» Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library I https://archive.org/details/womanmovementfroOOtaft \ The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness By JESSIE TAFT PHILOSOPHIC STUDIES ISSUED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO N UMBER 6 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Agents THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, London and Edinburgh THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto KARL IV. HIERSEMANN, Leipzig THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY, New York The Department of Philosophy of the University of Chicago issues a series of monographs in philosophy, including ethics, logic, and meta¬ physics, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy. The successive monographs are numbered consecutively with a view to their subsequent publication in volumes. These studies are similar to the series of Contributions to Philosophy , but do not contain psychological papers or reprints of articles previously published. THE WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS THE WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS BY y JESSIE TAFT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Copyright 1916 By The University of Chicago All Rights Reserved Published April, 1916 NOTE I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Professor James H. Tufts and Professor George H. Mead for their advice and counsel in the writing of this thesis and to Miss Virginia P. Robinson and Miss Margaret Snodgrass for their aid in revising the manuscript. Jessie Taft. s i \ . r ' TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction .ix I. The Reality of the Problems Represented by the Woman Movement. 1. An enumeration of them as both personal and social. 1 2. Typical interpretations of them by modern writers.12 II. The Nature of the Problems Revealed in Their Relationship' i to the Larger Social Situation. 1. The common basis of labor and woman movements in the conflict between a very complex social order and inadequately socialized selves .24 2. A twofold conflict in lives of women, not only that of the incomplete personality and the enlarged social environment, shared equally by men, but also the more obvious conflict affecting women more immediately than men between mediaeval methods, standards, and virtues in the home and modern methods, standards, and virtues in the world.30 III. A Social Theory of the Self as the Ground for a Solution of the Problems in both Woman and Labor Movements. 1. Implications of a genuinely social theory of self-consciousness .36 2. Actual qualitative development of self-consciousness histori¬ cally. 40 3. Appearance of socially conscious self and its value for the handling of social problems.*..48 IV. Conclusion. 1. Woman and labor movements equally expressions of thwarted impulses for which there is as yet no outlet compatible with the present social order.53 2. Hope of both movements in the possibility of the appearance of a genuine social science as a result of the growing prevalence of the socially conscious person.55 Bibliography 58 THE WOMAN MOVEMENT AS PART OF A LARGER SOCIAL SITUATION By Jessie Taft I' ■ INTRODUCTION For the. last twenty-five years or more, women, their position and function in the scheme of things, their biological superiority or inferi¬ ority, their mental and physical characteristics, their achievements and failures, have been discussed and rediscussed with unflagging interest. Every nook and corner of feminine nature has been brought to light and examined as if woman were a newly discovered species. Yet out of this endless controversy only a very general agreement has been reached. It is fair to say that the majority of intelligent people today are agreed on at least two points: the necessity of improving motherhood and the need of some form of useful work for every woman. But here the agreement ends. As to exactly what conduces to improved motherhood or con¬ stitutes the proper kind of useful labor, both masculine and feminine authorities disagree. In the meantime, while the controversy continues, despite the approval or disapproval of the theorists, women, whether they wish it or no, are necessarily affected by all the changes in education, industry, and government that are in the process of remaking society. Women find themselves as a matter of hard fact in the equivocal position of being neither one thing nor the other, neither in the home nor out of it, neither wholly mediaeval nor wholly modern. The world to which women have been accustomed for centuries and to whose patterns their minds have been shaped is not for the most part the world of the modern man. His world is not only different, it is even hostile and antagonistic in many respects to the world of the woman; so much so that women who attempt to conform to both worlds, as many are compelled to do, find themselves face to face with conflicts so serious and apparently irreconcilable that satisfactory adjustment is often quite impossible on the part of the individual woman. The world outside the home has proved itself so ill suited to women and children, even to the extent of being positively injurious, and the home in its present form has seemed to be so little adapted to the larger world’s ideals of trained motherhood, scientific domestic economy, and socialized ethics, that the problems arising from the clashing of the two spheres have grown into great social questions to be handled by society as a whole. An unprejudiced examination of the actual conditions which the average middle class woman has to meet in adjusting her life to the home and to the man’s world gives sufficient evidence of the reality of the problems which are back of the so-called “woman question” X INTRODUCTION and reveals their intimate connection with every other great social movement of our day. The cry of the uneasy woman 1 is not merely the reprehensible expression of her own personal restlessness. Con¬ sciously or unconsciously it voices her share in the protest of the age against the impossible situation in which humanity finds itself today, and her struggles, even though they seem to be but a vain beating against the righteous and inevitable order of things, are a real part of that larger conflict which society as a whole is waging in its effort to combine modern industry and modern individualism. It is the purpose of this thesis to determine just what are the problems represented by the woman movement, to trace their connection with the larger, more inclusive social problems, and to indicate in a general way the direction from which a solution may be expected. Tarbell, The Business of Being a Woman. I. THE PROBLEM 1. Personal and Social Aspects The problems which justify the woman movement appear and may be handled under two aspects: first, as they break out in the life of the individual woman as personal difficulties demanding some kind of per¬ sonal adjustment; second, as they take on the guise of public questions assuming such proportions as openly to threaten the welfare of society. The following section is an attempt to treat them very briefly from both points of view. None of this material is new, but it is well worth pre¬ senting as a whole in condensed form that its very bulk may convince us of the reality of what is so often regarded as an illusion due to the restless and unstable character of women always longing for that which they have not and failing to make use of that which they have. From the standpoint of the individual woman the most hopeless problem, and one which carries with it a long train of lesser difficulties, lies in the economic field. Here she faces what appears to be under our present system an almost insoluble dualism. Shall the young girl of today prepare for marriage or for wage-earning, for neither, or for both? The women of the laboring classes can indulge in little preparation either for marriage or for earning a living, yet for them economic inde¬ pendence is usually necessary before marriage and frequently after. The women of the wealthier classes, on the other hand, have the advan¬ tage of being able to make their own situation to a large extent and may prepare for both, either, or neither, as they choose. On the middle class woman, however, this uncertainty of training presses heavily. An examination of all the factors involved shows a heavy balance on the side of the ad visibility of preparing to earn a living. Marriage, housekeeping, childbearing, as commonly understood and practised, do not, if one has average intelligence, necessarily require any special training beyond that which is picked up at home or can be acquired when the time comes by actual doing. It is possible and customary to get along as most people do without scientific preparation for mar¬ riage. Moreover, marriage is not a certainty upon which one may depend as a sure or even probable means of support. Nor is marriage for the sake of livelihood any longer considered morally justifiable and, with that avenue cut off, the probability of marriage is greatly lessened. To find a husband one loves is not so easy as finding merely a husband. Widowhood, too, is a possibility that must be reckoned with. But, even granted the certainty of marriage, there are still a considerable 2 WOMAN MOVEMENT EROM VIEW OE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS number of years during which the young woman may find economic independence essential. Modern economic conditions tend both to defer marriage and so to deplete the amount of work done in the home that in many cases the daughter’s share is not of sufficient economic value to enable her father to support her. Even when the father is quite able to support his daughter indefinitely or until her marriage, the work which falls to her in the home is seldom of such a nature as to keep her interest or bring out and develop all her unused resources and powers. As long as the mother is at the helm, very little authority or responsibility is likely to rest upon the daughter, and the modern girl usually feels that, however wealthy her parents, she is not justified in living unless she is engaged in responsible work and is giving value received to society. On the whole, therefore, even when there is no economic necessity, self- support or preparation for it appears to be the part of prudence and good judgment. As a result of this training for work in the world rather than for home¬ making, the desire of the normal woman for a husband, children, and a home inevitably clashes with other desires developed in connection with her work in the world or in her preparation for such work. She natur¬ ally wishes to continue to do that for which she has been trained and for which she may have a natural aptitude. She clings to her economic freedom. The heterogeneous, unsystematized work of housekeeping has little attraction for one accustomed to regular hours and specialized, standardized work whose dignity as a trade or profession is universally recognized. She may realize that she has not merely a disinclination but a deep-rooted distaste for household tasks and a positive lack of ability to perform them well. Knowing this, she must face the possi¬ bility that, if she forces herself to assume duties to which she brings neither liking nor training, there may arise a discontent with life so great as to endanger the success of her marriage. If she is a woman with a socially trained conscience she may even feel that, if she accepts the home under its present conditions and allows her husband to support her, she owes it to society to take the time before marriage to make herself as fit as possible for her duties as con¬ sumer, food preparer, housekeeper, childbearer, and trainer. Yet she knows that this, if taken seriously, means a second profession or group of professions. Furthermore, to the gifted and ambitious woman, the woman who has found growth and freedom and happiness in her work, comes the fear which is almost certainty, that she too, like so many others, if she marries. THE PROBLEM 3 will find her talents and her ambitions hopelessly swamped by the infinite detail, the wear and tear of domestic duties, and that middle age will see her contented, settled down, all her possibilities for growth gone forever, even the desire to do, dead. Should her zest for life and work persist to that period when her family duties no longer absorb her, will it be possible for her after the long years of absence to resume the work for which she was trained? For the alert modern woman, conscious to her finger tips, knowing in her heart that she could give a lifetime of happy associations to the man she loved, and to society, healthy, normal children, the deadlock into which the present social order forces her is a cruel, blighting thing—a choice between a crippled life in the home or an un¬ fulfilled one out of it. We are not attempting in this discussion of difficulties arising on the economic side to justify any of the conditions or attitudes presented, but merely to state them as real problems actually appearing in the lives of many women. While none of the conflicting impulses above described may result in the giving up of marriage in a concrete case, yet they tend to restrain the woman from making any effort in the direction of matrimony and they make married life more difficult, more easily shipwrecked. Turning from the economic to the ethical field, we find that there also women encounter a dualism. -The values which they have put first— life, love, children—are not the values most emphasized by men outside the home. The fact that women are forced to subordinate these values if they enter the man’s world as it is, involves constant emotional strain. Their sense of relative values is continually violated. Equipped with only a family ethics, women as they go into the larger world often seem to lack the loyalty, the ethical consciousness which men consider essen¬ tial for such social institutions as law, government, or business. Men feel that honor as they understand it is quite impossible for women, because women are so often unable to see wrong in what men condemn when it does not violate the closer relations and loyalties to which their code applies; whereas women fail equally to comprehend the man’s dis¬ regard of the duties to the immediate family and the weakness of his allegiance to that which is for them supreme. This mutual incompatibility of ethical standards due to the difference in the worlds to which they were meant to apply and the corresponding difference in the emphasis placed on values is a favorite theme of Ibsen and is brought out with unusual clearness in the drama John Gabriel Borkman. Borkman who has spent years in prison for the dishonest 4 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS use of other people’s money in the making of his own fortune is reproached bitterly by his former sweetheart for his crime, which, for her, is found to consist, not in the fact that he has broken the law of the land, but solely in this, that he voluntarily gave up his love for her and their mutual happiness for the sake of business advancement, that he killed the love life in her soul. When a woman with such standards of life burnt deep into her soul attempts conscientiously to reconcile them with what the world demands as honorable, she faces a herculean task which is likely to crush or harden her and which she can never accomplish as an individual. The man also, it is true, in so far as he too lives in both the home and the world has just as overwhelming a discrepancy in standards and, as an individual, is just as unequal to the task of dealing with them; the strain, however, is usually not so great because he lives much less com¬ pletely than the woman in both worlds and therefore feels much less keenly the need of harmonization. The woman is never allowed to forget that, whatever her work, the home and all that it stands for must be her deepest interest; she cannot throw off its standards lightly. Yet, if she is to succeed in the world without, she cannot afford to ignore the rules as she finds them there, whereas the man has long treated the home as a pleasant place for week-ends and holidays, essentially a place where he can and does cast off the rules and standards of his work¬ aday world. Nobody expects him to carry the ideals of the home back to his business and he has grown accustomed to keeping them shut off in an air tight compartment of his personality. A part of this ethical conflict, but so large and prominent a part that it looms up as a separate problem, is the double standard in sex. A standard of absolute physical chastity for the woman is confronted by a world where almost unlimited license is taken for granted. This fact, reinforced by the ordinary training of the home to the effect that sex, especially in all its physical manifestations, is inherently and mys¬ teriously evil and is allowable only when the evil is counteracted by the charm of the marriage ceremony, that the flesh and the devil are one, may lead the woman to revolt in disgust against sex in general, to such an extent that the natural impulse to marry is actually checked by her intense horror of the physical relationship involved and by her belief that all men are brutes in so far as they seek sex satisfaction. 2 The antagonism between her bringing up in the home and the world of sex as she finds it beyond the home, makes for every thinking woman a 2 Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society , II, p. 77. THE PROBLEM 5 problem that may last over years of her life—the task of building up an idea of sex that is consistent with the facts and yet leaves a universe in which she can live comfortably, of escaping from her own barren chas¬ tity while avoiding the man’s meaningless license, of creating a new appreciation and expression of the most fundamental human instinct. In the political field, the suffrage movement is the expression of a conflict of demands on the part of society and of impulses on the part of the individual woman. Society expects women to be good and useful citizens. It holds them responsible for the welfare of homes and children and is ready to criticize them for failures within their own province. At the same time, it makes direct responsibility impos¬ sible for women by forbidding the use of the instrument through which for the most part civic control is acquired, The woman, on the other hand, must reconcile her own inertia and the natural inclination to dodge responsibility reinforced as it is by the extreme effort required to exercise indirect influence, by public acquiescence, and even by legal prohibition, with a conscience awakened by a larger worldly experience which insists that she is already morally responsible and ought never to rest until she is legally so. Even within the apparently unimportant realm of clothes, there runs the same inevitable dualism of conflicting demands and impulses. The home, especially the home of today, permits a style of dress which is impracticable for the woman who works in the world. Men like and demand so-called fashionable clothes for their women folk and every normal woman desires her apparel to be pleasing in the eyes of at least one man; yet women know that the ultra feminine clothes imposed on them by fashion and masculine taste are disastrous for real work and make them appear ridiculous to the sober workaday world. They must choose, therefore, between lessened sex attraction and increased respect on the part of the men with whom they work. If the woman has succeeded in suppressing her own yearning for fluffy, frivolous clothes which she realizes make her appear more desirable to the men of her acquaintance, she has still to face the practical difficulties of obtaining any other kind. Women’s clothes, in accordance with the desires of men and the economic changes in women’s work, have evolved along the line of adaptation to a class which does no serious work, whose chief end in life is to attract attention and elicit admiration, and which has no responsibility for paying the bills. This type of dress is suitable only for the very wealthy leisure class and for the prostitute. When the professional or business women at- 6 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS tempts to keep herself clothed in simple durable garments that are ap¬ propriate to her work and her income, she finds that she is not free to follow the dictates of common sense. In order to get what she wants she must expend time, money, and thought quite out of proportion to the value of clothes in her life. For the working girl in store or factory, the problem is almost insoluble. For the average working girl, a good appearance is essential to keeping a job; yet the only clothes within her means are the most extreme, the most unsuitable for her work, and the least durable. She cannot afford to buy such clothing, yet she can never afford to dress sensibly unless she has unusual advantages in the way of skill in dressmaking or a home where clothes can be made. A woman wants to be beautiful in the eyes of men; she also wants to be sensible—sometimes. Men themselves demand of her both beauty and sense; yet the world in which she is forced to live at present makes the combination a difficult one. We now turn back to consider these same problems, but this time from the standpoint of society as a whole rather than from the point of view of the individual woman. On the economic side, the dilemma in which woman as an individual finds herself is expressed socially on a large scale both within the home and without it in conditions unfavorable to the welfare of the commu¬ nity. Under the present organization of the home, society must suffer the consequences of an institution carried on almost entirely by un¬ skilled labor. Women have fallen into their new role of consumers without knowledge and without any sense of responsibility. Consumption as carried on by the home is still a relatively uncon¬ scious performance 3 . Society must carry the burden of badly nourished families resulting in large part from women’s ignorance of food values, of poorly clothed families due to women’s ignorance of textiles, and of families that are sickly and diseased because the mothers know nothing of sanitation, hygiene or eugenics . 