WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM RALCY HUSTED BELL SOME OTHER BOOKS By DR. BELL TAORMINA THE WORTH OP WORDS ART-TALKS WITH EANGER THE PHILOSOPHY OF PAINTING THE EELIGION OP BEAUTY AALA DEANE AND OTHER POEMS WORDS OF THE WOOD, POEMS THE CHANGING VALUES OP ENGLISH SPEECH SPIRITISM ETC. WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM 1921 THE CRITIC AND GUIDE COMPANY 12 MOUNT MORRIS PARK WEST NEW YORK OOPYWSHTZD, 1921, BY EALCY HUSTED BELL Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U. S. A. TO AEKELL EOGEE McMICHAEL, A.M., M.D., A GREAT PHYSICIAN, A COURTLY GENTLE- MAN, AND A CORDIAL FRIEND 1561 284 CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE bt EARLIEST MANKIND 1 WOMAN IN PREHISTORY 17 "\VOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY .... 41 WOMAN AND RELIGION 71 WOMAN AND THE LAW 105 OVERMAN AND UNDERMAN 137 THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT 155 WOMAN SUFFRAGE , 169 ETHICS OF MARRIAGE, &c 189 BIRTH CONTROL 199 WOMEN AND THE GREAT WAR 207 MENTAL ATTITUDE . 215 PEEFACE |ATUEALLY, a work of this kind must be abridged. "When woman started from her ancient bondage for modern freedom, she hit a long trail. I shall try to blaze that trail. She has been on the way some time, but she never knew where she was going nobody does. Progress has no ultimate goal it can 't have. It has an instinct. It is a wanderer. It passes through successive zones that are repeated. They can not be infinite in number and diversity, because being is limited in its reactions. There is not even conception of infinity. Being is necessarily provincial. It is characterized by its surround- ings. Cosmic consciousness is an idea. God is hope. Immortality is a dream. Is there truth in the idea? Is there reality in the hope? Is there prophecy in the dream? No one knows. The very soul of our race is dumb, or, at best, inarticulate in its cries and vague in its longings. In the long run, progress may be like a dog chasing his tail. Activity is good for the dog even if he misses the rabbit; but if we assume X PREFACE that he will catch the rabbit, what then? Shall he stop, or catch another and another forever and ever? Still, if progress turns out to be only a movement with an active instinct, I like to think that the instinct makes for well-being. The bewildering fact is that it doesn't. For nothing so bedevils us as that which we call progress. Let us say then that bedevilment is good (for the soul) since we can not abate it. Let us go in for progress, as everybody does. Here the trouble begins. Each knows the road that all the world should take, but no two roads are alike. I see one that looks prom- ising. It seems to be a continuation of the trail, leading to broader human rights from the narrower rights of sex or class. This road passes I hope to an equal spiritual dignity of manhood and womanhood, opening up the pos- sibilities of human nature through orderly activity. Of course, no wise woman travels alone if she can help it. Nature loves nothing better than mating. Nature is hard-headed. According to her, almost any kind of a mate is better than none. In general, her children obey her, in one way or another. Those who do not obey the mother are weaned before it is good for them; that is to say, they are runted out of existence. So we find that woman in her trail from relative bondage to comparative freedom had PREFACE XI company all along. She was both helped and hindered by her companion ; but she was helped more than hindered, because her very hindrance often was a help. At all events, a stage has been reached where no one doubts the desirability of equal oppor- tunity and equal responsibility of men and women under the law ; and nobody should ques- tion the wisdom of their equal moral obligations to society, on given conditions. There also is common agreement on the right to freedom of speech within the limits of decency, regardless of sex ; and no one now who loathes caste doubts the fitness of women for full citizenship with men. When women discuss with each other the established order of things, they accomplish little; but when men and women together ex- amine established orders with care and discuss them publicly with freedom, if not always with judgment, much is accomplished. The inter- ested parties find points of agreement. In- trenched systems yield to the slow attrition of agitation. Deep in our hearts we know that agitation is not pernicious when it quickens the social conscience; that no good system can be harmed very much by agitators ; and that no bad system should be exempt from criticism. This is true of all systems religious, economic, and the others. Xll PREFACE The ever-increasing recognition of woman's right to a voice in public council is beginning to show good effects. Cosmopolitanism is awakening. Fanaticism is disappearing from patriotism. We are beginning to see that the love of mankind develops from a proper regard for the interests of home, community, country. If it is true that an interest in the welfare of neighbors does not impede nor impair one's patriotic impulses, then patriotism should strengthen, rather than weaken one's love for humanity. This truth is exemplified in the lives of all great men and women. It is natural for love to radiate from the hearth to link up with kin, friend, and fellow, and thus to extend from a personal center to the impersonal circumference, if it would en- compass all that lies between. But as the love of family, friend, and neighbor does not imply the hatred of strangers, neither should the love of country breed intolerance of the patriotism in other lands. For if patriotism is right in one country, it is right in all countries. Those of us who heartily accept "Old Glory" as the hallowed symbol of our national aspirations, reverently salute other flags. Woman knows better than man that love, like visual perception, decreases in definition as the horizon broadens. Emotion tempers justice both in man and woman, but more in PEEFACE Xlll woman than in man. Therefore a greater fem- inine element in the judiciary would be an im- provement. Flexible emotion is better for society than inflexible justice is for anything. Absolute justice would wipe us all out the judges with the rest. There are many kinds of justice; and until we master them all we can not hope to become civilized. It is not humanly possible, for instance, to mete out precisely the same quality of justice to friend and foe; if it were, friendship would be an empty pretense. The same rule of justice can not be applied to the halt and the fit, to the blind and those that see, to the weak and the strong. The architect of this world made no provision for a Hall of Justice; and for that reason perhaps we have failed to establish so much as a single court of justice on earth. Even our worship of abstract justice is a form of fetishism. Many other things are as important as justice is to our human condition; and one of these is an elastic emotion that has a healthy rebound. Only a heartless machine could judge alike the next-door neighbor and a stranger on the far-away steppes of Manchuria; yet only a savage would interpret the kindly feeling for the one into terms of cruelty to the other. In a word, unqualified universal eternal justice is the cry of a mad soul debauched with idealism. PKEFACE Nobody wants it ; nothing deserves it, least of all the human being. Women are the essential religionists of the race. They are as subject to false gods as to the effects of the moon. Therein lie their political instability, their economic weakness, and, as a sex, their unfitness to govern. Owing to no fault of their own, they have been slaves too long to be good masters. I am glad for every slave that becomes a master ; but I shrink from a master that has been a slave. There- fore, firmly believing in the woman 's movement, also I believe in the man's. I think man and woman should move together, or, what amounts to the same thing, synchronously. Each sex should do that which it can do better than the other sex. Man and woman must perform to- gether, but, if they would get on, each must do the thing that each is adapted for by the nat- ural order of existence. For everything that interests them jointly is an elaboration of sex divergence into sexual conjunction. Some of these things I shall try to set forth whilst blazing the trail here and there from woman's bondage to freedom. Incidentally among other topics, I shall discuss the freedom of choice in mating and in the bearing of chil- dren. The ethics of marriage, the desirability of easy divorce, and the hideous evil of prosti- tution will be lightly touched in passing; but PREFACE XV no matter how much we cry between the silences of yesterday and to-morrow, the long trail will go forward just the same into the unknown gen- erations of the world. For still "We are the ancients of the earth, And in the morning of our times." WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM EAELIEST MANKIND HE earliest status of woman is un- known. From our knowledge of early mankind, however, we may speculate on the remote problems of sex. At the dawn of humanity perhaps there were no problems of that kind. In the be- ginning, sex cleavage was expressed merely in beast-like motherhood and fatherhood. Everything depends from something else. The earliest human beings were aristocrats; they had attained a high and a secure position in life as it was at that time. They were be- ginning to walk around mostly on their hind legs. Some of them actually strutted. I really think they did, because our strutting started sometime and it may as well have been then. Also the dawn of ancestral pride may have broken on their waking minds at about the same period; for they were the ancestors of all our kind. 1 Z WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM Their crests were thinning frontal bones ; Their coats of arms were hairy hides ; Their proud estates were clubs and stones, And we inherit all, besides Their pride of blood that still abides. Where they originated, no one knows. It is probable that the ancestors of mankind lived in the forests of the great plains of Southern Asia, or perhaps on the Mongolian plateau. Their westward migration must have begun ages before the human stage was reached. Anthropologists believe, however, that human traits were first developed in the East during an extremely early period. For this reason we repeat the old saw, "Asia was the cradle of our race. ' y The aristocracy of to-day suffers no humili- ation from the fact that anthropoid apes and men sprang from a common stock. Time is gra- cious: it softens grief and it assuages the shame that stings like an adder's tooth from graves forgot. The divergence between ape and man began so long ago that now the blood of neither contaminates that of the other. An occasional reversion to type is momentarily disconcerting; but we have learned that every- thing reasonable may be borne by rational beings ; and there is balm in the belief that the racial cleavage is ever widening. The study of our remote ancestry takes us EARLIEST MANKIND 6 back to heroic times when social distinctions, or the lack of them, forced men and women to be neither liars nor hypocrites. They were frankly what they w r ere. They lived in happy freedom from the wiles of professional religionists ; and there were no capitalists in those days to ex- ploit them, nor labor organizations to pester them. There were neither kings nor slaves, riches nor poverty. Human parasites and pro- hibitionists and politicians had not begun to breed, because social filth had not yet been de- posited by civilization. To those blessed asons we must hark back if we would be happy in our dreams. Although our common ancestral stock is not precisely known, we suspect one branch of the Old World primates. It is unnecessary to try to follow this branch down through the an- cestral anthropoids of Egypt, however interest- ing it might be to do so. The mists of the Early Tertiary Period are too thick for clear vision. But humanly considered, the most im- portant event in Time, which Pythagoras called the soul of our world, occurred in this period ; for it gave to us our remote Pliocene ancestors, already fast running humanward through the dim ages. Our family tree is a big one. It has many distinct branches. The earlier branches were formed in the vast continental region now 4 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM called Eurasia. During the Old Stone Age some of these branches crept over to Western Europe; some became extinct while they still were in a prehuman state, and others long after they had become distinctly human. Beginning now anywhere in the well-defined human zone of development, let us try to vis- ualize conditions in remote prehistoric ages. At first thought it seems hopeless to expect more than a fanciful picture ; and if we were to rely solely on facts relating to contemporary groups of savages we should fail to get a true picture. For although some of these groups virtually live in the distant past, they differ in many vital respects from similar groups living no longer ago than thirty or forty thousand years. Fortunately, we have a great deal of data gathered, it is true, in fragments slowly and laboriously, but from many reliable sources. These data must be assembled, and from them we must make our deductions. This process will give us the groundwork or scenario. Some knowledge of the principles governing the con- duct of human beings in their struggles with the environment, and their rebounds resulting from these activities, together with some under- standing of their relations with each other relations which were slowly crystallized, as it were, by the laws of aggroupment will enable us to produce the film of a mental moving- EARLIEST MANKIXD O picture which shall visualize to us the unknown past almost as truthfully as contemporary life and incident may be thrown upon the screen. Before making the pictures, let us see how we can piece together the scenario and where we get the material. For the sake of conveni- ence, we will lay the scene in Western Europe at a time when the beings who inhabited that region were as distinctively human as are we ourselves. For, during the Old Stone Age, man already had received the heritage which, for short, we call the soul. During many ages the prehuman ancestors of man had aspired, subconsciously perhaps, to an upright carriage. For ages, man himself had known the benefit of the erect posture. His changed physical attitude was, in some mys- terious manner, the forerunner of his spiritual attitude. He was beginning to look toward the stars. But the slow change from four legs to two did not carry with it unalloyed bless- ings. As man arose from the more or less horizontal to the perpendicular posture, he be- gan to hope, to dream, to laugh, and to weep. Spiritual suffering came not through the "fall" of man but through his rise. His new posture also imposed anatomical penalties, the effects of which have not yet passed away. The ab- dominal cavity, for instance, is ill-suited to carry the viscera in an upright posture. But 6 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM the liberation of the arms in locomotion; man's ability to travel erect on two hind-limbs; and the transfer of the anthropoid function of the big-toe of the fore-foot to that of an opposable thumb of the human hand, were an enormous recompense for the ills suffered through the change. From the ability to suffer as a man came his faculty to enjoy as a god. His new sorrows broke into ripples of laughter; his horizon broadened ; his spirit longed for wings. For ages, man's brain had been helped in its development by the advantages of his op- posable thumb, perfectly capable of co-operat- ing with each of his four fingers. The hand had become an efficient assistant of the brain. The more he used his hands, the more he stimu- lated the development of his brain; and the more his brain developed, the more skillful became his hands. "We utilize this reaction be- tween hand and brain even to-day in the train- ing of children. For ages, the brain had been growing and undergoing adjustments of mass suitable to superanimal needs. One of the most marvel- lous acquirements of the human brain was its power of speech in one little area of either hemisphere. In the right-handed person, this speech-center became localized in the left. A little spot, situated in what is called the convo- lution of Broca, had become susceptible to an EAELIEST MANKIND 7 acquired change that made speech possible. Thus man found himself endowed with the gift of articulate speech. Without going into the reasons why, this could only have come about through the use of his hands during his in- dividual and racial childhood. Yet strangely enough, the faculty of speech is not congenital. Man is born as dumb as any other animal; but unlike other animals, he is born with the will-power of bringing forth in his brain a faculty that sets him apart from all the beasts of the earth. Still, no language ever came to him spontaneously. Every word was born of a need. His mind kissed his brain and words blossomed from his lips. Nor did the words issue merely as sounds, but they came full-fledged as verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech which make up a language in its infancy. The development of the faculty of speech was not owing to any difference in brain-structure, since anatomically it is the same with several groups of primates. But in man's brain, the particles of gray matter in a part of the cortex when subjected to the incessant repetition of certain stimuli develop the power of speech. Why is this? We say, rather loosely, that the personality longs to communicate with its fel- low in accordance with one of the feminine instincts of the race. The first effort to speak 8 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM was a gestnre; and the first "language" was not of the tongue, but of the hand a gestural speech. Thus language was born of the hand ; and spoken language, even in its most perfect form, still retains a large gestural element. The source of words is in the mind ; their im- pellant force is personality urged by the inter- action between need and longing. Words are inventions of the mind, which the brain, the nerves, and the muscles have learned to use. During the long period from somewhere well within the Miocene and extending through the Pliocene Age, a steady and coincident develop- ment took place of the hand, the brain, the powers of upright locomotion, and of speech. Already, as we have seen, in Early Quarternary Times this development had reached the flower called human. At this time we find our prehistoric human ancestors in Europe. They walk as we walk; they have our hands and brains. Their speech is rudimentary, but the brain-centers related to the higher senses are well developed, and they control perfectly all motions of the bodily members. The anterior centers of the brain are keenly awake, and they have long been busy in the hoarding of experience and the develop- ing of ideas. Fifty thousand or more years ago these groups of intelligent human beings possessed faculties and powers in all essentials EARLIEST MANKIND 9 " modern", though still in the dawn of educa- tion. These folk saw as we see, felt as we feel, and they otherwise functioned as we func- tion to-day. They were men and women with our emotions, hopes, and dreams. They were bound to our cycle of childhood, vigor, and senil- ity beings of our own intellectual timber, more roughly hewn perhaps and more ruggedly joined. Looking back beyond these racial groups through the concentric plenitude of time, we see others vaguely others still that are intelli- gent and still of an Eastern origin, yet ever lower as the period recedes, until the earliest ancestry of man is lost in brutedom. During a period covering more than a hun- dred thousand years, reaching to the dawn of human culture, Europe has been the habitat of man. The record of his residence is un- broken ; and the knowledge of his environment, of his life, and of his art is virtually complete. We know that he has been manufacturing im- plements for upwards of 125,000 years. We know the varieties and the habits of the animals that he knew; and we are familiar with the vegetal life that surrounded him during all that time. Through this knowledge we are en- abled to visualize the status of early woman- hood. The various elements of our knowledge cov- 10 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM ering this almost inconceivable lapse of years could be gathered only from many different sources by many diligent and well-equipped students. And then it is necessary to make a synthetic study of the facts gathered from a careful investigation of plant and animal life, of climate, of geography and geology, of relics and remains, of mental development, and of the physical modifications of the different racial groups, of their arts and industries which con- nect them with their surroundings and which reveal the relations between the intellectual and the material world. "We may look into the mirror of time for reflections of eternity; but we must interpret these reflections in thought ; and our chronology can not be founded on mere conjecture. We know, for example, that the Old Stone Age was contemporaneous with the Glacial Epoch. This gives us a time-scale in the snow-levels and consequent temperatures which conditioned mammalian life. With the help of such and countless other facts, we may determine the order of succession of species and, in general, the order of their physical modifications. We know that the Ice Age of Europe was multiple ; that there were Glacial and Interglacial Stages. This knowledge supplies the means of comput- ing the grand divisions of time, whilst the de- velopment of the flint industry, the progress of EAKLIEST MANKIND 11 invention, of art, and of the chase afford us a fair working-knowledge of the subdivisions of time. The imagination is quickened by a contempla- tion of the art and the industry of a people who vanished many scores of thousands of years ago. The same stars are overhead, the same earth is underfoot, the same gray old ocean moans upon the shore; but all else, how changed! Verily, life is a sea of changing clouds bounded by the infinite mysteries of generation and death. Nothing else is so universal and so constant as change. Nothing happens without it. Change is the archagitator of cosmic life. It is op- posed to spiritual stasis, to moral stagnation, to intellectual inertia. Is progress only a phase of change, or is change the very soul of prog- ress? We only know that the spirit of change thrills the established order with aspiration for a better order; and that it enables man to use the imperfections of all his systems as stepping-stones. Change is elemental coeval with life. Change is the sole hope of death the only star that shines in the night of mortal tragedy. Change is the only promise that the gods have given to men; and if it is read sympathetically, it gives us hope. And so you see that every new age proceeds from an older just as a child issues from the 12 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM parent. There is a harmony in all the epochs of the world, a harmony that seems like a song of the supreme voice of the universe. One re- ligion gives way to another, not always a bet- ter. For change has rhythm, and progress has rhythm ; and no advance is continuous of level, of even intensity. Only the rhythm passes through progressive periods ; and thus progress is best seen in large-scale perspective. One race suceeds another. In the lines of Pope : "Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, Now green in youth, now withering on the ground ; Another race the following spring supplies: They fall successive, and successive rise. ' * One philosophy makes room for another. One system of economics displaces another. Species supplant species. And why? Because change is cosmic, eternal, rhythmic, and, we hope, pro- gressive. All our shining achievements every thought and act individually and collectively expressed in whatever form; in mechanics, in chemistry, in art, in science, in ethics, in eco- nomics every one is as a bit of cosmic dust energised by the spirit of change. One of the most significant facts in the study of prehistoric man is his rapid spiritual as- cendancy. That his higher development was relatively swift and intensely progressive is made evident by an examination of his ana- EABLIEST MANKIND 13 tomical remains, chiefly of the skull, the center of his evolutionary advancement. Indeed a multitude of facts indicate that his spiritual growth was rapid. For much of our knowledge along these lines, the world is indebted to the investigations of such scholars as Cartailhac, Breuil, Obermaier, Osborn, Avebury, Begouen, Boule, Broca, Dar- win, Dechelette, and a host of others. Through their eyes, as it were, we are enabled to visual- ize prehistoric times. These men have laid bare the industries of the Old Stone Age in their complete sequence. They have made us familiar with the climate ; and by their magic, the ancient flora and fauna once more act their vital parts on the world's stage for our instruction. Through the tireless industry of savants we may make our pleasure-excursions to the old camping-stations of Upper Palaeolithic Times, and we may follow for our amusement, if we wish, the prehistoric invention of implements that has left its trail in such fine gradation. The result is that modern man gains a new conception of the antiquity of his race. He is better able to understand now than ever before the unfolding of the human spirit as it occurred in very ancient times. Relationships are estab- lished across thousands of changing years, form- ing a medium through which the mind of to-day 14 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM may come in touch with the powers of human observation, of discovery, and of invention dur- ing a period so remote that in contrast with it the antiquity of Old Babylon is of yesterday. History that is written in books never is wholly truthful nor generally reliable. The rea- son for this is that the historian is human: the work suffers from the frailties and imper- fections of the workman. But the history that is recorded by the works of change in soil and rock is exact truth to one capable of reading Nature's inscriptions. "When Greek conceptions of man's origin are compared with the records left by Nature, the parallelism is remarkable. Lucretius, who went to Greek sources for his science and philosophy, foreshadowed our knowledge of prehistory in his poem, De Eerum Natura. The poem is pic- torial. It conjures from words a moving-pic- turelike drama acted in primitive epochs. Through it we catch glimpses of our kind in preagricultural periods. We see how ancient- man lived and how he developed. The relative status and the occupations of men and women are clearly perceived. We are enabled to under- stand how the cordial virtues blossomed at the fireside, and how man's savagery was slowly chastened by his growing love for wife and child. EARLIEST MANKIND 15 From ^Eschylus to Horace, the Greek con- ception of human natural history was domi- nant. At the rise of the new religion this wholesome view was obscured by the dogma of special creation a nightmare that swept the Western World triumphantly until about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when studies in comparative anatomy began to awaken the understanding, giving birth to doubt; and doubt started the mind toward dis- coveries that have all but wiped away the many absurdities, chief of which was the anthropo- morphic divinity a god who not only shaped our ends according to childish whim, but who pried into our private affairs which were not even of local importance, and who prescribed our prayers, our fasts, and our feasts. With the rise of modern anthropology, the Mosaic doctrine of special creation was doomed. Buffon thought man might be sensitive at the discovery which proved him to be * ' an animal in every material point". The pride built around our Western religious conception of ourselves and centered in our fabled origin has suffered, but it still remains as a sore spot under clerical influence. However, the doctrine of evolution engaged broader conceptions wherein there is room for the dignity of the human soul to ex- pand and to amuse itself by indulging a multi- 16 WOMAN PEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM tnde of harmless vanities regardless of La- marck's shocking belief that the