Facts And Fictions Of Life Part 8

Yet there is no report that Dr. Adler nor the editor of the magazine, who waxed eloquent over it, saw any special "hards.h.i.+p" or "inequality"

in a degraded status for all women. "Universal suffrage," indeed! And has Austria no women citizens? Were the working women who have not the ballot, better sheltered than the men? Or do they need no shelter?

Another editor says: "Don't talk about a free ballot while the bread of the ma.s.ses is in the giving of the cla.s.ses."

Yet, had a venturesome girl type-setter made it read, "Don't talk about a free ballot, a democracy or freedom while the bread of women is in the giving of men," the editor would have said: "She is insane, and besides that, she is talking unwomanly nonsense."

It is the same in science, in literature, in religion. All estimates are made on and for the "human race," "the people of a country," etc. The "will of the people" is spoken of; we are told all about the brain size and capacity and convolutions, etc., of the different "peoples"; we hear learned discourses about it all, and when you sift them, woman--one-half of the race talked about--is used always simply and only as ballast, as filling to make a point in man's favor. She does not figure in the benefits. He is the race--she his annex.

Not long ago an amusing ill.u.s.tration of this came to my knowledge. As you may perhaps know, there is more money invested in life insurance than in any other great financial enterprise in the world.

This is the way insurance experts look at the woman question. The estimates of longevity, desirability of risk, etc., are based upon male standards. This is not in itself unnatural or unreasonable, since men have been the chief insurers, but few companies, indeed, being willing to insure women at all. But not long ago a lady applied for a policy on her life in a first-cla.s.s company. She had three little children for whom she wished to provide in case of her death. She believed that she could properly support them so long as she lived. To her surprise she was told that the rate at which she must pay was $5 on each $1,000 more than her brother had to pay at the same age. She asked the actuary--a very profound man--why this was so. He told her that women had been found to be not so good risks as men, since they were subject to more dangers of death than were men, and that to make the companies safe it had been found necessary to charge women a higher rate.

She had heard much and eloquently all her life long of the dangers of men's lives; of the s.h.i.+elded, sheltered state of feminine humanity, and she had never dreamed that it was--from a mortuary point of view--"extra hazardous" to be a woman. She a.s.sumed, however, that it must be so and paid her extra hazardous premium, just as if she belonged to the army or was a blaster or miner or "contemplated going up in a balloon." A short time afterward her mother, an elderly lady, had some money to invest.

She did not wish to care for it herself, as she had never had the least business experience. She applied to the same actuary to know how much of an annual income or annuity she could buy for the sum she had. He figured on it for a while and told her. It was a good deal less than a man could get for the same amount. She had the temerity to ask why.

"Well," said the actuary, gazing benignly over his gla.s.ses at her in a congratulatory fas.h.i.+on, "you see women live longer than men do--"

"But you told my daughter that they did not live so long, and so she pays at a higher rate on insurance to make you safe lest she should die too young. Now you charge me more for an annuity on the theory that a woman lives longer than a man."

"Well," said he, readjusting his gla.s.ses and going carefully over the mortuary table again, "that does seem to be the fact. If a woman a.s.sures her life she beats the company by dying sooner than a man and if she takes an annuity she beats us by living longer than he would. Don't know how it happens, but we charge extra to cover the facts as we find 'em."

Such is masculine logic upon feminine perversity even in death.

Yet men say that they understand us and our needs so much better than we do ourselves that they abandon all of their reasoning, logic, enthusiasm and beliefs on the great fundamental principles of justice, equality, liberty and law the moment their own arguments are applied to women instead of to "labor," the "Irish question" or to any other phase of cla.s.s legislation as applied between man and man. The fact is simply and only this, that the arrogance of s.e.x power and perversion is now so thoroughly ingrained that man really believes himself to be--by divine right--the human race and that woman is his perquisite. He has no universal language. He thinks in the language of s.e.x. But more than this, and worse than this, he insists upon no one else being allowed to think in the language of humanity, and to translate that thought into action.

THE MORAL RESPONSIBILITY OF WOMAN IN HEREDITY

Read before the World's Congress of Representative Women, Chicago, 1893

Ladies and Gentlemen:--Poets, statesmen, novelists, and artists have for ages untold striven to eclipse each other in the eulogies of motherhood.

