duty faithfully and well. A woman who has thus fulfilled her obligation to the world knows that there is not time left to take up political duties. Either the home or the politics must suffer. In the end, in the great majority of cases, nature would assert herself, and the political duties would be neglected.
A minister, who is a suffragist, is quoted recently as saying: "Our young men, we believe, would be safer if their mothers and wives had the ballot, for they are the ones most injured by many evils." In what way will our young men be safer because their mothers and their wives have the ballot? Instead of devoting themselves wholly to teaching their sons and daughters the value of self-restraint, of respect for the rights and comfort of others, and the importance of high ideals of citizenship, if these same mothers and wives are dividing their attention between the home and political strife and strain, can they reasonably be expected to fulfill their greatest duty successfully? No woman should be obliged to divide her energies, and so have less time to give to the study of her children. No two children are alike, and each child requires special consideration and care for its best development. Can any one tell at what moment a child may need unusual attention and thought to guide it aright? Supposing the mother had the ballot, would the political campaign wait because her child was going through a particularly trying period, when a step one way or the other might make or mar its character? Or would the child wait totake the step because it was important for the mother to throw all the weight of her sound sense and good influence into the political campaign, and she must, therefore, just at this critical time set aside her home duties? No, most certainly not. The mother must havenoother duties which could come before her home duties at any time.
Some one said recently: "A man must have a place to go from and to come to." In order to make him continue to want to go from and come to his home, there must be something there to make him look forward to the home-coming with pleasure as the reward of his labor. If this home is kept by a woman who cannot be at home often when most needed, who labors under the excitement of the political campaign, how long is he going to look forward to his home-coming? Of course, the answer to this is that most women would not spend any more time over politics than they do now. But if that is so, of what use will they be as voters, and why add a perfectly useless body of voters, when this addition to the electorate will mean an increase in the expenses of the government and consequently higher cost of living, already too high for the average family?
We do not believe with Mr. Creel that "the old fashioned idea of home is bunk," nor do we agree with Mr. Roger Sherman Hoar, who is reported as saying that "woman suffrage, by doubling the electorate, will double the opportunities of each man for political interest." He goes on to say that when a man's wifebecomes a voter he will talk politics with her and will give more weight to her political opinion, thereby learning the home point of view on home matters. Is it probable that a man who has not spent enough time with his wife to know what the home point of view is before she has a vote, would be induced to spend more time there because she had? It is much more likely that he would spend less time there, since without political duties she was unable to make his home attractive, and with political duties she would have even less time to give to the making of a good home. Further on we read: "With increased interest in matters political"—this increase to be brought about by giving women the vote—"the men will scrutinize their public servants more carefully." What becomes here of the contention of the suffragists that theballotis the only thing that wakens interest in good government, if the men who already have the ballot are not interested in good government, but need to have the women enfranchised before they can have a real interest in matters political?
No, woman must specialize in the home. I am not speaking of those who "by choice or accident have missed the highest privilege of womanhood," as Mr. Pyle ably puts it, but of the great majority of women. To my mind the advantages of a properly conducted home life far outweigh the advantages of any institution, no matter how good. That I am not alone in this opinion is witnessed by the fact that the trustees of the best orphan asylums are making every effort todiminish the number of children in their institutions and to place the children in homes. They have learned that even a poorly conducted home is better than a well conducted asylum, and that they have no right to deprive children of the benefits of family life. Yet the feminists, closely allied with the suffragists, advocate putting children of tender age into institutions, where, according to them, they will be better cared for than at home. "If they are well, the institution nurse is as good; if they are ill, she is much better than the mother" says one suffrage leader. Those of us who have known better can only pity people who hold such beliefs. To them mother love can have no meaning. Yet those of us who have felt this mother love, know what a guiding star it has been, and must always continue to be, brightening steadily as the years go by, and beckoning us more persistently than ever to higher ideals when it is only a memory. Who would dare deprive our children of this precious heritage? Only the unknowing.
