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Title: Concerning Women

Author: Suzanne La Follette

Release date: June 4, 2022 [eBook #68226]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Albert & Charles Boni

Credits: MWS, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONCERNING WOMEN ***

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CONCERNING
WOMEN

_by_

SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE

[Illustration: Logo]

ALBERT & CHARLES BONI
NEW YORK      1926


_Copyright, 1926, by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc._

_Manufactured in the United States of America_


_To_

ELLEN WINSOR

and

REBECCA WINSOR EVANS




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                              PAGE
  I THE BEGINNINGS OF EMANCIPATION                      1

 II WOMAN’S STATUS, PAST AND PRESENT                   19

III INSTITUTIONAL MARRIAGE AND ITS ECONOMIC ASPECTS    56

 IV WOMAN AND MARRIAGE                                 93

  V THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF WOMEN                    157

 VI WHAT IS TO BE DONE                                207

VII SIGNS OF PROMISE                                  270




CONCERNING
WOMEN


_Let there be, then, no coercion established in society, and the common
law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper
places._

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.




CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNINGS OF EMANCIPATION


It will be foolish to assume that women are free, until books about
them shall have ceased to have more than an antiquarian interest. All
such books, including this one, imply by their existence that women may
be regarded as a class in society; that they have in common certain
characteristics, conditions or disabilities which, predominating over
their individual variations, warrant grouping them on the basis of sex.
No such assumption about men would be thinkable. Certain masculine
qualities, so-called, may be singled out by amateur psychologists
and opposed to certain feminine qualities, so-called; but from books
about the sphere of man, the rights of man, the intelligence of man,
the psychology of man, the soul of man, our shelves are mercifully
free. Such books may one day appear, but when they do it will mean
that society has passed from its present state through a state of
sex-equality and into a state of female domination. In that day, in
place of the edifying spectacle of men proclaiming that woman is useful
only as a bearer of children, society may behold the equally edifying
spectacle of women proclaiming that man is useful only as a begetter
of children; since it seems to be characteristic of the dominant sex
to regard the other sex chiefly as a source of pleasure and as a means
of reproduction. It seems also to be characteristic of the dominant
sex--I judge from the world’s experience during the domination of
men--to regard itself as humanity, and the other sex as a class of
somewhat lower beings created by Providence for its convenience and
enjoyment; just as it is characteristic of a dominant class, such as an
aristocracy, to regard the lower classes as being created solely for
the purpose of supporting its power and doing its will. When once a
social order is well established, no matter what injustice it involves,
those who occupy a position of advantage are not long in coming to
believe that it is the only possible and reasonable order, and imposing
their belief, by force if necessary, on those whom circumstances have
placed in their power. There is nothing more innately human than the
tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been
divinely ordained.

Thus among the Hebrews the subordination of woman gave rise to the
notion that she was fashioned out of man’s rib. She was the result of
a divine afterthought, the _sexus sequior_ of the ancients and more
recently of Schopenhauer, “inferior in every respect to the first.”
Since the Divine Artist had had good practice in creating Adam, it
might logically have been expected that His second sex would turn out
even better than His first; we must therefore lay His failure to the
somewhat sketchy nature of the materials He chose to work with. This
Hebrew myth of the creation of woman has had considerable effect on
her status in the era known as Christian. Being “only a supernumerary
bone,” as Bossuet reminded her, she could naturally not aspire to a
position of equality with man. She must remember her origin, and be
humble and subservient as befitted a mere rib.

She was humble and subservient, as a matter of fact, for an incredibly
long time; so long that there exists a general suspicion even at the
present day that there is something in her nature which makes her want
to be subject to man and to live as it were at second hand. This
thought would be even more alarming than it is, perhaps, if it were
not true that men themselves have stood for a good deal of subjection
during the world’s known history. Chattel slavery and serfdom were
abolished from the civilized world only at about the time that the
subjection of women began to be modified; and men still endure, not
only with resignation but with positive cheerfulness, a high degree of
industrial and political slavery. The man who is entirely dependent for
his livelihood upon the will of an employer is an industrial slave, and
the man who may be drafted into an army and made to fight and perhaps
die for a cause in which he can have no possible interest is the
slave of the State; yet one can not see that this proves Aristotle’s
assumption that there are free natures and slave natures, any more than
the subjection of women proves that they want to be subjected. What the
slavery of men, as of women, implies is the existence of an economic
and social order that is inimical to their interests as human beings;
and it implies nothing more than this.

Nor does the opposition to the emancipation of women which still finds
expression in this country and in Europe, prove anything more than that
superstitious addiction to custom of which I have already spoken.
Those anxious critics who protest that women have got more freedom than
is good for Society make the mistake of supposing that Society can
exist only if its organization remains unchanged. The same conservatism
has opposed all the revolutionary adaptations which have fitted the
social order to the breakdown of old forms and their replacement by
new ones. Yet when the need for such adaptations ceases, the growth of
the social organism ceases with it, and we have such a spectacle of
arrested development as the civilization of India presents. Society, in
so far as it has become organic, is governed by the same rules as any
other organism: the condition of its health is growth, and growth is
change.

Certainly the present tendency of woman to assume a position of
equality with man involves, and will continue even more to involve,
profound psychic and material readjustments. But to assume that such
readjustments will injure or destroy Society is to adopt toward
Society an attitude of philosophical realism, to attribute to it a
personality, to suppose that it is equally capable of destruction with
the individual, and that it may in some mystical way derive benefit
from the sacrifice of the individual’s best interests. But what is
Society save an aggregation of individuals, half male, half female?
Where you have a handful of people forming a community, there you have
Society; and if the individuals are enlightened and humane it may be
called a civilized Society, if they are ignorant and brutal it will
be uncivilized. To assume that its “interests” may be promoted by
the enslavement of one-half its members, is unreasonable. One may be
permitted the doubtful assumption that this enslavement promotes the
welfare of the other half of Society, but it is obvious that it can
not promote the welfare of the whole, unless we assume that slavery
is beneficial to the slave (the classic assumption, indeed, where the
slaves have been women). When we consider the political organization
known as the State, we have a different matter. The State always
represents the organized interest of a dominant class; therefore the
subjection of other classes may be said to benefit the State, and their
emancipation may be opposed as a danger to the State.

It is evident from the very nature of the State[1] that its interests
are opposed to those of Society; and while the complete emancipation of
women, as I shall show later, would undoubtedly imply the destruction
of the State, since it must accrue from the emancipation of other
subject classes, their emancipation, far from destroying Society, must
be of inestimable benefit to it. Those critics, and there are many, who
argue that women must submit to restrictions upon their freedom for the
good of the State, as well as those advocates of woman’s rights who
argue that women must be emancipated for the good of the State, simply
fail to make this vital distinction between the State and Society; and
their failure to do so is one of the potent reasons why the nonsense
that has been written about women is limited only by the literature of
the subject.

Feminist and anti-feminist arguments from this standpoint centre in
the function of childbearing; therefore it should be noted that the
emphasis which is placed on this function by the interest of the State
is quite different from the emphasis that would be placed upon it by
the interest of Society; for the interest of the State is numerical,
while the interest of Society is qualitative. The State requires as
many subjects as possible, both as labour-motors and as fighters.
The interest of Society, on the other hand, is the interest of
civilization: if a community is to be wholesome and intelligent, it is
necessary not that the individuals who compose it shall be as numerous
as possible, but that they shall be as wholesome and intelligent as
possible. In general, the interest of the State is promoted by the
number of its subjects; that of Society by the quality of its members.

The interest of the State in this respect has been most concisely
expressed by Nietzsche. “Man,” said he, “shall be trained for war,
and woman for the re-creation of the warrior: all else is folly”,
and if one accept his premises he is exactly right. But there have
been many writers on women who have not accepted his premises--not at
least without qualification--and who have yet failed to observe the
antithesis between the interest which the State has, and the interest
which Society has, in the question of population. Hence, mingled
with the voices of those critics who have demanded the subjection
of woman for the sake of children, have been the voices of other
critics demanding her emancipation for the sake of children: and both
these schools of critics have overlooked her claim to freedom on her
own behalf. It is for the sake of humanity, and not for the sake of
children, that women ought to have equal status with men. That children
will gain enormously by the change is true; but this is beside the
issue, which is justice.

The argument that woman must be free for the sake of the race, is
an argument of expediency; as nine-tenths of the arguments against
her legal subjection have been, and indeed had to be. Unfortunately,
humanity is likely to turn a deaf ear to the claims of justice,
especially when they conflict with established abuses, unless these
claims are backed by the claims of expediency plus a good measure of
necessity. Adventitious circumstances have made the social recognition
of woman’s claims a necessity, and their political recognition a
matter of expediency. Otherwise she would have to wait much longer
for the establishment of her rights as man’s equal than now appears
likely. In the Western world her battle is very largely won; full
equality, social, industrial and legal, seems to be only a matter of
time and tactics. This she owes to the great political and industrial
revolutions of the eighteenth century.

The conscious movement towards freedom for women may be said to have
originated in the great emancipatory movement which found expression in
the American and French revolutions. The revolutionists did not succeed
in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in
equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some;
and it soured. But they did succeed in creating political forms which
admitted, in theory at least, the principle of equality. Their chief
contribution to progress was that they dramatically and powerfully
impressed the idea of liberty upon the minds of men, and thus altered
the whole course of human thought. Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, “A
Vindication of the Rights of Women,” revolutionary though it seemed in
its day, was a perfectly natural and logical application of this idea
of liberty to the situation of her sex. This remarkable book may be
said to have marked the beginning of the conscious movement towards
the emancipation of women.

The unconscious movement was the outgrowth of the revolution in
industry, brought about by the introduction of the machine. Women had
always been industrial workers, but their work, after the break-up of
the gilds, was for the most part carried on at home. When the factory
supplanted the family as the producing unit in society, the environment
of women was altered; and the change affected not only those women
who followed industry to the factories, but also those who remained
housewives, for where these had before been required to perform, or
at least to superintend, a large amount of productive work, they now
found their function, as the family became a consuming unit, reduced to
the superintendence of expenditures and the operation of the household
machinery--a labour which was increasingly lightened by the progress of
invention. With domestic conditions so changed, what was more natural
than that the daughters should go into the factory; or, if the family
were well-to-do, into the schools, which were forced reluctantly to
open their doors to women? And what was more natural than that women,
as their minds were developed through education, should perceive the
injustice and humiliation of their position, and organize to defend
their right to recognition as human beings? “If we dared,” says
Stendhal, “we would give girls the education of a slave.... Arm a man
and then continue to oppress him, and you will see that he can be so
perverse as to turn his arms against you as soon as he can.”

Women in the factories and shops; women in the schools--from this it
was only a moment to their invasion of the professions, and not a
very long time until they would be invading every field that had been
held the special province of men. This is the great unconscious and
unorganized woman’s movement which has aroused such fear and resentment
among people who saw it without understanding it.

The organized movement may be regarded simply as an attempt to get this
changing relation of women to their environment translated into the
kind of law that the eighteenth century had taught the world to regard
as just: law based on the theory of equal rights for all human beings.
The opposition that the movement encountered offers ample testimony to
the fact that “acceptance in principle” is more than a mere subterfuge
of diplomats and politicians. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
resolutely clung to the theory of equality, and as resolutely opposed
its logical application. This is not surprising; most people, no doubt,
when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations
about the proper application of the word “human.” Women had hardly been
regarded as human in mediaeval Europe; they were considered something
a little more from the chivalrous point of view, and something a
little less from the more common, workaday standpoint. The shadow of
this old superstition still clouded the minds of men: therefore it
is hardly surprising that the egalitarians of the French Revolution
excluded women from equal political and legal rights with men; and
that the young American republic which had adopted the Declaration of
Independence, continued to sanction the slavery of negroes and the
subjection of women. How firmly rooted this superstition was, may be
seen in the following irresistibly funny excerpt from the writings of
that great American advocate of freedom, the author of the Declaration,
Thomas Jefferson.


     Were our State a pure democracy, in which all its inhabitants
     should meet together to transact all their business, there would
     yet be excluded from their deliberations (1) infants until arrived
     at years of discretion. (2) Women, who, to prevent depravation of
     morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the
     public meetings of men. (3) Slaves.


Thus does superstition cast out logic. Nor does superstition die
easily. The masculine assumption, usually quite unconscious, that women
are unfit for freedom, bids fair to persevere as stubbornly as the
feminine assumption that marriage offers a legitimate and established
mode of extortion.[2]

If the conscious feminists bore the brunt of the resentment aroused
by woman’s changing relation to the world about her, it was because
their opponents did them the honour of believing that they were
responsible for the change. It was a strangely incurious attitude that
permitted such an assumption to be held; for it really takes a very
feeble exercise of intelligence to perceive that a handful of feminist
agitators could hardly coax millions of women into industry--under
conditions often extremely disadvantageous--into business, the schools
and the professions. I believe the cause of this incuriousness lay in
the very fear aroused by these changes and the social revaluations
which they implied; fear for a relation between the sexes which,
having been established for so long, seemed the only reasonable, or
indeed possible, relation. Filled as they were with this fear of
change, which is one of the strongest human emotions, the opponents of
woman’s emancipation were incapable of objectivity. Their intellectual
curiosity was paralyzed. This accounts, perhaps, for the utterances of
two such eminent philosophers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They came
to the subject strongly prejudiced: the idea of any claims on behalf of
women filled them with disgust; therefore, as one may take a certain
malicious pleasure in observing, their thought on the subject was
hampered by that “weakness of the reasoning faculty” which Schopenhauer
found characteristic of women. If, when discussing woman, they had
not been as “childish, frivolous and short-sighted” as they believed
women to be, they might, along with lesser minds, have arrived at some
understanding of a subject which has always been thought much more
mysterious and baffling than it really is. The woman of their day may
have been the poor creature they pronounced her to be, but if she was,
the obvious question was, Why? Was she a poor creature by nature, or
because of centuries of adaptation to a certain kind of life? This
question neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche took the trouble to ask.
They weighed her as she was--or as they thought she was--and arrived
at the sage conclusion that the West had much to learn from the Orient
concerning the proper attitude toward her.


     It would be a very desirable thing [says Schopenhauer] if this
     Number Two of the human race were in Europe also relegated to
     their natural place [which he conceives to be the harem of a
     polygamous household] and an end put to this lady-nuisance, which
     not only moves all Asia to laughter but would have been ridiculed
     by Greece and Rome as well.


Nietzsche, in the same vein, remarks that


     a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has
     also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and
     harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of
     woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession,
     as confinable property, as a being predestined for service and
     accomplishing her mission therein.


Such a view of the “weaker sex” of course proves nothing about women,
but it proves a good deal about the effect that their subjection
has had on the minds of men. It is a significant fact that both
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were Germans, and that in their day the
status of women was lower in Germany than in any other important
country of the Western World, except Italy.

The corruption of both sexes that results from the subjection of
one, has been too convincingly dealt with by other writers to need
discussion here. What I should like to emphasize is the futility
of approaching the so-called “woman question” with any sort of
pre-conceived notion concerning the nature of woman, or her sphere, or
her duty to the State or to Society; and above all, of approaching it
with the idea--the idea that obsesses all reformers--that she is a more
or less passive creature about whom something either ought or ought
not to be done, or, for that matter, about whom something can be done.
What she should and can do for herself is a different matter; and to
that question I intend to address myself before I leave this subject.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For a most enlightening treatment of the genesis and nature of
the State, I refer my readers to Franz Oppenheimer’s short treatise
on the subject (“The State,” B. W. Huebsch, Inc., New York). It is
sufficient here to define it as an organization primarily designed to
perpetuate the division of Society into an owning and exploiting class
and a landless, exploited class. In its genesis it is an organization
of a conquering group, by means of which that group maintains its
economic exploitation of those subjugated. In its later stages, when
the conquering class has become merely an owning class, the State is an
organization controlled by this class through its control of wealth,
for the purpose of protecting ownership against the propertyless
classes and facilitating their exploitation by the owning class. The
State is thus the natural enemy of all its citizens except those of the
owning class.

[2] I shall take up this question later; but I might remark that this
point is well illustrated by a suit recently brought in the State
of New York. The former wife of a wealthy man, whom he had divorced
twenty years before, brought action against him for separation and
maintenance. When asked why she had waited twenty years before
questioning the validity of the divorce and her husband’s subsequent
remarriage, her lawyer stated that _she had never been in need of money
before_, but that she had been swindled out of the money settled upon
her by her husband at the time of the divorce. The italics are mine;
and no comment, I think, is needed.




CHAPTER II

WOMAN’S STATUS, PAST AND PRESENT


I

Woman tends to assume a position of equality with man only where the
idea of property in human beings has not yet arisen or where it has
disappeared: that is to say, only in extremely primitive or highly
civilized communities. In all the intermediate stages of civilization,
woman is in some degree regarded as a purchasable commodity. Her status
varies widely among different peoples: there are primitive tribes
where she holds a position of comparative independence; and there are
civilized peoples, on the other hand, among whom she is virtually a
slave. But always there is present the idea of subordination to a male
owner, husband, father or brother, even though it may survive only in
ceremonial observances, _e.g._, in the ritual practice of “giving in
marriage,” or in certain legal disabilities, such, for instance, as the
law entitling a man to his wife’s services without remuneration.

The subjection of women, then, bears a close intrinsic resemblance
to both chattel slavery and industrial slavery, in that its basis
is economic. As soon as civilization advances to the point of a
rudimentary organization of agriculture and industry, woman becomes
valuable as a labour-motor and a potential producer of children
who will become labour-motors and fighters. Her economic value, or
chattel-value, then, is a commodity for which her family may demand
payment; and hence, apparently, arises the custom of exacting a
bride-price from the man who wishes to marry her. Once established,
this custom of barter in marriage strikes root so deeply that the
woman who has brought no bride-price is often regarded with scorn and
her children considered illegitimate; and the idea of male ownership
that accompanies it becomes so pronounced that it persists even where,
owing to an excess of women coupled with monogamy, the custom has been
practically reversed, and the father buys a husband for his daughter.
An instance of this survival is the system of dowry which exists in
France. Unless it is otherwise stipulated by pre-nuptial agreement, the
dowry is at the disposal of the husband, and the wife, under the law,
owes him obedience.

When the bargain has been made and the bride delivered to her husband’s
family, her services generally become, save in tribes where residence
is matrilocal, the property of her purchasers, and she is subject to
her husband, or, where the patriarchal system is highly developed, to
the head of his tribe. It must be remarked, however, that although this
is the usual arrangement, it is not invariable. Among some peoples,
the husband’s rights are purely sexual, the services of the wife, and
often even her children, belonging to her own tribe; and among others,
the husband must pay for his bride in services which render him for a
long period the virtual slave of his wife’s relatives. The point to be
remarked in all this is that any conception of woman as an individual
entity, as in any sense belonging to herself, and not to her own
relatives or to her husband and his family, seems to be practically
non-existent among primitive peoples, as it was until recently among
civilized peoples. But it must be remarked, too, that in this respect
her position is only less desirable than that of the man; for in
primitive society the group so dominates the individual that in almost
every phase of life he is hedged about with restrictions and taboos
which leave little room for the play of personality and the pursuit of
individual desires. All social advancement has been in the direction of
the individual’s escape from this group-tyranny.

So important is the part that the labour of women plays in the
primitive world, that the wife or wives are often the sole support
of husband and family; and a man’s wealth and social prestige may
actually depend upon the number of his wives. “Manual labour among
savages,” says Westermarck, “is undertaken chiefly by the women; and
as there are no day-labourers or persons who will work for hire, it
becomes necessary for any one who requires many servants to have many
wives.” _There are no day-labourers or persons who will work for hire._
Women, then, are the first victims of that deep-rooted and instinctive
preference for living by the labour of other people, which has played
so momentous and sinister a rôle in the world’s history. Among tribes
whose mode of life has made them exploitable by stronger and more
highly organized hordes--as, for example, an agricultural people which
is conquered by a more mobile and disciplined tribe of herders--there,
among the expropriated class, are day-labourers and people who will
work for hire, for these have no choice or alternative; but among
peoples where militant exploitation is impossible--as among the
hunting-tribes--no man can be forced to work for another man, for the
simple reason that there is no way of compelling him to share the
product of his labour. But even here we see the economic phenomenon of
the labour of women being exploited as the labour of man is exploited
after conquest and the foundation of the exploiting State; and this
is the case chiefly because certain natural disadvantages render them
easily exploitable, as I shall show later.

It may be remarked in this connexion, that sexual division of labour
appears to be quite arbitrary among primitive peoples; and that it
often bears little resemblance to the division which has existed
for so long among Europeans that it has apologists who regard it as
being divinely ordained.[3] This suggests at least that the European
division is arbitrary too. Indeed, it has undergone considerable
change. Brewing, for example, was regarded as woman’s work in mediaeval
England. It is even supposed that the monasteries, which excluded
women from other service within their walls, employed women brewers. In
general, it appears a fair conclusion that the occupations which are
considered least desirable are given over to the subordinate sex. Thus
men, according to the Vaertings, during the period when women dominated
in Egypt, were forced to care for children and perform the drudgery of
the household. Where military enterprise plays a part in tribal life,
the division of labour appears to give validity to the contention of
Spencer and others that man is militant and woman industrial; yet
the exclusion of women from military activity is no doubt primarily
due quite as much to the taboos against them as to their own lack of
warlike spirit. Indeed, there are tribes where women take active part
in fighting; and there are folk-tales in plenty which tell of their
prowess--as, for example, in the epic lore of Greece and Russia. But
because of a primitive awe of the function of menstruation, women are
often considered unclean, and excluded on this account from many tribal
activities, particularly from religious rites. Among such peoples, it
would not be surprising to find that the same superstition excluded
women from participation in any enterprise in which the tribal gods
are so active and their aid so important as in war. In certain tribes
of South Africa there is, according to Dr. Elsie Clews Parsons, a
direct connexion between militancy and a taboo against woman. “A man
sleeping with his wife must be careful not to touch her with his right
hand. Otherwise his strength as a warrior goes from him and he will
surely be killed.”

Whatever be the basis of sexual division of labour among different
tribes, and whatever minor differences there be in the relative
position of the sexes, one thing is certain, and it is all we are
at present concerned with, namely: in what Dr. Lowie has called
“that planless hodge-podge, that thing of shreds and patches called
civilization,” woman almost invariably occupies a more or less inferior
position. Dr. Lowie himself is careful to warn his readers against
the popular assumption that the position of primitive woman is always
abject, and that the status of woman offers a sure index of cultural
advancement; nevertheless he says that “It is true that in by far the
majority of both primitive and more complex cultures woman enjoys, if
we apply our most advanced ethical standards, a less desirable position
than man.”

The obvious question is, Why? The answer is equally obvious, and has
been so often stated and discussed that I need do no more than mention
it here. Woman, however nearly her physical strength in the natural
state may approximate that of man, is under a peculiar disadvantage in
being the childbearing sex. During pregnancy, at least in its later
stages, and during childbirth, she is powerless to defend herself
against aggression. She is also at considerable disadvantage during
the early infancy of her child. Man in the savage state, having
none of that consideration which proceeds in a rough ratio with
cultural development, takes advantage of her periodic weakness and
her consequent need of protection, to force her into a subordinate
position. Superstition, masculine jealousy and desire for domination,
have of course been joined with the economic motive in bringing about
this subjection to the male; but these motives could not have operated
if her subjection had not been physically possible. If woman had had
the natural advantage over man, she would have used it to subject him,
precisely as he used his advantage to subject her; for the human being
in the ruder stages exploits other human beings, when possible, as a
matter of course, without any of those pretexts and indirections that
characterize communities where the sense of human rights has become
sufficiently general to gain the doubtful tribute of disingenuousness.
It is among these more enlightened communities that the subjection of
woman--or of any class--becomes reprehensible: a society that exploits
human beings through ignorant brutality is not open to the same
criticism as a society which continues to exploit them when clearly
aware that in doing so it is violating a natural right.


II

So much for the cause of woman’s subjection and exploitation. It has
had powerful abetment in superstitious notions concerning sex, such as
the primitive horror of menstruation. “Even educated Indians,” says Dr.
Lowie, “have been known to remain under the sway of this sentiment, and
its influence in moulding savage conceptions of the female sex as a
whole should not be underrated. The monthly seclusion of women has been
accepted as a proof of their degradation in primitive communities, but
it is far more likely that the causal sequence is to be reversed and
that her exclusion from certain spheres of activity and consequently
lesser freedom is the consequence of the awe inspired by the phenomena
of periodicity.”

It is evident that this superstition has operated powerfully to
segregate women into a special class, excluded from full and equal
participation in the life of the community. It is also reasonable to
assume that it has stimulated the growth of many other superstitions
that have hedged them about from time immemorial. It is probably, for
example, closely connected with the Chinese association of evil with
the female principle of the Universe, and with the Hebrew notion that
sorrow entered the world through the sin of a woman. No doubt it may be
connected with the mediaeval tendency to regard woman as a mysterious
and supernatural being, either angelic or demoniac. The conception
of sibyls and witches is derived from it; and likewise the notion
which shows an interesting persistence even now, that a good woman is
somewhat nearer the angels than a good man, and a bad woman much more
satanic than a bad man.[4] Once the idea is established that woman is
a being extra-human, minds prepossessed by this superstition may see
her as either subhuman or superhuman; or these two notions may coexist,
as in Christian society.

The notion that there is always a savour of sin in the indulgence of
sexual appetite, even when exercised under due and formal regulation,
has also had a profound effect on the status of women. This notion is
to be found in both primitive and civilized communities; and since
to each sex the other sex represents the means of gratifying sexual
desire, the other sex naturally comes, where such a notion obtains,
to represent temptation and sin. But where one sex is dominant and
tends to regard itself as the sum of humanity, the other sex is forced
to bear alone the burden of responsibility for the evil that sex
represents; and it is therefore hedged about by the dominant sex with
all sorts of restrictions intended to reduce its opportunities to be
tempting, and thus to minimize its harmfulness.

It seems a fair assumption that the association of sin with sex-desire
may have arisen from the antagonism between individual inclination
and the domination of the group. Among peoples where the clan or the
family is the final category, marriage is far from being exclusively a
matter of individual interest and preference; indeed the individuals
concerned may have little or nothing to say about it. The marriage
is arranged by their elders, and the principals may not even see one
another before their wedding day. Marriage under these conditions is a
contract between families, an arrangement for founding a new economic
unit and for perpetuating the tribe, as royal marriages are purely
dynastic arrangements in behalf of a political order. Sexual preference
can have little place in such a scheme; nothing, indeed, is more
inimical to it. Love becomes an interloping passion, threatening the
purely utilitarian basis upon which sex has been placed; and as such it
must be discountenanced, and young men and women carefully segregated
in order that this inconvenient sentiment may have no chance to spring
up unauthorized between them.

In the Christian world this association of sin with the sexual
appetite has prevailed since the days of St. Paul.[5] Sexual desire
has been regarded as a base instinct, and its gratification under
any circumstances as a kind of moral concession; therefore woman, as
the instrument of sexual satisfaction in the dominant male, must be
repressed and regulated accordingly, and to this end she was always to
be under obedience to some man, either her husband or a male relative.
“Nothing disgraceful,” says Clement of Alexandria, “is proper for
man, who is endowed with reason; much less for woman, to whom it
brings shame even to reflect of what nature she is.” Repression has
combined with the proprietary idea to make chastity a woman’s principal
if not her only virtue, and unchastity a sin to be punished with a
severity that, in another view, seems irrational and disproportionate,
by permanent social ostracism, for example, as in most modern
communities, or, as in Egypt and mediaeval Europe, by violent death. An
extraordinary inconsistency appears in the fact that since Christian
thought has chiefly connected morality with chastity, woman came to be
regarded as the repository of morality, and as such to be considered
on a higher moral plane than man. But it was really her economic and
social inferiority that made her the repository of morality. She must
embody the ideal of sexual restraint that her husband often found it
inconvenient or onerous to attain for himself; and any unfaithfulness
to this ideal on her part inflicted upon him a mysterious injury
called “dishonour.” He might indulge his own polygamous leanings with
impunity, but his failure to make effective his sexual monopoly of his
wife made him liable to contempt and ridicule. So strongly does this
notion persist that one may find anthropologists, usually the most
objective among our men of science, gauging the morality of a primitive
people by the chastity of its women.

Of course the effect of the attempt to make the chastity of women
a matter of morality and law, has been the precise opposite of the
one aimed at. Society can never be made virtuous through arbitrary
regulation; it can only be made unhappy and unamiable. The attempt
to suppress all unauthorized expression of the sex-impulse in women
tended to make them not only miserable and abject, but hypocritical
and deceitful; and it tended also to make men predatory. This was its
inevitable result in a society where women paid an exorbitant penalty
for unchastity and men paid no penalty at all; a result which has made
the relations between the sexes in the Christian world about as bad
as any that could be imagined. Theoretically, to be sure, Christianity
exacted of men the same degree of chastity as of women; practically
it did no such thing, as may be amply proved even now by a study of
the marriage and divorce laws of Christian nations, not excepting
our own.[6] The sexual license of the dominant male was limited only
by the practicable correspondence between his own desires and his
opportunities; and thanks to that convenient being, the prostitute,
his opportunities were plentiful. Hence for him, women were divided
into two classes: the chaste and respectable from whom he chose the
wife who kept his home, bore his children, and embodied his virtue;
and those outcasts from society who promoted the chastity of the first
class by offering themselves, for a price, as sacrifices to illicit
sexual desire. Neither class was he bound to respect; for the only
thing that compels respect is independence, and in neither the first
nor the second class were women independent. From the man’s point of
view, such a social arrangement was superficially satisfactory. It
provided for what might be called the utilitarian ends of sex; that
is to say, the man’s name was perpetuated and his natural appetites
gratified. But beyond this it left a good deal to be desired. Its worst
effect was by way of a complete evaporation of the spiritual quality of
union between man and woman and the very considerable dehumanization
that in consequence set in. Both the wife and the prostitute were man’s
creatures _quoad hoc_, to be used for different purposes but equally
to be used. It is hardly to be wondered at that man came to regard
women as “the sex,” and through his own management of their degradation
came to feel and to express toward them a degree of contempt that
cast considerable doubt on his own humanity. It is invariable that
the person who is able to regard any class of human beings as _per
se_ his natural inferiors, will by so doing sacrifice something of
his own spiritual integrity. In his relation to woman, man occupied a
position of privilege analogous to that occupied by the aristocracy
in the State; and he paid the same penalty for his exercise of a
usurped and irresponsible power: a coarsening of his spiritual fibre.
One of the oddest of the many odd superstitions that have grown out
of male domination is the notion that men suffer less spiritual harm
from sexual promiscuity than women; and this in spite of the biblical
injunction, applied exclusively to their sex: “None who go unto her
return again.” This superstition is accountable for abundant and
incurable misery; and so slow is it to disappear that one is inclined
to advocate a movement for the emancipation of men, a movement to free
them from the prejudices and prepossessions concerning women that are
inculcated by the traditional point of view.

We have seen that the Christian philosophy looked upon woman as man’s
creature and his chief temptation, and that Christian society took
good care to keep her in that position. In doing so, it made her the
enemy of man’s better self in a way that apparently was not foreseen
by St. Paul, whose concern with the temptations of the flesh seems
to have been a matter of more passionate conviction than his concern
with those of the spirit. Woman’s subordinate position; her enforced
ignorance; the narrowness of the interests that were allowed her; the
exaggerated regard for the opinion of other people that was bound
to be developed in a creature whose whole life depended on her
reputation--these conditions were calculated to evolve the sort of
being which is hardly able to give clear recognition either to her own
spiritual interest or to that of other people. Such a being would be
the enemy of man’s spiritual interest primarily through sheer inability
to understand it. Public opinion was the arbiter of her own destiny;
how could she be expected to conceive of any other or higher for man?
Her whole life must be lived for appearances; how could she help man
to live for actualities, and to make the sacrifice of appearances
that such an ideal might entail? The only renunciation of the world
that figured in her life was that which led to the convent; of that
renunciation which involves being in the world but not of it--that
steady repudiation of its standards which clears the way to spiritual
freedom--of such a renunciation she would almost certainly be unable
even to dream. The inevitable result of this enforced narrowness was
well stated by John Stuart Mill in the essay which remains the classic
of feminist literature; he pointed out that in a world where women
are almost exclusively occupied with material interests, where their
standard of appraisal is the opinion of other people, their ambition
will naturally connect itself with material things, with wealth
and prestige, no matter how inimical such an ambition may be to the
spiritual interests of the men upon whom they depend. That there have
been distinguished exceptions to this rule does credit to the strength
of character which has enabled an individual now and then to attain
something like spiritual maturity in spite of a disabling and retarding
environment.


III

The effects of repression and seclusion on the character of woman
have given rise, and an appearance of reason, to a host of other
superstitions about her nature; notions which have been expressed in
terms by many writers and have coloured the thought of many others. To
offer a petty but interesting example, one of the most widely prevalent
and most easily disproved of these is the belief that women are by
nature more given to self-decoration than men. Certainly the practice
in civilized society at present seems to bear out this notion. But when
we turn to primitive communities we find, on the contrary, that the men
are likely to be vainer of finery and more given to it than the women.
The reason is simple: decoration of the person arises from the desire
to enhance sex-attraction; and it is most industriously practised by
that sex among whose members there is the keener competition for favour
with members of the opposite sex. In European civilization marriage
has been practically the only economic occupation open to women;
but monogamous marriage, accompanied by an excess of females and an
increasing proportion of celibacy among males, has made it impossible
for every woman to get a husband; therefore the rivalry among them
has been keen, and their interest in self-decoration has been largely
professional. “If in countries with European civilization,” says
Westermarck, “women nevertheless are more particular about their
appearance and more addicted to self-decoration than the other sex, the
reason for it may be sought for in the greater difficulty they have in
getting married. But there is seldom any such difficulty in the savage
world. Here it is, on the contrary, the man who runs the risk of being
obliged to lead a single life.”

M. Vaerting, on this subject, takes the view that “the inclination to
bright and ornamental clothing is dependent not upon sex, but upon
the power-relation of the sexes. The subordinate sex, whether male or
female, seeks ornament.” But it would seem, in view of the accepted
theory that self-decoration originates in the desire to enhance
sex-attraction, that Westermarck’s is the more reasonable explanation;
moreover it covers certain cases in primitive life where the women,
although their position is abject, nevertheless go plainly clad while
the men are given to elaborate decoration of their persons.

In spite of all the evidence which anthropology arrays against it,
however, the notion persists that woman is by nature more addicted
to self-decoration than man; and there are not wanting advocates of
her subjection, among them many women, who maintain that it shows the
essential immaturity of her mind!

