Liberty may be an uncomfortable blessing unless you know what to do with it. That is why so many freed slaves returned to their masters, why so many emancipated women are only too glad to give up the racket and settle down. For between announcing that you will live your own life, and the living of it lie the real difficulties of any awakening.
If all that women needed were 'rights,’—the right to work, the right to vote, and freedom from the authority of father and husband, then feminism would be the easiest human question on the calendar. For while there will be a continuing opposition, no one supposes that these elementary freedoms can be withheld from women. In fact, they will be forced upon millions of women who never troubled to ask for any of these rights. And that isn't because Ibsen wrote the Doll's House, or because Bernard Shaw writes prefaces. The mere withdrawal of industries from the home has drawn millions of women out of the home, and left millions idle within it. There are many other forces, all of which have blasted the rock of ages where woman's life was centered. The self-conscious modern woman may insist that she has a life of her own to lead, which neither father, nor priest, nor husband, nor Mrs. Grundy is fit to prescribe for her. But when she begins to prescribe life for herself, her real problems begin.
Every step in the woman's movement is creative. There are no precedents whatever, not even bad ones. Now the invention of new ways of living is rare enough among men, but among women it has been almost unknown. Housekeeping and baby-rearing are the two most primitive arts in the whole world. They are almost the last occupations in which rule of thumb and old wives' tales have resisted the application of scientific method. They are so immemorially backward, that nine people out of ten hardly conceive the possibility of improving upon them. They are so backward that we have developed a maudlin sentimentality about them, have associated family life and the joy in childhood with all the stupidity and wasted labor of the inefficient home. The idea of making the home efficient will cause the average person to shudder, as if you were uttering some blasphemy against monogamy. 'Let science into the home, where on earth will Cupid go to?’ Almost in vain do women like Mrs. Gilman insist that the institution of the family is not dependent upon keeping woman a drudge amidst housekeeping arrangements inherited from the early Egyptians. Women have invented almost nothing to lighten their labor. They have made practically no attempt to specialize, to cooperate. They have been the great routineers.
So people have said that woman was made to be the natural conservative, the guardian of tradition. She would probably still be guarding the tradition of weaving her own clothes in the parlor if an invention hadn't thwarted her. She still guards the tradition of buying food retail, of going alone and unorganized to market. And she has been, of course, a faithful conservator of superstition, the most docile and credulous of believers. In all this, I am saying nothing that awakened women themselves aren't saying, nor am I trying to take a hand in that most stupid of all debates as to whether men are superior to women. Nor am I trying to make up my mind whether the higher education of women and their political enfranchisement will produce in the next generation several Darwins and a few Michelangelos. The question is not even whether women can be as good doctors and lawyers and business organizers as men.
It is much more immediate, and far less academic than that. The feminists could almost afford to admit the worst that Schopenhauer, Weininger, and Sir Almoth Wright can think of, and then go on pointing to the fact that competent or incompetent they have got to adjust themselves to a new world. The day of the definitely marked 'sphere’ is passing under the action of forces greater than any that an irritated medical man can control. It is no longer possible to hedge the life of women in a set ritual, where their education, their work, their opinion, their love, and their motherhood, are fixed in the structure of custom. To insist that women need to be moulded by authority is a shirking of the issue. For the authority that has moulded them is passing. And if woman is fit only to live in a harem, it will have to be a different kind of harem from any that has existed.
The more you pile up the case against woman in the past the more significant does feminism become. For one fact is written across the whole horizon, the prime element in any discussion. That fact is the absolute necessity for a readjusting of woman's position. And so, every time you insist that women are backward you are adding to the revolutionary meaning of their awakening. But what these anti-feminists have in mind, of course, is that women are by nature incapable of any readjustment. However, the test of that pudding is in the eating. What women will do with the freedom that is being forced upon them is something, that no person can foresee by thinking of women in the past.
Women to-day are embarked upon a career for which their tradition is no guide. The first result, of course is a vast amount of trouble. The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul. She who always took what was given to her has to find for herself. She who passed without a break from the dominance of her father to the dominance of her husband is suddenly compelled to govern herself. Almost at one stroke she has lost the authority of a little world and has been thrust into a very big one, which nobody, man or woman, understands very well. I have tried to suggest what this change from a world of villages has meant for politicians, clergymen and social thinkers. Well, for women, the whole problem is aggravated by the fact that they come from a still smaller world and from a much more rigid authority.
