The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

C >> Charlotte Perkins Gilman >> The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

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Do what he would, his mouth set hard in its accustomed lines. "Those
English fender are not practicable in this country, Mary. They have
been tried."

"When? Where? By whom?" she threw at him. "I have read about it, and
heard about it. I know there was an effort to get them adopted, and
that they were refused. They cost more than this kind!" and she pointed
disdainfully at the rattling bit of stub-toed slat-work in front of a
passing car.

"Do you expect me to make a revolution in the street car system of
America--to please you? Do you make it a condition? Perhaps I can
accomplish it. Is it a bargain? Come--"

"No," she said slowly. "I'm not making bargains. I'm only wishing, as
I have wished so often in years past--that you were a different kind of
man--"

"What kind do you want me to be?"

"I want you to be--I wish you were--a man who cared to give perfect
service to his country, in his business."

"Perhaps I can be yet. I can try. If I had you to help me, with your
pure ideals, and the boy to keep my heart open for the children. I
don't know much about these things, but I can learn. I can read, you
can tell me what to read. We could study together. And in my position
perhaps, I could really be of some service after all."

"Perhaps?" She watched him, the strong rather heavy face, the
attractive smile, the eyes that interested and compelled. He was an
able, masterful man. He surely loved her now. She could feel a power
over him that her short miserable marriage had never given her; and her
girlhood's attraction toward him reasserted itself.

A new noise rose about them, a dissonant mingled merry outcry, made into
a level roaring sound by their height above the street.

"That's when the school up here lets out," she said. "We hear it every
day. Just see the crowds of them!"

They leaned on the broad sill and watched the many-colored torrent of
juveniles pouring past.

"One day it was different," she said. "A strange jarring shrillness in
it, a peculiar sound. I looked out, and there was a fight going on; two
boys tumbling about from one side of the street to the other, with a
moving ring around them, a big crowd, all roaring in one key."

"You get a birdseye view of life in these streets, don't you. Can you
make out that little chap with the red hair down there?"

"No--we are both near-sighted, you know. I can't distinguish faces at
this distance. Can you?"

"Not very clearly," he said. "But what a swarm they are!"

"Come away," said she, "I can't bear to look at them. So many children
in that stony street, and those cars going up and down like roaring
lions!"

They drew back into the big sunny room, and she seated herself at the
piano and turned over loose sheets of music.

He watched her with a look of intensest admiration, she was so tall, so
nobly formed, her soft rich gown flowed and followed as she walked, her
white throat rose round and royal from broad smooth shoulders.

He was beside her; he took away the music, laid it out of reach,
possessed himself of her hands.

"Give them back to me, Mary," he pleaded. "Come to me and help me to be
a better man! Help me to be a good father. I need you!"

She looked at him almost pleadingly. His eyes, his voice, his
hands,--they had their old-time charm for her. Yet he had only said
"Perhaps"--and he _might_ study, _might_ learn.

He asked her to help him, but he did not say "I will do this"--only "I
may."

In the steady bright June sunshine, in the sifting dust of a city
corner, in the dissonant, confused noise of the traffic below, they
stood and looked at one another.

His eyes brightened and deepened as he watched her changing color.
Softly he drew her towards him. "Even if you do not love me now, you
shall in time, you shall, my darling!"

But she drew back from him with a frightened start, a look of terror.

"What has happened!" she cried. "It's so still!"

They both rushed to the window. The avenue immediately below them was
as empty as midnight, and as silent. A great stillness widened and
spread for the moment around one vacant motionless open car. Without
passenger, driver, or conductor, it stood alone in the glaring space;
and then, with a gasp of horror, they both saw.

Right under their eyes, headed towards them, under the middle of the
long car--a little child.

He was quite still, lying face downward, dirty and tumbled, with
helpless arms thrown wide, the great car holding him down like a mouse
in a trap.

Then people came rushing.

She turned away, choking, her hands to her eyes.

"Oh!" she cried, "Oh! It's a child, a little child!"

"Steady, Mary, steady!" said he, "the child's dead. It's all over.
He's quite dead. He never knew what hit him." But his own voice
trembled.