After all, the women who rebel against the idea that home is the place for woman are largely those who misunderstand the duties of home, who think only of the drudgery, and forget to think of the happiness that comes with watching our families develop under our care. Although the mother must do all the work in the average family, it is not from these homes where in most cases the women are happily busy with their home duties that most of the agitation about abandonning the home comes, but from among those people whohave too much leisure on their hands, and who, unfortunately, do not find sufficiently exciting the duties of training good citizens. Whatever our work in life, whatever our occupation, we cannot rid ourselves of drudgery. Is there not more deadening, unvarying monotony for the business woman, the shop girl, the factory hand, than for the woman in the home who is her own mistress and can in some degree regulate and vary her work to suit her own pleasure? It is only because such work is new and untried by them that many women think it preferable to home duties; but the fact that so many girls in industry marry young to get away from this uncongenial work proves that when tried it is not found either so exciting or so interesting as these advocates of woman in industry and out of the home imagine.
Do not mistake me: No woman should spend all of her time at home. Public needs and social duties must be attended to. From the latter she brings refreshment and new ideas to the home, and by giving a proper share of her energies to the former she can do her part toward helping the community in which she lives to be constantly improving itself, and so to become an ideal place in which to develop worthy citizens. With these interests she can be a real influence for good, and without them she must fall short of ideal motherhood. We must not forget that a woman can select her own time for her social duties, and they can be set aside at any time that more important mattersneed her attention in the home, but that she could not select her own time for political duties.
Let us remember, then, as Miss Lucy Price says, that after all, women in big business are not the successes, men can do that work as well and better than they. It is the women in the home, outnumbering all others fifteen to one (and fourteen of these do not keep a servant), who are really the great and typical women of the world.
MRS. WILLIAM LOWELL PUTNAM
Mrs. William Lowell Putnam; a director of the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality; Chairman, Department of Public Health of Women's Municipal League of Boston, which has the following committees: Household Nursing, Prenatal and Obstetrical Care, Sanitation and Safety of Public Buildings and Conveyances, Hygiene of Occupations, Abatement of Noise, Social Hygiene and Quackery; a member of the National Child Welfare Exhibit Committee, and of the Massachusetts Committee on Unemployment of the American Section of the International Association; Chairman, Executive Committee of Massachusetts Milk Consumers' Association; Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Boston of the Special Aid Society for American Preparedness.J. A. H.
Mrs. William Lowell Putnam; a director of the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality; Chairman, Department of Public Health of Women's Municipal League of Boston, which has the following committees: Household Nursing, Prenatal and Obstetrical Care, Sanitation and Safety of Public Buildings and Conveyances, Hygiene of Occupations, Abatement of Noise, Social Hygiene and Quackery; a member of the National Child Welfare Exhibit Committee, and of the Massachusetts Committee on Unemployment of the American Section of the International Association; Chairman, Executive Committee of Massachusetts Milk Consumers' Association; Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Boston of the Special Aid Society for American Preparedness.
J. A. H.
More talk and less thought is expended on the subject of sex today than on almost anything else.
It is a hopeful sign for the future that society in general is awakening to the far-reaching importance of the relations between the sexes, and—feeling that theserelations at present leave much to be desired—is offering many suggestions for the solution of this vexed problem, even though the suggestions themselves are not always calculated to obtain the desired results. The fact that throughout much of the civilized world, women outnumber men, combined with the attitude of certain women whose lives have been passed without personal experience of sexual relations has led to the suggestion that the sex problem may be simplified in the future by the development of a neuter sex which these people think they see approaching. But this seems hardly a likely solution, for asexuality must of necessity be self-destructive, and need not, therefore, occupy us long, though just now the type does seem rather self-concious. A less fanciful, though not more satisfying, solution is that of the feminist, who, in hunting for a cure, demands for men and women alike no restraint on sexual relations beyond the immediate desires of the two people most intimately concerned, while her milder sister, the suffragette, believes that women by voting can bring about in both sexes the control of human passion.
That the sexual relation interests the world is not so new a condition as we sometimes think; indeed, half unconsciously, sex has always been of paramount interest from the cradle to the grave, from the time when the child alone first nurses tenderly its doll, or in groups plays house, and at being father and mother and children. It is only the realization and open discussion of the interest which is new. Sex is the mostvital thing in the world, for on it all but the lowest forms of life depend; hence the instinct of reproduction is equalled in its force by no other except, perhaps, that of self-preservation. We must think about it. Only let us think straight.