It is no great wonder if there is chaos among the awakening women. Take a cry like that for a 'single standard’ of morality. It means two utterly contradictory things. For the Pankhursts it is assumed that men should adopt women's standards, but in the minds of thousands it means just the reverse. For some people feminism is a movement of women to make men chaste, for others the enforced chastity of women is a sign of their slavery. Feminism is attacked both for being too 'moral’ and too 'immoral.’ And these contradictions represent a real conflict, not a theoretical debate. There is in the movement an uprising of women who rebel against marriage which means to a husband the ultimate haven of a sexual career. There is also a rebellion of women who want for themselves the larger experience that most men have always taken. Christabel Pankhurst uses the new freedom of expression to drive home an Old Testament morality with Old Testament fervor. She finds her book suppressed by Mr. Anthony Comstock, who differs from her far less than he imagines. And she rouses the scorn of great numbers of people who feel that she is out, not to free women, but to enslave men. There is an immense vacillation between a more rigid Puritanism and the idolatry of freedom. Women are discovering what reformers of all kinds are learning, that there is a great gap between the overthrow of authority and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt. We are in it to-day.
The first impulse of emancipation seems to be in the main that woman should model her career on man's. But she cannot do that for the simple reason that she is a woman. Towards love and children her attitude is not man's, as everyone but a doctrinaire knows. She cannot taboo her own character in order to become suddenly an amateur male. And if she could, it would be the sheerest folly, for there are plenty of men on this earth.
Yet at the very time when enlightened people are crying out against the horrors of capitalism, you will find many feminists urging women to enter capitalism as a solution of their problems. Of course, millions have been drawn in against their will, but there is still a good number who go in voluntarily, because they feel that their self-respect demands it.
They go in response to the desire for economic independence. And they find almost no real independence in the industrial world. What has happened, it seems to me, is this: the women who argue for the necessity of making one's own living are almost without exception upper class women, either because they have special talents or because they have special opportunities. Some time ago I attended a feminist meeting where a brilliant woman was presented to the audience as an example of how it was possible to earn a living and have twins at the same time. But it happened that the woman was a lecturer who could earn a very comfortable sum by speaking a few hours a week. Another woman at the same meeting was an actress, another had been a minister, another was a popular novelist; the only woman present who was concerned with factory work said not one word about the pleasure of earning your own living.
Now, only a very small percentage of men or women can enter the professions. For the great mass, economic independence means going to work. And the theorists of feminism have yet to make up their minds whether they can seriously urge women to go into industry as it is to-day or is likely to be in the near future. I, for one, should say that the presence of women in the labor market is an evil to be combatted by every means at our command. The army of women in industry to-day is not a blessing but the curse of a badly organized society. Their position there is not the outpost of an advance toward a fuller life but an outrage upon the race, and I believe that the future will regard it as a passing phase of human servitude.
For the great mass, women's work in the future will, I believe, be in the application of the arts and sciences to a deepened and more extensively organized home. There is nothing narrowing about that, no thrusting of women back into the chimney corner. There is opportunity for every kind of talent, and for the sharing of every kind of interest. It does not mean that women need not concern themselves with industry. Far from it. For any decent kind of home women will have lo develop beyond anything we have today an intelligent and powerful consumers' control. They must go into politics, of course, for no home exists that doesn't touch in a hundred ways upon the government of cities, states and the nation. They have the whole educational system to deal with, not only from the public school up, but also, what is beginning to be recognized as most important of all, from infancy to school age. Nor does it mean that every women must be an incompetent amateur of all the arts, as she is today, a cook, a purchaser, a housekeeper, a trained nurse and a kindergarten teacher. Woman's work can and will be specialized, as Mrs. Gilman has pointed out, so that a woman will have a very wide choice in a host of new careers that are going to be created. A great many things which are done in each house will be done by the collective action of a group of houses. The idea of having forty kitchens, forty furnaces, forty laundries, and forty useless backyards in one square block, managed by forty separate overworked women, each going helplessly to market, each bringing up children by rule of thumb,? all that is a kind of individualism which the world will get away from.
To get away from it is an effort that will provide ample careers for most women. The elementary facts of cooperation and division of labor are being forced upon women by the wastefulness of the old kind of housekeeping. We see already the organization of housewives' associations, of common playgrounds, which some people object to when they have a roof and are called common nurseries. There are neighborhood associations, and women's municipal leagues. There are kindergartens which take away from each mother the necessity of being an accomplished teacher of the most subtly plastic period of human life.
Now with the development of some division of labor among women, they will begin to earn salaries. To be paid for work in money is possible only when you don't do all the work. So the moment you divide the work the only way you can share the product is by paying money to each worker. A woman who does her own cooking gets no pay. A woman who docs someone else's cooking gets pay. And when women introduce into the work of the home the principle of division of labor and cooperative organization, they also will receive pay, and what is called 'economic independence'' will be open to them.