temple of the spirit is nothing more than the modified body of an anthropoid ape. WOMAN IN PREHISTORY ESTINY made motherlfood the chief occupation of prehistoric women. Fatherhood was a mere incident, a diversion from the chase, a pleasant avocation. Motherhood became a vocation when humanity emerged from prehuman beings. As we look backward along time 's ever-narrow- ing vista the milestones crowd together until it seems that motherhood leapt from the function of fortuitous reproduction among animals to an imperative calling thrilled with spiritual aspiration. Motherhood was a multiple calling in early primitive epochs. It made other occupations necessary. It was enlivened with subtle phan- toms; and it carried "the sad burden of some merry song". It moulded the form of woman, and it has shaped the soul of man. If God ever spoke to mortals, it was through mother- hood, not through a book. Ceaselessly He knocked at the door of human consciousness, as it were, bidding it to open and to admit the ten- derer virtues. Perhaps mercy first entered the heart of man through this door. Sympathy 17 18 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM is a feminine trait. The primordial savage spared the life of an orphaned babe because his woman had brought forth a similar stranger equally helpless. Primitive woman suckled the waif because her own babe had lain at her breasts. She first sheltered a young being, more ape thati human, because she thought of her own offspring. She fed a strange child be- cause the hunger-cries of her own were ringing in her memory. Some of her earliest virtues were born of the make-believe. She held an alien child in her arms and made believe it was her own. She mourned the loss of her first- born and lo ! her grief turned into imagination. Early in the dawn of humanity, motherhood was a well-established occupation. As hu- manity waxed, this occupation differentiated to specialize on what we now call the virtues. It learned to grow the flowers that long for moths and moonlight, as well as those that love the bees and the hot sun. Man was engrossed in the seeking of food for himself. He became the hunter. Woman was occupied in the seek- ing of food for herself and her young. Thus motherhood was the seed of altruism sown in the fairy dust of earth when the world was young. When the primitive mother had to lay up from the chase when she was compelled to watch and guard her babes to slacken her WOMAN IN PREHISTORY 19 arduous efforts for a period she usually found herself short of meat. At such times, when the season was favorable, she ate roots and herbs and the seeds of wild grasses. Remembering her hardships, her hunger and want, she in- vented agriculture. She probably invented fire. She was the first to cook. She made the first home, and she will preside over the last. Love came to her heart ages before it entered man's. She invented art ; and she was the first to dream of immortality. As sexual relations broadened into other forms of co-operation between men and women, labor slowly differentiated. The division of labor made woman a drudge. Her sex became domestical. She was driven to sustained effort. Man, always the hunter, naturally be- came the warrior. Nature fitted him for bursts of speed. Vitally, he was a spendthrift, and a spendthrift he has remained. In vitality, woman was the banker. Very early in her career she became inured to routine. Routine is a form of bondage. Gradually men began to co-operate for pur- poses of war and the chase. They became gregarious. Woman remained solitary. She developed resources, and the faculty of medita- tion that was the mother of her intuition. Her mental trajectory diverged from man's. She was the first thinker. Her solitary periods 20 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FKEEDOM fostered her self-reliance, her ingenuity. She was first to seek shelter and to wear clothes. She excelled in the arts of peace as man ex- celled in the arts of war. She invented the needle. She discovered the uses of grease. She was the first to dig a hole, to plant a seed to erect the pole-house, around which she wove twigs, or covered the poles with bark and leaves. She was first to dress hides. She in- vented the pelt-raiser, the skin-scraper. As the Ice Age approached, she made rude gar- ments of vegetal fiber and of skins, sewing them with sinewy thread of her own produc- tion. She fashioned the first shoes. She de- vised the water-vessel, the basket, the first crude pottery, the first agricultural implement which probably was a stick, sharpened and point-hardened by flame. She was the first miller first to pound seeds with stones and to grind them with mullers. She originated the granary. She invented drag-poles ages before man invented the wheel. She invented civiliza- tion. Woman made the cat and the dog domesti- cal. She domesticated the plants. Man tamed dogs, cattle, reindeer, sheep, and horses ; and woman domesticated them. Man was the shepherd; woman was the farmer. The Ne- anderthal hunters drove the cave-bear and the hyena from the caverns, converting the en- WOMAN IN PKEHISTOKY 21 trances into homes and camps. They hunted the mammoth, the wild-horse, the rhinoceros, the giant deer, the reindeer, the bison, and wild cattle. The women prepared the meals, or rather the irregular gluts; they dressed the pelts made them into covers and clothes. Women laid the hearthstones at the entrances of the caves, so they could work in the open daylight. At night and during rainy or in- clement weather, they retired just within, making their beds well back from the mouth of the grotto. Man raided the lair of the wolf trained the cubs to aid him in the chase ; but it was woman who converted the wolf into a warder of the fireside and the friend of mankind. She dis- membered the game where men and dogs brought it down. She split the marrow-bones; she clove the skull for its brains ; and she trans- muted tooth, tusk, and claw into ornaments and talismans. She invented the fat-burning lamp to succeed the torch; she tended the fires; she guarded the springs; she protected her young from marauders at the cave-entrance; she de- vised the first crude implements of the hearth- side; she gathered the natural tar for making her baskets water-tight. In a word, she was man's help that was meet for him. Man was familiar with the virgin forests, with their wild denizens. Woman knew the 22 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM plants. The great Ice Age was approaching. Forests, plants, and animals of central France and northern Italy were beginning to feel the coming change. The forests were not unlike those of our central states. There were sassa- fras trees, the roots of which woman already had learned to use. There were locusts, su- machs, the bald cypress, and the tulip. In northern Italy were forests of sweet and sour gum, of the bay, and of other varieties such as we have to-day in the Carolinas. Along the Mediterranean were bamboos, palms, and the sequoia. All over central France were thriv- ing forests of oak, poplar, willow, beech, and larch. These for the most part survived the Glacial rigors to reforest Europe in Post-Gla- cial times; but many types, some of which we now have in America, became extinct in Europe. The forests abounded with several kinds of monkeys. There were Asiatic mammals such as the rhinoceros, the mastodon, the antelope, the gazelle. Hyenas lurked in the shadows ; the African hippopotamus wallowed in the river- bottoms; there were saber-tooth tigers, and several species of deer. There were African- Asiatic mammals such as elephants, wild boars, lynxes, foxes, and wild-cats. In the rivers were otter and beaver; on the hills were the hares. As some of these animals disappeared before WOMAN IN PREHISTORY 23 the lowering temperature, others, such as the northern musk-ox, took their places. In the region of England, where the climate was warmer than at present, there were for- ests of maple, elm, birch, alder, oak, pine, and spruce. All these trees flourished during the first Interglacial Period. Only the hardier flora and fauna survived later hardships. All over Europe the forests and the meadows were teeming with wild-life. In truth, as John Hey- wood says, Fieldes had eies and woods had eares. Such, in brief, was the environment of our early ancestors. The effects of climatic phenomena on human beings during Glacial and Interglacial Times have engaged the attention of many thoughtful minds. The multiple Glacial Stages were ac- companied by multiple climatic changes, the successive periods of which conditioned the flora and fauna of Europe throughout the long age. Beds of fossil plants and bones of mam- mals, glacial moraines and "drifts", and suc- ceeding "river-terraces", all these tell the story. And because the wisest man that ever lived is not always right, there is divergence of opinion among savants as to the number of Glacial and Interglacial Periods. The prevail- ing opinion is there were eight; but the exact 24 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM number is not important to our present pur- poses. These divisions taken together form the most interesting age of the ancient world. For it was during this great Ice Age that the cultural relics and the skeletal remains of primitive man were deposited. On these deposits are based vital parts of our study. The duration of this epoch therefore is important. Authorities differ from 800,000 to 100,000 years; but the conservative estimate of Penck is now generally accepted. This gives us an approximate period of 525,000 years ' ' since the first great ice-fields developed in Scandinavia, in the Alps, and in North America west of Hudson Bay". Since the grand divisions of time are marked by certain large geologic agencies forever at work, the comparative ages of the various camp- sites of prehistoric folk are determined, first, by their geologic succession; second, by the im- bedded remains of mammals and plants; and, third, by implements and other relics of cultural types of industry. The Old-Stone-Age man was induced to dwell where game was abundant and where the raw material for his meager industries was acces- sible. Something ever brought him back to his old camping-grounds. Perhaps it was ' ' the musty reek that lingers about dead leaves and last year's ferns", in the words of Rupert WOMAN IN PREHISTORY 25 Brooke. It was at these sites that prehistoric children first noticed that wet pebbles were rich for an hour; and there it was that lovers first noted the gleaming raindrops in the cups of flowers. At any rate, where woman laid the hearthstones is written much of the strange tale of primordial human life. But other rec- ords also were left. Xow and then in the "river- drift" are found vestiges of man's skeletal re- mains, and oftener the relics of his industry. In time and the fulness thereof, as love evolved the funeral rite and appointed the burial place, his relics tended to assemble. The implements of his make, less perishable than his bones, were widely scattered; some are found in "river- drift" and "river-terrace"; others on the plateaus and uplands of the "loess" stations. Chronology therefore must be determined by geologist, archaeologist, anatomist, anthropolo- gist, and the rest, all working together co- operatively. Then the inspired savants, with the enthusiasm of genius, weave the whole into a fabric that constitutes the fascinating story of prehistoric life and times. The caves, scoured out in early glacial times by subterranean streams heavy with grit and gravel, became relatively dry in later epochs. Yet their depths were not generally inhabited, owing to poor ventilation, as indicated by the old hearths that almost always are near the 26 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM entrance, just inside or just without. Instead of cave-life, it was grotto-life. The primitive hunter-tribes were ever in love with the open regions where they followed a roving life as free as the winds. They made their camps however in sheltered places during the inclem- ent seasons. The deep cave-recesses were re- served probably as prisons for captured women, and later perhaps as headquarters for artists, priests, and magicians. The geologic technic in cave-construction was efficacious in smoothing the walls and in carpeting the floors with fine loam. The Mag- dalenian artists probably made their first draw- ings in this cave-loam; and now and then, as for example in the Tuc d 'Audoubert, they made use of this material as modelers' clay. The smooth, often polished, walls were used in an early day as drawing-boards, and finally to re- ceive the paintings of the Upper Palaeolithic artists. So much depends from point of view that I often wonder what should be regarded as a standard in looking at anything. In the con- templation of prehistory, the time-scale is the epoch marked by geologic changes in the skin of the world, by climatic conditions which bathe it, and by evolutionary stages in the progress of life : a progress dominated by some mysterious force surrounding the habitable globe an epi- WOMAN IN PREHISTOEY 27 phenomenon governed by a strange mandate that forces life to bruise and to break living beings in order to continue. In dealing with prehistory, one must treat a continent as he might treat his garden; that is to say, he must note all the changes through the round year. The difference is this: the prehistoric year is multiplied in the concep- tion of the prehistorian by 525,000. His spring begins with the Eocene Epoch, when mammalian life swarmed over the continent of Western Europe life that was " indigenous to every continent on the globe except South America and Australia, and adapted to every climatic life-zone, from the warm and dry plains of southern Asia and northern Africa to the tem- perate forests and meadows of Eurasia". Some came "from the heights of the Alps, Himalayas, Pyrennees, and Altai mountains ' ' ; others from "the high, arid, dry steppes of central Asia, with their alternating heat of summer and cold of winter"; others came down "from the tundras or barren grounds of Scandinavia, northern Europe, and Siberia"; and still others from "the mild forests and plains of southern Europe". 1 Thus the prehistorian visualizes this swarm- ing life; and he marks its variations through succeeding epochal seasons. He notes that the 1 Men of the Old Stone Ago (Osborn). 28 WOMAN FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM successive groups of our Palaeolithic kind fed upon these mammals, used their bones for im- plements and their skins for clothing ; and that in the course of time these utilitarian objects became artistic subjects of aesthetic taste capable of high development. This aesthetic development based on the most utilitarian pursuits of early man is a sign, lit- tle in itself, pointing to large things. It makes possible those fine deductions that carry with them in some way an atmosphere of poetic fancy to soften the sharp angles of realism and to render alluring a realm which is so weirdly remote. Having now the human being with his nature and powers well established and defined, we see him environed by climate and flora and fauna in no respect remarkably strange to his descendants to-day. Knowing that he was in the earliest stages of education, we are able to visualize the nature of his struggles for ex- istence, and to see just what powers of his mind and body were exercised to their fullest extent and keenest intensity. With this as a basis, w T e may follow his aesthetic development through the various stages of his art, and thus may we catch glimpses of his soul in its un- folding. Xothing else so clearly reveals the soul of a people as does their art. Science and mechanics WOMAN IX PREHISTORY 29 are purely intellectual. Commerce is the flux of acquisitiveness everywhere extended. Eco- nomics is a philosophy founded on the preda- tory instincts of man. Statecraft is a working- theory to make the philosophy seem plausible. Politics is the brutal application of that theory. But the aesthetic impulse bursts from the emo- tional nature of man. This impulse is one of the earlier signs of man's superanimal destiny. Artistic vision is an innate faculty of mind and spirit; and the inborn urge to create and to perpetuate enjoyment precedes- the powers of representation. Art is destined to reveal a sense of proportion in which beauty dwells ; to welcome the advent of morals, because morals is the flowering of spiritual beauty; and at the same time it is destined to discover the charm of form and color. Art in Europe may be traced from early Aurignacian times, and it may be continuously followed until the close of the Magdalenian period. The dominant racial group of that epoch is believed to have been the Cro-Magnon. Dr. Osborn regards this people as the "Palae- olithic Greeks ' '. From the beginning, their art shows on the whole an unbroken evolution. Lartet was the first to discover this art; and the investigations he started were continued by Piette, Capitan, Sautuola, Cartailhac, Breuil, and others. It ranges from I'art mobilier, con- 30 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM sisting of the embellishment of ornaments and implements of stone, bone, and ivory, to I'art parietal which covers "drawings, engravings, paintings, and bas-reliefs on the walls of cav- erns and grottos". 1 Breuil proved this art to be homogeneous and progressive in its devel- opment. According to Osborn, it forms a key to the psychology of the racial group not only, but it becomes another means ' * of establishing pre- historic chronology". Considered as a means of determining the comparative chronology of the times, a study of this art is invaluable as giving the rough date of execution "by the archaeological layers of succeeding periods". The stalactite formations that have required thousands of years in which to close the entrances of galleries in caves, are sufficient proof of the antiquity of the art found in those galleries. There are also frescoed ceil- ings that have been buried since "long before Neolithic times ... by the closing up of the entrance" of the cave. Again, there is the similarity of characteristics shown "in the en- gravings on bone, found in the old hearths, as- sociated with flints, to [those of] the mural decorations which are found upon the walls". There are still other means of determining the chronology as, for instance, the superposition of design, the type of the animal depicted, etc. 1 Osborn. WOMAN" IN PREHISTORY 31 A careful examination of the art shows that it proceeded gradually from childlike powers of observation to those as adequate as any possessed by ourselves. The artistic impulse of this people found outlet through many dif- ferent fields of achievement. There were en- gravings on bone, stone, and ivory; the fash- ioning and the carving of the same materials range from the crudest attempts at sculpture to fine effects in bas-relief, mural drawing, geo- metric decoration, and painting. Aurignacian figurines carved from soapstone throw sidelights on the life of the times. The male figures indicate that the men followed active, athletic pursuits; while the female fig- ures show a corpulency resulting from a sedentary life and a diet of fat and marrow. The delineation of animal forms naturally began at a very early date, before attempts were made to depict the human form. The first indications of painting lead to ancient Aurig- nacian times. The efforts in this direction were confined to crude outlines; later the outline drawings were filled in with color. All through these designs and paintings may be found evi- dent attempts at close observation and realism of effect produced by relatively few lines, to- gether with vital suggestions of the spirit of action. As draughtsmanship developed, char- acteristic features were seized upon and em- 32 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM phasized, showing not only the power of ac- curate observation but an artistic sense of a high order in the designer. Slowly but surely the human motif became more important to the mind of the artist than that of the brute figure. A fact bearing on the speech-area of the brain already referred to, indicating that its location at that time had been established in the left hemisphere, is found in the many right-handed tools recently discovered, such as crude flint saws, picks, chopping instruments, stone planes, burins, and so forth. During the long course of artistic unfolding, the effect of climate, which produced changed habits of life, bears upon the art-product of these prehistoric groups. Apparently, during the Solutrean times when the people were ac- customed to live more in the open, the art-im- pulse slackened, to become taut again under the more rigorous climate of Magdalenian times as the people were driven back to cave- or grotto-life. The Cro-Magnon group probably produced the art of both Aurignacian and Magdalenian times. The Solutrean culture reached Europe from the East ; its origin however is as obscure as that of the Cro-Magnon. There is some evi- dence of Solutrean advance over Aurignacian art in decorative and geometric effects. But Magdalenian art interests us most because it WOMAN IN PKBHISTOBY 33 reveals "the culmination of Palaeolithic civil- ization"; because "it marka the highest de- velopment of the Cro-Magnon race preceding their sudden decline and disappearance as the dominant race of western Europe". Further- more, according to Osborn, "The men of this time are commonly known as the Magdalenians, taking their name from the type station of La Madeleine, as the Greeks in their highest stage took their name from Athens and were known as Athenians." It seems to be well established that the early Aurignacian art movement culminated during Magdalenian times when it reached its apogee in sculpture, engraving, and painting. Its uniform character implies that it was done by the Cro-Magnon group. The Magdalenian artists, being accomplished realists, must have come into close contact with their subjects since they rendered them so well in action and form. This is notable in their treatment of bison, horse, mammoth, reindeer, rhinoceros, lion, and bear. The decoration of living-utensils also shows a high state of artistic culture. Whatever the cause of the incom- plete arrest of art during Solutrean times, its revival during the Magdalenian is obvious in many forms, including that of the human figure. The two leading interests of those times seem to have been the chase and the cultivation of 34 WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FKEEDOM art. Mysterious caverns were converted into picture galleries. The aesthetic impulse was intensely active. Certain beautifully carved implements called "batons de commandement " suggest tribal organization of an advanced stage. Then as now, there was diversity of temperament and of talent. This diversity al- ways produces social differentiation. There were hunters, priests, chiefs, artists, manufac- turers, dressers of hides, and primitive tillers of the soil. As the intellect developed, the sense of won- der grew. The phenomena of nature attracted first the emotions and later the thought of man. This partly accounts for the dim birth of re- ligion; for religion is, among other things, an emotive outlet for wonder and awe. From the sense of wonder the gods were born, just as ghosts issued from dreams, just as angels sprang from hope and evil demons from fear. The sense of grandeur aroused ideas of the supernatural; and the sense of curiosity led early man to explore the depths of caves and the unknown regions of forest and sea. Music and poetry, formerly one but now widely di- vergent, came from love; and the idea of a spirit possibly had its origin in the shadow. The craving for an explanation of natural oc- currences let loose all manner of vague notions .and a host of superstitions, many of which re- WOMAN IN PREHISTORY 35 main with us. For we still are living in the morning of humanity. The noontide of our race is ages and ages away. The burial rite probably originated in the hope of another life. The artists of those far-off times delineated upward of thirty varieties of mammals. We know that they had before their eyes a vast ar- ray of animal life, many forms of which they depicted with vigor and skill. There were the tundra animals: mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, musk-ox! from the steppes were horses, antelope, asses; Asiatic life gave to them the lion and the desert horse ; in the Alps were ibex and chamois, in the meadows, bison and wild cattle; roaming the forests were red deer, stags, forest-horses, cave-bears, wolves, wild-boars, and the moose. It is highly sug- gestive that the artists were attracted more by animal subjects that possessed fine lines and pleasing proportion than by the others, a favorite being the majestic bison, or the grace- ful horse. Eeturning to climatic influences : It is quite certain that as the climatic conditions became harder the artistic traits of the Cro-Magnons were stimulated and, as naturally would be expected, both physical and mental development became more rapid. The imagination seems to flower in physical hardship, and its roots always are found in the home, whether the home 36 (WOMAN" FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM be a natural cave below ground or one arti- ficially constructed above; and better than all else, the home must contain a hearth presided over by a woman. The people of Magdalenian times certainly had stone vessels for holding water, stone mor- tars and pestles for grinding mineral colors. They engraved ivory tusks and made wonder- ful harpoons, flint augers, burins, polishers, bone needles, flint saws, and stone lamps. Ac- cording to Barthelot, animal fata were burned in the lamps. The methods of some of the later Magda- lenian artists were similar to those of to-day; that is to say, first a sketch or design was made, to be followed with the painting. Pri- mordial realism slowly passed into a form of impressionism which was executed with the least number of lines. The spirit of Magda- lenian art was as " modern" as that of Bar- bizon. The foregoing leads to a very important fea- ture of prehistory: that is the relation of woman to the earliest known art. This fea- ture never has been recognized fully by any authority on these matters. It has been as- sumed, always tacitly or otherwise, that the prehistoric artists were men. This assumption is natural enough to one who has in mind the art-development of the last two or three thou- WOMAN IN PBEHISTOEY 37 sand years. But during this relatively modern period, conditions under which art developed are so entirely different from those of remote prehistory that analogy between them breaks down. It seems altogether probable that woman was the first artist. The conditions of her life were favorable to the development of an Artistic temperament, to use a trite expression, ages before man had time to think of much else than the chase and war. As we have seen, the life of woman was more solitary than that of man. We know that the child (quickly repro- ducing the childhood of its race) is given to " making pictures". The solitary child, par- ticularly, finds its chief amusement in the draw- ing of crude outlines. It uses colored materials when it can ; but when it can not do better, the child resorts to scratches, making use of any material within reach. Primitive woman, probably was a keener ob- server than primitive man. Her life, as his, depended on powers of observation; but what was more important to her than life was the life of her child. Thus a double stress was imposed on her powers of observation. Be- sides, she had greater opportunity than man, during her enforced periods of solitude, to turn toward artistic employment. She had learned to make baskets and to daub them with 38 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM natural tar. Already she was producing crude handicraft objects. She knew how to scratch in the earth and other soft substances to con- vey information to a chance passer-by. It was now only a step to the making of drawings on bark, stone, and bone. From her earliest util- itarian signs and marks to playful caricature was another step. From this to the aesthetic drawings on the walls of caves, on loose stones, on tusks and bark, was only another step ; and that step I think she made. Figures of women are relatively scarce in the examples we have of the art of this period. This is exactly what would be expected if the artists were women. The mysterious lure of sex inspired the early delineators with dreams of their sexual complements. These dreams seek concrete expression. Naturally, the women artists would be more concerned with the male figure; and for that reason, where the human form is outlined, it usually is the lithe, athletic form of man. Where we find the figures of women represented, they are fat and they have the maternity features grossly exaggerated. Both in outline and in modeling, the figures clearly indicate that woman was of sedentary occupation. The point is that the sedentary life favored the artistic pursuit then as it does now. At any rate, those who had the leisure were more likely to have been artists than those WOMAN IN PREHISTORY 39 who were engaged more or less continuously in the strenuous pursuit of game or the arduous pursuit of warfare. When these early folk began to occupy the caverns, the deeper recesses probably were at first used as prisons for women captives. Con- fined in these retreats, they were easily guarded. During long periods of idleness, it is natural that they should turn to the adornment of the cavern walls and to other artistic occupations. "When men first crept from out earth's womb, like worms, Dumb speechless creatures, scarce with human forms, With nails or doubled fists they used to fight For acorns or for sleeping-holes at night ; Clubs followed next ; at last to arms they came ' ' ; And meanwhile longing taught them how to frame An intuition vague with boundary-lines; And then the love of mimicry entwines With loftier imagery, until the heart Of prehistoric man sowed seeds of art That found congenial soil in bark and bone, Took root in sunless galleries of stone; Thenceforth a vine crept round the smiling earth To bear the blossoms of benignant worth. 