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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75366 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+Woman’s Voice
+
+
+
+
+ WOMAN’S VOICE
+ AN ANTHOLOGY
+
+ _By_
+ JOSEPHINE CONGER-KANEKO
+
+ [Illustration]
+
+ BOSTON
+ THE STRATFORD COMPANY
+ 1918
+
+ Copyright 1918
+ The STRATFORD CO., Publishers
+ Boston, Mass.
+
+ The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+Dedicated to
+
+THE SPLENDID WOMEN OF ALL NATIONS AND ALL AGES WHO HAVE VALIANTLY STRIVEN
+TOWARD THE BROADER FIELDS OF THOUGHT AND ACTIVITY FOR THEIR SISTERS AND
+FOR MANKIND AS A WHOLE
+
+
+
+
+EDITOR’S PREFACE
+
+
+Just now, when the world is going through the most significant period of
+human history, it is well that woman’s voice be heard above the tumult.
+For upon woman’s activity may rest the salvation of the race.
+
+This Anthology is not an attempt at literary effects so much as it is
+an attempt to present seriously woman’s viewpoint of life to a nation
+standing on the verge of—it knows not what!
+
+So new is the voice of woman in the affairs of life, that in time of
+stress or panic it must become insistent to be heard or heeded. One book,
+by one woman, regardless of its strength or purpose, could not have the
+effect that one book by “crowds” of women could have. That is why this
+volume has come into existence. It literally is the voice of “crowds of
+women.”
+
+Those whose words are quoted here are representative women, leaders
+in their various organizations, representing hundreds of thousands of
+individuals. Many of them are among our foremost writers, artists,
+teachers, actors, orators and organizers—some of them combining several
+of these qualities.
+
+“Woman’s Voice” might easily have been two or three times its present
+size, but that would have meant a publication too expensive to reach
+the thousands of readers of moderate means to whom this work is an
+immediate, special appeal. Future editions of this Anthology will be
+revised and enlarged until we finally shall have a perfect volume which
+will take its place in every home as a standard household classic, along
+with those other books of strong human appeal which every home possesses.
+
+Much of the material in “Woman’s Voice” is covered by copyright, and
+special permission has been granted the editor to reproduce it here.
+Many very good things were taken from exchanges (more or less obscure
+publications), and in such cases the original source of their appearance
+was difficult to trace. However, in each instance attempt has been made
+to give credit where it is due, and the editor hopes she has made no
+serious failures in this respect.
+
+The many publishers and publications, as well as authors and artists
+represented here, have been very kind in their co-operation to make
+“Woman’s Voice” a success, by granting permission to use these selections
+from their output. Special mention is given them elsewhere.
+
+It is the editor’s hope that this volume will circulate very largely in
+the small towns and country districts of our nation. I want the millions
+of women who are feeling, and thinking, but who are as yet inarticulate
+upon the larger affairs of life, to find their need and their voice in
+this volume. I want that great isolated sisterhood, many of whom have
+never read a book by a woman on social questions, to have this volume
+in their homes—and always near at hand; on the sewing table, or in the
+kitchen cabinet, where it may be referred to between cake-baking and
+bread-making times. I hope the children in these homes will memorize
+the verses in this book, and recite them at the Friday afternoon
+“Literaries,” in their schools.
+
+I hope the club women will make constant use of this volume in their club
+work—in the preparation of programs, and in roll calls. For the things
+quoted here deal with the most vital issues of the times, as well as
+with the most intimate personal emotions and needs of the individual,
+and are presented by responsible and capable women. Also, they show the
+growth of race progress through woman’s efforts—how she has struggled and
+won educational rights; how she has struggled and won political rights;
+how she has struggled and won matrimonial rights, and rights for her
+children, and for the world’s workers. How she is struggling still to
+bring about an ever higher and fuller life for today and for the future.
+
+And in all this she needs your help, you in your isolated corners; for
+not until every nook and cranny is active and comes to the front, can our
+nation attain to those heights for which our womankind is so valiantly
+working.
+
+When woman’s voice is heard the world around, mankind will hearken to her
+cries and heed them.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF AUTHORS
+
+
+ PAGE
+
+ Adams, Abigail, 32
+
+ Addams, Jane, 28, 61
+
+ Alexander, Mrs. R. P., 90
+
+ Allen, Carrie W., 168
+
+ Allen, Elizabeth Akers, 111
+
+ Anthony, Katherine, 1
+
+ Anthony, Susan B., 33
+
+ Archer, Ruby, 102, 254
+
+ Atherton, Gertrude, 44, 273
+
+ Austin, Mary, 160
+
+
+ Bachi, Mme, 163
+
+ Barker, Elsa, 268
+
+ Barnard, Anne Morton, 104, 161
+
+ Barnes, Florence Elberta, 189
+
+ Barnhart, Nora Elizabeth, 158
+
+ Barnum, Gertrude, 5
+
+ Barr, Amelia E., 163, 164
+
+ Bartlett, Lucy Re, 51
+
+ Barton, C. Josephine, 81, 121
+
+ Bass, Mrs. George, 38, 252
+
+ Beacon, Virginia Cleaver, 278
+
+ Beals, May, 272
+
+ Beard, Mary Ritter, 1, 204
+
+ Belmont, Mrs. O. H. P., 15
+
+ Birney, Elizabeth Cherrill, 192
+
+ Blackwell, Elizabeth, 199
+
+ Bloomer, Amelia, 286
+
+ Bocage, Mme. du, 163
+
+ Booth, Eva Gore, 184
+
+ Brandreth, Paulina, 278
+
+ Breshkovskaya, Catherine, 270
+
+ Brewer, Grace D., 132
+
+ Brower, Pauline Florence, 83
+
+ Brown, Rev. Antoinette, 35
+
+ Brown, Marion, 225
+
+ Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 104, 241
+
+ Burr, Amelia Josephine, 155
+
+ Butler, Josephine, 157, 171
+
+
+ Cairo, Mona, 119
+
+ Campbell, Helen, 85
+
+ Cannon, Ida M., 264
+
+ Carbutt, Mary E., 103
+
+ Carr, Edna Elliott, 223
+
+ Cipriani, Charlotte, 207
+
+ Cleyre, Voltairine de, 237
+
+ Clifford, Mrs. W. K., 161
+
+ Cobb, Frances Power, 292
+
+ Cockran, Mrs. Burke, 15
+
+ Colet, Louise, 164
+
+ Colquhoun, Ethel Maude, 145, 172, 182
+
+ Comer, Cornelia A. P., 141
+
+ Conger, M. Josephine, 46, 177
+
+ Cook, Coralie Franklin, 2
+
+ Cook, Elizabeth, 56
+
+ Cooper, Elizabeth, 206
+
+ Cotton, Mrs. R. R., 36
+
+
+ Daggett, Mable Potter, 6, 88, 226
+
+ Dargan, Olive Tilford, 215
+
+ Davies, Mary Carolyn, 139, 283
+
+ Deardorf, Neva R., 4
+
+ De Ford, Miriam Allen, 37
+
+ Deland, Margaret, 294
+
+ Dick, Mrs. Fred, 62
+
+ Dix, Beulah Marie, 233
+
+ Dix, Dorothy, 159
+
+ Dorr, Rheta Childe, 123
+
+ Doty, Madeline Z., 218
+
+ Douglas, Winona, 115
+
+ Downing, Agnes, 294
+
+ Downy, June E., 287
+
+
+ Edgar, Mary S., 243
+
+ Eliot, George, 161, 162
+
+ Eulalia, Infanta, 274
+
+
+ Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 263
+
+ Fee, Mme, 293
+
+ Field, Mary, 217
+
+ Flahaut, Mme. de, 163
+
+ Flexner, Hortense, 107
+
+ Fuller, Gertrude Breslau, 36, 108, 171
+
+
+ Gaffny, Fannie Humphrey, 2
+
+ Gage, Matilda Jocelyn, 15, 289
+
+ Gale, Zona, 24
+
+ Garrison, Theodosia, 155, 182, 291
+
+ Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 120, 142, 280
+
+ Girardin, Mme. de, 161
+
+ Grove, Lady, 85
+
+ Gruenberg, Sidonie Matzner, 89
+
+ Guerin, Eugenie de, 293
+
+
+ Haile, Margaret, 244
+
+ Haines, Marion Gertrude, 192
+
+ Hale, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson, 16
+
+ Hallam, Julia Clark, 116
+
+ Hamilton, Cicily, 45
+
+ Harland, Marion, 112
+
+ Harper, Ida Husted, 34
+
+ Harrison, Elizabeth, 91
+
+ Hartley, C. Gasquoine, 124, 154, 211
+
+ Henry, Alice, 72, 160, 203
+
+ Higgs, Mary, 65, 182
+
+ Hillis, Mrs. Newell Dwight, 142
+
+ Hoblitt, Margaret, 237
+
+ Hollins, Dorothea, 266
+
+ Holly, Marietta, 25
+
+ H. R. H., 274
+
+ Houdetot, Comtesse d’, 161
+
+ Houston, Margaret Belle, 100
+
+ Hoyt, Helen, 137
+
+ Hultin, Ida C., 170
+
+ Hutchins, Emily J., 5, 204
+
+
+ Irwin, Inez Haynes, 272
+
+ Israels, Belle Lindner, 36, 186
+
+
+ Jameson, Anna, 164
+
+
+ Kassimer, Ada M., 114
+
+ Keller, Helen, 53, 209, 265
+
+ Kelly, Florence, 86
+
+ Kenton, Edna, 71, 268
+
+ Key, Ellen, 83, 125, 143, 189, 234, 248
+
+ Kiper, Florence, 84, 171
+
+ Knowles, Josephine Pitcairn, 148, 208
+
+
+ La Follette, Mrs. Belle Case, 22, 69
+
+ Lagerlof, Selma, 52
+
+ Laidlaw, Mrs. James Lees, 47
+
+ Lambert, Mme. de, 162
+
+ LaMotte, Ellen N., 228
+
+ Lathrop, Julia, 91
+
+ Laughlin, Clara E., 68, 169, 264
+
+ Lawrence, Mrs. Pethick, 126, 180
+
+ Lazarovick-Hrebelianovich, 240
+
+ Lebedeff-Kropotkin, Sarah, 224
+
+ L’Enclos, Le, 161
+
+ Lespinasse, Mlle. de, 293
+
+ Lewis, Lena Morrow, 23
+
+ Lloyd, Caro, 63
+
+ Lowe, Caroline A., 19
+
+ Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 267
+
+ Lyttleton, Hon. Mrs. Arthur, 51, 205, 253
+
+
+ MacLean, Annie Marion, 175
+
+ Macy, Mrs, 210
+
+ May, Florence, 260
+
+ Maintenon, de, 161
+
+ Maley, Anna A., 227
+
+ Malkiel, Theresa, 44
+
+ Marsden, Dora, 186
+
+ Martin, Mrs. John, 274
+
+ Marwedel, Emma, 210
+
+ McCracken, Elizabeth, 69, 90
+
+ McCulloch, Catherine Waugh, 43
+
+ McDowell, Mary, 249
+
+ McKeehan, Irene P., 285
+
+ Meynell, Alice, 31
+
+ Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 138
+
+ Miller, Emily Huntington, 116
+
+ Monroe, Harriet, 94, 180
+
+ Montefiore, Dora B., 20
+
+ Montessori, Maria, 195, 249
+
+ Morgan, Angela, 167
+
+ Morgan, Lady, 17, 201
+
+ Morton, Honnor, 185
+
+ Mott, Lucretia, 146
+
+ Motteville, Mme. de, 164
+
+
+ Natahlie, Countess, 162
+
+ Necker, Mme, 164, 293
+
+ Newman, Pauline M., 251
+
+ Nichols, Clarina Howard, 150
+
+ Nordica, Mme, 183
+
+ Norton, Grace Fallow, 176
+
+
+ O’Hare, Kate Richards, 119, 183
+
+ O’Reilly, Mary, 258
+
+ “Ouida”, 3, 113, 162, 202
+
+
+ Pankhurst, Sylvia, 12
+
+ Parce, Lida, 74, 174
+
+ Parker, Adella M., 152
+
+ Parsons, Elsie Clews, 170, 248
+
+ Pease, Leonora, 79
+
+ Peck, Mary Gray, 39
+
+ Pethick-Lawrence, 126, 180
+
+ Peyser, Ethel R., 30
+
+ Philip, Elizabeth, 142
+
+ Pompadour, Mme. de, 164
+
+ Porter, Mrs. C. E., 68, 133
+
+ Potter, Frances Squire, 255
+
+ Powers, Rose Mills, 231
+
+ Putnam, Alice H., 116
+
+ Putnam, Emily James, 184
+
+ Putnam, Helen G., 69, 86
+
+
+ Repplier, Agnes, 79
+
+ Reyband, Mme, 164
+
+ Richards, Ellen H., 184
+
+ Richardson, Bertha June, 202
+
+ Ridge, Lola, 193
+
+ Rieux, Mme. de, 163
+
+ Robins, Elizabeth, 42
+
+ Robins, Margaret Dreier, 180
+
+ Robinson, Ethel Blackwell, 81
+
+ Royle, Emily Taplin, 185
+
+ “Ruth”, 277
+
+
+ Sage, Mrs. Russell, 3, 170
+
+ Sand, George, 163
+
+ Schoff, Mrs. Frederick, 87
+
+ Schreiner, Olive, 41, 172, 289
+
+ Sellers, Sarah, 289
+
+ Shaw, Anna Howard, 1, 51
+
+ Simmons, Laura, 117, 277
+
+ Snow, Mary, 191
+
+ Sonza, Mme. de, 293
+
+ Sorringe, Katherine Parrott, 11
+
+ Stael, Mme. de, 164
+
+ Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 206, 248
+
+ Stern, Meta L., 11, 250, 286
+
+ Stewart, Anna Bigoney, 194
+
+ Stewart, Ella S., 34
+
+ Stobart, Mrs. St. Clair, 55, 144
+
+ Stone, Lucy, 147
+
+ Stoner, Winifred Sackville, 71
+
+ Swanwick, Mrs. H. W., 205, 264
+
+
+ Tarbell, Ida, 63, 124, 195, 266
+
+ Teichner, Miriam, 39
+
+ Thomas, M. Carey, 10, 102, 149, 176, 208, 262
+
+ Thomas, Mrs. Leonard, 80
+
+ Turczynowicz, Laura de, 227
+
+ Tweedie, Mrs. Alec, 126, 162, 206, 286
+
+ Twining, Luella, 23
+
+
+ Valois, Margaret de, 162, 163, 293
+
+ Van de Water, Virginia Terhune, 91
+
+ Van Vorst, Mrs. John, 57, 96
+
+ Varnhagen, Rachel, 138
+
+
+ Wald, Lillian D., 70
+
+ Warwick, Countess of, 253
+
+ Wedgewood, Julia, 47
+
+ Wentworth, Eleanor, 245
+
+ Wentworth, Marion Craig, 215
+
+ Wharton, Edith, 73, 294
+
+ Widdemer, Margaret, 144, 156, 242
+
+ Wilcox, Louise Collier, 7
+
+ Wilde, Lady, 262
+
+ Wilkinson, Margaret O. B., 151, 173
+
+ Willard, Emma, 196
+
+ Willard, Frances E., 250
+
+ Wilson, Marjorie, 221
+
+ Wollstonecraft, Mary, 37, 87, 121, 146, 274
+
+
+ Young, Laura P., 62, 67
+
+
+ Zetkin, Clara, 222
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF SUBJECTS
+
+
+ PAGE
+
+ BOOK I
+
+ THE WOMAN MOVEMENT
+
+ A Generation Ago, Deardorf, 4
+
+ A Great Life, Harper, 34
+
+ A Lady Rebel, Adams, 32
+
+ A Pageant of Great Women, Hamilton, 45
+
+ A Prisoner in Bow, Pankhurst, 12
+
+ A Spade’s a Spade, Peyser, 30
+
+ A Woman’s Question, Thomas, 10
+
+ Allegory on Wimmin’s Rights, Holly, 25
+
+ All Methods Employed, Belmont, 15
+
+ Because They Cannot Vote, Stern, 11
+
+ Call to Social Service, Bass, 38
+
+ Clearing Up the Muss, Fuller, 36
+
+ Coming Into Her Own, Gaffny, 2
+
+ Feminism a Tree, Forbes-Robertson Hale, 16
+
+ For Woman Suffrage, Addams, 28
+
+ Freedom of the Women, Wilcox, 7
+
+ From “The Convert”, Robins, 42
+
+ Gibraltar of Our Cause, Anthony, 33
+
+ Glory in Power, Cockran, 15
+
+ He Shall See the New Woman, Daggett, 6
+
+ Legislative Responsibility, Hutchins, 5
+
+ Man Cannot Represent Woman, Brown, 35
+
+ Mankind Our Neighbor, Cotton, 36
+
+ Most Brilliant Period, Shaw, 1
+
+ New Woman, Montefiore, 20
+
+ Our Common Interests, Lewis, 23
+
+ Out of the Dark, Gage, 15
+
+ Plea of the Women, Sorringe, 11
+
+ Prayer of the Modern Woman, Conger, 46
+
+ Price of Liberty, Peck, 39
+
+ Revolt of Women, “Ouida”, 3
+
+ Rights, Privileges and Capacities, McCulloch, 43
+
+ Sisterhood of Women, Cook, 2
+
+ Submission, Teichner, 39
+
+ Story of Katie Malloy, Lowe, 19
+
+ Suffrage a Means to an End, Stewart, 34
+
+ To Raise the Standards of Life, Barnum, 5
+
+ Unanimity of Needs, Anthony, 1
+
+ Universality, Israels, 36
+
+ What Is This Government? La Follette, 22
+
+ Wisdom Comes with Freedom, Wollstonecraft, 37
+
+ Woman’s Awakening, Beard, 1
+
+ Woman Has Helped, Twining, 23
+
+ Woman Has Justified Herself, Morgan, 17
+
+ Woman on the Scaffold, Meynell, 31
+
+ Woman’s Right, Schreiner, 41
+
+ Woman’s Weak Dependency, Atherton, 44
+
+ Women, Gale, 24
+
+ Women to Men, De Ford, 37
+
+ Women’s Qualifications for Suffrage, Sage, 3
+
+ Working Woman’s Awakening, Malkiel, 44
+
+ BOOK II
+
+ THE HOME
+
+ Cannot Replace the Home, Wald, 70
+
+ Child at Home, The, McCracken, 69
+
+ Domestic Home Destroyed, Parce, 74
+
+ Domestic Strife, La Follette, 69
+
+ Home, The, Young, 62
+
+ Home Influence, Tarbell, 63
+
+ Home of the Workingman, Henry, 72
+
+ Honest Partnership in the Home, Dick, 62
+
+ Hotel “Home”, The, Wharton, 73
+
+ Immorality and the Home, Laughlin, 68
+
+ Inefficient Home, The, Young, 67
+
+ Lovers of Home, Shaw, 51
+
+ Man, Woman and the Home, Kenton, 71
+
+ Market Value of Home Labor, Putnam, 69
+
+ Mother and Child-Character, Stoner, 71
+
+ Perpetuate the Ideal, Porter, 68
+
+ Poor and Good Housing, Cook, 56
+
+ Spirit of the Home, Bartlett, 51
+
+ Then—Back to the Home, Lloyd, 63
+
+ War and the Home, Addams, 61
+
+ Where She Lived, Van Vorst, 57
+
+ Woman and the Primitive Home, Stobart, 55
+
+ Woman’s High Achievement, Lagerlof, 52
+
+ Woman’s Place, Lyttleton, 51
+
+ Woman’s Sphere the Home, Keller, 53
+
+ Women’s Lodging Houses, Higgs, 65
+
+ BOOK III
+
+ THE CHILD
+
+ Announce Her Maturity, Barnard, 104
+
+ Blot on Civilization, Lathrop, 91
+
+ Call of the Unborn, The, Robinson, 81
+
+ Child, The, Repplier, 79
+
+ Child and Parental Youth, McCracken, 90
+
+ Child Labor, Archer, 102
+
+ Children Innumerable, Kiper, 84
+
+ Child Slavery, Fuller, 108
+
+ Children’s Ward, Flexner, 107
+
+ Consideration for Others, Alexander, 90
+
+ Cotton Mill Child, The, Van Vorst, 96
+
+ Crusade of the Children, Houston, 100
+
+ Cry of the Children, Browning, 104
+
+ Equality in Fitness, Putnam, 86
+
+ Factory Child, Monroe, 94
+
+ Fettered Little Children, Carbutt, 103
+
+ Fewer and Better Children, Campbell, 85
+
+ For Father’s Amusement, Harrison, 91
+
+ Government and Child Life, Schoff, 87
+
+ Ideals of the Child, Gruenberg, 89
+
+ Little Beloved, Pease, 79
+
+ More Woman’s Work, Thomas, 80
+
+ My Little Son, Brower, 83
+
+ Need the Vote for Children, Thomas, 102
+
+ Nursery A University, Barton, 81
+
+ Parental Duty, Key, 83
+
+ Quantity Versus Quality, Grove, 85
+
+ Reason and the Child, Wollstonecraft, 87
+
+ Rising Value of a Baby, The, Daggett, 88
+
+ Teaching the Child Citizenship, Van de Water, 91
+
+ Where Women Have Voted, Kelly, 86
+
+ BOOK IV
+
+ THE MOTHER
+
+ Adolescent Child, Hallam, 116
+
+ A Good Mother, Wollstonecraft, 121
+
+ Ancient and Modern Mother, Tweedie, 126
+
+ Collective Motherhood, Dorr, 123
+
+ Companion Mother, Tarbell, 124
+
+ Factory Worker and Motherhood, O’Hare, 119
+
+ Fatherhood Cannot Be Motherhood, Kassimer, 114
+
+ Functions Identical, Putnam, 116
+
+ I am the Mother-Heart, Brewer, 132
+
+ Mother, Simmons, 117
+
+ Mother, a Creator, Barton, 121
+
+ Mother’s Influence, “Ouida”, 113
+
+ Mother, The, Pethick-Lawrence, 126
+
+ Mother, The, Harland, 112
+
+ Mothers, Gilman, 120
+
+ Parental Respect for Rights of Child, Key, 125
+
+ Passionate Instinct, Miller, 116
+
+ Rock Me to Sleep, Allen, 111
+
+ Price, The, Douglas, 115
+
+ Wise Mothers, Cairo, 119
+
+ Woman and Mother, Hartley, 124
+
+ BOOK V
+
+ LOVE AND MARRIAGE
+
+ A Man Never Gets Over It, Comer, 141
+
+ A New Stimulus to Marriage, Stobart, 144
+
+ A Possible Utopia, Knowles, 148
+
+ Art of Loving, Key, 143
+
+ Ashes of Life, Millay, 138
+
+ Confidante, The, Barnhart, 158
+
+ Cry of Man to Woman, Hartley, 154
+
+ Flirt, The, Burr, 155
+
+ Greatest Love, Varnhagen, 138
+
+ I Can Go to Love Again, Widdemer, 156
+
+ Love that Pales, Wollstonecraft, 146
+
+ Love Songs, Davies, 139
+
+ Marriage a Partnership, Hillis, 142
+
+ Marriage and the Labor Market, Thomas, 149
+
+ Marriage Laws of 1850, Nichols, 150
+
+ Marriage Not an Assurance of Support, Henry, 160
+
+ Marriage of the Friends, Mott, 146
+
+ Marriage the Sole Means of Maintenance, Butler, 157
+
+ Mirandy on the Monotony of Domesticity, Dix, 159
+
+ Old Suffragist, Widdemer, 144
+
+ One of the Best Things, Gilman, 142
+
+ Overheard in the Marriage Congress, Parker, 152
+
+ Postponing Marriage, Colquhoun, 145
+
+ Preventive of Divorce, A, Wilkinson, 151
+
+ Price of Love, Austin, 160
+
+ To Love on Feeling Its Approach, Hoyt, 137
+
+ What Is Love? Philip, 142
+
+ When Love Went By, Garrison, 155
+
+ When Marriage Meant Bondage, Stone, 147
+
+ BOOK VI
+
+ WOMAN AND LABOR
+
+ Bondwomen, Marsden, 186
+
+ Changed Condition of Tomorrow, Wilkinson, 173
+
+ Development Through the Choice of Work, Kiper, 171
+
+ Economics and the Home, Colquhoun, 182
+
+ Exploitation of Workingwomen, O’Hare, 183
+
+ Housewife, Morgan, 167
+
+ How Is She Housed? Higgs, 182
+
+ Lady, Putnam, 184
+
+ Left-Over Women, Colquhoun, 172
+
+ Morality and Woman in Industry, Laughlin, 169
+
+ One-Fifth of the Woman Population at Work, Thomas, 176
+
+ Orchards, Garrison, 182
+
+ Sex-Parasitism, Schreiner, 172
+
+ Simple Right to Live, Robins, 180
+
+ Sisterhood in Labor, Hultin, 170
+
+ Song of the Working Girls, Monroe, 180
+
+ Success Through Work, Nordica, 183
+
+ Unequal Distribution of Labor, Morton, 185
+
+ Wasted Energy and Talent, Sage, 170
+
+ Woman and Social Betterment, Richards, 184
+
+ Woman and the Dinner Pail, Gore-Booth, 184
+
+ Woman in the Home, Allen, 168
+
+ Woman’s Awakening, Conger, 177
+
+ Woman’s Demand for Work, Butler, 171
+
+ Woman’s Place, Fuller, 171
+
+ Woman’s Wages, Pethick-Lawrence, 180
+
+ Woman’s Work in Woman’s Way, Parce, 174
+
+ Women Are Going to Work, Parsons, 170
+
+ Women Who Sit at Ease, Norton, 176
+
+ Women Workers in New England, MacLean, 175
+
+ Working Woman Speaks, Royle, 185
+
+ BOOK VII
+
+ EDUCATION
+
+ Aim and End of Education, Ridge, 193
+
+ A Moral Crusade, Blackwell, 199
+
+ A Plan for Improving Female Education, Willard, 196
+
+ Democratization of Learning, Cipriani, 207
+
+ Educating Children, Montessori, 195
+
+ Educating the Daughter, Knowles, 208
+
+ Education and Votes For Women, Cooper, 206
+
+ Essentials in Education, Snow, 191
+
+ Equal Advantages of Education, Stanton, 206
+
+ Greatness of Froebel, Haines, 192
+
+ History of Woman’s Education, Beard, 204
+
+ Intellect Wins, Tweedie, 206
+
+ Intellectual Women of Rome, Morgan, 201
+
+ Mothers’ Library, Birney, 192
+
+ Mother’s Task, The, Tarbell, 195
+
+ Old and New Schools, Barns, 189
+
+ Plan for Improving Female Education, Willard, 196
+
+ Power of Education, “Ouida”, 202
+
+ Professions Educational, Lyttleton, 205
+
+ Social Education Important, Keller, 209
+
+ Soul Murder in the Schools, Key, 189
+
+ Standards Raised by Women Teachers, Stewart, 194
+
+ To Reach the Divine, Marwedel, 210
+
+ Traditions Upset, Hutchins, 204
+
+ Vision Realized, The, Richardson, 202
+
+ Vocational Training for Girls, Henry, 203
+
+ Woman’s Struggle for Educational Rights, Swanwick, 205
+
+ World of Scholarship a Man’s World, Thomas, 208
+
+ BOOK VIII
+
+ WAR AND PEACE
+
+ Babies Bred for War, Field, 217
+
+ Breeding Machines, Wentworth, 215
+
+ Deserter, The, LaMotte, 228
+
+ Devonshire Mother, Wilson, 221
+
+ Early Morning Funeral, Carr, 223
+
+ Last Racial War, Zetkin, 222
+
+ Prayer of the Toilers, Powers, 231
+
+ Prussians in Poland, Turczynowicz, 227
+
+ Red Easter, Brown, 225
+
+ Righteous Wars, Dix, 233
+
+ Rising Value of a Baby, Daggett, 226
+
+ Russian Women in Time of War, Kropotkin-Lebedeff, 224
+
+ These Latter Days, Dargan, 215
+
+ War Cripples, Doty, 218
+
+ Wars Will Cease, Maley, 227
+
+ BOOK IX
+
+ CLASSES
+
+ Abolish “Dependent Classes”, Lowell, 267
+
+ After the Fight, O’Reilly, 258
+
+ Breadth of Woman Suffrage, Fawcett, 263
+
+ Break Down the Wall, Key, 248
+
+ Breaking Up in Violence, Laughlin, 264
+
+ Breshkovskaya, Barker, 268
+
+ Class Intolerance Passing, Parsons, 248
+
+ Class Legislation, Thomas, 262
+
+ Despair, Lady Wilde, 262
+
+ Enslaved, The, Warwick, 253
+
+ Factories Instead of Homes, McDowell, 249
+
+ Fool’s Christmas, The, May, 260
+
+ Glad Day of Universal Brotherhood, The, Willard, 250
+
+ God and the Strong Ones, Widdemer, 242
+
+ Happy Warrior, Hollins, 266
+
+ Inequality for Women, Lyttleton, 253
+
+ Lore of the Woods, Archer, 254
+
+ Moses, the Strike Leader, Potter, 255
+
+ My Sister’s Heritage, Edgar, 243
+
+ New Sense of Justice, Stanton, 248
+
+ Of What Use Is It? Cannon, 264
+
+ Old Comrade, Beals, 272
+
+ Organized Woman Labor, Bass, 252
+
+ Our New Aristocracy, Atherton, 273
+
+ Outcasts, Wentworth, 245
+
+ Out of the Darkness, de Cleyre, 237
+
+ Poet’s Task, Hoblitt, 237
+
+ Poor Sex, Swanwick, 264
+
+ Revolutionist, Breshkovskaya, 270
+
+ Servant Class, Kenton, 268
+
+ Servitude, Montessori, 249
+
+ Socialist Prayer, Haile, 244
+
+ Two Sides of the Shield, Lazarovick-Hrebelianovich, 240
+
+ Voice of Labor, The, Irwin, 272
+
+ Voteless Sex, Stern, 250
+
+ Woman’s Labor Organizations, Tarbell, 266
+
+ Women and the Oppressed, Browning, 241
+
+ Worker’s Right, Keller, 265
+
+ Working Girls Must Cooperate, Newman, 251
+
+ BOOK X
+
+ MISCELLANEOUS
+
+ Contrast, A, Simmons, 277
+
+ Custom, Sellers, 289
+
+ Dare We Judge? Brandreth, 278
+
+ Difference, The, Schreiner, 289
+
+ Doomed Men’s Message, Davies, 283
+
+ Dress Reform, Bloomer, 286
+
+ Giving Up Her Name, Tweedie, 286
+
+ I Heard the Spirit Singing, Downy, 287
+
+ In Passing, “Ruth”, 277
+
+ Mary and Magdalene, Beacon, 278
+
+ Purse and the Soul, Stern, 286
+
+ Road Song, McKeehan, 285
+
+ Sheaf of Quotations, 293
+
+ Thanksgiving, Garrison, 291
+
+ The Unfair Status, Gage, 289
+
+ Two Storks, Gilman, 280
+
+ Women Run in Molds, Cobb, 292
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE
+
+
+The American people today may be likened to the onlookers of a great
+drama. A drama so tremendous, so spectacular, so tragic, that it
+surpasses anything the mind of man has hitherto conceived. The onlookers
+of this drama naturally are absorbed with its immediate movements. With
+its broad meanings they are intensely concerned, but beyond these they
+have no interest. Their vision for detail is clouded by the flare and
+vastness of the apparent. What lies beneath, above, about, are only
+incidentals and of no immediate consequence to them.
+
+But the “incidentals” of the present war are, for the careful observer,
+to say nothing of the professional drama critic, the chips which show
+what is taking place as the result of the flare and the noise, and the
+tragedy. One of these incidents is the coming of woman into realms of
+activity which not for a million years—that is to say, never before—have
+been opened to her.
+
+Under the stress involved in winning a world peace, this fact is scarcely
+noted, and is not understood in its full meaning. But the moment peace is
+declared it will become a question of vital importance, involving as it
+does all lines of human endeavor—labor, commerce, philosophy, literature,
+agriculture, law, education, and the crafts as well as the arts.
+
+The conservative mind, freed from the absorption of war, will turn with
+startled gasp to discover that one half of the race has been shaken out
+of the rut of ages, and is spilling itself helter-skelter, into every
+department of social achievement. And the conservative mind will ask with
+child-like frankness if the women are equal to the responsibility and the
+opportunity which has been thrust upon them.
+
+“Woman’s Voice” has been compiled in anticipation of this awakening on
+the part of the multitude, as an answer to its wondering inquiry.
+
+That women have themselves long yearned toward the broader paths of
+effort and usefulness is manifest in the utterances of those who have
+learned the art of self-expression. That they fully comprehend the
+meaning, hardships and blessings of the broader life, is plainly shown in
+their wide-spread printed word. “Woman’s Voice” is an effort to collect,
+in what may be called at once a brief and an exposition of woman’s
+entrance into the world of general endeavor, the wisdom of the women who
+have studied conditions with an earnestness and efficiency which renders
+them peculiarly fitted to speak for themselves upon the questions most
+closely touching themselves and their children.
+
+For ages untold only the voice of man has dictated the conditions under
+which the rest of the world should live, including women and children.
+All the poetry, all the philosophy, all the wisdom of the ages was
+presented in man’s words, and from man’s standpoint. Woman, dumb,
+untutored, and handicapped by an adverse public opinion, another creation
+of the solely masculine mind, held to her chimney corner as helpless in
+the face of petty and colossal injustices as the children she bore.
+
+“Woman’s Voice” portrays the effort of women to get away from this now
+apparent social mistake. Women have spoken and will continue to speak,
+for, if we are to proceed speedily and with the least possible resistance
+into the new order of things, education is still essential. There are
+millions to whom the apparent is not apparent, and whose eyes must be
+opened before the democracy for which the world is paying in blood and
+agony can become a reality.
+
+I believe “Woman’s Voice” should be in every home in the nation, and
+in all nations where society is affected by the conditions which have
+brought women away from the hearth-stone into the market-place. As a
+digest of the best thought of representative women the world over, it
+will be read when the multiplicity of volumes from which it is quoted
+are passed by. It will be read not only for its seriousness, but for its
+poetic sentiment, and its sprightly comment on the every-day things of
+life. Its usefulness to club members and to workers in the equal suffrage
+campaigns will be invaluable, but it is to the average housewife and
+mother that I trust it will make its strongest appeal. To the women who
+have more or less dimly felt, but who have not as yet found a voice or
+an avenue through which to develop or express this feeling about things
+which so much concern them and their children. I am hoping, also, that it
+will fall into the hands of thousands of theorists who are opposing, for
+no reason except their own ignorance about it, the advance of women in
+the coming world-democracy.
+
+Briefly, but earnestly, I wish to thank the publishers, editors and
+writers who have made this Anthology possible through their permission to
+reprint from books, magazines and articles the matter contained herein. I
+have endeavored in all instances to give full credit to all of these, and
+if errors happen to occur in this regard they are unintentional, and only
+the result of the initial publishing of a work as new and comprehensive
+as this one. Also, if any name has been omitted whose observations should
+have appeared in this book, it is only because it was impossible for a
+very busy editor to fail to miss some very worthy writers. In future
+editions these can be gathered up, until we have a volume or many volumes
+which may be perfectly representative of the woman’s voice of the world.
+
+ JOSEPHINE CONGER
+ Compiler “Woman’s Voice”
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+The Woman Movement
+
+
+
+
+THE WOMAN MOVEMENT
+
+
+The Most Brilliant Period
+
+By Anna Howard Shaw
+
+(American contemporary. Former president of the National American
+Suffrage Association. From a series of articles in “The Metropolitan.”)
+
+The winning of the suffrage states, the work in the states not yet won,
+the conventions, gatherings and international councils in which women of
+every nation have come together, have all combined to make this quarter
+of a century the most brilliant period for women in the history of the
+world.
+
+
+Woman’s Awakening
+
+By Mary Ritter Beard
+
+The awakening of women to the low social status of their sex is the most
+encouraging fact of the century.
+
+
+Unanimity of Needs
+
+By Katherine Anthony
+
+(Author of “Mothers Who Must Earn,” and “Feminism in Germany and
+Scandinavia,” from which the following is taken.)
+
+The woman movement of the civilized world wants much the same thing in
+whatever language its demands are expressed. In more or less unconscious
+cooperation, the women of the civilized nations have from the first
+worked for similar ends and common interests. Beyond all superficial
+differences and incidental forms, the vision of the emancipated woman
+wears the same features whether she be hailed as _frau_, _fru_, or
+_woman_. The disfranchisement of a whole sex, a condition which has
+existed throughout the civilized world until a comparatively recent date,
+has bred in half the population an unconscious internationalism. The man
+without a country was a tragic exception; the woman without a country
+was the accepted rule. The enfranchisement of the women now under way
+has come too late to inculcate in them the narrow views of citizenship
+which were once supposed to accompany the gift of the vote. Its effect
+will rather be to make the unconscious internationalism of the past the
+conscious internationalism of the future.
+
+
+Coming Into Her Own
+
+By Fanny Humphrey Gaffny
+
+(American contemporary. President National Council of Women. From a
+speech delivered at the celebration of Miss Anthony’s 80th birthday.)
+
+The Christian world reckoned by centuries is just coming of age.
+Therefore women are beginning to put away childish things and to realize
+the greatness of womanhood.
+
+
+The Sisterhood of Women
+
+By Coralie Franklin Cook
+
+(From a speech delivered at the 80th birthday celebration of Susan B.
+Anthony.)
+
+Not until the suffrage movement had awakened woman to her responsibility
+and power, did she come to appreciate the true significance of Christ’s
+pity for Magdalene as well as of his love for Mary; not till then was the
+work of Pundita Ramabai in far away India as sacred as that of Frances
+Willard at home in America; not till she had suffered under the burden of
+her own wrongs and abuses did she realize the all-important truth that no
+woman and no class of women can be degraded and all womankind not suffer
+thereby.
+
+
+The Revolt of Women
+
+“Ouida” in Lippincott’s
+
+(See page 113)
+
+The whole human race is involved in the results of the present revolt and
+reaction amongst women; if turned back upon itself by mockery it will
+burn and bite on unseen, and find its issue in mad sins, wild frivolity,
+and all the anarchy of voluptuous abandonment; if rightly met, if rightly
+guided, it may become the noblest and highest revolution that has ever
+broken the chains of effete prejudices, and let out human souls from the
+darkness of ignorance into the light and glory of a day of liberty.
+
+
+Women’s Qualifications for Suffrage
+
+By Mrs. Russell Sage
+
+(See page 170)
+
+Twenty years ago I did not think that women were qualified for suffrage,
+but the strides they have made since then in the acquirement of business
+methods, in the management of their affairs, in the effective interest
+they have evinced in civic matters, and the way in which they have
+mastered parliamentary methods, have convinced me that they are eminently
+fitted to do men’s work in all purely intellectual fields.
+
+
+A Generation Ago
+
+By Neva R. Deardorf, Ph. D.
+
+(Department Public Health and Charities, Philadelphia. From “Annals of
+the American Academy.”)
+
+Woman’s place in the crowd of a generation ago was immediately back
+of her masculine kinsfolk. Here she enjoyed protection from the rough
+elbowing of the crowd, though in return for this shelter she forfeited
+her liberty and was expected to devote all of her physical strength and
+mental energy to pushing some particular masculine protector to the
+front. Some times her efforts were appreciated, frequently they were
+taken for granted, since etiquette favored a covert manner of pushing.
+But the rules of the game have changed. Partners and co-laborers are
+taking the place of lords and masters. Farmers, professors, clergymen,
+politicians, in fact, husbands of every calling are coming to see the
+advantage of having a wife beside, instead of behind, them. They now take
+pride in a wife who enjoys an outlook on the world which enables her
+to help far more intelligently and effectively than did the wife of a
+generation ago.
+
+
+To Raise the Standards of Life
+
+By Gertrude Barnum
+
+(American newspaper woman. Speaker and writer in the cause of organized
+labor.)
+
+The attitude of men toward women, economic, social, political, reacts
+upon man and society. In recognizing this, the man with the scythe is
+a length ahead of the man with the cap and gown, the cassock or the
+check book. The awakening to a sense of the economic interdependence and
+fellowship of men and women, has made the trade unionist the first to
+recognize the justice and wisdom of “universal suffrage,” and annually in
+convention the American Federation of Labor declares:
+
+“That the best interests of labor require the admission of women to
+full citizenship—not only as a matter of justice to them, but also as a
+necessary step toward insuring and raising the American standards of life
+for all.”
+
+
+Legislative Responsibility
+
+By Emily J. Hutchins
+
+(See page 204)
+
+The most obvious effect of the vote is that it puts women upon a plane
+of political equality with other normal adults.... Universal suffrage
+stands for a certain recognition of the stake that all human beings,
+irrespective of sex, have in the general welfare, and destroys a false
+sense of sex limitations. By virtue of their new standing in the
+community women assume an equal responsibility with men, for both good
+and bad legislation.
+
+
+He Shall See the New Woman
+
+By Mabel Potter Daggett
+
+(From “What the War Means to Woman,” in “Pictorial Review.”)
+
+You see, when her country called her, it was destiny that spoke. Though
+no nation knew. Governments have only thought they were making women
+munition workers and women conductors and women bank-tellers and women
+doctors and women lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I doubt
+if there is a statesman anywhere who has learned to unlock a door of
+opportunity to let the woman movement by, who has realized that he was
+but the instrument in the hands of a higher power that is re-shaping the
+world for mighty ends, rough-hewn though they be today from the awful
+chaos of war.
+
+But there is one who will know. When the man at the front gets back
+and stands again before the cottage rose-bowered on the English downs,
+red-roofed in France and Italy, blue-trimmed in Germany, or ikon-blessed
+in Russia, or white-porched off Main Street in America, he will clasp her
+to his heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at arm’s length
+and look long into her eyes and deep into her soul. And lo, he shall see
+there the New Woman. This is not the woman whom he left behind when he
+marched away to the Great World War. Something profound has happened to
+her since. It is woman’s coming of age.
+
+
+The Freedom of the Women
+
+By Louise Collier Wilcox
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
+
+ When woman knew that on her strength devolved the care of race,
+ She crept into her cave to sleep and told her man to face
+ The prowling outer dangers, and the dark and fearful odds,
+ The thunder, beasts, and lightning, and the wrath of all the gods;
+ For at her heart she carried the future and its cares,
+ And the freedom that she needed was more precious far then theirs.
+
+ So she watched her babe’s eyes open, and the little limbs grow straight,
+ And she taught him all the lore she’d learned, and what to love and
+ hate;
+ And she trained the little body, and she led the little soul,
+ Till another woman took him to lead further toward the goal;
+ Then the mother smiled in anguish, though she laughed at age and cares,
+ For the freedom that she wanted was a longer one than theirs.