That will, of course, be a real emancipation. If women are trained to do all the things that the existing home requires, that is, if they become amateur cooks, marketers, and Montessori mothers, and specialists in none of these things, then they have to wait till they can have a home of their own in which to display their versatility. They have to wait for a man who loves them enough to put up with their general amateurishness, or one who doesn't know any better. But the moment they specialize, so that women can do some one thing very well, they can begin to do homework before they are married. A kindergarten teacher doesn't have to bear a child before she can begin to teach a child. She has a place in the world, a livelihood, and a self-respect because she can do something which is needed. She can marry for love, because she desires children of her own, because she wants what the family can give, not because she is a detached and meaningless female until she is married.
What this will mean for everyone is almost beyond the imagination of most people to-day. We are just beginning to realize that the intense narrowness of women is one of the things that thwarts human effort. The number of wives who have egged their husbands on to ruthless business practices, the inventive minds that have been stunted by a fierce absorption in the little interests of the household— all the individualism of women is a constant obstacle to a larger cooperative life. If we knew the details of why men falter, why they are pulled away from common action, we should find, I believe, in unnumbered cases that there was some woman at home, a mother or a wife, who, limited in her whole vision, was clinging desperately to some immediate, personal advantage. And as for children, in their most educable period, they are surrounded by an example of isolation, made to feel that the supreme concern of human life is to look in towards the home, instead of out from it. It is no wonder that democracy is so difficult, that collective action is impeded by a thousand conflicting egotisms. Every one of us is trained in a little water-tight compartment of his own.
From the economic and spiritual subjection of his mother the child forms its ideal of the relation of men and women. We speak about the influence of the parents. It is deeper than most of us realize. The child is influenced by its parents, but not only for good, as sentimentalists seem to imagine. The boy may absorb all the admirable qualities of his father, but he is just as capable of absorbing his father's contempt for woman's mind, his father's capacity for playing the little tyrant, and his father's bad economic habits. The girl learns to obey, to wait on the lordly male, to feel unimportant in human affairs, to hold on with unremitting force to the privileges that sex gives her. And out of it all we get the people of to-day, unused to the very meaning of democracy, grasping their own with an almost hysterical tenacity.
The sense of property may be a deep instinct. But surely the nineteenth century home stimulated that instinct to the point of morbidity. For it did almost nothing to bring the child into contact with the real antidote to acquisitiveness—a sense of social property. To own things in common is, it seems to me, one of the most educating experiences in the world. Those people who can feel that they possess the parks, the libraries, the museums of their city, are likely to be far more civilized people than those who want a park which they can enclose, and who want to own a masterpiece all by themselves. It is well known that there is among sea-faring people a rare comradeship. May this not be due to the fact that the sea is there for all to use and none to own? On the high road men salute each other in passing. Farmers seem at times to have a kind of personal friendship with the weather and the turning seasons, and those things which no single man can appropriate.
Now in the complicated civilization upon which we are entering, it will be impossible for many people to enjoy the primitive sense of absolute possession. We shall need men and women who can take an interest in collective property, who can feel personally and vividly about it. One of the great promises of the conservation movement is the evidence it gave of a passionate attachment to public possessions. But that attachment is something that almost everyone to-day has had to acquire after he was grown up. We are all of us compelled to overcome the habits and ideals of a childhood where social property was almost unknown. In this respect the only child is perhaps the most deeply miseducated. He has had what he had as his in fee simple. But all children have far too little contact with other children—too few toys that are owned in common, too few group nurseries. Now boys, when they grow to be a bit older, do come in for a little social education. The gang is a fine experience, even though a few windows are smashed. The boy who can talk about 'us fellers’ has a better start for the modern world than the little girl of the same age who is imitating her mother's housekeeping. From the gang to the athletic team, class spirit, school spirit —with all their faults and misdirected energy—they do mean loyalty to something larger than the petty details of the moment.
One of the supreme values of feminism is that it will have to socialize the home. When women seek a career they have to specialize. When they specialize they have to cooperate. They have to abandon more and more the self-sufficient individualism of the older family. They will have to market through associations. They will do a great deal more of the housework through associations, just as they are now beginning to have bread baked outside and the washing done by laundries that are not part of the home. If they are not satisfied with the kind of work that is done for the home but outside of it, they will have to learn that difficult business of democracy which consists in expressing and enforcing their desires upon industry. And just as from the kindergarten up, education has become a collective function, so undoubtedly a great deal of the care and training of infants will become specialized.
