| Chapter 25
| 0 | |
| The personality of Edith Leete had naturally impressed me
strongly ever since I had come, in so strange a manner, to be an
inmate of her father's house, and it was to be expected that after
what had happened the night previous, I should be more than
ever preoccupied with thoughts of her. From the first I had been
struck with the air of serene frankness and ingenuous directness,
more like that of a noble and innocent boy than any girl I
had ever known, which characterized her. I was curious to know
how far this charming quality might be peculiar to herself, and
how far possibly a result of alterations in the social position of
women which might have taken place since my time. Finding an
opportunity that day, when alone with Dr. Leete, I turned the
conversation in that direction.
| 1 | |
| "I suppose," I said, "that women nowadays, having been
relieved of the burden of housework, have no employment but
the cultivation of their charms and graces."
| 2 | |
| "So far as we men are concerned," replied Dr. Leete, "we
should consider that they amply paid their way, to use one of
your forms of expression, if they confined themselves to that
occupation, but you may be very sure that they have quite too
much spirit to consent to be mere beneficiaries of society, even
as a return for ornamenting it. They did, indeed, welcome their
riddance from housework, because that was not only exceptionally
wearing in itself, but also wasteful, in the extreme, of energy,
as compared with the cooperative plan; but they accepted relief
from that sort of work only that they might contribute in other
and more effectual, as well as more agreeable, ways to the
common weal. Our women, as well as our men, are members of
the industrial army, and leave it only when maternal duties
claim them. The result is that most women, at one time or another
of their lives, serve industrially some five or ten or fifteen
years, while those who have no children fill out the full term."
| 3 | |
| "A woman does not, then, necessarily leave the industrial
service on marriage?" I queried.
| 4 | |
| "No more than a man," replied the doctor. "Why on earth
should she? Married women have no housekeeping responsibilities
now, you know, and a husband is not a baby that he should
be cared for."
| 5 | |
| "It was thought one of the most grievous features of our
civilization that we required so much toil from women," I said;
"but it seems to me you get more out of them than we did."
| 6 | |
| Dr. Leete laughed. "Indeed we do, just as we do out of our
men. Yet the women of this age are very happy, and those of the
nineteenth century, unless contemporary references greatly mislead
us, were very miserable. The reason that women nowadays
are so much more efficient colaborers with the men, and at the
same time are so happy, is that, in regard to their work as well as
men's, we follow the principle of providing every one the kind of
occupation he or she is best adapted to. Women being inferior
in strength to men, and further disqualified industrially in
special ways, the kinds of occupation reserved for them, and the
conditions under which they pursue them, have reference to
these facts. The heavier sorts of work are everywhere reserved for
men, the lighter occupations for women. Under no circumstances
is a woman permitted to follow any employment not
perfectly adapted, both as to kind and degree of labor, to her sex.
Moreover, the hours of women's work are considerably shorter
than those of men's, more frequent vacations are granted, and
the most careful provision is made for rest when needed. The
men of this day so well appreciate that they owe to the beauty
and grace of women the chief zest of their lives and their main
incentive to effort, that they permit them to work at all only
because it is fully understood that a certain regular requirement
of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and
mind, during the period of maximum physical vigor. We believe
that the magnificent health which distinguishes our women
from those of your day, who seem to have been so generally
sickly, is owing largely to the fact that all alike are furnished with
healthful and inspiriting occupation."
| 7 | |
| "I understood you," I said, "that the women-workers belong
to the army of industry, but how can they be under the same
system of ranking and discipline with the men, when the
conditions of their labor are so different?"
| 8 | |
| "They are under an entirely different discipline," replied Dr.
Leete, "and constitute rather an allied force than an integral part
of the army of the men. They have a woman general-in-chief and
are under exclusively feminine regime. This general, as also the
higher officers, is chosen by the body of women who have passed
the time of service, in correspondence with the manner in which
the chiefs of the masculine army and the President of the nation
are elected. The general of the women's army sits in the cabinet
of the President and has a veto on measures respecting women's
work, pending appeals to Congress. I should have said, in
speaking of the judiciary, that we have women on the bench,
appointed by the general of the women, as well as men. Causes
in which both parties are women are determined by women
judges, and where a man and a woman are parties to a case, a
judge of either sex must consent to the verdict."
| 9 | |
| "Womanhood seems to be organized as a sort of imperium in
imperio in your system," I said.