1 1 The Philosophy of Painting (Bell). WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY HERE is no evidence that primitive woman was inferior to primitive man. The differences in sex that effected divergence of mental tra- jectory, emotive cleavage, and a division of labor gradually forced woman into bondage. She became degraded in man's eyes and, what was worse, in her own. In savage states of society the helplessness of the weak arouses the cruelty of the strong. The period of gestation, the temporary preoc- cupation of childbirth, and the necessary care of the young compelled woman to seek protec- tion and aid from man. Brutality and strength went hand in hand. Weakness and slavery were companions. Primeval barbarism was long-lived. Hunger was man's first god; and the seeking of food was his earliest religion. Pillage was the ambition of our ancestors; warfare was their glory; and the Great War might imply that yet there is some ethical progress to be made by their descendants. 41 42 .WOMAN" FBOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM Early man's aspiration did not rise much above his amatory desires and the taste for a few rude comforts. Whatever he perceived to be of service to himself, he used with little regard to the rights of the others. The things that encumbered him in his march through time and its wildernesses, he discarded. The weak and the aged, crippled and female children were killed or abandoned. The robust women, necessary to his well-being and useful as slaves, were kept as chattels. As recently as in Spar- tan times, the remnants of some of these hard customs trailed the march of civilization. The indifferent attitude of the Greek mind toward unfortunate children however was modified by ideals of bodily perfection; and these ideals were transformed into art. Woman staggered for ages under oppression. She was the common property of the tribe, in no sense the mistress of herself. The tribe was the father of her children ; but the mother was responsible for their care, and for that rea- son perhaps primitive justice perceived dimly that the child should belong to the mother. This was in effect a victory for womanhood. Many ages later, society recognized that the right of inheritance by the logic of succession should depend from the female line. Long afterward when this view of natural justice became ob- WOMAJST IN THE BORDEELAISTD OF HISTORY 43 scured, the pendulum of woman's rights swung backward. Marriage maybe was the second victory un- consciously achieved by woman. It may have been only a Cadmean victory ; yet it was a great step from the state of being the common prop- erty of the clan to a state of marriage, how- ever low the form of union. This acceptance of unity in the mating of men and women, ten- uous and tenebrous as it was, nevertheless was a momentous event in the trail that primeval people were blazing toward a civilization that we moderns still pursue afar-off. "When marriage had become a custom gen- erally recognized in later epochs of prehistory, the dawn of civilization was breaking. The home had appeared on earth ; the roof -tree had reared its symbol above the hearth. A spir- itual synthesis, like an altar-flame, burst forth to warm the heart with love. Woman, who long had stood between man and the uncertainties of the chase by cultivating the soil; woman, who had stood between man and the misfortuntes of war by guarding his frocks; woman, who always had stood between man and extinction by the bearing and the rear- ing of his children, woman at last was able to stand between man and the inclemencies of life by making a home for him. Through servitude she had become the mother of art. Through 44 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM love she became the mother of everything worth while. Motherhood, the chief benefactor of man, was the severest slave-driver of woman. Mother- hood made her a physical slave, and in later times a legal idiot. Through aeons of servitude shackles were riveted on her mind. Through love she became the wife of man, the mother of virtue, the fount of the spirituality of our race. Through all the stages of motherhood, from the lowest physical to the highest spir- itual, she has paid a penalty for every benefit she has bestowed upon us. In every way the peer of man, her gifts, duties, sacrifices, servi- tude, and obligations to humanity have withheld from her sex in the past the opportunities to reach man's intellectual level. Only in spir- ituality, during the dim ages gone, has woman been permitted by Nature and Fate, or God and Man, to lead in progress. Otherwise and always, until most recent times, she has pushed the van of civilization so that those who rode in it might dream of some joys in this life whilst she walked behind blinded by the sweat of toil and the dust of the road. Her only consola- tion was the hope of a life to come in a better world. From the unknown period of man's earliest domination over woman, down to recent times, he has maintained arbitrary authority over her WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 45 person whilst taking ever subtler liberties with her soul. He kept her in physical confinement or in the prison of pious fear. He called to his aid all the superstitious elements of religion. He forced her to suppress her natural desires. He told her childish tales, and he fed her mind with impossible precepts until she acquired in- tellectual dyspepsia, which threatened to be- come chronic. He educated her so thoroughly in nastiness that she became puritanical. She was ashamed of her natural parts, acts, and im- pulses. Ideas of sex grew to be abhorrent to her or, following the rule of reaction to ex- tremes, she became sexually engrossed. He filled her mind with dread lest she offend God with the physical pleasure and the spiritual joy which abide in the house of love. He did his un- witting best to make her thoughts obscene. He converted her into a plaything of his lust, and he trafficked in her charms as he traffics in beef-on-the-hoof. For ages, man's conduct was public conduct and his opinion, public opinion. Now all these oppressive acts were inter- woven with kindly motives. Many stupid men, perfectly honest, believed that fear was the only safe foundation of virtue, and that ignorance was a bulwark against sin. The whole weft of social progress is purple-shotten and mingled with threads of pure gold. The shuttle passes from epoch to epoch. Strange patterns are 46 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM woven the beautiful together with the hideous. In the broad course of racial advance, retro- gressive movements parallel the progressive. Our hope lies in the forward tendency of the general current. The flux of time brought woman to another stage comparable to victory. This gain mod- ified her defeat in the loss of succession, in the line of descent. An important factor in her new status was the legality of monogamy, which already had received ecclesiastical benediction. She became the recognized mother of her lord 's heirs. Through her he dreamed of posthumous glory in his sons. Through her he lived again. Through her he kept an avaricious grip on his gold by passing it along to his children. Woman had acquired the dignity of definite and con- crete worth. Virgins now could bring high prices to their sires, position and jewels to themselves. This legalized form of sanctified prostitution has not yet passed away. But such things do not shock us who so love the Bible that we can not dis- criminate between what is recorded and that which is taught in its pages. According to this venerable book, there is slight occasion for pride in pedigree. Considering our ancestors, we are getting on. If Leah and Rachel were sold to Jacob for service, why may not Ella or Jane be exchanged for position and power? WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 47 Mrs. Mill, in her "Enfranchisement of Wom- an ", says: "That those who are physically weaker should have been made legally inferior, is quite conformable to the mode in which the world has been governed. Until very lately, the rule of physical strength was the general law of human affairs. . . . * ' The world is very young, and has only just begun to cast off injustice. It is only now getting rid of negro slavery. It is only now getting rid of monarchial despotism. It is only now getting rid of hereditary feudal nobility. It is only now getting rid of disabilities on the ground of religion. It is only beginning to treat any men as citizens, except the rich and a favored portion of the middle-class. Can we wonder that it has not yet done as much for women ? ' ' This is too modern. Let us go back for a moment to the ancient Hellenes. The lament of Iphigenia shows how woman was regarded in those cultured times: "The condition of woman is worse than that of all other human beings. If man is favored by fortune, he be- comes a ruler and wins fame on the battle- field; and if the gods have ordained him mis- fortune, he is the first to die a fair death among his people. But the joys of woman are nar- rowly compassed; she is given unasked in mar- riage, by others, often strangers, and when de- 48 WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM stmction falls upon her house, she is dragged away by the victor." "We have read how Penelope was ordered about by Telemachus ; and that he had authority even to give his mother in marriage. We are familiar with the command of the sacred Tal- mud which says: "When thy daughter has reached maturity, set one of thy slaves free and betroth her unto him." By a thousand similar records and traditions we realize how long human nature has been loath to change for the better. Solon, the giver of laws, was praised by a contemporary at Athens in the fifth century, B. C. in these words: "Solon be extolled! for thou hast brought public women for the safety of the town, for the morals of a town filled with strong young men, who, but for thy wise institution, would have grven themselves up to the annoyance and pursuit of women of the upper classes." Even the iron-tongued Demos- thenes said: "We marry in order to obtain legitimate children and a faithful warder of the house; we keep concubines as servants for our daily attendance, but we seek the Hetaerae for love's delights." I shall refer to St. Paul and others of his ilk later. Mark the words of Thucydides: "Woman is more evil than the storm-tossed waves, than the heat of fire, than the fall of the WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 49 wild cataract; if it was a god who created woman, wherever he may be, let him know that he is the unhappy author of the greatest ills." Thucydides fared badly in love. The unhappy author of his ill, or somebody else, bungled him in the making; and bungled lovers always are all vinegar toward women. The garrulous Cato advised the heads of Ro- man families to be more rigid in their treat- ment of wives; to keep them in a state of "proper servility" in order that wives and mothers should not become public nuisances. This is the attitude of male "antis" to-day. Well within the border of authentic history, the feudal system, with its military ideas and ecclesiastical traditions, exercised under the " rights of seignory" a monstrous tyranny over women. Not only did these * * rights " comprise a jurisdiction that is unprintable now to de- fine, but even the power on occasion to deprive women of life itself. The vaunted deeds of chivalry inspire us with little admiration. Chivalrous indeed were the times when a shapely horse might compete with a beautiful woman; when a man might legally cudgel his wife for infidelity and beat her for contradicting his statements or for dif- fering from his opinions ! We read that if the woman will insist on her views she shall be 50 .WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM 1 ' struck in the face till the blood comes ' '. Such flowers of chivalry are innumerable. In the half-lights of history, feudalism takes on the colors of romance. In fact, much of the romance is false. The age was savage and superstitious. It was filthy, violent, brutal, and barbaric. Nearly all its poetry celebrated adulterous love. The troubadours rarely sang to innocent maidens; the minstrel knights sel- dom addressed their lyrics to the love of un- married women. Indeed, mediaeval literature struck a higher note and a purer tone only after the middle-class freemen of the cities became strong enough to be independent and wealthy enough to develop a culture of their own. Only after that did women begin to win honorable position in society during the Middle Ages. Almost any kind of violence however repul- sive may be transformed into a ceremonial cus- tom if it is practiced long enough to acquire a venerable cast. Eape is a notable instance. Following the decline of woman's wooing when she ceased to be the woo-man of some pre- historic age force and capture became the cus- tom. This practice of the male is so old, in one form or another, that the female rather expects it. At the first embrace, most women are dis- appointed if they are not subjected at least to some euphemism of force. The very na- ture of woman was modified by this kind of vi- WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 51 olence until a new element arose in her psy- chology. This is known to the students of erotic tumescence or the phenomena of sexual tensions. The psychologist knows that this act of violence on man's part has its complement in woman's modesty, among her other complex emotions. Some factors of her modesty are older than our race; and all the factors inter- mingle or blend in her sense of decorum ; some are indicated by her gestures; others have their roots in the fear of personal injury, in disgust and reprobation. We observe also that jealousy in woman's nature is allied to, or par- allel with, a streak of brutality in man's. Both in men and women, jealousy is related to strong amatory impulses poorly governed by a weak will under which low-grade thought is in gurgitation. Eomulus, as we read in Ovid, represents not only "a true king", but also man's attitude for many centuries toward woman: "Providing Sabine women for his braves Like a true king, to get a race of slaves." The incident of the Sabine women is a classical, as that of the Belgian women is a sordid, ex- ample known to all. At the present time rape is symbolically, if not always actually, per- formed very generally over the world in the consummation of marriage. Even amongst the 52 WOMAN FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM most cultivated of peoples, the marriage-bed too often is "for joys of matrimonial rape designed". For ages, woman was fair booty in war ; for ages, only her brothers inherited from her father; for ages, the birth of a girl-baby was almost a calamity in a family ; for ages, only her brothers were educated; for ages, she was taught chastity and forced to be impure; for ages, she was given in marriage against her will; for ages, she was compelled to earn her bread in her own family by the most menial of work; for ages, the wife was subject to the husband in body and soul; it was his "right" to chastise her and otherwise to violate her per- son to humiliate her and, as I have said, even to take her life. Man has cheerfully thrust woman into pros- titution and then, in the hypocritical indigna- tion of his soul, he proscribed, tortured, and otherwise punished her for the act. He always has been a true believer in vicarious atone- ment. For many centuries the economic de- pendence of woman on man has been almost absolute. During long ages it never occurred to him that woman had a right to economic equality, to equal opportunity for full develop- ment, and to free and equal choice where her happiness and well-being were at stake. And so, whenever I read pharisaical homilies WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 53 on the sins of prostitutes it makes me sick. And whenever I hear of woman's ''unfaithful- ness" I can not help feeling something akin to delight in that kind of crude justice. For it seems to be only an evening-up in the fitness of things a kind of poetic righteousness which shears the sheep that set out to gather wool. Not that I wish to encourage adulterous love, but I can no more weep over woman's marital infractions than I can gloat over man's. It is a bad mess all around; but I can excuse the woman a little more easily than I can pardon the man. Woman ought to be tired of bondage, tired of flattery, tired of sentimental nonsense, and of sexual patronage; and she is beginning to show her disapproval of such treatment. Surely, it is high time that her personal dignity should give the lie to such twaddle as this : "By flatteries we prevail on womankind; As hollow banks by streams are undermined. ' ' From the strength of man's "passion" and woman's "weakness" arose the various sex- cults. The superstitious elements of religion aided man in his acts of conscious and, more often, unconscious oppression of woman. False religion helped him to enslave and to degrade her. Behind the mask of "consolation", re- ligious superstitution has ever been her most 54 WOMAN FROM: BONDAGE TO FREEDOM insidious foe. It has been her worst enemy because she was taught to regard it as her best friend. She is most under the spell of dogma when she is least capable of belief. The paradox clears up when we realize that most women, and men too for that matter, think they believe this or that when in truth they indulge only slavish notions implanted by au- thority. For it requires free and keen mental powers to appreciate the nature of belief, or to analyze its processes. The practical appli- cation of its processes therefore is necessarily restricted, but not necessarily to the priest- craft. We see the evil influences of sex-cults bearing on woman in the East from prehistoric times. We see the virgin driven to the Temple of Mylitta to be ravished by the loitering horde of human boars and lascivious goats. Down through Phoenicia, Syria, Carthage, Egypt, Greece, and Rome we can trace the same de- grading rites and customs practiced in the name of religion; and nearly all of these rites t<-.ii(]<-A to <\<:\)iLS(> woman. The evils of vicious superstition were com- mon among the Jews in Bible times ; and sim- ilar evils have flourished among other tribes and peoples over a large part of the world al- most nvor Hincc. In "the good old days of the old-fashioned woman", the acme of hospitality WOMAX IX THE BORDEBLAXD OF HISTOBY 55 was the giving of wife or daughter to a visitor for the night. No doubt there are many to- day who in their hearts would welcome .a re- turn of those dear old times ; but the develop- ment of what is best in womanhood does not proceed in that direction. No human being gives forth its best in slav- ery. Perfect freedom, of course, is possible only to the enraptured disembodied soul in a salubrious climate ; yet practical freedom should be possible to corporeal beings in civilized so- ciety. Freedom does not countenance license in sex-privilege nor in any other. But there should be no "mortification of the flesh" in one class and a glorification of the flesh in another class of human beings. Equal rights should be the rule; for jnrhere there are equal rights to every opportunity, there also is freedom. The inconsistency of man's age-old treatment of woman would be ridiculous if it were less harrowing. From Solon down to the crazy Otto Weininger, her sex has been discriminated against with force and diatribe. The old law- giver encouraged prostitution, as we have seen, for the benefit of Athens ' * ' strong young men" ; and whilst he made it legal for man to degrade woman, he made her degradation punitory. His laws called for her imprisonment, slavery, or death when she broke her vows to a brute per- haps for the man she loved but could not marry. 56 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM The essence of this identical injustice is alive all over the Christian world to-day, and it is nurtured by priestcraft in the name of religion. Its iniquitous vitality can he accounted for only by the barbarism that still is in us and by the fact that lies are, and ever have been, the most respectable factors in our system of civiliza- tion. II y a quelque chose de plus parfait que I'homlme parfait, c'est la jemm*e parfaite. All real men admit that; yet the blade of chivalry is not bright enough to maintain that barbaric traits exist only in the nature of man. The female part of our race has, and always has had, its full share. The wonder is that woman should have made such amazing progress in spiritual and material development under her enormous handicap. Man has erected temples and built shrines to his lust while woman has created the sanctu- aries of love, called homes. The lowliest home made sacred by a woman's love and the laugh- ter of children does more for civilization than the fairest temple ever erected to the Hetaerae or the finest cathedral that ever was builded to God. The religious symbolism of Motherhood, as exemplified in Mary, outweighs all the good to be found in the symbolism of Aphrodite, Astarte, Venus, Freya, and others of the same WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 57 genus ; or of Phryne, Lais of Corinth, and other notables in "love's delight" whom Mary sup- planted at the rise of the new religion. The laws of Solon, in so far as they were humiliating to womanhood, were a curse to mankind. The Julian law of Augustus was no better because, while it provided for chil- dren, it did nothing to elevate' the moral tone of marriage; and the monstrous modification of that law by Tiberius transformed it into a moral thumbscrew and rack in the hands of the JEdiles. Indeed, a strange retrospect is furnished by the laws made by men for them- selves and those that they fashioned for their women. The lawgivers for the most part were spiritually blind and stupidly cruel. For every misdeed toward woman is a sword that cuts him who strikes, even as it wounds her upon whom the blade falls. Athens, it is true, had its "Golden Age"; but even at that time the better nature of wom- an was constrained from all except the gilt. The female sex was not permitted to partici- pate as much in the development of civiliza- tion as it was forced to corrupt public morals. Little value was set on chastity. With pro- priety a guest could outrage what we con- ceive to be the principles of hospitality; and with impunity he could violate the higher laws of nature. Among some of the Gnostic sects, 58 WOMAN FKOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM the wife was freely lent to any filthy old tramp of the Order while he remained a visitor in the honse. Gods were given all the infirmities of men; priests and priestesses were corrupt and lecherous. Yet the fame of Penelope, Andro- mache, Helen, and Hecuba tells us that the Greeks saw clearly into the nature of woman with its good and bad traits, and that they often celebrated her at her best. The kidnaping of women, and their subse- quent treatment, stare coldly from the pages of Homer. Polygamy was common. Polyandry was permitted by the Code of Lycurgus to the most beautiful of the Spartan women, which proves that the Greek mind, seven or eight hun- dred years B. C., harbored some seeds of jus- tice.. The Athenian women were wielders of phys- ical force believers in public violence and per- sonal vengeance. Their fits of passion bor- dered on madness ; yet countless Greek women of that day were ideal wives and mothers. At that time the Hetseras held strong social sway; and they exercised an influence over the most enlightened minds of men, as their successors in the sterile art have done ever since. In China, Tartary, Thibet, and Japan women were especially debased. Wives were bought and sold, harnessed to hard labor, and rewarded with harsh treatment. In Japan, woman plays WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 59 virtually no part in history. The Hebraic laws, heavy enough, were less galling to her shoul- ders than those of the Buddhists which surely were not light. The records of Miriam and Deborah, and a few of the less doubtful of the Sibylline verses, indicate that women in ancient times took some part in religious matters and that they were influential in secular affairs. The early Israelites however were prone to dis- regard woman's natural dignity and to trample ruthlessly on her natural rights. Incidentally it may be mentioned that their widows were clothed with sackcloth and " shirts of hair", even when well rid of worthless husbands. In India, the priests devoted young daughters to the abominable service of the Shrine. Here women were active in religious ceremonies ; and here always were they preyed upon by disgust- ing idolatry. They were crushed by the Jug- gernaut, drowned, buried alive with corpses, burned on funeral pyres, tortured by caste, mar- ried as infants, and generally bedeviled be- yond belief. Owing to the submissive nature of their women, Hindu marriages often turn out well. Despite the brutality of their treat- ment and the iniquity of the marriage cus- toms, the women for the most part make good wives, if conjugal worthiness may be expressed in terms of servile degradation. "The horrid rites of idolatry", according to Fullom, "the 60 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM wicked devices of superstition, the monotony of a secluded life, and a long course of barbarous usage, have, in their case, failed to deface, how- ever they might distort, the beautiful lineaments of the female character, and almost every ac- tion of their lives attests an abnegation of self." As a rule, in pastoral ages women perform the menial tasks. They tend the flocks; they make the wool into garments and the hides into many useful articles. Women are beasts of burden the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. Their clothing and personal orna- ments are prescribed. They are kept in sep- arate lodgings, like cattle. They are ravished without the slightest consideration. They have nothing to say about marriage or divorce ; and, of course, nothing as to the number of children they must bear. Job's description of the Trog- lodytes might almost be used as a finishing touch to the picture. Now and then the rule has an exception. Among the early Egyptions, who were a pas- toral people, women fared better. They were permitted to share in the fruits of civiliza- tion, such as they were, to some purpose; but on the whole, women were subordinated, and as times grew worse, they were degraded. During the flower of Egyptian civilization, womanhood arose to a state of true dignity. WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 61 The Code of Hermes was so liberal that it acknowledged many of women's natural rights in a light that is regarded as modern. It fa- vored monogamy; and it provided equally for the