Part 8

Jim begins by asking if anybody has seen Dora. The ensemble tells him not only that but everything else about Dora. Harry orders a round of drinks. So does Charlie. Somebody praises the drawn-butter sauce at the Suddington. This is met with the merits of the pineapple parfait at the La Fontaine. Jim orders a round of drinks. Jim is willing to eat his hat if Dora's divorce wasn't her husband's fault. Must have been. Never saw the husband. But Dora's character! Jim drinks off one of the cocktails standing in front of his right-hand neighbor Frank, and returns to Dora's character. No straighter little girl ever came to this town. On hearing this from her husband, Margaret gets up and leaves the Tea Room and goes to the Purple Parlor and cries. Fannie takes her opportunity and begins to tell Jim how attentive Ned has been lately to Margaret. This is so helpful that Jim drinks off another of Frank's cocktails and runs to the Purple Parlor to find Margaret. She's still crying. He thinks she's crying because Ned is away with Dora. He rebukes her. In King Arthur's vein. Is he not her husband? Woman, tell him that. But dignity soon tapers off with him into the "Now I warn you to cut it out" of the tyrannical manikin with a cinder in the eye of his self-conceit. Their friends hear them quarreling and follow them into the Purple Parlor. There's a terrible row in the Purple Parlor. The Purple Parlor is full of persons explaining. Fannie explains. Charlie explains. Each person explains, individually, to each other person, individually. Each couple reaches a satisfactory explanation. But, somehow, when they start to explain that explanation to the next couple, it vanishes. Everybody runs about trying to find it. The waiter runs about trying to find the gen'l'man to pay for the undrunk drinks back in the Tea Room. Frank, being the only member of the party who hasn't been drinking, can't help seeing what the waiter means. He pays the bill. Then he exerts himself like a sheep-dog and runs the whole crowd down the corridor and out into a couple of taxicabs. The air reminds them of unsatisfied appetites. Conjugal problems are things of the past. As the taxicabs jump out from the curb to the street-center everybody's head is out of window and everybody's voice is saying "The Suddington," "The Gruenewurst," "Max's," "The Royal Gorge," "Perinique's."

The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic Independence, which has been spoken of in former chapters; Social Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of in the next chapter.

Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence, carries them out of the world's mental life. If it is the one toward frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and of service which produce power and character.

* * * * *

With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort--to and beyond all other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery of it in torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment of all the world's worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong, its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle for existence! What a work!

But what a preparation for it had Marie!

She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.

She became a woman of the future--_of her type_.

From the facts of modern leisure the positive character reacts toward novel activity. It may be a reaction toward Civic Service. Or toward Self-Support. Or toward an enormous never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on the physical and mental education of children. The positive character, fighting modern facts, creates new ideals. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a neutral mixture of the old ideals and of the modern facts, of child-rearing made amateurish by idling and of idling made irritable by child-rearing. The negative character--like Marie's--just yields to the modern facts and is swept along by them into final irresponsibility and inutility.

But Marie wasn't negative enough--she wasn't _emotional_ enough in her negativeness--to plunge into _dissipation_. It wasn't in her nature to do any _plunging_ of any kind. Good, safe, motionless _sponging_ was her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She is charming.

When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.

No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a recognized commercial asset.

Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined down town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt stud.

No struggle in Marie's life so far! No _having_ to swim in the cold water of daily enforced duty or else sink. _No being accustomed to the disagreeable feel of that water._

She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being _hardened_ to work. That was everything.

The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort came when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected, Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary. But there had been no necessity in Marie's experience. They became quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn. Marie talked about her mother and her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.

For two years she inhabited Chunk's flat in the city and lived on Chunk's monthly check.

She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. He was the man nearest to her. Her father had once supported her. Her job then had been Being Nice. Her father had supported her for that, even after she had grown up. Well, she still was nice. And she still was, and deserved to be, supported. Perfectly logical.

For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the parties for Chunk's business friends, she did nothing but become more and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hardship, in her horror of pain.

When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that she didn't want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the world had capsized.

In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was widespread.

Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a diffusion of leisure.

The causes were similar.

The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of despoiled peoples, just as we live on the products of exploited continents. They had slaves in multitudes, just as we have machines in masses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do. Along with leisure and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences, just as we have acquired them. And the sermons of Augustus Caesar, first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of ours.

Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons identical with ours--the increased competitiveness of the modern life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation, divorce, and aversion to childbearing leave nothing to be desired, in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric--or for ineffectiveness in result.

Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to child-bearing in the Roman world--for she did not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full citizenship--for _she_ did not exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was parasitic--the economic power which comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of sexual charm.