She made a mighty effort to control herself, and he tried to take her in
his arms, to comfort her, but she sprang away from him with fierce
energy.

"Very well!" she said. "You are right! The child is dead. We can not
save him. No one can save him. Now come back--come here to the
window--and see what follows. I want to see with my own eyes--and have
you see--what is done when your cars commit murder! Child murder!"

She held up her watch. "It's 12:10 now," she said.

She dragged him back to the window, and so evident was the struggle with
which she controlled herself, so intense her agonized excitement, that
he dared not leave her.

"Look!" she cried. "Look! See the them crowd now!"

The first horrified rush away from the instrument of death was followed
by the usual surging multitude.

From every direction people gathered thickly in astonishing numbers,
hustling and pushing about the quiet form upon the ground; held so flat
between iron rails and iron wheels, so great a weight on so small a
body! The car, still empty, rose like an island from the pushing sea of
heads. Men and women cried excited directions. They tried with
swarming impotent hands to lift the huge mass of wood and iron off the
small broken thing beneath it, so small that it did not raise the
crushing weight from the ground.

A whole line of excited men seized the side rail and strove to lift the
car by it, lifting only the rail.

The crowd grew momently, women weeping, children struggling to see, men
pushing each other, policemen's helmets rising among them. And still
the great car stood there, on the body of the child.

"Is there no means of lifting these monsters?" she demanded. "After
they have done it, can't they even get off."

He moistened his lips to answer.

"There is a jacking crew," he said. "They will be here presently."

"Presently!" she cried. "Presently! Couldn't these monsters use their
own power to lift themselves somehow? not even that?"

He said nothing.

More policemen came, and made a scant space around the little body,
covering it with a dark cloth. The motorman was rescued from many would
be avengers, and carried off under guard.

"Ten minutes," said she looking at her watch. "Ten minutes and it isn't
even off him yet!" and she caught her breath in a great sob.

Then she turned on the man at her side: "Suppose his mother is in that
crowd! She may be! Their children go to this school, they live all
about below here, she can't even get in to see! And if she could, if
she knew it was her child, she can't _get him out_!"

Her voice rose to a cry.

"Don't, Mary," said he, hoarsely. "It's--it's horrible! Don't make it
worse!"

She kept her eyes on her watch-face, counting the minutes She looked
down at the crowd shudderingly, and said over and over, under breath, "A
little child! A little soft child!"

It was twelve minutes and a-half before the jacking crew drove up, with
their tools. It was a long time yet before they did their work, and
that crushed and soiled little body was borne to a near-by area grating
and laid there, wrapped in its dingy shroud, and guarded by a policeman.

It was a full half hour before the ambulance arrived to take it away.

She drew back then and crouched sobbing by the sofa. "O the poor
mother! God help his mother!"

He sat tense and white for a while; and when she grew quieter he spoke.

"You were right, Mary. I--naturally, I never--visualized it! It is
horrible! I am going to have those fenders on every car of the four
systems!"

She said nothing. He spoke again.

"I hate to leave you feeling so, Dear. Must I go?"

She raised a face that was years older, but did not look at him.

"You must go. And you must never come back. I cannot bear to see your
face again!"

And she turned from him, shuddering.

BEFORE WARM FEBRUARY WINDS

Before warm February winds
Arouse an April dream--
Or sudden rifts of azure sky
Suggest the bluebird's gleam;

Before the reddening woods awake,
Before the brooks are free--
Here where all things are sold and hired,
The driven months we see.

Wither along our snow-soiled streets,
Or under glass endure,
Fruits of the days that have not come,
Exotic--premature.

I hear in raw, unwelcome dawns
The sordid sparrows sing,
And in the florist's windows watch
The forced and purchased spring.

KITCHEN-MINDEDNESS

It is physically possible to see through a knot-hole. If the eye be
near enough, and the board be movable, one can, with patient rotation,
see the universe in spots, through a knot-hole. Such a purview is
limited of necessity, and while suitable to the microscope, is not
congenial to the study of life in general.