The reproductive instinct is normally stronger in men than in women; because in matters of sex, whatever he may be in other things, man is certainly the giver and woman the receiver of the gift. This fact has led to the assumption that man is, therefore, responsible for all the sins of sex, and this would undoubtedly be true were instinct and passion matters quite beyond our personal control, but they are not. The instinct of self-preservation is the most fundamental feeling that we have, and yet in the sinking of the "Titanic" and the horror of the "Lusitania," we saw this instinct controlled—how gloriously—by the highest manhood of men, not only of those from whom we should have expected the utmost consideration, but also of those who, we might have thought, had forfeited their manhood by lives of uncontrolled and sodden self-indulgence, lives full of injury to women, and to children born through them. Their manhood was not lacking when the call to protect the women and the children came in terms which they could understand. Why were they not taught to control the other fundamental instinct of life at a time when such a thing was possible? Are men responsible for the evil of their upbringing? Is it not their mothers rather, who should bear the heaviest burden of blame?
Every man is born of woman and almost every man is cared for by a woman throughout his earliest years. The Jesuits, in their wisdom, founded on much experience, have said: "Give me a child until he is seven and after that you may do what you like with him!" It is these early years that count most in a man's future. What have the mothers done in these years? Have they taught their children the laws of the transmission of life in their sacredness and their beauty, or, while willingly telling them of all the other facts of life, have they let this one, by far the most important, go untold, fear tying their tongues, and given to themselves the excuse of ignorance unequal to its task—an ignorance which in a mother is culpable—I had almost said criminal? Moreover, the responsibility of women for the moral standards of men does not end with their boyhood, for each sex is ultimately what the other demands of it to be. Men have demanded purity of their women, but women have not demanded it of men. Have not good women been in the habit of receiving into their society men whose past they know to have been bad—yes, and even of encouraging their daughters to marry such men for the sake of money or of social position? Women's responsibility for the social evil is greater than that of men, and those who are most responsible are the good women of the community. The arraignment is severe, but is it not deserved?
It is in childhood that the teaching of the sex relation must be given,—with the children that the trainingof self-control must begin. If men and women are started right in childhood, the later time will take care of itself. I would not belittle the father's influence, nor his teaching of his children; but of the two the mother is the more important, for the man who has talked of all things with his mother, to whom the sacredness of motherhood is indissolubly bound up with the great instinct of reproduction, will find it very hard to go far wrong. The girl, too, who understands the laws of her own nature and that of the young men whom she meets, will be in a position not only to choose her mate more wisely, but in the things that come up every day among young people of opposite sexes she will not excite in him, by word and gesture, through mere careless ignorance, as is so often done, a passion, which, though she go free and ignorant of harm, may bring to him much needless suffering, and may sometimes end in ruin both for him and for some other.
Women, through their training of their sons and daughters, hold the future of the world in their keeping. This training cannot be given by the enactment of laws; we cannot legislate the control of human passion. The law-maker bears no relation to the character builder.
"They're no more like than hornet's nests and hivesOr printed sarmons be to holy lives."
"They're no more like than hornet's nests and hivesOr printed sarmons be to holy lives."
Law can only prevent wrongdoing, it is negative at best, for its appeal in the end must be to fear, and a people ruled by fear becomes a race of slaves. In a freecountry it is impossible to enforce a law unless the will of the people is behind it; and the moulding of this will, its training and development, must come in early childhood and must be done by its women. There is no greater sophistry than that women need the vote to protect themselves and one another from evil men. Were most men libertines today, no law could be enforced against them. Were all men self-controlled and pure in heart, no law would be required. The failure of the women—the good women of the community—to bring up their sons to be such men cannot be corrected by any short and easy road, nor can their responsibility for the present evil be obliterated by talk. Women have failed to do their duty, and the only way to prevent further evil is to do that duty now.
LILY RICE FOXCROFT
Lily Rice Foxcroft, daughter of the late Rev. Dr. Charles B. Rice of Danvers, Mass., for nearly twenty years Secretary of the Congregational Board of Pastoral Supply; wife of Frank Foxcroft, editor of "The Living Age." Frequent contributor to the religious press, the author of a volume entitled, "While You Are a Girl," and a well-known speaker in opposition to woman suffrage.J. A. H.
Lily Rice Foxcroft, daughter of the late Rev. Dr. Charles B. Rice of Danvers, Mass., for nearly twenty years Secretary of the Congregational Board of Pastoral Supply; wife of Frank Foxcroft, editor of "The Living Age." Frequent contributor to the religious press, the author of a volume entitled, "While You Are a Girl," and a well-known speaker in opposition to woman suffrage.
