The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

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

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"Oh Child of Mine!" I cried, "I will love you and serve you and I will
feed and guard and teach and save--but that is not enough! You are but
one, oh Child of Mine, and there are millions and millions! There
were--there are--and there will be! It is a stream--a torrent. It is
everlasting. Babyhood upon earth continuously, always Babyhood, Human
Babyhood--and not yet Motherhood to meet its needs!"

No savage Mother is enough. No slavish Mother is enough. No narrow,
selfish Mother is enough. No pitiful offered sacrifice of one Mother's
life is enough.

The Child does not need sacrifice. It needs Wisdom and Freedom and
Knowledge and Power. It needs Social Motherhood--the conscious, united
Mother Love and Mother Care of the Whole World.

THE NEW MOTHERHOOD

I have been reading Ellen Key's "Century of the Child," reviewed in this
number, and am moved to add, in connection with that review, a "brief"
for the New Motherhood.

Agreeing with almost all of that noble book and with the spirit of the
whole of it, I disagree with its persistence in the demand for primitive
motherhood--for the entire devotion of each and every mother to her own
children--and disagree on the ground that this method is not the best
for child service.

Among animals, where one is as good as another, "the mother"--each one
of them--can teach her young all that they need to know. Her love, care
and instruction are all-sufficient. In early stages of human life, but
slightly differentiated, each mother was still able to give to her
children all the advantages then known, and to teach them the few arts
and crafts necessary of attainment. Still later, when apprenticeship
taught trades, the individual mother was still able to give all the
stimulus and instruction needed for early race culture--and did so,
cheerfully.

But we have now reached a stage of social development when this grade of
nurture is no longer sufficient, and no longer found satisfying either
by mother or child. On the one hand, women are differentiating as human
beings: they are no longer all one thing--females, mothers, and NOTHING
ELSE. They are still females, and will remain so; still mothers, and
will remain so: but they are also Persons of widely varying sorts, with
interests and capacities which fit them for social service in many
lines.

On the other hand, our dawning knowledge of child culture leads us to
require a standard of ability in this work based on talent, love,
natural inclination, long training and wide experience. It is no longer
possible for the average woman, differentiated or undifferentiated, to
fulfill the work of right training for babies and little children,
unassisted. Moreover, the New Motherhood is belying to-day the dogma of
the high cultural value of "the home" as a place of education for young
children--an old world assumption which Miss Key accepts without
question and intensifies.

The standards of the New Motherhood are these:

First: The fullest development of the woman, in all her powers, that she
may be the better qualified for her duties of transmission by
inheritance.

Second: The fullest education of the woman in all plain truths
concerning her great office, and in her absolute duty of right
selection--measuring the man who would marry her by his fitness for
fatherhood; and holding him to the highest standards in his duty
thereto.

Third: Intelligent recognition that child culture is the greatest of
arts, that it requires high specialization and life service, and the
glad entrance upon this service of those women naturally fitted for it.

Such standards as these recognize the individual woman's place as a
human being, her economic independence, her special social service; and
hold her a far more valuable mother for such development, able to give
her children a richer gift by inheritance than the mothers of the
past--all too much in femininity and too little in humanity.

A mother who is something more--who is also a social servant--is a
nobler being for a child to love and follow than a mother who is nothing
more--except a home servant. She is wiser, stronger, happier, jollier,
a better comrade, a more satisfying and contented wife; the whole
atmosphere around the child at home is improved by a fully human mother.

On the second demand, that of a full conscious knowledge of the primal
conditions of her business, the New Motherhood can cleanse the world of
most of its diseases, and incidentally of many of its sins. A girl old
enough to marry, is old enough to understand thoroughly what lies before
her and why.

Especially why. The real cause and purpose of the marriage relation,
parentage, she has but the vaguest ideas about--an ignorance not only
absurd but really criminal in the light of its consequences. Women
should recognize not only the personal joy of motherhood, which they
share with so many female creatures, but the social duty of motherhood
and its unmeasured powers. By right motherhood they can build the
world: by wrong motherhood they keep the world as it is--weak, diseased,
wicked.