The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.

The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work, going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity--that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her, in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.

They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury the _start_? Wasn't it only the means to the _finish_?

Eating a grouse destroys, in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider down or on straw, arose Bismarck.

The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.

On the other hand, we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on the luxury of stable floors and of free-lunch counters, just as thoroughly as any nobleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the luxury of castles and of game preserves.

It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham sandwiches, of either eider down or straw, _without service rendered and without fatigue endured_, that ultimately desiccates the moral character and drains it of all capacity for effort.

Marie was enervated not by her luxury but by her failure to _pay_ for her luxury. She wouldn't have had to pay much. Her luxury was petty. But she paid nothing. And her failure to pay was just as big as if her luxury had been bigger. Getting three thousand a year in return for nothing leaves you morally just as bankrupt as if you had got three million.

Marie came to her abdication of life's _greatest_ effort not by wearing too many clothes or by eating too many foods but by becoming accustomed to getting clothes and foods and all other things without the _smallest_ effort.

She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the _habit_ of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.

Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last, in her negative, non-resistive mind, atrophied all the instincts of that struggle, including finally the instinct for reproduction.

The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. Work, the perpetuation of one's own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the class, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to live.

The detailed daily reasons for this social law stand clear in Marie's life. It is a strong law. Its triumph in Marie could have been thwarted only by the presence in her of a certain other social law. Authority!

The woman who is coerced by Authority, the woman who is operated by ideals introduced into her from without, will bear children even when she does not feel the active wish to bear them. She will bear them just because the authoritative expectation is that she _shall_ bear them.

But Marie was free!

She was free from the requirement of an heir for the family estate. The modern form of property, requiring no male warrior for its defense in the next generation, had done that for her.

She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted reproduction. Modern Protestantism had done that for her.

She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband's will. Modern individualism had done that for her.

She was free! Uncoerced by family authority, uncoerced by ecclesiastical authority, uncoerced by marital authority, she was almost limitlessly free!

There being no _external force_ compelling her to bear children, she had to follow _internal instinct_.

That instinct, if it had existed in her, would have been a sufficient guide. It would have been a commanding guide. It would have been the best possible guide. Rising in her from the original eternal life-power it would have driven her to child-bearing more surely than she could have been driven to it by any external agency whatsoever.

But the instinct toward child-bearing could not now be revived in Marie. With the cessation from struggle and from effort and from fatigue and from discipline and from the sorrow of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, with that cessation the instinct toward child-bearing had reached cessation, too. With the petrifaction of its soil it had withered away.

Nobody had ever tried to bring Marie back to the soil of struggle. Nobody,--not her father, not her mother, not her husband, not one of her friends, not one of her teachers had ever taught her to return to life by returning to labor.

The greatest wrong possible to a woman had been wrought upon her.

She had been sedulously trained out of the life of the race into race-death.

Yet when it got talked around among her friends that she didn't want children, people blamed her and said it was very surprising, _in view of all that had been done for her_.

V.

Mothers of the World

Leaning over a tiled parapet, we looked down at the streak of street so far below. Motor-cars, crawling--crawling, glossy-backed beetles. "Drop a pin and impale that green one." One couldn't, from up there, give motor-car and motor-car owner the reverence rightly theirs. A thousand miles of horizontal withdrawal into majestic forest recesses may leave one's regard for worldly greatness unabated. A perpendicular vantage of a hundred and fifty feet destroys it utterly.

"But look at that!" she said.

In the east, dull red on the quick blue of Lake Michigan, an ore-boat. Low and long. A marvelously persistent and protracted boat. Might have been christened _The Eel_. Or _The Projectile_. No masts. And, except at her stern, under her deferred smokestack, no portholes. Forward from that stack her body stretched five hundred feet to her bow without excrescences and without apertures. Stripped and shut-eyed for the fight, grimmer than a battle ship, not a waste line nor a false motion in her, she went by, loaded with seven thousand tons of hematite, down to the blast furnaces of South Chicago.

"But," she said, "look at this."

She turned me from the lake. We crossed the roof's tarred gravel and looked north, west, and south abroad at the city.

Puffs of energy had raised high buildings over there; over there an eccentric subsidence had left behind it a slum. Queer, curling currents of trade and of lust, here, there, and everywhere, were carrying little clutching eddies of disease and of vice across the thoroughfares of the wholesome and of the innocent. Sweet unused earth lay yonder in a great curve of green; within two miles of it stood clotted houses in which children were dying for air; brown levels of cottage and tenement, black bubbles of mill and factory, floating side by side, meeting, mingling, life and light merged into filth and fume--uncalculated; uncontrolled; fortuitous swirls and splutters on senseless molten metal; a reproduction in human lives of the phantom flurry which on simmering ladles in the steel mills they call the Devil's Flower Garden.

