Part 148 (1/2)

We who have grown Human--house-bodied, cloth-skinned, Wire-nerved and steam-heated--alas! we forget The poor little beasts we have bandaged and pinned And hid in our carpet-lined prisons!--and yet Though our great social body be brickwork and steel, The little white animals in it, can feel!

Humanity needs them. We cannot disclaim The laws of the bodies we lived in before We grew to be Human. In spite of our frame Of time-scorning metals, the life at its core, Controlling its action and guarding its ease, Is the little white animal out of the trees!

It is true that our soul is far higher than theirs; We look farther, live longer, love wider--we _know;_ They only can feel for themselves--and their heirs; We, the life of humanity. Yet, even so, We must always remember that soul at its base Looks out through the little white animal's face.

If they die we are dead. If they live we can grow, They ply in our streets as blood corpuscles ply In their own little veins. If you cut off the flow Of these beasts in a city, that city will die.

Yet we heighten our buildings and harden our souls Till the little white animals perish in shoals.

Their innocent instincts we turn to a curse, Their bodies we torture, their powers we abuse, The beast that humanity lives in fares worse Than the beasts of the forest with nothing to lose.

Free creatures, sub-human--they never have known The sins and diseases we force on our own.

And yet 'tis a beautiful creature!--tall--fair-- With features full pleasant and hand-wooing hair; Kind, docile, intelligent, eager to learn; And the longing we read in its eyes when they burn Is to beg us to use it more freely to show To each other the love that our new soul can know.

Our engines drive fast in earth, water and air; Our resistless, smooth-running machines still unroll, With brain-work unceasing and handiwork fair, New material forms for each step on the soul; But that soul, for the contact without which it dies, Comes closest of all through that animal's eyes.

WOMEN TEACHERS, MARRIED AND UNMARRIED

We have still active and conspicuous among us, saying and doing foolish things about women, men, both eminent and ordinary, whose att.i.tude in this matter will make them a shame to their children, and a laughing stock to their grandchildren. We are proud to exhibit name and portrait of the great-grandfather who signed the Declaration of Independence, but our descendants will forget as soon as possible those asinine ancestors who are to-day so writing themselves down--in their att.i.tude in regard to women teachers, married and unmarried.

For long women were kept out of the schools altogether--education was for boys. They were not allowed to teach, save in a small way, in infant schools, or schools for girls; teaching was a masculine profession. Now they have equal educational opportunities--in large measure, and const.i.tute the majority of pupils; and, what is more alarming, the majority of teachers. The ”male mind”--essentially and hopelessly male--sees in this not the natural development of a long suppressed human being, but the entrance of females upon a masculine province.

In her relation of pupil, there is a large body of eminent educators clamoring that girls should be taught female things; that, whether our universities are turned into trade schools or not, the women's colleges and ”annexes” should teach girls ”the duties of wife and mother.” By this, of course, they mean the duties of house-service, and, perhaps, of nursing. Nothing would scandalize these Antique Worthies more than to have girls taught the real duties of wife and mother!

Also, in the relation of pupils, a man of as high standing as Professor Barrett Wendell of Harvard claims that teaching girls lowers the mentality of men! In coeducational colleges the ”male mind,” seeing in the violent games of young men a profound educational influence (and large profits!), considers that the presence of the purely studious element--the girls--is an injury to the college, and is even now endeavoring to eliminate them.

But it is in treatment of women teachers that this s.e.x att.i.tude of mind is most prominent to-day, most offensive, and most ridiculous.

The first effect is, of course, to give to the woman teacher the lowest grades of work and the lowest pay. Even when she has forced her way into high-grade work, and won a good position over all compet.i.tors, her pay is still measured by her status as a female--not as a teacher. The ”male mind” can never for a moment forget or overlook the fact that women are females; and is rigidly incapable of admitting that they are also human beings as much as he.

In spite of this absurd limitation, women teachers have increased in numbers and in power; and are pressing steadily up into the higher positions reserved for men. An enormous majority of our teaching force is now composed of women; and, in our public schools, they naturally teach boys. Upon this point has arisen, and is still rising, an angry protest among men. Women teachers are, they say, unmarried; to be unmarried is an unnatural state, productive of various mental and physical morbidities; and as such does not form a suitable atmosphere for growing boys.

Recently President Hamilton of Tufts College goes even further than this, and objects to the influence of unmarried teachers upon girls!

To the ”male mind,” viewing the woman as first, last and always a female, and marriage and motherhood as her only normal relations, these crowding thousands of calm, respectable, independent, unmarried women are in a condition of unrest, of acrimonious rebellion against fate, of a contemptuous dislike for their unattainable ”sour grapes.” They are a.s.sumed to have been queer in the first place, or some gracious protector would have married them; and to grow queerer as life drags away, leaving them eternally unsatisfied, bitter and perverse. This deadly influence is supposed to have some poisonous effect on the pupils; just what is not defined. The unselfish, tireless service of the ”maiden aunt” in the home we all know; but set her to teaching school, and some strange evil follows from the contact.

President Hamilton says college girls need to have their outlook on life broadened, not narrowed; and thinks these limited ladies, the teachers, are fitted only for work in the lower preparatory schools, or in ”homes”

and ”settlements.”

Just how the average male teacher in a college is to broaden the outlook of his pupils is not explained. It does not need explanation. It is broader because he is a man!

Most of our men teachers are still young men, by the way, and unmarried.

Is the influence of the unmarried male on cla.s.ses of girls an unmixed good? Is a man by nature a better teacher? More subtly sympathetic, more capable of understanding the difficulties of each pupil and meeting them, more patient and tender?

No--but he is ”more methodical,” and ”a better disciplinarian.” In other words, he is more male--and therefore a better teacher! All this is absurd enough, and injurious enough; false, unjust, pitifully ignorant.

But the crowning feat of the ”logical male mind” is in its exclusion of married women from schools. This is what the living children of living men will laugh at and blush for--that their fathers should have made themselves thus lamentably conspicuous in present-day history. Here in this city of New York, where a system of compet.i.tive examination ensures the required degree of learning and promotion follows on proved efficiency (or is supposed to); some women teachers, following ”that inexorable law of nature” which so many others successfully evade, have presumed to marry. Surely now the stock objection to women teachers is removed.

All that ”narrowness,” that ”bitterness,” that ”morbidity” is transformed by this magic alchemy into breadth and sweetness and all health. Now we have for our children the influence of ”normal womanhood”--of ”the wife and mother.”