+
+ When the work of life grew harder and men bowed beneath the yoke,
+ Of needs too great to master, and lusts too deep to choke,
+ She worked and slaved and tended, she wrestled with the dearth;
+ She harnessed up herself to beasts, to till the barren earth;
+ And she planted in her garden and she weeded out the tares,
+ For the freedom that she wanted was more beautiful than theirs.
+
+ But when she saw man bestial and content with earthly things,
+ She scourged herself in cloisters, and she wept and prayed for wings.
+ Then she nurtured heavenly visions and she held aloft the cross,
+ To show eternal values amid life’s gain and loss.
+ And she pointed to the radiance round the crown the god-man wears,
+ For the freedom that she wanted was a holier one than theirs.
+
+ Then she smiled from out her shelter while her men coped with the world;
+ Her strength she made of weakness, and about her heart she curled
+ The tendrils of dependence and his little children’s love;
+ And she showed him what a home was in her gathered treasure trove.
+ All the time her eyes were smiling with the smile the seer wears,
+ For the freedom that she wanted was the freedom of his heirs.
+
+ Still her heart grew great and greater, and her eyes she would not blind
+ To the suffering of the victims, to the needs of all mankind.
+ And she knew her safety futile and her children’s stronghold weak,
+ Till the least, last one is sheltered, and there’s none astray to seek.
+ So she looked far down the ages to the good that all man shares,
+ For the freedom that she wanted was a broader one than theirs.
+
+ And she knew her man short-sighted, since he had not borne the pain,
+ The slavery, drudgery, darkness, the glory and the stain
+ Of womanhood and motherhood. How could he love the race?
+ As she who bore and nurtured, God’s instrument of grace?
+ So she ceased to coax and wheedle, and commanded as one dares
+ Whose only love of freedom is a higher one than theirs.
+
+ ...
+
+ She stands, now, hand upon the helm, to help him govern life,
+ And she steers her world, his equal, in love, in peace, in strife;
+ She owns her strength and wisdom; and he may read who runs,
+ That she must demand her freedom from his daughters and his sons.
+ Neither beneath nor over, but equal in her place,
+ The freedom that she’ll die for, is the freedom of the race.
+
+
+A Woman’s Question
+
+By M. Carey Thomas
+
+(A contemporary. President of Bryn Mawr College. From an address at the
+College Evening of the National American Suffrage Association.)
+
+Woman suffrage is first of all a woman’s question. We cannot remain
+indifferent. The issues involved are so overwhelmingly important, first
+of all, to us as women caring as we must for all other women’s welfare,
+and second, to us as citizens of the modern industrial state. I am
+sure as the result of repeated experiment that it is only necessary
+for generous and unprejudiced women to realize the present economic
+independence of millions of women workers, and the swiftly coming
+economic independence of millions upon millions more women workers for
+woman suffrage to seem to them inevitable from that moment.
+
+No one can maintain by serious arguments—that is, by arguments that are
+not pure and simple distortion of fact—that the ballot will not aid
+women workers, as it has aided men workers, to obtain fairer conditions
+and fairer wages. All working men and all men of every class regard the
+ballot as their greatest protection against the oppression and injustice
+of other men. It is only necessary to ask ourselves what would be the
+fate of any political party whose platform contained a plank depriving
+laboring men of the right to vote.
+
+
+Because They Cannot Vote
+
+By Meta L. Stern
+
+(See page 250)
+
+Industrial organization and political activity constitute the two
+powerful arms of the labor movement. Men are free to use both their arms.
+Women are struggling with one arm tied.
+
+
+The Plea of the Women
+
+By Katherine Parrott Sorringe
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
+
+ Standing before you with suppliant hands,
+ Mothers and wives and daughters, we
+ Sue for the justice long denied;—
+ Give us the vote that makes us free!
+
+ She who went down to the gates of death,
+ Joyful, to fling the life-doors wide,
+ Mother of statesman, soldier, saint—
+ Set this crown on her patient pride!
+
+ She, your comrade, who steadfast stood
+ Shoulder to shoulder, through storm and night,
+ Held up your hands till victory pealed—
+ Grant her this prize of well-fought fight.
+
+ Who trips laughing across your life,
+ Light of your love, your soul made fair?
+ Give her this pledge of a father’s faith,
+ Flower o’ freedom to deck her hair!
+
+ Mothers and wives and daughters, we,
+ Shall we ask in vain, with suppliant hand?
+ We, who are children of the free!
+ We, who are builders in the land!
+
+
+A Prisoner in Bow
+
+By Sylvia Pankhurst
+
+(A leader of the Suffragette movement of England. The following, quoted
+from “The Woman’s Journal,” is an account of one of her imprisonments in
+the London jails.)
+
+My eight days’ license had expired. The police were massed outside the
+Bromley Public Hall where I was speaking, waiting to arrest me. Numbers
+of detectives in plain clothes within were amongst the audience; the
+people hissed and howled at them and they threatened them with sticks.
+At the close of the meeting, the people, declaring that I should not be
+arrested, crowded down the stairs and out in a thick mass with men in
+the center of them all. The police rushed at us, striving to break our
+ranks and to force a way through to me.... Policemen were on every side
+of me. Two of them gripped and bruised my arms, dragging me along. The
+crowd followed, calling to me.... The policemen dug their fingers into my
+flesh. One of them took out his truncheon and grasped it tight against my
+hand and arm. The back of my left hand was bruised from it all next day.
+Several women rushed up to me and were arrested, and one girl who did
+not know any of us, or what the trouble was about, called out: “Oh, you
+should not hurt her,” and was taken into custody. They dragged me into a
+Cannon Row police station....
+
+So, hatless, and without so much as a brush or comb, I was taken back to
+gaol to begin my hunger, thirst and sleep strike. When I reached my cell,
+the same cell in the hospital in which during February and March I had
+been forcibly fed for five weeks, I began to pace up and down.
+
+A woman officer came to me and said I must not make a noise.... I took a
+blanket from the bed and spread it on the floor to deaden the sound of my
+footsteps, lest any of the other women prisoners should hear them and be
+kept awake.
+
+Then I walked on and on, five short steps across the cell and five short
+steps back, on and on, and on.... As the hours dragged their slow way I
+stumbled often over the blanket that wrinkled up and caught in my feet.
+Often I stooped with dizzy brain to straighten it. The walking, the
+ceaseless walking, when I was so tired, made me grow sick and faint. I
+was stumbling, falling to my knees, clutching, as one drowning, at the
+bed or chair. Sometimes I think I slept an instant or two as I lay, for
+sleep seemed to be dogging as I walked.
+
+It was cold, cold and colder, as the morning came, as the sombre yellow
+faded and the gray sky turned to violet—such a strange brilliant violet,
+almost startling it seemed through those heavy bars. Then the violet died
+into the bleak white chill of early day.
+
+In the day time I still walked, but sometimes I had to rest in the hard,
+wooden chair, and then I would be startled to feel my head nod heavily to
+one side. My legs ached, the soles of my feet were swollen. They burned,
+and I thought of the women of the past who were made to walk on red hot
+plough shares for their faith. After the first few days I remembered that
+tramps rubbed soap on their feet to prevent their getting sore. I rubbed
+soap on mine and found that it eased them a good deal. Each time I took
+my stocking off to do this I noticed that my feet had grown more purple.
+My hands, too, were purple as they hung at my sides. My throat was
+parched and dry. My lips were cracked. On Wednesday I fainted twice, and
+afterwards there came and stayed till I was released, a strange pressure
+in the head, especially in the ears. There was a sharp pain across my
+chest. That evening I asked to see a doctor from the home office. On
+Thursday afternoon he came. On Friday there was no more likelihood of my
+sleeping. I lay on the bed most of the day burning hot, with cold shivers
+that seemed to pass over me as though a cold wind was blowing on my face.
+In the afternoon I was released and came back to the little red-roofed
+house under St. Stephen’s church and the kind hearts of Bow.
+
+
+Out of the Dark
+
+By Matilda Jocelyn Gage
+
+(From “Woman, Church and State.”)
+
+Although England was Christianized in the fourth century, it was not
+until the tenth that the Christian wife of a Christian husband acquired
+the right of eating at table with him.
+
+
+All Methods Employed
+
+By Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont
+
+(In “Harper’s Bazar.” President of the Political Equality Association of
+New York, a leading spirit in the Congressional Union, an organization
+whose tactics have caused it to be called the militant wing of the
+suffrage movement.)
+
+Woman suffrage is a war on ignorance, prejudice and vice. To attack
+certain gigantic forces, a people must take any and every line open to
+them. If the Germans had attacked Warsaw from but one side, that great
+city would still be under Russian rule. I believe, therefore, that women
+in fighting for their suffrage should use all lines approaching the
+enemy. I personally am working along all roads of attack, for I feel that
+where one method may fail, another may succeed.
+
+
+Glory in Power
+
+By Mrs. Burke Cockran
+
+(In “Harper’s Bazar.”)
+
+Suffragists are born, not made. There are many women whose brains will
+never respond to suffrage argument.... And yet I am convinced that these
+women, when they do receive the vote, will not only use their power
+judiciously and conscientiously, but will eventually glory in it.
+
+
+Feminism a Tree
+
+By Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
+
+(Well-known English actress. Author of “What Women Want,”[1] from which
+the following is taken.)
+
+... Feminism is a tree, and woman suffrage merely one of its many
+branches. Some of these branches are essential to the life of the tree,
+others are not. Some grow strong and put forth shoots in their turn,
+others blossom prematurely, wither young, and drop from the trunk.
+Meanwhile the tree towers up into the sun with its crown of sturdy
+growths, and its abortive shoots lie forgotten in the shadow below,
+leaving hardly a scar upon the great stem to mark their death. Only few
+people see this tree as a unit. All who do know that woman suffrage is
+one of its essential growths. But the majority still concentrate their
+gaze upon one branch or another, whichever seems to them most fair, and
+the parent tree is lost to sight amid the multiplicity of its offspring’s
+leaves. Suffrage has rallied to its march thousands of conservative women
+who are indifferent, or even opposed, to some newer branches of the tree,
+while those who are absorbed in certain later and eccentric growths are
+sometimes amusingly contemptuous of the older limbs. They forget that the
+topmost crown could not flourish if the wide boughs below did not help
+the tree to breathe. They are sometimes, too, in danger of forgetting
+that if the great roots of the trees were not anchored deep in the soil
+of woman’s nature itself, in her motherhood, her strong tenderness, and
+her service, the whole growth would perish.
+
+[1] Frederick A. Stokes Co.
+
+
+Woman Has Justified Herself
+
+By Lady Morgan
+
+(English. From “Woman and Her Master,” published in Paris, in a
+“Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors,” 1840.)
+
+Notwithstanding her false position, woman has struggled through all
+disabilities and degradations, has justified the intentions of Nature
+in her behalf, and demonstrated her claim to share in the moral agency
+of the world. In all outbursts of mind, in every forward rush of the
+great march of improvement she has borne a part; permitting herself
+to be used as an instrument, without hope of reward, and faithfully
+fulfilling her mission, without expectation of acknowledgment. She has,
+in various ages, given her secret service to the task-master, without
+partaking in his triumph, or sharing in his success. Her subtlety has
+insinuated views which man has shrunk from exposing, and her adroitness
+found favor for doctrines which he had the genius to conceive, but not
+the art to divulge. Priestess, prophetess, the oracle of the tripod, the
+sibyl of the cave, the veiled idol of the temple, the shrouded teacher
+of the academy, the martyr or missionary of a spiritual truth, the armed
+champion of a political cause, she has been covertly used for every
+purpose, by which man, when he has failed to reason his species into
+truth, has endeavored to fanaticize it into good; whenever mind has
+triumphed by indirect means over the hearts of the masses.
+
+In all moral impulsions, woman has aided and been adopted; but, her
+efficient utility accomplished, the temporary part assigned her for
+temporary purposes performed, she has ever been hurled back into her
+natural obscurity, and conventional insignificance.... Alluded to, rather
+as an incident, rather than a principle in the chronicles of nations, her
+influence, which cannot be denied, has been turned into a reproach; her
+genius, which could not be concealed, has been treated as a phenomenon,
+when not considered as a monstrosity!
+
+But where exist the evidences of these merits unacknowledged, of these
+penalties unrepealed? They are to be found carelessly scattered through
+all that is known in the written history of mankind, from the first to
+the last of its indited pages. They may be detected in the habits of the
+untamed savage, in the traditions of the semi-civilized barbarian! And
+in those fragments of the antiquity of our antiquity, scattered through
+undated epochs,—monuments of some great moral debris, which, like the
+fossil remains of long-imbedded, and unknown species, serve to found a
+theory or to establish a fact.
+
+Wherever woman has been, there has she left the track of her humanity, to
+mark her passage—incidentally impressing the seal of her sensibility and
+wrongs upon every phase of society, and in every region, “from Indus to
+the Pole.”
+
+
+The Story of Katie Malloy
+
+By Caroline A. Lowe
+
+(Well-known as a speaker on the Socialist and labor platforms. From a
+speech before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives,
+Sixty-Second Congress.)
+
+The need of the ballot for the wage-earning woman is a vital one. No plea
+can be made that we have the protection of the home or are represented by
+our fathers or brothers....
+
+What of the working girls, who through unemployment are no longer
+permitted to sell the labor of their hands and are forced to sell their
+virtue?
+
+I met Katie Malloy under peculiar circumstances. It was because of this
+that she told me of her terrible struggles during the great garment
+workers strike in Chicago. She had worked at H——’s for five years and had
+saved $30. It was soon gone. She hunted for work, applied at the Young
+Women’s Christian Association and was told that so many hundreds of girls
+were out of work that they could not possibly do anything for her. She
+walked the streets day after day without success. For three days she had
+almost nothing to eat. “Oh,” she said, with the tears streaming down her
+cheeks, “there is always some place where a man can crowd in and keep
+decent, but for us girls there is no place, no place but one, and it is
+thrown open to us day and night. Hundreds of girls—girls that worked by
+me in the shop—have gone into houses of impurity.”
+
+Has Katie Malloy and the five thousand working girls who are forced into
+lives of shame each month no need of a voice in a Government that should
+protect them from this worse than death!
+
+
+The New Woman
+
+By Dora B. Montefiore
+
+(In “The Progressive Woman.” English Contemporary. Writer and speaker on
+woman and labor problems.)
+
+ Pausing on the century’s threshold,
+ With her face toward the dawn,
+ Stands a tall and radiant presence;
+ In her eyes the light of morn,
+ On her brow the flush of knowledge
+ Won in spite of curse and ban,
+ In her heart the mystic watchword
+ Of the Brotherhood of Man.
+
+ She is listening to the heartbeats
+ Of the People in its pain;
+ She is pondering social problems
+ Which appeal to heart and brain.
+ She is daring for the first time
+ Both to think—and then to act;
+ She is flouting social fictions,
+ Changing social lie—for Fact.
+
+ Centuries she followed blindfold
+ Where her lord and master led;
+ Lived his faith, embraced his morals;
+ Trod but where he bade her tread.
+ Till one day the light broke round her,
+ And she saw with horror’s gaze,
+ All the filth and mire of passion
+ Choking up the world’s highways.
+
+ Saw the infants doomed to suffering,
+ Saw the maidens slaves to lust,
+ Saw the starving mothers barter
+ Souls and bodies for a crust.
+ Saw the workers crushed by sweaters,
+ Heard the cry go up, “How long?”
+ Saw the weak and feeble sink ’neath
+ Competition’s cursed wrong.
+
+ For a moment paused she shuddering;
+ Hers in part the guilt, the blame—
+ Untrue to herself and others,
+ Careless to her sister’s shame.
+ Then, she rose—with inward vision
+ Nerving all her powers for good;
+ Feeling one with suffering sisters
+ In a perfect womanhood.
+
+ Rising ever ’bove the struggle
+ For this mortal fleeting life;
+ Listening to the God within her
+ Urging Love—forbidding Strife.
+ Love and care for life of others
+ Who with her must fall or rise.
+ This the lesson through the ages
+ Taught to her by Nature Wise.
+
+ She had pondered o’er the teaching,
+ She had made its truths her own;
+ Grasped them in their fullest meaning,
+ As “New Woman” she is known.
+ ’Tis her enemies have baptized her
+ But she gladly claims the name;
+ Hers it is to make a glory
+ What was meant to be a shame.
+
+ Thinking high thoughts, living simply,
+ Dignified by labor done;
+ Changing the old years of thraldom
+ For new freedom—hardly won.
+ Clear-eyed, selfless, saved through knowledge,
+ With her ideals fixed above,
+ We may greet in the “New Woman”
+ The old perfect Law of Love.
+
+
+What Is This Government?
+
+By Mrs. Belle Case La Follette
+
+(American contemporary. Wife of the United States Senator, Robert La
+Follette. The following is from a speech on suffrage, given in Boston.)
+
+What is this government that we women have been taught to think of as
+something so remote from our interests, so unrelated to the immediate
+personal preoccupations of our daily lives? There are three great matters
+in which we are all concerned: religion, education and government. In
+religion men and women share equally (indeed, men sometimes are content
+that women should do more than their share). In education it has come to
+pass that both men and women participate equally, though that was not
+always so. It is less than two generations that our universities and even
+our high schools have been open to women upon the same terms as to men.
+
+But government is considered as man’s exclusive province—a limitation
+that has narrowed the lives of the women, that has robbed the children,
+and that has reacted most injuriously upon the State. For with what
+matters does government concern itself? Why, with matters that touch
+intimately home happiness and home prosperity, with laws and regulations
+that guard and further human lives.
+
+
+Woman Has Helped
+
+By Luella Twining
+
+Woman always has figured prominently in every movement and transformation
+that has changed the conditions of human life.
+
+
+Our Common Interests
+
+By Lena Morrow Lewis
+
+(American contemporary. Writer. Speaker. Former member of the National
+Executive Committee of the Socialist Party. Editor “The Seattle Call.”)
+
+Every argument in behalf of man suffrage applies with equal force to
+woman suffrage. Men and women have more in common as members of the same
+species, belonging to the same human family, than they have differences,
+because of the incident of sex. To deny woman the ballot because of her
+sex is virtually to repudiate her right and claim as a human being. That
+a difference does exist between men and women is on the other hand a
+strong argument in behalf of woman suffrage. The giving of the ballot to
+woman will not rob man of his just rights. The admission of woman into
+the political arena will do away with male supremacy, which is injurious
+to man, breeds tyranny and results in injustice to woman. Justice to
+woman does not mean injustice to man. Our common interests as human
+beings, and our differences as men and women both demand political power
+and social rights for women the same as for men.
+
+
+Women
+
+By Zona Gale
+
+(Contemporary American writer and suffragist. In “The American Magazine.”)
+
+ They looked from farm house window;
+ Their joyless faces showed
+ Between the curtain and the sill—
+ You saw them from the road.
+ They looked up while they churned and cooked
+ And washed and swept and sewed.
+ Some could die and some just lived, and many a one went mad,
+ But it’s “Mother be up at four o’clock,” the menfolk bade.
+
+ They looked from town-house windows,
+ A shadow on the shade
+ Rose-touched by colorful depths of room
+ Where harmonies were made.
+ Within, the women went and came,
+ And delicately played.
+ Some could grow, and some could work, but many of them were dead.
+ “We must be gowned and gay tonight when the men come home,” they said.
+
+ They looked from factory windows
+ Where many an iron gin
+ Drew in their days and ground their days
+ On the black wheels within,
+ Drew in their days and wove their days
+ To a web exceeding thin.
+ And they suffered what women have suffered over and over again.
+ And it’s “Double your speed for a living wage, ye mothers and wives of
+ men!”
+
+ They looked from brothel windows,
+ And caught the curtain down.
+ A piteous, beckoning hand thrust out,
+ To summon or clod, or clown.
+ They named them true, they named them true,
+ The Women of the Town.
+ Some could live and some just died, and most of them none could know,
+ And it’s “What if the fallen women vote?” from the men who keep them so.
+
+
+Allegory on Wimmin’s Rights
+
+By Josiah Allen’s Wife (Marietta Holly)
+
+(American contemporary. A philosopher who uses the humorous story to
+carry her message to the reading public.)
+
+“Wimmin haint no business with the laws of the country,” said Josiah.
+
+“If they haint no business with the law, the law haint no business with
+them,” said I warmly. “Of the three classes that haint no business with
+the law—lunatics, idiots and wimmin—the lunatics and idiots have the best
+time of it,” says I with a great rush of ideas into my brain that almost
+lifted up the border of my head-dress. “Let a idiot kill a man; ‘What of
+it?’ says the law. Let a luny steal a sheep; again the law murmurs in a
+calm and gentle tone, ‘What of it? They haint no business with the law,
+and the law haint no business with them!’
+
+“But let one of a third class, let a woman steal a sheep, does the law
+soothe her in those comfortin’ tones? No; it thunders to her in awful
+accents: ‘You haint no business with the law, but the law has a good deal
+of business with you, vile female; start for state’s prison! You haint
+nothin’ at all to do with the law, only to pay all the taxes it tells you
+to, embrace a license bill that is ruinin’ to your husband, give up your
+innocent little children to a wicked father if it tells you to, and a few
+other little things, such as bein’ dragged off to prison by it, chained
+up for life, and hung, and et cetery.”
+
+“‘Methought I once heard the words,’ sithes the female, ‘True government
+consists in the consent of the governed. Did I dream them, or did the
+voice of a luny pour them into my ear?’
+
+“‘Haint I told you,’ frowns the law on her, ‘that that don’t mean wimmin?
+Have I got to explain again to your weakened female comprehension, the
+great fundymental truth that wimmin haint included and mingled in the law
+books and statutes of the country, only in a condemnin’ and punishin’
+sense as it were?’
+
+“‘Alas!’ sithes the woman to herself, ‘would that I had the sweet rights
+of my wild and foolish companions, the idiots and lunys!’
+
+“‘But,’ says she, ‘are the laws always just, that I should obey them thus
+implicitely?’
+
+“‘Idiots, lunatics! and wimmin! Are they goin’ to speak?’ thunders the
+law. ‘Can I believe my noble right ear? Can I, bein’ blindfolded, trust
+my seventeen senses? I’ll have you understand that it haint no woman’s
+business whether the laws are just or unjust; all you have to do is just
+to obey ’em. So start off for prison, my young woman.’
+
+“‘But my housework,’ pleads the woman. ‘Woman’s place is the home. It
+is her duty to remain, at all hazards, within its holy and protectin’
+precincts. How can I leave its sacred retirement to moulder in state’s
+prison?’
+
+“‘Housework!’ and the law fairly yells the words, he is so filled with
+contempt at the idea. ‘Housework! Jest as if housework is goin’ to
+stand in the way of the noble administration of the law! I admit the
+recklessness and immorality of her leavin’ that holy haven long enough
+to vote; but I guess she can leave her housework long enough to be
+condemned, and hung, and so forth.’
+
+“‘But I have got a infant,’ says the woman, ‘of tender days. How can I
+go?’
+
+“‘That is nothin’ to the case,’ says the law in stern tones. ‘The
+peculiar conditions of motherhood only unfits a female woman from ridin’
+to town in a covered carriage once a year, and layin’ her vote on a pole.
+I’ll have you understand it’s no hinderence to her at all in a cold and
+naked cell, or in a public court room crowded with men.’
+
+“As the young woman totters along to prison is it any wonder that she
+sithes to herself—
+
+“‘Would that I were an idiot! Alas is it not possible that I may become
+even now, a luny? Then I should be respected!’”
+
+
+For Woman Suffrage
+
+By Jane Addams
+
+(From speech favoring a suffrage amendment to the Constitution, before
+the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Sixty-Second
+Congress. Prior to the enfranchisement of the Illinois women.)
+
+As I have been engaged for a number of years in various philanthropic
+undertakings, perhaps you will permit me, for only a few moments, to
+speak from experience. A good many women with whom I have been associated
+have initiated and carried forward philanthropic enterprises, which were
+later taken over by the city, and thereupon the women have been shut out
+from the opportunity to do the self-same work which they have done up to
+that time. In Chicago the women for many years supported school nurses
+who took care of the children, both made them comfortable and kept them
+from truancy. When the nurses were taken over by the health department of
+the city the same women who had given them their support and management
+were shut out from doing anything more in that direction. And I think
+Chicago will bear me out when I say that the nurses are not now doing as
+good work as they did before.
+
+I could also use the illustration of the probation officers in Chicago
+who are attached to the juvenile court. For a number of years women
+selected and supported these probation officers. Later, when the same
+officers, paid the same salary, were taken over by the county and paid
+from the county funds, the women who had had to do with the initiation
+and beginning of the probation system, and with the primary and early
+management of the officers, had no more to do with them. At the present
+moment the juvenile court in Chicago has fallen behind its former
+position in the juvenile courts of the world. I think the fair-minded men
+of Chicago will admit that it was a disaster for the juvenile court when
+the women were disqualified, by their lack of the franchise, to care for
+it.
+
+The juvenile court has to do largely with delinquent and dependent
+children, and I think there is no doubt that on the whole women can deal
+with such cases better than men, because their natural interests lie in
+that direction....
+
+The establishment of a sanitarium for the care of tubercular patients in
+Chicago was begun by some philanthropic women, and later on, when these
+also were put under the care of the city, these women were shut out,
+save as they were permitted to do some work through the courtesy of the
+officials. Sometimes the officials are very courteous to them and glad to
+have their assistance; sometimes they quite resent the suggestions from
+them, claiming it is “up to” them to take care of the city affairs, and
+that women are only interfering when they try to help.
+
+So, it seems fair to say, if women are to keep on with the work which
+they have done since the beginning of the world—to continue with
+their humanitarian efforts which are so rapidly being taken over by
+the Government, and often not properly administered, that the women
+themselves will have to have the franchise.
+
+The franchise is only a little bit of mechanism which enables the voter
+to say how much money shall be appropriated from the taxes, of which
+women pay so large a part. When a woman votes, she votes in an Australian
+ballot box, very carefully guarded from roughness, and it seems to us
+only fair to the State activities which are so largely humanitarian that
+women should have this opportunity.
+
+
+A Spade’s A Spade
+
+By Ethel R. Peyser
+
+(In “Judge.”)
+
+ She’s treated by him like a queen,
+ She’s helped across the streets,
+ She’s given every courtesy
+ That every woman greets;
+ And yet he thinks the vote for her
+ Would signal grave defeats.
+
+ She trained and reared his able sons,
+ She helped him make his cash,
+ She advised him in his business,
+ She made him act less rash;
+ And yet he thinks the vote for her
+ Would be “just so much trash.”
+
+ She answers all his business notes
+ In a manner quite “parfait,”
+ She does all his stenography
+ And seems to have great sway;
+ And yet he thinks the vote for her
+ Would bring “naught but dismay.”
+
+ She knows the whys of stocks and bonds,
+ She knows statistics dull,
+ She keeps him up on markets
+ And knows the price to cull;
+ And yet he thinks the vote for her
+ “Would be an awful mull.”
+
+ She’s placed on rate commissions,
+ She takes part in great debates,
+ She is asked for her opinion,
+ She knows causes, bills, and dates;
+ And yet he thinks the vote for her
+ Would cause the fall of States.
+
+ She’s the brains of large conventions,
+ She knows well the social trend,
+ She has written books of civics,
+ She has made great forces blend;
+ And yet the vote for such as she
+ He cannot comprehend!
+
+
+Woman on the Scaffold
+
+By Alice Meynell
+
+(English contemporary. Poet and essayist. From “The Bookman.”)
+
+See the curious history of the political rights of woman under the
+Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the
+fortunes of a party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems
+a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted political
+death. She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her
+living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted no part in the
+largest interests, social, national, international. The blood with which
+she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in
+the tribune was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins....
+Women might be, and were, duly silenced when, by the mouth of Olympe de
+Gougas, they claimed a “right to concur in the choice of representatives
+for the formation of the laws,” but in her person, too, they were
+liberally allowed to bear responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de
+Gougas was guillotined. Robespierre then made her public and complete
+amends.
+
+
+A Lady Rebel
+
+By Abigail Adams
+
+(Wife of one president of the United States, and mother of another. A
+brilliant correspondent, her letters showing her to be a woman unusual in
+breadth of interest, and general culture. The following extract is from
+a letter written to her husband in 1774, during the session of the First
+Continental Congress.)
+
+I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And in the new
+code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I
+desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable
+to them than your ancestors.... If particular care and attention is
+not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and
+will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or
+representation.
+
+
+“The Gibraltar of Our Cause”
+
+By Susan B. Anthony
+
+(From a speech delivered at the Suffrage Convention held at Syracuse, N.Y.
+September 8, 1852. Quoted from “Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony.”[2])
+
+The claims we make at these conventions are self-evident truths. The
+second resolution affirms the right of human beings to their persons
+and earnings. Is that not self evident? Yet the common law, which
+regulates the relations of husband and wife, and is modified only in a
+few instances, gives the “custody” of the wife’s person to the husband,
+so that he has a right to her, even against herself. It gives him her
+earnings, no matter with what weariness they have been acquired, or how
+greatly she may need them for herself or her children. It gives him a
+right to her personal property, which he may will entirely away from
+her, also the use of her real estate, and in some of the states married
+women, insane persons and idiots are ranked together as not fit to make
+a will, so that she is left with only one right, which she enjoys in
+common with the pauper, the right of maintenance. Indeed, when she has
+taken the sacred marriage vows, her legal existence ceases. And what is
+our position politically? The foreigner, the negro, the drunkard, all are
+entrusted with the ballot, all are placed by men higher than their own
+mothers, wives, sisters and daughters!
+
+The woman, who, seeing this, dares not maintain her rights is the one to
+hang her head and blush. We ask only for justice and equal rights—the
+right to vote, the right to our own earnings, equality before the law:
+these are “the Gibraltar of our Cause.”
+
+[2] The Bowen Merrill Co.
+
+
+A Great Life
+
+By Ida Husted Harper
+
+(Biographer of Susan B. Anthony. From Introduction to the “Life and Works
+of Susan B. Anthony.”)
+
+Those who follow the story of this life will confirm the assertion that
+every girl who enjoys a college education; every woman who has the chance
+of earning an honest living in whatever sphere she chooses; every wife
+who is protected by law in the possession of her person and property;
+every mother who is blessed with the custody and control of her own
+children—owes these sacred privileges to Susan B. Anthony beyond all
+others.
+
+
+Suffrage a Means to an End
+
+By Ella S. Stewart
+
+(Contemporary. Ex-President the Illinois Equal Suffrage
+Association—Former Secretary “National American Suffrage Association.”)
+
+Suffrage is not an end in itself, but a means to an end....
+
+The opposition of the liquor forces is not gauged by the number of women
+actively engaged in temperance work. That number is still comparatively
+small. It takes no comfort from the fact that suffrage associations are
+non-partisan on all questions except suffrage. It would fear and fight
+off the enfranchisement of women if every temperance organization were to
+disband today. Therein it unconsciously pays its high tribute to woman
+and confesses its own lack of moral defense.... The forces of evil fear
+for woman’s vote.
+
+
+Man Cannot Represent Woman
+
+By Rev. Antoinette Brown
+
+(The first woman ordained to preach in the United States. The following
+extract is from a speech delivered at the Suffrage Convention at
+Syracuse, N. Y., Sept. 8, 1852.)
+
+Man cannot represent woman. They differ in their nature and relations.
+The law is wholly masculine; it is created and executed by man. The
+framers of all legal compacts are restricted to the masculine standpoint
+of observation, to the thoughts, feelings and biases of man. The law
+then can give us no representation as women, and therefore no impartial
+justice, even if the law makers were intent upon this, for we can be
+represented only by our peers.... When woman is tried for crime, her
+jury, her judges, her advocates, are all men; and yet there may have
+been temptations and various palliating circumstances connected with her
+peculiar nature as woman, such as man cannot appreciate. Common justice
+demands that a part of the law-makers and law-executors should be of her
+own sex. In questions of marriage and divorce, affecting interests dearer
+than life, both parties in the contract are entitled to an equal voice.
+
+
+Universality
+
+By Belle Lindner Israels
+
+(From the Introduction to “The Upholstered Cage.”)
+
+There can be no problem of women anywhere without aspects of universality.
+
+
+Mankind Our Neighbor
+
+By Mrs. R. R. Cotton
+
+(In “Social Service Review.”)
+
+The day is past when we deluded ourselves with the thought that our
+responsibilities ceased with the performance of our individual duties. We
+are jointly responsible for the existing conditions, and only by a joint
+effort can they be improved. Our neighbor’s welfare is our business, and
+our neighbor is mankind.
+
+
+Clearing Up the Muss
+
+By Gertrude Breslau Fuller
+
+(American contemporary. Prominent as a Lyceum speaker on social
+questions.)
+
+You say politics are too corrupt for women to mix up in? Well, they are
+pretty bad, there is no doubt about that. You have laid almost everything
+under heaven onto the women, but this one thing that has been under your
+own exclusive, masculine domain.
+
+Don’t you know that the principal business of women, all down the ages,
+has been to go along after the men and clear up the everlasting muss
+they made? Well, we are still at the same task. Our politics are no more
+corrupt than our housekeeping would be if we let you run it alone.
+
+
+Wisdom Comes with Freedom
+
+By Mary Wollstonecraft
+
+(See page 121)
+
+In France or Italy have the women confined themselves to domestic life?
+Though they have not hitherto had a political existence, yet have they
+not illicitly had great sway, corrupting themselves and the men with
+whose passions they played? In short, in whatever light I view the
+subject, reason and experience convince me that the only method of
+leading women to fulfill their peculiar duties is to free them from all
+restraint by allowing them to participate in the inherent rights of
+mankind.
+
+Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtuous, as men
+become more so, for the improvement must be mutual, or the injustice
+which one-half of the race are obliged to submit to retorting on their
+oppressors, the virtue of men will become worm-eaten by the insect whom
+he keeps under his feet.
+
+
+Women to Men
+
+By Miriam Allen De Ford
+
+(In “The Woman Voter.”)
+
+ We are they that wept at Babylon,
+ And still are they that weep;
+ We have watched the cradles of the world,
+ And hushed its sick to sleep;
+ We have served your folly and desire,
+ And drunk your cruel will;
+ You have smiled on us with far content:—
+ Are you smiling still?
+
+ We were slaves most fit for Solomon,
+ That now can call you kin;
+ It was strength of soul and many years
+ That changed us so within;
+ The strength of those you killed with scorn,
+ The years you could not kill;
+ Steep were the stairs to climb and hard:—
+ Are you smiling still?
+
+ We have shared your salt of loyalty,
+ And eaten of its bread;
+ We have died with you for Freedom’s sake,
+ And gained it, being dead:
+ You have drawn from out our breasts your life,
+ The life you use so ill:
+ We are they that bore you in the night:—
+ Are you smiling still?
+
+
+The Call to Social Service
+
+By Elizabeth (Mrs. George) Bass
+
+(American contemporary. Former president of the Woman’s City Club,
+Chicago. Chairman Chicago-Biennial Board, General Federation of Women’s
+Clubs. From editorial in “Life and Labor.”)
+
+The call to social service and action has brought the modern club woman
+along an ever broadening path to the high, wind-swept levels, where she
+sights limitless opportunity for expression and action; and two things
+she has come to see clearly, first, that she needs the ballot to do this,
+her natural work, more effectively; and second, that the Commonwealth
+needs her.
+
+
+Submission
+
+By Miriam Teichner
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
+
+ Submission? They have preached at that so long,
+ As though the head bowed down would right the wrong;
+ As though the folded hands, the coward heart,
+ Were saintly signs of souls sublimely strong;
+ As though the man who acts the waiting part
+ And but submits, had little wings a-start.
+ But may I never reach that anguished plight,
+ Where I at last grow weary of the fight!
+
+ Submission? “Wrong of course, must ever be
+ Because it ever was. ’Tis not for me
+ To seek a change; to strike the maiden blow.
+ ’Tis best to bow the head and not to see;
+ ’Tis best to dream, that we need never know
+ The truth—to turn our eyes away from woe.”
+ Perhaps. But, ah! I pray for keener sight.
+ And—may I not grow weary of the fight!
+
+
+The Price of Liberty
+
+By Mary Gray Peck
+
+(In “Life and Labor.” Chairman Committee on Drama, General Federation of
+Women’s Clubs.)
+
+“I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty
+or give me death.”
+
+Patrick Henry, when he said that, was not asking that liberty come as a
+free gift. No race or class ever has attained it so cheaply. Fifty years
+after the battle of Gettysburg, the negro is still fighting for the
+liberty which the bloodiest war in history could not confer on him. He
+must get it for himself.
+
+Women have been fighting longer than that for freedom.
+
+It is the glory of the women’s labor movement that working women struck
+the first blow for women’s liberty in this country.
+
+For a hundred years, working women have made straight the way for
+all women to follow. It was the women in the mills and the shops and
+factories who made it possible sixty years ago for women to enter the
+schools and the professions.
+
+Today, in the ultimate analysis, it is the women in the mills of commerce
+who gave women the ballot in the suffrage states. It is they who are
+paying the price. _Their strikes are all hunger strikes; not a hunger for
+bread alone, but a hunger for life and the liberty of soul._
+
+Not till these strikes end in victory, not till the last burning-factory
+martyr has rendered up her life as a sacrifice necessary to the
+destruction of the system which thrives on factory fires, can we count
+the price which working women have paid to make all women free.
+
+“No people can long endure half slave and half free.”
+
+If the working women had consented to be slaves, there would have been
+no woman movement. More than that—without the woman’s trade unions there
+could be no organized labor movement. Theirs is the strategic point in
+the conflict in which the whole world is lining up. Around them will rage
+the fiercest fight; but the stars in their courses fight for them.
+
+
+Woman’s Right
+
+By Olive Schreiner
+
+(South African novelist. Contemporary. Author of “An African Farm,”
+“Three Dreams in a Desert,” “Woman and Labor,” etc. The following is from
+“Woman and Labor.”[3])
+
+Thrown into strict logical form, our demand is this: We do not ask that
+the wheels of time should reverse themselves, or the stream of life
+flow backward. We do not ask that our ancient spinning wheels be again
+resuscitated and placed in our hands; we do not demand that our old
+grindstones and hoes be returned to us, or that man should again betake
+himself entirely to his province of war and the chase, leaving to us
+all domestic and civil labor. We do not even demand that society shall
+immediately so reconstruct itself that every woman may again be a child
+bearer (deep and overmastering as lies the hunger for motherhood in every
+virile woman’s heart!); neither do we demand that the children we bear
+shall again be put exclusively into our hands to train. This, we know,
+cannot be. The past material conditions of life have gone forever; no
+will of man can recall them. But _this_ is our demand: We demand that, in
+that strange new world that is arising alike upon the man and the woman,
+where nothing is as it was, and all things are assuming new shapes
+and relations, that in this new world we also shall have our share of
+honored and socially useful human toil, our full half of the labor of
+the Children of Woman. We demand nothing more than this, and will take
+nothing less. _This is our WOMAN’S RIGHT!_
+
+[3] Frederick A. Stokes Co.
+
+
+From “The Convert”
+
+By Elizabeth Robins
+
+(English contemporary. Actress, playwright, novelist. Author of “Way
+Stations,” “The Convert,” etc. The following is from a suffrage speech by
+one of her characters, Miss Claxton, in “The Convert.”)
+
+What, women don’t want it? Are you worrying about a handful who think
+because they have been trained to like subservience everybody else
+ought to like subservience, too?... The women who are made to work
+over hours—they want the vote. To compel them to work over hours is
+illegal. But who troubles to see that laws are fairly interpreted for
+the unrepresented.... I know a factory where a notice went up yesterday
+to say that the women employed there will be required to work 12 hours a
+day for the next few weeks.... Much of woman’s employment is absolutely
+unrestricted except that they may not be worked on Sunday. And while
+all this is going on, comfortable gentility sit in arm chairs and write
+alarmist articles on the falling birth-rate and the horrible amount of
+infant mortality. Here and there we find a man who realizes that the
+main concern of the State should be its children, and that you can’t get
+worthy citizens when the mothers are sickly and enslaved. The question
+of statecraft rightly considered always reaches back to the mother. That
+State is most prosperous that most considers her. No State that forgets
+her can survive. The future is rooted in the real being of women. If you
+rob the women, your children and your child’s children pay. Men haven’t
+realized it—your boasted logic has never yet reached so far. Of all the
+community the women who give the next generation birth, and who form its
+character, during the most impressionable years of its life—of all the
+community, these mothers now, or mothers to be, ought to be set free from
+the monstrous burden that lies upon the shoulders of millions of women.
+
+
+Rights, Privileges and Capacities
+
+By Catherine Waugh McCulloch
+
+(American contemporary. Former President Illinois Woman Suffrage
+Association, and practicing attorney. The following is from a pamphlet,
+“Illinois Laws Concerning Women,” issued by the I. W. S. A.)
+
+We read that no person shall be denied any political rights, privileges,
+or powers on account of religion. The word sex should have been added.
+People may change their religion, but never their sex. Rights, privileges
+and capacities ought never to depend on color of eyes or hair, cast of
+features, sex or any other accident for which a person is not to be
+blamed and which a person can never overcome. Any other qualification
+demanded of a voter may be acquired by one’s own exertion, or the
+lapse of time. Property may be earned, minority out-grown, education
+secured, sanity regained, alienage removed, imprisonment outlived. But no
+industry, no age, no brilliancy, no morality, can change sex. Sex should
+be made less a disgrace instead of more of a disgrace than poverty,
+minority, alienage, insanity and criminality.
+
+
+The Working Woman’s Awakening
+
+By Theresa Malkiel
+
+(In “The Progressive Woman.” American contemporary. Socialist. Speaker
+and writer on woman, child and labor problems.)
+
+Unconsciously, with closed eyes, driven, perhaps, by the herd instinct
+that makes her follow the others, the working woman is rising at last
+from her long slumber....
+
+The solution of the problem of existence is pressing upon her more and
+more. Even the mantle of marriage does no longer save her from it. The
+patient sufferer cannot and will not see her children destitute and
+hungry. She wants some of the celestial promises to be realized here on
+earth. Hence this general unrest of womanhood the world over.
+
+
+Woman’s Weak Dependency
+
+By Gertrude Atherton
+
+(American contemporary. Said by the London critics to be the most
+brilliant of American women novelists. The following is from “Julia
+France and Her Times.”)
+
+No wonder so few women had left an impression on history. How could any
+brain, even if endowed with true genius, reach the highest order of
+development while the character remained placid in its willing dependence
+upon the reigning sex? And man had despised woman through the ages,
+even when most enslaved by her, knowing that on him depended her very
+existence. He had the physical strength to wring her neck, and the legal
+backing to treat her as partner or servant, whichever he found convenient.
+
+
+A Pageant of Great Women
+
+By Cicily Hamilton
+
+A dramatic poem of power and beauty. Woman contends with prejudice in an
+argument before the throne of Justice, calling a pageant of the world’s
+great women to justify her claims. She wins her freedom and speaks to man
+as follows:
+
+ I have no quarrel with you, but I stand
+ For the clear right to hold my life my own:
+ The clear, clean right. To mould it as I will,—
+ Not as you will, with or apart from you
+ To make of it a thing of brain and blood,
+ Of tangible substance and of turbulent thought—
+ No thin, gray shadow of the life of man!