The notion that women are by nature mentally inferior to men, is
primarily due to the fact that their enforced ignorance made them
appear inferior. This is one of the strongest superstitions concerning
women, as it is also one of the oldest. It has been much weakened
by modern experience, but it has by no means disappeared. Indeed,
it has stood in the way of dispassionate scientific study of the
relative mental capacity of the sexes. Havelock Ellis, in his “Man and
Woman,” says that “the history of opinion regarding cerebral sexual
difference forms a painful page in scientific annals. It is full of
prejudices, assumptions, fallacies, over-hasty generalizations. The
unscientific have a predilection for this subject; and men of science
seem to have lost the scientific spirit when they approached the study
of its seat.... It is only of recent years that a comparatively calm
and disinterested study of the brain has become in any degree common;
and even today the fairly well ascertained facts concerning sexual
differences may be easily summed up.” He then proceeds to show that
those differences are few. It might be remarked here that such actual
differences as appear are differences between man and woman as they
now are, and can not be taken as final. If brain-mass, for example,
depends to some extent on physical size and strength, the mass of
woman’s brain should tend to increase as she abandons her unnatural
seclusion, engages in exacting occupations and indulges in vigorous
physical exercise. Already there has been an astonishing change in the
female figure. An interesting indication of this is a recent dispatch
from Germany stating that according to the shoe-manufacturers of that
country the average German woman of today wears a shoe two sizes larger
than the woman of a century ago. If woman’s body tends thus to enlarge
with proper use, so in all likelihood will her brain.

Even Plato, who advocated the education of woman, held that while her
capacities did not differ in kind from those of man, they differed
in degree because of her inferiority in physical strength. It was a
broad-minded view; for the most part women have simply been held to be
by nature relatively weak-minded and therefore relatively ineducable.
They have already passed one general test of educability, by entering
schools on the same footing with men and showing themselves equally
able to achieve a high scholastic standing; yet the Platonic notion
persists that they are physically incapable of going as far as men
can go in intellectual pursuits. This question can probably not be
settled a priori to any one’s satisfaction. It must be conceded,
after the fact, however, that considering the short time that women
have been tolerated in the schools and in the practical prosecution
of intellectual pursuits, the showing they have made has really been
quite as good as might reasonably be expected, and that it certainly
has not been such as to warrant any arbitrary fixing of limits
beyond which they can not or shall not go. Moreover, the physical
weakness which is supposed to disable woman intellectually may be
itself a result of her adaptation to her environment. There is no
way that I know of to forecast with any kind of accuracy what a few
generations of freedom will accomplish specifically in the way of
spiritual development. Considering that human beings are “creatures
of a large discourse,” the matter is probably determinable only by
experiment--_solvitur ambulando_.

Nor will there be any reason to agree with the numerous adherents of
the idea that women are naturally incapable of great creative work in
any field until they shall have failed, after generations and even
centuries of complete freedom, to produce great creative work. This
notion represents the last stand of a priori judgment concerning female
intelligence. It is based on the theory, at present much in fashion,
that men are more variable than women, and that both idiocy and genius
are thus much more frequent in the male sex, while the intelligence of
women tends to keep to the safe ground of mediocrity. The implications
of this theory manifestly are that genius of the highest order can
not be expected to appear in a woman. Since all cats are grey in the
dark, according to the proverb, nothing worth saying can be said
against this theory or for it. The data which underly it are simply
incompetent and immaterial to any conclusion, one way or the other.
They represent only a projection of men and women as they now are,
and therefore can not be taken as a basis for speculation concerning
men and women as they may become. To say, for instance, that because
there has never been, to our knowledge, any woman, with the possible
exception of Sappho, who showed the highest order of genius in the
arts it is probable that there never can or will be, is much the same
as to say that because there has never been a woman President of the
United States no woman ever can or will be President. Let it be freely
admitted that women have had opportunities in the creative field, and
have fallen short of supremacy. What of it? One must yet perceive
that the woman who has had those opportunities has been the product
of a civilization constitutionally inimical to her use of them, and
one may not assume that she has entirely escaped the effects of the
continuous repression and discouragement exercised upon her by her
social, domestic and political environment. When the power and purchase
of this influence are fully taken into account, one would say it is
not half so remarkable that women have missed supreme greatness in the
arts as that they have been able to achieve anything at all. For in the
arts, more than anywhere else, spiritual freedom is essential to great
achievement; and spiritual freedom means a great deal more than the
mere absence of formal restraint upon the processes of writing books
or painting pictures. It is this important distinction that writers
like Dr. Ellis and Dr. Hall, for example, have overlooked or ignored.
They have simply failed to take into account the effect of a generally
debilitating environment on the activities of the human spirit.

The environment of women has long been such as tends to make them,
much more than men, the slaves of “_was uns alle bändigt, das
Gemeine_,” and therefore to win release from the commonplace was,
and still is, proportionately harder for a woman than for a man.
The prevailing notion that a woman must at all costs cultivate
the approval of the world lest she fail, through lack of it, to
manœuvre herself successfully into the only occupation that society
showed any cordiality about opening to her--this put a heavy premium
on dissimulation and artifice. Women have not dared freely to be
themselves, even to themselves. It was the effect of this constraint
that Stendhal noted when he remarked that “the reason why women, when
they become authors, rarely attain the sublime, ... is that they never
dare to be more than half candid.”

It can not be gainsaid that the east wind of indifference which has
chilled the fire of many a masculine artist who found himself part of
an age indifferent to his order of talent, has always blown its coldest
upon the woman who essayed creative work. The woman who undertakes to
achieve artistic or intellectual distinction in a world dominated by
men, finds herself opposed by many disabling influences. In an earlier
day she had to endure being thought unwomanly, freakish, or wicked
because she dared venture outside the limited sphere of sexuality that
had been assigned to her. Now her presence in the field of spiritual
endeavour is taken quietly; but she is constantly meeting with the
tacit assumption, which finds expression in a thousand subtle ways,
that her work must be inferior on account of her sex.[7] Again, the
idea that marriage and reproduction constitute an exclusive calling
and are really the natural and proper calling for every woman, still
has general currency; and the very fact that a vast majority of women
tacitly acquiesce in this idea, constitutes a strong pull upon the
individual towards the orthodox and expected. Human beings are always
powerfully drawn to be like their fellows; to be different requires
a somewhat uncommon independence of spirit and toughness of fibre,
and the fewer the individuals who attempt it, the more independence
and tenacity it requires. “The fewer there be who follow the way to
heaven,” says the author of the Imitation, “the harder that way is to
find.”

The position of woman in creative work the world over is analogous
to that of the man in America who ventures into the arts: he will be
tolerated; he may even be respected; but he will not find in his
environment the interest and encouragement that will help to develop
his talents and spur him to his best efforts. He may get sympathy and
encouragement from individuals; but his environment as a whole will
not yield what Sylvia Kopald has well termed the “tolerant expectancy”
which nourishes and develops genius. In American civilization the
prevailing ideal for men is business--material success; and our people
retain, as Van Wyck Brooks has pointed out, the suspicious dislike and
disregard which the pioneer community displays towards the individual
whose governing ideals take a different line of development from those
of his fellows. The artist, therefore, is likely to be looked upon as
a queer being who loses something of his manhood by taking up purely
cultural pursuits, unless and until, indeed, he happens to make money
by it. Yet one never hears the intimation that because no Shakespeare
or Raphael has ever yet appeared in this country, none ever will. Very
well--imagine instead the prevailing ideal to be domesticity, and you
perceive at once the invidious position of the woman artist in an
exclusively or dominantly masculine civilization.

But what if the emergence of genius does not depend so much on
variability as upon the degree of spiritual freedom that the
environment allows, and the amount and kind of culture that is current
in it? “The number of geniuses produced in a nation,” says Stendhal,
“is in proportion to the number of men receiving sufficient culture,
and there is nothing to prove to me that my bootmaker has not the soul
to write like Corneille. He wants the education necessary to develop
his feelings and teach him to communicate them to the public.” The
fact that prominent men of science accept the theory that genius is
explained by variability, along with a number of conclusions which
they have seen fit to draw from it, is no reason why their view should
be considered final. Whole schools of scientists have before now gone
wrong in the ticklish business of making speculative generalizations;
they may go wrong again, for men of science are human, and may not be
supposed to live wholly above the miasma arising from the stagnant mass
of current prepossessions. So long as the apparent dearth of female
genius may be satisfactorily accounted for on other grounds, one is
under no compulsion to accept the theory that it is due to a natural
and inescapable tendency toward mediocrity. When regarded fairly,
indeed, this theory has something of an _ad captandum_ character; it
is not in itself disingenuous, perhaps, but it lends itself with great
ease to an interested use. It offers strong support, for example, to
an advocacy of an actual qualitative difference in the education of
men and women. Women, being assumed to be fixed by nature at or below
the line of mediocrity, shall be educated exclusively for marriage,
motherhood, and the occupations which require no more than an average
of reflective intelligence. This assumption underlies the educational
plans of even such great libertarians as Thomas Jefferson and Theodore
Hertzka; it represents a reversion, conscious or unconscious, to the
primitive ideology which subordinates the individual to the group,
taking for granted that the individual is to be educated not primarily
for his or her own sake, but for an impersonal “good of society.”
Thus, whether they are aware of it or not, those who subscribe to this
theory would not only keep in woman’s way the discouraging postulate
of inferiority that at present stands against her, but they would
reinforce upon her those arbitrary limitations of opportunity to
which her position of inferiority in the past may not unreasonably be
ascribed.


IV

I have mentioned the repression of natural impulse inculcated upon
women by their upbringing. This will probably not disappear entirely
until the prevailing ideal in bringing up girls shall be to help them
to become fully human beings, rather than to make them marriageable;
for humanity and market-value have really little in common. For
centuries the minds and bodies of women have been moulded to suit the
more or less casual taste of men. This was the condition of their
profession, which was to please men. Woman, in a word, got her living
by her sex; her artificially-induced deformities and imbecilities
had an economic value: they helped to get her married. It would be
impossible to imagine a more profoundly corrupting influence than the
dual ideal of sexuality and chastity that has been held up before
womankind. “We train them up,” says Montaigne, “from their infancy
to the traffic of love.” Yet men would have them, he says, “in full
health, vigorous, in good keeping, high-fed and chaste together;[8]
that is to say, both hot and cold.” The utter levity of this
traditional attitude makes it fair to say that woman is man’s worst
failure. I know of no stronger argument for the social philosophy of
the anarchist; for there is no more striking proof of the incapacity of
human beings to be their brothers’ keepers than man’s failure, through
sheer levity, over thousands of years to govern woman either for his
good or her own.

With the growing disposition of women to take their interests into
their own hands, this state of things is changing; but the curious
superstitions to which its effect on the female character has given
rise will long survive it. The world’s literature, from the Sanscrit
proverbs to the comic magazine of the twentieth century, is full of
disparaging references to the character of women; to their frailty,
their cunning, their deceitfulness, their irresponsibility, their
treachery--qualities, all of them, which in a fair view they seem bound
to have extemporized as their only defence in a social order which
was proof against more honourable weapons. “A woman,” says Amiel,
“is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and
contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a
good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring
about innumerable evils without knowing it.” This is no doubt true,
and the purposes of the moralist perhaps demand no more than a mere
statement of the fact. But the critic’s purposes demand that the fact
should give an account of itself. Why does woman so regularly bear this
character? Well, certainly the only life that European civilization
offered to women in Amiel’s day--the only views of life that it
accorded them, the only demands on life that it allowed them--was a
specific for producing the kind of creature he describes; and there is
no doubt that it must have produced them by the million. The inference
is inescapable that an equivalent incidence of the same educational and
environmental influences upon men would have produced the same kind
of men. The matter, in short, is not one of the primary or even the
secondary character of women _qua_ women or of men _qua_ men; it is
one of the effect of education and environment upon human beings _qua_
human beings.

The effort to escape this inference gives rise to extraordinary
inconsistencies in the current estimate of female character, and
even the estimate put upon it by men of scientific habit. Women
are supposed, for instance, to be tenderer and gentler than
men--“Tenderness,” says Ellen Key, “distinguishes her whole way of
thinking and feeling, of wishing and working”--yet they are also
supposed to be more vengeful--“Hell hath no fury....” They are supposed
to be creatures of impulse and sentiment “_la femme, dont l’impulsion
sentimentale est le seul guide écouté_”[9]--yet they are at the same
time supposed to be calculating, particularly in their relations with
men. Diluvial irruptions of sentimentalism are continually spewed
over their nobility and self-sacrifice in the rôle of motherhood; yet
men have taken care in the past to deny them guardianship of their
own children. Schopenhauer, far on the right wing, again, appears to
represent the legalistic point of view on this relation: he does not
trust them in it beyond the first purely instinctive love for the child
while it is physically helpless; he thinks they should “never be given
free control of their children, wherever it can be avoided.” Man, now,
is more likely, he thinks, to love his child with a lasting love,
because “in the child he recognizes his own inner self; that is to
say his love for it is metaphysical [or egotistical?] in its origin.”
Occasionally, again, the world is treated to the diverting spectacle
of some woman writer, like Dr. Gina Lombroso, trotting out all the
poor old spavined superstitions and putting them through their paces
in order to prove the strange contention that women are incapable of
making the progress they have already made. Dr. Lombroso’s ideal woman,
as I have already remarked elsewhere in a review of her recent book,
is something of a cross between an imbecile and a saint; that is to
say, she conforms closely to the ideal which has been held up before
the women of the Christian world; an ideal towards which millions of
them have striven with a faithfulness which does more credit to their
devotion than to their intelligence.

Since any discussion of woman’s place in society must necessarily be
to some extent a study in superstition, one can not really have done
with superstition until one is done with the subject. It has seemed
to warrant some special attention at the outset of this work not only
because the past and present status of womankind can not be explained
without reference to it, but because the future of womankind will in
large measure depend upon the expeditiousness with which it and those
prepossessions which spring from it, are laid aside. The sum of these
superstitions and prepossessions may be expressed in the generalization
that woman is primarily a function; and wherever any remote approach
to this generalization may be discerned in a discussion of her status
or her rights--as it may at once be discerned, for instance, in the
sentimental side of the work of feminists as staunch as Ellen Key and
Olive Schreiner--at just that point the abdication of the scientific
spirit in favour of superstition may be suspected.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Among the Chinese, for example, the woman never goes near the
kitchen.

[4] According to news-reports on the day that this is written, Judge
McIntyre of New York, sentencing a young woman in a criminal case,
said: “When a woman is bad she is vicious and worse than a man, many,
many times over.”

[5] It finds grotesque expression now and then. I remember seeing in
a San Francisco newspaper a few years ago this headline: “Accused of
having immoral relations with a woman other than his wife.”

[6] In the State of Maryland, if the wife be found to have been
unchaste before marriage, the husband is entitled to a divorce; but
premarital unchastity on the part of the husband gives the wife no
corresponding ground.

[7] As the only woman member of an editorial staff during a period of
four years, I had ample opportunity for experience of this attitude. It
was openly expressed only twice, both times, oddly enough, by women;
but so universal was the unconscious assumption of inferiority that I
may say without great exaggeration that it was only among my colleagues
that I did not meet with it.

[8] This was written, needless to say, before the casual taste of men
set the fashion for women to be mincing and sickly.

[9] Elie Faure.




CHAPTER III

INSTITUTIONAL MARRIAGE AND ITS ECONOMIC ASPECTS


I

Marriage, by a strictly technical definition, is a natural habit; that
is to say, it is a relationship proceeding out of the common instinct
of male and female to mate, and to remain together until after the
birth of one or more children.[10] Organized society, on the other
hand, always makes it a civil institution, and sometimes a religious
institution. So long as man remained in the natural state, roaming
about in search of his food as do the apes today, it may be supposed
that marriage was based on personal preference and involved only
the selective disposition of the individual man and woman and their
common concern for the safety of their offspring. But as advancing
civilization enabled mankind more easily to obtain and augment its
food-supply, and consequently to secure greater safety and also to
satisfy its gregarious instinct by living in numerous communities, the
habit of marriage underwent a process of sanction and regulation by
the group, and was thus transformed into a civil institution. While
society remains ethnical, the family exercises supervision over the
sexual relations of its members, but always subject to the approval or
disapproval of the larger group--the tribe or clan. When the political
State emerges, this function continues to be exercised by the family,
but it is subject to sanction by the State and is gradually absorbed by
it. Yet even where the State has usurped almost all the prerogatives of
the family, custom continues to give powerful sanction to interference
in marriage both by relatives and by the community.

Where the tribal religion takes on the form of ancestor-worship,
or where much importance is attached to burial-rites, marriage and
reproduction take on a religious significance. “As the dead,” says Dr.
Elsie Clews Parsons, “are dependent on the living for the performance
of their funeral rites and sacrificial observances, marriage itself as
well as marriage according to prescribed conditions, child-begetting
and bearing, become religious duties. Marriage ceremonial not
infrequently takes on a religious character. Infanticide, abortion,
celibacy other than celibacy of a sacerdotal character, and adultery,
become sins. The punishment of the adulteress is particularly severe,
although in some cases her value as property may guarantee her against
punishment by death.”[11]

Thus there may be, and in most civilized societies there is, a fourfold
interference in marriage: interference by the family, by the community,
by the State, and by the Church. An old Russian song had it that
marriages were contracted


     By the will of God,
     By decree of the Czar,
     By order of the Master,
     By decision of the community,


--with not a word about the two persons immediately concerned. Nor is
this strange, for marriage is not generally conceived of among either
primitive or highly civilized peoples as a personal relationship. It
is an economic arrangement, an alliance between families, a means for
getting children. To allow so unruly a passion as love to figure in
the selection of a mate, is an irregularity which may under certain
circumstances be tolerated, but one which is nevertheless likely to
be regarded with extreme disapproval. As individualism makes progress
against group-tyranny, the preliminaries and the actual contracting of
marriage become less the affair of God, the State, the family and the
community, and more the affair of the two people chiefly interested;
but once contracted, the marriage can hardly be said, even in the most
civilized community, to be free of considerable regulation by these
four influences. The time which Spencer foresaw, when “the union by
affection will be held of primary moment and the union by law as of
secondary moment,” has by no means arrived. If the married couple be
Roman Catholics, for example, they may not free themselves from an
unhappy marriage without paying the penalty of excommunication; and
if they live in a State dominated by the Catholic Church, they may be
legally estopped from freeing themselves at all. Nor may they, save by
continence, limit the number of their offspring without risking the
same penalty. If they are Episcopalians or Lutherans they may divorce
only on the ground of adultery, and the guilty party is forbidden to
remarry. In communities where the influence of other Protestant sects
predominates, and where, therefore, divorce and remarriage are not
formally forbidden by the Church, the pressure of public opinion may
yet operate to prevent them. The State not only prescribes the form
that marriage shall take, but it may also either prohibit divorce--as
in South Carolina, for example--or forbid it save in accordance with
such regulations as it sees fit to make; and these regulations are
not only of a kind that make divorce prohibitive to the poor, but
they are often so humiliating as to constitute an effective barrier
to the dissolution of unhappy unions. The State of New York offers an
excellent illustration. Adultery is the only ground upon which divorce
is allowed, and even then it may be refused if the action is taken by
mutual consent. The couple who wish to be divorced must therefore,
if there be no legal cause, go through the demoralizing business of
making a case, which means that one or the other must provide at least
the appearance of “misconduct”; and even then they are in danger of
being found in collusion. But suppose one party to be giving legal
ground; then the other party, in order to get proof, is obliged to
resort to the lowest kind of espionage. Such disreputable methods,
however much they be in keeping with the nature and practices of
the State, are hardly becoming to civilized society, and civilized
persons are indisposed towards them. Their general effect is therefore
to discourage application for divorce in New York and encourage it
elsewhere.

It is significant of the unspiritual estimate generally put upon
marriage, that incompatibility is rarely allowed as a legal ground
of divorce. Violation of the sexual monopoly that marriage implies;
pre-nuptial unchastity on the part of the woman; impotence; cruelty;
desertion; failure of support; insanity; all of these or some of
them are the grounds generally recognized where divorce is allowed
at all. This is to say that society demands a specific grievance of
one party against the other, a grievance having physical or economic
consequences, as a prerequisite to freedom from the marriage-bond.
The fact that marriage may be a failure spiritually is seldom taken
into account. Yet there is no difficulty about which less can be
done. Infidelity may be forgiven and in time forgotten; the deserter
may return; the delinquent may be persuaded to support his family;
the insane person may recover; even impotence may be cured. But if
two people are out of spiritual correspondence, if they are not at
ease in one another’s society, there is nothing to be done about it.
“Anything,” says Turgenev, “may be smoothed over, memories of even
the most tragic domestic incidents gradually lose their strength and
bitterness; but if once a sense of being ill at ease installs itself
between two closely united persons, it can never be dislodged.” Modern
society is slowly, very slowly, coming into the wisdom which prompted
this observation. The gradual liberalization of the divorce-laws
which our moralists regard as a symptom of modern disrespect for the
sacredness of marriage, is in fact a symptom of a directly opposite
tendency--the tendency to place marriage on a higher spiritual plane
than it has hitherto occupied.

The State assumes the right either to allow artificial limitation of
offspring or to make it a crime; and it exercises this assumption
according to its need for citizens[12] or the complexion of its
religious establishment. It also fixes the relative status and
rights of the two parties. In several American States, for instance,
a married woman is incompetent to make contracts or to fix her legal
residence. The Virginia law recognizes the primary right of the father
to the custody of the child, yet it makes the mother criminally
liable for the support of children. On the other hand, the husband is
everywhere required by law to support his wife. Such laws, of course,
like most laws, are felt only when the individual comes into conflict
with them. The State does not interfere in many cases where married
couples subvert its regulations--for example, the law which entitles
the husband to his wife’s services in the home and permits him to
control her right to work outside the home, does not become binding
save in cases where the husband sees fit to invoke it. As a rule the
State forbids fornication and adultery.[13] In case of separation and
divorce, if the parties disagree concerning financial arrangements or
the custody of children, it exercises the right to arbitrate these
matters.

The sanctions of interference by the family, save in the contracting of
marriage by minors, are at present those of custom, affection, and (in
so far as it exists and may be made effective) economic power. When two
persons have decided to marry, for instance, it remains quite generally
customary for the man to go through the formality of asking the woman’s
nearest male relation for her hand. This is of course a survival from
the period when a woman’s male guardian had actual power to prevent her
marrying without his consent. The influence of affection is too obvious
to require illustration; it is the subtlest and most powerful sanction
of family interference. Economic power is perhaps most commonly used
to prevent or compel the contracting of marriage. It may make itself
felt, where parents or other relatives are well-to-do, in threats of
disinheritance if prospective heirs undertake to make marriages which
are displeasing to them. A striking instance of the use of this power
is the will of the late Jay Gould, which required each of his children
to obtain consent of the others before marrying. It is not uncommon for
legators to stipulate that legatees shall or shall not marry before a
certain age under penalty of losing their inheritance.

These influences do not always, of course, take the same direction.
At present, for example, artificial limitation of offspring receives
irregular but effective community-sanction in face of opposition by
Church and State. Or again, public opinion almost universally condemns
the idea that a father may, by his will, remove his children from
the custody of their mother, although the State, as in Maryland and
Delaware, may sanction such an act. But, however much they may check
one another, these influences are all constantly operating to restrict
and regulate marriage away from its original intention as a purely
personal relationship, and to keep it in the groove of economic and
social institutionalism. The reasons for this are to be found in the
vestigiary fear of sex, love of power, love of the habitual, religious
superstition, and above all in the notion that the major interests of
the group are essentially opposed to those of the individual and are
more important than his. A combination of two of these motives has
recently come under my own observation in the case of a young woman
whose parents can not forgive her for having divorced a man whom she
did not love and married a man whom she did. They were accustomed
to their first son-in-law, and resent the necessity of adjusting
themselves to the idea of having a new one. Moreover, they feel that
their daughter should have spared them the “disgrace” of a divorce. The
fact that she was unhappy in her first marriage and is happy in her
second seems to have little weight with them. They did their best to
prevent her second marriage and are at present exerting every effort to
make it unsuccessful. It is needless to emphasize the fact that this
order of interference can not be expected to disappear while the notion
persists that the actions of one adult member of a family or group can
possibly reflect credit or discredit upon all the other members.


II

If one be an apologist for the present economic and social order,
there is little fault to be found with this endless and manifold
regulation of the most intimate concern of the individual, save that it
is not as effective as it once was. Society, we are being constantly
reminded, is founded in the family. No one, I think, will quarrel
with this statement, particularly at this stage of the world’s rule
by the exploiting State. Marriage is, to quote Dr. E. C. Parsons, “an
incomparable protection of society--as society has been constituted”;
and this for a reason which Dr. Parsons did not mention. Nor has the
reason been stated by anyone else, so far as I am aware, although the
fact is emphasized often enough. It is emphasized, however, largely
in the spirit of a contemporary French writer who declares that “an
institution upon which society[14] is based should not be represented
to society as an instrument of torture, a barbarous apparatus. We know,
on the contrary that this institution is good, and that it would be
impossible to conceive of a better one upon which to base our customs.”
Well, but suppose it _is_ an instrument of torture, or at least that we
have come to find it highly unsatisfactory; must we, in spite of the
fact, resolve to think it good because society is based upon it? Ought
we not, rather, to examine the order of society that institutionalized
marriage helps to perpetuate, in order to determine whether it is worth
preserving at the cost of preserving also an institution which has
become “an instrument of torture”?

The reason why marriage is “an incomparable protection to society”
lies in the fact that the continuance of the power of the exploiting
State depends upon the relative helplessness of its exploited subjects;
and nothing renders the subject more helpless against the dominance
of the State than marriage. For monopoly, under the protection of the
State, has rendered the support of a family extremely difficult, by
closing free access of labour to natural resources and thus enabling
the constant maintenance of a labour-surplus. Where there is little
or no land not legally occupied, access to the soil is impossible
save on terms that render it, if not downright prohibitive, at least
unprofitable. The breadwinner who has neither land nor capital is
thus forced to take his chance in a labour-market overcrowded by
applicants for work who are in exactly his position: they are shut out
from opportunity to work for themselves, and obliged to accept such
employment as they can get at a wage determined not by their capacity
to produce, but by the number of their competitors. Not only is the
wage-earner thus obliged to content himself with a small share of what
his labour produces; he is forced to pay out of that share further
tribute to monopoly in most of the things he buys. For shelter, for the
products of the soil and mines, he pays tribute to the monopolist of
land and natural resources; for industrial products, in most countries,
he pays to the monopoly created by high tariffs. Or he may have to pay
to both, as in the case of the purchaser of steel products.

Such disadvantages tend not only to keep wages near the
subsistence-level, but to keep opinions orthodox--or if not orthodox,
unexpressed. For the wage-earner gets his living on sufferance: while
he continues to please his employer he may earn a living, however
inadequate, for himself and family; but if he show signs of discontent
with the established order, by which his employer benefits or thinks
he benefits, he is likely to find himself supplanted by some other
worker whose need makes him more willing to conform, in appearance
at least. There are even conditions under which his mere unorthodoxy
may bring him to jail, in thirty-four States of this enlightened
Republic. There are exceptional cases, of course, where his skill
or special training makes him a virtual monopolist in his line and
thus renders him indispensable, like a certain well-known professor
who continues to hold his position in spite of his avowed economic
unorthodoxy simply because there is no one else who can fill it. But
it may be perceived at once that the average wage-earner with a family
to support will be under much greater pressure to dissemble than
will the worker who has no family; for where the single worker risks
privation for himself alone, the married worker takes this risk for
his family as well. Nor does economic pressure operate only towards
the appearance of conformity; it operates towards actual conformity,
for the person who has children to rear and educate will be strongly
impelled towards conservatism by his situation. If he can get along at
all under the present order, the mere _vis inertiae_ will incline him
to fear for the sake of his family the economic dislocation attendant
upon any revolutionary change, and to choose rather to keep the ills
he has.[15] Moreover, the unnatural situation popularly called the
“labour-problem,” brought about through exclusion from the land, tends
to create the psychology of the wage-slave: it tends to make people
regard the opportunity to earn one’s living not as a natural right, but
as something that one receives as a boon from one’s employer, and hence
to accept the idea that an employer may be justified in dictating to
his employees in matters of conduct and opinion.

Thus the economic conditions brought about by the State operate to make
marriage the State’s strongest bulwark; and those who believe that the
preservation of the State, or of a particular form of it, is a sacred
duty--their number among its victims is legion--are quite logical in
taking alarm at the increasing unwillingness of men and women to
marry, or if they do marry, to have children. They are logical not only
because marriage and children make for endurance of established abuses,
but because, as I have already remarked, it is important for the State
to have as many subjects as possible, to keep up a labour-surplus at
home and to fight for the interests of its privileged class abroad;
that is, so long as industry is able to meet the exactions of monopoly
and still pay interest and wages. Where monopoly has reduced interest
and wages to the vanishing-point, the State can no longer be said
to be a going concern; its breakdown is then only a matter of time.
This point has been reached in England, and hence the condition of
which I have spoken: a numerous population is no longer desirable,
for as unemployed they are a burden on the State and a menace to its
existence. But as long as the State is a going concern, the Spartan
rule is that best suited to its interests: obligatory marriage, and
unlimited reproduction.

In modern civilization, however, in spite of the enormous power of
the State, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to
enforce this rule. The State, with all its power, can not force its
subjects to obey any law which they do not really want to obey--or
perhaps I should say, which they want not to obey; and the growth of
individualism has created a general distaste for any effort on the part
of government to meddle directly in the affairs of citizens. Attempts
to do so are likely to bring humiliation on the Government through
its inability to enforce them, and to generate in the population a
salutary disrespect for law; as the attempt to enforce the fourteenth
and eighteenth Amendments has done in this country. With the decline
of the patriarchal system, the contracting of marriage if not the
status of marriage, is coming to be regarded as the exclusive concern
of the individual. Many who would not for a moment tolerate compulsory
marriage will tolerate a humiliating regulation of marriage; they
will allow the State to make of marriage a life-long bondage, but
they reserve the right to refuse to enter into bondage. The State may
penalize celibacy by levying a special tax on unmarried persons; but it
can no longer force people to abandon it.

Indeed, one may say without overmuch exaggeration that at present
the preservation of marriage as an institution is almost solely due
to its tenacity as an instinctive habit. For while marriage is the
strongest bulwark of the State, the economic order for the sake of
which the State exists tends nevertheless to discourage marriage
because it progressively concentrates wealth in a few hands, and thus
deprives the great mass of people of adequate means to rear and educate
families. This condition is largely responsible for the fact that
celibacy, illegitimacy and prostitution are on the increase in every
civilized country; and that the average age at which marriage takes
place tends steadily to become higher, as it takes longer to get into
an economic position which makes possible the support of a family. In
this connexion, Katharine Anthony’s statement that factory-girls and
heiresses are the country’s youngest brides is significant. Neither
the heiress nor the factory-girl has anything to gain by waiting: the
heiress already has economic security and the factory-girl never will
have it, for she and her husband--if she marries in her own class--will
always be pretty much at the mercy of conditions in the labour-market.
It should also be remarked that among the great middle class the
standard of education for both sexes, but more particularly for women,
is higher than among the very rich and the very poor; and this tends
to advance the average age for marriage.

It tends as well to make children a heavy burden on the parents. Among
primitive peoples, where difficulty in supporting a family is virtually
unknown, where adjustment to the environment offers no complexities and
childhood is therefore not so prolonged, and where, moreover, children
through their labour become an economic asset, they are desirable.[16]
But in a civilized society where the parental sense of responsibility
has developed to the point where the child is reared for its own sake,
where adaptation to the environment is a complex and lengthy process
involving expensive education and prolonged dependence of the child
upon the parents, and where the difficulty of getting a start in life
tends also to lengthen the period of dependence; in such a society
it is natural that the parental sense of responsibility should find
expression in an artificial limitation of offspring to the number that
the circumstances of the parents will enable them to educate properly.
There is a further step that this feeling can suggest in these days of
excessive economic exploitation and ruinous wars; that is, refusal to
reproduce at all: and this step an increasing number of married people
are taking, to the great distress of self-appointed guardians of our
customs and morals.

Failure to perceive the decisive importance of the connexion between
the economic condition of the parents and the proper equipment
of children for making their way in life often leads to absurd
contradictions; as for example in that staunch friend of childhood,
the late Ellen Key. No one is more insistent than this writer upon
the importance of rearing the child for its own good; yet she gravely
declares that “from the point of view of the nation, always from
that of the children, and most frequently from that of the parents,
the normal condition must be, that the number of children shall not
fall short of three or four.” Miss Key’s primary failure is one that
must be judged with great severity because it is both fundamental
and typical--it pervades and vitiates the whole body of feminist
literature. It is a failure in intellectual seriousness. Miss Key
is fully aware of a persistent economic dislocation bearing on her
thesis--“At present there is a shortage of labour for those willing
to work, of food for the hungry, of educational advantages for those
thirsting for knowledge, of nursing for the sick, of care for the
children. The circumstances of the majority are now such as to produce,
directly or indirectly, crime, drunkenness, insanity, consumption,
or sexual diseases in large sections of the population.” Again, “The
struggle for daily bread, the cares of livelihood ... are now the
stamp of public as well as private life.... Married people have no
time to cultivate their feelings for one another.... Through the cares
of livelihood parents have no time to live with their children, to
study them in order to be able really to educate them.”[17] One must
suspect a peculiar incapacity for logic in the writer who recognizes
such conditions and still recommends three or four children as being
the minimum number that people should have who wish to do their duty by
their country, their children and themselves. Miss Key has been content
to shirk inquiry into the fundamental cause of these conditions, and
hence the means she recommends for their cure are silly and feeble.
An international universal organization which is to regulate all
competition and all co-operation; trade-unionism, the abolition of
inheritances; the exercise of “collective motherliness” in public
affairs; these are some of the means she offers for the regeneration of
society. Probably never since the remark attributed to Marie Antoinette
that if the starving populace could not get bread they should eat cake,
has ineptitude gone further. If Miss Key’s call to duty were brought
to the attention of the well-to-do married couple of the city of New
York whose means are sufficient to permit them to occupy an apartment
of, let us say, two or three or four rooms, often without kitchen, they
might agree with her in principle; but they would probably not attempt
to bring up three or four children in such straitened surroundings and
to educate them over a long span of years, for a very doubtful future.
If this example seem special and far-fetched, I would remind my readers
that over fifty per cent of people in this country are urban dwellers,
and that the vast majority of them are worse off for dwelling space,
not better, than the hypothetical couple I have cited.