J. A. H.
The strongest motive for anti-suffrage action is the deepening dread of woman suffrage as a menace to the home. The radical suffragists have little use for the home, and the radical suffragists are young and brilliant, and their following grows rapidly. It is they who are in the public eye; whom the reporters interview; who, far more than the conservatives, are really influencing the thought of the day. They claim to be the consistent thinkers, reasoning from the common premise to conclusions from which "older women" shrink. They welcome with whole-hearted enthusiasm the theory of "economic independence."
This theory was first popularized by theWoman's Journal, in a notable series of articles by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an associate editor, which appeared weekly in 1904, and of which the central thought was, "The woman should be in the home as much as the man is, no more." She urged women to "come out of their little monogamous harems," promised that "whenallwomen are in industry, the conditions of industry will be compelled to suit the conditions of maternity," and predicted the time when "a man would no more think of having a woman become his house servant than a woman would think of marrying her butler and retaining him in that capacity." Mrs. Gilman summarized these ideas, again, in a lecture in New York last year: "The home of the future is one in which not one stroke of work shall be done except by professional people who are paid by the hour."
This theory meets so well the anti-suffrage argument that the woman, while spending most of her time within the home, cannot be expected to attain outside it a degree of efficiency equal to that of the man, that it naturally becomes part of the creed of the logical and consistent suffragist. Miss Henrietta Rodman—a wife who, like Miss Fola La Follette, retains her maiden name, because taking that of a husband "dwarfs individuality"—gave to a reporter of theBoston Heraldlast year her opinion that "a house is as demoralizing a place to stay in all day as a bed," and assured him that the ideal feminist apartment-house, with its co-operative nursery on the top floor, had itsplans actually drawn, its site chosen. "Trained staffs are to relieve women of the four primitive industries—care of houses, clothes, food and children." "By real motherhood," said Miss Rodman, "I do not mean washing the baby's clothes, preparing its food, watching over its sleep, nursing it through its baby illnesses, nor, in later years, darning the children's stockings, making or even mending their clothes, preparing their food or supervising their education. All these things can be done better by experts."
No one can follow the utterances of this group of suffragists without noting the constant slight cast on "domestic drudgery," and the eagerness to prove other lines of activity better adapted to women. "There is rising revolt among women," wrote Miss Edna Kenton, inThe Centuryfor November, 1913, "against the unspeakable dullness of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life-servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world."
General Rosalie Jones, of "hiking fame," who is now breaking into the automobile business, says: "There are idiot asylums in every state whose inmates are expert at darning and mending. Any one of those idiots sitting by the fireside could do the family mending, while the woman of education, ingenuity and common sense, could utilize her faculties to the betterment of her family and the country.... After suffrage is granted, women will no longer be content to waste their brains in this manner." Miss Inez Boissevain's "Ten Minutes-a-Day Housekeeping" iswell known, as is her declaration to the reporter that she "should go crazy if she had to do housework one whole day." "Young children," she admitted, "need their mother. But," she added hopefully, "the age at which they can be left with others is much less than it was formerly supposed to be." Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, Mrs. Pankhurst's closest companion on her last United States tour, says: "Men are not yet used to seeing their wives in the role of wage-earners. They'll have to get used to it, that's all.... I don't say that every married woman must go to work outside her home. I should commit suicide if I had to spend my life doing housework, but some women probably like to do it. Let them do it then. All I ask is that every woman, married or single, should be allowed to choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure."
"To choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure"—there is the real individualistic note, sounded so often by the radical suffragists. It is struck still more clearly when to the reporter's question: "What about the argument that the wife with a business career is apt to deprive her husband of the joys of fatherhood?" Mrs. Dorr replies: "No one but the individual woman herself has any right to decide whether or not she shall have children. That is a question which she alone is entitled to settle."
In the same tone of contempt for the domestic round in which the average wife and mother has been accustomed to find her fair share of human satisfaction, Mrs. Susan Fitzgerald wrote in the opening number of "Femina": "Of course, some women don't want to do independent work; some prefer the quiet routine and detail of the home and are satisfied to make a profession of its many little refinements, even as many men have not the ambition to go into business for themselves.... But the creative artist, whether in a profession or business, gets most of the joy of living out of the satisfaction that comes to him in his work, and so I say, do away with the prejudice against married women working outside their homes."