+ Your love, perchance, may set a crown on it;
+ But I may crown myself in other ways—
+ (As you have done, who are in one flesh with me).
+ I have no quarrel with you; but, henceforth
+ This you must know: The world is mine as yours—
+ The pulsing strength and passion and hurt of it:
+ The work I set my hand to, woman’s work,
+ Because I set my hand to it.
+
+
+The Prayer of the Modern Woman
+
+By Josephine Conger
+
+(Published in various Suffrage Journals.)
+
+(See page 177)
+
+ Unbind our hands. We do not ask for favor in this fight
+ Of human souls for human needs. We ask for naught but right,
+ That we may throw the burden from our backs, and from our brains
+ The thrall of servitude. We are so weary of the pains
+ That crush our hearts and cramp our wills, reducing all desires
+ To childish whims, while great hopes lie like smould’ring fires
+ Within our brains, or burst distorted from some weak, unguarded point,
+ Leaving ruin and anguish in their track. With woman bound, the whole
+ world’s out of joint,
+ For women are the mothers of the race. We cannot boast
+ Of natural rights, of liberty, while mothers of the host
+ Must know they’re classed in common law with idiots and slaves,
+ Must stand aside with criminals, with imbeciles and knaves.
+ The sturdy sons nursed at their breast cannot be wholly free,
+ For what the mother is, the child will in a measure be.
+ You are not granting Favor when you give us equal power;
+ The shame is, you’ve withheld from us so long our dower
+ Of earth’s inheritance. We do not beg for alms, for charity.
+ We do not want our rights doled out; we want full liberty
+ To grow, to be, to do our part, as Nature meant we should.
+ We want a perfect sister-, as well as brother-hood.
+
+
+By Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw
+
+(Chairman of the New York City Suffrage Party. In “Harper’s Bazar.”)
+
+The getting of votes has been to us like the saving of souls.
+
+
+By Julia Wedgewood
+
+(English writer. From an essay, “Female Suffrage, Considered Chiefly with
+Regard to Its Indirect Results.”)
+
+Of course, if women are either exactly like men, or simply men minus
+something or other, they could add no light to that already possessed by
+a male constituency, but I know of no one who seriously believes either
+of these things.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+The Home
+
+
+
+
+THE HOME
+
+
+“The Woman’s Place”
+
+By The Hon. Mrs. Arthur Lyttleton
+
+(English contemporary. The following is taken from “Women and Their
+Work.”)
+
+“The woman’s place is the home.”
+
+Such is a very common reply to those who propound any new schemes for
+educating or helping women. No one would deny the statement. It is true
+that those who make it sometimes forget that now-a-days a considerable
+number of women have no homes, and that therefore the remark by no means
+meets the whole case.
+
+
+The Spirit of the Home
+
+By Lucy Re Bartlett
+
+(English contemporary. Author of “Toward Liberty,” from which the
+following is taken.)
+
+By all means let most women choose the home for their sphere, if they
+will, and even severely avoid politics for the moment, if they be so
+minded. But whether in the home, or outside it, let all women consider
+well what be the spirit they are bringing into life—whether it be one
+which liberates and uplifts, or one which makes, instead, for bondage.
+
+
+Lovers of Home
+
+By Dr. Anna Howard Shaw
+
+(In “The Metropolitan Magazine.”)
+
+Every suffragist I have ever met has been a lover of home; and only the
+conviction that she is fighting for her home, her children, for other
+women, for all of these, has sustained her in her public work.
+
+
+Woman’s High Achievement
+
+By Selma Lagerlof
+
+(Swedish contemporary. Prominent in literary and progressive circles.
+From an address delivered before the Sixth Congress of the International
+Suffrage Alliance in Stockholm, entitled “Woman the Savior of the State.”)
+
+Have women done nothing which entitles us to equal rights with man? Our
+time on earth has been long—as long as his. Have we created nothing of
+incontestable worth to life and civilization? Besides this, that we have
+brought human beings into the world, have we contributed nothing of use
+to mankind?... I look at paintings and engravings, pictures of old women,
+of olden times. Their faces are haggard and stern; their hands rough and
+bony. They had their struggles and their interests. What have they done?
+
+I place myself before Rembrandt’s old peasant woman, she of the thousand
+wrinkles in her intelligent face, and I ask myself why she lived?
+Certainly not to be worshipped by many men, not to rule a state, not to
+win a scholar’s degree! And yet the work to which she devoted herself
+could not have been of a trivial nature. She did not go through life
+stupid and shallow! The glances of men and women rest rather upon her
+aged countenance than upon that of the fairest young beauty. Her life
+must have had a meaning.
+
+We all know what the old woman will reply to my question. We read the
+answer in her calm and kindly smile: “All that I did was to make a good
+home.”
+
+And look you! That is what the women would answer if they could rise
+from their graves generation after generation, thousands upon thousands,
+millions upon millions: “All that we strove for was to make a good home.”
+
+We know that if we were to ask the men, could we line them up, generation
+after generation, thousands and millions in succession, it would not
+occur to one of them to say that he had lived for the purpose of making a
+good home....
+
+We know that it is needless to seek further. We should find nothing. Our
+gift to humanity is the home—that, and nothing else....
+
+For the home we have been great; for the home we have been petty. Not
+many of us have stood with Christina Gyllenstierna on the walls of
+Stockholm and defended a city; still fewer of us have gone forth with
+Jeanne D’Arc to battle for the Fatherland. But if the enemy approached
+our own gate, we stood there with broom and dish rag, with the sharp
+tongue and clawing hand, ready to fight to the last in defense of our
+creation, the home. And this little structure which has cost us so much
+effort, is it a success or a failure? Is this woman’s contribution to
+civilization inconsiderable or valuable? Is it appreciated or despised?
+
+
+Woman’s Sphere the Home
+
+By Helen Keller
+
+(From “Out of the Dark.”[4])
+
+(See page 209)
+
+Woman’s sphere _is_ the home, and the home, too, is the sphere of man.
+The home embraces everything we strive for in this world. To get and
+maintain a decent home is the object of all our best endeavors. But what
+is the home? What are its boundaries? What does it contain? What must we
+do to secure and protect it?
+
+In olden times the home was a private factory.... Home and industrial
+life were one.... Once the housewife made her own butter and baked her
+own bread; she even sowed, reaped, threshed, and ground the wheat. Now
+her churn has been removed to great cheese and butter factories. The
+village mill, where she used to take her corn, is today in Minneapolis;
+her sickle is in Dakota. Every morning the express company delivers her
+loaves to the local grocer from a bakery that employs a thousand hands.
+The men who inspect her winter preserves are chemists in Washington. Her
+ice box is in Chicago. The men in control of her pantry are bankers in
+New York. The leavening of bread is somehow dependent upon the culinary
+science of congressmen, and the washing of milk cans is a complicated art
+which legislative bodies, composed of lawyers, are trying to teach the
+voting population on the farms.
+
+It would take a modern woman a lifetime to walk across her kitchen floor;
+and to keep it clean is an Augean labor. No wonder that she sometimes
+shrinks from the task and joins the company of timid, lazy women who do
+not want to vote. But she _must_ manage her home; for, no matter how
+grievously incompetent she may be, there is no one else authorized or
+able to manage it for her. She _must_ secure for her children clean food
+at honest prices. Through all the changes of industry and government she
+remains the baker of bread, the minister of the universal sacrament of
+life.
+
+[4] Doubleday Page & Co.
+
+
+Woman and the Primitive Home
+
+By Mrs. St. Clair Stobart
+
+(See page 144)
+
+(From “War and Woman.”)
+
+In the days when such proverbs as “The woman, the cat and the chimney
+should never leave the house”, “_Bonne femme est oiseau de cage_”, “A
+wife and a broken leg are best left at home”, were current in every
+household, there was some reason why women should remain at home. For
+_within the home_ were conducted—by women—all the industries of life.
+In those days women not only made jams and pickles, cured the hams and
+bacon, concocted wines and medicines, they also designed and embroidered
+all the curtains, tapestries and carpets; the making of beautiful
+laces, the spinning, the weaving, the sewing and the knitting of all
+the garments was committed to the charge of women. In those days when
+the control of all that made life worth living was with woman, she did
+not need, nor did she seek, outside occupations, which indeed consisted
+chiefly of the less intellectual pursuits of hunting and fishing. There
+was plenty of scope _within_ doors for the intellectual, industrial,
+and artistic faculties of every active-minded woman. If it is true that
+woman was more honored at that time when she remained indoors than she is
+now, this was _not because_ she remained at home, but because all the
+arts and crafts of life were in her hands—_within the home_. But now all
+this is changed, through no fault of the woman herself, and, except for
+the young wife and mother who has plenty of occupation in the rearing of
+her family, there is not enough work _within the home_ for additional
+active-minded and able-bodied women, the numerous daughters, sisters,
+cousins, aunts, who need occupation, but who have no family of their own
+because there are not enough men to go round.
+
+
+The Poor and Good Housing
+
+By Elizabeth Cook
+
+(From Speech on “Housing and Morals in Richmond.” Quoted from “Woman’s
+Work in Municipalities.”)
+
+Can children raised in Jail Bottom, whose only outlook is a mountain-like
+dump of rotting and rusty tin cans on the one side, and on the other a
+stream which is an open sewer, smelling to heaven from the filth which
+it carries along, or leaves here and there in slime upon its banks,
+have any but debasing ideas? Can parents inculcate high moral standards
+when across the street or down the block are houses of the “red light”
+district? Is the world so small that there is no room left for the
+amenities of life? Are ground space and floor space of more value than
+cleanliness and health and morality?... It is certainly a fallacy that
+the poor do not want good housing.
+
+
+Where She Lived
+
+By Mrs. John Van Vorst
+
+(American contemporary writer on Child Labor Problems. The following is
+taken from her book, “The Cry of the Children.”)
+
+The cotton-mill “folks” wear unwittingly a badge which distinguishes
+them far and wide. As I came along down over the hillside I met a child
+holding in her arms another smaller child; both were covered, their hair,
+their clothes, their very eyelids, with fine flakes of lint, wisps of
+cotton, fibres of the great web in which the factories imprison their
+victims.
+
+“Hello,” I said, “do you work in the mill?”
+
+“Yes, meaum.” The voice was gentle and the manner friendly. And giving
+a sidewise hitch to the baby, who had a tendency to slip from her tiny
+mother’s arms, this little worker showed me one of her fingers done up in
+a loose, dirty bandage.
+
+“I cut my finger right smart,” she drawled, “so I’m takin’ a day off.”
+
+“How old are you?”
+
+“Tweaulve.”
+
+“Got any brothers or sisters?”
+
+“I’ve got him.... And I’ve got one brother in the mill.”
+
+“How old is he?”
+
+“Tweaulve.”
+
+“Twins?” I asked.
+
+She smiled and shook her head. “He’s tweaulve in the mill, and he’s
+teayun outside.”
+
+This little bit of humanity, taking a day off as mother of a still tinier
+being, seemed a promising sponsor, and I suggested that we walk along
+together. She could not go to the mill with me, she explained, without
+first consulting her mother, so we proceeded to the settlement in which
+she lodged, along with eighty or a hundred families, who man the mill in
+which she was a hand.
+
+“That’s where we live.”
+
+Her fleet little bare feet picked a way deftly over the stony path, and
+she kept a hand free—when it was not laid on the baby’s back—to point
+out the turns in the road that led to “where she lived.” Her home was
+one of a group of frame one-story houses, perched on a slant of ground.
+Each house was encircled by a wooden veranda, and the order of the
+housekeeping described itself before the eyes, as a whisk of the broom
+which carried all the dirt from the kitchen onto the porch, and another
+whisk which landed it on the slant of ground, bedecked, in consequence,
+with old tin cans, decayed vegetables, pieces of dirty paper, rags and
+chicken feathers.
+
+It was to the more intimate quarters, however, that I penetrated with my
+guide. The inside court, or square upon which these “homes” opened their
+back doors, was a large mud puddle overhung with the collective wash
+of the neighborhood. In and out of the mud puddle wallowed the younger
+members of the mill families, receiving from time to time admonition and
+reprimand from a gently irate parent, who swished her long cotton wrapper
+over the court, drawling to her offspring: “I sure will whip you if
+you-all don’t quit.”
+
+“That-a-ways where we live,” said my little companion, stepping onto
+the porch and depositing her load, as she opened the door to announce
+a visitor to her mother. The woman turned listlessly from her sewing
+machine over which she was bent.
+
+“Won’t you come in?” she called to me, dragging out a chair by the fire,
+without getting up. “Lookin’ for work?” she asked.
+
+I took a seat, glancing at the interior which my little friend called
+“home.” The outer room was a kitchen—though it might, except for the
+stove, have been mistaken for a hen coop. The chickens pecked their way
+about the dirty floor, venturing as far, even, as the table upon which
+stood the meagre remains of a noonday meal. The second and the inner room
+had each a bed;—an unmade bed, I was going to say, but how, indeed, could
+a bed be made without either sheets or pillows? Two grimy counterpanes
+were flung in disorder across the mattresses; a few chairs, a bureau and
+the sewing machine completed the house furnishings.
+
+As the listless woman talked with me in a kindly manner about work,
+the baby, who had crawled in from the porch, and arrived as far as his
+mother’s skirts, now tugged at these, to be taken up. His tiny hands had
+served as propellers across the filthy floor. The piece of lemon candy
+had added to the general stickiness of the dirt, with which both hands
+and face were smeared. As a soldier shoulders a gun—the burden to which
+he is most accustomed—this mother swung her baby into her arms, and,
+while she talked on, giving items about the cost of living, and factory
+wages, she loosened her cotton jacket—evidently the only garment she had
+on—and folding the baby to her breast, she lulled its whimperings.
+
+“Yes,” she said, “we pay $1.50 a week for three rooms. That’s a little
+over six a month. I call it high. We don’t get no runnin’ water. Every
+drop we use’s got to be drawed in the yard; an’ we don’t get no light,
+either, nuthin’ but lamps.”
+
+The baby, comfortable and contented, let his hand stray over the mother’s
+throat, with little spasmodic caresses which left in their trail smears
+of dirt, flecked with tiny scarlet streaks where the sharp nails had
+caught in the pale, withered flesh.
+
+“I reckon you-all might be cold,” she said, directing the older child
+to put more wood on the open grate fire, thinking apparently nothing of
+herself. “We don’t like it here first-rate. Maybe we’ll move on. I sure
+do crave traveling. Well, honey,” this was addressed to the baby, who had
+sat up with a jerk and began to whine. The candy picked up from the floor
+where it had fallen and restored to its owner’s mouth, did not seem the
+desired thing. The mother looked at me with a knowing smile.
+
+“I reckon I can guess what ails him. He wants his babies.” And at this,
+always without getting out of her chair before the machine, she reached
+behind her and drew from a shelf over her head two white rats. These were
+apparently what the baby wanted. In the game that ensued between him and
+his pets, his chief delight seemed to be in seeing the rats disappear
+through the open throated gown of his mother, and making the tour of
+her bodice, wriggling, burrowing, crawling, to emerge finally from
+her collar at the nape of her neck. Sometimes they diversified their
+gyrations, proceeding upward into her hair and down again by way of her
+ears onto easier climbing ground. Impassable, unmoved, she talked on in
+her gentle voice, giving no sign whatever that she noticed the animals.
+It was only when the baby plunged his short nails into the white rat’s
+side that she ejaculated mercifully:
+
+“Quit that! You-all ’ll hurt them babies.”
+
+I was somewhat dazed as I proceeded presently with my little girl guide
+from this interior to the mill. The squalor and disorder of what I had
+seen, the ignorance and the insensibility, contrasted strangely with the
+courtesy that had been shown me, the friendly concern about any intention
+I might have to get work, the desire to help me on my way, the strange
+lethargic tenderness which took the form of pity for even rats.
+
+“Like animals,” my friend had told me. That we must wait to see.
+
+
+The War and the Home
+
+By Jane Addams
+
+(See page 28)
+
+This war is destroying the home unit in the most highly civilized
+countries in the world to an extent which is not less than appalling....
+At the present moment women in Europe are being told: bring children
+into the world for the benefit of the nation; for the strengthening of
+future battle lines; forgetting everything that you are taught to hold
+dear; forgetting your struggles to establish the responsibilities of
+fatherhood; forgetting all but the appetite of war for human flesh. It
+must be satisfied and you must be the ones to feed it, cost what it may;
+this is war’s message to the world of women.
+
+
+The Home
+
+By Mrs. Laura P. Young
+
+It is the home, and specifically the mother, who, with taste and tact,
+experience and wisdom, and above all, with love and faith, must guide
+and steady and inspire these lives. If we want our boys and girls to be
+free from discontent, free from hard commercialism, free from vulgarity
+and false ideals, we must enter their lives and quietly guide them into a
+youthful brotherhood and sisterhood of service.
+
+
+Honest Partnership in the Home
+
+By Mrs. Fred Dick
+
+(From speech before Congress on Welfare of the Child.)
+
+The homemaking of the future ... must be founded in this day and
+generation on financial independence. The girl of the past used to go
+from financial dependence in the girlhood home, to financial dependence
+as wife. She now goes from the independence of a wage earner to financial
+dependence as a wife, which relationship creates friction, and leads
+to incompatibility and divorce. There should be an adjustment of the
+responsibilities of home life before marriage on the basis of honest
+partnership. The children coming into the home should be taken into
+partnership financially and occupationally. They should be paid for
+their work on the basis that “If you don’t work you can’t eat,” and held
+responsible for their share in the home-making.
+
+
+The Home Influence
+
+By Ida Tarbell
+
+(From “The Business of Being a Woman.”[5])
+
+(See page 266)
+
+Every home is perforce a good or bad educational center. It does its
+work in spite of every effort to shirk or supplement it. No teacher can
+entirely undo what it does, be that good or bad. The natural, joyous
+opening of a child’s mind depends on its first intimate relations.
+These are, as a rule, with the mother. It is the mother who “takes an
+interest,” who oftenest decides whether the new mind shall open frankly
+and fearlessly. How she does her work depends less upon her ability to
+answer questions, than her effort not to discourage them; less upon her
+ability to lead authoritatively into great fields than her efforts to
+push the child into those which attract him. To be responsive to his
+interests is the woman’s greatest contribution to the child’s development.
+
+[5] McMillan Publishers.
+
+
+Then—Back to the Home!
+
+By Caro Lloyd
+
+(American contemporary writer. Sister of Henry Demarest Lloyd, and
+author of his Biography. The following was taken from an article in “The
+Progressive Woman.”)
+
+Search any woman’s heart, no matter how “emancipated”, how “modern”,
+she may be, and you will find there the love of home, of a lover, of a
+child, either realized or hoped for. How far this love is being denied to
+women today needs no showing. Women are being forced from the home into
+industry at a faster rate than the birth rate. Those still in the home
+are beginning to realize the interdependence of the modern social order
+and to see that only by extending their home-making out into the larger
+life of the community are their own circles safe.
+
+As they go out into this wider service and struggle, women will take the
+spirit of the home with them. There are already signs that the faith,
+honesty, cleanliness, kindness of the home are to become the qualities
+of future society. We are to forsake our present régime with its cruel
+hostilities, and to build an order which shall meet the needs of all
+its children with the tenderness of father and mother, which shall
+institutionalize sisterhood and brotherhood. In this reconstruction
+women, the home-makers, will do a valiant share.
+
+Then, having battled for their emancipation and won, and having used
+their new powers to join in the crusade for a higher civilization and
+won, women will go back into the home. Back to the home! But it will be
+as free women to a free home, under whose roof justice, equality and
+security will be sheltered. At last there will be an era of peace, and
+the morning rays of the golden age will tint the hilltops.
+
+
+Women’s Lodging Houses
+
+By Mary Higgs
+
+(English contemporary. Author of “The Master,” “How to Deal With the
+Unemployed,” “Glimpses Into the Abyss,” etc. The following extract is
+taken from the last named book.)
+
+We sat watching until we were weary, between 11 and 12, and then went to
+our bedroom. The same beds were reserved, and one woman who was said to
+work for her living, and had a very bad cough, was already in bed. We
+were speedily in bed also, and for awhile were quiet. The room was very
+stuffy, in spite of two ventilators; the sheets were not very clean,
+but still fairly so. The beds were filled by degrees all but one, that
+previously occupied by the Scotch woman. One girl who came in late said
+she was not on the streets; that she had begged money for her lodging,
+as she was out too late to return to her place. It was holiday time,
+being Whit week. One girl came in late and had had drink, which made her
+talkative, said she was a servant, and had just left a place where she
+had been ten months.... She meant to “enjoy herself” over the holiday and
+go to service again.
+
+One girl who had been in before grumbled that her bed had been slept in
+and was dirty; but her own underlinen was far from clean. No one seemed
+to possess a nightgown; all slept in their underlinen.
+
+We had the door a little ajar, and far into the night the doorbell kept
+ringing, and girls were admitted, and laughter and conversation drifted
+up the stairs. Our room settled down sometime past midnight, but the
+girl who was drunk several times tried to begin a conversation. At last
+we all slept. Two, however, had bad coughs. I woke at intervals through
+the night, and finally at 6.30. I was longing for fresh air, so put on
+a skirt and went down to enquire the time, and decided to go out for a
+quiet stroll. The bath room was empty, the bath had old papers in it, and
+did not look as if it was often used. There was a table with a looking
+glass, and a good deal of rouge about. The wash basin was very small,
+and no soap was provided. There was a roller towel for everybody. We had
+learned by experience to take our own soap and towel, and we lent the
+soap several times....
+
+I slipped out to the brightness of a May morning, and walked in the
+direction of the park. The park was not open, as it was not yet seven,
+but just outside I found a resting place. What a contrast to the fresh
+budding life of the trees was that perversion and decay of budding
+womanhood I had left behind me! A tree cut down in its prime to make way
+for building furnished me with a parallel. What _artificial_ conditions
+of man’s making, are pressing on those young lives, sapping them off from
+true use to rottenness and decay?...
+
+Is there even at the back an _organized_ system, seeking victims and
+preying on them? This much is certain: that there is room for an
+allowance of greed and wickedness against defenseless womanhood. For if a
+woman cannot get work, where is she to go? What is she to do? Can all our
+homes and shelters together prevent many from drifting “on the streets”?
+Do we not need a national provision for migration, and temporary
+destitution among women?
+
+
+The Inefficient Home
+
+By Mrs. Laura P. Young
+
+(From a paper read at the Third International Congress on “Welfare of the
+Child.”)
+
+At present the chief reason I see for the fostering of a recreative
+social relationship among high school students is the inefficiency of the
+average home....
+
+For instance, there is the home where the father may assume the attitude
+that after working all day at his own necessary pursuits, he cannot be
+annoyed by a riotous lot of youngsters all over the place in the evening.
+This is the short-sighted home....
+
+There is the home in which the mother values her housekeeping above her
+home-making, the mother who cannot have her cherished lares and penates
+marred or displaced by visiting young people or indeed even by her own.
+This is the home of things, not of children....
+
+And an especially pitiful type of inefficient home is that materially
+prosperous one in which the parents are too absorbed in their own
+affairs, social and business, to encourage home social life in their
+children. This type flourishes in many so-called exclusive suburban
+districts.
+
+From whatever type of home a child goes to school, it is in that home
+that his standards of conduct and ideals of life are formed, and it is
+these that he carries to his association with his fellow-pupils.
+
+
+Immorality and the Home
+
+By Clara E. Laughlin
+
+(Contemporary—Author of “The Evolution of a Girl’s Ideal,” “Everybody’s
+Lonesome,” “The Work-a-Day Girl.” The following extract is from “The
+Work-a-Day Girl.”)
+
+What is the relation between domestic service and criminality and
+immorality? Between erring girls and their own homes as nurseries of
+weakness and wilfulness? It is this: housework as a sad majority of women
+perform it, is the most unsystematized, unstandardized, undisciplinary,
+unsocial and uninteresting work in the world. And family relations, as a
+sad majority of our citizens comprehend them, are the most unregulated
+relations in the world; there are a few standards below which the social
+conscience of the community will not allow a parent to fall in the
+treatment of a child, or a mistress to fall in the treatment of a maid;
+but they are standards so low that almost any other human relationship
+is better regulated by law and by public sentiment. The home is the most
+haphazard institution of our day.... Of the twelve or fifteen million
+homes in the country, probably not one million would pass an efficiency
+test based on the way they are run and the quality of their output.
+
+
+Perpetuate the Ideal
+
+By Mrs. C. E. Porter
+
+If every man and woman held in their hearts a definite home ideal,—a
+lofty conception of their united lives, the highest function of
+parenthood would then, too, be perfect. There is little credit in simply
+perpetuating either a condition or a race.
+
+
+Market Value of Home Labor
+
+By Helen G. Putnam, M. D., LL. D.
+
+If the labors which the great majority of women are putting in homes were
+estimated at market rates like those of men—and domestic arts are coming
+to have high values—husband’s incomes in a great majority of cases could
+not secure either the quality or the quantity. This, the largest single
+field of industries, is not enumerated by the census. Accurate valuation
+would put an end to the shibboleth, “The husband supports the wife”;
+would give self-respect to millions of women, and so inspire them; would
+remove the unsound impression of women’s comparative irresponsibility and
+men’s comparative dependability, whose psychologic effect is disastrous.
+
+
+Domestic Strife
+
+By Mrs. Belle Case La Follette
+
+(See page 22)
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
+
+Where do we find strife amid civilization? In the homes where husband and
+wife have not had mutual interests, where they have grown apart, and one
+has outstripped the other in development.
+
+
+The Child at Home
+
+By Elizabeth McCracken
+
+(See page 90)
+
+In one of the letters of Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, to her mother,
+Queen Victoria, she writes: “I try to give my children in their home what
+I had in my childhood’s home. As well as I am able, I copy what you did.”
+
+There is something essentially British in this point of view. The English
+mother, whatever her rank, tried to give her children in their home what
+she had in her childhood’s home; as well as she is able, she copies what
+her mother did. The conditions in her life may be entirely different from
+those of her mother, her children may be unlike herself in disposition;
+yet she holds to tradition in regard to their upbringing; she tries to
+make their home a reproduction of her mother’s home.
+
+The American mother, whatever her station, does the exact opposite—she
+attempts to bestow upon her children what she did not possess; and she
+makes an effort to imitate as little as possible what her mother did....
+Her ambition is to train her children, not after the mother’s way, but in
+accordance with “the most approved method”. This is apt, on analysis, to
+turn out to be merely the reverse of her mother’s procedure.
+
+
+Cannot Replace the Home
+
+By Lillian D. Wald
+
+(Of Henry Street Settlement, New York.)
+
+We acknowledge the inability and the inefficiency of the parents and the
+home to control the fortunes of the child when we substitute for them the
+parental function of government; nevertheless, the strongest of education
+remains in the home, and the school and the settlement and other agencies
+that hover over it cannot replace that home.
+
+
+Man, Woman, and the Home
+
+By Edna Kenton
+
+(American contemporary writer. The following quotation is from “The
+Militant Women—and Women,” in “The Century Magazine.”)
+
+There is a rising revolt among women against the unspeakable dullness
+of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life of
+servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world. No honest woman
+will deny—man’s opinion is valueless here—that there is nothing in the
+home alone to satisfy woman’s human longing for variety, adventure,
+romance. But any man will tell you strongly that home is not enough to
+fill a human being’s life—_if that human being is to be himself_.
+
+
+Mother and Child-Character
+
+By Mrs. Winifred Sackville Stoner
+
+(Of the University of Pittsburgh, and noted specialist in Child Culture.)
+
+As you know, the ancients believed that a mother had a great deal to do
+with the character of her children, and this is true, for no mother has
+the right to bring children into this world and not give them the best of
+care and attention. I believe that every child born into this world has
+the trinity of mental, physical and moral elements, and it is up to the
+mother to develop this trinity....
+
+I believe more good can be accomplished by proper training right from the
+cradle than all the corporal punishment in the world. I have ten rules,
+and they are:
+
+1. Never say “don’t.” The very atmosphere of some homes is fairly reeking
+with “don’t”.
+
+2. Never scold. A scolding mother is worse than a spanking mother.
+
+3. Never give corporal punishment.
+
+4. Never say “must”.
+
+5. Never allow a child to lose its self-respect or respect for its
+parents.
+
+6. Never frighten a child.
+
+7. Never refuse to answer questions.
+
+8. Never ridicule a child or tease him.
+
+9. Don’t banish the fairies.
+
+10. Don’t let a child ever think there is any more attractive place than
+its own home.
+
+
+The Home of the Workingman
+
+By Alice Henry
+
+(See page 203)
+
+I look forward to a time I believe to be rapidly approaching, when the
+home of the workingman, like everyone else’s home, will be truly a home,
+the happy resting-place, the sheltering nest of father, mother and
+children, and when, through the rearrangement of labor, the workingman’s
+wife will be relieved from her monotonous existence of unrelieved
+domestic drudgery and overwork, disguised under the name of wifely
+and maternal duties, when the cooking and the washing, for instance,
+will be no more part of the home life in the humblest home than in the
+wealthiest. The workingman’s wife will then share in the general freedom
+to occupy part of her time in whatever occupation she is best fitted
+for, and, along with every other member of the community, she will share
+in the benefits arising from the better organization of domestic work.
+
+
+The Hotel “Home”
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+(Contemporary American Novelist. From “The House of Mirth.”)
+
+The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its
+inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New
+York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with
+mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements,
+while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a
+desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as
+richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits
+or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity
+from restaurant to concert hall, from palm-garden to music-room,
+from “art-exhibit” to dressmaker’s opening. High-stepping horses or
+elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague
+metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the
+weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of
+the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them in the background of their
+lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities;
+they themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent
+energies, diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet
+they had no more real existence than the poet’s shades in limbo.
+
+Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs.
+Hatch was its most substantial figure.... The details of her existence
+were as strange to Lily as its general tenor. The lady’s habits were
+marked by an Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her
+companion. Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside
+the bonds of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed
+obligations existed: night and day floated into one another in a blur
+of confused and retarded engagement so that one had the impression of
+lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner was often merged in the noisy
+after-theater supper which prolonged Mrs. Hatch’s vigil until daylight.
+Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng
+of hangers-on—manicures, beauty-doctors, hairdressers, teachers of
+bridge, of French, of “physical development”.... Mrs. Hatch swam in a
+haze of interminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage,
+the newspapers, the fashion-journals, and a gaudy world of sport still
+more completely beyond her companion’s ken.
+
+
+The Domestic Home Destroyed
+
+By Lida Parce
+
+(From “Economic Determinism.”[6])
+
+(See page 174)
+
+We have seen how the ties of mutual interest and common experience are
+disrupted by the transference of industry from the home to the factory.
+We have seen members of the family forsake the roof-tree in pursuit
+of work. We have seen the wife and child receiving their pay from the
+corporation, in definite, fixed wages.... The home shifts from time
+to time. Light, food, air, space, all are inadequate or polluted. The
+parents are irritable from the constant friction and anxiety of the
+predicament in which they live. Naturally, none of them can love “the
+home” very deeply. The children feel little reverence for the parents
+whose helplessness exposes the family to such a life. There are few
+common activities and interests between the members of the family,
+hence, there are few strong ties. The companions of the alleyways and
+streets form the social circle of the young, and the cheap theatres
+which offer their attractions at short intervals along the city streets
+fill up that vacuum in their experience which the nature of man abhors.
+Children living in these conditions do not have a reasonable chance to
+grow up with strong minds in sound bodies. Nor can this kind of youthful
+life develop those ideas of fair and right conduct, that honorable and
+dignified attitude of mind which are essential to good citizenship. Born
+into such a world, growing up in such an environment, why should they
+respect anything or any body? They do not. And the family disintegrates
+as soon as the children are old enough to declare their independence.
+Society has deprived the family of the means of securing normal living
+conditions for its future citizens. It is now confronted by the immediate
+and urgent problem of providing those conditions outside the family. The
+domestic home having been destroyed, a social one must be provided.
+
+[6] Kerr Publishing Company.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+The Child
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILD
+
+
+Child
+
+By Agnes Repplier
+
+This is so emphatically the children’s age that a good many of us are
+thankful that we were not born in it. The little girl who said she wished
+she had lived in the time of Charles II because then “education was much
+neglected” wins our sympathy. It is a doubtful privilege to have the
+attention of the civilized world focussed upon us both before and after
+birth.
+
+
+Little Beloved
+
+By Leonora Pease
+
+(In “The Progressive Woman.”)
+
+ I hold by man’s hand for thy sake,
+ Little Beloved.
+ Of the large human life, in thy being I partake,
+ Little Beloved.
+ My heart’s to the lowly, the weary and frail,
+ Who shall fail,
+ For they step up and enter thy place;
+ Lift thy face,
+ Little Beloved.
+
+ My soul fellowships in thy name,
+ Little Beloved.
+ Man’s overcoming is mine, his wrong is my shame,
+ Little Beloved.
+ Thy image for me stamps the low and the high,
+ As a die,
+ And thou, of thy kind, one with all,
+ Mount or fall,
+ Little Beloved.
+
+ When sounds the alarm of disaster,
+ Little Beloved,
+ For the swift prayer of my heart runneth faster,
+ Little Beloved.
+ Thou, too, imperiled, fashioned as they,
+ Of the clay;
+ Thou, too, who shalt walk in the way,
+ Or astray,
+ Little Beloved.
+
+ I would disentangle in vain,
+ Little Beloved,
+ Thy one shining, delicate thread from the skein,
+ Little Beloved.
+ For Fate’s fast-running loom all the strands doth enmesh,
+ Of the flesh,
+ And her intricate pattern unroll,
+ As a whole,
+ Little Beloved.
+
+
+More Woman’s Work
+
+By Mrs. Leonard Thomas
+
+The child from its birth is more woman’s work than man’s.
+
+
+The Call of the Unborn
+
+By Ethel Blackwell Robinson
+
+(Author of “The Religion of Joy,” and “A Child’s Glimpse of God, for
+Grown-Up Children”—from which the following is taken.)
+
+ Oh, smile up your heart for me, mother,
+ Be happy, be buoyant, be mild;
+ Oh, smile up your heart, for I’m coming!
+ You’ll make me a lovelier child.
+ I’ll bud as a gay little lassie,
+ Or bloom as a cheery young lad;
+ So, smile up your heart, mother darling,
+ You’ll always be grateful and glad.
+
+
+The Nursery a University
+
+By C. Josephine Barton
+
+(See page 121)
+
+If your child is rightly born, with no prenatal drapery to untangle from,
+you need concern yourself about his proper guidance, only past the infant
+age. He will educate, without your insistence. He will be showing you new
+points wherein your old rhetoric is at fault, or your mental philosophy
+behind the times. If you are wise, you will get vast lessons from him.
+
+Froebel said: “The nursery was my university.” The child receives there
+indelible lessons, nor does he judge as to whether a thing is literal or
+figurative. It is all fact to him. Plato says it is most important that
+tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thought.
+The highest and grandest that could be said of that strange phase of
+human experience, the Flesh-birth phase, was said by Friedrich Froebel,
+substantially as follows: “With the beginning of every new family there
+is issued to mankind and to each individual human being, the call to
+represent humanity in _pure development_; to represent man in his _ideal
+perfection_.” Froebel was broad in saying also, “The destiny of nations
+lies far more in the hands of women, the mothers, than in the possessors
+of power, or of those innovators who, for the most part, do not
+understand themselves! We _must cultivate women_, who are the educators
+of the race, else the new generation cannot accomplish its task.”
+
+Now Froebel was not contending for woman’s rights, but for the _race_.
+He speaks of woman, because he saw that _her element_ in the cause of
+civilization was in need of accentuation. He was seeking in the race that
+_balance_ which is imperative in the promotion of perfect conditions....
+Froebel spoke of women because men have held the reins of education in
+the past. Even in the matter of bringing children into the world....
+
+Above all things do not encourage the child to occupy his time with
+trivialities, to the neglect of the grand phenomena of nature—the beauty
+and poetry everywhere, along the dewy borders of the country road, the
+hedges and fields, the rocks and imbedded fossils, insects and plants.
+To study botany, geology, physiology and even psychology in youth, is
+excellent occupation.
+
+
+Parental Duty
+
+By Ellen Key
+
+(Swedish contemporary. From “Love and Marriage.”)
+
+Children begotten under a sense of duty would ... be deprived of a number
+of essential conditions of life; among others that of finding in their
+parents beings full of life and radiating happiness which constitutes the
+chief spiritual nourishment of children—and it may be added that parents
+who live entirely for their children are seldom good company for them.
+
+
+My Little Son
+
+By Pauline Florence Brower
+
+(American contemporary poet. From “Century Magazine.”)
+
+ We were so very intimate, we two,
+ Even before I knew
+ The outline of the little face I love,
+ Or bent above
+ The small, sweet body made so strong and fair;
+ For we had learned to share
+ The silences that are more than speech,
+ Before your cry could reach
+ My listening heart, or I could see
+ The miracle made manifest to me.
+
+ My little son,
+ Most glad, most radiant one,
+ Too soon, too soon, the hour must be cried
+ That draws you from my side!
+ In life’s exultant hands is lifted up
+ This newly molded cup.
+ The tangled vineyard of the world demands
+ Your toiling hands.
+ Look deep, and in all women that you meet
+ Your searching gaze will greet
+ This mother of the child that used to be;
+ Beholding women, oh, remember me!
+
+
+Children Innumerable
+
+By Florence Kiper
+
+(In “The Forum.”)
+
+Our age, it is true, is not a very reverential age, a sceptical age,
+one questioning the traditions. It is doubting the dignity in the lot
+of a soldier driven to martial courage by conscription. It is finding
+attenuated beauty in unwilling motherhood, though submission be in the
+name of God or Social Duty. It has asked itself this question and the
+answers are perturbing—For what and for whom are we breeding humanity if
+it be not for humanity itself?... Indeed, it is unbelievable that there
+should be a cry for breeding, when children innumerable crowd the city
+slums, deprived of air and spiritual breathing place, or in small towns
+and little farm houses grow dull and vicious through lack of appeal to
+the imagination and the intellect. Society as a whole cannot be too
+thankful for those women, who, celibate in body, have given themselves to
+the rearing of this “child material below par”, in the belief that the
+world is not for its superman but for the many.
+
+
+Quantity vs. Quality in Children
+
+By Lady Grove
+
+(English contemporary. From “Fortnightly Review.”)
+
+Is not the quality, rather than the quantity, of children the thing to
+be aimed at? If, then, by improving woman’s status the breed improves,
+as improve it must, is not this preferable to the “plenty” in their
+present very mixed condition? Has no one sufficient imagination to see in
+the mind’s eye a race that would be incapable of breeding this mass of
+“undesirable aliens”, who are tossed about from shore to shore, welcome
+nowhere, and a curse to themselves?
+
+
+Fewer and Better Children
+
+By Helen Campbell
+
+(In “The Arena.”)
+
+Slowly, how slowly, has dawned the thought that something more than mere
+numbers is the need of the family. Man found out long ago what laws
+must be studied and carried out in breeding for the high results in
+animal life; the brood mare or other animal rested and skillfully fed.
+For the woman, such thought never entered the mind of either husband or
+wife. The formula “God wills it”, lifted the burden of responsibility
+for defectives, or diseased, deformed or crippled children.... “Fewer
+and better”, has its own mission, till the day comes when a trained
+motherhood and fatherhood will ensure to the state an order of citizens
+for whom that war cry is no longer needed. The old phrase “God’s will”,
+is to fill with new meaning. God’s will and man’s, more and more with
+every step forward in the knowledge of what life was meant to bring to
+every child of man.
+
+
+Equality in Fitness
+
+By Helen G. Putnam, M. D. LL. D.
+
+It makes no difference to the child’s inheritance which parent is unfit.
+Neither should be. It makes no difference to the child whether, after
+birth, the ignorance, evil instruction, contagious blighting of him
+come from a man or from a woman; from domestic conditions (said to be
+women’s work), or from municipal conditions (said to be man’s work). The
+responsibility cannot be divided. Before this ideal—the child’s well
+being—these sexes are on an equal footing, nor is one sex justified in
+wronging the child because the other says or does so. Nature forgives no
+spurious reasoning. The child and the race suffer the consequences.
+
+
+Where Women Have Long Voted
+
+By Florence Kelly
+
+Never before in human history has the right of the young to pure living,
+the claim of the adolescent to guidance and restraint, the need of
+the child for nurture at the hands of father, mother, school and the
+community been recognized as in Colorado today.
+
+
+Reason and the Child
+
+By Mary Wollstonecraft
+
+(See page 121)
+
+Few parents think of addressing their children in the following manner,
+though it is in this reasonable way that Heaven seems to command the
+whole human race:—It is your interest to obey me till you can judge for
+yourself; and the Almighty Father of all has implanted an affection in me
+to serve as a guard to you whilst your reason is unfolding; but when your
+mind arrives at maturity, you must only obey me, or respect my opinions,
+so far as they coincide with the light that is breaking in on your mind.
+
+A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind; and Mr.
+Locke very judiciously observes, that “if the mind be curbed and humbled
+too much in children; if their spirits be abased and broken much by too
+strict a hand over them, they lose all their vigor and industry.” ...
+
+On the contrary, the parent who sets a good example, patiently lets that
+example work, and it seldom fails to produce its natural effect—filial
+reverence.
+
+
+The Government and Child Life
+
+By Mrs. Frederick Schoff
+
+(National President Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teachers Association.
+From speech delivered at Third International Congress of the Association.)
+
+The Government’s interest in children shown to all the world has
+stimulated every nation to deeper study of its own conditions as they
+relate to child life and the effect has been more far-reaching than can
+be estimated.
+
+America, which is the Mecca for every nation, which has within its
+borders over 100,000 children of foreign birth and one-quarter of whose
+children are of foreign parentage, can claim a wider interest in the
+children of every nation than can any other nation on the globe, for
+within the boundaries of the United States may be found children of every
+race and every clime.
+
+
+The Rising Value of a Baby
+
+By Mabel Potter Daggett
+
+(In “Pictorial Review.”)
+
+Only a mother counted her jewels yesterday, you see. Today, States count
+them, too. Even Jimmie Smith in, we will say, England, who before the
+war might have been regarded as among the least of these little ones,
+has become the object of his country’s concern. Jimmie came screaming
+into this troublous world in a borough of London’s East End, where there
+were already so many people that you didn’t seem to miss Jimmie’s father
+and some of the others who had gone to the war. Jimmie belongs to one of
+those three hundred thousand London families who are obliged to live in
+one- and two-room tenements. Five or six, perhaps it was five, little
+previous brothers and sisters, waited on the stair landing outside the
+door until the midwife in attendance ushered them in to welcome the new
+arrival. Now Jimmie is the stuff from which soldiers are made, either
+soldiers of war or soldiers of industry. And however you look at the
+future, his country’s going to need Jimmie. He is entered in the great
+new ledger which has been opened by his government. The Notification of
+Births Act, completed by Parliament in 1915, definitely put the British
+baby on a business basis. Every child must now, within thirty-six hours
+of its advent, be listed by the local health authorities. Jimmie was.
