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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Women as World Builders, by Floyd Dell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Women as World Builders
+       Studies in Modern Feminism
+
+Author: Floyd Dell
+
+Release Date: August 30, 2010 [EBook #33584]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN AS WORLD BUILDERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eleni, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
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+
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+
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+
+
+
+    WOMEN AS WORLD BUILDERS
+
+
+
+
+    Women
+    as
+    World Builders
+
+
+    Studies in
+    Modern Feminism
+
+    BY
+    FLOYD DELL
+
+    [Illustration]
+
+    CHICAGO
+    FORBES AND COMPANY
+    1913
+
+
+
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
+    FORBES AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAPTER                                    PAGE
+
+    I The Feminist Movement                      7
+
+    II Charlotte Perkins Gilman                 22
+
+    III Emmeline Pankhurst and Jane Addams      30
+
+    IV Olive Schreiner and Isadora Duncan       41
+
+    V Beatrice Webb and Emma Goldman            52
+
+    VI Margaret Dreier Robins                   65
+
+    VII Ellen Key                               76
+
+    VIII Freewomen and Dora Marsden             90
+
+
+
+
+Women as World Builders
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT
+
+
+The feminist movement can be dealt with in two ways: it can be treated
+as a sociological abstraction, and discussed at length in heavy
+monographs; or it can be taken as the sum of the action of a lot of
+women, and taken account of in the lives of individual women. The latter
+way would be called "journalistic," had not the late William James used
+it in his "Varieties of Religious Experience." It is a method which
+preserves the individual flavor, the personal tone and color, which,
+after all, are the life of any movement. It is, therefore, the method I
+have chosen for this book.
+
+The ten women whom I have chosen are representative: they give the
+quality of the woman's movement of today. Charlotte Perkins Gilman--Jane
+Addams--Emmeline Pankhurst--Olive Schreiner--Isadora Duncan--Beatrice
+Webb--Emma Goldman--Margaret Dreier Robins--Ellen Key: surely in these
+women,[see also the chapter "Freewomen and Dora Marsden."] if anywhere,
+is to be found the soul of modern feminism!
+
+One may inquire why certain other names are not included. There is
+Maria Montessori, for instance. Her ideas on the education of children
+are of the utmost importance, and their difference from those of Froebel
+is another illustration of the difference between the practical minds of
+women and the idealistic minds of men. But Madame Montessori's relation
+to the feminist movement is, after all, ancillary. A tremendous lot
+remains to be done in the way of cooperation for the management of
+households and the education of children before women who are wives and
+mothers will be set free to take their part in the work of the outside
+world. But it is the setting of mothers free, and not the specific kind
+of education which their children are to receive, which is of interest
+to us here.
+
+Again, one may inquire why, since I have not blinked the fact that the
+feminist movement is making for a revolution of values in sex--why I
+have not included any woman who has distinguished herself by defying
+antiquated conventions which are supposed to rule the relations of the
+sexes. This requires a serious answer. The adjustment of one's social
+and personal relations, so far as may be, to accord with one's own
+convictions--that is not feminism, in my opinion: it is only common
+sense. The attempt to discover how far social laws and traditions must
+be changed to accord with the new position of women in society--that is
+a different thing, and I have dealt with it in the paper on Ellen Key.
+
+Another reason is my belief that it is with woman as producer that we
+are concerned in a study of feminism, rather than with woman as lover.
+The woman who finds her work will find her love--and I do not doubt will
+cherish it bravely. But the woman who sets her love above everything
+else I would gently dismiss from our present consideration as belonging
+to the courtesan type.
+
+It is not very well understood what the courtesan really is, and so I
+pause to describe her briefly. It is not necessary to transgress certain
+moral customs to be a courtesan; on the other hand, the term may
+accurately be applied to women of irreproachable morals. There are some
+women who find their destiny in the bearing and rearing of children,
+others who demand independent work like men, and still others who make a
+career of charming, stimulating, and comforting men. These types, of
+course, merge and combine; and then there is that vast class of women
+who belong to none of these types--who are not good for anything!
+
+The first of these types may be called the mother type, the second the
+worker type, and the third--the kind of women which is not drawn either
+to motherhood or to work, but which is greatly attracted to men and
+which possesses special qualities of sympathy, stimulus, and charm, and
+is content with the more or less disinterested exercise of these
+qualities--this may without prejudice be called the courtesan type. It
+will be seen that the courtesan qualities may find play as well within
+legal marriage as without, and that the transgression of certain moral
+customs is only incidental to the type. Where circumstances encourage
+it, and where the moral tradition is weakened by experience or
+temperament, the moral customs will be transgressed: but it is the human
+qualities of companionship, and not the economic basis of that
+companionship, which is the essential thing.
+
+When a girl with such qualities marries, and she usually marries, much
+depends upon the character of her husband. If her husband appreciates
+her, if he does not expect her to give up her career of charming
+straightway, and restrict herself to cooking, sewing, and the incubating
+of babies; and, furthermore, if he does not baffle those qualities in
+his wife by sheer failure in his own career, then there is a happy and
+virtuous marriage. Otherwise, there is separation or divorce, and the
+woman sometimes becomes the companion of another man without the
+sanction of law. But she has been, it will be perceived, a courtesan all
+along. And while I do not wish to seem to deprecate her comfortable
+qualities, she does not come in the scope of this inquiry.
+
+But there is another figure which I wish I had been able to include.
+Not wishing to involve my publisher in a libel suit, I refrain. She is
+the young woman of the leisure class, whose actions, as represented to
+us in the yellow journals, shock or divert us, according to our
+temperaments. I confess to having the greatest sympathy for her, and in
+her endeavor to create a livelier, a more hilarious and human morale,
+she is doing, I feel, a real service to the cause of women. Our American
+pseudo-aristocracy is capable to teach us, despite its fantastic
+excesses, how to play. And emancipation from middle-class standards of
+taste, morality, and intellect is, so far as it goes, a good thing. "Too
+many cocktails," a lady averred to me the other day, "is better than
+smugness; risque conversation far better than none at all." And that
+celebrated "public-be-damned" attitude of the pseudo-aristocracy is a
+great moral improvement over the cowardly, hysterical fear of the
+neighbors which prevails in the middle class.
+
+But, if I sympathize with the "hell raising" tendency--no other phrase
+describes it--of the young woman of the leisure class, I have more pity
+than sympathy for the one who is trying to realize the ideal of the
+"salon." For she must, after sad experience and bitter disillusionment,
+be content with the tawdry activities which, relieved by the orgiastic
+outbreaks alluded to above, constitute social life in America.
+
+The establishment of a salon is, in itself, a healthful ideal. If
+civilization were destroyed, and rebuilt on any plan, the tradition of
+the salon would be a good starting point for the creation of a medium of
+satisfying social intercourse. Social intercourse we must have, or the
+best of us lapse into boorishness. The ego only properly functions in
+contact with other and various egos. So that, in any case, we should
+have to have something in the nature of our contemporary "society."
+All the more do we need "society" at present, since those ancient
+institutions, the church and the café, have almost entirely lost the
+character of real social centers.
+
+Recognizing this need, and supposing the best intentions in the world,
+what can people do at present in the creation of a "society" which shall
+be useful to the community instead of a laughing stock for the
+intelligent?
+
+That is a fair question. Many an ambitious and idealistic young American
+matron has tried to solve it. She has found that the materials were a
+little scarce--the people who could talk brilliantly are very rare. But
+brilliancy is always a miracle, and it can be dispensed with. The real
+trouble lies elsewhere.
+
+The fact is that in our present industrial system the need for social
+life is in inverse ratio to the opportunity for it. The people who need
+social intercourse are those who do hard work. The people who have most
+money and leisure, the most opportunity for social life, are those who
+have too much of it, anyway. Moreover--and this is an important
+point--no one profits less by leisure and money than those who have a
+great deal of it. Consequently, the basis of "society" today is a class
+of people naturally and inevitably inferior. It is this class which
+dominates "society," which gives the tone, and which sets the standard.
+So long, then, as "society" is dominated by inferiors, intelligent men
+and women will not be inclined to waste what time they have for social
+intercourse in such stupid activities as those that "society" can
+furnish. They will flock by themselves, and if they become undemocratic
+and unsocial as a result, that will appear to them the lesser evil. So
+that, however catholic our standards, the saloniere, as a bounden
+failure, has no place in this transcript of feminism.
+
+One thing will be observed with regard to these following
+papers--though they are imbued with an intense interest in women, they
+are devoid of the spirit of Romance. I mean that attitude toward woman
+which accepts her sex as a miraculous justification for her existence,
+the belief that being a woman is a virtue in itself, apart from the
+possession of other qualities: in short, woman-worship. The reverence
+for woman as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of her capacities
+as friend or leader or servant--that is Romance. It is an attitude
+which, discovered in the Middle Ages, has added a new glamour to
+existence. To woman as a superior being, a divinity, one may look for
+inspiration--and receive it. For those who cannot be fired by an
+abstract idea, she gives to imagination "some pure light in human form
+to fix it." She is the sustenance of hungry souls. Believe in her and
+you shall be saved--so runs the gospel of Petrarch, of Dante, of
+Browning, of George Meredith.
+
+So runs not mine. I have hearkened to the voice of modern science, which
+tells me that woman is an inferior being, with a weak body, a stunted
+mind, poor in creative power, poor in imagination, poor in critical
+capacity--a being who does not know how to work, nor how to talk, nor
+how to play! I hope no one will imagine that I am making these charges
+up maliciously out of my own head: such a notion would indicate that a
+century of pamphleteering on the woman question had made no impression
+on a mind saturated in the ideology of popular fiction.
+
+But--I have hearkened even more eagerly to the voice of sociology,
+which tells me of woman's wonderful possibilities. It is with these
+possibilities that this book is, in the main, concerned.
+
+But first the explanation of why I, a man, write these articles on
+feminism. It involves the betrayal of a secret: the secret, that is, of
+the apparent indifference or even hostility of men toward the woman's
+movement. The fact is, as has been bitterly recited by the rebellious
+leaders of their sex, that women have always been what man wanted them
+to be--have changed to suit his changing ideals. The fact is,
+furthermore, that the woman's movement of today is but another example
+of that readiness of women to adapt themselves to a masculine demand.
+
+Men are tired of subservient women; or, to speak more exactly, of the
+seemingly subservient woman who effects her will by stealth--the pretty
+slave with all the slave's subtlety and cleverness. So long as it was
+possible for men to imagine themselves masters, they were satisfied. But
+when they found out that they were dupes, they wanted a change. If only
+for self-protection, they desired to find in woman a comrade and an
+equal. In reality they desired it because it promised to be more fun.
+
+So that we have as the motive behind the rebellion of women an obscure
+rebellion of men. Why, then, have men appeared hostile to the woman's
+rebellion? Because what men desire are real individuals who have
+achieved their own freedom. It will not do to pluck freedom like a
+flower and give it to the lady with a polite bow. She must fight for it.
+
+We are, to tell the truth, a little afraid that unless the struggle is
+one which will call upon all her powers, which will try her to the
+utmost, she will fall short of becoming that self-sufficient, able,
+broadly imaginative and healthy-minded creature upon whom we have set
+our masculine desire.
+
+It is, then, as a phase of the great human renaissance inaugurated by
+men that the woman's movement deserves to be considered.
+
+And what more fitting than that a man should sit in judgment upon the
+contemporary aspects of that movement, weighing out approval or
+disapproval! Such criticism is not a masculine impertinence but
+a masculine right, a right properly pertaining to those who are
+responsible for the movement, and whose demands it must ultimately fulfill.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
+
+
+Of the women who represent and carry on this many-sided movement today,
+the first to be considered from this masculine viewpoint should, I
+think, be Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For she is, to a superficial view,
+the most intransigent feminist of them all, the one most exclusively
+concerned with the improvement of the lot of woman, the least likely to
+compromise at the instance of man, child, church, state, or devil.
+
+Mrs. Gilman is the author of "Women and Economics" and several other
+books of theory, "What Diantha Did" and several other books of fiction;
+she is the editor and publisher of a remarkable journal, The Forerunner,
+the whole varied contents of which is written by herself; she has a
+couple of plays to her credit, and she has published a book of poems.
+If in spite of all this publicity it is still possible to misunderstand the
+attitude of Mrs. Gilman, I can only suppose it to be because her poetry
+is less well known than her prose. For in this book of verse, "In This
+Our World," Mrs. Gilman has so completely justified herself that no man
+need ever be afraid of her--nor any woman who, having a lingering
+tenderness for the other sex, would object to living in a beehive world,
+full of raging efficient females, with the males relegated to the
+position of drones.
+
+Of course, I do but jest when I speak of this fear; but there is, to
+the ordinary male, something curiously objectionable at the first glance
+in Mrs. Gilman's arguments, whether they are for coöperative kitchens or
+for the labor of women outside the home. And the reason for that
+objection lies precisely in the fact that her plans seem to be made in a
+complete forgetfulness of him and his interests. It all has the air of a
+feminine plot. The coöperative kitchens, and the labor by which women's
+economic independence is to be achieved, seem the means to an end.
+
+And so they are. But the end, as revealed in Mrs. Gilman's poems, is
+that one which all intelligent men must desire. I do not know whether or
+not the more elaborate coöperative schemes of Mrs. Gilman are practical;
+and I fancy that she rather exaggerates the possibilities of independent
+work for women who have or intend to have children. But the spirit
+behind these plans is one which cannot but be in the greatest degree
+stimulating and beneficent in its effect upon her sex.
+
+For Mrs. Gilman is, first of all, a poet, an idealist. She is a lover
+of life. She rejoices in beauty and daring and achievement, in all the
+fine and splendid things of the world. She does not merely disapprove of
+the contemporary "home" as wasteful and inefficient--she hates it
+because it vulgarizes life. In this "home," this private food-preparing
+and baby-rearing establishment, she sees a machine which breaks down all
+that is good and noble in women, which degrades and pettifies them. The
+contrast between the instinctive ideals of young women and the sordid
+realities into which housekeeping plunges them is to her intolerable.
+And in the best satirical verses of modern times she ridicules these
+unnecessary shames. In one spirited piece she points out that the
+soap-vat, the pickle-tub, even the loom and wheel, have lost their
+sanctity, have been banished to shops and factories:
+
+    But bow ye down to the Holy Stove,
+      The Altar of the Home!
+
+The real feeling of Mrs. Gilman is revealed in these lines, which voice,
+indeed, the angry mood of many an outraged housewife who finds herself
+the serf of a contraption of cast-iron:
+
+    ... We toil to keep the altar crowned
+      With dishes new and nice,
+    And Art and Love, and Time and Truth,
+    We offer up, with Health and Youth
+      In daily sacrifice.
+
+Mrs. Gilman is not under the illusion that the conditions of work
+outside the home are perfect; she is, indeed, a socialist, and as such
+is engaged in the great task of revolutionizing the basis of modern
+industry. But she has looked into women's souls, and turned away in
+disgust at the likeness of a dirty kitchen which those souls present.
+
+Into these lives corrupted by the influences of the "home" nothing can
+come unspoiled--nothing can enter in its original stature and beauty.
+She says:
+
+    Birth comes. Birth--
+    The breathing re-creation of the earth!
+    All earth, all sky, all God, life's sweet deep whole,
+    Newborn again to each new soul!
+    "Oh, are you? What a shame! Too bad, my dear!
+    How well you stand it, too! It's very queer
+    The dreadful trials women have to carry;
+    But you can't always help it when you marry.
+    Oh, what a sweet layette! What lovely socks!
+    What an exquisite puff and powder box!
+    Who is your doctor? Yes, his skill's immense--
+    But it's a dreadful danger and expense!"
+
+And so with love, and death, and work--all are smutted and debased. And
+her revolt is a revolt against that which smuts and debases
+them--against those artificial channels which break up the strong, pure
+stream of woman's energy into a thousand little stagnant canals, covered
+with spiritual pond-scum.
+
+It is a part of her idealism to conceive life in terms of war. So it is
+that she scorns compromise, for in war compromise is treason. And so it
+is that she has heart for the long, slow marshaling of forces, and the
+dingy details of the commissariat--for these things are necessary if the
+cry of victory is ever to ring out over the battlefield. Some of her
+phrases have so militant an air that they seem to have been born among
+the captains and the shouting. They make us ashamed of our vicious
+civilian comfort.
+
+Mrs. Gilman's attitude toward the bearing and rearing of children is
+easy to misapprehend. She does seem to relegate these things to the
+background of women's lives. She does deny to these things a tremendous
+importance. Why, she asks, is it so important that women should bear and
+rear children to live lives as empty and poor as their own? Surely, she
+says, it is more important to make life something worth giving to
+children! No, she insists, it is not sufficient to be a mother: an
+oyster can be a mother. It is necessary that a woman should be a person
+as well as a mother. She must know and do.
+
+And as for the ideal of love which is founded on masculine privilege,
+she satirizes it very effectively in some verses entitled "Wedded
+Bliss":
+
+    "O come and be my mate!" said the Eagle to the Hen;
+        "I love to soar, but then
+        I want my mate to rest
+        Forever in the nest!"
+        Said the Hen, "I cannot fly
+        I have no wish to try,
+    But I joy to see my mate careering through the sky!"
+    They wed, and cried, "Ah, this is Love, my own!"
+    And the Hen sat, the Eagle soared, alone.
+
+Woman, in Mrs. Gilman's view, must not be content with Hendom: the sky
+is her province, too. Of all base domesticity, all degrading love, she
+is the enemy. She gives her approval only to that work which has in it
+something high and free, and that love which is the dalliance of the
+eagles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+EMMELINE PANKHURST AND JANE ADDAMS
+
+
+A few months ago it was rather the fashion to reply to some political
+verses by Mr. Kipling which assumed to show that women should not be
+given the ballot, and which had as their refrain:
+
+    The female of the species is more deadly than the male!
+
+But it seems that no one pointed out that this fact, even in the limited
+sense in which it is a fact in the human species, is an argument for
+giving women the vote.
+
+For if women are, as Mr. Kipling says, lacking in a sense of abstract
+justice, in patience, in the spirit of compromise; if they are violent
+and unscrupulous in gaining an end upon which they have set their
+hearts, then by all means they should be rendered comparatively harmless
+by being given the ballot. For it is characteristic of a republic that
+its political machinery, created in order to carry out the will of the
+people, comes to respond with difficulty to that will, while being
+perfectly susceptible to other influences. Republican government, when
+not modified by drastic democratic devices, is an expensive, cumbrous,
+and highly inefficient method of carrying out the popular will; and
+casting a vote is like nothing so much as casting bread upon the waters.
+It shall return--after many days. By voting, by exercising an
+infinitesimal pressure on our complex, slow-moving political mechanism,
+one cannot--it is a sad fact--do much good; but one cannot--and it
+should encourage the pessimistic Mr. Kipling--one cannot, even though a
+woman, do much harm.
+
+This is not, however, a disquisition on woman suffrage. There is only
+one argument for woman suffrage: women want it; there are no arguments
+against it. But one may profitably inquire, What will be the effect of
+the emergence of women into politics upon politics itself? And one may
+hope to find an answer in the temperament and career of certain
+representative leaders of the woman's movement. Let us accordingly turn
+to the accredited leader of the English "votes for women" movement, and
+to the woman in the American movement who is best known to the public.
+
+That Miss Jane Addams has become known chiefly through other activities
+does not matter here. It is temperament and career in which we are
+immediately interested. What is perhaps the most outstanding fact in the
+temperament of Miss Addams is revealed only indirectly in her
+autobiography: it may be called the passion of conciliation.
+
+Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst has by her actions written herself down for a
+fighter. She has but recently been released from Holloway jail, where
+she was serving a term of imprisonment for "conspiracy and violence." In
+a book by H. G. Wells, which contains a very bitter attack on the
+woman's suffrage movement (I refer to "Ann Veronica"), she is described
+as "implacable"; and I believe that it is she to whom Mr. Wells refers
+as being "as incapable of argument as a steam roller broken loose." The
+same things might have been said of Sherman on his dreadful march to the
+sea. These phrases, malicious as they are, contain what I am inclined to
+accept as an accurate description of Mrs. Pankhurst's temperament.
+
+No one would call Mrs. Pankhurst a conciliator. And no one would call
+Miss Addams "implacable." It is not intended to suggest that Miss Addams
+is one of those inveterate compromisers who prefer a bad peace to a good
+war. But she has the gift of imaginative sympathy; and it is impossible
+for her to have toward either party in a conflict the cold hostility
+which each party has for the other. She sees both sides; and even though
+one side is the wrong side, she cannot help seeing why its partisans
+believe in it.
+
+"If the under dog were always right," Miss Addams has said, "one might
+quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but
+obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong,
+but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly
+reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession
+of prejudice to the other almost insuperable difficulties in
+understanding him."
+
+Miss Addams has taken in good faith the social settlement ideal--"to
+span the gulf between the rich and the poor, or between those who have
+had cultural opportunities and those who have not, by the process of
+neighborliness." In her writings, as in her work, there is never sounded
+the note of defiance. Even in defense of the social settlement and its
+methods of conciliation (which have been venomously assailed by the
+newspapers during Chicago's fits of temporary insanity, as in the
+Averbuch case), Miss Addams has not become militant. She has never
+ceased to be serenely reasonable.
+
+But when one comes to ask how powerful Miss Addams' example has been,
+one is forced to admit that it has been limited. There are two other
+settlement houses in Chicago which are managed in the spirit of Hull
+House. But all the others--and there are about forty settlement houses
+in the city--have discarded almost openly the principle of conciliation.
+They are efficient, or religious, or something else, but they are afraid
+of being too sympathetic with the working class. They do not, for
+instance, permit labor unions to meet in their halls. The splendid
+social idealism of the '80s, of which Miss Addams is representative, has
+disappeared, leaving two sides angry and hostile and with none but Miss
+Addams believing in the possibility of finding any common ground for
+action. One event after another from the Pullman strike to the Averbuch
+case has brought this hostility out into the open, with Miss Addams
+occupying neutral ground, and left high and dry upon it.
+
+It is the fact that Miss Addams has not been able to imbue the movement
+in which she is a leader with her own spirit. Her career has been
+successful only so far as individual genius could make it successful. If
+one compares her achievement to that of Mrs. Pankhurst, one sees that
+the latter is startingly social in its nature.
+
+For Mrs. Pankhurst has called upon women to be like herself, to display
+her own Amazonian qualities. She called upon shop girls and college
+students and wives and old women to make physical assaults on cabinet
+ministers, to raid parliament and fight with policemen, to destroy
+property and go to prison, to endure almost every indignity from the
+mobs and from their jailers, to suffer in health and perhaps to die,
+exactly as soldiers suffer and die in a campaign.
+
+And they did. They answered her call by the thousands. They have fought
+and suffered, and some of them have died. If this had been the result of
+individual genius in Mrs. Pankhurst, transforming peaceful girls into
+fighters out of hand, she would be the most extraordinary person of the
+age. But it is impossible to believe that all this militancy was created
+out of the void. It was simply awakened where it lay sleeping in these
+women's hearts.
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst has performed no miracle. She has only shown to us the
+truth which we have blindly refused to see. She has had the insight to
+recognize in women generally the same fighting spirit which she found in
+herself, and the courage to draw upon it. She has enabled us to see what
+women really are like, just as Miss Addams has by her magnificent
+anomalies shown us what women are not like.
+
+Can anyone doubt this? Can anyone, seeing the lone eminence of Miss
+Addams, assert that imaginative sympathy, patience, and the spirit of
+conciliation are the ordinary traits of women? Can anyone, seeing the
+battle frenzy which Mrs. Pankhurst has evoked with a signal in thousands
+of ordinary Englishwomen, deny that women have a fighting soul?
+
+And can anyone doubt the effect which the emergence of women into
+politics will have, eventually, on politics? Eventually, for in spite of
+their boasted independence the decorous example of men will rule them at
+first. But when they have become used to politics--well, we shall find
+that we have harnessed an unruly Niagara!
+
+In women as voters we shall have an element impatient of restraint,
+straining at the rules of procedure, cynical of excuses for inaction;
+not always by any means on the side of progress; making every mistake
+possible to ignorance and self-conceit; but transforming our politics
+from a vicious end to an efficient means--from a cancer into an organ.
+
+This, with but little doubt, is the historic mission of women. They
+will not escape a certain taming by politics. But that they should be
+permanently tamed I find impossible to believe. Rather they will subdue
+it to their purposes, remold it nearer to their hearts' desire, change
+it as men would never dream of changing it, wreck it savagely in the
+face of our masculine protest and merrily rebuild it anew in the face of
+our despair. With their aid we may at last achieve what we seem to be
+unable to achieve unaided--a democracy.
+
+Meanwhile let us understand this suffrage movement. Let us understand
+that we have in militancy rather than in conciliation, in action rather
+than in wisdom, the keynote of woman in politics. And we males, who have
+so long played in our politics at innocent games of war, we shall have
+an opportunity to fight in earnest at the side of the Valkyrs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+OLIVE SCHREINER AND ISADORA DUNCAN
+
+
+I hope that no one will see in the conjuncture of these names a mere
+wanton fantasy, or a mere sensational contrast. To me there is something
+extraordinarily appropriate in that conjuncture, inasmuch as the work of
+Olive Schreiner and the work of Isadora Duncan supplement each other.
+
+It is the drawback of the woman's movement that in any one of its
+aspects (heightened and colored as such an aspect often is by the
+violence of propaganda) it may appear too fiercely narrow. That women
+should make so much fuss about getting the vote, or that they should so
+excite themselves over the prospect of working for wages, will appear
+incomprehensible to many people who have a proper regard for art, for
+literature, and for the graces of social intercourse. It is only when
+the woman's movement is seen broadly, in a variety of its aspects, that
+there comes the realization that here is a cause in which every fine
+aspiration has a place, a cause from which sincere lovers of truth and
+beauty have nothing really to fear.
+
+Mrs. Olive Schreiner stands, by virtue of her latest book, "Women and
+Labor," as an exponent of the doctrine that would send women into every
+field of economic activity; or, rather, the doctrine that finds in the
+forces which are driving them there a savior of her sex from the
+degradation of parasitism. In behalf of this doctrine she has expended
+all that eloquence and passion which have made her one of the figures in
+modern literature and a spokesman for all women who have not learned to
+speak that hieratic language which is heard, as the inexpressive speech
+of daily life is not heard, across space and time.
