The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

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

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This conscious education was, for long, given to boys alone, the girls
being left to maternal influence, each to learn what her mother knew,
and no more. This very clear instance of the masculine theory is
glaring enough by itself to rest a case on. It shows how absolute was
the assumption that the world was composed of men, and men alone were to
be fitted for it. Women were no part of the world, and needed no
training for its uses. As females they were born and not made; as human
beings they were only servants, trained as such by their servant
mothers.

This system of education we are outgrowing more swiftly with each year.
The growing humanness of women, and its recognition, is forcing an equal
education for boy and girl. When this demand was first made, by women
of unusual calibre, and by men sufficiently human to overlook
sex-prejudice, how was it met? What was the attitude of woman's
"natural protector" when she began to ask some share in human life?

Under the universal assumption that men alone were humanity, that the
world was masculine and for men only, the efforts of the women were met
as a deliberate attempt to "unsex" themselves and become men. To be a
woman was to be ignorant, uneducated; to be wise, educated, was to be a
man. Women were not men, visibly; therefore they could not be educated,
and ought not to want to be.

Under this androcentric prejudice, the equal extension of education to
women was opposed at every step, and is still opposed by many. Seeing
in women only sex, and not humanness, they would confine her exclusively
to feminine interests. This is the masculine view, _par excellence_.
In spite of it, the human development of women, which so splendidly
characterizes our age, has gone on; and now both woman's colleges and
those for both sexes offer "the higher education" to our girls, as well
as the lower grades in school and kindergarten.

In the special professional training, the same opposition was
experienced, even more rancorous and cruel. One would think that on the
entrance of a few straggling and necessarily inferior feminine beginners
into a trade or profession, those in possession would extend to them the
right hand of fellowship, as comrades, extra assistance as beginners,
and special courtesy as women.

The contrary occurred. Women were barred out, discriminated against,
taken advantage of, as competitors; and as women they have had to meet
special danger and offence instead of special courtesy. An
unforgettable instance of this lies in the attitude of the medical
colleges toward women students. The men, strong enough, one would
think, in numbers, in knowledge, in established precedent, to be
generous, opposed the newcomers first with absolute refusal; then, when
the patient, persistent applicants did get inside, both students and
teachers met them not only with unkindness and unfairness, but with a
weapon ingeniously well chosen, and most discreditable--namely,
obscenity. Grave professors, in lecture and clinic, as well as grinning
students, used offensive language, and played offensive tricks, to drive
the women out--a most androcentric performance.

Remember that the essential masculine attitude is one of opposition, of
combat; his desire is obtained by first overcoming a competitor; and
then see how this dominant masculinity stands out where it has no
possible use or benefit--in the field of education. All along the line,
man, long master of a subject sex, fought every step of woman toward
mental equality. Nevertheless, since modern man has become human enough
to be just, he has at last let her have a share in the advantages of
education; and she has proven her full power to appreciate and use these
advantages.

Then to-day rises a new cry against "women in education." Here is Mr.
Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, solemnly claiming that teaching women
weakens the intellect of the teacher, and every now and then bursts out
a frantic sputter of alarm over the "feminization" of our schools. It
is true that the majority of teachers are now women. It is true that
they do have an influence on growing children. It would even seem to be
true that that is largely what women are for.

But the male assumes his influence to be normal, human, and the female
influence as wholly a matter of sex; therefore, where women teach boys,
the boys become "effeminate"--a grievous fall. When men teach girls, do
the girls become -----? Here again we lack the analogue. Never has it
occurred to the androcentric mind to conceive of such a thing as being
too masculine. There is no such word! It is odd to notice that which
ever way the woman is placed, she is supposed to exert this degrading
influence; if the teacher, she effeminizes her pupils; if the pupil, she
effeminizes her teachers.

Now let us shake ourselves free, if only for a moment, from the
androcentric habit of mind.