+
+And he was thereby automatically linked up with the great national
+child-saving campaign. Since then, so much as a fly in his milk is a
+matter of solicitude to the borough council. If he sneezes, it’s heard in
+Westminster. And it’s at least worried about there.
+
+
+Ideals of the Child
+
+By Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
+
+(American Contemporary. From “Your Child To-day and To-morrow.”)
+
+We should make a special effort to discover our children’s ideals, for
+several reasons. First of all, by knowing what the girl or boy has
+nearest the heart we shall be able to enter into closer sympathy with
+the child, we shall be able to understand much of the conduct that would
+otherwise baffle as well as annoy us....
+
+It is very easy to ridicule the ideals and ambitions of children when
+they seem to us too high flown or futile. But a person’s ideals stand
+too close to the center of his character to be treated so rudely. It is
+better to ignore the many trifling flights of fancy that are not likely
+to have any permanent effect, and to throw the child into circumstances
+that will force the emergence of more deep-seated or far-reaching
+ambitions.
+
+
+The Child and Parental Youth
+
+By Elizabeth McCracken
+
+(American contemporary. From “The American Child.”)
+
+A Frenchwoman to whom I once said that American parents treat their
+children in many ways as though they were their contemporaries remarked,
+“But does that not make the children old before their time?”
+
+So far from this, it seems, on the contrary, to keep the parents young
+after their time. It has been truly said that we have in America fewer
+and fewer grandmothers who are “sweet old ladies,” and more and more who
+are “charming elderly women.” We hear less and less about the “older” and
+the “younger” generations; increasingly we merge two, and even three,
+generations into one.
+
+
+Consideration for Others
+
+By Mrs. R. P. Alexander
+
+(Official Delegate to National Mothers’ Council from Tokio, Japan.)
+
+A Japanese child is rarely punished and never whipped, but the strong
+influence of the home training makes the average child obedient and
+self-controlled at a comparatively early age. He is taught to conceal his
+grief with the thought that if he does not, he will give pain to others.
+
+
+A Blot on Civilization
+
+By Julia Lathrop
+
+(Head of The National Children’s Bureau)
+
+Infant mortality is a blot on civilization. If it is worth while to spend
+millions to safeguard farm products which are, after all, only raised to
+serve the needs of each generation of children in turn, is it not worth
+while to spend the necessary sums to popularize the methods by which the
+lives of children themselves may be safe-guarded?
+
+
+Teaching the Child Citizenship
+
+By Virginia Terhune Van de Water
+
+(From “Little Talks with Mothers of Little People.”[7])
+
+One cannot begin too early to teach boys the duties of citizenship. There
+are many men who are educated, intelligent gentlemen who do not “take the
+trouble to vote,” and are not ashamed of the fact. When such things are
+true, is it any wonder that we have cause to complain of corruption or
+misgovernment? How can it be otherwise when some of our citizens neglect
+their duty to their country?
+
+[7] D. Estes & Company, Publishers.
+
+
+For Father’s Amusement
+
+By Elizabeth Harrison
+
+(Author of “A Study in Child-Nature,” “Two Children of the Foot-Hills,”
+“Some Silent Teachers,” “In Storyland,” etc. From “Misunderstood
+Children.”[8])
+
+I was strolling through a neighboring park one breezy September day when
+it occurred. It took less than ten minutes from beginning to end—but did
+it _end_ then?
+
+There had been a shower the night before, and the city’s dust had been
+washed from the leaves on trees and shrubbery. All nature seemed in
+fine mood and had filled me, along with the rest of the town-imprisoned
+mortals, with some of her exuberance and life.
+
+This keen enjoyment of mere existence, which nature alone can give,
+was particularly noticeable in the buoyant movements of a little
+three-year-old child, who was dancing in and out of the shadows of
+the tall trees, now running, now skipping, now jumping in the joyous
+exhilaration of mere animal life. Ever and anon he looked back at his
+father and his father’s friend, who were strolling along in a more sedate
+enjoyment of the fresh air and glittering sunshine. The fact that each
+of them carried a tennis racket showed that they, too, were out for a
+holiday.
+
+The child’s delight in all the freshness and freedom about him quickened
+his senses, as it always will quicken a healthy child. In a few moments
+his attention was attracted by the bending, swaying branches of a nearby
+clump of willow trees. The fascination of the lithe, graceful movement of
+the boughs was so strong that he stooped and stood with upturned face,
+gazing at them until the two men approached him. Then catching hold of
+his father’s hand he exclaimed, “See! See!” pointing to the nodding tree
+branches. His face was full of happiness, and his eyes were looking into
+his father’s eyes expecting sympathy in this new-found wonder of nature.
+But the father gave no heed to what was interesting the boy. Instead,
+he began playfully slapping him on his skirts with the tennis racket, at
+the same time saying, “Will you be good?” “No,” answered the child in
+high glee. It was evidently a familiar pastime between them. “Will you be
+good?” repeated the father, in mock threat lifting the tennis racket as
+if to strike the child over the head. “No, I won’t! No, I won’t!” shouted
+the boy as he scampered off over the grass. This created a chase in which
+the father playfully spanked the captured boy as with make-believe wrath
+he dragged him back to the side-walk. Having returned to the starting
+point of the chase he released the boy with the words, “There now, I’ll
+spank you hard if you are not a good boy!” He had scarcely let go his
+hold on the youngster’s arm before the latter again ran off, shouting
+in high glee, “No, I won’t! No, I won’t be good!” Again came the chase
+and again the playful spanking and dragging back and the release with an
+admonition that he would get a beating this time if he was not a good
+boy. The tone in which the words were said were an invitation to the
+child to renew the game.
+
+The third time he started off, however, the other man decided that he,
+too, would take part in the sport. So he quickly put his tennis racket in
+front of the boy, thus obstructing his path. The child manfully struggled
+to push it aside, but could not. Soon his “No, I won’t,” in answer to his
+father’s “Will you be good?” had in it a note of fretfulness or, rather,
+resentment. He was contending now with two grown men and his strength
+was not equal to the strain. He pushed angrily against the racket in
+front while trying at the same time to avoid the light blows from the
+one in the rear. With cat-like agility the man in front would withdraw
+his obstructing tennis racket until the boy started forward and then
+check—would come the racket just in front of him. The very movement of
+his arm was like that of a cat regaining his hold on an escaping mouse.
+A peal of laughter from him each time he caught the exasperated child
+showed how much he was enjoying the sport. The father seemed equally
+amused and joined heartily in thwarting the efforts of the boy to escape.
+The little fellow’s face grew red, and he was soon short of breath from
+his struggles, and there was the angry sob of defeat in his voice. The
+scene ended by the child’s getting into a towering rage.
+
+When they passed out of sight the father had seized him by the arm and
+was forcing him along, the boy kicking and struggling, but powerless to
+help himself. The two men were laughing heartily.
+
+The child’s blood had been poisoned by the heat of anger, he had
+exhausted his physical vitality and his nervous system had been
+disarranged, not to speak of his moral standards—but then, the father and
+his friend had been amused.
+
+[8] Central Publishing Company.
+
+
+The Factory Child
+
+By Harriet Monroe
+
+(In “The Century.”)
+
+ Why do the wheels go whirling round,
+ Mother, mother?
+ Oh, mother, are they giants bound,
+ And will they growl forever?
+ Yes, fiery giants underground,
+ Daughter, little daughter.
+ Forever turn the wheels around,
+ And rumble, grumble ever.
+ Why do I pick the threads all day?
+ Mother, mother?
+ While sunshine children are at play,
+ And must I work forever?
+ Yes, factory-child; the live-long day,
+ Daughter, little daughter,
+ Your hands must pick the threads away,
+ And feel the sunshine never.
+ Why do the birds sing in the sun,
+ Mother, mother,
+ If all day long I run and run—
+ Run with the wheels forever?
+ The birds may sing till day is done,
+ Daughter, little daughter,
+ But with the wheels your feet must run—
+ Run with the wheels forever.
+ Why do I feel so tired each night,
+ Mother, Mother?
+ The wheels are always buzzing bright;
+ Do they grow sleepy never?
+ Oh, baby thing, so soft and white,
+ Daughter, little daughter,
+ The big wheels grind us in their might,
+ And they will grind forever.
+ And is the white thread never spun,
+ Mother, mother?
+ And is the white cloth never done—
+ For you and me done never?
+ Oh, yes, our thread will all be spun,
+ Daughter, little daughter,
+ When we lie down out in the sun,
+ And work no more forever.
+ And when will come that happy day,
+ Mother, mother?
+ Oh, shall we laugh and sing and play
+ Out in the sun forever?
+ Nay, factory child, we’ll rest all day,
+ Daughter, little daughter,
+ Where green peas grow and roses gay,
+ There in the sun forever.
+
+
+The Cotton-Mill Child
+
+By Mrs. John Van Vorst
+
+(From “The Cry of the Children.”[9])
+
+(See page 57)
+
+The first child to whom I spoke stood waiting, without work, for the
+machinery to start up. He had on a cloth cap, overalls, and a blue cotton
+shirt open at the throat. His face was wan, his eyes blue, with an
+intense blue streak beneath them. His mouth was full of tobacco, which
+had collected in a dingy crust about his lips. As he leaned back, one
+foot crossed over the other, expectant for the spindles to begin their
+whirling, he presented in his attitude and gestures, the appearance, not
+of a child, but of a gaunt man shrunk to diminutive size. Going over to
+where he sat, I started conversation with him about his work.
+
+“How many sides do you run a day?” I asked.
+
+“Three to four,” he answered.
+
+“How much do you make?”
+
+“About $2.40 a week.”
+
+Then hastily I put the question: “How old are you!”
+
+“Goin’ on tweayulve,” he responded. “I’ve been workin’ about four years.
+I come in here when I was seayvun.”
+
+“Ever been to school?”
+
+He shook his head. “No, meayum. I don’t know if I would like it. I reckon
+I’d as soon work here as be in school.”
+
+“How many hours do you work here a day!”
+
+“From six until six.”
+
+The noise of the machine was distracting, and as I bent over him to
+catch his answer piped in a shrill, nasal voice, I could not but notice
+how fine and delicate his features were; the deep eyes, the high arched
+nose, the slender lips were placed in the oval face as features only can
+be placed by the unerring mold that breeding casts. Observing, also, the
+miniature shoulders that seemed to have been oppressed by some iron hand,
+I said:
+
+“Don’t you get very tired?”
+
+There was a pause which made more marked the honesty of his response.
+
+“Why, I don’t never pay much attention whether I get tired or not.”
+
+“You have an hour at noon?”
+
+Here he brushed the cloth cap onto the back of his head, and sent a long,
+wet, black line from his mouth to the floor.
+
+“Well,” he said (it was the man who spoke, his arms akimbo, his body
+warped in the long tussle for existence), “they aim to give us an hour,
+but we don’t never get more’n twenty-five minutes. We all live right
+up there.” He nodded toward the square of houses clustered around the
+mud-puddle on the brink of the slovenly hillside. Then the bobbins began
+to revolve slowly, and the boy started back to his work.
+
+“You can’t loaf much,” he explained, “when the machine’s a runnin’.”
+
+Up and down he plied on his monotonous beat—lone little figure....
+
+Evidently waiting to join in the conversation, a small boy, I noticed,
+was standing beside me. His dark eyes sparkled merrily in his colorless
+face; he was dirty and covered with lint.
+
+“What’s your job?”
+
+“Sweepin’,” he grinned.
+
+“How much do you make a day!”
+
+“Twenty cents.”
+
+“How old are you!”
+
+“Seayvun.”
+
+The boy at the machine, making bands for the spindles, was “goin’ on
+tayun.” He earned twenty cents a day. Others, I learned, were eight, nine
+and ten, and occasionally there was one as old as twelve.
+
+As I walked on now through the mills talking with a twelve-year-old
+red-headed girl who had been four years at work, my eyes suddenly fell
+upon a strange couple. I could not take my attention from the tinier of
+the tiny pair; the boy’s hands appeared to be made without bones, his
+thumb flew back almost double as he pressed the cotton to loosen it from
+the revolving roller in the spinning frame; they no longer moved, these
+yellow, anemic hands, as though directed in their different acts by a
+thinking intelligence; they performed mechanically the gestures which had
+given them their definite form.
+
+The red-headed girl laughed and nodded in the direction of the dwarfs.
+
+“He’s most six,” she said. “He’s been here two years. He come in when he
+was most four. His little brother most four’s workin’ here now.”
+
+“Yes? Where?”
+
+“Oh, he works on the night shift. He comes in ’beaout half-a-past five
+and stays till six in the mornin’.”
+
+I went over to the other dwarf of the couple, older, evidently, than
+the boy “most six.” Below her red cotton frock hung a long apron which
+reached to the ground. Her hair was short and shaggy, her face bloated,
+her eyes like a depression in the flesh, and about her mouth trailed
+streaks of tobacco. It seemed absurd to question her. Oblivion was the
+only thing that could have been mercifully tendered—even the peace of
+death could hardly have relaxed those tense features, cast in the dogged
+mould of suffering.
+
+“How old are you?” I asked.
+
+She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
+
+“What do you earn?”
+
+She shook her head again.
+
+Her fingers did not for a moment stop in their swift manipulation of the
+broken thread. Then, as if she had suddenly remembered something, she
+said:
+
+“I’ve only been workin’ here a day.”
+
+“Only one day?”
+
+“I’ve been on the night shift till neow.”
+
+Dwarfs? Ah, yes; dwarfs indeed. But would that those who affirm it might
+catch sight of the expression that lowered under the brows of those two
+miniature victims. Like a menace, threatening, terrible, it seemed to
+presage the storm that shall one day be unchained by the spirits too long
+pent up in service to the greed of man.
+
+[9] Moffett, Yard & Company.
+
+
+The Crusade of the Children
+
+By Margaret Belle Houston
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
+
+ O’er the grind of the wheels of traffic,
+ Through the strident scream of the mart,
+ Soundeth a muffled tramping,
+ Like the faltering beat of a heart.
+ But only the ear hath heard it
+ That low on the earth is laid—
+ The stumbling tread of the children,
+ As they go on their long crusade!
+
+ Oh, some that are rosy as blossoms
+ Sing with the singing rills,
+ Wade through the sun-lit shadows
+ And clamber the violet hills.
+ But these are the paler children
+ That move with the sad footfalls,
+ And dark is the road they follow,
+ Tunneled through iron walls.
+
+ They hear the song of the others
+ Ring sweet in the outer air,
+ But they may not run in the sunlight
+ With the load their shoulders bear.
+ They may not weave bright blossoms
+ Though nimble their fingers be;
+ But the Master hath not forgotten—
+ “Let the little ones come to me!”
+
+ Well have ye planned and shaped it,
+ The road that the children plod,
+ Yet it leads, for all your delving,
+ Straight to the throne of God.
+ And there shall they lay their burdens,
+ And there will they loose their bands;
+ They will lift up their twisted fingers,
+ To Him of the nail-marked hands.
+
+ They will cry, “Like Thee, O Father,
+ We come with the marks of men!”
+ Nor all the gold of their toiling
+ Will spare you His answer then!
+ Better the nether millstone
+ And the depths of the darkest seas!
+ Ye have wounded Christ the Avenger,
+ Who wounded the least of these!
+
+
+Child Labor
+
+By Ruby Archer
+
+(See page 254)
+
+ Poor little children that work all day—
+ Far from the meadows, far from the birds,
+ Far from the beautiful, silent words
+ The hills know how to say!
+
+ Laughter is gone from your old-young eyes—
+ Gone from the lips with the dimples sweet,
+ Gone with the song of the little feet—
+ As light in winter dies.
+
+ Evening—with only the years at ten?
+ Where was the morning, where was the noon?
+ Did the day turn back to the night so soon,
+ Children—women—and—men?
+
+ Parts of the monster things that turn;
+ Less than a lever, less than a wheel!
+ Pity you were not wrought of steel,
+ To save the pence you earn!
+
+ Add the columns, aye, foot the gain—
+ Ye that barter in children’s lives!
+ How will the reckoning end, that strives
+ To balance gold and pain?
+
+
+Need the Vote for the Children
+
+By M. Carey Thomas
+
+(See page 149)
+
+Women need a vote for the sake of children. No state, modern or ancient,
+has ever cared properly for its children. Children are at the present
+time horribly neglected in every country, even when they are not, as in
+many states of the United States, horribly abused. All women whatever
+their nationality care more than all men for the welfare of all children.
+This is true even of female animals in the animal world. It is supremely
+true in our human world. Children are, and always will be, the special
+interest of women. Wherever women already vote, their influence is felt
+immediately and persistently in ameliorative measures for the protection,
+reformation, and education of little children. No one with any knowledge
+of the facts can deny that the political power of women is exercised on
+behalf of children. We are now learning that children should be the chief
+concern of our present civilization because in them lies the hope of the
+future. For the sake of children, women must vote.
+
+
+Fettered Little Children
+
+By Mary E. Carbutt
+
+(In “The Progressive Woman.” Contemporary. Prominent California Club
+Woman.)
+
+ Oh blind and cruel nation,
+ In your selfish race for wealth,
+ You have fettered your young children
+ With chains that drag to death.
+
+ To the wheel of toil you’ve bound them,
+ In their young and tender years;
+ And when they cry in anguish,
+ You do not heed their tears.
+
+ They drag out their days in sorrow;
+ They grow old before their time;
+ All the joy of their young childhood
+ You have stifled by your crime.
+
+ The children, wan and pallid,
+ With wasted frames and weary hands,
+ Turn in their defenseless sorrow
+ To the mothers of the land.
+
+ You, fond and tender mothers,
+ Happy children at your knee,
+ Will you hear their silent pleading—
+ Will you rise and set them free?
+
+
+Announce Her Maturity
+
+By Anne Morton Barnard
+
+As woman has always mothered the race she should now refuse to be its
+child.
+
+
+The Cry of the Children
+
+By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
+
+1806-1861
+
+(English. Foremost among the world’s poets. Lived with her husband,
+Robert Browning, for many years in Italy, championing the cause of the
+Italian people toward liberty.)
+
+ Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
+ Ere the sorrow comes with years?
+ They are leaning their young heads against their mothers—
+ And _that_ cannot stop their tears.
+ The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
+ The young birds are chirping in the nest:
+ The young fawns are playing in the shadows;
+ The young flowers are blowing toward the west—
+ But the young, young children, O my brothers,
+ They are weeping bitterly!
+ They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
+ In the country of the free.
+
+ Do you question the young children in the sorrow
+ Why their tears are falling so?
+ The old man may weep for his to-morrow
+ Which is lost in Long Ago;
+ The old tree is leafless in the forest,
+ The old year is ending in the frost,
+ The old wound, if stricken, is the sorest,
+ The old hope is hardest to be lost:
+ But the young, young children, O my brothers,
+ Do you ask them why they stand
+ Weeping sore before the bosoms of their mothers,
+ In our happy Fatherland?
+
+ They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
+ And their looks are sad to see,
+ For the man’s hoary anguish draws and presses
+ Down the cheeks of infancy;
+ “Your old earth,” they say, “is very dreary,
+ Our young feet,” they say, “are very weak;
+ Few paces we have to ken, yet are weary—
+ Our grave-rest is very far to seek.
+ Ask the old why they weep, and not the children,
+ For the outside earth is cold,
+ And we young ones stand without, in our bewildering,
+ And the graves are for the old”....
+
+ “For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
+ And we cannot run or leap;
+ If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
+ To drop down in them and sleep.
+ Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping,
+ We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
+ And, underneath our eyelids heavy drooping,
+ The reddest flower would look as pale as snow.
+ For all day long we drag our burden tiring
+ Through the coal-dark, underground,
+ Or, all day we drive the wheels of iron
+ In the factories, round and round.
+
+ “For, all day the wheels are droning, turning;
+ Their wind comes in our faces,
+ Till our hearts turn, our head, with pulses burning,
+ And the walls turn in their places:
+ Turns the sky in the high window blank and reeling,
+ Turns the light that drops adown the wall,
+ Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling,
+ All are turning, all the day, and we with all.
+ And all day, the iron wheels are droning,
+ And sometimes we could pray,
+ ‘O ye wheels,’ (breaking out in a mad moaning)
+ ‘Stop! be silent for today!’”....
+
+ They look up, with their pale and sunken faces,
+ And their look is dread to see,
+ For they mind you of the angels in their places,
+ With eyes turned on Deity.
+ “How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation,
+ Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart,—
+ Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
+ And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
+ Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
+ And your purple shows your path!
+ But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper
+ Than the strong man in his wrath.”
+
+
+Children’s Ward
+
+By Hortense Flexner
+
+(In “The Survey.”)
+
+ She had been sent for—visiting hours were past—
+ The Lithuanian woman with the blue,
+ Still eyes. The child’s bed was the last
+ In the row. She stood beside it, white—she knew,
+ And watched! Her broad, young shoulders drooped
+ Beneath the hooded gown that visitors wear;
+ The nurse had left her—suddenly she stooped,
+
+ The hood slipped back and showed her braided hair.
+ There was no cry. The Russians weep and pray,
+ Italians beat their breasts. This mother turned,
+ Asked for his clothes—tearless and calm and gray—
+ The doctor told her they had all been burned.
+ So she was gone—only her great eyes said
+ What thing is lost, when a small child is dead!
+
+
+Child Slavery
+
+By Gertrude Breslau Fuller
+
+(See page 36)
+
+(There are 1,700,000 children working in the mills, mines and factories
+of the United States.)
+
+Generations of the past have been responsible for certain iniquitous
+practises, but it remained for the present century to shut the little
+ones up in factories, stunting physical and mental growth. Because of
+child labor today the future generation of men and women will suffer.
+Their career will bear the stamp of human brutality.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+Mother
+
+
+
+
+MOTHER
+
+
+Rock Me to Sleep
+
+By Elizabeth Akers Allen
+
+(An old familiar poem. My mother often sang it to me when she rocked me
+to sleep as a child. Taken from her scrap book.—“Editor”)
+
+ Backward, turn backward, O time in your flight,
+ Make me a child again just for tonight!
+ Mother, come back from the echoless shore,
+ Take me again to your heart as of yore;
+ Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care,
+ Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair;
+ Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;
+ Rock me to sleep, mother,—rock me to sleep!
+
+ Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!
+ I am so weary of toil and of tears—
+ Toil without recompense—tears all in vain—
+ Take them and give me my childhood again!
+ I have grown weary of dust and decay—
+ Weary of flinging my soul-wealth away;
+ Weary of sowing for others to reap;
+ Rock me to sleep, mother,—rock me to sleep!
+
+ Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue,
+ Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you!
+ Many a summer the grass has grown green,
+ Blossomed and faded, our faces between;
+ Yet, with strong yearning and passionate pain,
+ Long I tonight for your presence again.
+ Come from the silence so long and so deep;
+ Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!
+
+ Over my heart in the days that are flown,
+ No love like mother-love ever has shown;
+ No other worship abides and endures,—
+ Faithful, unselfish, and patient like yours;
+ None like a mother can charm away pain
+ From the sick soul or the world-weary brain.
+ Slumber’s soft calms o’er my heavy lids creep—
+ Rock me to sleep, mother,—rock me to sleep!
+
+ Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold,
+ Fall on your shoulders again as of old;
+ Let it drop over my forehead tonight,
+ Shading my faint eyes away from the light;
+ For with its sunny-edged shadows once more
+ Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore;
+ Lovingly, softly, its bright billows sweep;—
+ Rock me to sleep, mother,—rock me to sleep!
+
+ Mother, dear mother, the years have been long
+ Since I last listened your lullaby song;
+ Sing, then, and unto my soul it shall seem
+ Womanhood’s years have been only a dream.
+ Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace,
+ With your light lashes just sweeping my face,
+ Never hereafter to wake or to weep;—
+ Rock me to sleep, mother,—rock me to sleep!
+
+
+The Mother
+
+By Marion Harland
+
+(Well-known magazine writer. The following is from “The Independent.”)
+
+She has never ceased out of the land. That she seems to be more in
+evidence now than she was sixty years ago may be but one more expression
+of Feminism....
+
+In every well-appointed household the mother is the controlling
+influence. In a large percentage of homes her acknowledged sovereignty
+is a dictatorship. If she be a woman of intelligence and refinement, she
+virtually supervises her girl’s education and molds her views of life,
+morals and manners. The father is, at most, Prince Consort, playing an
+insignificant part in the selection of associates and instructors, and no
+part at all in the regulation of deportment, speech and dress. “My mother
+thinks,” and “My mother says,” are cast-iron formulas that make an end of
+all controversy while the girl is in short skirts and wears her unshorn
+locks between her shoulders. With the lengthened skirts, and trussed
+hair, comes entrance upon the school or college world, and the beginning
+of individual life.
+
+
+The Mother’s Influence
+
+By “Ouida”
+
+(Mlle. Louise de la Ramee, Author of “Under Two Flags,” “A Dog of
+Flanders,” etc. Died Jan. 28, 1908. The following is from one of a series
+of articles written and sold to Lippincott’s 28 years ago with the
+request that they be not published until after her death. The articles
+appeared in the May, June, and July, 1909, issues.)
+
+When we reflect on the enormous weight which the woman’s influence has
+on the growing child; when we consider the incurable superstitions, the
+unreasonable fables, the illogical deductions, the warped and stifled
+judgments, which millions of young boys learn in education and religion
+at their mothers’ knees in infancy,—it is impossible to over-rate the
+invaluable consequences of any introduction of _geist_ into the minds of
+women. But for the backward pressure of woman—woman ever conservative,
+ever _reculante_, ever wedded to form and precedent, and to tradition—the
+world of men would have forsaken many a _cultus_ built on fable, many
+a dominion of priestcraft, many a limbo of worn-out and oppressive
+credulity. The evil mental influence of women is fully as great as can
+be the good moral influence of the best of their sex. Wars hounded
+on; fetters freshly riveted; the withes of dead beliefs binding down
+the free action of living limbs; the pressure of narrow ties, and of
+egotisms deified to virtue, forcing men aside from paths of greatness or
+justice—all those, and much more, are due to the baleful intellectual
+influence of women.
+
+
+Fatherhood Cannot Be Motherhood
+
+By Ada M. Kassimer
+
+(From Introduction to “Representative Women.”)
+
+Womanhood now as always recognizes motherhood as its highest duty, its
+greatest obligation; and the present awakened womanhood sees its mission
+of motherhood—not only in the narrowed home immediately about it, but in
+the large human family, in the world of activity, it sees how the affairs
+of men, women and children need the true mother instinct, which in every
+phase of nature is one of unselfish devotion, of unlimited service, of
+freedom from combat for financial, social and personal supremacy. The
+inherent attributes of motherhood must combine with those of fatherhood
+to square the balance of justice for childhood.
+
+The world needs woman, her ideas, her way of reasoning, her insight, her
+sense of justice, her tender hands and her loving heart. The children
+of the world need her; for a long time they have been governed by the
+masculine mind which has made laws for them, established educational
+plans for them, opened juvenile courts for them, founded factories,
+mills, mines, in which little hands have hardened, little bodies have
+dwarfed, young minds and hearts grown prematurely old—and this, not
+because the masculine mind and the masculine heart would intentionally
+be drastic, but because men are not women, and fatherhood cannot be
+motherhood.
+
+
+The Price
+
+By Winona Douglas
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
+
+ Sleep, little dream child, in mother’s arms;
+ Cuddle yet closer and take your rest,
+ Eyelids now hiding the blue eyes since laughing,
+ Laughing in glee here on mother’s breast.
+
+ Dear are the moments with you I am spending;
+ Toil is forgotten in comfort and calm.
+ Together we are, wee one, in the gloaming,
+ Evening blessed,—my babe’s coo is a psalm.—
+
+ You were my dream child, and I must awaken,
+ My arms are empty, sweet babe unborn,
+ For me the lone quiet, while night is fast darkening;
+ Darkening now, and there’s toil on the morn.
+
+ The days come and go, toil is ever supreme;
+ Motherhood smother, the thought is vain.
+ Forget it, indeed, for wheels must be turning,
+ Turning incessantly—more wealth to gain!
+
+
+Passionate Instinct
+
+By Emily Huntington Miller
+
+(From “Parents and Their Problems.”)
+
+What could atone to a multitude of children for the misfortune of having
+been born, but the passionate instinct that takes no account of lack of
+beauty, grace or intellectual gift, but clings to its own with deathless
+devotion?
+
+
+Functions Identical
+
+By Mrs. Alice H. Putnam
+
+(From “Parents and Their Problems.”)
+
+In one respect, at least, the functions of mother and teacher should be
+identical.... The teacher and parent must take their charge “for better,
+for worse.”
+
+
+The Adolescent Child
+
+By Julia Clark Hallam
+
+(From “Studies in Child Development.” American contemporary. Instructor
+in the University of Chicago.)
+
+It goes without saying that every mother has an imperative duty toward
+her son as he approaches this important period in his development.
+Nature has done her part in preparing the boy’s body, the mother must be
+doing her part in preparing his mind for all of these new experiences.
+There are many things which a mother can do because she is the mother,
+and because her mind is mature while the mind of the boy is yet immature.
+The mother, through her study, comes to see that the adolescent boy is
+about to acquire new powers. Before, he was simply an individual. Now
+he is becoming a part of the race, because he is acquiring the power
+of conserving it. To the mother who has duly prepared herself for her
+child’s adolescence, its appearance will bring the same mysterious thrill
+which she felt when she first saw the child as a new-born babe. It has
+been said in this connection, “When a baby is to be born, preparations
+for its advent are carefully made. But when, in future years, the most
+critical time comes when the child is to be re-born, a man or a woman, it
+is rare that intelligent suggestions or wise words of counsel tell him or
+her of the importance of the period.”
+
+
+Mother
+
+By Laura Simmons
+
+(In the “Boston Herald.”)
+
+ Oh, Mother—hands of balm and gracious healing,
+ And cool, soft fingers that could heal and bless!
+ So sure to charm the aching and the fever
+ With magic spell and soothing tenderness.
+
+ Oh, Mother—feet that grew so very tired
+ Treading Life’s pavements and its burning sands!
+ Have they found rest at last, and cooling waters
+ Where they may stop to loose their earthly bands?
+
+ Oh, Mother—eyes so keen to probe the sorrows!
+ So quick to see the hurt and understand!
+ Do they not shine tonight from highest Heaven
+ Bright with the old-time courage, high and grand?
+
+ Oh, Mother—heart so wise and tender—
+ That has not died, nor failed, but lived and wrought
+ In deeds and words—in daily work and action—
+ In lovely memory and blessed thought!
+
+ Oh, Mother—love that lives past death and parting!
+ That reaches still to bless and guard and guide,
+ To hold me from the snare undreamed and waiting—
+ To point the refuge where I yet may hide!
+
+ And, oh—the things my heart hath yearned to utter!
+ The joys that thrilled—the pain that seared and scarred!
+ But I must wait—I, too—till sunset’s splendor
+ Shall hold for me its shining gates unbarred.
+
+ Past joy, past sorrow, past the driving torrent
+ Of tears, I see her stand and watch for me;
+ And clear the sweet old Mother-question cometh:
+ “Oh, child—dear child! And is all well with thee?”
+
+
+Wise Mothers
+
+By Mona Cairo
+
+(From “The Morality of Marriage.”)
+
+We shall never have really good mothers until women cease to make
+motherhood the central idea of their existence. The woman who has no
+interest larger than the affairs of her children is not a fit person to
+train them.
+
+
+The Factory Worker and Motherhood
+
+By Kate Richards O’Hare
+
+(American contemporary. Well-known Socialist speaker and writer. From
+“The Sorrows of Cupid.”)
+
+I spent six months one winter in the various factories of New York in
+order to get information by actual experience. I can truthfully and
+conservatively say that not more than one out of two girls employed
+in the factory trades for a year or more are physically fitted to be
+wives and mothers, not considering their fitness mentally, morally or
+spiritually. There are six million women workers in the United States. If
+fifty per cent., not ninety, are made physically, mentally and morally
+unfit for wife and motherhood by doing work unsuited to their strength,
+then the wage-system must be weighed and “found wanting” indeed. Economic
+conditions which force women to work in unsuitable industrial occupations
+are not only a fruitful cause for divorce, but an outrage against
+humanity as well.
+
+
+Mothers
+
+By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
+
+(See page 280)
+
+(From “The Forerunner.”)
+
+ We are mothers. Through us in our bondage,
+ Through us with a brand in the face,
+ Be we fettered with gold or with iron,
+ Through us comes the race.
+
+ See the people who suffer, all people!
+ All humanity wasting its powers
+ In the hand-to-hand struggle—death-dealing—
+ All children of ours!
+
+ Shall we bear it? we mothers who love them?
+ Can we bear it? we mothers who feel
+ Every pang of our babes and forgive them
+ Every sin when they kneel?
+
+ Dare ye sleep while your children are calling?
+ Dare ye wait while they clamor unfed?
+ Dare ye pray in the proud-pillared churches
+ While they suffer for bread?
+
+ Rise now in the power of the woman!
+ Rise now in the power of our need!
+ The world cries in hunger and darkness!
+ We shall light! We shall feed!
+
+ In the name of our ages of anguish!
+ In the name of the curse and the slain!
+ By the strength of our sorrow we conquer!
+ In the power of our pain!
+
+
+A Good Mother
+
+By Mary Wollstonecraft
+
+1759-1797
+
+(English. The mother of Mary, wife of the poet Shelley. One of the
+earliest advocates of the right of woman to education, and political
+rights.)
+
+To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of
+mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their
+husbands. Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers; wanting their
+children to love them best, and take their part, in secret against the
+father, who is held up as a scarecrow. When chastisement is necessary,
+though they have offended the mother, the father must inflict the
+punishment; he must be the judge in all disputes; ... I ... mean to
+insist that unless the understanding of woman is enlarged, and her
+character rendered firm, but being allowed to govern her own conduct,
+she will never have sufficient sense or command of temper to manage her
+children properly.
+
+
+The Mother a Creator
+
+By C. Josephine Barton
+
+(Contemporary. Formerly associate editor and publisher “The Life,” author
+of “An Interlude,” “Evangel Ahvallah,” “The Mother of the Living,” etc.)
+
+Thoughts are the blocks out of which children are made.... Your
+child’s thoughts will flow in the trenches you open for it. During the
+impressible first few months it will cultivate that which you cultivate.
+If you love, it will love; if you hate, it will hate. If you have the
+measles, it will have it; the child will rejoice at your rejoicing, and
+will weep when you weep. (This is one instance wherein if you “weep you
+will _not_ weep alone”! Anger indulged in by you will make the foetus
+helpless in Anger’s toils! Love humanity, find and faithfully perform
+your work, and your unborn child will one day be a philanthropist....
+
+Two brothers manifested the same criminality their father had been
+guilty of when begetting them, and they became even worse men, because
+their weak, unresisting mother took no control over them during the
+months most important, and their passions developed. Thus the design and
+form of temple unwittingly carved out in the brain of their two sons,
+developed the phrenological bumps, criminal protuberances to match the
+design marked out for them by their father in his unenlightened Temple
+of Thought. This condition could not have been altered by any process
+known except that of the mother’s thought-action during the period of
+pliability in the atom. But being incompetent, unable to systematize
+her thoughts and purify her heart, or cultivate the philosophical and
+rational, the begotten shape developed with all the qualities about it
+that had so blighted the begetter....
+
+It is with pleasure I turn from the above picture and point out to
+you the laws leading up to the beautiful character of Elizabeth
+Cady Stanton—one of the bravest of leaders in the cause of woman’s
+emancipation. Daniel Cady was a distinguished lawyer, a New York judge,
+later elected to Congress. Though a man of fine qualities, unimpeachable
+integrity, he was sensitive and modest to a marked degree; while her
+mother, Margaret Livingston, had the military idea of government, was
+tall and queenly, self-reliant and at her ease under all circumstances.
+She was the daughter of Colonel Livingston, who, at West Point, when
+Arnold made the attempt to betray that stronghold into the enemy’s hands,
+in the absence of his superior officer, took the responsibility of firing
+into the Vulture, a suspicious looking British vessel that lay at anchor
+on the opposite side of the river, leaving Andre, the British spy, with
+his papers to be captured.
+
+The foregoing shows the result of the influence of two united energies
+in the production of a powerful woman. To modify the effect of her
+begetter’s modesty, the mother’s military ideas stood in good place;
+and to supplement his embarrassment, she was full of courage; so that
+even if her father had implanted the foundation for the cultivation of
+an over-modest child, the mother made up the happy balance during her
+supervision, and it resulted in the freedom of individuality in the
+beautiful woman who has blessed the race with light, in the dispelling of
+many clouds. The loving and faithful mother of seven children, she found
+time to fill a noble sphere in public, one in which they could rise up to
+call her blessed.
+
+
+Collective Motherhood
+
+By Rheta Childe Dorr
+
+(American contemporary. Author of “What Eight Million Women Want.” From
+an article in “Good Housekeeping.”)
+
+We have the ideal of collective motherhood expressing itself through
+the women’s clubs, through consumer’s leagues, through mothers’
+congresses, through a dozen like agencies. We have the ideal for a
+collective fatherhood also, but this is waiting to express itself through
+organizations, which can be formed only by men. Of the details of
+children’s lives the average man knows infinitely less than do women. Of
+the interrelationship of children and the whole structure of society most
+men know nothing at all.
+
+
+Woman and Mother
+
+By C. Gasquoine Hartley
+
+(Mrs. Walter M. Gallichan)
+
+(See page 154)
+
+Any stigma attached to women is really a stigma attached to their
+potentiality as mothers, and we can only remove it by beginning with the
+emancipation of the actual mother.
+
+
+The Companion Mother
+
+By Ida Tarbell
+
+(From “The Business of Being a Woman.”)
+
+A woman never lived who did all she might have done to open the mind of
+her child for its great adventure. It is an exhaustless task. The woman
+who sees it knows she has need of all the education the college can give,
+all the experience and culture she can gather. She knows that the fuller
+her individual life, the broader her interests, the better for the child.
+She should be a better person in their eyes. The real service of the
+“higher education,”—the freedom to take part in whatever interests or
+stimulates her—lies in the fact that it fits her intellectually to be a
+companion worthy of a child.
+
+
+Parental Respect for Right of Children
+
+By Ellen Key
+
+(From “The Century of the Child.”)
+
+(See page 143)
+
+A mother happy in the friendship of her own daughter, said not long ago
+that she desired to erect an asylum for tormented daughters. Such an
+asylum would be as necessary as a protection against pampering parents
+as against those who are overbearing. Both alike torture their children
+though in different ways, by not understanding the child’s right to have
+his own point of view, his own ideal of happiness, his own proper tastes
+and occupations. They do not see that children exist as little for their
+parents’ sake as parents do for their children’s sake.... Family life
+would have an intelligent character if each one lived fully and entirely
+his own life and allowed the others to do the same. None should tyrannize
+over, none should suffer tyranny from, the other. Parents who give their
+homes this character can justly demand that children shall accommodate
+themselves to the habits of the household as long as they live in it.
+Children on their part can ask that their own life of thought and feeling
+shall be left in peace at home, or that they shall be treated with the
+same consideration that would be accorded to a stranger. When the parents
+do not meet these conditions they themselves are the greater sufferers.
+
+
+The Ancient and Modern Mother
+
+By Mrs. Alec Tweedie
+
+(English contemporary. Author of “America As I Saw It,” “Mexico As I Saw
+It,” “Sunny Sicily,” etc. From “Women the World Over.”)
+
+The ancient mother and the modern mother are two very different beings.
+The very ancient mother fought for her child like the tigress for her
+young cubs. The mother of past generations gave her entire life to her
+children to the absolute neglect of her husband. The modern mother,
+although she sometimes neglects her children for her fads and frivolities
+is really a much more sane person, for she lives three lives; one part
+she gives to her husband, one part to her children, and a third part to
+herself. Instead of entirely obliterating herself, as the ancient mother
+did, she believes in self-culture, self-advancement, and is a thinking,
+human being; she is therefore more of a companion to her husband, and
+more capable of educating her offspring.
+
+
+The Mother
+
+By Mrs. Emmaline Pethick-Lawrence
+
+(In “Votes for Women.”)
+
+(See page 180)
+
+In a small room, dimly lighted, sat a woman making collars. Above the
+humming of her sewing machine the clock of a neighboring church struck
+ten. The woman lifted her head, and, gathering up her work, folded it
+together. She crossed the room and looked down upon the faces of two boys
+sleeping. “Christmas Eve!” she sighed.
+
+She went back to cover up the machine. Sitting wearily, she leant her
+weight upon it and her head sank upon her arms. Last year it had all
+been so different! She had to be both father and mother now, since the
+bread-winner had been cut down by the hand of death falling with an awful
+suddenness. And within her body there slept, soon to waken to life, a
+child. “Pray God it be a boy,” she moaned. “If not, pray God it may die!
+It is too terrible to be a woman.”
+
+She thought of the girl on the second floor who had been taken that day
+to the workhouse infirmary; she knew her story. The girl had been a
+waitress in a tea shop. She earned her food and five shillings a week.
+She could not live alone in the world on that wage. She had accepted the
+“protection” of a man more than twice her age. When her trouble came he
+had tired of her. He had left her. She did not know where he was now.
+Would that child who was to be born in the workhouse be a girl, too? She
+hoped not. She prayed that it might be a boy.
+
+She remembered the old woman who had tried to drown herself last week.
+The old woman’s husband had died; that was a year ago. The widow had
+taken in work for an army clothing establishment. But the money she
+earned had hardly paid the rent. The case had made something of a
+sensation in the police court. The papers had taken it up for a day or
+two. The employer said it was the Government that was to blame. The
+Government would not allow its contracts to be carried out by the sweated
+labor of men, but the sweating of women did not matter. Women did
+not seem to matter to anybody. When her husband was alive she had not
+realized it. She realized it now. She remembered, though, that even in
+these days—
+
+Suddenly her room seemed full of light. Afar off she heard a burst of
+song. It came nearer. Never had she listened to such music. The woman
+lifted her head. The window was gone, the whole of the outside wall had
+fallen noiselessly away, and the sky was filled with a glory that was not
+of the sun nor of the moon. The light seemed to come from a cloud, and
+the singing, too. No, it was not a cloud, it was a host of radiant forms,
+for, as she looked, those shining ones came nearer to her, and she could
+hear their voices: “Good tidings of great joy!”
+
+So that was what they were singing! Where had she heard it before? The
+words seemed so familiar to her that, though she wondered, she was
+not overwhelmed with surprise. Then came a rapturous outburst: “They
+that dwell in the land of the shadow of death—upon them hath the light
+shined.” The light! How wonderful it was! How amazing! It seemed to the
+woman like a glorious sea upon which her spirit floated—a flood which
+drowned her senses, so that for a moment or two she lost consciousness
+of all else. Then once again her attention was arrested by the singing,
+because she heard these words: “For unto us a child is born.” “Pray God
+it is a boy,” she murmured.