4 That society recognizes the weakness of its homes is seen in the fact that it is attempting to correct evils connected therewith by various laws and institutions. Rash consumption is met by such organizations as the Consumers’ League and by all sorts of newspaper and magazine campaigns calculated to educate women buyers. Pure food laws are designed to protect families from the ignorant mother as well as from 3 Ida Tarbell, The Business of Being a Woman, chap. III. 4 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, p. 192. THE PROBLEM 7 the corrupt dealer. To check the increasing amount of child delinquency, due in large measure to poor home conditions, society offers the juvenile court. The social settlement, the associated charities with visiting nurse and housekeeper, child welfare and household exhibits on a gigantic scale, baby health contests, schools for mothers, are society’s attempts to remedy the ignorance and unfitness of the mother in the poorer home. Preventive methods also are being worked out in schemes for an edu¬ cational system which shall insure some training in home making to every girl who attends public school. The difficulty is, of course, to contrive some method of giving her two preparations, one in general housekeeping and child training and another in some vocation by which she may earn her living, if necessary. Outside the home, likewise, society feels the results of untrained or half trained workers. The occupations entered by women are lowered by the lack of a professional attitude on their part. Women do not take their jobs seriously enough because they expect to marry. Usually they are not well trained for their work; but neither are they thoroughly trained for home making and society loses all around . 5 There is great waste involved in training thoroughly women who will drop their work in a few years; there is also waste in not training them; but the greatest waste of all, if society expects the home to continue to be efficient on its present basis, is in allowing them to marry, not only unprepared, but also frequently unfitted for home work by their experience in the shop or office . 6 The addition of a large number of unskilled and unorganized women to the industrial world has tended to render certain labor problems more acute and more conscious. Conditions which were bad enough for men come out more sharply when applied to women. The effect of long hours, of night work, of standing all day, of bad sanitary conditions, is more serious in the case of women, and the results for their children, if they are married, or for their future motherhood, are serious enough to force the state to protect them in a measure. If women must or will work outside of the home, society cannot afford to suffer because of conditions not essential to the work itself. Therefore, we see society’s consciousness of the woman’s problem expressed in the struggle for the shorter day , 7 in laws allowing time off and part pay before and after the birth of a child , 8 and providing means for nursing the child during 6 David Snedden, The Problem of Vocational Education. e C. P. Gilman, Women and Economics , p. 245. 7 Louis Brandeis, Women in Industry. 8 II. Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society , I, p. 21. 8 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS working hours , 9 in various regulations obliging employers to furnish seats, better sanitary conditions, and forbidding night work and certain dangerous trades. Only recently there came up before the school authorities of New York City as a live and burning issue the question of what was to be done with women teachers who asked for leave of absence to become mothers. That this situation, which was once merely a personal problem for some women, has now become a bona fide public question is made evident by the general interest on the part of the com¬ munity and by the amount of time and space given to its serious discus¬ sion both in newspapers and in public meetings. The lack of solidarity characteristic of women brought up in the individualistic home, the habit of many of them of living partly on the home and partly on their own earnings, their lack of skill, and the over supply of labor which they cause, have all combined to increase the wage cutting that has forced society to face the problem of a living wage and the necessity of getting working women to organize and to become conscious of themselves as constituting a class. The efforts of the Woman’s Trade Union League to increase the trade schools for girls and the agitation for a minimum wage law indicate the lines of attack . 10 Unequal pay for men and women is something that exists all along the line except perhaps on the stage. The most conspicuous effort to relieve the situation has been the legis¬ lation in New York City equalizing the pay of men and women teachers. In the ethical field, too, the woman who is in modern society and yet not of it, is forcing upon society the need for reconstruction along finer and subtler lines than can be reached by legislation. The woman whose social consciousness is formed still on the pattern of the isolated family is out of place and a stumbling block to a society that is struggling for a more inclusive, more highly socialized consciousness, and whose work¬ ing machinery is already social on a huge scale. Society finds its ends obstructed by the women who do not understand that they are responsi¬ ble as members of a larger social order as well as of the family. Ibsen, over and over again, presents this conflict. In An Enemy of the People , when Dr. Stockman decides to do his duty to the public at any cost, the reaction of the wife is, “ But towards your family, Thomas. Towards us at home. Do you think that is doing your duty towards those that are dependent on you?” The woman tends not to recognize the claim of those beyond the family circle . 11 Society gets concrete evidence of mid., p. 27. 10 Adams and Sumner, Labor Problems, Bk. I, 11; Louise Bosworth, The Living Wage of Women Workers , pp. 4-7. U W. I. Thomas, Sex and Society, pp. 223-234. THE PROBLEM 9 this in the difficulty of making women understand that their families cannot be made exceptions in cases of quarantine laws, other health regulations, or rules of the public schools. The attitude of the mother is likely to be, “My child must have this or that advantage,” rather than, “All the children in the school should benefit by a given improvement.” Her child must have good light and a seat that is comfortable even though the others do not. Brieux brings out a very extreme case of this kind in Damaged Goods when he makes Madame DuPont quite willing to break the laws, to bribe, to lie, to sacrifice the health, perhaps the life of a wet-nurse and her family, that her diseased grandchild may have every chance of recovery. This woman’s sense of social respon¬ sibility, far from including a lower social class, hardly extends beyond the limits of her own immediate family. The lack of respect for law when it conflicts with her ends, and the preponderance of the personal over the impersonal in the traditional homebred woman, also come home to society when she shows a tendency to cheat the impersonal corpora¬ tions such as the street car, railroad, or telephone companies, to defraud the government through the customs house or the tax collector, or to express her sympathy for criminals in foolish gifts. On the other hand, the invasion of women into the regions beyond the home has very naturally forced into prominence the interests for which women stand and has brought into sharp relief the incompati¬ bility of business for money only and municipal government for politi¬ cians, with the ends which women hold essential—the welfare of children and the health and happiness of human beings. The presence of women, therefore, in new and manifold places is a mighty influence in compelling society to consider how the values of the home can be reconciled with money making, power, and ambition as ends in themselves. The new activity of women is also an agent in the great movement against prostitution, one of the means by which society has become more and more conscious that prostitution must be dealt with scientifi¬ cally as one deals with the great destructive forces of nature. Prosti¬ tution is interrelated with almost every problem that concerns women, (a) The lack of eugenic consciousness and conscience, together with ignorance on the part of women concerning venereal diseases and the facts of sex, has increased the production of the unfit, the subnormal, the neurotic, on whom prostitution depends so largely for its supply. This alone forms a great social problem which can be reached only through slow educational processes and is being so reached. Men are, of course, just as responsible as women, but women must be instructed, or there 10 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS can be no relief, (b) As women come to consciousness, they make it very plain to society that one standard for men and an outlawed class of women, with another for all the rest of the women, is an impossible situation. If men are not able or willing to accept the code of physical purity which they have exacted of women, society as a whole must work out a new standard for both, (c) The conditions under which women work, the barbarous state of domestic service, the fatigue of the long working day and unsanitary surroundings, the less than living wage, all tend to make prostitution a more pressing problem and the question of prostitution reacts again to send home the need of better conditions for working women, (d) There is dawning upon the more enlightened the thought that after all prostitution may possibly be the logical corollary of a marriage system, based not on sexual selection, but on economic motives, and that sexual selection must be given freer play if prostitu¬ tion is to be wiped out and eugenic mating encouraged. This means a recognition of the immediate relation between prostitution and the economic dependence of women and a realization that, in some way, for the sake of women, marriage, and the home, the economically inde¬ pendent woman must be made compatible with a form of home and of marriage which is also approved of by society . 12 (e) Prostitution is influenced in some degree also by a number of factors which tend to make marriage later or more difficult, such as hard economic conditions, the greater effort required to support a com¬ paratively nonproductive family, as well as the increasing inclination of women for education, economic independence, and specialized work with the accompanying disinclination to take on the restrictions of matrimony. Life without marriage and children has been rendered more tolerable to women, thus enabling them to hold out against their own normal desires, by their discovery that home and companionship are still possible for them. Everywhere we find the unmarried woman turning to other women, building up with them a real home, finding in them the sympathy and understanding, the bond of similar standards and values, as well as the same aesthetic and intellectual interests, that are often difficult of realization in a husband, especially here in America, where business so frequently crowds out culture. The man who comes within her circle of possibilities is too often a man who has no form of self expression beyond his business and who, therefore, fails to meet her ideal 12 Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society , VII, p. 254—Pt. Ill, p. 316; IV, pp. 363, 409, 410; W. I. Thomas, Sex and Society , p. 245; Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age, p. 8; Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics , chap. iv. THE PROBLEM 11 of companionship in marriage. Thus prostitution is strengthened by the ease with which women are able to satisfy in part their needs for love and home while still retaining independence and to feel that a full life is to be lived even without marriage. One has only to know professional women, teachers, social workers, doctors, nurses, and librarians to realize how common and how satisfactory is this substitute for marriage. They have worked out a partial solution to their problem in that they have contrived to combine a real home based on love and community of interests with work in the world, but they have solved it at the expense of men and children . 13 (f) Another aid to prostitution results from trying to combine in marriage two people, one of whom has been brought up on the principle of absolute suppression of sex and horror of the physical; the other of whom has been accustomed from childhood to take sex and the right to its physical expression as a matter of course . 14 To the man of such a marriage, where he is incapable of bringing the woman to his attitude or of working out a new one acceptable to both, the prostitute will offer real temptation or a natural solution of the problem . 15 Bound up with the problem of prostitution, as well as with every other phase of the woman problem, is the question of divorce , 16 which is being agitated from one end of the country to the other. Law makers are urged to place fresh restrictions on the dissolution of marriage, with utter disregard of the complexity of the influences bringing about the increase of divorce. All the strains and tensions which meet in marriage today are part of the divorce problem . 17 All the stirrings and awakenings of the feminine mind, all the difficulties of adjusting the new order to the old, all the economic problems in which women are involved, the revolt against a double standard in morals, the growth of a finer, higher standard for married life on the part of both men and women, the feeling of the need for nicer adaptations, greater unity of interest, occupation, view of life, ethical theory—all these growing demands on marriage render divorce an inevitable phenomenon symptomatic of other conflicts and struggles for development. 13 Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex. 14 M. R. Coolidge, Why Women Are So, pp. 31, 329, 330. 16 Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society , VII, pp. 295, 296, 299, 300; May Sin¬ clair, The Helpmate. 18 Special Reports of the Census Office: 1867-1906, Marriage and Divorce , Part I, pp. 11 ff. 17 Havelock Ellis, Sex in Relation to Society , X, pp. 461, 462, 464; C. D. Wright, Increase of Divorce in the United States; Dewey and Tufts, Ethics , chap. XXVI, •6; 2. p. 603. 12 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 2. Typical Interpretations The mere bulk of the difficulties here presented, the fact that they are social as well as personal, indicates the presence of real problems. If all these signs failed, the voluminous literature on the subject would be sufficient proof. The older method of attacking the question was that of determining from an a priori consideration of the nature of woman, the activities, mental and physical, for which she is particularly fitted. This was often found to differentiate women from men along lines which seemed to the progressive woman to leave all the best things in the masculine division. The refutation, therefore, has been an effort to show that all these traits which were thought to indicate inferiority had been acquired in the course of ages of social inheritance. It has been quite thoroughly explained that the majority of the undesirable feminine qualities are as easily accounted for by environmental factors as by physical heredity, so that modern controversialists usually take for granted the possibility of almost any kind of development on the part of the individual woman, but they shift the point of emphasis from the question of woman’s capacity to that of her inevitable function. One of the more recent attempts to deal with the woman question in an entirely open-minded way throws around its conclusions the atmos¬ phere of scientific experiment by the use of a mass of empirical data on which with evident sincerity on the part of the writer, they are sup¬ posed to rest, but in reality it adopts the form of the older methods of attack in that it seeks to give the traditional limitations of women an a priori psychological basis. G. Heymans in his Psychologie der Frauen presents a theory of the difference between the sexes and the conse¬ quent type of activity for which each is fitted that is supported by his general psychological position and its supposed agreement with a mass of data which he has collected chiefly by questionnaires sent to coedu¬ cational schools and to physicians. The argument on which Mr. Heymans bases his conclusion of pro¬ nounced difference in mental traits of men and women runs as follows: emotion affects profoundly and undesirably the other mental processes; the average woman is more emotional than the average man, therefore the average woman exhibits to a much greater degree the undesirable effects of emotion. Emotion tends to narrow the field of consciousness and subconsciousness in that it gives undue weight to the emotionally toned ideas and shuts out the neutral or less emotionally toned ideas that ought to be considered if thinking and willing are to give sound and THE PROBLEM 13 well balanced results. The constant presence of emotional complexes in the feminine consciousness and subconsciousness as well as an inherent tendency to narrowed consciousness vitiates to a large extent all her mental processes. Because of her hyperemotionality she is inferior to men in the scientific realm where the required analysis and abstraction are too neutral in character to hold her interest; in every field of art her achievement is less than that of men, because of her limitation to the merely personal. Reason, any detailed logical process, is also quite impossible for the average woman because her emotions are hostile to its dry, patient analysis. Women excel only in morality and in the use of intuition, which they substitute for logic, and their activities should be limited to the home, the church, the sick-bed, and practical philan¬ thropy. In theory of any kind, women may not meddle because their emotions give too strong a bias to their thought. Mr. Heymans’ conclusions are so extreme that it would hardly be worth our while to criticize them, if it were not that his use of emotion and intuition is so typical of a common method of approaching the woman question. The point is, are the problems in which women find themselves involved today, due merely or chiefly to certain peculiar mental characteristics such as emotionality and irrationality, or is it possible that they are rather the result of the general social situation and that, in the light of more modern psychology, the difficulties raised by Mr. Heymans’ conception of emotion and intuition would disappear? A more careful examination and criticism of the two may serve to clear the matter. In the first place, Mr. Heymans is not clear in his use of the term intuition. First he identifies intuition in woman with sensitivity to fine shades of reality and the ability to adapt herself to varied and complex conditions. He also compares it to the flash of insight which is charac¬ teristic of genius. Then he likens it to the judgments or rather the unconscious estimates we make in the space world and to the weather predictions of old sailors. There seems to be a confusion here of two views: the first regards intuition as that which suggests the novel idea, the solution, the happy thought; the second treats it as a habit formed unconsciously by trial and error through a long series of similar experi¬ ences and applied without reflection. Heymans seems finally to adopt the second interpretation; at least, his statement of the disadvantages of intuition as a mode of thought indicates as much, for its great draw¬ back is that it does not fit the new situation, the real problem. This would, of course, be true of space perceptions and weather predictions. 