+
+Miss Isadora Duncan stands as representative of the renaissance in
+dancing. She has brought back to us the antique beauty of an art of
+which we have had only relics and memento in classic sculpture and
+decoration. She has made us despise the frigid artifice of the ballet,
+and taught us that in the natural movements of the body are contained
+the highest possibilities of choregraphic beauty. It has been to many of
+us one of the finest experiences of our lives to see, for the first
+time, the marble maiden of the Grecian urn come to life in her, and all
+the leaf-fringed legends of Arcady drift before our enamored eyes. She
+has touched our lives with the magic of immemorial loveliness.
+
+But to class Olive Schreiner as a sociologist and Isadora Duncan as a
+dancer, to divorce them by any such categories, is to do them both an
+injustice. For they are sister workers in the woman's movement. They
+have each shown the way to a new freedom of the body and the soul.
+
+The woman's movement is a product of the evolutionary science of the
+nineteenth century. Women's rebellions there have been before, utopian
+visions there have been, which have contributed no little to the modern
+movement by the force of their tradition and ever-living spirit. No Joan
+of Arc has led men to victory, no Lady Godiva has sacrificed her
+modesty--nay, even, no courtesan has taught a feeble king how to rule
+his country--without feeding the flame of feminine aspiration. But it is
+modern science which, by giving us a new view of the body, its
+functions, its needs, its claim upon the world, has laid the basis for a
+successful feminist movement. When the true history of this movement is
+written it will contain more about Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman,
+perhaps, than about Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. In any
+case, it is to the body that one looks for the Magna Charta of feminism.
+
+The eye--that is to say--is guarantor for the safety of art in a future
+régime under the dominance of women; and the ear for poetry. These have
+their functions and their needs, and the woman of the future will not
+deny them.
+
+It is the hand that Olive Schreiner would emancipate from idleness. She
+knows the significance of the hand in human history. It was by virtue of
+the hand that we, and not some other creature, gained lordship over the
+earth. It was the hand (marvelous instrument, coaxing out of the
+directing will an ever-increasing subtlety) that made possible the human
+brain, and all the vistas of reason and imagination by which our little
+lives gain their peculiar grandeur.
+
+And this hand, if it be a woman's in the present day, is doomed to the
+smallest activities. "Our spinning wheels are all broken ...Our hoes and
+grindstones passed from us long ago.... Year by year, day by day, there
+is a silently working but determined tendency for the sphere of women's
+domestic labors to contract itself." Even the training of her child is
+taken away from the mother by the "mighty and inexorable demands of
+modern civilization." That condition is to her intolerable; and it is on
+behalf of women's empty hands that she makes her demand: "that, in that
+strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman,
+where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and
+relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of
+honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of
+the Children of Woman."
+
+And what of Miss Duncan--what is her part in the woman's movement? In
+her book on "The Dance" she tells a story: "A woman once asked me why I
+dance with bare feet, and I replied, 'Madam, I believe in the religion
+of the beauty of the human foot'; and the lady replied, 'But I do not,'
+and I said: 'Yet you must, Madam, for the expression and intelligence of
+the human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of man.'
+'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in the evolution of man.' At
+this said I, 'My task is at an end. I refer you to my most revered
+teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel--' 'But,' said the
+lady, 'I do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel--' At this point I could
+think of nothing more to say. So you see that, to convince people, I am
+of little value and ought not to speak."
+
+But rather to dance! Yet it is good to find so explicit a statement of
+the idea which she nobly expresses in her dancing. For, as the hand is
+the symbol of that constructive exertion of the body which we call work,
+so is the foot the symbol of that diffusive exertion of the body which
+we call play. Isadora Duncan would emancipate the one as Olive Schreiner
+would emancipate the other--to new activities and new delights.
+
+And if such work is not a thing for itself only, but a gateway to a new
+world, so is such play not a thing for itself only. "It is not only a
+question of true art," writes Miss Duncan, "it is a question of race, of
+the development of the female sex to beauty and health, of the return to
+the original strength and the natural movements of woman's body. It is a
+question of the development of perfect mothers and the birth of healthy
+and beautiful children." Here we have an inspiriting expression of the
+idea which through the poems of Walt Whitman and the writings of various
+moderns, has renovated the modern soul and made us see, without any
+obscene blurring by Puritan spectacles, the goodness of the whole body.
+This is as much a part of the woman's movement as the demand for a vote
+(or, rather, it is more central and essential a part); and only by
+realizing this is it possible to understand that movement.
+
+The body is no longer to be separated in the thought of women from the
+soul: "The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have
+grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul
+will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not belong to
+a nation, but to all humanity. She will dance, not in the form of nymph,
+nor fairy, nor coquette, but in the form of woman in its greatest and
+purest expression. She will realize the mission of woman's body and the
+holiness of all its parts. She will dance the changing life of nature,
+showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of
+her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the
+message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall
+dance the freedom of woman.
+
+"She will help womankind to a new knowledge of the possible strength and
+beauty of their bodies, and the relation of their bodies to the earth
+nature and to the children of the future. She will dance, the body
+emerging again from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, emerging not
+in the nudity of primitive man, but in a new nakedness, no longer at war
+with spirituality and intelligence, but joining itself forever with this
+intelligence in a glorious harmony.
+
+"Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future; the free spirit, who will
+inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet
+been; more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the Greek, the early
+Italian, than all women of past centuries--the highest intelligence in
+the freest body!"
+
+If the woman's movement means anything, it means that women are
+demanding everything. They will not exchange one place for another, nor
+give up one right to pay for another, but they will achieve all rights
+to which their bodies and brains give them an implicit title. They will
+have a larger political life, a larger motherhood, a larger social
+service, a larger love, and they will reconstruct or destroy
+institutions to that end as it becomes necessary. They will not be
+content with any concession or any triumph until they have conquered all
+experience.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+BEATRICE WEBB AND EMMA GOLDMAN
+
+
+The careers of these two women serve admirably to exhibit the woman's
+movement in still another aspect, and to throw light upon the essential
+nature of woman's character. These careers stand in plain contrast.
+Beatrice Webb has compiled statistics, and Emma Goldman has preached the
+gospel of freedom. It remains to be shown which is the better and the
+more characteristically feminine gift to the world.
+
+Beatrice Potter was the daughter of a Canadian railway president. Born
+in 1858, she grew up in a time when revolutionary movements were in the
+making. She was a pupil of Herbert Spencer, and it was perhaps from him
+that she learned so to respect her natural interest in facts that the
+brilliancy of no generalization could lure her into forgetting them. At
+all events, she was captured permanently by the magic of facts. She
+studied working-class life in Lancashire and East London at first hand,
+and in 1885 joined Charles Booth in his investigations of English social
+conditions. These investigations (which in my amateur ignorance I always
+confused with those of General Booth of the Salvation Army!) were
+published in four large volumes entitled "Life and Labor of the People."
+Miss Potter's special contributions were articles on the docks, the
+tailoring trade, and the Jewish community. Later she published a book on
+"The Coöperative Movement in Great Britain." Then, in 1892, she married
+Sidney Webb, a man extraordinarily of her own sort, and became
+confirmed, if such a thing were necessary, in her statistical habit of
+mind.
+
+Meanwhile, in 1883, the Fabian Society had been founded. But first a
+word about statistics. "Statistics" does not mean a long list of
+figures. It means the spreading of knowledge of facts. Statistics may be
+called the dogma that knowledge is dynamic--that it is somehow operative
+in bringing about that great change which all intelligent people desire
+(and which the Fabians conceived as Socialism). The Fabian Society was
+founded on the dogma of statistics as on a rock. The Fabians did not
+start a newspaper, nor create a new political party, nor organize public
+meetings; but they wrote to the newspapers already in existence, ran for
+office on party tickets already in the field, and made speeches to other
+organizations. That is to say, they went about like the cuckoo, laying
+their statistical eggs in other people's nests and expecting to see them
+hatch into enlightened public opinion and progressive legislation.
+
+Some of them hatched and some of them didn't. The point is that we have
+in this section of Beatrice Webb's career something typical of herself.
+She has gone on, serving on government commissions, writing (with her
+husband) the history of Trades Unionism, patiently collecting statistics
+and getting them printed in black ink on white paper, making detailed
+plans for the abolition of poverty, and always concerning herself with
+the homely fact.
+
+At the time that Beatrice Potter joined Mr. Booth in his social
+investigations there was a 16-year-old Jewish girl living in the
+German-Russian province of Kurland. A year later, in 1886, this girl,
+Emma Goldman by name, came to America, to escape the inevitable
+persecutions attending on any lover of liberty in Russia. She had been
+one of those who had gone "to the people"; and it was as a working girl
+that she came to America.
+
+She had, that is to say, the heightened sensibilities, the keen
+sympathies, of the middle class idealist, and the direct contact with
+the harsh realities of our social and industrial conditions which is the
+lot of the worker. Her first experiences in America disabused her of the
+traditional belief that America was a refuge where the oppressed of all
+lands were welcome. The treatment of immigrants aboard ship, the
+humiliating brutalities of the officials at Castle Garden, and the
+insolent tyranny of the New York police convinced her that she had
+simply come from one oppressed land to another.
+
+She went to work in a clothing factory, her wages being $2.50 a week.
+She had ample opportunities to see the degradations of our economic
+system, especially as it affects women. So it was not strange that she
+should be drawn into the American labor movement, which was then, with
+the Knights of Labor, the eight-hour agitation, and the propaganda of
+the Socialists and the Anarchists, at its height. She became acquainted
+with various radicals, read pamphlets and books, and heard speeches. She
+was especially influenced by the eloquent writings of Johann Most in his
+journal Freiheit.
+
+So little is known, and so much absurd nonsense is believed, about the
+Anarchists, that it is necessary to state dogmatically a few facts. If
+these facts seem odd, the reader is respectfully urged to verify them.
+One fact is that secret organizations of Anarchists plotting a violent
+overthrow of the government do not exist, and never have existed, save
+in the writings of Johann Most and in the imagination of the police: the
+whole spirit of Anarchism is opposed to such organizations. Another fact
+is that Anarchists do not believe in violence of any kind, or in any
+exercise of force; when they commit violence it is not as Anarchists,
+but as outraged human beings. They believe that violent reprisals are
+bound to be provoked among workingmen by the tyrannies to which they are
+subjected; but they abjure alike the bomb and the policeman's club.
+
+There was a brief period in which Anarchists, under the influence of
+Johann Most, believed in (even if they did not practice) the use of
+dynamite. But this period was ended, in America, by the hanging of
+several innocent men in Chicago in 1887; which at least served the
+useful purpose of showing radicals that it was a bad plan even to talk
+of dynamite. And this hanging, which was the end of what may be called
+the Anarchist "boom" in this country, was the beginning of Emma
+Goldman's career as a publicist.
+
+Since 1887 the Anarchists have lost influence among workingmen until
+they are today negligible--unless one credits them with Syndicalism--as
+a factor in the labor movement. The Anarchists have, in fact, left the
+industrial field more and more and have entered into other kinds of
+propaganda. They have especially "gone in for kissing games."
+
+And Emma Goldman reflects, in her career, the change in Anarchism. She
+has become simply an advocate of freedom--freedom of every sort. She
+does not advocate violence any more than Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated
+violence. It is, in fact, as an essayist and speaker of the kind, if not
+the quality, of Emerson, Thoreau, or George Francis Train, that she is
+to be considered.
+
+Aside from these activities (and the evading of our overzealous police
+in times of stress) she has worked as a trained nurse and midwife; she
+conducted a kind of radical salon in New York, frequented by such people
+as John Swinton and Benjamin Tucker; she traveled abroad to study social
+conditions; she has become conversant with such modern writings as those
+of Hauptmann, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Zola, and Thomas Hardy. It is stated
+that the "Rev. Mr. Parkhurst, during the Lexow investigation, did his
+utmost to induce her to join the Vigilance Committee in order to fight
+Tammany Hall." She was the manager of Paul Orlenoff and Mme. Nazimova.
+She was a friend of Ernest Crosby. Her library, it is said, would be
+taken for that of a university extension lecturer on literature.
+
+It will thus be seen that Emma Goldman is of a type familiar enough in
+America, and conceded a popular respect. She has a legitimate social
+function--that of holding before our eyes the ideal of freedom. She is
+licensed to taunt us with our moral cowardice, to plant in our souls the
+nettles of remorse at having acquiesced so tamely in the brutal artifice
+of present day society.
+
+I submit the following passage from her writings ("Anarchism and Other
+Essays") as at once showing her difference from other radicals and
+exhibiting the nature of her appeal to her public:
+
+"The misfortune of woman is not that she is unable to do the work of a
+man, but that she is wasting her life force to outdo him, with a
+tradition of centuries which has left her physically incapable of
+keeping pace with him. Oh, I know some have succeeded, but at what cost,
+at what terrific cost! The import is not the kind of work woman does,
+but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage
+or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that
+will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her
+independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting
+herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by
+refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children
+unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State,
+society, the husband, the family, etc.; by making her life simpler, but
+deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance
+of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of
+public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot,
+will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the
+world; a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine
+fire, of life giving; a creator of free men and women."
+
+There is little in this that Ibsen would not have said amen to. But--and
+this is the conclusion to which my chapter draws--Ibsen has said it
+already, and said it more powerfully. Emma Goldman--who (if among women
+anyone) should have for us a message of her own, striking to the
+heart--repeats, in a less effective cadence, what she has learned from
+him.
+
+The work of Beatrice Webb is the prose of revolution. The work of Ibsen
+is its poetry. Beatrice Webb has performed her work--one comes to
+feel--as well as Ibsen has his. And one wonders if, after all, the prose
+is not that which women are best endowed to succeed in.
+
+A book review (written by a woman) which I have at hand contains some
+generalizations which bear on the subject. "This is a woman's book [says
+the reviewer], and a book which could only have been written by a woman,
+though it is singularly devoid of most of the qualities which are
+usually recognized as feminine. For romance and sentiment do not
+properly lie in the woman's domain. She deals, when she is herself, with
+the material facts of the life she knows. Her talent is to exhibit them
+in the remorseless light of reality and shorn of all the glamour of
+idealism. Great and poetical imagination rarely informs her art, but
+within the strictness of its limits it lives by an intense and
+scrupulous sincerity of observation and an uncompromising recognition of
+the logic of existence."
+
+If that is true, shall we not then expect a future more largely
+influenced by women to have more of the hard, matter-of-fact quality,
+the splendid realism characteristic of woman "when she is herself"?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MARGARET DREIER ROBINS
+
+
+The work of Margaret Dreier Robins has been done in the National Women's
+Trade Union League. It might be supposed that the aim of such an
+organization is sufficiently explicit in its title: to get higher wages
+and shorter hours. But I fancy that it would be a truer thing to say
+that its aim is to bring into being that ideal of American womanhood
+which Walt Whitman described:
+
+    They are not one jot less than I am,
+    They are tann'd in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
+    Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
+    They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,
+      retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
+    They are ultimate in their own right--they are
+      calm, clear, well-possessed of themselves.
+
+When Whitman made this magnificent prophecy for American womanhood the
+Civil War had not been fought and its economic consequences were
+unguessed at. The factory system, which had come into England in the
+last century, bringing with it the most unspeakable exploitation of
+women and children, had hardly gained a foothold in this country. In
+1840, of the seven employments open to women (teaching, needlework,
+keeping boarders, working in cotton mills, in bookbinderies, typesetting
+and household service) only one was representative of the new industrial
+condition which today affects so profoundly the feminine physique. And
+to the daughters of a nation that was still imbued with the pioneer
+spirit, work in cotton mills appealed so little that they undertook it
+only for unusually high pay. Anyone of that period seeing the
+red-cheeked, robust, intelligent, happy girl operatives of Lowell might
+have dismissed his fears of the factory as a sinister influence in the
+development of American womanhood and gone on to dream, with Walt
+Whitman, of a race of "fierce, athletic girls."
+
+But two things happened. With the growing flood of immigration, the
+factories were abandoned more and more to the "foreigners," the
+native-born citizens losing their pride in the excellence of working
+conditions and the character of the operatives. And all the while the
+factory was becoming more and more an integral part of our civilization,
+demanding larger and larger multitudes of girls and women to attend its
+machinery. So that, with the enormous development of industry since the
+Civil War, the factory has become the chief field of feminine endeavor
+in America. In spite of the great opening up of all sorts of work to
+women, in spite of the store, the office, the studio, the professions,
+still the factory remains most important in any consideration of the
+health and strength of women.
+
+If the greatest part of our womankind spends its life in factories, and
+if it further appears that this is no temporary situation, but
+(practically speaking) a permanent one, then it becomes necessary to
+inquire how far the factory is hindering the creation of that ideal
+womanhood which Walt Whitman predicted for us.
+
+As opposed to the old-fashioned method of manufacture in the home (or
+the sweatshop, which is the modern equivalent), the factory often shows
+a gain in light and air, a decrease of effort, an added leisure; while,
+on the other hand, there is a considerable loss of individual freedom
+and an increase in monotony. But child labor, a too long working day,
+bad working conditions, lack of protection from fire, personal
+exploitation by foremen, inhumanly low wages, and all sorts of petty
+injustice, though not essential to the system, are prominent features of
+factory work as it generally exists.
+
+People who consider every factory an Inferno, however, and have only
+pity for its workers, are far from understanding the situation. Here is
+a field of work which is capable of competing successfully with domestic
+service, and even of attracting girls from homes where there exists no
+absolute necessity for women's wages. Yet at its contemporary best, with
+a ten-hour law in operation, efficient factory inspection, decent
+working conditions and a just and humane management, the factory remains
+an institution extremely perilous to the Whitmanic ideal of womanhood.
+
+But there are women who, undaunted by the new conditions brought about
+by a changing economic system, seize upon those very conditions to use
+them as the means to their end: such a woman is Mrs. Robins. Has a new
+world, bounded by factory walls and noisy with the roar of machinery,
+grown up about us, to keep women from their heritage? She will help them
+to use those very walls and that very machinery to achieve their
+destiny, a destiny of which a physical well-being is, as Walt Whitman
+knew it to be, the most certain symbol.
+
+The factory already gives women a certain independence. It may yet give
+them pleasure, the joy of creation. Indeed, it must, when the workers
+require it; and those who are most likely to require it are the women
+workers.
+
+It is well known that with the ultra-development of the machine, the
+subdivision of labor, the régime of piecework, it has become practically
+impossible for the worker to take any artistic pleasure in his product.
+It is not so well known how necessary such pleasure in the product is to
+the physical well-being of women--how utterly disastrous to their
+nervous organization is the monotony and irresponsibility of piecework.
+This method--which men workers have grumbled at, but to which they seem
+to have adjusted themselves--bears its fruits among women in
+neurasthenia, headaches, and the derangement of the organs which are the
+basis of their different nervous constitution. It is sufficiently clear
+to those who have seen the personal reactions of working girls to the
+piecework system, that when women attain, as men in various industries
+have attained, the practical management of the factory, piecework will
+get a setback.
+
+But not merely good conditions, not merely a living wage, not merely a
+ten or an eight hour day--all that self-government in the shop can bring
+is the object of the Women's Trade Union League.
+
+"The chief social gain of the union shop," says Mrs. Robins, "is not
+its generally better wages and shorter hours, but rather the incentive
+it offers for initiative and social leadership, the call it makes,
+through the common industrial relationship and the common hope, upon the
+moral and reasoning faculties, and the sense of fellowship, independence
+and group strength it develops. In every workshop of say thirty girls
+there is undreamed of initiative and capacity for social leadership and
+control--unknown wealth of intellectual and moral resources."
+
+It is, in fact, this form of activity which to many thousands of factory
+girls makes the difference between living and existing, between a
+painful, necessary drudgery and a happy exertion of all their faculties.
+It can give them a more useful education than any school, a more vital
+faith than any church, a more invigorating sense of power than any other
+career open to them.
+
+To do all these things it must be indigenous to working-class soil. No
+benefaction originating in the philanthropic motives of middle-class
+people, no enterprise of patronage, will ever have any such meaning. A
+movement, to have such meaning, must be of the working class, and by the
+working class, as well as for the working class. It must be imbued with
+working-class feeling, and it must subserve working-class ideals.
+
+It is the distinction of Mrs. Robins that she has seen this. She has
+gone to the workers to learn rather than to teach--she has sought to
+unfold the ideals and capacities latent in working girls rather than
+impress upon them the alien ideals and capacities of another class.
+
+"Just"--it is Mrs. Robins that speaks--"as under a despotic church and
+a feudal state the possible power and beauty of the common people was
+denied expression, so under industrial feudalism the intellectual and
+moral powers of the workers are slowly choked to death, with
+incalculable loss to the individual and the race. It is easy to kill; it
+requires a great spirit as well as a great mind to arouse the dormant
+energies, to vitalize them and to make them creative forces for good."
+
+One is reminded of the words of John Galsworthy, addressed to
+workingwomen: "There is beginning to be a little light in the sky;
+whether the sun is ever to break through depends on your constancy, and
+courage, and wisdom. The future is in your hands more than in the hands
+of men; it rests on your virtues and well-being, rather than on the
+virtues and the welfare of men, for it is you who produce and mold the
+Future."
+
+There are 6,000,000 working women in the United States, and half of
+them are girls under 21. One may go out any day in the city streets, at
+morning or noon or evening, and look at a representative hundred of
+them. The factories have not been able to rob them of beauty and
+strength and the charm of femininity, and in that beauty and strength
+and charm there is a world of promise. And that promise already begins
+to be unfolded when to them comes Mrs. Robins with a gospel germane to
+their natures, saying, "Long enough have you dreamed contemptible
+dreams."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ELLEN KEY
+
+
+In these chapters a sincere attempt has been made not so much to show
+what a few exceptional women have accomplished as to exhibit through a
+few prominent figures the essential nature of women, and to show what
+may be expected from a future in which women will have a larger freedom
+and a larger influence.
+
+It has been pointed out that the peculiar idealism of women is one that
+works itself out through the materials of workaday life, and which seeks
+to break or remake those materials by way of fulfilling that idealism;
+it has been shown that this idealism, as contrasted with the more
+abstract and creative idealism of men, deserves to be called
+practicalism, a practicalism of a noble and beautiful sort which we are
+far from appreciating; and as complementing these forms of activity, the
+play instinct, the instinct of recreation, has been pointed out as the
+parallel to the creative or poetic instinct of men.
+
+Woman as reconstructor of domestic economics, woman as a destructive
+political agent of enormous potency, woman as worker, woman as dancer,
+woman as statistician, woman as organizer of the forces of labor--in
+these it has been the intent to show the real woman of today and of
+tomorrow.
+
+There have been other aspects of her deserving of attention in such a
+series, notably her aspect as mother and as educator. If she has not
+been shown as poet, as artist, as scientist, as talker (for talk is a
+thing quite as important as poetry or science or art), it has not been
+so much because of an actual lack of specific examples of women
+distinguished in these fields as because of the unrepresentative
+character of such examples.
+
+Here, then, is a man's view of modern woman. To complete that view, to
+round off that conception, I now speak of Ellen Key.
+
+Her writings have had a peculiar career in America, one which perhaps
+prevents a clear understanding of their character. On the one hand, they
+have seemed to many to be radically "advanced"; to thousands of
+middle-class women, who have heard vaguely of these new ideas, and who
+have secretly and strongly desired to know more of them, her "Love and
+Marriage" has come as a revolutionary document, the first outspoken word
+of scorn for conventional morality, the first call to them to take their
+part in the breaking of new paths.
+
+On the other hand, it must be remembered that America is the home of
+Mormonism, of the Oneida Community, of the Woodhull and Claflin
+"free-love" movement of the '70s, of "Dianism" and a hundred other
+obscure but pervasive sexual cults--in short, of movements of greater or
+less respectability, capable of giving considerable currency to their
+beliefs. And they have given considerable currency to their beliefs. In
+spite of the dominant tone of Puritanism in American thought, our social
+life has been affected to an appreciable extent by these beliefs.
+
+And these beliefs may be summed up hastily, but, on the whole, justly,
+as materialistic--in the common and unfavorable sense. They have
+converged, from one direction or another, upon the opinion that sex is
+an animal function, no more sacred than any other animal function,
+which, by a ridiculous over-estimation, is made to give rise to
+jealousy, unhappiness, madness, vice, and crime.
+
+It is a fact that the Puritan temperament readily finds this opinion,
+if not the program which accompanies it, acceptable, as one may discover
+in private conversation with respectable Puritans of both sexes. And it
+is more unfortunately true that the present-day rebellion against
+conventional morality in America has found, in Hardy and Shaw and other
+anti-romanticists, a seeming support of this opinion. So that one finds
+in America today (though some people may not know about it) an
+undercurrent of impatient materialism in matters of sex. To become freed
+from the inadequate morality of Puritanism is, for thousands of young
+people, to adopt another morality which is, if more sound in many ways,
+certainly as inadequate as the other.
+
+So that Ellen Key comes into the lives of many in this country as a
+conservative force, holding up a spiritual ideal, the ideal of monogamy,
+and defending it with a breadth of view, a sanity, and a fervor that
+make it something different from the cold institution which these
+readers have come to despise. She makes every allowance for human
+nature, every concession to the necessities of temperament, every
+recognition of the human need for freedom, and yet makes the love of one
+man and one woman seem the highest ideal, a thing worth striving and
+waiting and suffering for.
+
+She cherishes the spiritual magic of sex as the finest achievement of
+the race, and sees it as the central and guiding principle in our social
+and economic evolution. She seeks to construct a new morality which will
+do what the present one only pretends, and with the shallowest and most
+desperately pitiful of pretenses, to do. She would help our struggling
+generation to form a new code of ethics, and one of subtle stringency,
+in this most important and difficult of relations.
+
+Thus her writings, of which "Love and Marriage" will here be taken as
+representative, have a twofold aspect--the radical and the conservative.
+But of the two, the conservative is by far the truer. It is as a
+conservator, with too firm a grip on reality to be lured into the
+desertion of any real values so far achieved by the race, that she may
+be best considered.
+
+And germane to her conservatism, which is the true conservatism of her
+sex, is her intellectual habit, her literary method. She is not a
+logician, it is true. She lacks logic, and with it order and clearness
+and precision, because of the very fact of her firm hold on realities.
+The realities are too complex to be brought into any completely logical
+and orderly relation, too elusive to be stated with utter precision.
+There is a whole universe in "Love and Marriage"; and it resembles the
+universe in its wildness, its tumultuousness, its contradictory quality.
+Her book, like the universe, is in a state of flux--it refuses to remain
+one fixed and dead thing. It is a book which in spite of some attempt at
+arrangement may be begun at any point and read in any order. It is a
+mixture of science, sociology, and mysticism; it has a wider range than
+an orderly book could possibly have; it touches more points, includes
+more facts, and is more convincing, in its queer way, than any other.
