The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

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Social evolution has worked in many ways wastefully, and with
unnecessary pain, but it compares very favorably with natural evolution.

As we grow wiser; as our social consciousness develops, we are beginning
to improve on nature in more ways than one; a part of the same great
process, but of a more highly sublimated sort.

Nature shows a world of varied and changing environment. Into this
comes Life--flushing and spreading in every direction. A pretty hard
time Life has of it. In the first place it is dog eat dog in every
direction; the joy of the hunter and the most unjoyous fear of the
hunted.

But quite outside of this essential danger, the environment waits, grim
and unappeasable, and continuously destroys the innocent myriads who
fail to meet the one requirement of life--Adaptation. So we must not be
too severe in self-condemnation when we see how foolish, cruel, crazily
wasteful, is our attitude toward crime and punishment.

We become socially conscious largely through pain, and as we begin to
see how much of the pain is wholly of our own causing we are overcome
with shame. But the right way for society to face its past is the same
as for the individual; to see where it was wrong and stop it--but to
waste no time and no emotion over past misdeeds.

What is our present state as to crime? It is pretty bad. Some say it
is worse than it used to be; others that it is better. At any rate it
is bad enough, and a disgrace to our civilization. We have murderers by
the thousand and thieves by the million, of all kinds and sizes; we have
what we tenderly call "immorality," from the "errors of youth" to the
sodden grossness of old age; married, single, and mixed. We have all
the old kinds of wickedness and a lot of new ones, until one marvels at
the purity and power of human nature, that it should carry so much
disease and still grow on to higher things.

Also we have punishment still with us; private and public; applied like
a rabbit's foot, with as little regard to its efficacy. Does a child
offend? Punish it! Does a woman offend? Punish her! Does a man
offend? Punish him! Does a group offend? Punish them!

"What for?" some one suddenly asks.

"To make them stop doing it!"

"But they have done it!"

"To make them not do it again, then."

"But they do do it again--and worse."

"To prevent other people's doing it, then."

"But it does not prevent them--the crime keeps on. What good is your
punishment?"

What indeed!

What is the application of punishment to crime? Its base, its
prehistoric base, is simple retaliation; and this is by no means wholly
male, let us freely admit. The instinct of resistance, of opposition,
of retaliation, lies deeper than life itself. Its underlying law is the
law of physics--action and reaction are equal. Life's expression of
this law is perfectly natural, but not always profitable. Hit your hand
on a stone wall, and the stone wall hits your hand. Very good; you
learn that stone walls are hard, and govern yourself accordingly.

Conscious young humanity observed and philosophized, congratulating
itself on its discernment. "A man hits me--I hit the man a little
harder--then he won't do it again." Unfortunately he did do it again--a
little harder still. The effort to hit harder carried on the action and
reaction till society, hitting hardest of all, set up a system of legal
punishment, of unlimited severity. It imprisoned, it mutilated, it
tortured, it killed; it destroyed whole families, and razed contumelious
cities to the ground.

Therefore all crime ceased, of course? No? But crime was mitigated,
surely! Perhaps. This we have proven at last; that crime does not
decrease in proportion to the severest punishment. Little by little we
have ceased to raze the cities, to wipe out the families, to cut off the
ears, to torture; and our imprisonment is changing from slow death and
insanity to a form of attempted improvement.

But punishment as a principle remains in good standing, and is still the
main reliance where it does the most harm--in the rearing of children.
"Spare the rod and spoil the child" remains in belief, unmodified by the
millions of children spoiled by the unspared rod.

The breeders of racehorses have learned better, but not the breeders of
children. Our trouble is simply the lack of intelligence. We face the
babyish error and the hideous crime in exactly the same attitude.

"This person has done something offensive."

Yes?--and one waits eagerly for the first question of the rational
mind--but does not hear it. One only hears "Punish him!"

What is the first question of the rational mind?

"Why?"

Human beings are not first causes. They do not evolve conduct out of
nothing. The child does this, the man does that, _because_ of
something; because of many things. If we do not like the way people
behave, and wish them to behave better, we should, if we are rational
beings, study the conditions that produce the conduct.

