■.•"(;■ - . 
 
 JANE AISAMS i
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 THE LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S 
 MEMORY
 
 _^T1^^ 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NBW YORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 THE LONG ROAD OF 
 WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 BY 
 
 JANE ADDAMS 
 
 Author of "Twenty Years at Hull House" 
 
 "The Spirit of Youth and the 
 
 City Streets," Etc. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1916 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Copyright, 1916, 
 Bv THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1916. 
 
 J. S. Cnshing Co. — Berwick <fc Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
 
 
 
 4 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 '^ 
 
 <^\ ^ TO MY DEAR FRIEND 
 
 MARY H. WILMARTH 
 
 WHOSE MEMORY STORED WITH THE BEST IN LITERATURE 
 
 AND WHOSE FINE PUBLIC SPIRIT ARE DAILY PLACED 
 
 AT THE SERVICE OF HER FRIENDS AND OF 
 
 HER CITY, WITH A GALLANT AND 
 
 GENTLE COURTESY 
 
 20v'8'72
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction ....... ix 
 
 I. Women's Memories — Transmuting the Past, 
 AS illustrated by the Story of the 
 Devil Baby ..... I 
 
 II. Women's Memories — Reacting on Life, as 
 illustrated by the Story of the Devil 
 Baby . . . . . .25 
 
 III. Women's Memories — Disturbing Conven- 
 
 tions ...... 53 
 
 IV. Women's Memories — Integrating Industry 84 
 V. Women's Memories — Challenging War . 115 
 
 VI. A Personal Experience in Interpretative 
 
 Memory ...... 141
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 For many years at Hull-House I have at 
 intervals detected in certain old people, when 
 they spoke of their past experiences, a tendency 
 to an idealization, almost to a romanticism sug- 
 gestive of the ardent dreams and groundless 
 ambitions we have all observed in the young 
 when they recklessly lay their plans for the 
 future. 
 
 I have, moreover, been frequently impressed 
 by the fact that these romantic revelations were 
 made by old people who had really suffered 
 much hardship and sorrow, and that the trans- 
 mutation of their experiences was not the result 
 of ignoring actuality, but was apparently due to 
 a power inherent in memory itself. 
 
 It was therefore a great pleasure when I 
 found this aspect of memory delightfully por- 
 trayed by Sir Gilbert Murray in his life of 
 Euripides. He writes that the aged poet, 
 when he was officially made one of the old men 
 of Athens, declared that he could transmute
 
 X INTRODUCTION 
 
 into song traditional tales of sorrow and wrong- 
 doing because, being long past, they had al- 
 ready become part mystery and part music : 
 " Memory, that Memory who is the Mother 
 of the Muses, having done her work upon 
 them." 
 
 Here was an explanation which I might have 
 anticipated ; it was the Muses again at their 
 old tricks, — the very mother of them this 
 time, — thrusting their ghostly fingers into the 
 delicate fabric of human experience to the ex- 
 treme end of life. I had known before that 
 the Muses foregathered with the Spirit of 
 Youth and I had even made a feeble attempt 
 to portray that companionship, but I was stupid 
 indeed not to see that they are equally at home 
 with the aged whose prosaic lives sadly need 
 such interference. 
 
 Even with this clue in my hands, so preoc- 
 cupied are we all with our own practical affairs, 
 I probably should never have followed it, had 
 it not been for the visit of a mythical Devil 
 Baby who so completely filled Hull-House 
 with old women coming to see him, that for a 
 period of six weeks I could perforce do little 
 but give them my attention.
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 When this excitement had subsided and I 
 had written down the corroboration afforded by 
 their eager recitals in the first two chapters of 
 this book, I might have supposed myself to be 
 rid of the matter, incidentally having been 
 taught once more that, while I may receive 
 valuable suggestions from classic literature, 
 when I really want to learn about life, I must 
 depend upon my neighbors, for, as William 
 James insists, the most instructive human doc- 
 uments lie along the beaten pathway. 
 
 The subject, however, was not so easily dis- 
 posed of, for certain elderly women among 
 these selfsame neighbors disconcertingly took 
 quite another line from that indicated by 
 Euripides. To my amazement, their remi- 
 niscences revealed an additional function of 
 memory, so aggressive and withal so modern, 
 that it was quite impossible, living as I was in 
 a Settlement with sociological tendencies, to 
 ignore it. 
 
 It was gradually forced upon my attention 
 that these reminiscences of the aged, even while 
 softening the harsh realities of the past, exer- 
 cise a vital power of selection which often 
 necessitates an onset against the very traditions
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 and conventions commonly believed to find 
 their stronghold in the minds of elderly people. 
 Such reminiscences suggested an analogy to 
 the dreams of youth which, while covering the 
 future with a shifting rose-colored mist, contain 
 within themselves the inchoate substance from 
 which the tough-fibred forces of coming social 
 struggles are composed. 
 
 In the light of this later knowledge, I was 
 impelled to write the next two chapters of this 
 book, basing them upon conversations held 
 with various women of my acquaintance whose 
 experience in family relationships or in the 
 labor market had so forced their conduct to a 
 variation from the accepted type that there 
 emerged an indication of a selective groping 
 toward another standard. They inevitably sug- 
 gested that a sufficient number of similar varia- 
 tions might even, in Memory's leisurely fashion 
 of upbuilding tradition, in the end establish a 
 new norm. 
 
 Some of these women, under the domination 
 of that mysterious autobiographical impulse 
 which makes it more difficult to conceal the 
 truth than to avow it, purged their souls in all 
 sincerity and unconsciously made plain the part
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 borne in their hard lives by monstrous social 
 injustices. 
 
 These conversations proved to be so illus- 
 trative of my second thesis that it seemed 
 scarcely necessary to do more than record them. 
 The deduction was obvious that mutual remi- 
 niscences perform a valuable function in de- 
 termining analogous conduct for large bodies 
 of people who have no other basis for like- 
 mindedness. 
 
 So gradual is this process, so unconsciously 
 are these converts under Memory's gentle 
 coercion brought into a spiritual fellowship, 
 that the social changes thus inaugurated, at least 
 until the reformers begin to formulate them 
 and to accelerate the process through propa- 
 ganda, take on the aspect of beneficent natural 
 phenomena. And yet, curiously enough, I 
 found that the two functions of Memory — first, 
 its important role in interpreting and appeasing 
 life for the individual, and second its activity 
 as a selective agency in social reorganization — 
 were not mutually exclusive, and at moments 
 seemed to support each other. Certain con- 
 versations even suggested that the selective 
 process itself might be held responsible for the
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 softened outlines of the past to one looking 
 back, by the natural blurring of nonessentials 
 and the consequent throwing into high relief 
 of common human experiences. 
 
 The insistence of Memory upon the great 
 essentials, even to the complete sacrifice of its 
 inherent power to appease, was most poignantly 
 brought to my attention during two months I 
 spent in Europe in the summer of 19 15. 
 Desolated women, stripped by war of all their 
 warm domestic interests and of children long 
 cherished in affectionate solicitude, sat shelter- 
 less in the devastating glare of Memory. Be- 
 cause by its pitiless light they were forced to 
 look into the black depths of primitive human 
 nature, occasionally one of these heart-broken 
 women would ignore the strident claims of the 
 present and would insist that the war was cut- 
 ting at the very taproots of the basic human 
 relations so vitally necessary to the survival of 
 civilization. I cannot hope to have adequately 
 reproduced in Chapter V those conversations 
 which themselves partook of the grim aspect 
 of war. 
 
 It was during this cataclysmic summer in 
 Europe that I sometimes sought for a solace,
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 or at least for a source of sanity, by resting my 
 mind on the immemorial monuments of ancient 
 Egypt, from which I had once received an 
 almost mystic assurance of the essential unity 
 of man's age-long spiritual effort. But because 
 such guarding of continuity as Egypt had 
 afforded me had been associated with an unex- 
 pected revival of childish recollections, I found 
 that Memory was a chief factor also in this 
 situation. Therefore, in spite of the fact that 
 these reminiscences of my childhood were 
 vividly resuscitated in Egypt by a process 
 which postulates a reversal of the one described 
 in the first two chapters of this book, I venture 
 to incorporate my personal experience in the 
 last chapter. It may suggest one more of our 
 obligations to Memory, that Protean Mother, 
 who first differentiated primitive man from the 
 brute ; who makes possible our complicated 
 modern life so daily dependent on the experi- 
 ences of the past ; and upon whom at the 
 present moment is thrust the sole responsi- 
 bility of guarding, for future generations, our 
 common heritage of mutual good-will.
 
 THE LONG ROAD OF 
 WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 women's memories — TRANSMUTING THE 
 PAST, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF 
 THE DEVIL BABY 
 
 Quite as it would be hard for any one of 
 us to select the summer in which he ceased 
 to live that life, so ardent in childhood and 
 early youth, when all the real happenings 
 are in the future, so it must be difficult 
 for old people to tell at what period they 
 began to regard the present chiefly as a 
 prolongation of the past. There is no 
 doubt, however, that such instinctive shift- 
 ings and reversals have taken place for 
 many old people who, under the control of 
 Memory, are actually living much more in 
 the past than in the ephemeral present.
 
 2 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 It is most fortunate, therefore, that in 
 some subtle fashion these old people, re- 
 viewing the long road they have travelled, 
 are able to transmute their own untoward 
 experiences into that which seems to make 
 even the most wretched life acceptable. 
 This may possibly be due to an instinct of 
 self-preservation, which checks the devastat- 
 ing bitterness that would result did they 
 recall over and over again the sordid detail 
 of events long past ; it is even possible that 
 those people who were not able thus to 
 inhibit their bitterness have died earlier, 
 for as one old man recently reminded me, 
 "It is a true word that worry can kill a 
 cat." 
 
 This permanent and elemental function 
 of Memory was graphically demonstrated 
 at Hull-House during a period of several 
 weeks when we were reported to be harbor- 
 ing within its walls a so-called "Devil 
 Baby.'' 
 
 The knowledge of his existence burst 
 upon the residents of Hull-House one day 
 when three Italian women, with an excited 
 rush through the door, demanded that he
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 3 
 
 be shown to them. No amount of denial 
 convinced them that he was not there, for 
 they knew exactly what he was hke with 
 his cloven hoofs, his pointed ears and dimin- 
 utive tail ; the Devil Baby had, moreover, 
 been able to speak as soon as he was born 
 and was most shockingly profane. 
 
 The three women were but the forerunners 
 of a veritable multitude ; for six weeks from 
 every part of the city and suburbs the 
 streams of visitors to this mythical baby 
 poured in all day long and so far into the 
 night that the regular activities of the set- 
 tlement were almost swamped. 
 
 The Italian version, with a hundred 
 variations, dealt with a pious Italian girl 
 married to an atheist. Her husband in a 
 rage had torn a holy picture from the bed- 
 room wall saying that he would quite as soon 
 have a devil in the house as such a thing, 
 whereupon the devil incarnated himself in 
 her coming child. As soon as the Devil 
 Baby was born, he ran about the table 
 shaking his finger in deep reproach at his 
 father, who finally caught him and, in fear 
 and trembling, brought him to Hull-House.
 
 4 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 When the residents there, in spite of the 
 baby's shocking appearance, wishing to save 
 his soul, took him to church for baptism, 
 they found that the shawl was empty and 
 the Devil Baby, fleeing from the holy water, 
 was running lightly over the backs of the 
 pews. 
 
 The Jewish version, again with varia- 
 tions, was to the effect that the father of 
 six daughters had said before the birth of a 
 seventh child that he would rather have a 
 devil in the family than another girl, where- 
 upon the Devil Baby promptly appeared. 
 
 Save for a red automobile which occasion- 
 ally figured in the story and a stray cigar 
 which, in some versions, the new-born child 
 had snatched from his father's lips, the 
 tale might have been fashioned a thousand 
 years ago. 
 
 Although the visitors to the Devil Baby 
 included persons of every degree of pros- 
 perity and education, even physicians and 
 trained nurses, who assured us of their sci- 
 entific interest, the story constantly demon- 
 strated the power of an old wives' tale 
 among thousands of men and women in
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 5 
 
 modern society who are living in a corner 
 of their own, their vision fixed, their inteUi- 
 gence held by some iron chain of silent habit. 
 To such primitive people the metaphor ap- 
 parently is still the very "stuff of life," 
 or rather no other form of statement reaches 
 them ; the tremendous tonnage of current 
 writing for them has no existence. It was 
 in keeping with their simple habits that the 
 reputed presence of the Devil Baby should 
 not reach the newspapers until the fifth 
 week of his sojourn at Hull-House — after 
 thousands of people had already been in- 
 formed of his whereabouts by the old method 
 of passing news from mouth to mouth. 
 
 For six weeks as I went about the 
 house, I would hear a voice at the telephone 
 repeating for the hundredth time that day, 
 "No, there is no such baby"; "No, we 
 never had it here"; "No, he couldn't 
 have seen it for fifty cents"; "We didn't 
 send it anywhere, because we never had 
 it"; "I don't mean to say that your 
 sister-in-law lied, but there must be some 
 mistake" ; "There is no use getting up an 
 excursion from Milwaukee, for there isn't
 
 6 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 any Devil Baby at Hull-House"; "We 
 can't give reduced rates, because we are 
 not exhibiting anything" ; and so on and 
 on. As I came near the front door, I would 
 catch snatches of arguments that were 
 often acrimonious: *'Why do you let so 
 many people believe it, if it isn't here?" 
 "We have taken three lines of cars to come 
 and we have as much right to see it as 
 anybody else"; "This is a pretty big 
 place, of course you could hide it easy 
 enough" ; "What are you saying that for, 
 are you going to raise the price of admis- 
 sion r 
 
 We had doubtless struck a case of what 
 the psychologists call the "contagion of 
 emotion" added to that "aesthetic socia- 
 bility" which impels any one of us to drag 
 the entire household to the window when 
 a procession comes into the street or a 
 rainbow appears in the sky. The Devil 
 Baby of course was worth many proces- 
 sions and rainbows, and I will confess that, 
 as the empty show went on day after day, 
 I quite revolted against such a vapid mani- 
 festation of even an admirable human
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 7 
 
 trait. There was always one exception, 
 however ; whenever I heard the high eager 
 voices of old women, I was irresistibly inter- 
 ested and left anything I might be doing 
 in order to listen to them. As I came down 
 the stairs, long before I could hear what 
 they were saying, implicit in their solemn 
 and portentous old voices came the ad- 
 monition : — 
 
 " Wilt thou reject the past 
 Big with deep warnings ? " 
 
 It was a very serious and genuine matter 
 with the old women, this story so ancient 
 and yet so contemporaneous, and they 
 flocked to Hull-House from every direc- 
 tion ; those I had known for many years, 
 others I had never known and some whom 
 I had supposed to be long dead. But they 
 were all alive and eager ; something in the 
 story or in its mysterious sequences had 
 aroused one of those active forces in human 
 nature which does not take orders, but 
 insists only upon giving them. We had 
 abruptly come in contact with a living and 
 self-assertive human quality !
 
 8 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 During the weeks of excitement it was 
 the old women who really seemed to have 
 come into their own, and perhaps the most 
 significant result of the incident was the 
 reaction of the story upon them. It stirred 
 their minds and memories as with a magic 
 touch, it loosened their tongues and revealed 
 the inner life and thoughts of those who are 
 so often inarticulate. They are accustomed 
 to sit at home and to hear the younger 
 members of the family speak of affairs 
 quite outside their own experiences, some- 
 times in a language they do not understand, 
 and at best in quick glancing phrases 
 which they cannot follow; "More than 
 half the time I can't tell what they are 
 talking about," is an oft-repeated complaint. 
 The story of the Devil Baby evidently 
 put into their hands the sort of material with 
 which they were accustomed to deal. They 
 had long used such tales in their unremitting 
 efforts at family discipline, ever since they 
 had frightened their first children into awed 
 silence by tales of bugaboo men who prowled 
 in the darkness. 
 
 These old women enjoyed a moment of
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 9 
 
 triumph — as if they had made good at 
 last and had come into a region of sanc- 
 tions and punishments which they under- 
 stood. Years of hving had taught them 
 that recrimination with grown-up children 
 and grandchildren is worse than useless, 
 that punishments are impossible, that do- 
 mestic instruction is best given through 
 tales and metaphors. 
 
 As the old women talked with the new 
 volubility which the story of the Devil 
 Baby had released in them, going back 
 into their long memories and urging its 
 credibility upon me, the story seemed to 
 condense that mystical wisdom which be- 
 comes deposited in the heart of man by 
 unnoticed innumerable experiences. 
 
 Perhaps my many conversations with 
 these aged visitors crystallized thoughts 
 and impressions I had been receiving 
 through years, or the tale itself may have 
 ignited a fire, as it were, whose light il- 
 lumined some of my darkest memories of 
 neglected and uncomfortable old age, of 
 old peasant women who had ruthlessly 
 probed into the ugly depths of human na-
 
 lO LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 ture in themselves and others. Many of 
 them who came to see the Devil Baby had 
 been forced to face tragic experiences, the 
 powers of brutality and horror had had 
 full scope in their lives and for years they 
 had had acquaintance with disaster and 
 death. Such old women do not shirk life's 
 misery by feeble idealism, for they are 
 long past the stage of make-believe. They 
 relate without flinching the most hideous 
 experiences: "My face has had this queer 
 twist for now nearly sixty years ; I was 
 ten when it got that way, the night after 
 I saw my father do my mother to death 
 with his knife." *'Yes, I had fourteen 
 children ; only two grew to be men and 
 both of them were killed in the same ex- 
 plosion. I was never sure they brought 
 home the right bodies." But even the 
 most hideous sorrows which the old women 
 related had apparently subsided into the 
 paler emotion of ineffectual regret, after 
 Memory had long done her work upon 
 them ; the old people seemed, in some un- 
 accountable way, to lose all bitterness and 
 resentment against life, or rather to be so
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST II 
 
 completely without it that they must have 
 lost it long since. 
 
 None of them had a word of blame for 
 undutiful children or heedless grandchil- 
 dren, because apparently the petty and 
 transitory had fallen away from their 
 austere old age, the fires were burnt out, 
 resentments, hatreds, and even cherished 
 sorrows had become actually unintelligible. 
 
 Perhaps those women, because they had 
 come to expect nothing more from life and 
 had perforce ceased from grasping and 
 striving, had obtained, if not renunciation, 
 at least that quiet endurance which al- 
 lows the wounds of the spirit to heal. 
 Through their stored-up habit of acquies- 
 cence, they offered a fleeting glimpse of 
 the translucent wisdom, so often embodied 
 in the old, but so difficult to portray. It 
 is doubtless what Michael Angelo had in 
 mind when he made the Sybils old, what 
 Dante meant by the phrase "those who 
 had learned of life," and the age-worn 
 minstrel who turned into song a Memory 
 which was more that of history and tra- 
 dition than his own.
 
 12 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 In contrast to the visitors to the Devil 
 Baby who spoke only such words of groping 
 wisdom as they were able, were other old 
 women who, although they had already 
 reconciled themselves to much misery, were 
 still enduring more : "You might say it's a 
 disgrace to have your son beat you up for 
 the sake of a bit of money you've earned 
 by scrubbing — your own man is different 
 — but I haven't the heart to blame the boy 
 for doing what he's seen all his life, his 
 father forever went wild when the drink 
 was in him and struck me to the very 
 day of his death. The ugliness was born 
 in the boy as the marks of the Devil was 
 born in the poor child up-stairs." 
 
 Some of these old women had struggled 
 for weary years with poverty and much 
 childbearing, had known what it was to be 
 bullied and beaten by their husbands, 
 neglected and ignored by their prosperous 
 children, and burdened by the support of 
 the imbecile and the shiftless ones. They 
 had literally gone "Deep written all their 
 days with care." 
 
 One old woman actually came from the
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 13 
 
 poorhouse, having heard of the Devil Baby 
 "through a lady from Polk Street visiting 
 an old friend who has a bed in our ward." 
 It was no slight achievement for the penni- 
 less and crippled old inmate to make her 
 escape. She had asked "a young bar-keep 
 in a saloon across the road" to lend her ten 
 cents, offering as security the fact that she 
 was an old acquaintance at Hull-House who 
 could not be refused so slight a loan. She 
 marvelled at some length over the good- 
 ness of the young man, for she had not had 
 a dime to spend for a drink for the last six 
 months, and he and the conductor had 
 been obliged to lift her into the street car 
 by main strength. She was naturally much 
 elated over the achievement of her escape. 
 To be sure, from the men's side, they were 
 always walking off in the summer and 
 taking to the road, living like tramps they 
 did, in a way no one from the woman's 
 side would demean herself to do ; but to 
 have left in a street car like a lady, with 
 money to pay her own fare, was quite a 
 different matter, although she was indeed 
 "clean wore out" by the effort. However,
 
 14 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 it was clear that she would consider herself 
 well repaid by a sight of the Devil Baby 
 and that not only the inmates of her own 
 ward, but those in every other ward in the 
 house would be made to "sit up" when she 
 got back ; it would liven them all up a bit, 
 and she hazarded the guess that she would 
 have to tell them about that baby at least 
 a dozen times a day. 
 
 As she cheerfully rambled on, we weakly 
 postponed telling her there was no Devil 
 Baby, first that she might have a cup of 
 tea and rest, and then through a sheer de- 
 sire to withhold a blow from a poor old 
 body who had received so many through- 
 out a long, hard life. 
 