When those who would save the forests of America began their work, the
burden of effort lay in so stimulating and stretching the mental vision
of our people, that they could see wider than their own immediate
acreage, deeper than their own immediate profit, further than their own
immediate time. Some such struggle was no doubt gone through, when that
far-seeing iconoclast of early times strove to prove to the greedy
hunter that more food was to be attained by breeding cattle than by
killing them all at once; that meat kept better when alive. What mental
labor, what arduous conflict between that prehistoric ant and
grasshopper!

Steadily up the ages the mind of man has had to stretch, and sturdily
has he resisted the process. That protoplasmic substance of the brain,
used so much and understood so little, astonishes us no less by its
infinite capacity for new extension, for endless fluent combination,
than by its leaden immobility. Here are some, open-minded, sensitive
and hospitable to new impressions; and here are others, an innumerable
majority, preferring always to know only what they have known, to think
only what they have thought before. The distinction does not seem
innate. A normal child provided with proper stimulus, responds with
ever fresh interest as field after field of new fact and new idea opens
before him.

Twenty years later that same child has lost this capacity, has become
dull, inert, conventional, conservative, contented. Upon his growing
mind have been imposed in long succeeding years, the iron limitations of
his "elders and betters"; only in the rarest of cases has he the mental
strength to resist these influences and "think new," think for himself.

Here we all are, living together in relations as complex as the pattern
of some mighty tapestry; each of us, seeing only his own part in it,
considering the pattern from the point of view of a stitch. This
attitude is exquisitely expressed by the reply of a dull student to the
earnest teacher who strove to arouse in him some spontaneous opinion on
human conduct. With enthusiasm and dramatic force, this instructor
exhibited the career of Nero,--showed his list of crimes natural and
unnatural, personal and political; his indecency, and cruelty, demanding
what should be said of the monster. The student, spurred by questions,
some-what fretfully responded, "He never did anything to me!"

Consciousness is of varying range. We know its gradual development, its
narrow field in childhood, its permanent restriction in idiocy. We know
how it may be developed, even in animals, how we have added to the dog's
field of consciousness a deep and passionate interest in his master's
life; how a well-befriended cat becomes desperately uneasy, when the
family begins to pack for a journey. We know personally the difference
between our range of thought at one age, and at another; how one's
consciousness may include wider and wider fields of knowledge, longer
ranges of time, deeper causal relations; and how the same object, viewed
by different minds, may arouse in one as it were, a square inch, and in
the other a square mile of consciousness. Those of us, who have the
larger area under cultivation,--who are accustomed to think of human
life as age-long, world-wide, and in motion, learn to see human conduct,
not as something in neat detachable strata, like a pile of plates, but
as having long roots and longer branches, and requiring careful handling
to alter.

To these, studying the world's affairs, clear lines of causal sequence
present themselves. Is it a thousand cases of typhoid? They trace the
fever to its lair as one would hunt a tiger; they point out every step
of its course; they call on the citizens to rise and fight the enemy, to
save their lives. Do the citizens do it? Not they. Individually they
suffer and die. Individually they grieve and mourn, bury,their dead
(when they should cremate them), and pay the doctor and the undertaker.
Hundreds of dollars they pay as individuals to nurses, doctors,
graveyard men, and monument makers. If, collectively they would put up
a tenth of the sum to ensure a pure water and milk supply, they would
save not only hundreds for themselves, but thousands and millions for
those after them.--to say nothing of grief!

But they look at life through a knot-hole. They see their own personal
affairs as things of sky-shadowing importance, and those same affairs,
taken collectively, become as remote and uninteresting as the Milky Way.

Now in the mere labor of intellectual comprehension our average citizen
of common-school education is able to see that where so much tuberculous
milk is fed into so many babies, that such a proportion will surely die.
He sees, but it does interest him. Show him tubercular bacilli from
the autopsy of his dead baby, show him the same in the bottle of milk
reposing in his refrigerator, and show him the man who put them
there--and you may get results.

He could see the larger facts, but only feel the smaller ones. It is a
limitation of consciousness.

All workers for human advance know this. Whatever the cause upheld,
those who work for it find everywhere the same difficulty; they have to
stretch the minds, to stimulate the consciousness, to arouse the
interest of their hearers, so that they will take action for the common
good.