Miss Alyse Gregory—who has campaigned for suffrage in Connecticut and New Jersey with striking success—says: "Girls should be self-supporting up to the time of their marriage, and after marriage up to the time when they begin to bear children. During the child-bearing period there might be some provision made for mothers by the State, as is now done in France; then all women who have reared families and who again find themselves with leisure on their hands, should again be self-supporting." This, of course, is the Socialist view, and Miss Gregory, like so many of the younger suffragists, is presumably a Socialist.
Another pronounced advocate of economic independence is Mrs. Havelock Ellis—an English suffragist much fêted on her visits to this country—of whom an admirer writes in theChicago Herald, that "she has never accepted a penny from her husband since they were married." It will be noticed that all these women are in professional work, in which their earnings may reasonably be expected to provide "expert" care for their children. Incidentally, does not that support the anti-suffrage claim that the suffrage movement is gauged to the talents and habits of exceptional, rather than average, women, and that its principles are not those under which the average woman's life finds its best development?
This tendency away from domestic life fosters the very evils which conservative suffragists hope to remedy by the vote. Even more startling is the tone taken in the discussion of "sex problems." Interviewed on the subject of "war babies" last summer by an enterprising syndicate which spread her views all over the country, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr said: "There are always war babies at a time when normal restraints are removed and slackened. After a great religious revival in any town there is an increased number of illegitimate children.... The government endowed immorality when it entered the war.... The government made war, the war made war babies—then let the government take care of them."
To the same interviewer, Miss Eleanor Gates, of the Empire State Campaign Committee, said: "It's unfortunate that the parents of these babies did not take out licenses to be parents.... But more unfortunate, to my mind, than an omission of the license, is the fact that motherhood should ever be counted a crime.... And, when all is said and done, I, myself, respect the unmarried woman with a child more than I do the married woman with a poodle."
These are the utterances of conspicuous leaders ofthe younger, more radical wing of the woman suffrage movement; and no one who follows with any care their speeches and writings can claim that they are out of character. Is it unfair to say such utterances confuse moral values and weaken the sense of individual responsibility?
This regret that "motherhood should ever be counted a crime" is often more tersely expressed in the phrase "right to motherhood," first made fashionable, I believe, by Mr. Bernard Shaw. It was given publicity last June through an address made by Prof. W. I. Thomas of the University of Chicago at the banquet held by the Chicago Equal Suffrage Association in honor of the National Executive Council. Professor Thomas said, "in substance"—I quote theWoman's Journal—"that many women who could not marry were earnestly desirous of children, and that it ought to be recognized that monogamy was not the only relation in which it was respectable for a woman to have a child." The National Association, as is well known, is the conservative wing of the wrangling suffragist army, and contains most of those "middle-aged reformers" whom the "younger generation" dispose of so easily by saying that they have not kept up with the times. Miss Alice Stone Blackwell promptly combatted the speaker's opinions, and theWoman's Journalreports that she was heartily applauded.
But Professor Thomas is not so easily disavowed. A ten-page pamphlet, "Votes for Women," published by the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, is ofhis authorship. InThe Case for Woman Suffrage, a bibliography with critical comments, published by the National College Equal Suffrage League in 1913, eighty-eight lines are given to quotations from Professor Thomas's works, while Miss Blackwell's receive only forty. Such comparisons may seem trifling, but they are significant. If any one doubts the hold of the feminist ideas upon many of the most influential suffragists, he may be convinced by himself examiningThe Case for Woman Suffrage. Anti-suffragists are often accused of arguing from isolated, casual utterances. For my part, I find it impossible to reproduce, by any quotations, the impression of recklessness left by habitually reading publications, both American and English, in sympathy with suffrage.
Our age is not one that can afford to trifle with recklessness. Its own problems are of the sort that call for prudence and restraint. The International Purity Congress in San Francisco has laterly drawn attention to the spread of immorality among school girls. Suffragists offer to "mother the community." It is the individual girl that needs mothering. She is not helped to self-control by reading in her favorite news-paper that Inez Haynes Gilmore, interviewed as to the use of "obey" in the marriage service, has said: "To me the promise to love and honor is more extraordinary—it's easier to promise to obey. It's impossible to promise to control the emotions." The lesson the girl draws from a play like Hindle Wakes, when Inez Milholland, inMcClure's, calls her attention toit, is not that men must be as chaste as women, but that it is one of women's rights to be as lax as men.