 As I recall those unreal weeks, it was in 
 her presence that I found myself for the 
 first time vaguely wishing that I could 
 administer comfort by the simple device of 
 not asserting too dogmatically that the 
 Devil Baby had never been at Hull-House. 
 
 Our guest recalled with great pride that 
 her grandmother had possessed second 
 sight ; that her mother had heard the 
 Banshee three times and that she, herself,
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 15 
 
 had heard it once. All this gave her a 
 certain proprietary interest in the Devil 
 Baby and I suspected she cherished a secret 
 hope that when she should lay her eyes 
 upon him, her inherited gifts might be 
 able to reveal the meaning of the strange 
 portent. At the least, he would afford a 
 proof that her family-long faith in such 
 matters was justified. Her misshapen 
 hands lying on her lap fairly trembled with 
 eagerness. 
 
 It may have been because I was still 
 smarting under the recollection of the 
 disappointment we had so wantonly in- 
 flicted upon our visitor from the poorhouse 
 that the very next day I found myself 
 almost agreeing with her whole-hearted 
 acceptance of the past as of much more 
 importance than the mere present ; at least 
 for half an hour the past seemed endowed 
 also for me with a profounder and more 
 ardent life. 
 
 This impression was received in connec- 
 tion with an old woman, sturdy in her 
 convictions, although long since bedrid- 
 den, who had doggedly refused to believe
 
 l6 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 that there was no Devil Baby at Hull- 
 House, unless "herself" told her so. Be- 
 cause of her mounting irritation with the 
 envoys who one and all came back to her 
 to report "they say it ain't there," it seemed 
 well that I should go promptly before "she 
 fashed herself into the grave." As I walked 
 along the street and even as I went up the 
 ramshackle outside stairway of the rear 
 cottage and through the dark corridor to 
 the "second floor back" where she lay in 
 her untidy bed, I was assailed by a veri- 
 table temptation to give her a full descrip- 
 tion of the Devil Baby, which by this time 
 I knew so accurately (for with a hundred 
 variations to select from I could have 
 made a monstrous infant almost worthy 
 of his name), and also to refrain from put- 
 ting too much stress on the fact that he 
 had never been really and truly at Hull- 
 House. 
 
 I found my mind hastily marshalling 
 arguments for not disturbing her belief in 
 the story which had so evidently brought 
 her a vivid interest long denied her. She 
 lived alone with her young grandson, who
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 17 
 
 went to work every morning at seven o'clock 
 and save for the short visits made by the 
 visiting nurse and by kind neighbors, her 
 long day was monotonous and undisturbed. 
 But the story of a Devil Baby, with his 
 existence officially corroborated as it were, 
 would give her a lodestone which would 
 attract the neighbors far and wide and 
 exalt her once more into the social impor- 
 tance she had had twenty-four years be- 
 fore when I had first known her. She was 
 then the proprietor of the most prosperous 
 second-hand store on a street full of them, 
 her shiftless, drinking husband and her 
 jolly, good-natured sons doing exactly what 
 she told them to do. This, however, was 
 long past, for "owing to the drink," in her 
 own graphic phrase, "the old man, the 
 boys, and the business, too, were clean 
 gone" and there was "nobody left but little 
 Tom and me and nothing for us to live 
 on." 
 
 I remember how well she used to tell a 
 story when I once tried to collect some 
 folk-lore for Mr. Yeats to prove that an 
 Irish peasant does not lose his faith in the
 
 i8 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 little people nor his knowledge of Gaelic 
 phrases simply because he is living in a 
 city. She had at that time told me a 
 wonderful tale concerning a red cloak 
 worn by an old woman to a freshly dug 
 grave. The story of the Devil Baby would 
 give her material worthy of her powers, 
 but of course she must be able to believe 
 it with all her heart. She could live only 
 a few months at the very best, I argued to 
 myself; why not give her this vivid in- 
 terest and through it awake those earliest 
 recollections of that long-accumulated folk- 
 lore with its magic power to transfigure and 
 eclipse the sordid and unsatisfactory sur- 
 roundings in which life is actually spent ? 
 I solemnly assured myself that the imag- 
 ination of old age needs to be fed and prob- 
 ably has quite as imperious a claim as 
 that of youth, which levies upon us so re- 
 morselessly with its ''I want a fairy story, 
 but I don't like you to begin by saying that 
 it isn't true." Impatiently I found myself 
 challenging the educators who had given 
 us no pedagogical instructions for the 
 treatment of old age, although they had
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 19 
 
 fairly overinformed us as to the use of the 
 fairy tale with children. 
 
 The little room was stuffed with a mag- 
 pie collection, the usual odds and ends which 
 compose an old woman's treasures, aug- 
 mented in this case by various articles 
 which a second-hand store, even of the most 
 flourishing sort, could not sell. In the 
 picturesque confusion, if anywhere in Chi- 
 cago, an urbanized group of the little people 
 might dwell ; they would certainly find the 
 traditional atmosphere which they strictly 
 require, marvelling faith and unalloyed 
 reverence. At any rate, an eager old woman 
 aroused to her utmost capacity of wonder 
 and credulity was the very soil, prepared 
 to a nicety, for planting the seed-thought 
 of the Devil Baby. If the object of my 
 errand had been an hour's reading to a 
 sick woman, it would have been accounted 
 to me for philanthropic righteousness, and 
 if the chosen reading had lifted her mind 
 from her bodily discomforts and harassing 
 thoughts so that she forgot them all for 
 one fleeting moment, how pleased I should 
 have been with the success of my effort.
 
 20 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 But here I was with a story at my tongue's 
 end, stupidly hesitating to give it validity, 
 although the very words were on my lips. 
 I was still arguing the case with myself 
 when I stood on the threshold of her room 
 and caught the indomitable gleam of her 
 eye, fairly daring me to deny the existence 
 of the Devil Baby, her slack dropsical body 
 so responding to her overpowering excite- 
 ment that for the moment she looked alert 
 in her defiance and positively menacing. 
 
 But, as in the case of many another weak 
 soul, the decision was taken out of my 
 hands, my very hesitation was enough, for 
 nothing is more certain than that the bearer 
 of a magic tale never stands dawdling on 
 the door-step. Slowly the gleam died out 
 of the expectant old eyes, the erect shoul- 
 ders sagged and pulled forward, and I saw 
 only too plainly that the poor old woman 
 had accepted one more disappointment in a 
 life already overflowing with them. She 
 was violently thrown back into all the 
 limitations of her personal experience and 
 surroundings, and that larger life she had 
 anticipated so eagerly was as suddenly
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 2i 
 
 shut away from her as if a door had been 
 slammed in her face. 
 
 I never encountered that particular 
 temptation again, though she was no more 
 pitiful than many of the aged visitors whom 
 the Devil Baby brought to Hull-House. 
 But, perhaps as a result of this experience, 
 I gradually lost the impression that the 
 old people were longing for a second chance 
 at life, to live it all over again and to live 
 more fully and wisely, and I became more 
 reconciled to the fact that many of them 
 had little opportunity for meditation or for 
 bodily rest, but must keep on working 
 with their toil-worn hands, in spite of 
 weariness or faintness of heart. 
 
 The vivid interest of so many old women 
 in the story of the Devil Baby may have 
 been an unconscious, although powerful, 
 testimony that tragic experiences gradually 
 become dressed in such trappings in order 
 that their spent agony may prove of some 
 use to a world which learns at the hard- 
 est ; and that the strivings and sufferings 
 of men and women long since dead, their 
 emotions no longer connected with flesh
 
 22 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 and blood, are thus transmuted into leg- 
 endary wisdom. The young are forced to 
 heed the warning in such a tale, although 
 for the most part it is so easy for them to 
 disregard the words of the aged. That 
 the old women who came to visit the Devil 
 Baby believed that the story would se- 
 cure them a hearing at home was evident, 
 and as they prepared themselves with 
 every detail of it, their old faces shone with 
 a timid satisfaction. Their features, worn 
 and scarred by harsh living, as effigies 
 built into the floor of an old church become 
 dim and defaced by rough-shod feet, grew 
 poignant and solemn. In the midst of 
 their double bewilderment, both that the 
 younger generation was walking in such 
 strange paths and that no one would lis- 
 ten to them, for one moment there flickered 
 up the last hope of a disappointed life, 
 that it may at least serve as a warning, 
 while affording material for an exciting 
 narrative. 
 
 Sometimes in talking to a woman who 
 was "but a hair's breadth this side of 
 the darkness," I realized that old age has
 
 TRANSMUTING THE PAST 23 
 
 its own expression for the mystic renun- 
 ciation of the world. Their impatience 
 with all non-essentials, the craving to be 
 free from hampering bonds and soft con- 
 ditions, recalled Tolstoy's last impetuous 
 journey, and I was once more grateful 
 to his genius for making clear another 
 unintelligible impulse of bewildered hu- 
 manity. 
 
 Often, in the midst of a conversation, one 
 of these touching old women would quietly 
 express a longing for death, as if it were a 
 natural fulfilment of an inmost desire, 
 with a sincerity and anticipation so gen- 
 uine that I would feel abashed in her 
 presence, ashamed to *' cling to this strange 
 thing that shines in the sunlight and to be 
 sick with love for it." Such impressions 
 were, in their essence, transitory, but one 
 result from the hypothetical visit of the 
 Devil Baby to Hull-House will, I think, 
 remain : a realization of the sifting and 
 reconciling power inherent in Memory it- 
 self. The old women, with much to ag- 
 gravate and little to soften the habitual 
 bodily discomforts of old age, exhibited
 
 24 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 an emotional serenity so vast and so reas- 
 suring, that I found myself perpetually spec- 
 ulating upon how soon the fleeting and 
 petty emotions which now seem unduly 
 important to us might be thus transmuted ; 
 at what moment we might expect the in- 
 consistencies and perplexities of life to be 
 brought under this appeasing Memory with 
 its ultimate power to increase the elements 
 of beauty and significance and to reduce, 
 if not to eliminate, all sense of resentment.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 women's memories — REACTING ON LIFE 
 
 AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF THE 
 
 DEVIL BABY 
 
 During the weeks when the Devil Baby 
 seemed to occupy every room in Hull- 
 House, I was conscious that all human 
 vicissitudes are, in the end, melted down into 
 reminiscence, and that a metaphorical state- 
 ment of the basic experiences which are 
 implicit in human nature itself, however 
 crude in form the story may be, has a singu- 
 lar power of influencing daily living. 
 
 At moments we also seemed to glimpse 
 the process through which such tales had 
 been evolved. As our visitors to the Devil 
 Baby came day by day, it gradually be- 
 came evident that the simpler women were 
 moved not wholly by curiosity, but that 
 many of them prized the story as a valu- 
 able instrument in the business of living. 
 
 25
 
 26 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 From them and from the surprising number 
 of others who had been sent by the aged 
 and the bed-ridden to secure an exact 
 history and description of the child, the 
 suggestion finally became quite irresis- 
 tible that such a story, outlining a great 
 abstraction, may once have performed the 
 high service of tradition and discipline in 
 the beginnings of a civilized family life. 
 
 The legend exhibited all the persistence 
 of one of those tales which has doubtless 
 been preserved through the centuries be- 
 cause of its taming effects upon recalci- 
 trant husbands and fathers. Shamefaced 
 men brought to Hull-House by their women 
 folk to see the baby, but ill concealed their 
 triumph when there proved to be no such 
 visible sign of retribution for domestic 
 derelictions. On the other hand, numbers 
 of men came by themselves, one group 
 from a neighboring factory on their *'own 
 time" offered to pay twenty-five cents, a 
 half dollar, two dollars apiece to see the 
 child, insisting that it must be at Hull- 
 House because "the women had seen it." 
 To my query as to whether they supposed
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 27 
 
 we would, for money, exhibit a poor little 
 deformed baby, if one had been born in the 
 neighborhood, they replied: "Sure, why 
 not?" and "it teaches a good lesson, too," 
 they added as an afterthought, or perhaps 
 as a concession to the strange moral stand- 
 ards of a place like Hull-House. All the 
 members in this group of hard-working 
 men, in spite of a certain swagger towards 
 one another and a tendency to bully the 
 derelict showman, wore a hang-dog look 
 betraying that sense of unfair treatment 
 which a man is so apt to feel when his 
 womankind makes an appeal to the super- 
 natural. In their determination to see 
 the child, the men recklessly divulged much 
 more concerning their motives than they 
 had meant to do. Their talk confirmed 
 my impression that such a story may still 
 act as a restraining influence in the sphere 
 of marital conduct which, next to primitive 
 religion, has always afforded the most fer- 
 tile field for irrational taboos and savage 
 punishments. 
 
 What story could be better than this to 
 secure sympathy for the mother of too
 
 28 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 many daughters and contumely for the 
 irritated father ; the touch of mysticism, 
 the supernatural sphere in which it was 
 placed, would render a man quite helpless. 
 
 The story of the Devil Baby, evolved in 
 response to the imperative needs of anxious 
 wives and mothers, recalls the theory that 
 woman first fashioned the fairy story, that 
 combination of wisdom and romance, in an 
 effort to tame her mate and to make him 
 a better father to her children, until such 
 stories finally became a crude creed for 
 domestic conduct, softening the treatment 
 men accorded to women. Because such 
 stories, expressing the very essence of 
 human emotion, did not pretend to imitate 
 the outside of life, they were careless of 
 verisimilitude and absolutely indifferent 
 to the real world. They did, however, 
 meet an essential requirement of the good 
 story, in that they dealt with fundamental 
 experiences. 
 
 These first pitiful efforts of women were 
 so widespread and powerful that we have 
 not yet escaped their influence. As sub- 
 conscious memories, they still cast vague
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 29 
 
 shadows upon the vast spaces of Hfe, shad- 
 ows that are dim and distorted because of 
 their distant origin. They remind us 
 that for thousands of years women had 
 nothing to oppose against unthinkable bru- 
 tahty save "the charm of words," no other 
 implement with which to subdue the fierce- 
 nesses of the world about them. Only 
 through words could they hope to arouse 
 the generosity of strength, to secure a 
 measure of pity for themselves and their 
 children, to so protect the life they had 
 produced that "the precious vintage stored 
 from their own agony" might not wan- 
 tonly be spilled upon the ground. Pos- 
 sibly the multitude of life's failures, the 
 obscure victims of unspeakable wrong and 
 brutality, have embodied their memories 
 in a literature of their own, of which the 
 story of the Devil Baby is a specimen, 
 crude and ugly in form, as would be inevi- 
 table, but still bringing relief to the sur- 
 charged heart. 
 
 During the weeks that the Devil Baby 
 drew multitudes of visitors to Hull-House, 
 my mind was opened to the fact that new
 
 30 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 knowledge derived from concrete experi- 
 ence is continually being made available 
 for the guidance of human life ; that hum- 
 ble women are still establishing rules of 
 conduct as best they may, to counteract 
 the base temptations of a man's world. 
 I saw a new significance in the fact that 
 thousands of women, for instance, make 
 it a standard of domestic virtue that a 
 man must not touch his pay envelope, but 
 bring it home unopened to his wife. High 
 praise is contained in the phrase, "We 
 have been married twenty years and he 
 never once opened his own envelope," or 
 covert blame in the statement, "Of course 
 he got to gambling ; what can you expect 
 from a man who always opens his own 
 pay? 
 
 These humble domestic virtues, of which 
 women see the need so much more vividly 
 than men do, have furthermore developed 
 their penalties. The latter, too, are put into 
 aphorisms which, in time, when Memory 
 has done her work upon them, may become 
 legendary wisdom. 
 
 Such a penalty was recently illustrated
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 31 
 
 in our neighborhood by the fate of an old 
 man who was found in his room almost 
 starved to death. He was pointed out by 
 many of our neighbors as an example of 
 the inevitable fate of one who deserts his 
 family and therefore, "without a woman to 
 keep him straight," falls into drink and 
 shiftlessness and the endless paths of wrong- 
 doing, so that loneliness and destitution 
 inevitably overtake his old age. 
 
 The women were so fatalistically certain 
 of this relation of punishment to domestic 
 sin, of reward to domestic virtue, that when 
 they talked about them, as they so con- 
 stantly did in connection with the Devil 
 Baby, it often sounded as if they were 
 using the words of a widely known ritual. 
 Among the visitors to the Devil Baby were 
 many foreign-born peasant women who, 
 when they had come to America, had been 
 suddenly subjected to the complicated and 
 constantly changing environment of city 
 life, and, finding no outlet for many in- 
 herited tendencies, might easily have been 
 thrown into that state described by psy- 
 chologists as one of "baulked disposition."
 
 32 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 To them this simple tale, with its direct 
 connection between cause and effect, 
 between wrong-doing and punishment, 
 brought soothing and relief, and restored 
 a shaken confidence as to the righteous- 
 ness of the universe. They used the story 
 not only to tame restless husbands, but 
 mothers threatened their daughters that 
 if they went to dance halls or out to walk 
 with strange young men, they would be 
 eternally disgraced by devil babies. As 
 the story grew, the girls themselves seized 
 upon it as a palpable punishment to be 
 held over the heads of reckless friends. 
 That the tale was useful was evidenced by 
 many letters similar to the anonymous 
 epistle here given. 
 
 "me and my friends we work in talor shop and 
 when we are going home on the roby street car 
 where we get off that car at blue island ave. we will 
 meet some fellows sitting at that street where they 
 drink some beer from pail, they keep look in cars 
 all time and they will wait and see if we will come 
 sometimes we will have to work, but they will wait 
 so long they are tired and they dont care they get 
 rest so long but a girl what works in twine mill saw 
 them talk with us we know her good and she say
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 33 
 
 what youse talk with old drunk man for we shall 
 come to thier dance when it will be they will tell us 
 and we should know all about where to see them that 
 girl she say oh if you will go with them you will get 
 devils baby like some other girls did who we knows, 
 she say Jane Addams she will show one like that in 
 Hull House if you will go down there we shall come 
 sometime and we will see if that is trouth we do not 
 believe her for she is friendly with them old men 
 herself when she go out from her work they will 
 wink to her and say something else to. We will 
 go down and see you and make a lie from what she 
 say." 
 
 Because the Devil Baby embodied an 
 undeserved wrong to a poor mother whose 
 tender child had been claimed by the forces 
 of evil, his merely reputed presence had 
 power to attract to Hull-House hundreds 
 of women who had been humbled and dis- 
 graced by their children ; mothers of the 
 feeble-minded, of the vicious, of the crim- 
 inal, of the prostitute. In their talk it 
 was as if their long role of maternal apology 
 and protective reticence had at last broken 
 down, as if they could speak out freely be- 
 cause for once a man responsible for an 
 ill-begotten child had been "met up with'*
 
 34 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 and had received his deserts. Their sin- 
 ister version of the story was that the father 
 of the Devil Baby had married without 
 confessing a hideous crime committed years 
 before, thus basely deceiving both his in- 
 nocent young bride and the good priest 
 who performed the solemn ceremony ; that 
 the sin had become incarnate in his child 
 which, to the horror of the young and 
 trusting mother, had been born with all 
 the outward aspects of the devil himself. 
 
 As if drawn by a magnet, these forlorn 
 women issued forth from the many homes 
 in which dwelt "the two unprofitable 
 goddesses. Poverty and Impossibility.'* 
 Occasionally it seemed to me that the 
 women were impelled by a longing to see 
 one good case of retribution before they 
 died, as a bullied child hopes to deal at 
 least one crushing blow at his tormentor 
 when he "grows up," but I think, on the 
 whole, such an explanation was a mistake ; 
 it is more probable that the avidity of the 
 women demonstrated that the story itself, 
 like all interpretative art, was "one of those 
 free, unconscious attempts to satisfy, out-
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 35 
 
 side of life, those cravings which Hfe itself 
 leaves unsatisfied." At moments, however, 
 baffled desires, sharp cries of pain, echoes 
 of justices unfulfilled, the original material 
 from which such tales are fashioned, would 
 defy Memxory's appeasing power and break 
 through the rigid restraints imposed by all 
 Art, even that unconscious of itself. 
 
 With an understanding quickened, per- 
 haps, through my own acquaintance with 
 the mysterious child, I listened to many 
 tragic reminiscences from the visiting 
 women; of premature births, ''because he 
 kicked me in the side" ; of children maimed 
 and burnt because "I had no one to leave 
 them with when I went to work" ; women 
 had seen the tender flesh of growing little 
 bodies given over to death because "he 
 wouldn't let me send for the doctor," or 
 because "there was no money to pay for 
 the medicine." But even these mothers, 
 rendered childless through insensate bru- 
 tality, were less pitiful than some of the 
 others, who might well have cried aloud of 
 their children as did a distracted mother of 
 her child centuries ago :
 
 36 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 "That God should send this one thing more 
 Of hunger and of dread, a door 
 Set wide to every wind of pain !" 
 