In one field it is easy, that of public danger from war. The reason is
clear. Wars are carried on by men, and men have reacted to conflict
stimuli collectively, for so many ages, that it is a race habit with
them. Only in the last extreme of terror is this habit broken, and the
battle turns to rout, with every man for himself. Then comes the
officer and strives to rekindle that common consciousness without which
is no human victory.

In the economic world our habits of organization are not so old. We
have fought in company since we fought at all, as humans; but we have
worked, for the most part alone. The comradeship of shop and factory is
of yesterday, compared to the solitary spindle, loom and forge of
earlier centuries. Yet in that comradeship wherever found, comes the
new consciousness, that recognizes common danger or common gain, and
substitutes the army for the mob, the victory for the rout.

This effect is so strong, so clear, so quick in appearance, that even
with one poor century or two of economic combination, we ought to find
much better results than we do. Where the common interest is as clear
as day, where the common strength is so irresistible, where the loss and
the danger lie so wholly in isolation, one wonders over and over at the
lack of comprehension which keeps us so helplessly apart.

We can see the immense activities of the nation, the multiplication of
national wealth, power, and progress,--the saving of life, the
elimination of disease, the development of art and science, of beauty
and of health and glorious living that we might have, but we cannot feel
these things. Therefore we do not act.

Can there be still among us some general cause, acting on everyone,
which mysteriously checks out progress, which makes us "penny-wise and
pound-foolish," makes us "save at the spigot and spend at the
bung-hole," which continually intensifies our consciousness of personal
interest and continually prevents the recognition of social interests?

It may seem almost grotesque to make so heavy a complaint as this, and
then to put forward as chief offender our old companion the kitchen.

Briefly the charge is this: that in the private kitchen, we maintain in
our civilization an economic institution as old as house-building,
almost as old as the use of fire. The results of this surviving
rudiment of a remote past are many. The one presented here is the
effect of the kitchen on the mind.

The condition is practically universal. For each house a kitchen. Be
it the merest hut, the smallest tenement, one room; wherever the family
is found, there is the kitchen. For each man there is a cook. In the
great majority of cases the man's wife is his cook, and as she must
spend most of her time in the kitchen, there must be her little ones
also. In fifteen-sixteenths of American families, the children are thus
reared,--by cooks in kitchens.

We, in our fatuous acceptance of race habits, have ceaselessly
perpetuated this kitchen-bred population, and even defended it as an
educational influence of no mean importance. "Children brought up by
their mothers in the kitchen," we say, "early acquire knowledge and
skill in various occupations; they see things done, and learn how to do
them themselves."

This seems to the superficial listener like good sense. He never looks
below the allegation for the evidence. He sees that daily observation,
and practice should develop knowledge and skill, and fails to inquire
further to see if it does.

Surely if all children were brought up in blacksmith shops, it would
make them good blacksmiths; if they were brought up in dental parlors
they would become good dentists!

Waiving the desirability of a form of training calculated to turn out an
unvarying population of cooks, let us see if this daily association with
the maternal house-servant in her workshop does educate as stated. On
this point one clear comment has been made: "If kitchen life is such
good training to mind and hand, why is it that so few of us are willing
to follow the kitchen trades when we are grown? and why is it that
competence in the kitchen is so rare?" This is a most practical
observation. If fifteen-sixteenths of our women followed incessantly
the occupation of shoemaking, and brought up their children in the shoe
shop, we should hardly claim great educational advantages for that
arrangement. If we did, would it not be disappointing to find that the
trade of shoemaking was universally disliked and despised, and that good
shoemakers were hard to find at any price?

Yet this is precisely the case in hand. Our kitchen-bred children, boy
and girl alike, prefer almost any other trade, and when we wish to
secure competent workers in the kitchen we find them extremely scarce.

Moreover, in its own special activities, the private kitchen makes no
advance. Advance comes to it from outside; from the wider and more
progressive professionalism of its various industries; specialized and
socialized one by one. But, left to itself, domestic cook hands down to
domestic cook the recipes of female ancestors, occasionally added to by
obliging friends. It is endless repetition, but not progress.

