“The wide-spread change in thought and attitude of my sex towards yours,” which Anastasia Beauchamp announced to Adrian Savage in “Lucas Malet’s” novel of the latter name, affects marriage, of course, primarily. And it appears from Ida M. Tarbell, Making a Man of Herself (The American Magazine, February, 1912) that the leaders of Feminism have been trying for many years to dissuade their younger sisters from matrimony:
Man and marriage are a trap—that is the essence the young woman draws from the campaign for woman’s rights.... She will be a “free” individual, not one “tied” to a man. The “drudgery” of the household she will exchange for what she conceives to be the broad and inspiring work which men are doing. From the narrow life of the family she will escape to the excitement and triumph of a “career.” The Business of Being a Woman becomes something to be ashamed of, to be apologized for. All over the land there are women with children clamoring about them, apologizing for never having done anything. Women whose days are spent in trades and professions complacently congratulate themselves that they at least have lived. There were girls in the early days of the movement, as there no doubt are today, that prayed on their knees that they might escape the frightful isolation of marriage; might be free to “live,” and to “know,” and to “do.”
In another article she says:
“Celibacy is the aristocracy of the future,” is the preaching of one European Feminist.... The ranks of the women celibates are not full. Many a candidate falls out by the way, confronted by something she had not reckoned with—the eternal command that she be a woman. She compromises—grudgingly. She will be a woman on condition that she is guaranteed economic freedom, opportunity for self-expressive work, political recognition. What this amounts to is that she does not see in the woman’s life a satisfying and permanent end.
Naturally, this attitude does not tend toward domestic contentment, peace and happiness. The woman who marries in this frame of mind already has her face set toward Reno.
Yet the instinct for maternity is a force. Therefore the great desideratum in the opinion of George Bernard Shaw and Ellen Key is the satisfaction of the instinct without the inconvenience of a husband. But when he comes to deal with the facts Shaw’s courage fails him, and he turns tail and flees. In Getting Married he confesses that, in spite of all its horrors, he can invent no substitute for marriage. Ellen Key, on the other hand, in Love and Marriage, has the courage of her convictions.
And yet her relations to man cannot be entirely without satisfactions to woman. She cannot be quite the slave that the Feminists describe. Anna A. Rogers, in Why American Marriages Fail (Atlantic Monthly, September, 1907) speaks of
the present false and demoralizing deification of women, especially in this country, an idolatry of which we as a people are so inordinately proud. One of the evil effects of this attitude is shown in the intolerance and selfishness of young wives, which is largely responsible for the scandalous slackening of marriage ties in the United States.... Our women as a whole are spoiled, extremely idle, and curiously undeserving of the maudlin worship that they demand from our hard-working men.... The hair-dressers, the manicurists, the cafes at lunch time, are full to overflowing with women—extravagant, idle, self-centred.... She has not merged her fate with her husband’s, if married, nor with her father’s if not: she does not properly supplement their lives; she is striving for a detached, profitless, individuality.... The sacredness and mystery of womanhood are fast passing away from among us.
A successful woman dramatist, an interview with whom was published in The New York Times a few months ago, said:
The American man is a great deal more unselfish and chivalrous than is good for the woman. He often bears his own burden, and part of the woman’s. This is very excellent discipline for him, but it is hard on the woman. She doesn’t have a chance to learn sacrifice.
Miss Tarbell recognized that the Feminist was in revolt against the drudgery of the household. Edna Kenton, for the militants, is even more explicit. She says in Militant Women—and Women (The Century Magazine, November, 1913):
There is rising revolt among women against the unspeakable dullness of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world.... There is nothing in the home alone to satisfy woman’s longing for variety, adventure, romance.
How many men have any means of satisfying their longings for variety, adventure and romance? Miss Kenton’s notion that “the restrictions on men’s free-willing are comparatively few,” is mere silliness. In the business and professional classes woman’s opportunities of disposing of her time and cultivating her tastes are vastly greater than man’s, and among the less fortunate classes, the care of a three-room flat or a five-room house is a lighter servitude than that by which the man gets the bread for his wife and babies. There is more companionship in the children and the neighbors than there is in digging, in tending the lathe, and operating the loom. There is more social life in hanging out the clothes in the back yard, and talking to the woman who is doing the same thing in the next yard, than there is in making entries in a ledger, and adding up columns of figures. The kitchen utensils are as interesting as the saw and the monkey-wrench.