+
+"Love and Marriage" is the Talmud of sexual morality. It contains
+history, wisdom, poetry, psychological analysis, shrewd judgments,
+generous sympathies, ... and it all bears upon the creation of that new
+sexual morality for which in a thousand ways--economic, artistic, and
+spiritual--we are so astonishing a mixture of readiness and unreadiness.
+
+Ellen Key is fundamentally a conservator. But she is careful about what
+she conservates. It is the right to love which she would have us
+cherish, rather than the right to own another person--the beauty of
+singleness of devotion rather than the cruel habit of trying to force
+people to carry out rash promises made in moments of exaltation. She
+conserves the greatest things and lets the others go: motherhood, as
+against the exclusive right of married women to bear children; and that
+personal passion which is at once physical and spiritual rather than any
+of the legally standardized relations. Nor does she hesitate to speak
+out for the conservation of that old custom which persists among peasant
+and primitive peoples all over the world and which has been reintroduced
+to the public by a recent sociologist under the term of "trial
+marriage"; it must be held, she says, as the bulwark against the
+corruption of prostitution and made a part of the new morality.
+
+It is perhaps in this very matter that her attitude is capable of
+being most bitterly resented. For we have lost our sense of what is old
+and good, and we give the sanction of ages to parvenu virtues that are
+as degraded as the rococo ornaments which were born in the same year. We
+have (or the Puritans among us have) lost all moral sense in the true
+meaning of the word, in that we are unable to tell good from bad if it
+be not among the things that were socially respectable in the year 1860.
+Ellen Key writes: "The most delicate test of a person's sense of
+morality is his power in interpreting ambiguous signs in the ethical
+sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line,
+sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality.
+In our time, ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the
+condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies.
+The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which this
+implies in comparison with the code of so many men who, without
+responsibility--and without apparent risk--purchase the repose of their
+senses. The free union of love, on the other hand, gives them an
+enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring
+anyone. It answers to their idea of love's chastity, an idea which is
+justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement, with
+all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their
+soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a
+common longing, then they consider that they have a right to full unity
+of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society
+render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful
+struggle which would give them neither peace nor inner purity, and which
+would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the
+end--love--for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed."
+
+It is almost impossible to quote any passage from "Love and Marriage"
+which is not subject to further practical modification, or which does
+not present an incomplete idea of which the complement may be found
+somewhere else. Even this passage is one which states a brief for the
+younger generation rather than the author's whole opinion. Still, with
+all these limitations, her view is one which is so different from that
+commonly held by women that it may seem merely fantastic to hold it up
+as an example of the conservative instinct of women. Nevertheless, it is
+so. It must be remembered that the view which holds that the chastity of
+unmarried women is well purchased at the price of prostitution, is a
+masculine view. It is a piece of the sinister and cruel idealism of the
+male mind, divorced (as the male mind is so capable of being) from
+realities. No woman would ever have created prostitution to preserve the
+chastity of part of her sex; and the more familiar one becomes with the
+specific character of the feminine mind, the more impossible does it
+seem that women will, when they have come to think and act for
+themselves, permanently maintain it. Nor will they--one is forced to
+believe--hesitate long at the implications of that demolition.
+
+No, I think that with the advent of women into a larger life our
+jerry-built virtues will have to go, to make room for mansions and
+gardens fit to be inhabited by the human soul.
+
+It will be like the pulling down of a rotten tenement. First (with a
+great shocked outcry from some persons of my own sex) the façade goes,
+looking nice enough, but showing up for painted tin what pretended to be
+marble; then the dark, cavelike rooms exposed, with their blood-stained
+floors and their walls ineffectually papered over the accumulated filth
+and disease; and so on, lath by lath, down to the cellars, with their
+hints of unspeakable horrors in the dark.
+
+It is to this conclusion that these chapters draw: That women have a
+surer instinct than men for the preservation of the truest human values,
+but that their very acts of conservation will seem to the timid minds
+among us like the shattering of all virtues, the debacle of
+civilization, the Götterdämmerung!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+FREEWOMEN AND DORA MARSDEN
+
+
+This is by way of a postscript. Dora Marsden is a new figure in the
+feminist movement. Just how she evolved is rather hard to say. Her
+family were Radicals, it seems, smug British radicals; and she broke
+away, first of all, into a sort of middle class socialism. She went into
+settlement work. Here, it seems, she discovered what sort of person she
+really was.
+
+She was a lover of freedom. So of course she rebelled against the
+interference of the middle class with the affairs of the poor, and threw
+overboard her settlement work and her socialism together. She was a
+believer in woman suffrage, but the autocratic government of the
+organization irked her. And, besides, she felt constrained to point out
+that feminism meant worlds more than a mere vote. The position of woman,
+not indeed as the slave of man, but as the enslaver of man, but with the
+other end of the chain fastened to her own wrist, and depriving her
+quite effectually of her liberties--this irritated her. Independence to
+her meant achievement, and when she heard the talk about "motherhood"
+by which the women she knew excused their lack of achievement, she
+was annoyed. Finally, the taboo upon the important subject of sex
+exasperated her. So she started a journal to express her discontent with
+all these things, and to change them.
+
+Naturally, she called her journal The Freewoman. "Independent"
+expresses much of Dora Marsden's feeling, but that word has been of late
+dragged in a mire of pettiness and needs dry cleaning. It has come to
+signify a woman who isn't afraid to go out at night alone or who holds a
+position downtown. A word had to be chosen which had in it some
+suggestion of the heroic. Hence The Freewoman.
+
+The Freewoman was a weekly. It lived several months and then suspended
+publication, and now all the women I know are poring over the back
+numbers while waiting for it to start again as a fortnightly. It was a
+remarkable paper. For one thing, it threw open its columns to such a
+discussion of sex that dear Mrs. Humphry Ward wrote a shocked letter to
+The Times about it. Of course, a good many of the ideas put forth in
+this correspondence were erroneous or trivial, but it must have done the
+writers no end of good to express themselves freely. For once sex was on
+a plane with other subjects, a fact making tremendously for sanity. In
+this Miss Marsden not only achieved a creditable journalistic feat, but
+performed a valuable public service.
+
+Her editorials were another distinctive thing. In the first issue was
+an editorial on "Bondwomen," from which it would appear that perhaps
+even such advanced persons as you, my dear lady, are still far from
+free.
+
+"Bondwomen are distinguished from Freewomen by a spiritual distinction.
+Bondwomen are the women who are not separate spiritual entities--who are
+not individuals. They are complements merely. By habit of thought, by
+form of activity, and largely by preference, they round off the
+personality of some other individual, rather than create or cultivate
+their own. Most women, as far back as we have any record, have fitted
+into this conception, and it has borne itself out in instinctive working
+practice.
+
+"And in the midst of all this there comes a cry that woman is an
+individual, and that because she is an individual she must be set free.
+It would be nearer the truth to say that if she is an individual she
+_is_ free, and will act like those who are free. The doubtful aspect in
+the situation is as to whether women are or can be individuals--that is,
+free--and whether there is not danger, under the circumstances, in
+labelling them free, thus giving them the liberty of action which is
+allowed to the free. It is this doubt and fear which is behind the
+opposition which is being offered the vanguard of those who are 'asking
+for' freedom. It is the kind of fear which an engineer would have in
+guaranteeing an arch equal to a strain above its strength. The opponents
+of the Freewomen are not actuated by spleen or by stupidity, but by
+dread. This dread is founded upon ages of experience with a being who,
+however well loved, has been known to be an inferior, and who has
+accepted all the conditions of inferiors. Women, women's intelligence,
+and women's judgments have always been regarded with more or less secret
+contempt, and when woman now speaks of 'equality,' all the natural
+contempt which a higher order feels for a lower order when it presumes
+bursts out into the open. This contempt rests upon quite honest and
+sound instinct, so honest, indeed, that it must provide all the charm of
+an unaccustomed sensation for fine gentlemen like the Curzons and
+Cromers and Asquiths to feel anything quite so instinctive and
+primitive.
+
+"With the women opponents it is another matter. These latter apart,
+however, it is for would-be Freewomen to realize that for them this
+contempt is the healthiest thing in the world, and that those who
+express it honestly feel it; that these opponents have argued quite
+soundly that women have allowed themselves to be used, ever since there
+has been any record of them; and that if women had had higher uses of
+their own they would not have foregone them. They have never known women
+to formulate imperious wants, this in itself implying lack of wants, and
+this in turn implying lack of ideals. Women as a whole have shown
+nothing save 'servant' attributes. All those activities which presuppose
+the master qualities, the standard-making, the law-giving, the
+moral-framing, belong to men. Religions, philosophies, legal codes,
+standards in morals, canons in art, have all issued from men, while
+women have been the 'followers,' 'believers,' the 'law-abiding,' the
+'moral,' the conventionally admiring. They have been the administrators,
+the servants, living by borrowed precept, receiving orders, doing
+hodmen's work. For note, though some men must be servants, all women are
+servants, and all the masters are men. That is the difference and
+distinction. The servile condition is common to all women."
+
+This was only the beginning of such a campaign of radical propaganda as
+feminism never knew before. Miss Marsden went on to attack all the
+things which bind women and keep them unfree. As such she denounced what
+she considered the cant of "motherhood."
+
+"Considering, therefore, that children, from both physiological and
+psychological points of view, belong more to the woman than to the man;
+considering, too, that not only does she need them more, but, as a rule,
+wants them more than the man, the parental situation begins to present
+elements of humor when the woman proceeds to fasten upon the man, in
+return for the children she has borne him, the obligation from that time
+to the end of her days, not only for the children's existence, but for
+her own, also!"
+
+When asked under what conditions, then, women should have children, she
+replied that women who wanted them should save for them as for a trip to
+Europe. This is frankly a gospel for a minority--a fact which does not
+invalidate it in the eyes of its promulgator--but she does believe that
+if women are to become the equals of men they must find some way to have
+children without giving up the rest of life. It has been done!
+
+Then, having been rebuked for her critical attitude toward the woman
+suffrage organization, she showed herself in no mood to take orders from
+even that source. She subjected the attitude of the members of the
+organization to an examination, and found it tainted with
+sentimentalism. "Of all the corruptions to which the woman's movement is
+now open," she wrote, "the most poisonous and permeating is that which
+flows from sentimentalism, and it is in the W. S. P. U. [Women's Social
+and Political Union] that sentimentalism is now rampant.... It is this
+sentimentalism that is abhorrent to us. We fight it as we would fight
+prostitution, or any other social disease."
+
+She called upon women to be individuals, and sought to demolish in
+their minds any lingering desire for Authority. "There is," she wrote,
+"a genuine pathos in our reliance upon the law in regard to the affairs
+of our own souls. Our belief in ourselves and in our impulses is so
+frail that we prefer to see it buttressed up. We are surer of our
+beliefs when we see their lawfulness symbolized in the respectable blue
+cloth of the policeman's uniform, and the sturdy good quality of the
+prison's walls. The law gives them their passport. Well, perhaps in this
+generation, for all save pioneers, the law will continue to give its
+protecting shelter, but with the younger generations we believe we shall
+see a stronger, prouder, and more insistent people, surer of themselves
+and of the pureness of their own desires."
+
+She did not stick at the task of formulating for women a new moral
+attitude to replace the old. "We are seeking," she said, "a morality
+which shall be able to point the way out of the social trap we find we
+are in. We are conscious that we are concerned in the dissolution of one
+social order, which is giving way to another. Men and women are both
+involved, but women differently from men, because women themselves are
+very different from men. The difference between men and women is the
+whole difference between a religion and a moral code. Men are pagan.
+They have never been Christian. Women are wholly Christian, and have
+assimilated the entire genius of Christianity.
+
+"The ideal of conduct which men have followed has been one of
+self-realization, tempered by a broad principle of equity which has been
+translated into practice by means of a code of laws. A man's desire and
+ideal has been to satisfy the wants which a consciousness of his several
+senses gives rise to. His vision of attainment has therefore been a
+sensuous one, and if in his desire for attainment he has transgressed
+the law, his transgression has sat but lightly upon him. A law is an
+objective thing, laid upon a man's will from outside. It does not enter
+the inner recesses of consciousness, as does a religion. It is nothing
+more than a body of prohibitions and commands, which can be obeyed,
+transgressed or evaded with little injury to the soul. With women moral
+matters have been wholly different. Resting for support upon a religion,
+their moral code has received its sanction and force from within. It has
+thus laid hold on consciousness with a far more tenacious grip. Their
+code being subjective, transgression has meant a darkening of the
+spirit, a sullying of the soul. Thus the doctrine of self-renunciation,
+which is the outstanding feature of Christian ethics, has had the most
+favorable circumstances to insure its realization, and with women it has
+won completely--so completely that it now exerts its influence
+unconsciously. Seeking the realization of the will of others, and not
+their own, ever waiting upon the minds of others, women have almost lost
+the instinct for self-realization, the instinct for achievement in their
+own persons."
+
+Whether she is right is a moot question. Certainly in such matters as
+testimony in court, the customs-tariff, and the minor city ordinances,
+women show no particular respect for the law. Ibsen sought in "The
+Doll's House" to show that her morality had no connection with the laws
+of the world of men. Even in matters of human relationship it is
+doubtful if women give any more of an "inner assent" to law than do men.
+Woman's failure to achieve that domination of the world which
+constitutes individuality and freedom--this Dora Marsden would explain
+on the ground of a dulling of the senses. It may be more easily
+explained as a result of a dulling of the imagination. The trouble is
+that they are content with petty conquests.
+
+There you have it! Inevitably one argues with Dora Marsden. That is her
+value. She provokes thought. And she welcomes it. She wants everybody to
+think--not to think her thoughts necessarily, nor the right thoughts
+always, but that which they can and must. She is a propagandist, it is
+true. But she does not create a silence, and call it conversion.
+
+She stimulates her readers to cast out the devils that inhabit their
+souls--fear, prejudice, sensitiveness. She helps them to build up their
+lives on a basis of will--the exercise, not the suppression, of will.
+She indurates them to the world. She liberates them to life. She is the
+Max Stirner of feminism.
+
+Freedom! That is the first word and the last with Dora Marsden. She
+makes women understand for the first time what freedom means. She makes
+them want to be free. She nerves them to the effort of emancipation. She
+sows in a fertile soil the dragon's teeth which shall spring up as a
+band of capable females, knowing what they want and taking it, asking no
+leave from anybody, doing things and enjoying life--Freewomen!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+Obvious punctuation errors have been repaired.
+On p. 36 sucessful changed to successful (has been successful).
+
+
+
+
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Women as World Builders, by Floyd Dell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Women as World Builders
+       Studies in Modern Feminism
+
+Author: Floyd Dell
+
+Release Date: August 30, 2010 [EBook #33584]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN AS WORLD BUILDERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eleni, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>WOMEN AS WORLD BUILDERS</h1>
+
+
+
+<h1>Women</h1>
+<h1>as</h1>
+<h1>World Builders</h1>
+
+<h3>Studies in</h3>
+<h3>Modern Feminism</h3>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+<h2>FLOYD DELL</h2>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 230px;">
+<img src="images/004.jpg" width="230" height="217" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h4>CHICAGO</h4>
+<h3>FORBES AND COMPANY</h3>
+<h4>1913</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h5>COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY<br />
+FORBES AND COMPANY</h5>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span></p>
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="4" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align="left"><small>CHAPTER</small></td><td align="center"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Feminist Movement</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;II&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Charlotte Perkins Gilman</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;III&nbsp;&nbsp;Emmeline Pankhurst and Jane Addams</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;IV&nbsp;&nbsp;Olive Schreiner and Isadora Duncan</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_41">41</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;V&nbsp;&nbsp;Beatrice Webb and Emma Goldman</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;&nbsp;VI&nbsp;&nbsp;Margaret Dreier Robins</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_65">65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;VII&nbsp;Ellen Key</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_76">76</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">VIII&nbsp; Freewomen and Dora Marsden</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="right"></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="Women_as_World_Builders" id="Women_as_World_Builders"></a>Women as World Builders</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="THE_FEMINIST_MOVEMENT" id="THE_FEMINIST_MOVEMENT">THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT</a></h3>
+
+
+<p>The feminist movement can be dealt
+with in two ways: it can be treated as
+a sociological abstraction, and discussed at
+length in heavy monographs; or it can be
+taken as the sum of the action of a lot of
+women, and taken account of in the lives of
+individual women. The latter way would
+be called "journalistic," had not the late
+William James used it in his "Varieties of
+Religious Experience." It is a method
+which preserves the individual flavor, the
+personal tone and color, which, after all, are
+the life of any movement. It is, therefore,
+the method I have chosen for this book. </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span>The ten women whom I have chosen are
+representative: they give the quality of the
+woman's movement of today. Charlotte
+Perkins Gilman&mdash;Jane Addams&mdash;Emmeline
+Pankhurst&mdash;Olive Schreiner&mdash;Isadora
+Duncan&mdash;Beatrice Webb&mdash;Emma Goldman&mdash;Margaret
+Dreier Robins&mdash;Ellen
+Key: surely in these women, [see also the chapter "Freewomen and Dora Marsden."] if anywhere,
+is to be found the soul of modern feminism!</p>
+
+<p>One may inquire why certain other names
+are not included. There is Maria Montessori,
+for instance. Her ideas on the education
+of children are of the utmost importance,
+and their difference from those of
+Froebel is another illustration of the difference
+between the practical minds of women
+and the idealistic minds of men. But Madame
+Montessori's relation to the feminist
+movement is, after all, ancillary. A tremendous
+lot remains to be done in the way of
+cooperation for the management of households
+and the education of children before
+women who are wives and mothers will be
+set free to take their part in the work of the
+outside world. But it is the setting of mothers
+free, and not the specific kind of education
+which their children are to receive, which
+is of interest to us here.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>Again, one may inquire why, since I have
+not blinked the fact that the feminist movement
+is making for a revolution of values in
+sex&mdash;why I have not included any woman
+who has distinguished herself by defying
+antiquated conventions which are supposed
+to rule the relations of the sexes. This
+requires a serious answer. The adjustment
+of one's social and personal relations, so far
+as may be, to accord with one's own convictions&mdash;that
+is not feminism, in my opinion:
+it is only common sense. The attempt to
+discover how far social laws and traditions
+must be changed to accord with the new
+position of women in society&mdash;that is a
+different thing, and I have dealt with it in
+the paper on Ellen Key.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>Another reason is my belief that it is with
+woman as producer that we are concerned
+in a study of feminism, rather than with
+woman as lover. The woman who finds her
+work will find her love&mdash;and I do not doubt
+will cherish it bravely. But the woman who
+sets her love above everything else I would
+gently dismiss from our present consideration
+as belonging to the courtesan type.</p>
+
+<p>It is not very well understood what the
+courtesan really is, and so I pause to describe
+her briefly. It is not necessary to
+transgress certain moral customs to be a
+courtesan; on the other hand, the term may
+accurately be applied to women of irreproachable
+morals. There are some women
+who find their destiny in the bearing and
+rearing of children, others who demand independent
+work like men, and still others who
+make a career of charming, stimulating, and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>comforting men. These types, of course,
+merge and combine; and then there is that
+vast class of women who belong to none of
+these types&mdash;who are not good for anything!</p>
+
+<p>The first of these types may be called the
+mother type, the second the worker type,
+and the third&mdash;the kind of women which is
+not drawn either to motherhood or to work,
+but which is greatly attracted to men and
+which possesses special qualities of sympathy,
+stimulus, and charm, and is content
+with the more or less disinterested exercise
+of these qualities&mdash;this may without prejudice
+be called the courtesan type. It will be
+seen that the courtesan qualities may find
+play as well within legal marriage as without,
+and that the transgression of certain
+moral customs is only incidental to the type.
+Where circumstances encourage it, and
+where the moral tradition is weakened by
+experience or temperament, the moral customs
+will be transgressed: but it is the
+human qualities of companionship, and not
+the economic basis of that companionship,
+which is the essential thing.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>When a girl with such qualities marries,
+and she usually marries, much depends upon
+the character of her husband. If her husband
+appreciates her, if he does not expect
+her to give up her career of charming
+straightway, and restrict herself to cooking,
+sewing, and the incubating of babies; and,
+furthermore, if he does not baffle those qualities
+in his wife by sheer failure in his own
+career, then there is a happy and virtuous
+marriage. Otherwise, there is separation or
+divorce, and the woman sometimes becomes
+the companion of another man without the
+sanction of law. But she has been, it will
+be perceived, a courtesan all along. And
+while I do not wish to seem to deprecate her
+comfortable qualities, she does not come in
+the scope of this inquiry.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>But there is another figure which I wish
+I had been able to include. Not wishing to
+involve my publisher in a libel suit, I refrain.
+She is the young woman of the leisure class,
+whose actions, as represented to us in the
+yellow journals, shock or divert us, according
+to our temperaments. I confess to
+having the greatest sympathy for her, and
+in her endeavor to create a livelier, a more
+hilarious and human morale, she is doing, I
+feel, a real service to the cause of women.
+Our American pseudo-aristocracy is capable
+to teach us, despite its fantastic excesses,
+how to play. And emancipation from
+middle-class standards of taste, morality,
+and intellect is, so far as it goes, a
+good thing. "Too many cocktails," a lady
+averred to me the other day, "is better than
+smugness; risque conversation far better
+than none at all." And that celebrated
+"public-be-damned" attitude of the pseudo-aristocracy
+is a great moral improvement
+over the cowardly, hysterical fear of the
+neighbors which prevails in the middle class.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>But, if I sympathize with the "hell raising"
+tendency&mdash;no other phrase describes
+it&mdash;of the young woman of the leisure class,
+I have more pity than sympathy for the
+one who is trying to realize the ideal of the
+"salon." For she must, after sad experience
+and bitter disillusionment, be content
+with the tawdry activities which, relieved by
+the orgiastic outbreaks alluded to above,
+constitute social life in America.</p>
+
+<p>The establishment of a salon is, in itself,
+a healthful ideal. If civilization were destroyed,
+and rebuilt on any plan, the tradition
+of the salon would be a good starting
+point for the creation of a medium of satisfying
+social intercourse. Social intercourse
+we must have, or the best of us lapse into
+boorishness. The ego only properly functions
+in contact with other and various egos.
+So that, in any case, we should have to have
+something in the nature of our contemporary
+"society." All the more do we need<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+"society" at present, since those ancient
+institutions, the church and the caf&#233;, have
+almost entirely lost the character of real
+social centers.</p>
+
+<p>Recognizing this need, and supposing the
+best intentions in the world, what can people
+do at present in the creation of a "society"
+which shall be useful to the community instead
+of a laughing stock for the intelligent?</p>
+
+<p>That is a fair question. Many an ambitious
+and idealistic young American matron
+has tried to solve it. She has found that the
+materials were a little scarce&mdash;the people
+who could talk brilliantly are very rare. But
+brilliancy is always a miracle, and it can be
+dispensed with. The real trouble lies elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that in our present industrial
+system the need for social life is in inverse
+ratio to the opportunity for it. The people<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+who need social intercourse are those who do
+hard work. The people who have most
+money and leisure, the most opportunity for
+social life, are those who have too much of it,
+anyway. Moreover&mdash;and this is an important
+point&mdash;no one profits less by leisure
+and money than those who have a great deal
+of it. Consequently, the basis of "society"
+today is a class of people naturally and inevitably
+inferior. It is this class which
+dominates "society," which gives the tone,
+and which sets the standard. So long, then,
+as "society" is dominated by inferiors, intelligent
+men and women will not be inclined
+to waste what time they have for social intercourse
+in such stupid activities as those that
+"society" can furnish. They will flock by
+themselves, and if they become undemocratic
+and unsocial as a result, that will appear to
+them the lesser evil. So that, however
+catholic our standards, the saloniere, as a
+bounden failure, has no place in this transcript
+of feminism.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>One thing will be observed with regard to
+these following papers&mdash;though they are
+imbued with an intense interest in women,
+they are devoid of the spirit of Romance.
+I mean that attitude toward woman which
+accepts her sex as a miraculous justification
+for her existence, the belief that being a
+woman is a virtue in itself, apart from the
+possession of other qualities: in short,
+woman-worship. The reverence for woman
+as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of
+her capacities as friend or leader or servant&mdash;that
+is Romance. It is an attitude which,
+discovered in the Middle Ages, has added a
+new glamour to existence. To woman as a
+superior being, a divinity, one may look for
+inspiration&mdash;and receive it. For those who
+cannot be fired by an abstract idea, she gives
+to imagination "some pure light in human
+form to fix it." She is the sustenance of
+hungry souls. Believe in her and you shall
+be saved&mdash;so runs the gospel of Petrarch,
+of Dante, of Browning, of George Meredith.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>So runs not mine. I have hearkened to
+the voice of modern science, which tells me
+that woman is an inferior being, with a weak
+body, a stunted mind, poor in creative power,
+poor in imagination, poor in critical capacity&mdash;a
+being who does not know how to
+work, nor how to talk, nor how to play! I
+hope no one will imagine that I am making
+these charges up maliciously out of my own
+head: such a notion would indicate that a
+century of pamphleteering on the woman
+question had made no impression on a mind
+saturated in the ideology of popular fiction.</p>
+
+<p>But&mdash;I have hearkened even more
+eagerly to the voice of sociology, which
+tells me of woman's wonderful possibilities.
+It is with these possibilities that this book
+is, in the main, concerned.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>But first the explanation of why I, a man,
+write these articles on feminism. It involves
+the betrayal of a secret: the secret, that is,
+of the apparent indifference or even hostility
+of men toward the woman's movement. The
+fact is, as has been bitterly recited by the
+rebellious leaders of their sex, that women
+have always been what man wanted them to
+be&mdash;have changed to suit his changing
+ideals. The fact is, furthermore, that the
+woman's movement of today is but another
+example of that readiness of women to adapt
+themselves to a masculine demand.</p>
+
+<p>Men are tired of subservient women; or,
+to speak more exactly, of the seemingly subservient
+woman who effects her will by
+stealth&mdash;the pretty slave with all the slave's
+subtlety and cleverness. So long as it was
+possible for men to imagine themselves masters,
+they were satisfied. But when they
+found out that they were dupes, they wanted
+a change. If only for self-protection, they
+desired to find in woman a comrade and an
+equal. In reality they desired it because it
+promised to be more fun.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>So that we have as the motive behind the
+rebellion of women an obscure rebellion of
+men. Why, then, have men appeared hostile
+to the woman's rebellion? Because what
+men desire are real individuals who have
+achieved their own freedom. It will not do
+to pluck freedom like a flower and give it to
+the lady with a polite bow. She must fight
+for it.</p>
+
+<p>We are, to tell the truth, a little afraid
+that unless the struggle is one which will call
+upon all her powers, which will try her to the
+utmost, she will fall short of becoming that
+self-sufficient, able, broadly imaginative and
+healthy-minded creature upon whom we
+have set our masculine desire.</p>
+
+<p>It is, then, as a phase of the great human
+renaissance inaugurated by men that the
+woman's movement deserves to be considered.