The purpose of this discussion, however, is not to show the inefficacy
of this ancient workshop, as a means of carrying on that great art,
science, handicraft, and business--the preparation of food; but to point
out the effect of the kitchen on the human mind.

The one dominant note of kitchen work is personality. Its products are
all prepared for home consumption only. Its provisions are all secured
and its processes directed with a view to pleasing a small group. It
does not and cannot consider the general questions of hygiene, of
nutrition, of the chemistry of improved processes of preparation, and
the immense and pressing problems of pure food.

The kitchen mind, focussed continually upon close personal concerns,
limited in time, in means, in capacity, and in mechanical convenience,
can consider only; a, what the family likes; b, what the family can
afford; and, c, what the cook can accomplish.

The most perfect type of organization we have is the military. Military
success depends most absolutely on the commissary and sanitary
departments. "An army travels on its belly," is the famous dictum.

Is there any difference in this respect between soldiers and other
people? Are we not all gasteropods whether singly or in regiments? Is
not the health and strength of the productive workers of the world, at
least as valuable as that of the cumbrous forces of destruction?

In our last little war, and in the big one before that, disease killed
more than sword and steel. We lament this--in armies. We prefer to
keep our soldiers healthy that they may fight more strongly, and die
more efficaciously, and this sick list is pure waste.

Is it any less waste in private life? Can we easily afford the loss in
money--annual billions; the loss in strength, the loss in intellect, the
loss in love, that falls on us so heavily from year to year? Study the
record of man's fight with disease. See how the specialists devoting
not only lifetimes, but the accumulating succession of lifetimes to the
study of causes, cures and preventions, announce to us at last, "thus
and thus are you made sick. Thus may you be cured, and thus may you so
live as to be well."

See then the sanitary work of an aroused public; a truth is discovered;
a truth is announced; a law is made; the law is enforced--a disease is
conquered.

This is vividly shown in the work of our Government against
pleuro-pneumonia--in cattle. The Federal Government, furnishing
information and funds, and cooperating with the various States, attacked
that disease, and stamped it out completely.

There is an effort now to rouse our government to fight the White
Plague, in people as well as in cattle. And, as always, the difficulty
is to stir and stretch and rouse our kitchen minds, to make us see
things in common instead of individually. The men whose cattle had
pleuro-pneumonia, kept them in herds, and lost them in herds, losing
much money thereby. Many men were so afflicted. Therefore these many
men got together, and, using the machinery of the State, they together
destroyed their enemy. Cattle-raising is a business, a social industry.

But child-raising, husband-feeding, the care of the lives and health of
all our families, is a domestic industry, in the management of the
kitchen mind.

it has been shown recently that 72 per cent. of the cattle in New York
State are tuberculous. This does not kill them quickly like
pleuro-pneumonia. They live and may be sold. They live and may give
milk. It has been shown recently (as stated in our unimpeachable daily
press), that in some of the milk sold in New York City, there were more
germs to the cubic millimeter, than in the same amount of sewage!

This milk, and most of the milk in all our cities, goes into the
kitchen; the blind, brainless, family-feeding kitchen, and from there is
given us to drink.

What protest rises from the kitchens of New York, or Chicago, or any
city? What mass-meeting of angry women, presenting to their legislators
the horrible facts of strong men poisoned and babies slain by this or
any other abomination in the food supply?

A young man writes a novel exhibiting the badness of our meat supply.
Men become excited. Men take action. Men legislate. The great meat
industries stagger under the shock, recover, and go on smiling. Before
this meanwhile, and afterwards, the meat went into out kitchens and we
ate it.

Being kitchen-minded we cannot see that health is a public concern; that
the feeding of our people is one of the most vital factors in their
health, and that the private kitchen with its private cook is not able
to keep the public well.

Ask the physician, the sanitary expert. He will tell you that the great
advance in sanitary science is in its battle with the filth diseases;
and that we die worse than ever from food diseases.

In fighting the filth diseases we have the public forces to work with;
compulsory systems of sewage and drainage, quarantine, isolation
hospitals, and all the other maneuvers by which an enlightened public
protects itself.