The connection between our archaic system of punishment and our
androcentric culture is two-fold. The impulse of resistance, while, as
we have seen, of the deepest natural origin, is expressed more strongly
in the male than in the female. The tendency to hit back and hit harder
has been fostered in him by sex-combat till it has become of great
intensity. The habit of authority too, as old as our history; and the
cumulative weight of all the religions and systems of law and
government, have furthermore built up and intensified the spirit of
retaliation and vengeance.

They have even deified this concept, in ancient religions, crediting to
God the evil passions of men. As the small boy recited; "Vengeance. A
mean desire to get even with your enemies: 'Vengeance is mine saith the
Lord'--'I will repay.'"

The Christian religion teaches better things; better than its expositors
and upholders have ever understood--much less practised.

The teaching of "Love your enemies, do good unto them that hate you, and
serve them that despitefully use you and persecute you," has too often
resulted, when practised at all, in a sentimental negation; a
pathetically useless attitude of non-resistance. You might as well base
a religion on a feather pillow!

The advice given was active; direct; concrete. "_Love!_" Love is not
non-resistance. "Do good!" Doing good is not non-resistance. "Serve!"
Service is not non-resistance.

Again we have an overwhelming proof of the far-reaching effects of our
androcentric culture. Consider it once more. Here is one by nature
combative and desirous, and not by nature intended to monopolize the
management of his species. He assumes to be not only the leader, but
the whole thing--to be humanity itself, and to see in woman as Grant
Allen so clearly put it "Not only not the race; she is not even half the
race, but a subspecies, told off for purposes of reproduction merely."

Under this monstrous assumption, his sex-attributes wholly identified
with his human attributes, and overshadowing them, he has imprinted on
every human institution the tastes and tendencies of the male. As a
male he fought, as a male human being he fought more, and deified
fighting; and in a culture based on desire and combat, loud with
strident self-expression, there could be but slow acceptance of the more
human methods urged by Christianity. "It is a religion for slaves and
women!" said the warrior of old. (Slaves and women were largely the
same thing.) "It is a religion for slaves and women" says the advocate
of the Superman.

Well? Who did the work of all the ancient world? Who raised the food
and garnered it and cooked it and served it? Who built the houses, the
temples, the acqueducts, the city wall? Who made the furniture, the
tools, the weapons, the utensils, the ornaments--made them strong and
beautiful and useful? Who kept the human race going, somehow, in spite
of the constant hideous waste of war, and slowly built up the real
industrial civilization behind that gory show?--Why just the slaves and
the women.

A religion which had attractions for the real human type is not
therefore to be utterly despised by the male.

In modern history we may watch with increasing ease the slow, sure
progress of our growing humanness beneath the weakening shell of an
all-male dominance. And in this field of what begins in the nurse as
"discipline," and ends on the scaffold as "punishment," we can clearly
see that blessed change.

What is the natural, the human attribute? What does this "Love," and
"Do good," and "Serve" mean? In the blundering old church, still
androcentric, there was a great to-do to carry out this doctrine, in
elaborate symbolism. A set of beggars and cripples, gathered for the
occasion, was exhibited, and kings and cardinals went solemnly through
the motions of serving them. As the English schoolboy phrased it,
"Thomas Becket washed the feet of leopards."

Service and love and doing good must always remain side issues in a male
world. Service and love and doing good are the spirit of motherhood,
and the essense of human life.

Human life is service, and is not combat. There you have the nature of
the change now upon us.

What has the male mind made of Christianity?

Desire--to save one's own soul. Combat--with the Devil.
Self-expression--the whole gorgeous outpouring of pageant and display,
from the jewels of the high priest's breastplate to the choir of
mutilated men to praise a male Deity no woman may so serve.

What kind of mind can imagine a kind of god who would like a eunuch
better than a woman?

For woman they made at last a place--the usual place--of renunciation,
sacrifice and service, the Sisters of Mercy and their kind; and in that
loving service the woman soul has been content, not yearning for
cardinal's cape or bishop's mitre.

All this is changing--changing fast. Everywhere the churches are
broadening out into more service, and the service broadening out beyond
a little group of widows and fatherless, of sick and in prison, to
embrace its true field--all human life. In this new attitude, how shall
we face the problems of crime?