+And what more fitting than that a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>
+man should sit in judgment upon the contemporary
+aspects of that movement, weighing
+out approval or disapproval! Such
+criticism is not a masculine impertinence but
+a masculine right, a right properly pertaining
+to those who are responsible for the
+movement, and whose demands it must
+ultimately fulfill.</p>
+<p><a name="toopp" id="toopp"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">top</a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="CHARLOTTE_PERKINS_GILMAN" id="CHARLOTTE_PERKINS_GILMAN"></a>CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN</h3>
+
+
+<p>Of the women who represent and
+carry on this many-sided movement
+today, the first to be considered from this
+masculine viewpoint should, I think, be
+Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For she is, to
+a superficial view, the most intransigent
+feminist of them all, the one most exclusively
+concerned with the improvement of
+the lot of woman, the least likely to compromise
+at the instance of man, child, church,
+state, or devil.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gilman is the author of "Women
+and Economics" and several other books of
+theory, "What Diantha Did" and several
+other books of fiction; she is the editor and
+publisher of a remarkable journal, The Forerunner,
+the whole varied contents of which
+is written by herself; she has a couple of
+plays to her credit, and she has published a
+book of poems. If in spite of all this publicity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+it is still possible to misunderstand the
+attitude of Mrs. Gilman, I can only suppose
+it to be because her poetry is less well known
+than her prose. For in this book of verse,
+"In This Our World," Mrs. Gilman has so
+completely justified herself that no man
+need ever be afraid of her&mdash;nor any woman
+who, having a lingering tenderness for the
+other sex, would object to living in a beehive
+world, full of raging efficient females,
+with the males relegated to the position of
+drones.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, I do but jest when I speak of
+this fear; but there is, to the ordinary male,
+something curiously objectionable at the
+first glance in Mrs. Gilman's arguments,
+whether they are for co&#246;perative kitchens or
+for the labor of women outside the home.
+And the reason for that objection lies precisely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+in the fact that her plans seem to be
+made in a complete forgetfulness of him and
+his interests. It all has the air of a feminine
+plot. The co&#246;perative kitchens, and the
+labor by which women's economic independence
+is to be achieved, seem the means to
+an end.</p>
+
+<p>And so they are. But the end, as revealed
+in Mrs. Gilman's poems, is that one
+which all intelligent men must desire. I do
+not know whether or not the more elaborate
+co&#246;perative schemes of Mrs. Gilman are
+practical; and I fancy that she rather exaggerates
+the possibilities of independent work
+for women who have or intend to have children.
+But the spirit behind these plans is
+one which cannot but be in the greatest
+degree stimulating and beneficent in its
+effect upon her sex.</p>
+
+<p>For Mrs. Gilman is, first of all, a poet, an
+idealist. She is a lover of life. She rejoices<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+in beauty and daring and achievement, in
+all the fine and splendid things of the world.
+She does not merely disapprove of the contemporary
+"home" as wasteful and inefficient&mdash;she
+hates it because it vulgarizes life.
+In this "home," this private food-preparing
+and baby-rearing establishment, she sees a
+machine which breaks down all that is good
+and noble in women, which degrades and
+pettifies them. The contrast between the
+instinctive ideals of young women and the
+sordid realities into which housekeeping
+plunges them is to her intolerable. And in
+the best satirical verses of modern times she
+ridicules these unnecessary shames. In one
+spirited piece she points out that the soap-vat,
+the pickle-tub, even the loom and wheel,
+have lost their sanctity, have been banished
+to shops and factories:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But bow ye down to the Holy Stove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The Altar of the Home!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>The real feeling of Mrs. Gilman is revealed
+in these lines, which voice, indeed, the
+angry mood of many an outraged housewife
+who finds herself the serf of a contraption
+of cast-iron:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">... We toil to keep the altar crowned<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With dishes new and nice,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Art and Love, and Time and Truth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We offer up, with Health and Youth<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In daily sacrifice.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gilman is not under the illusion that
+the conditions of work outside the home are
+perfect; she is, indeed, a socialist, and as
+such is engaged in the great task of revolutionizing
+the basis of modern industry.
+But she has looked into women's souls, and
+turned away in disgust at the likeness of a
+dirty kitchen which those souls present.</p>
+
+<p>Into these lives corrupted by the influences
+of the "home" nothing can come unspoiled&mdash;nothing
+can enter in its original stature
+and beauty. She says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">Birth comes. Birth&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The breathing re-creation of the earth!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All earth, all sky, all God, life's sweet deep whole,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Newborn again to each new soul!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">"Oh, are you? What a shame! Too bad, my dear!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How well you stand it, too! It's very queer<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dreadful trials women have to carry;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But you can't always help it when you marry.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, what a sweet layette! What lovely socks!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What an exquisite puff and powder box!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who is your doctor? Yes, his skill's immense&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But it's a dreadful danger and expense!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And so with love, and death, and work&mdash;all
+are smutted and debased. And her revolt
+is a revolt against that which smuts and
+debases them&mdash;against those artificial
+channels which break up the strong, pure
+stream of woman's energy into a thousand
+little stagnant canals, covered with spiritual
+pond-scum.</p>
+
+<p>It is a part of her idealism to conceive life
+in terms of war. So it is that she scorns
+compromise, for in war compromise is treason.
+And so it is that she has heart for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+long, slow marshaling of forces, and the
+dingy details of the commissariat&mdash;for
+these things are necessary if the cry of victory
+is ever to ring out over the battlefield.
+Some of her phrases have so militant an air
+that they seem to have been born among the
+captains and the shouting. They make us
+ashamed of our vicious civilian comfort.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gilman's attitude toward the bearing
+and rearing of children is easy to misapprehend.
+She does seem to relegate these
+things to the background of women's lives.
+She does deny to these things a tremendous
+importance. Why, she asks, is it so important
+that women should bear and rear children
+to live lives as empty and poor as
+their own? Surely, she says, it is more
+important to make life something worth
+giving to children! No, she insists, it is not
+sufficient to be a mother: an oyster can be
+a mother. It is necessary that a woman
+should be a person as well as a mother. She
+must know and do.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>And as for the ideal of love which is
+founded on masculine privilege, she satirizes
+it very effectively in some verses entitled
+"Wedded Bliss":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O come and be my mate!" said the Eagle to the Hen;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">"I love to soar, but then<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I want my mate to rest<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Forever in the nest!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Said the Hen, "I cannot fly<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I have no wish to try,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But I joy to see my mate careering through the sky!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They wed, and cried, "Ah, this is Love, my own!"<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the Hen sat, the Eagle soared, alone.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Woman, in Mrs. Gilman's view, must not
+be content with Hendom: the sky is her
+province, too. Of all base domesticity, all
+degrading love, she is the enemy. She gives
+her approval only to that work which has in
+it something high and free, and that love
+which is the dalliance of the eagles.</p>
+<p><a name="tooop" id="tooop"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">top</a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="EMMELINE_PANKHURST_AND_JANE_ADDAMS" id="EMMELINE_PANKHURST_AND_JANE_ADDAMS"></a>EMMELINE PANKHURST AND JANE ADDAMS</h3>
+
+
+<p>A few months ago it was rather the
+fashion to reply to some political
+verses by Mr. Kipling which assumed to
+show that women should not be given the
+ballot, and which had as their refrain:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The female of the species is more deadly than the male!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But it seems that no one pointed out that
+this fact, even in the limited sense in which
+it is a fact in the human species, is an argument
+for giving women the vote.</p>
+
+<p>For if women are, as Mr. Kipling says,
+lacking in a sense of abstract justice, in
+patience, in the spirit of compromise; if
+they are violent and unscrupulous in gaining
+an end upon which they have set their hearts,
+then by all means they should be rendered
+comparatively harmless by being given the
+ballot. For it is characteristic of a republic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+that its political machinery, created in order
+to carry out the will of the people, comes to
+respond with difficulty to that will, while
+being perfectly susceptible to other influences.
+Republican government, when not
+modified by drastic democratic devices, is an
+expensive, cumbrous, and highly inefficient
+method of carrying out the popular will;
+and casting a vote is like nothing so much
+as casting bread upon the waters. It shall
+return&mdash;after many days. By voting, by
+exercising an infinitesimal pressure on our
+complex, slow-moving political mechanism,
+one cannot&mdash;it is a sad fact&mdash;do much
+good; but one cannot&mdash;and it should encourage
+the pessimistic Mr. Kipling&mdash;one
+cannot, even though a woman, do much
+harm.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>This is not, however, a disquisition on
+woman suffrage. There is only one argument
+for woman suffrage: women want it;
+there are no arguments against it. But one
+may profitably inquire, What will be the
+effect of the emergence of women into politics
+upon politics itself? And one may hope
+to find an answer in the temperament and
+career of certain representative leaders of
+the woman's movement. Let us accordingly
+turn to the accredited leader of the English
+"votes for women" movement, and to the
+woman in the American movement who is
+best known to the public.</p>
+
+<p>That Miss Jane Addams has become
+known chiefly through other activities does
+not matter here. It is temperament and
+career in which we are immediately interested.
+What is perhaps the most outstanding
+fact in the temperament of Miss
+Addams is revealed only indirectly in her
+autobiography: it may be called the passion
+of conciliation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst has by her actions
+written herself down for a fighter. She
+has but recently been released from Holloway
+jail, where she was serving a term of
+imprisonment for "conspiracy and violence."
+In a book by H. G. Wells, which
+contains a very bitter attack on the woman's
+suffrage movement (I refer to "Ann Veronica"),
+she is described as "implacable"; and
+I believe that it is she to whom Mr. Wells
+refers as being "as incapable of argument
+as a steam roller broken loose." The same
+things might have been said of Sherman on
+his dreadful march to the sea. These
+phrases, malicious as they are, contain what
+I am inclined to accept as an accurate
+description of Mrs. Pankhurst's temperament.</p>
+
+<p>No one would call Mrs. Pankhurst a conciliator.
+And no one would call Miss
+Addams "implacable." It is not intended
+to suggest that Miss Addams is one of those
+inveterate compromisers who prefer a bad
+peace to a good war. But she has the gift of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+imaginative sympathy; and it is impossible
+for her to have toward either party in a conflict
+the cold hostility which each party has
+for the other. She sees both sides; and even
+though one side is the wrong side, she cannot
+help seeing why its partisans believe in it.</p>
+
+<p>"If the under dog were always right,"
+Miss Addams has said, "one might quite
+easily try to defend him. The trouble is that
+very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes
+only partially right, and often quite
+wrong, but perhaps he is never so altogether
+wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible
+as he is represented to be by those who
+add the possession of prejudice to the other
+almost insuperable difficulties in understanding
+him."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Addams has taken in good faith the
+social settlement ideal&mdash;"to span the gulf
+between the rich and the poor, or between
+those who have had cultural opportunities
+and those who have not, by the process of
+neighborliness." In her writings, as in her<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+work, there is never sounded the note of
+defiance. Even in defense of the social settlement
+and its methods of conciliation
+(which have been venomously assailed by
+the newspapers during Chicago's fits of temporary
+insanity, as in the Averbuch case),
+Miss Addams has not become militant. She
+has never ceased to be serenely reasonable.</p>
+
+<p>But when one comes to ask how powerful
+Miss Addams' example has been, one is
+forced to admit that it has been limited.
+There are two other settlement houses in
+Chicago which are managed in the spirit of
+Hull House. But all the others&mdash;and there
+are about forty settlement houses in the city&mdash;have
+discarded almost openly the principle
+of conciliation. They are efficient, or
+religious, or something else, but they are
+afraid of being too sympathetic with the
+working class. They do not, for instance,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+permit labor unions to meet in their halls.
+The splendid social idealism of the '80s, of
+which Miss Addams is representative, has
+disappeared, leaving two sides angry and
+hostile and with none but Miss Addams believing
+in the possibility of finding any common
+ground for action. One event after
+another from the Pullman strike to the
+Averbuch case has brought this hostility out
+into the open, with Miss Addams occupying
+neutral ground, and left high and dry
+upon it.</p>
+
+<p>It is the fact that Miss Addams has not
+been able to imbue the movement in which
+she is a leader with her own spirit. Her
+career has been successful only so far as
+individual genius could make it successful. If
+one compares her achievement to that of
+Mrs. Pankhurst, one sees that the latter is
+startingly social in its nature.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>For Mrs. Pankhurst has called upon
+women to be like herself, to display her own
+Amazonian qualities. She called upon shop
+girls and college students and wives and old
+women to make physical assaults on cabinet
+ministers, to raid parliament and fight
+with policemen, to destroy property and go
+to prison, to endure almost every indignity
+from the mobs and from their jailers, to
+suffer in health and perhaps to die, exactly
+as soldiers suffer and die in a campaign.</p>
+
+<p>And they did. They answered her call
+by the thousands. They have fought and
+suffered, and some of them have died. If
+this had been the result of individual genius
+in Mrs. Pankhurst, transforming peaceful
+girls into fighters out of hand, she would be
+the most extraordinary person of the age.
+But it is impossible to believe that all this
+militancy was created out of the void. It
+was simply awakened where it lay sleeping
+in these women's hearts.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>Mrs. Pankhurst has performed no
+miracle. She has only shown to us the truth
+which we have blindly refused to see. She
+has had the insight to recognize in women
+generally the same fighting spirit which she
+found in herself, and the courage to draw
+upon it. She has enabled us to see what
+women really are like, just as Miss Addams
+has by her magnificent anomalies shown us
+what women are not like.</p>
+
+<p>Can anyone doubt this? Can anyone, seeing
+the lone eminence of Miss Addams, assert
+that imaginative sympathy, patience,
+and the spirit of conciliation are the ordinary
+traits of women? Can anyone, seeing the
+battle frenzy which Mrs. Pankhurst has
+evoked with a signal in thousands of
+ordinary Englishwomen, deny that women have
+a fighting soul?</p>
+
+<p>And can anyone doubt the effect which
+the emergence of women into politics will
+have, eventually, on politics? Eventually,
+for in spite of their boasted independence
+the decorous example of men will rule them
+at first. But when they have become used<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
+to politics&mdash;well, we shall find that we have
+harnessed an unruly Niagara!</p>
+
+<p>In women as voters we shall have an element
+impatient of restraint, straining at the
+rules of procedure, cynical of excuses for
+inaction; not always by any means on the
+side of progress; making every mistake possible
+to ignorance and self-conceit; but
+transforming our politics from a vicious end
+to an efficient means&mdash;from a cancer into
+an organ.</p>
+
+<p>This, with but little doubt, is the historic
+mission of women. They will not escape a
+certain taming by politics. But that they
+should be permanently tamed I find impossible
+to believe. Rather they will subdue it
+to their purposes, remold it nearer to their
+hearts' desire, change it as men would never
+dream of changing it, wreck it savagely in
+the face of our masculine protest and merrily
+rebuild it anew in the face of our despair.
+With their aid we may at last achieve<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+what we seem to be unable to achieve unaided&mdash;a
+democracy.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile let us understand this suffrage
+movement. Let us understand that we have
+in militancy rather than in conciliation, in
+action rather than in wisdom, the keynote of
+woman in politics. And we males, who have
+so long played in our politics at innocent
+games of war, we shall have an opportunity
+to fight in earnest at the side of the
+Valkyrs.</p>
+<p><a name="tttop" id="tttop"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">top</a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="OLIVE_SCHREINER_AND_ISADORA_DUNCAN" id="OLIVE_SCHREINER_AND_ISADORA_DUNCAN"></a>OLIVE SCHREINER AND ISADORA DUNCAN</h3>
+
+
+<p>I hope that no one will see in the conjuncture
+of these names a mere wanton
+fantasy, or a mere sensational contrast. To
+me there is something extraordinarily appropriate
+in that conjuncture, inasmuch as
+the work of Olive Schreiner and the work
+of Isadora Duncan supplement each other.</p>
+
+<p>It is the drawback of the woman's movement
+that in any one of its aspects (heightened
+and colored as such an aspect often is
+by the violence of propaganda) it may appear
+too fiercely narrow. That women
+should make so much fuss about getting the
+vote, or that they should so excite themselves
+over the prospect of working for
+wages, will appear incomprehensible to
+many people who have a proper regard for
+art, for literature, and for the graces of social
+intercourse. It is only when the woman's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+movement is seen broadly, in a variety of
+its aspects, that there comes the realization
+that here is a cause in which every fine aspiration
+has a place, a cause from which
+sincere lovers of truth and beauty have
+nothing really to fear.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Olive Schreiner stands, by virtue of
+her latest book, "Women and Labor," as an
+exponent of the doctrine that would send
+women into every field of economic activity;
+or, rather, the doctrine that finds in the
+forces which are driving them there a savior
+of her sex from the degradation of parasitism.
+In behalf of this doctrine she has
+expended all that eloquence and passion
+which have made her one of the figures in
+modern literature and a spokesman for all
+women who have not learned to speak that
+hieratic language which is heard, as the
+inexpressive speech of daily life is not heard,
+across space and time.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>Miss Isadora Duncan stands as representative
+of the renaissance in dancing. She
+has brought back to us the antique beauty of
+an art of which we have had only relics and
+memento in classic sculpture and decoration.
+She has made us despise the frigid artifice of
+the ballet, and taught us that in the natural
+movements of the body are contained the
+highest possibilities of choregraphic beauty.
+It has been to many of us one of the finest
+experiences of our lives to see, for the first
+time, the marble maiden of the Grecian urn
+come to life in her, and all the leaf-fringed
+legends of Arcady drift before our enamored
+eyes. She has touched our lives with
+the magic of immemorial loveliness.</p>
+
+<p>But to class Olive Schreiner as a sociologist
+and Isadora Duncan as a dancer, to
+divorce them by any such categories, is to do
+them both an injustice. For they are sister
+workers in the woman's movement. They
+have each shown the way to a new freedom
+of the body and the soul.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>The woman's movement is a product of
+the evolutionary science of the nineteenth
+century. Women's rebellions there have
+been before, utopian visions there have
+been, which have contributed no little to the
+modern movement by the force of their tradition
+and ever-living spirit. No Joan of
+Arc has led men to victory, no Lady Godiva
+has sacrificed her modesty&mdash;nay, even, no
+courtesan has taught a feeble king how to
+rule his country&mdash;without feeding the flame
+of feminine aspiration. But it is modern
+science which, by giving us a new view of
+the body, its functions, its needs, its claim
+upon the world, has laid the basis for a successful
+feminist movement. When the true
+history of this movement is written it will
+contain more about Herbert Spencer and
+Walt Whitman, perhaps, than about Victoria
+Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. In
+any case, it is to the body that one looks for
+the Magna Charta of feminism.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>The eye&mdash;that is to say&mdash;is guarantor
+for the safety of art in a future r&eacute;gime under
+the dominance of women; and the ear for
+poetry. These have their functions and
+their needs, and the woman of the future
+will not deny them.</p>
+
+<p>It is the hand that Olive Schreiner would
+emancipate from idleness. She knows the
+significance of the hand in human history.
+It was by virtue of the hand that we, and
+not some other creature, gained lordship
+over the earth. It was the hand (marvelous
+instrument, coaxing out of the directing will
+an ever-increasing subtlety) that made possible
+the human brain, and all the vistas of
+reason and imagination by which our little
+lives gain their peculiar grandeur.</p>
+
+<p>And this hand, if it be a woman's in the
+present day, is doomed to the smallest activities.
+"Our spinning wheels are all broken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>
+...Our hoes and grindstones passed from
+us long ago.... Year by year, day by day,
+there is a silently working but determined
+tendency for the sphere of women's domestic
+labors to contract itself." Even the training
+of her child is taken away from the mother
+by the "mighty and inexorable demands of
+modern civilization." That condition is to
+her intolerable; and it is on behalf of
+women's empty hands that she makes her
+demand: "that, in that strange new world
+that is arising alike upon the man and the
+woman, where nothing is as it was, and all
+things are assuming new shapes and relations,
+that in this new world we also shall
+have our share of honored and socially useful
+human toil, our full half of the labor of
+the Children of Woman."</p>
+
+<p>And what of Miss Duncan&mdash;what is her
+part in the woman's movement? In her
+book on "The Dance" she tells a story:
+"A woman once asked me why I dance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+with bare feet, and I replied, 'Madam, I believe
+in the religion of the beauty of the
+human foot'; and the lady replied, 'But I
+do not,' and I said: 'Yet you must, Madam,
+for the expression and intelligence of the human
+foot is one of the greatest triumphs of
+the evolution of man.' 'But,' said the lady,
+'I do not believe in the evolution of man.'
+At this said I, 'My task is at an end. I
+refer you to my most revered teachers, Mr.
+Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel&mdash;'
+'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in
+Darwin and Haeckel&mdash;' At this point I
+could think of nothing more to say. So you
+see that, to convince people, I am of little
+value and ought not to speak."</p>
+
+<p>But rather to dance! Yet it is good to
+find so explicit a statement of the idea
+which she nobly expresses in her dancing.
+For, as the hand is the symbol of that constructive
+exertion of the body which we call
+work, so is the foot the symbol of that diffusive
+exertion of the body which we call
+play. Isadora Duncan would emancipate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+the one as Olive Schreiner would emancipate
+the other&mdash;to new activities and new
+delights.</p>
+
+<p>And if such work is not a thing for itself
+only, but a gateway to a new world, so is
+such play not a thing for itself only. "It is
+not only a question of true art," writes Miss
+Duncan, "it is a question of race, of the development
+of the female sex to beauty and
+health, of the return to the original strength
+and the natural movements of woman's
+body. It is a question of the development
+of perfect mothers and the birth of healthy
+and beautiful children." Here we have an
+inspiriting expression of the idea which
+through the poems of Walt Whitman and
+the writings of various moderns, has renovated
+the modern soul and made us see, without
+any obscene blurring by Puritan spectacles,
+the goodness of the whole body. This<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+is as much a part of the woman's movement
+as the demand for a vote (or, rather, it is
+more central and essential a part); and only
+by realizing this is it possible to understand
+that movement.</p>
+
+<p>The body is no longer to be separated in
+the thought of women from the soul: "The
+dancer of the future will be one whose body
+and soul have grown so harmoniously
+together that the natural language of that
+soul will have become the movement of the
+body. The dancer will not belong to a nation,
+but to all humanity. She will dance,
+not in the form of nymph, nor fairy, nor
+coquette, but in the form of woman in its
+greatest and purest expression. She will
+realize the mission of woman's body and the
+holiness of all its parts. She will dance the
+changing life of nature, showing how each
+part is transformed into the other. From
+all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence,
+bringing to the world the message
+of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands
+of women. She shall dance the freedom of
+woman.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>"She will help womankind to a new
+knowledge of the possible strength and
+beauty of their bodies, and the relation of
+their bodies to the earth nature and to the
+children of the future. She will dance, the
+body emerging again from centuries of civilized
+forgetfulness, emerging not in the
+nudity of primitive man, but in a new nakedness,
+no longer at war with spirituality and
+intelligence, but joining itself forever with
+this intelligence in a glorious harmony.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the
+future; the free spirit, who will inhabit the
+body of new women; more glorious than any
+woman that has yet been; more beautiful
+than the Egyptian, than the Greek, the early
+Italian, than all women of past centuries&mdash;the
+highest intelligence in the freest body!"</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>If the woman's movement means anything,
+it means that women are demanding
+everything. They will not exchange one
+place for another, nor give up one right to
+pay for another, but they will achieve all
+rights to which their bodies and brains give
+them an implicit title. They will have a
+larger political life, a larger motherhood, a
+larger social service, a larger love, and they
+will reconstruct or destroy institutions to
+that end as it becomes necessary. They will
+not be content with any concession or any
+triumph until they have conquered all
+experience.</p>
+<p><a name="toppp" id="toppp"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">top</a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="BEATRICE_WEBB_AND_EMMA_GOLDMAN" id="BEATRICE_WEBB_AND_EMMA_GOLDMAN"></a>BEATRICE WEBB AND EMMA GOLDMAN</h3>
+
+
+<p>The careers of these two women serve
+admirably to exhibit the woman's
+movement in still another aspect, and to
+throw light upon the essential nature of
+woman's character. These careers stand in
+plain contrast. Beatrice Webb has compiled
+statistics, and Emma Goldman has
+preached the gospel of freedom. It remains
+to be shown which is the better and the more
+characteristically feminine gift to the world.</p>
+
+<p>Beatrice Potter was the daughter of a Canadian
+railway president. Born in 1858, she
+grew up in a time when revolutionary movements
+were in the making. She was a pupil
+of Herbert Spencer, and it was perhaps
+from him that she learned so to respect her
+natural interest in facts that the brilliancy
+of no generalization could lure her into forgetting
+them. At all events, she was captured<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>
+permanently by the magic of facts.
+She studied working-class life in Lancashire
+and East London at first hand, and in 1885
+joined Charles Booth in his investigations
+of English social conditions. These investigations
+(which in my amateur ignorance I
+always confused with those of General
+Booth of the Salvation Army!) were published
+in four large volumes entitled "Life
+and Labor of the People." Miss Potter's
+special contributions were articles on the
+docks, the tailoring trade, and the Jewish
+community. Later she published a book on
+"The Co&#246;perative Movement in Great
+Britain." Then, in 1892, she married Sidney
+Webb, a man extraordinarily of her
+own sort, and became confirmed, if such a
+thing were necessary, in her statistical habit
+of mind.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>Meanwhile, in 1883, the Fabian Society
+had been founded. But first a word about
+statistics. "Statistics" does not mean a
+long list of figures. It means the spreading
+of knowledge of facts. Statistics may be
+called the dogma that knowledge is dynamic&mdash;that
+it is somehow operative in bringing
+about that great change which all intelligent
+people desire (and which the Fabians conceived
+as Socialism). The Fabian Society
+was founded on the dogma of statistics as
+on a rock. The Fabians did not start a
+newspaper, nor create a new political party,
+nor organize public meetings; but they
+wrote to the newspapers already in existence,
+ran for office on party tickets already
+in the field, and made speeches to other organizations.