Ninety-five per cent of the work of men is drudgery, and few men have any choice in the selection of their drudgery. They do what as boys they were set at, or what they can get a chance at. A very small proportion of men have variety, adventure, romance, and no one who looks at our shopping streets and places of amusement will be in any doubt that women are less tied to their galley oars than men. Olive Schreiner, in Woman and Labor, ungenerously says that men have always been willing that women should do the coarse and ill-paid work; it is only when women demand admission to the higher and more intellectual occupations that men admonish them to keep within their sphere. Yet to women of genius the world of literature and art and music has long been open, and within recent years a multitude of occupations have been opened to women, with little if any objection from men; perhaps in consistency the Feminists should approve the many men who have been glad enough to shirk the support of their womankind and let their sisters and daughters take care of themselves.
But these are for the most part the unmarried women, very many of whom marry and “lapse with their marriage into the old parasitism,” in the agreeable phrase of Edna Kenton. One remedy for this that has been proposed is that men shall pay wages to their wives. This, however, besides commercializing the union of men and women, is open to the further objection that if a man hires a woman to be his wife, he must have the right to discharge her when he finds some one else that would suit him better, for a time. This is admittedly a makeshift. A more “thorough” remedy offered is “paid motherhood,” the men supporting the state and the state supporting the women and children. In such a case the state would naturally decide what mothers to pay, and what men to mate them with. Nothing that is now recognized as a home could survive such an arrangement, and the Feminists don’t wish it to survive.
And even so, the house work has got to be done by somebody. If it is done by a hired charwoman she would be economically justifying her existence, while if it is done by a wife and mother, she would be a parasite, in the language of Olive Schreiner, and would be earning her living by the exercise of her sex functions, in the chaste words of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics, and Edna Kenton. And in any case the men must go on with their drudgery, which comprises overwhelmingly the greater part of all the work that is done in the world.
On the one hand, we are assured by Feminists that women do not differ from men, and therefore should not be confined to a “sphere.” On the other hand, we are no less confidently assured by them that politics and industry are in pressing need of qualities which men do not possess, and cannot acquire, because they are distinctively feminine. Olive Schreiner has carefully studied the male and female dog, and reaches the conclusion that there is no difference between them to justify different treatment and different occupations. She does not expect woman suffrage to effect any political changes, except in one or two matters where she believes women have interests which men have not, or do not recognize. For example, war. Woman in politics will put an end to war because she knows how much it costs to produce each human life. This is mere rhetoric. What are the facts? The Teutonic women, whose status she would re-establish, went to the wars with their husbands, and fought by their sides. From the Spartan mother who charged her son to return with his shield or on it, to Mlle. Juliette Habay, of Brussels, who wrote: “We are learning to shoot with rifles. Here in Brussels great numbers of young girls have joined rifle corps, and a professor of arms is teaching us to shoot,” when has woman ever failed to gird the sword upon her man? Socially there is assuredly no discrimination against the red coat in England, or the blue coat in the United States.
Very recently Femina, the woman’s newspaper in Paris, addressed to its readers the question, “If not a woman, what man would you have wished to be?” We are told in a news despatch that “Napoleon won easily.”
But Mrs. Schreiner is substantially correct. Biology may know something of male and female temperaments, but in their general characters and habits and adaptability to employments, there is no great difference between her male and female dog, or the male and female of other animals. If the path of progress leads downward by all means let us learn our sociology and domestic economy from the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. If human progress has been retrogression, let us get back by way of primitive man and the missing link, to the animals and birds whose social economy commends itself strongly to Feminist and socialist.
The differentiation of men and women is the most valuable product of ages of gradually developing civilization. The world does not need twice as many diggers in the earth, and workers in metals, as it has now, but it does need homes. If the beasts merely have dens from which they go forth at night for their prey, and in which they produce their young, which they care for only till the young can catch their own game, Mrs. Gilman sees no reason why men and women should have homes, except as places for sleeping, from which they go out every morning to secure subsistence for themselves and for their young. But the latter, in her system, would soon be removed to training institutions conducted by the state, and managed by experts in child-culture; for Mrs. Gilman does not credit women with ability to rear their own offspring (however well she thinks they can rear those of other women), though the world is perishing for lack of their greater participation in industries and politics.
The prolonged association of parents with children, the protraction of mother-love beyond the infancy of offspring, the association of men and women intimately, but not entirely for the perpetuation of the race; the instinct of exclusiveness in the relations of man and woman, and their refinement by sentiments of romance; the development of chivalry and accountability for others in man, and of modesty in woman; the separation of one part of the race from much that the other part must often be in close contact with; the creation of a domestic atmosphere which is not like that of the shop or the field—the essential features of the home and the family—these are the best results of civilization, and against them the Feminist storms. Yet they are more important, if possible, to woman than to man.
