The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62

How, then, do we find these masculine tendencies, desire, combat and
self-expression, affect the home and family when given too much power?

First comes the effect in the preliminary work of selection. One of the
most uplifting forces of nature is that of sex selection. The males,
numerous, varied, pouring a flood of energy into wide modifications,
compete for the female, and she selects the victor, this securing to the
race the new improvements.

In forming the proprietary family there is no such competition, no such
selection. The man, by violence or by purchase, does the choosing--he
selects the kind of woman that pleases him. Nature did not intend him
to select; he is not good at it. Neither was the female intended to
compete--she is not good at it.

If there is a race between males for a mate--the swiftest gets her
first; but if one male is chasing a number of females he gets the
slowest first. The one method improves our speed: the other does not.
If males struggle and fight with one another for a mate, the strongest
secures her; if the male struggles and fights with the female--(a
peculiar and unnatural horror, known only among human beings) he most
readily secures the weakest. The one method improves our strength--the
other does not.

When women became the property of men; sold and bartered; "given away"
by their paternal owner to their marital owner; they lost this
prerogative of the female, this primal duty of selection. The males
were no longer improved by their natural competition for the female; and
the females were not improved; because the male did not select for
points of racial superiority, but for such qualities as pleased him.

There is a locality in northern Africa, where young girls are
deliberately fed with a certain oily seed, to make them fat,--that they
may be the more readily married,--as the men like fat wives. Among
certain more savage African tribes the chief's wives are prepared for
him by being kept in small dark huts and fed on "mealies' and molasses;
precisely as a Strasbourg goose is fattened for the gourmand. Now
fatness is not a desirable race characteristic; it does not add to the
woman's happiness or efficiency; or to the child's; it is merely an
accessory pleasant to the master; his attitude being much as the amorous
monad ecstatically puts it, in Sill's quaint poem, "Five Lives,"

"O the little female monad's lips!
O the little female monad's eyes!
O the little, little, female, female monad!"

This ultra littleness and ultra femaleness has been demanded and
produced by our Androcentric Culture.

Following this, and part of it, comes the effect on motherhood. This
function was the original and legitimate base of family life; and its
ample sustaining power throughout the long early period of "the
mother-right;" or as we call it, the matriarchate; the father being her
assistant in the great work. The patriarchate, with its proprietary
family, changed this altogether; the woman, as the property of the man
was considered first and foremost as a means of pleasure to him; and
while she was still valued as a mother, it was in a tributary capacity.
Her children were now his; his property, as she was; the whole enginery
of the family was turned from its true use to this new one, hitherto
unknown, the service of the adult male.

To this day we are living under the influence of the proprietary family.
The duty of the wife is held to involve man-service as well as
child-service, and indeed far more; as the duty of the wife to the
husband quite transcends the duty of the mother to the child.

See for instance the English wife staying with her husband in India and
sending the children home to be brought up; because India is bad for
children. See our common law that the man decides the place of
residence; if the wife refuses to go with him to howsoever unfit a place
for her and for the little ones, such refusal on her part constitutes
"desertion" and is ground for divorce.

See again the idea that the wife must remain with the husband though a
drunkard, or diseased; regardless of the sin against the child involved
in such a relation. Public feeling on these matters is indeed changing;
but as a whole the ideals of the man-made family still obtain.

The effect of this on the woman has been inevitably to weaken and
overshadow her sense of the real purpose of the family; of the
relentless responsibilities of her duty as a mother. She is first
taught duty to her parents, with heavy religious sanction; and then duty
to her husband, similarly buttressed; but her duty to her children has
been left to instinct. She is not taught in girlhood as to her
preeminent power and duty as a mother; her young ideals are all of
devotion to the lover and husband: with only the vaguest sense of
results.

The young girl is reared in what we call "innocence;" poetically
described as "bloom;" and this condition is held one of her chief
"charms." The requisite is wholly androcentric. This "innocence" does
not enable her to choose a husband wisely; she does not even know the
dangers that possibly confront her. We vaguely imagine that her father
or brother, who do know, will protect her. Unfortunately the father and
brother, under our current "double standard" of morality do not judge
the applicants as she would if she knew the nature of their offenses.