"Not so clever as the ore-boat, is it?" she said. "That was making wealth, conquering. Well done. This is using wealth, living. Done ill. A city. Better than many. Worse than many. But none of my business. I'm emancipated."

She waved her hand and blotted out the city from before me. In its place I saw now only an uninhabited wilderness plain. In a moment, however, in the side of a distant ridge, there appeared a tiny opening. A woman sat near it, plaiting a grass mat. A mile away a man stood, mending a bow.

It was the scene Mr. Kipling once reported:

"The man didn't begin to be tame till he met the woman. She picked out a nice dry cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail down, across the opening of the cave; and she said: 'Wipe your feet, dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.'"

As we looked, we saw the man fit an arrow to his bow, take aim, and bring down a deer. He carried it to the cave. The woman rose to meet him, the mat in her hand. He pushed her away savagely, took the mat from her, and threw the deer on the ground. She picked herself up and began to skin the deer with a knife which she slipped from her belt. He lay down on the mat and went to sleep.

I heard my companion say: "_I_ did all the housekeeping of _that_ camp. It was woman's work. But now----"

She waved her hand and restored the city to my gaze.

"Now, of _this_ camp _you_ are the real housekeeper. The arranging of it, the cleaning of it, the decorating of it, on the big scale, as a total, all masculine, all yours! How you have expanded your duties, you who were once just hunter and fighter, principally fighter! How your sphere is swollen! You do not realize it. You are familiar enough with the commonplace fact that most primitive industry in its origin owed little to you except (a big 'except') the protection of your sword against enemies. You are familiar with the fact that the plaiting of mats and the tanning of hides and every other industrial feature of housekeeping has passed from my control to yours in precise proportion as it has ceased to be individual and has become collective. You dominate everything collective. You understand that. What you don't understand is this:

"It is not only the _industrial_ features of housekeeping which tend to become collective. It is also its _administrative_ features. I will give you just one illustration. I cannot now keep my premises clean, beautiful, livable, except through the collective control of smoke, garbage, billboards, noise. And that control is yours.

"Further!

"Even the tenderer phases of housekeeping, those which are more subtle than mere administration, move steadily toward becoming yours. I will give you an illustration of that. The very children, now no longer always at their mothers' knees, but spread abroad through school and park and playground and street and factory, are now much in your hands, for school and park and playground and street and factory are essentially controlled by you. You are increasingly housekeeper, and even mother. You not only control Working. You also control Living. But who are you, you that now control Living? You are----"

She tapped my shoulder and laughed.

"You are the Tired Business Man. Yes, whether manufacturer, financier, scholar, or poet, you are the Tired Business Man. You always were. You still are. You are a fighter still, by nature. You conquer steel and steam--and make a boat that will carry a mountain of ore. You conquer mounds of stock certificates and masses of men--and organize armies for the production of wealth. You conquer knowledge--and write your treatise. You conquer the sources of emotion--and write your poem. Then you're through. You lie down on your mat and go to sleep. To be housekeeper, to be homemaker, to take from each part of life its offerings of value and patiently to weld them into a coherent, livable whole--that is not your faculty. You are a specialist. Produce, produce, produce--a certain thing, a one certain thing, any one certain thing, from corkscrews to madonnas--you can do it. But to make a city a home, to elicit from discordant elements a harmonious total of warm, charming, noble, livable life--you'll never do it, by yourself."

She paused.

"Well," she said, "why don't you ask me to help you a bit? Even aside from any special qualities of my sex, don't you know that the greatest reserve fund of energy in any American city to-day is the leisure and semi-leisure of certain classes of its women?"

"But they can give their leisure to 'good works' now if they want to," I answered.

"Yes," she said, "but if they do that, they'll want to go farther. Look!"

And this is what she showed me--what she told me:

* * * * *

Over there on Michigan Avenue, occupying the whole front part of the ninth floor of the Fine Arts Building, are the quarters of the Chicago Woman's Club. Twenty-seven years ago, in the Brighton public school, northwest of the Yards, that club started a kindergarten, providing the money, the materials, the teacher, the energy--everything but the room.

It was a "good work," one might think, quite within "woman's sphere." But it wasn't entered into lightly and unadvisedly. In one of the club's old pamphlets you'll find it set down that Goethe had said that activity without insight is an evil. Accordingly, the club had spent its youth, from 1876 to 1883, reading, considering, discussing. But certain topics were excluded. _Particularly woman's suffrage._