| 10 | |
| "To some extent," Dr. Leete replied; "but the inner imperium
is one from which you will admit there is not likely to be much
danger to the nation. The lack of some such recognition of the
distinct individuality of the sexes was one of the innumerable
defects of your society. The passional attraction between men
and women has too often prevented a perception of the profound
differences which make the members of each sex in many
things strange to the other, and capable of sympathy only with
their own. It is in giving full play to the differences of sex
rather than in seeking to obliterate them, as was apparently the
effort of some reformers in your day, that the enjoyment of each
by itself and the piquancy which each has for the other, are alike
enhanced. In your day there was no career for women except in
an unnatural rivalry with men. We have given them a world of
their own, with its emulations, ambitions, and careers, and I
assure you they are very happy in it. It seems to us that women
were more than any other class the victims of your civilization.
There is something which, even at this distance of time, penetrates
one with pathos in the spectacle of their ennuied, undeveloped
lives, stunted at marriage, their narrow horizon, bounded so
often, physically, by the four walls of home, and morally by a
petty circle of personal interests. I speak now, not of the poorer
classes, who were generally worked to death, but also of the
well-to-do and rich. From the great sorrows, as well as the petty
frets of life, they had no refuge in the breezy outdoor world of
human affairs, nor any interests save those of the family. Such an
existence would have softened men's brains or driven them mad.
All that is changed to-day. No woman is heard nowadays wishing
she were a man, nor parents desiring boy rather than girl
children. Our girls are as full of ambition for their careers as our
boys. Marriage, when it comes, does not mean incarceration for
them, nor does it separate them in any way from the larger
interests of society, the bustling life of the world. Only when
maternity fills a woman's mind with new interests does she
withdraw from the world for a time. Afterward, and at any
time, she may return to her place among her comrades, nor need
she ever lose touch with them. Women are a very happy race
nowadays, as compared with what they ever were before in the
world's history, and their power of giving happiness to men has
been of course increased in proportion."
| 11 | |
| "I should imagine it possible," I said, "that the interest which
girls take in their careers as members of the industrial army and
candidates for its distinctions might have an effect to deter them
from marriage."
| 12 | |
| Dr. Leete smiled. "Have no anxiety on that score, Mr. West,"
he replied. "The Creator took very good care that whatever other
modifications the dispositions of men and women might with
time take on, their attraction for each other should remain
constant. The mere fact that in an age like yours, when the
struggle for existence must have left people little time for other
thoughts, and the future was so uncertain that to assume
parental responsibilities must have often seemed like a criminal
risk, there was even then marrying and giving in marriage,
should be conclusive on this point. As for love nowadays, one of
our authors says that the vacuum left in the minds of men and
women by the absence of care for one's livelihood has been
entirely taken up by the tender passion. That, however, I beg
you to believe, is something of an exaggestion. For the rest, so
far is marriage from being an interference with a woman's career,
that the higher positions in the feminine army of industry are
intrusted only to women who have been both wives and mothers,
as they alone fully represent their sex."
| 13 | |
| "Are credit cards issued to the women just as to the men?"
| 14 | |
| "Certainly."
| 15 | |
| "The credits of the women, I suppose, are for smaller sums,
owing to the frequent suspension of their labor on account of
family responsibilities."
| 16 | |
| "Smaller!" exclaimed Dr. Leete, "oh, no! The maintenance of
all our people is the same. There are no exceptions to that rule,
but if any difference were made on account of the interruptions
you speak of, it would be by making the woman's credit larger,
not smaller. Can you think of any service constituting a stronger
claim on the nation's gratitude than bearing and nursing the
nation's children? According to our view, none deserve so well of
the world as good parents. There is no task so unselfish, so
necessarily without return, though the heart is well rewarded, as
the nurture of the children who are to make the world for one
another when we are gone."
| 17 | |
| "It would seem to follow, from what you have said, that wives
are in no way dependent on their husbands for maintenance."