+That is to say, they went about
+like the cuckoo, laying their statistical eggs
+in other people's nests and expecting to see
+them hatch into enlightened public opinion
+and progressive legislation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>Some of them hatched and some of them
+didn't. The point is that we have in this
+section of Beatrice Webb's career something
+typical of herself. She has gone on, serving
+on government commissions, writing (with
+her husband) the history of Trades Unionism,
+patiently collecting statistics and getting
+them printed in black ink on white
+paper, making detailed plans for the abolition
+of poverty, and always concerning
+herself with the homely fact.</p>
+
+<p>At the time that Beatrice Potter joined
+Mr. Booth in his social investigations there
+was a 16-year-old Jewish girl living in the
+German-Russian province of Kurland. A
+year later, in 1886, this girl, Emma Goldman
+by name, came to America, to escape
+the inevitable persecutions attending on any
+lover of liberty in Russia. She had been one
+of those who had gone "to the people"; and
+it was as a working girl that she came to
+America.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>She had, that is to say, the heightened
+sensibilities, the keen sympathies, of the
+middle class idealist, and the direct contact
+with the harsh realities of our social and industrial
+conditions which is the lot of the
+worker. Her first experiences in America
+disabused her of the traditional belief that
+America was a refuge where the oppressed
+of all lands were welcome. The treatment
+of immigrants aboard ship, the humiliating
+brutalities of the officials at Castle Garden,
+and the insolent tyranny of the New York
+police convinced her that she had simply
+come from one oppressed land to another.</p>
+
+<p>She went to work in a clothing factory,
+her wages being $2.50 a week. She had
+ample opportunities to see the degradations
+of our economic system, especially as it affects
+women. So it was not strange that
+she should be drawn into the American labor
+movement, which was then, with the Knights
+of Labor, the eight-hour agitation, and the
+propaganda of the Socialists and the Anarchists,
+at its height. She became acquainted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+with various radicals, read pamphlets and
+books, and heard speeches. She was especially
+influenced by the eloquent writings of
+Johann Most in his journal Freiheit.</p>
+
+<p>So little is known, and so much absurd
+nonsense is believed, about the Anarchists,
+that it is necessary to state dogmatically a
+few facts. If these facts seem odd, the
+reader is respectfully urged to verify them.
+One fact is that secret organizations of
+Anarchists plotting a violent overthrow of
+the government do not exist, and never have
+existed, save in the writings of Johann Most
+and in the imagination of the police: the
+whole spirit of Anarchism is opposed to such
+organizations. Another fact is that Anarchists
+do not believe in violence of any kind,
+or in any exercise of force; when they commit
+violence it is not as Anarchists, but as
+outraged human beings. They believe that
+violent reprisals are bound to be provoked
+among workingmen by the tyrannies to
+which they are subjected; but they abjure
+alike the bomb and the policeman's club.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>There was a brief period in which Anarchists,
+under the influence of Johann Most,
+believed in (even if they did not practice)
+the use of dynamite. But this period was
+ended, in America, by the hanging of several
+innocent men in Chicago in 1887; which at
+least served the useful purpose of showing
+radicals that it was a bad plan even to talk
+of dynamite. And this hanging, which was
+the end of what may be called the Anarchist
+"boom" in this country, was the beginning
+of Emma Goldman's career as a publicist.</p>
+
+<p>Since 1887 the Anarchists have lost influence
+among workingmen until they are
+today negligible&mdash;unless one credits them
+with Syndicalism&mdash;as a factor in the labor
+movement. The Anarchists have, in fact,
+left the industrial field more and more and
+have entered into other kinds of propaganda.
+They have especially "gone in for
+kissing games."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>And Emma Goldman reflects, in her career,
+the change in Anarchism. She has become
+simply an advocate of freedom&mdash;freedom
+of every sort. She does not advocate
+violence any more than Ralph Waldo Emerson
+advocated violence. It is, in fact, as an
+essayist and speaker of the kind, if not the
+quality, of Emerson, Thoreau, or George
+Francis Train, that she is to be considered.</p>
+
+<p>Aside from these activities (and the evading
+of our overzealous police in times of
+stress) she has worked as a trained nurse
+and midwife; she conducted a kind of radical
+salon in New York, frequented by such
+people as John Swinton and Benjamin
+Tucker; she traveled abroad to study social
+conditions; she has become conversant with
+such modern writings as those of Hauptmann,
+Nietzsche, Ibsen, Zola, and Thomas
+Hardy. It is stated that the "Rev. Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>
+Parkhurst, during the Lexow investigation,
+did his utmost to induce her to join the
+Vigilance Committee in order to fight Tammany
+Hall." She was the manager of Paul
+Orlenoff and Mme. Nazimova. She was a
+friend of Ernest Crosby. Her library, it is
+said, would be taken for that of a university
+extension lecturer on literature.</p>
+
+<p>It will thus be seen that Emma Goldman
+is of a type familiar enough in America, and
+conceded a popular respect. She has a legitimate
+social function&mdash;that of holding before
+our eyes the ideal of freedom. She is
+licensed to taunt us with our moral
+cowardice, to plant in our souls the nettles
+of remorse at having acquiesced so tamely
+in the brutal artifice of present day society.</p>
+
+<p>I submit the following passage from her
+writings ("Anarchism and Other Essays")
+as at once showing her difference from other
+radicals and exhibiting the nature of her
+appeal to her public:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>"The misfortune of woman is not that she
+is unable to do the work of a man, but that
+she is wasting her life force to outdo him,
+with a tradition of centuries which has left
+her physically incapable of keeping pace
+with him. Oh, I know some have succeeded,
+but at what cost, at what terrific cost! The
+import is not the kind of work woman does,
+but rather the quality of the work she furnishes.
+She can give suffrage or the ballot
+no new quality, nor can she receive anything
+from it that will enhance her own quality.
+Her development, her freedom, her independence,
+must come from and through herself.
+First, by asserting herself as a personality,
+and not as a sex commodity. Second,
+by refusing the right to anyone over her
+body; by refusing to bear children unless
+she wants them; by refusing to be a servant
+to God, the State, society, the husband, the
+family, etc.; by making her life simpler, but
+deeper and richer. That is, by trying to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+learn the meaning and substance of life in
+all its complexities, by freeing herself from
+the fear of public opinion and public condemnation.
+Only that, and not the ballot,
+will set woman free, will make her a force
+hitherto unknown in the world; a force for
+real love, for peace, for harmony; a force
+of divine fire, of life giving; a creator of
+free men and women."</p>
+
+<p>There is little in this that Ibsen would not
+have said amen to. But&mdash;and this is the
+conclusion to which my chapter draws&mdash;Ibsen
+has said it already, and said it more
+powerfully. Emma Goldman&mdash;who (if
+among women anyone) should have for us
+a message of her own, striking to the heart&mdash;repeats,
+in a less effective cadence, what
+she has learned from him.</p>
+
+<p>The work of Beatrice Webb is the prose
+of revolution. The work of Ibsen is its
+poetry. Beatrice Webb has performed her
+work&mdash;one comes to feel&mdash;as well as Ibsen
+has his. And one wonders if, after all, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
+prose is not that which women are best endowed
+to succeed in.</p>
+
+<p>A book review (written by a woman)
+which I have at hand contains some generalizations
+which bear on the subject.
+"This is a woman's book [says the reviewer],
+and a book which could only have
+been written by a woman, though it is singularly
+devoid of most of the qualities which
+are usually recognized as feminine. For romance
+and sentiment do not properly lie in
+the woman's domain. She deals, when she
+is herself, with the material facts of the life
+she knows. Her talent is to exhibit them in
+the remorseless light of reality and shorn of
+all the glamour of idealism. Great and
+poetical imagination rarely informs her art,
+but within the strictness of its limits it lives
+by an intense and scrupulous sincerity of
+observation and an uncompromising recognition
+of the logic of existence."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>If that is true, shall we not then expect
+a future more largely influenced by women
+to have more of the hard, matter-of-fact
+quality, the splendid realism characteristic
+of woman "when she is herself"?</p>
+<p><a name="ttop" id="ttop"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">top</a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="MARGARET_DREIER_ROBINS" id="MARGARET_DREIER_ROBINS"></a>MARGARET DREIER ROBINS</h3>
+
+
+<p>The work of Margaret Dreier Robins
+has been done in the National
+Women's Trade Union League. It might
+be supposed that the aim of such an organization
+is sufficiently explicit in its title: to
+get higher wages and shorter hours. But I
+fancy that it would be a truer thing to say
+that its aim is to bring into being that
+ideal of American womanhood which Walt
+Whitman described:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They are not one jot less than I am,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They are tann'd in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They are ultimate in their own right&mdash;they are calm, clear, well-possessed of themselves.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>When Whitman made this magnificent
+prophecy for American womanhood the
+Civil War had not been fought and its economic
+consequences were unguessed at. The
+factory system, which had come into England
+in the last century, bringing with it the
+most unspeakable exploitation of women
+and children, had hardly gained a foothold
+in this country. In 1840, of the seven employments
+open to women (teaching, needlework,
+keeping boarders, working in cotton
+mills, in bookbinderies, typesetting and
+household service) only one was representative
+of the new industrial condition which
+today affects so profoundly the feminine
+physique. And to the daughters of a nation
+that was still imbued with the pioneer
+spirit, work in cotton mills appealed so little
+that they undertook it only for unusually
+high pay. Anyone of that period seeing the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+red-cheeked, robust, intelligent, happy girl
+operatives of Lowell might have dismissed
+his fears of the factory as a sinister influence
+in the development of American womanhood
+and gone on to dream, with Walt
+Whitman, of a race of "fierce, athletic
+girls."</p>
+
+<p>But two things happened. With the
+growing flood of immigration, the factories
+were abandoned more and more to the
+"foreigners," the native-born citizens losing
+their pride in the excellence of working conditions
+and the character of the operatives.
+And all the while the factory was becoming
+more and more an integral part of our civilization,
+demanding larger and larger multitudes
+of girls and women to attend its
+machinery. So that, with the enormous development
+of industry since the Civil War,
+the factory has become the chief field of feminine
+endeavor in America. In spite of the
+great opening up of all sorts of work to
+women, in spite of the store, the office, the
+studio, the professions, still the factory remains
+most important in any consideration
+of the health and strength of women.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>If the greatest part of our womankind
+spends its life in factories, and if it further
+appears that this is no temporary situation,
+but (practically speaking) a permanent one,
+then it becomes necessary to inquire how far
+the factory is hindering the creation of that
+ideal womanhood which Walt Whitman predicted
+for us.</p>
+
+<p>As opposed to the old-fashioned method
+of manufacture in the home (or the sweatshop,
+which is the modern equivalent), the
+factory often shows a gain in light and air,
+a decrease of effort, an added leisure; while,
+on the other hand, there is a considerable loss
+of individual freedom and an increase in monotony.
+But child labor, a too long working
+day, bad working conditions, lack of protection
+from fire, personal exploitation by foremen,
+inhumanly low wages, and all sorts of
+petty injustice, though not essential to the
+system, are prominent features of factory
+work as it generally exists.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>People who consider every factory an Inferno,
+however, and have only pity for its
+workers, are far from understanding the
+situation. Here is a field of work which is
+capable of competing successfully with domestic
+service, and even of attracting girls
+from homes where there exists no absolute
+necessity for women's wages. Yet at its
+contemporary best, with a ten-hour law in
+operation, efficient factory inspection, decent
+working conditions and a just and humane
+management, the factory remains an institution
+extremely perilous to the Whitmanic
+ideal of womanhood.</p>
+
+<p>But there are women who, undaunted by
+the new conditions brought about by a
+changing economic system, seize upon those
+very conditions to use them as the means to
+their end: such a woman is Mrs. Robins.
+Has a new world, bounded by factory walls<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+and noisy with the roar of machinery, grown
+up about us, to keep women from their heritage?
+She will help them to use those very
+walls and that very machinery to achieve
+their destiny, a destiny of which a physical
+well-being is, as Walt Whitman knew it to
+be, the most certain symbol.</p>
+
+<p>The factory already gives women a certain
+independence. It may yet give them
+pleasure, the joy of creation. Indeed, it
+must, when the workers require it; and those
+who are most likely to require it are the
+women workers.</p>
+
+<p>It is well known that with the ultra-development
+of the machine, the subdivision
+of labor, the r&eacute;gime of piecework, it has
+become practically impossible for the worker
+to take any artistic pleasure in his product.
+It is not so well known how necessary such
+pleasure in the product is to the physical
+well-being of women&mdash;how utterly disastrous
+to their nervous organization is the
+monotony and irresponsibility of piecework.
+This method&mdash;which men workers have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>
+grumbled at, but to which they seem to have
+adjusted themselves&mdash;bears its fruits
+among women in neurasthenia, headaches,
+and the derangement of the organs which are
+the basis of their different nervous constitution.
+It is sufficiently clear to those who
+have seen the personal reactions of working
+girls to the piecework system, that when
+women attain, as men in various industries
+have attained, the practical management of
+the factory, piecework will get a setback.</p>
+
+<p>But not merely good conditions, not
+merely a living wage, not merely a ten or an
+eight hour day&mdash;all that self-government in
+the shop can bring is the object of the
+Women's Trade Union League.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>"The chief social gain of the union shop,"
+says Mrs. Robins, "is not its generally better
+wages and shorter hours, but rather the
+incentive it offers for initiative and social
+leadership, the call it makes, through the
+common industrial relationship and the common
+hope, upon the moral and reasoning
+faculties, and the sense of fellowship, independence
+and group strength it develops.
+In every workshop of say thirty girls there
+is undreamed of initiative and capacity for
+social leadership and control&mdash;unknown
+wealth of intellectual and moral resources."</p>
+
+<p>It is, in fact, this form of activity which to
+many thousands of factory girls makes the
+difference between living and existing, between
+a painful, necessary drudgery and a
+happy exertion of all their faculties. It can
+give them a more useful education than any
+school, a more vital faith than any church,
+a more invigorating sense of power than any
+other career open to them.</p>
+
+<p>To do all these things it must be indigenous
+to working-class soil. No benefaction<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>
+originating in the philanthropic motives of
+middle-class people, no enterprise of patronage,
+will ever have any such meaning. A
+movement, to have such meaning, must be
+of the working class, and by the working
+class, as well as for the working class. It
+must be imbued with working-class feeling,
+and it must subserve working-class ideals.</p>
+
+<p>It is the distinction of Mrs. Robins that
+she has seen this. She has gone to the workers
+to learn rather than to teach&mdash;she has
+sought to unfold the ideals and capacities
+latent in working girls rather than impress
+upon them the alien ideals and capacities of
+another class.</p>
+
+<p>"Just"&mdash;it is Mrs. Robins that speaks&mdash;"as
+under a despotic church and a feudal
+state the possible power and beauty of the
+common people was denied expression, so
+under industrial feudalism the intellectual
+and moral powers of the workers are slowly
+choked to death, with incalculable loss to the
+individual and the race. It is easy to kill; it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>
+requires a great spirit as well as a great mind
+to arouse the dormant energies, to vitalize
+them and to make them creative forces for
+good."</p>
+
+<p>One is reminded of the words of John
+Galsworthy, addressed to workingwomen:
+"There is beginning to be a little light in the
+sky; whether the sun is ever to break
+through depends on your constancy, and
+courage, and wisdom. The future is in your
+hands more than in the hands of men; it
+rests on your virtues and well-being, rather
+than on the virtues and the welfare of men,
+for it is you who produce and mold the Future."</p>
+
+<p>There are 6,000,000 working women in
+the United States, and half of them are girls
+under 21. One may go out any day in
+the city streets, at morning or noon or
+evening, and look at a representative hundred
+of them. The factories have not been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>
+able to rob them of beauty and strength and
+the charm of femininity, and in that beauty
+and strength and charm there is a world of
+promise. And that promise already begins
+to be unfolded when to them comes Mrs.
+Robins with a gospel germane to their natures,
+saying, "Long enough have you
+dreamed contemptible dreams."</p>
+<p><a name="toop" id="toop"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">top</a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="ELLEN_KEY" id="ELLEN_KEY"></a>ELLEN KEY</h3>
+
+
+<p>In these chapters a sincere attempt has
+been made not so much to show what a
+few exceptional women have accomplished
+as to exhibit through a few prominent figures
+the essential nature of women, and to show
+what may be expected from a future in
+which women will have a larger freedom
+and a larger influence.</p>
+
+<p>It has been pointed out that the peculiar
+idealism of women is one that works itself
+out through the materials of workaday life,
+and which seeks to break or remake those
+materials by way of fulfilling that idealism;
+it has been shown that this idealism, as contrasted
+with the more abstract and creative
+idealism of men, deserves to be called practicalism,
+a practicalism of a noble and beautiful
+sort which we are far from appreciating;
+and as complementing these forms of
+activity, the play instinct, the instinct of
+recreation, has been pointed out as the
+parallel to the creative or poetic instinct of
+men.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>Woman as reconstructor of domestic
+economics, woman as a destructive political
+agent of enormous potency, woman as
+worker, woman as dancer, woman as statistician,
+woman as organizer of the forces of
+labor&mdash;in these it has been the intent to
+show the real woman of today and of tomorrow.</p>
+
+<p>There have been other aspects of her deserving
+of attention in such a series, notably
+her aspect as mother and as educator. If
+she has not been shown as poet, as artist, as
+scientist, as talker (for talk is a thing quite
+as important as poetry or science or art), it
+has not been so much because of an actual
+lack of specific examples of women distinguished
+in these fields as because of the unrepresentative
+character of such examples.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>Here, then, is a man's view of modern
+woman. To complete that view, to round off
+that conception, I now speak of Ellen Key.</p>
+
+<p>Her writings have had a peculiar career
+in America, one which perhaps prevents a
+clear understanding of their character. On
+the one hand, they have seemed to many to
+be radically "advanced"; to thousands of
+middle-class women, who have heard vaguely
+of these new ideas, and who have secretly
+and strongly desired to know more of them,
+her "Love and Marriage" has come as a
+revolutionary document, the first outspoken
+word of scorn for conventional morality, the
+first call to them to take their part in the
+breaking of new paths.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it must be remembered
+that America is the home of Mormonism, of
+the Oneida Community, of the Woodhull
+and Claflin "free-love" movement of the
+'70s, of "Dianism" and a hundred other
+obscure but pervasive sexual cults&mdash;in
+short, of movements of greater or less respectability,
+capable of giving considerable
+currency to their beliefs. And they have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
+given considerable currency to their beliefs.
+In spite of the dominant tone of Puritanism
+in American thought, our social life has been
+affected to an appreciable extent by these
+beliefs.</p>
+
+<p>And these beliefs may be summed up
+hastily, but, on the whole, justly, as materialistic&mdash;in
+the common and unfavorable sense.
+They have converged, from one direction or
+another, upon the opinion that sex is an animal
+function, no more sacred than any other
+animal function, which, by a ridiculous over-estimation,
+is made to give rise to jealousy,
+unhappiness, madness, vice, and crime.</p>
+
+<p>It is a fact that the Puritan temperament
+readily finds this opinion, if not the program
+which accompanies it, acceptable, as
+one may discover in private conversation
+with respectable Puritans of both sexes.
+And it is more unfortunately true that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+present-day rebellion against conventional
+morality in America has found, in Hardy
+and Shaw and other anti-romanticists, a
+seeming support of this opinion. So that one
+finds in America today (though some people
+may not know about it) an undercurrent
+of impatient materialism in matters of sex.
+To become freed from the inadequate morality
+of Puritanism is, for thousands of young
+people, to adopt another morality which is,
+if more sound in many ways, certainly as
+inadequate as the other.</p>
+
+<p>So that Ellen Key comes into the lives of
+many in this country as a conservative force,
+holding up a spiritual ideal, the ideal of
+monogamy, and defending it with a breadth
+of view, a sanity, and a fervor that make it
+something different from the cold institution
+which these readers have come to despise.
+She makes every allowance for human nature,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>
+every concession to the necessities of
+temperament, every recognition of the
+human need for freedom, and yet makes the
+love of one man and one woman seem the
+highest ideal, a thing worth striving and
+waiting and suffering for.</p>
+
+<p>She cherishes the spiritual magic of sex
+as the finest achievement of the race, and
+sees it as the central and guiding principle
+in our social and economic evolution. She
+seeks to construct a new morality which will
+do what the present one only pretends, and
+with the shallowest and most desperately
+pitiful of pretenses, to do. She would help
+our struggling generation to form a new
+code of ethics, and one of subtle stringency,
+in this most important and difficult of
+relations.</p>
+
+<p>Thus her writings, of which "Love and
+Marriage" will here be taken as representative,
+have a twofold aspect&mdash;the radical and
+the conservative. But of the two, the conservative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+is by far the truer. It is as a
+conservator, with too firm a grip on reality
+to be lured into the desertion of any real
+values so far achieved by the race, that she
+may be best considered.</p>
+
+<p>And germane to her conservatism, which
+is the true conservatism of her sex, is her
+intellectual habit, her literary method. She
+is not a logician, it is true. She lacks
+logic, and with it order and clearness and
+precision, because of the very fact of her
+firm hold on realities. The realities are too
+complex to be brought into any completely
+logical and orderly relation, too elusive to
+be stated with utter precision. There is a
+whole universe in "Love and Marriage";
+and it resembles the universe in its wildness,
+its tumultuousness, its contradictory quality.
+Her book, like the universe, is in a state of
+flux&mdash;it refuses to remain one fixed and
+dead thing. It is a book which in spite of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+some attempt at arrangement may be begun
+at any point and read in any order. It is a
+mixture of science, sociology, and mysticism;
+it has a wider range than an orderly book
+could possibly have; it touches more points,
+includes more facts, and is more convincing,
+in its queer way, than any other.</p>
+
+<p>"Love and Marriage" is the Talmud of
+sexual morality. It contains history, wisdom,
+poetry, psychological analysis, shrewd
+judgments, generous sympathies, ... and
+it all bears upon the creation of that new
+sexual morality for which in a thousand
+ways&mdash;economic, artistic, and spiritual&mdash;we
+are so astonishing a mixture of readiness
+and unreadiness.</p>
+
+<p>Ellen Key is fundamentally a conservator.
+But she is careful about what she
+conservates. It is the right to love which
+she would have us cherish, rather than the
+right to own another person&mdash;the beauty of
+singleness of devotion rather than the cruel
+habit of trying to force people to carry out
+rash promises made in moments of exaltation.
+She conserves the greatest things and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>
+lets the others go: motherhood, as against
+the exclusive right of married women to
+bear children; and that personal passion
+which is at once physical and spiritual rather
+than any of the legally standardized relations.
+Nor does she hesitate to speak out
+for the conservation of that old custom which
+persists among peasant and primitive peoples
+all over the world and which has been
+reintroduced to the public by a recent sociologist
+under the term of "trial marriage";
+it must be held, she says, as the bulwark
+against the corruption of prostitution and
+made a part of the new morality.</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps in this very matter that her
+attitude is capable of being most bitterly
+resented. For we have lost our sense of
+what is old and good, and we give the sanction
+of ages to parvenu virtues that are as
+degraded as the rococo ornaments which
+were born in the same year. We have (or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+the Puritans among us have) lost all moral
+sense in the true meaning of the word, in
+that we are unable to tell good from bad if
+it be not among the things that were socially
+respectable in the year 1860. Ellen Key
+writes: "The most delicate test of a person's
+sense of morality is his power in interpreting
+ambiguous signs in the ethical
+sphere; for only the profoundly moral can
+discover the dividing line, sharp as the edge
+of a sword, between new morality and old
+immorality. In our time, ethical obtuseness
+betrays itself first and foremost by the condemnation
+of those young couples who freely
+unite their destinies. The majority does not
+perceive the advance in morality which this
+implies in comparison with the code of so
+many men who, without responsibility&mdash;and
+without apparent risk&mdash;purchase the
+repose of their senses. The free union of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>
+love, on the other hand, gives them an
+enhancement of life which they consider that
+they gain without injuring anyone. It answers
+to their idea of love's chastity, an idea
+which is justly offended by the incompleteness
+of the period of engagement, with all
+its losses in the freshness and frankness of
+emotion. When their soul has found another
+soul, when the senses of both have met
+in a common longing, then they consider that
+they have a right to full unity of love,
+although compelled to secrecy, since the
+conditions of society render early marriage
+impossible. They are thus freed from a
+wasteful struggle which would give them
+neither peace nor inner purity, and which
+would be doubly hard for them, since they
+have attained the end&mdash;love&mdash;for the sake
+of which self-control would have been
+imposed."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>It is almost impossible to quote any
+passage from "Love and Marriage" which
+is not subject to further practical modification,
+or which does not present an incomplete
+idea of which the complement may be
+found somewhere else. Even this passage
+is one which states a brief for the younger
+generation rather than the author's whole
+opinion. Still, with all these limitations, her
+view is one which is so different from that
+commonly held by women that it may seem
+merely fantastic to hold it up as an example
+of the conservative instinct of women.
+Nevertheless, it is so. It must be remembered
+that the view which holds that the
+chastity of unmarried women is well purchased
+at the price of prostitution, is a masculine
+view. It is a piece of the sinister and
+cruel idealism of the male mind, divorced (as
+the male mind is so capable of being) from
+realities. No woman would ever have created
+prostitution to preserve the chastity of
+part of her sex; and the more familiar one
+becomes with the specific character of the
+feminine mind, the more impossible does it
+seem that women will, when they have come
+to think and act for themselves, permanently
+maintain it. Nor will they&mdash;one is forced
+to believe&mdash;hesitate long at the implications
+of that demolition.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>No, I think that with the advent of
+women into a larger life our jerry-built
+virtues will have to go, to make room for
+mansions and gardens fit to be inhabited by
+the human soul.</p>
+
+<p>It will be like the pulling down of a rotten
+tenement. First (with a great shocked outcry
+from some persons of my own sex) the
+fa&#231;ade goes, looking nice enough, but showing
+up for painted tin what pretended to
+be marble; then the dark, cavelike rooms
+exposed, with their blood-stained floors and
+their walls ineffectually papered over the
+accumulated filth and disease; and so on,
+lath by lath, down to the cellars, with their
+hints of unspeakable horrors in the dark.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>It is to this conclusion that these chapters
+draw: That women have a surer instinct
+than men for the preservation of the truest
+human values, but that their very acts of
+conservation will seem to the timid minds
+among us like the shattering of all virtues,
+the debacle of civilization, the G&#246;tterd&#228;mmerung!</p>
+<p><a name="topp" id="topp"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">top</a></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+<h3><a name="FREEWOMEN_AND_DORA_MARSDEN" id="FREEWOMEN_AND_DORA_MARSDEN"></a>FREEWOMEN AND DORA MARSDEN</h3>
+
+
+<p>This is by way of a postscript. Dora
+Marsden is a new figure in the feminist
+movement. Just how she evolved is
+rather hard to say. Her family were Radicals,
+it seems, smug British radicals; and
+she broke away, first of all, into a sort of
+middle class socialism. She went into settlement
+work. Here, it seems, she discovered
+what sort of person she really was.</p>
+
+<p>She was a lover of freedom. So of course
+she rebelled against the interference of the
+middle class with the affairs of the poor, and
+threw overboard her settlement work and
+her socialism together. She was a believer
+in woman suffrage, but the autocratic government
+of the organization irked her.