 Such was the mother of a feeble-minded 
 boy who said : "I didn't have a devil baby 
 myself, but I bore a poor 'innocent' who 
 made me fight devils for twenty-three years." 
 She told of her son's experiences from the 
 time the other little boys had put him up 
 to stealing that they might hide in safety 
 and leave him to be found with "the 
 goods on him," until grown into a huge 
 man he fell into the hands of professional 
 burglars ; he was evidently the dupe and 
 stool-pigeon of the vicious and criminal until 
 the very day he was locked into the State 
 Penitentiary. "If people played with him 
 a little, he went right off and did anything 
 they told him to, and now he's been sent 
 up for life. We call such innocents 'God's 
 Fools' in the old country, but over here 
 the Devil himself gets them. I've fought 
 off bad men and boys from the poor lamb 
 with my very fists ; nobody ever came near 
 the house except such-like and the police 
 officers, who were always arresting him."
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 37 
 
 There were a goodly number of visitors 
 to the Devil Baby of the type of those to 
 be found in every large city, who are on the 
 verge of nervous collapse, or who exhibit 
 many symptoms of mental aberration, and 
 yet are sufficiently normal to be at large 
 most of the time, and to support themselves 
 by drudgery which requires little mental 
 effort, although the exhaustion resulting 
 from the work they are able to do is the 
 one thing from which they should be most 
 carefully protected. One such woman, evi- 
 dently obtaining inscrutable comfort from 
 the story of the Devil Baby even after she 
 had become convinced that we harbored 
 no such creature, came many times to tell 
 of her longing for her son, who had joined 
 the army eighteen months before and was 
 now stationed in Alaska. She always be- 
 gan with the same words. 
 
 "When Spring comes and the snow melts 
 so that I know he could get out, I can 
 hardly stand it. You know I was once in 
 the Insane Asylum for three years at a 
 stretch, and since then I haven't had much 
 use of my mind except to worry with. Of 
 
 20v'8'72
 
 38 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 course I know that it is dangerous for me, 
 but what can I do ? I think something 
 like this: 'The snow is melting, now he 
 could get out, but his officers won't let 
 him off and if he runs away he'll be shot 
 for a deserter — either way I'll never see 
 him again ; I'll die without seeing him' — 
 and then I begin all over again with the 
 snow." After a pause, she said : "The 
 recruiting officer ought not to have taken 
 him, he's my only son and I'm a widow. 
 It's against the rules, but he was so crazy 
 to go that I guess he lied a little — at any 
 rate, the government has him now and I 
 can't get him back. Without this worry 
 about him my mind would be all right ; 
 if he were here he would be earning money 
 and keeping me and we would be happy all 
 day long." 
 
 Recalling the vagabondish lad, who had 
 never earned much money and had cer- 
 tainly never "kept" his hard-working 
 mother, I ventured to suggest that, even 
 if he were at home, he might not have work 
 these hard times, that he might get into 
 trouble and be arrested — I did not need
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 39 
 
 to remind her that he had already been 
 arrested twice — that he was now fed and 
 shehered and under disciphne, and I added 
 hopefully something about his seeing the 
 world. She looked at me out of her with- 
 drawn, harried eyes, as if I were speaking 
 a foreign tongue. " That wouldn't make 
 any real difference to me — the work, the 
 money, his behaving well and all that, if I 
 could cook and wash for him. I don't need 
 all the money I earn scrubbing that factory. 
 I only take bread and tea for supper and 
 I choke over that, thinking of him." 
 
 She ceased to speak, overcome by a 
 thousand obscure emotions which could 
 find no outlet in words. She dimly real- 
 ized that the facts in the case, to one who 
 had known her boy from childhood, were 
 far from creditable, and that no one could 
 understand the eternally unappeased ideal- 
 ism which, for her, surrounded her son's 
 return. She was even afraid to say much 
 about it, lest she should be overmastered 
 by her subject and be considered so ir- 
 rational as to suggest a return to the 
 Hospital for the Insane.
 
 40 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 Those mothers who have never resisted 
 fate nor buffeted against the black waters, 
 but have allowed the waves to close over 
 them, worn and bent as they are by hard 
 labor, subdued and misshapen by the bru- 
 tality of men, are at least unaffrighted by 
 the melodramatic coarseness of life, which 
 Stevenson more gently describes as "the 
 uncouth and outlandish strain in the web 
 of the world." The story of the Devil 
 Baby may have made its appeal through 
 its frank presentation of this very de- 
 moniac quality, to those who live under 
 the iron tyranny of that poverty which 
 threatens starvation, and under the dread 
 of a brutality which may any dark night 
 bring them or their children to extinction ; 
 to those who have seen both virtue and 
 vice go unrewarded and who have long 
 since ceased to explain. 
 
 This more primitive type embodies the 
 eternal patience of those humble, toiling 
 women who through the generations have 
 been held of little value, save as their 
 drudgery ministered to their men. One 
 of them related her habit of going through
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 41 
 
 the pockets of her drunken son every pay- 
 day, and complained that she had never 
 found so httle as the night before, only 
 twenty-five cents out of fifteen dollars he 
 had promised for the rent, long overdue. 
 ''I had to get that as he lay in the alley 
 before the door ; I couldn't pull him in, 
 and the copper who helped him home, 
 left as soon as he heard me coming and pre- 
 tended he didn't see me. I have no food 
 in the house, nor cofi^ee to sober him up 
 with. I know perfectly well that you will 
 ask me to eat something here, but, if I 
 can't carry it home, I won't take a bite 
 nor a sup. I have never told you so much 
 before. Since one of the nurses said he 
 could be arrested for my non-support, I 
 have been awful close-mouthed. It's the 
 foolish way all the women in our street 
 are talking about the Devil Baby that's 
 loosened my tongue, more shame to me." 
 
 A sorrowful woman clad in heavy black, 
 who came one day, exhibited such a capac- 
 ity for prolonged weeping that it was evi- 
 dence in itself of the truth of at least half 
 her statement, that she had cried herself
 
 42 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 to sleep every night of her life for fourteen 
 years in fulfilment of a *' curse" laid upon 
 her by an angry man, that "her pillow 
 would be wet with tears as long as 
 she lived." Her respectable husband had 
 a shop in the Red Light district because 
 he found it profitable to sell to the men 
 and women who lived there. She had kept 
 house in the room over the *' store" from 
 the time she was a bride newly come from 
 Russia, and her five daughters had been 
 born there, but never a son to gladden her 
 husband's heart. 
 
 She took such a feverish interest in the 
 Devil Baby that, when I was obliged to 
 disillusion her, I found it hard to take 
 away her comfort in the belief that the 
 Powers that Be are on the side of the 
 woman when her husband resents too 
 many daughters. But, after all, the birth 
 of daughters was but an incident in her 
 tale of unmitigated woe, for the scoldings 
 of a disappointed husband were as nothing 
 to the curse of a strange enemy, although 
 she doubtless had a confused impression 
 that if there were retribution for one in
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 43 
 
 the general scheme of things, there might 
 be for the other. When the weeping woman 
 finally put the events of her disordered life 
 in some sort of sequence, it became clear 
 that about fifteen years ago she had re- 
 ported to the police a vicious house whose 
 back door opened into her own yard. Her 
 husband had forbidden her to do anything 
 about it and had said that it would only 
 get them into trouble, but she had been 
 made desperate one day when she saw her 
 little girl, then twelve years old, come out 
 of the door, gleefully showing her younger 
 sister a present of money. Because the 
 poor woman had tried for ten years without 
 success to induce her husband to move 
 from the vicinity of such houses, she was 
 certain that she could save her child only 
 by forcing out "the bad people" from her 
 own door yard. She therefore made her 
 one frantic effort, found her way to the 
 city hall and there reported the house to 
 the chief himself. Of course, "the bad 
 people stood in with the police" and 
 nothing happened to them save, perhaps, 
 a fresh levy of blackmail, but the keeper
 
 44 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 of the house, beside himself with rage, 
 made the dire threat and laid the curse 
 upon her. In less than a year from that 
 time he had enticed her daughter into a 
 disreputable house in another part of the 
 district. The poor woman, ringing one door- 
 bell after another, had never been able to 
 find her, but her sisters, who in time came 
 to know where she was, had been dazzled 
 by her mode of life. The weeping mother 
 was quite sure that two of her daughters, 
 while still outwardly respectable and 
 "working downtown," earned money in 
 the devious ways which they had learned 
 all about when they were little children, 
 although for the past five years the now 
 prosperous husband had allowed the family 
 to live in a suburb, where the two younger 
 daughters were *' growing up respectable." 
 Certain of the visitors, although con- 
 fronted by those mysterious and impersonal 
 wrongs which are apparently inherent in the 
 very nature of things, gave us glimpses of 
 another sort of wisdom than that expressed 
 in the assumptions that the decrees of Fate 
 are immutable.
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 45 
 
 Such a glimpse came to me through a 
 conversation with a woman whose fine 
 mind and indomitable spirit I had long 
 admired ; I had known her for years, and 
 yet the recital of her sufferings, added to 
 those the Devil Baby had already induced 
 other women to tell me, pierced me afresh. 
 The story of the Devil Baby may have 
 incited these women to put their experiences 
 more vividly than they had hitherto been 
 able to do. It may have been because 
 they were unconsciously spurred by the 
 hope that a supernatural retribution might 
 intervene even for them, or because they 
 were merely comforted by the knowledge 
 that it had once done so for some one else 
 that they spoke with more confidence than 
 they had ever done before. 
 
 "I had eleven children, some born in 
 Hungary and some born here, nine of 
 them boys ; all of the children died when 
 they were little but my dear Liboucha. 
 You know all about her. She died last 
 winter in the Insane Asylum. She was only 
 twelve years old when her father, in a fit 
 of delirium tremens, killed himself after
 
 46 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 he had chased us around the room, trying 
 to kill us first. She saw it all, the blood 
 splashed on the wall stayed in her mind 
 the worst ; she shivered and shook all that 
 night through, and the next morning she 
 had lost her voice, couldn't speak out 
 loud for terror. After a while she went to 
 school again and her voice came back, al- 
 though it was never very natural. She 
 seemed to do as well as ever and was awful 
 pleased when she got into High School. 
 All the money we had I earned scrubbing 
 in a public dispensary, although sometimes 
 I got a little more by interpreting for the 
 patients, for I know three languages, one 
 as well as the other. But I was deter- 
 mined that whatever happened to me, 
 Liboucha was to be educated. My hus- 
 band's father was a doctor in the old coun- 
 try, and Liboucha was always a clever 
 child. I wouldn't have her live the kind 
 of life I had, with no use for my mind ex- 
 cept to make me restless and bitter. I was 
 pretty old and worn out for such hard 
 work, but when I used to see Liboucha on 
 a Sunday morning ready for church in her
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 47 
 
 white dress, with her long yellow hair 
 braided round her beautiful pale face, ly- 
 ing there in bed as I was, being brought 
 up a free-thinker, and needing to rest my 
 aching bones for the next week's work, 
 I'd feel almost happy, in spite of every- 
 thing. But of course no such peace could 
 last in my life ; the second year at High 
 School Liboucha began to seem different 
 and to do strange things. You know the 
 time she wandered away for three days and 
 we were all v^^ild with fright, although a 
 kind woman had taken her in and no harm 
 came to her. I could never be easy after 
 that ; she was always gentle, but she was 
 awful sly about running away and at last 
 I had to send her to the asylum. She 
 stayed there off and on for five years, but 
 I saw her every week of my life and she 
 was always company for me, what with 
 sewing for her, washing and ironing her 
 clothes, cooking little things to take out 
 to her, and saving a bit of money to buy 
 fruit for her. At any rate, I had stopped 
 feeling so bitter, and got some comfort out 
 of seeing the one thing that belonged to
 
 48 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 me on this side of the water, when all of a 
 sudden she died of heart failure and they 
 never took the trouble to send for me until 
 the next day." 
 
 She stopped as if wondering afresh that 
 the Fates could have been so casual, but 
 with a sudden illumination, as if she had 
 been awakened out of the burden and 
 intensity of her restricted personal inter- 
 ests into a consciousness of those larger 
 relations that are, for the most part, so 
 strangely invisible. It was as if the young 
 mother of the grotesque Devil Baby, that 
 victim of wrong doing on the part of 
 others, had revealed to this tragic woman 
 much more clearly than soft words had 
 ever done, that the return of a deed of 
 violence upon the head of the innocent is 
 inevitable ; as if she had realized that, al- 
 though she was destined to walk all the 
 days of her life with the piteous multitude 
 who bear the undeserved wrongs of the 
 world, she would walk henceforth with a 
 sense of companionship. 
 
 At moments it seemed possible that these 
 simple women, representing an earlier de-
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 49 
 
 velopment, eagerly seized upon the story 
 because it was primitive in form and sub- 
 stance. Certainly, one evening, a long- 
 forgotten ballad made an unceasing effort 
 to come to the surface of my mind as I 
 talked to a feeble woman who, in the last 
 stages of an incurable disease from which 
 she soon afterwards died, had been helped 
 off the street car in front of Hull-House. 
 The ballad tells how the lover of a proud 
 and jealous mistress, who demanded as a 
 final test of devotion that he bring her the 
 heart of his mother, had quickly cut the 
 heart from his mother's breast and impetu- 
 ously returned to his lady, bearing it upon 
 a salver ; and how, when stumbling in his 
 gallant haste, he stooped to replace upon 
 the silver plate his mother's heart, which 
 had rolled to the ground, the heart, still 
 beating with tender solicitude, whispered 
 the hope that her child was not hurt. The 
 ballad itself was scarcely more exaggerated 
 than the story of our visitor that evening, 
 who had made the desperate effort of a 
 journey from home in order to see the 
 Devil Baby. I was familiar with her vicis-
 
 50 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 situdes ; the shiftless, drinking husband 
 and the large family of children, all of whom 
 had brought her sorrow and disgrace, and I 
 knew that her heart's desire was to see 
 again, before she died, her youngest son, 
 who was a life prisoner in the penitentiary. 
 She was confident that the last piteous 
 stage of her disease would secure him a 
 week's parole, founding this forlorn hope 
 upon the fact that "they sometimes let 
 them out to attend a mother's funeral, 
 and perhaps they'd let Joe come a few 
 days ahead ; he could pay his fare after- 
 wards from the insurance money. It 
 wouldn't take much to bury me." Again 
 we went over the hideous story : Joe had 
 violently quarrelled with a woman, the 
 proprietor of the house in which his dis- 
 reputable wife was living, because she had 
 withheld from him a part of his wife's 
 "earnings," and in the altercation had 
 killed her — a situation, one would say, 
 which it would be difficult for even a mother 
 to condone. But not at all, her thin gray 
 face worked with emotion, her trembling 
 hands restlessly pulled at her shabby skirt
 
 REACTING ON LIFE 51 
 
 as the hands of the dying pluck at their 
 sheets, but she put all the vitality she 
 could muster into his defence. She told 
 us he had legally married the girl, who sup- 
 ported him, "although Lily had been so 
 long in that life that few men would have 
 done it. Of course, such a girl must have 
 a protector or everybody would fleece her. 
 Poor Lily said to the day of her death that 
 he was the kindest man she ever knew, and 
 treated her the whitest ; that she herself 
 was to blame for the murder because she 
 told on the old miser, and Joe was so hot- 
 headed she might have known that he 
 would draw a gun for her." The gasping 
 mother concluded: ''He was always that 
 handsome and had such a way. One 
 winter, when I was scrubbing in an office 
 building, I'd never get home much before 
 twelve o'clock, but Joe would open the 
 door for me just as pleasant as if he hadn't 
 been waked out of a sound sleep." She 
 was so triumphantly unconscious of the 
 incongruity of a sturdy son in bed while 
 his mother earned his food, that her audi- 
 tors said never a word, and in silence we
 
 52 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 saw a hero evolved before our eyes, a de- 
 fender of the oppressed, the best beloved of 
 his mother, who was losing his high spirits 
 and eating his heart out behind prison 
 bars. He could well defy the world even 
 there, surrounded as he was by that invin- 
 cible affection which assures both the for- 
 tunate and unfortunate alike that we are 
 loved, not according to our deserts, but in 
 response to some profounder law. 
 
 This imposing revelation of maternal 
 solicitude was an instance of what con- 
 tinually happened in connection with the 
 Devil Baby. In the midst of the most 
 tragic reminiscences, there remained that 
 something in the memories of these mothers 
 which has been called the great revelation 
 of tragedy, or sometimes the great illusion 
 of tragedy ; that which has power in its 
 own right to make life palatable and at 
 rare moments even beautiful.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 women's memories — DISTURBING CON- 
 VENTIONS 
 
 In sharp contrast to the function of woman's 
 long memory as a reconciler to life, revealed 
 by the visitors to the Devil Baby, are those 
 individual reminiscences which, because 
 they force the possessor to challenge exist- 
 ing conventions, act as a reproach, even as 
 a social disturber. When these reminis- 
 cences, based upon the diverse experi- 
 ences of many people unknown to each 
 other, point to one inevitable conclusion, 
 they accumulate into a social protest, 
 although not necessarily an effective one, 
 against existing conventions, even against 
 those which are most valuable and those 
 securely founded upon cumulative human 
 wisdom. But because no conventional- 
 ized tradition is perfect, however good its 
 intent, most of them become challenged in 
 
 53
 
 54 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 course of time, unwittingly illustrating the 
 contention that great social changes are 
 often brought about less by the thinkers 
 than by "a certain native and indepen- 
 dent rationalism operating in great masses 
 of men and women." 
 
 The statement is well founded that a 
 convention is at its best, not when it is 
 universally accepted, but just when it is 
 being so challenged and broken that the 
 conformists are obliged to defend it and 
 to fight for it against those who would 
 destroy it. Both the defenders of an old 
 custom and its opponents are then driven 
 to a searching of their own hearts. 
 
 Such searching and sifting is taking 
 place in the consciences of many women of 
 this generation whose sufferings, although 
 strikingly influencing conduct, are seldom 
 expressed in words until they are told in 
 the form of reminiscence after the edges 
 have been long since dulled. Such suffer- 
 ings are never so poignant as when women 
 have been forced by their personal experi- 
 ences to challenge the valuable conventions 
 safeguarding family life.
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 55 
 
 A woman whom I had known sHghtly 
 for many years came to Hull-House one day 
 escorted by her little grandson. Her delicate 
 features, which were rather hard and severe, 
 softened most charmingly as the little boy 
 raised his cap in good-by from the vanish- 
 ing automobile. In reply to my admiring 
 comment upon the sturdy lad and his af- 
 fectionate relation to her, she startled me 
 by saying abruptly, "You know he is 
 really not my grandson. I have scarcely 
 admitted the doubt before, but the time 
 is coming when I must face it and de- 
 cide his future. If you are kind enough 
 to listen, I want to tell you my experience 
 in all its grim sorrow. 
 
 "My husband was shot twenty-seven 
 years ago, under very disgraceful circum- 
 stances, in a disreputable quarter of Paris ; 
 you may remember something of it in the 
 newspapers, although they meant to be 
 considerate. I was left with my little son, 
 and with such a horror of self-indulgence 
 and its consequences, that I determined to 
 rear my child in strict sobriety, chastity, 
 and self-restraint, although all else were
 
 56 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 sacrificed to it. Through his school and 
 college days, which I took care should be 
 far from his father's friends and associations, 
 I always lived with him, so bent on recti- 
 tude and so distressed by any lack of self- 
 control that I see now how hard and 
 rigorous his life must have been. I meant 
 to sacrifice myself for my child, in reality 
 I sacrificed him to my narrow code. 
 
 "The very June that he took his master's 
 degree, I myself found him, one beautiful 
 morning, lying dead in his own room, shot 
 through the temple. No one had heard 
 the report of the revolver, for the little 
 house we had taken was so on the edge of 
 the college town that the neighbors were 
 rather remote, and he must have killed 
 himself while I sat in the moonlight, on the 
 garden bench, after he had left me, my 
 mind still filled with plans for his future. 
 
 "I have gone over every word of our 
 conversation that evening in the garden a 
 thousand times ; we were planning to come 
 to Chicago for his medical course, and I 
 had expressed my exultant confidence in 
 him to withstand whatever temptation a
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 57 
 
 city might offer, my pride in his purity of 
 thought, his rectitude of conduct. It was 
 then he rose rather abruptly and went into 
 the house to write the letter to me which 
 I found on his table next morning. In 
 that letter he told me that he was too vile 
 to live any longer, that he had sinned not 
 only against his own code of decency and 
 honor, but against my lifelong standards 
 and teachings, and that he realized per- 
 fectly that I could never forgive him. 
 He evidently did not expect any under- 
 standing from me, either for himself or for 
 *the young and innocent girl' about to be- 
 come the mother of his child, and in his 
 interpretation of my rigid morals he was 
 quite sure that I would never consent to 
 see her, but he wrote me that he had told 
 her to send the little baby to me as soon 
 as it was born, obviously hoping that I 
 might be tender to the innocent, although 
 I was so harsh and unpitying to the guilty. 
 I had apparently never given him a glimpse 
 beyond my unbending sternness, and he had 
 all unwittingly pronounced me too self- 
 righteous for forgiveness ; at any rate, he
 
 58 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 faced death rather than my cold disap- 
 probation. 
 
 "The girl is still leading the life she had 
 led for two years before my son met her. 
 She is glad to have her child cared for and 
 hopes that I will make him my heir, but 
 understands, of course, that his paternity 
 could never be established in court. So 
 here I am, old and hard, beginning again 
 the perilous experiment of rearing a man 
 child. I suppose it was inevitable that I 
 should hold the girl responsible for my son's 
 downfall and for his death. She was one 
 of the wretched young women who live 
 in college towns for the express purpose 
 of inveigling young men, often deliberately 
 directing their efforts toward those who 
 are reputed to have money. I discovered 
 all sorts of damaging facts about her, which 
 enabled me to exonerate my son from in- 
 tentional wrong-doing, and to think quite 
 honestly that he had been lured and 
 tempted beyond his strength. The girl 
 was obliged to leave the little town, which 
 was filled with the horror and scandal of 
 the occurrence, but even then, in that first
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 59 
 
 unbridled public censure against the *bad 
 woman' who had been discovered in the 
 midst of virtuous surroundings, there was 
 a tendency to hold me accountable for my 
 son's death, whatever the girl's earlier 
 responsibility may have been. 
 