The average quality of the human stock today is no personal credit to
the Old Motherhood, and will be held a social disgrace by the New. But
beyond a right motherhood and a right fatherhood comes the whole field
of social parentage, one phase of which we call education. The effect
of the environment on the child from birth is what demands the attention
of the New Motherhood here: How can we provide right conditions for our
children from babyhood? That is the education problem. And here arises
the insistent question: "Is a small, isolated building, consecrated as a
restaurant and dormitory for one family, the best cultural environment
for the babyhood of the race?"

To this question the New Motherhood, slowly and timidly, is beginning to
answer, "No." It is becoming more and more visible, in this deeper,
higher demand for race improvement, that we might provide better
educational conditions for the young of the human species. For the
all-engrossing importance of the first years of childhood, it is time
that we prepared a place. This is as real a need as the need of a
college or school. We need A PLACE FOR BABIES--and our homes arranged
in relation to such places.

A specially prepared environment, a special service of those best fitted
for the task, the accumulated knowledge which we can never have until
such places and such service are given--these are demanded by the New
Motherhood.

For each child, the healthy body and mind; the warm, deep love and
protecting care of its own personal mother: and for all children, the
best provision possible from the united love and wisdom of our social
parentage. This is not to love our children less, but more. It is not
to rob them of the life-long devotion of one well-meaning average woman,
but to give them the immortal, continued devotion of age after age of
growing love and wisdom from the best among us who will give successive
lives to the service of children because they love them better even than
their mothers!

HOW WE WASTE THREE-FOURTHS OF OUR MONEY

The waste of Nature is great, and seems unavoidable: it is Nature's way.
She is prodigal of time, of material, of life itself; and seems to have
unlimited supplies to draw from. But the waste in our human processes
is conspicuously absurd. We submit to it because we are not, in
general, awake to what is going on.

Recent spasms of civic investigation have revealed to us one large
source of waste in the dishonest use of public money. We are taxed more
than is necessary to meet expenses in no way essential to good
government. Ten per cent is a moderate allowance for this loss.

We waste more largely and less noticeably in carelessness of our natural
resources, as is now beginning to be realized. Waste of timber is
followed by waste of water, and that by waste of land. The earth's
surface of arable soil is being washed into the ocean at a wholly
unnecessary rate, the foundation of all wealth--of our very life on
earth--thus slipping away from us unobserved. Every barren, naked hill
is a ruined garden; every yellow, muddy river is leaking gold dust from
our pockets; every choked harbor is a loss in money. Another ten per
cent is scant allowance for this.

The waste of sewage in almost every city so provided, as well as the
loss of the same valuable fertilizing material in smaller places, is
grotesquely foolish. If we saw a farmer gathering all the material from
his stables and cow sheds and throwing it into the sea, we should think
he was a fool. We in towns and cities are just as foolish in wholesale
waste of what is worth good money to the farmer. The sale of this
material by any great city, together with the sale of its garbage, would
be a large and steady source of income. At present we pay out large
sums for sewage systems to throw away this product, and pay further sums
to persons to take away the garbage and other refuse. We then, to
accumulate idiocy, pay more large sums to dredge out the harbors we have
ourselves obstructed, and furthermore charge ourselves with a heavy
death rate and a burden of disease from the effects of the defiled water
and poisoned fish--defiled and poisoned by ourselves. Taken altogether
this makes another ten per cent. of our wealth wasted. (All these sums
are arbitrary, but well below what they would really amount to.)

We pay very heavily to support our public institutions for the
defective, crippled and criminal population--in terrible numbers and
increasing. Practically all this is pure waste of money--to say nothing
of the loss and suffering to humanity. Prisons, hospitals, insane
asylums, poor houses, and the like cost the community a prodigious
amount.

This is very largely unnecessary. Our criminal population is made--not
born! The born criminal belongs in the hospital or asylum. Our
crippled and blind are mainly made so by vicious parents--and all that
contributes to vice can be avoided. It is a tremendous expense to
produce and maintain such a lot of poor human stock--and it is wholly
unnecessary--the most utter waste. We will call it another ten per
cent.