Furthermore, if her heart is set on one of them, no amount of general
advice and opposition serves to prevent her marrying him. "I love him!"
she says, sublimely. "I do not care what he has done. I will forgive
him. I will save him!"

This state of mind serves to forward the interests of the lover, but is
of no advantage to the children. We have magnified the duties of the
wife, and minified the duties of the mother; and this is inevitable in a
family relation every law and custom of which is arranged from the
masculine viewpoint.

From this same viewpoint, equally essential to the proprietary family,
comes the requirement that the woman shall serve the man. Her service
is not that of the associate and equal, as when she joins him in his
business. It is not that of a beneficial combination, as when she
practices another business and they share the profits; it is not even
that of the specialist, as the service of a tailor or barber; it is
personal service--the work of a servant.

In large generalization, the women of the world cook and wash, sweep and
dust, sew and mend, for the men.

We are so accustomed to this relation; have held it for so long to be
the "natural" relation, that it is difficult indeed to show that it is
distinctly unnatural and injurious. The father expects to be served by
the daughter, a service quite different from what he expects of the son.
This shows at once that such service is no integral part of motherhood,
or even of marriage; but is supposed to be the proper industrial
position of women, as such.

Why is this so? Why, on the face of it, given a daughter and a son,
should a form of service be expected of the one, which would be
considered ignominious by the other?

The underlying reason is this. Industry, at its base, is a feminine
function. The surplus energy of the mother does not manifest itself in
noise, or combat, or display, but in productive industry. Because of
her mother-power she became the first inventor and laborer; being in
truth the mother of all industry as well as all people.

Man's entrance upon industry is late and reluctant; as will be shown
later in treating his effect on economics. In this field of family
life, his effect was as follows:

Establishing the proprietary family at an age when the industry was
primitive and domestic; and thereafter confining the woman solely to the
domestic area, he thereby confined her to primitive industry. The
domestic industries, in the hands of women, constitute a survival of our
remotest past. Such work was "woman's work" as was all the work then
known; such work is still considered woman's work because they have been
prevented from doing any other.

The term "domestic industry" does not define a certain kind of labor,
but a certain grade of labor. Architecture was a domestic industry
once--when every savage mother set up her own tepee. To be confined to
domestic industry is no proper distinction of womanhood; it is an
historic distinction, an economic distinction, it sets a date and limit
to woman's industrial progress.

In this respect the man-made family has resulted in arresting the
development of half the field. We have a world wherein men,
industrially, live in the twentieth century; and women, industrially,
live in the first--and back of it.

To the same source we trace the social and educational limitations set
about women. The dominant male, holding his women as property, and
fiercely jealous of them, considering them always as _his,_ not
belonging to themselves, their children, or the world; has hedged them
in with restrictions of a thousand sorts; physical, as in the crippled
Chinese lady or the imprisoned odalisque; moral, as in the oppressive
doctrines of submission taught by all our androcentric religions;
mental, as in the enforced ignorance from which women are now so swiftly
emerging.

This abnormal restriction of women has necessarily injured motherhood.
The man, free, growing in the world's growth, has mounted with the
centuries, filling an ever wider range of world activities. The woman,
bound, has not so grown; and the child is born to a progressive
fatherhood and a stationary motherhood. Thus the man-made family reacts
unfavorably upon the child. We rob our children of half their social
heredity by keeping the mother in an inferior position; however
legalized, hallowed, or ossified by time, the position of a domestic
servant is inferior.

It is for this reason that child culture is at so low a level, and for
the most part utterly unknown. Today, when the forces of education are
steadily working nearer to the cradle, a new sense is wakening of the
importance of the period of infancy, and its wiser treatment; yet those
who know of such a movement are few, and of them some are content to
earn easy praise--and pay--by belittling right progress to gratify the
prejudices of the ignorant.