This doesn't mean baby-farms or barracks or any of the other nightmares of the hysterical imagination. Nobody is proposing to separate the child from its parents any more than the child is now separated. It is curious how readily any woman who can afford it will trust her infant to the most ignorant nurse-girl, and then be horribly shocked at the idea of trusting her child to day nurseries in charge of trained women. The private nurse-girl often abuses the child in unmentionable ways, but she is preferred because she seems somehow to satisfy the feeling of possession. The penalty that grown-ups pay for the sins of the superstitious and unsocialized nursery is something that we are just beginning to understand from the researches of the psychiatrists.
There is one question about feminism which is sure to have risen in the mind of any reader who has followed the argument up to this point. Does the awakening of women mean an attack upon monogamy? For the moment anyone dares to criticize any arrangement of the existing home he might as well be prepared to find himself classed as a sexual anarchist. It is curious how little faith conservatives have in the institution of the family. They will tell you how deep it is in the needs of mankind, and they will turn around and act as if the home were so fragile that collapse would follow the first whiff of criticism.
Now I believe that the family is deeply grounded in the needs of mankind, or it would never survive the destructive attacks made upon it, not by radical theorists, mind you, but by social conditions. At the present moment over half the men of the working-class do not earn enough to support a family, and that's why their wives and their daughters are drawn into industry. The family survives that, men and women do still want to marry and have children. But we put every kind of obstacle in their way. We pay such wages that young men can't afford to marry. We do not teach them the elementary facts of sex. We allow them to pick up knowledge in whispered and hidden ways. We surround them with the tingle and glare of cities, stimulate them, and then fall upon them with a morality which shows no quarter. We support a large class of women in idleness, the soil in which every foolish freak can flourish. We thrust people into marriage and forbid them with fearful penalties to learn any way of controlling their own fertility. We do almost no single, sensible, and deliberate thing to make family life a success. And still the family survives.
It has survived all manner of stupidity. It will survive the application of intelligence. It will not collapse because the home is no longer the scene of drudgery and wasted labor or because children are reared to meet modern civilization. It will not collapse because women have become educated, or because they have attained a new self-respect.
But in answer to the direct question whether monogamy is to go by the board, the only possible answer is this: there is no reason for supposing that there will be any less of it than there is to-day. That is not saying very much, perhaps, but more than that no honest person can guarantee. He can believe that when the thousand irritations of married life are reduced, the irritations of an unsound economic status, of ignorance in the art of love, then the family will have a better chance than it has ever had. How many homes have been wrecked by the sheer inability of men and women to understand each other can be seen by the enormous use made of the theme in modern literature. It does not seem to me that education and a growing sensitiveness are likely to make for promiscuity.
For you have to hold yourself very cheaply to endure the appalling and unselective intimacy that promiscuity means. To treat women as things and yourself as a predatory animal is the product not of emancipation and self-respect, but of ignorance and inferiority. The uprising of women as personalities is not likely to make them value themselves less, nor is it likely that they will be satisfied with the fragments of love they now attain. Of course, every movement attracts what Roosevelt calls its 'lunatic fringe,’ and feminism has collected about it a great rag-tag of bohemianism. But it cannot be judged by that; it must be judged by its effect on the great mass of women who, half-consciously for the most part, are seeking not a new form of studio and cafe life, but a readjustment to work and love and interest. There is among them, so far as I can see, no indication of any desire for an impressionistic sexual career.
To be sure they don't treat a woman who has had relations out of marriage as if she were a leper. They are not inclined to visit upon the offspring of illegitimacy the curse of patriarchal Judea. But so far as their own demands go they are set in overwhelming measure upon greater sexual sincerity. They are, if anything, too stern in their morality and, perhaps, too naive. But the legislation they initiate, the books they write, look almost entirely to the establishment of a far more enduring and intelligently directed family.
The effect of the woman's movement will accumulate with the generations. The results are bound to be so far-reaching that we can hardly guess them to-day. For we are tapping a reservoir of possibilities when women begin to use not only their generalized womanliness but their special abilities. For the child it means, as I have tried to suggest, a change in the very conditions where the property sense is aggravated and where the need for authority and individual assertiveness is built up. The greatest obstacles to a cooperative civilization are under fire from the feminists. Those obstacles today are more than anything else a childhood in which the anti-social impulses are fixed. The awakening of women points straight to the discipline of cooperation. And so it is laying the real foundations for the modern world.
For understand that the forms of cooperation are of precious little value without a people trained to use them. The old family with its dominating father, its submissive and amateurish mother produced inevitably men who had little sense of a common life, and women who were jealous of an enlarging civilization. It is this that feminism comes to correct, and that is why its promise reaches far beyond the present bewilderment.