+
+She wanted to hear more, and listened breathlessly now. Nearer and
+nearer to her came the voices, and she heard a new refrain that seemed to
+fill both heaven and earth with ringing joy: “To set at liberty—them that
+are bruised.”
+
+Suddenly that triumphant chanting became a lament. “No room! No room!”
+wailed that multitude of voices. “The door of the mother’s heart is shut.
+She prays that the child may die!” Then the woman knew that it was the
+child who stirred within her, whose coming the angels had heralded. The
+woman child! Yes, for she had prayed that it might die, and her heart
+stood still with fear.
+
+And it seemed to the woman that the wall had been built up and the room
+was dark again, save for the light of one small lamp. But in her heart
+she heard still the echo of the song: “They that dwell in the land of the
+shadow of death”—that was the girl in the workhouse infirmary; that was
+the old woman in the police court charged with attempted suicide; that
+was herself—upon them “hath the light shined.” “For unto us a child is
+born, a Saviour, which”—Then she understood. It was her own child. The
+child that moved under her heart. What was it came next? Ah! It came back
+to her now; she seemed to hear again that burst of joy that filled the
+sky with song: “To set at liberty them that are bruised.”
+
+Who were the bruised? Some one had told her a story a few hours ago. It
+was about the poor creature at the corner of the street; her husband
+had come back last Saturday and demanded money; had knocked her down
+and kicked her; the magistrate had made a joke about it in court, and
+everybody had laughed except the woman. She had wept bitterly. But nobody
+seemed to care. “To set at liberty them that are bruised.” The poor thing
+was horribly bruised, they said. But was she not “at liberty?” No, she
+was in bondage—cruel bondage. Were all women in bondage? If so, some of
+the fetters were made of gold. Were fetters of gold light? Some one was
+going to break the fetters. And that some one was—her own child. “No!
+No!” she cried, in agony. “It is she—my child—who will be broken! Rather
+let her die now, before she has become acquainted with grief.”
+
+Then the woman felt herself folded in a purple mantle, so that she could
+not see, but she was not afraid, rather comforted, as if with a sense of
+deep security. “I am destiny,” she heard; “your child will be safe with
+me. I will cover her with my arm. I will hide her in the secret place of
+the Most High. She shall break in pieces the fetters of those who are in
+bondage.”
+
+“Then she shall not herself be broken?” faltered the mother.
+
+“She shall be broken,” answered Destiny, “yet not her spirit. That shall
+return victorious to God, who sends it forth.”
+
+“Tell me one thing,” pleaded the mother, “Shall the joy of my child
+outweigh her sorrow?”
+
+“The angels sang at the birth of One who was destined to be crucified for
+the world. Did the joy of the crucified outweigh the sorrow?”
+
+“I do not know,” she answered.
+
+“According to her strength her joy shall be like unto His joy, and her
+sorrow like unto His sorrow.”
+
+And the mother said, “God’s will be done.”
+
+And when the veil was removed it seemed as though the little room was
+full of those shining presences who had drawn near to her from the
+singing hosts of heaven.
+
+“I am Wisdom,” said one, and laid a hand upon the woman’s head. “I give
+to your child what is mine.” “I am Vision,” cried another, kissing her
+eyes, saying, “For the child’s sake.” And Love was revealed, as Love
+reverently touched the child where she lay beneath the mother’s heart,
+saying: “It is I who give to women the courage that amazes strong men.”
+“Take from me for the child that shall be born, my double-edged sword,
+the spirit and the word,” said one: “My name is Inspiration.”
+
+Then once more there was wafted upon the air the singing of the heavenly
+host—and the outside wall had disappeared again, and the garret was open
+to the sky. And the heart of the woman sang with the joy of the angels:
+“For unto us a child is born.” ...
+
+A peal of bells rang out from the church. One of the boys stirred, sat
+up, and cried out, “Mother!” She lifted her head. “Hush!” she said,
+“Hush, the angels are singing.” She rose and walked to the window,
+drawing aside the curtain. A star shone brilliantly; it seemed to shoot
+a shaft of light into the room. The Christmas chimes clamored their
+tidings. She went back and knelt by the startled child. “Kiss mother,”
+she said, as she put her arms about him. “It is Christmas morning.”
+
+
+I Am the Mother-Heart
+
+By Grace D. Brewer
+
+(In “The Progressive Woman.”)
+
+I am the Mother-heart of this nation.
+
+I have loved and nourished its little ones in age-long mother fashion;
+have swelled with pride when the nation has protected them from disease;
+come nearly to bursting with unuttered gratitude when happiness has come
+to the youth of the land.
+
+I have spent many long, sleepless nights weeping over the fate of
+millions of my babies, forced from home, school and mother, to the
+factories and shops of the cities, and all night have wondered “why” and
+“how long?”
+
+I am haunted by the childish protestations, desirous glances from faded,
+childish eyes, and bleed anew when I see my children marching from the
+factory door, their bent and bony figures clad in rags.
+
+I, the Mother-heart of the nation have been deceived, tricked and
+defrauded.
+
+I believed that modern industry, with all the improvements, could provide
+for my infants; believed the mighty labor-saving machines would not
+require the help of my babies to feed the world; believed the children
+would be given plenty of time in which to grow healthy bodies.
+
+I have, however, awakened to existing conditions. No longer will I be
+submissive.
+
+I have ever been a power for good, but seldom rebellious.
+
+I am now pulsing red blood. I will temper my mother-love with human
+justice and stand only for right.
+
+I will help restore to my babies the privileges of their years.
+
+I can labor for justice and hover my young flock.
+
+I no longer send out purely love throbs, but send warnings to those who
+have been blinded by gold.
+
+I beat in harmony with the masses struggling for freedom, feeling
+confident of results. I beat with will and determination, a glorious
+future before me.
+
+I know the day will come when the Mother-heart of all nations will be
+content because of the reign of justice.
+
+I realize my responsibility and beat the faster.
+
+I am the Mother-heart of this nation.
+
+
+By Mrs. C. E. Porter
+
+(Vice President National Congress of Mothers.)
+
+Let no one fear the loss of womanliness so long as woman is a willing
+slave to her mother instinct.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+Love and Marriage
+
+
+
+
+LOVE AND MARRIAGE
+
+
+To Love on Feeling Its Approach
+
+By Helen Hoyt
+
+(In “The Masses.”)
+
+ Love is a burden, a chain,
+ Love is a trammel and tie;
+ Love is disquiet and pain
+ That slowly go by.
+
+ O why should I bind my heart
+ And bind my sight?
+ Love is only a part
+ Of all delight.
+
+ Let me have room for the rest,—
+ To find and explore!
+ Love is greatest and best?
+ But love closes the door.
+
+ And closes us off so long from the ways
+ And concernments of men;
+ And owns us, and hinders our days.
+ O love, come not again!
+
+ I have walked with you all my mile,
+ Now let me be free, be free!
+ O now a little while
+ Love, come not back to me!
+
+
+Ashes of Life
+
+By Edna St. Vincent Millay
+
+(In “The Forum.”)
+
+ Love has gone and left me, and the days are all alike;
+ Eat I must and sleep I will,—and would that night were here!
+ But ah!—to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!
+ Would that it were day again!—with twilight near!
+
+ Love has gone and left me and I don’t know what to do;
+ This or that or what you will is all the same to me;
+ But all the things that I begin I leave before I’m through—
+ There’s little use in anything as far as I can see.
+
+ Love has gone and left me, and the neighbors knock and borrow,
+ And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse,—
+ And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
+ There’s this little street and this little house.
+
+
+The Greatest Love
+
+By Rahel Varnhagen
+
+(From “Life and Letters of Rahel Varnhagen.”)
+
+Only one in the whole world recognizes my claim to the personality, and
+does not wish merely to use and swallow up some part or other of me;
+loves me as nature created me, and fate distorted me; understands this
+fate; is willing to leave me the remainder of my life, and to gladden it
+and draw it nearer to heaven; and, for the happiness of being my friend,
+will be, do, and leave all for me. This is the man who is called my
+bridegroom.
+
+
+Love-Songs
+
+By Mary Carolyn Davies
+
+ What is love?
+ Love is when you touch me;
+ Love is a noise of stars singing as they march;
+ Love is a voice of worlds glad to be together;
+ What is love?
+
+ There is a strong wall about me to protect me:
+ It is built of the words you have said to me.
+
+ There are swords about me to keep me safe:
+ They are the kisses of your lips.
+
+ Before me goes a shield to guard me from harm:
+ It is the shadow of your arms between me and danger.
+
+ All the wishes of my mind know your name,
+ And the white desires of my heart
+ They are acquainted with you.
+ The cry of my body for completeness,
+ That is a cry to you.
+ My blood beats out your name to me, unceasing, pitiless—
+ Your name, your name.
+
+ My body talks about you in the night,
+ My hand says soft, “His hand is like a shield.”
+ My cheek grows warm, remembering your lips.
+ My arms reach blindly out into the dark;
+ My pulses say, “We cannot beat without him;”
+ And my eyes do not speak at all, for what they know is beyond being said.
+ My body talks about you all night long.
+ I cannot sleep, my body talks so loud.
+
+ See, I lead you to my heart,
+ It is a winding way, the way to my heart;
+ It is thorn-beset and very long;
+ It is walled and buttressed; it is sentineled,
+ And none could ever find the way alone.
+ So take my hand,
+ And I will lead you to my heart.
+
+ Our hearts lie so close
+ That when your heart trembles,
+ Mine will be afraid.
+
+ Our hearts beat so near
+ That when your heart stirs,
+ Mine will hear it.
+
+ Our hearts speak so loud
+ That all the world must know.
+
+ I have lost track of what world I am living in
+ Or what day I am seeing;
+ I only know that there is blue about—
+ The blue of your eyes;
+
+ I only know that there is music somewhere—
+ Words quick and broken that you have said.
+
+ Your parted lips hard on mine,
+ Your sudden arms crushing heaven into my heart,
+ Your broken words that tell me nothing and everything—
+
+ When God is thundering the last world into oblivion,
+ And quenching the farthest star,
+ And putting blackness around,
+ We two will cling to each other.
+
+
+A Man Never Gets Over It
+
+By Cornelia A. P. Comer
+
+(From “The Wealth of Timmy Zimmerman,” in the “Atlantic Monthly.”)
+
+“I mean to have a swell home, if I am a bachelor,” boasted Timmy. “I feel
+like I wanted it. It’s just another game, I guess. But I’ll play a lone
+hand—I don’t reckon a man can be ready for matrimony when it sends cold
+shivers down his spine just to think of it, do you?”
+
+Kid lowered his voice.
+
+“Timmy, listen a minute. I’ll tell you something—_a man never gets over
+feelin’ that way about it_. He just has to kind of chloroform them
+feelings and hurry along with it. Because there ain’t no doubt it’s the
+thing to do.”
+
+
+Marriage, a Partnership
+
+By Mrs. Newell Dwight Hillis
+
+(American contemporary. From “The American Woman and Her Home.”)
+
+There is a sense in which marriage is a contract, at the same time
+business, moral and social....
+
+Marriage is looked upon often as the consummation of the romance of life,
+whereas, it is simply its beginning. It is called a matter of the heart,
+which it should be, but it should also be an affair of the intellect.
+It is fortunate that the day of early marriage has passed, since the
+early marriage implied a choice guided almost wholly by the emotions, as
+the intellect is slower in its development than the heart. But marriage
+should involve both heart and brain and fulfill the chief desire of both.
+
+
+One of the Best Things
+
+By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
+
+(From “The Duty of Surplus Women,” in “The Independent.”)
+
+(See page 280)
+
+If marriage laws are wrong, mend them. If marriage customs offend, change
+them. If other people’s marriages do not please, improve on them. But
+marriage itself remains a good thing—one of the best things in the world.
+
+
+What Is Love?
+
+By Elizabeth Philip
+
+(English contemporary. Quoted from “Women the World Over.”)
+
+ What is Love, that all the world
+ Should talk so much about it?
+ What is Love, that neither you
+ Nor I can do without it?
+
+ What is Love that it should be
+ As changeful as the weather?
+ Is it joy or is it pain
+ Or is it both together?
+
+ Love’s a tyrant and a slave,
+ A torment and a treasure.
+ Having it, you know no peace,
+ Lacking it, no pleasure.
+
+ Would I shun it if I could?
+ Faith, I almost doubt it.
+ No, I’d rather bear its sting,
+ Than live my life without it.
+
+
+The Art of Loving
+
+By Ellen Key
+
+(Contemporary Norwegian writer. From “Love and Marriage.”[10])
+
+Every developed modern woman wishes to be loved not _enmale_, but _en
+artiste_. Only a man whom she feels to possess an artist’s joy in her,
+and who shows this joy in discreet and delicate contact with her soul as
+with her body, can retain the love of the modern woman.
+
+[10] J. G. Stokes Co., Pub.
+
+
+A New Stimulus to Marriage
+
+By Mrs. St. Clair Stobart
+
+(See page 55)
+
+As concerns marriage, if it should indeed be true that women, who can
+find practical work in life outside marriage, would no longer be so eager
+to marry, this would not necessarily be an evil, for it would probably
+act as an additional incentive to man to desire marriage. Marriage has
+been regarded for women as a profession in which failure involves, as
+in other professions, humiliation. Women are trained, therefore, under
+the present régime, to employ all the arts at their disposal to ensure
+success in their profession.... If women were absorbed in professions
+and occupations, such as farming, architecture, territorial service,
+and the like, and only desired marriage when and because they loved, we
+would have the loss in the woman of the wiles and artificialities which
+formerly stimulated the man, and marriage would be counterbalanced by a
+more healthy emulation on the part of the man, who would be desirous to
+obtain something of value which was difficult to get.
+
+
+The Old Suffragist
+
+By Margaret Widdemer
+
+(See page 156)
+
+ She could have loved—her woman passions beat
+ Deeper than theirs, or else she had not known
+ How to have dropped her heart beneath their feet
+ A living stepping-stone.
+
+ The little hands—did they not clutch her heart?
+ The guarding arms—was she not very tired?
+ Was it an easy thing to walk apart,
+ Unresting, undesired?
+
+ She gave away her crown of woman-praise,
+ Her gentleness and silent girlhood grace
+ To be a merriment for idle days,
+ Scorn for the market-place:
+
+ She strove for an unvisioned, far-off good,
+ For one far hope she knew she would not see:
+ These—not _her_ daughters—crowned with motherhood,
+ And love and beauty—free.
+
+
+Postponing Marriage
+
+By Ethel Maud Colquhoun
+
+(See page 172)
+
+A very important question in this connection is whether, in promising
+fidelity to one woman, a lover is really undertaking more than he can
+perform. When he postpones marriage to the latest possible moment man is
+certainly not offering to his bride that gift of a life-long devotion
+which is part of the ideal of true love.
+
+
+Marriage of the “Friends”
+
+By Lucretia Mott
+
+(One of the early leaders in the Woman Suffrage, Anti-Slavery, and other
+progressive movements of her time. A member of the Society of Friends—a
+Quaker. The following is from a letter written in 1869 to Josephine
+Butler, of England.)
+
+In the Marriage union, no ministerial or other official aid is required
+to consecrate or legalize the bond. After due care in making known their
+intentions, the parties, in presence of their friends, announce their
+covenant, with pledge of fidelity and affection, invoking Divine aid
+for its faithful fulfilment. There is no assumed authority or admitted
+inferiority, no _promise_ of obedience. Their independence is equal,
+their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal. This of course
+has had its influence on married life and the welfare of families. The
+permanence and happiness of the conjugal relation among us have ever
+borne a favorable comparison with those of other denominations.
+
+
+The Love That Pales
+
+By Mary Wollstonecraft
+
+1759-1797
+
+(See page 121)
+
+Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of
+thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important
+years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation. But Rousseau,
+and most of the male writers who have followed his steps, have warmly
+inculcated that the whole tendency of female education ought to be
+directed to one point—to render them pleasing.
+
+Let me reason with the supporters of this opinion who have any knowledge
+of human nature. Do they imagine that marriage can eradicate the habitude
+of life? The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that
+her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect
+on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is
+past and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into
+herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? Or is it not
+more rational to expect that she will try to please other men, and, in
+the emotions raised by the expectations of new conquests, endeavor to
+forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband
+ceases to be a lover, and the time will inevitably come, her desire
+of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness;
+and love, perhaps the most evanescent of all passions, gives place to
+jealousy or vanity.
+
+
+When Marriage Meant Bondage
+
+By Lucy Stone
+
+(Probably the most brilliant and effective of the early woman suffrage
+orators. Is said to have possessed a beautiful speaking voice, and great
+personal charm. The founder, with her husband, Henry Blackwell, of “The
+Woman’s Journal.” From “Susan B. Anthony, Her Life and Work.”)
+
+The common law, which regulates the relation of husband and wife, and is
+modified only in a few instances by the statutes, gives the “custody” of
+the wife’s person to the husband, so that he has a right to her even
+against herself. It gives him her earnings, no matter with what weariness
+they have been acquired, or how greatly she may need them for herself or
+her children. It gives him a right to her personal property which he may
+will away from her, also the use of her real estate, and in some of the
+states, married women, insane persons and idiots are ranked together as
+not fit to make a will; so that she is left with only one right, which
+she enjoys in common with the pauper, the right of maintenance. Indeed,
+when she has taken the sacred marriage vows, her legal existence ceases.
+
+
+A Possible Utopia
+
+By Josephine Pitcairn Knowles
+
+(From “The Upholstered Cage.”)
+
+Nothing is permanent, there is going on always a continual shuffling of
+the cards of public opinion; trends of thought, standards of conduct
+come and go; and so when the day comes that women are more economically
+independent, then they will go on strike and sweep away all the unworthy
+suitors and declare that they will only mate with the physically and
+mentally sound, and then all considerations but love and respect will
+go by the board. This will appear but a distant and unrealizable Utopia
+to many who read this; nevertheless it will happen; all changes seem
+incredible from the distance, but when they crystallize themselves in
+fact nothing appears more natural or suitable. Every prophecy since the
+commencement of history has been scouted in its first inception, but
+when in time it has fulfilled itself it is seen to be the very thing
+awaited, natural and obvious, and a direct result of the past sequence of
+events.
+
+
+Marriage and the Labor Market
+
+By M. Carey Thomas
+
+(See page 10)
+
+Recent investigations of the after lives of college women and of their
+sisters who have not been to college have shown us that only about
+one-half of the daughters of men of the professional business classes
+who do not inherit independent fortunes can look forward to marriage.
+Statistics seem to prove that only fifty per cent. of the women of these
+classes marry. What are the other fifty per cent. to do except work or
+starve? Most women of independent means marry because their inherited
+fortunes enable them to contribute to the support of the family. Women of
+the working classes marry because they too, can help by their labor to
+support the family. It is only the dowerless women who are prevented by
+social usage from engaging in paid work outside the home, or in manual
+labor inside the home, after marriage, who remain unmarried. All other
+women are married and at work.
+
+Is it well for the great middle classes of our civilized nations that is,
+for the classes that are not very poor or very rich, to contain these
+ever increasing number of celibate men and women? To such a question
+there can be only one reply. If it is ill, as we all admit, why do we
+not encourage the women of these middle classes to work and marry like
+the women of the poorer classes who are practically all married? Why in
+England and Germany and the United States are there these thousands upon
+thousands of unmarried women teachers, a celibate class like the monks
+and nuns of the Middle Ages, and like them an ever present menace to the
+welfare of the state? Why in Italy, on the other hand, are so many of the
+women public school teachers married? Because in Germany and England and
+the United States women teachers lose their positions when they marry,
+and marry and starve they cannot. Because in Italy women teachers are
+allowed to marry and teach. Is it inconceivable that the state of the
+future in which women as well as men will vote will deprive women of
+bread because they wish to marry?
+
+
+Marriage Laws in 1850
+
+By Clarina Howard Nichols
+
+(From speech at Woman’s Suffrage Convention in 1852. Quoted from “Life of
+Susan B. Anthony.”)
+
+If a wife is compelled to get a divorce on account of the infidelity
+of the husband, she forfeits all right to the property which they have
+earned together, while the husband, who is the offender still remains the
+sole possession and control of the estate. She, the innocent party, goes
+out childless and portionless by decree of law, and he, the criminal,
+retains the home and children by favor of the same law. A drunkard takes
+his wife’s clothing to pay his rum bills, and the court declares that the
+action is legal because the wife belongs to the husband.
+
+
+A Preventive of Divorce
+
+By Margaret O. B. Wilkinson
+
+(From “Parents and Their Problems.”)
+
+(See page 173)
+
+And here we come to the most potent of all causes of divorce—the
+conventionally enforced idleness of many married women—parasitism, Mrs.
+Schreiner calls it—and the overwork of many of our men.... The rush of
+our present life comes to bear most heavily on our most chivalrous. It
+wears them out physically and mentally and discourages them spiritually
+before they are fifty years of age. It gives them only time enough to
+nourish a vague doubt of the womanhood that is content to fatten their
+toil, instead of laboring staunchly with them as healthy women should
+do. They find their usefulness limited, their powers exhausted, and
+wonder why. And then, sometimes in utter weariness they throw off the
+yoke and try to begin again. But the women are not always wholly to
+blame for this condition. Sometimes with a perfectly unreasoning “I can
+support a wife” pride, a man will insist that a woman give up once and
+forever the only work in which she takes an interest, and leaves her a
+choice between idleness and housework in his home (which always, with or
+without fitness, a man will permit a woman to do)! But if a woman should
+say to her husband before, or soon after marriage, “John, it does not
+please me that you should be a lawyer—you must become a stock broker,” or
+“James, when you marry me you must give up the art you love and become a
+carpenter,” would we not be quick to decry her injustice? Yet there are
+men who still say to their wives, “The work you love you must give up.
+You may do the work I provide or none at all.”
+
+Of course, motherhood brings to women certain limitations, but the thing
+we do not recognize is that these limitations are temporary. And, if,
+in the ages past, women were able to combine with motherhood the most
+arduous physical labors, it seems probable, that, in the present and
+future when the demands of maternity are less rigorous, women should be
+able, with gain to the race, to enter new fields of labor and accomplish
+laudable results.
+
+Surely there is no greater safeguard for man and woman than the work in
+which mind and body can delight.
+
+
+Overheard in the Marriage Congress
+
+By Adella M. Parker
+
+(From the Suffrage Edition of the “Daily News,” Tacoma, Wash.)
+
+Once upon a time all the men in the world gathered together to make
+the laws of marriage. And the women, learning of this, gathered also,
+protesting and saying:
+
+“A woman is one of the parties to every contract of marriage. Why do we
+also not make the laws of marriage?”
+
+“Woman’s place is at home,” said the men.
+
+“But,” said the women, “the marriage agreement is the very basis of the
+home.”
+
+“Yes,” said the men, “but woman’s place is at home. It is not her place
+to create the conditions that make the home.”
+
+“For how long is the marriage contract?” asked the women.
+
+“Forever,” said the men. Then the women said:
+
+“Suppose we should insist upon helping to make the contracts we enter
+into?”
+
+“It wouldn’t be lawful,” said the men.
+
+“Who makes the laws?” said the women.
+
+“We do,” said the men.
+
+“And do the men make the laws concerning the rights of children?” asked a
+woman with a babe in her arms, and another at her heels.
+
+“Oh yes,” said the men.
+
+“And the laws concerning a woman’s rights with respect to her own child?”
+
+“Yes,” said the men, “the women bear the children, but the men determine
+their legal control.”
+
+“Can the marriage contract ever be broken?” asked the bravest one of the
+women.
+
+“No,” said the men, “it can’t be broken except upon facts that can’t be
+proved.”
+
+“Do the men keep the marriage vows?” softly asked a woman ’way at the
+rear.
+
+“Hush,” said a portly landlord who owned a “restricted district;” “no
+respectable woman would ask such a question.” Then a thoughtful woman
+earnestly asked:
+
+“Will there not be more murders, and more suicides and more insanity if
+the women have not part in settling the terms of marriage?”
+
+But the Lombrosos and the Allen McLane Hamiltons and all the other
+criminologists and insanity experts paid no heed to this question.
+Finally the women said:
+
+“But suppose we don’t enter into these contracts that you make?”
+
+“Oh, but you will,” said the men.
+
+And they did. But some of the women got even.
+
+
+The Cry of Man to Woman
+
+By C. Gasquoine Hartley
+
+(From “The Truth About Woman.”)
+
+The cry of man to woman under the patriarchal system has been, and still
+for the most part is, “Your value in our eyes is your sexuality; for your
+work we care not.” But mark this! The penalty of this false adjustment
+has fallen upon men. For women, in their turn, have come to value men
+first in their capacity as providers for them, caring as little for man’s
+sex value as men for women’s work-value. From the moment when women had
+to place the economic considerations in love first, her faculties of
+discrimination were no more of service for the selection of the fittest
+man. Here we may find the explanation of the kind of men girls have been
+willing to marry—old men, the unfit fathers, the diseased.... And it is
+the race that has suffered.
+
+
+When Love Went By
+
+By Theodosia Garrison
+
+(In “The Woman’s Home Companion.”)
+
+ When Love went by I scarcely bent
+ My eyes to see the way he went.
+ Life had so many joys to show,
+ What time I had to watch him go,
+ Or bid him in, whom folly sent.
+
+ But when the day was well nigh spent,
+ From out the casement long I leant,
+ Ah, would I had been watching so
+ When Love went by!
+
+ Gray day with dismal nights are blent,
+ Lonely and sad and discontent;
+ I would his feet had been more slow.
+ Oh, heart of mine, how could we know
+ Or realize what passing meant
+ When Love went by?
+
+
+The Flirt
+
+By Amelia Josephine Burr
+
+(From “The Century Magazine.”)
+
+ Beautiful Boy, lend me your youth to play with;
+ My heart is old.
+ Lend me your fire to make my twilight gay with,
+ To warm my cold;
+ Prove that the power my look has not forsaken,
+ That at my will
+ My touch can quicken pulses and awaken
+ Man’s passion still.
+
+ The moment that I ask do not begrudge me.
+ I shall not stay.
+ I shall have gone, e’er you have time to judge me,
+ My empty way.
+ I am not worth remembrance, little brother,
+ Even to damn.
+ One kiss—O God! if I were only other
+ Than what I am!
+
+
+I Can Go to Love Again
+
+By Margaret Widdemer
+
+(From “The Century Magazine.”)
+
+ Now that you are gone, loving hands, loving lips,
+ Now I can go back to love,
+ I can free my soul, that was kissed to eclipse,
+ I can fling my thoughts above.
+ I can run and stand in the wind, on the hill,
+ Now that I am lone and free,
+ Whistle through the dusk and the cleansing chill,
+ All my red-winged dreams to me.
+
+ I had dreamed of love like a wind, like a flame,
+ I had watched for love, a star;
+ That was never love that you brought when you came....
+ Silver cord and golden bar!
+ I was swathed with love like a veil, like a cloak;
+ I was bound with love a shroud,
+ All my red-winged dreams flew afar when you spoke....
+ Dreams I dared not call aloud.
+
+ They are waiting still in the hush, in the light,
+ Morning wind and leaves and dew,
+ Whisper of the grass, of the waves, of the night,
+ Things I gave away for you.
+ I can speed my soul to its old wonderlands,
+ Free my wild heart’s wings from chain,
+ Now that you are gone, loving lips, loving hands,
+ I can go to love again.
+
+
+Marriage the Sole Means of Maintenance
+
+By Josephine Butler
+
+(English. Editor of “Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture,” published in
+1869. From the Introduction.)
+
+What dignity can there be in the attitude of women in general, and toward
+men, in particular, when marriage is held (and often necessarily so,
+being the sole means of maintenance) to be the one end of a woman’s life,
+when it is degraded to the level of a feminine profession, when those
+who are soliciting a place in this profession resemble those flaccid
+Brazilian creepers which cannot exist without support, and which sprawl
+out their limp tendrils in every direction to find something—no matter
+what—to hang upon; when the insipidity or the material necessities of so
+many women’s lives make them ready to accept almost any man who may offer
+himself? There has been a pretense of admiring this pretty helplessness
+of women. But let me explain that I am not deprecating the condition of
+dependence in which God has placed every human being, man or woman,—the
+sweet interchange of services, the give and take of true affection, the
+mutual support and aid of friends or lovers, who have each something to
+give and to receive. That is a wholly different thing from the abject
+dependence of one entire class of persons on another and a stronger
+class. In the present case such a dependence is liable to peculiar
+dangers by its complication with sexual emotions and motives, and with
+relations which ought, in an advanced and Christian community, to rest
+upon a free and deliberate choice,—a decision of the judgment and of the
+heart, and into which the admission of a necessity, moral or material,
+introduces a degrading element.... Cordelia ... declared, “Love is not
+love when it is mingled with respects that stand aloof from the entire
+point.” Truly, the present condition of society ... leaves little room
+for the heart’s choice.
+
+
+The Confidante
+
+By Nora Elizabeth Barnhart
+
+(In “The Independent.”)
+
+ I let him in and shut the door,
+ And when the key was turned,
+ There leapt a look into his face—
+ A look I had not learned!
+
+ Within the four walls of my heart
+ He sudden stalked a lord,
+ Possessed of all he did survey,
+ To hold by might of sword!
+
+ Ah! Then how gray and small the room
+ That I had deemed so fair!
+ How paltry were its furnishings,
+ Its wealth of book and chair!
+
+ The wide-flung windows seemed to shrink,
+ That long my stars had framed!
+ The stretch of daisy fields and hills
+ Lay startled and ashamed!
+
+ And all my little world was his,
+ Which once had stretched so wide!
+ He holds the key upon his palm,
+ And jingles it with pride!
+
+
+Mirandy on the Monotony of Domesticity
+
+By Dorothy Dix
+
+(Foremost among American humorous writers. In “Good Housekeeping.”)
+
+Dere ain’t nothin’ dull in bein’ married, and dere ain’t no sameness
+’bout havin’, a husband which I reckon is de main reason dat most of
+us wants one. Hits de ole maids an’ de ole bachelors what ain’t got
+nobody to boss ’em an’ dispute ’em, an’ rile ’em, an’ fight wid ’em, dat
+gets dull an’ lonesome lak. Not married folks.... Life in one of dese
+ole bachelor clubs, or spinsters’ retreats makes me think of my batter
+puddin’s. Hit sets well on a weak stomach, but hit aint got no flavor to
+hit. Matrimony, hits lak one of de fruit cakes what I bakes at Christmas.
+Hits full of ginger an’ spice, an’ plums, an’ raisins, an’ hits mighty
+apt to give dem a night mare what partakes of hit, but hit sho has got
+taste to hit.
+
+
+Marriage Not an Assurance of Support
+
+By Alice Henry
+
+(From “The Trade Union Woman.”[11])
+
+It often happens that marriage in course of time proves to be anything
+but an assurance of support. Early widowed, the young mother herself may
+have to earn her children’s bread. Or the husband may become crippled, or
+an invalid, or he may turn out a drunkard or spendthrift. In any of these
+circumstances, the responsibility and burden of supporting the family
+usually falls upon the wife. Is it strange that the group so often drifts
+into undeserved pauperism, sickness and misery, perhaps later on even
+into those depths of social maladjustment that bring about crime?
+
+[11] Henry Holt Publishing Co.
+
+
+The Price of Love
+
+
+By Mary Austin
+
+(From “Love and the Soul Maker.”[12])
+
+“But love,” Valda insisted, ... “should be free.”
+
+“If it is, Nature didn’t make it so. Automatically the end of loving ties
+up with it those who love and the unborn.
+
+“No sooner do we begin upon it than we enter upon certainties of
+effecting the happiness of the one who loves with us, and the potential
+third. It is so little free, that we can neither go out of it nor into
+it on the mere invitation, nor abate by saying so one of the widening
+circles of its disaster. Whether for better or worse, love is irrevocably
+tied to its consequences.”
+
+
+By Mme. de Girardin
+
+It is not easy to be a widow; one must resume all the modesty of girlhood
+without being allowed even to feign ignorance.
+
+
+By Comtesse d’ Houdetot
+
+I have seen more than one woman drown her honor in the clear water of
+diamonds.
+
+
+By De Maintenon
+
+Before marriage woman is a queen; after marriage, a subject.
+
+
+By de l’Enclos
+
+The resistance of a woman is not always a proof of her virtue, but more
+frequently of her experience.
+
+
+By Anne Morton Barnard
+
+A prison, plus “love”, is tyranny with its crown carefully hidden.
+
+
+Mrs. W. K. Clifford
+
+Why should man, who is strong, always get the best of it, and be forgiven
+so much; and woman who is weak, get the worst, and be forgiven so little?
+
+
+By George Eliot
+
+The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till
+she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.
+
+
+By Marguerite de Valois
+
+There are few husbands whom the wife cannot win in the long run by
+patience and love, unless they are harder than the rocks which the soft
+water penetrates in time.
+
+
+By Countess Natahlie
+
+Love is the association of two beings for the benefit of one.
+
+
+George Eliot
+
+We look at one little woman’s face we love, as we look at the face of our
+mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our yearnings.
+
+
+By “Ouida”
+
+What is it that love does to woman? Without it, she only sleeps; with it
+alone, she lives.
+
+
+By Mme. de Lambert
+
+It is only the coward who reproaches as a dishonor the love a woman has
+cherished for him.
+
+
+By Amelia E. Barr
+
+The truth is, women are lost because they do not deliberate.
+
+
+By Mrs. Alec Tweedie
+
+(See page 126)
+
+There will be more marriages, and happier marriages, when women are on an
+equal footing with men in education and income.
+
+
+By Mme. du Bocage
+
+The coquette comprises her reputation, and sometimes even her virtue;
+the prude, on the contrary, often sacrifices her honor in private, and
+preserves it in public.
+
+
+By George Sand
+
+A woman cannot guarantee her heart, even though her husband be the
+greatest and most perfect of men.
+
+
+By Mme. de Rieux
+
+In all ill-mated marriages, the fault is less the woman’s than the man’s,
+as the choice depended on her the least.
+
+
+By Marguerite de Valois
+
+There are women so hard to please that it seems as if nothing less than
+an angel will suit them; hence it comes that they often meet with devils.
+
+
+By Mme. Bachi
+
+Men bestow compliments only on women who deserve none.
+
+
+By Mme. de Rieux
+
+Marriage is a lottery in which men stake their liberty, and women their
+happiness.
+
+
+By Mme. de Flahaut
+
+Manners, morals, customs change; the passions are always the same.
+
+
+By Mme. Necker
+
+The quarrels of lovers are like summer showers that leave the country
+more verdant and beautiful.
+
+
+By Mme. Reyband
+
+To continue love in marriage is a science.
+
+
+By Anna Jameson
+
+How many women since the days of Echo and Narcissus have pined themselves
+into air for the love of men who were in love only with themselves.
+
+
+By Amelia E. Barr
+
+Cruelly tempted, perplexed and bewildered, when passion is stronger than
+reason, women do not think of consequences, but go blindfolded, headlong
+to their ruin.
+
+
+By Louise Colet
+
+Better to have never loved, than to have loved unhappily, or to have
+_half_ loved.
+
+
+By De Pompadour
+
+Love is the passion of great souls; it makes them merit glory, when it
+does not turn their heads.
+
+
+Mme. de Stael
+
+I am glad I am not a man, as I should be obliged to marry a woman.
+
+
+By Mme. de Motteville
+
+A woman can be held by no stronger tie than the knowledge that she is
+loved.
+
+[12] Doubleday, Page and Co.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VI
+
+Woman and Labor
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN AND LABOR
+
+
+The Housewife
+
+By Angela Morgan
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
+
+ It is she who makes ready the army when day is at hand,
+ When the bugle of labor is blowing its mighty command,
+ Oh, fierce are the feet of the workers who answer the call,
+ But swifter and fiercer the toil that hath weaponed them all.
+ Do we boast of their brawn? Do we trumpet the cause of the fighter
+ Who marches at rise of sun?
+ Lo! Look at the woman! The heat of her labor is whiter;
+ Ere the work of the world has begun
+ She is up, and her banners are flying from yard and from alley,
+ The roofs are a-flutter with eloquent streamers of snow.
+ Oh, not for a moment her passionate fingers may dally,
+ Till the soldier is shod and is fed and made ready to go.
+
+ Oh, weary the heart of the host when the battle is done,
+ But the woman is laboring still with the set of the sun!
+ Does the worker return? She is able and eager with bread.
+ Does he faint? There is cheer for his soul and delight for his head.
+ Do we trumpet our gain? Do we sing of our land and its thunder
+ Of factory, query and mill?
+ Lo! look to the woman! Her love, her love, it hath compassed the wonder,
+ And the army swings on at her will.
+ For hers is the whip, and her spur is the fighter’s salvation—
+ In the strength of Jehovah she comes.
+ Her faith is the sword and her thrift is the shield of the nation,
+ And her courage is greater than drums.
+
+ March, march, march, to your victories, O man!
+ Fight, fight, fight, as you’ve fought since time began.
+ For she who hath wed you, and fed you and sped you,
+ Fulfilling Eternity’s laws,
+ Is she who hath soldiered the Cause!
+
+
+Woman in the Home
+
+By Carrie W. Allen
+
+(In “The Progressive Woman.”)
+
+It is generally conceded that woman lives in a state of subordination to
+man, and nowhere is this more apparent than in that sphere which is said
+to be distinctly her own, the home.
+
+The woman in the home renders service which the male wage-earner could
+not buy. She is the family economist. She mends and makes the garments,
+buys the food and clothing, and by her intelligence and thrift maintains
+the head of the house in a state of physical efficiency which enables him
+to go out and sell his labor power. The service she renders is priceless.
+But, because she brings in no actual money, she is considered an economic
+dependent, and treated as a subordinate because of this dependence.
+
+The lot of this woman is desolately pitiable, much worse in many cases
+than that of the woman who has gone out into industry.
+
+
+Morality and Woman in Industry
+
+By Clara E. Laughlin
+
+(See page 68)
+
+There seemed to be a widely prevailing idea that modern industrial
+conditions, which take women and girls out of the home are responsible
+for a great increase in criminality and immorality. The Government
+investigation shows that exactly the reverse is true. The traditional
+pursuits of women—housework, sewing, laundry work, nursing, and the
+keeping of boarders furnish more than four-fifths of all the feminine
+criminals, compared with only about one-tenth furnished by all the
+newer pursuits, including mills, factories, shops, offices, and the
+professions; and the number of criminals who have never been wage-earners
+in any pursuit, but who come directly from their own homes into the
+courts and penal institutions, is more than twice as large as that coming
+from all the newer industrial pursuits together.
+
+
+Wasted Energy and Talent
+
+By M. Olivia (Mrs. Russell) Sage
+
+(American contemporary. Millionaire philanthropist. From “The North
+American Review.”)
+
+There is an immense amount of feminine talent and energy wasted in the
+world every day. This is not due to the indifference or the laziness of
+woman, for she is eager to do, to accomplish, to go out into the field of
+life and achieve for herself and her kind. But she simply does not know
+how. One of the most important movements of the day, therefore, is the
+reawakening of woman, the building her up on a new basis of self-help and
+work for others. That movement will set loose an amount of talent that
+will revolutionize our social life.
+
+
+Sisterhood in Labor
+
+By Ida C. Hultin
+
+(American contemporary. From speech delivered at the 80th anniversary of
+Susan B. Anthony.)
+
+Women have failed to see that the work of every woman touched that of
+every other woman. The woman who works with the hand helps her who works
+with the brain. Today we know there could be no choice of work until
+there was freedom of choice to work.
+
+
+Women Are Going to Work
+
+By Elsie Clews Parsons
+
+(From “Penalizing Marriage.” In “The Independent.”)
+
+Women are going to work, and they are not going to limit their work to
+house service. Let us cease to attempt to make marriage and childbearing
+a check upon their work, thereby strengthening their tendencies toward
+celibacy and race suicide.... Let us rather adjust work and marriage and
+childbearing to a minimum of incompatibility by lifting inherited taboos
+on education in sex facts.
+
+
+Development Through Choice of Work
+
+By Florence Kiper
+
+(In “The Forum.”)
+
+More and more must we demand that woman be freed from unmeaning
+drudgery—and from the enervating influences of support in return for sex,
+in marriage or out of it. Only by self-assertion and by self-development
+through the work which she may elect, will woman come into her own.
+
+
+Woman’s Place
+
+By Gertrude Breslau Fuller
+
+(See page 36)
+
+A woman’s place is like a man’s place. It is where her work is, wherever
+she can do the most good; wherever she serves herself best without
+invading any one else.
+
+
+Woman’s Demand for Work
+
+By Josephine Butler
+
+(From “Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture.”)
+
+(See page 157)
+
+The demand of the women of the humbler classes for bread may be more
+pressing, but it is not more sincere than that of the women of the
+leisure classes for work. And these two demands coming together, it seems
+to me, point to an end so plainly to be discerned, that I marvel that
+any should remain blind to it. The latter demand is the attestation of
+the collective human conscience that God does not permit any to live
+as cumberers of the earth, and that the very conditions of their moral
+existence is, that efforts and pains taken by them should answer to some
+part of the needs of the community.
+
+
+The Left-Over Women
+
+By Ethel Maud Colquhoun
+
+(English contemporary. Author “The Vocation of Women,” “Two on Their
+Travels,” etc. From “The Vocation of Women.”)
+
+It is practically certain that every discussion on the vocation of woman,
+whether among feminists or their opponents, will ultimately lead to the
+following problem: woman was obviously intended by nature to become a
+mother; modern social requirements make it obligatory that she should
+be legally married before doing so; there are not enough husbands to go
+round. What do you propose to do with the women who are left over?
+
+
+Sex-Parasitism
+
+By Olive Schreiner
+
+(From “Woman and Labor.”)
+
+The position of the unemployed modern female is one wholly different.
+The choice before her, as her ancient fields of domestic labor slip from
+her, is not generally or often at the present day the choice between
+finding new fields of labor, or death; but one far more serious in its
+ultimate reaction on humanity as a whole—it is the choice between finding
+new forms of labor or sinking slowly into a condition of more or less
+complete and passive _sex parasitism_!
+
+Again and again in the history of the past, when among human creatures
+a certain stage of material civilization has been reached, a curious
+tendency has manifested itself for the human female to become more or
+less parasitic; social conditions tend to rob her of all forms of active
+conscious social labor, and to reduce her, like the field-bug, to the
+passive exercise of her sex functions alone. And the result of this
+parasitism has invariably been the decay in vitality and intelligence of
+the female, followed by a longer or shorter period by that of her male
+descendants and her entire society.
+
+
+The Changed Conditions of Tomorrow
+
+By Margaret O. B. Wilkinson
+
+(From “Parents and Their Problems.”)