 " In my loathing of her I experienced all 
 over again the harsh and bitter judgments 
 through which I had lived in the first years 
 after my husband's death. I had secretly 
 held the unknown woman responsible for his 
 end, but of course it never occurred to me 
 to find out about her, and I certainly could 
 never have brought myself to hear her 
 name, much less to see her. I have at 
 least done better than that in regard to 
 the mother of my * grandson,' and Heaven 
 knows I have tried in all humility and 
 heartbreak to help her. She fairly hated 
 me, as she did anything that reminded her 
 of my son — the entire episode had seemed 
 to her so unnatural, so monstrous, so un- 
 necessary — she considered me his mur- 
 derer, and I never had the courage to tell 
 her that I agreed with her. Perhaps if I 
 had done that, really abased myself as I
 
 6o LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 was willing she should be abased, we might 
 have come into some sort of genuine re- 
 lation born of our companionship in trag- 
 edy. But I couldn't do that, possibly 
 because the women of my generation can- 
 not easily change the traditional attitude 
 towards what the Bible calls 'the harlot/ 
 At any rate, I didn't succeed in 'saving' 
 her. She so obviously dreaded seeing me, 
 and our strained visits were so unsatis- 
 factory and painful, that I finally gave it 
 up, and her son has apparently quite for- 
 gotten her. I am sure she tries to forget 
 him and all the tragic scenes associated 
 with his earliest babyhood, when I in- 
 sisted not only upon 'keeping mother and 
 child together' but also on keeping them 
 with me." 
 
 After a moment's pause she resumed : 
 "It would have been comparatively easy 
 for me to die when my child was little, 
 when I still had a right to believe that he 
 would grow up to be a good and useful 
 man, but I lived to see him driven to his 
 death by my own stupidity. I have en- 
 countered the full penalty for breaking the
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 6i 
 
 commandment to judge not. I passed 
 sentence without hearing the evidence ; I 
 gave up the traditional role of the woman 
 who loves and pities and tries to under- 
 stand ; I forgot that it was my mission to 
 save and not to judge. 
 
 "As I have gone back over my unmiti- 
 gated failure again and again, I am sure 
 at last that it was the sorry result of my 
 implacable judgment of the woman I held 
 responsible for my husband's sin. I did 
 not realize the danger nor the inevitable 
 recoil of such a state of self-righteousness 
 upon my child." 
 
 As she paused in the recital I rashly 
 anticipated the conclusion, that her bitter 
 experiences had brought the whole question 
 to that tribunal of personal conduct whose 
 concrete findings stir us to our very mar- 
 row with shame and remorse ; that she had 
 frantically striven as we all do, to keep her- 
 self from falling into the pit where the 
 demons of self-reproach dwell, by clinging 
 to the conventional judgments of the 
 world. I expected her to set them forth 
 at great length in self-justification, and per-
 
 62 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 haps, belonging, as she so obviously did, to 
 an older school, she might even assure me 
 that the wrong to those to whom it was 
 now impossible to make reparation had 
 forever lifted her above committing another 
 such injustice. I found, however, that I 
 was absolutely mistaken and that whatever 
 might be true of her, it still lay within me 
 to commit a gross injustice, when she re- 
 sumed with these words : "It is a long time 
 since I ceased to urge in my own defence 
 that I was but reflecting the attitude of 
 society, for, in my efforts to get at the root 
 of the matter I have been convinced that 
 the conventional attitude cannot be de- 
 fended, certainly not upon religious 
 grounds." 
 
 She stopped as if startled by her own 
 reflections upon the subject of the social 
 ostracism so long established and so harshly 
 enforced that women seem to hold to it as 
 through an instinct of self-preservation. 
 
 She was, perhaps, dimly conscious that 
 the tradition that the unchaste woman 
 should be an outcast from society rests 
 upon a solid basis of experience, upon the
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 63 
 
 long struggle of a multitude of obscure 
 women who, from one generation to another, 
 were frantically determined to establish the 
 paternity of their children and to force the 
 father to a recognition of his obligations ; 
 and that the living representatives of these 
 women instinctively rise up in honest re- 
 bellion against any attempt to loosen the 
 social control which such efforts have es- 
 tablished, bungling and cruel though the 
 control may be. 
 
 Further conversation showed that she 
 also realized that these stern memories 
 inherited from the past have an undoubted 
 social value and that it is a perilous under- 
 taking upon which certain women of this 
 generation are bent in their efforts to deal 
 a belated justice to the fallen woman. It 
 involves a clash within the very mass of 
 inherited motives and impulses as well as 
 a clash between old conventions and con- 
 temporary principles. On the other hand, 
 it must have been obvious to her in her 
 long effort to get at *'the root of the mat- 
 ter" that the punishment and hatred of 
 the bad woman has gone so far as to over-
 
 64 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 reach its own purpose ; it has become re- 
 sponsible for such hardness of heart on the 
 part of "respectable" women towards the 
 so-called fallen ones, that punishment is 
 often inflicted not only without regard to 
 justice, but in order to feed the spiritual 
 pride, "I am holier than thou." Such 
 pride erects veritable barricades, deliber- 
 ately shutting out sympathetic understand- 
 ing. 
 
 The very fact that women remain closer 
 to type than men do and are more swayed 
 by the past, makes it difficult for them to 
 defy settled conventions. It adds to their 
 difficulty that the individual women, 
 driven to modify a harsh convention which 
 has become unendurable to them, are per- 
 force those most sensitive to injustice. The 
 sharp struggle for social advance, which is 
 always a struggle between ideas, long be- 
 fore it becomes embodied in contending 
 social groups, may thus find its arena in 
 the tender conscience of one woman who 
 is pitilessly rent and pierced by her war- 
 ring scruples and affections. Even such a 
 tentative effort in the direction of social
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 65 
 
 advance exacts the usual toll of blood and 
 tears. 
 
 Fortunately the entire burden of the 
 attempt to modify a convention which 
 has become unsupportable, by no means 
 rests solely upon such self-conscious women. 
 Their analytical efforts are steadily sup- 
 plemented by instinctive conduct on the 
 part of many others. A great mass of 
 "variation from type/* accelerating this 
 social change, is contributed by simple 
 mothers who have been impelled by the 
 same primitive emotion which the Devil 
 Baby had obviously released in so many 
 old women. This is an overwhelming pity 
 and sense of tender comprehension, doubt- 
 less closely related to the compunction 
 characteristic of all primitive people which 
 in the earliest stage of social development 
 long performed the first rude offices of a 
 sense of justice. This early trait is still a 
 factor in the social struggle, for as has often 
 been pointed out, our social state is like a 
 countryside — of a complex geological struc- 
 ture, with outcrops of strata of very diverse 
 ages.
 
 66 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 Such compunction sometimes carries the 
 grandmother of an illegitimate child to the 
 point of caring for the child when she is 
 still utterly unable to forgive her daughter, 
 the child's mother. Even that is a step 
 in advance from the time when the 
 daughter was driven from the house and 
 her child, because a bastard, was con- 
 scientiously treated as an outcast both by 
 the family and by the community. 
 
 Such an instance of compunction was 
 recently brought to my attention when 
 Hull-House made an effort to place a sub- 
 normal little girl twelve years old in an 
 institution in order that she might be pro- 
 tected from certain designing men in the 
 neighborhood. The grandmother who had 
 always taken care of her savagely opposed 
 the effort step by step. She had scrubbed 
 the lavatories in a public building during 
 the twenty-five years of her widowhood, 
 and because she worked all day had been 
 unable to protect her own feeble-minded 
 daughter who, when barely fifteen years 
 old, had become the mother of this child. 
 When her granddaughter was finally placed
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS d'j 
 
 in the institution, the old woman was ab- 
 solutely desolated. She found it almost 
 impossible to return home after her day's 
 work because *'it was too empty and lone- 
 some, and nothing to come back for. 
 You see," she explained, ''my youngest 
 boy wasn't right in his head either and kept 
 his bed for the last fifteen years of his life. 
 During all that time I took care of him the 
 way one does of a baby, and I hurried home 
 every night with my heart in my mouth 
 until I saw that he was all right. He died 
 the year this little girl was born and she 
 kind of took his place. I kept her in a 
 day nursery while she was little, and when 
 she was seven years old the ladies there 
 sent her to school in one of the subnormal 
 rooms and let her come back to the nursery 
 for her meals. I thought she was getting 
 along all right and I took care never to let 
 her go near her mother." The old woman 
 made it quite clear that this was because 
 her daughter was keeping house with a man 
 with whom there had been no marriage 
 ceremony. In her simple code, to go to 
 such a house would be to connive at
 
 68 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 sin, and while she was grateful that the 
 man had established a control over her 
 daughter which she herself had never been 
 able to obtain, she always referred to her 
 daughter as "fallen," although no one knew 
 better than she how unguarded the girl had 
 been. As I saw how singularly free this 
 mother was from self-reproach and how 
 untouched by any indecisions or remorses 
 for the past, I was once more impressed by 
 the strength of the stout habits acquired 
 by those who early become accustomed to 
 fight off black despair. Such habits stand 
 them in good stead in old age, and at least 
 protect them from those pensive regrets 
 and inconsolable sorrows which inevitably 
 tend to surround whatever has once made 
 for early happiness, as soon as it has ceased 
 to exist. 
 
 Many individual instances are found in 
 which a woman, hard pressed by life, in- 
 cludes within her tenderness the mother of 
 an illegitimate child. A most striking ex- 
 ample of this came to me through a woman 
 whom I knew years ago when she daily 
 brought her three children to the Hull-
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 69 
 
 House day nursery, obliged to support 
 them by her work in a neighboring laundry 
 because her husband had deserted her. I 
 recall her fatuous smile as she used to say 
 that "Tommy is so pleased to see me at 
 night that I can hear him shout 'Hello, 
 ma' when I am a block away." I had 
 known Tommy through many years ; peri- 
 ods of adversity when his father was away 
 were succeeded by periods of fitful pros- 
 perity when his father returned from his 
 wanderings with the circus with which "he 
 could always find work," because he had 
 once been a successful acrobat and later a 
 clown, and "so could turn his hand to any- 
 thing that was needed." 
 
 Perhaps it was unavoidable that Tommy 
 should have made his best friends among 
 the warm-hearted circus people who were 
 very kind to him after his father's death, 
 and that long before the Child Labor Law 
 permitted him to sing in Chicago saloons, 
 he was doing a successful business singing 
 in the towns of a neighboring state. He 
 was a droll little chap "without any sense 
 about taking care of himself," and in those
 
 yo LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 days his mother not only missed his cheer- 
 ful companionship but was constantly 
 anxious about his health and morals. 
 When he grew older and became a profes- 
 sional he sent his mother money occasion- 
 ally, although never very much and never 
 with any regularity. She was always so 
 pleased when it came that the two daughters 
 supporting her with their steady wages 
 were inclined to resent her obvious grati- 
 fication, as they did the killing of the 
 fatted calf on those rare occasions when 
 the prodigal returned "between seasons" 
 to visit his family. 
 
 It is possible that his mother thus early 
 acquired the habit of defending him, the 
 black sheep, against the strictures of the 
 good children who so easily become the 
 self-righteous when they feel "put upon." 
 However that may be, five years ago, after 
 one daughter had been married to a skilled 
 mechanic and the other, advanced to the 
 position of a forewoman, was supporting her 
 mother in the comparative idleness of keep- 
 ing house for two people in three rooms, 
 a forlorn girl appeared with a note from
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 71 
 
 Tommy asking his mother "to help her out 
 until the kid came and she could work 
 again." 
 
 The steady daughter would not permit 
 "such a girl to cross the threshold," and 
 the little household was finally broken up 
 upon the issue. The daughter went to 
 live with her married sister, while the 
 mother, having moved into one room with 
 "Tommy's girl," went back to the laundry 
 in order to support herself and her guest. 
 
 The daughters, having impressively told 
 their mother that she could come to live 
 with them whenever she "was willing to 
 come alone," dropped the entire situation. 
 In doing this, they were doubtless in- 
 stinctively responding to a habit acquired 
 through years of "keeping clear of the 
 queer people father knew in the circus and 
 the saloon crowds always hanging around 
 Tommy," in their secret hope to come 
 to know respectable young men. Con- 
 scious that they had back of them the 
 opinion of all righteous people they could 
 not understand why their mother, for the 
 sake of a bad girl, had deserted them in
 
 72 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 this praiseworthy effort in which hitherto 
 she had been the prime mover. 
 
 Tommy had sent his "girl" to his mother 
 on the eve of his departure for *'a grand 
 tour to the Klondike region," and since 
 then, almost four years ago, she has heard 
 nothing further from him. During the 
 first half of the time the two women strug- 
 gled on together as best they could, sup- 
 porting themselves and the child who was 
 brought daily to the nursery by his grand- 
 mother. But the pretty little mother, grad- 
 ually going back to her old occupation of 
 dancing in the vaudeville, had more and 
 more out-of-town engagements, and while 
 she always divided her earnings with the 
 baby, the grandmother suspected her of 
 losing interest in him, a situation which 
 was finally explained when she confessed 
 that she was about to be married to a 
 cabaret manager who "knew nothing of 
 the past," and to beg that the baby might 
 stay where he was. "Of course, I will 
 pay board for him, but his father can be 
 made to do something, too, if we can only 
 get the law on him."
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 73 
 
 It was at this point that I had the fol- 
 lowing conversation with the grandmother, 
 who was shrewd enough to see that the 
 support of the baby was being left upon 
 her hands, and that she could expect help 
 from neither his father nor his mother, al- 
 though she stoutly refused the advice that 
 the whole matter be taken into the Court 
 of Domestic Relations. "If I could only 
 see Tommy once I think I could get him to 
 help, but I can't find out where he is, and 
 he may not be alive for all I know ; he was 
 always that careless about himself. If he 
 put on a new red necktie he'd never know 
 if his bare toes were pushing out of his shoes. 
 He probably didn't get proper clothes for 
 'the Klondike region' and he may have 
 been frozen to death before this. But 
 whatever has happened to him, I can't 
 let his baby go. I suppose I've learned to 
 think differently about some things after 
 all my years of living with a light-minded 
 husband. Maggie came to see me last 
 week, for she means to be a good daughter. 
 She said that Carrie and Joe were buying a 
 house way out on the West Side, that they
 
 74 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 were going to move into it this month, and 
 that she and I could have a nice big room 
 together. She said, too, that Carrie would 
 charge only half rate board for me, and 
 would be glad to have my help with her 
 little children, for they both think that 
 nobody has such a way with children as 
 I have. The night before, when she and 
 Carrie were playing with the little boys, 
 they remembered some of the funny songs 
 father used to teach Tommy, and how 
 jolly we all were when he came home good- 
 natured and would stand on his head to 
 make the candy fall out of his pockets. 
 I know the two girls really want me to come 
 back, and that they are often homesick, 
 but when I pointed to the bed where the 
 baby was and asked, 'What about him.?' 
 Maggie turned as hard as nails and said as 
 quick as a flash, 'We're all agreed that 
 you'll have to put him in an institution. 
 We'll never have any chance with the nice 
 people in a swell neighborhood like ours 
 if you bring the baby.' She looked real 
 white then, and I felt sorry for her when 
 she said, 'Why, they might even think he
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 75 
 
 was my child, you never can tell/ although 
 she was ashamed of that afterwards and 
 cried a little before she left. She told me 
 that she and Carrie, when they were chil- 
 dren, were always talking of what they 
 would do when they got old enough to work, 
 how they would take care of me and move 
 to a part of the city where nobody would 
 know anything about the outlandish way 
 their father and Tommy used to carry on. 
 Of course, it was almost telling me that 
 they didn't want me to come to see them if 
 I kept the baby." 
 
 My old friend was quite unable to for- 
 mulate the motives which underlay her 
 determination, but she implied that cling- 
 ing to this helpless child was part of her 
 unwavering affection for her son when, 
 without any preamble, she concluded the 
 conversation with the remark, "It's the 
 way I always felt about him," as if further 
 explanation were unnecessary. 
 
 It was all doubtless a manifestation of 
 Nature's anxious care — so determined 
 upon survival and so indifferent to morals 
 — that had induced her long devotion to
 
 'jG LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 her one child least equipped to take care 
 of himself; and for the same reason the 
 helpless little creature whose existence no 
 one else was deeply concerned to preserve 
 had become so entwined in her affections 
 that separation was impossible. 
 
 From time to time a mother goes further 
 than this, in her determination to deal 
 justly with the unhappy situation in which 
 her daughter is placed. When the mother 
 of a so-called fallen girl is of that type 
 of respectability which is securely founded 
 upon narrow precepts, inherited through 
 generations of careful living, it requires 
 genuine courage to ignore the social stigma 
 in order to consider only the moral de- 
 velopment of her child, although the re- 
 sult of such courage doubtless minimizes 
 the chagrin and disgrace for the girl herself. 
 
 In one such instance the parents of the 
 girl, who had been prevented from marry- 
 ing her lover because the families on both 
 sides objected to differences of religion, 
 have openly faced the situation and made 
 the baby a beloved member of the house- 
 hold. The pretty young mother arrogates
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 77 
 
 to herself a hint of martyrdom for her 
 faith's sake, but the discipline and re- 
 sponsibility are working wonders for her 
 character. In her hope of earning money 
 enough for two, she has been stirred to new 
 ambition and is eagerly attending a busi- 
 ness college. She suffers a certain amount 
 of social ostracism but at the same time her 
 steady courage excites genuine admiration. 
 In another case a fearless mother exacts 
 seven dollars a week in payment of the 
 board for her daughter and the baby, al- 
 though the girl earns but eight dollars a 
 week in a cigar factory and buys such 
 clothing for two as she can with the re- 
 maining dollar. She admits that it is 
 *'hard sledding," but that the baby is 
 "mighty nice." Whatever her state of 
 mind, she evidently has no notion of re- 
 belling against her mother's authority, and 
 is humbly grateful that she was not turned 
 out of doors when the situation was dis- 
 covered. It is possible that the mother's 
 remorse at her failure to guard her daugh- 
 ter from wrong doing enables her thus 
 grimly to defy social standards which,
 
 78 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 although they are based upon stern and 
 narrow tenets, nevertheless epitomize the 
 bitter wisdom of generations. Such 
 mothers, overcoming that timidity which 
 makes it so difficult to effect changes in 
 daily living, make a genuine contribution 
 to the solution of the vexed problem. 
 
 In spite of much obtuseness on the part 
 of those bound by the iron fetters of con- 
 vention, these individual cases suggest a 
 practical method of procedure. For quite 
 as pity and fierce maternal affection for 
 their own children drove mothers all over 
 the world to ostracize and cruelly punish 
 the "bad woman" who would destroy the 
 home by taking away the breadwinner and 
 the father, so it is possible that, under the 
 changed conditions of modern life, this 
 same pity for little children, this same con- 
 cern that, even if they are the children 
 of the outcast, they must still be nourished 
 and properly reared, will make good the 
 former wrongs. There has certainly been 
 a great modification of the harsh judg- 
 ments meted out in such cases, as women 
 all over the world have endeavored, through
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 79 
 
 the old bungling method of trial and 
 error, to deal justly with individual situ- 
 ations. Each case has been quietly judged 
 by reference to an altered moral standard, 
 for while the ethical code like the legal 
 code stands in need of constant revision, 
 the remodeling of the former is always pri- 
 vate, tacit and informal in marked con- 
 trast to the public and ceremonious acts 
 of law-makers and judges when the latter 
 is changed. 
 
 Such measure of success as the organized 
 Woman's Movement has attained in the 
 direction of a larger justice has come 
 through an overwhelming desire to cherish 
 both the illegitimate child and his un- 
 fortunate mother. In addition to that, 
 the widespread effort of modern women to 
 obtain a recognized legal status for them- 
 selves and their own children has also 
 been largely dependent upon this desire, 
 at least in the beginnings of the movement. 
 Women slowly had discovered that the 
 severe attitude towards the harlot had not 
 only become embodied in the statutory 
 law concerning her, as thousands of court
 
 8o LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 decisions every day bear testimony, but had 
 become registered in the laws and social 
 customs pertaining to good women as 
 well ; the Code Napoleon, which prohibited 
 that search be made for the father of an 
 illegitimate child, also denied the custody 
 of her children to the married mother ; 
 those same states in which the laws con- 
 sidered a little girl of ten years the seducer 
 of a man of well-known immorality, did 
 not allow a married woman to hold her 
 own property nor to retain her own wages. 
 The enthusiasm responsible for the world- 
 wide Woman's Movement was generated 
 in the revolt against such gross injustices. 
 The most satisfactory achievements of the 
 movement have been secured in the Scan- 
 dinavian countries, where the splendid code 
 of laws protecting all women and children 
 was founded on the instinct to defend the 
 weakest, and upon a determination to 
 lighten that social opprobrium which makes 
 it so unreasonably difficult for a mother to 
 support a child born out of wedlock. In 
 Germany, when the presence of over a 
 million illegitimate children under the age
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 8l 
 
 of fourteen years made the situation acute, 
 the best women of the nation, asserting 
 that all attempts to deal out social pun- 
 ishment upon the mothers resulted only in 
 a multitude of ill-nourished and weakened 
 children, founded *'The Mutterchutz" 
 Movement. Through its efforts to secure 
 justice and protection for these mothers, 
 it has come to be the great defender of 
 the legal rights of all German women. 
 