| 18 | |
| "Of course they are not," replied Dr. Leete, "nor children on
their parents either, that is, for means of support, though of
course they are for the offices of affection. The child's labor,
when he grows up, will go to increase the common stock, not his
parents', who will be dead, and therefore he is properly nurtured
out of the common stock. The account of every person, man,
woman, and child, you must understand, is always with the
nation directly, and never through any intermediary, except, of
course, that parents, to a certain extent, act for children as their
guardians. You see that it is by virtue of the relation of
individuals to the nation, of their membership in it, that they
are entitled to support; and this title is in no way connected with
or affected by their relations to other individuals who are fellow
members of the nation with them. That any person should be
dependent for the means of support upon another would be
shocking to the moral sense as well as indefensible on any
rational social theory. What would become of personal liberty
and dignity under such an arrangement? I am aware that you
called yourselves free in the nineteenth century. The meaning of
the word could not then, however, have been at all what it is at
present, or you certainly would not have applied it to a society of
which nearly every member was in a position of galling personal
dependence upon others as to the very means of life, the poor
upon the rich, or employed upon employer, women upon men,
children upon parents. Instead of distributing the product of the
nation directly to its members, which would seem the most
natural and obvious method, it would actually appear that you
had given your minds to devising a plan of hand to hand
distribution, involving the maximum of personal humiliation to
all classes of recipients.
| 19 | |
| "As regards the dependence of women upon men for support,
which then was usual, of course, natural attraction in case of
marriages of love may often have made it endurable, though for
spirited women I should fancy it must always have remained
humiliating. What, then, must it have been in the innumerable
cases where women, with or without the form of marriage, had
to sell themselves to men to get their living? Even your
contemporaries, callous as they were to most of the revolting
aspects of their society, seem to have had an idea that this was
not quite as it should be; but, it was still only for pity's sake that
they deplored the lot of the women. It did not occur to them
that it was robbery as well as cruelty when men seized for
themselves the whole product of the world and left women to
beg and wheedle for their share. Why--but bless me, Mr. West,
I am really running on at a remarkable rate, just as if the
robbery, the sorrow, and the shame which those poor women
endured were not over a century since, or as if you were
responsible for what you no doubt deplored as much as I do."
| 20 | |
| "I must bear my share of responsibility for the world as it then
was," I replied. "All I can say in extenuation is that until the
nation was ripe for the present system of organized production
and distribution, no radical improvement in the position of
woman was possible. The root of her disability, as you say, was
her personal dependence upon man for her livelihood, and I can
imagine no other mode of social organization than that you have
adopted, which would have set woman free of man at the same
time that it set men free of one another. I suppose, by the way,
that so entire a change in the position of women cannot have
taken place without affecting in marked ways the social relations
of the sexes. That will be a very interesting study for me."
| 21 | |
| "The change you will observe," said Dr. Leete, "will chiefly
be, I think, the entire frankness and unconstraint which now
characterizes those relations, as compared with the artificiality
which seems to have marked them in your time. The sexes now
meet with the ease of perfect equals, suitors to each other for
nothing but love. In your time the fact that women were
dependent for support on men made the woman in reality the
one chiefly benefited by marriage. This fact, so far as we can
judge from contemporary records, appears to have been coarsely
enough recognized among the lower classes, while among the
more polished it was glossed over by a system of elaborate
conventionalities which aimed to carry the precisely opposite
meaning, namely, that the man was the party chiefly benefited.
To keep up this convention it was essential that he should
always seem the suitor. Nothing was therefore considered more
shocking to the proprieties than that a woman should betray a
fondness for a man before he had indicated a desire to marry her.
Why, we actually have in our libraries books, by authors of your
day, written for no other purpose than to discuss the question
whether, under any conceivable circumstances, a woman might,
without discredit to her sex, reveal an unsolicited love. All this
seems exquisitely absurd to us, and yet we know that, given your
circumstances, the problem might have a serious side. When for
a woman to proffer her love to a man was in effect to invite him
to assume the burden of her support, it is easy to see that pride
and delicacy might well have checked the promptings of the
heart. When you go out into our society, Mr. West, you must be
prepared to be often cross-questioned on this point by our young
people, who are naturally much interested in this aspect of
old-fashioned manners."[5]
| 22 | |
| [5] I may say that Dr. Leete's warning has been fully justified by my
experience. The amount and intensity of amusement which the
young people of this day, and the young women especially, are
able to extract from what they are pleased to call the oddities of
courtship in the nineteenth century, appear unlimited.
| 23 | |
| "And so the girls of the twentieth century tell their love."