+
+We must accustom ourselves to another new idea that as marriage is no
+longer a duty, for all women, so it is no longer a trade or profession,
+requiring all the time and labor of all married women. Some confusion has
+arisen on this point because certain labors have been associated with
+marriage in the popular mind. But these labors may, in the near future,
+come to be considered as trades in themselves, not inseparably connected
+with marriage, and the wives of the days to come may be found performing
+diverse tasks. For we know that in our own times women may be the best
+of wives and good mothers, but with small knowledge of spinning, weaving,
+basket-making, pottery-making, agriculture or even baking, although
+all of these trades used to be inseparably connected with the lives of
+married women. And tomorrow, owing to changed conditions, the woman
+doctor or lawyer may seem to be as desirable of a mate as the cook or
+seamstress today. So much is possible!
+
+
+Woman’s Work in Woman’s Way
+
+By Lida Parce
+
+(American contemporary. Educator. Author of “Economic Determinism,” etc.
+From “The Progressive Woman.”)
+
+If the economic interest is the important one, then woman’s work has
+always been the important work. The loom and the hand mill were strictly
+feminine implements, so long as their product was used only to supply
+the wants of the people. Only when the products of the loom and the mill
+became useful in competition did man take them up; and then for purposes
+of exploitation. For thousands of years man has devastated the earth and
+drenched it in blood to further that exploitation. Now he is beginning to
+find out that, after all, the only safe and proper use that can be made
+of goods is in supplying the needs of the people. Man has not yet begun
+to learn humility, but he will learn it.
+
+Isn’t it time for women to begin to defend their work, and their way of
+doing it? And to make a sober and critical estimate of the part that man
+has played in history? I think that women may well take pride in doing
+their work in a woman’s way.
+
+
+Women Workers in New England
+
+By Annie Marion MacLean, Ph. D.
+
+(Professor of Sociology in Adelphi College. From “Wage-Earning Women.”)
+
+It was in New England that women and girls first went out in large
+numbers to work with their husbands and fathers and brothers in the
+mill. They followed the industries from the fireside to the factory. It
+was a natural movement stimulated in many cases by necessity. At that
+time public opinion frowned on the idle girl, and work was considered a
+crowning virtue; so the factory girl was not commiserated but commended.
+Things have changed in the last century, and now we find most people of
+humanitarian instincts looking with regret at the spectacle of young
+girls marching to the mills. The procession is a long one in the old New
+England towns, and it is growing longer with the years....
+
+When Charles Dickens came to America, it was to Lowell he went to see
+the cotton-mills in operation, and it was of those mills he wrote his
+glowing picture of factory life for women. “They look like human beings,”
+he said, “not like beasts of burden.” If he were to come to us to-day
+to see the cotton workers, he would, in all probability, be taken to
+Fall River first and asked to behold the product of the evolution of two
+generations. He would see no beautiful window boxes, no smiling girls
+making poetry as they worked, or moving about with songs on their lips.
+Life is grim in the Fall River mills, and the women come perilously near
+having the mien of “beasts of burden.” The semi-idyllic conditions of the
+early New England cotton-mill have given way to a system brutalized by
+greed and the exigencies of modern industry.
+
+
+Women Who Sit at Ease
+
+By Grace Fallow Norton
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
+
+ I know a lady in this land
+ Who carries a Chinese fan in her hand;
+ But in her heart does she carry a thought
+ Of her Chinese sister who carefully wrought
+ The dainty, delicate, silken toy
+ For her to admire and enjoy?
+
+ To shield my lady from chilling draught
+ Is a Japanese screen of curious craft.
+ She takes the comfort its presence gives,
+ But in her heart not one thought lives,
+ Not even one little thought—ahem!—
+ For her Japanese sister from over the sea!
+
+
+One-Fifth of the Women Population at Work
+
+By M. Carey Thomas
+
+(See page 10)
+
+Unheralded, with no blare of trumpets, reluctantly emerging into the
+light, are millions of women wage-earners thronging every trade and
+profession, multiplying themselves beyond all calculation from census
+to census in every country of the civilized world. Even in the United
+States where fewer women are at work than in any other country about five
+millions of women, or about one-fifth of all women of working age, are
+supporting themselves outside the home. It is because this industrial
+revolution has taken place in our own lifetime that we do not as yet
+realize it. Women of my own age, however, need only refer to their own
+experience. I can remember when no women at all were employed in business
+offices, when the business streets of New York and Philadelphia and
+Baltimore were practically deserted by women. Now all the great office
+buildings are like rabbit hutches swarming with women typewriters, women
+bookkeepers, women secretaries, and business women of every sort, kind
+and description. Already everyone who studies the subject is compelled
+to recognize that whether we wish it or not the economic independence
+of women is taking place before our eyes. Men of the poorer classes
+have long been unable to care for their families without the assistance
+of women, and men of the classes which formerly supported their wives
+and daughters in comfort are now unable to do so and are becoming
+increasingly unwilling to marry and assume responsibility which they
+cannot meet....
+
+
+Woman’s Awakening
+
+By Josephine Conger
+
+(Editor “Home Life Magazine.” Formerly editor and publisher “The
+Progressive Woman.”)
+
+ She wrought, and the world wore on its back the cloth her nimble fingers
+ wove.
+ And as she wrought her mind lay blank beneath the thick-coiled tresses
+ of her hair,
+ For man had relegated to her that one task of weaving.
+ And while her mind lay blank, the rulers of the earth reached forth,
+ and (clad in cloth she wove)
+ Built for them cities, kingdoms, empires, laws,
+ And ruled within them to their hearts’ content.
+ And Woman dreamed and wove, and dreamed and wove,
+ Monotonously for ages dreamed and wove, apparently content.
+
+ Then took the rulers of the earth from out her hands her weaving;
+ Left the Woman empty-handed in her home;
+ Gave her universal task to vast machines, to mills, to factories;
+ Took the dignity of social service from her hearth;
+ No longer in her handiwork was clad the world.
+
+ Then Woman sat in brooding silence, or she served,
+ Growing dark-browed in rebellion, the wheels that spun the cloth she
+ erstwhile wove.
+ Served machines in mills and factories.
+ Then saw her children serve; the girl-child, tender, soft;
+ And the small boy who should have played in freedom with his kind.
+
+ And when she saw herself who once had clothed the world in dignity
+ Turned slave to whirring wheels, to harsh, unsympathetic steel and iron,
+ When the soft children of her mortal agony were murdered inch by inch
+ and year by year
+ Before her eyes—when the Woman, bereft, defeated,
+ Or brooding at her task saw this,
+ No longer lay her mind asleep. No longer dreamed she
+ As when she sat beside her ancient tasks at home,
+ Her children playing near her in the sun.
+
+ Awaked the Woman then in every land where slavery to the harsh machine
+ had come.
+ Awaked and brushed the cobwebs of tradition from her brain.
+ Spoke of the unfairness of the rulers in the busy marts.
+ Asked for place beside them in the making of the laws;
+ In their execution. Asked for justice for the race,
+ Including women and the children which they bear.
+
+ Awaked the Woman when the pressure of the system
+ Grew too heavy on her heart, and cried: “We must
+ Abolish this, O Brother Man;
+ Together you and I must build a better day, a universal humanhood,
+ a superworld.”
+
+ Awaked the Woman, and the passion of her cry envelopes all the world
+ today,
+ As once enveloped human kind the cloth she wove.
+
+
+The Simple Right to Live
+
+By Margaret Dreier Robins
+
+(American contemporary. Writer and speaker on labor problems, especially
+those concerning the woman and child. President of the National Women’s
+Trade Union League. In “Life and Labor.”)
+
+Why must young girls pay the price of their youth and forfeit their right
+of motherhood at the machine—why must thousands of men and women endure
+hardships and sufferings to secure the primitive demands of a living wage
+and the right to self-government, to which we as a people stand pledged?
+What power makes necessary these terrible struggles for the simple right
+to live?
+
+
+Woman’s Wages
+
+By Emmaline Pethick-Lawrence
+
+(Editor of “Votes for Women,” London. In “Life and Labor.”)
+
+Woman’s industrial life is inseparable from her civic and social status.
+The only way to earn equal pay for equal work is to win equal political
+rights, equal influence with the legislature.
+
+
+Song of the Working Girls
+
+By Harriet Monroe
+
+(American contemporary. Editor “Poetry.” In “Life and Labor.”[13])
+
+ Sisters of the whirling wheel
+ Are we all day;
+ Builders of a house of steel
+ On Time’s highway,
+ Giving bravely, hour by hour,
+ All we have of youth and power.
+
+ Oh, lords of the house we rear,
+ Hear us, hear!
+ Green are the fields in May-time,
+ Grant us our love-time, play-time.
+ Short is the day and dear.
+
+ Fingers fly and engines boom
+ The livelong day,
+ Through far fields when roses bloom
+ The soft winds play.
+ Vast the work is—sound and true
+ Be the tower we build for you!
+
+ Oh, lords of the house we rear,
+ Hear us, hear!
+ Green are the fields in May-time,
+ Grant us our love-time, play-time.
+ Short is the day and dear.
+
+ Ours the future is—we face
+ The whole world’s needs.
+ In our hearts the coming race
+ For life’s joy pleads.
+ As you make us—slaves or free—
+
+ Oh, lords of the house we rear,
+ Hear us, hear!
+ Green are the fields in May-time,
+ Grant us our love-time, play-time.
+ Short is the day and dear.
+
+[13] Copyright by the “Poetry Publishing Co.”
+
+
+Economics and the Home
+
+By Ethel Maud Colquhoun
+
+(See page 172)
+
+If woman is to be normally the economic partner of man in the home, it is
+a question of first importance that she should be his economic equal.
+
+
+How Is She Housed?
+
+By Mary Higgs
+
+(From her book, “Practical Housekeeping.”)
+
+(See page 65)
+
+Upon how the woman worker of today is housed, depends, very largely, the
+efficiency and productiveness of her work. But, more impelling still,
+upon how she is housed depends the efficiency and productiveness of the
+future generation. For we must not forget that we have many married and
+widowed industrial women, and that large numbers of our working girls
+will rear the children of the coming race.
+
+
+Orchards
+
+By Theodosia Garrison
+
+(In “Everybody’s Magazine.”)
+
+ Orchards in the Spring-time! Oh, I think and think of them—
+ Filmy mists of pink and white above the fresh, young green,
+ Lifting and drifting—how my eyes could drink of them!
+ _I’m staring at a dirty wall behind a big machine._
+
+ Orchards in the Spring-time! Deep in soft, cool shadows,
+ Moving all together when the west wind blows
+ Fragrance upon fragrance over road and meadows—
+ _I’m smelling heat and oil and sweat, and thick, black clothes._
+
+ Orchards in the Spring-time! The clean white and pink of them
+ Lifting and drifting with all the winds that blow.
+ Orchards in the Spring-time! Thank God I can think of them!
+ _You’re not docked for thinking—if the foreman doesn’t know._
+
+
+The Exploitation of Workingwomen
+
+By Kate Richards O’Hare
+
+(See page 119)
+
+Woman labor in itself is not bad; it is good. It is woman wage-labor
+which is the curse. It is not labor, but exploited labor that is a menace
+to the womankind of the race.
+
+
+Success Through Work
+
+By Madame Nordica
+
+(Lillian Norton)
+
+If you work five minutes, you succeed five minutes’ worth; if you work
+five hours, you succeed five hours’ worth. Plenty have natural voices
+equal to mine, _but I have worked_.
+
+
+Woman and Social Betterment
+
+By Ellen H. Richards, A. M.
+
+(Author of “The Cost of Living.” From Introduction to “The Woman Who
+Spends.”)
+
+Social economics is preeminently a woman’s problem, especially if
+Münsterberg’s assertion is widely true that in America it is the women
+who have the leisure and the cultivation to direct the development
+of social conditions. With this opportunity comes corresponding
+responsibilities.
+
+
+Woman and the Dinner Pail
+
+By Eva Gore-Booth
+
+(From “The Case for Woman Suffrage.”)
+
+The rich may say that women should stay at home and cook the dinner; the
+poor know that if women did stay at home there would often be no dinner
+to cook.
+
+
+The Lady
+
+By Emily James Putnam
+
+(American contemporary. The following is from her book, whose title is
+self-explanatory—“The Lady.”)
+
+The typical lady everywhere tends to the feudal habit of mind.... She can
+renounce the world more easily than she can identify herself with it.
+A lady may become a nun in the strictest and poorest order without the
+moral convulsion, the destruction of false ideas, the birth of character
+that would be the preliminary steps toward becoming an effective
+stenographer.
+
+
+Unequal Distribution of Labor
+
+By Honnor Morton
+
+Obviously, if all women did their share of the world’s work, there would
+be no need for the seamstress to slave sixteen hours at a stretch; there
+would be no starvation among the poor, and no hysteria among the rich.
+
+
+The Working Woman Speaks
+
+By Emily Taplin Royle
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.” Mrs. John Martin, speaking at an anti-suffrage
+meeting in New York, says that women normally need a great deal of
+solitude, quiet and sleep and they suffer physically, mentally and
+morally, if they do not get it.)
+
+ “Solitude, quiet and sleep!”
+ I stand by the roaring loom
+ And watch the growth of the silken threads,
+ That glow in the bare, gray room.
+ I hurry through darkling streets
+ In the chill of the wintry day,
+ That women who talk from their cloistered ease
+ May rustle in colors gay.
+
+ “Solitude, quiet and sleep!”
+ In the dripping, humid air
+ I whiten the flimsy laces
+ That women may be fair;
+ I clothe my orphan children
+ With the price my bare hands yield,
+ That the idle women may walk as fair
+ As the lilies of the field.
+
+ “Solitude, quiet and sleep!”
+ Is it given to me today,
+ When I march in the ranks with those who fight
+ To keep the wolf at bay?
+ Do my daughters rest in peace
+ Where a myriad needles yield
+ Their bitter bread or a sheet of flame,
+ And the rest of the Potter’s Field?
+
+ “Solitude, quiet and sleep!”
+ To factory, shop and mill,
+ The feet of the working women go,
+ While their leisure sisters still
+ Boast of the home they have never earned,
+ Of the ease we can never share,
+ And bid us go back to the depths again,
+ Like Lazarus to his lair.
+
+
+Bondwomen
+
+By Dora Marsden
+
+(English contemporary. Editor “The Freewoman,” a brilliant, radical
+feminist journal. In “The Freewoman.”)
+
+Feminists would hold that it is neither desirable nor necessary for
+women, when they become mothers, to leave their chosen, money-earning
+work for any length of time. The fact that they do so, largely rests on
+tradition which has to be worn down. In wearing it down vast changes must
+take place in social conditions in housing, nursing, kindergarten—in the
+industrial world and in the professional.
+
+
+By Belle Lindner Israels
+
+(From Introduction to “The Upholstered Cage.”)
+
+We know now that the girl without occupation is the girl without mental
+growth.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VII
+
+Education
+
+
+
+
+EDUCATION
+
+
+Soul Murder in the Schools
+
+By Ellen Key
+
+(From “The Century of the Child.”[14])
+
+(See page 143)
+
+Any one who would attempt the task of felling a virgin forest with a
+penknife would probably feel the same paralysis of despair that the
+reformer feels when confronted with existing school systems. The latter
+finds an impassable thicket of folly, prejudice, and mistakes, where
+each point is open to attack, but where each attack fails because of the
+inadequate means at the reformer’s command.
+
+[14] J. G. Stokes Co., Pub.
+
+
+The Old and New Schools
+
+By Florence Elberta Barns
+
+(From “Social Aspects of Industrial Education” in “Education”—a monthly
+school magazine.)
+
+The master of the old school looked askance at the master of the new
+school, and the following conversation is recorded:
+
+“Young man, in my day, in your day, in the present day, and in the
+future day, the three R’s were, are, and will be, the necessary and most
+efficient training for our school children. Can you deny the evidence of
+generations trained in this way?”
+
+“Nay, my master, I do not dispute that the three R’s are a necessity to
+the mental development of the race, but my contention is that besides
+this literary culture, and theoretical knowledge, a training for the
+hands, and practical ability should be fostered, and included within the
+curriculum of our schools. Can you deny the evidence of the present day,
+testifying to the need of efficient training in all branches of industry
+and business, as well as in the professions and arts? How, dear sir,
+are we to meet this pressing need, and prepare our people for a life of
+useful labor, if we do not begin to train them from the primary class?”
+
+“And so, sir, you would join the ranks of those who are commercializing
+all the fine arts, who are forgetting all else but money in capital
+letters?”
+
+“You do not understand, my master. Under the great economic pressure
+of the times, waste-labor must be avoided, and training is the only
+means of avoidance. Think of the mass of immigrants that flock to our
+cities, to be amalgamated with our race. It is a laboring class, and
+self-preservation demands that we provide suitable living and working
+centers for it and its posterity. And our own people demand the same
+consideration in view of the fact that the great majority, poor,
+middle-class, and rich, are employed in some art, industrial or fine.
+All fine arts, they, if we provide efficient training for skill and fine
+workmanship.”
+
+“I am grieved that one of my former pupils should so forget the ideals
+of education. If you must, build schools for those who wish industrial
+training, but keep our cultural schools undisturbed.”
+
+“Ah, that would not be democratic, my master, and neither would it
+be effective. Our idea is to develop both the brain and the hand—in
+this way opening the door to the life work which appeals most to each
+individual.”
+
+And the master of the old school answered, “Well.”
+
+In the above we find the prevailing controversy between the old and the
+new, a controversy which must cease with the progression of thought, and
+understanding of the times.
+
+
+Essentials in Education
+
+By Mary Snow
+
+(Supervisor, Household Arts and Science, Board of Education, Chicago.
+From “The Child in the City.”)
+
+Certainly some essential is missing. Children are not dull about
+significant truths. They wish to know how to read and to write and to
+manipulate number processes. They have wholesome and often keen interest
+in the movements and experiences of people and the great figures in
+history; they work hard and cheerfully to know somewhat of the countries
+of the earth. Musical expression satisfies and delights them. Art
+entices them up to the point where they find that it misses practical
+application, and then interest dies and with it expression. Then they
+begin to reach after further reality with passionate earnestness.
+They long to express themselves in tangible ways. They have a right
+consciously to experience the sensations of knowing that they know and
+knowing that they can do. If opportunity for “doing” has been opened
+to them, they will have gained in strength of character through their
+authoritative wills commanding their powers, and the purposive and
+co-ordinate work of the motor phases of education will have furnished a
+kind of test of progress, a mental verification of accomplishment that
+can never come through any academic work. They have many measuring rods
+in the evaluation of the finished task—the eye, the muscular tension,
+judgment, comparison, trial. There is necessary integrity since no amount
+of vanity will make the tangible result reveal anything but truth.
+William James, with ever brilliant insight, said that manual training
+did more for the moral strength of youth than any other subject in the
+curriculum.
+
+
+The Greatness of Froebel
+
+By Marion Gertrude Haines
+
+(In “Home Government.”)
+
+No one before him so ably demonstrated the civic and spiritual wisdom
+of Christ’s teachings as did Froebel, in discovering—not devising—the
+ways and means of developing man into a self-governed being, obeying
+the inner voice of conscience in the face of every temptation to which
+flesh is heir, and becoming a voluntary, law-abiding citizen of both the
+individual and the national home.
+
+
+Mothers’ Library
+
+By Elizabeth Cherrill Birney
+
+(First chairman of literature in the National Congress of Mothers. From
+“Parents and their Problems.”)
+
+It seems a rather hard condition that though the years when a mother
+feels most deeply her need for more knowledge of children she should
+usually have least time for reading and study. This would not be so
+disastrous if school and college curricula were not framed to embrace
+even the slightest preparation for home life. That profession which
+demands a knowledge of sanitation, dietetics, and chemistry of cooking,
+careful and economic purchasing, artistic and hygienic furnishing, to
+say nothing of the care of children, is surely of sufficient dignity to
+deserve some preparation.... We can learn no science or art entirely
+from books, but when good trails have been blazed by those who have gone
+before us, it is foolish to attempt our own untried paths. Every mother
+can hang a little book-shelf in her busiest corner, and put on it from
+time to time a few books, which will be to her what his Blackstone is to
+a lawyer, his Baedeker to a traveler.
+
+
+The Aim and End of Education
+
+By Lola Ridge
+
+(Former organiser of the Modern School in New York. In “Everyman.”)
+
+What do we imagine to be the end and aim of education? Most people will
+say, the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge of what? Of oneself, of
+humanity, of life? If this was the ideal, as conceived by the builders of
+the present system, it has not been attained; or perhaps the system, like
+a Frankenstein creation, has grown beyond all intent of its sponsors,
+exhibiting a diabolic and independent will....
+
+Let us examine the effect of public school education upon the psychology
+of the child; then we shall see if we are “wasting our energies.”
+
+In the first place, no gardener would think of giving each plant the
+same amount of air and sun, and the same quality of soil. Yet this is
+exactly what you are doing to your children, and there are as many
+different kinds of children as there are different kinds of flowers.
+Why pay more attention to the cultivation of a vegetable than to the
+development of a human being? Each child requires individual attention,
+individual understanding, and individual mental food.
+
+
+Standards Raised by Women Teachers
+
+By Anne Bigoney Stewart
+
+(In “The Educational Review.”)
+
+It is due to the perseverance of the women in their poorly paid duty that
+teaching is gradually emerging into a regular profession with a proper
+stipend and respectable standing, and now when such is the result, we
+have men crowding back into the profession grumblingly, complaining of
+the poor pay, and throwing up their hands in “holy horror” at the “woman
+peril.”
+
+And after all, of what does “the woman peril” consist? That boys are
+being feminized; that is, that boys are being trained to decenter
+standards of living? That they do not so much drink, or smoke, or, we
+hope, “sow wild oats,” that they do not so much regard these acts as
+manly, or a necessary part of their upbringing? That war is not a regular
+occupation; that peace is desirable and to be sought after?
+
+“That abnormal families in which the mother’s influence is too long
+continued and not sufficiently counteracted by masculine control are
+notoriously productive of decadence and degeneracy.”
+
+That is certainly a grave charge! “A mother’s influence”! that which has
+been the theme of poets, artists, scholars, essayists, the clergy, for
+centuries, “productive of decadence and degeneracy.”
+
+It would appear that logically as the masculine mind may think, its logic
+is not unassailable.
+
+
+Educating Children
+
+By Maria Montessori
+
+(From speech delivered in California.)
+
+What shall we say, then, when the question before us is that of educating
+children?
+
+We know only too well the sorry spectacle of the teacher, who, in the
+ordinary school room, must pour certain cut and dried facts into the
+heads of the scholars. In order to succeed in this barren path she finds
+it necessary to discipline her pupils into immobility and to force their
+attention. Prizes and punishments are ever ready and efficient aids to
+the master who must force into a given attitude of mind and body those
+who are condemned to be his listeners.
+
+
+The Mother’s Task
+
+By Ida Tarbell
+
+(See page 266)
+
+(From “The Business of Being a Woman.”)
+
+A woman never lived who did all she might have done to open the mind of
+her child for its great adventure. It is an exhaustless task. The woman
+who sees it knows she has need of all the education the college can
+give, all the experience and culture she can gather. She knows that the
+fuller her individual life, the broader her interests, the better for
+the child. She should be a person in their eyes. The real service of the
+“higher education,” the freedom to take part in whatever interests or
+stimulates her—lies in the fact that it fits her intellectually to be a
+companion worthy of a child.
+
+
+A Plan for Improving Female Education
+
+By Mrs. Emma Willard
+
+(From a paper read by Mrs. Willard before the members of the New York
+Legislature, in behalf of a girl’s seminary, in 1819. Reproduced in
+“Woman and the Higher Education,” Distaff Series.)
+
+The object of this address is to convince the public that a reform with
+respect to female education is necessary; that it cannot be effected by
+individual exertion, but that it requires the aid of the Legislature;
+and, further, by showing the justice, the policy and the magnanimity
+of such an undertaking, to persuade that body to endow a seminary for
+females as the commencement of such reformation.
+
+The idea of a college for males will naturally be associated with that of
+a seminary, instituted and endowed by the public; and the absurdity of
+sending ladies to college may, at first thought, strike every one to whom
+this subject shall be proposed. I therefore hasten to observe that the
+seminary here recommended will be as different from those appropriated to
+the other sex as the female character and duties are from the male. The
+business of the husbandman is not to waste his endeavors in seeking to
+make his orchard attain the strength and majesty of his forest, but to
+rear each to the perfection of its nature....
+
+1. Females, by having their understandings cultivated, their reasoning
+powers developed and strengthened, may be expected to act more from the
+dictates of reason, and less from those of fashion and caprice.
+
+2. With minds thus strengthened, they would be taught systems of morality
+enforced by the sanctions of religion; and they might be expected to
+acquire juster and more enlightened views of their duty, and stronger and
+higher motives in its performance.
+
+3. This plan of education offers all that can be done to preserve female
+youth from a contempt of useful labor. The pupils would become accustomed
+to it, in conjunction with the high objects of literature and the elegant
+pursuits of the fine arts; and it is to be hoped that both from habit and
+association they might in future life regard it as respectable.
+
+To this it may be added that if housekeeping could be raised to a
+regular art, and taught from philosophical principles, it would become
+a higher and more interesting occupation; and ladies of fortune, like
+wealthy agriculturists, might find that to regulate their business was an
+agreeable employment.
+
+4. The pupils might be expected to acquire a taste for moral and
+intellectual pleasures which would buoy them above a passion for show and
+parade, and which would make them seek to gratify the natural love of
+superiority by endeavoring to excel others in intrinsic merit rather than
+in the extrinsic frivolities of dress, furniture, and equipage.
+
+By being enlightened in moral philosophy, and in that which teaches the
+operation of the mind, females would be enabled to perceive the nature
+and extent of that influence which they possess over their children,
+and the obligation which this lays them under to watch the formation of
+their characters with unceasing vigilance, to become their instructors,
+to devise plans for their improvement, to weed out the vices of their
+minds, and to implant and foster the virtues. And surely there is that
+in the maternal bosom which, when its pleadings shall be aided by
+education, will overcome the seductions of wealth and fashion, and will
+lead the mother to seek her happiness in communing with her children, and
+promoting their welfare, rather than in a heartless intercourse with the
+votaries of fashion, especially when with an expanded mind she extends
+her views to futurity, and sees her care to her offspring rewarded by
+peace of conscience, the blessing of her family, the prosperity of her
+country, and, finally, with everlasting pleasure to herself and them....
+
+In calling on my patriotic countrymen to effect so noble an object,
+the consideration of national glory should not be overlooked. Ages
+have rolled away; barbarians have trodden the weaker sex beneath their
+feet; tyrants have robbed us of the present light of heaven, and fain
+would take its future. Nations calling themselves polite have made us
+the fancied idols of a ridiculous worship, and we have repaid them with
+ruin for their folly. But where is that wise and heroic country which
+has considered that our rights are sacred, though we cannot defend
+them? that, though a weaker, we are an essential part of the body
+politic, whose corruption or improvement must affect the whole? and
+which, having thus considered, has sought to give us by education that
+rank in the scale of being to which our importance entitles us? History
+shows not that country. It shows many whose legislatures have sought to
+improve their various vegetable productions and their breeds of useful
+brutes, but none whose public councils have made it an object of their
+deliberations to improve the character of their women.
+
+
+A Moral Crusade
+
+By Elizabeth Blackwell
+
+(One of the brilliant Blackwell family, to which progress in our country
+owes so much. Henry Blackwell married Lucy Stone, and with her became
+a pioneer advocate of woman suffrage. Elizabeth took up the study of
+medicine, forcing the medical colleges to open their doors to women. From
+her letters.)
+
+In the summer of 1847, with my carefully hoarded earnings, I resolved to
+seek an entrance into a medical school. Philadelphia was then considered
+the chief seat of medical learning in America, so to Philadelphia I
+went; taking passage in a sailing vessel from Charleston for the sake of
+economy....
+
+Applications were cautiously but persistently made to the four medical
+colleges of Philadelphia for admission as a regular student. The
+interviews with their various professors were by turns hopeful and
+disappointing....
+
+The fear of successful rivalry which at that time often existed in the
+medical mind was expressed by the dean of one of the smaller schools, who
+frankly replied to the application, “You cannot expect us to furnish
+you with a stick to break our heads with;” so revolutionary seemed the
+attempt of a woman to leave a subordinate position and seek to obtain
+a complete medical education. A similarly mistaken notion of the rapid
+practical success which would attend a lady doctor was shown later by one
+of the professors of my medical college, who was desirous of entering
+into partnership with me on condition of sharing profits over $5,000 on
+my first year’s practice.
+
+During those fruitless efforts my kindly Quaker adviser, whose private
+lectures I attended, said to me: “Elizabeth, it is no use trying. Thee
+cannot gain admission to these schools. Thee must go to Paris and don
+masculine attire to gain the necessary knowledge.” Curiously enough,
+this suggestion of disguise made by good Dr. Warrington was also given
+me by Dr. Pankhurst, the Professor of Surgery, in the largest college
+in Philadelphia. He thoroughly approved of a woman’s gaining complete
+medical knowledge; told me that although my public entrance into the
+classes was out of question, yet if I would assume masculine attire and
+enter the college he could entirely rely on two or three of his students
+to whom he should communicate my disguise, who would watch the class and
+give me timely notice to withdraw should my disguise be suspected.
+
+But neither the advice to go to Paris nor the suggestion of disguise
+tempted me for the moment. It was to my mind a moral crusade on which
+I had entered, a course of justice and common sense, and it might be
+pursued in the light of day, and with public sanction, in order to
+accomplish its end.
+
+
+Intellectual Women of Rome
+
+By Lady Morgan
+
+(See page 17)
+
+Female amanuenses, or secretaries, or “writers out of books,” were by
+no means unusual in Rome. Vespasian had a female amanuesis, Antonio,
+whom he greatly esteemed and confided in. Even the Christian fathers
+adopted this fashion; and Eusebius asserts that Origen had not only
+young men, but young women to transcribe his books, which “they did with
+peculiar neatness.” Among the accusations brought against the Roman
+women of his own time by Juvenal, is that of their learning; he bitterly
+attacks their presumption in studying Greek, their interlarding even
+their most familiar conversations with its elegant idioms and phrases;
+and, among their other crimes of acquirement, he further accuses them
+of encroaching on the exclusive male prerogative of mind, by discussing
+philosophical subjects, quoting favorite authors and scholiasts, their
+_purism_ in affected exactness of grammar, and by their antiquarian
+researches in language. On the word antiquarian, an ancient commentator
+observes:—“Antiquaria, one that does refine or preserve ancient books
+from corruption, one studious of the old poets and historians, one that
+studies ancient coins, statues, and inscribed stones: lastly, such as use
+obsolete and antiquated words. All which, though they might be counted
+an overplus and curiosity in a woman, yet only the last is absolutely a
+fault.”
+
+
+The Power of Education
+
+By “Ouida”
+
+(See page 113)
+
+That women should, however tardily, awaken to a desire for greater
+intellectual light is of the utmost promise. Education cannot confer
+genius, but it can do an infinite work in the refinement, the
+strengthening, and the enlightening of the mind; in the banishment of
+prejudice, and in the correction of illogical judgment. In view of the
+manifold superstitions, intolerances and ignorances that prevail in
+the feminine intelligence, and of the fearful influence which these in
+turn bring to bear upon the children committed in such numbers to their
+charge, no crusade that can find favor with them, towards a New Jerusalem
+of Culture, can be too early encouraged.
+
+
+The Vision Realized
+
+By Bertha June Richardson, A. B.
+
+(Holder of the Mary Lowell Stone Fellowship 1903. From “The Woman Who
+Spends.”)
+
+When the sweet faced New England woman, living her quiet life in the old
+town of Halfield, stretched out her strong, helpful hands to all the
+generations of girls to come, by making a woman’s college a possibility,
+she was called a dreamer, a visionary woman, who had better be looked
+after by some strong-minded man who could put her money to some practical
+use. That vision realized has given to hundreds of women ideals and
+standards which have made life full and rich.
+
+
+Vocational Training for Girls
+
+By Alice Henry
+
+(Of Australian birth. For a number of years editor of “Life and Labor,”
+the official organ of the “Woman’s Trade Union League.” Well-known
+speaker on suffrage and labor problems. Author of “The Trade Union
+Woman,”[15] from which the following is taken.)
+
+Harvard was opened in 1636. Two hundred years elapsed before there was
+any institution offering corresponding advantages to girls....
+
+If these women have always lagged in the rear as increasing educational
+advantages of a literary or professional character have been provided or
+procured for boys, it is not strange, when, in reading over the records
+of work on the few lines of industrial, educational trade training and
+apprenticeship we detect the same influences at work, sigh before the
+same difficulties, and recognize the old, weary, threadbare arguments
+too, which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before
+to be at least in this connection....
+
+In such an age of transition as ours, any plan of vocational training
+intended to include girls must be a compromise with warring facts,
+and will therefore have to face objections from both sides, from
+those forward looking ones who feel that the domestic side of woman’s
+activities is over emphasized, and from those who still look back,
+who will fain refuse to believe that the majority of women have to be
+wage-earners for at least a part of their lives. These latter argue that
+by affording to girls all the advantages of industrial training, granted,
+or which may be granted to boys, we are “taking them out of the home.”
+As if they were not out of the home already!
+
+[15] Copyright by Henry Holt Publishing Co.
+
+
+Traditions Upset
+
+By Emily J. Hutchins
+
+(American contemporary. Instructor in Economics, Barnard College, New
+York. From “The Annals of the American Academy.”)
+
+The reaction that women show today to their educational freedom upsets a
+lot of the notions we have inherited about the atmosphere of seclusion in
+which womanly natures have been supposed to thrive.... Whatever fault may
+be found with our educational system, it has at least provided a belated
+opportunity for women to share in the social stimulus that men have found
+and prized in academic institutions.
+
+
+The History of Women’s Education
+
+By Mary Ritter Beard
+
+(Quoted from “Woman’s Work in Municipalities.”)
+
+The history of the education of women from the early days, when to
+educate “shes” was viewed with horror as an immoral proposition, to the
+present time when more “shes” graduate from the high schools than “hes”,
+is an interesting record in itself. Even more significant, however, is
+the fact that both “hes” and “shes” are educated largely by women in the
+secondary schools which are the schools of “the people.”
+
+
+The Professions Educational
+
+By The Hon. Mrs. Arthur Lyttleton
+
+(From “Women and Their Work.”)
+
+(See page 51)
+
+The habits of application, of concentration and of regularity which
+professional training requires will never be out of place in any kind of
+life, and women will be the more capable of doing, not only their own
+particular kind of work, but all work, better for the experience they
+have passed through. It is simply a continuation of their education,
+which now very unreasonably ends at eighteen.
+
+
+Woman’s Struggle for Educational Rights
+
+By Mrs. H. M. Swanwick
+
+(English contemporary. Author of “The Future of the Woman’s Movement,”
+from which the following is taken.)
+
+All the world knows of the foundation of the great modern career of
+sick-nursing; of the more bitter and prolonged struggle of women to study
+medicine and surgery and qualify as practitioners therein.... All these
+changes had, to a greater or less degree, to be fought for by those who
+desired them.... People resisted them with more or less tenacity, and
+used against the reformers the sort of arguments they are still using
+against further emancipation.... There are, of course, some Orientalists,
+even in England, who think in their hearts that it was a great mistake to
+teach women to read. But most people now accept the principle that women
+should have the best education available, and only differ as to what that
+education should be.
+
+
+Equal Advantages of Education
+
+By Elizabeth Cady Stanton
+
+(Famous leader, with Susan B. Anthony, of the early woman suffrage
+movement. From a letter quoted in “Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony.”)
+
+Should not all women, living in states where they have the right to hold
+property, refuse to pay taxes so long as they are unrepresented in the
+governments?...
+
+Man has pre-empted the most profitable branches of industry, and we
+demand a place at his side; to this end we need the same advantages
+of education, and we therefore claim that the best colleges of the
+country be opened to us.... In her present ignorance, woman’s religion,
+instead of making her noble and free, by the wrong application of great
+principles of right and justice, has made her bondage but more certain
+and lasting; her degradation more helpless and complete.
+
+
+Intellect Wins
+
+By Mrs. Alec Tweedie
+
+(See page 126)
+
+A pretty woman has the first innings, but an intelligent woman gets the
+most runs. A clever woman catches out her opponents.
+
+
+Education and Votes for Women
+
+By Elizabeth Cooper
+
+(Author of “My Lady of the Chinese Court Yard,” “Women of Egypt,” “Market
+for Souls,” “The Harem and the Purdah,” “Living Up to Billy,” etc. From
+“Woman and Education” in “Educational Foundations.”)
+
+That this enlargement of the educational horizon of women in Britain
+means necessarily “Votes for Women” may or may not be inferred.
+Certain it is that the advancing social and economic arrangements of
+modern society will add continually to the allotment to women of tasks
+and responsibilities unknown to them in the past. Women will accept
+such responsibilities in accordance with their ability and training in
+competition with men, and their trained intelligence will become year by
+year a more widely recognized fact in the minds of University authorities
+and in the adjustment and enlargement of curriculum and University life.
+
+
+Democratization of Learning
+
+By Charlotte J. Cipriani
+
+(American contemporary. Teacher, writer on educational problems. From
+“Elimination of Waste in Elementary Education,” in “Education”—a monthly
+magazine.)
+
+Two processes of “democratization” are conceivable in the educational
+system of a nation; one consists in lowering educational standards and
+aims to the level that makes them readily acceptable and accessible to
+the masses; the other consists in gradually raising the intellectual
+level of the masses to the level of high and efficient educational
+standards. The admission of too early specialized “vocational training”
+in a public school system has a dangerous leaning towards the first
+process of democratization, which is apt ultimately to defeat its own
+end. That the second is of necessity a far lower and more laborious one,
+does not invalidate its superiority.
+
+
+Educating the Daughter
+
+By Josephine Pitcairn Knowles
+
+(From “The Upholstered Cage.”)
+
+The day has now arrived when nature and fairness are proclaiming that
+the same expenditure of time and money must be bestowed on the girl as
+on the boy, and she should be regarded as an investment in the same way
+as the boy now is. It has always been realized that unless he is given
+a good education and then started properly in life, that is, given a
+“shove off,” as it were, he won’t do much, and so all efforts in a family
+of small means are concentrated toward helping launch the boy in life.
+The idea, of course, being that he must support himself, and very likely
+keep a wife and children, therefore it is more important for him to get
+on well than for the girl, who has her parents to keep her until she
+marries. There would be nothing against this theory if it were sound;
+but where the theory breaks down is that girls and women now _do_ have
+to earn their own living, and this necessity is on the increase, and the
+point is that the women have often to do it on inadequate material; the
+girl earns _her_ living _without_ the previous training, _without_ the
+school or college training, _without_ any capital having been spent on
+her as a premium, _without_ all the advantages the boy started with.
+
+
+The World of Scholarship a Man’s World
+
+By M. Carey Thomas
+
+(See page 10)
+
+Fifty years ago the world of scholarship was a man’s world in which
+women had no share. Now although only one woman in one thousand goes
+to college, even in the United States, where there are more college
+women than in any other country, the position of every individual woman
+in every part of the civilized world has been changed because this
+one-tenth of one percent. has proved beyond possibility of question that
+in intellect there is no sex. Unwillingly at first but inevitably and
+irresistably men have admitted women into intellectual comradeship. The
+opinions of educated women can no longer be ignored by educated men.
+
+
+Social Education Important
+
+By Helen Keller
+
+(Helen Keller, having been born blind, deaf and dumb, is not only
+remarkable in that she has mastered many things, including articulate
+speech, but also that out of her reading and observations of life, she is
+able to construct a philosophy obviously superior to that of the average
+human being with normal faculties. The following is from “The Modern
+Woman” in “The Metropolitan Magazine,” October, 1912.)
+
+Social ignorance is at the bottom of our miseries, and if the function of
+education is to correct ignorance, social education is at this hour the
+most important kind of education.
+
+The educated woman, then, is she who knows the social basis of her
+life, and of the lives of those whom she would help, her children, her
+employers, her employees, the beggar at her door, and her congressman at
+Washington....
+
+It is for the American woman to know why millions are shut out from
+the full benefits of such education, art, and science as the race has
+thus far achieved. We women have to face questions that men alone have
+evidently not been able to solve....
+
+We must educate ourselves and that without delay. We cannot wait longer
+for political economists to solve such vital problems as clean streets,
+decent houses, warm clothes, wholesome food, living wages, safeguarded
+mines and factories, honest public schools. These are our questions.
+Already women are speaking and speaking nobly, and men are speaking with
+us. To be sure, some men and some women are speaking against us; but
+their contest is with the spirit of life. Lot’s wife turned back; but she
+is an exception. It is proverbial that women get what they are bent on
+getting, and circumstances are driving them toward education.
+
+
+To Reach the Divine
+
+By Emma Marwedel
+
+Froebel learned to recognize in each child a new educational problem, to
+be solved according to its nature.... He therefore demands a methodical
+unification in education, in order to reach the divine through a
+unification of action.
+
+
+By Mrs. Macy
+
+(The teacher of Helen Keller.)
+
+There is no education except self-education, no government but
+self-government.
+
+
+By C. Gasquoine Hartley
+
+(Mrs. Walter M. Gallichan)
+
+(From “The Truth About Women.”)
+
+To assume, as Schopenhauer and so many others have done ... that woman,
+on account of her womanhood is incapable of intellectual and social
+development, paying her sole debt of Nature in bearing and caring for
+children, is really to state a belief in decay for mankind.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VIII
+
+War and Peace
+
+
+
+
+WAR AND PEACE
+
+
+These Latter Days
+
+By Olive Tilford Dargan
+
+(From “Path Flower.”)
+
+ Take down thy stars, O God! We look not up.
+ In vain thou hangest there thy changeless sign.
+ We lift our eyes to power’s glowing cup,
+ Nor care if blood make strong that wizard wine,
+ So we but drink and feel the sorcery
+ Of conquest in our veins, of wits grown keen
+ In strain and strife for flesh-sweet sovereignty,—
+ The fatal thrill of kingship over men.
+ What though the soul be from the body shrunk,
+ And we array the temple, but no god?
+ What though the cup of golden greed once drunk,
+ Our dust be laid in a dishonored sod,
+ While thy loud hosts proclaim the end of wars?
+ We read no sign. O, God, take down thy stars!
+
+
+Breeding Machines
+
+By Marion Craig Wentworth
+
+(From “War Brides,” a drama of protest, popularized by the Russian
+actress, Nazimova.)
+
+HOFFMAN: When we are gone—the best of us,—what will the country do if it
+has no children?
+
+HEDWIG: Why didn’t you think of that before?—before you started this
+wicked war?
+
+HOFFMAN—I tell you it is a glory to be a war bride. There!
+
+HEDWIG (with a shrug): A breeding machine! (They all draw back). Why not
+call it what it is? Speak the naked truth for once?
+
+...