+And, besides, she felt constrained to point<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
+out that feminism meant worlds more than
+a mere vote. The position of woman, not
+indeed as the slave of man, but as the enslaver
+of man, but with the other end of
+the chain fastened to her own wrist, and
+depriving her quite effectually of her liberties&mdash;this
+irritated her. Independence to
+her meant achievement, and when she heard
+the talk about "motherhood" by which the
+women she knew excused their lack of
+achievement, she was annoyed. Finally, the
+taboo upon the important subject of sex
+exasperated her. So she started a journal
+to express her discontent with all these
+things, and to change them.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally, she called her journal The
+Freewoman. "Independent" expresses
+much of Dora Marsden's feeling, but that
+word has been of late dragged in a mire of
+pettiness and needs dry cleaning. It has
+come to signify a woman who isn't afraid to
+go out at night alone or who holds a position
+downtown. A word had to be chosen which
+had in it some suggestion of the heroic.
+Hence The Freewoman.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>The Freewoman was a weekly. It lived
+several months and then suspended publication,
+and now all the women I know are
+poring over the back numbers while waiting
+for it to start again as a fortnightly. It was
+a remarkable paper. For one thing, it
+threw open its columns to such a discussion
+of sex that dear Mrs. Humphry Ward wrote
+a shocked letter to The Times about it. Of
+course, a good many of the ideas put forth
+in this correspondence were erroneous or
+trivial, but it must have done the writers no
+end of good to express themselves freely.
+For once sex was on a plane with other subjects,
+a fact making tremendously for sanity.
+In this Miss Marsden not only achieved
+a creditable journalistic feat, but performed
+a valuable public service.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>Her editorials were another distinctive
+thing. In the first issue was an editorial
+on "Bondwomen," from which it would appear
+that perhaps even such advanced persons
+as you, my dear lady, are still far from
+free.</p>
+
+<p>"Bondwomen are distinguished from
+Freewomen by a spiritual distinction.
+Bondwomen are the women who are not separate
+spiritual entities&mdash;who are not individuals.
+They are complements merely.
+By habit of thought, by form of activity,
+and largely by preference, they round off
+the personality of some other individual,
+rather than create or cultivate their own.
+Most women, as far back as we have any
+record, have fitted into this conception, and
+it has borne itself out in instinctive working
+practice.</p>
+
+<p>"And in the midst of all this there
+comes a cry that woman is an individual,
+and that because she is an individual she
+must be set free. It would be nearer the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+truth to say that if she is an individual she
+<i>is</i> free, and will act like those who are free.
+The doubtful aspect in the situation is as to
+whether women are or can be individuals&mdash;that
+is, free&mdash;and whether there is not
+danger, under the circumstances, in labelling
+them free, thus giving them the liberty
+of action which is allowed to the free. It
+is this doubt and fear which is behind the
+opposition which is being offered the vanguard
+of those who are 'asking for' freedom.
+It is the kind of fear which an engineer
+would have in guaranteeing an arch equal
+to a strain above its strength. The opponents
+of the Freewomen are not actuated
+by spleen or by stupidity, but by dread.
+This dread is founded upon ages of experience
+with a being who, however well loved,
+has been known to be an inferior, and who
+has accepted all the conditions of inferiors.
+Women, women's intelligence, and women's
+judgments have always been regarded with
+more or less secret contempt, and when
+woman now speaks of 'equality,' all the natural
+contempt which a higher order feels for
+a lower order when it presumes bursts out
+into the open. This contempt rests upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
+quite honest and sound instinct, so honest,
+indeed, that it must provide all the charm
+of an unaccustomed sensation for fine gentlemen
+like the Curzons and Cromers and
+Asquiths to feel anything quite so instinctive
+and primitive.</p>
+
+<p>"With the women opponents it is another
+matter. These latter apart, however, it is
+for would-be Freewomen to realize that for
+them this contempt is the healthiest thing
+in the world, and that those who express it
+honestly feel it; that these opponents have
+argued quite soundly that women have
+allowed themselves to be used, ever since
+there has been any record of them; and that
+if women had had higher uses of their own
+they would not have foregone them. They<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+have never known women to formulate imperious
+wants, this in itself implying lack
+of wants, and this in turn implying lack of
+ideals. Women as a whole have shown
+nothing save 'servant' attributes. All those
+activities which presuppose the master qualities,
+the standard-making, the law-giving,
+the moral-framing, belong to men. Religions,
+philosophies, legal codes, standards in
+morals, canons in art, have all issued from
+men, while women have been the 'followers,'
+'believers,' the 'law-abiding,' the 'moral,' the
+conventionally admiring. They have been
+the administrators, the servants, living by
+borrowed precept, receiving orders, doing
+hodmen's work. For note, though some
+men must be servants, all women are servants,
+and all the masters are men. That is
+the difference and distinction. The servile
+condition is common to all women."</p>
+
+<p>This was only the beginning of such a
+campaign of radical propaganda as feminism
+never knew before. Miss Marsden<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+went on to attack all the things which bind
+women and keep them unfree. As such she
+denounced what she considered the cant of
+"motherhood."</p>
+
+<p>"Considering, therefore, that children,
+from both physiological and psychological
+points of view, belong more to the woman
+than to the man; considering, too, that not
+only does she need them more, but, as a
+rule, wants them more than the man,
+the parental situation begins to present elements
+of humor when the woman proceeds
+to fasten upon the man, in return for the
+children she has borne him, the obligation
+from that time to the end of her days, not
+only for the children's existence, but for her
+own, also!"</p>
+
+<p>When asked under what conditions, then,
+women should have children, she replied
+that women who wanted them should save
+for them as for a trip to Europe. This is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+frankly a gospel for a minority&mdash;a fact
+which does not invalidate it in the eyes of
+its promulgator&mdash;but she does believe that
+if women are to become the equals of men
+they must find some way to have children
+without giving up the rest of life. It has
+been done!</p>
+
+<p>Then, having been rebuked for her critical
+attitude toward the woman suffrage organization,
+she showed herself in no mood to
+take orders from even that source. She subjected
+the attitude of the members of the
+organization to an examination, and found
+it tainted with sentimentalism. "Of all the
+corruptions to which the woman's movement
+is now open," she wrote, "the most poisonous
+and permeating is that which flows from
+sentimentalism, and it is in the W. S. P. U.
+[Women's Social and Political Union]
+that sentimentalism is now rampant....
+It is this sentimentalism that is abhorrent
+to us. We fight it as we would fight prostitution,
+or any other social disease."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>She called upon women to be individuals,
+and sought to demolish in their minds any
+lingering desire for Authority. "There is,"
+she wrote, "a genuine pathos in our reliance
+upon the law in regard to the affairs
+of our own souls. Our belief in ourselves
+and in our impulses is so frail that we prefer
+to see it buttressed up. We are surer of
+our beliefs when we see their lawfulness
+symbolized in the respectable blue cloth of
+the policeman's uniform, and the sturdy
+good quality of the prison's walls. The law
+gives them their passport. Well, perhaps
+in this generation, for all save pioneers, the
+law will continue to give its protecting shelter,
+but with the younger generations we
+believe we shall see a stronger, prouder, and
+more insistent people, surer of themselves
+and of the pureness of their own desires."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>She did not stick at the task of formulating
+for women a new moral attitude to
+replace the old. "We are seeking," she
+said, "a morality which shall be able to point
+the way out of the social trap we find we
+are in. We are conscious that we are concerned
+in the dissolution of one social order,
+which is giving way to another. Men and
+women are both involved, but women differently
+from men, because women themselves
+are very different from men. The
+difference between men and women is the
+whole difference between a religion and a
+moral code. Men are pagan. They have
+never been Christian. Women are wholly
+Christian, and have assimilated the entire
+genius of Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>"The ideal of conduct which men have
+followed has been one of self-realization,
+tempered by a broad principle of equity
+which has been translated into practice by
+means of a code of laws. A man's desire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+and ideal has been to satisfy the wants which
+a consciousness of his several senses gives
+rise to. His vision of attainment has therefore
+been a sensuous one, and if in his desire
+for attainment he has transgressed the law,
+his transgression has sat but lightly upon
+him. A law is an objective thing, laid upon
+a man's will from outside. It does not enter
+the inner recesses of consciousness, as does
+a religion. It is nothing more than a body
+of prohibitions and commands, which can
+be obeyed, transgressed or evaded with little
+injury to the soul. With women moral matters
+have been wholly different. Resting
+for support upon a religion, their moral
+code has received its sanction and force from
+within. It has thus laid hold on consciousness
+with a far more tenacious grip. Their
+code being subjective, transgression has
+meant a darkening of the spirit, a sullying
+of the soul. Thus the doctrine of self-renunciation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+which is the outstanding feature
+of Christian ethics, has had the most
+favorable circumstances to insure its realization,
+and with women it has won completely&mdash;so
+completely that it now exerts
+its influence unconsciously. Seeking the
+realization of the will of others, and not
+their own, ever waiting upon the minds of
+others, women have almost lost the instinct
+for self-realization, the instinct for achievement
+in their own persons."</p>
+
+<p>Whether she is right is a moot question.
+Certainly in such matters as testimony in
+court, the customs-tariff, and the minor city
+ordinances, women show no particular respect
+for the law. Ibsen sought in "The
+Doll's House" to show that her morality
+had no connection with the laws of the world
+of men. Even in matters of human relationship
+it is doubtful if women give any
+more of an "inner assent" to law than do
+men. Woman's failure to achieve that domination
+of the world which constitutes individuality
+and freedom&mdash;this Dora Marsden
+would explain on the ground of a dulling
+of the senses. It may be more easily explained<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>
+as a result of a dulling of the imagination.
+The trouble is that they are content
+with petty conquests.</p>
+
+<p>There you have it! Inevitably one argues
+with Dora Marsden. That is her value.
+She provokes thought. And she welcomes
+it. She wants everybody to think&mdash;not to
+think her thoughts necessarily, nor the right
+thoughts always, but that which they can
+and must. She is a propagandist, it is true.
+But she does not create a silence, and call
+it conversion.</p>
+
+<p>She stimulates her readers to cast out the
+devils that inhabit their souls&mdash;fear, prejudice,
+sensitiveness. She helps them to build
+up their lives on a basis of will&mdash;the exercise,
+not the suppression, of will. She indurates
+them to the world. She liberates them
+to life. She is the Max Stirner of feminism.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>Freedom! That is the first word and the
+last with Dora Marsden. She makes women
+understand for the first time what freedom
+means. She makes them want to be free.
+She nerves them to the effort of emancipation.
+She sows in a fertile soil the dragon's
+teeth which shall spring up as a band of
+capable females, knowing what they want
+and taking it, asking no leave from anybody,
+doing things and enjoying life&mdash;Freewomen!</p>
+<p><a name="top" id="top"></a><a href="#CONTENTS">top</a></p>
+
+
+<div class='tnote'>
+<h3>Transcriber's Notes</h3>
+<p>Obvious punctuation errors have been repaired.</p>
+<p>On p. 36: sucessful changed to successful (has been successful).</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Women as World Builders, by Floyd Dell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Women as World Builders
+       Studies in Modern Feminism
+
+Author: Floyd Dell
+
+Release Date: August 30, 2010 [EBook #33584]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN AS WORLD BUILDERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eleni, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
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+
+
+    WOMEN AS WORLD BUILDERS
+
+
+
+
+    Women
+    as
+    World Builders
+
+
+    Studies in
+    Modern Feminism
+
+    BY
+    FLOYD DELL
+
+    [Illustration]
+
+    CHICAGO
+    FORBES AND COMPANY
+    1913
+
+
+
+
+    COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
+    FORBES AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    CHAPTER                                    PAGE
+
+    I The Feminist Movement                      7
+
+    II Charlotte Perkins Gilman                 22
+
+    III Emmeline Pankhurst and Jane Addams      30
+
+    IV Olive Schreiner and Isadora Duncan       41
+
+    V Beatrice Webb and Emma Goldman            52
+
+    VI Margaret Dreier Robins                   65
+
+    VII Ellen Key                               76
+
+    VIII Freewomen and Dora Marsden             90
+
+
+
+
+Women as World Builders
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT
+
+
+The feminist movement can be dealt with in two ways: it can be treated
+as a sociological abstraction, and discussed at length in heavy
+monographs; or it can be taken as the sum of the action of a lot of
+women, and taken account of in the lives of individual women. The latter
+way would be called "journalistic," had not the late William James used
+it in his "Varieties of Religious Experience." It is a method which
+preserves the individual flavor, the personal tone and color, which,
+after all, are the life of any movement. It is, therefore, the method I
+have chosen for this book.
+
+The ten women whom I have chosen are representative: they give the
+quality of the woman's movement of today. Charlotte Perkins Gilman--Jane
+Addams--Emmeline Pankhurst--Olive Schreiner--Isadora Duncan--Beatrice
+Webb--Emma Goldman--Margaret Dreier Robins--Ellen Key: surely in these
+women,[see also the chapter "Freewomen and Dora Marsden."] if anywhere,
+is to be found the soul of modern feminism!
+
+One may inquire why certain other names are not included. There is
+Maria Montessori, for instance. Her ideas on the education of children
+are of the utmost importance, and their difference from those of Froebel
+is another illustration of the difference between the practical minds of
+women and the idealistic minds of men. But Madame Montessori's relation
+to the feminist movement is, after all, ancillary. A tremendous lot
+remains to be done in the way of cooperation for the management of
+households and the education of children before women who are wives and
+mothers will be set free to take their part in the work of the outside
+world. But it is the setting of mothers free, and not the specific kind
+of education which their children are to receive, which is of interest
+to us here.
+
+Again, one may inquire why, since I have not blinked the fact that the
+feminist movement is making for a revolution of values in sex--why I
+have not included any woman who has distinguished herself by defying
+antiquated conventions which are supposed to rule the relations of the
+sexes. This requires a serious answer. The adjustment of one's social
+and personal relations, so far as may be, to accord with one's own
+convictions--that is not feminism, in my opinion: it is only common
+sense. The attempt to discover how far social laws and traditions must
+be changed to accord with the new position of women in society--that is
+a different thing, and I have dealt with it in the paper on Ellen Key.
+
+Another reason is my belief that it is with woman as producer that we
+are concerned in a study of feminism, rather than with woman as lover.
+The woman who finds her work will find her love--and I do not doubt will
+cherish it bravely. But the woman who sets her love above everything
+else I would gently dismiss from our present consideration as belonging
+to the courtesan type.
+
+It is not very well understood what the courtesan really is, and so I
+pause to describe her briefly. It is not necessary to transgress certain
+moral customs to be a courtesan; on the other hand, the term may
+accurately be applied to women of irreproachable morals. There are some
+women who find their destiny in the bearing and rearing of children,
+others who demand independent work like men, and still others who make a
+career of charming, stimulating, and comforting men. These types, of
+course, merge and combine; and then there is that vast class of women
+who belong to none of these types--who are not good for anything!
+
+The first of these types may be called the mother type, the second the
+worker type, and the third--the kind of women which is not drawn either
+to motherhood or to work, but which is greatly attracted to men and
+which possesses special qualities of sympathy, stimulus, and charm, and
+is content with the more or less disinterested exercise of these
+qualities--this may without prejudice be called the courtesan type. It
+will be seen that the courtesan qualities may find play as well within
+legal marriage as without, and that the transgression of certain moral
+customs is only incidental to the type. Where circumstances encourage
+it, and where the moral tradition is weakened by experience or
+temperament, the moral customs will be transgressed: but it is the human
+qualities of companionship, and not the economic basis of that
+companionship, which is the essential thing.
+
+When a girl with such qualities marries, and she usually marries, much
+depends upon the character of her husband. If her husband appreciates
+her, if he does not expect her to give up her career of charming
+straightway, and restrict herself to cooking, sewing, and the incubating
+of babies; and, furthermore, if he does not baffle those qualities in
+his wife by sheer failure in his own career, then there is a happy and
+virtuous marriage. Otherwise, there is separation or divorce, and the
+woman sometimes becomes the companion of another man without the
+sanction of law. But she has been, it will be perceived, a courtesan all
+along. And while I do not wish to seem to deprecate her comfortable
+qualities, she does not come in the scope of this inquiry.
+
+But there is another figure which I wish I had been able to include.
+Not wishing to involve my publisher in a libel suit, I refrain. She is
+the young woman of the leisure class, whose actions, as represented to
+us in the yellow journals, shock or divert us, according to our
+temperaments. I confess to having the greatest sympathy for her, and in
+her endeavor to create a livelier, a more hilarious and human morale,
+she is doing, I feel, a real service to the cause of women. Our American
+pseudo-aristocracy is capable to teach us, despite its fantastic
+excesses, how to play. And emancipation from middle-class standards of
+taste, morality, and intellect is, so far as it goes, a good thing. "Too
+many cocktails," a lady averred to me the other day, "is better than
+smugness; risque conversation far better than none at all." And that
+celebrated "public-be-damned" attitude of the pseudo-aristocracy is a
+great moral improvement over the cowardly, hysterical fear of the
+neighbors which prevails in the middle class.
+
+But, if I sympathize with the "hell raising" tendency--no other phrase
+describes it--of the young woman of the leisure class, I have more pity
+than sympathy for the one who is trying to realize the ideal of the
+"salon." For she must, after sad experience and bitter disillusionment,
+be content with the tawdry activities which, relieved by the orgiastic
+outbreaks alluded to above, constitute social life in America.
+
+The establishment of a salon is, in itself, a healthful ideal. If
+civilization were destroyed, and rebuilt on any plan, the tradition of
+the salon would be a good starting point for the creation of a medium of
+satisfying social intercourse. Social intercourse we must have, or the
+best of us lapse into boorishness. The ego only properly functions in
+contact with other and various egos. So that, in any case, we should
+have to have something in the nature of our contemporary "society."
+All the more do we need "society" at present, since those ancient
+institutions, the church and the cafe, have almost entirely lost the
+character of real social centers.
+
+Recognizing this need, and supposing the best intentions in the world,
+what can people do at present in the creation of a "society" which shall
+be useful to the community instead of a laughing stock for the
+intelligent?
+
+That is a fair question. Many an ambitious and idealistic young American
+matron has tried to solve it. She has found that the materials were a
+little scarce--the people who could talk brilliantly are very rare. But
+brilliancy is always a miracle, and it can be dispensed with. The real
+trouble lies elsewhere.
+
+The fact is that in our present industrial system the need for social
+life is in inverse ratio to the opportunity for it. The people who need
+social intercourse are those who do hard work. The people who have most
+money and leisure, the most opportunity for social life, are those who
+have too much of it, anyway. Moreover--and this is an important
+point--no one profits less by leisure and money than those who have a
+great deal of it. Consequently, the basis of "society" today is a class
+of people naturally and inevitably inferior. It is this class which
+dominates "society," which gives the tone, and which sets the standard.
+So long, then, as "society" is dominated by inferiors, intelligent men
+and women will not be inclined to waste what time they have for social
+intercourse in such stupid activities as those that "society" can
+furnish. They will flock by themselves, and if they become undemocratic
+and unsocial as a result, that will appear to them the lesser evil. So
+that, however catholic our standards, the saloniere, as a bounden
+failure, has no place in this transcript of feminism.
+
+One thing will be observed with regard to these following
+papers--though they are imbued with an intense interest in women, they
+are devoid of the spirit of Romance. I mean that attitude toward woman
+which accepts her sex as a miraculous justification for her existence,
+the belief that being a woman is a virtue in itself, apart from the
+possession of other qualities: in short, woman-worship. The reverence
+for woman as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of her capacities
+as friend or leader or servant--that is Romance. It is an attitude
+which, discovered in the Middle Ages, has added a new glamour to
+existence. To woman as a superior being, a divinity, one may look for
+inspiration--and receive it. For those who cannot be fired by an
+abstract idea, she gives to imagination "some pure light in human form
+to fix it." She is the sustenance of hungry souls. Believe in her and
+you shall be saved--so runs the gospel of Petrarch, of Dante, of
+Browning, of George Meredith.
+
+So runs not mine. I have hearkened to the voice of modern science, which
+tells me that woman is an inferior being, with a weak body, a stunted
+mind, poor in creative power, poor in imagination, poor in critical
+capacity--a being who does not know how to work, nor how to talk, nor
+how to play! I hope no one will imagine that I am making these charges
+up maliciously out of my own head: such a notion would indicate that a
+century of pamphleteering on the woman question had made no impression
+on a mind saturated in the ideology of popular fiction.
+
+But--I have hearkened even more eagerly to the voice of sociology,
+which tells me of woman's wonderful possibilities. It is with these
+possibilities that this book is, in the main, concerned.
+
+But first the explanation of why I, a man, write these articles on
+feminism. It involves the betrayal of a secret: the secret, that is, of
+the apparent indifference or even hostility of men toward the woman's
+movement. The fact is, as has been bitterly recited by the rebellious
+leaders of their sex, that women have always been what man wanted them
+to be--have changed to suit his changing ideals. The fact is,
+furthermore, that the woman's movement of today is but another example
+of that readiness of women to adapt themselves to a masculine demand.
+
+Men are tired of subservient women; or, to speak more exactly, of the
+seemingly subservient woman who effects her will by stealth--the pretty
+slave with all the slave's subtlety and cleverness. So long as it was
+possible for men to imagine themselves masters, they were satisfied. But
+when they found out that they were dupes, they wanted a change. If only
+for self-protection, they desired to find in woman a comrade and an
+equal. In reality they desired it because it promised to be more fun.
+
+So that we have as the motive behind the rebellion of women an obscure
+rebellion of men. Why, then, have men appeared hostile to the woman's
+rebellion? Because what men desire are real individuals who have
+achieved their own freedom. It will not do to pluck freedom like a
+flower and give it to the lady with a polite bow. She must fight for it.
+
+We are, to tell the truth, a little afraid that unless the struggle is
+one which will call upon all her powers, which will try her to the
+utmost, she will fall short of becoming that self-sufficient, able,
+broadly imaginative and healthy-minded creature upon whom we have set
+our masculine desire.
+
+It is, then, as a phase of the great human renaissance inaugurated by
+men that the woman's movement deserves to be considered.
+
+And what more fitting than that a man should sit in judgment upon the
+contemporary aspects of that movement, weighing out approval or
+disapproval! Such criticism is not a masculine impertinence but
+a masculine right, a right properly pertaining to those who are
+responsible for the movement, and whose demands it must ultimately fulfill.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
+
+
+Of the women who represent and carry on this many-sided movement today,
+the first to be considered from this masculine viewpoint should, I
+think, be Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For she is, to a superficial view,
+the most intransigent feminist of them all, the one most exclusively
+concerned with the improvement of the lot of woman, the least likely to
+compromise at the instance of man, child, church, state, or devil.
+
+Mrs. Gilman is the author of "Women and Economics" and several other
+books of theory, "What Diantha Did" and several other books of fiction;
+she is the editor and publisher of a remarkable journal, The Forerunner,
+the whole varied contents of which is written by herself; she has a
+couple of plays to her credit, and she has published a book of poems.
+If in spite of all this publicity it is still possible to misunderstand the
+attitude of Mrs. Gilman, I can only suppose it to be because her poetry
+is less well known than her prose. For in this book of verse, "In This
+Our World," Mrs. Gilman has so completely justified herself that no man
+need ever be afraid of her--nor any woman who, having a lingering
+tenderness for the other sex, would object to living in a beehive world,
+full of raging efficient females, with the males relegated to the
+position of drones.
+
+Of course, I do but jest when I speak of this fear; but there is, to
+the ordinary male, something curiously objectionable at the first glance
+in Mrs. Gilman's arguments, whether they are for cooeperative kitchens or
+for the labor of women outside the home. And the reason for that
+objection lies precisely in the fact that her plans seem to be made in a
+complete forgetfulness of him and his interests. It all has the air of a
+feminine plot. The cooeperative kitchens, and the labor by which women's
+economic independence is to be achieved, seem the means to an end.
+
+And so they are. But the end, as revealed in Mrs. Gilman's poems, is
+that one which all intelligent men must desire. I do not know whether or
+not the more elaborate cooeperative schemes of Mrs. Gilman are practical;
+and I fancy that she rather exaggerates the possibilities of independent
+work for women who have or intend to have children. But the spirit
+behind these plans is one which cannot but be in the greatest degree
+stimulating and beneficent in its effect upon her sex.
+
+For Mrs. Gilman is, first of all, a poet, an idealist. She is a lover
+of life. She rejoices in beauty and daring and achievement, in all the
+fine and splendid things of the world. She does not merely disapprove of
+the contemporary "home" as wasteful and inefficient--she hates it
+because it vulgarizes life. In this "home," this private food-preparing
+and baby-rearing establishment, she sees a machine which breaks down all
+that is good and noble in women, which degrades and pettifies them. The
+contrast between the instinctive ideals of young women and the sordid
+realities into which housekeeping plunges them is to her intolerable.
+And in the best satirical verses of modern times she ridicules these
+unnecessary shames. In one spirited piece she points out that the
+soap-vat, the pickle-tub, even the loom and wheel, have lost their
+sanctity, have been banished to shops and factories:
+
+    But bow ye down to the Holy Stove,
+      The Altar of the Home!
+
+The real feeling of Mrs. Gilman is revealed in these lines, which voice,
+indeed, the angry mood of many an outraged housewife who finds herself
+the serf of a contraption of cast-iron:
+
+    ... We toil to keep the altar crowned
+      With dishes new and nice,
+    And Art and Love, and Time and Truth,
+    We offer up, with Health and Youth
+      In daily sacrifice.
+
+Mrs. Gilman is not under the illusion that the conditions of work
+outside the home are perfect; she is, indeed, a socialist, and as such
+is engaged in the great task of revolutionizing the basis of modern
+industry. But she has looked into women's souls, and turned away in
+disgust at the likeness of a dirty kitchen which those souls present.
+
+Into these lives corrupted by the influences of the "home" nothing can
+come unspoiled--nothing can enter in its original stature and beauty.
+She says:
+
+    Birth comes. Birth--
+    The breathing re-creation of the earth!
+    All earth, all sky, all God, life's sweet deep whole,
+    Newborn again to each new soul!