Women are different from men as the result of ages of segregation, and that is above all things else the object of Feminist attack. The whole purpose of Feminism is to make the conditions of life the same for men and women. Women are more chaste than men, and the Feminists may be right when they say that this has been forced upon woman by man, but they are mistaken when they treat this not as a gain, but as a grievance. It need not be disputed that men ought to be as pure as women, but it is at least a great gain to hold one sex to a high standard of purity. In the course of time something may be achieved by the other—much has been already, or mixed society would be impossible—but it will not be effected by the Feminists who complain of servitude to man-made standards of morals, and demand for women the freedom practiced surreptitiously by some men.
The common notion of the innate moral superiority of woman is due to fond recollections of happy childhood, to the warm language of poets, to the romance of the male when in the springtime of life his fancies lightly turn to thoughts of love, and to actual differences which are the result of the segregation of women. Feminism is breaking that down, and we are already getting some of the results. In The Vanishing Lady, The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1911, Mrs. Comer finds that the contrast between the people in the novels of Howells and in those of David Graham Phillips suggests something like a submergence of Christian civilization under a wave of materialism and paganism. The interval between these two writers is the period during which Feminism has been spreading like an epidemic. Women have not saved society from the change. The advanced women have not tried to. Like their clothes, they have been entirely up-to-date, and the materialism and paganism of the day are quite as apparent among women as among men.
This is Mrs. Comer’s description of the type of woman who is being evolved by Feminism:
One cannot travel far in these days without being filled with wonder at the vast numbers of these women roaming the continent. They are usually of a willful fatness, with flesh kept firm by the masseuse; their brows are lowering, and there is the perpetual hint of hardness in their faces; their apparel is exceedingly good, but their manners are ungentle, their voices harsh and discontented; there is no light in their eyes, no charm or softness in their presence. They are fitting mates, perhaps, for the able-bodied pagans who are overrunning the earth, but hardly suitable nurses for a generation which must redeem us from materialism, if, indeed, we are to be so redeemed. Facing them, one wonders if race-suicide is not one of nature’s merciful devices?
In a period of rapidly acquired fortunes women have accepted the dollar as the unit of individual worth quite as readily as men have, and have applied it more relentlessly, for men are more democratic than women; rich and poor wear the same costumes, and in their friendships they do not draw the financial line so closely as their wives do. During the spread of Feminism manners have coarsened, modesty is disappearing, the fiction and drama of the day familiarize the young with vice under the thin pretext of fortifying virtue. If it be true, as is sometimes charged, that women are taking to alcohol and tobacco, it is merely one additional evidence that in breaking down the distinctions between men and women, the standards of the former are not raised, but those of the latter are lowered.
Two women have lately suggested the assimilation of the figures of the male and female of the species. Ellen Key refers to the flattening of woman’s bosom as the result of the growing use of artificial means of nourishing infants, and “Lucas Malet” speaks of “large-boned, athletic, sexless persons, petticoated, yet conspicuously deficient in haunches and busts.”
As the garb of male and female in the lower animals does not differ radically, and seldom varies much except in the brighter hues of the male, so the socialist who seeks to assimilate the human sexes, objects to radical differences in their costume, and many essays toward the adoption of the costume of men have been made by advanced women. Morris and Bax, in Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome, deplore differences of costume, saying: “Another fault may be noted in all bad periods (as in the present), that an extreme difference is made between the garments of the sexes.” Since that was written the skirts of women have been reduced to a point suggestive of a single trouser instead of a pair, and the divided skirt, the harem skirt and the riding costume for the cross saddle indicate a movement that Morris and Bax would welcome.
There are history and politics in clothes. Trousers are described as a product of democracy, because they conceal the material of the stocking, whether silk or wool. Not so very long ago men wore laces, and ribbons, and jewels, and delicate tints. With the gradual breaking down of the caste system, the spread of democracy in politics, and of the brotherhood of man in philanthropy and religion, men have reduced their costumes to the present inartistic, but very serviceable standard. There has been no lasting change in that direction in the costume of women. If the determination of some women to “make men of themselves” had coincided with the severe simplicity of the tailor-made suit there would have been, as there has been in some cases, a certain measure of harmony between the inner and the outer woman. But the period of aggressive Feminism coincides with decrees of fashion that are designed to expose as much of the female figure as the police will permit. The paucity of garments, and their thinness and scantiness are suggestive of Vivien, upon whom
The pageants and tableaux which afford women an opportunity to appear in the garb of statues, leave one somewhat in doubt whether Feminism relies chiefly upon arson and malicious mischief, or upon the arts Vivien practiced upon Merlin, for the accomplishment of its ends. Salome is dancing before Herod in the confident expectation that he will give her the half of his kingdom. But it is idle for women in the Western world, in the Twentieth Century, to pretend that they are odalisques, compelled by their helplessness to appeal to the sensuous side of men. They exhibit themselves for their own pleasure, and they dance the whole list of modern dances, with their vulgar names, because they enjoy them.