It is, of course, among those who are worse off that children are
most numerous. Ignorance and religious scruples--for the Church is
strongest among the ignorant because of their ignorance--combine to
produce large families among the class that can least afford them. For
civilization, although it denies these people most things, grants them
too great a fecundity. Among primitive peoples fecundity is decreased
by various causes, such as excessively hard work, childbearing at a
too early age, and prolonged lactation during which continence is
often the rule. The average number of children borne by a savage
does not often exceed five or six, whereas the civilized woman may
bear eighteen or twenty, and it is not at all exceptional for the
woman of our slums to bear ten or twelve. Among west-side women of
New York whom Katherine Anthony questioned concerning frequency of
pregnancies, one reported fifteen in nineteen years, another ten in
twelve years, and another six in nine years. Obviously, then, when
eugenists and moralists deplore what they term the modern tendency to
race-suicide, they refer to the educated classes. The moralist argues
from prepossession and may be dismissed from consideration; but the
eugenist has scientific pretensions which are not without a certain
degree of validity and can therefore not be lightly passed over. So
long as he argues for improvement in the quality of the race through
the substitution of intelligence for blind instinct in propagation, he
is on solid ground: no one unprepossessed by the sentimentalism which
regards legitimate children, however untoward be the circumstances
of their birth and breeding, as a direct visitation from God, can
deny that voluntary and intelligent attention to the quality of
offspring offers better prospects for civilization than hit-or-miss
quantity-production. The eugenist deplores the fact that at present
this exercise of intelligence is confined to the comparatively small
class of the educated and well-to-do, and that therefore the birth-rate
among that class is all too small to offset the unchecked propagation
of the ignorant and unfit. This is unfortunately true; and it suggests
the obvious question: Why is there in every modern State so large
a class of ignorant and unfit persons as to constitute a menace to
the vitality of that State? If it is solely because the unfit are
allowed to propagate unchecked, then those eugenists who advocate
the sterilization of paupers and imbeciles and the encouragement of
propagation among the intelligent classes by an elaborate system of
State subsidy, may be listened to with respect if not with perfect
faith in the practicability of their proposals. But how about that
large mass of the physically and mentally normal who live at the
subsistence-level, and whose progeny, if economic pressure tighten
a little, are likely to be forced down into the class of underfed
beings, dulled and brutalized by poverty, from whose ranks our paupers,
imbeciles and criminals are largely recruited? To ignore the existence
of this perennial source of unfitness is levity. To recognize it, and
to assume that it results from over-propagation is to assume at the
same time that the earth’s population is too numerous for comfortable
subsistence on the amount of cultivable land in existence. If this
disproportion be real, the only hope lies in persuading this class to
limit its offspring voluntarily to the number that the earth’s surface
will comfortably support. If it be only an apparent disproportion
due to an artificial shortage of land created by monopoly, then
the eugenist’s program amounts simply to a recommendation that the
population be somehow restricted to the number that can get subsistence
on the terms of the monopolist. Henry George has conclusively disproved
the validity of the Malthusian theory which underlies the assumption
of over-population, while Oppenheimer’s figures show that if land
were freely available for use, the earth’s present population might
easily be supported on one-third of its arable surface.[18] Here,
really, is the most convincing answer to the standard arguments for
birth-control; yet so far as I know, the opponents of birth-control
have never done much with it, whether out of ignorance or because of
the profound economic readjustments that it implies. The eugenist,
too, generally displays a constitutional aversion to attacking the
problem of unfitness at the right end--which is, to inquire, first of
all, why it exists. Hence the ineptitude of his proposals for social
betterment: they would involve much unwieldy governmental machinery and
considerably more intelligence than any State has ever displayed in
dealing with social questions; and they would attack only the results
of our social ills, leaving the causes freely operative.[19]

While those causes continue to operate, the support of a family, save
in the comparatively small class of wealthy people, will be more or
less of a burden. At present, this burden bears most heavily upon the
middle-class man and the lower-class woman. Meretricious standards of
respectability, among them the idea that a married woman must not work
outside her home even when she is childless, tend to make marriage
from the outset a burden on the man of the middle class. For it must
be remembered that since the so-called feminine occupations have been
taken out of the home, a man no longer gains an economic asset in
taking unto himself a wife. Rather, he assumes a liability. This is
especially true among the middle classes, where social standing has
come to be gauged to some extent by the degree in which wives are
economically unproductive. It is a commonplace in this country that
women form the leisure class; and this leisure class of women, like
leisured classes everywhere, has its leisure at the expense of other
people, who in this case are the husbands. Moreover, it is among the
middle classes that the standards of education are highest and the
rearing of children therefore most expensive; and this burden is
usually borne by the husband alone. Hence the emergence of the type
of harassed _pater familias_ at whom our comic artists poke much
sympathetic fun, who meets his family now and then on Sundays, foots
their bills, and is rewarded for his unremitting toil in their behalf
by being regarded much in the light of a cash-register.

This sort of thing, of course, is not the invariable rule. There are
many middle-class women who give their families untiring service, and
an increasing number who, either from choice or necessity, engage in
gainful occupations outside their homes. Of this country’s eight and
one half million women breadwinners, two million are married; and
it may be assumed that a fair percentage of these are of the middle
class. The great majority, however, are of the labouring class; and
upon these, economic injustice weighs most heavily. It is these women
who bear most children; and it is they who, when their husbands are
unable or unwilling to meet the growing expenses of the family, assume
the double burden of “woman’s work” in the home and whatever they can
get to do outside that will enable them to earn a few dollars a week,
in order to “keep the family together.” Miss Katharine Anthony, in
her book, “Mothers Who Must Earn,” gives a striking picture of the
unskilled married women workers of west-side New York, victims of a
crowded labour-market, who take the hardest jobs at the lowest pay, in
order that they may give some few poor advantages to the children they
have brought into the world unwillingly, knowing that they could not
afford them. “The same mother,” says Miss Anthony, “who resents the
coming of children and resigns them so apathetically to death, will
toil fourteen hours a day and seven days a week to keep up a home for
the young lives in her charge.”

Such testimony, and testimony of a similar kind from governmental
investigators, somehow makes the general run of social criticism
appear frivolous and superficial. The married wage-earner, worn with
excessive childbearing, who still finds strength to work long hours
in laundry or factory during the day and do her housework at night,
hardly fits into the picture of selfish, emancipated women, wilfully
deserting their proper sphere of domesticity either to seek pleasure or
to maintain their economic independence. Indeed, the idea of economic
independence is quite at variance with her notions of respectability.
“Not to work,” says Miss Anthony, “is a mark of the middle-class
married woman, and the ambitious west-side family covets that mark.
Hence comes the attempt to conceal the mother’s employment, if she
has one, which is one of the little snobberies of the poor.” The sole
object of these women’s toil is to preserve the home, chief prop of
a social order which bears upon it with crushing weight; and their
adherence to a social philosophy which regards the preservation of
the home as peculiarly the business of women is evident in the fact
that they contribute the whole of their meagre earnings to its upkeep,
whereas their husbands are likely to contribute only as much of their
own earnings as they see fit.

It goes without saying that the conditions I have cited have a profound
effect on the psychology of parents, and therefore on the lives of
children. The rearing of children, if justice is to be done them, is
one of the most exacting tasks that can be undertaken. The adjustment
that is required to fit parents to the personalities of their children
and children to those of their parents and of one another, is in itself
a most delicate and difficult process, and one upon which the nature
of the child’s adjustment to the larger world greatly depends. Such
a process naturally involves friction, and therefore, if it is to be
successful, calls for no little tact and patience in the parents; and
cramped quarters, sordid poverty, and exhausting labour are hardly
conducive to the possession of either of these qualities. Children
of the middle class, it is remarked often enough, hardly know their
harassed, overworked fathers; but children of the labouring class
are likely to know neither of their parents, or to know them only as
fretful, quarrelsome people, brutalized by overwork. “The strain of
bringing up a family on the average workingman’s wage,” says Miss
Anthony, “reduced as this is likely to be by unemployment, sickness,
or drink, constitutes, indeed, the dark age of the tenement mother’s
life. It is not strange that the good will existing between husband
and wife often gives way beneath it. ‘I tell my husband,’ said Mrs.
Gurney, ‘it’s not right for us to be quarreling all the time before the
children. But it seems like we can’t help it. He’s so worried all the
time and I’m so tired. If we were easy in our minds we wouldn’t do it.’”

Nor do the children of these people have anything much better to look
forward to than such a lot as that of their parents, for poverty
drives them too into the labour-market as soon as they are old enough
to earn, to the profound distress of reformers who refuse to face
the basic question of child-labour, namely: whether it is better for
human beings, even if they be children, to work for their living or
to starve. This applies not only to the children of our industrial
labouring classes, but to those of the agricultural labourer and
the tenant-farmer, who pay the same penalty for the exploitation of
their parents. There is no little irony in the fact that our growing
consciousness of the right of children to be well born and well reared
proceeds hand in hand with an economic injustice which renders it
impossible to secure that right for all children.

If responsibility for the upbringing of children is to continue to
be vested in the family, then the rights of children will be secured
only when parents are able to make a living for their families with
so little difficulty that they may give their best thought and energy
to the child’s development and the problem of helping it to adjust
itself to the complexities of the modern environment. Such a condition
is not utopian, but quite possible of attainment, as I shall show
later. But for the present, and for some time to come, marriage and
parenthood will continue to make men and women virtual slaves of the
economic order which they help to perpetuate. Small wonder that
the women of whom Miss Anthony writes are thoroughly disillusioned
concerning “marriage life,” and would avoid it if they “had it to do
over.” Marriage as an institution has little to offer these people
save toil and suffering; it is, as I have remarked, its tenacity as an
instinctive habit that makes them its victims. And if it were not for
the responsibilities that marriage entails, responsibilities which make
people fearful of the economic uncertainty involved in revolutionary
change, the economic order that makes marriage “an instrument of
torture” and thwarts the development of children, would not last
overnight.

Both as a personal relationship and as an institution, marriage is at
present undergoing a profound modification resulting from the changing
industrial and social position of women. The elevation of woman from
the position of a chattel to that of a free citizen must inevitably
affect the institution in which her subordinate position has been most
strongly emphasized--which has been, indeed, the chief instrument of
her subordination. The woman who is demanding her rightful place in
the world as man’s equal, can no longer be expected to accept without
question an institution under whose rules she is obliged to remain
the victim of injustice. There is every reason therefore, assuming
that the process of emancipation shall not be interrupted, to expect
a continuous alteration in the laws and customs bearing on marriage,
until some adjustment shall be reached which allows scope for the
individuality of both parties, instead of one only. The psychological
conflict involved in the adaptation of marriage to woman’s changing
position and the changing mentality that results from it, is not to
be underrated. At present the process of adjustment is needlessly
complicated and this attendant conflict immensely exaggerated, by
an economic injustice which bears most heavily on married people.
Individualism is developing in modern society to such an extent that
marriage based on anything but affection seems degrading; but economic
injustice is progressing simultaneously with such strides that marriage
based on nothing but affection is likely to end in disaster; for
affection and the harassment of poverty are hardly compatible. If this
complication were removed, as it could be, we should probably find that
the adjustment of marriage to shifting ideals and conditions would come
about in a natural and advantageous manner, as adjustments usually do
when vexing and hampering conditions are removed. The question will
settle itself in any case. Just how, no one, of course, can tell; but
however revolutionary the adaptation to new conditions may be, it will
not _seem_ revolutionary to the people of the future because “the minds
of men will be fitted to it.” This is an all-important fact, and one
that is too little respected; for the desire to enforce our own moral
and spiritual criteria upon posterity is quite as strong as the desire
to enforce them upon contemporaries. It is a desire which finds a large
measure of fulfilment--where is the society which does not struggle
along under a dead weight of tradition and law inherited from its
grandfathers? All political and religious systems have their root and
their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind, and its
intense fear of autonomy. Because of this conservatism, people never
move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable
injustices in the economic and social order under which they live.
There were, and are, such injustices in the laws and customs of the
Christian world governing marriage and the relations of the sexes;
hence the changes which have already begun, and may conceivably proceed
until they shall prove as far-reaching as those by which marriage in
the past was transformed from an instinctive habit into an institution
subject to regulation by everyone except the two people most intimately
concerned.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Westermarck defines it as “a more or less durable connexion
between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till
after the birth of the offspring.”

[11] E. C. Parsons: “The Family.”

[12] It is interesting in this connexion to note that in post-war
England, where the thousands of unemployed workers constitute a heavy
drain on the public purse and a baffling political problem, it has
been made lawful to sell devices for birth-control. One now sees these
devices conspicuously displayed in druggists’ windows.

[13] In Maryland fornication is not a crime, although it may entitle
a husband to divorce if he did not know of it at the time of the
marriage. Adultery is punishable by a fine of ten dollars.

[14] It is important to call attention to the loose use of the word
“Society” in this quotation, as practically synonomous with the
State. In their final definition, the two terms are antithetical.
There is general agreement among scholars, according to Professor
Beard, that in the genesis of the State, exploitation was primary,
and organization for other purposes, e.g., what we know as “law and
order,” was incidental and secondary. The term Society, then, really
implies the disappearance of the State, and is commonly so used by
scholars. Even now, too, tribes which have never formed a State and
are without government of any kind, maintain society, i.e., a quite
highly organized mode of communal life. Thomas Jefferson remarked this
phenomenon among the American Indian hunting tribes, and so did the
historian Parkman.

[15] This motive is especially powerful in the United States, because
monopoly in this country even now permits people to do relatively well.
Moreover, there is still a strong current of optimism attributable
to the failure of Americans to see that the old days of almost
unlimited opportunity ended with the closing of the frontier. If the
American family finds itself in straitened circumstances, its members
are likely to attribute the fact to “hard times,” and to expect an
improvement before long, since the country has recovered from a panic
about every twenty years for the past century. They do not understand
that the measure of recovery they hope for is now impossible. How
many Americans, I wonder, have stopped to ask themselves why this
country has suffered from _uninterrupted_ economic “depression,” with
the exception of the war-period, ever since the panic of 1907? What
they regard as depression is really the normal result of complete
land-monopoly and high tariffs. Prices have continued to rise since the
war; which is to say that real wages have fallen.

[16] According to Herriot, children form the wealth of savage tribes.

[17] The first passage I have quoted is from “Love and Marriage”;
the other two I have taken from Miss Key’s “The Younger Generation,”
simply because I found the ideas they contain somewhat more clearly and
definitely expressed in that book than in the other.

[18] Franz Oppenheimer, Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie.
Berlin, 1912.

[19] For a striking and characteristic example of this ineptitude, I
refer my readers to Dr. Havelock Ellis’s little book, “Eugenics Made
Plain.”




CHAPTER IV

WOMAN AND MARRIAGE


I

Perhaps the most pronounced conventional distinction between the sexes
is made in their relation to marriage. For man, marriage is regarded as
a state; for woman, as a vocation. For man, it is a means of ordering
his life and perpetuating his name, for woman it is considered a proper
and fitting aim of existence. This conventional view is yielding before
the changing attitude of women toward themselves; but it will be long
before it ceases to colour the instinctive attitude of the great
majority of people toward women. It is because of the usual assumption
that marriage is woman’s special province, that I have discussed its
general aspect somewhat at length before considering its relation to
women in particular. This assumption, I may remark, has been justified
expressly or by implication by all those advocates of freedom for
women who have assured the world that woman’s “mission” of wifehood
and motherhood would be better fulfilled rather than worse through an
extension of her rights. If we imagine the signers of the Declaration
of Independence, in place of proclaiming the natural right of all men
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, arguing with King
George that a little more freedom would make them better husbands and
fathers, we shall imagine a pretty exact parallel for this kind of
argument on behalf of the emancipation of women.

The belief that marriage and parenthood are the especial concern of
women is rooted in the idea that the individual exists for the sake of
the species. Biologically, this is of course true; but it is equally
true of male and female. Among primitive peoples, where individuation
has not progressed as far as among more highly civilized peoples, this
idea still prevails in regard to both sexes. Among these peoples the
man who must remain unmarried and childless is considered quite as
unfortunate as the woman who suffers the same fate. Among civilized
peoples, on the other hand, where individuation has progressed
farthest, it is not usual to look upon the male as existing solely
for the species; but it is usual for the female to be so regarded,
because, having had less freedom than the male, she has not been
able to assert to the same extent her right to live for herself. The
one-sided view that the future of the race depends solely on women
has curious results: a nation may send the best of its male youth
to be destroyed in war without overmuch anxiety being manifested in
any quarter over the effect of this wholesale slaughter upon future
generations; but if the idea of enlisting women in military service
be so much as broached, there is an immediate outcry about the danger
to posterity that such a course would involve. Yet it requires only a
moderate exercise of intelligence to perceive that if there must be
periodic slaughter it would be better, both for the survivors and for
posterity, if the sexes were to be slaughtered in equal numbers; and
more especially is this true, for obvious reasons, where monogamy is
the accepted form of marriage. Again, although it is extremely hard to
get laws passed to protect men from the hazards of industry, the laws
designed to protect women--_i.e._, posterity--which have been passed
at the instance of reformers and social workers, already constitute a
serious handicap to women workers in their necessary competition with
men in the labour-market. Yet every child must have two parents, and
certainly unfitness or disability in the father must have a bad effect
upon his offspring, even though it be less harmful than unfitness or
disability in the mother.

The view of woman as a biological function might be strongly defended
on the ground of racial strength if that function were respected and
she were free in discharging it. But it is not respected and she is
not free. The same restrictions that have kept her in the status
of a function have denied her freedom and proper respect even in
the exercise of that function. Motherhood, to be sure, receives a
great deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is committed in
accordance with rules which have been prescribed by a predominantly
masculine society. _Per se_ it is accorded no respect whatever. When
it results from a sexual relationship which has been duly sanctioned
by organized society, it is holy, no matter how much it may transgress
the rules of decency, health, or common sense. Otherwise it is a sin
meriting social ostracism for the mother and obloquy for the child--an
ostracism and an obloquy, significantly enough, in which the father
does not share.

The motives behind the universal condemnation of extra-legal
motherhood are various and complex; but I believe it is safe to say
that the strongest is masculine jealousy. Motherhood out of wedlock
constitutes a defiance of that theory of male proprietorship on which
most societies are based; it implies on the part of woman a seizure
of sexual freedom which, if it were countenanced, would threaten the
long-established dominance of the male in sexual matters, a dominance
which has been enforced by imposing all manner of unnatural social and
legal disabilities upon women, such, for example, as the demand for
virginity before marriage and chastity after it. The woman who bears
an illegitimate child violates one of these two restrictions. On the
other hand, the man who begets an illegitimate child violates no such
restriction, for society demands of him neither virginity nor chastity;
therefore he is not only not punished by social ostracism, but he is
often protected by law from being found out.[20]

The fact that paternity may so easily be doubtful furnishes a strong
motive for the attempt to enforce chastity upon women; but that this
is not so potent as the idea of male proprietorship is evident from
the practice which exists in many primitive societies, and appears
formerly to have existed in Europe, of lending wives to visitors, as a
mark of hospitality. Adultery thus imposed on a woman by her husband
is not only regarded as quite proper, but the children that may result
are considered his legitimate offspring. The superstitious notion
that a woman’s honour is a matter of sex, and that she can not be
considered virtuous if her sex-life is not conducted in accordance with
regulations imposed by organized society, also has something to do with
the disgrace that attaches to illegitimate motherhood; but of course
this superstition itself has its source in masculine dominance. Indeed,
there is no need to emphasize the fact that the whole mass of taboo and
discrimination arrayed against the unwedded mother and her child is the
direct result of the subjection of women; for in a society where women
dominated--or even where they were the equals of men--illegitimacy
would either not exist at all, or its consequences would be made to
bear either upon the father or upon both parents equally. This may
seem an extravagant statement in view of the harshness with which
women themselves are prone to treat the unmarried mother. But it should
not be forgotten that women are what the procrustean adaptations of a
factitious morality have made them. They have been taught to believe
that motherhood out of wedlock is a cardinal sin, and the value and
fragility of reputation have been effective hindrances to any impulse
of lenience toward the sinner. Their attitude, moreover, has been
tinged with a feeling that may be termed professional. Marriage has
been, generally speaking, the only profession open to them; their
living and their social position have depended on it, and still do in
great measure; therefore the woman who commits a sexual irregularity
acts unprofessionally, somewhat as the trader who smuggles wares into
a tariff ridden country and undercuts his competitors. The position
of the unmarried mother is analogous to that of the married mother
in certain societies of which I have already spoken, whose children
are considered illegitimate because she has not been bought. Even the
prostitute, although she is a social outcast, is sooner tolerated,
because while prostitution, like marriage, has been established on a
commercial basis, it is a non-competing institution. It does not impair
the economic value of the “virtuous” woman’s chief asset. Prostitution
is condoned as a protective concession to the postulated sexual needs
of men; the prostitute has been justified, and even praised in a
back-handed way, as “the most efficient guardian of virtue”;[21] that
is to say, of the arbitrary restraints on women which pass for virtue
in a society where woman is the repository of morality. Illegitimacy,
on the other hand, or at least that large share of it which implies a
fall from conventional virtue, is an embarrassing suggestion of sexual
need in woman. Therefore, it is a disturbing phenomenon, intimating
as it does to virtuous women that the duplex morality to which their
freedom is sacrificed is unnatural and unworkable.

There is a sense, of course, in which extra-legal motherhood is, if
not sinful, at least unjust. The mother knows that the child she bears
out of wedlock will be forced, although innocent, to share with her
in the world’s displeasure at her defiance of conventional taboo,
and that the sneers of its legitimately born playmates may have a
blighting effect upon its spiritual development. She knows also,
unless she be well-to-do or especially well qualified to earn, that
her child will be at a disadvantage from the start in the matter of
livelihood and education unless the father be willing--or required
by law--to contribute to its support. There is likely to be a grim
consistency in legal injustices. Sometimes the denial of one right
makes expedient the denial of another, as when the poor, having been
reduced by legalized privilege to want and squalor, are legally
deprived of the alcohol with which they increase their wretchedness
in an attempt to find forgetfulness of their misery. The denial to
women of economic opportunity has made expedient denial of freedom in
performing the function of motherhood. Men, having enjoyed a virtual
monopoly of earning power, have been regarded as the natural providers
for women and children; therefore a woman has been required to get
a legal provider before she could legally get a child; and if one
accepted her legal disabilities without questioning their justice,
this restraint might appear quite justifiable. This may be taken as an
argument for weakness or wantonness in the unmarried mother. If so, it
must certainly apply with equal force to the unmarried father--with
double force indeed, for he knows that his act will not only add to the
difficulties, numerous enough under the best circumstances, that his
child will have to contend with, but that it means social ostracism for
the mother. Thus every illegitimate child, as society is at present
constituted, is the victim not only of social but of parental injustice.

It is hardly necessary to discuss further the economic aspects of
the question. In a society where economic opportunity is pretty well
monopolized by men, the task of the mother with children to support
is, as I have shown in the preceding chapter, extremely difficult; and
it may even be rendered impossible where the disgrace of unmarried
motherhood decreases such comparatively slight opportunity as industry,
even now, offers a woman. The effect of this disability shows clearly
in any comparison of the death-rates among legitimate and illegitimate
babies. The rate among illegitimate children is often twice as high as
that among children born in wedlock. Truly marriage is an invaluable
protection to motherhood and childhood in a society which denies them
any other.

Instead of joining in the universal condemnation of illegitimacy, it
seems more reasonable to question the ethics of a society which permits
it to exist. Certainly no social usage could be more degrading to
women as mothers of the race than that which makes it a sin to bear
a child; and nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of
morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility
for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to
abortion, infanticide, prostitution and self-destruction. I know of
no word that may be said in justification of such a code or of a
society that tolerates it. As marriage ceases to be a vested interest
with women, and as their growing freedom enables them to perceive the
insult to their humanity that this kind of morality involves, they
will refuse to stand for it. Those who prefer to regard woman as a
function will devote their energy to securing conditions under which
she may bear and bring up children with a greater degree of freedom and
self-respect than conventional morality allows her. As for those who
prefer to regard her as a human being, they will naturally demand the
abolition of all discriminations based on sex; while all women must
certainly repudiate the barbarous injustice of organized society to the
illegitimate child.

This is hardly to be regarded as a prophecy, for the revolt has already
begun. A small minority of women in Europe have for some time been
denouncing this injustice, the most prominent among them being the
famous Swedish champion of childhood, Ellen Key. Their influence
has already been reflected in the laws of several countries. In
Scandinavia, in Switzerland, and even in France, laws have already
been enacted either removing or modifying the legal disabilities of
the child born out of wedlock, and fixing the responsibilities of the
father. There are similar laws in Australia and New Zealand. These
laws vary in scope, but their general tendency is toward the abolition
of illegitimacy and recognition of joint parental responsibility for
every child brought into the world. In this country, where unjust
legal discriminations against unmarried mothers and their children are
still in force, the Woman’s Party is demanding laws recognizing every
child as legitimate, and determining the responsibilities of unmarried
parents. The abolition of illegitimacy will naturally mean that the
child of unmarried parents will have the same right to the father’s
name, and to support and inheritance, as the child born in wedlock.

There is a general impression, to which I have adverted, that marriage
is a great protection to women. Bachofen and his followers even went
so far as to suppose that she herself originally devised it for that
purpose. This school quite overlooked the fact that in so far as it has
been a protection it has been so only because society has been inimical
to her interests, and has allowed her no other defence against itself.
Marriage has certainly not protected her in the past from hard labour,
cruelty, and mental and spiritual deterioration. In spite of these
well-known facts, the notion persists that it is of inestimable benefit
to her; and those influenced by this superstition are likely to fear
that to abolish illegitimacy, with its humiliating consequences, will
be to encourage “free love” and thus to expose women to victimization
by unscrupulous men. Such a view not only carries an untenable
assumption of feminine inferiority, but it carries an equally untenable
assumption that marriage constitutes a protection against victimization
by unscrupulous men. Not only did our marriage-laws until recently give
a woman into the absolute power of her husband, however unscrupulous he
might be, but they left her no way of escape. On the other hand, they
protected the husband’s sexual monopoly of his wife and his right to be
considered the only legal parent of their children. Indeed, the law
has gone further; it has exposed women to victimization by protecting
men from detection in illegitimate parentage. Laws equalizing the
responsibilities of men and women towards illegitimate children, will
reduce temptation to unscrupulous conduct, for men will be aware
that if it result in the birth of a child they will be obliged to
acknowledge their parenthood and assume the attendant responsibilities.

I might remark here that some communities have tried to deal with
this question in what seems to me a very bungling manner, namely: by
forcing the “seducer” of a woman under the legal age of consent to
choose between marrying her and going to jail. Such laws represent
concessions to traditional prejudices, and have little relation either
to justice or common sense. They take no cognizance of the inclination
of the parties or their fitness for marriage; hence they afford a
stupid way of legitimizing the child. It would be much more sensible to
regard every child as legitimate by the very fact of having arrived in
the world, and to demand of its parents a full discharge of parental
responsibility, without complicating it with the very different
question of marital obligations. Another legal provision which is as
general as it is humiliating to women is that which permits a father to
recover damages from the seducer of his daughter. This law, which is in
force in several of our States, is supposed to find justification in
the daughter’s status as a servant in her father’s house; but since the
law grants him no similar redress for the seduction of a servant who is
not his daughter, it is evident that its real basis is in a surviving
notion of woman as the natural property of a male owner. These laws do
not lessen the disgrace that attaches to extra-legal birth; rather they
recognize and endorse it.

The importance of abolishing illegitimacy is not to be underrated,
for it means the removal of the legal sanctions which have enforced a
barbarous custom. But the abolition of illegitimacy can not be expected
entirely to remove the stigma attaching to unmarried motherhood and
birth out of wedlock. That will disappear only when the economic
independence of women shall have resulted in a spiritual independence
which will lead them to examine critically the social dogmas that
have been forced upon them, and to repudiate those which conflict
with justice. In other words, it will involve an adaptation to more
humane ethical standards; an adaptation which has begun but may be
long in reaching completion, for superstition and taboo are not easily
eradicated.


II

The assumption that justice to motherhood and childhood will undermine
the institution of marriage implies that marriage as an institution
is based on injustice; which is to assume that it is fundamentally
unsound. That it does, under present economic conditions, involve
serious injustice to both sexes I have shown in the preceding chapter.
But this notion implies something more: it implies that marriage is
acceptable to women only or chiefly because it offers them a position
of privilege--the privilege of exemption from the social and economic
consequences of illegitimate motherhood. There is some show of reason
in this; for the disabilities which marriage puts on women are in
most communities humiliating and onerous, more particularly since the
unmarried woman has so generally succeeded in establishing her right
to be treated as a free agent. The abolition of illegitimacy may
conceivably undermine institutional marriage; yet hardly before women
are economically free. For her need of society’s protection against
itself in the discharge of her maternal function has certainly had
less to do with woman’s long acquiescence in the disabilities which
marriage involves than the fact that marriage offered the only career
which society approved for her or gave her much opportunity to pursue.
She was under enormous economic and social pressure to accept those
disabilities, and she yielded, precisely as thousands of men who have
been under analogous pressure to get their living under humiliating
conditions, have yielded, rather than not get it at all.

Since we have been discussing unmarried motherhood, we may
appropriately begin our consideration of these disabilities by
examining the status of motherhood in marriage. The married mother,
particularly in modern times, is the object of a sickly pawing and
adulation and enjoys a certain formal respect--not, however, as a
mother, but as a mother of legitimate children. While she continues
to live with her husband, she may exercise considerable supervision
over the rearing of her offspring; indeed in some communities she
is, by force of custom, supreme in this province. But in case of
separation or the death of her husband, she may find herself without
any legal claim to their guardianship or custody, for until recently
children born in wedlock have been generally held to belong exclusively
to the father. The principle of joint guardianship is coming to be
recognized in modern jurisprudence, but there are communities where
the old laws still hold. In Virginia, for example, the father’s claim
is always preferred to that of the mother. In Maryland and Delaware
it is preferred to such an extent that he may even, by his will,
deprive her of the guardianship and custody of her children after
his death. This provision is a survival from English common law, and
is a logical correlative of woman’s status under that law, which was
that of a minor. Her position with regard to her children was one
of responsibilities with no compensating rights; and although the
discriminations against her have been modified here and there, this
is still pretty generally her position. In this respect the unmarried
mother is better off than the mother of legitimate children, for in
most countries, as the only legal parent of her child, she exercises
the right of guardianship and control and possesses full claim to
their services and earnings. The unmarried mother, in a word, bears her
own children; the married mother bears the children of her husband.

Usage, as every one knows, is far ahead of the laws governing the
rights of the married mother. In France, where her legal position is
notoriously bad, her relation to her family is nevertheless one of
influence and authority. In this country also her actual position is
generally far better than that allowed her by the law. But this is
merely to say that most husbands are more humane than the law; and the
fact may not be ignored that so long as legal discriminations bar her
from an equal share with her husband in the control and guardianship of
her children, she exercises parental rights only on sufferance. It is
the law which finally fixes her status in this as in other matters; and
as long as she may legally be made to suffer injustice on account of
her sex, she can hardly be called her husband’s equal, no matter what
privileges she may enjoy by virtue of his indulgence.

So much for the disabilities of the married mother. Her compensations
are the immunity that marriage affords her from society’s displeasure
and consequent persecution; the inestimable advantage of her husband’s
co-operation in making a home for her children, and in rearing and
educating them; and the fact that they have a legal claim upon him for
support and inheritance.

Her own claim for support does not depend, in law, upon her motherhood,
but upon her wifehood. She is entitled to support whether she has
children or not. On the other hand the law, in most communities, allows
her nothing more than mere support, while at the same time it maintains
certain restrictions upon her economic independence. Although most
States now allow the wife to control her own earnings in industry, her
services in the home are still pretty generally her husband’s property,
and any savings that result from economy in her domestic management
belong to him, and so does any money earned by her in her own house,
as from taking in boarders or lodgers. In short, while she works in
the home her status is that of her husband’s servant[22]. He may even,
as in Michigan, still prevent her from undertaking employment outside
the home, simply by withholding his consent. Nor is this the only
way in which the opportunities of a married woman are restricted. She
is frequently disqualified by her status for engaging in business on
her own account, or for doing so without her husband’s consent. She
may also be disqualified by law or prejudice for engaging in certain
professions, such as teaching, an occupation in which, strangely
enough, a married woman is frequently held to be incapable.

The claim for alimony which at present constitutes such a fecund source
of injustice to men and corruption among women, implies the assumption
that a woman is economically helpless, that she is a natural dependent
whose support, having been undertaken by her husband, must be continued
even after divorce, until she dies or finds another husband to support
her. It does not take into account the woman’s rightful claim to any
property that she may have helped her husband to accumulate, for
the question whether or not she shall receive alimony is within the
discretion of the court. On the other hand, the awarding of alimony may
give a woman a claim to income from property possessed by her husband
before marriage and therefore not rightfully to be enjoyed by her; it
may, furthermore, give her an equally unjustifiable lien on his future
earnings. Thus it allows women at once too little and too much. If the
community is to continue to fix the economic obligations which marriage
shall entail, it might be fairer to both sexes if those obligations
were fixed as they have been in certain of our Western States. In
those States, property acquired during marriage is regarded as common
property, and in case of separation must be divided equally. Neither
party may, during the marriage, dispose of such property without
consent of the other; nor may either party dispose of more than half
of it by will. On the other hand, either party has free disposal of
property acquired before marriage, or inherited during marriage. In
case one party dies intestate, the other shares equally with children
in his or her half of the common property, and in other property. Thus
the law raises woman above the status of a dependent and recognizes
marriage as an equal partnership. Such laws, of course, do not fit
all cases, for all marriages are by no means equal partnerships; but
so long as the State insists upon maintaining a blanket-regulation of
the marital relation, some such arrangement would seem to be more
nearly just, both to men and women, than the laws now in force in most
communities.

I have given only a partial list of the economic disabilities enforced
upon a good many millions of married women. Their status in the various
countries of the civilized world ranges all the way from complete
subjection to their husbands to complete equality with them[23]. The
subjection of women, like all slavery, has been enforced by legally
established economic disadvantages; and upon the married woman these
disadvantages, or some of them, are still binding in most communities.
The law deprived her of the right to her own property and her own
labour, and in return gave her a claim upon her husband for bare
subsistence, which is the claim of a serf. Since woman’s partial
emergence from her subjection, and the consequent modification of the
discriminations against her, laws which were logical and effective when
her status was that of a chattel have been allowed to survive other
laws which made them necessary. The result is a grotesque hodge-podge
of illogical and contradictory provisions which involve injustice to
both sexes, and should be abolished by the simple expedient of making
men and women equal in all respects before the law, and sweeping away
all legal claims which they now exercise against one another by virtue
of the marriage-bond.