+    "Oh, are you? What a shame! Too bad, my dear!
+    How well you stand it, too! It's very queer
+    The dreadful trials women have to carry;
+    But you can't always help it when you marry.
+    Oh, what a sweet layette! What lovely socks!
+    What an exquisite puff and powder box!
+    Who is your doctor? Yes, his skill's immense--
+    But it's a dreadful danger and expense!"
+
+And so with love, and death, and work--all are smutted and debased. And
+her revolt is a revolt against that which smuts and debases
+them--against those artificial channels which break up the strong, pure
+stream of woman's energy into a thousand little stagnant canals, covered
+with spiritual pond-scum.
+
+It is a part of her idealism to conceive life in terms of war. So it is
+that she scorns compromise, for in war compromise is treason. And so it
+is that she has heart for the long, slow marshaling of forces, and the
+dingy details of the commissariat--for these things are necessary if the
+cry of victory is ever to ring out over the battlefield. Some of her
+phrases have so militant an air that they seem to have been born among
+the captains and the shouting. They make us ashamed of our vicious
+civilian comfort.
+
+Mrs. Gilman's attitude toward the bearing and rearing of children is
+easy to misapprehend. She does seem to relegate these things to the
+background of women's lives. She does deny to these things a tremendous
+importance. Why, she asks, is it so important that women should bear and
+rear children to live lives as empty and poor as their own? Surely, she
+says, it is more important to make life something worth giving to
+children! No, she insists, it is not sufficient to be a mother: an
+oyster can be a mother. It is necessary that a woman should be a person
+as well as a mother. She must know and do.
+
+And as for the ideal of love which is founded on masculine privilege,
+she satirizes it very effectively in some verses entitled "Wedded
+Bliss":
+
+    "O come and be my mate!" said the Eagle to the Hen;
+        "I love to soar, but then
+        I want my mate to rest
+        Forever in the nest!"
+        Said the Hen, "I cannot fly
+        I have no wish to try,
+    But I joy to see my mate careering through the sky!"
+    They wed, and cried, "Ah, this is Love, my own!"
+    And the Hen sat, the Eagle soared, alone.
+
+Woman, in Mrs. Gilman's view, must not be content with Hendom: the sky
+is her province, too. Of all base domesticity, all degrading love, she
+is the enemy. She gives her approval only to that work which has in it
+something high and free, and that love which is the dalliance of the
+eagles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+EMMELINE PANKHURST AND JANE ADDAMS
+
+
+A few months ago it was rather the fashion to reply to some political
+verses by Mr. Kipling which assumed to show that women should not be
+given the ballot, and which had as their refrain:
+
+    The female of the species is more deadly than the male!
+
+But it seems that no one pointed out that this fact, even in the limited
+sense in which it is a fact in the human species, is an argument for
+giving women the vote.
+
+For if women are, as Mr. Kipling says, lacking in a sense of abstract
+justice, in patience, in the spirit of compromise; if they are violent
+and unscrupulous in gaining an end upon which they have set their
+hearts, then by all means they should be rendered comparatively harmless
+by being given the ballot. For it is characteristic of a republic that
+its political machinery, created in order to carry out the will of the
+people, comes to respond with difficulty to that will, while being
+perfectly susceptible to other influences. Republican government, when
+not modified by drastic democratic devices, is an expensive, cumbrous,
+and highly inefficient method of carrying out the popular will; and
+casting a vote is like nothing so much as casting bread upon the waters.
+It shall return--after many days. By voting, by exercising an
+infinitesimal pressure on our complex, slow-moving political mechanism,
+one cannot--it is a sad fact--do much good; but one cannot--and it
+should encourage the pessimistic Mr. Kipling--one cannot, even though a
+woman, do much harm.
+
+This is not, however, a disquisition on woman suffrage. There is only
+one argument for woman suffrage: women want it; there are no arguments
+against it. But one may profitably inquire, What will be the effect of
+the emergence of women into politics upon politics itself? And one may
+hope to find an answer in the temperament and career of certain
+representative leaders of the woman's movement. Let us accordingly turn
+to the accredited leader of the English "votes for women" movement, and
+to the woman in the American movement who is best known to the public.
+
+That Miss Jane Addams has become known chiefly through other activities
+does not matter here. It is temperament and career in which we are
+immediately interested. What is perhaps the most outstanding fact in the
+temperament of Miss Addams is revealed only indirectly in her
+autobiography: it may be called the passion of conciliation.
+
+Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst has by her actions written herself down for a
+fighter. She has but recently been released from Holloway jail, where
+she was serving a term of imprisonment for "conspiracy and violence." In
+a book by H. G. Wells, which contains a very bitter attack on the
+woman's suffrage movement (I refer to "Ann Veronica"), she is described
+as "implacable"; and I believe that it is she to whom Mr. Wells refers
+as being "as incapable of argument as a steam roller broken loose." The
+same things might have been said of Sherman on his dreadful march to the
+sea. These phrases, malicious as they are, contain what I am inclined to
+accept as an accurate description of Mrs. Pankhurst's temperament.
+
+No one would call Mrs. Pankhurst a conciliator. And no one would call
+Miss Addams "implacable." It is not intended to suggest that Miss Addams
+is one of those inveterate compromisers who prefer a bad peace to a good
+war. But she has the gift of imaginative sympathy; and it is impossible
+for her to have toward either party in a conflict the cold hostility
+which each party has for the other. She sees both sides; and even though
+one side is the wrong side, she cannot help seeing why its partisans
+believe in it.
+
+"If the under dog were always right," Miss Addams has said, "one might
+quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but
+obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong,
+but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly
+reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession
+of prejudice to the other almost insuperable difficulties in
+understanding him."
+
+Miss Addams has taken in good faith the social settlement ideal--"to
+span the gulf between the rich and the poor, or between those who have
+had cultural opportunities and those who have not, by the process of
+neighborliness." In her writings, as in her work, there is never sounded
+the note of defiance. Even in defense of the social settlement and its
+methods of conciliation (which have been venomously assailed by the
+newspapers during Chicago's fits of temporary insanity, as in the
+Averbuch case), Miss Addams has not become militant. She has never
+ceased to be serenely reasonable.
+
+But when one comes to ask how powerful Miss Addams' example has been,
+one is forced to admit that it has been limited. There are two other
+settlement houses in Chicago which are managed in the spirit of Hull
+House. But all the others--and there are about forty settlement houses
+in the city--have discarded almost openly the principle of conciliation.
+They are efficient, or religious, or something else, but they are afraid
+of being too sympathetic with the working class. They do not, for
+instance, permit labor unions to meet in their halls. The splendid
+social idealism of the '80s, of which Miss Addams is representative, has
+disappeared, leaving two sides angry and hostile and with none but Miss
+Addams believing in the possibility of finding any common ground for
+action. One event after another from the Pullman strike to the Averbuch
+case has brought this hostility out into the open, with Miss Addams
+occupying neutral ground, and left high and dry upon it.
+
+It is the fact that Miss Addams has not been able to imbue the movement
+in which she is a leader with her own spirit. Her career has been
+successful only so far as individual genius could make it successful. If
+one compares her achievement to that of Mrs. Pankhurst, one sees that
+the latter is startingly social in its nature.
+
+For Mrs. Pankhurst has called upon women to be like herself, to display
+her own Amazonian qualities. She called upon shop girls and college
+students and wives and old women to make physical assaults on cabinet
+ministers, to raid parliament and fight with policemen, to destroy
+property and go to prison, to endure almost every indignity from the
+mobs and from their jailers, to suffer in health and perhaps to die,
+exactly as soldiers suffer and die in a campaign.
+
+And they did. They answered her call by the thousands. They have fought
+and suffered, and some of them have died. If this had been the result of
+individual genius in Mrs. Pankhurst, transforming peaceful girls into
+fighters out of hand, she would be the most extraordinary person of the
+age. But it is impossible to believe that all this militancy was created
+out of the void. It was simply awakened where it lay sleeping in these
+women's hearts.
+
+Mrs. Pankhurst has performed no miracle. She has only shown to us the
+truth which we have blindly refused to see. She has had the insight to
+recognize in women generally the same fighting spirit which she found in
+herself, and the courage to draw upon it. She has enabled us to see what
+women really are like, just as Miss Addams has by her magnificent
+anomalies shown us what women are not like.
+
+Can anyone doubt this? Can anyone, seeing the lone eminence of Miss
+Addams, assert that imaginative sympathy, patience, and the spirit of
+conciliation are the ordinary traits of women? Can anyone, seeing the
+battle frenzy which Mrs. Pankhurst has evoked with a signal in thousands
+of ordinary Englishwomen, deny that women have a fighting soul?
+
+And can anyone doubt the effect which the emergence of women into
+politics will have, eventually, on politics? Eventually, for in spite of
+their boasted independence the decorous example of men will rule them at
+first. But when they have become used to politics--well, we shall find
+that we have harnessed an unruly Niagara!
+
+In women as voters we shall have an element impatient of restraint,
+straining at the rules of procedure, cynical of excuses for inaction;
+not always by any means on the side of progress; making every mistake
+possible to ignorance and self-conceit; but transforming our politics
+from a vicious end to an efficient means--from a cancer into an organ.
+
+This, with but little doubt, is the historic mission of women. They
+will not escape a certain taming by politics. But that they should be
+permanently tamed I find impossible to believe. Rather they will subdue
+it to their purposes, remold it nearer to their hearts' desire, change
+it as men would never dream of changing it, wreck it savagely in the
+face of our masculine protest and merrily rebuild it anew in the face of
+our despair. With their aid we may at last achieve what we seem to be
+unable to achieve unaided--a democracy.
+
+Meanwhile let us understand this suffrage movement. Let us understand
+that we have in militancy rather than in conciliation, in action rather
+than in wisdom, the keynote of woman in politics. And we males, who have
+so long played in our politics at innocent games of war, we shall have
+an opportunity to fight in earnest at the side of the Valkyrs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+OLIVE SCHREINER AND ISADORA DUNCAN
+
+
+I hope that no one will see in the conjuncture of these names a mere
+wanton fantasy, or a mere sensational contrast. To me there is something
+extraordinarily appropriate in that conjuncture, inasmuch as the work of
+Olive Schreiner and the work of Isadora Duncan supplement each other.
+
+It is the drawback of the woman's movement that in any one of its
+aspects (heightened and colored as such an aspect often is by the
+violence of propaganda) it may appear too fiercely narrow. That women
+should make so much fuss about getting the vote, or that they should so
+excite themselves over the prospect of working for wages, will appear
+incomprehensible to many people who have a proper regard for art, for
+literature, and for the graces of social intercourse. It is only when
+the woman's movement is seen broadly, in a variety of its aspects, that
+there comes the realization that here is a cause in which every fine
+aspiration has a place, a cause from which sincere lovers of truth and
+beauty have nothing really to fear.
+
+Mrs. Olive Schreiner stands, by virtue of her latest book, "Women and
+Labor," as an exponent of the doctrine that would send women into every
+field of economic activity; or, rather, the doctrine that finds in the
+forces which are driving them there a savior of her sex from the
+degradation of parasitism. In behalf of this doctrine she has expended
+all that eloquence and passion which have made her one of the figures in
+modern literature and a spokesman for all women who have not learned to
+speak that hieratic language which is heard, as the inexpressive speech
+of daily life is not heard, across space and time.
+
+Miss Isadora Duncan stands as representative of the renaissance in
+dancing. She has brought back to us the antique beauty of an art of
+which we have had only relics and memento in classic sculpture and
+decoration. She has made us despise the frigid artifice of the ballet,
+and taught us that in the natural movements of the body are contained
+the highest possibilities of choregraphic beauty. It has been to many of
+us one of the finest experiences of our lives to see, for the first
+time, the marble maiden of the Grecian urn come to life in her, and all
+the leaf-fringed legends of Arcady drift before our enamored eyes. She
+has touched our lives with the magic of immemorial loveliness.
+
+But to class Olive Schreiner as a sociologist and Isadora Duncan as a
+dancer, to divorce them by any such categories, is to do them both an
+injustice. For they are sister workers in the woman's movement. They
+have each shown the way to a new freedom of the body and the soul.
+
+The woman's movement is a product of the evolutionary science of the
+nineteenth century. Women's rebellions there have been before, utopian
+visions there have been, which have contributed no little to the modern
+movement by the force of their tradition and ever-living spirit. No Joan
+of Arc has led men to victory, no Lady Godiva has sacrificed her
+modesty--nay, even, no courtesan has taught a feeble king how to rule
+his country--without feeding the flame of feminine aspiration. But it is
+modern science which, by giving us a new view of the body, its
+functions, its needs, its claim upon the world, has laid the basis for a
+successful feminist movement. When the true history of this movement is
+written it will contain more about Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman,
+perhaps, than about Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin. In any
+case, it is to the body that one looks for the Magna Charta of feminism.
+
+The eye--that is to say--is guarantor for the safety of art in a future
+regime under the dominance of women; and the ear for poetry. These have
+their functions and their needs, and the woman of the future will not
+deny them.
+
+It is the hand that Olive Schreiner would emancipate from idleness. She
+knows the significance of the hand in human history. It was by virtue of
+the hand that we, and not some other creature, gained lordship over the
+earth. It was the hand (marvelous instrument, coaxing out of the
+directing will an ever-increasing subtlety) that made possible the human
+brain, and all the vistas of reason and imagination by which our little
+lives gain their peculiar grandeur.
+
+And this hand, if it be a woman's in the present day, is doomed to the
+smallest activities. "Our spinning wheels are all broken ...Our hoes and
+grindstones passed from us long ago.... Year by year, day by day, there
+is a silently working but determined tendency for the sphere of women's
+domestic labors to contract itself." Even the training of her child is
+taken away from the mother by the "mighty and inexorable demands of
+modern civilization." That condition is to her intolerable; and it is on
+behalf of women's empty hands that she makes her demand: "that, in that
+strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman,
+where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes and
+relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of
+honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of
+the Children of Woman."
+
+And what of Miss Duncan--what is her part in the woman's movement? In
+her book on "The Dance" she tells a story: "A woman once asked me why I
+dance with bare feet, and I replied, 'Madam, I believe in the religion
+of the beauty of the human foot'; and the lady replied, 'But I do not,'
+and I said: 'Yet you must, Madam, for the expression and intelligence of
+the human foot is one of the greatest triumphs of the evolution of man.'
+'But,' said the lady, 'I do not believe in the evolution of man.' At
+this said I, 'My task is at an end. I refer you to my most revered
+teachers, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Ernst Haeckel--' 'But,' said the
+lady, 'I do not believe in Darwin and Haeckel--' At this point I could
+think of nothing more to say. So you see that, to convince people, I am
+of little value and ought not to speak."
+
+But rather to dance! Yet it is good to find so explicit a statement of
+the idea which she nobly expresses in her dancing. For, as the hand is
+the symbol of that constructive exertion of the body which we call work,
+so is the foot the symbol of that diffusive exertion of the body which
+we call play. Isadora Duncan would emancipate the one as Olive Schreiner
+would emancipate the other--to new activities and new delights.
+
+And if such work is not a thing for itself only, but a gateway to a new
+world, so is such play not a thing for itself only. "It is not only a
+question of true art," writes Miss Duncan, "it is a question of race, of
+the development of the female sex to beauty and health, of the return to
+the original strength and the natural movements of woman's body. It is a
+question of the development of perfect mothers and the birth of healthy
+and beautiful children." Here we have an inspiriting expression of the
+idea which through the poems of Walt Whitman and the writings of various
+moderns, has renovated the modern soul and made us see, without any
+obscene blurring by Puritan spectacles, the goodness of the whole body.
+This is as much a part of the woman's movement as the demand for a vote
+(or, rather, it is more central and essential a part); and only by
+realizing this is it possible to understand that movement.
+
+The body is no longer to be separated in the thought of women from the
+soul: "The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have
+grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul
+will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not belong to
+a nation, but to all humanity. She will dance, not in the form of nymph,
+nor fairy, nor coquette, but in the form of woman in its greatest and
+purest expression. She will realize the mission of woman's body and the
+holiness of all its parts. She will dance the changing life of nature,
+showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of
+her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the
+message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall
+dance the freedom of woman.
+
+"She will help womankind to a new knowledge of the possible strength and
+beauty of their bodies, and the relation of their bodies to the earth
+nature and to the children of the future. She will dance, the body
+emerging again from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, emerging not
+in the nudity of primitive man, but in a new nakedness, no longer at war
+with spirituality and intelligence, but joining itself forever with this
+intelligence in a glorious harmony.
+
+"Oh, she is coming, the dancer of the future; the free spirit, who will
+inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet
+been; more beautiful than the Egyptian, than the Greek, the early
+Italian, than all women of past centuries--the highest intelligence in
+the freest body!"
+
+If the woman's movement means anything, it means that women are
+demanding everything. They will not exchange one place for another, nor
+give up one right to pay for another, but they will achieve all rights
+to which their bodies and brains give them an implicit title. They will
+have a larger political life, a larger motherhood, a larger social
+service, a larger love, and they will reconstruct or destroy
+institutions to that end as it becomes necessary. They will not be
+content with any concession or any triumph until they have conquered all
+experience.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+BEATRICE WEBB AND EMMA GOLDMAN
+
+
+The careers of these two women serve admirably to exhibit the woman's
+movement in still another aspect, and to throw light upon the essential
+nature of woman's character. These careers stand in plain contrast.
+Beatrice Webb has compiled statistics, and Emma Goldman has preached the
+gospel of freedom. It remains to be shown which is the better and the
+more characteristically feminine gift to the world.
+
+Beatrice Potter was the daughter of a Canadian railway president. Born
+in 1858, she grew up in a time when revolutionary movements were in the
+making. She was a pupil of Herbert Spencer, and it was perhaps from him
+that she learned so to respect her natural interest in facts that the
+brilliancy of no generalization could lure her into forgetting them. At
+all events, she was captured permanently by the magic of facts. She
+studied working-class life in Lancashire and East London at first hand,
+and in 1885 joined Charles Booth in his investigations of English social
+conditions. These investigations (which in my amateur ignorance I always
+confused with those of General Booth of the Salvation Army!) were
+published in four large volumes entitled "Life and Labor of the People."
+Miss Potter's special contributions were articles on the docks, the
+tailoring trade, and the Jewish community. Later she published a book on
+"The Cooeperative Movement in Great Britain." Then, in 1892, she married
+Sidney Webb, a man extraordinarily of her own sort, and became
+confirmed, if such a thing were necessary, in her statistical habit of
+mind.
+
+Meanwhile, in 1883, the Fabian Society had been founded. But first a
+word about statistics. "Statistics" does not mean a long list of
+figures. It means the spreading of knowledge of facts. Statistics may be
+called the dogma that knowledge is dynamic--that it is somehow operative
+in bringing about that great change which all intelligent people desire
+(and which the Fabians conceived as Socialism). The Fabian Society was
+founded on the dogma of statistics as on a rock. The Fabians did not
+start a newspaper, nor create a new political party, nor organize public
+meetings; but they wrote to the newspapers already in existence, ran for
+office on party tickets already in the field, and made speeches to other
+organizations. That is to say, they went about like the cuckoo, laying
+their statistical eggs in other people's nests and expecting to see them
+hatch into enlightened public opinion and progressive legislation.
+
+Some of them hatched and some of them didn't. The point is that we have
+in this section of Beatrice Webb's career something typical of herself.
+She has gone on, serving on government commissions, writing (with her
+husband) the history of Trades Unionism, patiently collecting statistics
+and getting them printed in black ink on white paper, making detailed
+plans for the abolition of poverty, and always concerning herself with
+the homely fact.
+
+At the time that Beatrice Potter joined Mr. Booth in his social
+investigations there was a 16-year-old Jewish girl living in the
+German-Russian province of Kurland. A year later, in 1886, this girl,
+Emma Goldman by name, came to America, to escape the inevitable
+persecutions attending on any lover of liberty in Russia. She had been
+one of those who had gone "to the people"; and it was as a working girl
+that she came to America.
+
+She had, that is to say, the heightened sensibilities, the keen
+sympathies, of the middle class idealist, and the direct contact with
+the harsh realities of our social and industrial conditions which is the
+lot of the worker. Her first experiences in America disabused her of the
+traditional belief that America was a refuge where the oppressed of all
+lands were welcome. The treatment of immigrants aboard ship, the
+humiliating brutalities of the officials at Castle Garden, and the
+insolent tyranny of the New York police convinced her that she had
+simply come from one oppressed land to another.
+
+She went to work in a clothing factory, her wages being $2.50 a week.
+She had ample opportunities to see the degradations of our economic
+system, especially as it affects women. So it was not strange that she
+should be drawn into the American labor movement, which was then, with
+the Knights of Labor, the eight-hour agitation, and the propaganda of
+the Socialists and the Anarchists, at its height. She became acquainted
+with various radicals, read pamphlets and books, and heard speeches. She
+was especially influenced by the eloquent writings of Johann Most in his
+journal Freiheit.
+
+So little is known, and so much absurd nonsense is believed, about the
+Anarchists, that it is necessary to state dogmatically a few facts. If
+these facts seem odd, the reader is respectfully urged to verify them.
+One fact is that secret organizations of Anarchists plotting a violent
+overthrow of the government do not exist, and never have existed, save
+in the writings of Johann Most and in the imagination of the police: the
+whole spirit of Anarchism is opposed to such organizations. Another fact
+is that Anarchists do not believe in violence of any kind, or in any
+exercise of force; when they commit violence it is not as Anarchists,
+but as outraged human beings. They believe that violent reprisals are
+bound to be provoked among workingmen by the tyrannies to which they are
+subjected; but they abjure alike the bomb and the policeman's club.
+
+There was a brief period in which Anarchists, under the influence of
+Johann Most, believed in (even if they did not practice) the use of
+dynamite. But this period was ended, in America, by the hanging of
+several innocent men in Chicago in 1887; which at least served the
+useful purpose of showing radicals that it was a bad plan even to talk
+of dynamite. And this hanging, which was the end of what may be called
+the Anarchist "boom" in this country, was the beginning of Emma
+Goldman's career as a publicist.
+
+Since 1887 the Anarchists have lost influence among workingmen until
+they are today negligible--unless one credits them with Syndicalism--as
+a factor in the labor movement. The Anarchists have, in fact, left the
+industrial field more and more and have entered into other kinds of
+propaganda. They have especially "gone in for kissing games."
+
+And Emma Goldman reflects, in her career, the change in Anarchism. She
+has become simply an advocate of freedom--freedom of every sort. She
+does not advocate violence any more than Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated
+violence. It is, in fact, as an essayist and speaker of the kind, if not
+the quality, of Emerson, Thoreau, or George Francis Train, that she is
+to be considered.
+
+Aside from these activities (and the evading of our overzealous police
+in times of stress) she has worked as a trained nurse and midwife; she
+conducted a kind of radical salon in New York, frequented by such people
+as John Swinton and Benjamin Tucker; she traveled abroad to study social
+conditions; she has become conversant with such modern writings as those
+of Hauptmann, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Zola, and Thomas Hardy. It is stated
+that the "Rev. Mr. Parkhurst, during the Lexow investigation, did his
+utmost to induce her to join the Vigilance Committee in order to fight
+Tammany Hall." She was the manager of Paul Orlenoff and Mme. Nazimova.
+She was a friend of Ernest Crosby. Her library, it is said, would be
+taken for that of a university extension lecturer on literature.
+
+It will thus be seen that Emma Goldman is of a type familiar enough in
+America, and conceded a popular respect. She has a legitimate social
+function--that of holding before our eyes the ideal of freedom. She is
+licensed to taunt us with our moral cowardice, to plant in our souls the
+nettles of remorse at having acquiesced so tamely in the brutal artifice
+of present day society.
+
+I submit the following passage from her writings ("Anarchism and Other
+Essays") as at once showing her difference from other radicals and
+exhibiting the nature of her appeal to her public:
+
+"The misfortune of woman is not that she is unable to do the work of a
+man, but that she is wasting her life force to outdo him, with a
+tradition of centuries which has left her physically incapable of
+keeping pace with him. Oh, I know some have succeeded, but at what cost,
+at what terrific cost! The import is not the kind of work woman does,
+but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage
+or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that
+will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her
+independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting
+herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by
+refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children
+unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State,
+society, the husband, the family, etc.; by making her life simpler, but
+deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance
+of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of
+public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot,
+will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the
+world; a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine
+fire, of life giving; a creator of free men and women."
+
+There is little in this that Ibsen would not have said amen to. But--and
+this is the conclusion to which my chapter draws--Ibsen has said it
+already, and said it more powerfully. Emma Goldman--who (if among women
+anyone) should have for us a message of her own, striking to the
+heart--repeats, in a less effective cadence, what she has learned from
+him.
+
+The work of Beatrice Webb is the prose of revolution. The work of Ibsen
+is its poetry. Beatrice Webb has performed her work--one comes to
+feel--as well as Ibsen has his. And one wonders if, after all, the prose
+is not that which women are best endowed to succeed in.
+
+A book review (written by a woman) which I have at hand contains some
+generalizations which bear on the subject. "This is a woman's book [says
+the reviewer], and a book which could only have been written by a woman,
+though it is singularly devoid of most of the qualities which are
+usually recognized as feminine. For romance and sentiment do not
+properly lie in the woman's domain. She deals, when she is herself, with
+the material facts of the life she knows. Her talent is to exhibit them
+in the remorseless light of reality and shorn of all the glamour of
+idealism. Great and poetical imagination rarely informs her art, but
+within the strictness of its limits it lives by an intense and
+scrupulous sincerity of observation and an uncompromising recognition of
+the logic of existence."
+
+If that is true, shall we not then expect a future more largely
+influenced by women to have more of the hard, matter-of-fact quality,
+the splendid realism characteristic of woman "when she is herself"?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MARGARET DREIER ROBINS
+
+
+The work of Margaret Dreier Robins has been done in the National Women's
+Trade Union League. It might be supposed that the aim of such an
+organization is sufficiently explicit in its title: to get higher wages
+and shorter hours. But I fancy that it would be a truer thing to say
+that its aim is to bring into being that ideal of American womanhood
+which Walt Whitman described:
+
+    They are not one jot less than I am,
+    They are tann'd in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
+    Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
+    They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike,
+      retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
+    They are ultimate in their own right--they are
+      calm, clear, well-possessed of themselves.
