Part 5 (2/2)
The anti-suffrage att.i.tude of mind is not so much a belief as a disease. I read a series of anti-suffrage articles not long ago in the _New York Times_. They all were written in the same strain: ”We are gentle ladies. Protect us. We are weak, very weak, but very loving.”
There was not one strong nouris.h.i.+ng sentence that would inspire anyone to fight the good fight. It was all anemic and bloodless, and beseeching, and had the indefinable sick-headache, kimona, breakfast-in-bed quality in it, that repels the strong and healthy.
They talked a great deal of the care and burden of motherhood. They had no gleam of humor--not one. The anti-suffragists dwell much on what a care children are. Their picture of a mother is a tired, faded, bedraggled woman, with a babe in her arms, two other small children holding to her skirts, all crying. According to them, children never grow up, and no person can ever attend to them but the mother. Of course, the anti-suffragists are not this kind themselves. Not at all.
They talk of potential motherhood--but that is usually about as far as they go. Potential motherhood sounds well and hurts n.o.body.
The Gentle Lady still believes in the masculine terror of tears, and the judicious use of fainting. The Jane Austin heroine always did it and it worked well. She burst into tears on one page and fainted dead away on the next. That just showed what a gentle lady she was, and what a tender heart she had, and it usually did the trick. Lord Algernon was there to catch her in his arms. She would not faint if he wasn't.
The Gentle Lady does not like to hear distressing things. Said a very gentle lady not long ago: ”Now, please do not tell me about how these ready-to-wear garments are made, because I do not wish to know. The last time I heard a woman talk about the temptation of factory girls, my head ached all evening and I could not sleep.” (When the Gentle Lady has a headache it is no small affair--everyone knows it!) Then the Gentle Lady will tell you how ungrateful her washwoman was when she gave her a perfectly good, but, of course, a little bit soiled party dress, or a pair of skates for her lame boy, or some such suitable gift at Christmas. She did not act a bit nicely about it!
The Gentle Lady has a very personal and local point of view. She looks, at the whole world as related to herself--it all revolves around her, and therefore what she says, or what ”husband” says, is final.
She is particularly bitter against the militant suffragette, and excitedly declares they should all be deported.
”I cannot understand them!” she cries.
Therein the Gentle Lady speaks truly. She cannot understand them, for she has nothing to understand them with. It takes n.o.bility of heart to understand n.o.bility of heart. It takes an unselfishness of purpose to understand unselfishness of purpose.
”What do they want?” cries the Gentle Lady. ”Why some of them are rich women--some of them are t.i.tled women. Why don't they mind their own business and attend to their own children?”
”But maybe they have no children, or maybe their children, like Mrs.
Pankhurst's, are grown up!”
The Gentle Lady will not hear you--will not debate it--she turns to the personal aspect again.
”Well, I am sure _I_ have enough to do with my own affairs, and I really have no patience with that sort of thing!”
That settles it!
She does not see, of course, that the new movement among women is a spiritual movement--that women, whose work has been taken away from them, are now beating at new doors, crying to be let in that they may take part in new labors, and thus save womanhood from the enervation which is threatening it. Women were intended to guide and sustain life, to care for the race; not feed on it.
Wherever women have become parasites on the race, it has heralded the decay of that race. History has proven this over and over again. In ancient Greece, in the days of its strength and glory, the women bore their full share of the labor, both manual and mental; not only the women of the poorer cla.s.ses, but queens and princesses carried water from the well; washed their linen in the stream; doctored and nursed their households; manufactured the clothing for their families; and, in addition to these labors, performed a share of the highest social functions as priestesses and prophetesses.
These were the women who became the mothers of the heroes, thinkers and artists, who laid the foundation of the Greek nation.
In the day of toil and struggle, the race prospered and grew, but when the days of ease and idleness came upon Greece, when the acc.u.mulated wealth of subjugated nations, the cheap service of slaves and subject people, made physical labor no longer a necessity; the women grew fat, lazy and unconcerned, and the whole race degenerated, for the race can rise no higher than its women. For a while the men absorbed and reflected the intellectual life, for there still ran in their veins the good red blood of their st.u.r.dy grandmothers. But the race was doomed by the indolent, self-indulgent and parasitic females. The women did not all degenerate. Here and there were found women on whom wealth had no power. There was a Sappho, and an Aspasia, who broke out into activity and stood beside their men-folk in intellectual attainment, but the other women did not follow; they were too comfortable, too well fed, too well housed, to be bothered. They had everything--jewels, dresses, slaves. Why worry? They went back to their cus.h.i.+ons and rang for tea--or the Grecian equivalent; and so it happened that in the fourth century Greece fell like a rotten tree. Her conqueror was the indomitable Alexander, son of the strong and virile Olympia.
The mighty Roman nation followed in the same path. In the days of her strength, and national health, the women took their full share of the domestic burden, and as well fulfilled important social functions.
Then came slave labor, and the Roman woman no longer worked at honorable employment. She did not have to. She painted her face, wore patches on her cheeks, drove in her chariot, and adopted a mincing foolish gait that has come down to us even in this day. Her children were reared by someone else--the nursery governess idea began to take hold. She took no interest in the government of the state, and soon was not fit to take any. Even then, there were writers who saw the danger, and cried out against it, and were not a bit more beloved than the people who proclaim these things now. The writers who told of these things and the dangers to which they were leading unfortunately suggested no remedy. They thought they could drive women back to the water pitcher and the loom, but that was impossible. The clock of time will not turn back. Neither is it by a return to hand-sewing, or a resurrection of quilt-patching that women of the present day will save the race. The old avenues of labor are closed. It is no longer necessary for women to spin and weave, cure meats, and make household remedies, or even fas.h.i.+on the garments for their household. All these things are done in factories. But there are new avenues for women's activities, if we could only clear away the rubbish of prejudice which blocks the entrance. Some women, indeed many women, are busy clearing away the prejudice; many more are eagerly watching from their boudoir windows; many, many more--the ”gentle ladies,” reclining on their couches, fed, housed, clothed by other hands than their own--say: ”What fools these women be!”
There are many women who are already bitten by the poisonous fly of parasitism; there are many women in whose hearts all sense of duty to the race has died, and these belong to many cla.s.ses. A woman may become a parasite on a very limited amount of money, for the corroding and enervating effect of wealth and comfort sets in just as soon as the individuality becomes clogged, and causes one to rest content from further efforts, on the strength of the labor of someone else. Queen Victoria, in her palace of marble and gold, was able to retain her virility of thought and independence of action as clearly as any pioneer woman who ever battled with conditions, while many a tradesman's wife whose husband gets a raise sufficient for her to keep one maid, immediately goes on the retired list, and lets her brain and muscles atrophy.
The woman movement, which has been scoffed and jeered at and misunderstood most of all by the people whom it is destined to help, is a spiritual revival of the best instincts of womanhood--the instinct to serve and save the race.
Too long have the gentle ladies sat in their boudoirs looking at life in a mirror like the Lady of Shallot, while down below, in the street, the fight rages, and other women, and defenseless children, are getting the worst of it. But the cry is going up to the boudoir ladies to come down and help us, for the battle goes sorely; and many there are who are throwing aside the mirror and coming out where the real things are.
The world needs the work and help of the women, and the women must work, if the race will survive.
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