Our all too numerous diseases with their premature deaths constitute
another heavy loss. The waste of human life force in the infant
mortality alone is enormous. The cost of medicine, of doctors, of
undertakers, of graveyard rents; the loss of services of those
prematurely taken from us--all this is a groaning burden of pain and
loss amounting easily to another ten per cent.

We lose by fire, unnecessarily, other huge sums--and fire loss is
absolute; there is no "come back," no compensating circumstance. More
human life is lost in fighting fire. In this, and in the terrible death
roll from accident in mill and mine and railroad, we lose in money more
than another ten per cent.

In the foolishness of throat-cutting competition with all its
multiplication of plant and service, its interruptions and interference
and delay, another ten per cent is gone--and more. In the general
inadequacy of our people--low grade people where we might have high
grade ones, like poor stock in cows or hens, or poor kinds of corn or
wheat instead of first-class varieties, we waste again good ten per
cent--and more. Also in the blind, careless assortment of occupation
where people work grudgingly at what they do not like we lose largely.
The vigorous output of happy, well placed workers would be worth ten per
cent. added to our present wealth.

Then comes our method of domestic industry in which we waste forty-three
per cent. of the productive labor of the world--and three-fourths of our
living expenses.

Put these all together--and every one of them is modestly within the
mark--and three-fourths is a small allowance to cover our wastes. Isn't
it time we had a Social Secretary and a Financial Expert to teach us a
few things?

OUR ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE; OR, THE MAN-MADE WORLD

XIV.

A HUMAN WORLD.

In the change from the dominance of one sex to the equal power of two,
to what may we look forward? What effect upon civilization is to be
expected from the equality of womanhood in the human race?

To put the most natural question first--what will men lose by it? Many
men are genuinely concerned about this; fearing some new position of
subservience and disrespect. Others laugh at the very idea of change in
their position, relying as always on the heavier fist. So long as
fighting was the determining process, the best fighter must needs win;
but in the rearrangement of processes which marks our age, superior
physical strength does not make the poorer wealthy, nor even the soldier
a general.

The major processes of life to-day are quite within the powers of women;
women are fulfilling their new relations more and more successfully;
gathering new strength, new knowledge, new ideals. The change is upon
us; what will it do to men?

No harm.

As we are a monogamous race, there will be no such drastic and cruel
selection among competing males as would eliminate the vast majority as
unfit. Even though some be considered unfit for fatherhood, all human
life remains open to them. Perhaps the most important feature of this
change comes in right here; along this old line of sex-selection,
replacing that power in the right hands, and using it for the good of
the race.

The woman, free at last, intelligent, recognizing her real place and
responsibility in life as a human being, will be not less, but more,
efficient as a mother. She will understand that, in the line of
physical evolution, motherhood is the highest process; and that her
work, as a contribution to an improved race, must always involve this
great function. She will see that right parentage is the purpose of the
whole scheme of sex-relationship, and act accordingly.

In our time, his human faculties being sufficiently developed, civilized
man can look over and around his sex limitations, and begin to see what
are the true purposes and methods of human life.

He is now beginning to learn that his own governing necessity of Desire
is not _the_ governing necessity of parentage, but only a contributory
tendency; and that, in the interests of better parentage, motherhood is
the dominant factor, and must be so considered.

In slow reluctant admission of this fact, man heretofore has recognized
one class of women as mothers; and has granted them a varying amount of
consideration as such; but he has none the less insisted on maintaining
another class of women, forbidden motherhood, and merely subservient to
his desires; a barren, mischievous unnatural relation, wholly aside from
parental purposes, and absolutely injurious to society. This whole
field of morbid action will be eliminated from human life by the normal
development of women.

It is not a question of interfering with or punishing men; still less of
interfering with or punishing women; but purely a matter of changed
education and opportunity for every child.