The whole position is simple and clear; and easily traceable to its
root. Given a proprietary family, where the man holds the woman
primarily for his satisfaction and service--then necessarily he shuts
her up and keeps her for these purposes. Being so kept, she cannot
develop humanly, as he has, through social contact, social service, true
social life. (We may note in passing, her passionate fondness for the
child-game called "society" she has been allowed to entertain herself
withal; that poor simiacrum of real social life, in which people
decorate themselves and madly crowd together, chattering, for what is
called "entertainment.") Thus checked in social development, we have
but a low grade motherhood to offer our children; and the children,
reared in the primitive conditions thus artificially maintained, enter
life with a false perspective, not only toward men and women, but toward
life as a whole.

The child should receive in the family, full preparation for his
relation to the world at large. His whole life must be spent in the
world, serving it well or ill; and youth is the time to learn how. But
the androcentric home cannot teach him. We live to-day in a
democracy-the man-made family is a despotism. It may be a weak one; the
despot may be dethroned and overmastered by his little harem of one; but
in that case she becomes the despot--that is all. The male is esteemed
"the head of the family;" it belongs to him; he maintains it; and the
rest of the world is a wide hunting ground and battlefield wherein he
competes with other males as of old.

The girl-child, peering out, sees this forbidden field as belonging
wholly to men-kind; and her relation to it is to secure one for
herself--not only that she may love, but that she may live. He will
feed, clothe and adorn her--she will serve him; from the subjection of
the daughter to that of the wife she steps; from one home to the other,
and never enters the world at all--man's world.

The boy, on the other hand, considers the home as a place of women, an
inferior place, and longs to grow up and leave it--for the real world.
He is quite right. The error is that this great social instinct,
calling for full social exercise, exchange, service, is considered
masculine, whereas it is human, and belongs to boy and girl alike.

The child is affected first through the retarded development of his
mother, then through the arrested condition of home industry; and
further through the wrong ideals which have arisen from these
conditions. A normal home, where there was human equality between
mother and father, would have a better influence.

We must not overlook the effect of the proprietary family on the
proprietor himself. He, too, has been held back somewhat by this
reactionary force. In the process of becoming human we must learn to
recognize justice, freedom, human rights; we must learn self-control and
to think of others; have minds that grow and broaden rationally; we must
learn the broad mutual interservice and unbounded joy of social
intercourse and service. The petty despot of the man-made home is
hindered in his humanness by too much manness.

For each man to have one whole woman to cook for and wait upon him is a
poor education for democracy. The boy with a servile mother, the man
with a servile wife, cannot reach the sense of equal rights we need
to-day. Too constant consideration of the master's tastes makes the
master selfish; and the assault upon his heart direct, or through that
proverbial side-avenue, the stomach, which the dependent woman needs
must make when she wants anything, is bad for the man, as well as for
her.

We are slowly forming a nobler type of family; the union of two, based
on love and recognized by law, maintained because of its happiness and
use. We are even now approaching a tenderness and permanence of love,
high pure enduring love; combined with the broad deep-rooted
friendliness and comradeship of equals; which promises us more happiness
in marriage than we have yet known. It will be good for all the parties
concerned--man, woman and child: and promote our general social progress
admirably.

If it needs "a head" it will elect a chairman pro tem. Friendship does
not need "a head." Love does dot need "a head." Why should a family?

COMMENT AND REVIEW

I watched and waited for Margharita's Soul through eleven glittering
chapters of fair words; and when it appeared at last, in the twelfth
chapter, it was the funniest little by-product, born of imminent peril
and ice-water.

A beautiful great body had Margharita and a beautiful great voice; but
her long-delayed soul was the size of a small island and one family.
Funny notion of a soul! A hen might have it. No, not a hen--she is a
light-minded promiscuous creature; but a stork, let us say; she is
monogamous and quite bound up in her family. No--not a stork
either--storks migrate; no island would satisfy her. Apparently it
takes a human creature to be proud of a soul that size.

It is a very pretty story.