As a matter of sex, the female is the more important. Her share of the
processes which sex distinction serves is by far the greater. To be
feminine--if one were nothing else, is a far more extensive and
dignified office than to be masculine--and nothing else.

But as a matter of humanity the male of our species is at present far
ahead of the female. By this superior humanness, his knowledge, his
skill, his experience, his organization and specialization, he makes and
manages the world. All this is human, not male. All this is as open to
the woman as the man by nature, but has been denied her during our
androcentric culture.

But even if, in a purely human process, such as education, she does
bring her special feminine characteristics to bear, what are they, and
what are the results?

We can see the masculine influence everywhere still dominant and
superior. There is the first spur, Desire, the base of the reward
system, the incentive of self-interest, the attitude which says, "Why
should I make an effort unless it will give me pleasure?" with its
concomitant laziness, unwillingness to work without payment. There is
the second spur, Combat, the competitive system, which sets one against
another, and finds pleasure not in learning, not exercising the mind,
but in getting ahead of one's fellows. Under these two wholly masculine
influences we have made the educational process a joy to the few who
successfully attain, and a weary effort, with failure and contumely
attached, to all the others. This may be a good method in
sex-competition, but is wholly out of place and mischievous in
education. Its prevalence shows the injurious masculization of this
noble social process.

What might we look for in a distinctly feminine influence? What are
these much-dreaded feminine characteristics?

The maternal ones, of course. The sex instincts of the male are of a
preliminary nature, leading merely to the union preceding parenthood.
The sex instincts of the female cover a far larger field, spending
themselves most fully in the lasting love, the ceaseless service, the
ingenuity and courage of efficient motherhood. To feminize education
would be to make it more motherly. The mother does not rear her
children by a system of prizes to be longed for and pursued; nor does
she set them to compete with one another, giving to the conquering child
what he needs, and to the vanquished, blame and deprivation. That would
be "unfeminine."

Motherhood does all it knows to give to each child what is most needed,
to teach all to their fullest capacity, to affectionately and
efficiently develop the whole of them.

But this is not what is meant by those who fear so much the influence of
women. Accustomed to a wholly male standard of living, to masculine
ideals, virtues, methods and conditions, they say--and say with some
justice--that feminine methods and ideals would be destructive to what
they call "manliness." For instance, education to-day is closely
interwoven with games and sports, all of an excessively masculine
nature. "The education of a boy is carried on largely on the
playground!" say the objectors to women teachers. Women cannot join
them there; therefore, they cannot educate them.

What games are these in which women cannot join? There are forms of
fighting, of course, violent and fierce, modern modifications of the
instinct of sex-combat. It is quite true that women are not adapted, or
inclined, to baseball or football or any violent game. They are
perfectly competent to take part in all normal athletic development, the
human range of agility and skill is open to them, as everyone knows who
has been to the circus; but they are not built for physical combat; nor
do they find ceaseless pleasure in throwing, hitting or kicking things.

But is it true that these strenuous games have the educational value
attributed to them? It seems like blasphemy to question it. The whole
range of male teachers, male pupils, male critics and spectators, are
loud in their admiration for the "manliness" developed by the craft,
courage, co-ordinative power and general "sportsmanship" developed by
the game of football, for instance; that a few young men are killed and
many maimed, is nothing in comparison to these advantages.

Let us review the threefold distinction on which this whole study rests,
between masculine, feminine and human. Grant that woman, being
feminine, cannot emulate man in being masculine--and does not want to.
Grant that the masculine qualities have their use and value, as well as
feminine ones. There still remain the human qualities shared by both,
owned by neither, most important of all. Education is a human process,
and should develop human qualities--not sex qualities. Surely our boys
are sufficiently masculine, without needing a special education to make
them more so.