On the stage nothing is so sure of rapturous applause as is some touching bit of sacrifice which has reached its climax in a mother's love wherein she has yielded all to s.h.i.+eld, to protect, or to better the condition of husband or child. From the crude topical songs which advise the son to "Stick to your mother when her hair turns gray," through the various phases of maternal love and devotion or sacrifice in the "Camille" type of thought, on up to the loftiest touches in art and literature, there is alike the effort to celebrate the power, the potentiality and the beauty of motherhood and to stimulate the sentiments of grat.i.tude and love and of admiration for and emulation of the ideal depicted. But through it all, in the building and nurturing of the ideal, there runs--ever and always--the thread of thought that self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, self-effacement, are the grandest attributes of maternity. That in order to be a perfect, an ideal wife and mother, the woman must be sunk, the individual immolated, the ego subjugated. To a degree and in a sense, that is, of course, true.

For the willingness to go down to the gates of death; to face its possibility for long, weary months; to know that suffering, and to fear that death, stands as a sure and inevitable host at the end of a long journey--to know this and to be willing to face it for the sake of others is a heroism, a bravery, a self-abnegation so infinitely above and beyond the small heroism of camp or battlefield that comparison is almost sacrilege.

The condemned man, upon whom the death watch has been set, who cannot hope for executive clemency, who is helpless in the hands of absolute power, still knows that, although death may be sure, physical suffering is unlikely or at the worst will be but brief; but he alone stands in the position to know--even to a degree--the nervous strain, the mental anguish, the unthinking but uncontrollable panics of flesh and blood and nerve which woman faces at the behests of love and maternity and, alas, that it can be true, at the behests of s.e.x power and financial dependence!

But when we study anthropology and heredity we come to realize the indisputable facts that her love, her physical heroism and her bravery, linked with her political and financial subject status, has cast a physical blight, a moral shadow and a mental threat upon the world, we cease to clap quite so vigorously at the theater and our tears or smiles are mingled with mental reservations and a sigh for a loftier ideal of the meaning and purpose of maternity than the merely physical one that man has depicted as material sacrifice to the child and self-abnegation and subjection to him. We begin to wonder if much of the vice, the crime, the wrong, the insanity, the disease, the incompetence and the woe of the world is not the direct lineal descendant of this very self-debas.e.m.e.nt of the individual character of woman in maternity!

We wonder if an unwilling, a forced or supinely yielding (and not self-controlled), a subject motherhood, in short, is not responsible to the race for the weak, the deformed, the depraved, the double dealing, pretense-soaked natures which curse the world with failure, with disease, with war, with insanity and with crime. We wonder if the awful power with which nature clothes maternity in heredity does not strike blindly back at the race for man's artificial and cruel requirements at the hands of the producer of the race. We wonder if mothers do not owe a higher duty to their offspring than that of mere nurse. We wonder if she has the moral right to give her children the inheritance that accident and subserviency stamps upon body and mind. We wonder how she dares face her child and know that she did not fit herself by self-development and by direct, sincere, firm and thorough qualifications for maternity before she dared to a.s.sume its responsibilities. We wonder that man has been so slow in learning to read the message that nature has telegraphed to him in letters of fire and photographed with a terrible persistency upon the distorted, diseased bodies and minds of his children and upon the moral imbeciles she has set before him as an answer to his message of s.e.x domination.*

* "Alienists bold, in general, that a large proportion of mental diseases is the result of degeneracy; that is, they are the offspring of drunken, insane, syphilitic and consumptive parents, and suffer from the action of heredity."--Dr. MacDonald; author of Criminology.

"Who has sinned, this man or his parents that he was blind?"

Bible.

Self-abnegation, subserviency to man--whether he be father, lover, or husband--is the most dangerous that can be taught to, or forced upon her, whose character shall mould the next generation! She has no right to transmit a nature and a character that is subservient, subject, inefficient, undeveloped--in short, a slavish character, which is either blindly obedient or blindly rebellious and is therefore set, as is a time-lock, to prey or to be preyed upon by society in the future!

If woman is not brave enough personally to demand, and to obtain, absolute personal liberty of action, equality of status and entire control of her great and race-endowing function of maternity, she has no right to dare to stamp upon a child, and to curse a race with the descendants of a servile, a dwarfed, a time-and-master-serving character.