This would mean, of course, that a woman might no longer legally claim
support from her husband by virtue of her wifehood; nor should she
in fairness be able to do so when all his claims to her property and
services had been abolished. There is no reason why the disabilities
which marriage imposes on women should be done away with and those
which it imposes on men retained. To take such a course would be to
turn the tables and place women in a position of privilege. The fact
that women are still at considerable disadvantage in the industrial
world might appear to justify such a position; but there is a better
way of dealing with their economic handicaps than the way of penalizing
husbands and demoralizing a large number of women by degrading
marriage, for them, to the level of a means of livelihood, gained
sometimes through virtual blackmail. Given complete equality of the
sexes, so that prejudice may no longer avail itself of legal sanction
for excluding women from the occupations in which they may elect
to engage, the economic handicaps from which they may still suffer
will be those resulting from the overcrowded condition of the general
labour-market. The ultimate emancipation of woman, then, will depend
not upon the abolition of the restrictions which have subjected her
to man--that is but a step, though a necessary one--but upon _the
abolition of all those restrictions of natural human rights that
subject the mass of humanity to a privileged class_.

This phase of woman’s problem is the main thesis of my book; and since
it will come in for detailed consideration in subsequent chapters, I
leave it for the present and proceed to discuss some probable results
of sex-equality and the removal of legal claims which marriage now
gives husband and wife against one another.

The wife would no longer be humiliated by the assumption that as a
married woman she is the natural inferior of her husband, and entitled
to society’s protection against the extreme results of the disabilities
that her status involves. If she became his housekeeper, she would
do so by free choice, and not because her services were his legal
property; and her resultant claim on his purse would be fixed by
mutual arrangement rather than by laws allowing her the claims of a
serf. The marriage, if it became an economic partnership, would be
so by mutual consent and arrangement, and would thus no longer be a
one-sided contract, legally defined, in which all the rights were on
the side of the husband, but compensated in too many cases by unjust
privileges on that of the wife. At the same time, the temptation to
marry for economic security or ease would be lessened. This temptation
besets both men and women, though not in the same degree, because men,
through the economic advantage enjoyed by their sex, are oftener in
a position of ease than women are. It is the temptation, arising out
of man’s natural desire to gratify his needs with the least possible
exertion, to live by the means of others rather than by one’s own
labour. Its gratification through marriage would not be rendered
impossible by the mere abolition of coercive laws governing the
marriage relation; but at least its cruder manifestations, such as the
frequent attempts of unscrupulous or demoralized women to use marriage
for purposes of extortion, would no longer assail the nostrils of the
public. Its reduction to a minimum must await the establishment of an
economic order under which self-support will be easy and certain.

More general and binding, even, than the economic obligations that
marriage entails are the personal claims that it creates. In so far
as these claims are psychological--those of affection and habit, or
attachment to children--their regulation and abrogation will always
afford a problem which must be solved by the two persons concerned.
There is at present a strong tendency to equalize the incidence of the
laws whereby the State defines these relations and imposes them on
married people. The old assumption of feminine inferiority in sexual
rights is gradually yielding to a single standard for both sexes. So,
also, the requirement that the wife shall in all matters subordinate
her will and judgment to the will and judgment of her husband, tends to
be modified by the new view of woman as a free agent rather than a mere
adjunct to man. Qualifications for marriage and grounds for divorce
tend to become the same for both sexes as the State is forced to
relinquish its right to regard as offences in one sex actions which it
does not recognize as offences in the other. It would appear, indeed,
that the time is not far distant when the marriage-law, however
humiliating its provisions may be, will bear equally on men and women.

But mere equalization of the law’s incidence leaves untouched the
previous question whether any third person--and the State assumes the
rôle of a third person--has a legitimate right to define and regulate
the personal relations of adult and presumably mature people. So
long as the basic assumption goes unchallenged that the State may
grant to man and woman lifelong monopoly-rights in one another, or
monopoly-rights which shall endure, despite the inclination of the
persons concerned, during the State’s pleasure, so long will complaints
of harsh or unjust marriage or divorce laws prove the truth of Mill’s
dictum that “no enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once
... those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by
complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise.”
Marriage under conditions arbitrarily fixed by an external agency is
slavery; and if we allow the right of an external agency--be it State,
family, or community--to place marriage in so degrading a position, we
necessarily deny the freedom of the individual in this most intimate
of relationships, and put ourselves in the position of petitioners for
privilege when we sue for an improvement in the rules to which we have
subjected ourselves.

When this fundamental fact is borne in mind, it becomes at once
apparent that marriage will gain in dignity through the abolition
of all legal sanction upon the personal claims that it involves. In
a community which had renounced all claim to prescribe legally the
nature of the marriage-bond, its duration, and the manner of its
observance, there would be no washing of soiled domestic linen in the
squalid publicity of courtrooms and newspaper-columns; no arbitration
of noisy domestic differences by judges whose only qualification for
the office is that they have had enough political influence to get
themselves elected; none of the demoralizing consequences that the
sense of proprietorship in one another has on the dispositions of
married people. Marriage might still be publicly registered; it would
no longer be publicly regulated. Its regulation would be left to the
people whom it concerned, as it properly should be and safely could
be; for as Mill remarked, “the modern conviction, the fruit of a
thousand years experience, is that things in which the individual is
the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to
his own discretion, and that any regulation of them by authority, save
to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous.” The only
way to protect married people against the bad faith which one may show
toward the other, is to leave the door wide open for either of them
to be quit of the union the minute it ceases to be satisfactory. If
society for any reason sees fit to close the door to freedom, it sets
union by law above the union by affection on which alone true marriage
is based; and in so doing it is responsible for an amount of injustice,
spiritual conflict, and suffering which no attempt at equitable
regulation can ever compensate. Such attempts are in reality mere
efforts to adjust the marriage-relation to the fundamental injustice of
the marriage-law.

Perhaps the most serious objection to the union by law is that it is
so often an effective barrier against the union by affection; for the
union by law complicates marriage with a great many uses that are not
properly germane to it; such as the custom of taking on one another’s
family and friends, and the setting up of a common menage where this
most intimate and delicate of relationships is maintained in a trying
semi-publicity under the critical and unwavering scrutiny of relatives
and friends. The influence of the expected extends to the regulation of
the menage and the division of labour. A lover would hardly, perhaps,
require his mistress to darn his socks; but if she became his wife
he would probably yield to the immemorial expectation that a married
woman shall do her husband’s mending. So, likewise, a woman may refuse
to accept support from her lover so long as he is only her lover, and
accept it as a matter of course when the union has been legalized. All
conventional uses have a purely fortuitous and incidental connexion
with marriage; yet they often fret it into failure. As Jane Littell
remarked not long ago in the _Atlantic Monthly_, “being friends with
someone to whom the law binds one is not so easy as it sounds.” This
is especially true where the law assumes a natural inferiority in one
party to the contract, as it almost universally does.

I have not forgotten the children. One could hardly do so in an age
when sentimentalism offers them as the final and unanswerable reason
for continuing to tolerate the injustice involved in institutionalized
marriage. But the very fact that it is the sentimentalist who thus
defends established abuses is in itself enough to warrant considerable
wariness in dealing with his arguments; for when the defenders of any
cause have recourse to sentimentality, it is likely to be for want
of solid ground under their feet, or in order to obscure a doubtful
ulterior motive. Sentimentalism is a sugar coating on the pill of
things as they are, which makes it easier for many people to swallow
it than to contemplate a dose which is at once more salutary and more
formidable, namely: things as they ought to be. When one hears the
sentimentalist proclaiming the sacredness of marriage, one may agree
with him; but at the same time one must wonder what kind of marriage
he means; whether it is the ceremony performed by a minister or a
magistrate, or the union which two people have made sacred through
mutual respect, confidence and love. Such marriages as this last have
sometimes been without benefit of clergy--Would these be as sacred to
the sentimentalist as the marriage which has been sanctified only in
law? Again, when one listens to the good old saws about the glory of
motherhood, one may be interested to know the conditions under which
it is proposed to call it glorious; and when domesticity is held up
to admiration as woman’s natural vocation, one wonders whether the
sponsor of domesticity is willing to put his argument to the test
by leaving her free to choose that vocation or not, as she will, or
whether his praise is a mere preface to the demand that she be forced
into this natural vocation by the method of denying her an alternative.
So, likewise, when one hears the argument that marriage should be
indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot help wondering
whether the protagonist is really such a firm friend of childhood,
or whether his concern for the welfare of children is merely so much
protective coloration for a constitutional and superstitious fear of
change.

Children are really as helpless as women have always been held to be;
and in their case the reason is not merely supposition. Woman was
supposed to be undeveloped man. The child _is_ undeveloped man or
woman; and because of its lack of development it needs protection. To
place it in the absolute power of its parents as its natural protectors
and assume that its interests will invariably be well guarded, would
be as cruel as was the assumption that a woman rendered legally and
economically helpless and delivered over to a husband or other male
guardian, was sure of humane treatment. No human being, man, woman, or
child, may safely be entrusted to the power of another; for no human
being may safely be trusted with absolute power. It is fair, therefore,
that in the case of those whose physical or mental immaturity renders
them comparatively helpless, there should be a watchful third person
who from the vantage-point of a disinterested neutrality may detect
and stop any infringement of their rights by their guardians, be they
parents or other people. Here then, is a legitimate office for the
community: to arbitrate, in the interest of justice, between children
and their guardians.

But the community has a more direct and less disinterested concern in
the welfare of children: every child is a potential power for good or
ill; what its children become, that will the community become. It is
knowledge of this that prompts the establishment of public schools
and colleges, and all the manifold associational activities intended
to promote the physical and spiritual welfare of children. It is back
of the mothers’ pension system, which is properly, as the Children’s
Bureau insists, a system of assistance for children. From all this
activity it is only a step to the assumption by the community of
entire responsibility for the upbringing and education of every child.
This idea has some advocates; it is a perfectly logical corollary
of the modern conception of the child’s relation to the community.
Yet it invites a wary and conditional acceptance. It is fair that
the community should assume the burden of the child’s support and
education, particularly so long as the community sanctions an economic
system which makes this burden too heavy for the great majority of
parents, and a political system which may force male children to
sacrifice their lives in war as soon as parents have completed the task
of bringing them up. But the advisibility of accomplishing this purpose
through the substitution of institutionalized care for parental care
is more than a little doubtful; for to institutionalize means in great
degree to mechanize. To establish such a system and make it obligatory,
would be to remove many children from the custody of parents entirely
unfitted to bring them up; but it would likewise involve the removal
of many children from the custody of parents eminently well fitted for
such a responsibility. It would imply an assumption that the people who
might be engaged to substitute for parents would be better qualified
for their task than the parents themselves; and such an assumption
would be dangerous so long as the work of educators continues to be as
little respected and as poorly paid as it now is. Moreover, so long as
society remains organized in the exploiting State, the opportunity to
corrupt young minds and turn out rubber-stamp patriots would be much
greater than that which is now afforded by the public school system,
whose influence intelligent parents are sometimes able to neutralize.

Perhaps the best argument against such a system is that it would not
work. If experience teaches anything, it is that what the community
undertakes to do is usually done badly. This is due in part to the
temptation to corruption that such enterprises involve, but even
more, perhaps, to the lack of personal interest on the part of those
engaged in them. Those people who advocate bringing up children in
institutions do not take into account the value of parental interest in
the child; nor do they respect the parental affection which would cause
many parents to suffer keenly if they were forced to part with their
children. The family is by no means always the best milieu for young
people; but before we seek to substitute a dubious institutionalism,
it would be wise to ascertain whether the change is imperative. In
a matter which touches, as this one does, the most profound human
instincts, there is need to observe Lord Falkland’s dictum that “where
it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” As I
have shown in the preceding chapter, parents are at present under heavy
economic handicaps in discharging their parental duties, handicaps
which not only render those duties a heavy burden, but lengthen
inordinately the period for which they must be undertaken. Until those
handicaps are removed, it will not be fair to say that the family is a
failure; and until they are removed, we may be certain that any other
institution charged with the care of the young will be a failure, for
it will be filled with people who are there less because of their
understanding of children and their peculiar fitness to rear them, than
because such work offers an avenue of escape from starvation.

These same considerations apply to the argument that the rearing of
children should be institutionalized in order to emancipate women
from the immemorial burden of “woman’s work.” There is a simpler way
of dealing with this problem, a way which eliminates an element that
dooms to failure any scheme of human affairs in which it is involved,
namely: the element of coercion. To contend that all mothers should be
forced to devote themselves exclusively to the rearing of children,
or that they should be forcibly relieved of this responsibility, is
to ignore the right of the individual to free choice in personal
matters. There is no relation more intimately personal than that of
parents to the child they have brought into the world; and there is
therefore no relationship in which the community should be slower to
interfere. This is a principle universally recognized: the community
at present interferes only when the interest of the child, or that of
the community in the child, is obviously suffering. The emancipation
of women by no means necessitates the abandonment of this principle.
It necessitates nothing more than a guarantee to women of free
choice either to undertake themselves the actual work of caring for
their children, or to delegate that work to others. There is nothing
revolutionary about this: well-to-do parents have always exercised
this choice. In mediaeval Europe people of the upper classes regularly
sent their children to be brought up by other people, and took the
children of other people into their own houses. In Renaissance Italy
the wealthy urban dwellers, almost as soon as their children were born,
sent them out of the plague-infested cities to nurse with peasants. In
modern times people who can afford it often place their children in
boarding schools at an early age, and keep them at home only during
vacations--when they do not place them in camps. Under a system of
free economic opportunity all people, instead of a few, would have
this alternative to rearing their children at home, for they would all
be able to afford it. Even under the present economic order it would
be possible if the system of children’s assistance were extended to
include every child, whether the parents were living or not. But under
a system of free opportunity there would be greater certainty that the
child would not suffer through separation from its parents; for the
paid educator would be in his position because it interested him. If
it did not, he would take advantage of the opportunity, freely open to
him, to do something that did.

So long as responsibility for the care and support of children
continues to be vested in the parents, so long, for the sake of the
child, will it be the duty of society to insist that parents shall not
neglect this responsibility. But when society had renounced all claim
to regulate the affairs of married people, it would content itself
with holding all parents, married or unmarried, jointly liable for
the support and care of their children. If the parents were married,
then the apportioning of this burden between them would be arranged by
mutual agreement, and the community’s only interest in the contract
would be that of arbiter in case of a dispute between the parties,
precisely as in case of other contracts. To assume that the community’s
interest in children justifies its claim to “preserve the home” by
making marriage indissoluble or dissoluble only under humiliating
conditions, is to confuse issues. The practice of perpetuating
marriage merely for the sake of children defeats its own end; for
it is, far from being good for children, likely to be injurious to
them. It condemns them to be brought up in what Mr. Shaw has well
called a little private hell. For the home, as other critics than Mr.
Shaw have pointed out, is a proper place for children only when it
provides harmonious conditions for their development; and harmony is
not characteristic of homes where mutual love and confidence no longer
exist between the parents. The demand that the freedom and happiness
of parents shall be sacrificed to the so-called interest of the child
is in reality a demand that injustice shall be done one person for
the sake of another; and where this demand is effective it serves no
end but that of frustration and discord, as might be expected. It is
far better, as modern society is coming to realize, for the community
to content itself with insisting upon the discharge of parental
responsibility, without prescribing too minutely the conditions under
which it shall be done.

It is not, perhaps, so much a concern for the preservation of the home
that makes people afraid of divorce, as it is for other time-honoured
concepts; such, for instance, as the idea that marriage is a sacrament,
that it is made in heaven and is therefore indissoluble in this world.
Curiously enough, this idea of the essential holiness and consequent
indissolubility of the marriage-bond has coexisted in Christian society
with the most cold-blooded practice of marrying for convenience, for
money, for social prestige, for place and power, for everything that
ignores or negates the spiritual element in sexual union. The marriage
arranged for social or mercenary reasons by the families of the
contracting parties, who might not even meet before the wedding-day,
was as sacred as if it had been founded upon an intimate acquaintance
and tender passion between them. Thus was utilitarianism invested
with a spurious holiness. Small wonder that a mediaeval court of love
denied the possibility of romantic attachment between husband and
wife. The Church, to be sure, introduced the principle of free consent
of the contracting parties; but so long as the subjection of women
endured, there could be little more than a perfunctory regard for this
principle. There can be no real freedom of consent when the alternative
to an unwelcome marriage is the cloister or lifelong celibacy at the
mercy of relatives whose wishes and interests one has defied, in a
society where to be unmarried is, for a woman, to be nobody. A son,
because of the greater independence that his sex gave him, might
safely exercise some degree of choice in marrying. A daughter might
safely exercise none. As women have become more independent, and their
economic opportunities have increased, consent has become more closely
related to inclination, and in many places, notably the United States,
it is actually dependent upon inclination;[24] but while women remain
at an economic disadvantage it is hardly to be expected that the
motives behind inclination and consent will always be entirely free
from an ignoble self-interest.

So long as woman’s economic and social welfare was bound up with
marriage, indissoluble marriage undeniably offered her a certain
kind of protection. It did not, as I have remarked, protect her from
cruelty and infidelity on the part of her husband; but it generally
assured her of a living and a respected position in society--that is,
so long as she violated none of the conventional taboos against her
sex. Even now the chivalrous man often feels that he must endure an
unhappy marriage rather than cause his wife to incur the economic and
social consequences of divorce. He generally feels that her chance of
finding another husband to support her would be considerably worse than
his of getting another wife to support; a feeling which, considering
the relative desirability of supporting and being supported, will be
justified so long as it is considered tolerable for women to be an
economic dead weight on the shoulders of men.


III

The sanctions of monogamic marriage have been enforced on women
only. The Christian Church, after some indecision, finally decided
that indissoluble monogamy was the only allowable form of marriage;
and in theory it exacted from man and woman the same faithfulness
to the marriage-vows. Practically, of course, it did no such thing.
Being dominated by men, it eventually came to condone the sexual
irregularities of men, if it did not sanction them; but sexual
irregularity in the subject sex continued to be both theoretically
and practically intolerable. Woman became the repository of morality
in a society which regarded morality as chiefly a matter of sex. But
since she was at the same time the means of satisfying those sexual
needs which Christianity disparaged, she also bore the brunt of
social displeasure at violation of the ascetic creed. Womankind, as
I have already remarked, was divided into two classes: the virtuous
wives and cloistered virgins who embodied Christian morals; and
those unfortunate social outcasts who sold their bodies to gratify
un-Christian desires. The prostitute, the “companion” of the Greeks,
who had been in the Greek world the only educated woman, the only woman
who enjoyed comparative freedom, became in the Christian world a social
outcast, reviled and persecuted, a convenient scapegoat for man’s sins
of the flesh, who atoned vicariously by her misery for his failure to
live up to the Christian ideal of sexual purity. Nothing reflects more
discredit upon the dominance of the male under Christianity than the
fact that he took advantage of the economic helplessness which forced
millions of women to sell their sex for a living, and then persecuted
them outrageously because he had outrageously mistreated them. For
prostitution, however much it may reflect upon the morality and, more
especially, upon the taste, of men, has nothing whatever to do with the
morality of women. It is, with women, a question of economics, purely
and simply. The man who buys gratification of his sexual desire has at
least an option in the matter; he will not starve if he abstains; but
the woman who sells her body indiscriminately to any man who will buy,
does so because her need to earn a living for herself or her family
forces her to do violence to her natural selective sexual disposition.

This economic pressure has been strikingly illustrated in Central
Europe since the war, where thousands of women of gentle breeding
have been literally driven to the streets by the compelling scourge
of want. The men upon whom these women in normal times would have
depended for a living had been either killed or incapacitated in the
war, or their power to earn had disappeared in the economic collapse
which followed. When men, in a society so organized as to give them
an economic advantage over women, can no longer earn enough to
maintain their dependents even at the subsistence-level, the chance
of women, for the most part untrained to breadwinning, to do so will
be poor indeed. Under such circumstances the woman thrown on her own
resources may, through some extraordinary stroke of luck, find a way to
self-sufficiency through labour; but more often she is obliged, after
her possessions have been disposed of, to take refuge from starvation
by selling the only marketable commodity that is left her--her sex.
Of course there is the alternative of starvation, which for herself
she may choose; but if this choice would involve starvation for her
children or other dependents she is likelier to choose prostitution,
precisely as so many German and Austrian mothers and daughters have
done. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s little story of Vienna after the war,
“Viennese Medley,” depicts a situation which is not untypical. A
middle-class Viennese family which had enjoyed a mediocre prosperity
before the war, is suffering, with all that suffering city, from the
nightmare of want that followed a savage peace. In the background,
unspoken of, the only ray of hope across the bleakness of their
extremity, moves the sister who sells her beauty to foreign officials
and native, war-made millionaires. It is she who, when the young
half-brother is struck by the dreaded plague of tuberculosis, sends
him to the mountains and health. It is she who helps the sister-in-law
to establish herself in trade, after the brilliant young surgeon, her
brother, has come back a nervous ruin from the war. It is she who
buries, with decent ceremony, the child of a sister whose husband, once
a distinguished professor, is now able to do little more than starve
with his numerous family. She even saves from want the young nobleman
whom she loves, and his family as well. Not every woman who has sold
herself in stricken Europe could command so high a price, but there is
no doubt that many of them stood between their suffering families and
death.

War releases all that is brutal in man, and places woman in a
peculiarly helpless position; therefore it is a prolific immediate
source of prostitution. But the ultimate and permanent source is the
source of war itself, the economic exploitation of man by man. So long
as society is organized to protect the exploiter, so long will peace
be an incessant struggle--for more wealth with the privileged classes;
for existence with the exploited masses--and war will be, as it has
always been, merely a final explosion of the struggling forces. So long
as human beings may starve in the midst of plenty, so long will woman
be under temptation to sell the use of her body. She may prostitute
herself because she has literally no other way to get a living; she
may do so in order to eke out an insufficient wage; she may do so
because prostitution seems to offer a relief from hopeless drudgery;
she may do so because she has made what the world calls a misstep and
is cut off thereby from respectability and the chance to earn a decent
living; or she may prostitute herself legally, in marriage, as women
have been forced to do from time immemorial. In every case there is
one motive force, and that motive force is economic pressure, which
bears hardest upon women because of the social, educational, and
economic disadvantages from which they are forced to suffer in a world
dominated by men. No amount of masculine chivalry has ever mitigated
this evil, and no amount ever will; for chivalry is not compulsory,
while prostitution is. No amount of exhortation, no amount of devoted
labour on the part of reformers will touch it; for it is not a question
of morality. No amount of persecution--of arrests, of manhandling,
of night-courts, public insult, fine and imprisonment--will check
it, for the necessity which prompts it is too imperious to be balked
by the uncomprehending guardians of public decency. The peril of
this necessity threatens all womankind; one turn of fortune’s wheel
may bring its stark aspect before the eyes of the most sheltered
of women. It is the sheltered women, indeed, who are peculiarly in
danger; those women whose preparation for the struggle to wrest a
living from economic injustice has consisted in waiting for men to
marry and support them. The parent who, in a world where celibacy and
prostitution are on the increase, fails to give a girl child education
or training which will enable her to get her living by her own efforts,
forces her to take a dangerous risk; for the woman who is brought up
in the expectation of getting her living by her sex may ultimately
be driven to accept prostitution if she fails to find a husband, or,
having found one, loses him.

There is only one remedy for prostitution, and that remedy is economic
freedom--freedom to labour and to enjoy what one produces. When women
have this freedom there will be no more prostitution; for no woman will
get a living by doing violence to her deep-rooted selective instinct
when opportunities are plentiful and a little labour will yield an
ample living. There may still be women who are sexually promiscuous;
but there is a vast gulf between promiscuity and prostitution: the
sexually promiscuous woman may choose her men; the prostitute may not.
It is the abysmal gulf between choice and necessity.


IV

Marriage, illegitimacy and prostitution are so closely related,
as social problems, that it is impossible to draw firm lines of
demarcation between them. The unlegalized union--which is betrayed by
illegitimate birth--may be a marriage in all but law; the legalized
marriage may be merely a respectable form of prostitution; prostitution
may take the form of a more or less permanent union which may even
assume the dignity of a true marriage. Illegitimacy, marriage, and
prostitution do not exist independently; they exist in relation to one
another and are often confused in people’s minds--as when it is assumed
that all mistresses are essentially harlots. They are the three faces
of mankind’s disastrous attempt to impose arbitrary regulation upon the
unruly and terrifying force of sex; they form a triptych of which the
central panel is institutionalized marriage and the other panels the
two chief aspects of its failure. The title might appropriately be “The
Martyrdom of Woman.”

Experience has amply proved that as individualism progresses, it
becomes increasingly difficult to impose upon people more than an
appearance of conformity in sexual matters. Society can not really
regulate anything so essentially personal and private in its nature
as the sexual relation: it can only take revenge upon its natural
result--and thereby encourage the prevention of that result by
artificial means. For every unmarried mother who is persecuted
by society, there are ten unmarried women who escape the social
consequences of an unauthorized sexual relation. For every faithful
husband there is another who deceives his wife with other women;
nor are wedded wives by any means always faithful to their marriage
vows. There are people who live together in the sexual uncleanness of
loveless marriages; and there are those who live purely in extra-legal
union. The sexual impulse is too variable and too imperious to be
compressed into a formula.

Christian society, as I have remarked, early surrendered its
uncompromising asceticism and settled down to an easy acceptance of the
mere appearance of conventional sexual virtue--that is, so far as men
were concerned. Women, as inferior and evil beings, who, incongruously
enough, at the same time embodied Christian morality, must naturally
be under the rigid surveillance of their male tutors, and no deviation
from established rules might be allowed them. Thus worldly motives
in marrying might be united with sacramental monogamy; for the man
might avail himself of extra-marital union as a safety-valve for the
emotional needs to which marriage gave no scope. The needs of the
woman were not considered, save when savage punishment was visited
upon their illicit satisfaction. Thus hypocrisy and deceit were tacitly
encouraged, and the monogamic ideal was degraded; and countless
generations lived a gigantic social lie which distorted and perverted
their spiritual vision as only an accepted lie can distort and pervert
it.

I do not mean by this that there have not been millions of really
monogamous marriages. To intimate that the greater sexual freedom
allowed men by law and custom has led all men into licence would be
as stupid as to assume that repression and surveillance have kept
all women chaste. But the institution of marriage, in Christian
society, has represented compromise, and the fruit of compromise is
insincerity--such insincerity, for example, as the Government of
South Carolina shows when it forbids divorce, and fixes by law what
proportion of his estate a man may leave to his concubine.

Any people which wishes to attain dignity and seriousness in its
collective life must resolve to cast aside compromise and insincerity,
and to look at all questions--even the vexed one of sex--squarely and
honestly. The person who would do this has first some prepossessions
to overcome: he must forget tradition long enough to appraise
institutionalized marriage by its value to the human spirit; he must
resolve for the time to regard men and women as equally human beings,
entitled to be judged by the same standards, and not by different sets
of traditional criteria; and he must put away fear of sex and fear of
autonomy. If he can do these things, he may be able to look clear-eyed
down the long vista of the centuries and realize the havoc that has
been wrought in the souls of men and women by a sexual code and a
system of marriage based on a double standard of spiritual values and
of conduct. He may perceive how constant tutelage degrades the human
spirit, and how much greater would be the sum of human joy if freedom
were substituted for coercion and regulation--if men and women were
without legal power to harass and bedevil one another simply because
the State, through the marriage-bond, allows them humiliating rights
in one another; if virginity and chastity were matters of self-respect
and taste, instead of being matters of worldly self-interest to women
and unconcern to men; if the relations between the sexes were based on
equality and regulated only by affection and the desire to serve and
give happiness.

The modification which institutionalized marriage has been undergoing
since the partial emergence of woman, its chief victim, have been
in the direction of equality and freedom. The relative ease with
which divorce may now be had marks a long step towards recognition
of marriage as a personal rather than a social concern; and so does
the tendency to abolish the legal disabilities resulting from the
marriage-bond. Nothing augurs better for the elevation of marriage to
a higher plane than the growing economic independence of women and the
consequent improvement in the social position of the unmarried woman;
for only when marriage is placed above all considerations of economic
or social advantage will it be in a way to satisfy the highest demands
of the human spirit.

But the emergence of women has had another significant effect, namely:
an increase in frankness concerning extra-legal sexual relations, if
not in their number. Of late there has been much public discussion of
the wantonness of our modern youth; which, being interpreted, means
the disposition of our girls to take the same liberty of indulgence
in pre-nuptial sexual affairs that has always been countenanced
in boys. This tendency is an entirely natural result of woman’s
increased freedom. The conditions of economic and social life have
undergone revolutionary change in the past half-century; and codes of
morals always yield before economic and social exigency, for this is
imperious. It is for this reason, as Dr. A. Maude Royden has acutely
observed, that women of the lower classes have always enjoyed a certain
immunity from the taboos that reduced women of the middle and upper
classes to virtual slavery. “If among the poor,” says Dr. Royden,
“these ‘protections’ have been dispensed with, it has not been because
the poor have thought either better or worse of their women, but merely
because they are too poor to dispense with their labour, and labour
demands some small degree of freedom.” Labour not only demands, it
gives freedom. The woman who is economically independent need no longer
observe rules based on male dominance; hence the new candour in woman’s
attitude towards the awe-inspiring fetich of sex.

If there is about this attitude an element of bravado, akin to that
of the youth who thinks it clever and smart to carry a hip-pocket
flask, it bears testimony, not to the dangers of freedom, but to the
bankruptcy of conventional morality. The worst effect of tutelage is
that it negates self-discipline, and therefore people suddenly released
from it are almost bound to make fools of themselves. The women who are
emerging from it, if they have not learned to substitute an enlightened
self-interest for the morality of repression, are certainly in danger
of carrying sexual freedom to dishevelling extremes, simply to
demonstrate to themselves their emancipation from unjust conventions.
There is no reason to expect that women, emerging from tutelage, will
be wiser than men. One should expect the contrary. It is necessary to
grow accustomed to freedom before one may walk in it sure-footedly.
“Everything,” says Goethe, “which frees our spirit without increasing
our self-control, is deteriorating.” This so-called wantonness, this
silly bravado, simply shows that the new freedom is a step ahead of the
self-discipline that will eventually take the place of surveillance
and repression. It would not be so, perhaps, if girls and boys had
ever been enlightened concerning the real sins of sex, and their true
consequences. Women, in the past, have been taught to keep virgin or
chaste for the sake of their reputations, of their families, of their
chances in the marriage-market; they have been scared into chastity in
the name of religion; but they have not been taught to be chaste for
the sake of the spiritual value of chastity to themselves. Men, having
been expected to “sow their wild oats”, have been taught to sow them
with a certain degree of circumspection. Girls have been intimidated
by pictures of the social consequences of a misstep; boys have been
warned of the physical danger involved in promiscuous sexual relations.
This may not have been the invariable preparation of youth for the
experiences of sex; but it has unquestionably been the usual one, and
it is one of utter levity and indecency.

The real sins of sex are identical for men and women; and they differ
from infractions of the conventional moral code in this respect among
others: that they do not have to be found out in order to be punished.
They carry their punishment in themselves, and that punishment is their
deteriorative effect upon the human spirit. They are infractions of
spiritual law; and there is this significant distinction to be observed
between spiritual laws and the laws of men: that regulation plays no
part in their administration. The law of freedom is the law of God, who
does not attempt to regulate the human soul, but sets instinct there
as a guide and leaves man free to choose whether he will follow the
instinct which prompts obedience to spiritual law, or the desire which
urges disregard of it. The extreme sophistication of the conventional
attitude towards sex has dulled the voice of instinct for countless
generations, with the inevitable result of much unnecessary suffering
and irreparable spiritual loss.

A healthy instinct warns against lightness in sexual relationships;
and with reason, for the impulse of sex is one of the strongest motive
forces in human development and human action. It touches the obscurest
depths of the soul; it affects profoundly the functions of the mind
and the imagination--can not, indeed, be dissociated from them. The
fact that it is also strongly physical leads to misunderstanding and
disregard of its relation to the mind and spirit; a misunderstanding
and disregard which are immensely aggravated in a society where woman,
because of her inferior position, may be used for the gratification
of physical desire, with no consideration of her own desires or her
spiritual claims. Prostitution, for example, has exerted a most
deleterious influence on the attitude of men toward sex and toward
women. But degradation of the sex-impulse is inevitably punished. The
sheerly physical indulgence to which it leads produces a coarsening of
spiritual fibre, an incapacity for appreciation of spiritual values.
Moreover, it produces a cleavage between passion and affection which
renders impossible the highest and most beautiful form of the sexual
relation, the relation in which passion and affection are fused in a
love which offers complete understanding and fulfilment. It is to this
fusion (and not to monogamy, which, Spencer thought, developed love)
that we owe “the many and keen pleasures derived from music, poetry,
fiction, the drama, etc., all of them having for their predominant
theme the passion of love.” True monogamy, the product of this
highest love, is not a regulation to be observed; it is an ideal to
be attained, and it will not be attained by the person who fails to
recognize and to respect the spiritual aspects of the sexual relation.

Nor will it be attained by the person who mistakes excitement for
love, and who flits from one temporary attachment to another, thinking
always to find the beautiful in the new. Such promiscuous philandering
not only precludes depth of affection and thus renders constancy
impossible; it also blunts perception. Its effect was never better
expressed than by Burns, who was one of its unhappy victims.


     I waive the quantum o’ the sin,
     The hazard of concealin’,
     But och! it hardens a’ within,
     And petrifies the feelin’.


This is the penalty of levity in human relations: that it _petrifies
feeling_. One pays the price in spiritual deterioration. There is
probably no more striking testimony to this than the first part of
Goethe’s “Faust.” Consider what we know of the nature of Goethe’s
relations with women; and then consider the spiritual insensitivity,
the failure to perceive and draw upon the inexhaustible spiritual
treasures that life holds in store, that are implied in his failure
to devise for Faust, brought back from the brink of the grave at cost
of his immortal soul, any more animating employment for his new-found
youth than a low intrigue with an ignorant peasant girl.