Thus: "It is painfully apparent that a certain percentage of our people
do not function properly. They perform antisocial acts. Why? What is
the matter with them?"

Then the heart and mind of society is applied to the question, and
certain results are soon reached; others slowly worked toward.

First result. Some persons are so morally diseased that they must have
hospital treatment. The world's last prison will be simply a hospital
for moral incurables. They must by no means reproduce their kind,--that
can be attended to at once. Some are morally diseased, but may be
cured, and the best powers of society will be used to cure them. Some
are only morally diseased because of the conditions in which they are
born and reared, and here society can save millions at once.

An intelligent society will no more neglect its children than an
intelligent mother will neglect her children; and will see as clearly
that ill-fed, ill-dressed, ill-taught and vilely associated little ones
must grow up gravely injured.

As a matter of fact we make our crop of criminals, just as we make our
idiots, blind, crippled, and generally defective. Everyone is a baby
first, and a baby is not a criminal, unless we make it so. It never
would be,--in right conditions. Sometimes a pervert is born, as
sometimes a two-headed calf is born, but they are not common.

The older, simpler forms of crime we may prevent with case and despatch,
but how of the new ones?--big, terrible, far-reaching, wide-spread
crimes, for which we have as yet no names; and before which our old
system of anti-personal punishment falls helpless? What of the crimes
of poisoning a community with bad food; of defiling the water; of
blackening the air; of stealing whole forests? What of the crimes of
working little children; of building and renting tenements that produce
crime and physical disease as well? What of the crime of living on the
wages of fallen women--of hiring men to ruin innocent young girls; of
holding them enslaved and selling them for profit? (These things are
only "misdemeanors" in a man-made world!)

And what about a crime like this; to use the public press to lie to the
public for private ends? No name yet for this crime; much less a
penalty.

And this: To bring worse than leprosy to an innocent clean wife who
loves and trusts you?

Or this: To knowingly plant poison in an unborn child?

No names, for these; no "penalties"; no conceivable penalty that could
touch them.

The whole punishment system falls to the ground before the huge mass of
evil that confronts us. If we saw a procession of air ships flying over
a city and dropping bombs, should we rush madly off after each one
crying, "Catch him! Punish him!" or should we try to stop the
procession?

The time is coming when the very word "crime" will be disused, except in
poems and orations; and "punishment," the word and deed, be obliterated.
We are beginning to learn a little of the nature of humanity its
goodness, its beauty, its lovingness; and to see that even its stupidity
is only due to our foolish old methods of education.

It is not new power, new light, new hope that we need, but _to
understand what ails us._

We know enough now, we care enough now, we are strong enough now, to
make the whole world a thousand fold better in a generation; but we are
shackled, chained, blinded, by old false notions. The ideas of the
past, the sentiments of the past, the attitude and prejudices of the
past, are in our way; and among them none more universally mischievous
than this great body of ideas and sentiments, prejudices and habits,
which make up the offensive network of the androcentric culture.

THE BEAUTY WOMEN HAVE LOST

We know how arbitrary, how changeable, how helplessly associative, is
the "beauty sense." That which gives us a peculiar feeling of deep
pleasure, received through various senses, we call "beautiful," whether
it be color of form, sound, scent, or touch; but no sensation is more
erratic.

Among savages absolute mutilation is considered beautiful; among
partially civilized peoples, like ourselves, restriction and distortion
in our bodies and those of domestic animals are still considered
beautiful; and in matters of fashion, or of food, we all know the
helpless proverb--"Every one to his taste."

In this general variability of taste we have in great measure failed to
grasp certain laws of beauty which obtain whether appreciated or not.
Abstract beauty is but a concept, a thought form for purposes of
discussion. The beauty perceived pertains to something, and in that
something lie its definitions and limitations. This we practically
recognize in certain marked and simple forms. The points which we
admire in a horse are visibly not the same as those admired in a fish or
bird; the beauty of a given animal must be of its own kind.

So vivid and sharp is this law of association, that precisely the same
bit of form and color which we would call beautiful while we supposed it
to be an irridescent shell, would strike us with disgust if we suddenly
perceived the little object to be a piece of very ancient meat. Beauty
must _belong_--varying with its subject.