equities of husband and wife. The stand- ing of a princess was as high as that of a prince. Thennuthis, daughter of Barneses the Great, is an example frequently mentioned by authorities, and the example is not solitary. It is true that the marriage customs of the Egyptians are more or less obscure; but it is known that the rights of wives were clearly defined and generally accepted. Ties of con- sanguinity, it appears, were no barriers to wed- lock; otherwise the marriage laws of this peo- ple were commendable. Jewels were much worn by the women ; gloves were in use ; and the appointments of the toilet reached their rarest refinement. Luxurious, perfumed baths, love of flowers and fine rai- ment, careful attention to personal hygiene all show a high order of society. Free social intercourse took place between the sexes, from the highest stratum to the lowest, excepting only the swineherds. Woman took part in pub- lic functions, except those of the heirarchical religious ceremonies which, as usual, were con- ducted by the men. But subordinate sacred offices were filled by women, who also were em- ployed as accoucheuses and mourners. Female 62 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM chastity was esteemed; and the Seventh Com- mandment of the Hebrews was Egyptian stat- ute law. This law however was one-sided it was made only for the women. She who broke it forfeited nose and ears. The same ''irregularity" was easy on the person and no doubt on the conscience of the man. With the wane of Egyptian civilization waxed feminine sorrow. Women received less and less consideration. "Their treatment", his- tory says, "grew every day worse, keeping pace with the decline and corruption of the nation, till, at last, we behold woman enduring cruel punishments, which modern justice withholds from the vilest female criminals. At one time she is publicly beaten with a stick; at another, loaded with overwhelming burdens, buried in a dungeon, or sent to work at the mines not, as might be supposed, for any guilt of her own, but in expiation of the crime of a brother, a hus- band, or a father. Diodorus has drawn a touch- ing picture of her sufferings at the mines. ' No attention', he observes, 'is paid to her person; she has not even a piece of rag to cover her- self; and so wretched is her condition, that everyone who witnesses it deplores the exces- sive misery she endures. She is allowed no rest or intermission from toil : neither the weak- ness of age nor woman's infirmities are consid- ered ; all are driven to their work with the lash, WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 63 till at length, overcome by the insupportable weight of their afflictions, they die in the midst of their tasks : so that they long for death as far preferable to life'." It would be a prodigious task to describe woman as she was in the borderland of history, with its shadowy traditions. About the best that can be done is to give glimpses of her sta- tion as it appears here and there at earlier and later times. But what she was, she no longer is. Even briefly summarized, her achievements challenge the thoughtful consideration and the admiration of mankind. As we look at the shifting mirages of the terrible centuries dead, we dream hopefully of the future. Seeing what has been done, we foresee partly at least what may be accomplished. Woman domesticated man, and she started him on the road to civilization. With the ad- vent of war, she had all the work to do. As I have said, she became an adept in homecraft and in the arts of peace. Some of her inven- tions have been mentioned. She taught her- self to weave and to spin, how to make clothing for her naked babes, how to protect herself from the weather. She invented the potter's wheel, the distaff, and fibrous cloth. Many centuries ago her Carib sisters were cotton-planters, and they manufactured cotton goods. At the same period men were engaged in huntcraft and war- 64 'WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FEEEDOM craft; they were inventing implements of de- struction, modes of enslaving, predatory meth- ods, and the various arts of quarreling, of re- prisal, and of punishment. By establishing the home, by developing agri- culture and the arts of peace, woman contrib- uted the most important elements of civiliza- tion. During some of the pastoral epochs, she even reached a station of comparative ease and comfort. Man relieved her of some of her- burdens protected, and helped her to feed her children. Now he was more regularly occupied than during earlier days when almost his sole pursuit was the chase. And so one finds that woman's hardships and burdens, her cares and trials, her sufferings and servitude, were not all imposed on her by the premeditated cruelty of man ; but that they fell upon her rather in the natural order of things which apportioned to each sex its work and to one sex excessively dismal periods. Necessity drew upon early man for bursts of exertion as he struggled with Nature and his own kind for food and life. These drafts were followed by equally necessary periods of rest, while woman toiled on and on toward condi- tions that slowly forced her into sedentary oc- cupations, and her work was never done. From the time when our progenitors left the branches of trees to live on the ground, down WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 65 to the present era, the division of labor be- tween the sexes has been unfair in kind and unjust in effect upon the development of woman- hood. Arthur Mee expresses the belief that "Man has done most of the work requiring power used swiftly and violently. . . . He built the boat which enabled the human race, probably in the Old Stone Age, to spread over the whole habitable world; and he solved the problem of a constant meat and milk supply by domesticating many of the animals he once hunted. He founded religion and philosophy and law, and many of the larger arts of life." But woman, in founding the arts of peace, in domesticating wild birds and beasts, in discov- ering the value of roots and herbs and thus lay- ing the foundation of pharmacy and medicine, was easily man's equal in advancing the race. Through the ages men and women have worked side by side, each sex for the most part following different pursuits, yet tending in the long run toward, whilst never reaching, a state of economic equality. This has been their fixed, though unconscious, goal: In diversity of work, diversity of character, diversity of ideal, emotion, psychology, and of function, they achieve at last unity of soul. On this synthesis civilization must stand. At certain times they have approached nearer this happy state than at others. All progress 66 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM is rhythmic. The Book of Proverbs more than hints at this state; and it is of this that the ancient poets dreamed ; out of it they spun their beautiful fables of the Golden Age, when women played their parts politically as well as so- cially and in religion. Unfortunately, the rec- ords of civilized nations do not go back very far. The immense antiquity of the human race is only beginning to dawn upon us. The uni- versality of symbol, tradition, and ceremony among detached peoples, some of them even without a written language, puzzle us less as we realize more how very old are many of our fairest dreams of civilization. Periods so relatively recent as those of the first dynasty of the Egyptians and the social life of the early Cretans, are veiled. Yet we know that as much as six thousand years ago woman was given some political consideration. Two thousand years later, her honor and in- tegrity of character were respected somewhat by the Babylonian laws. Again we observe a kind of parallelism running through the eighth and the twelfth Egyptian dynasties, and the Elizabethan and the Victorian periods of Eng- lish history, when queens reigned in their own right. At such times as woman has drawn nearer to general economic equality with man, her field broadened to enter the priesthood, not only, but WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 67 to embrace the minor divinities as well. In Babylonia, Istar was the godmother ; in Egypt, Isis was the wife of Osiris; and Astarte held sway over the other goddesses of the Assyrians ; whilst in ancient Arabia and in other lands, the goddesses seem to have been more powerful than the gods. Now, coming down from goddesses to peas- ant women, the world finds an example in Deb- orah, which symbolizes a type for sagacity and endurance. It has long been known that peas- ant women possess characteristics, such as en- ergy, the faculty for management, mother-wit, and others of a purely physical nature involv- ing glandular functions and erogenous areas that are not possessed by women generally in the higher walks of life. The lover seeking romantic delights of a kind is less likely to be disappointed with Judy 'Grady than with the Colonel's Lady. Man in time turned his attention from the making of weapons to the making of tools. His apprenticeship as an inventor of instruments of destruction served him well as an inventor and manufacturer of implements of agriculture, of art, of commerce, and of science. His art of handling weapons enabled him the better to handle tools. And although woman was the first to think of planting seeds, man first ir- rigated the soil. He utilized the bucket of her 68 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM invention and made it do the work of a pump ; he took her hoe and made a plow of it, to which he harnessed her and later his domesticated ani- mals ; and finally he hitched up steam and elec- tricity. He modified, improved, and glorified woman's inventions until she retired from the field to the home to devote herself more particu- larly to the domestic arts. The reapportionment of labor between the sexes had a depressing effect upon the position of woman. In some parts of the world it made her a prisoner; she was subjected to moral and physical tyranny; her atmosphere was poi- soned; she was both pampered and enslaved; nameless indignities were thrust upon her. A large area of her brain was forced to lie fal- low. Weeds sprang up where flowers should have grown. What should have been a garden became a desert at best, an oasis. Elemental storms swept the barren wastes. Unwhole- some fruits grew upon the little fertile spot she had learned to regard as her world her "proper sphere". Her soul was crippled. For ages she accepted her lot as natural to her sex, or as a god-given punishment for her "sin"; she asked for nothing else than what she was used to; she fiercely condemned her own kind for looking toward the east, for longing for the dawn, for attempting to arise, for calling for help, for trying to escape from prison, for WOMAN IN THE BORDERLAND OF HISTORY 69 looking upward, and at last for wanting to vote, and for wishing to be consulted when they are to bear children and by whom. Whenever vice has been most flourishing, woman has been the chief victim; yet strange to say, in most degenrate times she has, other things being equal, shown less than has man the ravages of devolution and of moral decad- ence. In a sense, woman may be likened to the Jew, who thrives on persecution : the more she is discriminated against, the stronger grows the solidarity of her virtues. And it may be that the epoch of her decay shall only begin when she becomes the dominant and militant sex. WOMAN AND EELIGION HE religious instinct is one of the finest elements in human nature. How it arose, how it became im- planted, and why it has persisted in our souls need not detain us, even if we knew. There it is! We have no choice other than to make the best of it. The longing to live again may spring from our shortened cycle of life, which is cut down by the indiscretions of ignorance. Nevertheless it is a worthy longing which, when reasonably indulged, need work no hardship on our lives, physically, morally, nor intellectually. The longing to do right in this world, to live in har- mony with the great moral forces of the uni- verse, to express our gratitude to the intel- lectual-ethical source, which the world believes to exist and which it calls God, for short, is not an unworthy longing. We may regard it, if we please, as a childish emotion of a young race. If it is a mere childish longing, we shall grow out of it in time; but meanwhile it will serve us well as spiritual beings thrilled with aspirations. 71 72 WOMAN FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM The hope to live again, to be able to repair the mistakes of our short lives; the hope for mercy to the maltreated, justice to the de- frauded; the hope that those who have been mauled in this world may find sympathetic treat- ment in another ; the hope to embrace again the loved and lost, to unite the threads of conscious- ness severed by death, to efface the memory of dead sorrow with living joy, is an estimable hope, however irrational it may seem to some. It is no crime to believe that the fountain- head of morality is moral; that the source of intellectuality is intellectual ; that the mother of emotions is emotive; that the principles of beauty are, in some inscrutable manner, born of supreme design; that the good within us comes from God. Neither is it a sin to reverse this belief: to speculate on the possibility of individual morality, flowing as tiny streams into a great reservoir, which ceaselessly becomes more and more moral. It is no sin to think that personal intellectuality contributes to the collective intellectuality of the race. It is not sinful to believe that private emotions feed a superlative public emotion; that the principles of beauty are crystallizing into a supreme de- sign; that the good within us all is slowly cre- ating God. It neither is sinful nor criminal to speculate, to reason, to believe, to have faith, to indulge hope, to reject, to doubt, to make a WOMAN AND RELIGION 73 god of reason, or a religion of ethics, or a prayer of work, or a hymn of beauty. We may believe in one God or in many gods or in no god without helping or harming our souls without placing in jeopardy a single chance to live again. We may believe that every human being is destined to become a god, or that when life is done each shall forever cease to be. Our religious beliefs and faiths, our postulates and hopes are negative, sociologic- ally. The religious instinct should be cultivated until it flowers as a cosmetic garden in the front- yard of civilization. Let no man destroy its flowers, for they have been watered with tears and nourished by hope! But let all who love their neighbors help to pull the weeds, and to kill the lice that feed and fatten on the young leaves ! Religion never will harm the soul, no matter how enlightened we become. It is only when we make dogmas of our speculations; when we try to force them upon others; when we re- quire performances that are hateful, sacrifices that are questionable, hardships that are need- less, efforts that are sterile, ceremonies that are ridiculous, then only do we pervert the religious instinct and convert it into an instru- ment of torture ; and then it is that we enslave the soul to superstition. We conceive of space as largely as we can, 74 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM and that conception we call "the boundless uni- verse ". There is no harm in suspecting that beyond our utmost conceptions of space and time there are other "universes" and other "times". We conceive as much as we can of power, and at the apex of that conception we put God. There can be no harm in asking ourselves whether there may not be other gods and other realms beyond our noblest conceptions of power and space. An innocent amusement is that which postulates other universes equally bound- less each with duration as endless as a circle and, like circles, intersecting without interfer- ence. We may without guilt conceive endless universes as we conceive circles, of one plane or of different planes, expanding or contracting throughout infinity. We even may postulate an infinite series of infinities, since infinity begins where our conception ends. If we are able, we may reverse our conceptions of dura- tion and space, regarding them as points-of-view peculiar to our make of mind as positional consciousness, as mere relativity, or as mathe- matical assumptions in conceptual trigonom- etry. Or we may cast all such efforts aside as futile metaphysics leading us nowhere, without hurt to our souls or harm to our intellects. Then, when we are all through, we come back to the religious instinct that is part of our na- ture ; and we still are unable to affirm that it is WOMAN AND BELIGION 75 the unenlightened part, or a source of light it- self. We must treat it therefore in a com- monsense way by making the best of it. Scoffing will not help us where reason and intuition fight and fail where revelation is silent. Our one clear duty, as intellectual beings, is to see to it that neither this instinct nor our treatment of it results detrimentally to individuals singly or collectively. A perversion of the religious instinct clouds our lives with superstitution and it fills our minds with fear. By denying the instinct, by trying to kill it, we wound our souls as birds bruise their wings beating against the bars of a cage. There is nothing to fear but everything to hope for in religion. There is everything to fear and nothing to hope for in superstition. Superstition always has carried a knife under its cloak. All religions are both false and true: mix- tures of pious fraud and sincere devotion. No religion ever was perfectly pure ; and the false elements of religion have been the enemy of woman since the first syllable of recorded fact. Superstition will remain her enemy until she laughs it out of court. She must overthrow the tyranny of dogma to gain her intellectual freedom, just as surely as she had to overcome the tyranny of prejudice in politics to gain her suffrage. She must break the bonds that bind 76 WOMAN FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM her soul if she would be free. And she never can be truly free so long as she is hounded by superstitious fear ; so long as it is possible for priests to maintain authority over her higher nature; so long as church or state may force unwelcome babes upon her breast. Xo one supposes that modern priests are es- pecially wicked or that as a class they mean to be bad. On the contrary, the most of them are good, self-sacrificing, zealous, and misled. But I know the priesthood is an evil in so far as it has power to subjugate the mind through fear of punishment in some other world; that no form of slavery enervates the dignity and the healthy glow of character more effectually than does the spiritual bondage propagated and sustained by the Confessional. I know the priesthood is questionable to the degree of its recognized authority and potential power to practice priestcraft on character during its formative period. I believe the priesthood is mistaken when it disseminates dogma for spirit- ual truth ; that it is dishonest when it pretends to have revelations of divine will, and in so far as it spreads fiction and faith as ascertained facts. The priesthood is stupid when it promul- gates absurd doctrines; when it teaches mir- acles ; when it builds on unsound premises ; and above all, when it neglects the rational training of young minds under its sway. In a word, the WOMAN AND RELIGION 77 authority to do evil through stupidity or design the power to do evil under the mantle of righteousness that authority or that power, active or passive, is a perpetual menace to the best interests of mankind. No amount of in- genious sophistry can justify it; no argument can uphold it. It is contrary to ethics, to all nobility of soul, to clear reason and humane intuition, alike, to the very nature of things, fundamentally; and it persists only as a flaw in every suprastructure that ever has been builded on the bedrock of decency and natural commonsense. The religions of mankind have been many; yet running through most of them one discovers two principles : the male, or dominating ; the fe- male, or passive. Man usually has made his tutelary divinities in his own image, and nat- urally therefore many of them have been sorry figures. There was Bacchus or Dionysus, who was worshiped by the Greeks and celebrated in their Choral Odes. The Egyptians wor- shiped virtually the same god under the name of Osiris. Various other names were given to him by Arabs, Persians, Scythians, and other ancient peoples. He is diversely represented, now as a goat which is not a bad idea when one thinks of the lubricity of the lesser gods and their sons; again his sign is the phallus, which throws all euphemism to the winds; 78 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM sometimes his sign is the bull, the horse, the cock, the pine-cone, the church-spire ; he also is symbolized by fire, by evergreens, by fruits, and by the sacred grove ; occasionally his spirit con- descended to enter fauns and satyrs, his at- tendants. Great as he was, there was one greater and that was Zeus, son of Kronos, the infinite Father in Mystic theology Father and Son in poetic Mythology. The male principle, it is true, has not always predominated in religion, mythology, and art. But on the whole, the female principle has been duly passive notwithstanding the influence of Demeter in Greece, of Isis in Egypt, of Astarte, Venus, Hertha, and so forth in other countries. Under whatever name, she remained the god- dess of the passive-reproductive principle of the earth. The fact that she once was the pa- troness of agriculture suggests that the first farmers were women. That she once was the tutelar deity of legislation and social order seems strange to us moderns who felt the heat of woman's heroic efforts to gain a voice in the making of laws under which she must live. Cybele, Ehea, or Magna Mater was at one time widely worshiped and justly celebrated. The Universal Mother, "the soul of everything'*, was beautifully commemorated in the Orphic Hymns. Thus it appears that the spiritual na- WOMAN AND RELIGION 79 ture of woman was idealized in one epoch, to be forgotten in others. It is not necessary to go back to the primitive philosophy called Animism, from which religion sprang, and to follow the effects on woman of all the different cults and sects down through Polytheism and the Nomistic religions. It is enough if her status is briefly sketched under one of the Individualistic religions, since the modifications of the others are mostly epochal and environmental, whilst to all purposes they remain essentially the same. During the infancy of Christianity, it was the women who most eagerly embraced this new hope of emancipation. So great was their zeal that many became martyrs, while thousands were missionaries and combatants. Without their far-reaching influence, the new religion could not have been established. For it was in the nature of woman that the spirituality of Christianity found rootage strong enough to carry it over Europe ; and ever since, it has been in the characteristic emotional nature of woman that the Church has found its abiding strength. The Church grew at the expense of the life that supported it ; but spiritually it was loath to turn toward women. Of course the Church fathers could not rise above the source of their inspiration. The Sacred Scriptures are not es- pecially flattering to womanhood. Little con- 80 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM sideration is shown for the beings that always have borne the major burdens of the race. Why should the Church, founded on these Scriptures, be more tenderly disposed toward women than the Scriptures themselves? In the Old Testament woman is regarded as a chattel of man. God addressed himself only to men, unless he wished to scold. On other occasions this Xomistic or Scriptural God was solicitous of eunuchs, especially those "that were eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake". We know, if we know anything, that the eunuch is not comparable to a woman in any- thing worth while. Yet the eunuch was ex- alted and the woman was debased. Moreover, why women, the best friends of Christ, should have been shabbily treated by his disciples, would remain a mystery if we had not learned to regard it as one of the false steps of religion. The apostle, who advertised Christianity in- ternationally, was hardly a friend of woman. St. Paul began as a Pharisee, and he ended as a thorn in her side. He believed in the patriarchal traditions of the Jews; he upheld the Mosaic laws ; and he seemed to have no conception of woman's natural dignity and rights. The whole weight of his influence was against her; and in time, even his prejudices crept into the canon law of the church. This delightful old saint looked upon woman as a thing unclean and not WOMAN AND RELIGION 81 good for man to touch. If there ever was a saint created with the creation of an ass, para- phrasing Jeremiah, it was this same old Paul. He so loved the spirit that he hated the flesh. But his bad taste and worse manners probably were sincere, since there is no record of his marriage. He believed that the sacerdotal gen- tlemen who had lost their extraneous organs were best fitted to be the fathers of the church and in this he was correct. No doubt it would have been far better for women if all sacerdotal gentlemen had been of the same order. St. Paul divided religion, like an apple, in halves with one stroke : the two parts were psy- chical and spiritual, leaving nothing for any other element of our being. His doctrine cruci- fied the flesh to the very core of lunacy. The unclean direct and indirect influences of his teaching trailed moral leprosy and bodily filth all through the Middle Ages; and it did this, unfortunately, in the guise of religion. Woman was countenanced in her natural nastiness sim- ply because she was necessary; and she never was forgiven the sin of having caused the fall of man. Similar idiotic traits still exist in the human mind. On many occasions I have heard political henchmen storm against the candidacy of a Jew for office on the sole grounds that he was a " Christ killer". Peter and Paul both taught that man should 82 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM be the boss in the conjugal partnership of thg home. They believed that the wife, no matter how good, should be subject to the husband, no matter how bad. Paul was vehemently opposed to the higher education of woman. Meekness, silence, subjection these were her jewels, her virtues! The idea of co-education, of democ- racy for both sexes, of equal opportunity before the law, would have shocked St. Paul pro- foundly. No longer ago than the seventeenth century, according to Macaulay, the condition of women among the pious Scottish Highlanders, was ap- palling. An observer " would have seen, wher- ever he turned, that dislike of steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labor, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or tak- ing aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of oats. Nor did the women repine at their hard lot. In their view it was quite fit that a man, especially if he assumed the aristocratic title of Duinhe Wassel and adorned his bonnet with the eagle's feather, should take his ease except when he was fighting, hunting, or marauding." As re- cently as 1915, I myself have seen equally bad WOMAN AND RELIGION 83 conditions in the very religions "outport" set- tlements of Newfoundland. To a varying degree, this has been the gen- eral tendency of pseudo-Christianity toward woman, just as had been that of the other false contributary religious elements which preceded the new religion. Yet, despite the force of this tendency, woman has progressed; her spiritual nature has expanded ; she has grown more ten- der ; her intellectual horizon has broadened ; her moral nature has developed; and with every- thing against her, her position, especially among the French, American, and English peo- ples, slowly became higher and better. Even the Church no longer holds councils to discuss the possibility of woman possessing a soul, as it did at the Council of Macon in 585. The Cal- vinistic nightmare has passed forever. Jesuit- ical casuistry and theological sophistry no longer are accepted seriously in society that can both read and think. Commonsense in some measure has fallen to the lot of man, who has not had the power, if he had the wish, to exclude woman from its benefits. Such worthies as Tertullian and Jerome were bitter in their denunciation of woman