I will pass by the contention that men are by nature polygamous and
women monogamous; for it rests on evidence created by a dual standard
of conduct for the sexes. Certain women of independent spirit are at
present rather conspicuously engaged in proving themselves not merely
polygamous but promiscuous; and a great many men have always proved
themselves to be monogamous. Probably human beings vary in respect of
these tendencies as of others. All people, perhaps, can not attain the
highest plane in love, either for want of capacity or of opportunity;
nor can all people conform to a single mode of conduct. But all people
can attain sincerity in sexual relations, and at least a certain degree
of self-knowledge. Sincerity, self-knowledge, respect for oneself and
for other people; these are essential to a genuine ethic of sex; and
they are uncontemplated by the sanctions of conventional morality. Yet
the person who violates this ethic sins against his own spirit, which
is to sin against the Holy Ghost, and on the spiritual plane he will be
punished.

An increase in extra-legal relationships does not of itself imply
spiritual retrogression. It might imply instead one of two things, or
both, namely: an increase in the economic obstacles to legal marriage;
or a growing disinclination to admit an affair so personal as the
sex-relation to sanction and regulation by people whom it did not
concern. If men and women were economically equal and independent,
the number of marriages might increase enormously; on the other hand,
institutionalized marriage might be superseded by marriage without
legal sanction, which before the birth of children might not be even
known or recognized as marriage.[25] Free people would probably want
less of official interference in their personal affairs, rather than
more. But for those who wanted to avoid the terrors of autonomy there
would still be marriage; and for those who wanted to walk in the strait
and ennobling way of freedom, there would be the right to love without
official permission, and to bring forth children unashamed. Those who
wished to sell themselves would be free to do so if they could find
buyers; but no one would be forced to live by violating the law of love
which is the law of life. Freedom implies the right to live badly, but
it also implies the right to live nobly and beautifully; and for one
who has faith in the essential goodness of the human spirit, in the
natural aspiration towards perfection which flowers with touching
beauty even in the bleak soil of that hardship, degradation and crime
to which injustice condemns the mass of humanity--for one who has this
faith in the human spirit, there can be no question what its ultimate
choice would be.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Code Napoléon: “_La recherche de la paternité est interdite_.”
This provision was expunged in 1913. In Massachusetts, the father’s
name may not be given in the record of birth except on the written
request of both father and mother. No similar protection against
publicity is provided for the mother.

[21] Lecky, “History of European Morals.” Chapter V.

[22] A recent decision in the State of New York declared that a husband
is not required to fulfil his promise to return money loaned him by his
wife, when she has accumulated it through economy in her housekeeping;
because every saving of the kind is the property of the husband, as are
the services of the wife. The wife has no money of her own.

[23] The State of Wisconsin has made men and women equal before the law.

[24] In countries where the custom of dowry persists the parents are
obviously in a position to exact a great degree of regard for their
wishes, more particularly where economic opportunity is no longer
plentiful. In this country, where abundance of free land made the
support of a family comparatively easy and secure, marriage early
became a matter to be arranged by the contracting parties. In modern
France, on the other hand, it is still largely a matter to be arranged
between families.

[25] Several feminists have already, indeed, urged public sanction
of extra-legal sexual relations, and C. Gasquoine Hartley, with
a genuinely Teutonic passion for order, has even advocated their
regulation by the State. This is probably impossible, for people who
choose such relationships usually do so to escape regulation.




CHAPTER V

THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF WOMEN


I

It is to the industrial revolution more than anything else, perhaps,
that women owe such freedom as they now enjoy; yet if proof were
wanting of the distance they have still to cover in order to attain,
not freedom, but mere equality with men, their position in the
industrial world would amply supply it. Men in industry suffer from
injustices and hardships due to the overcrowding of the labour-market.
Women suffer from these same injustices and hardships; and they have
an additional handicap in their sex. The world of work, embracing
industry, business, the professions, is primarily a man’s world. Women
are admitted, but not yet on an equal footing. Their opportunities
for employment are restricted, sometimes by law, but more often by
lack of training; and their remuneration as wage-earners and salaried
workers is generally less than that of men. They have to contend with
traditional notions of what occupations are fitting for their sex;
with the jealousy of male workers; with the prejudices of employers;
and finally with their own inertia and their own addiction to
traditional concepts. All these difficulties are immensely aggravated
by the keenness of the competition for work. If the opportunity to work
were, as it should be, an unimpeded right instead of a privilege doled
out by an employer, these handicaps of women would be easily overridden
by the demand for their labour. I shall discuss this point more fully
later on. It is sufficient here to note that when the war created a
temporary shortage of labour, women were not only employed in, but
were urged in the name of patriotism to enter, occupations in which
until then only men had been employed. The effect of this temporary
shortage on their industrial opportunities affords a hint of what their
position would be if the glutting of the labour-market were permanently
relieved. A shortage of labour means opportunity for the worker, male
or female.

Women have always been industrial workers. Otis T. Mason even went
so far as to declare that “All the peaceful arts of today were once
woman’s peculiar province. Along the lines of industrialism she was
pioneer, inventor, author, originator.” This view is in rather
striking contrast with the contemptuous derogation which has been for
a long time current in European civilization, and has found expression
in such cutting remarks as that of Proudhon, that woman “could not even
invent her own distaff.” It is no doubt a fairer view, although it
is probably somewhat exaggerated. There is certainly no valid reason
to suppose that sex is a barrier to the invention and improvement of
industrial processes. Be this as it may, it is undeniable that women
have always been producers. Among some primitive tribes, indeed, they
are the only industrialists, the men occupying themselves with war and
the chase or, among maritime peoples, with fishing. The modern invasion
of the industrial field by women does not, then, represent an attempt
to do something that women have never done before. It does represent
an attempt to adapt themselves to the new conditions created by the
industrial revolution.

The range of their opportunities has been considerably restricted by
prejudices arising from the traditional sexual division of labour in
European society. “In the developed barbarism of Europe, only a few
simple household industries were on the whole left to women.”[26] It
was natural, then, when women followed industry into the larger field
of machine-production, that it should be assumed that the industries
in which they might fittingly engage would be those most nearly akin
to the occupations which European society has regarded as peculiarly
feminine. Before the World War, according to the Women’s Bureau,
“over seventy-five per cent of all women engaged in manufacture were
concentrated in the textile and garment-making industries”; and we have
the same authority for the statement that “except for certain branches
of food-manufacture--such as flour making ... women constitute from a
third to two-thirds of the working forces in the industries concerned
with the business of clothing and feeding both the fighting and the
civilian population.” The new opportunities opened up by the exigency
of the war-period widened considerably the scope of women’s activity;
they were employed in machine-shops and tool-rooms, in steel- and
rolling-mills, in instrument-factories, in factories manufacturing
sewing machines and typewriters, in utensil-factories, in plants
working in rubber and leather, in wood-working industries.

In some of these industries women continue to be employed. In others
they were discharged to make room for men when the emergency was
over. But even where they continue to be employed their opportunities
for training are not equal to those of men. The Women’s Bureau in
1922 issued a valuable bulletin on “Industrial Opportunities and
Training for Women and Girls.” According to this bulletin, the
war-experience of women in new employments made it apparent that the
most promising future for craftswomen in these fields lies in (a)
machine-shops where light parts are made, (b) wood-product factories
where assembling and finishing are important processes, (c) optical-
and instrument-factories, (d) sheet-metal shops. The survey made by
the Bureau to discover how many of the country’s industrial training
schools were fitting women for these trades disclosed the fact that
in nine States where women, because of industrial conditions, are
most in need of training for machine-shop, sheet-metal, furniture, or
optical work, they are either excluded by public vocational schools
from the courses in such works, or they are not encouraged, as men are,
to enter those courses. In Ohio, for example, women were enrolled in
only five of the fifty-three public vocational schools reporting, and
in these five schools they were taught dressmaking, costume-design,
dress-pattern making, embroidery, power-machine sewing, and pottery
making. Men on the other hand, received instruction in the following
courses which women needed: machine-shop practice, tool-making, shop
mathematics, mechanical drafting, blue-print reading, metallurgy,
pattern-making, sheet-metal work, welding, auto-mechanics and repair,
motor-cycle mechanics, gas engineering, cabinet-making and woodworking.
Women were not debarred by rule or law from entering these courses, but
they were not encouraged to do so. The courses, as one superintendent
wrote, were “designed for men.” The situation in Ohio is more or less
the same as that in the other eight States. Women are either not
admitted to vocational courses designed to prepare workers for the
industries cited, or they are not encouraged to enroll. Yet, as the
Bureau points out, these institutions are operated at the expense of
the taxpayers, women as well as men, and their equipment should be
used to serve women as well as men. “It is obvious,” says the Bureau,
“that the public vocational school authorities, with few exceptions,
think of trade for women only in terms of dressmaking and millinery,
and are as yet quite oblivious to the fact that these trades, except in
certain clothing centers, are not the big employers of woman labour,
nor are they always the best trades at which to earn a livelihood. It
is the semi-public school that is beginning first to recognize the new
position which woman occupies in industry as a result of the war and
is opening to her its doors and guiding her into courses leading to
efficiency in the new occupations.”

This blindness of the school authorities to the vocational needs of
women goes to prove how strong is the force of traditional prejudices.
The making of clothing has been largely in the hands of women for so
long that even in cities where the only industries employing women
are mechanical or woodworking, the public schools offer them courses
in sewing and millinery. Prepossession does not yield all at once to
established fact. If women can make a permanent place for themselves
in their new occupations, public officials will eventually come to
associate them with these occupations and follow the lead of the
semi-public schools in fitting girls to engage in them on an equal
footing with boys. But it will take time; and meanwhile women will
continue to be at a disadvantage in entering these occupations. So
will they be at a disadvantage in entering any occupation where they
have not before been employed, or where they are employed only in
insignificant numbers, so long as prejudice or conservatism continues
to debar them, and the necessary training is not as freely available to
them as it is to men.

Above all, so long as their industrial status continues to be, as the
Women’s Bureau expresses it, “subsidiary to their home status,” they
can never be on a really secure footing in the industrial world. While
employers assume that all male workers have families to support and
that all female workers are in industry rather through choice than
necessity and may, in periods when work is slack, fall back on the
support of male relatives, so long will women be the first workers
to suffer from any slowing down of industry. This was strikingly
illustrated during the period of unemployment which succeeded the
intense industrial activity made necessary by the war, when women were
discharged in great numbers to make room for men, and much resentment
was voiced against their retention in places which might be filled by
men. “Back to the home,” says the Women’s Bureau, “was a slogan all
too easily and indiscriminately flung at the wage-earning woman by
those who had little conception of the causes which forced her into
wage-earning pursuits.” In periods of industrial depression it appears
to be the regular practice to lay off the married women workers first,
then the single women, and the men last.

How unjust to the woman worker, and how little justified by actual
facts, is this survival of the idea that woman’s place is the home,
has been shown through investigations undertaken by the Women’s Bureau
and other agencies. The results of these investigations, published
in Bulletin No. 30 of the Women’s Bureau, show that the woman in
industry is not merely working for pin-money, as thoughtless people
assume, but that she is more often not only supporting herself on
her inadequate wage, but contributing materially to the support of
dependents. “Contributing all earnings to the family fund,” says the
Bureau, “is a very general practice among wage-earning women.” This of
course means, as the Bureau remarks, that however much or little her
contribution may mean to the family, for the woman herself it means
a surrender of economic independence. The contrast between single men
and single women in this respect is significant. In an investigation
conducted among workers in the shoe-making industry of Manchester,
New Hampshire, the Bureau found that “comparing single men and women,
the women contributed (to the family income) more extensively, both
actually and relatively.” The percentage of earnings contributed by
sons and daughters is particularly interesting. The Bureau found that
“in the families with per capita earnings of less than $500, 49.3
per cent of the sons and 71.6 per cent of the daughters contributed
all their earnings, while in families with per capita earnings of
$500 or more, 36.8 per cent of the sons and 53.4 per cent of the
daughters contributed all earnings.” When one remembers that the wage
paid to women was so much lower than that paid to men that the Bureau
pronounced them to be scarcely comparable, the fact that “the daughters
contributed a somewhat larger proportion of the family earnings than
did the sons” takes on added significance. The sons contributed almost
as much in actual money as the daughters, but out of their higher wages
they retained something for themselves, “thus assuring themselves of a
degree of independence and an opportunity to strike out for themselves
which is denied the daughters.”

It is evident, then, that women, even in the “emancipation” of the
industrial world, are continuing their immemorial self-sacrifice
to the family, and that it is not the married woman alone, but the
single woman as well, who makes this sacrifice. The conditions of the
sacrifice have changed with the changes in industry, but the sacrifice
continues. The productive labour of women appears to be quite as
indispensable to their families as it was in the days when they spun
and wove and sewed and baked at home. This being the case, there is
obviously no other ground than prejudice for the assumption that men,
as the natural providers, should have preference in the labour-market.
According to the census of 1920, thirty-five per cent of the men in the
country are single; therefore it is fair to assume that thirty-five
per cent of the men in industry are single. Two-thirds of the women in
industry are single, but the available figures show that a much larger
percentage of these women than of single men are contributing all or
most of their earnings to their families, while married women workers
are contributing all of their earnings. In view of these figures,
there is patent injustice in the assumption that all men and no women
have dependents to support.

So is there injustice in the assumption that women are naturally at
least partly dependent on male workers, and therefore may fairly be
forced to accept a smaller wage than men. This assumption is not only
grossly unfair to the woman worker, but it does not tally with fact. A
fine example of the kind of defence for the practice of sweating women
workers that can be based on this assumption is quoted by the Women’s
Bureau from an unnamed commercial magazine. “Eighty-six per cent of
women workers,” runs this masterpiece of sophistry, “live at home or
with relatives. [So, in all likelihood, do eighty-six per cent of male
workers.] It is immaterial in these cases whether the earnings of each
measure up to the cost of living scheduled for a single woman living
alone, so that the theory of the need of a sufficient wage to support a
single woman living alone does not apply to eighty-six per cent of the
entire population [_sic_].” This quotation, says the Bureau, is typical
of the attitude of the employer who pays his women employees less than
a living wage on the plea that they live at home and therefore have
few expenses. It is equally remarkable in its ruthless disregard of
the just claim of the woman worker to the same share in the product of
her toil that the male worker is allowed; and in its disregard of the
fact that so long as eighty-six per cent of women workers are forced to
accept a starvation-wage because they live at home, the other fourteen
per cent who do not live at home will be forced by the pressure of
competition to accept the same starvation-wage. The question how this
fourteen per cent will eke out a living--whether through overwork,
begging or prostitution--does not of course concern the employer; for
it is one of the striking differences between chattel-slavery and
wage-slavery that the owner of the wage-slave is under no obligation to
keep his workers from starving. That is, presumably, their own lookout.

If employers are not given to concerning themselves with this question,
however, communities are. Thirteen States have enacted laws fixing a
minimum wage for women, three have fixed minimum wages in specified
occupations, one has fixed a minimum wage which its industrial welfare
commission has power to change, and nine have created boards or
commissions with power to fix minimum wage-rates. It may be noted that
in those States where the rate is fixed by law, it has not responded
to the rising cost of living. In Utah and Arkansas, for example,
the minimum wage for an experienced woman is $7.50 a week. There is
constant effort by interested individuals and organizations to get
similar laws enacted in other States, in spite of the fact that in 1923
the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional the
minimum wage-law of the District of Columbia. Such efforts, of course,
are in reality efforts to secure class-legislation, as are all attempts
to secure special enactments designed to benefit or protect women.

Of such enactments there is an ever increasing number. So rapidly
do they increase, indeed, that women may be said to be in a fair
way to exchange the tyranny of men for that of organized uplift.
They are sponsored by those well-meaning individuals who deplore
social injustice enough to yearn to mitigate its evil results, but
do not understand it well enough to attack its causes; by women’s
organizations whose intelligence is hardly commensurate with their zeal
to uplift their sex; and by men’s labour-organizations which are quite
frankly in favour of any legislation that will lessen the chances of
women to compete with men in the labour-market.[27] Given the combined
suasion of these forces, and the inveterate sentimentalism which makes
it hard for legislators to resist any plea on behalf of “the women
and children,” almost anything in the way of rash and ill-considered
legislation is possible, and even probable. There is on the
statute-books of the various States an imposing array of laws designed
to “protect” women workers. There are only four States which do not
in some way limit the hours of work for women; there are eleven which
limit the number of successive days that they may work; fourteen have
fixed the amount of time that shall be allowed them for their midday
meal; twelve have ruled that a woman may work only a given number of
hours without a rest-period. Sixteen States prohibit night-work in
certain industries or occupations; two limit her hours of night-work to
eight. There is also a tendency to extend to women special protection
against the hazards of industry. In seventeen States the employment of
women in mines is prohibited. Two States prohibit their employment in
any industry using abrasives. In four States they are not allowed to
oil moving machinery. Three regulate their employment in core-making;
and four regulate the amount of the weight that they may be required to
lift--the maximum ranging, oddly enough, from fifteen pounds in Ohio
and Pennsylvania to seventy-four pounds in Massachusetts. In addition
to those regulations which prohibit women from working in certain
occupations or under certain conditions, “each State,” says the Women’s
Bureau, “has many laws and rulings which prescribe the conditions
under which women should work, covering such matters as the lifting
of weights, provision of seats, and proper provision for sanitation
and comfort.” In six States, industrial commissions have power to make
regulations for the health and welfare of workers. In three, the
commissions have power to make regulations for women and minors only,
and in one, for women, minors, learners, and apprentices.

Perhaps the most striking thing about all these multiform regulations
governing the employment of women is the amount of misplaced zeal that
they denote. “In most cases,” says the Women’s Bureau, “the laws which
prohibit their employment have little bearing on the real hazards to
which they are exposed.... Prohibiting the employment of women on
certain dusty processes does not solve the problem of any industrial
disease in a community. Men are also liable to contract pulmonary
diseases from exposure to dusts.... It is very possible that under the
guise of ‘protection’ women may be shut out from occupations which are
really less harmful to them than much of the tedious, heavy work both
in the home and in the factory which has long been considered their
special province. _Safe standards of work for women must come to be
safe standards for men also if women are to have an equal chance in
industry._” The italics are mine. It is worth mentioning here that
only two States prohibit the employment of women in the lead-industry,
which so far is the only one that has been proved more harmful to
women than to men. The mass of legislation and regulation designed
to protect women from the fatigues and hazards of industry would
seem, then, to have been animated more by chivalry than by scientific
knowledge; and while chivalry may be all very well in its place, it can
hardly be expected to solve the industrial problem of women.

In connexion with so-called welfare-legislation, it is interesting
to observe that women and children are customarily grouped together
as classes requiring protection; and that various laws affecting
their position in industry have been sanctioned by the courts as
being for the good of the race and therefore not to be regarded
as class-legislation. Such decisions certainly would appear to be
reasonable in so far as they apply to children, who are the rising
generation of men and women, and should be protected during their
immaturity. But they can be held valid as they affect women only if
woman is regarded as primarily a reproductive function. This view,
apparently, is held by most legislators, courts, and uplifters; and
they have an unquestionable right to hold it. Whether, however,
they are just in attempting to add to the burdens of the working
woman by imposing it upon her in the form of rules that restrict
her opportunities, is another question. One thing is certain: if
discriminative laws and customs are to continue to restrict the
opportunities of women and hamper them in their undertakings, it makes
little difference for whose benefit those laws and customs are supposed
to operate, whether for the benefit of men, of the home, of the race,
or of women themselves; their effect on the mind of woman and her
opportunities, will be the same. While society discriminates against
her sex, for whatever reason, she can not be free as an individual.

Should nothing, then, be done to protect women from the disabilities
and hazards to which they are subject in the industrial world? Better
nothing, perhaps, than protection which creates new disabilities.
Laws which fix fewer hours of work for women than for men may
result in shortening men’s hours also in factories where many women
are employed; but they may result in the substitution of men--or
children--for women in factories where but few have been employed.
Laws prohibiting night-work may reduce the chances of women to get
much-needed employment, and may sometimes shut them out of work which
would offer higher returns on their labour than anything they might
get to do during the day--as, for example, night-work in restaurants,
where the generous tips of after-theatre patrons add considerably to
the earnings of waiters. Moreover, it is hard to see on what ground
night-work could be held to be more harmful for women than for men.
Minimum-wage laws may fix a legal limit to the greed of employers, but
they can not prevent the underpayment of women workers, for they are
based on theoretical notions of a living wage, and have no relation to
the actual value of the individual’s labour. Where they are fixed by
law, as I have remarked, a rise in the cost of living may render them
ineffectual. As for those laws which undertake to protect women against
the hazards of industry, they have usually, as the Women’s Bureau has
shown, very little relation to the hazards to which women are actually
exposed; but they constitute a real barrier to industrial opportunity.
On the whole, the vast and unwieldy array of laws and rules designed
either to protect the woman worker, or to safeguard the future of the
race at her expense, are a pretty lame result of a great deal of
humanitarian sound and fury. _Parturiunt montes._

It is quite natural that the result should be lame; for these
protections and safeguards represent so many attempts to mind some one
else’s business; and the great difficulty about minding some one else’s
business is that however good one’s intentions may be, one can never
really know just where that some one’s real interests lie, or perfectly
understand the circumstances under which he may be most advantageously
placed in the way to advance them, for the circumstances are too
intimately bound up with his peculiar temperament and situation. As
Mill has remarked in a passage which I have already quoted, the world
has learned by long experience that affairs in which the individual
is the person directly interested go right only when they are left to
his own discretion, and that any interference by authority, save to
protect the rights of others, is mischievous. The tendency of modern
welfare-legislation is to make a complete sacrifice of individual
rights not to the rights but to the hypothetical interests of others;
and for every individual who happens to benefit by the sacrifice, there
is another who suffers by it. If it is hard to regulate one human
being for his own good, it is impossible to regulate people _en masse_
for their own good; for there is no way of making a general rule affect
all individuals in the same way, since no two individuals are to be
found who are of precisely the same temperament and in precisely the
same situation.

There is in all this bungling effort to ameliorate the ills of working
women and to safeguard through them the future of the race, a tacit
recognition of economic injustice and a strange incuriousness about
its causes. One would naturally expect that the conditions which move
people to seek protective legislation would move them to question the
nature of an economic system which permits such rapacity that any class
of employees requires to be protected from it. Surely the forces of
righteousness must know that there are reasons for the existence of
the conditions which move them to pity and alarm; yet they seem quite
willing to go on indefinitely battling against the conditions, and
winning with great effort legislative victories which are constantly
being rendered ineffectual through lax administration of laws, through
the reluctance of employees to jeopardize their positions by testifying
against employers, or through unforeseen changes in economic
conditions. During all this waste of time and effort, this building
and crumbling and rebuilding of protective walls around the labourer,
the causes of economic injustice continue their incessant operation,
producing continuously a new crop of effects which are like so many
windmills inviting attack by the Don Quixotes of reform.

Let us consider the effects of economic injustice on women, side by
side with the reformer’s work upon those effects. Women in industry
suffer, as I have shown, the injustice of inequality with men as
regards wages, opportunities, training, and tenure of employment.
The reformer attacks the problem of wages, and secures minimum-wage
laws based on some one’s theory of what constitutes a living wage.
No allowance is made for dependents because women, theoretically,
have none. The amount allowed may from the first be inadequate, even
for one person, or it may be rendered inadequate by a rise in the
cost of living. In either case, it is purely arbitrary, and bears no
relation whatever to the value of the worker’s services. Still, such
legislation might be better than nothing if there were nothing better
to be done. The reformer is less zealous in his attempt to provide
women with opportunities; his showing in this field is less impressive
than in that of wages. Still, he has done something. If he has not
been entirely responsible for the opening to women of many positions
in government service, he has at least greatly assisted in securing
them these opportunities. Farther than this, it must be admitted, it is
difficult for him to go. He might, indeed, exert himself to see that
women are provided by one means or another with equal opportunities to
get training, but he can do little to affect the policies of private
employers of labour, who can hardly be dictated to concerning whom they
shall hire and whom they shall retain. Nor can he prevent employers
from laying off women workers first when there is a slowing down in
production. In three, then, out of four of the disadvantages which
bear more heavily on women in industry than on men, the reformer, with
all his excellent intentions, is unable to be very helpful; while in
his zeal to safeguard the race, whose future appears to him to depend
entirely on the health of the female sex, he has multiplied their
disadvantages in the manner I have already described, without, however,
having made any noteworthy advance toward the accomplishment of his
purpose.

Now, had he chosen to inquire into the causes of the artificial
disabilities by which women workers are handicapped, he might have
discovered that these and the industrial hazards which cause him
such grave concern may be traced to the same fundamental source; and
that the just and only effective way of removing these disabilities
and hazards is to eradicate the source. Women in industry are the
victims of traditional prejudices: I have shown what those prejudices
are--the idea that woman’s place is the home, that women workers have
no dependents, that they work for pin-money and therefore do not
need a living wage, that upon them alone depends the future health
of the race. But as I remarked at the beginning of this chapter,
these prejudices could not be turned to the disadvantage of the woman
worker if it were not for the overcrowding of the labour-market. So
long as there are more people looking for work than there are jobs to
be had, the advantage in fixing terms and conditions of labour is on
the side of the employer. If men are obliged by their need to put up
with underpayment, women will be forced to accept an even worse rate;
if the tenure of men is uncertain, that of women will be even more
so. If the conditions of industry are hazardous, the alternative of
starvation will force the workers to risk injury or death unless the
employer be required by law to maintain the proper safeguards. Suppose,
however, that labour were scarce, that for every worker looking for
employment there were a dozen employers looking for workers. Under
such circumstances, the employer would be glad enough to hire the
worker who could fill his particular requirements, without regard to
sex, as employers did during the war when labour was scarce; and he
would pay the worker a wage determined not by theory or prejudice,
but by the amount of competition for the worker’s services. If the
employment he offered were hazardous, he would be obliged to maintain
proper safeguards in order to retain his employees, and in addition
would probably be forced to pay them a higher wage than they could earn
in some safer employment. If he did not do these things, his workers
would simply leave him for more satisfactory positions. Nor would he
be able to overwork his employees, for if he attempted to do so, some
rival employer would outbid him for their services by offering better
hours and easier conditions of labour. Thus the peculiar disabilities
of women workers would disappear with the disabilities of labourers
in general, and not a stroke of legislation would be required to make
industry both safe and profitable for the woman worker.

This condition is not unnatural or impossible. It is the present
condition of chronic unemployment, of expensive and ineffectual
“welfare” legislation, of wasteful and futile struggles between
organized capital and organized labour--it is this condition that is
entirely unnatural. I have mentioned its cause in Chapter III, and I
shall discuss it further in my next chapter. Upon its removal, and not
upon regulations which hamper the woman worker and reduce her to the
status of a function, the future of the race depends. The ancestors of
coming generations are men as well as women, and posterity will derive
its heritage of health from its ancestors of both sexes. Its prospect
of health will not be improved by legislation calculated to safeguard
the health of women workers, so long as the children they bear continue
to be exposed to an involuntary poverty which breeds ignorance,
imbecility, disease and crime. The happiness as well as the health
of future generations will depend in great measure upon the extent to
which both men and women can release themselves from the deteriorating
conditions of economic exploitation.


II

It is in business and in professional pursuits that the occupational
progress of women, and their emancipation from traditional prejudices,
are most marked. Although in the lower ranks of labour in these
pursuits there is a mass of women who, impelled by necessity,
work for low wages at mechanical tasks which offer no chance of
advancement, there is, nearer the top, a large group of women who
have been more fortunate in worldly position and education, and who
are spurred as much either by interest in their work or a desire to
be self-supporting, as by actual need to earn; who share, in other
words, the attitude that leads young men to strike out for themselves
even though their fathers may be able to support them. It is the woman
animated by these motives who is doing most for the advancement of her
sex; for it is she, and not the woman who works through necessity,
who really challenges the traditional prejudices concerning the proper
place of women. The woman labourer proves the _need_ of women to earn;
the business woman or professional woman who works because she wants to
work, is establishing the _right_ of women to earn. More than this, as
she makes her way into one after another of the occupations that have
been held to belong to men by prescriptive right, she is establishing
her claim, as a human being, to choose her work from the whole wide
field of human activity. It is owing to the attitude towards life
adopted by such women, to their preference of independence and action
over the dependence and passivity in vogue not so many years ago, that
it is coming to be quite the expected thing that young women of the
well-to-do classes shall set out to earn their living, as young men do,
instead of stopping under the parental roof, with a watchful eye out
for men who will marry and support them. Need I remark that nothing is
more likely than this new attitude to bring about the substitution of
the “union by affection” for the union by interest? The woman who is
economically independent is under much less temptation to marry from
economic motives than the woman for whom marriage represents the only
prospect of security.

There is still a goodly number of prejudices and discriminations to
be overcome before women in business and the professions shall stand
on an equal footing with men as regards opportunity and remuneration.
Except where she is in business for herself, the woman in these
pursuits must generally be content with a lower rate of pay than men;
and if observation may be taken to count for anything, she is expected
to work somewhat harder for what she gets--less loafing on the job is
tolerated in her than in the male employee. She is also more likely
to find herself pocketed; that is to say, in a position from which,
because of her sex, there is no possibility of further advance because
the higher positions are reserved for men. It is so universally the
rule that women must content themselves with reaching the lower rungs
of the occupational ladder, that the instances where they manage to
attain to places of responsibility and authority are still rare enough
to be found worthy of remark in the press. The same thing is true of
political positions; women are not yet represented in politics in
anything like a just proportion to their numbers, nor are they often
able to get themselves either elected or appointed to responsible
positions. None the less, considering the comparatively short time
since their emergence into the business world and the world of public
affairs, they are already making an excellent showing.

The world of business and the professions, like the world of industry,
has its occupations which are considered peculiarly suitable for women.
Strictly subordinate positions are thought to suit them very well;
hence there is quite an army of women stenographers, bookkeepers,
clerks and secretaries to be found in the business section of any
modern city. The personnel of the nursing profession is made up almost
exclusively of women; and the work of teaching in our public schools,
especially where it is most conspicuously underpaid, is largely in
their hands. There is, to be sure, an impression current among members
of school boards that marriage disqualifies a woman for the teaching
profession; but the single woman is fairly secure in her position,
possibly because it does not pay well enough to be very attractive
to men. Occupations connected with the arts are also held, in this
country, to be particularly well adapted for women, although it must
be noted that the prejudice of male musicians is effective enough to
exclude them from the personnel of our important orchestras. It is in
the creative arts that their work is most welcomed; more especially
in the field of literature; and this may seem strange, in view of the
fact that so many eminent authorities believe that their sex renders
them incapable of attaining any significance in creative work. It is,
I apprehend, rather to the low opinion in which aesthetic pursuits are
held in this country than to a high opinion of female ability, that
this peculiar condition must be ascribed.

But if certain occupations are considered peculiarly appropriate for
women, there is none the less a great deal of prejudice against them in
others. The idea that woman’s place is the home has no more disappeared
from the world of business and the professions than it has disappeared
from the world of industry, even though it is the business woman and
the professional woman who are doing most to dislodge it. And here it
may be well to remark a fact that has already been noted, with some
pointed comment, by Ethel Snowden, namely: that woman’s invasion of the
gainful occupations appears to be found unwomanly in proportion to the
importance of the position to which she aspires.

It is the married woman in business or in professional work, as it is
in industry, who suffers most from the surviving prejudices concerning
her sex. When there are economies to be effected through the discharge
of workers, the idea that the married woman is normally a dependent
comes immediately to the fore, and she is the first employee to be
discharged. For example, _Equal Rights_ of 8 August, 1925, noted in an
editorial that the city of St. Louis had begun a campaign for economy
by discharging twelve married women; that there was a movement on in
Germany to reduce governmental expenses by a wholesale discharge of
women employees; and that, according to rumour, Mr. Coolidge’s campaign
of economy was being made to bear most heavily on married women. The
comment of _Equal Rights_ on the action of the city of St. Louis is
worth quoting:


     St. Louis employed twenty-seven married women. It investigated
     the economic condition of all these, retained nine, discharged
     twelve, and was, at last report, still considering the case of the
     other six. St. Louis did not investigate the economic condition
     of the men employees, to see whether or not these might continue
     to live if they were discharged. St. Louis did not try to find out
     whether or not these men had fathers, brothers, mothers, or wives
     who might support them while they were looking for other jobs. St.
     Louis assumed that men have a right to economic independence and
     the increased happiness and opportunity that it brings. St. Louis
     assumed that women have no such right.


In other words, St. Louis assumed, as the German and American
Governments apparently assume, and as most private employers assume,
that women are employed on sufferance; especially married women. Of
course it should be remembered that the position of the married woman
in this respect is only worse than that of single women, and that
the position of women is only worse than that of men; for, as I have
already remarked, under a monopolistic economic system the opportunity
to earn a living by one’s labour comes to be regarded as a privilege
instead of a natural right. Women are simply held to be less entitled
to this privilege than men.

That marriage should so often assume the nature of a disability
for the woman who either wishes or is obliged to earn, whereas it
often operates in favour of the male worker, may be attributed to
the traditional assumption that married women are dependent on, and
subject to, their husbands. I remarked in the preceding chapter that
the married woman who wishes to engage in business finds herself,
in many communities, hampered by legal disabilities arising from
her marital status, whereas her husband is under no corresponding
disabilities. Her position as an industrial and salaried worker is
rendered insecure if not by law, at least by the same psychology that
keeps legal disabilities in force. This psychology may be defined
as the expectation that a woman when she marries shall surrender a
much greater degree of personal freedom than the man she marries. The
man who does not object to his wife’s having a career is considered
generous and long-suffering. His insistence on her abandoning it and
contenting herself with looking out for his domestic comfort is thought
to be quite natural.[28] On the other hand, the woman who interferes
in any way with a husband’s career is regarded as an extremely selfish
person; while any sacrifice of herself and her ambitions to her husband
and his, is thought of merely as a matter of wifely duty. How often
does one hear that such and such a woman has given up her position
because “her husband didn’t want her to work.” There is, too, a very
general assumption that every married woman has children and should
stay at home and take care of them. Now, perhaps every married woman
should have children; perhaps in a future state of society men and
women will marry only when they wish to bring up a family. But at
present it is not so; therefore at present the assumption that a
married woman should stay at home and take care of her children leaves
out of account the fact that a large and increasing number of married
women are childless. It may be contended that these women should stay
at home and take care of their husbands; but even if we assume that the
unremitting personal attention of his wife is essential to the comfort
and happiness of a married man, there would still remain the question
of his title to this attention at the cost of her own interests.