14 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS If unfamiliar conditions were introduced, such as mountain regions for plains, the old habits would break down entirely or partially. But if he makes of intuition a habit formed and used unconsciously, he can hardly allow it to account for real insight, fine adjustments, and the appreciation of the subtleties in life. The former is, at any rate, not the intuition of genius, nor the intuition for which women are so often com¬ plimented and it is just the new situation, the unaccustomed complica¬ tion, that calls for this flash of inspiration. The difference between this latter form of intuition and logic would be that intuition gives the clue and logic carries it out consciously, tests the soundness of the idea. It may be then that women incline to fail in the patient, logical testing of their ideas and prefer a blind trial and error method, but in neither use of intuition is there to be found a substitute for the painful and laborious process of thinking, without which nothing dependable can be accomplished and for the loss of which no amount of insidious flattery can compensate. Women may as well face the truth, that, if reason is a sex limited character, all the intuition in the world will never help them. They are doomed. Even the limited field which Mr. Hey- mans assigns to women ought not to be left to the mercy of intuition. There is no sound reason why the family, the home, the sick, and the poor should not be handled with as much rationality as possible. Like¬ wise the supremacy in morality which is so freely granted to women, can refer only to a primitive type of morality, for woman in her dislike of principles, laws, and abstractions clings to the concrete act and never comes to the point of realizing its meaning. Her morality is not conscious morality and she is, therefore, on Mr. Heymans’ premises, never moral in the full sense of the word . 18 Emotion is as ambiguously treated as intuition. There is no definite statement as to what is meant by emotion, but one is led to infer that Mr. Heymans adopts a position similar to Wundt’s and considers emo¬ tion a compound of elementary feelings. He makes no attempt to analyze any of the emotions or to show how the simple feelings are combined in them, nor does he indicate that emotion has any funda¬ mental connection with the rest of consciousness. It is a sort of hanger-on of ideas, of no value in particular and often a great hindrance. Some¬ times it seems to be located in the object and he speaks of women as being interested only in emotionally colored objects; sometimes it seems to be located in the subject and, as they are in a perpetual state of emo¬ tion, women are said to throw a feeling tone about any object they 18 Dewey and Tufts, Ethics , p. 179. THE PROBLEM 15 'consider. By greater emotionality, he means not greater irritability, as Lombroso insists, but the fact that women do react with real emotion to weaker stimuli than does the average man and react with more intense emotion to the same stimuli. He makes no difference, then, in the quality of the emotion felt by men or women but seems to be main¬ taining that women actually possess greater emotional capacity, which exhibits itself in a feeling response to comparatively insignificant stimuli as well as in a more intense appreciation of the more important ones. He gives no basis in his theory for regarding the emotion of women, qua emotion, as inferior to that of men; there is merely more of it. However, he does limit the emotions of women in that he finds women peculiarly susceptible to certain kinds of emotion. But this he attributes in turn to their greater emotionality which favors certain feelings and reduces sensitivity to others such as the more intellectual and, therefore, less intense emotions. This vicious circle merely goes to show his own confused conception of emotion. Since emotion is practically the same in character for both sexes and feminine emotion need not be treated under a special heading, the simplest way to avoid the unpleasant consequences of Mr. Heymans’ position is to adopt another, and, as it seems to the writer, a much more satisfactory view of emotion. If one takes the standpoint of functional psychology and views mind as the best device for the adaptation of the organism to the environment that evolution has secured, then it is possible to organize consciousness around the act as the center, and emo¬ tion, no less than perception and reason, falls into its own place and be¬ comes functional instead of remaining the extraneous, useless, semi- pathological phenomenon which the older psychologists tended to make of it. In habitual action there is no emotion, but whenever consciousness is involved, there is some degree of it present as a necessary stage in the act. Functional psychology explains emotion as the expression in con¬ sciousness of the organic reverberations that occur whenever two or more impulses clash . 19 Emotion is the danger signal, the reporter of some kind of tension in what has been a smooth-going process. The sudden rush of feeling indicates the value to the self of the various imperiled ends, and measures the importance of making some kind of adjustment and the relative weight which is to be given to the con¬ flicting impulses. Reason comes in after emotion has died down to work out in cold blood the means whereby the ends indicated by emo¬ tion may yet be obtained and action made possible. This removes 19 William James, Psychology, Vol. II, chap. xxv. 16 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS the stigma from emotion as such, for if it is a factor in every conscious act, lack of rationality detected in the act cannot be laid at the door of emotion. Emotion is not rational and it has to subside before reason can operate effectively, but for instrumental psychology, the two are not opposed; they are rather different stages with different and equally necessary functions in all conscious action . 20 Emotion which is not followed by reflection is likely to end in a futile hit-or-miss response, but reason which is not preceded by the emotional evaluation of all the elements involved in a problematic situation, is equally likely to overlook results that ought to be part of the con¬ sciously sought end. Failure to be emotionally sensitive and respon¬ sive means failure to see some of the real values at stake or to take account of them in our plan of action. The great reformer, the man who stirs society to the point of doing something, is not necessarily a person of greater rational powers than many a contemporary. He only feels more, that is, he is more finely tuned emotionally; he responds more sensitively and detects values to which other people are blind. Such a conception of emotion clears up the confusion which one feels in Mr. Heymans’ use of the term. At one moment the impression is given that emotion is a mental state which persists in women uncon¬ ditionally, ready to attach itself equally to every object. If this were so, there seems to be no reason why it might not as well attach itself to analysis and abstraction as to anything else. At another time, emotion is a quality of objects and women are susceptible only to the emotionally colored stimulus. If that were the case, there is no a priori reason why the concrete and the personal should in themselves be more emotional than the abstract and the general. He has no means of fixing emotion and he runs into this kind of a circle: women are not scientific because they feel no emotion for analysis and abstractions because of their emotionality. Part of the difficulty, too, is in considering analysis and generalizations as ends in themselves. Men may enjoy the process, but they are working for some particular end to which analysis and abstrac¬ tion are a means. If a woman has a strong impulse in any given direc¬ tion, towards any end, and that impulse is obstructed, she will feel emotion. The fact that the removal of the obstacle involves analysis will not prevent her from evaluating the end emotionally, although it may prevent her from obtaining it. Analysis and abstraction may appear in any field whatsoever, where difficulties in action arise, and with reference to any sort of end or interest. 20 James R. Angell, Psychology. THE PROBLEM 17 Emotion likewise appears in any field when there is an obstructed interest, and when it functions properly, far from being a hindrance, it is a stimu¬ lus to the analyzing and abstracting that follows. The charge that fairly might be made is that women have failed to develop the reflective process and that emotion with them seems too often to be just emotion which does not lead to any rationalized expression. Certain ends are emotionally evaluated and the thought of them as already obtained is set up in a vague, abstract way as something highly desirable and some¬ thing which may come to pass somewhere, somehow, but there is no actual attempt to work out concrete means for obtaining the ends in question. With men, on the contrary, the emotion is much more fre¬ quently counterbalanced by the attempt to do something. The rational part of the process is given its innings. The whole matter might be put this way: emotion appears to be functioning more normally in men than in women. The history of women offers reason enough for this condition so that there is no need to assume an inherent abnormality in women with regard to the ordinary course of mental process. Any theory, like that of Mr. Heymans, which is based on sex differentiation so drastic as to forbid women ever to become complete human beings and thereby to render their work in any sphere of action ineffective, is not likely to be received as a solution until it is forced upon us by facts that are unalterable. Turning to some of the presentations of the woman question offered by women themselves, we find them agreeing usually on the welfare of the child as the determining factor but differing widely as to the limita¬ tions this puts upon the mother. Four rather typical attitudes are repre¬ sented in the positions taken by Olive Schreiner, an English woman, Ellen Key, a Swedish woman, and two American leaders, Ida Tarbell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Olive Schreiner presents the question from the standpoint of useful labor as essential to healthy life. She insists that there must be com¬ pensation for the contraction in the traditional field of feminine labor; that, in addition to childbearing, which also tends to decrease as an occupation, every woman ought to have work that is useful to society, not only because men are overburdened, but because women degenerate without it and become unfit mothers of the race. No restrictions should be put upon the work of women, since there is no scientific basis as ye t for correlating sex with peculiar aptitudes, and since, if such sex differ¬ ences do exist, they will adjust themselves in time. People do not 18 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS persist for any length of time in doing that for which they are not fitted and which others do better. The only evident sex differentiation is in connection with the reproductive process. From the part the woman plays in reproduction she does have a different set of experiences, a different attitude, and a peculiar interest in certain sets of values. From this fact it follows that, while she will probably have no special contri¬ bution to make in the fields of abstract and impersonal labor, she will bring to bear a decidedly different point of view in the handling of certain social questions. For her own development, she must have her share in the common labor of humanity; for the sake of the race, humanity must have the benefit of her peculiar contribution. Mrs. Schreiner does not show how in the concrete case our present form of marriage and the home is to be adjusted to the present industrial system, although she implies that the woman who is bearing and rearing children should not have' other work to do during that period. Miss Tarbell tries to combine a reactionary with a progressive solu¬ tion and deals with the concrete rather than with theory. She takes the home and the industrial world as they are and finds that the diffi¬ culty lies in the fact that women have failed to grasp the possibilities of their situation. The form of their work has changed: they have become consumers instead of producers, but consuming is just as much a business, just as important to society and affords as much development as other work which takes women beyond the home. The problems which are agitating women are largely illusory; they arise from the fact that women, having failed to see or develop their own field, have gone over to the men’s and find it impossible to combine men’s work success¬ fully with their feminine temperaments and maternal functions. But personal ambition and the joys of individual freedom and independence have too often overcome their sense of duty to the nation and they have not infrequently decided for the men’s field against marriage and mother¬ hood. Miss Tarbell is on dangerous ground when she admits that mother¬ hood and the present form of marriage do involve sacrifice of freedom, independence, and attractive work. The question always arises whether there is not something wrong with marriage, if it does mean actual sacrifice of the woman. The increasing individualism of the age is not likely to recognize as a duty an office or function which is admitted to be a check on the development of the individual. The particular work to which women are limited, according to Miss Tarbell, is assigned by nature; that is, the bearing and the rearing of THE PROBLEM 19 children and the making of a home. Nature does not apparently object to the work’s changing from production to consumption, so long as it is carried on in the home. Nature does not really limit the work then, but only the place where it may be done. Miss Tarbell finds a natural sex limit, however, in the emotional nature of women which is suppressed or killed in the hard and complex dealings of business and industry. The superior gift of women lies in their emotional capacity; therefore, if this is crushed, they show no peculiar genius but are usually mediocre when compared with men. This amounts to saying that our present social organization outside of the home does not afford an environment favorable to the best development of women—does not get the best they have to give. There would be room here for the question as to the eternal fitness and rightness of such a system, the possibilities of altering it to suit women, and the doubt as to its being especially well adapted to men, if it has such a deadening effect on the emotional life. From Miss Tarbell’s point of view, the woman’s business is to make a dollar go as far as possible, to understand the markets, to be a scientific housekeeper, to solve her own labor problem—domestic service—to bear children and train them into good citizens, or if she has no children or has sent them into the world, to be responsible for the homeless child and his environment. There is no lack of occupacion in this program, but it leaves unsolved the question as to the work for which the unmarried woman shall be prepared. Certainly training will be required for the tasks indicated above and certainly the unmarried woman will have to work, as long as she remains unmarried, at the ordinary work of the outside world, while many a woman will be forced to combine bread¬ winning with her maternal duties. The fact that the childless woman ought to care for the homeless child will not provide her with means to do this unless she too works at a man’s job. Miss Tarbell hints at the desirability of keeping the daughter in the home so far as possible by training her in scientific consuming so that she saves enough in her wise expenditure to pay her way. This, of course, would hardly work after all the mothers are so thoroughly trained that they are already saving every possible cent and it would never prevent the appearance of the homeless class who must depend entirely on themselves. Economic dependence, says Miss Tarbell, is one of the illusions agi¬ tated by the uneasy woman. The woman who takes up her task in marriage is performing work just as useful and necessary to society as that for which her husband is paid. She is an economic dependent only when she voluntarily assumes that relationship and lets slip her 20 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS end of the business partnership. Miss Tarbell ignores the question of how much economic independence is constituted by the value of the work actually done and how much by the recognition of that value on the part of society in money payment. She resents the attitude of women like Mrs. Gilman who think that the world’s progress up to the present is chiefly the work of men, and that women need to take up their share in life. She insists that there has never been any serious inequality in the sexes in actual practice and that women have suffered from no graver injustices than men. “There has never been any country, at any time, whatever may have been their social limitations or political disbarments, that women have not ranked with the men in actual capacity and achievement .” 