 Many achievements of the modern move- 
 ment demonstrate that woman deals most 
 efficiently with fresh experiences when she 
 coalesces them into the impressions Memory 
 has kept in store for her. Eagerly seeking 
 continuity with the past by her own secret 
 tests of affinity, she reinforces and encour- 
 ages Memory's instinctive processes of 
 selection. If she develops her craving for 
 continuity into a willingness to subordinate 
 a part to the whole and into a sustained 
 and self-forgetful search for congruity and 
 harmony with a life which is greater than 
 hers, she may lift the entire selective pro- 
 cess into the realm of Art ; at least so far 
 as Art is dependent upon proportion and
 
 82 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 so far as beauty hangs upon an ineffable 
 balance between restraint and inclusion. 
 Hungry for this finely proportioned living, 
 she may at length become a disciple of 
 Diotema, the wisest woman of antiquity, 
 who asserted that the life which above all 
 we should live, must be discovered by 
 faithful and strenuous search for ever- 
 widening kinds of beauty. 
 
 In woman's search for "the eternal 
 moment," balanced independently of time 
 itself because so melted both into memories 
 of the past and into surmises of new beauty 
 for the future of her children's children, she 
 may recognize as one of the universal har- 
 monies the touching devotion of the endless 
 multitude of mothers who were the humble 
 vessels for life's continuance and who carried 
 the burden in safety to the next generation. 
 
 Maternal affection and solicitude, in 
 woman's remembering heart, may at length 
 coalesce into a chivalric protection for all 
 that is young and unguarded. This chiv- 
 alry of women expressing protection for 
 those at the bottom of society, so far as it 
 has already developed, suggests a return to
 
 DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 83 
 
 that idealized version of chivalry which 
 was the consecration of strength to the 
 defence of weakness, unlike the actual chiv- 
 alry of the armed knight who served his 
 lady with gentle courtesy while his fields 
 were ploughed by peasant women mis- 
 shapen through toil and hunger. 
 
 As an example of this new chivalry, the 
 Hungarian women have recently risen in 
 protest against a proposed military regu- 
 lation requiring that all young women in 
 domestic service, who are living in the 
 vicinity of barracks, be examined each week 
 by medical officers in order to protect the 
 soldiers from disease. The good women in 
 Hungary spiritedly resented the assumption 
 that these girls, simply because they are the 
 least protected of any class in the commu- 
 nity, should be subjected to this insult. 
 
 An instance of this sort once again il- 
 lustrates that moral passion is the only 
 solvent for prejudice, and that women have 
 come to feel reproached and disturbed 
 when they ignore the dynamic urgency of 
 memories as fundamental as those upon 
 which prohibitive conventions are based.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 women's memories — INTEGRATING IN- 
 DUSTRY 
 
 If it has always been the mission of lit- 
 erature to translate the particular act into 
 something of the universal, to reduce the 
 element of crude pain in the isolated ex- 
 perience by bringing to the sufferer a real- 
 ization that his is but the common lot, 
 this mission may have been performed 
 through such stories as that of the Devil 
 Baby for simple, hardworking women who 
 at any given moment compose the bulk of 
 the women in the world. 
 
 Certainly some of the visitors to the 
 Devil Baby attempted to generalize and 
 evidently found a certain enlargement of 
 the horizon, an interpretation of life as it 
 were, in the effort. They exhibited that 
 confidence which sometimes comes to the 
 more literate person when, finding himself 
 
 84
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 85 
 
 morally isolated among those hostile to 
 his immediate aims, his reading assures 
 him that other people in the world have 
 thought as he does. Later when he dares 
 to act on the conviction his own experi- 
 ence has forced upon him, he has become 
 so conscious of a cloud of witnesses torn 
 out of literature and warmed into living 
 comradeship, that he scarcely distinguishes 
 them from the likeminded people actually 
 in the world whom he has later discovered 
 as a consequence of his deed. 
 
 In some of the reminiscences related by 
 working women I was surprised, not so 
 much by the fact that memory could in- 
 tegrate the individual experience into a 
 sense of relation with the more impersonal 
 aspects of life, as that the larger meaning 
 had been obtained when the fructifying 
 memory had had nothing to feed upon but 
 the harshest and most monotonous of in- 
 dustrial experiences. 
 
 I held a conversation with one such 
 woman when she came to confess that her 
 long struggle was over and that she and 
 her sister had at last turned their faces to
 
 86 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 the poorhouse. She clearly revealed not 
 only that she had caught a glimpse of the 
 great social forces of her day, but that she 
 had had the ability to modify her daily 
 living by what she had perceived. 
 
 Perhaps, under the shadow of a tragic 
 surrender, she had obtained a new sense of 
 values, or at least had made up her mind 
 that it was not worth while any longer to 
 conceal her genuine experiences, for she 
 talked more fully of her hard life than I 
 had ever heard her before in the many 
 years I had known her. She related in 
 illuminating detail an incident in her long 
 effort of earning, by ill-paid and unskilled 
 labor, the money with which to support 
 her decrepit mother and her imbecile sister. 
 For more than fifty years she had never 
 for a moment considered the possibility of 
 sending either of them to a public institu- 
 tion, although it had become almost impos- 
 sible to maintain such a household after the 
 mother, who lived to be ninety-four years 
 old, had become utterly distraught. 
 
 She was still sharing her scanty livelihood 
 with the feeble-minded sister, although she
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 87 
 
 herself was unable to do anything but wash 
 vegetables and peel potatoes in a small 
 restaurant of her neighborhood. The cold 
 water necessary to these processes made her 
 hands, already crippled with rheumatism, 
 so bad that on some days she could not 
 hold anything smaller than a turnip, al- 
 though the other people in the kitchen 
 surreptitiously helped her all they could 
 and the cooks gave her broken food to carry 
 home to the ever hungry sister. 
 
 She told of her monotonous years in a 
 box factory, where she had always worked 
 with the settled enmity of the other em- 
 ployes. They regarded her as a pace 
 setter, and she, obliged to work fast and 
 furiously in order to keep three people, 
 and full of concern for her old mother's 
 many unfulfilled needs, had never under- 
 stood what the girls meant when they 
 talked about standing by each other. 
 
 She did not change in her attitude even 
 when she found the prices of piece work 
 went down lower and lower, so that at 
 last she was obliged to work overtime late 
 into the night in order to earn the small
 
 88 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 amount she had previously earned by day. 
 She was seventy years old when the legality 
 of the Illinois Ten Hour Law was con- 
 tested, and her employer wanted her to 
 testify in court that she was opposed to 
 the law because she could not have sup- 
 ported her old mother all those years un- 
 less she had been allowed to work nights. 
 She found herself at last dimly conscious 
 of what it was that her long time enemies, 
 the union girls, had been trying to do, 
 and a subconscious loyalty to her own 
 kind made it impossible for her to bear 
 testimony against them. She did not 
 analyze her motives but told me that, 
 fearing she might yield to her employer's 
 request, in sheer panic she had abruptly 
 left his factory and moved her helpless 
 household to another part of the city on 
 the very day she was expected to appear in 
 court. In her haste she left four days un- 
 paid wages behind her, and moving the 
 family took all the money she had pains- 
 takingly saved for the coming winter's 
 coal. She had unknowingly moved into a 
 neighborhood of cheap restaurants, and
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 89 
 
 from that time on she worked in any of 
 them which would employ her until now 
 at last she was too feeble to be of much 
 use to anybody. 
 
 Although she had never joined the Union 
 which finally became so flourishing in the 
 box factory she had left, she was conscious 
 that in a moment of great temptation she 
 had refrained from seeking her own ad- 
 vantage at the expense of others. As she 
 bunglingly tried to express her motives, 
 she said: "The Irish — you know I was 
 ten years old when we came over — often 
 feel like that ; it isn't exactly that you are 
 sorry after you have done a thing, nor so 
 much that you don't do it because you know 
 you will be sorry afterwards, nor that any- 
 thing in particular will happen to you if 
 you do it, but that you haven't the heart 
 for it, that it goes against your nature." 
 
 When I expressed my admiration for her 
 prompt action she replied : " I have never 
 told this before except to one person, to a 
 woman who was organizing for the gar- 
 ment workers and who came to my house 
 one night about nine o'clock, just as I was
 
 90 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 having my supper. I had it late in those 
 days because I used to scrub the restaurant 
 floor after everybody left. My sister was 
 asleep back of the stove, I looked sharp 
 not to wake her up and I don't believe the 
 Union woman ever knew that she wasn't 
 just like other people. The organizer was 
 looking for some of the women living in 
 our block who had been taking work 
 from the shops ever since the strike was on. 
 She was clean tired out, and when I offered 
 her a cup of tea she said as quick as a 
 flash, *You are not a scab, are you.?' I 
 just held up my poor old hands before her 
 face, swollen red from scrubbing and full 
 of chilblains, and I told her that I couldn't 
 sew a stitch if my life depended on it. 
 
 "When I offered her the second cup of 
 tea — a real educated-looking woman she 
 was, and she must have been used to better 
 tea than mine boiled out of the old tea 
 leaves the restaurant cook always let me 
 bring home — I said to her, 'My hands 
 aren't the only reason I'm not scabbing. 
 I see too much of the miserable wages 
 these women around here get for their
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 91 
 
 sweatshop work, and I've done enough 
 harm already with my pace setting, and 
 my head so full of my poor old mother that 
 I never thought of anybody else.' She 
 smiled at me and nodded her head over 
 my old cracked cup. 'You are a Union 
 woman all right,' she said. 'You have the 
 true spirit whether you carry a card or 
 not. I am mighty glad to have met you 
 after all the scabs I have talked to this 
 day.'" 
 
 The old woman repeated the words as one 
 who solemnly recalls the great phrase which 
 raised him into a knightly order, revealing 
 a secret pride in her unavowed fellowship 
 with Trades Unions, for she had vaguely 
 known at the time of the Ten Hour trial 
 that powerful federations of them had 
 paid for the lawyers and had gathered the 
 witnesses. Some dim memory of Irish 
 ancestors, always found on the side of the 
 weak in the unending struggle with the 
 oppressions of the strong, may have de- 
 termined her action. She may have been 
 dominated by a subconscious suggestion 
 "from the dust that sleeps," a suggestion
 
 92 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 so simple, so insistent and monotonous 
 that it had victoriously survived its original 
 sphere of conduct. 
 
 It was in keeping with the drab colored 
 experiences of her seventy hard years that 
 her contribution to the long struggle should 
 have been one of inglorious flight, never- 
 theless she had gallantly recognized the 
 Trades Union organizer as a comrade in a 
 common cause. She cherished in her heart 
 the memory of one golden moment when 
 she had faintly heard the trumpets summon 
 her and had made her utmost response. 
 
 When the simple story of a lifetime of 
 sacrifice to family obligations and of one 
 supreme effort to respond to a social claim 
 came to an end, I reflected that for more 
 than half a century the narrator had freely 
 given all her time, all her earnings, all her 
 affections, and yet during the long period 
 had developed no habit of self-pity. At 
 a crucial moment she had been able to 
 estimate life, not in terms of her self- 
 immolation but in relation to a hard pressed 
 multitude of fellow workers. 
 
 As she sat there, a tall, gaunt woman
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 93 
 
 broken through her devotion, she inevitably 
 suggested the industrial wrongs and op- 
 pressions suffered by the women who, for- 
 gotten and neglected, perform so much of 
 the unlovely drudgery upon which our in- 
 dustrial order depends. At the moment 
 I could recall only one of her starved am- 
 bitions which to my knowledge had ever 
 been attained. When a friend tenderly 
 placed a pair of white satin slippers upon 
 the coffined feet of her old mother who 
 for more than ninety years had travelled 
 a long hard road and had stumbled against 
 many stones, the loving heart of the aged 
 daughter overflowed. "It is herself would 
 know how I prayed for white satin shoes 
 for the burial, thinking as how they might 
 make it up to mother, she who never 
 knew where the next pair was coming from 
 and often had to borrow to go to Mass." 
 I remembered that as my friend and I 
 left the spotless bare room wrapped in the 
 mystery of death and walked back to Hull- 
 House together, we passed a little child 
 who proudly challenged our attention to 
 his new shoes, *' shiny" in the first moment
 
 94 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 of joyous possession. We could but recog- 
 nize the epitome of the hard struggle of 
 the very poor, from the moment they 
 scramble out of their rude cradles until 
 they are lowered into their "partial pay- 
 ment" graves, to keep shoes upon their 
 feet. The rare moments of touching pleas- 
 ure when the simple desire for "a new 
 pair" is fulfilled are doubtless indicated 
 in the early fairy tales by the rewards of 
 glistening red shoes or glass slippers to 
 the good child ; in the religious allegories 
 which turn life itself into one long pil- 
 grimage, by the promises to the faithful 
 that they shall be shod with the sandals 
 of righteousness and to the blessed ones, 
 who having formally renounced the world, 
 forswearing shoes altogether and hum- 
 bly walking on without them, that their 
 bruised and torn feet shall yet gleam lily- 
 white on the streets of Paradise. 
 
 I suddenly saw in this worn old woman 
 who sat before me, what George Sand 
 described as "a rare and austere produc- 
 tion of human suffering" and was so filled 
 with a fresh consciousness of the long
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 95 
 
 barren road travelled by the patient 
 mother and daughter, that it merged into 
 the Via Dolorosa of the Poor of the world. 
 It may have been through this suggestion 
 of an actual street that my memory vividly 
 evoked a group of Russian pilgrims I had 
 once seen in Holy Week as they trium- 
 phantly approached Jerusalem. Their 
 heads, garlanded in wild flowers still fresh 
 with early dew, were lifted in joyous sing- 
 ing but their broken and bleeding feet, 
 bound in white cloth and thrust into san- 
 dals of stripped bark, were the actual sac- 
 rifice they were devoutly offering at tne 
 Sepulchre. 
 
 I As my mind swiftly came back from 
 the blossoming fields of Palestine to the 
 crowded Industrial district of Chicago, I 
 found myself recalling a pensive remark 
 made by the gifted Rachel Varnhagen, a 
 century ago. "Careless Fate never re- 
 quires of us what we are really capable of 
 doing." 
 
 This overwhelming sense of the waste in 
 woman's unused capacity came to me 
 again during a Garment Workers' strike,
 
 96 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 when some of the young women involved 
 were sitting in the very chairs occupied 
 so recently by the visitors to the Devil 
 Baby. They brought a curious reminder 
 of the overworked and heavily burdened 
 mothers who had yet been able to keep 
 the taste of life in their mouths and who 
 could not be overborne, because their en- 
 durance was rooted in simple and instinc- 
 tive human affections. During the long 
 strike these young women endured all 
 sorts of privations without flinching ; some 
 o^ them actual hunger, most of them dis- 
 approbation from their families, and all of 
 them a loss of that money which alone could 
 procure for them the American standards 
 so highly prized. Through participation 
 in the strike they all took the risk of losing 
 their positions, and yet, facing a future of 
 unemployment and wretchedness, they dis- 
 played a stubborn endurance which held 
 out week after week. 
 
 Perhaps because of my recent conver- 
 sations with old women I received the 
 impression that the very power of resist- 
 ance in such a socialized undertaking as a
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 97 
 
 strike, presents a marked contrast in both 
 its origin and motives to the traditional 
 type of endurance exercised by the mothers 
 and grandmothers of the strikers or by 
 their acquaintances among domestic women 
 Hving in the same crowded tenements. 
 
 When a mother cares for a sick child 
 for days and nights without relief, the long 
 period of solicitude and dread exhausting 
 every particle of her vitality, her strength 
 is constantly renewed from the vast reser- 
 voirs of maternal love and pity whenever 
 she touches the soft flesh or hears the 
 plaintive little voice. But such girls as 
 the strikers represent are steadily bending 
 their energies to loveless and mechanical 
 labor, and are obliged to go on without this 
 direct and personal renewal of their powers 
 of resistance. They must be sustained as 
 soldiers on a forced march are sustained, 
 by their sense of comradeship in high en- 
 deavor. Naturally, some of the young 
 working women are never able to achieve 
 this and can keep on with the monotony 
 of factory work only when they persuade 
 themselves that they are getting ready.
 
 98 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 and have not yet begun their own Hves, 
 because real hving for them must include 
 a home of their own and children to 
 "do for." 
 
 Such unutilized dynamic power illus- 
 trates the stupid waste of those impulses and 
 affections, registered in the very bodily struc- 
 ture itself, which are ruthlessly pushed aside 
 and considered of no moment to the work 
 in which so many women are now engaged. 
 My conversations with these girls of 
 modern industry continually filled me with 
 surprise that, required as they are to work 
 under conditions unlike those which women 
 have ever before encountered, they have 
 not only made a remarkable adaptation 
 but have so ably equipped themselves with 
 a new set of motives. The girl who stands 
 on one spot for fifty-six hours each week as 
 she feeds a machine, endlessly repeating 
 the identical motions of her arms and 
 wrists, is much further from the type of 
 woman's traditional activity than her 
 mother who cooks, cleans, and washes for 
 the household. The young woman who 
 spends her time in packing biscuits into
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 99 
 
 boxes which come to her down a chute 
 and are whirled away from her on a minia- 
 ture trolley, has never even seen how the 
 biscuits are made, for the factory proper 
 is separated from the packing room by a 
 door with the sign "No Admittance." 
 She must work all day without the vital 
 and direct interest in the hourly results 
 of her labors which her mother had. 
 
 These girls present a striking antithesis 
 to the visitors to the Devil Baby who in 
 their forlorn and cheerless efforts were 
 merely continuing the traditional struggle 
 against brutality, indifference, and neglect 
 that helpless old people and little children 
 might not be trampled in the dust. For 
 these simple women it is the conditions 
 under which the struggle is waged which 
 have changed, rather than the nature o^ 
 the contest. Even in this unlovely strug- 
 gle, the older women utilize well-seasoned 
 faculties, in contrast to the newly devel- 
 oped powers required by the multitude of 
 young girls who for the first time in the 
 long history of woman's labor, are uniting 
 their efforts in order to obtain opportu-
 
 100 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 nities for a fuller and more normal living. 
 Organizing with men and women of divers 
 nationalities they are obliged to form new 
 ties absolutely unlike family bonds. On 
 the other hand, these girls possess the enor- 
 mous advantage over women of the do- 
 mestic type of having experienced the dis- 
 cipline arising from impersonal obligations 
 and of having tasted the freedom from 
 economic dependence, so valuable that 
 too heavy a price can scarcely be paid 
 for it. 
 
 This clash between the traditional con- 
 ception of woman's duty narrowed solely 
 to family obligations and the claims arising 
 from the complexity of the industrial situ- 
 ation, manifests scarcely a suggestion of 
 the latent war so vaguely apprehended 
 from the earliest times as a possibility be- 
 tween men and women. Even the re- 
 strained Greeks believed that when the 
 obscure women at the bottom of society 
 could endure no longer and "the oppressed 
 women struck back, it would not be justice 
 which came but the revenge of madness." 
 My own observation has discovered little
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY lOi 
 
 suggesting this mood, certainly not among 
 the women active in the Labor Movement. 
 
 I recall the recent experience of an or- 
 ganizer whom I very much admire for her 
 valiant services in the garment trades and 
 whom I have known from her earliest 
 girlhood. Her character confirms the .con- 
 tention that our chief concern with the 
 past is not what we have done, nor the ad- 
 ventures we have met, but the moral re- 
 action of bygone events within ourselves. 
 
 As an orphaned child she had been cared 
 for by two aunts who owned between 
 them a little shop which pretended to 
 be a tailoring establishment, but which 
 in reality was a distributing centre for 
 home work among the Italian women and 
 newly immigrated Russian Jews living in 
 the neighborhood. Her aunts, because 
 they were Americans, superior in education 
 and resources to the humble home workers, 
 by dint of much bargaining both with the 
 wholesale houses from which they pro- 
 cured the garments, and with the foreign 
 women to whom they distributed them, 
 had been able to secure a very good com-
 
 I02 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 mission. For many years they had made 
 a comfortable hving, and in addition had 
 acquired an exalted social position in the 
 neighborhood, for they were much looked 
 up to by those so dependent upon them 
 for work. 
 
 Although my friend was expected to 
 help in the shop as much as possible, 
 she was sent regularly to school and had 
 already "graduated from the eighth grade," 
 when a law was passed in the Illinois 
 legislature, popularly known as the Anti 
 Sweat-shop Law, which, within a year, 
 had ruined her aunts' business. After 
 they had been fined in court for violating 
 the law, a case which obtained much pub- 
 licity because smallpox was discovered in 
 two of the tenement houses in which the 
 home finishers were living, the aunts were 
 convinced that they could not continue to 
 give out work to the Italian and Rus- 
 sian Jewish women. Reluctantly foregoing 
 their commissions they then tried crowd- 
 ing their own house and shop with workers, 
 only to be again taken into court and 
 fined when the inspector discovered their
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 103 
 
 kitchen and bedrooms full of half-finished 
 garments. They both flatly refused to go 
 into a factory to work, and after a futile 
 attempt to revive the tailoring business, 
 never very genuine, they were finally re- 
 duced to the dimensions of the tiny shop it- 
 self, which, under the new regulations as to 
 light and air could accommodate but three 
 people. My friend was at once taken from 
 school and made one of these ill-paid work- 
 ers and the little household was held to- 
 gether on the pittance the three could 
 earn. 
 