We are dealing here with an attitude which, general though it be, has
been outmoded by the conditions of modern life. The sexual division
of interests and labour which has been insisted upon so long among
European peoples does not very well fit in with the organization
of industrial and social life in the twentieth century. Our social
ideology, like our political ideology, is of the eighteenth century;
and its especial effectiveness at present is by way of obscuring our
vision of the changed world that has emerged from the great economic
revolution of the last century. A division of interests and labour
which was convenient if not just under the conditions of economic
and social life which preceded the industrial revolution, is neither
convenient nor just under the conditions which prevail today. The care
of young children and the management of a household may result in an
unequal division of labour in families where the husband’s inability
to provide for the needs of his family forces the wife to assume the
burdens of a breadwinner. When one reads through the literature on
the question of hours of labour for women in industry, one is struck
by the persistent stressing of the married woman’s double burden of
breadwinning and housekeeping. These women, it seems, must not only
earn money to contribute to their families’ support, but they must,
before setting out for work and after returning from it, prepare the
family meals, get the children ready for school or the day-nursery,
take them there and call for them, wash, sew, and perform a hundred
other household tasks. This double burden is often made an argument for
establishing shorter hours of work for women in industry, but never for
expecting the husband to share the wife’s traditional burden as she has
been forced to share his. I have no doubt that innumerable husbands are
doing this; but there is no expectation put upon them to do it, and
those who do not are in no wise thought to shirk their duty to their
families, as their wives would be thought to do if they neglected to
perform the labour of the household.

Quite analogous to this attitude of the advocates of special
legislation for working women is that of the people who concern
themselves with the so-called problem of the educated woman, which
is supposed to be that of reconciling domesticity with intellectual
pursuits. A timely illustration of this attitude is the establishment
by Smith College of an institute for the “co-ordination of women’s
interests.” The purpose of this institute, in the words of President
Neilson, is “to find a solution of the problem which confronts
almost every educated woman today--how to reconcile a normal life
of marriage and motherhood with a life of intellectual activity,
professional or otherwise.” Here again is the tacit assumption that
marriage is the special concern of woman, and one whose claims must
take precedence over her other interests, whatever they may be; that
marriage and motherhood constitute her normal life, and her other
interests something extra-normal which must somehow be made to fit in
if possible. I have heard of no institute intended to find a way to
reconcile the normal life of marriage and fatherhood with a life of
intellectual activity, professional or otherwise; although when one
considers how many educated men of today are obliged to compromise with
their consciences in order to secure themselves in positions which
will enable them to provide for their families, one is persuaded that
some such institute might be at least equally appropriate and equally
helpful with that which Smith College has established.

Let us forget for a moment the sophisticated traditional attitude
toward this question of marriage and parenthood, and go back, as
it were, to the beginning--to a fact recognized in the animal world
and not entirely overlooked by primitive man, namely: that every
offspring has two parents who are equally responsible for its care and
protection. In the animal kingdom one finds a widely varied division
of the labour connected with the care of the young. For example, the
male of certain species is found to perform functions which our own
usage has led us to regard as maternal. Among the viviparous animals
the heavier share of responsibility rests with the female during
the gestation, birth and extreme youth of the offspring; and among
primitive human beings the actual physical dependence of the offspring
on the mother is likely to be prolonged over a period of several years.
It was, perhaps, this necessity of a close physical association between
mother and child that led to a sexual division of labour under which
the mother undertook the physical care of children while the father
undertook the task of providing food. It must be remarked, however,
that this division of labour by no means excludes productive labour on
the part of the woman. Among most tribes she augments the food-supply
through agriculture, grubbing, or sometimes through fishing or
hunting; and there are tribes, notably in Africa, where she is the sole
provider for the family. The Vaertings have remarked that the drudgery
connected with the care of children is invariably imposed by the
dominant upon the subject sex; a view which is in perfect consonance
with what we know of the general human willingness to transfer to other
shoulders the burden of uninteresting though necessary labour. Since
women have most often been subject, they have most often been forced to
undertake this drudgery, either in lieu of or in addition to the labour
of providing food and shelter for their families.

This is to say that their subject position has added considerably to
what newspaper editors and other commentators are fond of calling the
burden of Eve. Since woman is the childbearing sex, it has seemed
natural to a great many peoples to increase the disadvantage at
which her share in reproduction naturally places her, by making her
confinement at home permanent instead of occasional, and by permitting
her few, if any, interests save those connected with reproduction; in
short, by prolonging and enhancing her subjection to the demands of
the race. This is why the term married woman is still taken to imply
the term housekeeper; an implication which, as the _Freeman_ remarked
editorially some years ago, modern civilization must renounce “if
it wants such of its women as are editors and bank-presidents to be
mothers as well.”

Civilization shortens the period of the child’s physical dependence on
the mother by shortening the period of lactation. On the other hand, it
increases fecundity to such an extent that where religious superstition
or ignorance prevents the use of contraceptives, the burden of
childbearing is greatly increased. This result of civilization is
not, however, commonly found among the educated classes; and even
among those classes where children are most numerous, I have already
shown that women are not restrained by motherhood from engaging in
gainful occupations outside the home. On the contrary, the number of
their offspring is more often their chief incentive to this course.
Among well-to-do families, prepared foods and wet-nursing have for a
long time been rather generally employed to relieve mothers even of
the responsibility of lactation, while the custom of assigning the
physical care of children to hired substitutes has reduced their actual
work to that of bringing the child into the world. That this mode of
caring for children is approved by all classes is evident from their
readiness to adopt it when fortune favours them with an opportunity.
It is occasionally inveighed against by moralists, but on the whole it
is coveted and approved, especially while women devote to frivolous
pursuits the leisure that it leaves them. When a woman adopts this
mode in order to reconcile motherhood with a serious interest outside
the home, it is a different matter, and lays her open to the charge
of neglecting her family, though in fact she may spend no more hours
away from home than the woman who gives her morning to shopping and her
afternoon to playing bridge. Why this should be the case I am at a loss
to know, unless it be that a serious interest outside the home appears
to smack too much of an assertion of her right to live her life for her
own sake rather than for the sake of the race or that of her husband--a
self-assertion not readily to be accepted without such reservations
as find expression in institutes designed to “co-ordinate women’s
interests.”

It appears, then, that the care of the young is the concern of both
sexes, and is so recognized in the animal world and among human
beings; and that among the latter such differences in usage as
exist touching this matter are differences in the apportioning of
the burden. Even in our own day, when there is observable a tendency
to forget that the child has more than one parent--that parent being
the mother--the father’s claim to his children is still recognized
in law, often to the prejudice of the mother’s; and so, likewise, is
his obligation to provide for them. Indeed, the child may be said to
be regarded as exclusively the mother’s only while it is young; for
it is a general custom among us to speak of Mrs. So-and-So’s baby,
but of Mr. So-and-So’s son or daughter. Let us, then, recognize the
claim and interest of both parents. Let us also remember that the
economic organization has so extensively altered that the traditional
division of labour--this division is always profoundly affected by
consideration of the young--has been outmoded as far as thousands of
families are concerned. Let us also assume that woman has established
her right to be considered as a human being rather than a function or a
chattel. Then it must seem reasonable to assume that the co-ordination
of interests to be brought about concerns both sexes equally; that
the problem to be confronted is that of reconciling a normal life of
marriage and parenthood not only with the freest possible development
of intellectual interest but with the utmost devotion to any chosen
profession.

I can not pretend to foretell how this problem will be settled; for its
solution will depend upon the general solution of the labour-problem.
It may be that the necessary collectivism of modern industry will
result in a collectivist system of caring for children. Such a system
would by no means be an innovation; it would simply constitute an
extension and adaptation of means which already exist--of nurseries for
very small children and schools for older ones. Whatever its demerits
might be, such a system would certainly represent an enormous economy
of effort. The average home is adapted less to the needs of children
than to those of adults; hence a mother of young children must spend a
great deal of her time in preventing her young charges from injuring
themselves with dangerous household implements, from falling downstairs
or off of furniture too high for them, and from touching objects which
would not be safe in their hands. In a properly equipped nursery, on
the other hand, the furniture and all the objects are adapted to the
size and intelligence of the children. Children have the advantage of
numerous playmates; and one person can supervise the play of a dozen of
them with less fatigue than the mother of one is likely to feel at the
end of a day in the average home.

The Russians have already taken some steps in this direction by
establishing both nurseries and schools in connexion with certain
factories. From what I can gather of their policy, it would seem that
they regard the care and education of children as being very much
the concern of the whole community. They look upon childbearing as
a service to the community, but they do not appear to take the view
that women should be required to perform this service at the expense
of their independence, for they have instituted a system of subsidies
for pregnant and nursing working mothers, with rest-periods before and
after confinement, and a subsidy during confinement amounting to the
daily subsidy multiplied by fifteen.[29]

I have already indicated in the preceding chapter what it seems to me
would be the course of a free people in this matter of reconciling the
care of children with the greatest possible freedom for both parents.
It seems hardly necessary to call attention to the obvious fact that
the question is simply that of placing the care of the young in the
hands of those who are interested in it and fitted for it, instead
of forcing it willy-nilly upon either sex through a traditional
expectation and a traditional division of labour. In a free society,
those parents who wished to pursue careers incompatible with the actual
care of young children would avail themselves of the services of
substitutes, as the well-to-do classes do at present; and they might
do so with even greater confidence because, as I have remarked, those
engaged in caring for and teaching the young would do so as a matter of
interest primarily and only secondarily as a means of livelihood. There
is another important consideration to be taken into account, and that
is, that in a free society the problem of reconciling the occupations
of the parents with their personal supervision of their children would
be much easier to solve; for their hours of labour would be greatly
decreased. It is only where production must support an enormous amount
of idleness and waste that it is necessary to overwork producers.

It is possible, of course, that the institution of economic freedom
might check the present tendency of women to engage in gainful
occupations outside the home. It most certainly would if the vast
increase of opportunity which it offered were reserved exclusively
for men; but to bring about this result it would be necessary for
traditional anti-feminist prejudices to survive much more strongly
than they do today. The position of women has too radically changed to
admit of their exclusion from direct participation in the benefits of
economic freedom; therefore if they resigned the increased economic
opportunities that it offered them, and withdrew to the sphere of
domesticity, they would do so as a matter of choice. Why should we
not expect them to choose the exclusive domesticity which might be
rendered possible through the increased earning power of men? They
probably would, where it suited their taste to do so; but one of the
most powerful incentives to do so would no longer exist, namely: the
desire for economic security. Women, to be sure, are not exempt from
the characteristic willingness of humankind to live by the exertions
of others; but I would remark that there is this difference between the
person who does this indirectly, through legalized privilege, and the
person who depends directly on the bounty of another: that the former
is independent and the latter is dependent. Women are not strangers
to the human desire for freedom; and when the fear of want is allayed
they are quite likely to prefer an easy and secure self-support to the
alternative of economic dependence. Moreover, economic freedom would
set domesticity in competition with the interests of women rather than
their needs; for it would set all people free to engage in occupations
that interested them, whereas at present the vast majority do whatever
offers them a living. Under these circumstances it might reasonably be
expected that the number of women who would continue in business and in
industrial and professional pursuits, even after marriage and the birth
of children, would greatly increase.

Indeed, if we postulate an economic system under which every human
being would be free to choose his occupation in accordance with his
interests, I see no more reason to suppose that women would invariably
choose domesticity than to suppose that all men would choose
blacksmithing. Under such a régime I doubt that even the power of the
expected which affects them so strongly at present, would long continue
in an effectiveness which it has already begun to lose. Women, I think,
might be expected to choose their occupations with the same freedom
as men, and to look for no serious interruption from marriage and the
birth of children. There are a good many women at present who very ably
reconcile motherhood with a chosen career. I think we might expect to
find more of them rather than fewer, in a free society. One thing is
certain, and it is the important thing: they would be free to choose.
If it be woman’s nature, as some people still believe, to wish to live
at second hand, then in a free society they will freely make that
choice, and no one can complain of it--unless it be the men on whom
they elect to depend. However, to assume from past experience that they
do want to live at second hand is to assume that all the social and
legal injustices which have been employed to force them to do so, were
unnecessary; and when have Governments and communities wasted their
power in exercising compulsion where no compulsion was needed?

FOOTNOTES:

[26] Ellis: Man and Woman. 5th ed. p. 14.

[27] Katharine Anthony found the workmen of Germany frankly in favour
of any “protective” legislation that would hamper German working women
(“Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia”); and the Woman’s Party has
met with the same attitude among unions in this country. Among the
resolutions passed at the twenty-fifth convention of the International
Moulders’ Union of North America was the following: “_Resolved_, that
the decision of this convention be the restriction of the further
employment of child and woman labour in union core rooms and foundries,
and eventually the elimination of such labour in all foundries by
the example set by union foundries in the uplifting of humanity....
_Resolved_, that the incoming officers be directed to, either by
themselves or in co-operation with others in the labour movement, give
their best thought and effort in opposing the employment of female and
child labour in jobs recognized as men’s employment.”

[28] There are, of course, exceptions to this rule; as when a woman
has, before her marriage, already made a great reputation. In such a
case the husband would be thought selfish who demanded the sacrifice of
her career. But the husband who demands the sacrifice of a potential
career is generally thought to be well within his rights.

[29] From the Laws and Decrees of the Soviet Government on medical
questions, sanitation, etc., published in Moscow, 1922.




CHAPTER VI

WHAT IS TO BE DONE


I

In the foregoing chapters I have intimated that every phase of the
question of freedom for women is bound up with the larger question
of human freedom. If it is freedom that women want, they can not be
content to be legally equal with men; but having gained this equality
they must carry on their struggle against the oppressions which
privilege exercises upon humanity at large by virtue of an usurped
economic power. All human beings, presumably, would gain by freedom;
but women particularly stand to gain by it, for as I have shown, they
are victims of special prepossessions which mere legal equality with
men may hardly be expected to affect.

If, on the other hand, it is dominance that they desire, they might,
indeed, conceivably attain this without freedom; but one can not see
much encouragement for that wish in the present trend of affairs.
Before women could dominate, they would not only have to overcome
the prejudices, superstitions, and legal disabilities which have
contributed to their subjection; but they would also have to get the
upper hand of men economically. They would have to manœuvre themselves
into that advantage in opportunity which men at present enjoy. One
can hardly see how this could be brought about except by some kind of
_coup d’état_, for the tendency of modern legislation, as I have shown,
far from being calculated to enlarge the scope of women’s economic
activity, is likely rather to narrow it; nor is it entirely probable
that the establishment of mere legal equality would count for much in
the premises, for the courts may always decide that any legislation
designed for the Larger Good is valid even though it may clash with
the principle of equal rights.[30] Suppose, however, that the momentum
gathered by the woman’s movement should carry society through a period
of sex-equality and bring it out on the other side--the side of female
domination--then men and women would simply have exchanged places,
and the social evils which now afflict mankind would remain, _mutatis
mutandis_. Women would be more nearly free than men, as men are now
more nearly free than women; but no one would be really free, because
real freedom is not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one
sex to the other or from one class to another. Real freedom means the
disappearance of advantage, and primarily of economic advantage. It
can not be too often repeated that political and social freedom are
unattainable unless and until economic freedom has been attained--but
this is not a concern of either sex or class. In order to live, women,
like men, must eat; to eat, they, like men, must labour; to labour,
they, like men, must have opportunity. Control of men’s and women’s
economic opportunity, therefore, means control of their livelihood,
and control of men’s and women’s livelihood means control of men and
women. Real freedom, therefore, does not come in sight of either men
or women until this control is abated; that is to say, until (speaking
in technical terms) the two active factors in production, capital and
labour, which are _pro tanto_ sexless, have free access to the passive
factor, natural resources--in other words, until the private monopoly
of natural resources is dissolved.

If the struggle of women to rid themselves of their peculiar
disabilities were to turn out into an attempt to dominate men as men
have for so long dominated women, one could perfectly understand
the psychology behind such an attempt. With the exception of a few
individuals, humankind has thus far achieved no very high idea of
freedom. The ambition of subject classes has never gone much beyond
the desire to enjoy the privileges usurped by their masters. They
have resented being dominated, but not domination; they have had no
repugnance to the thought of dominating others. Their psychology was
very well summed up by _Punch_, in the remark of one old market-woman
to another (I quote from memory): “You see, Mrs. ----, when we have a
Labour Government we’ll all be equal, and then I shall have a servant
to do my work for me.” It is because of this myopic view of the nature
of freedom that all revolutions have been mere scrambles for advantage,
and have accomplished nothing more than a shifting of power from one
class to another, or as John Adams said, “a mere change of impostors.”
If the woman’s movement should resolve itself into a similar scramble,
it would be unfortunate but not surprising, for women may hardly be
expected to rise at once above the retaliatory spirit which is one of
the common curses of humanity.

They would have good _ex parte_ arguments ready to their tongue; many
an argument, indeed, which has been advanced to defend their subjection
might be effectively turned around. Their part in parenthood for
example, has long been held to justify their subjection under the
guise of protection in this function. It would be equally logical to
argue that women, as mothers of the race, should dominate the family
because, as givers of life, they have a deeper personal interest and
a greater natural right in their children than men have. It might be
argued that they should control all public affairs because of the
greater understanding of the value of human life and deeper interest
in the welfare of humanity that motherhood brings. One often hears the
argument--which no amount of female bloodthirst in time of war ever
seems to make effectively ridiculous--that if women were in power there
would be no wars, because they, knowing the cost of giving life, would
not consent to its wilful wholesale destruction. The doctrine that
women are closer to the race than men is really dangerous to those who
now preach it; for it affords the best kind of basis for the contention
that women should dominate in all matters concerning the race--and all
human affairs may be held to concern the race in one way or another.

Perhaps the best argument for the domination of women is that if
society, like parliamentary government, must for ever contemplate a
mere sterile succession of outs and ins, it is time that women had
their innings. But the analogy with the parliamentary system goes
further. Public faith in the parliamentary principle has waned almost
to the disappearing-point, and the system has suffered wholesale
discredit, because it became slowly but surely evident that what
actually kept them up was “the cohesive power of public plunder.”
If women took what might be called by analogy the political view of
their right to their innings, and let it animate them in a scuffle for
predominance, the general reaction would be similar. In a matter of
this kind, great numbers of people would be found objective enough to
glance at such an effort and pass it by in disapproval of the waste of
energy involved in bringing about a readjustment that promised nothing
better than a shifting of the incidence of injustice. Women would thus
forfeit a great deal of sympathy, and at the same time probably create
even more antagonism than they have thus far had to face. They would
place themselves in a position similar to that of organized labour,
which is so intent on contending for what it conceives to be its own
interest--a position of advantage in bargaining on wages and conditions
of labour--that by the narrowness of its policy it antagonizes a great
deal of public sentiment which must inevitably be enlisted on its
behalf if it undertook to contend for the general interest, in which
its own is included, and in the service of which its own is bound, in
the long run, to be best served.

What the nature of this general interest is, I have already intimated.
It is economic, and it can be advanced only through the establishment
of an order of society in which every human being shall enjoy the
natural right to labour and to enjoy all that his labour produces.
It is upon mankind’s security in this right that human freedom,
in whatever mode or aspect--social, philosophical, political,
religious--primarily depends.

The right to labour and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour means
only the right of free access to the source of subsistence, which is
land.[31] If access to that source may be arbitrarily denied, the right
to labour is denied, and the opportunity to get one’s living becomes
a privilege which may be withheld or granted as suits the need or
convenience of the person who bestows it, and wholly on his own terms.
If access may be had only on the payment of tribute, the condition
abrogates the right to enjoy the fruit of one’s labour, for the tribute
consumes a share of it.

While access to land is free, no one need know want; for he may always
get his living by applying his labour to natural resources “on his
own.” He may always, that is, work for himself instead of depending
for his living on the chance to work for an employer. Under such
conditions, moreover, no one need content himself, as the labourer
is forced to content himself at present, with a small share of what
his labour produces, for as Turgot pointed out a century and a half
ago, he can always demand of an employer the full equivalent of what
he could earn by working for himself. It is clear that under such an
economic system, the share of the capitalist in any product would
amount only to a fair competitive return on his actual investment.
Under the present system the capitalist often enjoys both directly and
indirectly the advantage of monopoly, which enables him to appropriate
an unfair proportion of his workers’ labour-product. He is a direct
beneficiary of monopoly when he holds legal title to the source of
his product--cultivable land, mines, forests, water-power--or where
he holds franchises or profits by protective tariffs or embargoes.
He is an indirect beneficiary when he profits by the competition
for work among workers whom monopoly has deprived of free access to
land. The steel-trust, as I have remarked, is a striking example of a
capitalist organization which benefits both directly and indirectly by
monopoly. On the one hand, it monopolizes and holds out of access vast
mining-properties, and monopolizes the home market through a protective
tariff. On the other, it levies tribute on labour by virtue of the
scarcity of opportunity created by monopoly in general.

Another excellent instance of this dual advantage is furnished by the
railways of this country. Not only have they received governmental
land-grants worth enough to cover their construction-costs many times
over, but they hold a valuable franchise-monopoly in the exclusive
right to do business over a long continuous strip of land called their
“right of way”; by means of which monopoly they drain the commerce
of a vast area as a river drains its waters. Through the enormous
wealth which these monopolies have enabled them to accumulate, they
have been able to influence governmental policy in ways designed to
enhance their privileges; for example, they have been able to curtail
water-transportation and thus reduce competition. They have profited by
tariffs, as through the emergency-law some years ago, which raised the
tariff on wheat just enough to cover the difference between the cost
of landing a bushel of wheat from the Argentine at one of our Eastern
ports, and the rate for transporting it by railway from our Western
wheat-fields. Through the Interstate Commerce Commission, of which they
captured control almost as soon as it was formed, they are allowed
to levy rates which represent not the cost of transportation but the
amount which can be exacted for it. So much for their direct benefit
from monopoly. Indirectly they benefit in the same way as any other
capitalist, through the opportunity to exploit a labour-surplus created
and maintained by monopoly; and while they are somewhat hindered in
making the most of this opportunity by the effectiveness of defensive
organization among their skilled employees, they have a pretty free
hand with their thousands of unskilled workers, and manage on the whole
to do very well out of them.

Even where the capitalist is not himself to any significant extent a
monopolist, he derives great benefit from monopoly, for it is thanks to
the monopolist of natural resources that he is able to keep labourers
at, or very near, the margin of subsistence. He is not always, however,
undisturbed in the enjoyment of his advantage; for he may be himself
quite as much at the mercy of monopoly as the workers he exploits.
The tenant-farmer affords an excellent example of this. He is the
capitalist in the farming-industry, who pays to the land-monopolist
tribute in the form of rent, to the railways tribute in exorbitant
freight-rates on his implements and products, to the manufacturers of
his implements tribute in the form of tariffs. He furnishes the capital
necessary for operating the farm, pays the wages of such labour as he
may require, and takes for himself what is left after all these charges
have been met, which in this country is so little that it does not
suffice to pay him both interest on his capital and wages for his own
labour--a condition which explains the steady drift of our population
from the farms to the cities, and which also accounts for the
extraordinary fact that agriculture, which is in volume our greatest
industry is, _qua_ industry, bankrupt. All the money in farming is now,
and for some time has been, in the rise of land-values. It is evident,
then, that save where capital and monopoly are united, capital as well
as labour is victimized by monopoly. This is one of the most important
facts of our system, and almost everyone overlooks it. The whole
producing organization is levied upon by a power which itself performs
no service whatever in return for the wealth that it appropriates;
which is, on the contrary, an incubus on the producing organization.
To put this statement more clearly, the monopolist, whose control of
the sources of production makes his exactions inescapable, is limited
in those exactions only by the amount that the traffic will bear. If a
condition arises which makes a certain kind of production especially
desirable, there will naturally be a pressure of people desiring to
undertake that kind of production, and the monopolist who controls its
source will exact in payment for access to that source an amount fixed
by the number of competitors seeking access. He is thus able to absorb
all the returns of the industry which depends on his monopoly, except
just so much as is necessary to encourage people to keep on with it.
For example, during the war the owners of our Western wheat-lands, who
had been demanding one-third of the crop in rent, raised the amount to
two-fifths, because at the price fixed by the Government wheat-growing
was profitable and there were many would-be producers seeking access to
wheat-lands. The same condition was reflected in the selling price of
land. Farms were sold and resold at advancing prices until land that
had sold before the war for sixty-five dollars an acre was bringing
two hundred. During the period of deflation thousands of acres bought
on mortgages reverted from one buyer to another until the original
owner had back his land plus whatever profit he had had from its sale.
All this raising of rents and this buying and selling at inflated
prices, did nothing for production, obviously, except to drain off the
lion’s share of its proceeds into the pocket of the monopolist; for all
speculative values must necessarily be paid finally out of production,
since there is no other source for them to come from. The producing
organization thus carries an enormous load of people who draw their
living from it and give neither goods nor services in return; who live,
that is to say, by appropriating the labour-products of others without
compensation--in other words, by legalized theft.

As monopoly extends and tightens its grip on the sources of production,
it is enabled to exact an increasing share of the proceeds, until
the point is reached where industry can no longer meet its demands
and continue to pay interest and wages. For example, so long as this
country had a frontier, the monopolist was in no position to exact a
very great share of production, for the producer had the alternative
of pushing on to the margin of cultivation where there were as yet
no landlords to support. The monopolist, therefore, could exact no
more than the difference between what a man might earn in a sparsely
settled country, remote from markets, and what he could earn by
carrying on production in a more thickly settled and more nearly
monopolized region. So long as this condition endured, production in
this country was able to pay tribute to monopoly and still pay the
capitalist a fairly good rate of interest and the labourer a fairly
good wage. But since the late nineteenth century, when the frontier
was closed, all the best of the country’s land and natural resources
being legally occupied, monopoly has been able to exact an ever greater
share of production; for while monopoly progresses, the population
grows, and competitive demand for access to the source of production
increases; and these two causes combine to cut down free economic
opportunity to the disappearing point. Thus it seems only a matter of
time until production will break down under the exactions of monopoly
and revolution and readjustment will follow. The breakdown has already
begun in the basic industry, agriculture, for, as I have stated above,
the tenant farmer is no longer able to meet the charges of monopoly
and still earn interest and wages. Therefore our agrarian population,
literally starved off the land, is steadily drifting to the cities, to
swell the numbers of workers who crowd the industrial labour-market.
This is to say that our civilization is dying at the root; and this
having presently grown too rotten to nourish it or support it, a little
wind of revolution or foreign invasion will one day overturn it, as all
civilizations which have hitherto existed have been overturned by the
same cause. “_Latifundia_,” said Pliny, “_perdiderunt Romam_.”

This same economic system exists in all the great countries of the
world save Russia, where it broke down under the Czarist régime and has
not been re-established. It is farther advanced in the countries of
the old world than it is here, because this country is more recently
settled. This fact constitutes the only difference between the economic
order in the old world and that in the new--a difference in the degree
that exploitation has reached.

Wherever exploitation exists, whether in the new world or the old, it
exists by means of a governmental organization which its beneficiaries
control and use to protect their privileges against the expropriated
and exploited masses. There is general agreement among scholars that in
government, exploitation came first, and what we know as law and order
are its incidental by-products; and that however far the development
of these by-products may go, they are never allowed to interfere with
exploitation. “The State,” says Oppenheimer, “grew from the subjugation
of one group of men by another. Its basic justification, its _raison
d’être_, was and is the economic exploitation of those subjugated.”
Both the origin and the essential nature of the State remain perfectly
clear so long as the conquering class remains distinct from the subject
classes and keeps these in a state of vassalage, without freedom of
movement, and subject to transfer from one owner to another along with
the land on which they dwell. In our own age, they are quite evident
in the dealings of the Western powers with weak peoples, as in India
or the Philippine Islands, or the mandated territories under the
League of Nations, where foreign Governments, through their military
organizations, protect their nationals in an economic exploitation of
the native population, and themselves levy taxes upon the natives to
pay the costs of the process. The nature and purpose of the State are
clear, indeed, in any community where the owning and exploiting class
exercises direct control over the propertyless dependent classes
as more or less chattels. The landed aristocracy of Europe formerly
exercised this direct control, as their titles, now grown meaningless,
indicate.

But where the form of the State has undergone a change which precludes
this direct control by the owning class, the nature of the State, and
its essential function, are obscured. Under the republicanism which
succeeded the American and French revolutions, the expropriated classes
have gained freedom of movement, a limited freedom of opinion, and a
nominal share in the exercise of government. The peasant is no longer
bound to the soil he tills; he may leave it at will to seek his fortune
elsewhere--on the terms of another landlord. The owning classes no
longer directly exercise government or directly enjoy honours and
titles by virtue of ownership. The peoples of the Western world,
at least where parliamentarism has not broken down, have a nominal
freedom with little of the reality. Nominal freedom of movement is
worth little to the man who faces the alternative of being exploited
where he is, or being exploited elsewhere. Nominal freedom of opinion
is not extremely valuable when expression of opinion may cost one the
opportunity to earn one’s living; and the right to vote offers little
satisfaction when it means merely a right of choice between rival
parties and candidates representing exactly the same system of economic
exploitation.

The political revolution which followed the breakdown of feudalism did
the world its greatest service in launching the _idea_ of freedom; it
did nothing--or relatively very little--for its substance. Through its
agency the equal right of all human beings to “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness” has come to be granted in theory though not in
fact; it remained for the Russian Revolution to proclaim the further
idea that the basis of this right is not political but economic. The
political revolution did more; by establishing political democracy,
it put into the hands of the people the power to achieve economic
democracy by peaceful means. But by that very act it obscured the
essential function of the State and the source of its power, which
remained clear as long as those who owned ruled directly by virtue
of ownership; and thus it hindered a clear perception of the causal
relation between privilege and slavery. By abolishing hereditary power,
it effected a redistribution of privilege, and at the same time forced
privilege to exercise its control of government by indirect means.
Privilege was no longer seated on the throne, but it remained, through
its control of economic opportunity, the power behind the throne;[32] a
power all the more difficult to dislodge now that it exercised control
without assuming responsibility. Republicanism has proved the futility
of dislodging a privileged class without abolishing privilege; for this
simply prepares the way for the rise of a new privileged class which
will use government to enforce its exploitation of the propertyless
class, in a different way, perhaps, but quite as effectively as its
predecessors.

The psychological effect of the political equality established under
republicanism is extremely demoralizing. As I have remarked, the
subject classes have never desired freedom so much as a chance at
the privileges that they see other people enjoy. Political equality,
with its breaking-down of class distinctions, creates an impression
of equality of opportunity--and indeed to the extent that government
maintains no disabling legal discriminations among members of the
enfranchised class,[33] it actually establishes equality. No member
of that class is excluded from the benefits of privilege by anything
save his inability to get possession of it; and this fact, especially
in a country where opportunity is comparatively plentiful, is more
likely to confirm people in their loyalty to a system under which
they stand even a dog’s chance to become beneficiaries of privilege,
than it is to stimulate an endeavour to abolish privilege altogether.
In this country the incalculable richness of natural resources and
the enormous wealth to be gained by speculative enterprise under a
government which gives full rein to monopoly, contributed immensely to
the corruption of the citizenry. Speculation became the normal course
of enterprise, the most approved method of money-getting; and the more
ruinously did the monopolist exploit the country’s resources, as Mr.
Veblen has pointed out, the greater the regard in which he was held
by his fellow citizens. Never before in the world’s history had so
many people a chance at the enjoyment of privilege as in the pioneer
period of American development. The country’s resources were gutted for
profit, not developed for use. The use-value of land was incidental
to its value as real estate. Every farmer became a speculator, and
consequently the margin of cultivation, instead of being pushed out
gradually in response to the natural increase in the country’s needs,
was extended artificially and with extreme rapidity, with the result
that farms were miles apart and unnecessary difficulties in marketing,
and in the maintenance of education and social life, were created.
The country resembled the modern city-addition of the real-estater,
with all the framework of settlement, waiting for the pressure of
population to enhance the selling-price of land. Not only was the
public mind corrupted by the apparently limitless opportunity to enjoy
privilege--not only was speculation confused with production--but
all this opportunity was blindly attributed to the blessings of
republicanism. “The greatest government on earth” came to be regarded
as the guardian of free opportunity for all citizens, in spite of the
very evident fact that no government which protects land-monopoly can
possibly maintain freedom of opportunity, for in the course of monopoly
all available natural resources are shortly pre-empted, and those
people who are born after occupation is complete will find nothing left
to pre-empt. Thus American patriotism took on a religious fervour, and
the corruption of the populace was complete.

The rise of industrialism has done as much as anything else to
engender misapprehension of the State’s essential nature, its chief
function, and the source of its power. It is significant that the
Physiocrats lived and observed the workings of the State before the
industrial era, in an agricultural country, where the relation between
land-monopoly and government was direct and inescapable; and that
Karl Marx lived and wrote after the rise of the factory-system, in a
highly industrialized country. The Physiocrats, for whom the basic
economic problem was unobscured, therefore attributed involuntary
poverty to its actual cause; while Marx, confusing capital’s fortuitous
advantage from monopoly with monopoly itself, laid the responsibility
at the door of capitalism. To be sure, Marx recognized and stated the
fact that expropriation must precede exploitation; but he did not
draw the obvious conclusion that the way to break capital’s power to
exploit the worker is by simple reimpropriation. At present there
is a general impression that the factory-system lured the population
into the cities, and thus caused the overcrowding that results in
scarcity of jobs and inadequacy of wage. As a matter of fact, the
factory-system found the cities already overcrowded with exploitable
labour. In England, for example, the Enclosures Acts had deprived the
people of what common land remained to them, and had driven them into
the cities where they lived in inconceivable filth and squalor, eking
out a miserable existence under the old family-system of industry.
The machine-system found all this expropriated and exploitable human
material ready to serve its ends--far more, indeed, than it needed,
as the riots among the workers deprived of their livelihood by its
labour-saving tools, plainly indicated. The industrial revolution,
then, did not produce the overcrowding of the labour-market; but the
capitalist of the revolution profited by an overcrowding that already
existed. He reaped indirectly the fruits of monopoly. He profited
likewise, and profits still, by every labour-saving device, for it
enabled him at once to dispense with some labourers and, because of
the increase of unemployment thus caused, to pay his remaining workers
less. Capital was thus enabled to appropriate much more than its
rightful share of production, and hence to amass enormous wealth, by
means of which it influenced government on behalf of its own further
enrichment. In this country, it has secured a system of protective
tariffs which amount to a governmental delegation of taxing-power to
the protected industries; it gives them a monopoly of the home-market
and enables them to add to the price of their product the amount of
the tariff which has been set against the competing foreign article.
Capital has found other ways of creating monopolies, such as the
combinations in restraint of trade at which the ineffectual Sherman
law was levelled. As the exactions of monopoly increase, and the
exploitation of labour nears the point of diminishing return, the
capitalist-monopolist embarks, with the protection of government,
on a policy of economic imperialism. He monopolizes the markets of
weak nations at the point of his Government’s bayonets. He invests
in foreign enterprises which offer high returns for himself and risk
of war for the Government which backs him--that is to say, for the
exploited masses at home who must support the Government and furnish
its soldiers. In short, he constitutes himself a menace to peace and
prosperity both at home and abroad; so that it is not to be wondered
at if people observing his sinister activities, take capital to be
the cause of the economic injustice from which it derives its power.
Yet, if natural resources were put freely in competition with industry
for the employment of labour, the inflamed fortunes of the capitalist
class would disappear. Monopoly having been abolished,[34] the
capitalist-monopolist would no longer exist, and the capitalist would
no longer be in a position to exact from production anything more than
his rightful interest--that is, as I have said, the amount fixed by
free competitive demand for the use of his capital.