The error lies here. A strictly masculine world, proud of its own sex
and despising the other, seeing nothing in the world but sex, either
male or female, has "viewed with alarm" the steady and rapid growth of
humanness. Here, for instance, is a boy visibly tending to be an
artist, a musician, a scientific discoverer. Here is another boy not
particularly clever in any line, nor ambitious for any special work,
though he means in a general way to "succeed"; he is, however, a big,
husky fellow, a good fighter, mischievous as a monkey, and strong in the
virtues covered by the word "sportsmanship." This boy we call "a fine
manly fellow."

We are quite right. He is. He is distinctly and excessively male, at
the expense of his humanness. He may make a more prepotent sire than
the other, though even that is not certain; he may, and probably will,
appeal more strongly to the excessively feminine girl, who has even less
humanness than he; but he is not therefore a better citizen.

The advance of civilization calls for human qualities, in both men and
women. Our educational system is thwarted and hindered, not as Prof.
Wendell and his life would have us believe, by "feminization," but by an
overweening masculization.

Their position is a simple one. "We are men. Men are human beings.
Women are only women. This is a man's world. To get on in it you must
do it man-fashion--i.e., fight, and overcome the others. Being
civilized, in part, we must arrange a sort of "civilized warfare," and
learn to play the game, the old crude, fierce male game of combat, and
we must educate our boys thereto." No wonder education was denied to
women. No wonder their influence is dreaded by an ultra-masculine
culture.

It will change the system in time. It will gradually establish an equal
place in life for the feminine characteristics, so long belittled and
derided, and give pre-eminent dignity to the human power.

Physical culture, for both boys and girls, will be part of such a
modified system. All things that both can do together will be accepted
as human; but what either boys or girls have to retire apart to practice
will be frankly called masculine and feminine, and not encouraged in
children.

The most important qualities are the human ones, and will be so named
and honored. Courage is a human quality, not a sex-quality. What is
commonly called courage in male animals is mere belligerence, the
fighting instinct. To meet an adversary of his own sort is a universal
masculine trait; two father cats may fight fiercely each other, but both
will run from a dog as quickly as a mother cat. She has courage enough,
however, in defence of her kittens.

What this world most needs to-day in both men and women, is the power to
recognize our public conditions; to see the relative importance of
measures; to learn the processes of constructive citizenship. We need
an education which shall give its facts in the order of their
importance; morals and manners based on these facts; and train our
personal powers with careful selection, so that each may best serve the
community.

At present, in the larger processes of extra-scholastic education, the
advantage is still with the boy. From infancy we make the gross mistake
of accentuating sex in our children, by dress and all its limitations,
by special teaching of what is "ladylike" and "manly." The boy is
allowed a freedom of experience far beyond the girl. He learns more of
his town and city, more of machinery, more of life, passing on from
father to son the truths as well as traditions of sex superiority.

All this is changing before our eyes, with the advancing humanness of
women. Not yet, however, has their advance affected, to any large
extent, the base of all education; the experience of a child's first
years. Here is where the limitations of women have checked race
progress most thoroughly. Here hereditary influence was constantly
offset by the advance of the male. Social selection did develop higher
types of men, though sex-selection reversed still insisted on primitive
types of women. But the educative influence of these primitive women,
acting most exclusively on the most susceptible years of life, has been
a serious deterrent to race progress.

Here is the dominant male, largely humanized, yet still measuring life
from male standards. He sees women only as a sex. (Note here the
criticism of Europeans on American women. "Your women are so sexless!"
they say, meaning merely that our women have human qualities as well as
feminine.) And children he considers as part and parcel of the same
domain, both inferior classes, "women and children."

I recall in Rimmer's beautiful red chalk studies, certain profiles of
man, woman and child, and careful explanation that the proportion of the
woman's face and head were far more akin to the child than to the man.
What Mr. Rimmer should have shown, and could have, by profuse
illustration, was that the faces of boy and girl differ but slightly,
and the faces of old men and women differ as little, sometimes not at
all; while the face of the woman approximates the human more closely
than that of the man; while the child, representing race more than sex,
is naturally more akin to her than to him. The male reserves more
primitive qualities, the hairiness, the more pugnacious jaw; the female
is nearer to the higher human types.