+
+HOFFMAN: That isn’t the question now. We are going away—the best of us—to
+be shot, most likely. Don’t you suppose we want to send some part of
+ourselves into the future, since we can’t live ourselves? There, that’s
+straight; and right, too.
+
+HEDWIG: What I said—to breed a soldier for the empire; to restock the
+land. (Fiercely). And for what? For food for the next generation’s
+cannon. Oh, it is an insult to our womanhood! You violate all that makes
+marriage sacred! (Agitated, she walks about the room). Are we women never
+to get up out of the dust? You never asked us if we wanted this war, yet
+you ask us to gather in the crops, cut the wood, keep the world going,
+drudge and slave, and wait, and agonize, lose our all, and go on bearing
+more men—and more—to be shot down! If we breed the men for you, why don’t
+you let us say what is to become of them? Do we want them shot—the very
+breath of our life?
+
+HOFFMAN: It is for the fatherland.
+
+HEDWIG: You use us, and use us,—dolls, beasts of burden, and you expect
+us to bear it forever dumbly; but I won’t! I shall cry out till I die.
+And now you say it almost out loud, “Go and breed for the empire.” War
+brides! Pah!
+
+HOFFMAN: I never would dream of speaking to Amelia like that. She is the
+sweetest girl I have seen for many a day.
+
+HEDWIG: What will happen to Amelia? Have you thought of that? No; I
+warrant you haven’t. Well, look. A few kisses and sweet words, the
+excitement of the ceremony, the cheers of the crowd, some days of living
+together,—I won’t call it marriage, for Franz and I are the ones who know
+what real marriage is, and how sacred it is,—then what? Before you know
+it, an order to march. No husband to wait with her, to watch over her.
+Think of her anxiety if she learns to love you. What kind of a child
+will it be? Look at me. What kind of a child would I have, do you think?
+I can hardly breathe for thinking of my Franz, waiting, never knowing
+from minute to minute. From the way I feel, I should think my child
+would be born mad, I’m that wild with worrying. And then for Amelia to
+go through the agony alone! No husband to help her through the terrible
+hour. What solace can the state give then? And after that, if you don’t
+come back, who is going to earn the bread for her child? Struggle and
+struggle to feed herself and her child; and the fine-sounding name you
+trick us with—war-bride! Humph! That will all be forgotten then. Only one
+thing can make it worth while, and do you know what that is? Love! Well
+struggle through fire and water for that, but without it....
+
+
+Babies Bred for War
+
+By Mary Field
+
+(In “Everyman.”)
+
+Said Prince Bismarck with a shrug of his shoulder to a comment on the
+great number of men killed in one of the Franco-Prussian battles, “Oh,
+well, we will have another crop in twenty years!”
+
+It is crops of men that governments depend upon. At the outbreak of
+the war the military nations of Europe took immediate steps to provide
+for the next crop of soldiers. Before the ranks mobilized the seed of
+warriors was sown. In Germany all soldiers were urged to marry before
+leaving for the front. In many churches hundreds of couples were married
+simultaneously that no time might be lost. One of the Emperor’s own sons
+set the example which thousands of marriageable men immediately followed.
+In some villages “holy matrimony” was recognized as the equivalent of an
+engagement. Everywhere throughout the fatherland distinctions between
+legitimate and illegitimate have become indistinct. An illegitimate
+son receives the support of the government. To bear children for
+the fatherland is of greater virtue than that they shall be born of
+wedlock, for thrones are greater than altars and exigencies greater than
+ceremonies.
+
+
+War Cripples
+
+By Madeline Z. Doty
+
+(In “The New Republic.”)
+
+France says little and does much. She is proud; she is heroic; she fights
+on. But the heart and life of France is being crushed. It is impossible
+to see this and do nothing. I offer my services as assistant nurse at the
+American ambulance and am accepted....
+
+On the second morning as I hurry down a long hospital corridor I see
+a familiar face. A short, dark-haired, dark-eyed young man is coming
+toward me. He is one of the wounded and his right arm is gone. His eye
+catches mine. He stops bewildered. Then comes recognition. It is Zeni
+Peshkoff—Maxim Gorki’s adopted son. Eight years ago when this man was a
+boy I had known him in America. I grasp the left hand, and my eyes drop
+before the empty right sleeve. But Zeni Peshkoff is still gay, laughing
+Zeni. He makes light of his trouble. Not until later do I understand
+the terrible suffering there is from the missing arm or realize how he
+struggles to use what is not. Peshkoff had been in the trenches for
+months. He had been through battles and bayonet charges and escaped
+unhurt, but at last his day had come. A bursting shell destroyed the
+right arm. He knew the danger, and struggling to his feet, walked from
+the battlefield. With the left hand he supported the bleeding, broken
+right arm. As he stumbled back past trenches full of German prisoners his
+plight was so pitiful, his pluck so great, that instinctively these men
+saluted. At the Place de Secours eight hundred wounded had been brought
+in. There were accommodations for one hundred and fifty.
+
+All night young Peshkoff lay unattended, for there were others worse
+hurt. Gangrene developed, and he watched it spread from fingers to hand
+and from hand to arm. In the morning a friendly lieutenant noticed
+him. “There’s one chance,” he said, “and that’s a hospital. If you can
+walk, come with me.” Slowly young Peshkoff arose. Half fainting he
+dressed and went with the lieutenant—first by taxi to the train and then
+twelve torturing hours to Paris. As the hours passed the gangrene crept
+higher and higher. The sick man grew giddy with fever. At each station
+his carriage companions, fearing death, wished to leave him upon the
+platform. But the lieutenant was firm. The one chance for life was the
+hospital. Finally, Paris was reached; a waiting ambulance rushed him to
+the hospital. Immediately he was taken to the operating room and the arm
+amputated. A half hour more and his arm could not have been saved. But
+this dramatic incident is only one of many. The pluck of the average
+soldier is unbelievable. Operations are accepted without question. There
+are no protests—only the murmured “_C’est la guerre, que voulez-vous_.”
+
+I asked Zeni Peshkoff, Socialist, what his sensations were when he went
+out to kill. “It didn’t seem real, it doesn’t now. Before my last charge
+the lieutenant and I were filled with the beauty of the night. We sat
+gazing at the stars. Then the command came, and we rushed forward. It
+did not seem possible I was killing human beings.” It is this unreality
+that sustains men. Germans are not human beings—only the enemy. For
+the wounded French soldier will tell you he loathes war and longs for
+peace. He fights for one object—a permanent peace. He fights to save his
+children from fighting.
+
+
+The Devonshire Mother
+
+By Marjorie Wilson
+
+(In “The Westminster Gazette.”)
+
+ The king have called the Devon lads and they be answering fine—
+ But shadows seem to hide this way, for all the sun do shine,
+ For there’s Squire’s son have gone for one, and Parson’s son—and mine.
+
+ I mind the day mine went from me—the skies were all aglow—
+ The cows deep in our little lanes was comin’ home so slow—
+ “And don’t ’ee never grieve yourself,” he said, “because I go.”
+
+ His arms were strong around me, then he turned and went away—
+ I heard the little childer dear a’ singin’ at their play;
+ The meanin’ of an achin’ heart is hid from such as they.
+
+ And scarce a day goes by now but I set my door ajar,
+ And watch the road that Jan went up, the time he went to war,
+ That when he’ll come again to me, I’ll see him from afar.
+
+ And in my chimney seat o’ nights, when quiet grows the farm,
+ I pray the Lord he be not cold, while I have fire to warm—
+ And give the mothers humble hearts whose boys are kept from harm.
+
+ And then I take the Book and read before I seek my rest,
+ Of how that other Son went forth (them parts I like the best),
+ And left his mother lone for him she’d cuddled on her breast.
+
+ I like to think when nights were dark, and Him at prayer, maybe,
+ Upon the gurt dark mountain side, or in His boat at sea,
+ He worried just a bit for her, who’d learnt Him at her knee.
+
+ And maybe when He minds her ways, He will not let Jan fall—
+ I’m thinkin’ He will know my boy, with his dear ways an’ all—
+ With his tanned face, his eyes of blue, and he so strappin’ tall.
+
+
+The Last Racial War
+
+By Clara Zetkin
+
+(Well-known Socialist leader of Germany. Many times imprisoned for her
+denunciation of the present war. The following is from “Die Gleichheit,”
+a woman’s paper, edited by herself.)
+
+Above the horror of this dark hour do we not see the light of certainty
+that the longing of the poor and weak for free humanity must again unite
+the peoples in one ideal and effort? We women hear the voices which in
+this time of blood and iron speak low and painfully, but nobly, of and
+for the future. Let us interpret them for our children. Let us guard
+against the hollow din which fills our streets today, when cheap racial
+pride defeats humanity. In our children we must have a pledge that this
+most fearful of all wars is the last racial struggle. The blood of dead
+and wounded must have become a stream to divide what present need and
+future hope unite. It must be a chain to bind eternally.
+
+
+The Early Morning Funeral
+
+By Edna Elliott-Carr
+
+(In “The Living Age.”)
+
+One of the sad sights is the early morning funeral to be met almost daily
+in the streets of Paris—the lonely journey of a dead hero from his bed of
+suffering to the Garden of Sleep.
+
+One sunny morning as I turned from the wide Champs Elysees into a side
+street, I found waiting near the back entrance of a large hotel hospital
+a small company of gendarmes with bowed heads, their banner bearing the
+crêpe ribbons of mourning. Near them a few passers-by were standing
+reverently looking on. I waited. The hearse drove closer to the door,
+and later bore away the coffin. No military pomp or display! A splendid
+hero had given his life for his country, and this was his simple funeral.
+Above, on the window balconies, some maids stood looking down, crying,
+and wiping their tears away with their aprons. This “colonel” had lain
+only four days in the house of suffering, but in so short a time had been
+beloved enough to be missed. The gendarmes followed slowly, and in the
+rear a motor car bore a military official. That was all!
+
+The sun seemed to cease shining, and the world looked cold and gray. A
+taxi cab hovered in sight. I hailed it, and, entering, bade the driver
+accompany the solemn cortage slowly. I had a sudden wish to follow this
+soldier to his last resting place, and as I did so, my thoughts were sad
+ones. How many thousands of such deaths could this war already account
+for, and how many thousands of hearts had it broken?
+
+
+Russian Women in Time of War
+
+By Sarah Kropotkin-Lebedeff
+
+(In “The Outlook” for October 21, 1914. Madame Lebedeff is the daughter
+of the Russian Prince, Peter Kropotkin, known the world over for his
+brilliant books, and his revolutionary ideas.)
+
+It is not for nothing that the Russian peasant woman is respected by
+her men and counted as their equal in all labor. She plows and sows and
+reaps with them, rising before the sun and ceasing work only when the
+day fades. And the work she has to undertake when her men have gone
+to war is no light one. Each family has at least five or six acres to
+cultivate. The pasture land the village holds is common. It is usually
+the custom in time of stress for the workers to do all the field work in
+common. At three in the morning the women, and even the children, turn
+out to work; at eleven they have a meal of dry black bread and perhaps
+a small cucumber. Then, while the sun is high, they sleep; and from four
+o’clock they work again, till sunset.... There is other work for the
+women to do—shoeing horses, mending plows, scythes, wheels, and so on.
+The blacksmith has gone to the war, the wheelwright also; so the peasant
+woman wields the hammer and sends the chips flying with the ax. In the
+summer she fells the trees and shears the sheep. And all the winter she
+spins and weaves, waiting for her men to come back, hoping always, and
+teaching her children to love their country and their father, who has
+gone to defend them against a strange foe.
+
+
+Red Easter
+
+By Marion Brown
+
+(In “Femina.”)
+
+ This is a spring that has no Easter Day.
+ Even the little children must be told
+ That all the beauty of the world is sold;
+ And in the grim, gray ranks of war’s array
+ Christ’s carols turn to knells of loud dismay.
+ Nor women’s tears nor kingly power nor gold
+ Can resurrect the forms the trenches hold.
+ Ah, children murmur softly at your play
+ Lest your sweet mirth like poisoned darts be sped
+ Swift to the widowed mother hearts reviled
+ Twice over as they clasp their still-born dead.
+ Pray, children, for the world’s unreconciled!
+ Ye are our only lilies undefiled—
+ The others are incarnadined too red.
+
+
+The Rising Value of a Baby
+
+By Mabel Potter Daggett
+
+(From “What the War Really Means to Women” in “Pictorial Review.”)
+
+Thus is explained quite simply over the world to-day the rising value of
+a baby. Civilization is running short in the supply of men. We don’t know
+exactly how short. There are Red Cross returns that say in the first six
+months alone of the war there were 2,146,000 men killed in battle and
+1,150,000 more seriously wounded. Figures, however, of cold statistics,
+as always, may be challenged. There is a living figure that may not be.
+See the woman in black all over Europe, and to-morrow we shall meet her
+in Broadway. There are so many of her in every belligerent land over
+there that her crêpe veil flutters across her country’s flag like the
+smoke that dims the landscape in a factory town. It is the mourning
+emblem of her grief, unmistakably symbolizing the dark catastrophe of
+civilization that has signaled Parliaments to assemble in important
+session. Population is being killed off at such an appalling rate at the
+front that the means for replacing it behind the lines must be speeded up
+without delay. To-day registrar-generals in every land, in white-faced
+panic, are scanning the figures of the birth-rates that continue to show
+steadily diminishing returns. And in every house of government in the
+world, above all the debates on aeroplanes and submarines and shipping
+and shells, there is the rising alarm of another demand. Fill the
+cradles! In the defense of the State, men bear arms. It is women who must
+bear the armies.
+
+
+Wars Will Cease
+
+By Anna A. Maley
+
+(Prominent Socialist speaker and writer. Socialist nominee for Governor
+of Washington in 1912.)
+
+Wars will cease when the conditions which cause them are abolished.
+The present war is no more of an “accident” than have been the wars of
+the past. But it is terrible and far-reaching enough in its effects to
+warrant a reconstruction of our political and industrial systems.
+
+
+The Prussians in Poland
+
+By Laura de Turczynowicz
+
+(Nee Blackwell)
+
+(The story of an American woman, the wife of a Polish nobleman, caught in
+her home by the floodtide of German invasion of the ancient Kingdom of
+Poland. From “When the Prussians Came to Poland.”[16])
+
+“Manya did not come when I rang—for Jacob.... A long time afterward my
+cook came. She had difficulty in controlling herself, but finally made me
+understand. The doctor had taken Manya—not yet seventeen! God help her!...
+
+“Four days after Manya’s disappearance, news was brought that she was in
+the house of an old Jewess, a cigarette maker. Leaving the cook with the
+children, and hardly able to drag myself along, I went with Jacob to find
+her.... After many difficulties we finally found the place, and paying no
+attention to the soldiers about, pushed our way into the room where Manya
+was—what _had_ been Manya. When she, poor creature, saw us, she threw
+herself on the floor sobbing. An officer came in to ask our business
+with the girl.
+
+“She is my maid—stolen! This is her father. I have come to take her home.
+
+“‘I am very sorry, but you are not allowed to take her, she belongs to
+the soldiers.’
+
+“Don’t you see, Herr Officer, the girl is dying?
+
+“‘Ill she is, and shall have the best of care. We have doctors to attend
+just such cases.’ And I had to leave her! Jacob’s face was without
+expression, he seemed to have lost the power to think or feel—his little
+girl—!”
+
+[16] Grosset & Dunlap.
+
+
+The Deserter
+
+By Ellen N. LaMotte
+
+(The story of the human wreckage of the battlefield, as witnessed by an
+American hospital nurse a few miles behind the French lines. From “The
+Backwash of War.”[17])
+
+When he could stand it no longer, he fired a revolver up through the roof
+of his mouth, but he made a mess of it. The ball tore out his left eye,
+and then lodged somewhere under his skull, so they bundled him into an
+ambulance and carried him, cursing and screaming, to the nearest field
+hospital. The journey was made in double quick time, over rough Belgian
+roads. To save his life, he must reach the hospital without delay, and
+if he was bounced to death jolting along at break-neck speed, it did not
+matter. That was understood. He was a deserter, and discipline must be
+maintained. Since he had failed on the job, his life must be saved, he
+must be nursed back to health, until he was well enough to be stood up
+against a wall and shot. This is War. Things like this also happen in
+peace time, but not so obviously.
+
+At the hospital he behaved abominably. The ambulance men declared that
+he had tried to throw himself out of the back of the ambulance, that he
+had yelled and hurled himself about, and spat blood all over the floor
+and blankets—in short, he was very disagreeable. Upon the operating table
+he was no more reasonable. He shouted and screamed and threw himself
+from side to side, and it took a dozen leather straps and four or five
+orderlies to hold him in position, so that the surgeon could examine him.
+During this commotion his left eye rolled about loosely upon his cheek,
+and from his bleeding mouth he shot great clots of stagnant blood, caring
+not where they fell. One fell upon the immaculate white uniform of the
+_Directrice_, and stained her from breast to shoes. It was disgusting.
+They told him it was _La Directrice_, and that he must be careful. For
+an instant he stopped his raving, and regarded her fixedly with his
+remaining eye, then took aim afresh, and again covered her with his
+cowardly blood. Truly it was disgusting.
+
+To the _Medecin Major_ it was incomprehensible, and he said so. To
+attempt to kill oneself, when, in these days, it was so easy to die in
+honour upon the battlefield, was something he could not understand. So
+the _Medecin Major_ stood patiently aside, his arms crossed, his supple
+fingers pulling the long black hairs on his bare arms, waiting. He had
+long to wait, for it was difficult to get the man under the anesthetic.
+Many cans of ether were used, which went to prove that the patient was a
+drinking man. Whether he had acquired the habit of hard drink before or
+since the war could not be ascertained; the war had lasted a year now,
+and in that time many habits may be formed. As the _Medecin Major_ stood
+there, patiently fingering the hairs on his hairy arms, he calculated the
+amount of ether that was expended—five cans of ether, at so many francs a
+can—however, the ether was a donation from America, so it did not matter.
+Even so, it was wasteful.
+
+At last they said he was ready. He was quiet. During his struggles he
+had broken out two big teeth with the mouth gag, and that added a little
+more blood to the blood already choking him. Then the _Medecin Major_
+did a very skillful operation. He trephined the skull, extracted the
+bullet that had lodged beneath it, and bound back in place that erratic
+eye. After which the man was sent back to the ward, while the surgeon
+returned hungrily to his dinner, long overdue. In the ward, he was a bad
+patient. He insisted upon tearing off his bandages, although they told
+him that this meant bleeding to death. His mind seemed fixed on death.
+He seemed to want to die, and was thoroughly unreasonable, although
+quite conscious. All of which meant that he required constant watching
+and was a perfect nuisance. He was so different from the other patients,
+who wanted to live. It was a joy to nurse them. By expert surgery, by
+expert nursing, some of these were to be returned to their homes again,
+_reformes_, mutilated for life, a burden to themselves and to society;
+others were to be nursed back to health, to a point at which they could
+again shoulder eighty pounds of marching kit, and be torn to pieces again
+on the firing lines. It was a pleasure to nurse such as these. It called
+forth all one’s skill, all one’s humanity. But to nurse back to health a
+man who was to be court-martialled and shot, truly that was a dead-end
+occupation....
+
+Dawn filtered in through the little square windows of the ward. Two of
+the patients rolled on their sides, that they might talk to one another.
+In the silence of early morning their voices rang clear.
+
+“Dost thou know, _mon ami_, that when we captured that German battery a
+few days ago, we found gunners chained to their guns?”
+
+[17] Putnam Sons.
+
+
+The Prayer of the Toilers
+
+By Rose Mills Powers
+
+(In “The Survey.”)
+
+ Lord of the peaceful Toilers, hark to the toiler’s plea:
+ The kings of the earth assemble, pawns in their hands are we.
+ Now as the battle thickens, out of the blood and flame,
+ Lord of the Toilers, hear us; forgive us who play the game.
+
+ Lord of the cheerful reapers, the harvest was fair and good.
+ Hard by our quiet hearth stones, the yellowing wheat fields stood,
+ But the scythe has become a sabre in meadow and glebe and glen.
+ Lord of the Toilers, hear us; forgive as we cut down men!
+
+ Lord of the cunning craftsmen: The vision of Thee a lad,
+ Working with plane and measure, kept us content and glad;
+ Now, as we charge, red-handed, wielding the tools that kill,
+ Lord of the Toilers, hear us: Forgive us the blood we spill.
+
+ Lord of the visioning learners: out of our cloistered halls,
+ Parchment and tomb abandoned, we march when the bugle calls,
+ Death and destruction hurling, havoc to babes and wives,
+ Lord of the Toilers, hear us: Forgive us these broken lives.
+
+ Lord of the keen-eyed traders: our vessels went up and down,
+ Our shores were alive with traffic in village and mart and town,
+ But our harbors are red with slaughter, the markets in ruins lie,
+ Lord of the Toilers, hear us; forgive as we strike and die!
+
+ Lord of the peaceful Toilers, husbandman, craftsman, clerk,
+ Student and sage and trader, torn from the world’s good work,
+ Dead in the King’s arena, pawns who were not to blame,
+ Lord of the Toilers, hear us: end now the awful game!
+
+
+Righteous Wars
+
+By Beulah Marie Dix
+
+(From the drama, “Across the Border.”)
+
+THE JUNIOR LIEUTENANT: Children crying—hungry, freezing, tortured.
+Hundreds of ’em. Poor little devils! Old women—starving, stumbling,
+driven, mumbling their prayers that nobody minds. Mothers crying over
+the smashed-up things that were their kids. Ah-h! That’s the horses
+screeching. Don’t you hear them? When a shell rips them up they look at
+you beseeching. But you can’t waste shot on them.... That’s the chaps in
+the hospital now—drying up with typhoid, rotting with dysentery—chaps on
+the battlefield, torn and smashed and mangled, two days of it, three days
+of it, and the wheels of the big guns grinding them to pulp. Ah-h! That’s
+some chaps caught in the granary. It’s burning. The flames are at them.
+That’s a train load of wounded, smashing through a bridge, stifling,
+drowning, helpless, rats in a trap. Men and women and children,—hundreds
+of ’em, thousands of ’em, millions of ’em—O my God! My God! Why don’t
+you stop it? Why don’t you stop it?
+
+THE MASTER OF THE HOUSE: Did you do anything to stop it? It’s drifted
+through here, that wail of the world, for a long time now. Years.
+Centuries. Ages. God hears it. It repented Him that He made the world.
+Always the crying comes up to us. Always misery and to spare. But it’s
+worse when you are making your righteous wars. For they’re all righteous.
+There’s never a man comes here but says, as you said, that his cause
+is just and God is on his side. It’s wonderful how many ages through,
+as you reckon time, you men have fought your righteous wars to advance
+civilization, and you’re advancing it today just the same way you did
+when Attilia was king.
+
+
+By Ellen Key
+
+(See page 143)
+
+If war should stand as an eternal phantom against the horizon of the
+world, then all social work for the elevating and purifying of humanity
+might as well be laid down forever.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IX
+
+Classes
+
+
+
+
+CLASSES
+
+
+The Poet’s Task
+
+By Margaret Hoblitt
+
+(In “Charities and Commons.”)
+
+ Wouldst thou be a poet of these latter days?
+ Turn then thine eye from joy, thine ear from praise!
+
+ Go where the city’s pallid millions throng,
+ And of their sorrows fashion thee a song.
+
+ Sing of unending toil,—of childhood’s blight—
+ Of weary day that dawns on weary night.
+
+ Sing, if thou canst, of womanhood in shame,—
+ Of manhood bartered for a place and name.
+
+ Sing of a flower that never knew the sun;
+ Sing of a virtue dead ere ’twas begun!
+
+ Then, lest our hearts break and our faith grow cold,
+ Sing better things to be, ere time is old.
+
+ Sing ’midst the tears, and touch men’s souls with fire,
+ Till God fulfill through thee His Great Desire.
+
+
+Out of the Darkness
+
+By Voltairine de Cleyre
+
+(Poet and essayist. Died 1912.)
+
+ Who am I? Only one of the commonest common people,
+ Only a worked-out body, a shriveled and withered soul;
+ What right have I to sing, then? None; and I do not, I cannot.
+ Why ruin the rhythm and rhyme of the great world’s songs with moaning?
+ I know not—nor why whistles must shriek, wheels ceaselessly mutter;
+ Nor why all I touch turns to clashing and clanging and discord;
+ I know not; I know only this,—I was born to this, live in it hourly,
+ Go ’round with it, hum with it, curse with it, would laugh with it, had
+ it laughter;
+ It is my breath—and that breath goes outward from me in moaning.
+
+ O you, up there, I have heard you; I am “God’s image defaced”,
+ “In heaven reward awaits me,” “hereafter I shall be perfect”;
+ Ages you’ve sung that song, but what is it to me, think you?
+ If you heard down here in the smoke and the smut, in the smear and the
+ offal,
+ In the dust, in the mire, in the grime and in the slime, in the hideous
+ darkness,
+ How the wheels turn your song into sounds of horror and loathing and
+ cursing,
+ The offer of lust, the sneer of contempt and acceptance, thieves’
+ whispers,
+ The laugh of the gambler, the suicide’s gasp, the yell of the drunkard,
+ If you heard them down here you would cry, “The reward of such is
+ damnation,”
+ If you heard them, I say, your song of “rewarded hereafter” would
+ fail....
+
+ Oh, is there no one to find or to speak a meaning to _me_
+ To me as I am,—the hard, the ignorant, withered-souled worker?
+ To me upon whom God and science alike have stamped “failure”,
+ To me who know nothing but labor, nothing but sweat, dirt and sorrows?
+ To me whom you scorn and despise, you up there who sing while I moan?
+ To me as I am—for me as I am—not dying but living;
+ _Not_ my future—my present! my body, my needs, my desires! Is there no
+ one?
+ In the midst of this rushing of phantoms—of Gods, of Science, of Logic,
+ Of Philosophy, Morals, Religion, Economy,—all this that helps not,
+ All these ghosts at whose altars you worship, these ponderous,
+ marrowless Fictions,
+ Is there no one who thinks, is there nothing to help this dull
+ moaning _Me_?
+
+
+Two Sides of the Shield
+
+By Princess Lazarovick-Hrebelianovich
+
+(Nee, Eleanor Calhoun—Actress of American birth. From an article in
+“Century Magazine.”)
+
+Nowhere more than in London does the blazing shield show a dark reverse.
+For, along with the splendors of life, that ancient city brought me, too,
+the first overwhelming sense of the world’s misery. For sometime my life
+took me daily through a large stretch of London. It seemed to me that I
+was wandering through vast tides of woe. Age-long tyrannies of ignorance
+and vice and suffering have welded a fixity of type in the flesh, binding
+enormous segregations into more or less uniform kinds of peoples. The
+misery-sodden “lower classes,” as I heard them called, seemed narrowed
+and fixed and starved and warped forever. The “lower middle classes” gave
+the impression of being jammed in between walls from above and below,
+as if all broad or wholesome feeling, or generous enjoyment of beauty
+were kept from penetrating to them or issuing from them. The “upper
+middle classes” and the “higher classes” appeared to look with horror
+upon any real contact with the others, while intermarrying with them was
+impossible.... It was the vast crowds of the others, “the wholesale lot”,
+that reflected their discouragement in my mind.
+
+
+Women and the Oppressed
+
+By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
+
+(From “Aurora Leigh.”)
+
+ I call you hard
+ To a general suffering. Here’s the world half blind
+ With intellectual light, half brutalized
+ With civilization, having caught the plague
+ In silks from Tarsus, shrieking East and West
+ Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain
+ And sin too!.... does one woman of you all,
+ (You who weep easily) grow pale to see
+ This tiger shake his cage?—does one of you
+ Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls,
+ And pine and die because of the great sum
+ Of universal anguish?—Show me a tear
+ Wet as Cordelia’s, in eyes bright as yours,
+ Because the world is mad. You cannot count,
+ That you should weep for this account, not you!
+ You weep for what you know. A red-haired child
+ Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,
+ Though but so little as with a finger-tip,
+ Will set you weeping; but a million sick—
+ You could as soon weep for the rule of three
+ Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world,
+ Uncomprehended by you.—Women as you are,
+ Mere women, personal and passionate,
+ You give us doting mothers, and perfect wives,
+ Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints!
+ We get no Christ from you,—and verily
+ We shall not get a poet, in my mind.
+
+
+God and the Strong Ones
+
+By Margaret Widdemer
+
+(Contemporary American poet.)
+
+ “We have made them fools and weak!” said the Strong Ones:
+ “We have crushed them, they are dumb and deaf and blind;
+ We have crushed them in our hands like a heap of crumbling sands,
+ We have left them naught to seek or find:
+ They are quiet at our feet,” said the Strong Ones;
+ “We have made them one with wood and stone and clod;
+ Serf and laborer and woman, they are less than wise or human!—”
+ _“I shall raise the weak!” saith God._
+
+ “They are stirring in the dark,” said the Strong Ones,
+ “They are struggling, who were moveless like the dead;
+ We can hear them cry and strain hand and foot against the chain,
+ We can hear their heavy upward tread....
+ What if they are restless?” said the Strong Ones;
+ “What if they have stirred beneath the rod?
+ Fools and weak and blinded men, we can tread them down again—”
+ _“Shall ye conquer Me?” saith God._
+
+ “They will trample us and bind!” said the Strong Ones;
+ “We are crushed beneath the blackened feet and hands;
+ All the strong and fair and great they will crush from out the state;
+ They will whelm it with the weight of pressing sands—
+ They are maddened and are blind,” said the Strong Ones;
+ “Black decay has come where they have trod;
+ They will break the world in twain if their hands are on the rein—”
+ _“What is that to me?” saith God._
+
+ _“Ye have made them in their strength, who were Strong Ones,_
+ _Ye have only taught the blackness ye have known:_
+ _These are evil men and blind—Ay, but molded to your Mind!_
+ _How shall ye cry out against your own?_
+ _Ye have held the light and beauty I have given_
+ _For above the muddied ways where they must plod:_
+ _Ye have builded this your lord with the lash and with the sword—_
+ _Reap what ye have sown!” saith God._
+
+
+My Sister’s Heritage
+
+By Mary S. Edgar
+
+(In “The Survey.”)
+
+ Budding tree and singing bird,
+ Joy of springtime seen and heard;
+ All the wealth of all the year,
+ Scattered by the wayside here.
+ But oh, little sister of mine in the shadowy places,
+ Where the wheel turns and the small young fingers ply,
+ I cannot forget that this is yours, too, to inherit—
+ The open fields and the streams, and the clear blue sky.
+
+ Stirring sap and quickening sod—
+ Miracles revealing God:
+ Prophets of the fatherhood,
+ Speaking from the field and wood.
+ But oh, little sister of mine in the shadowy places,
+ Where shoulders droop, eyes dim, and cheeks grow wan,
+ I yearn for your hand, and a road that leads to the open,
+ To the commonwealth of the fields, ere the light be gone.
+
+
+Socialist Prayer
+
+By Margaret Haile
+
+(Contemporary American poet. In “The Vanguard.”)
+
+ Give us this day our daily bread, O God!
+ Not for _my_ bread alone I selfish pray.
+ Such prayer would never reach Thy loving ear;
+ Such prayer my human lips refuse to say.
+
+ I pray for those whom Thou hast given me here—
+ All men and women to be one with me,—
+ To soothe, sustain, and comfort, love and cheer,
+ And draw in loving service nearer Thee.
+
+ My sister suffers in a garret bare,
+ My brothers labor and grow faint and pine;
+ My baby wails—for food! I cannot bear it God,
+ For all the babies in the world are mine!
+
+ Father, and they are Thine! I claim Thine aid;
+ Thou needs must help us in our righteous cause!
+ Make strong our hands to tear Oppression down,
+ And build a world according to Thy laws!
+
+ I cannot eat my daily bread alone,
+ Give none to me if these cannot be fed.
+ With them I stand or fall, for we are one.
+ Father, give _all_ of us our daily bread.
+
+
+Outcasts
+
+By Eleanor Wentworth
+
+(In “The International Socialist Review.”)
+
+Outside the Rotunda of the Fine Arts Building of the Panama-Pacific
+International Exposition is hunched a gripping, sorrowful figure—a figure
+that crouches back amidst the foliage as if humbly seeking to escape
+the eye of the passer. Meekly it bears the name of _Outcast_. About it,
+fountains ripple; beyond, the sun joyfully sets agleam the somber greens
+of olive; chuckling, sprightly Pans, with uptilted pipes, laugh to scorn
+the chill atmosphere of the sorrowful one, set so far into the shadows
+that the sun never reaches it, leaving its marble surface ghastly.
+
+The figure, with arms clenched and head bowed, in its shadow seclusion
+indomitably symbolizes the disowned of the ages—the iron-collared slave,
+the branded thief, the wandering disbeliever, the woman scorned, the
+helpless debtor. It symbolizes those passive sufferers, who, after
+tilling and sowing the fields of life, so that they grow green and cool,
+wander begrimed and thirsty in the waste desert stretches. Pitifully it
+speaks of those who confidently threw their heart’s sweetest flowers in
+the world they loved, receiving no return, living forevermore with barren
+hopes. It whispers of those who flung their cries of joy to the winds,
+and heard them wafted back as taunts. It speaks of builders, of whose
+dream houses no cornerstone or cornice has been realized. Voicelessly it
+proclaims the _Slave of the Past_.
+
+And as I looked at it, so hopelessly resigned, I hated it, for all its
+powerful symbolism.
+
+Did the world know no other Outcast than this shrinking, unreproachful
+figure? Was this symbolism the whole truth? Were there no Outcasts
+who dared accuse?—who dared fight for their inheritance? None to cry
+dauntlessly, “We will not be cast aside, we who have builded and tilled
+and dreamed!” Were there no outcasts with hope—with fighting blood?
+
+In the far recesses of the Japanese Section, where only a few errant
+footfalls echo solemnly through the spacious silence, I found that for
+which I searched. There I found the symbol of the Outcast I dared hope
+to see. A truly courageous figure it is, with Hope and the Spirit to be
+Free stamped large upon it. It is the very antithesis of that bowed
+figure out among the green vines and laughing Pans, which seem to beg
+forgiveness for its very existence. This other figure is called “Strike”,
+and proudly it bears its insignia of rebellion. The gaunt outlines and
+the eyes overshadowed with a terrible fatigue brand this figure of a man,
+as the other, with the marks of the Outcast. A woman leans upon him, and
+in turn, a brood of young cling to her skirts. But this Outcast is no
+craven. He neither cringes nor sorrows. He stands erect, and through the
+shadows of fatigue, his eyes flash defiance out upon the world of the
+Self-Satisfied. He seems to cry aloud:
+
+“I suffer, my mate suffers, and our young; but you shall pay—pay in
+full! You who stand between us and our inheritance, your time is drawing
+near—prepare! For we declare that we, too, shall live, we, the sufferers!”
+
+This Outcast, springing from the depths, flings a challenge where others
+have only wept; dares where others have cowered in self-debasement.
+This man of courage, standing erect under the scourges of suffering and
+deprivation, gazing so steadfastly into the Beyond through overshadowed
+eyes—he dares aspire to walk in the green fields of his making; already
+he treads them in his imagination. He has sent a barely whispered hope of
+joy out upon the winds and it is rushing back to him a mighty symphony of
+realization. He dreams of a beautiful world, and builds it as he dreams.
+
+He heralds the day when there will be no Outcasts, but all will be
+Well-Beloved.
+
+He is the _Master of the Future_.
+
+
+The New Sense of Justice
+
+By Elizabeth Cady Stanton
+
+(From a letter to Susan B. Anthony on “Woman and War,” written just prior
+to our war with Spain.)
+
+The co-operative will remodel codes and constitutions, creeds and
+catechisms, social customs and conventionalism, the curriculum of schools
+and colleges. It will give a new sense of justice, liberty and equality
+in all the relations of life....
+
+The few have no right to the luxuries of life while the many are denied
+its necessities.
+
+
+Break Down the Wall
+
+By Ellen Key
+
+Men and women, upper and lower classes, are walking on different sides of
+a wall. They can stretch their hands over it; the important thing to be
+done is to break the wall down.
+
+
+Class Intolerance Passing
+
+By Elsie Clews Parsons
+
+(See page 170)
+
+Age-class, caste group, family, and race, each has its own closed
+circle—but each of these vicious circles the modern spirit has begun to
+invade and break down. In the spirit of our time fear of the unlike is
+waning and _pari passu_ intolerance.
+
+
+Servitude
+
+By Maria Montessori
+
+(Quoted from “The Larger Aspect of Socialism,” by Walling.)
+
+Any nation that accepts the idea of servitude and believes that it is an
+advantage for man to be served by man admits servility as an instinct,
+and indeed we all too easily lend ourselves to obsequious service, giving
+to it such complimentary names as courtesy, politeness, charity.
+
+In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence. This concept
+will be the foundation of the dignity of the man of the future; “I do
+not wish to be served because I am not impotent.” And this idea must be
+gained before men can feel themselves to be really free.
+
+
+Factories Instead of Homes
+
+By Mary E. McDowell
+
+(Head of University Settlement House, Chicago. Writer and speaker for
+suffrage, organized labor, etc.)
+
+However earnestly we may deplore the fact that women are in factories
+instead of homes, we must squarely face conditions as they exist. There
+are hundreds of thousands of helpless, untrained, unorganized women
+without the power of legislating for themselves, who are forced by the
+stress of circumstances to earn their livelihood, and it is of vital
+importance that they be given the chance to be decently self-supporting
+under conditions which will unfit them for wifehood and motherhood and
+the care of the homes.
+
+
+The Voteless Sex
+
+By Meta L. Stern
+
+(American contemporary journalist and speaker. From a leaflet on
+Suffrage.)
+
+Thousands of women today are working under conditions unfit for human
+beings. At unguarded machinery they are risking their nimble fingers,
+the only source of income they possess. In firetrap buildings they
+are risking their lives. Badly ventilated workrooms, filled with
+particles of flying dust, weaken their lungs and make them susceptible
+to tuberculosis. Long working hours sap their strength and vitality.
+Dangerous occupations make them physical wrecks in a few years and render
+them unfit for wifehood and motherhood. In the case of married women
+workers an appalling infant mortality is a concomitant of women’s labor.
+But with all these sacrifices even the woman who performs a man’s work
+does not get a man’s wages. Everywhere we find unequal pay for equal
+work. The voteless sex is cheap.
+
+
+The Glad Day of Universal Brotherhood
+
+By Frances E. Willard
+
+(Great temperance worker; the only woman whose statue is in the Hall of
+Fame. From an address at the National W. C. T. U. Convention at Buffalo,
+in 1897.)
+
+Look about you; the products of labor are on every hand; you could not
+maintain for a moment a well-ordered life without them; every object in
+your room has in it, for discerning eyes, the mark of ingenious tools and
+the pressure of labor’s hands. But is it not the cruelest injustice for
+the wealthy, whose lives are surrounded and embellished by labor’s work,
+to have a superabundance of the money which represents the aggregate of
+labor in any country, while the laborer himself is kept so steadily at
+work that he has no time to acquire the education and refinements of life
+that would make him and his family agreeable companions to the rich and
+cultured?...
+
+I believe that competition is doomed. The trust, whose single object is
+to abolish competition, has proved that we are better without it, than
+with it, and the moment corporations control the supply of any product,
+they combine. What the Socialist desires is that the corporation of
+humanity should control all production. Beloved comrades, this is the
+frictionless way; it is the higher way; it eliminates the motives for a
+selfish life; it enacts into our every-day living the ethics of Christ’s
+gospel. Nothing else will do it; nothing else can bring the glad day of
+universal brotherhood.
+
+
+Working Girls Must Cooperate
+
+By Pauline M. Newman
+
+(Organizer of working women. Former organizer for the International
+Garment Workers’ Union. In “Life and Labor.”)
+
+All those who work are aware of the fact that conditions today—insofar as
+the working girl is concerned—are not what they should be....
+
+Now, what is wrong? To begin with, the work day is too long, the wages
+are too low. Good sanitary conditions are a rarity. Laws to protect the
+lives of women and children workers are scarce—in reality.... There are
+enough laws on the statute books, but very few are enforced. Labor laws
+intended to protect women are constantly being violated. Why? Simply
+because the women have, thus far, failed to cooperate with one another in
+order to enforce them.
+
+Nearly eight million working women are subjected to the conditions
+described above. According to investigators—the writer of these lines
+having been one of these—the average wage of these women does not exceed
+seven dollars a week. A wage _proven_ insufficient to live on. Such
+wages shape the lives of the women, and those dependent upon them. What
+kind of a life, then, can they lead? A life which is a mere existence,
+that is all. Because they are compelled to do so, they substitute cheap
+amusement for something more refined. They live on a five-cent breakfast,
+ten-cent lunch, and a twenty-cent dinner; live in a dingy room without
+air and without comfort; wear clothes of cheap material, trying hard to
+imitate those who are more fortunate than they. Their whole life is cheap
+from beginning to end. Deprived of sunshine and fresh air, no time for
+recreation, no time for rest, they have only time for _work_.
+
+
+Organized Woman Labor
+
+By Mrs. George Bass
+
+(See page 38)
+
+Almost every constructive statute of the past two decades that touches
+the protection and prevents the exploitation of women and children, owes
+its initiation and passage largely to the organized women.
+
+
+The Enslaved
+
+By The Countess of Warwick
+
+(English contemporary. Once said to be the most beautiful woman in
+England. Socialist, writer and speaker on labor and other modern
+problems. From “Why I Became a Socialist.” In “Hearst’s Magazine.”)
+
+At present women are the most enslaved part of the human race. They are
+paid lower wages even than the average working man. When they are not in
+the wage market as industrial workers, or clerks or civil servants, then
+they are usually in the unsatisfactory position of being a wife who is,
+economically speaking, a dependent on the wishes and purse of her father
+or husband. They may work all day at the management of the children and
+the home—much harder often, than the worker in the factory—but in return
+these wives and mothers do not get, in the ordinary case, a fixed salary
+or wage which they can call their own. Neither are the working hours of
+the wife and mother fixed, as even in the case of factory workers. There
+is in the life of the housewife of the manual laboring class scarcely an
+hour a day when she is entirely free to go where she pleases or do what
+she pleases. The woman who has not a private income of her own is, in the
+general case, the economic dependent of the man, and in that class is the
+large majority of my sex.
+
+
+Inequality for Women
+
+By Mrs. Arthur Lyttleton
+
+(From “Women and Their Work.”)
+
+Here and there throughout history occur instances of women who have been
+received as equals by men, but for the mass of women equality could only
+be procured by civilization.
+
+
+Lore of the Woods
+
+By Ruby Archer
+
+(Contemporary. Poet and journalist.)
+
+ Go not into the woods for rioting.
+ But sit thee down alone; lean on a tree,
+ And read the greatest volume of the world,
+ Writ in the letters of the leaves and birds.
+ Mark how the branches draw their fluid life
+ From the one stem deep nourished in the earth,
+ And on those boughs how individual leaves
+ Find neighbor kindness, yielding each to each.