There is yet another cause of confusion in the long-established custom
of regarding land as private property, whereas it is not, rightly
speaking, private property at all, but the source from which property
is produced by the combined efforts of labour and capital. The right
to property in wealth which has been produced, as, for instance, the
coat on one’s back, may be defended on the ground that it is the
product of one’s own labour, or has been acquired through exchange of
an equivalent amount of one’s own product; but the right to property
in land can not be defended on the same ground, because land is not a
labour-product. The distinction is simply between labour-made property
and law-made property. Under our present system of tenure, to be sure,
the purchase price of land--that is, the investment of capital that the
owner has made in order to get title--may represent human labour--but
this is merely to say that the owner has invested his capital in
privilege, or law-made property; that he has purchased, under
governmental guarantee, a certain delegation of taxing-power, precisely
as the investor in governmental securities purchases a governmental
guarantee that a certain share of future labour-products will be
taken from the producers and turned over to him. The fact that, under
political government, capital may be invested in privilege in no wise
alters the iniquitous nature of privilege, and a sound public policy
would disallow an investor’s plea of good faith _ex post facto_.[35]
Under a system which did not permit such investments, those people who
wished to put their capital to gainful use would invest it in the only
legitimate way, which is in productive enterprise.

It is, perhaps, partly because of the confusion of thought produced by
all these causes, that no revolution has ever abolished the exploiting
State and the privileges that it exists to secure. But it must also be
remembered that all revolutions have risen out of factional disputes
or class-wars, and that in the latter case, the chief interest of the
revolting class has been not to abolish privilege but to redistribute
it. The French Revolution, for instance, expropriated the land-owning
nobility, but its politicians dared not abolish private land-monopoly,
for the bourgeoisie which supported the revolution would not have
tolerated such an interference with their own enjoyment of privilege.
In one important respect the Russian Revolution is an exception to
this rule. It is a class-revolution, but its avowed ultimate purpose
is to abolish even that State-organization which itself at present
maintains.[36] It is too early for any forecast to be made concerning
the outcome of this attempt; but whether it succeeds or not, the
Russian Revolution has already performed an inestimable service to the
world in proclaiming that the nature of freedom is not political but
economic, and in refusing, as a State-organization, to use its power
for the maintenance of an idle, rent-consuming class, living by the
exploitation of labour at home or in spheres of influence abroad.

In order to abolish privilege it is not necessary, in a political
democracy, to wait for the economic breakdown which its exactions
inevitably bring about--that is to say, it is not necessary to wait
until the number of wasteful idlers that production must support shall
become so numerous and so wasteful that it can no longer meet their
exactions. The ballot has been a pretty ineffectual weapon in the hands
of the rank and file, but--so much must be said for republicanism--it
could be made effective. First, however, the rank and file would
have to learn what it is that this weapon should be used against--it
would have to become aware of the nature of real freedom, and to wish
real freedom to prevail. The power of privilege under republicanism
depends not only on its control of wealth, but much more upon its
control of thought and opinion. That a campaign of education among the
voters can seriously endanger the position of privilege was proved
in England during the great land-values campaign of 1914, which was
cut short by the war. But the task of education is not easy, because
of the conditions I have just been discussing, which obscure the
essential nature of privilege, and of the State. We have had in this
country a great deal of outcry against privilege, and it has aroused
considerable popular sympathy; but the zeal engendered thereby has not
advanced the cause of freedom, because the outcry was directed against
the capitalist and the exploiting power gained by his fortuitous
advantage from privilege, but not against privilege itself. The nature
of privilege was obscured. It is evidently necessary, then, if the
ballot is ever to be successfully employed against privilege, to know
what privilege means and to clear away all confusion about it, so that
the voters may see what is at fault in our economic system, and what
remedial steps are necessary.

The essential nature of freedom has been already shown. It comes out
in the abolition of monopoly, primarily monopoly of natural resources,
resulting in complete freedom of the individual to apply his productive
labour where he will. It is freedom to produce, and its corollary,
freedom to exchange--the _laissez-faire_, _laissez-passer_ of the
Physiocrats. How this freedom is to be obtained is not for me to say.
I am not a propagandist, nor do I regard the question as at present
so important as that of establishing a clear understanding of the
nature of freedom. When enough people come to see that the root of all
bondage, economic, political, social--even the bondage of superstition
and taboo--is expropriation, reimpropriation will not be long in
following; and it may be achieved by a method quite different from all
those which theorists have thus far devised. When people know what
they need, they are usually pretty resourceful about finding means to
get it; and so long as they do not know what they need, all the means
of securing it that can be suggested, however excellent, must remain
ineffective from the lack of sufficient will to use them.


II

In the foregoing chapters I have spoken of the effect that freedom
would have upon this or that phase of human relations. There is really
no field of human activity that would not be profoundly affected by
it. A system of free economic opportunity would exert upon the lives
of human beings precisely as great an influence as that exerted by the
present economic system: that is to say, their mode of life, their
education, their quality of spirit, their cast of thought, would all
be determined by their command of wealth, precisely as they now are.
But where the present economic system operates to place the great mass
of wealth at the command of a very small percentage of the population
and thus to keep the majority in an involuntary and oppressive poverty
unfavourably affecting body, mind and spirit in a thousand ways, a
system of free opportunity would place in the hands of every human
being all the wealth that his labour, freely employed, could produce,
and at the same time it would relieve productive labour from the heavy
burden of privilege. Thus that huge share of wealth which now goes
to maintain the privileged classes in luxurious idleness, and that
further huge share which supports vast bureaucracies and keeps up
armies and navies to secure the foreign investments of the privileged
classes, would be diverted to its proper use. The number of workers
would be augmented by all those privilegees and placeholders who
now live without producing;[37] but opportunity would be increased
in infinitely greater proportion; therefore these newcomers would
find no difficulty in supporting themselves. On the other hand, the
immense reduction in luxury and waste thus brought about would very
much shorten the hours of labour. The worker whose labour, in addition
to maintaining himself and his dependents, is supporting two or
three idlers and paying for a share of governmental waste besides,
must necessarily spend many more hours at work than the worker whose
exertions are required only for the support of himself and his natural
dependents. But while the labour of each producer would decrease,
production would be increased by the opening of new opportunities, by
the increase in number of the producers, and by the enhanced power of
consumption made possible through their greater command of wealth.
The redistribution which would follow upon the establishment of free
opportunity, and the curtailment of waste, would satisfy a share of
this new demand; but just as production and exchange, in a period of
comparative prosperity at present, are stimulated by the increased
consuming power of the public, so, when artificial restrictions on
production had been removed, the increased power of consumption which
would result would act as a permanent stimulus to production and
exchange.

I will not speculate about the conditions arising during the period
of adjustment to the new conditions of economic freedom. If bad,
they would be but temporary, and though they are often magnified as
arguments against freedom by those who either can not or do not wish to
see beyond them, they have no proper place in this discussion, which
is concerned only with the permanent effect of free opportunity on the
lives, spirits and minds of human beings. It may be doubted that the
intercalary hardships of the transition would be great; but if they
were to be twice as great as the most timorous would forecast them,
would they not be preferable to those attending the protraction of the
present system to its inevitable break-up? That is the real question.
Thomas Jefferson said that rather than the French Revolution should
fail, he would see half Europe perish, and “though but an Adam and Eve
were left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it
is now.”

Who can picture the profound alteration in the attitude of people
toward life and their fellow-beings, if they were but emancipated from
the fear of want which now besets all of humankind? Even the rich and
the well-to-do are not exempt from this fear; for an economic security
based on an unsound economic system is like those walks which are
thrown along the thin crust of earth among the geysers of Yellowstone
Park, where those who walk them are in danger that a misstep may plunge
them through the thin crust to perish in the scalding heat beneath.
While an economic system based upon the legalized robbery of one class
by another remains in force, the abyss of involuntary poverty will
always yawn for those who may lose their command of wealth through
their own incapacity for management, or through circumstances beyond
their control. It seems likely that an instinctive sense of this is at
least partly responsible for the constant effort of people already
well off to increase their fortunes. It is certainly responsible for a
great deal of effort to get wealth by dishonest means--that is to say,
by those forms of dishonesty which are without legal sanction. The fear
of want produces avarice, chicanery, fraud, servility, envy, suspicion,
distrust. It leads to unlegalized theft, to murder, to prostitution.
It produces a class of people who, in a society which denies free
opportunity and puts a premium on graft, live by their wits, and in
so doing often display an energy and ability which would be useful
to a society that offered it no opportunity save that for honest
and useful employment. Moreover, this fear of want keeps the great
majority of people constantly occupied with the means of existence,
when they should properly be devoting a large share of their time to
the fulfilment of its purpose, which is that enjoyment gained from
developing one’s spiritual capacities and pursuing spiritual interests.
Those thus preoccupied can not employ with either imagination or profit
what leisure they have. Rather, they will merely use their leisure to
overcome their weariness of themselves. Their pleasures will be mere
pastimes, of the kind that subvert thought and dull imagination. Thus
little scope is left for the higher activities of the spirit, and the
quality of life is impoverished.

The spiritual effects of the fear of want are naturally most clearly
observable in countries where it is most widespread and deep-rooted.
England offers a particularly good field for observation of these
phenomena, for economic exploitation by a conquering class which has
merged into a powerful owning aristocracy, is there advanced to the
point of breakdown; therefore all the results of economic exploitation
are present in overflowing measure. The most striking, perhaps, are
the servility and snobbery which find sanction even in the Church
catechism, in the passage admonishing candidates for confirmation to
order themselves lowly and reverently unto all their betters--that is
to say, those born to a higher place in the social order. The English
novelists, from the days of Richardson and Fielding down to the
present, have faithfully recorded the unlovely characteristics bred
in a people by the ever-present necessity of keeping an eye to the
main chance; by the knowledge that fortune may depend less on merit
and ability than on a servile currying of favour with those powerful
persons who, through the fortuitous circumstance of birth, are in
control of economic opportunity. Richardson was himself demoralized
by the social system to which the economic system had given rise. His
acceptance of arrogance in the owning class and abjectness in the
exploited, shows how acquiescence in injustice can corrupt even a man
of genius. “Pamela” is a veritable study in servility; an unconscious
and devastating exposition of the basic principle of English society.
Fielding, on the other hand, was too critical to be corrupted by
it, and his books are all the more valuable for the objectivity
with which he presents the demoralization that a predatory economic
system has produced. What an array of characters he parades before
his readers--avaricious, envious, suspicious, self-seeking, arrogant,
venal! Even the hero of his great novel, “Tom Jones,” is not above
prostituting himself to an elderly lady of wealth when he finds himself
in danger of want and with no more honest means of getting a living,
having been brought up as a gentleman, that is to say, an idler. This
greatest of English novelists was well aware of the effect produced on
the collective life of his nation by an arbitrary division of human
kind into “High people and Low people,” and he took occasion to comment
upon it with a penetrating satire.


     Now the world being divided thus into people of fashion and
     people of no fashion, a fierce contention arose between them; nor
     would those of one party, to avoid suspicion, be seen publicly
     to speak to those of the other, tho’ they often held a very good
     correspondence in private ... but we who know them, must have
     daily found very high persons know us in one place and not in
     another, today and not tomorrow; ... and perhaps if the gods,
     according to the opinions of some, made men only to laugh at them,
     there is no part of our behavior which answers the end of our
     creation better than this.


One might say that the profuseness of unamiable qualities with which
Fielding endows so many of his characters, was due to a peculiar humour
or pessimism in this writer, if one did not find those same qualities
plentifully distributed among the characters of his successors. Dickens
created a whole gallery of highly interesting and unadmirable folk, and
one finds such faithful counterparts in Thackeray, for example, or in
George Eliot, that they are to be explained not as the mere creation of
any author’s imagination, but as a product of the society in which he
lived and observed.

There is material for an excellent study of the relation of the
economic and social system to the literary art, in the important rôle
that money plays in English fiction. That intense preoccupation with
the means of existence which is enforced by the fear of want, has
profoundly affected the plots and characters of English novels. The
number of plots which hinge on someone’s attempt to get someone else’s
money, is astonishing. The number of men and women who either marry
or attempt to marry for money, is legion; and no English novelist has
the hardihood to settle his characters for life without providing them
with a living, generally through inheritance or the generosity of some
wealthy patron. It is significant that if they are going to make their
own fortunes they usually strike out to make them in the new world,
where there is some opportunity. The preoccupation with getting money,
not through industry but through inheritance, cadging, or chicanery,
is reduced to its lowest terms in the stories of W. W. Jacobs about
life along the waterfront of London. These entertaining and racy
stories, with monotonous regularity, present one theme, and that theme
is the attempt of one character to do another--usually his closest
associate--out of some trifling sum of money. It is interesting to note
that one of the striking differences between English and American
fiction is that where the former deals with money-getting the latter is
likelier to deal with money-making. The one represents a society where
opportunity is pretty thoroughly monopolized; the other a society in
which it is as yet somewhat less so.

It is not the fear of want alone which demoralizes and corrupts. In
a society where the greatest respect is paid to those who live in
idleness through legalized theft; where men of genius may be treated
like lackeys by those whose only claim to superiority is their command
of wealth; where industry and ability yield smaller returns than
flattery and servility; in such a society there is little to encourage
honesty and independence of spirit. So long as honour is paid to those
who live by other people’s labour, in proportion to their power of
commanding it, so long will praise of honesty, industry, and thrift
savour of hypocrisy, and so long will the mass of people be under small
temptation to cultivate these virtues; and so long, also, will the
moralists who seek to inculcate them be open to the same suspicion of
insincerity as are those bankers who stand to profit substantially by
the thrift they preach among depositors. There is something grimly
amusing in the complaints so frequently heard from those who live
in ease, about the shiftlessness of the working classes and their
dishonest workmanship; complaints which are well founded, perhaps, but
do not take into account the slight incentive that is furnished by the
knowledge that the profits of industry and honest workmanship will
be diverted into other pockets than those of the workers. If labour
takes every opportunity of giving as little as it can for as much as
it can get, one must remember that it but follows the example set by
the owning classes, an example that has yielded them rich returns both
in wealth and in the esteem of their fellow-men. Under a free economic
system no such demoralizing example would exist. The material rewards
of honesty, industry, and thrift would accrue to those who practised
these virtues; and since there would be no opportunity to gain esteem
through the appropriation of other people’s labour, those who wished
to enjoy it would be forced to depend on more worthy means, such as
ability, integrity, and uprightness in their dealings with other people.

In a free society, ignorance, vice and crime would tend to disappear.
We should have no people in high places whose large-scale theft
would make them fitter inmates for jails, and no people in jails for
those petty thefts to which need is a perennial incentive. Jails,
indeed, would be very little needed by such a society; for what with
the abolition of the State, with its long list of law-made crimes,
and the disappearance of those social conditions which are largely
responsible for the few infractions of moral law which constitute real
crime, there would be very few offenders to occupy them. I have already
remarked that need is a constant incentive to theft; it is also the
chief cause of ignorance; and ignorance and misery are fecund sources
of vice, as well as of the physical and mental degeneracy which result
in imbecility and idiocy. If need were removed, if every human being
were assured from birth of physical well-being and ample opportunity to
develop mentally to the full extent of his capacity, these distressing
results of involuntary poverty would not long exist to menace the peace
and health of communities and fill reformers and eugenists with alarm.
The cities where human beings are crowded together under conditions
subversive of health and decency would be gradually emptied of their
surplus population. At present they are largely asylums for the
expropriated, but when land was once more freely available they would
resume their natural character as centres of industry and exchange.
There would be no more centres of want, misery and vice, like centres
of infection, to menace the health and well-being of society. Man,
reclaimed by the land which is his natural home, would appear for
what he really is, a child of the earth, rather than an industrial
machine far removed from his rightful heritage of close, health-giving
connexion with the soil from which his sustenance comes. Life, in
short, having been placed on its natural basis, might be expected
to proceed along natural lines of development. Mankind, assured of
physical health, would progress steadily in health of mind and activity
of spirit; and being freed from its pressing need to take thought of
the morrow, it would have leisure to seek the kingdom of heaven--not
that heaven which the church promises as a future reward for orthodox
communicants, but the kingdom of heaven which “is within you,” the
happiness that comes from the harmonious development of the highest
faculties of body, mind and spirit, and their use in the promotion of a
beautiful individual and collective life. Superstition and intolerance
would disappear with the ignorance that produces them. Thought would
no longer be hampered either by fear or the consciousness of dependence
on an order of things unfit to bear the light of reason; but every
human being would be free to exercise that independence of mind
that only the most courageous or the most securely placed may allow
themselves at present. The long story of martyrdom for opinion would
come to an end when freedom of opinion no longer threatened a vested
interest in the perpetuation of injustice. Thus that “progressive
humanization of man in society” which is civilization in the highest
sense, would be in a way to be promoted as it has never been promoted
in any society of which the world has knowledge.


III

Theoretically, it might still be possible for free economic opportunity
and its benefits to exist for men only or for women only; but in
order to exclude a whole sex from participation in them, it would be
necessary to reduce its members to the status of chattels. Now, to
reduce half of humanity to slavery is practically unthinkable; it would
necessitate a reversion to an order of thought that has largely been
outgrown; for all social injustice, in the last analysis, is founded in
an ignorance and prejudice which cause even its victims to acquiesce
in it. Indeed, without this acquiescence, social injustice may be
called impossible. “After the primary necessities of food and raiment,
freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.” Because of
this instinct for freedom, the subjection of any class in society can
be continued only so long as that class itself fails clearly to realize
the injustice of its position; when it comes into a clear realization
of this injustice it will demand and eventually obtain the removal
of its disabilities. The subjection of women, such as it has been,
lasted only so long as women themselves acquiesced in it.[38] When they
developed a sense of injury, they began to demand the equality with
men which is their right, and ignorance, prejudice and superstition
are yielding before the demand. There is no reason to suppose that
women, having progressed thus far, would tolerate without a sharp
struggle any reversion to the injustice from which they have escaped.
Ignorance, prejudice, and superstition, moreover, are incompatible
with the enlightenment which will be necessary in order to secure
economic justice even for one-half of humanity; for that enlightenment
postulates not only the desire to enjoy freedom oneself, but the desire
that all people may enjoy it--that is, it postulates repudiation of the
idea of dominance. Thus society not only could not endure half slave,
half free; it would not wish so to endure.

Women are at present under certain disabilities which legal equality
with men can hardly be expected to remove. Those disabilities are:

1. Economic: Women are the victims of unjust discriminations in
industry and the professions in regard to training, opportunities,
tenure of employment, and wages. They are also victimized by
ill-considered “welfare” legislation sponsored by benevolent persons,
and by male workers whose purpose is to rid themselves of unwelcome
competition.[39]

If legal equality of the sexes were established, women might be able,
under the law, to force public industrial schools to give them equal
opportunities for training; they might also be able to enforce a demand
for equal pay with men for equal work. It is even conceivable that they
might force employers to lay off workers, during periods of depression,
on a proportional basis--men and women together, in proportion to
the number of each sex employed. All this, however, would entail
unremitting vigilance, and great effort in getting legal enactments;
it would also entail a great deal of governmental machinery, with all
the waste and ineffectiveness implied by the term; and it would leave
the general labour-problem precisely where it is at present. As for the
matter of opportunity, so long as industry is in the hands of private
concerns, I see no way by which employers can be forced under an
equal-rights law to employ women where they prefer to employ men. Nor
is there any certainty that legal equality will save working women from
having the race “safeguarded” at their expense. But if land were put
freely in competition with industry for the employment of labour, all
these disabilities would disappear. Women would enjoy the same freedom
as men to get their living by their labour, and since there would be no
such thing as a labour-surplus, their wage, like that of men, would be
the full product of their labour, and not that share which employers
or governmental boards thought fit to grant them. There would be no
need for reformers or other benevolent persons to secure them fair
hours and conditions of labour, or to get them excluded from hazardous
employments; for there is no way to make a worker accept onerous
conditions of labour from an employer if he have an ever-present
alternative of going out and creating more agreeable conditions by
working for himself. The worker whose independent position makes it
possible to refuse to work an excessive number of hours or under
unhealthful or dangerous or disagreeable conditions, will simply
refuse, and there will be an end of it. Thus employers, instead of
being prevented from exploiting women beyond a certain point, would be
rendered incapable of exploiting anyone in any degree. Nor would male
workers longer have any incentive to avail themselves of “protective”
legislation in order to reduce the competition of women with men in
the labour-market; for it is only where opportunity is artificially
restricted that there are “not enough jobs to go around.”

Certain direct consequences of the economic inferiority of women might
be expected to disappear when that inferiority no longer existed.
Foremost among these is the demoralizing temptation to get their
living by their sex. Prostitution would disappear from a society which
offered women ample opportunity to earn their living without doing
violence to their selective sexual disposition. Marriage would no
longer be degraded to the level of a means of livelihood, as it is
today for a great many women; for economic security would no longer
in any wise depend upon it. This being the case, the expectation now
put upon women to undertake marriage as a profession would disappear,
and marriage would come to be regarded in the light of a condition,
freely and voluntarily assumed by both sexes, who would jointly and
equally undertake its responsibilities. Under such circumstances, one
might confidently expect a further modification of institutionalized
marriage which would remove all those privileges and disabilities
now legally enforced on either party by virtue of the contract. The
idea that woman’s place is the home--which implies that marriage,
for her, necessarily involves acquiescence in a traditional sexual
division of labour and a traditional mode of life--with all its
disabling economic and psychological consequences, would disappear
from a society in which she was able freely to choose her occupation
according to her abilities. Thus, from the status of a class regarded
as being divinely ordained to be the world’s housekeepers, women would
emerge into the status of human beings, free to consult their interests
and inclinations in the ordering of their lives, without regard to
traditional expectations which, being no longer enforced by economic or
legal sanctions, would have no longer any power over them.

2. Psychological: Those prejudices and superstitions which now hamper
women in their development and in the ordering of their lives, might
be expected to disappear from a free society. In so far as they are
the consequences of woman’s subjection, they would yield before her
emergence into the status of a human being, sharing equally with man in
the freedom of opportunity that would result from the establishment of
economic justice, and the increased cultural advantages that freedom
of opportunity would bring. In so far as they are the outgrowth of
primitive ignorance and superstition, they would yield before the
increased intelligence and enlightenment which might be expected to
result from the abundance and leisure afforded to every human being
by economic freedom. Thus those artificial differentiations between
the sexes which have been built up by fear, by superstitions, and by
masculine dominance, would tend to disappear. Women would no longer
be regarded as extra-human beings endowed with superhuman powers for
good or ill; they would no longer be regarded exclusively or chiefly
as a function, being no longer forced to occupy that status; theories
of their mental and spiritual inferiority based on the results of
centuries of subjection would yield before a more humane and scientific
attitude; and as freedom promoted individuation among women, it would
become evident that the traditional notions concerning the feminine
nature were drawn from qualities which, having been bred by their
subjection, should have been regarded as characteristics not of a sex
but of a class.

3. Social: The superstitious notion that woman’s honour is a matter
of sex would disappear with the masculine dominance from which it
resulted. When women need no longer depend on marriage for their
living or their social position, they will no longer be under any
great compulsion to make their sexual relations conform to standards
which have been adapted to suit the interests, desires and tastes of
men. Being economically independent of men, they will be at liberty to
consult their own interests, desires and tastes, in this as in other
matters. They may desire to preserve those habits of virginity before
marriage and chastity after it, which have been imposed upon them under
masculine dominance; but they will be under no external compulsion to
do so. When they have no longer a professional interest in conforming
to the conventional moral code, their sexual relations will cease to be
regarded as falling within the purview of morality at all; rather they
will be, as those of men have been, a question of manners. For when a
moral precept no longer has social or economic sanctions to enforce it,
its observance ceases to be a matter of worldly interest or expediency,
and becomes a matter of personal taste. Then, if it be not sound, it
will be repudiated; if it be sound, the individual who allows himself
to be guided by it will profit spiritually by doing so, because his
obedience will respond to his own instinct for what is good, rather
than to an external pressure.

The spiritual gain that will come through the release from bondage to
superstition, discrimination and taboo, is incalculable. Freed from her
slavery to catchwords, woman will be able to discover and appraise for
herself the true spiritual values which catchwords usually obscure.
Having no longer any need to preserve a fearful regard for what other
people may think of her, she will be at liberty to regulate her conduct
by what she wishes to think of herself; and hence she will be able to
cast aside the hypocrisy, duplicity and dissimulation that must be bred
in any class of people whose position in society depends not upon what
they are but upon what they appear to be. Having attained to the full
humanity which this emancipation implies, she will gain sufficient
respect for her sex to tolerate no discriminations against it. Thus we
may expect to see her sexual function of motherhood placed on a basis
of self-respect, and the barbarous injustice of illegitimacy relegated
to the limbo of forgotten abuses. Woman will for the first time undergo
the profound and weighty experience of responsibility to herself,
rather than to social institutions and arrangements which were made
for her, and whose nature is not such as to command the deference of a
free agent. Free from the tyranny of the expected, from the disabling
consequences of surveillance and repression, women will for the first
time be able to develop to their full stature as human beings, in
accordance with the law of spiritual growth which has so long been
thwarted and perverted by the usages of society.

I have given only a general idea of what economic freedom would do to
promote human happiness. Its effect upon the lives and characters of
men would be quite as emancipating as upon those of women; but this
I have not space to consider in detail. In passing, however, I might
remark that not the least of the benefits that men would gain by it
would be relief from the worry and humiliation which the support of
women so often involves at present. “I have taken mistreatment from
that conductor,” said a young musician recently, “that I never would
have stood for if I were single. But I have a wife, and that makes
us all cowards.” A free people would outgrow on the one hand the
sheepishness that fear of want begets, and on the other the arrogance
bred by consciousness of power. Men would no longer need endure
humiliation for the sake of keeping their jobs; and those over them
would be estopped from arrogance by the knowledge that they were
dealing with free men who were under no compulsion to tolerate it.

If it appear that I envisage utopian results from the institution of
economic freedom, let me assume the possibility that those spiritual
results which I foresee might not come about. If they did not come
about, however, their failure to do so would imply a profound and
inexplicable change for the worse in human nature; for if the world’s
history proves anything, it is that there is in mankind a natural
disposition to aspire toward what is ennobling and beautiful, and
that this disposition is favoured by economic security--especially
where it is not associated with irresponsible power--and thwarted by
involuntary poverty. Why is it that the middle classes are regarded as
the “backbone” of society, if not because they have had enough command
of wealth to enable the maintenance of health and a high standard of
education, without that excess and power which too often breed idleness
and arrogance? Leisure and abundance stimulate independence of spirit,
thought, education, creative activity. Penury leads to demoralization,
ignorance, dulness. This has been the world’s experience in the past.
“There is in man,” says Goethe, “a creative disposition which comes
into activity as soon as his existence is assured. _As soon as he has
nothing to worry about or to fear_, this semi-divinity in him, working
effectively in his spiritual peace and assurance, grasps materials
into which to breathe its own spirit.” Why should one assume that this
spirit will pass over the material offered by life itself and the
relations of human beings with one another? It has not done so in the
past. Throughout mankind’s long martyrdom of exploitation, through all
the struggling and hatred engendered thereby, this semi-divinity in
man has been leading him towards a more humane conception of life. The
spiritual peace and assurance resulting from economic justice would
set all human beings free not only to share in this conception but to
realize it--to establish upon earth that ideal life of man which, in
the words of George Sand, “is nothing but his normal life as he shall
one day come to know it.”


IV

The whole point of the foregoing, for present purposes, is this: It
is impossible for a sex or a class to have economic freedom until
everybody has it, and until economic freedom is attained for everybody,
there can be no real freedom for anybody. Without economic freedom,
efforts after political and social freedom are nugatory and illusive,
except for what educational value they may have for those concerned
with them. The women of the United States, having now got about all
that is to be had out of these efforts--enough at any rate, to raise
an uneasy suspicion that their ends are lamentably far from final--are
in a peculiarly good position to discern the nature of real freedom,
to see which way it lies, and to feel an ardent interest in what it
can do for them. My purpose, then, is not deliberately to discourage
their prosecution of any enfranchising measures that may lie in their
way to promote, and still less to disparage the successes that they
have already attained. It is rather to invite them thoughtfully to take
stock of what they have really got by these successes, to consider
whether it is all they want, and to settle with themselves whether
their collective experience on the way up from the status of a subject
sex does not point them to a higher ideal of freedom than any they have
hitherto entertained.

In the past century, women have gained a great deal in the way of
educational, social and political rights. They have gained a fair
degree of economic independence. They are no longer obliged to “keep
silence in the churches,” as they still were at the beginning of the
nineteenth century; indeed, certain sects have even admitted them
to the ministry. The women who now enjoy this comparative freedom,
and accept it more or less as a matter of course, are indebted to
a long line of women who carried on the struggle--sometimes lonely
and discouraging--against political, legal, social and industrial
discrimination, and to the men, as well, who aided and encouraged them.
Thanks to the efforts of these pioneers, the women of today have a new
tradition to maintain, a nobler tradition than any of those which women
were expected to observe in the past: the tradition of active demand
for the establishment of freedom. They will be none the less under
obligation to continue this demand when the freedom that shall remain
to be secured is of a kind not envisaged by their predecessors. Rather,
in the measure that they proceed beyond those ends that seemed ultimate
to their predecessors, they will prove that these built well; for the
best earnest of advancement is the attainment of an ever new and wider
vision of progress.

The organized feminist movement in England and America has concerned
itself pretty exclusively with securing political rights for women;
that is to say, its conception of freedom has been based on the
eighteenth century misconception of it as a matter of suffrage. Women
have won the vote, and now they are proceeding to use their new
political power to secure the removal of those legal discriminations
which still remain in force against their sex. This is well enough;
it is important that the State should be forced to renounce its
pretension to discriminate against women in favour of men. But even
if we assume that the establishment of legal equality between the
sexes would result in complete social and economic equality, we are
obliged to face the fact that under such a régime women would enjoy
precisely that degree of freedom which men now enjoy--that is to say,
very little. I have remarked that those who control men’s and women’s
economic opportunity control men and women. The State represents the
organized interest of those who control economic opportunity; and
while the State continues to exist, it may be forced to renounce
all legal discriminations against one sex in favour of the other
without in any wise affecting its fundamental discrimination against
the propertyless, dependent class--_which is made up of both men and
women_--in favour of the owning and exploiting classes. Until this
fundamental discrimination is challenged, the State may, without danger
to itself, grant, in principle at least, the claims to political and
legal equality of all classes under its power. The emancipation of
negroes within the political State has not notably improved their
condition; for they are still subject to an economic exploitation
which is enhanced by race-prejudice and the humiliating tradition of
slavery. The emancipation of women within the political State will
leave them subject, like the negro, to an exploitation enhanced by
surviving prejudices against them. The most that can be expected of
the removal of discriminations subjecting one class to another within
the exploiting State, is that it will free the subject class from
dual control--control by the favoured class and by the monopolist of
economic opportunity.

Even this degree of emancipation is worth a good deal; and therefore
one is bound to regret that it has no guarantee of permanence more
secure than legal enactment. Rights that depend on the sufferance of
the State are of uncertain tenure; for they are in constant danger of
abrogation either through the failure of the State to maintain them,
through a gradual modification of the laws on which they depend, or
through a change in the form of the State.[40] At the present moment
the third of these dangers, which might have seemed remote ten years
ago, may be held to be at least equally pressing with the other two.
It is a misfortune of the woman’s movement that it has succeeded in
securing political rights for women at the very period when political
rights are worth less than they have been at any time since the
eighteenth century. Parliamentary government is breaking down in
Europe, and the guarantees of individual rights which it supported are
disappearing with it. Republicanism in this country has not yet broken
down, but public confidence in it has never been so low, and it seems
certainly on the way to disaster. No system of government can hope
long to survive the cynical disregard of both law and principle which
government in America regularly exhibits. Under these circumstances, no
legal guarantee of rights is worth the paper it is written on, and the
women who rely upon such guarantees to protect them against prejudice
and discrimination are leaning on a broken reed. They will do well to
bear this in mind as they proceed with their demands for equality, and
to remember that however great may be their immediate returns from the
removal of their legal disabilities, they can hardly hope for security
against prejudice and discrimination until their natural rights, not
as women but as human beings, are finally established. This is to say
that if they wish to be really free they must school themselves in “the
magnificent tradition of economic freedom, the instinct to know that
without economic freedom no other freedom is significant or lasting,
and that if economic freedom be attained, no other freedom can be
withheld.”

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Still, putting the shoe on the other foot, there is no denying
that discriminative legislation based on the Larger Good might as well
serve to secure to women privileges which would lead toward female
domination, as to create disabilities which would keep them at a
disadvantage compared with men. Even the United States Supreme Court
has been known to reverse itself.

[31] Land, that is, in the technical economic sense. It does not mean
the solid part of the earth’s surface--earth as distinguished from
water. It means the sum-total of natural resources.

[32] It is hardly necessary to go into the methods by which this
control is exercised. In a country where government is elected, as
in this, privilege controls through its contribution to party-funds,
through bribery, through economic pressure, and all the other means
which its control of economic opportunity puts at its disposal.

[33] Women and slaves were discriminated against in this country; and
in the State of California today, no person incapable of citizenship
may hold land--a provision which excludes Japanese and Chinese.

[34] A great deal is said about credit-monopoly, as if it were
something requiring a new and special kind of instrument to break up.
But what is credit? Merely a device for facilitating the exchange
of wealth, and all wealth is produced from land. The break-up of
land-monopoly would therefore at once break up credit-monopoly. Or,
putting it in another way, the one and only imperishable security is
land--all other forms of security finally run back to it. The break-up
of land-monopoly would therefore break up the monopoly of all the
secondary and derived forms of security upon which credit could be
based.