An ultra-male selection has chosen women for their femininity first, and
next for qualities of submissiveness and patient service bred by long
ages of servility.

This servile womanhood, or the idler and more excessively feminine type,
has never appreciated the real power and place of the mother, and has
never been able to grasp or to carry out any worthy system of education
for little children. Any experienced teacher, man or woman, will own
how rare it is to find a mother capable of a dispassionate appreciation
of educative values. Books in infant education and child culture
generally are read by teachers more than mothers, so our public
libraries prove. The mother-instinct, quite suitable and sufficient in
animals, is by no means equal to the requirements of civilized life.
Animal motherhood furnishes a fresh wave of devotion for each new birth;
primitive human motherhood extends that passionate tenderness over the
growing family for a longer period; but neither can carry education
beyond its rudiments.

So accustomed are we to our world-old method of entrusting the first
years of the child to the action of untaught, unbridled mother-instinct,
that suggestions as to a better education for babies are received with
the frank derision of massed ignorance.

That powerful and brilliant writer, Mrs. Josephine Daskam Bacon, among
others has lent her able pen to ridicule and obstruct the gradual
awakening of human intelligence in mothers, the recognition that babies
are no exception to the rest of us in being better off for competent
care and service. It seems delightfully absurd to these reactionaries
that ages of human progress should be of any benefit to babies, save,
indeed, as their more human fathers, specialized and organized, are able
to provide them with better homes and a better world to grow up in. The
idea that mothers, more human, should specialize and organize as well,
and extend to their babies these supreme advantages, is made a laughing
stock.

It is easy and profitable to laugh with the majority; but in the
judgment of history, those who do so, hold unenviable positions. The
time is coming when the human mother will recognize the educative
possibilities of early childhood, learn that the ability to rightly
teach little children is rare and precious, and be proud and glad to
avail themselves of it.

We shall then see a development of the most valuable human qualities in
our children's minds such as would now seem wildly Utopian. We shall
learn from wide and long experience to anticipate and provide for the
steps of the unfolding mind, and train it, through carefully prearranged
experiences, to a power of judgment, of self-control, of social
perception, now utterly unthought of.

Such an education would begin at birth; yes, far before it, in the
standards of a conscious human motherhood. It would require a quite
different status of wifehood, womanhood, girlhood. It would be wholly
impossible if we were never to outgrow our androcentric culture.

COMMENT AND REVIEW

With the May issue of the American Magazine closes the first set of
papers on "The American Woman," by Miss Ida Tarbell. She has to a high
degree the historian's power to collate facts and so marshall them as to
give a clear picture of the time and scenes in question. I always read
her work with admiration and respect, also with enjoyment, personal and
professional. The strong, far-seeing mind at work; the direct style;
and the value of the subject matter, place this writer high among our
present day teachers.

For these reasons I was wholly unprepared for the painful shock caused
by reading the opening page in the March number of these articles.
Preceding issues had treated of the rise of the Equal Suffrage movement
in this country; while not wholly sympathetic, these were fair, and ably
treated.

The March number begins: "What was the American Woman doing in the '40's
and '50's that she went on her way so serenely while a few of her sex
struggled and suffered to gain for her what they believed to be her
rights?" And she goes on to show for what reason she kept out of the
Woman's Rights Movement, "reasons, on the whole, simple and noble."

Here are the reasons.

"She was too much occupied with preserving and developing the great
traditions of life she had inherited and accepted. . . . She was firmly
convinced that these traditions were the best the world had so far
developed, not merely for women, but for society. She did not deny that
women had not the full opportunity they should have; but as she saw it,
no more did men. She saw civil and educational and social changes going
on about her. She feared their coming too fast rather than too slow.

"And it was no unworthy thing that she was doing. Take that part of her
life so often spoken of with contempt--her social life. Those who would
pass society by as a frivolous and unworthy institution are those who
have never learned its real functions--who confuse the selfish business
of amusement with the serious task of providing _an intimate circle for
the free exchange of ideals and of service,_ for stimulus and enjoyment.