obscene in their abhorrence of her sex. Origen was so fearful of "sensual lust" that he put tempta- tion forever away from his body by what we should call to-day rather crude operative in- 84 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM terference; and if he had thrown in the hide for good measure he would have done admir- ably. Augustine, Euseubius, and Jerome looked upon celibates as " heaven's dazzling stars ", whilst fathers and mothers were classed with the dark orbs or " stars without light". One needs a new vocabulary, or none, to deal pa- tiently with such notions. These pious imbe- ciles probably fancied that, in reversing the Hebraic injunction to be fruitful, they were obeying heaven's newer laws. The history of religion is depressing. The vices of the clergy made victims of their con- fiding "spiritual daughters". In the ''holy" Eussia of yesterday, we saw a repetition of the fanatical horrors common to earlier Christian times all over southern and western Europe. The standard of morality under Christian and Byzantine influences was pushed backward. Religious bodies were filled with contention and lost to decency. As society became more and more debased by superstition, the women of the poor, as usual, suffered most; "the tax called 'gold of affliction' was frequently paid, by work- ing men, with the price of the bartered honor of their daughters". Fullom records that "a Benedictine friar, whom indolence or penury had driven to the cloister, candidly avowed that 'his vow of poverty had given him a hundred thousand crowns a year, and his vow of obedi- WOMAN AND RELIGION 85 ence raised him to the rank of a sovereign prince'." At the time of Valentinian it was necessary to pass laws against the greed of priests and the rapacity of monks who preyed upon the conscience and who fattened on the property of devout women. Damascus, Bishop of Kome, and even St. Jerome, despite his horror of "sex", earned the nickname of "the ladies' ear-scratchers". After that nothing could add to their reputations. Naturally, woman was the chief sufferer from the "lamentable depravity" and the "moral rottenness" of the early Christians. "Women took a large share in the raging controversies ' ' amongst Trinitarians, Arians, and Nestorians, "which, like most religious disputes, termin- ated in persecutions ; and Christians, no longer dreading a Nero or a Domitian, now openly crucified and burnt each other. The naked bodies of maidens and noble matrons were, by means of pulleys, hoisted in the air, with a weight attached to their feet ; and in this igno- minious posture, their tender flesh was torn with red-hot pincers, lashed with scourges, and coated with plates of burning iron. Christian contending with Christian, washed the broad streets of Borne and Constantinople with Christian blood; and in a sectarian riot at Al- exandria, ferocity ran so high that the victors, 86 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM after perpetrating the most savage butchery, positively devoured the mangled bodies of the slain. What a terrible realization of that warn- ing prophecy 'I have not come to give peace, but a sword'! ''Among the many victims of these unhappy tumults was Hypatia, a maiden not more dis- tinguished for her beauty than for her learning and her virtues. Her father was Theon, the illustrious mathematician, who had early init- iated his daughter in the mysteries of philoso- phy. The classic groves of Athens and the schools of Alexandria equally applauded her attainments, and listened to the pure wisdom and the music of her lips. She respectfully declined the tender attentions of lovers; but, raised to the chair of Gamaliel, suffered youth and age, without preference or favor, to sit indiscriminately at her feet. Her fame and increasing popularity ultimately excited the jealousy of St. Cyril, at that time the Bishop of Alexandria, and her friendship for his an- tagonist, Orestes, the prefect of the city, en- tailed on her devoted head the crushing weight of his enmity. In her way through the city, her chariot was surrounded by his creatures, headed by a crafty and savage fanatic named Peter the Eeader; and the young and innocent woman was dragged to the ground, stripped of her garments, paraded naked through the WOMAN AND RELIGION 87 streets, and then torn limb from limb on the steps of the cathedral. The still warm flesh was scraped from her bones with oyster-shells, and the bleeding fragments thrown into a fur- nace, so that not an atom of the beautiful virgin should escape destruction." 1 The torture, the maiming, and the murder of of Elgiva by Dunstan illustrates further, amongst thousands and thousands of similar bloody deeds, the diabolical brutality of super- stition perpetrated in the name of Christianity upon women in the earlier centuries of our epoch. Indeed, religious superstition always has contrived to rob, to pester, to deceive, and to degrade women. There is reason for this, as for everything else. Through tyranny and lack of opportunity, woman had become weakened as a social unit; her weakness was in line of the least resistance ; and she fell easy prey to the basest of human passions. The paganism of Rome was almost as bad as the early Christian religion. The better nature of woman long had suffered from the nonsensical cruelties of superstition. She had been taught to search the entrails of fowls for the secrets of Fate ; to question altar-flames for omens of the future. Her augurs had di- vided the heavens into four parts ; if a flock of birds flew across one of the celestial quarters, 'The History of Woman (S. W. Fullom). 88 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM it was portentous of good or evil. The voice of thunder, the gleam of lightning, and the spill- ing of salt were threatening signs that filled her heart with dread. Juno and Vesta were favor- ite deities ; if sins were committed against them, those sins were expiated in dungeons on "the Field of Wickedness". The Sibylline prophe- sies were taken seriously ; and women generally were so ignorant that they believed Fate might hang on the foot put forth first in the morning; that good or bad luck lay coiled in a slipper. Eeligious influence, good and bad, is only one factor in society; the influence is not always consciously corrupt; the worst superstitious elements in religion often are the sincerest; and all the elements of religion are inevitable, for they spring spontaneously from the imperfect human mind, not as divine revelations nor even as human inventions, but as natural growths; and it is fair to assume therefore that religion neither is spiritually nor morally perfect. Good and evil elements always mingle in the mind and work of man yet mankind lias progressed. In that fact lies the salvation of woman ; in that fact is rooted her intuition which, like the cel- lar-plant, is heliotropic it turns toward the light. Her soul ever was more or less vaguely conscious of the right direction, even when her eyes were blinded, her feet beset with pitfalls, WOMAN AND BELIGION 89 and when her false guides were luring her on to darkness. Religion is personal as well as collective in character; therefore it is variable and inde- finable. It is pure and noble, gross and inde- cent, kind or cruel, foolish and fantastic accord- ing to the personality of the believer. Religious formulae and creeds and superstitious propa- ganda with its dogmas, orders, ceremonies and rituals, its churches and mob-clamor are, on the contrary, impersonal. To criticise these things is very different from scoffing at one's inner- most faith, the factors of which not only are hard to determine by another, but are unknown to one's self. But the outward trappings of faith, the camouflage of theology, the ethical reactions in society caused by religious organi- zations, are public characters, as it were, and as such they are open to criticism. No one need feel a delicacy in discussing them, since it is plain that not all can be right some must be better than others, and some must be bad. The conduct of religious bodies is no more sacred than that of political bodies. The crimes committed in the name of religion lose none of their guilt. Armenians massacred by Turks and Kurds Christians slaughtered by Mohammedans is a horror as hideous in the name of religion as in the name of war. The persecution of Jews by Christians in the name 90 WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM of Christ is diabolical. The atrocities inflicted on Christian Belgium by Christian Germany stains the Teuton's hand as red as the Turk's, but with this difference : The Teuton outraged his own "holy women" despoiled and mur- dered his own "sisters in Christ"; while the Mohammedan hordes perpetrated their name- less infamies on those whom they believed to be the imps of Satan. Mercifully call these things the logical crimes of a state of war! Then we must admit that savagery still is more powerful than religion ; and we must concede that no re- ligion thus far has achieved the success that one might reasonably expect of a divine institution. The inadequacy of religion is the inadequacy of human nature. The hands that bind up wounds, that soothe the dying, that feed the or- phan, belong to no one religion, nor essentially to any, but rather to the ethics of humanity, which is of divine tendency rather than of di- vine origin its source is human ; its destiny is God. It is a demonstrable fact that woman has fared badly under our own religion. Her con- dition has improved not because of it but de- spite it shams, its shame, and its blunders. Under its authority, a violation of the mar- riage-vow is punished only when the culprit chances to be a woman. "Sins against purity" carry severest penance when the sinner happens WOMAN AND RELIGION 91 to be female. Usually the males are not incon- venienced by such venal infractions. Celibacy imposed by the Church on healthy human beings is an incentive to sexual excesses ; these excesses produce evil that naturally re- acts on women. Concubinage was so common among the priests of the Middle Ages that the Bishop of Constance levied a concubine tax on his clergy. Kings who received their " divine right' ' to rule from the Church, and the spiritual and temporal gentry made up of knights and nobles, were notorious for their gluttony and drunkenness and for their debaucheries of de- fenseless women. The Christianity of the Middle Ages or that of to-day is false, because they are not alike. Mediaeval Christianity, inspired by the Biblical command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!" had a lovely time hounding innocent women to death. Thousands were hunted like wild beasts, and they were less mercifully treated when brought to bay. Pope Innocent VIII, in the latter part of the fifteenth century, was not pleased with the weather. Storms and other meterological phenomena terrified his pious soul. He therefore issued the bull, Sum- mis Desiderantes, which caused more spilling of blood perhaps than any other document ever is- sued by a Pope, which is saying a good deal. A manual called the Witch Hammer, that came to 92 WOMAN" FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM be revered both by Catholics and Protestants, was very widely used. This precious handbook taught, among other things, the subtle art of de- tecting and punishing witches guilty of disturb- ing the elements. Countless women were tor- tured on the rack until they ''confessed"; hun- dreds and thousands were burned at the stake or murdered on the scaffold. During several centuries, women were tortured and slain for the theological crime of exercising Satanic in- fluence over the weather. The Dominicans first, and later the Jesuits, were particularly hot on the trail of the witch. These sweet-souled theo- logians not only persecuted and murdered the witch, but they confiscated her property to meet the expense and to cover the damage done to the crops by her sorcery. As a delicious morsel of theological discrimination against women, the history of witchcraft may be ruminated by those who have a taste for such tid-bits. Yet, what should one expect of benighted be- ings having so little intelligence and so much superstition that they relied on the sounding of Ave Maria to stop hail storms? What of those who believed that Satan's power could be para- lyzed by the ringing of "consecrated bells"; that thunder is " a flaming exhalation set in mo- ' tion by evil spirits, and hurled downward with a great crash and a horrible smell of sulphur"! What should one think of mentality low enough WOMAN AND KELIGION 93 to believe that there is revealed truth in the 104th Psalm: "Who maketh his angels spirits, his ministers a flaming fire!" Haply, Chris- tians no longer rely on the efficacy of ringing bells to "put hellish legions to flight" they are using high explosives and Marshals, such as Foch. Let us hope there is some beneficent progress even in superstition. As late as the time of Newton, Father Au- gustine de Angeles of Rome believed that "the surest remedy", to use his own words, "against thunder is that which our Holy Mother the Church practices; namely, the ringing of bells when a thunderbolt impends; thence follows a twofold effect, physical and moral a physical, because the sound variously disturbs and agi- tates the air, and by agitation disperses the hot exhalations and dispells the thunder; but the moral effect is more certain, because by the sound the faithful are stirred to pour forth their prayers, by which they win from God the turn- ing away of the thunderbolt." All through the darkened Middle Ages there were men who opposed, as much as they dared to oppse, the fiendish and idiotic practices of the devout. One of the splendid examples of the en- lightened few of the ninth century was Ango- bard, Archbishop of Lyons. This good man in his work, "Against the Absurd Opinion of the Vulgar Touching Hail and Thunder" ridiculed 94 WOMAN FKOM BONDAGE TO FBEEDOM "the tyranny of foolishness". He wrote: 1 1 Things are believed by Christians of such ab- surdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." Paracelsus, in the sixteenth century, at his peril tried to explain thunder reasonably; he likened it to the reverberation of cannon. Pro- fessor Pomponatius of Padua also had his "Doubts" of the influence of devils on meteorol- ogy, but he was careful to express them only as a "philosopher" as a "Christian" he pro- fessed a belief in all the teachings of the Church, and wisely enough thus saved his skin. Poor Agrippa of Nettesheim was not so diplo- matic. He tried hard to stem the tide of the persecution of women, and failed pathetically. Driven from place to place, he was pursued, per- secuted, and reviled. The blessed Dominicans would not let him rest, even in death. They not only traduced his memory, but they erected above his grave one of the most malignant epi- taphs ever devised. The depressing influence of false religion on the nature of woman is revealed in the debauch- eries of the sacerdotal Fathers. In 1259, Alex- ander IV tried to disrupt the shameful union be- tween concubines and the clergy. Henry III, Bishop of Liege, was such a fatherly sort of man that he had sixty-five "natural" children. Wil- liam, Bishop-elect of Paderborn, in 1410, al- WOMAN AND BELIGIOET 95 though successful in reducing such powerful en- emies as the Archbishop of Cologne and the Count of Cleves by fire and sword, was power- less against the dissolute morals of his own monks, who were chiefly engaged in the corrupt- ing of women. The successful resistance of the Swiss clergy, in 1230, against the civil author- ities of Zurich, was intrenched in the sensible doctrine of the priests, as shown by their state- ment that they "were flesh and blood, unequal to the task of living like angels, etc. ' > The Council of Cologne, in 1307, tried in vain to give the nuns a chance to live virtuous lives to protect them from priestly seduction. Conrad, Bishop of Wurzburg, in 1521, tried to reform his priests, but without success. In his mandate he accused them of habitual "glut- tony, drunkenness, gambling, quarreling, and lust". Erasmus felt called upon to admonish his clergy against concubinage. The Abbot of St. Pelazo de Antealtaria "was proved by com- petent witnesses to have no less than seventy concubines". King Solomon's example was not entirely ignored by the good Fathers. We read: "The old and wealthy abbey of St. Al- bans was little more than a den of prostitutes, with whom the monks lived openly and avowedly". The crimes and vices of the Borgias are com- monplace records of history. The Diet of Nur- 96 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM emburg, in 1522, concerned itself with the evils of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, chief of which was the clerical immunity of the gentlemen who " night and day" preyed upon "the virtue of the wives and daughters of the laity". At one time the sale of indulgences in lust to ecclesiastics was an established order, finally reduced "to the form of an annual tax, which in most dioceses was exacted of all the clergy without exception, so that when those who per- chance lived chastely, demurred to the pay- ment, they were told that the bishop must have the money, and that after it was handed over they might take their choice whether to keep concubines or not." John van Arkel, Bishop of Utrecht, in 1347, found it necessary to prohibit men from ac- cess to the nunneries. In Spain (1322) and in the Swiss Cantons, priests were forced by the community to select concubines in assuming charge of parishes, in order that the wives and daughters of the people should be safe from despoilation. The Council of Constance (1415), in deposing a pope, uncovered every crime imaginable including incest, adultery, defile- ment, etc. Of the Pontifical Fathers of the fifteenth cen- tury, few indeed were not notorious for their "frailties". Innocent VIII was so renowned for his method of increasing the population of WOMAN AND RELIGION 97 Eome that he was the butt of the wits of his day; and everybody knows that Alexander VI did not allow his predecessor's good work to languish. History is bulging with innumerable similar instances too revolting for more than passing notice. Of course, there always were honest priests and pure nuns thousands of self-sacrificing, tender souls who were ever striving against wickedness; who bravely met, if powerless to conquer, the immeasurable difficulties of their times which, unfortunately, the superstition of their own religion but multiplied and intensi- fied. To-day it is an exception for a priest to be wickedly designing or for a nun to be impure. The clergy generally are honest men who do a deal of good; but it is childish to suppose that they know any more about the hereafter than do those whom they presume to enlighten. It is idle to blame the wicked who could not have been good if they had tried. It is generous to praise the good who had so much incentive to be bad. And it is but honest to denounce the false religions that have been so excessively de- grading to womanhood. li Custom", says Mrs. Mill, "hardens human beings to any kind of degradations, by deadening the part of their nature that would resist it. ' ' Mean, narrow, and brutal as the Church had been in its treatment of woman, the Protestants 98 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM immediately after the Keformation became worse, if that were possible. Martin Luther was as good perhaps as he could be in the circum- stances, and no doubt he was much better than the average monk; but the monkish taint shows itself in his estimate of woman in a let- ter to Stif el : ' ' Catherine, my dear rib salutes you. She is quite well, thank God: gentle, obedient, and kind in all things, far beyond my hopes. ..." The spirit of puritanism was hateful and ma- licious. It promulgated a vindictive, a relentless warfare against persons rather than practices against females rather than their "faults". Eeligious asceticism blew its frosty breath over the flowers of love, seared the fresh leaves, and chilled the plant to its roots its puritanical fruit was hard, acrid, and gnarled. The Puritans were as full of hatred as they were empty of humor. Their persecution of the "daughters of the devil", as they called prostitutes and the unfortunate sisters who had loved not wisely but too well, was nothing less than fiendish in its cruelty. The Puritans seem to have had no notion of the pathetic fact that a perfectly vrituous woman might be deceived, ruined, and abandoned by an unscrupulous man. The chief defect in puritanism was the lack of imagination a defect which in the crim- inal mind makes the murderer. WOMAN AND EELIGION 99 The position of woman was seldom worse than under Puritan domination at the height of its power, which measured the depth of its neg- ative morality. Woman was kept at the most menial of work; her natural impulses were subdued without ruth. Old Mother Nature rebelled; the result was illicit relations and illegitimate children, both were severely stig- matized ; yet both were results as inevitable as the religious intolerance that caused them. The drudgeries imposed on married women were maddening in their monotony, wearisome and killing in their toil. As the family in- creased, mother and daughters became worse than slaves. Industries, later specialized and differentiated, were carried on by the housewife in the home ; she was baker, weaver, tailor, bar- ber, bleacher, spinner, brewer, soap-mater, butcher, cook, dairyist, and often gardener and fieldhand besides. In addition, as a matter of course, she bore children; she was wet-nurse, day nurse, and night nurse; she was druggist, washerwoman, and doctor. She was a victim of caste ; her soul was kept in prison her body in harness, and her hands in the meanest of filth for her men-folk and children. To her, the theatre was the "vestibule of perdition"; gossip was her newspaper; the Bible was the only form of fiction she could read without endangering her immortal soul ; and the dull, gloomy church 100 WOMAN" FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM was her only place of amusement. She was a poor benighted being a human toad under the harrow of pious imbecility. Puritanism not only oppressed woman and discriminated against her, but it robbed her of every spontaneous joy; it took from her the few annual fete-days which her slavery had in- herited from the Saturnalia. The mirth of Carnival, sanctioned by the Catholics, was strangled by the Puritans. This same puritan spirit, although somewhat weakened, still lives in the English-speaking countries ; it crops out in opposition to the great feminist movement with its lofty aims ; it appears even in the little eddies of the movement itself ; it is seen in our antiquated Sabbatical observances, in our oppo- sition to divorce, in our attitude toward the Hester Prynnes and little Pearls; we can read it between the lines of Thanksgiving and other foolish proclamations of our Presidents. The attitude of false religion toward the na- ture of woman always has been abominably ignorant and lamentably unjust ignorant alike of the laws of psychology and of biology un- just in setting up artificial standards that rig- idly oppose natural laws. In sexual relations, the church looks upon the married woman as subject to the husband : she is supposed to be passionless as a statue and passive as the udder WOMAN AND RELIGION 101 of a milch-cow a thing to be used and manipu- lated. Peter commanded obedience of the wife to the husband; Paul insisted that the husband was "the head of the wife", that "the head of the woman is man", which probably is the reason why he thought woman was brainless. Xow in fact there is no natural, no ethical, nor any other reason w r hy man should dominate woman in any of their social, political, or inti- mate relations. The nature of the normal wom- an is no more devoid of passion than is that of the normal man. Indeed, natural men and women are sexually complementary both in need and desire ; and when unified by love, they are wholly co-ordinate and equally necessary, one to the other. This is true not only as to the noblest state of their own souls and as to the best condition of their own bodies, but also as to the wellbeing of the most fundamental in- stinct of the race. "Whenever artificial moon- shine has interfered with the orderly climax of sexual emotion, the result has been disastrous. It makes no difference whether a saint obstructs natural law or whether the same thing is ef- fected through ignorant commands put into the mouth of a god so far as nature is concerned, the result is the same. The indecent sexual extravagances of me- diaeval times were closely related to earlier 102 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM mysticism and to the ascetism of Christianity. Commonsense, it is true, was a factor, inasmuch as it perceived the need of acceding to natural demands; but the pressure of artificial man- dates of the church was too much for healthy human nature it turned out badly. Common- sense under high pressure overflowed, it was transmuted into sensuality, and sensuality readily turned into vice, and vice into disease. The rise of the Christian priests to domina- tion over the private affairs of women was slow and subtle, and its end is not yet. In ec- clesiastical doctrine, the sexual instinct is sin- ful; but as it could not be uprooted, a sacra- mental license was issued whereby it might at least be regulated, "analogous to a license to sell intoxicating liquors ". Theology regarded sexual enjoyment as impure, but the Church assumed the authority to purify it in exchange for power and pence. Thus to the Church is owing the development of the conception of mar- riage as a religious sacrament. When most of the differences between Ca- tholicism and Protestantism shall have been shaken down and blown as dust away by the winds of time, one thing will remain to the glory of Martin Luther, and that is his perception and acknowledgment of the needs of human love in human society. This sometime-monk, with all his belief in demons, with all his insane WOMAN AND RELIGION 103 moods and childish fancies and grotesque and primitive notions, nevertheless had sense enough to see the folly of celibacy among per- sons healthy of body and mind. Among all the many utterances of this sturdy reformer, the one that will be remembered longest for its wisdom is this: "A woman, unless she be pe- culiarly sanctified from above, can as little dis- pense with a man, as with eating, sleeping, drinking, or the fulfillment of any other phys- ical need. Neither can a man dispense with a woman. The reason is this : it is as deeply im- planted in our nature to beget children as to eat and drink. Therefore has God given the body members, veins, fluids, and everything that is necessary for these purposes. He who seeks to restrain them, and will not let Nature alone, what does he else but seek to restrain Nature from being Nature; fire from burning; water from wetting; and man from eating, drinking, or sleeping?" It is suspected by some thinkers that the god of this litle world is still a foetus in the throb- bing womb of humanity; that our race may re- main an expectant mother for millions of years ; and that other millions of years may be required for the growth of this god into a full- fledged minor deity. And then the chances are even that this divinity gestating within our souls will be female. So many of the male gods 104 'WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM have been failures, a female deity may save the race at last from the false elements of religion. But for the present we shall get on if "We walk according to our light, Pursue the path That leads to honor's stainless height, Careless of wrath Or curse of God or priestly spite, Longing to know and do the right. "We love our fellowman, our kind, "Wife, child, and friend. To phantoms we are deaf and blind ; But we extend The helping hand to the distressed; By lifting others we are blessed." Ingersoll, WOMAN AND THE LAW Long is the way And hard, that out of hell leads up to light. Milton. OMAN'S subordinate position before the law is more ancient than history. Her legal status was modified by religion. Law and religion have been interwoven so long that the one can hardly be discussed without dragging in the other. Primitive usage was the first law; and out of it the fixed tribal customs developed into what is known as personal rights. Later laws laid down by the headmen were founded on these rights. From primitive simplicity to civ- ilized complexity, the principle of natural rights