21 Aside from the fact that such a state¬ ment needs detailed exposition, it is rather incongruous in connection with her arraignment of the modern woman in the United States as having failed not only in the man’s field but in her own. The modern woman, at any rate, is inferior to the man, for, through her ignorance of the economic questions involved in consumption, she has helped on the high price of living, the trusts, graft, adulterated food, and the like; through her neglect of her children, she has raised up a generation of dishonest politicians, unscrupulous business men, unpatriotic citizens; through her narrowness and false training she has made dress a moral, economic, and aesthetic problem for the nation, and her handling of domes¬ tic service has been injurious to home and servant. If the modern woman is really guilty of all these sins, descendant though she be of the noble woman of the past, a possible explanation might be that she has on her hands an insoluble problem and consequently has been unsuccessful all around. Ellen Key, while she agrees with Mrs. Gilman in many respects, differs on what has come to be the center of the conflict. They are at one on the necessity of economic independence at all times; they coincide in regarding the child as the supreme end of all social activities, but they differ fundamentally in what they regard as the essential relation of effective maternity to the occupations of the mother and in their general attitude towards the meaning of sex for life. Mrs. Gilman tends to minimize sex, to limit it to the bare field of reproduction, and to leave all the rest of life to that which is common, social, higher than sex. She also maintains that if domestic work is to be put on a modern business basis, the system which allows each woman to manage all the various forms of it for her own individual household will have to be replaced by 21 Ida Tarbell, The Business of Being a Woman , p. 225. THE PROBLEM 21 cooperation and specialization. This would mean that each woman, if she worked at all, must have a specialty; regular work which she would be obliged to combine with motherhood in place of the heterogeneous household labors which she used to combine with it. Ellen Key, on the contrary, with a broad philosophic attitude, a lack of dogmatism and sex-antagonism which gives her a decided advantage over the more hostile Mrs. Gilman, insists on the final worth and importance of sex in its highly developed forms and on the necessity of maintaining sex distinction. While she still believes that the mother should retain economic independence through the state, she also thinks that the greatest opportunity for a woman to develop all the possibilities of her personality, especially those qualities which are peculiarly hers, lies in her work within the home; that if she is to function most effectively she must not try to combine any profession or outside occupation with motherhood. She seems to be influenced to this view by several consid¬ erations : one, the tendency of the modern industrial and business world to crush out the emotional life and make a sexless creature out of a sen¬ sitive woman; another, which is the positive side of the same point, is her feeling that the spaciousness of home life, the absence of rules and system, the room it affords to grow and live as well as to work, the greater meaning given to its work through the personal relations in¬ volved, all of these promise a finer, better rounded self for the woman who casts her lot there; and, last and most important consideration of all, is the need of the child for the education and training that a mother is best fitted to give and which in the giving enriches her more than any other work she could possibly do. Mrs. Gilman’s reply to this is that a home is still a home even though it be separated from the business of cooking and serving food, cleaning, laundry work, and the like. The atmosphere of the home could be maintained as well by a mother who had one particular kind of work which kept her away from the home certain hours in the day, as by one who worked for the same number of hours at cooking or cleaning within it. There seems to be truth on both sides. Ellen Key emphasizes the tendency of the modern world to crush its workers, to take out of them the joy of life and to deprive them of the leisure in which to cultivate ideal interests. But this condition, if it means ruin of womanhood, is surely not the best environment for men. There must be something wrong with work that unsexes the worker. Mrs. Gilman on the other hand emphasizes the unprogressiveness of domestic economy; the waste involved in maintaining a separate cleaning, cooking, and washing 22 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS plant for every individual family; the folly of perpetuating what must necessarily involve amateur service in any department so important as food and sanitation; the wisdom of training each woman for some kind of expert service to be exercised for many families instead of half training her for amateur service in one family. As to the training of the child by the mother, it is a question that, could be settled only by experiment and to which many exceptions might be found. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Gilman is not making a very startling proposal when she advocates partial care of the child by trained nurses even in his babyhood. Our present educational system takes the child from his mother for several hours a day at least, beginning with his fifth year. The children of the wealthy are cared for a large part of the time by trained nurses. Unless the mother devoted her entire time to the baby, leaving all her duties of consumer and housekeeper to hired help, he might very well receive more time and attention from a nurse whose entire business it was to give babies scientific care. If the mother is to be an expert in child culture, is to undertake all the education and training of her child, she will have occupation enough without attempting to be an expert housekeeper and buyer. The question narrows itself then to the advisability of child training by a few specialists or of attempting to make specialists of all mothers. Is it better to put. the child under the supervision of the expert from babyhood for a part of the working day and leave to the mother the general influence which she is able to bring to bear through her personality as a whole, the training that is given through love and daily association, as is the case now after the child enters the school; or, is the mother love and under¬ standing of the child so superior in itself as to compensate for lack of special skill or natural fitness? Experience must give the answer to questions like these. Every position here noted indicates a conviction either of a lack in woman’s personality or a lack of harmony between the nature of woman and the modern world, which is unfavorable to the development of her personality. Mr. Heymans unintentionally tries to prove that the woman is quite unfit for any share in a civilization that has reached the stage of reflective consciousness. Miss Tarbell emphasizes the differ¬ ence between the greater unity and restfulness of the personality of the woman of the past as compared with the uneasy split-up consciousness of the modern woman. Both Miss Tarbell and Ellen Key point out the tendency of the world outside the home to crush the essential womanli¬ ness of the woman, yet admit a certain amount of sacrifice of personal THE PROBLEM 23 development as necessary to the woman in the home. Ellen Key recognizes this so keenly that she advocates minimizing the sacrifice by such means as the vote, economic independence through motherhood pensions, and work at the end of the childbearing period. Mrs. Gilman lays greatest stress on the individualistic narrowness of the woman who is confined to isolated home life and the bad effects on society of the unscientific methods of feeding, clothing, training a family and keep¬ ing a house clean under the regime of the woman who is not on a par with modern society intellectually, while Olive Schreiner gives a general picture of the dwarfing of the woman’s personality in terms of her diminishing usefulness as a worker. II. THE WOMAN MOVEMENT AS PART OF THE LARGER SOCIAL SITUATION 1. Personality and the Present Social Order Such a survey as we have just made leaves little doubt as to the reality and seriousness of the chaotic conditions of which the “ uneasy woman” complains. The bare fact that there exists in society at the present moment a large class of idle women; a still larger class of women working in homes at enormous waste of time, energy, and efficiency; a third and comparatively small class whose work, though satisfactory, is of such a character as to interfere with marriage if they desire it; and a fourth class whose work is rendering them unfit for anything else, is sufficient evidence in itself that women are not realizing themselves through their social relations in any complete or harmonious way; but rather are buffeted about at the mercy of these same social relations. The selves which women bring to bear upon the struggle seem to be overwhelmed by a situation that is too large for them. They are con¬ trolled by these external conditions instead of realizing themselves through them. The case is not different with the modern man. The woman has no monopoly on conflict and disharmony. He, too, is swamped by the system in which he finds himself. He, too, is being made, willy-nilly, by the relations in which modern business and industry are involving him; yet he is not expressing himself consciously through these relations. One has only to recall the struggle between capital and labor, the way in which life with its ideal interests is being crowded out by the pressure of the economic machinery not only on the laborer but on the man who is chained down to money-making, the frequent incompatibility of home and family with the work for which the man is fitted by nature, the aliena¬ tion of the father from his home responsibilities through lack of leisure, to realize that the unsatisfactory character of the woman’s life is but a conspicuous part of a wider and more basic situation which involves men as well. This thesis is based on the contention that the incompatibilities and oppositions sketched above are genuine and are the particular expressions of a more basic conflict existing between the self, the personality, of the modern man and woman, and the present social situation through which this self has not yet succeeded in expressing itself because it is not yet sufficiently conscious of the social character of that situation WOMAN MOVEMENT AS PART OF LARGER SOCIAL SITUATION 25 or of the method through which control can be secured. The realiza¬ tion, that we have as yet no social control and few personalities, either masculine or feminine, sufficiently socialized to cope with the modern world, is being forced upon us most conspicuously in the terrific conflicts arising from the indifference of the form taken on by business and in¬ dustry to the actual content involved . 22 Industry and trade, as carried on in the Middle Ages within a single family, a small community, or even in the craft and merchant guilds of the larger towns, was a social institution controlled to a large extent from within by natural social impulses. A man had no business relations which did not involve relations of an immediate personal character. He was in direct contact with the people for whom he worked or who worked for him and he had a self, a personality, formed by these rela¬ tionships and adequate to them. The man who made shoes depended immediately upon the man who shaped iron at the forge and exchange was likely to be made in kind, or the members of a large, more or less isolated family produced among themselves all the necessaries of life. Economic and intimate social relationships were inextricably mingled, so that even where there was no clear consciousness of their significance, there was no danger of the natural emotional controls which arise in personal situations failing to operate. Modern business and finance, on the other hand, has become so complex, so impersonal and abstract in its organization that it seems to involve only economic values. In form it is purely economic, in content it is still as social as ever it was in the Middle Ages. The changes that have brought all this about have been so tremendous and so sudden, the introduction of machinery and the consequent centralization and systematization of industry have so depersonalized it that the human beings involved in it have not yet had time to develop personalities that are equal to the complexity of the system. The world today is confronted by this kind of a problem: Men are being forced to act under enormously widened social conditions in which their relationships to their fellows have multiplied increasingly while becoming correspondingly difficult to perceive as social, because of the growing abstractness of the business medium. Yet they bring to this enlarged social activity only the selves that are formed on the feudal pattern—neighborhood, family selves too narrow to respond socially beyond a limited and obviously social circle. In the narrower personal connections, natural conflict of egoistic and social impulses furnish a 22 G. H. Mead, Lectures. (Unpublished.) 26 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS rough control; in the new and unrecognized social relations, there is nothing to call up social tendencies. Egoistic motives easily pre¬ dominate. A man who would as soon lose his own life as injure a child he knew personally, can, without ever being conscious of the fact, injure hundreds of children and indirectly an entire community by feeling no responsibility for their employment in his factory through his superin¬ tendents. The man in the world of business, therefore, is not constituted a self, a person, a moral and social agent, by the individuals at the other end of the system. He does not make their motives and attitudes a part of his consciousness, thus bringing all the elements of the situation within his grasp. He uses his connections with people for his own benefit while remaining oblivious to their social character. The maxim for this procedure is “business is business.” The results are social as well as economic, but only the economic factor is recognized and con¬ sciously intended. Hence we have these unlooked for social elements actually altering our civilization but absolutely uncontrolled because external to the consciousness of the individual or group of individuals that is responsible for them. This means the loosing of a great stream of social activities which as social are without rational guidance. No control of modern life is to be hoped for short of a complete consciousness of the social character of business and industry, and the development of a self large enough to answer to the new environment with the sub- sitution of thoughtful control for the instinctive controls of personal contact. In our modern associated charities organization we have an illus¬ tration of one attempt to substitute thoughtful for emotional control. To leave relief work to the chance that suffering will make an immediate appeal to some one’s sympathy is a method that does not work in such complex social conditions. It leads to abuse from the point of view of the reliever and the relieved. So the effort is made to awaken a perma¬ nent consciousness of social responsibility and obligation towards the weaker or more unfortunate members of the community which will result in a steady, reliable relief fund managed in a semi-scientific way in place of the haphazard and indiscriminate giving that follows the harrowing of one’s feelings by chance personal contact with pitiful cases. The system is doubtless far from perfect and our theory may condemn it altogether in time, but at least it is a thoughtful application of theory as far as we have acquired any. Similarly, a few department store managers and factory owners have awakened to the fact that it is the part of intelligence to recognize that WOMAN MOVEMENT AS PART OF LARGER SOCIAL SITUATION 27 people are factors in their problem and that ignoring the human side will bring its own revenge in failure to solve their own problem of eco¬ nomic efficiency in the management of their business. The social con¬ tent is constantly bobbing up and making trouble. Employers are beginn¬ ing to realize that to overcome these conflicts they must understand the point of view of their workers and try to get the workers to understand theirs,to make their relationship human as well as commercial. A similar conflict is in progress between the form of the family, which is still feudal and individualistic, and the content, which is as widely social as society itself. Men and women have tried to believe that the family has not changed through the centuries, that it is still the self-centered, self-supporting, well-nigh independent unit of mediaeval times, that within its limits are produced the necessities of life so that the least change in its form would mean death and destruction to its members. The content of the family has always been recognized to be social but there is marked blindness to the actual range of its social relations. They are still conceived of as limited more or less to its immediate members. Just as society has ignored the fact that business has any content but money-making, so it has maintained its belief in the family as a sacred and unchanged institution. As a matter of fact, the family has undergone a complete revolution of all its activities and its center of gravity has been shifted to the factory, the brewery, the bakery, the delicatessen shop, the school, the kindergarten, the depart¬ ment store, the municipal department of health and sanitation, the hospital, the library, the social centers and playgrounds, and dozens of other similar institutions, while the control over the activities represented has likewise departed to the outer world. Far from being an independent unit, the family exists by virtue of its relations to these social organiza¬ tions, it is formed by them and in turn reacts upon them, but the cry of “ heresy,” “sacrilege,” goes up whenever anyone suggests that an intel¬ ligent appreciation of the change in the content of the family might result in a more suitable form since no amount of superstitious worship is going to restore the mediaeval situation. Just what, then, is to be expected in the case of the average woman whose only recognized environment is the home? Logically, she must be the kind of self that answers to the form of the family. Just in so far as society has been able to preserve the feudal family, it has also succeeded in preserving the feudal woman and until within the last few years all women have been theoretically of the feudal type. The feudal lady was the center of activity in her household which included 28 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS a small community. She was the great producer and knew personally every handmaid, farmer, herd boy, or retainer who assisted her in keeping her family clothed, housed, and fed. Her personality was organized on the basis of all these relationships, none of which were abstract or impersonal, even though they were not yet reflectively con¬ scious. As far as they went these connections were all real and effective. She responded actively to all of them just because they lay within her control. She was mistress of the situation, a working part of the social scheme in which she found herself. How does she compare with the modern woman in the home? There is supposed to be no difference except that producing is replaced by con¬ suming. But just this change makes the fundamental difference of connecting the modern woman with a new world of production, increasing her relationship to outside institutions, infinitely, and at the same time depriving her of any effective control over her own actions. How can an individual woman exert any essential control over consumption while production is in the power of a huge system managed collectively ? 