"It is through society that _the quickening of mind and heart best comes
about--that the nature is aroused, the fancy heightened. It is the very
foundation of civilization--society. The church and state work through
it. Morals are made and unmade in it. Ideas find life or death
there."_

The italics are mine.

For so clear-headed a woman as Miss Tarbell to commit herself to
statements like these was a keen disappointment to a sincere admirer. I
have quoted at length that there may be no mistake as to her meaning.
The "society" referred to is unmistakably that business of exchanging
entertainments which most of us do pass by as "a frivolous and unworthy
institution;" but which some find the sufficient occupation of a
lifetime.

That human intercourse is profoundly important no one will deny; we know
that contact and exchange does quicken the mind and heart, does give
stimulus and enjoyment. It is even true in a large sociological sense
that human intercourse is the foundation of civilization. But to call
"society" the foundation of civilization does seem like putting a very
long train of carts before the horse.

Women who work for suffrage, like other women, and men also, need to
meet other people, need relaxation, need the stimulus of contact with
differing minds, and get it. Being a suffragist is not like being a
leper--or a pauper--or excommunicated. There is nothing about the
belief itself to cut off the believer from her kind, and make it
impossible to invite her to dinner.

"Society" is of course averse to meeting persons who talk seriously of
important things. We are all taught as children that religion and
politics must not be discussed in society--and the cause of woman
suffrage is often both.

"The selfish business of amusement" is so predominant in "society" that
amusing people are the preferred guests; and if some earnest and
noteworthy person is drawn into "society" as a temporary exhibit, he is
expected to be amusing if he can, and not talk "shop."

It may be admitted at once that Miss Tarbell's main contention is true.
It was of course because most women were so occupied in "preserving and
developing the great traditions of life" that they could not open their
minds to new convictions. They were of course suspicious of change, so
is the mass of people at all times, in proportion to their ignorance.
The deadening effect of a ceaseless round of housework keeps most women
from grasping general issues of importance; and the deadening effect of
a ceaseless round of entertainments does the same thing to the few who
represent "society." But to have that "society" presented to us as a
noble soul-satisfying rightfully exclusive occupation, is a shock.

If it is a natural, simple right form of meeting together it is in no
way forbidding to woman suffragists. If it is the "round of gaieties"
to which our newspapers give columns--how does it accomplish all those
invaluable achievements Miss Tarbell enumerates?

What are the occupations of "society?" Its members are always getting
together in expensive clothes, to visit and receive, to eat and drink,
to ride and drive, to dance and play games, to go to the opera; and to
travel from town to country, from beach to mountain, from land to land,
to repeat these things or to hire some one to invent new ones. But
these pleasures cannot be in themselves the foundation of civilization!
The "exchange of ideals and service" alleged to take place in "society"
must be in conversation! It is by this medium that we get our minds and
hearts quickened--our natures aroused--our fancy heightened--that the
ideas find life and death, and morals are made and unmade.

During which process of "society" does the conversation which promotes
the exchange of ideals and service best come about? Is it in the talk
of women who are "paying calls?" Is it in the talk at a "tea" or
reception? Is it in the talk at a luncheon or a dinner? Is it in the
talk over the card-table, or while dancing? Is it in talk at the
horse-show or opera? (The pressure of ideas in society is so great that
its members do converse at the opera.)

Surely it cannot be "society" which Miss Tarbell means! She must mean
human intercourse--the meeting of congenial minds. But no; that is open
to the suffragist as well as to any; and no one ever called it a
frivolous and unworthy institution.

The meaning is clear enough, but the claims made are to say the least
unconvincing.

PERSONAL PROBLEMS

My own, partly personal and partly professional.

Q. Why don't people send questions to this department?

A. 1. Because it does not interest them.

A. 2. Because they have no problems.