+ They share the common good, yet with no loss;
+ What grace there is, unique, in every one!
+ And the glad birds! Only their nests have they,
+ And the great heritage of light and love
+ Which none has need of hoarding, yet not one
+ But greets the morning with the song, “I live,”
+ And warbles low at twilight, “Life is sweet.”
+ Study the helpful ants; the social bees;
+ The hovering, unbound insects of the air,
+ Swaying in cities light as gossamer
+ Along one sunbeam on one fragrant breeze;
+ And never dream that man may dare presume
+ To name himself the king of things create,
+ Till he shall learn the lessons of the leaves,
+ The birds, the ants, the bees, the winged dust:
+ _That life is born of brotherhood_.
+
+
+Moses, the Strike Leader
+
+By Frances Squire Potter
+
+(American contemporary. Professor of English in the University of
+Minnesota. Writer and speaker on labor and political problems.
+Corresponding Secretary of the National American Woman’s Suffrage
+Association, author “The Ballingtons,” etc. Died March, 1914. In “Life
+and Labor.”)
+
+Out of the waters of the Nile, Pharaoh’s daughter drew a Hebrew babe,
+condemned to die. As her adopted son, he was taught at court all the
+wisdom of the Egyptians. As an Egyptian prince he might have lived
+and died in splendor, and his gold-cased mummy might have been on
+some museum shelf today, a dead curiosity. An aristocrat, a lawyer, a
+capitalist—these are what he was brought up to be.
+
+Egypt was in the full afternoon of her grandeur. A Pharoah was on the
+throne whose soul was filled with the ambition to build palaces and
+temples and cities such as the world had never seen. His heavy hand fell
+upon the free Hebrews in his kingdom, and sent them to the quarries and
+the brick-yards to toil with slaves under the lash of merciless foreman.
+And as his cities and monuments grew, he became drunk with his own
+glory, and the slaves were flogged to ever more inhuman exertions in the
+quarries.
+
+“And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown up, that he went
+out to his brethren, and looked on their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian
+smiting an Hebrew. And he looked this way, and that way, and when he saw
+that there was no man, he smote the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.”
+
+I do not believe this was the first time he had walked abroad to view
+his brother slaves toiling. His wrath had been long smouldering in him.
+You notice he did not attack the Egyptian with blind rage. “He looked
+this way and that”, and when he saw he was unobserved he deliberately
+slew the oppressor and buried the body in the desert sands.
+
+Thus the greatest law-giver in history began his career by committing the
+greatest crime known to the law. He was not young. He was forty years of
+age. He became a law-breaker only because the laws of Egypt no longer
+protected the man who worked from the tyrant who confiscated his labor.
+His soul was in rebellion against “the system”.
+
+How did the workers take this “direct action”? Just as the workers of
+today would. When he went back the next day, instead of being greeted
+as a deliverer, he was repudiated by the Hebrews. They were justly
+suspicious of a member of the system who eased his conscience for a
+living in the royal family by killing a brutal foreman. “Who made thee a
+prince and a judge over us?” was a very pertinent question. Who, indeed,
+but Pharoah himself?
+
+But Pharoah on his part was deeply incensed at this rebel in his own
+family and Moses fled for his life into the deserts of Arabia, carrying
+with him the consciousness of having made his brethren’s lot worse by his
+blundering attempt to mend it....
+
+At last, amid the frowning precipices and lonely crags of Mount Sinai,
+the cry of his race became too strong for him to resist.... And so Moses
+turns his face once more toward the Nile country, and the great moment of
+his life is upon him.... From now on the magnificent story represents
+the struggle of the enslaved Hebrews for freedom as a duel between two
+men—Pharoah on the throne, and Moses, the desert wanderer. The one stands
+for entrenched tyranny, the other is a strike leader. Behind Pharoah is
+all the power of Egypt, upheld by the armies of the empire. Behind Moses
+is the mysterious pillar of cloud and of fire—the destiny of the race.
+Between these two colossi cower the race of slaves whose destiny is at
+hand....
+
+Just as the Pharoahs of the Colorado coal fields are doing today, Pharoah
+of Egypt hardened his heart, until the climax of the struggle came in
+his cry of rage, “Get thee from me, take heed to thyself, see my face no
+more: for in the day thou seest my face, thou shalt die!” And Moses said,
+“Thou hast spoken well, I will see thy face no more.” ...
+
+So Moses leads his people out into the wilderness of freedom....
+
+Years passed, and the wilderness was whitened with the bones of the
+slaves, whose free-born children grew up to higher manhood under their
+aged leader’s constant counsels and warnings. At last the time came when
+they were fit to take a place among the nations of the earth, and the
+pillar of fire and of cloud turns and drifts toward Canaan.
+
+With what longing the old man’s heart looked toward the land of promise,
+the first fixed abiding place life seemed to offer, we can gather from
+his own confession. But it was not to be. His course was run. He was a
+strike leader, a nation-molder, a law-giver, not a military conqueror.
+When the tribes reach the desert and look down into the green valley of
+the Jordan, they are called together to hear his parting words. On the
+slopes of Mount Nebo in the land of Moab, after the antiphonal chanting
+of the blessings and curses, and the sounding of the trumpets of the
+Levites, the dying leader stands for the last time before his people,
+delivers the matchless farewell address recorded in Deuteronomy, blesses
+them, and passes from their sight forever, up into the solitude of the
+mountain peaks....
+
+“And the children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab, but no
+man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. And there hath not arisen a
+prophet since in Israel like unto Moses....”
+
+ Dear God! The desert wandering is done,
+ A fixed abode has come to all—but one!
+ Command the muses of the sacred well
+ Say paeans for the sons of Israel!
+ But turn, oh, turn their silent lips away,
+ While he ascends the solitudes to pray!
+
+ Deep valley murmurings rise into peace,
+ At that still height his mission wins surcease,
+ And God in mercy lets his eyes undim,
+ Gaze long on glories that are not for him.
+
+
+After the Fight
+
+By Mary O’Reilly
+
+(Chicago school teacher. Writer and speaker on labor questions. The
+following poem was written for “Life and Labor.”)
+
+ A lull in the struggle,
+ A truce in the fight,
+ The whirr of machines
+ And the dearly-bought right
+ Just to labor for bread,—
+ Just to work and be fed.
+
+ For this we have marched
+ Through the snow-covered street;
+ Have borne our dead comrades
+ While muffled drums beat.
+ It is thus we have fought
+ For this boon dearly bought.
+
+ We measure our gain
+ By the price we have paid.
+ Call the victory great
+ As the struggle we made.
+ For we struggled to grow,
+ And we won. And we know....
+
+ Together we suffered
+ The weary weeks past;
+ Together we won,
+ And together at last
+ As we learn our own might,
+ We shall win the _great_ fight.
+
+ A lull in the struggle,
+ A truce in the fight,
+ The whirr of machines
+ And the dearly-bought right
+ Just to labor for bread,—
+ Just to work and be fed!
+
+
+The Fool’s Christmas
+
+By Florence May
+
+ On Christmas eve, the king, disconsolate,
+ Weary with all the round of pomp and state,
+ Gave whisper to his Fool: “A merry way
+ Have I bethought to spend our holiday.
+ Thou shalt be king, and I the fool will be—
+ And thou shalt rule the court in drollery
+ For one short day!” With caper, nod, and grin,
+ Full saucy replied the harlequin;
+ “A merry play; and sire, amazing strange
+ For one of us to suffer such a change!
+ But thou? Why all the kings of earth” said he,
+ “Have played the fool and played it skillfully!”
+ Then the king’s laugh stirred all the arras dim,
+ Till courtiers wondered at his humor grim.
+
+ And so it chanced when wintry sunbeams shone
+ From Christmas skies, lo! perched upon the throne
+ Sat Lionel the Fool, in purple drest,
+ The royal jewels blazing on his breast.
+
+ On Christmas morning too, the king arose,
+ And donned with sense of ease, the silken hose
+ Of blue and scarlet; then the doublet red
+ With azure slashed; upon his kingly head
+ That wearied oft beneath a jeweled crown,
+ He drew the jingling hood, and tied it down.
+ All day he crouched among the chill and gloom
+ None seeking him—within the turret room.
+
+ But when calm night with starry lamps came down
+ Her purple stairs—he crept forth to the town
+ His scanty cape about his shoulders blew,
+ Close to his face the screening hood he drew.
+ He knocked first at a cottage of the poor,
+ And lo! flew open wide the door—
+ “We have not much to give, dear fool,” they said,
+ “But thou art cold; come share our fire and bread!”
+ With willing hands they freed his cape from snow
+ And warmed and cheered him ere they let him go.
+
+ And so’t was ever: By the firelight dim
+ Of many a hearth stone poor they welcomed him;
+ And children who would shun the king in awe,
+ Would scamper to the door way if they saw
+ The scarlet peak of Lionel’s red hood.
+ “Dear fool” they called him loudly, “thou wert good
+ To bring the frosted cake! Come in and see
+ Our little Lishelk—hark! she calls for thee!”
+
+ And so’t was ever. On his way the king
+ With softened heart saw many a grievous thing:
+ But love he found and charity. And when
+ He crept at dawn through palace gates again,
+ He knew that he who rules by fear alone
+ May sit securely on his throne;
+ But he who rules by love shall find it true
+ That love, the milder power, is mightier, too.
+ “Dear fool”, he said, “thou art the king of hearts insooth;
+ The king of hearts! Today no farce but truth!
+ For I have seen that thou, beneath my rule,
+ Hast often played the king,—and I the fool!”
+
+
+Class Legislation
+
+By M. Carey Thomas
+
+(See page 10)
+
+In the past we have no single instance of any class of men with the
+ballot legislating fairly for any other class of men without the ballot.
+How then can the men of the world all working and all voting protect the
+special interests of the voteless women of the world who are emerging
+as workers millions strong on the surface of our human bee-hive? They
+cannot. If they have in the past done injustice to the disfranchised
+classes of their fellow men, they will do far more terrible injustice
+in the future to disfranchised classes of working women. If the vote
+has been indispensable as a protection in the past, it will be still
+more indispensable in the future because modern socialistic legislation
+will increasingly control employers and employed. Thousands of English
+women are to-day banded together in their suffrage unions demanding with
+desperate courage from a reluctant parliament a vote to protect their
+labor and their children for whom they labor.
+
+
+Despair
+
+By Lady Wilde
+
+(Irish poet, mother of Oscar Wilde.)
+
+ Before us dies our brother of starvation;
+ Around are cries of famine and despair!
+ Where is hope for us, or comfort, or salvation—
+ Where—oh! where?
+ If the angels ever harken, downward bending,
+ They are weeping, we are sure,
+ At the litanies of human groans ascending
+ From the crushed hearts of the poor.
+
+ We never knew a childhood’s mirth and gladness,
+ Nor the proud heart of youth free and brave;
+ Oh, a death-like dream of wretchedness and sadness
+ Is life’s weary journey to the grave!
+ Day by day we lower sink, and lower,
+ Till the God-like soul within
+ Falls crushed beneath the fearful demon power
+ Of poverty and sin.
+
+ So we toil on, on with fever burning
+ In heart and brain;
+ So we toil on, on through bitter scorning,
+ Want, woe, and pain.
+ We dare not raise our eyes to the blue heavens
+ Or the toil must cease—
+ We dare not breathe the fresh air God has given
+ One hour in peace.
+
+
+Breadth of Woman Suffrage
+
+By Millicent Garrett Fawcett
+
+(English contemporary. Introduction to “The Future of the Woman’s
+Movement.”)
+
+Other movements toward freedom have aimed at raising the status of a
+comparatively small group or class. But the woman’s movement aims at
+nothing less than raising the status of an entire sex—half of the human
+race—to lift it up to the freedom and valor of womanhood.
+
+
+The Poor Sex
+
+By Mrs. H. W. Swanwick
+
+(See page 205)
+
+Women are notoriously the poor sex. Even a woman who figures as a rich
+woman is often merely an article de luxe for the man who provides for
+her, and though he may band her neck with jewels, he does not readily
+give her a check for her suffrage society.
+
+
+Of What Use Is It
+
+By Ida M. Cannon
+
+(Headworker of the Social Service Department Massachusetts General
+Hospital.)
+
+If a patient for whom a surgeon orders a back brace starves herself to
+pay the bill?
+
+If a workman, cured of rheumatism, goes back to his job in the damp
+cellar which caused it?
+
+If a clerk fitted to glasses, returns to the dim desk which crippled her
+sight?
+
+If an unmarried girl, delivered of her child, goes from the maternity
+ward back to the neighborhood that ruined?
+
+
+Breaking Up in Violence
+
+By Clara E. Laughlin
+
+(See page 68)
+
+There must be a check on the ever-widening inequality between the richest
+and the poorest, or our social structure will not endure; we shall have
+revolution, not evolution; cataclysm, not growth.... In some of the old
+world countries the inequality is of such long growth that one can
+hardly imagine its breaking up without violence. With us it is not yet
+adamantine. Pray God it never may be.
+
+
+The Workers’ Right
+
+By Helen Keller
+
+(See page 209)
+
+(From “Out of the Dark.”[18])
+
+Their cause is my cause. If they are denied a living wage, I also am
+defrauded. While they are industrial slaves, I cannot be free. My hunger
+is not satisfied while they are unfed. I cannot enjoy the good things of
+life which come to me, if they are hindered and neglected. I want all the
+workers of the world to have sufficient money to provide the elements
+of a normal standard of living—a decent home, healthful surroundings,
+opportunity for education and recreation. I want them to have the same
+blessings I have. I, deaf and blind, have been helped to overcome many
+obstacles. I want them to be helped as generously in a struggle which
+resembles my own in many ways.
+
+Surely the things that the workers demand are not unreasonable. It
+cannot be unreasonable to ask of society a fair chance for all.... Until
+the spirit of love for our fellow men, regardless of race, color or
+creed, shall fill the world, making real in our lives and our deeds the
+actuality of human brotherhood—until the great mass of the people shall
+be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare,
+social injustice can never be attained.
+
+[18] Doubleday, Page & Co.
+
+
+Women’s Labor Organizations
+
+By Ida Tarbell
+
+(American contemporary. Author of “History of Standard Oil,” “The
+Business of Being a Woman,” etc.)
+
+Already there are signs that the woman’s labor organizations are willing
+to recognize the inherent dignity of household service—and this is as it
+should be. The woman who labors should be the one to recognize that all
+labor is per se equally honorable—that there is no stigma in honestly
+performed, useful service.
+
+If she is to bring to the labor world the regeneration she dreams, she
+must begin not by saying that the shop girl, the clerk, the teacher, are
+in a higher class than the cook, the waitress, the maid, but that we are
+all laborers alike, sisters by virtue of the service we are rendering
+society. That is, labor should be the last to recognize the canker in the
+caste.
+
+
+The Happy Warrior
+
+By Dorothea Hollins
+
+(In “The Labor Leader.” J. Keir Hardie, English Labor leader,
+Anti-militarist and Member of Parliament. Died September 26, 1915. It is
+said the present war broke his heart.)
+
+ ’Midst the world’s tumult, he lies very still
+ Humanity’s knight-errant, who ’gainst wrong
+ Ne’er sheathed his sword, but climbed the perilous long
+ And lengthening ascent to that far hill
+ Throning the city of God! What shapes of ill
+ He met, he recked not, so he might be strong
+ For the down-trodden at his side. His song
+ Of Brotherhood each failing heart did fill
+ With manly comfort, and from Womanhood
+ He smote the bands of tyranny and ease;
+ No knight was e’er more dauntless. Devil’s strife
+ Outbreaking, broke his heart, snapped the worn life,
+ Yet cannot dim the victory of good
+ Nor take from Righteousness the kiss of Peace.
+
+
+Abolish “Dependent Classes”
+
+By Josephine Shaw Lowell
+
+(Quoted from “The Survey.” Mrs. Charles Russell Lowell. Mrs. Lowell
+served 13 years as Charity Commissioner in New York, and in many other
+ways was engaged in all good causes, municipal as well as philanthropic.)
+
+I object to the term “dependent classes,” unless in speaking of the
+insane. That such a class, not included among the insane, does exist
+among us is a fact; in more than one county of this great, rich state,
+there are families, as you know, who for five generations have been more
+or less dependent on their fellow citizens and such families constitute
+a class; but yet I protest against the use of this phrase in a way to
+suggest that the existence of such a class should be recognized except to
+be abolished.
+
+There will always be _persons_ who must be helped, _individuals_ who must
+depend upon public relief or on private charity for maintenance, it is
+true, but it is a disgrace to any community to have a dependent _class_,
+and the fact of its existence is a proof that the community has done its
+duty neither to those who compose it, nor to those who maintain it.
+
+
+The Servant Class
+
+By Edna Kenton
+
+(See page 71)
+
+Women are thinking at last, not in men’s terms, but in their own, and
+that in a slave class is always dynamic.... Because it has vision where
+the other has archaism, the “lower class” is become the higher class,
+self-conscious and self-poised. Not only youth, but childhood, is rebel.
+Art has become anarchic, and as mysteriously as Nature works everywhere,
+so has she worked with the servant half of the human race, stirring it to
+self-consciousness and action; helping to keep alive the tiny torch of
+revolt.
+
+
+Breshkovskaya
+
+By Elsa Barker
+
+(Contemporary American poet and novelist. Author “The Frozen Grail,” etc.
+The following is said to be the strongest of her poems. It was written
+during Breshkovskaya’s last exile, before the Russian revolution released
+her.)
+
+ How narrow seems the round of ladies’ lives
+ And ladies’ duties in their smiling world,
+ The day this Titan woman, gray with years,
+ Goes out across the void to prove her soul!
+ Brief are the pains of motherhood that end
+ In motherhood’s long joy; but she has borne
+ The age-long travail of a cause that lies
+ Still-born at last on History’s cold lap.
+ And yet she rests not; yet she will not drink
+ The cup of peace held to her parching lips
+ By smug Dishonor’s hand. Nay, forth she fares,
+ Old and alone, on exile’s rocky road—
+ That well-worn road with snows incarnadined
+ By blood-drops from her feet long years agone.
+
+ Mother of power, my soul goes out to you
+ As a strong swimmer goes to meet the sea
+ Upon whose vastness he is like a leaf.
+ What are the ends and purposes of song,
+ Save as a bugle at the lips of Life
+ To sound reveille to a drowsing world
+ When some great deed is rising like the sun?
+ Where are those others whom your deeds inspired
+ To deeds and words that were themselves a deed?
+ Those who believe in death have gone with death
+ To the gray crags of immortality;
+ Those who believed in life have gone with life
+ To the red halls of spiritual death.
+
+ And you? But what is death or life to you?
+ Only a weapon in the hand of faith
+ To cleave a way for beings yet unborn
+ To a far freedom you will never share!
+ Freedom of body is an empty shell
+ Wherein men crawl whose souls are held with gyves;
+ For Freedom is a spirit and she dwells
+ As often in a jail as on the hills.
+ In all the world this day there is no soul
+ Freer than you, Breshkovskaya, as you stand
+ Facing the future in your narrow cell.
+ For you are free of self and free of fear,
+ Those twin-born shades that lie in wait for man
+ When he steps out upon the wind-blown road
+ That leads to human greatness and to pain.
+ Take in your hand once more the pilgrim’s staff—
+ Your delicate hand misshapen from the nights
+ In Kara’s mines; bind on your unbent back
+ That long has borne the burdens of the race,
+ The exile’s bundle, and upon your feet
+ Strap the worn sandles of a tireless faith.
+ You are too great for pity. After you
+ We send not sobs, but songs; and all our days
+ We shall walk bravelier knowing where you are.
+
+
+The Revolutionist
+
+By Catherine Breshkovskaya
+
+(Born to luxury, but casting her lot, when only twenty-six, with the
+group of revolutionists who dared hope that the Russian peasantry
+might some day arise and rebel against the horrible oppression of the
+government. Twice exiled to Siberia, escaping once after serving a
+sentence of twenty-one years. Just before the overthrow of the czar
+closely guarded in a Siberian prison cell, after a second attempt to
+escape. Free once more, she has lived to see part of the realization of
+her dreams, the overthrow of Imperialism.)
+
+We put on peasant dress, to elude the police and break down the peasant’s
+cringing distrust. I dressed in enormous bark shoes, coarse shirt and
+drawers, and heavy cloak. I used acid on my face and hands; I worked
+and ate with the peasants; I learned their speech; I travelled on foot,
+forging passports. I lived ‘illegally!’
+
+By night I did my organizing. You desire a picture? A low room with mud
+floors and walls. Rafters just overhead, and still higher thatch. The
+room was packed with men, women and children. Two big fellows sat up
+on the high brick stove, with their dangling feet knocking occasional
+applause. These people had been gathered by my host, a brave peasant whom
+I picked out, and he in turn had chosen only those whom Siberia could
+not terrify. I now recalled their floggings; I pointed to those who were
+crippled for life; to women, whose husbands died under the lash; and
+when asked if men were to be forever flogged, then they would cry out so
+fiercely that the three or four cattle in the next room would bellow and
+have to be quieted. Again I would ask what chances their babies had of
+living, and in reply some peasant woman would tell how her baby had died
+the winter before. Why? I asked. Because they had only the most wretched
+strips of land. To be free and live, the people must own the land! From
+my cloak I would bring a book of fables written to teach our principles
+and stir the love of freedom. And then far into the night, the firelight
+showed a circle of great, broad faces and dilated eyes, staring with all
+the reverence every peasant has for that mysterious thing—a book.
+
+These books, twice as effective as oral work, were printed in secrecy
+at heavy expense. But many of us had libraries, jewels, costly gowns
+and furs to sell; and new recruits kept adding to our fund. We had no
+personal expenses....
+
+In that year of 1874, over two thousand educated people traveled among
+the peasants. Weary work, you say. Yes, when the peasants were slow and
+dull and the spirit of freedom seemed an illusion. But when that spirit
+grew real one felt far from weary....
+
+We may die in exile, and our children may die in exile, and our
+children’s children may die in exile, but something must come of it at
+last.
+
+
+The Old Comrade
+
+By May Beals
+
+(In “The Progressive Woman.”)
+
+ You have sowed for the world and man
+ The harvest you cannot reap.
+ You have won nor fame nor gold nor lands,
+ But your faith in man you keep.
+
+ You have stood for the right alone—
+ Faced odium, danger, death;
+ Poverty is your reward and pain,
+ That shall end with your dying breath.
+
+ I, beginning the path you trod,
+ Love you, so near the end;
+ Can I, too, conquer the trammeled clod,
+ Till the higher self ascend?
+
+ I know not: Many brave men fall
+ Ere they reach your brave life’s span.
+ Old friend, it is due in part to you,
+ That I keep my faith in man.
+
+
+The Voice of Labor
+
+By Inez Haynes Irwin
+
+(From “The American Federation of Labor Convention”: An Impression. In
+“The Masses.”)
+
+The voice of labor is a roar, deep as though it came from a throat of
+iron, penetrating as though it came through lips of silver. One day that
+voice will silence all the great guns of the world.
+
+
+Our New Aristocracy
+
+By Gertrude Atherton
+
+(From “The New Aristocracy,” in “The Cosmopolitan.”)
+
+(See page 44)
+
+Instead of laying away their sense of social supremacy in old rose and
+lavendar, our new aristocracy of wealth is often haughty and frigid
+in manner, and not only ostentatious in expenditure, but arrogantly
+assertive of what it believes to be its superior rights ... frivolity,
+selfishness and pride and the constant exercise of these qualities
+hardens what, for convenience, we call the heart, and breeds indifference
+for the feelings and rights of others. I have been interviewed by women
+reporters in almost every country I have visited, and it is only in
+America—in New York, to be exact—that they have spoken of their dread
+of approaching fashionable or merely rich, women.... Those we have of
+ancient lineage,—who have framed their family tree and proved their
+seven generations, whose fortunes have kept pace with the times, and
+who from the somewhat attenuated backbone of society, in New York, for
+instance—are more objectionable in some respects, than the new-rich.
+While they ought to know better, they are so uneasily conscious of their
+position as real aristocrats in a country too large to give them a
+universal recognition, that anxious pride has bleached their very blood,
+attenuated their features, narrowed their lips, and practically deprived
+them of any distinctive personalities, the best that can be said of them
+is that they are not, with one notorious exception, vulgar in the common
+use of the word.
+
+
+By H. R. H.
+
+(The Infanta Eulalia of Spain. In the “Century Magazine.”)
+
+1864-1912
+
+The glitter and magnificence of society can exist only against a
+background of misery and starvation.
+
+
+By Mary Wollstonecraft
+
+(In “Vindication of the Rights of Women.”)
+
+It is the pestiferous purple which renders the progress of civilization a
+curse, and warps the understanding, till men of sensibility doubt whether
+the expansion of the intellect produces a greater proportion of happiness
+or misery.
+
+
+By Mrs. John Martin
+
+We have a civilization that is bloated at the top and bleeding at the
+bottom, and there is decay in both.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK X
+
+Miscellaneous
+
+
+
+
+MISCELLANEOUS
+
+
+In Passing
+
+By Ruth
+
+(Contemporary Poet.)
+
+ Too long have I listened to the voices of men;
+ They said they would teach me wisdom—
+ And I am not wise:
+ And now when I listen for the voice of God—
+ I cannot hear it.
+
+
+A Contrast
+
+By Laura Simmons
+
+ Across the gloom a shadow flits; I glimpse a sodden face
+ Wherein the years of sin and care, and toil have left their trace.
+ A wanton laugh;—I mark no more, for yonder in the glow
+ One waiteth me—my love! my star! with welcoming, I know.
+ Tender and fine is she, withal so stately sweet and fair
+ My grateful heart thrills thanks to heaven to see her standing there.
+ If this be woman, pure, benign—man’s blessed beacon light—
+ Then—Christ! What that poor outcast soul that passed me in the night?
+
+
+Mary and Magdalene
+
+By Virginia Cleaver Beacon
+
+(In “The Coming Nation.”)
+
+ Little sister of the street,
+ Do not hurry by!
+ There’s a problem we must meet
+ Together, you and I.
+
+ While your head with shame is bowed,
+ While you shun the day,
+ Right forbids that I be proud,
+ Who might have gone your way.
+
+ Did you find the road too hard,
+ Feet untaught must tread?
+ Was the honest pathway barred,—
+ To this the other led?
+
+ In a world where all is sold
+ You have sold yourself;
+ Poor the price the world has doled,
+ You win not even pelf.
+
+ Little sister of the street,
+ This old wrong must cease!
+ You and I as women meet
+ To give the world release.
+
+
+Dare We Judge?
+
+By Paulina Brandreth
+
+(In “The Survey.”)
+
+ What do we know of life,
+ We, who are housed and fed,
+ What do we know of strife
+ Who are so gently led?
+
+ Have we dwelt in the slime
+ Of Poverty’s abode
+ Have we walked with the crime
+ Engendered by its load?
+
+ Oh, have we ever known
+ Days of eternal care?
+ When Hope is turned to stone
+ And broken by Despair?
+
+ Or have we ever raced
+ And won, and lost again?
+ And then with failure faced
+ The cruelty of men?
+
+ We have not lived these things,
+ Our bread and wine is sweet;
+ We do not know what causes bring
+ The woman to the street.
+
+ Yet, she who wounds her soul
+ Is better far than we,
+ Who do our lives control
+ In self-complacency.
+
+ Aye, better far than we,
+ Who ignorantly dwell,
+ Lulled with tranquility
+ Above the wreck of hell.
+
+ What do we know of life,
+ We, who are housed and fed,
+ Who, sheltered from all strife,
+ On thornless pathways tread?
+
+
+Two Storks
+
+By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
+
+(America’s foremost woman Sociologist. Author of numerous books, and
+editor, owner and publisher of “The Forerunner,” a magazine of advanced
+thought on the woman question. The following is from “The Forerunner.”)
+
+Two storks were nesting.
+
+He was a young stork—and narrow minded. Before he married he had
+consorted mainly with striplings of his own kind, and had given no
+thought to the ladies, either maid or matron.
+
+After he married his attention was concentrated on his all-satisfying
+wife, upon that triumph of art, labor and love—their nest, and upon
+those special creations—their children. Deeply was he moved by the
+marvelous instincts and processes of motherhood. Love, reverence, intense
+admiration, rose in his heart for her of the well-built nest; her of the
+gleaming treasure of smooth eggs; her of the patient brooding breast, the
+warming wings, the downy, wide-mouthed group of little ones.
+
+Assiduously he labored to help her build the nest, to help her feed
+the young; proud of his impassioned activity in her and their behalf;
+devoutly he performed his share of the brooding, while she hunted in her
+turn. When he was a-wing he thought continually of her as one with the
+brood—his brood. When he was on the nest he thought all the more of her,
+who sat there so long, so lovingly, to such noble ends.
+
+The happy days flew by, fair spring—sweet summer—gentle autumn. The young
+ones grew larger and larger; it was more and more work to keep their
+lengthening, widening beaks shut in contentment. Both parents flew far
+afield to feed them.
+
+Then the days grew shorter, the sky grayer, the wind colder; there was
+large hunting and small success. In his dreams he began to see sunshine,
+broad, burning sunshine, day after day; skies of limitless blue; dark,
+deep, yet full of fire; stretches of bright water, shallow, warm—fringed
+with tall reeds and rushes, teeming with fat frogs.
+
+They were in her dreams, too, but he did not know that.
+
+He stretched his wings and flew farther every day; but his wings were
+not satisfied. In his dreams came a sense of vast heights and boundless
+spaces of the earth streaming away beneath him; black water and white
+land; gray water and brown land, blue water and green land, all flowing
+backward from day to day, while the cold lessened and the warmth grew.
+
+He felt the empty sparkling nights, stars far above, quivering, burning;
+stars far below quivering more in the dark water; and felt his great
+wings wide, strong, all-sufficient, carrying him on and on!
+
+This was in her dreams, too, but he did not know that.
+
+“It is time to go,” he cried one day. “They are coming! It is upon us!
+Yes,—I must go! Goodbye, my wife! Goodbye, my children!” For the passion
+of wings was upon him.
+
+She, too, was stirred to the heart. “Yes, it is time to go!” she cried.
+“I am ready! Come!”
+
+He was shocked, grieved, astonished. “Why, my dear!” he said, “How
+preposterous! You cannot go on the great flight! Your wings are for
+brooding tender little ones! Your body is for the wonder of the gleaming
+treasure.—Not for days’ and nights’ ceaseless soaring! You cannot go!”
+
+She did not heed him. She spread her wide wings and swept and circled far
+and high above,—as, in truth, she had been doing for many days, though he
+had not noticed it.
+
+She dropped to the ridge pole beside him, where he was still muttering
+objections. “Is it not glorious?” she cried. “Come! They are nearly
+ready!”
+
+“You unnatural mother!” he burst forth. “You have forgotten the order of
+nature! You have forgotten your children! Your lovely, precious, tender,
+helpless little ones!” And he wept, for his highest ideals were shattered.
+
+But the precious little ones stood there on the ridge pole and flapped
+their strong young wings in high derision. They were as big as he was,
+nearly; for as a matter of fact, he was but a young stork himself.
+
+Then the air was beaten white with a thousand wings; it was like snow and
+silver and sea-foam; there was a flash, a whirlwind, a hurricane of wild
+joy and then the army of the sky spread wide in due array and streamed
+southward.
+
+Full of remembered joy and more joyous hope, finding the sunlight better
+than her dreams, she swept away to the far summerland; and her children,
+mad with the happiness of the first flight, swept beside her.
+
+“But you are a mother!” he panted, as he caught up with them.
+
+“Yes,” she cried, joyously, “but I was a stork before I was a mother! and
+afterward!—and all the time!”
+
+And the storks were flying.
+
+
+The Doomed Men’s Message
+
+By Mary Carolyn Davies
+
+(In “The Survey.”)
+
+ Three doomed men in the death house write
+ A word like a torch from their night to my night.
+ Three doomed men in Sing Sing wait
+ Through the fading black of the night, a fate
+ That I made for them, I—
+ I said “You must die.”
+
+ They will die at dawn. But before they go
+ They write me a word, that I, too, may know.
+ They sit and write, the three doomed men,
+ (They three never will write again—)
+ Three doomed men in Sing Sing write
+ A word like a torch from their night to my night.
+
+ And this is the word: “Are you justified?
+ We would give our lives for the men who died—
+ Who died—by our hand. But it would not aid.
+ And out of two wrongs can a right be made?”
+
+ It is thus they plead, the three doomed men—
+ They three never will plead again.
+ They must die at dawn. As a brave man faces
+ The death he fears, they will take their places.
+ They will smile, perhaps, they will maybe jest.
+ They will be dust then. Perhaps that’s best;
+ But even so, what good am I
+ To say to three other men, “You must die?”
+ Three doomed men in the death house pray
+ Forgiveness. And I, do I ever pray?
+
+ Three doomed men confess their sin
+ And die as they watch a day begin.
+ Jealousy—anger through drink—and they
+ Go to their death at the break of day!
+ Jealousy, anger through drink—and I
+ A free man, walk down the street. Why, why?
+
+ Did I scorn them? Well, we are brothers now,
+ I and the three, or will be soon.
+ When day blots out this fading moon,
+ I shall have killed, no matter how,
+ Then, murderers all, take heed of me!
+ They killed but one.
+ When my deed is done,
+ My hands will be stained with the blood of three!
+
+ They sit and write, the three doomed men,
+ They three never will write again—
+ But I still shall hear, with fear and dread,
+ What the three doomed men in Sing Sing said.
+
+
+Road Song
+
+By Irene P. McKeehan
+
+(In “The Century Magazine.”)
+
+ I have lived in the garden with Adam,
+ And eaten the fruit of the tree;
+ I have hidden, ashamed, from the face of God,
+ For I dreamed that He could not see.
+ The flaming sword of the Angel of Wrath
+ Has driven me over the earth;
+ I am marked with the mark of the murderer Cain;
+ I have travailed at death and at birth.
+ With patriarch, priest and prophet, I seek for a promised land,
+ Lead me, brother; follow, me, brother; brother, oh, take my hand!
+ I am moving onward, and ever on, O brother, I may not stand!
+
+ I have made my children the slaves of trade,
+ And scarred their backs with the rod;
+ For a bag of gold, with a sword of steel
+ I have broken the laws of God.
+ But whenever a cause demands my life,
+ I have laid it down with a will;
+ For honor and love and a heart-wrung cry
+ I can play the hero still.
+ My feet are firm on the steep, straight way, though I doubt if
+ I understand;
+ Whether you lead or follow me brother, let us go hand in hand!
+ And stay not behind, dear brother of mine, on the road to the
+ Promised Land.
+
+
+Dress Reform
+
+By Amelia Bloomer
+
+(Editor of “The Lily.” An advocate in the ’50s, of dress reform.
+Introduced the bifurcated skirt which popular acclaim at once called “The
+Bloomer.” A woman personally modest, who suffered because of the sneers
+and attacks at her efforts to have women dress sensibly. From “Life and
+Work of Susan B. Anthony.”)
+
+I feel that if all of us were less slaves to fashion we would be nobler
+women, for both our bodies and minds are now rendered weak and useless
+from the unhealthy and barbarous style of dress adopted, and from the
+time and thought in making it attractive. A change is demanded and if I
+have been the means of calling the attention of the public to it and of
+leading only a few to disregard old customs and for once to think and act
+for themselves, I shall not trouble myself about the false imputations
+that may be cast upon me.
+
+
+Giving Up Her Name
+
+By Mrs. Alec Tweedie
+
+(See page 126)
+
+Another handicap that falls to the lot of woman is in her loss of
+individuality and family through giving up her own name in marriage.
+
+
+Purse and the Soul
+
+By Meta L. Stern
+
+(See page 250)
+
+(In “The Comrade.”)
+
+ The soul doth sow and the purse doth reap
+ The purse doth feed while the soul doth weep—
+ Oh, such is the world’s strange way.
+
+ Power and honor the purse doth bring—
+ Worship of trader and priest and king
+ While souls are as cheap as clay.
+
+ O, such is the bitter way of life;
+ A way of unending toil and strife—
+ Our heritage but a curse.
+
+ So must it be till the knell we toll
+ Of senseless greed that gives to the soul
+ Less honor than to the purse.
+
+
+I Heard the Spirit Singing
+
+By June E. Downy
+
+(In “The Independent.”)
+
+ I heard the spirits singing in the ancient caves of work;
+ “You are playing, man-child, playing, where the evil demons lurk.
+ Yet I would not have you falter, or count the awful cost,
+ Lest your heart grow old within you, and your zest for sport be lost.
+
+ “So toss the ball of empire, with its fatal coat of fire;
+ And dig for gilded nuggets, with the pangs of hot desire;
+ And blow your filmy bubbles in the bright face of the sun,
+ Tho’ you know they will tarnish, vanish, ere your playing day is done.
+
+ “Go, spin your humming-top of thought, or brood with sullen lip,
+ As you scrawl upon the canvas, or load the merchant ship;
+ Come, tell some old, old story, or rehearse some ancient creed,
+ Or with many a lisp of wonder, draw the music from the reed.
+
+ “Let your playful hand in cunning devise a giant eye;
+ And in long hours of frolic, guess the secrets of the sky;
+ Or peer with curious longing in the busy under-bourne,
+ Where microscopic beings are playing in their turn.
+
+ “And raise Love’s swaying ladder to the dizzy heights of woe;
+ And walk o’er desert places where the thorns and thistles grow,
+ When the man-child gropes and stumbles and holds his quivering breath,
+ As he meets within the shadows his last playfellow, “Death.”
+
+ I heard the Spirit singing: “Laughter is the strongest prayer,
+ And the zest of faith is measured by the mirth that toys with care;
+ And he who plays the hardest and dares to sing aloud,
+ Beyond the shadows’ caverns may some day work with God.”
+
+
+The Difference
+
+By Olive Schreiner
+
+(From “Woman and Labor.”)
+
+To the male, the giving of life is a laugh; to the female, blood,
+anguish and sometimes death. Here we touch one of the few yet important
+differences between man and woman as such.
+
+
+The Unfair Status
+
+By Matilda Jocelyn Gage
+
+(From “Woman, Church and State.”)
+
+Under French law, woman is a perpetual minor under the guardianship of
+her own, or that of her husband’s family. Only in the case of the birth
+of an illegitimate child is she treated as a responsible being, and then
+only that discomfort and punishment may fall upon her.
+
+
+Custom
+
+By Sarah Sellers
+
+(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
+
+ I was dreaming
+ And I saw the children,
+ The babies from heaven;
+ The mothers of the future
+ Who will nurse us and rear us.
+ Who will teach us, and guide us;
+ Straight from heaven, I saw them,
+ Beautiful to look on;
+ And I heard a voice:
+ “Bring the chains, the chains of custom.”
+
+ The chains were golden,
+ And fine as a baby’s hair,
+ And the beautiful children
+ Were wound in them.
+
+ I was dreaming;
+ And I saw the maidens,
+ Strong and straight,
+ With the beauty of youth in their faces,
+ With the promise of years before them;
+ And I heard a voice:
+ “Bring the chains, the chains of custom.”
+
+ And the new chains were brought,
+ Beautiful and golden;
+ And the maidens did not know
+ They were chains.
+
+ I was dreaming,
+ And the mothers stood before me,
+ With their children around them;
+ And a voice said:
+ “Bring the chains, the chains of custom.”
+
+ And the mothers were bound
+ With chains not golden,
+ And the links held them
+ With the strength of years.
+ The mothers knew they were chained;
+ And they looked at their children.
+
+
+A Thanksgiving
+
+By Theodosia Garrison
+
+(One of America’s leading contemporary poets.)
+
+ For the friendship of women, Lord, that hath been since the world had
+ breath,
+ Since a woman stood at a woman’s side to comfort through birth and
+ death,
+ You have made as a bond of mirth and tears to last forever and aye,—
+ For the friendship of true woman, Lord, take you my thanks today.
+
+ Many the joys I have welcomed, many the joys that have passed,
+ But this is the good unfailing, and this is the peace that shall last;
+ From love that dies and love that lies, and love that must cling and
+ sting,
+ Back to the arms of our sisters we turn, for our comforting.
+
+ For the friendship of true women, Lord, that has been and shall ever be,
+ Since a woman stood at a woman’s side at the cross of Calvary;
+ For the tears we weep and the trust we keep, and the self-same prayers
+ we pray—
+ For the friendship of true women, Lord, take you my thanks today.
+
+
+Women Run in Molds
+
+By Frances Power Cobb
+
+(From “Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture,” a compilation of essays
+published in 1869, in London.)
+
+Of all the theories current concerning women, none is more curious than
+the theory that it is needful to make a theory about them. That a woman
+is a Domestic, a Social, or a Political creature; that she is a Goddess,
+or a Doll; the “Angel in the House,” or a Drudge, with a suckling of
+fools and a chronicaling of small beer for her sole privileges that she
+has, at all events, a “Mission,” or a “Sphere,” or a “Kingdom,” of some
+sort or other, if we could but agree on what it is,—all this is taken
+for granted. But, as nobody ever yet sat down and constructed analogous
+hypotheses about the other half of the human race, we are driven to
+conclude, both that a woman is a more mysterious creature than a man,
+and also that it is the general impression that she is made of some more
+plastic material, which can be advantageously manipulated to fit our
+theory about her nature and office, whenever we have come to a conclusion
+as to what that nature and office may be. “Let us fix our own Ideal in
+the first place,” seems to be the popular notion, and then the real Woman
+in accordance thereto will appear in due course of time. We have nothing
+to do but to make round holes and women will grow round to fill them;
+or square holes, and they will become square. Men grow like trees, and
+the most we can do is to lop or clip them, but women run in molds, like
+candles, and we can make them long-threes, or short-sixes, whichever we
+please.
+
+
+A Sheaf of Quotations
+
+
+By Mme. Necker
+
+Woman’s tongue is her sword which she never lets rust.
+
+
+By Marguerite de Valois
+
+A woman of honor should never suspect another of things she would not do
+herself.
+
+
+By Mme. de Sonza
+
+It is vanity that renders the youth of women culpable and their old age
+ridiculous.
+
+
+By Mdlle. de Lespinasse
+
+A woman would be in despair if Nature had formed her as fashion makes her
+appear.
+
+
+Mme. Fee
+
+Do not take women from the bedside of those who suffer; it is their post
+of honor.
+
+
+By Eugenie de Guerin
+
+A mother’s tenderness and caresses are the milk of the heart.
+
+
+By Margaret Deland
+
+The best things of our nature fashion themselves in silence.
+
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+Life’s just a perpetual piecing together.
+
+
+By Agnes H. Downing
+
+(In “The Progressive Woman.”)
+
+The woman is censured with the idea of protecting morality. And the
+man is let go; why? Nobody knows why. Because he is a man and no one
+ever thought of punishing a man for a little thing like that.... Would
+you avoid tragedies? Then advocate sex-equality. We will always have
+individual and social tragedy so long as the woman is stoned and the man
+goes free.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75366 ***
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