Thesis: the only thing a woman is for is matrimony and much
childbearing! If she don't like it--no soul.

To develop thesis: Some unusual conditions; and a weird feminine
product, of such sort that her lover's sudden surrender and frantic
marriage is as it were involuntary. It is of the kind that requires no
soul in the beloved object, a soul might have been a little in the way
in that violent attack.

Then--to sharply accent and enforce the thesis, our soulless
charmer--(her overwhelming allure for the men about her, during this
period, casts a sharp sidelight on the value of Soul as an Attraction!)
is given a Golden Voice.

This Voice is evidently one to give measureless pleasure to thousands;
not only so, but is shown to have such power as to touch hard hearts and
lead them heavenward; she with no soul assisting the souls of others;
long careful chapters are given to this voice; evidently as one decks
out a sacrifice; for the world comforting voice is only given her that
she may give it up--for Roger!

It seems a pity--with all this arranged, to ruin that voice by the shock
and exposure which aroused her Soul, She herself regretted it--having so
much less to give up--for Roger. She meant to give it up anyway, she
said. Perhaps the author didn't trust that new Soul completely--knowing
her previous character. Anyway there she is, plus a soul and minus a
voice; living on the island and populating it as rapidly as possible,
perfectly happy, and a lesson for us all.

But is there not also Madam Schumann-Heinck? A great sweet voice and a
great sweet mother too? Has she not a Soul?

*

This Duty of Childbearing is evidently weighing on the minds of men, in
these days. The thing must be done--they cant do it themselves, and
they are mightily afraid we won't, if we have half a chance to do
anything else. If a woman was by way of being a Dante or a Darwin, she
had better give it up--for Roger--and take to replenishing the earth.
She can't do both--that is the main assumption; and if she chooses to
serve the world outside of the home that is sheer loss.

Says this wise Searcher of Feminine Souls: "For if all the wisdom and
experience and training that the wonderful sex is to gain by its exodus
from the home does not get back into it ultimately, I can't (in my
masculine stupidity) quite see how it's going to get back into the race
at all! And then what good has it done?"

The gentleman does not see any way of advancing the human race except by
physical heredity--or by domestic influence.

What Shakespeare wrought into the constitution and character of his
daughter Judy is all that matters of his life and work. Keats, having
no children, contributed nothing to the world. George Washington,
childless, was of no social service. Lincoln is to be measured by the
number and quality of his offspring. Florence Nightingale, in lifting
the grade of nursing for the world, accomplished nothing. Uncle Tom's
Cabin was of no service except as it might in some mysterious way "get
back into the home." What mortal perversity is it that cannot see
Humanity in women as well as Sex; see that Social Service is something
in itself, quite over and above all the domestic and personal relations.

This getting back into the race means only the boys. It would do no
good for generations of Margaritas to inherit that Golden Voice--each
and all must give it up--for Roger. The race gets no music till the
bass, barytone or tenor appear.

Books like this are pathetic in their little efforts to check social
progress.

We suspect the author's name to be Mr. Partington.

*

(The Life and Times of Anne Royall. By Sarah Harvey Porter, M.A. 12mo.
Cloth, 209 pp. $1.50 net; postage 12 cents.)

Biography has never been a favorite study with me; but I was interested
in this book because the woman whose life it described seemed worth
while. Reading it, I found not only the life of Anne Royall, but the
life of America in the early part of the nineteenth century, in our
young, crude, dangerous days of national formation. A novel has been
defined as "a corner of life seen through a temperament." If that is a
true definition, then this is a novel, for Anne Royall had "temperament"
if ever anyone had, and she saw a large corner of life through it.

Who was Anne Royall? An American woman, pioneer born and bred, familiar
with the life-and-death struggle of the frontier, and full of the spirit
of '76. She was born in 1769, and lived through the War of the
Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and almost up to the Civil
War, dying in 1854. In 1797 she was married to Captain William Royall,
an exceptional man, a Virginian, cultivated, liberal, singularly
broad-minded and public-spirited, and life with him added years of
genuine culture to the energy of a naturally bright mind. Left a widow
at the age of forty-four, and, after ten years of travel and experience,
defrauded of the property left to her by her husband, she began to live
a brave self-supporting independent life at an age when most of the
women of her years were white-capped grandmothers.