Professor Thomas' views called forth resolutions from the Executive Board of the National Suffrage Association, which took a curious form. They read: "While we do not wish to criticise the speaker's remarks as such, we heard them with profound misgivings as to their effect upon the cause of suffrage in the campaign states." The anti-suffrage majorities in the campaign states certainly proved the misgivings well-timed. But, however such remarks may have been received, is it not a significant fact that they were ventured, by a reputable man, at a reputable gathering? Can anyone doubt that radical views are startlingly on the increase?
Two years ago Mrs. Winifred Harper Cooley wrote inHarper's Weeklyof the "single standard": "There is a violent altercation going on continually, within the ranks of feminists in all countries, regarding this question. The conservative women reformers think the solution is in hauling men up to the standard of virginal purity that has always been set for women. The other branch, claiming to have a broader knowledge of human nature, asserts that it is impossible and perhaps undesirable to expect asceticism from all men and women." In theForum, of April, 1915, a correspondent from California signing herself "Lottie Montgomery," expanded in revolting detail what was, after all, pretty much the same idea. "On every hand," she remarked, "we hear of the 'singlestandard of morals,' by which the 'purists' mean a strict monogamous life for both men and women, and by which the feminists mean an opportunity to express themselves sexually whenever they see fit without the interference and permission of the Church and State, and this neither constitutes promiscuity, nor yet polyandry, but an opportunity to live your own life in your own way and not to have to sacrifice your name, privacy, self-respect and income in order to gratify the sex instinct." And, passing from theory to practical observation, she asserts: "Whether we like to admit it or not, the fact remains that women today, from the mansion to the tenement, are acquiring sex experience outside of marriage, which accounts for the great mental strides they have made with the past two decades." In the publication, by a leading editor, of such sentiments, we have an alarming sign of the times.
There are too many such signs. Do we not all know long-established magazines which have published, within the last five years, serials that they would not have considered fifteen years ago?
SaysPunch'sreviewer of a recent heroine: "Her point of view was typified in her attitude toward the illicit and incidental motherhood of one of her acquaintances. Without hearing the facts, she pronounced it to be 'a courageous stand against conventional morality,' which it just possibly might have proved to be upon enquiry, and by no means a weak surrender to immediate desires, as much more probablyit was in fact." The author ofAngela's Businessdepicts precisely the same mental attitude in the crimson-faced woman at the Redmantle Club, who demands of Charles in an angry sort of way, "Don't you favor a public reception immediately to splendid Flora Travenna? Don't you think she's struck a great blow for freedom?"—Flora Trevenna having just returned home after an absence of two years in the company of another woman's husband.
One of Robert Herrick's heroines prophesies—in line with Professor Thomas—"The time will come when single women like me, who work as men work, will have the courage to love and bear children if they need—and men will respect them."
Will it be believed that an English magazine of fine literary quality, in which the work of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett has often appeared, has printed an article by a woman pleading for a public sentiment in favor of irregular unions? "Women will go a step further toward freedom than men have dared to go," says Mrs. Walter Gallachan. "I believe that if there were some open recognition of these partnerships outside of marriage, not necessarily permanent, there would be many women who would be willing to undertake such unions gladly; there would even be some women, as I believe, who would prefer them to the present system that binds them permanently to one partner for life."
To many women these views seem so shocking that they cannot believe them to be widespread. I canonly say that such women are leading "sheltered lives." Said a conspicuous young feminist in an interview given to a Boston Sunday paper, "It is both cruel and foolish (eugenically and ethically) to prevent people from trying more than once to find their ideal comrade for race propagation." The fiction of today is full of the disgusting experiences of young persons trying to find their ideal comrades. And an appalling number of these books bear marks of brilliant talent, utterly unconscious of moral standards, "studies of adolescence," many of them are. Illicit relations are entered on in the most casual way and dropped as casually, and yet glorified as marking new eras of "development."
I know, of course, the answer made by thoughtful, conscientious suffragists who believe as strongly as I do in the integrity of the home, when facts like these are brought to their attention. "All suffragists are not feminists. All feminism is not of this extreme sort. Feminism is nothing but a theory, anyway."
Each of us must judge from her own observation; but it should be observation, not merely of the lives of one's personal acquaintance, but of current thought and tendency. Many of us are convinced that an increasing and influential number of suffragists are feminists, that a great deal of feminism is of this extreme sort, and that it is a "theory" which, through channels direct and indirect, is poisoning our literature and our social life.
(For pamphlets and leaflets on the various aspects of the question address the Secretary of the Women's Anti-Suffrage Association, Kensington Building. 687 Boylston Street, Boston.)