 It was but natural, perhaps, that as these 
 displaced proprietors became poorer they 
 should ever grow more bitter against the 
 reformers and the Trades Unionists who, 
 between them, had secured the *' high- 
 brow" legislation which had destroyed 
 their honest business. 
 
 The niece was married at eighteen to a 
 clerk in a neighboring department store 
 who worked four evenings a week and every 
 other Sunday in his determination to get 
 on. The bride moved into a more pros- 
 perous neighborhood and I saw little of
 
 104 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 her husband or herself for ten years, during 
 which time they made four payments on 
 the Httle house they occupied fully three 
 miles from the now abandoned sweat-shop. 
 Her husband worked hard with a consuming 
 desire to rear his children in good sur- 
 roundings as much as possible unlike the 
 slums, as he somewhat brutally designated 
 the neighborhood of his own youth. 
 Through his unrelieved years in the cheap 
 department store where, however, he had 
 always felt a great satisfaction in being well 
 dressed and had resisted any attempts of 
 his fellow clerks to shorten their prepos- 
 terous hours by trades-union organization, 
 his health was gradually undermined and 
 he finally developed tuberculosis. He was 
 unable to support his family during the 
 last decade of his life, and in her desperate 
 need my friend went back to the only 
 trade she had, that of finishing garments. 
 During these years, although she sold the 
 little house and placed her boy in a semi- 
 philanthropic institution, she steadily faced 
 the problem of earning insufficient wages 
 for the support of the family, the pang of
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 105 
 
 her failure constantly augmented by the 
 knowledge that, in spite of her utmost 
 efforts, the invalid never received the food 
 and care his condition required. The cloth- 
 ing factory in which she then worked 
 illustrated the lowest ebb in the fortune of 
 the garment workers in American cities 
 when, the sweat shop having been largely 
 eliminated through the efforts of the fac- 
 tory inspectors, the workers from every 
 land were crowded into the hastily organ- 
 ized factories. Separated by their diverse 
 languages and through their long habits of 
 home work, they had become too secretive 
 even to tell one another the amount of wages 
 each was receiving. It was as if the com- 
 petition had been transferred from the 
 sweat shop contractors to the individual 
 workers themselves, sitting side by side in 
 the same room, and perhaps it was not 
 surprising that the workers felt as if they 
 had been hunted down into their very 
 kitchens and their poverty cruelly exposed 
 to public view. 
 
 My friend shared this wretchedness and 
 carried into it the bitterness of her early
 
 lo6 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 experience. She says now that she never 
 caught even a suggestion that this might 
 be but a transitional period to a more 
 ordered sort of industrial life. 
 
 She did not tell me just when and how 
 she had come to the conclusion that wages 
 must be higher, that legal enactment for 
 better conditions must be supplemented 
 by the efforts of the workers themselves, 
 but it was absolutely clear that she had 
 independently reached that conclusion long 
 before a strike in the clothing industry 
 brought her into contact with the organized 
 Labor Movement. It was certainly not 
 until the year of her husband's death that 
 she became aware of the industrial changes 
 which had been taking place during the 
 twenty-two years since her aunts' business 
 had been ruined. 
 
 She was grateful that the knowledge had 
 first come to her through an Italian girl 
 working by her side, for, as she explained, 
 her old attitude toward the "dagoes," as 
 a people to be exploited, had to be thor- 
 oughly changed before she could be of much 
 real use in organizing a trade in which so
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 107 
 
 many Italians were engaged. Even dur- 
 ing the strike itself, to which she was 
 thoroughly committed, having been con- 
 vinced both of its inevitability and of the 
 justice of its demands, she resented the 
 fact that the leadership was in the hands of 
 Russian Jews and, secure in her American- 
 ism, she felt curiously aloof from the group 
 with which she was so intimately identified. 
 
 A few months after the strike my friend 
 fortunately secured a place in a manufac- 
 tory of men's clothing, in which there had 
 been instituted a Trade Board for the ad- 
 justment of grievances, and where wages 
 and hours were determined by joint agree- 
 ment. When she was elected to the posi- 
 tion of shop representative she found 
 herself in the midst of one of the most in- 
 teresting experiments being carried on in the 
 United States, not only from the standpoint 
 of labor but from that of applying the prin- 
 ciples of representative government in a new 
 field. She felt the stimulus of being a part 
 in that most absorbing of all occupations — 
 the reconstruction of a living world. 
 
 One evening, at Hull-House, as she came
 
 I08 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 out of a citizenship class she had been 
 attending, she tried to express some of the 
 implications of the great undertaking in 
 which more than ten thousand clothing 
 employes are engaged. She repeated the 
 statement made by the leader of the class 
 that it was the solemn duty and obligation 
 of the United States not only to keep a* 
 republican form of government alive upon 
 the face of the earth and to fulfill the expec- 
 tations of the founders but to modify and 
 develope that type of government as con- 
 ditions changed ; he had said that the 
 spirit of the New England town meeting 
 might be manifested through a referendum 
 vote in a large city, and that it must find 
 some such vehicle of expression if it would 
 survive under changed conditions. Her 
 eyes were quite shining as she made her 
 application to the experiment being car- 
 ried on in the great clothing factory, with 
 its many shops and departments unified 
 in mutual effort. Evidently her attention 
 had been caught by the similarity between 
 the town meeting in its relation to a more 
 elaborated form of government and the
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 109 
 
 small isolated sweat-shop such as that 
 formerly managed by her aunts, in its re- 
 lation to the "biggest clothing factory in 
 the world." She had heard her fellow 
 workers say that the "greenhorn" often 
 found much friendliness in a small shop 
 where his own language was spoken, and 
 where he could earn at least a humble 
 living until he grew accustomed to the 
 habits of a new country, whereas he would 
 have been lost and terrified in a factory. 
 She felt very strongly the necessity of trans- 
 lating this sense of comradeship and friendli- 
 ness into larger terms, and she believed that 
 it could be done by the united workers. 
 
 As she sat by my desk, this woman who 
 had not yet attained her fortieth year 
 looked much older, as if illustrating the 
 saying that hard labor so early robs the 
 poor man of his youth that it makes his 
 old age too long. She seemed to me for the 
 moment to have gathered up in her own 
 experience the transition from old con- 
 ditions to new and to be standing on the 
 threshold of a great development in the 
 lives of working women.
 
 no LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 As if she were conscious that I was re- 
 calHng her past with which I had been so 
 familiar, she began to speak again. ''You 
 know that I have both of my children with 
 me now ; the girl graduates from the 
 Normal School in June and hopes to put 
 herself through the University after she has 
 taught for a few years. She reminds me 
 of her father in her anxiety to know people 
 of education, to get on in the world, 
 and I am sure she will succeed. The boy 
 has caught the other motive of pulling up 
 with his own trade and of standing by the 
 organized Labor Movement. Of course, 
 sewing was too dull for him, and besides 
 he grew ambitious to be a machinist when 
 he was in the Industrial School where I 
 put him with such a breaking of the heart 
 when he was only ten years old. He has 
 to admit, however, that even his own 
 Machinists' Union, with its traditional 
 trade agreements and joint boards, is far 
 behind our experiment. He went with me 
 to the banquet on May Day. We had 
 marched through the Loop in celebration 
 of our new agreement and had stirring
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY iii 
 
 speeches at the Auditorium in the after- 
 noon, but it was in the evening that we 
 really felt at home with each other. When 
 he saw the tremendous enthusiasm for our 
 beloved leader — my boy, I am sorry to 
 say, is a little inclined to despise foreigners 
 and also tailors because they aren't as 
 big and brawny as the members of his 
 dear Machinists' Union — and really 
 caught some notion of the statesmanlike 
 ability required for the successful manage- 
 ment of such a complicated and difficult 
 industrial experiment, and when he real- 
 ized that the ten per cent increase provided 
 for in the new agreement was to go in 
 greater proportion to those at the lower 
 end of the scale, he suddenly forgot his 
 prejudices and I saw him applauding with 
 his hands and feet as if he had really let 
 loose at last. 
 
 ; "Of course, it hasn't been easy for me 
 even during these later years to keep Helen 
 in school and to support my aunt who is 
 now too old and broken even to keep house 
 for us. But we have got on, and quite 
 aside from everything else I am thankful
 
 112 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 to have had a small share in this forward 
 step in American democracy — at least, 
 that's what they called it at the banquet/* 
 she ended shyly. 
 
 The experience of my friend bore testi- 
 mony that in spite of all their difficulties 
 and handicaps, something of social value is 
 forced out of the very situation itself 
 among that vast multitude of women whose 
 oppression through the centuries has typi- 
 fied a sense of helpless and intolerable 
 wrongs. Many of them, even the older 
 ones, are being made slowly conscious of 
 the subtle and impalpable filaments that 
 secretly bind their experiences and moods 
 into larger relations, and they are filled 
 with a new happiness analogous to that of 
 little children when they are first taught 
 to join hands in ordered play. 
 
 Is such enthusiastic participation in or- 
 ganized effort but one manifestation of 
 that desire for liberty and for a larger 
 participation in life, found in great women's 
 souls all over the world ? 
 
 In pursuance of such a desire the working 
 women have the enormous advantage of
 
 INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 113 
 
 constant association with each other, an 
 advantage dimly perceived even by pioneer 
 women two hundred years ago. 
 
 The hostesses of the famous drawing- 
 rooms of the eighteenth century laid great 
 stress on human intercourse as the indi- 
 vidual's best means of cultivation. Cer- 
 tain French women gave as a raison d'etre 
 for their brilliant salons that *' people 
 must come together in order to exercise 
 justice," and they became enormously 
 proud of the fact that by the end of the 
 century "all Europe was thrown into a 
 state of agitation if injustice were com- 
 mitted in any corner of it." 
 
 This hypothesis was gallantly laid down 
 a hundred years before the industrial revo- 
 lution which, in its consummation, has con- 
 gregated millions of women into factories 
 all over the world. These myriad women, 
 most of them young and untrained and all 
 of them working under new industrial con- 
 ditions, are gradually learning to "exer- 
 cise justice" if only because they have 
 "come together." Their association has 
 been accomplished under the stress of a
 
 114 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 common necessity, and they have been 
 tutored in a mass at the hard school of 
 bitter experience. 
 
 Were the sheltered drawing-room ladies 
 the forerunners of such contemporary ad- 
 vocates of industrial justice or do we find 
 a better prototype in those simple old 
 women who, having reared their own chil- 
 dren and having come to be regarded as a 
 depository for domestic wisdom, dispense 
 sound advice to bewildered mothers which 
 always contains the admonition, *' Never 
 be partial to any one of them, always be 
 as just as you know how." 
 
 Possibly women's organizations of all 
 types are but providing ever-widening chan- 
 nels through which woman's moral energy 
 may flow, revivifying life by new streams 
 fed in the upper reaches of her undis- 
 covered capacities. In either case, we may 
 predict that to control old impulses so that 
 they may be put to social uses, to serve the 
 present through memories hoarding woman's 
 genuine experiences, may liberate energies 
 hitherto unused and may result in a notable 
 enrichment of the pattern of human culture.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 women's memories — CHALLENGING WAR 
 
 I WAS sharply reminded of an obvious 
 division between high tradition and current 
 conscience in several conversations I held 
 during the great European war with women 
 who had sent their sons to the front in un- 
 questioning obedience to the demands of 
 the State, but who, owing to their own 
 experiences, had found themselves in the 
 midst of that ever-recurring struggle, often 
 tragic and bitter, between two conceptions 
 of duty, one of which is antagonistic to 
 the other. 
 
 One such woman,^ who had long been 
 identified with the care of delinquent chil- 
 
 ^ The following conversation is a composite made from 
 several talks held with each of two women representing 
 both sides of the conflict. Their opinions and observations 
 are merged into one because in so many particulars they 
 were either identical or overlapping. Both women called 
 themselves patriots, but each had become convinced of the 
 folly of war.
 
 Il6 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 dren and had worked for many years 
 towards the estabhshment of a Children's 
 Court, had asked me many questions con- 
 cerning the psychopathic chnic in the Juve- 
 nile Court in Chicago, comparing it to the 
 brilliant work accomplished in her own 
 city through the cooperation of the univer- 
 sity faculty. The Imperial government 
 itself had recently recognized the value 
 of this work and at the outbreak of the 
 war was rapidly developing a system 
 through which the defective child might be 
 discovered early in his school career, and 
 might not only be saved from delinquency 
 but such restricted abilities as he possessed 
 be trained for the most effective use. 
 "Through all these years," she said, "I 
 had grown accustomed to the fact that 
 the government was deeply concerned in 
 the welfare of the least promising child. 
 I had felt my own efforts so identified with 
 it that I had unconsciously come to regard 
 the government as an agency for nurturing 
 human life and had apparently forgotten 
 its more primitive functions. 
 
 "I was proud of the fact that my son
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 117 
 
 held a state position as professor of Indus- 
 trial Chemistry in the University, because 
 I knew that the research in his department 
 would ultimately tend to alleviate the 
 harshness of factory conditions, and to 
 make for the well-being of the working 
 classes in whose children I had become so 
 interested. 
 
 "When my son's regiment was mobilized 
 and sent to the front I think that it never 
 occurred to me, any more than it did to 
 him, to question his duty. His profes- 
 sional training made him a valuable mem- 
 ber of the Aviation Corps, and when, in 
 those first weeks of high patriotism his 
 letters reported successful scouting or even 
 devastating raids, I felt only a solemn 
 satisfaction. But gradually through the 
 months, when always more of the people's 
 food supply and constantly more men 
 were taken by the government for its 
 military purposes, when I saw the state 
 institutions for defectives closed, the 
 schools abridged or dismissed, women and 
 children put to work in factories under 
 hours and conditions which had been
 
 Ii8 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 legally prohibited years before, when the 
 very governmental officials who had been 
 so concerned for the welfare of the helpless 
 were bent only upon the destruction of the 
 enemy at whatever cost to their fellow-citi- 
 zens, the State itself gradually became for 
 me an alien and hostile thing. 
 
 "In response to the appeal made by the 
 government to the instinct of self-pres- 
 ervation, the men of the nation were ar- 
 dent and eager to take any possible risks, 
 to suffer every hardship, and were proud 
 to give their lives in their country's ser- 
 vice. But was it inevitable, I constantly 
 asked myself, that the great nations of 
 Europe should be reduced to such a primi- 
 tive appeal .? Why should they ignore all 
 the other motives which enter into modern 
 patriotism and are such an integral part of 
 devotion to the state that they must in 
 the end be reckoned with .? 
 
 "I am sure that I had reached these 
 conclusions before my own tragedy came, 
 before my son was fatally wounded in a 
 scouting aeroplane and his body later 
 thrown overboard into a lonely swamp.
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 119 
 
 It was six weeks before I knew what had 
 happened and it was during that period 
 that I felt most strongly the folly and 
 waste of putting men, trained as my son 
 had been, to the barbaric business of kill- 
 ing. This tendency in my thinking may 
 have been due to a hint he had given me 
 in the very last letter I ever received from 
 him, of a change that was taking place 
 within himself. He wrote that whenever 
 he heard the firing of a huge field-piece he 
 knew that the explosion consumed years 
 of the taxes which had been slowly ac- 
 cumulated by some hard-working farmer 
 or shopkeeper, and that he unconsciously 
 calculated how fast industrial research 
 would have gone forward, had his de- 
 partment been given once a decade the 
 costs of a single day of warfare, with the 
 government's command to turn back into 
 alleviation of industrial conditions the taxes 
 which the people had paid. He regretted 
 that he was so accustomed to analysis that 
 his mind would not let the general situ- 
 ation alone but wearily went over it again 
 and again ; and then he added that this
 
 I20 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 war was tearing down the conception of 
 government which had been so carefully de- 
 veloped during this generation in the minds 
 of the very men who had worked hardest 
 to fulfill that conception. 
 
 "Although the letter sounded like a 
 treatise on government, I knew there was 
 a personal pang somewhere behind this 
 sombre writing, even though he added his 
 old joking promise that when their fathers 
 were no longer killed in industry, he would 
 see what he could do for my little idiots. 
 
 "At the very end of the letter he wrote, 
 and they were doubtless the last words he 
 ever penned, that he felt as if science her- 
 self in this mad world had also become 
 cruel and malignant. 
 
 "I learned later that it was at this time 
 that he had been consulted in the manu- 
 facture of asphyxiating gases, because the 
 same gases are used in industry and he had 
 made experiments to determine their poi- 
 sonousness in different degrees of dilution. 
 The original investigation with which he 
 had been identified had been carried on 
 that the fumes released in a certain indus-
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 121 
 
 trial process might be prevented from in- 
 juring the men who worked in the factory. 
 I know how hard it must have been for 
 him to put knowledge acquired in his long 
 efforts to protect normal living to the 
 brutal use of killing men. It was literally 
 a forced act of prostitution." 
 
 As if to free her son's memory from any 
 charge of lack of patriotism, after a few 
 moments she continued : ''These modern 
 men of science are red-blooded, devoted 
 patriots, facing dangers of every sort in 
 mines and factories and leading strenuous 
 lives in spite of the popular conception of 
 the pale anaemic scholar, but because they 
 are equally interested in scientific ex- 
 periments wherever they may be carried 
 on, they inevitably cease to think of 
 national boundaries in connection with 
 their work. The international mind, which 
 really does exist in spite of the fact that it 
 is not yet equipped with adequate organs 
 for international government, has become 
 firmly established, at least among scientists. 
 They have known the daily stimulus of a 
 wide and free range of contacts. They
 
 122 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 have become interpenetrated with the 
 human consciousness of fellow scientists 
 all over the world. 
 
 *'I hope that I am no whining coward 
 — my son gave his life to his country as 
 many another brave man has done, but 
 I do envy the mothers whose grief is at 
 least free from this fearful struggle of 
 opposing ideals and traditions. My old 
 father, who is filled with a solemn pride 
 over his grandson's gallant record and 
 death, is most impatient with me. I 
 heard him telling a friend the other day 
 that my present state of mind was a pure 
 demonstration of the folly of higher educa- 
 tion for women ; that it was preposterous 
 and more than human flesh could bear to 
 combine an intellectual question on the 
 function of government with a mother's 
 sharp agony over the death of her child. 
 He said he had always contended that 
 women, at least those who bear children, 
 had no business to consider questions of 
 this sort, and that the good sense of his 
 position was demonstrated now that such 
 women were losing their children in war.
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 123 
 
 It was enough for women to know that 
 government waged war to protect their 
 firesides and to preserve the nation from 
 annihilation ; at any rate, they should 
 keep their minds free from silly attempts 
 to reason it out. It's all Bertha von Sutt- 
 ner's book and other nonsense that the 
 women are writing, he exploded at the end.'* 
 Then as if she were following another line 
 of reminiscence she began again. "My son 
 left behind him a war bride, for he obeyed 
 the admonition of the statesmen, as well as 
 the commands of the military officers in 
 those hurried heroic days. But the hasty 
 wooing betrayed all his ideals of marriage 
 quite as fighting men of other nations did 
 violence to his notions of patriotism, and 
 the recklessness of a destructive air raid 
 outraged his long devotion to science. Of 
 course his child will be a comfort to us and 
 his poor little bride is filled with a solemn 
 patriotism which never questions any as- 
 pect of the situation. When she comes to 
 see us and I listen to the interminable talk 
 she has with my father, I am grateful for 
 the comfort they give each other, but when
 
 124 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 I hear them repeating those hideous stories 
 of the conduct of the enemy which ac- 
 cumulate every month and upon which the 
 war spirit continually feeds itself, I with 
 difficulty refrain from crying out upon them 
 that he whose courage and devotion they 
 praise so loudly would never have per- 
 mitted such talk of hatred and revenge in 
 his presence ; that he who lived in the 
 regions of science and whose intrepid mind 
 was bent upon the conquest of truth, must 
 feel that he had died in vain did he know 
 to what exaggerations and errors the so- 
 called patriotism of his beloved country 
 had stooped. 
 
 *'I listen to them thinking that if I 
 were either older or younger it would not 
 be so hard for me, and I have an unreal 
 impression that it would have been easier 
 for my son if the war had occurred in the 
 first flush of his adventurous youth. Eager 
 as he had been to serve his country, he 
 would not then have asked whether it 
 could best be accomplished by losing his 
 life in a scouting aeroplane or by dedicat- 
 ing a trained mind to industrial ameliora-
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 125 
 
 tion. He might then easily have preferred 
 the first and he certainly would never 
 have been tormented by doubts. But 
 when he was thirty-one years old and had 
 long known that he was steadily serving 
 his country through careful researches, the 
 results of which would both increase the 
 nation's productivity and protect its hum- 
 blest citizens, he could not do otherwise 
 than to judge and balance social values. I 
 am, of course, proud of his gallant spirit, 
 that did not for a moment regret his deci- 
 sion to die for his country, but I can make 
 the sacrifice seem in character only when I 
 place him back in his early youth. 
 