The beauty of women has suffered from too narrow a field of
appreciation. It has been measured solely from a masculine viewpoint,
primarily as a characteristic of sex, secondarily as pertaining to a
subject creature; and associatively, to every mad extreme of fancy in
nature's variant, the male.

Among other creatures the beauty of the female is mainly that of race.
The lioness is a more appreciable working type of feline power than the
lion, whose sex-beauty, the mane, is somewhat similar to that of a
bison, or a great seal.

In our case, where the dependent female adds to her neutral race-beauty
the shifting attributes of sex-attraction, she has gained to a high
degree in the field man most admires, and lost in the normal beauty of
humanity.

Relative size and strength are elements of beauty in an animal; neither
dwarf nor giant is beautiful; and we for many years have dwarfed our
women, under the direct effect of restraining conditions and the
selective action of the master, whose pride would brook no equal.

Of late years, in some classes and countries, this is changing; so
frequently that the tall woman no longer excites remark or disapproval.

There is no reason whatever, in a civilized condition, why the male and
female should differ markedly in size, and the difference is
disappearing as above noted, as is also the extreme weakness so long
held desirable in women.

But in the great majority of cases our women are still content to be
what they consider beautiful as _women_, and never to consider human
beauty at all.

The disproportionate part played by costume and decoration in the
sex-governed activities of the dependent woman, has given a peculiar
cant to her beauty-sense. If she be well dressed,--or so considered,
and richly ornamented, her sense of beauty is satisfied, quite
regardless of shape, size and color in herself. This is perhaps a
fortunate provision to meet our special case, where the male must be
attracted as a means of livelihood, and under the average limitations of
personal charms. But it is a pity, in the interest of a nobler race,
that our preoccupation with cloths should so blind us to the real beauty
of the human body.

I once knew a girl whose vanity led her to decline gymnasium work, on
the ground that it would make her hands large. The same vanity would
have urged her to it if she had even known of the beauty of a well
proportioned, vigorous, active body. She had read and heard of small
soft hands as a feminine attraction, but never of a smooth, strong neck,
a well set head, a firm, pliant, muscular trunk, and limbs that cannot
be beautiful unless they are strong.

"Slender," "plump," "rounded," "graceful,"--these words suggest beauty
in a woman, but "strong" does not. Yet weakness,--in a healthy
adult,--is incompatible with true beauty--race beauty--the beauty women
have lost.

In their enforced restriction they have lost the beauty of expression
that comes of a rich wide life, fully felt, fully expressed. Look at
the puffy negation of a row of women's faces in a street car. Plump
women, "pretty" women perhaps, well dressed, "stylish," not ill
tempered,--and not anything else! Their range of experience is
absolutely domestic; their interests and ambitions are either domestic
or what they fondly call "social;" they do not feel, know, or act in the
full sense of human life, and their faces show it. They are rated
first, last, and all the time as mothers: mothers future, mothers
present, mothers past; and much is made of "the maternal expression" in
women's beauty. It belongs there, surely. It is a true large part of
it; beauty in a woman could not be true which was inimical to maternity;
but, but it is not the whole of life.

A man's face may be beautiful with a paternal expression, but if that is
all the expression he has, he lacks much.

There is a lack of dignity in our types of female loveliness. There is
the appealing type, the coquettish, the provocative, the mysterious; but
seldom do we see the calm pride based on nature's mightiest power which
should distinguish womanhood.

The woman of the remote past, the far distant matriarchal age, had the
beauty of freedom and the beauty of power; though their hands were
large, doubtless, and assuredly strong. In much later ages, while
losing this, we still kept somewhat of the free beauty of untramelled
bodies; but that too has gone under our binding weight of clothes. No
free grace is possible under a huge, slouching, heavy hat, or to a body
poised on sharp-toed shoes with towering heels.

If we knew beauty--human beauty; if we were familiar from childhood with
the real proportions of the body; if we were familiar with pictures of
the human figure, and then shown that same figure, the woman's, with her
feet artificially mis-shapen and out of poise, her waist distorted, her
head obscured, her every action hampered and confined,--we should see
the ugliness of these things, as we do not now.