23 It is useless to ask women to try to express themselves through their work as consumers so long as they stand alone outside the system in which production takes place and without the technique through which it is controlled. It is the same with all of the woman’s interests. She may satisfy the emotional side in love for her family, but that love will not find any complete, active, and intelligent expression except as she is enabled to exert an influence through organized society. Just the fact that she loves her husband and children will give her as an individual no measure of control over the environment that surrounds them. The home is no longer individualistic and the control over its interests is no longer within the power of the individualistic woman. Unless she becomes an active member of the larger social order and adopts its socialized technique, she must be content to be battered this way and that by social forces which are external to her. In terms of self-consciousness, the woman, like the man, is not as large as the situation in which she acts, or exists passively. The rela¬ tions of the family to the larger social institutions are accepted in a perfectly abstract way. No work that she could take up outside the home would be more impersonal so far as recognized social content is con¬ cerned than her occupation as consumer. She treats it as purely eco¬ nomic, oblivious of the part played by human beings at the other end of 23 Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, chap. iv. WOMAN MOVEMENT AS PART OF LARGER SOCIAL SITUATION 29 the transaction. She is buying for her family and in that sense what she does has meaning for her, but she is quite unaware that her act is social also in its effect on the producer, the middleman, and other consumers. Even so the factory girl finds her work social in the sense that it helps to keep her family together in comfort. She works for them, but she has no idea that her work has any other social value. It is just business. The woman in the home, then, as well as the man in the world, has not a conscious self built up with reference to all the social relations by which she is affected and through which she in turn affects society. The chief difference is that the man does have some control since he has learned the power of organization and cooperation and can express himself through the ballot, whereas the woman, even if she were to become socially conscious, would be at the mercy of the machine until she had acquired modern methods of expression. On the formal side, the woman lacks social technique; on the content side, she lacks a socialized self. Neither is effective without the other, as man has proved in using a social technique which did not develop out of a social self. In relation to her immediate family, the woman’s attitude is social but not widely social enough to correspond to the methods she would have to use if that attitude gained a socialized expression; that is, in order to make effective her plans for her own children, she would have to combine with other people and socialize her ends so as to include the welfare of their children. Her self would neces¬ sarily be such as to respond to the interests of all children, to under¬ stand the attitude of all fathers and mothers. If she adopted the social technique only and used just enough of her understanding of other people’s motives to bring about purely selfish ends, instead of working for an end which really represented the interests of all concerned, she would have ignored a vital element in her problem and sooner or later the solution which she had made for herself would break down. On the other hand, with regard to her economic relations to society, she has neither effective social technique nor social consciousness of any kind. There is nothing in her business dealings with store or factory to call out instinctive social attitudes, to awaken her conscience or restrain her egoism. When she patronizes the bargain counter or the cut-rate butcher, she does not realize that what seems to her purely an advantageous business transaction is a social affair; that her acts are affecting other people and will in turn react upon herself and family. She feels no responsibility for the trust or the sweatshop, and as an isolated individual she is not responsible since she is not free and has no power to change conditions. 30 WOMAN MOVEMENT EROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS It is this last point which shows us why the modern woman is in worse straits than the modern man. The woman because she is allowed to remain passive, because she has no part in the system through which some control is possible, develops no sense of responsibility for any of the results which accrue. She takes good and bad with the same absence of any positive grip on the situation. She may avail herself in a small selfish way of any advantages which the system brings, but she makes no attempt to exploit these seemingly abstract relations on a large scale for her own gain as men do. Passivity is the keynote of her existence because society has striven to keep the form of the home and the woman in it as they were in the Middle Ages even after the transforma¬ tion that came with the industrial revolution. The woman can never become a full-fledged, rational human being, nor can she be held responsible for any of the conditions in modern life until society ceases to consider it essential to womanliness that she receive passively the impact of all the currents of present-day organized existence. As long as woman has no part in directing the forces which determine the family, herself, the least detail of her domestic life, society is retaining the lady of chivalry at the expense of conscious motherhood and is encouraging the immediate impulsive reactions of the simple situation at the price of deliberate reflection and social consciousness which alone are effective under the complex conditions of today. Just as the great labor movement is trying to bring the laborer to conscious¬ ness of his needs and possibilities, and society to awareness of the advan¬ tage of conscious labor, so the woman movement has before it a two¬ fold task: first, to make women conscious of their relations to a social order, second, to show society its need of conscious womanhood. 2. The Twofold Conflict in Lives of Women Woman’s position today is more difficult than man’s because she is peculiarly involved in a double conflict: first, the conflict of the smaller self with the enlarged social environment, second, the conflict of the methods, standards, values of the mediaeval world, preserved particu¬ larly through the woman and the home, with the methods, standards, and values dominating the modern world and the man within it. He cannot live in the world his new economic organization has created and maintain actively the attitudes of the mediaeval system, but he likes to think these are still kept alive in woman and the home just as he likes to preserve different species of animals which are becoming extinct under civilization. The difficulties begin when his industrial system will WOMAN MOVEMENT AS PART OF LARGER SOCIAL SITUATION 31 not allow women to remain in the home and they are forced to attempt the task which the man has long since abandoned of reconciling the two sets of attitudes, since there is no class to whose shoulders they can shift the task of keeping alive the traditions of the older world. The first of these conflicts as the fundamental one in which men and women are equally involved is less likely to be recognized for what it is although it supplies, in the writer’s opinion, the final justification of the woman movement as well as of socialism; but the second con¬ flict is so obvious and so disastrous in its results, the standards and methods of the Middle Ages are so evidently incompatible with the standards and methods of the modem world, that it is usually the one seized upon by feminists as the ground of the need of the woman move¬ ment and is likewise the one picked out by anti-feminists as the basis for most of the opposition. It really amounts to this, that the woman movement is opposed on the same ground that is used to check every change in the social order—loss of values. People are afraid to let their values be tampered with, and, in this case, having identified women from the beginning of time with sex and family, they dread, in any alteration in the family or the woman’s activities within it, the possible injury to contents which are of supreme worth to humanity. This is only right and wise as a measure of protection against sudden changes that tend to let drop values too precious to be lost, and any theories which the woman movement advances will have to meet that test, will have to make clear that what they propose will either increase human values or at least not sacrifice any of them. The resistance and prejudice which the most necessary and beneficial alterations in the established form of society have to meet is, however, largely instinctive and irrational and is merely part of the general diffi¬ culty which attends the personal as contrasted with the nonpersonal problem. A question involving personal relations is so much less objec¬ tive, so hard to isolate because of the manifold elements that enter into it, so difficult to subject to the test of experiment, so bound up with the emotions and the very innermost core of the self, that only a highly developed form of consciousness can hope to hold the personal problem away from itself long enough to subject it to analysis and objective consideration as it long ago succeeded in treating the nonpersonal problems of the physical world. The social sciences, then, in the very nature of their subject matter would be expected to lag behind the physical sciences in coming to consciousness of their methods and in getting control of their material, particularly in cases where the central 32 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS problem of sex, the most complex and intimate of all, is concerned; while the natural tendency of the human mind to identify form with value and to attribute to the unchanged form the very possibility of the continued existence of value would show itself peculiarly stubborn with regard to woman bound up as she is with the sex life. There is a curious paradox in the fact that human beings who believe firmly in the evolution of physical forms cling instinctively to the notion of a given social form as something which must remain fixed since its persist¬ ence is the only tangible evidence that the value it represents is being maintained. Worth, satisfaction, is not seen or touched, but only felt. How, then, shall one be sure it will not escape unless the forms in which it lodges be kept intact? However, neither the system of the philosopher nor the fears of the plain man can make a static world out of one whose essence is change. In looking back we are continually reminded of forms that once seemed essential to satisfaction but have long since been replaced by new forms better suited to the growing content, answer¬ ing to the old, yet embodying new and richer values. We can also point out instances where society clung to the form after the content which possessed the value had slipped away, lost temporarily or per¬ sisting in unacknowledged forms under other names. The Greeks had such an experience when in their zeal to safeguard the joys of the hearth and the ancient purity of woman, they so isolated and dwarfed her that she failed to be interesting to her cultured husband. He was no longer able to find joy or satisfaction in the marital relationship. The Greek lady had ceased to be the kind of person who could charm him and he satisfied his desires in the brilliant prostitution or the roman¬ tic attachments to young men which characterized the most flourishing period of Greek civilization. Normal sex values disappeared tempo¬ rarily to a considerable extent because of insistence on a particular form which destroyed instead of preserving the relation which was the real source of value. Similarly, the emphasis of the church on the marriage ceremony as the one form through which the relations between the sexes can be expressed, has tended to create the feeling that the form of mar¬ riage is the essential factor and sufficient in itself to insure the worth of the content. So convinced are many people of the inherent value of the form of marriage that they even desire laws to prevent the disso¬ lution of a marriage which has lost all the content that made it sacred or beautiful to the man and woman concerned. Even the worth of a child is not clearly differentiated from the form of connection existing between its parents, as is apparent in the efforts required to get recogni¬ tion and protection for illegitimate children. WOMAN MOVEMENT AS PART OF LARGER SOCIAL SITUATION 33 Thus human nature holds fast to the old and tried forms and is destined to see good more clearly in the past than in the future. There has never been a Golden Age in the Now and Here, and the Good we have let slip could be recovered only if we were to go back to the ancient forms that held it. Hence we find a Rousseau urging a return to a state of nature whose simplicity will bring back the purity, the sincerity, and the primitive worth of human relations. Likewise, the modern world, struggling to keep what was most precious in the Middle Ages, has tried to make women and the home the vehicle by which to carry over into the present the chivalry of men, the piety, industry, and self-sacrifice of women, the unity of the family, which were enjoyed under the forms of the feudal period. The altera¬ tion in industry that came with machinery and the factory system annihilated all obvious social content that had been part and parcel of life in the guild and in the household system. This new form looked very bare and impersonal, stripped, as it seemed, of all but economic interests. Even the work had less in it for the individual workman, when, instead of producing a whole article, he made only a small part of it. Government, too, when contrasted with the bonds of personal loyalty and the sense of protection and responsibility that held between lords and retainers, kings and knights, was a cold affair, little fitted to kindle the warm emotional response that is given to a person to whom one owes allegiance. With the overthrow of the great mediaeval church much that was rich and concrete and personal, much of color and glow died out. Protestantism was a bit stern and colorless, although it sym¬ bolized a principle of ultimate worth to the free individual. With so much that had made life full and beautiful slipping away, it is small wonder that the world held fast to the lady of chivalry and the mistress of the household. There is a belief that by keeping the home as nearly as possible in its isolated individualistic form and holding the woman within it to go through the motions of her ancient activities, the values of the feudal family and the virtues of feudal womanhood will be maintained uncor¬ rupted by the world outside. Women, in response to this demand, have striven valiantly to make themselves exponents of all the virtues that humanity feared to lose and of which they were popularly supposed to be the carriers. But since a virtue is only a name for an efficient and approved way of acting in a given social environment and since the virtues required of women were ways of behaving in a feudal situa¬ tion, the result has been that women have retained them only as ab- 34 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS stractions. Virtue has its being in action, yet no effective action is possible when one is confined to certain set forms which have no organic relation to the conditions under which action must take place. One cannot act virtuously while ignoring all the factors that make up the background of the action, for one’s act will then be entirely irrelevant. No virtue in woman excited so much praise as her industry, particularly her gifts as a spinner and weaver of cloth; but if industry means some¬ thing more than just being busy, if it means intelligent, useful occupa¬ tion, then it is vain to expect the modern woman to be industrious as the feudal woman was within the limits of her home. The woman who tries to fill her time with just the housework that is left to the modern home is too often manufacturing work that were better left undone and is certainly wasting time and getting indifferent results when compared with the skilled and expert work that is done under the methods of specialization and organization used by men. Charity is another of the ancient virtues of women which is today the bane of the scientific social worker. The woman who wishes to be truly charitable will have to go out of her home and her private life either to make a study of conditions herself or to join the organizations which are making such a study. Chastity, too, has become an empty form now that we have become conscious of the social responsibility for prostitution. No woman can possess chastity as an active quality who is not informed on the facts of sex and helping to give other women and all children the chance to retain their purity. What has been asked of women for the last century is that they in some fashion embody virtues which are nothing but abstract universals. Woman must either be virtueless because she is forced to be negative and therefore positively injurious to society, or she must be not only permitted but aided and encouraged to work out in new forms effective and approved ways of acting with reference to the actual situation in which she finds herself, forms which will possess a real content to be valued. What women must seek if they are to fulfil the spirit of society’s demands is selves that respond to the social values in the seemingly im¬ personal relations of the home to the wider community just as they have responded in the past to the more limited social values of the feudal household. In the reflectively conscious woman, men will find not only the content they feared to lose but an infinitely enriched content; new values not experienced before; the same woman but with a larger, sweeter self, more charitable, more understanding, just because she is able to represent sympathetically the interests of so many more people, just WOMAN MOVEMENT AS PART OE LARGER SOCIAL SITUATION 35 because she is an active center of so many more vital relations, just be¬ cause she is mother to all humanity and her power to love and protect is infinitely enlarged since her self is now as large as her world. The continued existence of the values centering in women and the family depend, therefore, first, on an adjustment of the external condi¬ tions, a change in the form of the home and in the methods of the indus¬ trial world such that the man and the woman may pass freely from the one to the other without such violent changes of attitude as to disrupt the harmony of the self and render the personality necessarily incon¬ sistent, but ultimately and essentially, on the passing of women from the individualistic family self to the self that corresponds to this wider, more complex society of which it must form a more or less conscious and active part. The degree of social consciousness which humanity shall be able to attain depends directly on the number of individuals who succeed in becoming conscious of the full meaning of all their social relations, who recognize to the full their dependence on a social situation for the form of self they develop, and who increasingly multiply the number of social attitudes or selves which they are capable of main¬ taining towards these complex relationships. When a majority of the members of a society become thus socially conscious, we shall have con¬ ditions favorable for the control of social problems since all the elements involved will be explicitly present in the consciousness of the majority of individuals. But this stage of social development can never be reached as long as any large class of people, such as its women, are permitted, encouraged, or forced to exist in an unreal world wilfully maintained for that purpose. Nor will the selves of men, in so far