 "At times I feel immeasurably old, and 
 in spite of my father's contention that I 
 am too intellectual, I am consciously dom- 
 inated by one of those overwhelming im- 
 pulses belonging to women as such, irre- 
 spective of their mental training, in their 
 revolt against war. After all, why should 
 one disregard such imperative instincts.? 
 We know perfectly well that the trend of 
 a given period in history has been influenced 
 by * habits of preference' and by instinc-
 
 126 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 tive actions founded upon repeated and un- 
 recorded experiences of an analogous kind ; 
 that desires to seek and desires to avoid 
 are in themselves the very incalculable 
 material by which the tendencies of an age 
 are modified. The women in all the bel- 
 ligerent countries who feel so alike in re- 
 gard to the horror and human waste of 
 this war and yet refrain from speaking out, 
 may be putting into jeopardy that power 
 inherent in human affairs to right them- 
 selves through mankind's instinctive shift- 
 ing towards what the satisfactions recom- 
 mend and the antagonisms repulse. The 
 expression of such basic impulses in regard 
 to human relationships may be most im- 
 portant in this moment of warfare which 
 is itself a reversion to primitive methods 
 of determining relations between man and 
 man or nation and nation. 
 
 "Certainly the women in every country 
 who are under a profound imperative to 
 preserve human life, have a right to regard 
 this maternal impulse as important now as 
 was the compelling instinct evinced by 
 primitive women long ago, when they made
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 127 
 
 the first crude beginnings of society by re- 
 fusing to share the vagrant hfe of man be- 
 cause they insisted upon a fixed abode in 
 which they might cherish their children. 
 Undoubtedly women were then told that 
 the interests of the tribe, the diminishing 
 food supply, the honor of the chieftain, 
 demanded that they leave their particular 
 caves and go out in the wind and weather 
 without regard to the survival of their 
 children. But at the present moment the 
 very names of the tribes and of the honors 
 and glories which they sought are for- 
 gotten, while the basic fact that the mothers 
 held the lives of their children above all 
 else, insisted upon staying where the chil- 
 dren had a chance to live, and cultivated 
 the earth for their food, laid the founda- 
 tions of an ordered society. 
 
 My son used to say that my scientific 
 knowledge was most irregular, but profound 
 experiences such as we are having in this war 
 throw to the surface of one's mind all sorts 
 of opinions and half-formed conclusions. 
 The care for conventions, for agreement 
 with one's friends, is burned away. One is
 
 128 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 concerned to express only ultimate con- 
 viction even though it may differ from all 
 the rest of the world. This is true in spite 
 of the knowledge that every word will be 
 caught up in an atmosphere of excitement 
 and of that nervous irritability which is 
 always close to grief and to moments of high 
 emotion. 
 
 *'In the face of many distressing mis- 
 understandings I am certain that if a 
 minority of women in every country would 
 clearly express their convictions they would 
 find that they spoke not for themselves 
 alone but for those men for whom the 
 war has been a laceration, — 'an abdication 
 of the spirit.' Such women would doubt- 
 less formulate the scruples of certain soldiers 
 whose 'mouths are stopped by courage/ 
 men who months ago with closed eyes 
 rushed to the defence of their countries. 
 
 "It may also be true that as the early 
 days of this war fused us all into an over- 
 whelming sense of solidarity until each 
 felt absolutely at one with all his fellow- 
 countrymen, so the sensitiveness to differ- 
 ences is greatly intensified and the dis-
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 129 
 
 senting individual has an exaggerated sense 
 of isolation. I try to convince myself that 
 this is the explanation of my abominable 
 and constant loneliness, which is almost 
 unendurable. 
 
 "I have never been a Feminist and 
 have always remained quite unmoved by 
 the talk of the peculiar contribution women 
 might make to the State, but during the 
 last dreadful months, in spite of women's 
 widespread enthusiasm for the war and 
 their patriotic eagerness to make the su- 
 preme sacrifice, I have become conscious of 
 an unalterable cleavage between Militarism 
 and Feminism. The Militarists believe that 
 government finally rests upon a basis of 
 physical force, and in a crisis such as this. 
 Militarism, in spite of the spiritual passion 
 in war, finds its expression in the crudest 
 forms of violence. 
 
 *'It would be absurd for women even to 
 suggest equal rights in a world governed 
 solely by physical force, and Feminism must 
 necessarily assert the ultimate supremacy 
 of moral agencies. Inevitably the two are 
 in eternal opposition.
 
 I30 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 "I have always agreed with the Fem- 
 inists that, so far as force plays a great part 
 in the maintenance of an actual social order, 
 it is due to the presence of those elements 
 which are in a steady process of elimination ; 
 and of course as society progresses the 
 difficulty arising from woman's inferiority 
 in physical strength must become propor- 
 tionately less. One of the most wretched 
 consequences of war is that it arrests these 
 beneficent social processes and throws 
 everything back into a coarser mould. The 
 fury of war, enduring but for a few months 
 or years, may destroy slow-growing social 
 products which it will take a century to 
 recreate — the 'consent of the governed,' 
 for instance. . . . 
 
 But why do I talk like this ! My father 
 would call it one of my untrained and 
 absurd theories about social progress and 
 the functions of government concerning 
 which I know nothing, and would say 
 that I had no right to discuss the matter 
 in this time of desperate struggle. Never- 
 theless it is better for me in these hideous 
 long days and nights to drive my mind
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 131 
 
 forward even to absurd conclusions than 
 to let it fall into one of those vicious circles 
 in which it goes round and round to no 
 purpose." 
 
 In absolute contrast to this sophisti- 
 cated, possibly oversophisticated, mother 
 was a simple woman who piteously showed 
 me a piece of shrapnel taken from her son's 
 body by his comrades, which they had 
 brought home to her in a literal-minded at- 
 tempt at comfort. They had told her that 
 the shrapnel was made in America and she 
 showed it to me, believing that I could at 
 sight recognize the manufactured products 
 of my fellow-countrymen. She apparently 
 wished to have the statement either con- 
 firmed or denied, because she was utterly 
 bewildered in her feeling about the United 
 States and all her previous associations with 
 it. In her fresh grief, stricken as she was, 
 she was bewildered by a sudden reversal 
 of her former ideals. Many of her rela- 
 tives had long ago emigrated to America, 
 including two brothers living in the Western 
 states, whom she had hoped to visit in her 
 old age. For many reasons, throughout
 
 132 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 her youth and early womanhood, she had 
 thought of that far-away country as a 
 kindly place where every man was given 
 his chance and where the people were all 
 friendly to each other irrespective of the 
 land in which they had been born. To 
 have these same American people send 
 back the ammunition which had killed her 
 son was apparently incomprehensible to her. 
 She presented, it seemed to me, a clear 
 case of that humble internationalism which 
 is founded not upon theories, but upon 
 the widespread immigration of the last 
 fifty years, interlacing nation to nation 
 with a thousand kindly deeds. Her older 
 brother had a fruit ranch which bordered 
 upon one of those co-operative Italian col- 
 onies so successful in California, and he 
 had frequently sent home presents from 
 his Italian neighbors with his own little 
 cargoes. The whole had evidently been 
 prized by his family as a symbol of Ameri- 
 can good-will and of unbounded opportu- 
 nity. Her younger brother had attained 
 some measure of success as a contractor in 
 an inland town, and when he had written
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 133 
 
 home of the polyglot composition of the 
 gangs of men upon whose labors his little 
 fortune had been founded, she had taken 
 it as an example of all nationalities and 
 religions working happily together. He 
 had also served one term as mayor, ob- 
 viously having been elected through his 
 popularity with the same foreign colonies 
 from which his employes had been drawn. 
 For many reasons therefore she had vis- 
 ualized America as a land in which all 
 nationalities understood each other with a 
 resulting friendliness which was not pos- 
 sible in Europe, not because the people 
 still living in Europe were different from 
 those who had gone to America, but be- 
 cause the latter, having emigrated, had a 
 chance to express their natural good-will 
 for everybody. The nations at war in 
 Europe suggested to her simple mind the 
 long past days of her grandmother's youth 
 when a Protestant threw stones at a Cath- 
 olic just because he was "different." The 
 religious liberty in America was evidently 
 confused in her mind with this other 
 liberalism in regard to national differences.
 
 134 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 Holding this conception of actual in- 
 ternationalism as it had been evolved 
 among simple people, crude and abortive 
 though it was, she had been much more 
 shocked by the fact that friendly Americans 
 should make ammunition to be used for 
 killing any human being than by the 
 actual war itself, because the war was 
 taking place in Europe, where it was still 
 quite natural for a German to fight against 
 a Frenchman or an Italian against an 
 Austrian. 
 
 Her son had been a Socialist and from 
 the discussions he sometimes held with 
 his comrades in her house, she had grown 
 familiar with certain phrases which she had 
 taken literally and in some curious fashion 
 had solemnly come to believe were put 
 into practice in her El Dorado of America. 
 
 The arguments I had used so many 
 times with her fellow-countrymen to justify 
 America's sale of ammunition, ponderously 
 beginning with The Hague conventions 
 of 1907, I found useless in the face of 
 this idealistic version of America's good- 
 will.
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 135 
 
 She was evidently one of those people 
 whose affections go out to groups and im- 
 personal causes quite as much as to indi- 
 viduals, thus often supplementing and 
 enlarging harsh and narrow conditions of 
 living. She certainly obtained a curiously 
 personal comfort out of her idealization of 
 America. Her conversation revealed what 
 I had often vaguely felt before when men 
 as well as women talked freely of the war, 
 that her feelings had been hurt, that her 
 very conception of human nature had re- 
 ceived a sharp shock and set-back. To her 
 the whole world and America in particular 
 would henceforth seem less kind and her 
 spirit would be less at home. She was 
 tormented by that ever recurring question 
 which perhaps can never be answered for 
 any of us too confidently in the affirmative, 
 "Is the Universe friendly .?" The troubled 
 anguish in her old eyes confirmed her 
 statement that the thought of the multi- 
 tude of men who were being killed all 
 over the world oppressed her day and 
 night. This old woman had remained 
 faithful to the cause of moral unity and
 
 136 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 bore her humble testimony to one of the 
 noblest and profoundest needs of the human 
 spirit. 
 
 These efforts at spiritual adjustment 
 necessitated by the war are attempted by 
 many people, from the simple souls whose 
 hard-won conceptions of a friendly universe 
 have been brought tumbling about their 
 ears, to the thinking men who are openly 
 disappointed to find civilized nations so 
 irrational. Such efforts are encountered 
 in all the belligerent nations as well as in 
 the neutral ones, although in the former 
 they are often inhibited and overlaid by 
 an overwhelming patriotism. Neverthe- 
 less, as I met those women who were bearing 
 their hardships and sorrows so courage- 
 ously, I often caught a glimpse of an in- 
 ner struggle, as if two of the most funda- 
 mental instincts, the two responsible for 
 our very development as human beings, 
 were at strife with each other. The first 
 is tribal loyalty, such unquestioning ac- 
 ceptance of the tribe's morals and stand- 
 ards that the individual automatically fights 
 when the word comes ; the second is
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 137 
 
 woman's deepest instinct, that the child 
 of her body must be made to Hve. 
 
 We are told that the peasants in Flanders, 
 whose fields border upon the very trenches, 
 disconsolately came back to them last 
 Spring and continued to plough the familiar 
 soil, regardless of the rain of shrapnel fall- 
 ing into the fresh furrows ; that the wine 
 growers of Champagne last Autumn in- 
 sistently gathered their ripened grapes, 
 though the bombs of rival armies were 
 exploding in their vineyards ; why should 
 it then be surprising that certain women 
 in every country have remained steadfast 
 to their old occupation of nurturing life, 
 that they have tenaciously held to their 
 anxious concern that men should live, 
 through all the contagion and madness of 
 the war fever which is infecting the nations 
 of the earth. 
 
 In its various manifestations the strug- 
 gle in women's souls suggests one of those 
 movements through which, at long his- 
 toric intervals, the human spirit has ap- 
 parently led a revolt against itself, as it 
 were, exhibiting a moral abhorrence for
 
 138 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 certain cherished customs which, up to 
 that time, had been its finest expression. 
 A moral rebelhon of this sort was inaugu- 
 rated three thousand years ago both in 
 Greece and Judea against the old custom 
 of human sacrifice. That a man should 
 slay his own child and stand unmoved 
 as the burning flesh arose to his gods 
 was an act of piety, of courage, and of 
 devotion to ideals, so long as he performed 
 the rite wholeheartedly. But after there 
 had gradually grown up in the minds of 
 men first the suspicion, and then the con- 
 viction, that it was unnecessary and im- 
 pious to offer human flesh as a living sac- 
 rifice, courage and piety shifted to the 
 men who refused to conform to this long- 
 established custom. At last both the Greeks 
 and the Jews guarded themselves against 
 the practice of human sacrifice with every 
 possible device. It gradually became ut- 
 terly abhorrent to all civilized peoples, an 
 outrage against the elemental decencies, a 
 profound disturber of basic human rela- 
 tions. Poets and prophets were moved 
 to call it an abomination ; statesmen and
 
 CHALLENGING WAR 139 
 
 teachers denounced it as a hideous bar- 
 barism, until now it is so nearly abolished 
 by the entire race that it is no longer 
 found within the borders of civilization and 
 exists to-day only in jungles and hidden 
 savage places. 
 
 There are indications that the human 
 consciousness is reaching the same stage 
 of sensitiveness in regard to war as that 
 which has been attained in regard to human 
 sacrifice. In this moment of almost uni- 
 versal warfare there is evinced a widespread 
 moral abhorrence against war, as if its very 
 existence were more than human nature 
 could endure. Citizens of every nation are 
 expressing this moral compunction, which 
 they find in sharp conflict with current 
 conceptions of patriotic duty. It is per- 
 haps inevitable that women should be 
 challenged in regard to it, should be called 
 upon to give it expression in such stirring 
 words as those addressed to them by 
 Romain Rolland, "Cease to be the shadow 
 of man and of his passion of pride and 
 destruction. Have a clear vision of the 
 duty of pity ! Be a living peace in the
 
 I40 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 midst of war — the eternal Antigone re- 
 fusing to give herself up to hatred and 
 knowing no distinction between her suffer- 
 ing brothers who make war on each other." 
 This may be a call to women to defend 
 those at the bottom of society who, irrespec- 
 tive of the victory or defeat of any army, 
 are ever oppressed and overburdened. The 
 suffering mothers of the disinherited feel 
 the stirring of the old impulse to protect 
 and cherish their unfortunate children, and 
 women's haunting memories instinctively 
 challenge war as the implacable enemy of 
 their age-long undertaking.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN INTERPRE- 
 TATIVE MEMORY 
 
 Several years ago, during a winter spent 
 in Egypt, I found within myself an unex- 
 pected tendency to interpret racial and 
 historic experiences through personal rem- 
 iniscences. I am therefore venturing to 
 record in this closing chapter my inevitable 
 conclusion that a sincere portrayal of a 
 widespread and basic emotional experience, 
 however remote in point of time it may be, 
 has the power overwhelmingly to evoke 
 memories of like moods in the individual. 
 
 The unexpected revival in my memory 
 of long-forgotten experiences may have 
 been due partly to the fact that we have 
 so long been taught that the temples and 
 tombs of ancient Egypt are the very earliest 
 of the surviving records of ideas and men, 
 that we approach them with a certain 
 
 141
 
 142 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 sense of familiarity, quite ready to claim 
 a share in these "family papers and title 
 deeds of the race." 
 
 We also consider it probable that these 
 primitive human records will stir within 
 us certain early states of consciousness, 
 having learned, with the readiness which so 
 quickly attaches itself to the pseudo-sci- 
 entific phrase, that every child repeats in 
 himself the history of the race. Never- 
 theless, what I, at least, was totally un- 
 prepared to encounter, was the constant 
 revival of primitive and overpowering emo- 
 tions which I had experienced so long ago 
 that they had become absolutely detached 
 from myself and seemed to belong to 
 some one else — to a small person with whom 
 I was no longer intimate, and who was 
 certainly not in the least responsible for 
 my present convictions and reflections. 
 It gradually became obvious that the 
 ancient Egyptians had known this small 
 person quite intimately and had most 
 seriously and naively set down upon the 
 walls of their temples and tombs her ear- 
 liest reactions in the presence of death.
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY 143 
 
 At moments my adult intelligence would 
 be unexpectedly submerged by the emo- 
 tional message which was written there. 
 Rising to the surface like a flood, this 
 primitive emotion would sweep away both 
 the historic record and the adult conscious- 
 ness interested in it, leaving only a child's 
 mind struggling through an experience 
 which it found overwhelming. 
 
 It may have been because these records 
 of the early Egyptians are so endlessly 
 preoccupied with death, portraying man's 
 earliest efforts to defeat it, his eager de- 
 sire to survive, to enter by force or by 
 guile into the heavens of the western sky, 
 that the mind is pushed back into that 
 earliest childhood when the existence of the 
 soul, its exact place of residence in the body, 
 its experiences immediately after death, 
 its journeyings upward, its relation to its 
 guardian angel, so often afforded material 
 for the crudest speculation. In the ob- 
 scure renewal of these childish fancies, 
 there is nothing that is definite enough to 
 be called memory ; it is rather that Egypt 
 reproduces a state of consciousness which
 
 144 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 has so absolutely passed into oblivion that 
 only the most powerful stimuli could re- 
 vive it. 
 
 This revival doubtless occurs more easily 
 because these early records in relief and 
 color not only suggest in their subject- 
 matter that a child has been endowed with 
 sufficient self-consciousness to wish to write 
 down his own state of mind upon a wall, 
 but also because the very primitive style 
 of drawing to which the Egyptians adhered 
 long after they had acquired a high degree 
 of artistic freedom, is the most natural 
 technique through which to convey so 
 simple and archaic a message. The square 
 shoulders of the men, the stairways done 
 in profile, and a hundred other details, 
 constantly remind one of a child's draw- 
 ings. It is as if the Egyptians had pains- 
 takingly portrayed everything that a child 
 has felt in regard to death, and having, dur- 
 ing the process, gradually discovered the 
 style of drawing naturally employed by a 
 child, had deliberately stiffened it into an 
 unchanging convention. The result is that 
 the traveller, reading in these drawings
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY 145 
 
 which stretch the length of three thousand 
 years, the long endeavor to overcome 
 death, finds that the experience of the two — 
 the child and the primitive people — often 
 become confused, or rather that they are 
 curiously interrelated. 
 
 This begins from the moment the trav- 
 eller discovers that the earliest tombs sur- 
 viving in Egypt, the mastabas, — which 
 resemble the natural results of a child's 
 first effort to place one stone upon another, 
 — are concerned only with size, as if that 
 early crude belief in the power of physical 
 bulk to protect the terrified human being 
 against all shadowy evils were absolutely 
 instinctive and universal. The mastabas 
 gradually develop into the pyramids, of 
 which Breasted says that "they are not 
 only the earliest emergence of organized 
 men and the triumph of concerted effort, 
 they are likewise a silent, but eloquent, 
 expression of the supreme endeavor to 
 achieve immortality by sheer physical 
 force." Both the mastabas at Sahkara 
 and the pyramids at Gizeh, in the sense 
 of Tolstoy's definition of art as that which
 
 146 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 reproduces in the spectator the state of 
 consciousness of the artist, at once appeal 
 to the child surviving in every adult, who 
 insists irrationally, after the manner of 
 children, upon sympathizing with the at- 
 tempt to shut out death by strong walls. 
 
 Certainly we can all vaguely remember, 
 when death itself, or stories of ghosts, had 
 come to our intimate child's circle, that 
 we went about saying to ourselves that 
 we were "not afraid," that it ''could not 
 come here," that "the door was locked, 
 the windows tight shut," that "this was a 
 big house," and a great deal more talk of 
 a similar sort. ui> iftnny^^i. 
 
 In the presence of these primitive^ at- 
 tempts to defeat death, and without the 
 conscious aid of memory, I found myself 
 living over the emotions of a child six years 
 old, saying some such words as I sat on the 
 middle of the stairway in my own home, 
 which yet seemed alien because all the 
 members of the family had gone to the 
 funeral of a relative and would not be 
 back until evening, "long after you are in 
 bed," they had said. In this moment of
 
 Y:lOi/. INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY' 1 I47 
 
 loneliness and horror, I depended absolutely 
 upon the brick walls of the house to keep 
 out the prowling terror, and neither the 
 talk of kindly Polly, who awkwardly and 
 unsuccessfully reduced an unwieldy the- 
 ology to child-language, nor the strings of 
 paper dolls cut by a visitor, gave me the 
 slightest comfort. Only the blank wall of 
 the stairway seemed to afford protection in 
 this bleak moment against the formless 
 peril. 
 
 Doubtless these huge tombs were built 
 to preserve from destruction the royal 
 bodies which were hidden within them at 
 the end of tortuous and carefully con- 
 cealed passages ; but both the gigantic 
 structures in the vicinity of Memphis, and 
 the everlasting hills, which were later 
 utilized at Thebes, inevitably give the im- 
 pression that death is defied and shut out 
 by massive defences. 
 