has persisted, at least in theory, in the formula- tion of human law. Then confusion arose as temporal and spir- itual authorities tried to co-ordinate their rules of governance. This confusion gave rise to continual conflict which imposed many hard- ships on society. Certain classes suffered from the inequalities of justice meted out to them, just as other classes of individuals were bene- 105 106 WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM fited. The favored few always have triumphed over the impersonal masses. Justice, most ar- dently desired, has ever been most difficult to attain; and the burdens of injustice have pressed heavily on woman from time imme- morial. "Those thousand decencies that daily flow From all her words and actions" made little impression on the statutes enacted by man. Her standing in law through the ages, naturally, has not been uniform. Periods of hope and despair have followed one another. But when viewed broadly, her legal rights have advanced steadily until now they approximate those of men, and in some respects go beyond. Beginning with the Mosaic laws for one must start somewhere it is evident from many known facts that these laws were built largely on precedent. The codes of Babylon were cen- turies old at the time of Moses and Aaron. Peo- ples contemporary with the Israelites lived under laws similar to theirs ; while many forms of legal procedure that are commonly called Mosaic, probably are post-Mosaic. However, the fact to be kept in mind is that woman's status under the Mosaic laws is generally indi- cative of her standing for many centuries among some of the most enlightened peoples of the world. WOMAN AND THE LAW 107 We read in the twenty-fourth chapter of Deuteronomy that the right of divorce was vested in the whim of the husband: ". . . let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house". The injustice of such early laws is everywhere apparent. In the thirtieth chapter of Numbers it is recorded that a woman could not make a vow binding her own soul without the consent of her father or her husband. Man's dominance over woman is exhibited in the rec- ord of her legal inability to inherit property if she had brothers; and even in their stead, she could inherit only if she married in the tribe, for if she "be married to any of the sons of the other tribes of the children *>f Israel, then shall" said heritage be taken away fron? her and given over to the tribe. The position of woman in society is mir- rored by her standing before the law. Her social degradation could not be illustrated bet- ter than it is in the "law of jealousies", fifth chapter of Numbers. According to this in- iquitous law, which many thousands of human beings believe was given to Moses by the Lord, any old jackal, in a fit of impotent or jealous aberration, might hale his wife to court: the judge in the case being a priest and the court- room a filthy tabernacle ; there she was put to the test of the "bitter water". If the bitter 108 WOMAN FKOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM water made her ill, it was proof of her guilt: "and her belly shall swell and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people". If she escaped poisoning, she was adjudged innocent for the time being, or until her husband had another attack of the grouch. Her chances of escape however were slim since the heaven-sent formula for the bit- ter water reads in part: "And the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel; and the dust that is in the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and put it into the water. . . . And he shall cause the woman to drink of the bitter water that causeth the curse, it shall enter into her, and become bitter". The idea of testing the fidelity of a wife by forcing her to swallow the germs of cholera or of typhoid fever may have been original in its time, and the test effective ; but that kind of procedure has lost is appeal. The germ-test for morals has become unpopular, and the pub- lic health has improved. As one reflects on the virulency of germs bred in the festering Orient during those unhygienic times, it is not surprising that the water, muddied with the dust from the floor of the tabernacle, was in- deed "bitter". Not only was woman subordinate before the law, she was unclean before her master. The Mosaic decree that the menstruating woman WOMAN AND THE LAW 109 should be regarded as unclean, had its point- of-view; but it is abominable that "she shall be put apart seven days ; and whoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even". Legally, the parturient mother of a "maid child" was twice as dirty as the mother of a "man child". For the law laid down in the twelfth chapter of Leviticus reads: "If a woman have . . . born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days. . . . And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks . . . and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying three score and six days". The intent of this law probably was hy- gienic; but its letter was cruel and degrading, and its suggestiveness was not flattering to womanhood. Such laws, especially those of sacred origin, have caused inestimable harm to society; for they not only have lent color to the primitive taboo, but they have encour- aged man's brutality to woman, inevitably hurt- ing both oppressor and oppressed. At the time of Abraham, the position of woman virtually was that of servitude. The patriarchs had slight respect for matrimony, to which state the ties of blood were of little 110 -WOMAN" FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM hindrance. Moral degradation, ever synchro- nous with legal injustice, is plain in the attitude of Sarah and in the conduct of Leah and Rachel. In the household of Abraham, the " bondwoman" was sanctioned by righteous laws. Suffering the final indignity, she was made to feel the last stroke of cruelty as she was driven forth from the tent, destitute and friendless, to wander in the world or to perish with her child in the desert. Nothing can be much more revolting to our sense of justice than the legal-religious standing of women dur- ing those pastoral times. Exposed to the ter- rors of kidnaping, struggling under the bur- dens and the vices of slavery, violated and scorned, they knew no security and they had no redress. According to Deuteronomy, when the legis- lative body of a semi-barbaric state sat in heaven, the bride not possessed of the "tokens of virginity" was put to death: "and the men of the city shall stone her with stones, that she die". The instrument that despoiled her of her tokens was the one chosen to be the death of her for having lost them. The robber is commanded to punish his victim. Nothing could be more ingenious. There are countless illustrations of the sub- ordination of woman before the law scattered through history, sacred literature, and art. WOMAN AND THE LAW 111 Almost everywhere, and nearly at all times, she has been forced to be unchaste and then was punished for the offense. She was re- strained from marriage, and thrust into mar- riage against her will. Eeligious legislation has denied her right to a second marriage at one time, and at another it forced her into a union with the brother of her dear departed. Dur- ing many centuries, religious and secular laws have been to woman, as it were, the devil and the deep sea there was little choice between them. The history of woman under the administra- tion of heaven-made laws is a record of her ser- vitude and humility : Euth at the feet of Boaz ; Jezebel "trod under foot" by Jehu; the Shu- nammite " handmaid" to Elisha, "the man of God"! These examples may be multiplied in- definitely. Even in Job's modest protestations of his integrity, it is suggested that a woman's deceit is worse than a man's; and he is mod- erately horrified at the thought lest his "heart have been deceived by a woman". But Job also had sane and tender moods; his spiritual sufferings show that he was aware of the wrongs endured by women, for he refers to his honorable conduct toward their sex. This was an exceptional prince an extraordinary char- acter of his day; and in nothing did his great- 112 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM ness of soul shine forth more clearly than in his better demeanor toward women. In the Eastern countries, woman's depend- ence has been deplorable for ages. The inher- itance of property was mostly restricted to the male line. When woman was permitted to ac- quire wealth, either before or after marriage, her property reverted at the death of her hus- band to the male members of one or the other family. For before the suttee was abolished by the English, it was customary for the Hindu widow to be burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre. As a great many old men had very young wives, this practice was appalling. Woman had no standing in Hindu law; and her status was little better under the early Roman law, when her property-rights were vested in her husband. If she was unmarried, and not a vestal virgin, then her father or kins- man, or some other male person adopted by her family, held possession of her estate. Having no male relatives under the law, her wealth went to the clan or gens. In marriage she was sold almost as a slave. Not qualified to hold office, she was legally an imbecile. As she had no standing in court, she was unable to enter into a legal contract; nor could she appear as a wit- ness. The few privileges granted to her were given in the spirit of pity. Among the meagre crumbs that the law cast WOMAN AND THE LAW 113 at her feet, was the right to accuse witches. This was only a theatrical step toward civiliza- tion. The right of one woman to hale another to court as a witch is quite on an ethical level of granting two cats the right to have their tails tied together and be suspended from a clothes-line. Woman was legislated against on almost every occasion. If she mourned too much for her dead, a repressive law forthwith was enacted. She could make her will only under the supervision of some male. In ancient times, her father or husband sitting in family council had the legal right to put her to death without a public trial. Eoman law regarded her character as " unsteady ", and it was re- ferred to as "the weakness of the sex". During the second century B.C., some changes favoring women began to appear in the statutes; and from the time of Augustus to that of Justinian, more or less steady prog- ress was made. Woman became independent or sui juris, first, if she were the mother of three children an extra child being required of the f reed-woman ; second, if she were a vestal vir- gin; but as there were only a half-dozen of these, the opportunity was narrow; third, by a special act, of infrequent occurrence, which granted her independence with restrictions. The restrictions usually nullified the grant ; and at best her legal independence was more in 114 WOMAN" FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM name than in fact; even her power oyer her children was exercised through an agnate, or guardian. Despite all the harshness of early law how- ever, woman was greatly respected in her own home during the best period of Roman civiliza- tion. Her influence in the family gradually extended to the political sphere, where it reached its culmination during the first three centuries of this era. And although the po- litical power of such women as Agrippina and Livia, unusually strong characters, may not be regarded as typical, nevertheless it indicates what was possible to the sex in the circum- stances. In the early period of the Republic, women were severely punished for wine drinking; and according to Valerius Maximus, wives who tippled "the sweet poison of misused wine" were now and then beaten to death by their hus- bands. But at the same time, gluttony, drunk- enness, and adultery among the men were glozed over. There was however a distinction made between the status of women before the law and their standing in society. The high regard of Marcus Aurelius for the teachings of his mother, and the affection of men like Pliny and Quintilian for their wives, were far from being sporadic examples of Ro- man sentiment. Some of the best historians WOMAN AND THE LAW 115 believe that the majority of the better condi- tioned Romans was duly appreciative of the nobility of character then, as before and since, widely borne by women. Gradually the hard and repressive statutes were softened and re- laxed until in actual effect they lapsed into dead-letter laws. In ancient Roman times, marriage was pos- sible in three ways: first, by a mock sale of the woman; second, by solemn rites considered sacred, which permitted the issue to qualify for the priesthood; third, by a common-law method that made the marriage legal after the couple had lived together for a year under cer- tain prescriptive rules. These three forms of marriage persisted until about the second cen- tury, A. D. Marriage by proxy was allowed later, and usually it was arranged by the woman's par- ents or guardian. Slowly the authority of father over daughter became weakened until the daughter's consent was essential to the mar- riage contract. Sons however could not be forced into marriage against their will, although the father's consent was necessary to the val- idity of the daughter's marriage. In time, Roman marriage developed into a civil contract founded on consent and denned by law as "the union of a man and a woman, and a partnership of all life ; a mutual sharing 116 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM of laws human and divine". The real status of the wife however was that of a daughter, since the husband held her in manu. The widow was compelled by law to wear for ten months the external signs of mourning, and to refrain in public from certain social diversions for the same period. The widower, on the contrary, was free to mourn or not, externally and intern- ally. These laws were in force until they were remitted by Gordian, the youngest, in 238, A. D. From absolute power over his wife, the hus- band's authority diminished during the first three centuries of our era until his domina- tion was in name rather than in fact. The wife's control of her private property was one of woman's victories achieved under the Roman law. This is referred to in some of the Com- edies of both Terence and Plautus. The state wisely conserved its own welfare by guarding and keeping inviolate the doweries of women. Gradually also the penalties of adultery grew lighter, until husbands became rather compla- cent. During the Empire, as society grew lax in morals, the grounds for divorce became more and more trivial, although the initiative rested too long with the husband. Cicero could di- vorce Terentia for a richer and younger woman. But in time, woman also acquired rights to in- itiative in divorce which became easier and WOMAN AND THE LAW 117 more frequent, especially in the better circles of society. Univira became so rare that the des- ignation was engraved on her tomb. Theselina, according to Martial, married ten times in thirty days, and thus established a record that hardly has been equalled by the most enterpris- ing stage-folk of to-day. The only form of marriage legally indissoluble was that of con- farreatio, because the priests of Jupiter were recruited from its issue. Roman law in its flower permitted women to engage in business pursuits such as the retail trade, the keeping of hostelries, barbering, the running of vaudeville, the practice of medicine, and so forward. The powers of the guardian had diminished; and woman's standing in the law courts had become well recognized. In fact, women were so successful as pleaders that, ac- cording to Juvenal, it was difficult for men law- yers to stand against them ; and finally the pen- dulum swung toward a partiality for women litigants. With the rapid advance of women's rights before the law, arose their many facili- ties for acquiring an education, which were later abolished under Christian rule. Yet with all the benefits received by women from the Roman law, there was no definite provision made for the public education of girls as for that of boys. At the time of Justinian, women could be- 118 WOMAZST FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM queath and make legal contracts. Indeed, sev- eral of the Christian emperors were kindly dis- posed toward a greater freedom for the sex. Slight improvements were made on the pagan laws so that, for instance, mothers no longer were dependent on their sons for the simplest acts of justice. In many ways, Justinian showed his taste for civilization ; above all else by his imperial championship of woman's cause and by his charitable disposition toward her "frailties". He softened the Constantine penalty of death for adultery to imprisonment in a convent. It is questionable which punish- ment was preferable at that time; but the em- peror's intentions were good. He was a trifle severe with the Jews; but that has been con- doned by Christians on the grounds of his re- ligious fervor. If, for example, a Christian woman married a Jew, both were held to be adulterous but the Jew never was purposely confined in a convent for punishment. Many good laws were promulgated by this worthy emperor for the benefit of working- women and others ; but the old notion of wom- an 's "natural inferiority" lurked in the minds of the most Christian of rulers. The canon law upheld the husband 's supremacy and power over the w r ife, and it introduced several nov- elties to the Eoman law : A priestly benediction was necessary to make the marriage ceremony WOMAN AND THE LAW 119 valid; women were not allowed to " desecrate " the church by holding any public office under it ; nor were they permitted to come within cer- tain fixed limits of the altar; and having " pro- fessed religion, they could not be forced to give testimony as witnesses". Of course this was no favor to their sex, since it tempted them to compound with crime. In the northern regions of Europe, early laws differed according to locality, and some were much more liberal toward woman than they be- came later. Sometimes inheritance was through individuals ; again, it was through classes, when there chanced to be no male heirs. The Scan- dinavian women were under a rigid guardian- ship; even as late as the latter part of the seventeenth century, a woman could not marry without the consent of her male " tutor"; if she did, her tutor was empowered to administer her estate for life, and to pay himself a salary for his services. In England, before the Conquest, a woman was punished for adultery by having her nose and ears cut off; female slaves were burned alive for petty thefts; penalties for witchcraft were brutally severe, whilst only a mild pen- ance was exacted for the beating of a slave- girl to death. In the time of Ethelbert, wives were bought and stolen ; but it was provided by law that if a freeman stole the wife of an- 120 "WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM other, the thief must procure at his own ex- pense a new wife for the injured husband. Under the old common and statute laws, wom- an's position differed materially from man's, and she was not permitted to forget her in- ferior station. She could not testify in court in certain cases, either for or against a man. She was allowed neither to appoint a testa- mentary guardian nor to act as one with full powers over her own children. Magna Charta treated her niggardly. She was legally burned for witchcraft and treason and that no longer ago than in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Women also were the victims of sumptuary measures in matters of style and dress and the materials of dress, as well. In a word, they were treated in general as chil- dren before the law. "Woman gained much from marriage in later primitive times, and she lost much by mar- riage under the law in still later times. For all her gains, she was compelled to bear endless burdens as concomitant results. From the dawn of history to feudal times, and down to the present day for that matter, marriage has thrust upon her many onerous evils. Under the common law of England, mar- riage despoils woman of her legal existence which however the law is gracious enough to grant on special occasions when it is deemed WOMAN AND THE LAW 121 desirable to punish her for some misdemeanor. According to Blackstone: "By marriage the husband and wife are one person in the law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, pro- tection and cover, she performs everything; and is therefore called in our law-French a femme covert". Agreeable to this form of "crystallized jus- tice", the wife loses her body, her civil repu- tation, and her legal existence, and for what? If it may be admitted that she still has a soul, it is of too little importance to be considered by the law. From this legal oneness of two beings, arise many unjust discriminations against the wife. Ordinarily, in criminal prac- tice she can not bear testmony either for or against her husband. Fortunately, there are cases in which the husband is made to feel the disadvantages of having absorbed his wife's personality. "For slanderous words spoken by the wife, libel published by her alone, tres- pass, assault and battery, etc.; he is liable to be sued, whether the act was committed with or without his sanction or knowledge." The injustice of the common law is plain when it assumes the absurdity that husband and wife for punitive purposes are one and the same 122 WOMAN FKOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM person. From this dictum have arisen many social evils, among others the destruction of popular reverence for the law. Under the op- erations of this law, the rights of the married woman are so few and elmentary that they are almost negligible. For her, there is no " un- interrupted enjoyment of" her "limbs", her "body", or of her "reputation". "If a wife be injured in her person", Blackstone says, "or her property, she can bring no action for redress without her husband's concurrence, and in his name as well as her own." Annie Besant, one of the wisest and noblest of women, says in her work on "Marriage": "If in a railway accident a married woman has her leg broken, she can not sue the railway company for damages; she is not a damaged person; in the eye of the law, she is a piece of damaged property, and the compensation is to be made to her owner. If she is attacked and beaten, she can not summon her assailant; her master suffers loss and inconvenience by the assault on his housekeeper, and his action is necessary to obtain redress. If she is libeled, she can not protect her good name, for she is incapable by herself of maintaining an action." A ghastly treatise might be written on the legal debasement of woman under the English common law. In the presence of justice, the WOMAN AND THE LAW 123 wife has no standing because she has no legal existence. At the court of her husband's "rights", her status is that of a servant or a piece of property. If the husband is granted a divorce for unfaithfulness, he can put in a claim against the corespondent for monetary damages sustained through the loss of her serv- ices. The same rule of law applies if a minor girl has been seduced. Regarded as the prop- erty of her father, she has no redress of her own, but he may recover damages. As late as 1856, Lord Lyndhurst in the House of Lords, said : "A wife is separated from her husband by a decree of the ecclesiastical Court, the reason for the decree being the husband's misconduct his cruelty, it may be, or his adult- ery. From that moment the wife is almost in a state of outlawry. She may not enter into a contract, or if she do so; she has no means of enforcing it. The law, so far from protect- ing, oppresses her. She is homeless, helpless, hopeless, and almost wholly destitute of civil rights. She is liable to all manner of injustice, whether by plot or by violence. She may be wronged in all possible ways, and her character may be mercilessly defamed; yet she has no redress. She is at the mercy of her enemies. Is that fair? Is that honest? Can it be vin- dicated upon any principle of justice, of mercy, or of common humanity?" 124 WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FKEEDOM This law deprives the married woman of her sacred rights, if any rights in this world are sacred ; and it robs her of self-respect. It kills the nobler virtues of the home, and it turns the warm heart of love into the cold stone of legal privilege. The wife is stripped of authority over her own body; sick or well, or revolted at the bestiality of her husband, she has no pro- tection from his connubial violence or brutal passion. Through marriage, the law denies her the protection it gives to harlots and con- cubines. The husband can not be guilty of rape if the act is committed on his wife ; he can not be guilty of murder, of homicide, nor even of misdemeanor, if his uncouth passion destroys an unborn infant or perhaps the life of its mother, as well. Another vicious element in the old common law is the provision made for the husband to administer corporal punishment to his wife. If anything may be expected to conserve a wife's personal dignity, it is an occasional beat- ing at the hands of one who should love and protect her. Think how inspiring the conjugal life must be that is punctuated with a cudgel- ing ! This provision of the law suggests the old couplet : A dog, a woman, and a walnut-tree, The more you beat 'em the better they be. WOMAN AND 7HE LAW 125 In fact, wife-beating has been practiced so long that many women look upon it as a right more personal to themselves than to their hus- bands. In some benighted parts of Kussia, the wife who is not occasionally "brushed down" by her husband feels neglected, and suspects that she is losing ground in his affections. A parallel state of mind exists, or did exist, among the women known as anti-suffragists in en- lightened parts of America; they were so used to the indignity of a subordinate civic position that they regarded it as normal to their sex, and therefore a right reprobating the "man- ishness" of their sisters ' discontent under po- litical bondage. "We read in Blackstone: "The husband also [by the old law] might give his wife moderate correction. For as he is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to entrust with him this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same mod- eration that a man is allowed to correct his apprentices or children. The lower rank of people, who were always fond of the old com- mon law, still claim and exact their ancient priv- ilege." The great commentator construes this as a wise provision of law for the protection of women something for their general good ; and he adds without intentional humor, "So great 126 a favorite is the female sex of the laws of Eng- land' '! No longer than forty or fifty years ago, it was common for some men under their "ancient privilege" to drag their wives out of bed by the hair of their heads, to tear off their night- robes, to torture them, to knock them about, to dance on their bruised bodies, to beat them with sticks of prescribed thickness, and, in a word, moderately to "correct" them. Linked with man's legal right to correct his spouse was his authority to deprive her of per- sonal liberty. The husband was delegated auto- matically by law with judicial and constraintive power over his wife. He was not only the judge who sentenced her without due process, but he was her jailer as well. She was in all essentials his property. The English law subjects the married woman to many concrete hardships. It strips her of the natural rights that are hers while unmar- ried, even though a mother. For example: if single, she owns her body and her child, if she has one ; she has the liberty of action that her married sister forfeits ; she can own prop- erty and defend herself against attack ; she pos- sesses a measure of independence and personal liberty for which she is accountable only to the law. Against these advantages she suffers so- cial stigma only if she is a mother or a woman WOMAN AND THE LAW 127 of joy; and in addition, her children, being illegitimate, are restricted in their rights and made to feel an odium that ought not to exist in any decent society. Of course the common law has been greatly modified by all sorts of legislative acts; but its spirit is not dead. Indeed it is lively enough to show the state of abasement into which wom- an has been kept for centuries by the laws of one of the most enlightened nations of modern times. Some of the anomalies of the more modern English law are interesting. A woman may be queen or regent; she may exercise the high- est political rights; yet, until recently, women could not vote at a parliamentary election nor be elected to parliament. Their political rights, such as they have, are more or less modified by marriage and prejudiced by their sex. A short time ago, woman was ineligible to most of the learned professions and limited in admission to university degrees. This is amazing in an era of intellectual activity, especially when one ob- serves that ignorant moneybags and windy pol- iticians are freely given degrees when some of the most intellectual of our race are denied them solely on account of sex. Women may take ex- .aminations at Oxford and Cambridge, it is true, but not a degree, unless the rule has been lately changed. 