[35] There is recent precedent for this in American law. Under
the XVIII Amendment and the Volstead Act, the Federal Government
confiscated _ex post facto_ without a penny of compensation hundreds
of millions invested in the liquor business. All this, too, was
in labour-made property, not in law-made property, which greatly
strengthens the precedent.

[36] The Constitution of one of the Soviet Republics--I think it is
Georgia--begins something after this fashion: “It is the purpose of
this Government to abolish government.”

[37] The political placeholder must not be confused with those workers
in business, industry, or the arts who are not manual labourers, but
perform valid services which are exchangeable for wealth and justify
their being accounted productive workers.

[38] This is not to be taken as a contradiction of what I have said in
Chapter I concerning the argument that women wanted to be subjected.
No class ever voluntarily accepts subjection; but when it has been
subjected by one means or another, the ignorance that its subjection
breeds may cause it to become passively acquiescent in the injustice of
its position. It is worth noting that so long as the _idea_ of slavery
is tolerated, slaves may accept their position with a certain fatalism,
much as the vanquished force in war accepts its defeat.

[39] It is not to be understood that all male workers, individually or
in union, take this attitude; but that it does exist among them I have
already shown.

[40] This is not to be taken as contradicting the earlier statement
that women would not renounce without a struggle the rights they have
gained. The world can not move toward freedom without carrying women
along; they would not tolerate a dual movement, towards freedom for men
and slavery for themselves. But when the general movement is away from
freedom, as the movement of political government is at present, the
rights of women are endangered along with those of men.




CHAPTER VII

SIGNS OF PROMISE


Superficially it may seem that the present is an inappropriate time
to suggest that either women or men go deliberately out of their way
to undertake a process of self-education in the meaning of freedom.
The dominant spirit among us is not only not hospitable to the idea
of freedom; it is openly inimical to the idea. The United States is
the richest and most powerful country in the world. It is in the midst
of the most interesting experiment ever seen in the simplification
of human life. It is undertaking to prove that human beings can live
a generally satisfactory life without the exercise of the reflective
intellect, without ideas, without ideals, and in a proper use of the
word without emotions, so long as they may see the prospect of a
moderate well-being, and so long as they are kept powerfully under the
spell of a great number of mechanical devices for the enhancement of
comfort, convenience and pleasure. This experiment is so universal and
so preoccupying that while it is going on there would seem to be no
chance to get any consideration for so unrelated a matter as freedom.
Hence the only current notion of freedom is freedom to live and behave
as the majority live and behave and to desire what the majority desire;
and notions which diverge from this have not been under stronger
suspicion and disapproval since the eighteenth century than they are
in this country today. Not that any one, probably, fears any degree of
liberty for himself, but every one has a nervous horror of too much
liberty for others. Most people no doubt feel that they themselves
would know exactly what to do with freedom and therefore might be
safely trusted with any measure of it; it is the possible social effect
of other people’s liberty that they dread. No idea, probably, is more
distrusted and feared among us at the present time than that of freedom
for someone else.

The dominant spirit at present--the spirit which gives tone to our
society--is diametrically opposed to the spirit of freedom. It is a
spirit of coercion and intolerance. Politically this spirit finds
expression in a pronounced reaction from the “progressivism” which had
gained so much support before the war; in an enormous strengthening of
“the cohesive power of public plunder,” with a consequent reversion
to the regimentation of strict party-government; in outrages committed
by government, with popular approval--or at least indifference--upon
the persons and property of people suspected of economic unorthodoxy;
and in a cynical disregard by both government and populace of those
guarantees of individual liberty which were wrested from government
by more liberty-loving generations than our own. It is evident also
in the development of extra-governmental organizations committed to
a programme of violence actuated by religious bigotry, race-hatred,
or inflamed chauvinism, such as the Hackenkreutzers and Fascists
abroad--for the spirit of intolerance is not confined to the United
States--and the Ku Klux Klan in this country; movements which,
although they imply no menace to the exploiting classes themselves,
do constitute a menace, at present imperfectly perceived, to the
established organization through which those classes exercise
exploitation, and an extremely threatening danger to the lives and
liberties of millions among the governed.

Economically the spirit of coercion is in evidence in the struggles
for advantage between capital and labour, each trying to force the
other to its own terms; in attempts by employers to break up defensive
organization among their workers; and in such laws as the Criminal
Syndicalism Acts, most of which give criminal character to membership
in an organization professing radical economic doctrine. Socially
it is reflected in such laws as the Eighteenth Amendment and the
Volstead Act, and in puerile and evil-minded attempts at censorship of
individual conduct, of public amusement, and of literature and art.
In religion it is manifest in the activities of the Ku Klux Klan,
in the current controversy between Fundamentalism and Modernism in
the Protestant churches, and in the attempt sponsored by bigoted and
influential church-organizations to stop by edict the progress of
biological and anthropological science, because it threatens the tenure
of established superstitions. It is likewise evident in the concern
of those organizations with such social behaviour of individuals as
must rationally be held indifferent, and their efforts to get their
particular code of conduct enforced through sumptuary law.

The recrudescence of this spirit is the immediate result of war, which
always brings it about. War embodies in its crudest form the doctrine
of government by violence; and when war is dominant, therefore,
the ideals of justice and liberty, which are directly opposed to
it, become so unpopular that those who continue to profess them are
liable to persecution by government and by their war-mad compatriots.
Governments, which never grant their citizens more freedom of opinion
and action than is absolutely necessary in order to get themselves
tolerated, take advantage of this war-spirit to revoke, in practice
if not in law, those guarantees of individual rights which it suits
their purpose to dispense with. When the popular orgy of patriotic
bloodthirst and intolerance is over, and the populace begins to get
back to sanity, it finds government more securely fixed upon its back
than ever, and prepared to ride it without that easy rein and that
sparing of the spur which fear compels. Thus it is that the Governments
of the Western world, since the war, have been carrying on their
imperialist activities abroad and persecuting dissenters at home, with
an excess of cynicism which would have been effectively reprehended by
public opinion before the war.

The chief reason why this policy of force continues to command a large
measure of popular support is because fear of bolshevism has taken the
place of that fear of the enemy which unifies public opinion behind
Governments in war-time. Economic interests immediately consolidated
against the influence of the Russian Revolution precisely as they did
against that of the French Revolution, and in the same way. Governments
have done all in their power to inculcate fear of this influence upon
their peoples; and in this they command the assistance of practically
the whole institutional organization of their respective countries.
There is other and far better reason for this propaganda than the
mere need of a new bogey with which to cow the timorous and keep the
disaffected under control. The idea of freedom which bolshevist Russia
has launched is a distinct menace to political government and its
beneficiaries, the owning classes. If the expropriated and exploited
masses in other countries once get it through their heads that their
primary interest is not political but economic, the days of political
government will be numbered. The propaganda against bolshevism is
therefore inspired by two motives: the wish to frighten peoples into
approving suppression of those suspected of political and economic
heresy, and the wish to divert attention from the idea behind the
Russian Revolution through the moral effect of real or supposititious
misbehaviour by the Revolutionary Government. It is a curious twist of
human psychology that makes supposed outrages committed by a foreign
Government five thousand miles away appear to justify actual and
equal outrages by one’s own Government in one’s own country; and a
proletarian dictatorship five thousand miles away appear to justify a
dictatorship of the exploiting classes at home. The Soviet Government’s
alleged mistreatment of political dissenters is easily made effective
in ranging popular opinion in this country behind governmental
persecution and deportation of communists and anarchists. Reports of
Red terror in Russia reconcile public opinion--or at least that portion
of it which is articulate--to the reign of a White terror here. It
would appear that the desirability of dictatorship and terrorism is
not in question, but their colour. Civilized persons, perhaps, would
find little to choose between Red terror and White terror, or a Red
dictatorship and a White; they would probably elect to dispense with
terrorism and dictatorship altogether; but civilized persons have
nothing to do with framing the policies of government, and almost
nothing to do with the formation of majority-opinion.

Superficially, then, an invitation to contemplate freedom seems
untimely. The cause of freedom is neither popular nor fashionable;
therefore it may seem unduly optimistic to expect that there will soon
be an interest in it deep enough or general enough to move many people
to inquire seriously into its meaning or its desirability. Such a study
would imply a critical reappraisal of institutions to which fear of
change impels the majority to cling with a tenacity out of proportion
to the benefits to be derived from their preservation. In this country
this fear of change is especially strong because, as I have remarked
before, the exactions of monopoly have not yet advanced to the point
of choking industry. Moreover, opportunities to enjoy monopoly are not
as extensively pre-empted here as they are elsewhere; and therefore
the chances of the individual to share in the loot of industry are
much better. This fact tends to keep a great many people loyal to
an economic and political order which offers them a chance, however
remote, to live by the earnings of other people, and to make them
inhospitable to an idea of freedom which threatens that chance. There
is another factor, too, which must be taken into account, as explaining
the hostility of our proletariat towards an experiment in proletarian
government which might be expected to gain their tolerance if not their
sympathetic interest: that factor is the tendency of human beings to
prefer an immediate temporary well-being to an ultimate permanent
well-being conditioned on the acceptance of immediate hardship or
uncertainty. “_Après nous le déluge_” is a sentiment by no means
peculiar to dissolute and irresponsible monarchs. Humankind has always
shown a perfect willingness to let posterity pay its bills and atone
for its misdeeds. Labour at present is comparatively well off in this
country; and it is significant that just those sections of it that are
most advantageously situated are strongest in their opposition to the
bolshevist experiment, namely: the unions in the American Federation
of Labour. One can not unreservedly condemn their attitude; there is
much to be said for it. In a society organized as ours is, the mere
loss of a job is, as I have remarked elsewhere, terrible enough to keep
one’s thoughts from wandering on burning ground. The labourer stands
to lose through any radical economic readjustment quite as much as
the monopolist, that is, his all. If his all be sufficient to keep him
from want, he will naturally regard with apprehension any proposal to
take it away for the moment, even for the sake of his own possible
future advantage. The poor man, especially if he have a family, is
likely to feel that a present sufficiency is worth much more than
a future surplus. It is only when people have literally nothing to
lose but their chains that they can face without fear the prospect of
revolutionary change. If the existing economic order remains in force,
that time will come in this country as it came in pre-revolutionary
France, and something over a century later in pre-revolutionary
Russia; and when it does, there will be plenty of active interest
in freedom, and of underground movements to bring it about by
revolutionary methods. But at present the “dissidence of Dissent and
the protestantism of the Protestant religion,” the Anti-Saloon League,
the one-hundred-per-centers, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Republican
party, are in unapproachable ascendancy.

This does not greatly matter. Force and proscription are in the
long run invariably ineffectual against an idea. The idea released
by the American and French revolutions--the idea of the right of
individual self-expression in politics--prevailed over the combined
forces of European feudalism; and the idea released by the Russian
Revolution will prevail over the combined forces of European and
American imperialism. For ideas can be fought neither with armies nor
with persecutions; nor can attention be for ever diverted from them.
The only thing that has effective force against an idea is a better
one. Whether or not the Soviet Government succeeds in getting beyond
dictatorship to the establishment of economic justice in Russia is
not really important. If it should fail, its failure will not halt
the progress of the idea that human freedom is fundamentally a matter
of economics. Not even that acceptance in principle and denial in
practice which is the chief characteristic of Liberal policy, can
permanently defeat it. Sooner or later it will penetrate into human
consciousness; it will become part of that consciousness; and it
will prevail. Whether or not it will prevail during this era of the
world’s history is another question, whose answer will depend upon the
readiness of mankind to assimilate and be actuated by it. If it is not
assimilated in time to prevent the ruin of European civilization, then
its ultimate victory will take place in a future era, when European
civilization has followed the way of other civilizations to oblivion.

The process of assimilation is even now at work; with what
effectiveness one may deduce from the strength and determination of
the forces arrayed against it. It was no love for the Czar and the
Russian nobility that caused the Allied Governments to spend millions
of dollars in support of Kolchak, Denikin, and Wrangel, just as it was
no love for Louis XVI and the French nobility that sent the Duke of
Brunswick into France at the head of the Allies’ army. It was fear of
the idea which animates the Bolshevist Government. It was not because
the Allied Governments hated Germany less but because they hated the
Bolsheviki more that they failed to assent to the Soviet Government’s
proposal to surrender Petrograd and Moscow, establish a front in the
Ural mountains, and continue the war against Germany. It was not their
belief in self-determination, but their desire to interpose a buffer
State between the embattled proletariat of Russia and the embattled
imperialists of Western Europe, that caused them to erect Poland into
an independent State. Nor has anything but the most pressing economic
necessity moved any one of the Western Governments to treat with the
cynical realists of Moscow, who have repeatedly embarrassed Allied
politicians by their persistent abstinence from the hypocritical cant
of the diplomat who has predatory designs to justify. Nor was it any
sudden access of friendliness for Germany, or any noble superiority
to sectional jealousies and nationalist ambitions, that moved these
same Governments to sign the agreement of Locarno; it was, rather, a
desire to make common cause against a Government whose avowed purpose
is to destroy the privileged interests by and for which they themselves
exist. Need anyone suppose that they would do all these things if they
believed that the Russian idea could be localized? Not even the desire
of their privilegees to exploit the natural wealth of Russia could
have brought about a Locarno agreement. It was their sense of a common
danger that overcame their mutual jealousies and distrust; the danger
that the proletarians of their own countries may, as their miseries
increase, be moved to emulate the proletarians of Russia, that a sense
of class-solidarity may overcome traditional and national antipathies,
and move them to unite for the purpose of casting off their chains.

There are tendencies in post-war Europe and America which must be
disturbing to the politician who knows how to interpret them, if
there be such a politician; tendencies far more significant of future
developments than the mere existence of organized revolutionary
minorities or the activities of single communists or anarchists, and
much more difficult to cope with. Chief among these is a growing
disrespect for government; the progress of a healthy cynicism
concerning its nature and purpose, and a promising disregard of
those sumptuary laws which do not meet with the convictions or
desires of citizens. This tendency is by no means confined to any
disaffected group or class. The citizen who is most patriotic, and
most wholeheartedly with his Government in its attempts to coerce
other people, may not scruple to evade its attempts to coerce himself.
There is no articulate sentiment in this country, for example, against
the income-tax law; yet there are few citizens who will not evade its
incidence if possible, and feel themselves quite justified in doing so.
Or again, who has not heard people comfortably provided with contraband
liquor remark that they believe prohibition to be an excellent thing
for the country in general? People may support the policies of a
Government who entertain no illusions whatever about the nature of its
personnel--or about the policies themselves for that matter--but who
support them as a matter of self-interest or because they see nothing
better to do. But all this does not augur especially well for the hold
of government upon the loyalty or imagination of the governed. It is
a truism that the Government which tries to enforce one law to which
its citizens do not subscribe, thereby engenders disrespect for all
law, and thus weakens its authority. Again, the citizen who supports
his Government through self-interest or inertia may oppose it through
self-interest or because his inertia has been overcome. If he does not
support it through respect, its hold upon him is tenuous and uncertain.

As for the growing numbers of the disaffected, they show their loss
of faith in so-called representative government, and their sense of
helplessness, by a practice of non-co-operation which is none the less
real because it is spontaneous and unorganized. The number of qualified
voters who abstain from using the ballot grows with every election;
and this is not surprising, since every voter of any intelligence
knows precisely what interests control government, and precisely
what measure of self-determination his apparent choice between rival
candidates involves. Even the old faith in Liberalism, or the belief
that the masses may get some voice in government through “putting good
men in office,” is not what it once was. Liberalism displayed its true
colours during the war, and since the war it has not been able to
fool a great many of the people even part of the time. It is worthy
of note that every war-Government of 1914 was a Liberal Government
except Russia’s. Mr. Wilson was a Liberal if there ever was one; and
Mr. Wilson’s Administration led the American people into a costly war
which was of practical moment to only an infinitesimal minority of
our population, and used the opportunity created by war-hysteria to
perpetrate the most high-handed outrages against dissenters from his
war-policy. Mr. Wilson may have been sincerely insincere, as one clever
critic put it; but whether he was so or not, he gave the American
people a thorough, high-priced lesson in the essential hypocrisy of
Liberalism. Mr. Wilson, and his fellow-Liberals of Europe, showed
the world that the real interests of Liberalism and those of Toryism
are identical, and that when those interests are endangered it is
impossible to distinguish between Liberal and Tory behaviour.

It has, indeed, become abundantly clear since the war that a
realignment of forces is inevitable; a realignment which shall
represent not merely two factions differing slightly in regard to
the non-essentials of government but one in the fundamental purpose
of furthering economic exploitation; but a realignment which shall
represent the cleavage which exists already, and will be widened
as time goes on, between those who wish to perpetuate economic
exploitation and those who wish it abolished. The remark which
one frequently hears, that the two great parties in this country
represent the same interests, means that they are both maintained by,
and directly represent, the interest of monopoly which is engaged
in exploiting industry. Their superficial differences, even, are
notoriously insignificant, and fundamentally their interests and
their source of power are identical. The logical cleavage, therefore,
is between members of those two parties with all mere Liberals and
reformers, on the one side, and advocates of economic justice on the
other. It is really too late for compromise; too late for government
to do everything for the exploited masses except get off their backs,
as the German Imperial Government did so admirably before the war.
Governments have become too corrupt and too ruthless, and the interests
behind them too greedy, to perceive the wisdom of such a course. If
the policy of coercion is in the ascendancy, if the executive arm
of political government is everywhere usurping the function of the
legislative arm, if parliamentarism and republicanism seem about
to merge into dictatorship, it is because the ruling classes are
much more aware of the coming struggle than are those classes whose
interests will range them on the other side; and if many people now
support government whose interests are against it, it is because
they have not yet awakened to a realization of their true position.
The increasing cynicism of the governed concerning the nature and
purposes of government really marks an important advance toward the new
alignment of forces. It is not a long step from the realization that
government does not represent the general interest, to a discovery of
the direction in which that interest lies.

Along with this cynicism go other signs of a changing attitude. There
is a conspicuous falling off of faith in what might be called the
unofficial adjuncts of government, namely: the press and the pulpit.
The changing attitude towards organized religion was recognized and
defined in the Pope’s recent Encyclical Letter condemning the progress
of laicism in all the countries of the Christian world, and the
accompanying tendency to discuss Christianity as if it were merely
one of the historical faiths, like Mohammedanism or Buddhism, instead
of the only true, revealed religion. It is recognized also in the
attempts to which I have alluded above, by certain Protestant sects in
this country to secure laws forbidding the teaching of the theory of
evolution. It is true that science and the printing-press have robbed
a secularized church of its main source of influence over the minds of
men, the one by discovering and proclaiming the natural laws behind
those phenomena which ignorance attributed to benign or evil spirits;
and the other by facilitating the general dissemination of knowledge.
The Church can no longer effectively appeal to fear. For a church which
very early became a class-organization, and one of the large-scale
promoters and beneficiaries of economic exploitation, this is a serious
thing. Its promises and its comminations are becoming alike ineffectual
in face of mankind’s growing concern with the spiritual effect of
involuntary poverty and wretchedness upon the human spirit in this
present world. The modern cynicism towards paternalism in government
and industry finds its counterpart in cynicism concerning organized
Christianity. In an age which questions the justice of mankind’s
arbitrary division into classes, such an Encyclical as that of Pope
Leo XIII which enjoined masters to be lenient and the subject masses
to be patient is already an anachronism; and the injunction put by the
Church of England upon candidates for confirmation to order themselves
lowly and reverently unto all their betters is more likely to arouse
antagonism than to win compliance. The churches do not understand the
new psychology with which they have to deal. They are offering dogmatic
creeds to an age which is suspicious of all dogma; they are upholding
traditional moral criteria in an age when the foundations of factitious
morality are being generally scrutinized by the light of reason and
knowledge; they are preaching salvationist doctrine in terms which no
longer edify or recommend themselves to serious attention. All this
is merely to say that organized religion, like political government,
remains static in the midst of flux; and like political government
it faces a spontaneous and widespread if entirely unorganized popular
movement of non-coöperation.

As for that large majority of prosperous newspaper-concerns which are
stigmatized in socialist literature as the “kept press,” they have
been so over-eager in the partisanship of their editorial writing and
in the colouring of their news or its manufacture out of whole cloth,
that there is discernible a decided change in the popular attitude
towards them. The power of the printed word is still great out of
all proportion to its weight; but editorial pronouncements, if they
are read at all, are by no means swallowed as the undiluted milk of
the word, as they were in the day when Horace Greeley used daily in
the _Tribune_ to dictate opinion to a large section of the American
public. It is significant that since the advertising department has
come to take precedence over the editorial department, there has been
a decided falling-off in respect for journalism and a marked decrease
in the number of honest and able people who take up journalistic
work. This was to be expected. The modern newspaper is essentially
an advertising medium, and its editorial writing and presentation of
news must conform to its general character. Under these circumstances
men of intellectual ability and integrity are no longer attracted by
such work, as they are no longer, for an analogous reason, attracted
to governmental office or to the pulpit. The consequent deterioration
in journalistic personnel contributes further to the newspaper’s loss
of prestige--again as in the case of the personnel of government and
of the churches. As all those institutions lose the power to command
respect and allegiance, they progressively lose power to attract able
and honest minds to their service; and as they lose this power of
attraction, their power to command respect progressively dwindles; and
thus by alternate reactions they tend to disintegration. To return to
the press, it is symptomatic of the loss of popular faith in its moral
and intellectual character that people buy this newspaper or that so
largely because of special features--local news, sporting news, this
person’s column or that person’s cartoons. It is no exaggeration to say
that the overwhelming majority of Americans look to their newspapers
not for information but for entertainment or excitement; a fact which
is amply attested by the amount of space devoted to special features,
comic strips and cheap stories, and above all by the extraordinary
success of a new tabloid type of newspaper devoted almost exclusively
to pictures, accompanied by the most sensational kind of backstairs
gossip. In the parlance of the street, the modern newspaper is “giving
’em what they want”; and while the preference is a sad reflection
on public taste, its gratification is an equally sad reflection on
the quality and standing of American journalism. The newspaper, in
short, as I have said, no longer informs or guides opinion; it purveys
amusement.

The same deterioration, with concomitant loss of prestige, that is
proceeding in government, the church and the press, is evident in
educational institutions. This is a natural and inevitable development,
since education is so largely under political control. The powers
which control government are in control of education; and those powers
quite naturally will not tolerate any teaching which even implies a
revaluation of the existing economic, political or social organization.
This intolerance is effective even in institutions not under direct
control by the State; for those institutions are largely dependent on
wealthy benefactors, and wealth is almost entirely in control of people
who have a direct interest in the preservation of the established
order. Under these circumstances, the primary purpose of education,
which is to develop the mind and help it to independent progress along
the paths of truth and reason, is rendered impossible of fulfilment;
and our schools have pretty generally substituted for this purpose
another and lower one which is calculated neither to embarrass nor
offend the powers on which they depend. This is the vocational purpose.
Thus they have ceased to be centres of culture, and become centres of
training whose object is to turn out graduates who shall resemble one
another as closely as possible in all things save in special vocational
training. As Professor Jerome Davis recently expressed it, our colleges
are turning out machine-made minds. The deterioration in the personnel
of the teaching profession is consequently quite as marked as that
in government, the churches and the press. Independence of spirit is
not tolerated by school-directors and boards of regents. Teaching,
moreover, being held in little respect by the State, to whose interests
it is obviously inimical if prosecuted intelligently and seriously, is
so poorly paid that people who can possibly do better elsewhere are
naturally unwilling to become teachers. It is needless to dwell upon
the demoralizing and vulgarizing effect of these circumstances on the
schools themselves and those who attend them. It is too obvious and
has been already too often discussed, to require consideration here.
What I do wish to note is the fact that this educational system does
not escape criticism and distrust; and that the most interesting and
promising manifestation of this distrust is evident not among outsiders
or alumni, but among undergraduates. Too much may not be expected of
it, but the “youth-movement” which is afoot among students may not be
disregarded; it is symptomatic of a critical attitude and a spirit of
revolt which may not be wholly without effect.

These are negative signs of progress, if one will, but none the less
impressive for that. They indicate a growing sense of discomfort in
the environment provided by established institutions, and a loss of
faith in those institutions as they deteriorate under the spread of
their own corruption. On the positive side one may cite the growing
power of economic organization, and its tendency to displace political
organization. The appearance in the American Congress of a group known
as the “farm-bloc” is an interesting instance of this tendency.
Here is a group of political representatives with whom an economic
interest is frankly placed ahead of political affiliation. They are
primarily neither Democrats nor Republicans, neither conservatives
nor progressives; they are primarily representative of a producing
group. As such, they stand for a departure from the theory of
representative political government, which assumes that representation
shall be not industrial but geographic. According to this theory, the
representatives from each arbitrarily fixed geographical unit are
supposed to represent the interests of all the citizens within that
unit. This evidently leaves out of account not only the fact that
economic interests are primarily industrial or occupational and only
secondarily and fortuitously sectional, but also the fact that the
economic interests within a given area may be mutually inimical. In
practice, of course, political representatives have really represented
the dominant economic interest within their allotted territory, the
interest which has exercised the strongest political influence; but
since in theory they must represent all interests, they have not
been able to represent that dominant interest openly, but have had
to resort to subterfuge and dishonesty. Even the members of the
farm-bloc, were they representing districts where agriculture was
not the dominant industry, would no doubt be less open in their
espousal of its interest. None the less they have dared, in disregard
of party-discipline, to form a bloc which stands squarely for the
interest of a producing class; and in doing so they have taken a step
towards the system of industrial representation which has of late
made great strides in European countries, more especially in Russia
and Germany. Although the group which has taken this step may be
unimportant politically, save when a close division chances to throw
the balance of power into its hands, the step it has taken is of the
utmost importance; for if economic representation should proceed until
it eventually superseded geographical representation, the change would
not only involve the destruction of the bipartisan machine which
controls government in this country; it would naturally bring about
an open alignment of the producing interests against the interests of
exploitation, and thus make clear the final and fundamental issue of
which I have spoken--the question whether economic exploitation is to
be perpetuated or abolished.

A good deal of non-political organization shows the same trend. The
growth of co-operation, for example, in production, marketing, and
consumption, is evidence of an attempt to evade through group-action
those exactions of government’s beneficiaries against which the single
individual is powerless to protect himself. The growth of offensive
and defensive organization among capitalists on the one side and
workers on the other, not only implies recognition of the primary
importance of economic interests and the value of co-operation among
groups whose economic interests are identical; it implies also an
acknowledgment that neither capital nor labour receives from government
what it will accept as adequate protection of its interests--as, of
course, neither can, since the interest that government exists to
protect--the interest of monopoly--is directly inimical to both.
Moreover, as this organization becomes international in scope it
constitutes a negation of the political differences which bolster up
rival national organizations. That it has not yet become strong enough
to prevent nationalistic wars, is true; but this is because the fact
that war is a clash, not of rival producing interests, but of rival
exploiting interests has not yet become sufficiently clear to overcome
a specious patriotism and the traditional distrust and prejudice
which governments have assiduously inculcated upon the governed.
The producing classes are really behind the exploiting classes in
discovering that their interests are pretty much the same, whatever
their various nationalities may be. Governments have always co-operated
when any rebellious move by the governed in any country threatened the
established economic and political order; as they co-operated in the
Holy Alliance against France, or in a similar alliance against Russia,
and as they are now co-operating in the League of Nations against
the exploited classes in all countries. When the exploited classes
understand their own position as clearly as the exploiting classes have
understood theirs, organization for defense and offense will no longer
be national and vertical but horizontal and international. The real
issue will be drawn at last. Hence the tendency of capital and labour
toward international organization along the lines of economic interest
is an extremely hopeful sign that the producing classes are beginning
to realize that their major interests are not political but economic,
and that the quarrels of Governments are injurious to those interests;
that they are beginning to outgrow the narrow nationalism which has
facilitated their exploitation in the past, and made it possible to pit
them against one another in the quarrels of rival exploiting classes.


II

All these signs of disaffection under the old order of things and the
gropings towards a new, do not imply, of course, any growth of the
spirit of freedom, or any new consciousness of its nature. They do
indicate, however, the progress of a temper which, when it shall have
become more pervasive and more deeply rooted, will be hospitable to
the doctrine of freedom. Discontent with the established order must
necessarily precede any serious move toward its displacement by a new
order; and discontent, while it is by no means dominant at present,
is widespread enough to cause Governments a good deal of anxiety.
The very tightening of the grip of government which is evident in
the present tendency to suppress legislative bodies, and in ruthless
persecution of economic dissenters, is, as I have already remarked, a
sure indication of the extent and strength of the dissenting forces.
When those people who now endure the harassment of governmental waste
and industrial exploitation, shall perceive that relief is to be
gained not through futile political reforms aimed at amelioration of
their lot, but through a radical readjustment of the whole economic
system--when, in other words, they realize “what is to be done”--then
and not before, will come the real test of the tenacity of the old
order and the strength of the forces moving towards the new. On its
side the old order will have governmental organization and armed
forces, and the enormous influence of the superstitious tendency to
regard as right that which is established, supporting the interest of
a compact, wealthy, and highly organized exploiting class. The new
order will have on its side the newly realized need of the majority
without whose acquiescence a highly organized minority can not long
maintain itself in power. The issue will depend, obviously, not only
on the intelligence, ability and determination of the majority’s
leaders, but upon their clear understanding of the issue involved. If
they compromise, as the leaders of the French Revolution compromised,
the cause of justice will be lost, and the most that will be gained
will be a shifting of privilege. The Western world is faced at present
with the alternative of establishing an enduring civilization on the
sure foundation of economic justice, or of sinking back into barbarism
through a long series of civil and international struggles for
possession of the power to exploit. If it follow the latter course, its
civilization will go the way of the civilization of Egypt, Greece, and
Rome; and its vitality, like theirs, will so decrease under the dual
drain of exploitation and war that it will eventually fall, as they
fell, an easy prey to some strong external force.

The task before those who wish to avert this fate, whose passionate
desire is to bring about an enduring civilization based on the solid
foundation of economic justice, is the task of educating themselves in
the nature of freedom, of learning to face freedom without fear, and
of communicating to others their understanding and their courage. The
women of today, especially in this country, are in a peculiarly good
position to undertake this task. They enjoy unprecedented advantages
in the way of social and intellectual autonomy, and of educational
opportunity. They have emerged successful from a long struggle for
political equality with men, and they are still engaged in an organized
effort to secure legal equality. Thus they have their hand in, as it
were, with the work of removing the artificial disabilities which
organized society imposes on a subject class in order to keep it
subject; and this work should have engendered in those who have been
active in it a healthy resentment of social injustice and a sense
of the value of freedom to the human spirit. They will still have,
moreover, even after legal equality is won, a considerable number of
discriminations to combat, which should operate against the temptation
to regard their fight as won, and to relax the vigilance which is
always necessary to preserve individual rights against encroachment by
organized society. The organizations through which they have worked
remain intact; it is for them to determine whether those organizations
shall continue as mere agencies for political lobbying or whether they
will carry on the demand for freedom to its logical end.

The fact that women are in a good position to inquire into the nature
of freedom offers, of course, no earnest that they will do so. In spite
of the reasonableness of such a course, they may content themselves
with trying to effect the ultimate equality of the sexes through
political measures which in their nature can never effect it--provided,
that is, that events do not move too fast for even a serious trial
of such inept methods. A good deal of mirth has already been aroused
in certain quarters by trivial and futile reform-measures which women
politicians have sponsored. If this sort of thing shall prove to be the
sum-total of women’s contribution to social problems, it will merely
prove that they are quite as incapable of an intelligent understanding
of those problems as men have hitherto shown themselves to be. If
women are now in a good position to school themselves in the tradition
of economic freedom, the men of Europe and America have been in an
equally good position to do so since the political revolutions of the
eighteenth century, and as yet they have given no very encouraging
signs of progress. However much one may hope that women will make a
better showing, it would be unfair to expect it of them; for they
are but now emerging from the mental and spiritual condition induced
by centuries of subjection. If, therefore, they fail to grasp their
opportunity to contribute to the process of education which must
precede the establishment of economic justice; if they are content to
fix their minds upon this or that special aspect of social freedom or
of political freedom, instead of looking steadily towards economic
freedom--economic freedom for men and women alike--the judicious critic
may lament their failure or disparage their tactics, but he can hardly
attribute either to any stupidity or incapacity peculiar to their sex,
since it is through the same failure and the same tactics that men have
brought civilization to the critical state in which it is at present.

The great point, however, is that if they fail they are sure to pay
for their failure a higher price than men will pay. As they have more
to gain from freedom than men, so they have more to lose than men if
the Western world shall fail to establish its civilization on the
firm basis of economic justice. In the relapse into barbarism which
must attend the ultimate breakdown of economic and social life under
the monopolistic system, physical force will be even more strongly
ascendant than it is at present; and when physical force dominates,
the ideals of justice and liberty are, as I have already remarked,
without effective influence--the only right is might. The well-being
of women depends in very great measure on the prevalence of those
ideals; for when force is dominant, woman’s physical disadvantage as
the child-bearing sex places her in a position to be more readily
subjected and exploited than man. Because of this disadvantage she
was the first victim of exploitation; because of it, she will be the
last to escape; and because of it she will be the greater sufferer
from exploitation so long as exploitation shall be the basis of the
economic and social order. There is potential tragedy in the fact
that the Western world has become civilized enough to perceive the
injustice involved in women’s subjection only when the economic
order which determines its social life has become so corrupt that it
threatens the destruction of civilization, with all such gains in
humanity as civilization has yielded. Women have equality almost within
their grasp; they may lose it if this civilization shall follow the
path of its predecessors to ruin and oblivion. There is one way to
avert this tragedy, and one only--the way of economic justice. If the
women who have been active in the struggle to emancipate their sex
shall enlarge their conception of freedom, and with it the scope of
their demand, they can help mightily to preserve civilization through
the establishment of justice. If they could win their sex away from
the exploded formulas of the eighteenth century and bring them to
understand that political and social freedom without economic freedom
are utterly illusory, that true freedom proceeds from economic justice,
and that justice and freedom offer the only hope for the salvaging of
this civilization, they would have won half of humanity, and that would
be a contribution of no small value. One thing is certain: the question
of freedom for women can not proceed much farther as an independent
issue. It has reached the point where it must necessarily merge in the
greater question of human freedom. Upon the fate of the greater cause,
that of the lesser will depend. It is for feminists to choose whether
they will merge the feminist in the humanist, or whether they will play
at political and social make-believe while the issue is being decided,
and either suffer in the event the consequences of a failure which they
shall have made no effort to avert, or enjoy the benefits of a success
which they shall have done nothing to attain.



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