 Even when the traveller sees that the 
 Egyptians defeated their object by the 
 very success of the Gizeh pyramids — for 
 when their overwhelming bulk could not 
 be enlarged and their bewildering labyrinths
 
 148 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 could not be multiplied, effort along that 
 line perforce ceased — there is something 
 in the next attempt of the Egyptians to 
 overcome death which the child within us 
 again recognizes as an old experience. 
 One who takes pains to inquire concerning 
 the meaning of the texts which were in- 
 scribed on the inner walls of the pyramids 
 and the early tombs, finds that the familiar 
 terror of death is still there although ex- 
 pressed somewhat more subtly ; that the 
 Egyptians are trying to outwit death by 
 magic tricks. 
 
 These texts are designed to teach the 
 rites that redeem a man from death and 
 insure his continuance of life, not only 
 beyond the grave but in the grave itself. 
 "He who sayeth this chapter and who has 
 been justified in the waters of Natron, he 
 shall come forth the day after his burial.'* 
 Because to recite them was to fight suc- 
 cessfully against the enemies of the dead, 
 these texts came to be inscribed on tombs, 
 on coffins, and on the papyrus hung around 
 the neck of a mummy. But woe to the 
 man who was buried without the texts:
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY 149 
 
 "He who knoweth not this chapter cannot 
 come forth by day." Access to Paradise 
 and all its joys was granted to any one, 
 good or bad, who knew the formulae, for 
 in the first stages of Egyptian develop- 
 ment, as in all other civilizations, the gods 
 did not concern themselves with the con- 
 duct of a man toward other men, but solely 
 with his duty to the gods themselves. 
 
 The magic formulae alone afforded pro- 
 tection against the shadowy dangers await- 
 ing the dead man when first he entered 
 the next world and enabled him to over- 
 come the difficulties of his journey. The 
 texts taught him how to impersonate par- 
 ticular gods and by this subterfuge to over- 
 come the various foes he must encounter, 
 because these foes, having at one time been 
 overcome by the gods, were easily terrified 
 by such pretence. 
 
 When I found myself curiously sympa- 
 thetic with this desire "to pretend," and 
 with the eager emphasis attached by the 
 Egyptians to their magic formulae, I was 
 inclined to put it down to that secret sympa- 
 thy with magic by means of which all chil-
 
 150 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 dren, in moments of rebellion against a 
 humdrum world, hope to wrest something 
 startling and thrilling out of the environing 
 realm of the supernatural ; but beyond a 
 kinship with this desire to placate the evil 
 one, to overcome him by mysterious words, 
 I found it baffling to trace my sympathy to 
 a definite experience. Gradually, however, 
 it emerged, blurred in certain details, sur- 
 prisingly alive in others, but all of it suf- 
 fused with the selfsame emotions which 
 impelled the Egyptian to write his Book of 
 the Dead. ijiiV;// .aju .>.., 
 
 To describe it as a spiritual' struggle is 
 to use much too dignified and definite a 
 term; it was the prolonged emotional 
 stress throughout one cold winter when re- 
 vival services — ^ protracted meetings, they 
 were then called — were held in the vil- 
 lage church night after night. I was, of 
 course, not permitted to attend them, but 
 I heard them talked about a great deal by 
 simple adults and children, who told of 
 those who shouted aloud for joy, cr lay on 
 the floor "stiff with power" because they 
 vviefce i saved ; and of others — it was for
 
 Y5if)MlINTERPRETATrVE MEMORY' ' 1-5% 
 
 those others that my heart was wrung — 
 who, although they wrestled with the 
 spirit until midnight and cried out that 
 they felt the hot breath of hell upon their 
 cheeks, could not find salvation. Would 
 it do to pretend ? I anxiously a:sked my- 
 self, why didn't they say the right words so 
 that they could get up from the mburners' 
 bench and sit with the other people, who 
 must feel so sorry for them that they 
 would let them pretend ? What were these 
 words that made such a difference that to 
 say them was an assurance of heavenly 
 bliss, but if you failed to say them you 
 burned in hell forever and ever ? Was 
 the preacher the only one who knew them 
 for sure? Was it possible to find them 
 without first kneeling at the mourners' 
 bench and groaning ? These words must 
 certainly be in the Bible somewhere, and if 
 one read it out loud all through, every 
 word, one must surely say the right words 
 in time ; but if one died before one was 
 grown up enough to read the Bible through 
 — - to-night, for instance — what would hap- 
 pen then ? Surely nothing else could be so
 
 152 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 important as these words of salvation. 
 While I did not exactly scheme to secure 
 them, I was certainly restrained only by 
 my impotence, and I anxiously inquired 
 from everyone what these magic words 
 might be ; and only gradually did this 
 childish search for magic protection from 
 the terrors after death imperceptibly merge 
 into a concern for the fate of the soul. 
 
 Perhaps, because it is so impossible to 
 classify one's own childish experiences or 
 to put them into chronological order, the 
 traveller at no time feels a lack of consist- 
 ency in the complicated attitude toward 
 death which is portrayed on the walls of 
 the Egyptian temples and tombs. Much 
 of it seems curiously familiar ; from the 
 earliest times, the Egyptians held the be- 
 lief that there is in man a permanent ele- 
 ment which survives — it is the double, the 
 Ka, the natural soul in contradistinction 
 to the spiritual soul, which fits exactly 
 into the shape of the body but is not 
 blended with it. In order to save this 
 double from destruction, the body must be 
 preserved in a recognizable form.
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY 153 
 
 i 
 
 This insistence upon the preservation of 
 the body among the Egyptians, antedating 
 their faith in magic formulae, clearly had 
 its origin, as in the case of the child, in a 
 desperate revolt against the destruction of 
 the visible man. 
 
 Owing to this continued insistence upon 
 corporeal survival, the Egyptians at length 
 carried the art of embalming to such a 
 state of perfection that mummies of royal 
 personages are easily recognized from their 
 likenesses to portrait statues. Such con- 
 fidence did they have in their own increas- 
 ing ability to withhold the human frame 
 from destruction that many of the texts 
 inscribed on the walls of the tombs assure 
 the dead man himself that he is not dead, 
 and endeavor to convince his survivors 
 against the testimony of their own senses ; 
 or rather, they attempt to deceive the 
 senses. The texts endlessly repeat the same 
 assertion, "Thou comest not dead to thy 
 sepulchre, thou comest living" ; and yet 
 the very reiteration, as well as the decora- 
 tions upon the walls of every tomb, portray 
 a primitive terror lest after all the body be
 
 154 LONG RO'XO'dt'' WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 destroyed and the element of life be lost 
 forever. One's throat goes dry over this 
 old fear of death expressed by men who 
 have been so long dead that there is no 
 record of them but this, no surviving docu- 
 ment of their once keen reactions to life. 
 '^'^'Doubtless the Egyptians in time over- 
 came this primitive fear concerning the dis- 
 appearance of the body, as we all do, al- 
 though each individual is destined to the 
 same devastating experience. The memory 
 of mine came back to me vividly as I stood 
 in an Egyptian tomb : I was a tiny child 
 making pothooks in the village school, 
 when one day — it must have been in the 
 full flush of Spring, for I remember the 
 crab-apple blossoms — during the afternoon 
 session;^ the "A B' G tlass was told that its 
 members would march all together to the 
 burial of the mother of one of the littlest 
 girls. Of course, I had been properly- 
 taught that people went to heaven when 
 they died and that, their bodies were buried 
 in the cemetery, but I was not at all clear 
 about it, and I was certainly totally un- 
 prepared to see what appeared to be the
 
 Y30J/ IMTERPRETATIVE^MEMORY 155 
 
 person herself put deep down into the 
 ground. The knowledge came to me so 
 suddenly and brutally that for weeks after- 
 ward the days were heavy with a nameless 
 oppression and the nights were filled with 
 horror. ^ ^ . - . 
 
 The cemetery; was hard by: the school- 
 house, placed there, it had always been 
 whispered among us, to make the bad 
 boys afraid. Thither the A B G class, in 
 awestruck procession, each child carefully 
 holding the hand of another, was l^.d by 
 the teacher to the edge of the open grave 
 and bidden to look on the still face of the 
 little girl's mother. 
 
 Our poor knees quaked and quavered as 
 we stood shelterless and unattended by 
 family protection or even by friendly grown- 
 ups ; for the one tall teacher, while clearly 
 visible, seemed inexpressively far away as 
 we kept an uncertain footing on the freshly 
 spaded earth, hearing the preacher's voice, 
 the sobs of the motherless children, and, 
 crowning horror of all, the hollow sound of 
 three clods of earth dropped impressively 
 upon the coffin lid.; ' mi h uTfii
 
 156 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 After endless ages the service was over 
 and we were allowed to go down the long 
 hill into the familiar life of the village. 
 But a new terror awaited me even there, 
 for our house stood at the extreme end 
 of the street and the last of the way- 
 home was therefore solitary. I remem- 
 ber a breathless run from the blacksmith 
 shop, past the length of our lonely or- 
 chard until the carriage-house came in 
 sight, through whose wide-open doors I 
 could see a man moving about. One last 
 panting effort brought me there, and after 
 my spirit had been slightly reassured by 
 conversation, I took a circuitous route to 
 the house that I might secure as much 
 companionship as possible on the way. I 
 stopped at the stable to pat an old horse 
 who stood munching in his stall, and again 
 to throw a handful of corn into the poultry- 
 yard. The big turkey gobbler who came 
 greedily forward gave me great comfort 
 because he was so absurd and awkward 
 that no one could possibly associate him 
 with anything so solemn as death, I went 
 into the kitchen where the presiding genius
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY 157 
 
 allowed me to come without protest al- 
 though the family dog was at my heels. 
 I felt constrained to keep my arms about 
 his shaggy neck while trying to talk of 
 familiar things — woiJd the cake she was 
 making be baked in the little round tins or 
 in the big square one ? But although these 
 idle words were on my lips, I wanted to cry 
 out, "Their mother is dead; whatever, 
 whatever will the children do?" These 
 words, which I had overheard as we came 
 away from the graveyard, referred doubtless 
 to the immediate future of the little family, 
 but :n my mind were translated into a de- 
 mand for definite actid on the part of 
 the children against this horrible thing 
 which had befallen their mother. 
 
 It was with no sense of surprise that I 
 found this long-forgotten experience spread 
 before my eyes on the walls of a tomb 
 built four thousand years ago into a sandy 
 hill above the Nile, at Assuan. The man 
 so long dead, who had prepared the tomb 
 for himself, had carefully ignored the grim- 
 ness of death. He is portrayed as going 
 about his affairs surrounded by his family,
 
 r^S LONG ROAD MOFT WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 his friends, and his servants ; grain is being 
 measured before him into his warehouse, 
 while a scribe by his side registers the 
 amount ; the herdsmen lead forth cattle 
 for his inspection ; two of them, enra.^ed 
 bulls, paying no attention to the sombre 
 implication of tomb decoration, lower their 
 huge headSj threatening each other as if 
 there were no such thing as death in the 
 world. Indeed, the builder of the tomb 
 seems to have liked the company of ani- 
 mals, perhaps because they were so in- 
 curious concerning death. His dogs are 
 around him, he stands erect in a boat front 
 which he spears fish, and so on from one 
 marvelous relief to another, but all the 
 time your heart contracts for him, and you 
 know that in the midst of this elaborately 
 prepared nonchalance he is miserably ter- 
 rified by the fate which may be in store for 
 Mm'^-and is trying to make himself believe 
 that he need not leave all this wonted and 
 homely activity ; that if his body is but 
 properly preserved he will be able to enjoy 
 it forever. -f-^torr ?} '.R 
 Although, the Egyptians, in their natural
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY) 159 
 
 desire to cling to the familiar during the 
 strange experience of death, portrayed upon 
 the walls of their tombs many domestic 
 and social habits whose likeness to our own 
 household life gives us the quick satis- 
 faction with which the traveller encounters 
 the familiar and wonted in a strange land, 
 such a momentary thrill is quite unhke the 
 abiding sense of kinship which is founded 
 upon the unexpected similarity of ideas, 
 and it is the latter which are encountered 
 in the tombs of the eighteenth century 
 dynasty. The paintings portray a great 
 hall, at the end of which sits Osiris, the 
 god who had suffered death on earth, 
 awaiting those who come: before; hira for 
 judgment. In the center of the hall stands 
 a huge balance in which the hearts of men 
 are weighed, once more reminiscent of a 
 childish conception, making clear, that as 
 the Egyptians became more; anxious i.aiid 
 scrupulous they gradually made the des- 
 tiny of man dependent upon morality, and 
 finally directed the souls of men to he9.y^n 
 or hell according to their merits. Nrr.- ;;?r)a 
 (KlThere; lis/.a ( thjeojry that the tremendous
 
 i6o LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 results of good and evil, in the earliest 
 awakening to them, were first placed in the 
 next world by a primitive people sore per- 
 plexed as to the partialities and injustices 
 of mortal life. This simple view is doubt- 
 less the one the child naturally takes. In 
 Egypt I was so vividly recalled to my first 
 apprehension of it, that the contention that 
 the very belief in immortality is but the 
 postulate of the idea of reward and retri- 
 bution, seemed to me at the moment a 
 perfectly reasonable one. 
 
 (The incident of my childhood around 
 which it had formulated itself was very 
 simple. I had been sent with a message 
 — an important commission it seemed to 
 me — to the leader of the church choir 
 that the hymn selected for the doctor's 
 funeral was "How blest the righteous 
 when he dies." The village street was so 
 strangely quiet under the summer sun that 
 even the little particles of dust beating in 
 the hot air were more noiseless than ever 
 before. Frightened by the noonday still- 
 ness and instinctively seeking companion- 
 ship, I hurried toward two women who
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY i6i 
 
 were standing at a gate talking in low tones. 
 In their absorption they paid no attention 
 to my somewhat wistful greeting, but I 
 heard one of them say with a dubious 
 shake of the head that "he had never 
 openly professed nor joined the church," 
 and in a moment I understood that she 
 thought the doctor would not go to heaven. 
 What else did it mean, that half-threaten- 
 ing tone ^ Of course the doctor was good, 
 as good as any one could be. Only a few 
 weeks before he had given me a new penny 
 when he had pulled my tooth, and once I 
 heard him drive by in the middle of the 
 night when he took a beautiful baby to 
 the miller's house ; he went to the farms 
 miles and miles away when people were 
 sick, and everybody sent for him the 
 minute they were in trouble. How could 
 any one be better than that ? 
 
 In defiant contrast to the whispering 
 women, there arose in my mind, composed 
 doubtless of various Bible illustrations, the 
 picture of an imposing white-robed judge 
 seated upon a golden throne, who listened 
 gravely to all those good deeds as they were
 
 i62 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 read by the recording angel from his great 
 book, and then sent the doctor straight to 
 heaven. 
 
 I dimly felt the challenge of the fine old 
 hymn in its claim of blessings for the 
 righteous, and was defiantly ready at the 
 moment to combat the theology of the 
 entire community. Of my own claim to 
 heaven I was most dubious, and I simply 
 could not bring myself to contemplate the 
 day when my black sins should be read 
 aloud from the big book ; but when the 
 claim of reward in the next world for well- 
 doing in this, came to me in regard to one 
 whose righteousness was undoubted, I was 
 eager to champion him before all mankind 
 and even before the judges in the shadowy 
 world to come. 
 
 This state of mind, this mood of trucu- 
 lent discussion, was recalled by the wall 
 paintings in the tomb of a nobleman in 
 the Theban hills. In an agonized posture 
 he awaits the outcome of his trial before 
 Osiris. Thoth, the true scribe, records on 
 the wall the just balance between the heart 
 of the nobleman, which is in one pan of
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY 163 
 
 the scale, and the feather of truth which is 
 in the other. The noble appeals to his 
 heart, which has thus been separated from 
 him, to stand by him during the weighing 
 and not to bear testimony against him. 
 "Oh, heart of my existence, rise not up 
 against me ; be not an enemy against me 
 before the divine powers ; thou art my Ka 
 that is in my body, the heart that came to 
 me from my mother." The noble even 
 tries a bribe by reminding the Ka that his 
 own chance of survival is dependent on his 
 testimony at this moment. The entire ef- 
 fort on the part of the man being tried is 
 to still the voice of his own conscience, to 
 maintain stoutly his innocence even to 
 himself. 
 
 The attitude of the self-justifying noble 
 might easily have suggested those later 
 childish struggles in which a sense of 
 hidden guilt, of repeated failure in "being 
 good," plays so large a part, and humbles 
 a child to the very dust. That the defi- 
 nite reminiscence evoked by the tomb 
 belonged to an earlier period of rebellion 
 may indicate that the Egyptian had not
 
 l64 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 yet learned to commune with his gods for 
 spiritual refreshment. 
 
 Whether it is that the long days and 
 magical nights on the Nile lend themselves 
 to a revival of former states of conscious- 
 ness, or that I had come to expect land- 
 marks of individual development in Egypt, 
 or, more likely still, that I had fallen into 
 a profoundly reminiscent mood, I am un- 
 able to state ; but certainly, as the Nile 
 boat approached nearer to him "who sleeps 
 in Philae," something of the Egyptian feel- 
 ing for Osiris, the god to whom was attrib- 
 uted the romance of a hero and the char- 
 acter of a benefactor and redeemer, came 
 to me through long-forgotten sensations. 
 Typifying the annual "great affliction," 
 Osiris, who had submitted himself to death, 
 mutilation, and burial in the earth, re- 
 turned each Spring when the wheat and 
 barley sprouted, bringing not only a 
 promise of bread for the body but healing 
 and comfort for the torn mind ; an in- 
 timation that death itself is beneficent and 
 may be calmly accepted as a necessary 
 part of an ordered universe.
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY 165 
 
 Day after day, seeing the rebirth of the 
 newly planted fields on the banks of the 
 Nile, and touched by a fresh sense of 
 the enduring miracle of Spring with its 
 inevitable analogy to the vicissitudes of 
 human experience, one dimly comprehends 
 how the pathetic legends of Osiris, by pro- 
 viding the Egyptian with an example for 
 his own destiny, not only opened the way 
 for a new meaning in life, but also gradually 
 vanquished the terrors of death. 
 
 Again there came a faint memory of a 
 child's first apprehension that there may 
 be poetry out-of-doors, of the discovery that 
 myths have a foundation in natural phe- 
 nomena, and at last a more definite rem- 
 iniscence. 
 
 fl saw myself a child of twelve standing 
 stock-still on the bank of a broad-flowing 
 river, with a little red house surrounded 
 by low-growing willows on its opposite 
 bank, striving to account to myself for a 
 curious sense of familiarity, for a con- 
 viction that I had long ago known it all 
 most intimately, although I had certainly 
 never seen the Mississippi River before.
 
 l66 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 I remember that, much puzzled and mysti- 
 fied, at last I gravely concluded that it was 
 one of those intimations of immortality 
 that Wordsworth had written about, and 
 I went back to my cousin's camp in so ex- 
 alted a frame of mind that the memory of 
 the evening light shining through the blades 
 of young corn growing in a field passed on 
 the way has remained with me for more 
 than forty years. 
 
 Was that fugitive sense of having lived 
 before nearer to the fresher imaginations 
 of the Egyptians, as it is nearer to the mind 
 of a child ? and did the myth of Osiris 
 make them more willing to die because the 
 myth came to embody a confidence in this 
 transitory sensation of continuous life ? 
 
 Such ghosts of reminiscence, coming to 
 the individual as he visits one after an- 
 other of the marvellous human documents 
 on the banks of the Nile, may be merely 
 manifestations of that new humanism which 
 is perhaps the most precious possession of 
 this generation, the belief that no altar at 
 which living men have once devoutly wor- 
 shipped, no oracle to whom a nation long
 
 INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY 167 
 
 ago appealed in its moments of dire con- 
 fusion, no gentle myth in which former 
 generations have found solace, can lose 
 all significance for us, the survivors. 
 
 Is it due to this same humanism that, 
 in spite of the overweight of the tomb, 
 Egypt never appears to the traveller as 
 world-weary, or as a land of the dead ? 
 Although the slender fellaheen, whom he 
 sees all day pouring the water of the Nile 
 on their parched fields, use the primitive 
 shaduf of their remote ancestors, and the 
 stately women bear upon their heads water- 
 jars of a shape unchanged for three thou- 
 sand years, modern Egypt refuses to be- 
 long to the past and continually makes the 
 passionate living appeal of those hard- 
 pressed in the struggle for bread. 
 
 Under the smoking roofs of the primi- 
 tive clay houses lifted high above the level 
 of the fields, because resting on the ruins 
 of villages which have crumbled there from 
 time immemorial, mothers feed their chil- 
 dren, clutched by the old fear that there is 
 not enough for each to have his portion ; 
 and the traveller comes to realize with a
 
 i68 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY 
 
 pang that the villages are built upon the 
 bleak, barren places quite as the dead are 
 always buried in the desert because no black 
 earth can be spared, and that each new 
 harvest, cut with sickles of a curve already 
 ancient when Moses was born, in spite of 
 its quick ripening, is garnered barely in 
 time to save the laborer from actual star- 
 vation. 
 
 Certain it is that through these our liv- 
 ing brothers, or through the unexpected 
 reactions of memory to racial records, the 
 individual detects the growth within of an 
 almost mystical sense of the life common 
 to all the centuries, and of the unceasing 
 human endeavor to penetrate Into the un- 
 seen world. rThese records also afford 
 glimpses into a past so vast that the pres- 
 ent generation seems to float upon its sur- 
 face as thin as a sheet of light which mo- 
 mentarily covers the ocean and moves in 
 response to the black waters beneath it. ^ 
 
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