128 'WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM A married woman having property is "liable for the support of her husband, children, and grandchildren chargeable to any union or par- ish". The husband has the first right, other things being equal, to the legitimate offspring; he could divorce his wife for adultery, but not long ago for the same offense she could not divorce him unless she could show cruelty, or desertion besides, or some other abomination on his part. But her advancement in property rights grows steadily more hopeful. All through the English law may be discov- ered vestiges of the time when women were chat- tels and very little else in the eye of the law. Yet it was the English law that arose above the laws of all other nations by being the first to take from adultery the sting of crime. Sin it might be, but crime it should not be. The Eng- lish law-makers had gumption enough to imply at least that husbands who can not retain the fidelity of their wives and wives who lose the fidelity of their husbands do not deserve it, gen- erally speaking. The English law with all its faults was at least sane and virile enough to be philosophic in this particular. "Wife-beating and witch-baiting and slave-whipping have passed out. In Scotland, some remnants of the early sumptuary laws still persist; but there as elsewhere the lagging spirit of the law is quickening with new life. WOMAN AND THE LAW 129 The idea of a husband regarding himself as injured because he can not retain the love and the loyalty of his wife, is ridiculous ; but when he is horny enough to put in a legal claim for damages, he sinks beneath contempt. It seems far more reasonable for the wife to plead dam- ages for her partner's conjugal failures. The law's unwisdom also is manifest in its refusal to grant a divorce where collusion can be proved. It is absurd to any save a legal mind for a court to honor the plea of one party, but to reject the plea of both parties co-operat- ing in the same purpose Godfrey, in his "Science of Sex", says: "The enforced continuance of an unsuccessful union is perhaps the most immoral thing that a civilized society ever countenanced, far less en- couraged. The morality of a union is depend- ent upon mutual desire, and a union dictated by any other cause is outside the moral pale, however custom may sanction it, or religion and law condone it". The indecencies, inconsistencies, and difficul- ties of the divorce court emanate from the traditions of the canon law doctrine of the in- dissolubility of marriage, the sinfulness of extramatrimonial embraces, the primitive prop- erty idea of marriage, and the ecclesiastical degradation and legal subordination of woman, 130 WOMAX FROM BONDAGE TO FEEEDOM Thus a breach of marriage came to be regarded as a public injury. The law has opposed the best development of woman's moral feelings. "Morality", says Havelock Ellis, "maybe outraged with impunity provided that law and religion have been in- voked". For this state of affairs we must thank ecclesiastical insolence and the inquisi- torial tyranny of the law the blind parents of anarchy. In the words of William von Hum- boldt: "Experience frequently convinces us that just where law has imposed no fetters, mor- ality most surely binds ; the idea of external co- ercion is one entirely foreign to an institution which, like marriage, reposes only on inclina- tion and an inward sense of duty". The am- atory life of man and woman can not be regu- lated by statute, circumscribed by code, nor is it subject to the canon law traditions ; it must travel its own road and go to hell through ignorance or soar to heaven through wisdom. Legal molds, crudely cast for the masses, in- evitably pinch thousands of the best individual assets of society. In the present state of mankind, the sexual demand for variation is a fact for law-makers and judges to consider; it can not be ignored where justice is desired; and it is best taken care of by allowing individuals, under enlight- enment, to work out their own salvation in their WOMAN AND THE LAW 131 own unobtrusive ways. The less prying the fewer the statutory acts the better. The es- sential monogamic element will continue, and it will continue to take care of itself; but if it is to perish, no legislation can save it. Men have made rules and passed laws for one-sided connubial felicity long enough. They have considered their own requirements, within variable degrees ; whilst the inferior position of women affords them only the lopsided happiness of adapting themselves to their husbands' pleasure, regardless of their own physical and spiritual needs. No one should begrudge women a chance at last to take a hand in the making of laws under which they must live. The sexual need of variation is as much a part of woman's nature as it is of man's; and any save the most general repressive rules are use- less or harmful. The vital fires of love can not be controlled by rote and rule. They are subject only to the unknown god that presides over the inner being of our nature. We shall never succeed in legislating civiliza- tion on ourselves. Statutes and codes, like pre- cepts and creeds, are mere makeshifts, wornout almost before they are fit to use. Our law courts never will have any jurisdiction over the human soul. The less we have of all this that we can get along without, the better. The sense of freedom in love, the thrill of joy in 132 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM passion, and the other ecstasies of mood in the rhythm of life were not born of codes and they never will work well in stautory yokes and re- ligious harness. The 'Only effective statute law is one that has genuine public approval one that carries the conviction of justice to the average mind; and the only religious precepts that can help us are those that enlighten the emotions while appealing to the mind. Alfred Russel Wallace truthfully said : ' * Com- pared with our astounding progress in physical science and its practical application, our system of government, of administrative justice, of na- tional education, and our entire social and moral organzation, remain in a state of barbarism". This is especially true of our legislative sys- tem. Thousands of useless laws are made at a cost as amazing as the laws themselves are bur- densome. Our statutes have been millstones on the neck of progress. Our printed constitutions seldom have borne any vital relation to gov- ernment. The unthinking class accepts prece- dent for reason, custom in the place of common- sense, and the lash instead of justice ; and when it does make a protest, it cither whines or growls. The truth is, we are pharisaical bar- barians. One should not cry justice and speak un- justly. The judiciary deserves serious consid- eration, and usually it gets respectful attention. WOMAN AND THE LAW 133 But the general opinion of the laity is that the judges are more likely to "hand down" their decisions according to influence than according to justice; that the rich get what they want oftener than the poor what they deserve. This of course is not always true. There are many judges who are both honest and intelligent. The miscarriages of justice result from the ignorance of the law-makers oftener perhaps than from any fault of the judiciary. It is notoriously true, just the same, that the so- called legal education is no education at all. The very things that the legal gentry and the legislators should know the most about, they fail in. To be learned in the technical prece- dents of practice to be familiar with the musty laws of other days is of no progressive impor- tance. The science upon which judicial func- tions should rest is extremely modern. The prated "philosophy of the law" is a myth, or, better a moth-eaten weft woven of darkness and error and figured with passion and predj- udice and stained with blood and wet with ' ' tears such as angels weep". The fundamental necessities of legal educa- tion are, if approximate justice is the aim, a knowledge of the animal organism and its rela- tions to environment, as well as a knowledge of the human mind and that of its comparative his- tory. The functions of the brain can not be 134 'WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM understood if the animal organism is not under- stood ; for it is in the animal organism that the mind has its roots roots that run back through aeons of organic development. Punitive laws are founded on vengeance and on the phantom notion of a "free moral agency", which we know never has existed on this flying island called the world. Modern sci- ence has proved that to deal justly with the functions of the will, the basic functions of the organism must be studied from their dawn down through the morning of life; the architecture of superorganic structure must be known; and the by-products of emotive function should be utilized without waste and needless pain. In dealing with the question of human justice, it is apparent that the little round ovum is as much a thing of life as is the infant that has passed through the dramatic change of environ- ment called birth. At present, legal education takes little note of these important things, and with psychology it concerns itself almost not at all. It follows that, as our lawmakers are guided by the legal mind when not dominated by lobbyists and superstitious poltroonery, the evils of the stat- ute books must be attributed to ignorance. For, to understand the intricacies of the working social organism, and to deal with them intelli- gently, it is necessary to understand human na- WOMAN AND THE LAW 135 ture, to know something of comparative anthro- pology, and all the little that has been learned of psychology. This takes us back along the trail of earlier types, through comparative zoology, and into the very cell-life of things. Certainly, no one should be expected to know anything worth while of the social structure and its functions who knows nothing of the individuals whose in- itiative and reactions determine social phenom- ena ; nor can much pertinent data be gathered from a study of individuals by one who knows nothing of the cell-world wherein each indi- vidual is, as it were, an embodied universe. The lack of this knowledge is the well-spring of judicial blunder and legal perversion, both hav- ing weighed so heavily on women for ages. Thus it is that many of the misfortunes of woman before the law and many phases of her miserable state, now happily passing, are owing to ignorance and the faulty sentiment thereof more perhaps than to premeditated tyranny on the part of man, as a law-maker. OMAN has been the nether millstone for ages. If she becomes the upper, it may be with a vengeance ; but she will not grind us finer in her new role than man has in his old. But if woman should rise to a dominant position, let us hope it will be with understanding and not in the mere imitation of man's failures and errors. If the political activities of women are to echo those of men, there will be confusion in our halls. If women fancy that human nature is going to to be changed by their ballots, they are mis- taken. If they use their hard-won civic rights, not as trophies of victory nor yet as a means of political reprisals, but as agencies to be employed sensibly for the common weal, the van of progress will move forward. The great inspiration of the feminist move- ment is the worthy desire to live a full life the yearning to reach the heights of being, and thus to attain a better command of the art of living. Human beings, surely, are justified in responding to this inspiration. The soul that will not struggle for its rights is unworthy to possess them. The soul that relinquishes its 137 138 WOMAX FKOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM rights is guilty of self-mutilation. No one should fear to explore new realms where wider possibilities abound; but everyone should hold fast to all the good that has been wrenched from bitter experience along the old roads. Humanity has never feared to suffer, and it never should be afraid to laugh : for suffering and happiness is our lot. Suffering is the sea- son of spiritual regeneration ; and happiness is the time to spend spiritual wealth. These are the two seasons of the soul the climate of human consciousness. We can no more escape our spiritual conditions than we can avoid our physical environment; but both can be made better. This elemental fact justifies all our efforts to enlarge our opportunities to make life richer and fuller. Our ideal should be to become entirely hu- man. When that stage has been reached, there will be time enough to dream of the superman. Xow the term has no meaning no more than the words angel and saint. When we shall be able to say, Lo, we are liuman at last! there no longer will be overman and underman con- noted by sex. There still will be relative differ- ences between men and women but not of posi- tion, since in all the essentials of living there will be equality of opportunity; and in the striving for the ideals of life, there will be the fullest co-operation between the sexes. OVERMAN AND TIN DERM AN 139 It is possible that humankind yet may de- velop a third sex. Human society may be forced to parallel that of the bees by forming a third sex and diverting it to the end that mil- lions of human beings may be content to be what millions now are compelled to be, willy- nilly : that is to say, the loveless workers of the race. As social beings, we are too young to determine the trend of social organization ; but we can guess that it will eventually so limit the rights and so circumscribe the liberties of the workers that their very thoughts shall become social instincts forgetful of self, and striving only for the good of all; and that the joy of living will beat in. the great heart of the hive humming among the stars. This may come to pass, and it may not. Pres- ent conditions are not favorable to prophecy. But as we interpret our longings for justice, it would seem that society has no right, and that it should have 110 power, to suppress the nor- mal functions, to limit the spiritual aspirations of individuals ; that society has no right to cir- cumscribe the natural acts, nor to destroy the elemental instincts of the individual so long as these natural acts and instincts do no harm to the social organism. Yet that is what society is doing to-day, and what it has been doing since the records runneth not to the contrary. Slavery has existed so long, in so many forms, 140 (WOMAX FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM that the most soulful of our kind are spiritually hardened ; those who could not be calloused died of pity long before the war. Spiritual glad- ness can not exist in a world that holds even one slave. Life is meaningless in thraldom. Superstitious bondage, it is true, may produce a mania in the victims in which exaggerated ecstasy forms a kind of compensation for the slavery endured; but the compensation is not real, but merely the ignis fatuus of civilization that leads us astray. The economic slavery of this period is not as devitalizing as it was, but it is bad enough. The wage-slaves used to find forgetfulness in drink; now they find an unrest in prohibition that leads to rabies. Having shed some of the rags of slavery, they are eager to put on the robes of tyranny. This is precisely according to human nature, because human nature is far more stupid than wise. Xo matter what class rules, the ignorance that is in us is responsible for the needless misery sure to follow. It is the same in all classes : the priests, the poli- ticians, the capitalists, and the so-called pro- letariat. The bane of our kind is ignorance. Ignorance begets misery, and misery begets crime. The propaganda of religious supersti- tion thrives under economic slavery. Wage- tyranny wipes out religious superstition and writes down economic superstition in human OVERMAN AND TJNDEEMAN 141 blood. The beast within us does not change when it changes its hide. Whether the success of feminism will kill the beast, remains to be seen. One thing is tolerably certain: the free- dom of woman can not make him worse than he has been through all recorded time. It is not work that kills. The workers who kill time butcher themselves. Capitalism and caste and class are old offenders. Valid hap- piness rests on a foundation of honest work and fair play. The man who has found his work and the woman who has found hers have achieved their destiny. Napoleon said: "A man is immortal till his work is done". Back of his words looms a grander idea: Man is immortal only through his work; and that per- haps is all the immortality he deserves. We are told in glittering homilies that wom- an's work is in her home; and common experi- ence tells us that countless thousands of women have no homes. What are these women to do, and how many of them find their work? The most of them are misfits;, most of them are buffeted about by a fate as aimless as it is cruel ; many of them are tied up to hostile tasks ; and finally, the most of them are cast out, as the good God's Did shoes, into the back alleys of civilization. In our pre-war order, these women toiled and suffered for what? To wear a few rags and to eat a few crusts to 142 (WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM glut the capitalist with luxuries and to dress his fancy women in silks and jewels. The present order is slightly different, but far from ideal. What is to be done? Enlightened men and women with equal civic rights must eventually answer the question. The noblest inspiration is that which directs us to our work ; yet in our social order too few of us ever find it. Nothing is more dignified than honest labor ; but how many human beings labor in the light of spiritual dignity? Why is it that idle fashion scorns those who work with their hands? The fault is not altogether with idle fashion, bad as it is. Why do humble craftsmen, and earnest peasant women working in the fields look so fine in art? Is it because art lets us see them on pedestals built by useful work? Is it because art clothes them with spiritual grandeur? If all were truly civilized, they would look just as fine as the beaver or the bee. As we have seen, woman's work for ages has been slavery. Arrogance and ignorance have been her masters. The lash has fallen on her heart as she was driven forth to overtax her strength while her mind was darkened. These mothers have given sons; and only from such mothers could come the tyrants ; only from such mothers could come our pettifoggers and priests the parasites of the poor and the apologists OVERMAN AND UNDERMAN 143 for the rich! Only from such mothers could come sons and daughters capable of objecting to better conditions. The specialization of work, brought about by the differences of sex, forced woman to learn many useful things beyond the primitive ca- pability of man. Olive Schreiner suggests that necessity, operating through woman, first taught man to walk on his hind legs. Grad- ually, the invention of machinery and the re- distribution of labor temporarily confused so- ciety by introducing new forms of slavery which forced women to degenerate, many of them from slaves into parasites two classes ever in opposition to the best interests of society. Pericles saw life from the summit of civiliza- tion. We who dream of lordlier heights would do well to recall what that wise old Greek said to the Athenian women : ' 'Aspire only to those virtues that are peculiar to your sex, and think it your greatest praise not to be talked of one way or another". Perhaps our epoch is not agreeable to such counsel, for we know that these words fall on deaf ears to-day. Many of our women unfortunately imitate masculine politics, on the theory maybe of fighting the devil with fire ; whatever the reason, they have caught the itch of notoriety and noise from the men, until nearly all our women leaders lust grossly for the public press. 144 WOMAN FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM! The time, so long coining, for women to shed the meanest of their shackles seems to be upon us. A world-cataclysm, shaking civilization to its foundation, [has crystallized the feminist movement into somewhat definite form. For the first time in history, the position of women has risen during war. The rule has been for their position to fall through warfare and to rise with the civilization founded on the arts of peace. It is too early to say what the final effect of the world's greatest war will be on the status of womanhood. "We can be sure only of this : women have demonstrated their fitness to co-operate with men in the arts of war as they had previously in the arts of peace. The stress of Serbia opened wide the door to wom- an's usefulness in war. Her success in the Levant assured her an opportunity in western Europe. Her work in the hospital, in the field, in the factory, on the platform, in business, and at home, is too well known to be more than men- tioned. On the other hand, militarism, usually the enemy of woman and a bar to her advance- ment, may have done her morals a grievous hurt more harm than many generations can heal. Whatever the future may hold, this is sure : The present tendency of society is toward eco- nomic equality between the sexes. Cradle-songs no more will lull women to sleep. The woman OVERMAN AND UNDERMAN 145 who mnst earn her own living who must work out her destiny unaided by a mate will cease to rely on tradition and prayer; but she will seize on every facility that society has to offer. Only a wretched creature would think of throw- ing an obstacle in her way. Men and women are beginning to see the un- wisdom of strife between the sexes, of competi- tion instead of co-operation, of independence rather than co-ordination of effort. They are beginning to realize that neither sex can reach the highest plane of material wellbeing and of spiritual unfolding without the other; that, so- ciologically, the help that is meet for woman is man; even, as in their intimate relations, the help-meet of man is woman. The element of independence, which makes for cleavage be- tween the sexes, is a factor of degeneracy, no matter whether it is found in the ''new wom- an's movement", which is very old, or in the old man's inertia, which is not very young. The Anglo-Saxon women, so called, aroused all the peoples of the earth by a movement that seems destined to liberate the women of East and West, of North and South. The age of Pericles will be eclipsed, we hope, by a greater age when women shall be free. The senile civ- ilizations shall take on youthful vigor while holding fast to mature wisdom. If this shall 146 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FEEEDOM come to pass it will be through, world-wide co- operation of earnest men and women. Idle polemics on the superiority of one sex has gone out of fashion. It no longer is a question of capability, but of relative differ- ences of function between the sexes functions which must be co-ordinated if we would achieve the greatest good for both. It makes no differ- ence whether the average brain of man is heav- ier than that of woman; but if it did matter, Professor L. Manouvrier's deductions would be pertinent; for he has shown "that the ac- tive organic mass of woman's body is to that of man's as, at most, seventy to one hundred", w r hilst her " brain-weight is to man's as ninety to one hundred". This " superiority of com- parative brain-mass, however, implies no in- tellectual superiority", he adds, "but is merely a characteristic of short people and children". The fact of relativity between the sexes is the sole basis of a philosophy that has any prag- matic bearing on the development of the race. The obvious differences between men and women are structural, physiologic, and psychic ; sociologically, their differences are of opportu- nity and training; intellectually, the possibil- ities are equally common to both. It may be said broadly that man is stronger of body w^oman is stronger of constitution; that man is a better fighting animal woman is a better OVERMAN AND TTNDERMAN 147 domesticator ; that man is better fitted to guard the home than is woman who created it; that man has become a better inventor of the arts and implements of war, just as woman has come to surpass him in the domestic arts. Thus the sexes differ in characteristics which, how- ever, overlap and interweave. On these co- ordinated differences the strength of the race stands. It is suggested that the human being is, among other things, a detached form of con- sciousness conditioned by what we call en- vironment a form which epitomizes the uni- verse a form of consciousness that has become intensified as a focus intensifies light by making the rays conical a form that is sentient and in a way, automatic. This idea is supported in many ways, among others by the facility with which the soul adapts itself as its needs alter. We find a new psychologic force, so to speak, springing up wherever there is a new need. Conditions change and men and women are sup- posed to change with them. How much they really do change is a question. Through the darkness of ignorance the sexes stumbled and fell into the bogs of competition and blind strife. Has human nature been changed by the fall? No one can say. I fancy that woman still is as a healing salve to man's hurts a rest and a joy to his nerves the restorer of his 148 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FEEEDOM spent power, and the courage of his soul ; but, say some, competition has made her his nettle- rash, the thorn in his flesh, the gall in his wine. But the true man still is a pillar of strength to the true woman still her protector and pro- vider still her faithful, if somewhat frisky, comrade on life's trackless sands. I do not like to think of him as her assailant in ambush, who sets traps and digs pitfalls for her feet. I do not like to think of her as his vampire as the worm that turns as the antagonist of man. Nevertheless, as man and woman strive more and more for economic independence of one an- other, rather than for economic co-operation, they will find less and less spiritual need of one sex for the other; and consequently their sexual life will fall to lower levels. Human sexuality is an accurate barometer of spirituality. As each finds less spiritual need of the other, they will the more easily fall into opposition harm- ful to both; and thus they will tend to close in a vicious circle what should be the open helix of progress. It seems too self-evident to be stated again that there should be no conflict between the sexes, as sexes. True, the wage competition between men and women is asexual; but that competition should not exist. Equal pay for equal work is only commons ense practically ap- OVERMAN AND UNDERMAN 149 plied. Decency demands it, and the wellbeing of society can not exist without it. The successful person in well ordered society is not the one who has wrung riches and power from others not the one who has become con- spicuous for a day or for a century not the most learned, nor the greatest philanthropist; but that person who, in passing through the threatening days of this short life, renders the most good to others, and who inflicts and suf- fers the fewest wounds and the fewest defeats of soul. That person is successful to whom every day is a Sabbath day that brings a gleam of joy to the sentient world. Competition for bread between men and wom- en, or between adults and children, is mon- strous. Strife may strengthen the race, but conflict between the sexes must weaken it, be- cause nothing could be more contrary to reason and to every known principle of the higher order of things. Woman is essentially the home-keeper. It is natural that she should be the soul presiding at the hearth. Nothing