as they are formed by their relations to women, ever reach the full possi¬ bilities of selfhood while women remain only partially self-conscious. III. A SOCIAL THEORY OF THE SELF AS THE GROUND OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT The clash of home and outer world which so disturbs the feminine mind today, as well as the struggle of labor and capital, might be avoided to a large extent by mere change in the external working conditions, by a lessening of the hours of labor, by a minimum wage, by improved hous¬ ing and sanitation, by a scientific cooperative housekeeping. But in the last analysis, the basic conflict on whose solution even the improve¬ ment of external conditions depends, the conflict between the narrow self and the wide social environment, can be adjusted only on the sup¬ position that personality or selfhood is made, not born, and that a less conscious form of personality may evolve into a more conscious form under conditions which are neither mysterious nor absolute but can be understood and made use of. The criticisms and analyses of the modern woman which we have examined all point to a personality inadequate to the life into which social and economic changes have plunged her. If the crux of the matter lies here, the fundamental purpose of the woman movement must be to correct this state of affairs by helping to bring into being a more conscious womanhood and by arousing society to an awareness of its need for such a womanhood. To believe that this is possible is to imply certain things about the nature of selves, person¬ ality, or self-consciousness (the terms are used interchangeably in this discussion). If we conceive of the self as something which is given, static, present from the beginning both in the individual and the race, or, what is practically the same thing, as something which develops absolutely, reaching its full growth regardless of any known condi¬ tions, then we have put the self outside of our own world, have made it mysterious and unknowable, and by so doing have given up the hope of social reconstruction, for there is no reconstruction of society without a reconstruction of selves. We can get no hold on a self that is static nor on one that develops absolutely. If social problems are ever to be solved like other problems in our world, selves must be thought of as existing in grades and degrees, evolving gradually in the individual and in the race, with certain definite conditions of growth which can be discovered and used. When we understand how consciousness develops into more and more adequate forms, then we have turned our once mysterious and unknown phenomenon into yielding, pliable material for a genuine social science. Control of physical objects was impossi- SOCIAL THEORY OF SELF AS GROUND OF WOMAN MOVEMENT 37 ble as long as physical facts were accepted as fixed, mysterious, or abso¬ lute. Just so, social control is impossible as long as the self remains an unknown quantity. If the knowability of the self is assumed, there follows the necessity of indicating at least the type of condition which determines its appear¬ ance and growth as we should do in the case of the physical fact . 24 There would seem to be a clue in the very general tendency of modern thought to conceive of the self as social in character . 25 The relation between ego and alter is quite generally recognized as essential by philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists alike, yet, even such thinkers as Royce and Baldwin, who have done so much to show the dependence of the self on other selves, assume a consciousness of self arising, first of its own ac¬ cord, i. e., absolutely, and then projecting itself into others who there¬ upon are perceived as selves likewise. This is to make the self social in name only. It remains just as mys¬ terious and unapproachable as before. There is no real interdependence of self and other. To escape from the absolute self, to make the self genuinely social and thus to keep it within the range of possible social control, we are convinced that we must take the final step proposed by Professor Mead of conceiving the self to appear and develop as the result of its relations to other selves. We must postulate a social environ¬ ment as an absolute prerequisite for consciousness of self and assume that the self thus developed continues to take on more highly conscious forms according to the increasing extent and complexity of the social relations which it actively maintains . 26 According to such a theory, it is the necessity of dealing with a social environment that brings the normal human being to a consciousness of himself as over against other selves. The self which he acquires must, in the nature of the case, be no richer nor more complex than the other selves in relation to which it 24 No attempt is made in this thesis to present a theory of personality. The writer merely wishes to indicate the type of theory that seems to her to be essential for a solution of the existing conflicts. For a consistent and detailed statement of such a theory see later references to articles by Professor George H. Mead. ^William James, Psychology , chapter on Self; J. M. Baldwin , Mental Development; C. H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order; Josiah Royce, Psychology , chap, xii; Studies in Good and Evil , chaps, vi, vii, viii. ^George Mead, “What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose?” Journal of Philosophy , Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1910, Vol. VII, pp. 170-180; I he Mechanism of the Social Consciousness,” ibid., Vol. IX, No. 15, 1912, Social Con¬ sciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning,” Psychological Bulletin , Vol. VII, pp. 397-405. 38 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS is formed and developed. Physical environment alone is incapable of supplying the kind of stimulus requisite for calling out the social reaction and it is just through the social attitude that the human being finally becomes aware of himself. In dealing with inanimate objects attention can safely confine itself to the object; there is no necessity of the agent’s being aware of his own attitude towards it. Attention is naturally at home with the stimulus and unless it is compelled by some¬ thing in the situation to turn in upon the subject it tends to remain there. The necessity on the part of the subject of becoming aware of his own responses as such, arises in dealing with the social object. Only when one human being is acting as stimulus to another have we a situation where the behavior of the agent must in time become as impor¬ tant for attention as the changes in the social object to which he is react¬ ing, for only in such a case does his own act determine the stimulus to which he will have to respond. The man who survives in a social group must attend to the form of his act sufficiently to know what effect it will have on the person towards whom it is directed; that is, his own act must take on for him a meaning in terms of the sort of reaction it is likely to call out in the other and he must be able to interpret and antici¬ pate the response of the other in the earliest stages, while it is still mere gesture or attitude, in terms of the action he must make in reply. In just this sort of interaction of selves are found the common roots of self-consciousness and consciousness of meaning. Both require a situation in which attention is forced to the side of the response and in which two attitudes are necessarily held in suspense within one mind, a proposed action of the agent and the probable response of another or others into whose place the agent is able to put himself in imagination. It is this necessity for playing many parts, for building up and taking over the selves of others, that gives the individual the basis for his own con¬ sciousness of self and it is the connecting of his own suspended act with the attitude of the other by means of some gesture which represents it that he gets his first grip on meaning. The earliest and most imperative demand for the child is that he shall adjust himself to social objects. His knowledge of himself is not nearly as important for him as his knowledge of the adults around him on whom he depends for survival. He must be able to put himself in their places, to take on their attitudes, to play their parts, to get enough of an idea of them as persons that he may in a measure anticipate their responses to his own acts. All this necessarily precedes his discovery of himself and conditions it. Take as an illustration the case of a child SOCIAL THEORY OF SELF AS GROUND OF WOMAN MOVEMENT 39 who reaches for the largest piece of cake at a party. The action is a perfectly natural one and there is no innate reason why it should be restrained. But the child is not an isolated being, he has been brought up within a family circle where father and mother have taught him that taking the largest piece is wrong and selfish. As the child instinc¬ tively starts to take the cake, there may come a check in the sudden realization of what his mother’s attitude would be. This may be sym¬ bolized in his own mind by a visual image of her frown or by words of reproof that she has used. Whatever the content of consciousness, it serves as a symbol for his inhibited action; that is, he gets a conscious¬ ness of meaning and momentarily he takes on the self of his mother and feels her disapproval of the act he was about to perform. If he had rushed into action with no inhibition, there would have been no chance for con¬ sciousness of meaning or awareness of self, but in holding on to the two attitudes, his own instinctive one and the opposing attitude of his mother, he experiences the sort of tension and contrast that leads him to feel one of the attitudes as his. The emotion aroused by the thwarted desire has time to be felt as his emotion and the very fact that he has a symbol which enables him to keep his action in the attitude stage gives him the prerequisites for the meaning relation. He may feel that he is one with his impulsive tendency and in that case the self of his mother will be set over against him as an other, but if he is a very well trained child he may identify himself with the mother attitude. In the latter case, he becomes a new self looking with scorn upon that other self which would have been guilty of such an act. In either case, his sense of self is constituted and enlarged by this taking on of the ideally con¬ structed self of another. Consciousness of meaning, then, and consciousness of self are possible only as one first builds up a consciousness of the meaning and selves of others to whom one must respond relevantly in order to maintain existence. To become conscious of self is to become conscious of one’s attitudes, that is of the meaning of the act one does not carry out and of the emotion that accompanies it as one’s own. The individual is enabled to do this only by first becoming aware of the attitudes of those about him and transferring them in turn to himself as interpretations of his own actions and their probable effect on others. The meaning of his own acts comes to him in terms of the social reactions they call out. The condition of attaining to self-consciousness is, therefore, a social environment, and the degree of complexity or the completeness of self- consciousness attained will vary with the complexity of the social organi- 40 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS zation of which it is a part. A simple form of society with simple prob¬ lems in which necessary social attitudes are comparatively few, unorganized, and simple, will build up undifferentiated, narrow, selves whose meanings and emotions are limited to a narrow range of objects and which are not highly conscious of those meanings as peculiarly a part of the self. Out of this background of social interaction and dependent upon it, reflective consciousness is evolved, from the first grasp on meaning that comes with the use of symbols, through the gradually acquired skill in the analysis of the static nonpersonal object, to the point where analysis is turned upon the thinking process itself. At this point, thought recognizes the part it has played in constructing the very object which thus far it had only analyzed. Now, consciousness not only reflects, it understands the method of its reflection and thereby gains its control over the physical environment. But all this appears to be an abstract process and is so considered. Its social character and its relation to concrete personality are for the most part ignored. Here we have a purely intellectual form with a perfectly definite though unacknowl¬ edged social content; a process that is constituted by the relations between human beings and that is one with the very process whereby personality is built up. As long as the intellectual side of the self remains in this abstract form, control of the nonpersonal object may be perfected; but the final goal will be reached only when, through recognition of the social character of these seemingly abstract, intellectual systems, the process by means of which the self comes into being and develops is also recognized and personality takes its place in the mobile, reconstructable world. What really happens is, not samuch that we gain a new control over the social object as distinct from the physical, as that all objects are seen to be social and subject to the same sort of control that hitherto has been limited to physical, or at least to nonpersonal objects and systems. The discovery of the social character of even the intellectual processes and the relation of these processes to the building up of a self gives a breadth and comprehensiveness to personality that it has never before attained in history. At a very early period it is possible for conscious¬ ness to take on the form of a self through building up the selves around it and playing various parts without having reached the point where it is capable of subjecting to analysis the self thus attained. It is also possible for consciousness to advance to the stage where it can turn in upon itself and dissect the self in a highly sophisticated way without even then realizing that it is part of a social process and that its intel- SOCIAL THEORY OF SELF AS GROUND OF WOMAN MOVEMENT 41 lectual activities, however expressed, are just as much a part of the per¬ sonality and just as social as the feelings or the will. The final step of seeing the self as a process whose law can be stated and of finding in the self and in all social relations material that admits of reconstruction and scientific handling, just as in the case of supposedly nonsocial objects and relations, marks the highest point of growth in self-consciousness as yet developed in our experience. All this is not to deny that the human mind supplies an element which must always be an unknown quantity, that after all it is the potentiality which is capable of developing self-consciousness, but it is to say that the material which this potentiality requires for its unfolding is social in character. When external conditions change the sweep and nature of social relations so rapidly that the social character of many of them is obscured for the time being, it will be possible to get a situation such as we have outlined in the preceding section, where the individual has not yet caught up with his enlarged environment, is using social relation¬ ships in a purely mechanical way, and is not constituted a self by them, and where the only cure for the disorder and unrest thus produced lies in the possibility of the individual’s finally waking up to the social character of the new connections and building up another and more perfectly conscious self to correspond. Reform, even of external con¬ ditions, must receive its impulse from selves that have become reflec¬ tively self-conscious to the point of realizing the social nature of the apparently abstract relations which are crushing the individuals at the other end of them and of deliberately assuming towards these relations a personal attitude. It is evident that such a theory of self-consciousness implies a positive difference in the type of personality that it is possible to develop at differ¬ ent periods in history. Not that great personalities are not to be found in every period, but it nevertheless remains true that the individual or the society that is conscious of the method by which personality is built up and is aware of the social content of all activities and all systems has the power to go farther in realizing all the possibilities of personality than the individual or the society which is unconscious of these implica¬ tions. With the former, the process is controlled and voluntary; with the latter, it is necessarily haphazard because it is only partially con¬ scious . 27 Just how far the individual shall go, then, in the direction of reflectively conscious personality cannot rest entirely with him or his own genius but must depend to a large extent on the period in which he 27 Dewey and Tufts, Ethics , chap, xviii. 