Each and all shall be taught the real nature and purpose of motherhood;
the real nature and purpose of manhood; what each is for, and which is
the more important. A new sense of the power and pride of womanhood
will waken; a womanhood no longer sunk in helpless dependence upon men;
no longer limited to mere unpaid house-service; no longer blinded by the
false morality which subjects even motherhood to man's dominance; but a
womanhood which will recognize its pre-eminent responsibility to the
human race, and live up to it. Then, with all normal and right
competition among men for the favor of women, those best fitted for
fatherhood will be chosen. Those who are not chosen will live
single--perforce.

Many, under the old mistaken notion of what used to be called the
"social necessity" of prostitution, will protest at the idea of its
extinction.

"It is necessary to have it," they will say.

"Necessary _to whom?_"

Not to the women hideously sacrificed to it, surely.

Not to society, honey-combed with diseases due to this cause.

Not to the family, weakened and impoverished by it.

To whom then? To the men who want it?

But it is not good for them, it promotes all manner of disease, of vice,
of crime. It is absolutely and unquestionably a "social evil."

An intelligent and powerful womanhood will put an end to this indulgence
of one sex at the expense of the other; and to the injury of both.

In this inevitable change will lie what some men will consider a loss.
But only those of the present generation. For the sons of the women now
entering upon this new era of world life will be differently reared.
They will recognize the true relation of men to the primal process; and
be amazed that for so long the greater values have been lost sight of in
favor of the less.

This one change will do more to promote the physical health and beauty
of the race; to improve the quality of children born, and the general
vigor and purity of social life, than any one measure which could be
proposed. It rests upon a recognition of motherhood as the real base
and cause of the family; and dismisses to the limbo of all outworn
superstition that false Hebraic and grossly androcentric doctrine that
the woman is to be subject to the man, and that he shall rule over her.
He has tried this arrangement long enough--to the grievous injury of the
world. A higher standard of happiness will result; equality and mutual
respect between parents; pure love, undefiled by self-interests on
either side; and a new respect for Childhood.

With the Child, seen at last to be the governing purpose of this
relation, with all the best energies of men and women bent on raising
the standard of life for all children, we shall have a new status of
family life which will be clean and noble, and satisfying to all its
members.

The change in all the varied lines of human work is beyond the powers of
any present day prophet to forecast with precision. A new grade of
womanhood we can clearly foresee; proud, strong, serene, independent;
great mothers of great women and great men. These will hold high
standards and draw men up to them; by no compulsion save nature's law of
attraction. A clean and healthful world, enjoying the taste of life as
it never has since racial babyhood, with homes of quiet and
content--this we can foresee.

Art--in the extreme sense will perhaps always belong most to men. It
would seem as if that ceaseless urge to expression, was, at least
originally, most congenial to the male. But applied art, in every form,
and art used directly for transmission of ideas, such as literature, or
oratory, appeals to women as much, if not more, than to men.

We can make no safe assumption as to what, if any, distinction there
will be in the free human work of men and women, until we have seen
generation after generation grow up under absolutely equal conditions.
In all our games and sports and minor social customs, such changes will
occur as must needs follow upon the rising dignity alloted to the
woman's temperament, the woman's point of view; not in the least denying
to men the fullest exercise of their special powers and preferences; but
classifying these newly, as not human--merely male. At present we have
pages or columns in our papers, marked as "The Woman's Page" "Of
Interest to Women," and similar delimiting titles. Similarly we might
have distinctly masculine matters so marked and specified; not assumed
as now to be of general human interest.

The effect of the change upon Ethics and Religion is deep and wide.
With the entrance of women upon full human life, a new principle comes
into prominence; the principle of loving service. That this is the
governing principle of Christianity is believed by many; but an
androcentric interpretation has quite overlooked it; and made, as we
have shown, the essential dogma of their faith the desire of an eternal
reward and the combat with an eternal enemy.