| 24 | |
| "If they choose," replied Dr. Leete. "There is no more
pretense of a concealment of feeling on their part than on the
part of their lovers. Coquetry would be as much despised in a
girl as in a man. Affected coldness, which in your day rarely
deceived a lover, would deceive him wholly now, for no one
thinks of practicing it."
| 25 | |
| "One result which must follow from the independence of
women I can see for myself," I said. "There can be no marriages
now except those of inclination."
| 26 | |
| "That is a matter of course," replied Dr. Leete.
| 27 | |
| "Think of a world in which there are nothing but matches of
pure love! Ah me, Dr. Leete, how far you are from being able to
understand what an astonishing phenomenon such a world
seems to a man of the nineteenth century!"
| 28 | |
| "I can, however, to some extent, imagine it," replied the
doctor. "But the fact you celebrate, that there are nothing but
love matches, means even more, perhaps, than you probably at
first realize. It means that for the first time in human history the
principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and
transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types
drop out, has unhindered operation. The necessities of poverty,
the need of having a home, no longer tempt women to accept as
the fathers of their children men whom they neither can love
nor respect. Wealth and rank no longer divert attention from
personal qualities. Gold no longer `gilds the straitened forehead
of the fool.' The gifts of person, mind, and disposition; beauty,
wit, eloquence, kindness, generosity, geniality, courage, are sure
of transmission to posterity. Every generation is sifted through a
little finer mesh than the last. The attributes that human nature
admires are preserved, those that repel it are left behind. There
are, of course, a great many women who with love must mingle
admiration, and seek to wed greatly, but these not the less obey
the same law, for to wed greatly now is not to marry men of
fortune or title, but those who have risen above their fellows by
the solidity or brilliance of their services to humanity. These
form nowadays the only aristocracy with which alliance is
distinction.
| 29 | |
| "You were speaking, a day or two ago, of the physical
superiority of our people to your contemporaries. Perhaps more
important than any of the causes I mentioned then as tending to
race purification has been the effect of untrammeled sexual
selection upon the quality of two or three successive generations.
I believe that when you have made a fuller study of our people
you will find in them not only a physical, but a mental and
moral improvement. It would be strange if it were not so, for not
only is one of the great laws of nature now freely working out
the salvation of the race, but a profound moral sentiment has
come to its support. Individualism, which in your day was the
animating idea of society, not only was fatal to any vital
sentiment of brotherhood and common interest among living
men, but equally to any realization of the responsibility of the
living for the generation to follow. To-day this sense of responsibility,
practically unrecognized in all previous ages, has become
one of the great ethical ideas of the race, reinforcing, with an
intense conviction of duty, the natural impulse to seek in
marriage the best and noblest of the other sex. The result is, that
not all the encouragements and incentives of every sort which
we have provided to develop industry, talent, genius, excellence
of whatever kind, are comparable in their effect on our young
men with the fact that our women sit aloft as judges of the race
and reserve themselves to reward the winners. Of all the whips,
and spurs, and baits, and prizes, there is none like the thought of
the radiant faces which the laggards will find averted.
| 30 | |
| "Celibates nowadays are almost invariably men who have
failed to acquit themselves creditably in the work of life. The
woman must be a courageous one, with a very evil sort of
courage, too, whom pity for one of these unfortunates should
lead to defy the opinion of her generation--for otherwise she is
free--so far as to accept him for a husband. I should add that,
more exacting and difficult to resist than any other element in
that opinion, she would find the sentiment of her own sex. Our
women have risen to the full height of their responsibility as the
wardens of the world to come, to whose keeping the keys of the
future are confided. Their feeling of duty in this respect amounts
to a sense of religious consecration. It is a cult in which they
educate their daughters from childhood."
| 31 | |
| After going to my room that night, I sat up late to read a
romance of Berrian, handed me by Dr. Leete, the plot of which
turned on a situation suggested by his last words, concerning the
modern view of parental responsibility. A similar situation would
almost certainly have been treated by a nineteenth century
romancist so as to excite the morbid sympathy of the reader with
the sentimental selfishness of the lovers, and his resentment
toward the unwritten law which they outraged. I need not de-
scribe--for who has not read "Ruth Elton"?--how different is
the course which Berrian takes, and with what tremendous effect
he enforces the principle which he states: "Over the unborn our
power is that of God, and our responsibility like His toward us.
As we acquit ourselves toward them, so let Him deal with us."
| 32 | |
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