42 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS lives. The process in time, which through increasingly complex social conditions and accumulated experiences finally forces the individual into the center of the stage yet ultimately connects him once more with his fellows, is a very gradual and prolonged affair, but whoever is born in the later stages gets the benefit of all that has preceded. The intro¬ spective attitude which was slowly and painfully acquired by the race, the power to analyze process and method as well as objects, which came only after centuries of conflict and effort at adjustment, can be gained easily today in part of the individual’s lifetime because he is born into a world where scientific method is an established habit. In the attainment of personality as in the pursuit of science, the individual stands today on the shoulders of past generations and may begin where they left off. Only on such a basis is there any happy outcome to be looked for in the conflicts between the individual and society which are overwhelming us today. If the Greek philosopher, or the mediaeval lord, or even the thinker of the Kantian period reached the limit of human development in the direction of self-consciousness, then there can be no salvation for us. Nothing short of the birth of a new man with a higher type of personality can offer a solution for the social evil, the woman problem, child labor, and industrial slavery. History shows that this is not only possible but actual. We are, in fact, seeing the birth of a new type of consciousness as far in advance of the consciousness of the period of the French Revolution as that was in advance of Greek consciousness at its best. It is, of course, not possible to indicate perfectly differentiated and isolated levels of consciousness in history. One period melts into another. The later development is foreshadowed in the earlier and the earlier is present in and alongside of the later, but it is possible to point out in a general way, at least, three fairly distinct and characteristic stages in the development of consciousness of self appearing within the historical period. There is first the type of consciousness wdiich we shall designate by the term objective consciousness of self , which colors Greek life and thought, although with the Greeks and through the Middle Ages it is already in the process of evolving into the second stage, which may be labeled subjective consciousness of self, and reaches its climax in Kant and the personalities of the French Revolution. Lastly comes what we have termed the period of reflective or social consciousness of self which is just now making its appearance and is indicated in the tremendous increase of social responsibility and awakening of social consciousness in all classes and countries. Although a great European SOCIAL THEORY OF SELF AS GROUND OF WOMAN MOVEMENT 43 war is still a possibility for our civilization, the attitude of public opinion towards such a war, at least in this country and Britain, could hardly have been comprehended a century ago, so greatly have our feelings of common brotherhood and interdependence increased and extended. Greek consciousness, even at its best, illustrates the objective charac¬ ter of the earlier forms of self. It deals marvelously well with the world of objects and ideas. It is at ease with universals, with truth, reality, beauty, virtue, all located in an external world, but it is never quite fully aware of itself and its own importance. The Greek thinker was eternally seeking truth, wisdom, and reality but he seldom thought of looking for them within. Their validity would necessarily lie in their independence and objectivity. So strong is this tendency of earlier Greek thinkers to find truth only in the objective that when they did begin to turn analysis towards the subjective and to discover the relation of the individual mind to the objective world, they felt themselves to be destroying objective validity, for recognizing the part played by the private experience of the person usually meant for them a giving up of the universal, hence the real, and ended in scepticism. The bottom seemed to drop out of reality for the Greeks when they were forced to admit the part taken by the particular mind in knowledge. To prevent this fatal result, they often removed the stigma of particularity and rein¬ stated the universal by making the rational element in the individual not a personal or private affair but part of the world reason. The Greek type of self, therefore, tended to become a split up metaphysical object, made up of the various absolute qualities in which it shared, and valued for their sake. Personality was not a supreme category for the Greeks as it is for us, nor was the individual necessarily conceived of as having certain inherent rights and value just because he was a human being. It was possible in consequence for the Greeks to present as ideal the high-minded man of Aristotle 28 who not only may but even must ignore entire classes of people because they are supposed to have no share, or a very small share, in the universal qualities which give the self its worth and reality. Despite the fact that Aristotle calls man “ a political animal” and recognizes in a measure his innate social impulses, his state leaves mechanics, artisans, husbandmen, slaves , 29 children, and even women , 30 as alien, unassimilated elements, lacking in virtue almost entirely or else possessing a subordinate variety quite different from that n The Nicomachean Ethics , Bk. IV. 29 Politics , Bk. IV, chap. ix. 80 Politics , Bk. I, chap. xiii. 44 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS of the real citizens. “The only parts of the state in the strict sense are the soldiery and the deliberative class.” “The citizens ought not to lead a mechanical or commercial life; for such a life is ignoble and opposed to virtue.” With such a theory and such a state it is made impossible from the start that the finest and most highly developed person in it could ever become conscious of more than a very limited number of social relations, for his relations to all the working classes are held to be abstract, necessary, it is true, but not implying any social connection. Ability to put himself in the place of the artisan, to feel sympathy for his ends, would imply a lowering of his own standard of virtue. There could never be, by any possibility, real community or feeling of social dependence between them. Likewise, with his domestic relations. There is no reciprocity of relationship between him and his wife and children. It is a one-sided affair, dependence on the one side, authority on the other. They are formed by him but he is not formed by them. They depend on him, he is independent of them. We cannot conceive of him as attempting to look at any question from the child’s or the wife’s point of view, however much it concerned them, or of feeling that it was as important for him to be able to put himself in their places as for them to understand him, because to do so would be to assume a less rational, less virtuous attitude with which he could have nothing in common as long as he maintained his own superior character. Plato, on the other hand, one would say at first thought, surely was a modern. There are very few of our up-to-date theories that are not suggested in the Dialogues. Plato’s treatment of the position of women is startlingly advanced. He makes very little sex distinction in work and education. Women stand on an equal footing with men in the Republic as far as their innate abilities permit. Plato, nevertheless, illustrates the failure of the Greek mind to appreciate the meaning and value of personality, to estimate properly the innate worth of the individu¬ al, much less to comprehend the essential character of social relationships. Women, as a sex, it is true, are not slighted in the scheme of Plato, but human beings, men and women alike, are disregarded. The citizen, first of all, exists for the republic not the republic for the citizen. Again the reality lies in the universal, the idea of the state. Beyond Greece, moreover, are only the barbarians. The essential connection with other races is not yet felt or understood. They are merely not Hellenes and exist chiefly for purposes of war. So with the lower classes. While Plato does not explicity exclude them from citizenship as does Aristotle, he ignores them. They form no part in the consciousness of the guardian SOCIAL THEORY OF SELF AS GROUND OF WOMAN MOVEMENT 45 or warrior class. Social divisions are cut and dried, classes are distinct. Relations are external and artificial and not based on mutual interests and understanding of each other’s attitudes and desires. The socialized person would have been an impossibility in Plato’s Republic, nor, had he existed, would he have been considered a desirable citizen. Jowett sums it all up when he says of the Republic: “The citizens, as in other Hellenic states, democratic as well as aristocratic, are really an upper class, for although no mention is made of slaves, the lower classes are allowed to fade away into the distance and are represented in the indi¬ vidual by the passions. Plato has no idea either of a social state in which all classes are harmonized, or of a federation of the world in which all nations have a place .” 31 A personality developed under such conditions could never come up to our ideal of the wise man whose ability to take on the attitude of many people and classes of people enables him to bring together within one consciousness all the various points of view, all the impulses and tendencies that have to be considered if a satisfactory solution for social problems is to be reached, and furnishes him with the background requisite for a real judgment on the problem in question; the man for whom all relations are social, even the most abstract, and for whom no social relation, however familiar or habitual, is without need of perpetual reflection and reconstruction; the man whose self includes so many and such varied “others,” and who is so aware of his dependence on these “others,” that it is impossible for him to act without reference to them. At a period of history where the first level of consciousness predomi¬ nates, where truth, reality, and order, so far as valid, lie outside the con¬ sciousness of the individual, where the individual’s thinking has no power over the real, and ideals and standards are of no value unless given apart from human agency, control must of necessity be external. Authority comes from without, as in the case of the child, in the shape of custom, law, ideas, religion, the Logos. If this extraneous authority breaks down under criticism and there is nothing at hand to substitute, chaos ensues. All human beings must have gone through this stage, phylogenetically and ontogenetically. But at any level of racial history there will always be found some individuals who never pass beyond the childlike condition, for whom authority must always be external, and to whom complete self-consciousness never comes. Moreover, women as a class are likely to remain at this level longer than men, since they are sub¬ ject to a twofold restraint: that by which men are bound, and the author- n Dialogues of Plato , Jowett, 3d ed., Vol. Ill, p. clxxii. 46 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS ity of husbands and fathers as well. Their activities and social relations in consequence are doubly restricted. Transition from the first to the second level of consciousness begins to be very apparent in Greek life when the breaking down of the social fabric turns the attention of men from the state, which no longer offers a refuge and an ideal, to the individual himself as the source of his own happiness and salvation. Reason and philosophy fail to satisfy the spiritual needs of the people and eventually religion in some sort is sought as a salvation and guide. Christianity reinforces this emphasis on the individual as the center of experience. The entire universe becomes simply the means whereby mankind works out salvation. If God may reveal himself to the humblest, then every individual is poten¬ tially a channel of revelation and his experiences may attain to objective validity. Emotion and feeling, the most essentially subjective in character of all mental faculties, are for the first time conceived of as having worth in themselves. True, the formalizing of Christianity into the dogmas of the church and the preservation of the authority of the church tended to confine revelation to an historic period, but personality has been recognized, the possibility of the reconstruction of the self and of society acknowledged in the doctrine of the new birth, and the external authority of the church condemned by the very theory on which it is built. The increase of commerce and industry, the discovery of new coun¬ tries, the sudden advance of science, and the dissatisfaction with the barrenness of scholastic thought, all indicate the steady movement away from the dogmatic authority of the objective to the claiming of objective validity for the experience of the individual as such. The revival of learning, the Reformation, new theories of the state advanced by Hobbes and Locke, the philosophies of Descartes, Leibnitz, Locke, Hume, and finally Kant and Hegel, the French Revolution, all mark the individual’s discovery of himself and of his supreme importance in the universe. Kant takes the last step of carrying the entire world of objects over into the subject which becomes the constructive center of the world, the seat of law and order. The tendency is, therefore, to rob external authori¬ ty of all claim to validity since nothing is valid which does not spring from the very nature of the self. But, as each self is equally the touch¬ stone of validity, and as there is no essential bond uniting any one self to any other, there seems to be no way of bringing together this world of atomistic individuals unless authority be vested in some external source and the selves be voluntarily limited for the sake of harmony SOCIAL THEORY OF SELF AS GROUND OF WOMAN MOVEMENT 47 and the safe enjoyment of partial freedom. Typical was the difficulty which Hobbes faced. There is no natural' basis for the state when individuals are all laws unto themselves and exist originally as inde¬ pendent atoms. It is easy to perceive that each atom has rights, but its rights will be obtained only at the expense of another atom’s rights. Rights of individuals are as antagonistic as they are inherent and valid, and satisfaction for one individual’s rights must needs mean suppression for the equally valid rights of the next one. Rights are thought of as independent entities, as hard and fixed as the individual himself, and they are treated as if they enjoyed some kind of absolute existence apart from their exercise in the actual social institutions of the time. Their dependence for reality on a social order and concrete social organization is overlooked to a large extent. About the time of the French Revolution, the contagion begins to reach women and following in the steps of the men a few groups here and there demand the rights that inhere in every human being for women also. The leaders of the Revolution give them no encouragement. Special limitation by God and Nature is the ground on which women are for¬ bidden to appeal to the doctrines on which men base their claims. Never¬ theless, the appeal is made by women like Olympia de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft, and is supported by such men as Condorcet and John Stuart Mill. It is not strange that the woman movement in its first stages followed the general line of development in philosophical and social doctrine and voiced the same cry for abstract rights inhering in women as individuals apart from their relations as mothers, wives, and daughters. Theoretical recognition of their equality with men and of their natural rights similar in every particular to those possessed by men seems to be the goal of their efforts. The fact that rights to be real and actual involve the concrete freedom of realizing to the utmost their fundamental relations to society, that they mean not bare, abstract assent but definite social channels through which they become effective and thus real, that the supreme right is the right to function normally as an organic part of the social whole, is not yet conscious with the majority of the progressive women any more than it is with the men. Emphasis on bare rights apart from obligations and responsibilities leads us to a species of anti-social, man-hating individualism on the part of the pioneers in the woman movement. The satisfaction they demand for their own rights seems to involve taking away from others. If women gain rights, men must lose them. There arises an atmosphere of hostility; every woman for herself and against every man. This finds expression in 48 WOMAN MOVEMENT EROM VIEW OE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS declarations of rights such as the one given out by the first Women’s Rights Convention in the United States, in 1848, beginning, “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” All of this only reflects the principle of such a theory as that of Hobbes in which there is no basis for the union of individuals except through external authority and in which common ends are inconceivable because each man can seek only his own satisfaction. Just this conception of the individual was used to oppose the entrance of women into wider fields of activity long after it had ceased to be applied to men. The interests of women and of men were assumed to be mutually hostile and exclusive. If society were to be maintained in harmony, women must voluntarily submit to having their rights curtailed. The third level of consciousness which is but now being glimpsed by the advance guard of civilization is that of the recognition of the social character of all experience, cognitive as well as emotional and affective. Methods of control have been worked out in the realm of the sciences, but they were supposed to concern objects quite different from those involved in social interaction in the obvious sense. Now that abstract intellectual processes of science are seen to be built up like the rest of the self through social consciousness, the entire social organization and the selves within it are perceived to be equally objective and real, and to offer problems that can in time be solved by a reflective process which is not alien but flesh of their flesh. 32 It is beginning to dawn on humanity that selves are made, not born, and that it is possible to exert some con¬ trol over the conditions which determine personality since they can in a measure be stated. People are realizing that the kind of selves that are found in the slum districts of big cities make undesirable citizens and will continue to do so; that punishment as such does not change the criminal; that prostitution is in fact a social evil and that its existence under any regulations, however strict, is a direct influence on the formation of the selves of the community and that it cannot be isolated because, so long as it affects part, the whole is formed with reference to that part. The third level sees that there was no basis for the state in the con¬ ception of humanity as composed of atomistic individuals; that if we start with separate units we can never hope to put them together. 32 C. H. Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order, chaps, v, vi; Josiah Royce, Psychology, chap, xii; J. M. Baldwin, Mental Development, Vol. II, Bk. I; Josiah Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, chaps, vi, vii, viii. SOCIAL THEORY OF SELF AS GROUND OF WOMAN MOVEMENT 49 The foundation of the state is the inherent social impulses and organi¬ zation of the individuals that compose it. There need be no contradic¬ tion in the seeking of a common end by many individuals. When ends are conceived of as objective and real, not as mere subjective states of satisfaction, it is evident that they must be sought in common if they are to be completely realized. Individuals are so interrelated and dependent that each one depends on the rest for obtaining his own ends. No person can seek his own health as his object excluding all reference to the health of his neighbors. Unless health is a common object of desire in a community and is sought for by each person with regard to all others, no one individual is safe from infection. The same is true with reference to protection and education of children. No one can be sure of gaining for his own family any advantages which conditions do not make secure for the majority. If my neighbor is not safe, I am in danger; if his children can grow up in ignorance, mine also run a risk, for individual fortunes come and go. Rights, too, are recognized as concrete functions in an organized society dependent for existence upon that society and are no longer thought of as absolute entities inhabiting an absolute self. My rights, unless realized along with those of other people through the forms of a social order, are nothing but abstractions. There is no doubt that humanity is actually seeing the birth of the third stage of consciousness, but men are very slow to realize the full import of its social character. They continue to accept their social relations unreflectively, as they always have. They are conscious of the more obvious ones in a way, but many that are not so apparent they fail to recognize as social at all. What a comparatively modern move¬ ment is the study of the child and his relationships to parents and teachers from his own point of view! Here was one of the fundamental social relations, taken as a matter of course for ages, and only in our own times subjected to reflection and brought to consciousness. The habitual, automatic character of sex relations is only now being shown up in the efforts to spread information regarding the most ordinary, normal phenomena of sex life and in the blind resistance such efforts are meeting in many quarters. Eugenics marks the birth of sex conscience with regard to the unreflective exercise of a basic social impulse. The begin¬ nings of organized efforts to understand the social evil are likewise the result of this attempt to comprehend and bring to light all the hidden meanings and far-reaching influence of the sex instinct. All this is far from being conscious with the mass of people and still further removed is any adequate consciousness of those far-reaching social connections 50 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS which are obscured by distance, lack of direct personal contact, and the abstract character of the economic interests involved. But even here awakening is promised in such phenomena as labor unions, the Con¬ sumers’ League, the Trade Union League, laws for factory inspection