The feminine attitude in life is wholly different. As a female she has
merely to be herself and passively attract; neither to compete nor to
pursue; as a mother her whole process is one of growth; first the
development of the live child within her, and the wonderful nourishment
from her own body; and then all the later cultivation to make the child
grow; all the watching, teaching, guarding, feeding. In none of this is
there either desire, combat, or self-expression. The feminine attitude,
as expressed in religion, makes of it a patient practical fulfillment of
law; a process of large sure improvements; a limitless comforting love
and care.

This full assurance of love and of power; this endless cheerful service;
the broad provision for all people; rather than the competitive
selection of a few "victors;" is the natural presentation of religious
truth from the woman's viewpoint. Her governing principle being growth
and not combat; her main tendency being to give and not to get; she more
easily and naturally lives and teaches these religious principles. It
is for this reason that the broader gentler teaching of the Unitarian
and Universalist sects have appealed so especially to women, and that so
many women preach in their churches.

This principle of growth, as applied and used in general human life will
work to far other ends than those now so painfully visible.

In education, for instance, with neither reward nor punishment as spur
or bait; with no competition to rouse effort and animosity, but rather
with the feeling of a gardener towards his plants; the teacher will
teach and the children learn, in mutual ease and happiness. The law of
passive attraction applies here, leading to such ingenuity in
presentation as shall arouse the child's interest; and, in the true
spirit of promoting growth, each child will have his best and fullest
training, without regard to who is "ahead" of him, or her, or who
"behind."

We do not sadly measure the cabbage-stalk by the corn-stalk, and praise
the corn for getting ahead of the cabbage--nor incite the cabbage to
emulate the corn. We nourish both, to its best growth--and are the
richer.

That every child on earth shall have right conditions to make the best
growth possible to it; that every citizen, from birth to death, shall
have a chance to learn all he or she can assimilate, to develop every
power that is in them--for the common good--this will be the aim of
education, under human management.

In the world of "society" we may look for very radical changes.

With all women full human beings, trained and useful in some form of
work; the class of busy idlers, who run about forever "entertaining" and
being "entertained" will disappear as utterly as will the prostitute.
No woman with real work to do could have the time for such petty
amusements; or enjoy them if she did have time. No woman with real work
to do, work she loved and was well fitted for, work honored and
well-paid, would take up the Unnatural Trade. Genuine relaxation and
recreation, all manner of healthful sports and pastimes, beloved of both
sexes to-day, will remain, of course; but the set structure of "social
functions"--so laughably misnamed--will disappear with the "society
women" who make it possible. Once active members of real Society; no
woman could go back to "society," any more than a roughrider could
return to a hobbyhorse.

New development in dress, wise, comfortable, beautiful, may be
confidently expected, as woman becomes more human. No fully human
creature could hold up its head under the absurdities our women wear
to-day--and have worn for dreary centuries.

So on through all the aspects of life we may look for changes, rapid and
far-reaching; but natural and all for good. The improvement is not due
to any inherent moral superiority of women; nor to any moral inferiority
of men; men at present, as more human, are ahead of women in all
distinctly human ways; yet their maleness, as we have shown repeatedly,
warps and disfigures their humanness. The woman, being by nature the
race-type; and her feminine functions being far more akin to human
functions than are those essential to the male; will bring into human
life a more normal influence.

Under this more normal influence our present perversities of functions
will, of course, tend to disappear. The directly serviceable tendency
of women, as shown in every step of their public work, will have small
patience with hoary traditions of absurdity. We need but look at long
recorded facts to see what women do--or try to do, when they have
opportunity. Even in their crippled, smothered past, they have made
valiant efforts--not always wise--in charity and philanthropy.

In our own time this is shown through all the length and breadth of our
country, by the Woman's Clubs. Little groups of women, drawing together
in human relation, at first, perhaps, with no better purpose than to
"improve their minds," have grown and spread; combined and federated;
and in their great reports, representing hundreds of thousands of
women--we find a splendid record of human work. They strive always to
improve something, to take care of something, to help and serve and
benefit. In "village improvement," in traveling libraries, in lecture
courses and exhibitions, in promoting good legislation; in many a line
of noble effort our Women's Clubs show what women want to do.