Instead of sinking into the position of a dependent female relative, she
insisted on earning her own living. This she did as so many women do
to-day, by the use of her pen, a rarer profession in those times. The
more remarkable thing is that in the face of overwhelming odds she stood
for a religion, at a period when old-fashioned Calvinism was still a
dominant power. The most remarkable, is her absolute devotion to the
public interests, to social service as she saw it.

There were a good many women writers even at that time, some of high
merit, but there were few publicists among them. Some espoused this or
that "Cause" and gave to it the passionate devotion so natural to a
woman's heart. But Anne Royall, while she also was passionately devoted
to several well-defined "Causes," was unique in that she kept in view
the general situation of her country, political, economic, geographic,
and educational, and wrote steadily for thirty-one years on matters of
national importance.

It is not a question of whether she was right or wrong--though she was
mostly right, as history has proved; but the impressive thing is that
this old woman, with "troubles of her own," was overwhelmingly
interested in her country and its service. There are not so many,
either men or women, of this mind, that we can afford to overlook this
sturdy pioneer "new woman." She had virtues, too, good solid Christian
virtues of the rarer sort; she visited the sick and afflicted, gave to
him that asked, and from him that would borrow turned not away. Even to
her own weaker sisters she was a strength and comfort, greatly injuring
her own position by this unusual charity. Also she was brave, honest,
truthful, persevering, industrious--"manly" virtues these.

But--and here we have the reason why Anne Royall made no greater mark,
why she was "unsuccessful," why most of us never heard of her--she
attacked great powers, and she fought unwisely. Her abusive writing
sounds abominably to-day, but must be judged, of course, by the standard
of her time. The worst things she said were not as bad as things
Shelley said--as the bitter invective and scurrilous attacks common to
pamphleteers of the time. If our newspapers are yellow, theirs were
orange in the matter of personalities.

But even then this woman had a keen-cutting weapon, and used it
unsparingly. Being alone, with no male relative to defend her; being
poor, and so further defenceless; being old, thus lacking weak woman's
usual protection of beauty, she had absolutely nothing to fall back on
when her enemies retaliated.

This picture of one lone woman defying and blackguarding what was almost
an established church, is much like Jack the Giantkiller--with a
different result. It was deemed necessary to crush this wasp that stung
so sharply; and in 1829, in the capitol city of the United States of
America, a court of men tried--and convicted--this solitary woman of
sixty as a Common Scold. They raked up obsolete laws, studied and
strove to wrest their meanings to apply to this case, got together some
justification, or what seemed to them justification for their deeds, and
succeeded in irretrievably damaging her reputation.

She was not to be extinguished, however. In 1831 she started a
newspaper, with the ill-chosen name of PAUL PRY. In 1836 another took
its place, called THE HUNTRESS. And on the sale of these newspapers and
her books, the indomitable old lady lived to fight and fought to live
till she was eighty-five.

She is well worth reading about. The history of her times rises and
lives around her. In her vivid description we see the new rugged
country, over which she travelled from end to end; in her accounts of
current literature we pick up stray bits of information as to new
authors and new words. "Playfulness," for instance, is one which she
stigmatizes as "silly in sound and significance," and declares that she
does not read the new novels "with the exception of Walter Scott's."
More interesting still to most of us is to study over the long lists of
her pen-portraits and see our ancestors as the others saw them. Few
Americans of three generations but can find some grandfather or great
uncle halo-ed or pilloried by this clear-eyed observer.

Miss Porter has done her work well. It is clear, strong and
entertaining--this biography. If the writer seems more enthusiastic
about Anne Royall than the reader becomes, that is clearly due to an
unusual perception of life-values; a recognition of the noble devotion
and high courage of her subject, and an intense sympathy with such
characteristics.