and the protection of women and children who labor, workmen’s com¬ pensation acts, and the birth of a new political party which tries to represent this consciousness. Full self-consciousness will never be approached, however, until all social relationships are recognized and understood in all their bearings and the self of the individual is consciously built up with reference to them. A father is only nominally such if he has not a personality which corresponds to and is formed by his relation to his children and consciously so. A man may have begotten many children, but if he does not know them, never sees them nor has any connection with them, he is not a father for he possesses no father self. Just so, when our con¬ sciousness of social relations becomes more sensitive and complex, we shall not know what it is to treat any social relation abstractly. The man to whom we sell or from whom we buy, the man who works in our factory or for whom we work, although we are removed from direct personal contact and the relation seems to be purely economic, will be for us an “other” and our relationship to him will be known for what it is, a truly social affair, and will correspond to and constitute a phase of our self-consciousness. In the meantime, partially unconscious social relations or relations whose social character is not perceived, continue to affect the individual and society whose repsonses to them are entirely inadequate. Where an individual is treating a social situation abstractly as if it were purely economic for example, he is bringing about certain results which he does not foresee, which are not part of his conscious purpose, and which are therefore entirely uncontrolled in their reaction upon himself and upon society at large. Since the social factors in the situation are overlooked, since there is no social self corresponding to them, no evalua¬ tion of them, the self and society are being determined in a purely accidental and external way with regard to them. Internal control will be possible only when the self that reacts to the situation is conscious of the real nature of all the relations involved and presents a self organized with reference to them. On the first level of consciousness, control is bound to be from the outside in the form of arbitrary authority. Thought is not sufficiently aware of its own method to feel any assurance even over against the SOCIAL THEORY OF SELF AS GROUND OF WOMAN MOVEMENT 51 physical object which it still accepts as something given. In all social institutions, government, the church, the family, authority is the key¬ note. It is the period of unquestioning obedience on the part of the sub¬ ject to the lord, wife to husband, children to parents, apprentice to master, slave to owner. Lack of freedom is softened by the social impulses which act as a check on egoistic tendencies and which cannot fail to be aroused when social life is so simple, direct, and personal. In the second stage, when society flies apart into hostile individuals, thought recognizes its own power in handling the physical world, but social control must still be an external affair although it is no longer a matter of arbitrary authority. Instead there arise the theories of competition and contract. Control will be chiefly such as results from the natural friction among the atoms, a mechanical pull and haul. Each individual is to be left to get what he can for himself with only enough interference to make organized society possible. Each atom retains all the abstract freedom which was not sacrificed to the govern¬ ment as essential to orderly living. Our age is witnessing the disappearance of the isolated individual and the growth of an internal control based on the recognition of the dependence of the individual on social relations and his actual interest in social goods and in the discovery that thought is social in origin and can be used to advantage in the social as well as in the physical world. The freedom that was supposed to reside in the individual is seen to be realized only through society. The individual is not economically or morally free except when he is able to express himself, to realize his ends through the common life. 33 As an individual, he is powerless to deter¬ mine his own actions beyond a certain point. He must think with society and make his thought effective through social media or he has no control. Moreover, the hypotheses which he offers as solutions to social problems must include as part of the data to be considered the impulses and interests, the point of view, of all classes of people, if they are to be successful. In other words, not only is thought social in origin, but it keeps a social content and character. The individual must think as a social being, must take over the points of view of all his social “others” if his thinking is to be true in a social order, that is, the value of his thought in handling social questions is tested just as it is in handling physical problems, by the adequacy with which it covers all the data involved. Hypotheses which ignore the interests of entire classes of people, which fail to recognize existing social relations, will not work in the long run. M Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap. xx. 52 WOMAN MOVEMENT EROM VIEW OE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS The hard and unyielding individual with his boundless, empty freedom is compensated for the loss of his abstract rights by the discovery that concrete freedom, an actual realizing of his own powers, is possible through a social order and through a selfhood that grows in an intelli¬ gible way and is, therefore, subject to reconstruction by the same methods that are continually changing the physical world in accordance with human desires. There is no field in which this attitude is not making itself felt and nowhere more clearly than in the change that has taken place in the character of the woman movement within the last ten years. Even militancy, which seems in its later phases to be a purely hostile mani¬ festation, can hardly be classed with the type of opposition character¬ istic of the beginning of the woman movement. In its origin, at least, violent and hostile demonstrations were taken up purely as a method¬ ology which was thought necessary to success. It was not in the minds of the originators a blind outbreak of hatred but a carefully thought out plan based on a theory of the useful and peaceful relation which women should bear to the social order. If the suffragettes themselves have come to the point where their acts truly express hostile emotions, then they have lost control of their method and thereby also the end in view. Their tactics must be judged pragmatically and, in so far as they cease to be merely tactics, have on the very face of things failed and have become expressions of an earlier and more limited consciousness. Militant methods are open to criticism not so much because of their militancy, but because of their apparent futility when carried beyond a certain point. In any case, the militant movement represents only a small proportion of the advanced womanhood of today and it still remains true that to clamor for rights, to inveigh against men as the oppressors of the sex, is not only bad taste but beside the mark. What the thinking women of the western civilization, consciously or uncon¬ sciously, are asking of society today is not the vote, not economic inde¬ pendence, nor any given right or privilege, but a real hearing, a genuine and thoughtful consideration of their difficulties from the standpoint of the woman herself and an attempt on the part of society at a reasonable adjustment of those difficulties resulting in a reconstruction of the feudal ideal of womanhood such that the modern woman will once more be brought into active working relationship with the modern world. IV. CONCLUSION We are now in a position to take a final survey of the woman move¬ ment in its relation to the larger stream of social evolution. The course of the preceding argument has been very briefly as follows: first, the woman movement is the expression of very genuine problems both for the individual woman and for society as a whole; second, those problems are the result of an unavoidable conflict of impulses and habits, values and standards, due to the effort of trying to combine, without deliberate and conscious adjustment on the part of society itself, two dissimilar worlds; third, such conflicts are, as a matter of fact, equally real for men and for women as the labor movement testifies, and give evidence of a real dualism of self and social environment, of a genuine inequality between the kind of consciousness actually developed and the type of conscious¬ ness required to deal with the complexities of modern social relations; and finally, the restoration of equality between self and environment depends on the possibility of developing a higher type of self-conscious¬ ness whose perfect comprehension of its relations to other selves would make possible a controlled adjustment of those relations from the point of view of all concerned. We endeavored to show that such a conception rests upon a social and dynamic theory of personality and pointed out an actual development in personality throughout history up to the present moment when the wished-for type is not only desired but is being actualized. In this concluding section, the attempt will be to leave an impression of the woman movement stripped bare of the detail of argu¬ ment as it appears in perspective to one who looks at it from the point of view indicated in the preceding discussion. The woman movement, viewed not as an isolated phenomenon but as an integral part of the vaster social evolution, is seen to be only the woman’s side of what from the man’s angle is called the labor movement. It is a reaction against the same conditions and a demand for changes in the social order such that life will once more become harmonious. The accident of modern civilization has brought about inevitable conflict in the fundamental human impulses for both men and women. It has apparently allowed for complete, almost over expression of one set of impulses, at the expense of a partial or sometimes complete repression of the other. This has meant, of course, that the set of impulses which was allowed to develop unchecked by the other set was as abnormal and as far from a well-balanced rounded fulfilment as were the unex¬ pressed impulses. The industrial and economic system of today, which 54 WOMAN MOVEMENT EROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS has come into being more or less unconsciously and accidentally, has so divorced the economic and the social that it is only with a tremendous struggle for more inclusive forms of consciousness that we shall be able to recognize that the split is only apparent and that a system which not only believes in, but insists on, such a separation results in irreconcilable dualism in the lives of the men and women involved, persisting to the point of gigantic social problems, agitations, and movements. Thus the labor movement symbolizes the impossibility of choosing between the fulfilment of the economic impulse and the fulfilment of the impulse to live. Men are granted unlimited opportunities to work, but no provision is made by the system for intelligent parenthood, for good citizenship, for a thoughtful development and use of the sex impulse. A man’s parental expression is limited to caring for the economic welfare of his family. His own growth as a person must be sacrificed to the necessity of supporting himself and family. Work must be combined with life, but our system makes little provision for such a combination, hence, forcing into opposition fundamental impulses clamoring for expression. The labor movement demands a new society in which creative, sexual, parental, and other social impulses will have an unques¬ tioned right to fulfilment. With women, on the other hand, social impulses are the only ones which are overtly recognized. Women are constantly forced into the economic world, but the system ignores that fact and provides in no way for combining the peculiar social function of women with any economic function which they may find desirable or necessary. Such economic expression as has been conceded to them is confined to the home. Like¬ wise, the other impulses, even the maternal, have no recognized place outside the limits of the individual home. For the woman, the system has no avenues of fulfilment foreseen and provided beforehand for any impulse whatsoever outside the home itself. Everything which has opened up has been at best, even after long and patient effort, only makeshift and haphazard. Society is always emphasizing the obligation of the woman to carry out the sex and maternal impulses at all costs and minimizing the need or value of the economic so far as she is concerned. In the conditions of living which are forced upon her, she is compelled to make the sorry choice of a limited sex and maternal expression or a doubtful and hazardous attempt on the economic side. In either case, she loses so far as society’s aid or prevision is concerned. Only by the extra¬ ordinary force of a powerful personality will she make a signal success at either venture. Society no more makes a thoughtful attempt to CONCLUSION 55 give the maternal interests the most complete development and employ¬ ment possible than it makes any pretense at all of using intelligently the natural impulse of the woman to be of economic value in the world. Much less does it offer a rational scheme for combining both motives within a possible form of living for the average normal woman. Thus the woman, even more than the man, faces a perfectly hopeless alterna¬ tive. Neither side at the present moment is overwhelmingly attractive in itself even apart from the sacrifice of other impulses which its choice involves. What woman would willingly abandon love and children? What normal woman would accept a life in which she gave up all effort at serious work of genuine economic value to society? What woman would attempt without shrinking the almost impossible task of combining the two as affairs stand today? Above all, what woman would under¬ take wifehood and motherhood with the limitations placed on it by our present social system and feel that those two fundamental parts of herself could ever reach a satisfactory and adequate fulfilment? That the peculiarly unhappy position of the woman is a reality and not an illusion can be detected in the arguments used to convince woman of her obligation to bear and rear. The element of sacrifice is so obvious that it is even seized upon and treated as a virtue, an added glory for the crown of the wife and mother. Moreover, this notion of necessary sacrifice on the part of the woman and the bare fact of motherhood itself have grown into a sort of fetish. The experiences of motherhood are exalted to the point where they are assumed to be a sufficient com¬ pensation for any and all sacrifices. To silence our own doubts and justify our procedure, we have come to believe in the inherent and absolute value to the woman of the mere fact of giving birth to a child, even though the emotions and purposes thus originated are never carried past the instinctive or intuitive level to a rationalized and socialized expression. We are afraid to face the fact that the home in its present unrelated, individual form does demand of women, and men too for that matter, a sacrifice so great as to have lost a large part of its value for spiritual growth, an overwhelming and crushing sacrifice of the possibilities of motherhood and fatherhood that defeats its own end. All of this hopeless conflict among impulses which the woman feels she has legitimate right, even a moral obligation, to express, all of the rebellion against stupid, meaningless sacrifice of powers that ought to be used by society, constitutes the force, conscious or unconscious, which motivates the woman movement and will continue to vitalize it until some adjustment is made. 56 WOMAN MOVEMENT FROM VIEW OF SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS The labor movement and the woman movement do not understand always how close is their relationship, nor do they see clearly that the reason why the obviously stupid and unsuitable social conditions which they combat are so difficult to alter is because human beings have not yet arrived at the stage where they know how to attack and solve social problems. The real goal of both movements is a society whose con¬ sciousness shall have reached the social stage and hence is capable of dealing scientifically with social as well as physical problems, a society which no longer leaves the social forms and relationships whereby human impulses are expressed to chance or physical force, but subjects them to rational control. In the physical world we have at last become conscious of our method and hence have acquired a control over physical conditions which promises to become more and more complete. If the desire arises in a community to do something for which present physical con¬ ditions make no allowance, it becomes instantly a problem for the experts and it is only a question of time when a way will be found for the gratifi¬ cation of the felt need. The very basis of the physical problem is the thwarted desire of human beings to do something and the method of obtaining the end is, of course, a full and free admission of the inherent right and value of the desire, a deliberate searching for every element involved in the physical conditions of the problem, and a careful experi¬ mental attempt to find the combination which will satisfy all the condi¬ tions. We should not consider our problem solved if the scientist said to us, “You do not really want this thing, you only imagine it, and in any case it would be bad for you to have it. You have managed to live all these years without it, why complain now?” Imagine such an answer to the determination to fly in the air. But, supposing, if we persisted in our wish to fly and began to talk about it and clamor for a way to be opened, the authorities were to turn on us, demand silence on pain of arrest and imprisonment, label us socialists or anarchists, and tell us we were rebelling against the fixed and righteous order of things as they are. Should we consider that any attempt had been made at solving our problem of how to make a machine that would fly in the air? Yet, impossible as it may seem, that is thus far the favorite method of dealing with any unsatisfied, insufficiently expressed set of human wants, whose fulfilment would mean change of the social order. First, deny the existence of the want; second, call it wicked, foolish, or injurious to individual and society; third, suppress it by force—and you have dealt with it adequately . 34 34 For a complete presentation of this failure of our civilization to handle its social problems see Walter Lippmann’s Preface to Politics. CONCLUSION 57 The chief task of all social movements, then, must be at first to impress upon the rest of society the right of unsatisfied and unexpressed human impulses to constitute a real problem worthy of the same amount of expert attention whether they demand a new way of crossing the Atlantic Ocean or a new combination of work and social expression in the lives of men and women. This they will never bring about until there is a sufficient number of people who are so socially sensitive and adaptable that they feel within themselves as their own the impulses and points of view of all classes and both sexes. Such individuals will be the social scientists who will offer solutions to our social problems because they are able to place themselves at the very heart of these problems and thus to comprehend the conditions, the unsatisfied, conflicting impulses, upon the harmonization and fulfilment of which any solution that has the right to the name must be based. 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