The human woman, now so rapidly developing, will regain the wholesome
natural beauty that belongs to her as a human being; will hold, of
course, the all-powerful attraction of her womanhood; but will leave to
the male of her species,--to whom it properly belongs, the effort of
conscious display.

COMMENT AND REVIEW

How many of you have read the life story of Alexander Irvine--"From the
Bottom Up"?*

It is one of the most vivid, interesting, readable of books. It talks,
it laughs, it lives,--and it reveals. It is not a "confession;" not the
overflow of a self-conscious soul like Marie Barklirtseff's outpourings;
it is a story; an account of what happened to the man, and how he grew.

A hungry, ragged, barefoot, ignorant little Irish boy; handicapped in
all ways but three; unusually fortunate in these. He had a good body, a
good mind, a good heart. Up and up and up he pushes; helped now by the
body, now by the soul, now by the intellect, till we find him, still in
strong middle life, educated, experienced, traveled, enobled by loving
and serving, awake to our larger social needs, and working with all his
splendid power to help humanity.

Never was there a man more alive; learning Greek roots while delivering
milk; converting miners, practicing a score of trades, and boxing like a
professional.

The book has a double value; in the hope and courage which must rise
from contact with such a personality and its rich experience, and in the
strong light it throws upon "how the other half live." As Rose Pastor
Stokes so quaintly put it, "Half the world does not know how. The other
half lives."

In this book one-half may learn much of the unnecessary misery of "the
submerged;" and the other half may begin to learn how to live.

* _From The Bottom Up._ The life story of Alexander Irvine. Doubleday
Page & Co. New York, 1910.

*

The English Suffrage papers are an inspiration--and a reproach.

_"Votes for Women"_--the London organ of the militant suffragist, is so
solid and assured; so richly upheld; so evidently the strong voice of a
strong party.

_"The Common Cause,"_ published in Manchester, is another, not militant,
giving the same sense of a settled position and masterly leadership.

The women of England are awake to their needs, and valiantly support
their defenders; but American women, as a rule, are still asleep as to
the responsibilities of citizenship. Here suffrage papers still give
much space to argument and appeal: there, they are mostly filled with
the record of work planned and done; they are party organs, secure and
effective.

One of our best is _"The Progressive Woman"_ of Girard, Kansas.

It is edited by a progressive woman--Josephine Conger-Kaneko.

This is a Socialist as well as Suffragist paper, and more than that; it
stands for the whole front rank of the woman's movement.

In the August number we read of Kate O'Hare's campaign for congress in
Kansas; of "The Socialist Woman's Movement in Russia;" of "The White
Slave Traffic"--quoting from Elizabeth Goodnow's impressive book of
stories, "The Soul Market;" of "The Work of Madam Curie;" of "The
Marriage Contract;" of "The Woman's Suffrage Movement and Political
Parties;" with much other valuable matter.

*

The "Arena Club" of New Orleans is doing good work. It has prepared a
bill against the "white slave traffic" in Louisiana, which was submitted
to the legislature by Hon. J. D. Wall, Representative for East
Feliciana, La. This bill is now a law, and the next step is
enforcement. This calls for activity on the part of the "City Mothers."

*

_"The Union Labor Advocate"_ is one of our exchanges, and a good one.
It is the organ of the National Woman's Trade Union League. One of the
most practical and useful of all woman's organizations.

As women work for the world they become more human; becoming human, they
organize; and in organization grow in further humanness. This was well
shown in the shirt-waist strike of last winter in New York, the new
sense of common interest bringing out college women, society women, all
kinds of women, to help the workingwomen in their struggle for decent
conditions.

Professor Francis Squire Potter formerly of Michigan University, is now
general lecturer for the League: a good field for her unusual powers.

PERSONAL PROBLEMS

The _Forerunner's_ question in this department of the June issue,
reached a good many, it would seem. Here is another response:

"When people must wake up too early every morning, half dead, or at
least half asleep, to begin the ceaseless, monotonous daily grind, keep
at it all day until half dead or at least half asleep until too late at
night, for the mere privilege of existence, they are too tired to wake
up and LIVE--the rest of the night.