The extreme of fashion, in this day when Feminism is demanding larger opportunities to refine, purify and uplift the world, is fast reaching the point of
and on the Paris stage this has already been done, with the approbation of the audience, until the Nymph came forward to the footlights to bow her acknowledgment of the applause, when the audience intimated plainly that she was overdoing her part.
In Berlin, in Chicago, and in Washington, very recently opposition to distinctive titles for married and single women has broken out. It is asked indignantly why women, and not men, should be tagged with their conjugal condition. One woman remarks, not without force, that it is more important to know whether men are married, than to know whether women are wives or maidens.
But men have so far been the more public, and therefore the better known of the two. General information about their status is more probable. Perhaps the conjugal status of men ought to be indicated in their titles, but they do not change their names in marriage, and therefore it is less convenient to change their titles. At any rate, it is better that the conjugal condition of one sex should be indicated than that that of neither should be. The distinctive titles for married and single women go back in England, France and Germany, rather less than 250 years, and they constitute a part of the differentiation of women from men which the Feminist resents, but which is really one of the most valuable products of civilization. It is a necessary feature of a society based upon the family as the unit, but in which women are free to move about without guards, and without the supervision of their men.
Intimately connected with the title is the last name the woman is to bear. The Feminist resents being “branded” upon marriage by her husband’s name. Certainly under Ellen Key’s system it would be folly to change the name for each association. One distinguished Feminist in Boston retained her maiden name after marriage, and her daughter uses the names of both parents. But this does not solve, it only evades, the real problem. What is the mother’s name? It is the name of her father. There is no reason to the Feminist or the socialist why she should bear the name of her father, any more than that her daughter should bear her father’s name.
There are no family names now except the names of the men, and in a Feminist society there can be no family names; which will not matter, for there will be no family. The Feminist is less frank in admitting this than the socialist is, but their programs are equally destructive of it. Each person will select his, or her, own name. To this social individualism leads. In no other way will the Feminist woman be satisfied that her identity is not merged in a man, and her ownership by a man indicated for public information.
Feminism is a declaration of sex war, Edna Kenton proclaims. Yet the havoc involved in this might well give advanced women pause. Miss Tarbell (The Uneasy Woman, The American Magazine, January, 1912) does not believe that “Man is a conscious tyrant, holding woman an unwilling captive—cutting her off from the things in life that really matter—education, freedom of speech, the ballot.” She asks:
Is man the calculating tyrant the modern uneasy woman charges?... Is not man a victim as well as she—caught in the same trap? Moreover, is woman never a tyrant? That a man’s life may not be altogether satisfactory, she declines to believe. The uneasy woman has always taken it for granted that man is happier than woman.
Mrs. Rogers recognizes that man, not woman, is the idealist. The unselfishness of woman, beyond her willingness to sacrifice herself for her offspring, is poetic license. She is often unselfish; so is man. In a small material way it may be worth noticing that the amount of ordinary life insurance in this country, nearly all of which is paid for by men for the benefit of women, is thirteen times the amount of the national debt. Man and woman have been happy together, or miserable together. There have been times when a man pounded his wife, but she in turn pounded the children, and he in his turn was pounded by men higher than he in the social scale. With an improvement in manners and morals, man ceased submitting to pounding on the one side, and inflicting it on the other. When force was the rule in all social relations, both suffered from it. Since force ceased to be the rule, woman has had very much the better of man; for she cares less about his comfort than he does about hers; and while he will give up a good deal for the sake of peace, there is little that she will not give up peace for the sake of. “It is the perseverance which conquers,” says Thackeray, “the daily return to the object desired. Take my advice, my dear sir, when you see your womankind resolute about a matter, give up at once and have a quiet life.”
The common interests of men and women, subserved by co-operation and certain to be destroyed by competition, should avert sex war. The bonds of matrimony, which gall so many women, are mainly restraints upon men, and protections of women. Their dissolution would be cheerfully submitted to by very many men, but it ought not to be necessary to refer to the condition women would find themselves in after a few years. The condition of the greater part of the women who have achieved economic independence in the mills and shops is not such as to commend economic independence to all the others, disregarding for a moment the certain destruction of the domestic life, the home, and the family, that would result from the universal economic independence of married women.
The answer to both Feminist and Socialist is that of The Lords of Their Hands, in Kipling’s, An Imperial Rescript. They were on the point of signing the pact which would put an end to all struggle in the industrial world—
After several delegates had expressed themselves energetically in regard to their plans for themselves and the Eternal Feminine, who was untouched by the Feminist movement—
They passed one resolution: “Your sub-committee believe