We have been taught that it is an awful thing to commit murder--to take a human life. There are students of anthropology and heredity who think that it is a far more awful thing to thrust, unasked, upon a human being a life that is handicapped before he gets it. It is a far more solemn responsibility to give than to take a human life! In the one case you invade personal liberty and put a stop to an existence more or less valuable and happy, but at least all pain is over for that invaded individuality. In the other case--in giving life--you invade the liberty of infinite oblivion and thrust into an inhospitable world another human ent.i.ty to struggle, to sink, to swim, to suffer or to enjoy. Whether the one or the other no mortal knows, but surely knows it must contend not only with its environment but with its heredity--with itself.

Not long ago a great man, who is successful beyond most human units, who is wealthy, socially to be envied, who enjoys almost ideal family relations, who is in all regards a man of broad intellect, of large heart, who is beloved, successful and powerful--not long ago this man said to me, when talking of life and its chances, its joys and its burdens and wrongs:

"Well, the more I think of it all, the more I know, the more I delve into philosophy and science, the more I understand life as it is and as it must be for long years to come, if not forever, the more I wonder at the st.u.r.dy bravery of those who are less fortunate than I. Does it pay me to live? Would I choose to be born again? Were I to-day unborn, could I be asked for my vote, knowing all I do of life, would I vote to come into this world? Taking life at its best estate are we not a.s.suming a tremendous risk to thrust it unasked upon those who are at least safe from its pitfalls? I ask myself these questions very often," he said, and then hesitatingly, "I sometimes think it pays after all. Of course, since I am here I am bound to make the best of it, but for all that I am not sure how I would vote on my birth if I had the chance to try it--not quite sure."

"If you are so impressed with life for yourself--you, a fortunate, healthy, wealthy, happily married, successful man," said I, "don't you think it is a pretty serious thing to a.s.sume the right to cast that vote for another human p.a.w.n, who could hardly conceivably stand your chances in the world?"

"Serious," he exclaimed. "Serious! With the world's conditions what they are to-day, with the physical, moral and mental chances to run, with woman, the character-forming producer of the race a half-educated subordinate to masculine domination, it is little short of madness; it is not far from a crime. It is a crime unless the mother is a physically healthy, a mentally developed and comprehending, morally clear, strong, vigorous ent.i.ty who knows her personal responsibility in maternity and, knowing, dares maintain it."

It has been the fas.h.i.+on to hold that the mothers of the race should not be the thinkers of the race. Indeed, in commenting upon this Congress of Representative Women, the most widely read newspaper on this continent last week said editorially:

"There is to be a great series of women's congresses held at Chicago during the Fair. The purpose is to ill.u.s.trate and celebrate the progress of women. Accordingly there will be sessions to discuss the achievements of women in art, authors.h.i.+p, business, science, histrionic endeavor, law, medicine and a variety of other activities.

"But so far as the published programmes enable us to judge not one thing is to be done to show the progress of women as women. There will be no showing made of any increased capacity on their part to make homes happier, to make their husbands stronger for their work in the world, to encourage high endeavors, to maintain the best standards of honor and duty, to stimulate, encourage, uplift--which--from the beginning of civilization--has been the supreme feminine function. Nothing, it appears, is to be done at the congresses to show that a higher education and a larger intellectual advancement has enabled women to bear healthier children or to bring them up in a manner more surely tending to make this a better world to live in, the n.o.blest of all work that can be done by women.

"We need no congress to show us that women are more thoroughly educated than they once were, or that they can successfully do things once forbidden to them. But have wider culture and wider opportunities made them better wives and mothers? A congress which should show that would make all men advocates of still larger endeavors for woman's advancement. A congress, on the other hand, which a.s.sumes that the only thing to be celebrated is an increased capacity to win fame or money will teach a disastrously false and dangerous lesson to our growing girls."

This fatal blunder as to woman's development as woman--quite aside from her home relations, which the editor confuses with it--has r.e.t.a.r.ded the real civilization and caused to be transmitted--unnecessarily transmitted--the characteristics which have gone far to make insanity, disease and deformity of mind and body, the heritage of well-nigh every family in the land.

A great medical expert said to me not long ago, "There is not more than one family in ten who can show a clean bill of health, mental and physical--aye, and moral--from hereditary taints that are serious in threat and almost certain of development in one form or another.

"Now, if a man with a contagious disease enters a community he is quarantined for the benefit of his fellows, who might never take it if he were not restrained and isolated. But if a man with a hereditary or transmittible disorder, which is certain, enters a community, he is allowed to marry and transmit it to the helpless unborn--to establish a line of posterity--who are far more directly his victims than would be those who were exposed to a cholera contagion by a lack of quarantine.