+
+When Whitman made this magnificent prophecy for American womanhood the
+Civil War had not been fought and its economic consequences were
+unguessed at. The factory system, which had come into England in the
+last century, bringing with it the most unspeakable exploitation of
+women and children, had hardly gained a foothold in this country. In
+1840, of the seven employments open to women (teaching, needlework,
+keeping boarders, working in cotton mills, in bookbinderies, typesetting
+and household service) only one was representative of the new industrial
+condition which today affects so profoundly the feminine physique. And
+to the daughters of a nation that was still imbued with the pioneer
+spirit, work in cotton mills appealed so little that they undertook it
+only for unusually high pay. Anyone of that period seeing the
+red-cheeked, robust, intelligent, happy girl operatives of Lowell might
+have dismissed his fears of the factory as a sinister influence in the
+development of American womanhood and gone on to dream, with Walt
+Whitman, of a race of "fierce, athletic girls."
+
+But two things happened. With the growing flood of immigration, the
+factories were abandoned more and more to the "foreigners," the
+native-born citizens losing their pride in the excellence of working
+conditions and the character of the operatives. And all the while the
+factory was becoming more and more an integral part of our civilization,
+demanding larger and larger multitudes of girls and women to attend its
+machinery. So that, with the enormous development of industry since the
+Civil War, the factory has become the chief field of feminine endeavor
+in America. In spite of the great opening up of all sorts of work to
+women, in spite of the store, the office, the studio, the professions,
+still the factory remains most important in any consideration of the
+health and strength of women.
+
+If the greatest part of our womankind spends its life in factories, and
+if it further appears that this is no temporary situation, but
+(practically speaking) a permanent one, then it becomes necessary to
+inquire how far the factory is hindering the creation of that ideal
+womanhood which Walt Whitman predicted for us.
+
+As opposed to the old-fashioned method of manufacture in the home (or
+the sweatshop, which is the modern equivalent), the factory often shows
+a gain in light and air, a decrease of effort, an added leisure; while,
+on the other hand, there is a considerable loss of individual freedom
+and an increase in monotony. But child labor, a too long working day,
+bad working conditions, lack of protection from fire, personal
+exploitation by foremen, inhumanly low wages, and all sorts of petty
+injustice, though not essential to the system, are prominent features of
+factory work as it generally exists.
+
+People who consider every factory an Inferno, however, and have only
+pity for its workers, are far from understanding the situation. Here is
+a field of work which is capable of competing successfully with domestic
+service, and even of attracting girls from homes where there exists no
+absolute necessity for women's wages. Yet at its contemporary best, with
+a ten-hour law in operation, efficient factory inspection, decent
+working conditions and a just and humane management, the factory remains
+an institution extremely perilous to the Whitmanic ideal of womanhood.
+
+But there are women who, undaunted by the new conditions brought about
+by a changing economic system, seize upon those very conditions to use
+them as the means to their end: such a woman is Mrs. Robins. Has a new
+world, bounded by factory walls and noisy with the roar of machinery,
+grown up about us, to keep women from their heritage? She will help them
+to use those very walls and that very machinery to achieve their
+destiny, a destiny of which a physical well-being is, as Walt Whitman
+knew it to be, the most certain symbol.
+
+The factory already gives women a certain independence. It may yet give
+them pleasure, the joy of creation. Indeed, it must, when the workers
+require it; and those who are most likely to require it are the women
+workers.
+
+It is well known that with the ultra-development of the machine, the
+subdivision of labor, the regime of piecework, it has become practically
+impossible for the worker to take any artistic pleasure in his product.
+It is not so well known how necessary such pleasure in the product is to
+the physical well-being of women--how utterly disastrous to their
+nervous organization is the monotony and irresponsibility of piecework.
+This method--which men workers have grumbled at, but to which they seem
+to have adjusted themselves--bears its fruits among women in
+neurasthenia, headaches, and the derangement of the organs which are the
+basis of their different nervous constitution. It is sufficiently clear
+to those who have seen the personal reactions of working girls to the
+piecework system, that when women attain, as men in various industries
+have attained, the practical management of the factory, piecework will
+get a setback.
+
+But not merely good conditions, not merely a living wage, not merely a
+ten or an eight hour day--all that self-government in the shop can bring
+is the object of the Women's Trade Union League.
+
+"The chief social gain of the union shop," says Mrs. Robins, "is not
+its generally better wages and shorter hours, but rather the incentive
+it offers for initiative and social leadership, the call it makes,
+through the common industrial relationship and the common hope, upon the
+moral and reasoning faculties, and the sense of fellowship, independence
+and group strength it develops. In every workshop of say thirty girls
+there is undreamed of initiative and capacity for social leadership and
+control--unknown wealth of intellectual and moral resources."
+
+It is, in fact, this form of activity which to many thousands of factory
+girls makes the difference between living and existing, between a
+painful, necessary drudgery and a happy exertion of all their faculties.
+It can give them a more useful education than any school, a more vital
+faith than any church, a more invigorating sense of power than any other
+career open to them.
+
+To do all these things it must be indigenous to working-class soil. No
+benefaction originating in the philanthropic motives of middle-class
+people, no enterprise of patronage, will ever have any such meaning. A
+movement, to have such meaning, must be of the working class, and by the
+working class, as well as for the working class. It must be imbued with
+working-class feeling, and it must subserve working-class ideals.
+
+It is the distinction of Mrs. Robins that she has seen this. She has
+gone to the workers to learn rather than to teach--she has sought to
+unfold the ideals and capacities latent in working girls rather than
+impress upon them the alien ideals and capacities of another class.
+
+"Just"--it is Mrs. Robins that speaks--"as under a despotic church and
+a feudal state the possible power and beauty of the common people was
+denied expression, so under industrial feudalism the intellectual and
+moral powers of the workers are slowly choked to death, with
+incalculable loss to the individual and the race. It is easy to kill; it
+requires a great spirit as well as a great mind to arouse the dormant
+energies, to vitalize them and to make them creative forces for good."
+
+One is reminded of the words of John Galsworthy, addressed to
+workingwomen: "There is beginning to be a little light in the sky;
+whether the sun is ever to break through depends on your constancy, and
+courage, and wisdom. The future is in your hands more than in the hands
+of men; it rests on your virtues and well-being, rather than on the
+virtues and the welfare of men, for it is you who produce and mold the
+Future."
+
+There are 6,000,000 working women in the United States, and half of
+them are girls under 21. One may go out any day in the city streets, at
+morning or noon or evening, and look at a representative hundred of
+them. The factories have not been able to rob them of beauty and
+strength and the charm of femininity, and in that beauty and strength
+and charm there is a world of promise. And that promise already begins
+to be unfolded when to them comes Mrs. Robins with a gospel germane to
+their natures, saying, "Long enough have you dreamed contemptible
+dreams."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+ELLEN KEY
+
+
+In these chapters a sincere attempt has been made not so much to show
+what a few exceptional women have accomplished as to exhibit through a
+few prominent figures the essential nature of women, and to show what
+may be expected from a future in which women will have a larger freedom
+and a larger influence.
+
+It has been pointed out that the peculiar idealism of women is one that
+works itself out through the materials of workaday life, and which seeks
+to break or remake those materials by way of fulfilling that idealism;
+it has been shown that this idealism, as contrasted with the more
+abstract and creative idealism of men, deserves to be called
+practicalism, a practicalism of a noble and beautiful sort which we are
+far from appreciating; and as complementing these forms of activity, the
+play instinct, the instinct of recreation, has been pointed out as the
+parallel to the creative or poetic instinct of men.
+
+Woman as reconstructor of domestic economics, woman as a destructive
+political agent of enormous potency, woman as worker, woman as dancer,
+woman as statistician, woman as organizer of the forces of labor--in
+these it has been the intent to show the real woman of today and of
+tomorrow.
+
+There have been other aspects of her deserving of attention in such a
+series, notably her aspect as mother and as educator. If she has not
+been shown as poet, as artist, as scientist, as talker (for talk is a
+thing quite as important as poetry or science or art), it has not been
+so much because of an actual lack of specific examples of women
+distinguished in these fields as because of the unrepresentative
+character of such examples.
+
+Here, then, is a man's view of modern woman. To complete that view, to
+round off that conception, I now speak of Ellen Key.
+
+Her writings have had a peculiar career in America, one which perhaps
+prevents a clear understanding of their character. On the one hand, they
+have seemed to many to be radically "advanced"; to thousands of
+middle-class women, who have heard vaguely of these new ideas, and who
+have secretly and strongly desired to know more of them, her "Love and
+Marriage" has come as a revolutionary document, the first outspoken word
+of scorn for conventional morality, the first call to them to take their
+part in the breaking of new paths.
+
+On the other hand, it must be remembered that America is the home of
+Mormonism, of the Oneida Community, of the Woodhull and Claflin
+"free-love" movement of the '70s, of "Dianism" and a hundred other
+obscure but pervasive sexual cults--in short, of movements of greater or
+less respectability, capable of giving considerable currency to their
+beliefs. And they have given considerable currency to their beliefs. In
+spite of the dominant tone of Puritanism in American thought, our social
+life has been affected to an appreciable extent by these beliefs.
+
+And these beliefs may be summed up hastily, but, on the whole, justly,
+as materialistic--in the common and unfavorable sense. They have
+converged, from one direction or another, upon the opinion that sex is
+an animal function, no more sacred than any other animal function,
+which, by a ridiculous over-estimation, is made to give rise to
+jealousy, unhappiness, madness, vice, and crime.
+
+It is a fact that the Puritan temperament readily finds this opinion,
+if not the program which accompanies it, acceptable, as one may discover
+in private conversation with respectable Puritans of both sexes. And it
+is more unfortunately true that the present-day rebellion against
+conventional morality in America has found, in Hardy and Shaw and other
+anti-romanticists, a seeming support of this opinion. So that one finds
+in America today (though some people may not know about it) an
+undercurrent of impatient materialism in matters of sex. To become freed
+from the inadequate morality of Puritanism is, for thousands of young
+people, to adopt another morality which is, if more sound in many ways,
+certainly as inadequate as the other.
+
+So that Ellen Key comes into the lives of many in this country as a
+conservative force, holding up a spiritual ideal, the ideal of monogamy,
+and defending it with a breadth of view, a sanity, and a fervor that
+make it something different from the cold institution which these
+readers have come to despise. She makes every allowance for human
+nature, every concession to the necessities of temperament, every
+recognition of the human need for freedom, and yet makes the love of one
+man and one woman seem the highest ideal, a thing worth striving and
+waiting and suffering for.
+
+She cherishes the spiritual magic of sex as the finest achievement of
+the race, and sees it as the central and guiding principle in our social
+and economic evolution. She seeks to construct a new morality which will
+do what the present one only pretends, and with the shallowest and most
+desperately pitiful of pretenses, to do. She would help our struggling
+generation to form a new code of ethics, and one of subtle stringency,
+in this most important and difficult of relations.
+
+Thus her writings, of which "Love and Marriage" will here be taken as
+representative, have a twofold aspect--the radical and the conservative.
+But of the two, the conservative is by far the truer. It is as a
+conservator, with too firm a grip on reality to be lured into the
+desertion of any real values so far achieved by the race, that she may
+be best considered.
+
+And germane to her conservatism, which is the true conservatism of her
+sex, is her intellectual habit, her literary method. She is not a
+logician, it is true. She lacks logic, and with it order and clearness
+and precision, because of the very fact of her firm hold on realities.
+The realities are too complex to be brought into any completely logical
+and orderly relation, too elusive to be stated with utter precision.
+There is a whole universe in "Love and Marriage"; and it resembles the
+universe in its wildness, its tumultuousness, its contradictory quality.
+Her book, like the universe, is in a state of flux--it refuses to remain
+one fixed and dead thing. It is a book which in spite of some attempt at
+arrangement may be begun at any point and read in any order. It is a
+mixture of science, sociology, and mysticism; it has a wider range than
+an orderly book could possibly have; it touches more points, includes
+more facts, and is more convincing, in its queer way, than any other.
+
+"Love and Marriage" is the Talmud of sexual morality. It contains
+history, wisdom, poetry, psychological analysis, shrewd judgments,
+generous sympathies, ... and it all bears upon the creation of that new
+sexual morality for which in a thousand ways--economic, artistic, and
+spiritual--we are so astonishing a mixture of readiness and unreadiness.
+
+Ellen Key is fundamentally a conservator. But she is careful about what
+she conservates. It is the right to love which she would have us
+cherish, rather than the right to own another person--the beauty of
+singleness of devotion rather than the cruel habit of trying to force
+people to carry out rash promises made in moments of exaltation. She
+conserves the greatest things and lets the others go: motherhood, as
+against the exclusive right of married women to bear children; and that
+personal passion which is at once physical and spiritual rather than any
+of the legally standardized relations. Nor does she hesitate to speak
+out for the conservation of that old custom which persists among peasant
+and primitive peoples all over the world and which has been reintroduced
+to the public by a recent sociologist under the term of "trial
+marriage"; it must be held, she says, as the bulwark against the
+corruption of prostitution and made a part of the new morality.
+
+It is perhaps in this very matter that her attitude is capable of
+being most bitterly resented. For we have lost our sense of what is old
+and good, and we give the sanction of ages to parvenu virtues that are
+as degraded as the rococo ornaments which were born in the same year. We
+have (or the Puritans among us have) lost all moral sense in the true
+meaning of the word, in that we are unable to tell good from bad if it
+be not among the things that were socially respectable in the year 1860.
+Ellen Key writes: "The most delicate test of a person's sense of
+morality is his power in interpreting ambiguous signs in the ethical
+sphere; for only the profoundly moral can discover the dividing line,
+sharp as the edge of a sword, between new morality and old immorality.
+In our time, ethical obtuseness betrays itself first and foremost by the
+condemnation of those young couples who freely unite their destinies.
+The majority does not perceive the advance in morality which this
+implies in comparison with the code of so many men who, without
+responsibility--and without apparent risk--purchase the repose of their
+senses. The free union of love, on the other hand, gives them an
+enhancement of life which they consider that they gain without injuring
+anyone. It answers to their idea of love's chastity, an idea which is
+justly offended by the incompleteness of the period of engagement, with
+all its losses in the freshness and frankness of emotion. When their
+soul has found another soul, when the senses of both have met in a
+common longing, then they consider that they have a right to full unity
+of love, although compelled to secrecy, since the conditions of society
+render early marriage impossible. They are thus freed from a wasteful
+struggle which would give them neither peace nor inner purity, and which
+would be doubly hard for them, since they have attained the
+end--love--for the sake of which self-control would have been imposed."
+
+It is almost impossible to quote any passage from "Love and Marriage"
+which is not subject to further practical modification, or which does
+not present an incomplete idea of which the complement may be found
+somewhere else. Even this passage is one which states a brief for the
+younger generation rather than the author's whole opinion. Still, with
+all these limitations, her view is one which is so different from that
+commonly held by women that it may seem merely fantastic to hold it up
+as an example of the conservative instinct of women. Nevertheless, it is
+so. It must be remembered that the view which holds that the chastity of
+unmarried women is well purchased at the price of prostitution, is a
+masculine view. It is a piece of the sinister and cruel idealism of the
+male mind, divorced (as the male mind is so capable of being) from
+realities. No woman would ever have created prostitution to preserve the
+chastity of part of her sex; and the more familiar one becomes with the
+specific character of the feminine mind, the more impossible does it
+seem that women will, when they have come to think and act for
+themselves, permanently maintain it. Nor will they--one is forced to
+believe--hesitate long at the implications of that demolition.
+
+No, I think that with the advent of women into a larger life our
+jerry-built virtues will have to go, to make room for mansions and
+gardens fit to be inhabited by the human soul.
+
+It will be like the pulling down of a rotten tenement. First (with a
+great shocked outcry from some persons of my own sex) the facade goes,
+looking nice enough, but showing up for painted tin what pretended to be
+marble; then the dark, cavelike rooms exposed, with their blood-stained
+floors and their walls ineffectually papered over the accumulated filth
+and disease; and so on, lath by lath, down to the cellars, with their
+hints of unspeakable horrors in the dark.
+
+It is to this conclusion that these chapters draw: That women have a
+surer instinct than men for the preservation of the truest human values,
+but that their very acts of conservation will seem to the timid minds
+among us like the shattering of all virtues, the debacle of
+civilization, the Goetterdaemmerung!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+FREEWOMEN AND DORA MARSDEN
+
+
+This is by way of a postscript. Dora Marsden is a new figure in the
+feminist movement. Just how she evolved is rather hard to say. Her
+family were Radicals, it seems, smug British radicals; and she broke
+away, first of all, into a sort of middle class socialism. She went into
+settlement work. Here, it seems, she discovered what sort of person she
+really was.
+
+She was a lover of freedom. So of course she rebelled against the
+interference of the middle class with the affairs of the poor, and threw
+overboard her settlement work and her socialism together. She was a
+believer in woman suffrage, but the autocratic government of the
+organization irked her. And, besides, she felt constrained to point out
+that feminism meant worlds more than a mere vote. The position of woman,
+not indeed as the slave of man, but as the enslaver of man, but with the
+other end of the chain fastened to her own wrist, and depriving her
+quite effectually of her liberties--this irritated her. Independence to
+her meant achievement, and when she heard the talk about "motherhood"
+by which the women she knew excused their lack of achievement, she
+was annoyed. Finally, the taboo upon the important subject of sex
+exasperated her. So she started a journal to express her discontent with
+all these things, and to change them.
+
+Naturally, she called her journal The Freewoman. "Independent"
+expresses much of Dora Marsden's feeling, but that word has been of late
+dragged in a mire of pettiness and needs dry cleaning. It has come to
+signify a woman who isn't afraid to go out at night alone or who holds a
+position downtown. A word had to be chosen which had in it some
+suggestion of the heroic. Hence The Freewoman.
+
+The Freewoman was a weekly. It lived several months and then suspended
+publication, and now all the women I know are poring over the back
+numbers while waiting for it to start again as a fortnightly. It was a
+remarkable paper. For one thing, it threw open its columns to such a
+discussion of sex that dear Mrs. Humphry Ward wrote a shocked letter to
+The Times about it. Of course, a good many of the ideas put forth in
+this correspondence were erroneous or trivial, but it must have done the
+writers no end of good to express themselves freely. For once sex was on
+a plane with other subjects, a fact making tremendously for sanity. In
+this Miss Marsden not only achieved a creditable journalistic feat, but
+performed a valuable public service.
+
+Her editorials were another distinctive thing. In the first issue was
+an editorial on "Bondwomen," from which it would appear that perhaps
+even such advanced persons as you, my dear lady, are still far from
+free.
+
+"Bondwomen are distinguished from Freewomen by a spiritual distinction.
+Bondwomen are the women who are not separate spiritual entities--who are
+not individuals. They are complements merely. By habit of thought, by
+form of activity, and largely by preference, they round off the
+personality of some other individual, rather than create or cultivate
+their own. Most women, as far back as we have any record, have fitted
+into this conception, and it has borne itself out in instinctive working
+practice.
+
+"And in the midst of all this there comes a cry that woman is an
+individual, and that because she is an individual she must be set free.
+It would be nearer the truth to say that if she is an individual she
+_is_ free, and will act like those who are free. The doubtful aspect in
+the situation is as to whether women are or can be individuals--that is,
+free--and whether there is not danger, under the circumstances, in
+labelling them free, thus giving them the liberty of action which is
+allowed to the free. It is this doubt and fear which is behind the
+opposition which is being offered the vanguard of those who are 'asking
+for' freedom. It is the kind of fear which an engineer would have in
+guaranteeing an arch equal to a strain above its strength. The opponents
+of the Freewomen are not actuated by spleen or by stupidity, but by
+dread. This dread is founded upon ages of experience with a being who,
+however well loved, has been known to be an inferior, and who has
+accepted all the conditions of inferiors. Women, women's intelligence,
+and women's judgments have always been regarded with more or less secret
+contempt, and when woman now speaks of 'equality,' all the natural
+contempt which a higher order feels for a lower order when it presumes
+bursts out into the open. This contempt rests upon quite honest and
+sound instinct, so honest, indeed, that it must provide all the charm of
+an unaccustomed sensation for fine gentlemen like the Curzons and
+Cromers and Asquiths to feel anything quite so instinctive and
+primitive.
+
+"With the women opponents it is another matter. These latter apart,
+however, it is for would-be Freewomen to realize that for them this
+contempt is the healthiest thing in the world, and that those who
+express it honestly feel it; that these opponents have argued quite
+soundly that women have allowed themselves to be used, ever since there
+has been any record of them; and that if women had had higher uses of
+their own they would not have foregone them. They have never known women
+to formulate imperious wants, this in itself implying lack of wants, and
+this in turn implying lack of ideals. Women as a whole have shown
+nothing save 'servant' attributes. All those activities which presuppose
+the master qualities, the standard-making, the law-giving, the
+moral-framing, belong to men. Religions, philosophies, legal codes,
+standards in morals, canons in art, have all issued from men, while
+women have been the 'followers,' 'believers,' the 'law-abiding,' the
+'moral,' the conventionally admiring. They have been the administrators,
+the servants, living by borrowed precept, receiving orders, doing
+hodmen's work. For note, though some men must be servants, all women are
+servants, and all the masters are men. That is the difference and
+distinction. The servile condition is common to all women."
+
+This was only the beginning of such a campaign of radical propaganda as
+feminism never knew before. Miss Marsden went on to attack all the
+things which bind women and keep them unfree. As such she denounced what
+she considered the cant of "motherhood."
+
+"Considering, therefore, that children, from both physiological and
+psychological points of view, belong more to the woman than to the man;
+considering, too, that not only does she need them more, but, as a rule,
+wants them more than the man, the parental situation begins to present
+elements of humor when the woman proceeds to fasten upon the man, in
+return for the children she has borne him, the obligation from that time
+to the end of her days, not only for the children's existence, but for
+her own, also!"
+
+When asked under what conditions, then, women should have children, she
+replied that women who wanted them should save for them as for a trip to
+Europe. This is frankly a gospel for a minority--a fact which does not
+invalidate it in the eyes of its promulgator--but she does believe that
+if women are to become the equals of men they must find some way to have
+children without giving up the rest of life. It has been done!
+
+Then, having been rebuked for her critical attitude toward the woman
+suffrage organization, she showed herself in no mood to take orders from
+even that source. She subjected the attitude of the members of the
+organization to an examination, and found it tainted with
+sentimentalism. "Of all the corruptions to which the woman's movement is
+now open," she wrote, "the most poisonous and permeating is that which
+flows from sentimentalism, and it is in the W. S. P. U. [Women's Social
+and Political Union] that sentimentalism is now rampant.... It is this
+sentimentalism that is abhorrent to us. We fight it as we would fight
+prostitution, or any other social disease."
+
+She called upon women to be individuals, and sought to demolish in
+their minds any lingering desire for Authority. "There is," she wrote,
+"a genuine pathos in our reliance upon the law in regard to the affairs
+of our own souls. Our belief in ourselves and in our impulses is so
+frail that we prefer to see it buttressed up. We are surer of our
+beliefs when we see their lawfulness symbolized in the respectable blue
+cloth of the policeman's uniform, and the sturdy good quality of the
+prison's walls. The law gives them their passport. Well, perhaps in this
+generation, for all save pioneers, the law will continue to give its
+protecting shelter, but with the younger generations we believe we shall
+see a stronger, prouder, and more insistent people, surer of themselves
+and of the pureness of their own desires."
+
+She did not stick at the task of formulating for women a new moral
+attitude to replace the old. "We are seeking," she said, "a morality
+which shall be able to point the way out of the social trap we find we
+are in. We are conscious that we are concerned in the dissolution of one
+social order, which is giving way to another. Men and women are both
+involved, but women differently from men, because women themselves are
+very different from men. The difference between men and women is the
+whole difference between a religion and a moral code. Men are pagan.
+They have never been Christian. Women are wholly Christian, and have
+assimilated the entire genius of Christianity.
+
+"The ideal of conduct which men have followed has been one of
+self-realization, tempered by a broad principle of equity which has been
+translated into practice by means of a code of laws. A man's desire and
+ideal has been to satisfy the wants which a consciousness of his several
+senses gives rise to. His vision of attainment has therefore been a
+sensuous one, and if in his desire for attainment he has transgressed
+the law, his transgression has sat but lightly upon him. A law is an
+objective thing, laid upon a man's will from outside. It does not enter
+the inner recesses of consciousness, as does a religion. It is nothing
+more than a body of prohibitions and commands, which can be obeyed,
+transgressed or evaded with little injury to the soul. With women moral
+matters have been wholly different. Resting for support upon a religion,
+their moral code has received its sanction and force from within. It has
+thus laid hold on consciousness with a far more tenacious grip. Their
+code being subjective, transgression has meant a darkening of the
+spirit, a sullying of the soul. Thus the doctrine of self-renunciation,
+which is the outstanding feature of Christian ethics, has had the most
+favorable circumstances to insure its realization, and with women it has
+won completely--so completely that it now exerts its influence
+unconsciously. Seeking the realization of the will of others, and not
+their own, ever waiting upon the minds of others, women have almost lost
+the instinct for self-realization, the instinct for achievement in their
+own persons."
+
+Whether she is right is a moot question. Certainly in such matters as
+testimony in court, the customs-tariff, and the minor city ordinances,
+women show no particular respect for the law. Ibsen sought in "The
+Doll's House" to show that her morality had no connection with the laws
+of the world of men. Even in matters of human relationship it is
+doubtful if women give any more of an "inner assent" to law than do men.
+Woman's failure to achieve that domination of the world which
+constitutes individuality and freedom--this Dora Marsden would explain
+on the ground of a dulling of the senses. It may be more easily
+explained as a result of a dulling of the imagination. The trouble is
+that they are content with petty conquests.
+
+There you have it! Inevitably one argues with Dora Marsden. That is her
+value. She provokes thought. And she welcomes it. She wants everybody to
+think--not to think her thoughts necessarily, nor the right thoughts
+always, but that which they can and must. She is a propagandist, it is
+true. But she does not create a silence, and call it conversion.
+
+She stimulates her readers to cast out the devils that inhabit their
+souls--fear, prejudice, sensitiveness. She helps them to build up their
+lives on a basis of will--the exercise, not the suppression, of will.
+She indurates them to the world. She liberates them to life. She is the
+Max Stirner of feminism.
+
+Freedom! That is the first word and the last with Dora Marsden. She
+makes women understand for the first time what freedom means. She makes
+them want to be free. She nerves them to the effort of emancipation. She
+sows in a fertile soil the dragon's teeth which shall spring up as a
+band of capable females, knowing what they want and taking it, asking no
+leave from anybody, doing things and enjoying life--Freewomen!
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
+
+Obvious punctuation errors have been repaired.
+On p. 36 sucessful changed to successful (has been successful).
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Women as World Builders, by Floyd Dell
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