Fathers, physicians, society, and all educational and economic conditions have conspired to keep mothers ignorant of all the facts of life of which mothers should know everything; and so it has come about that the race is the victim of the narrow and dangerous doctrine of s.e.x domination and s.e.x restriction, and of selfish reckless indulgence. If not one family in ten can show a clean bill of heredity, is it not more than time that the mothers learn why, learn where, and in what they are responsible, and that they cease 'to close the doors of mercy on mankind?'"

Maternity, its duties, needs and responsibilities has been exploited in all ages and climes; in all phases and spheres, from one point of view only--the point of view of the male owner. If you think that this statement is extreme I beg of you to read "The Evolution of Marriage"

by Letourneau. Read it all. Read it with care. It is the production of a man of profound learning and research, a man who sees the light of the future dawning, although even he sometimes lapses from a universal, language of humanity into hereditary forms of speech, hedged in by s.e.x bias.

But in all the past arguments maternity with its duties to itself; maternity with its duties to the race, has never been more than merely touched upon, and even then it has been chiefly from the side of the present, and not with the tremendous search-light of heredity and of future generations turned upon it. It has been ever and always in its relations to the desires, opinions and prejudices of the present man power which controls it.

Some time ago a famous doctor in New York took up the cudgel against higher education for women, and under the heading of "Education and Maternity; Woman's Proper Sphere; the Dangers Which Threaten Intellectual and Society Women;" wrote in favor of ignorant wives and a larger number of children. A great journal published his article without protest, thus giving added prestige to the opinions expressed. This, too, in spite of the fact that at that very time the same journal was appealing for alms, for free nurses, for volunteer doctors and for a fresh-air fund to enable the ignorant mothers of the crime-infested, disease-pol-luted, over populated tenements of the city to get even a breath of fresh air by the sea, which is only two miles from its doors!

In spite of the fact, too, that Lombroso, Ricardo, Mendel, Spitzka, MacDonald and other famous anthropologists and experts have pointed out so plainly in their criminal, insane, imbecile and mortuary statistics the all-pervading evil of rapid, ill advised, irresponsible parentage.

Professor Edward S. Morse, in a recent paper called "Natural Selection in Crime," which he courteously sent to me, said: "To one at all familiar with the external aspects of insanity in its various forms it seems incredible that its physical nature was not sooner realized. Had the laws of heredity been earlier understood it would have been seen that mental derangements, like physical diseases and tendencies, were transmitted."

Of late years there has sprung into existence a school of criminal anthropology, with societies, journals, and a rapidly increasing literature. A most admirable summary of the work thus far accomplished has recently been given by Dr. Robert Fletcher in his address as retiring president of the Anthropological Society of Was.h.i.+ngton. In his opening paragraphs Dr. Fletcher thus graphically portrays the scourge of the criminal and his rapid increase:

"In the cities, towns and villages of the civilized world every year thousands of unoffending men and women are slaughtered; millions of money, the product of honest toil and careful saving, are carried away by the conqueror, and incendiary fires light his pathway of destruction.

Who is this devastator, this modern "scourge of G.o.d," whose deeds are not recorded in history? The criminal! Statistics unusually trustworthy show that if the carnage yearly produced by him could be brought together at one time and place it would excel the horrors of many a well-contested field of battle. In nine great countries of the world, including our own favored land, in one year, 10,380 cases of homicide were recorded, and in the six years extending from 1884 to 1889, in the United States alone, 14, 770 murders came under cognizance of the law.

"And what has society done to protect itself against this aggressor?

True, there are criminal codes, courts of law, and that surprising survival of the unfittest, trial by jury. Vast edifices have been built as prisons and reformatories, and philanthropic persons have formed societies for the instruction of the criminal and to care for him when his prison gates are opened. But, in spite of it all, the criminal becomes more numerous. He breeds criminals; the taint is in the blood, and there is no royal touch can expel it."

Commenting on this Professor Morse says: "Certain results of the modern school of anthropology, as presented by Dr. Fletcher, may be briefly summed up by stating broadly that in studying the criminal cla.s.ses from the standpoint of anatomy, physiology, external appearance, even to the minuter shades of difference in the form of the skull and facial proportions, the criminal is a marked man. His abnormities are characteristic, and are to be diagnosticated in only one way. That these propositions are being rapidly established there can be no doubt. As an emphatic evidence of their truth, the criminal is able to transmit his criminal propensities even beyond the number of generations allotted to inheritance by Scripture."