could be better for the individual nothing better for society. But misfortune has driven her forth and thrust her into unsympathetic labor. She has been pushed into competition with man. Society has committed this sin against her and so long as the competition is tolerated, society has no right 150 {WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM to withhold from her any of the privileges of the game. The great law of sex is divergence of func- tion, unity of purpose. This beneficent law is violated every time woman assumes man's func- tions, or man woman's. But the onus of this violation should not fall on the unwilling victim. Man's regime dragged woman into the lists of capital and labor at war, or united in unscrupulous efforts to rob. While such condi- tions last, it is the clear duty of society on the whole to maintain fair play between the sexes. The sexes should not war against one another, but together against the causes of disorder against our blind system of economics against our ignorant schemes of education against the vices of capitalism, the manias of extreme rad- icalism, the superstitions of religion, the evils of our marriage system; against the haphaz- ards of parenthood, the crimes against child- hood and age against the cruelties of creed, greed, and custom against the prejudices of caste, wealth, and power. Not until the sexes strike hand and touch heart in a world-over movement seeking light where there is darkness, shall justice even so much as try to reign on earth. Men have tried to nationalize education. Women should try to nationalize health health of body and hygiene of soul. It is better for OVERMAN AND TJNDEBMAN 151 the State to have its citizens well-born than highly educated and measly. No degree of learning can atone for miserable inheritance. No nation can become great that can not pro- duce healthy children; but many nations have been great without state educational systems. The best primary school is the home; the best teacher is the wholesome influence of home. Colleges and universities are failures if not built on the foundation of the home-influences. The spirit of the home is woman. The society that drives her from her home into the market- place commits sin; and the society that forces her into unfit motherhood commits suicide. Man has written his own nature into the very constitution of society; he has made its law in his own image. The nature of woman has been forced to adapt itself to circumstances. Very likely, if woman had made the laws they would have been little better. The truth is that neither sex alone is competent to regulate the ethical and the intellectual relations of society, al- though either sex may, after a fashion, take care of the joint material resources. The awaken- ing of women to a realization that action on their part is necessary to social best being is one of the promising sociological phenomena of our times. Woman can reach her highest plane of devel- opment only by the cultivation and a conserva- 152 WOMAN FKOM BONDAGE TO FEEEDOM tion of her feminine characteristics and powers, not by the assumption of the masculine. The differences in character of men and women con- stitute the lure of the sexes, one for the other, from which springs the inspiration of the race. The secret of civilization lies not in the oblit- erating of these differences, but in the accentuat- ing and in the harmonizing of them. For the principles of human nature can no more be changed by our own conscious efforts than a man can lift himself by pulling his shoestrings. The collective soul of mankind can grow only through a co-operation of the sexes, in which man helps to make woman more womanly and woman helps to make man more manly, and in which both help to make coming generations healthier and free from the mistakes that have embarrassed their own generation. A commonsensibly arranged co-operation be- tween men and women should bring about equal rights under the law, equal opportunities, equal privileges, equal freedom of choice in mar- riage and divorce, equal moral and civic duties in all affairs that equally concern both sexes. Such self-evident truths should need no cham- pion in any enlightened age. It has been urged however that as men and women have different groups of feelings, their mental attitude is not the same, and therefore that they are not sub- ject to the same rules of governance. The an- OVERMAN AND UFDERMAN 153 swer to this is that woman stands at the gates of life man at the frontiers; one represents the metaphysical or idealistic side of_the race the other, the physical and practical side. Co- operative harmony is all the more essential to the welfare of the present generation, and it is quite indispensable to the future happiness of the child coiled in the loins of to-day. THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT OMAN was the first slave; she may be the last master. Nature intended her for neither. Conditions, new to ancient humanity, were responsible for her earlier bondage. The mind in its child- hood, and sentiment in its infancy may be for- given much. It is possible also that conditions in the future, for which humanity may not be prepared, shall make hers the master-sex. Give the race time enough however and neither sex will dominate the other. Give human beings time enough and there will be no sentient slaves left on earth. Men and women will be mas- ters not of each other but of themselves, of law, order, and energy. Justice will be their god. The traditions of human cruelty will be on a level with our folk-lore, or the tales of Atlantis. Mercy, no longer needed, will have fallen into poetic memory. Beauty and Strength will be the pillars of society ; and Love will be the only religion. Let us have confidence enough in humanity to predict its future attainments! Let us have reverence enough for its wise potentiality to 155 156 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM forecast its coining glory! Let us have a fixed faith in its destiny; and let us feel a fanatic happiness, if you please, in that faith ! But let us not close our eyes to the fact that the trail of the past is short compared with the road that humanity must travel in the future. Progress is very slow when measured by our nervous vision. Shift for a moment the view- point by so much as a concept, and all our changes appear to have come overnight; we are bewildered by the rush of things. One rea- son for this is that the mind of man is not pre- pared for the tragedies and comedies of life; if it were prepared, there would be neither tragedy nor comedy; and without its smiles and tears the soul would be poor indeed. "Whether we view progress as slow or swift, we must know that it will be long. The wise fatalist assumes that what has hap- pened, was inevitable ; that what is to happen, he may have a hand in. Nothing is gained by mourning over the past; but a great deal may be gained by considering the future. This makes it possible for mankind to think out its destiny. A little thought goes farther than much prayer. The feminist movement is hu- manity thinking in terms of social progress; and this thought is expressing itself through the vitality of womanhood. Primitive man fought the great cave-bear and THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT 157 the saber-tooth tiger and was victorious. His generations have overcome many more formi- dable obstacles. The victory of man over beast was owing to the advantages of flexible thought over rigid instinct. The mastery of man over his environment is the power of thought over nature. The feminist movement is the strug- gle of thought with the inertia of society the sluggish, unreasoning instinct of mass-mind. In this struggle thought must win. By accident or design, in some period of pre- historic darkness, the hand came in contact with a strange object which it grasped awk- wardly at first. The object was a key which the mind has learned to use and, by its use, to unlock the door of relativity that conditions all life. Through the door of relationship we discovered the laws of activity, called progress. The key is represented by invention which at first was crudely mechanical. The development of invention enabled man to gain increasing con- trol of the external world to transform it to his use and material benefit. The use of the key is represented by the automatic psychic power that came to be the soul of the social body. This soul contains, among other princi- ples, a moral force that guides human nature a force that aspires, as it were, to the ultimate control of our being. With this soul the fem- inist movement is concerned. 158 WOMAN FKOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM Primitive men singly fought wild beasts and slew them. Later men united to overcome the harsh conditions in which they found them- selves. Modern men socially organized are transcending one after another of the laws of ether and energy which hamper them. That is to say, continually we are bending natural prin- ciples to our will. "We have in fact learned how to make use of adverse phenomena as the sailor of contrary winds. So we shall learn to overcome the social inertia hostile to civ- ilization; and the feminist movement, as one of the factors of progress, will help to do it it has to help, for the die is cast. In time we shall rid ourselves of kings, capitalism, mili- tarism, and syndicalism. We shall find a means of making the soil of earth as free as the air of heaven; and the feminist movement is a step, we trust, in that direction. The children of primitive parents inherited the powers of brutes together with a few higher characteristics. Modern children inherit from all mankind more from organized society than from their direct progenitors. The children of to-day inherit the conquests of yesterday a little more readily than yesterday's defeats. That is the hope of the generations. A se- lective law, working through the mentality of mankind, seems to winnow the chaff from the wheat of time. Thus the people of this epoch THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT 159 are able to profit by the social consciousness of epochs past ; and the social consciousness of to-day will be modified, expanded and passed on to the children of to-morrow. The aim of the feminists should be to make this commun- istic soul a little more tender, a trifle more just, and slightly more comprehensive of personal nature. Social consciousness sweeps onward like a river fed by many streams. This does not mean a corresponding increase of individual in- tellectuality. The intellectual growth of indi- viduals generally, lags behind the growth of the intellectuality of society. The general level of personal intellectual capacity in any civilized nation to-day is not as high by a point or two as it was at the best period of Greek civiliza- tion, over two thousand years ago. Our mod- ern gains in comfort and material advancement are owing to the organization of a remarkable quasi-personality, or common mind of society. No better example of this phenomenon is needed than the mental, the moral, and the material co- ordination shown in the conduct of the world's greatest war. Our heritage from society may be likened to a ready-to-wear garment into which the per- sonality of the child is molded by the vague deity that presides over our spiritual nature and material environment, both more or less 160 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM in orderly relationship. That is to say, the child inherits adaptability; it is born with a mind capable of learning a mind extremely sensitive to social suggestion, to reflex think- ing: thinking in terms of aggregation; in a word, with a brain capable of inductive cerebra- tion, which is a kind of mental reverberation. Also the child is born with potential initiative. As the initiative becomes active, it affects its mental environment by action and reaction be- tween individual minds. Similar ideas and like purposes unite to produce an intenser initiative that is at once impersonal and social in its na- ture. If it were not for this fact, society once crystallized would remain changeless; classes used to bondage would remain in slavery for- ever; classes inured to degradation would ac- cept their lot as the "will of God"; and there would be no feminist nor any other humanist movement. The men and women who lifted hand or voice to make society better would be outlaws in perpetuity as they now are during life, or until society has had time to see its er- ror. As it is, all rational radicals, all reason- able reformers, all real lovers of their kind who translate their love into deeds are, during their lives, usually regarded by society as criminals. The sad truth of this social phenomenon has many examples : Christ not only was execrated THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT 161 by his contemporaries, but he was shamefully murdered; Lincoln was hated and traduced al- most to the hour of his assassination; Thomas Paine still is in disgrace; John Brown went to the gallows as a criminal lunatic; Eobert G. Ingersoll was despised by all good Christians during his life slandered and misunderstood by the pious since his death; Eugene V. Debs perhaps will die in prison calumniated and traduced by the very men and women whom he loves and serves; Margaret Sanger's righteous work is viciously condemned by the whole Cath- olic church ; Dr. William J. Robinson, American pioneer in the movement to control human birth for the benefit of all mankind a great philoso- pher one of the superb characters of our epoch probably is doomed to petty persecution all his days by pernicious numbskulls ; and per- haps he will be misunderstood always certain- ly by vast hordes of pious imbeciles. Wendell Phillips, "William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Mary Wollstonecraft, Annie Besant, Anna Howard Shaw, and thousands of others who have labored and sacrificed themselves to make the heart a little more tender, the mind a little broader, and to bring justice a little nearer, were unpopular during the greater part of their lives. Contemporary popularity is al- most a badge of shame, and usually it is the mark of mediocrity. 162 WOMAN" PROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM Although the child is molded to fit the clothes prepared by society, some kindly law working through variation and diversity, encourages personal enterprise and quickens individual in- vention. Fortunately, the individual may con- tribute a leavening that raises the level of the mass-mind. As all persons do not inherit alike, all can not render equally. The masses live by prescriptive rule, and think in terms of imitation ; but they have a communistic spirit that is easily touched by imagination or ro- mance ; thus the mass-mind may be aroused by individuals to imitate what is good, exceptional and rare, or wild and foolish. All propaganda is based on this fact, even the most pernicious. For it seems to be in the individual mind that the selective factors are so arranged that they have the power of co-ordinating experience both into wisdom and wickedness. The individual assembles scattered racial ideas into personal concepts. He invents, and society profits by his invention. An idea turns into machinery and wealth, into art and science, into mercy and the love of justice. Social consciousness is the synthesis of dis- .similar mental habits, dissimilar fetishes, sim- ilar ideals, common desires, habitual reactions, prevailing longings, similar sensations, estab- lished orders, etc. All these and many other factors synthetically unite in the engine of ac- THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT 163 tivity that makes for progress not only but that produces the awful cataclysms periodically shaking civilization and threatening society it- self. Germany has taught us what this en- gine can do when it is morally idiotic but sci- entifically efficient. Russia, bids us to beware. Capitalism, both friend and enemy of man, has ravished the soul of civilization whilst building its glittering dome. Bolshevism has drowned its noblest ideals in a sea of blood. Super- stition has done a like hideous thing in the name of religion whilst erecting splendid tem- ples to God. One need not reflect long to see that social consciousness easily splits up into class-consciousness readily capable of running amuck ; that unless the mass-mind is dominated by soul and lighted by reason, its dynamic en- gine is as likely to drive backward as forward ; and that it has indeed very often in history destroyed much of the good work that man has painfully done; for its blind caprices have im- peded progress for centuries, and more than once dragged us back into barbarism. It follows that the introduction of feminism into the management of affairs would be of lit- tle advantage to civilization if woman's head and heart brought nothing new and vivifying into our social consciousness. The hopeful fact however that woman is unlike man, yet his equal in all moral and intellectual possibilities, 164 WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FKEEDOM justifies the experiment. The field long fal- low gathers strength. Fresh psychic energy should be capable of stimulating sociologic growth of the right kind. The political rights of women, wisely exercised, should be of in- estimable service in the government. The cre- ative ingenuity of women should help us to build worthy social structures. The sensitive- ness of womanhood to moral principles should be a soul to the judiciary in its deliberations, and a conscience to our laws in their making. Society long has cogitated, besides its ma- terial interests, such subjects as immortality, religion, ethics, art, philosophy, etc.; but the question of simple justice to woman and child has had, relatively, little serious attention. The feminist awakening, as it is called, so widely active in so many different ways, is a phenome- non of social conscience at work, whereby hu- manity may be induced to think in nascent terms of progress. Primitive communities accepted the subordi- nate position of woman as natural, and there- fore proper to her sex. There were many rea- sons for this, some of which have been men- tioned. In a general way, sociologic influences of an inevitable nature, rather than rank de- pravity of the male liomo, determined her status. Her sex has made her dependent on man at recurrent times ; she was subject to sue- THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT 165 ceeding periods of emotional and mental in- ertia; she was ruled by superstition, and she was bound down by crude conventions ; she ever was more slave than man to imitation that, from time to time, arose to the dignity of custom and became a fashion; fashions founded on savage routine increased their sway over her as the elements of docility throve in her mind. As women were enslaved by the psychology of society working through their sex, so must they be liberated by the same means. The high tide of barbarism with its synchronous low ebb of ethical invention has passed we hope forever. "When the social organism is of a low order, its rigidity is high ; then it is that vicious sugges- tion runs rampant and progress becomes sta- tionary or turns backward. The feminist move- ment really has more intimate and vital rela- tions with the psychology of society than with forms of government and material welfare. The most important problem for feminism to consider, is that of sound citizenship. It is a poor country that exchanges health of body and soul for commercial wealth. That country is richest that has the most sound citizens, at once able-bodied and spiritually developed. "We can not expect robust children from sickly and over-worked parents. We can not hope for healthier children in the next generation unless we improve the conditions of this. "We must 166 WOMAX FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM not leave future generations wholly to chance, to ignorant whim, to brutal passion. The ob- ligations we owe to the past make us debtor to the future. "We can not discharge our debts to the dead, but our spiritual wealth and phys- ical vigor we can pass on to those who are about to live. If men are blind, women at least should see that the obligations of society to the pregnant woman are definite and clear as definite and clear as the duties of the expectant mother are to her unborn child duties that were sanely valued by the Chinese many centuries ago. It is over a thousand years since Madam Cheng wrote: ''Even before birth his education may begin ; and, therefore, the prospective mother of old, when lying down, lay straight ; when sitting down, sat upright; and when standing, stood erect. She would not taste strange flavors, nor have anything to do with spiritism ; if her food were not cut straight, she would not eat of it, and if her mat were not straight, she would not sit upon it. She would not look upon any objec- tionable sight, nor handle any impure thing. . . . Therefore, her sons were upright and eminent for their talents and virtues ; such was the result of antenatal training". It is commonly known that hundreds of thou- sands of expectant mothers, so called, are sur- rounded by the saddest of conditions, and that THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT 167 they are forced to live the most unhygienic of lives. What is society doing for these wom- en? Very little compared with what should be done. The philanthropist contents himself with giving a little of his ill-gotten gains for the posthumous perpetuation of his worthless name. The charitable organizations pay their officers fat salaries to insult the self-respect of help- less mothers and society continues the dance. Once we become civilized, charity will be re- garded as an impertinent and childish infamy. "When all human beings shall possess their rights, they will have no need of charity. It is the destiny of womanhood to solve many important problems, among which is that of marriage for marriage embraces more than things sexual. "Woman never will shed her many shackles until she has achieved economic independence, unrestricted activity, and birth control. When she has won this freedom, she will rise to the dignity of a thinking being strong enough to safeguard ,her own conscience con- cerning her freedom of choice in love and in motherhood. WOMAN SUFFRAGE T is too late to argue for or against the franchise alike for men and women for suffrage is the badge of all our tribe. The right of women to have a voice in government, no longer need be discussed since the exercise of that right vir- tually is in their control. The fight was long and bitter. It developed many interesting phases and not a few picturesque personages. It seems strange now that the fight was nec- essary. The backbone of woman suffrage is the dig- nity of womanhood. "Woman's spiritual nature is a sacrament that could not be profaned for- ever, nor could it be obscured by any degree of infernal cleverness. The whole issue of woman's enfranchisement centers in her per- sonal dignity as a human being, both intelligent and responsible. Every other consideration or contention is subservient to this imperious fact. No sensible person believed that the equal franchise, in itself, would solve our sorry eco- nomic scheme. Yet no one doubted that it would help to make some conditions better, since noth- ing could very well make them worse. Every- 169 170 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM body knows that our democracy has its defects ; and no one can be cock-sure that our system of suffrage is the best possible basis of govern- ment. Nevertheless, the ballot is the best in- strument of its kind that has been devised, and one as well suited to woman's use as to man's. The educational benefits and the governing powers of suffrage are about equal. What may be said for and against the one, may be said for and against the other with equal reason. Until the civic conscience of men becomes alert through education, the voting power of women should be helpful to society, because women may be expected to react as quickly to civic as they do to other needs. Yet the suffrage ques- tion, economically considered, is a minor one in the feminist movement; but so far as decency or the dignity of womanhood is concerned, it is a major question that could not be ignored. The question of superiority of either sex did not enter the core of the problem at all hardly even the question of equality. The broad issue rather embraced the supplemental union of the natural differences between the sexes for the highest good of both. During the long fight many irrelevant contentions were raised by the champions on either side. One of these con- tentions was that of the emotionalism, com- monly ascribed to women. Of course, if society had to be governed by either emotionalism or WOMAN SUFFRAGE 171 rationalism, the choice would fall to reason. It so happened however that this issue was a man of straw. Besides, it has been demonstrated that the ruling powers of society perform best their functions when reason is tempered with emotion. Indeed the emotive and the rational phases of the woman's suffrage movement could not be considered separately any more than love and hope can be separated in our thought. There always will be both men and women more sensitive to the emotional than to the economic stress, just as there always will be others of both sexes engrossed with the eco- nomic problems of society. It was futile there- fore to argue whether woman was disqualified for full citizenship by her emotional tempera- ment, since she is possessed of reason as surely as man has emotion. Another objection raised against woman suf- frage, was woman's primary obligation to motherhood. That objection to her civicism really was an argument for it. Woman's sec- ondary obligation to follow the occupations of producer in the industrial, the scientific, and the aesthetic fields, also worked in favor of her enfranchisement. Since motherhood makes the male necessary, and since females have been driven to industrialism for livelihood, a politi- cal union of men and women has become almost as necessary to society as the sexual union al- 172 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM ways has been to the race. The results of sex- ual union automatically take care of themselves. Women fit for motherhood, having opportuni- ties for marriage, will supply the generations. "Women unfit for motherhood, or having no op- portunities to marry, will not idly languish, but they will engage in pursuits useful to them- selve and needful to society. Therefore, both the married and the unmarried women had a right to the ballot that could not be denied them with decency. As human beings, women are going to make the fool mistakes that are common to mankind ; and they will use the ballot as human beings use and misuse everything they handle. In that respect we do not expect them to differ from the men ; but as human fallibility has not been a sufficient reason for men to deny them- selves the ballot, it was not deemed a valid reason for withholding votes from women. If it were feasible to disfranchise the igno- rant and the vicious, it would be desirable to do so; and if it were practicable to admit only wise and good women to the polls, it would be well ; but as we have no such selective means at hand for the women more than for the men voters, we shall have to rely on the slowly awak- ening civic conscience, on the spread of educa- tion in political economy, and on the develop- WOMAN SUFFKAGE 173 ment of intellectual eSSciency among women, as among men, to make them fit electors. Man's opposition to woman's possession of civic and political rights, was mean enough ; but the attitude of the women antis, was meaner. The women who asked for enfranchisement did not propose to force other women to vote who did not wish to do so although it might be only political wisdom to penalize the refusal of any reputable citizen to cast a ballot. Suffrage has not interfered with woman's interest in the home ; it has done no harm to the instincts of motherhood, and is not likely to do any. Voting has not lessened the sexual attrac- tion of woman. Civicism will interfere with her womanly qualities no more than will an athletic training or a scientific schooling. The kind of woman that a normal man likes best, is one most fully developed of body and soul; the woman he likes least, is the manly woman, and the creature most despised by both sexes, is the ladylike man. With the advent of woman suffrage, ap- proaches by another step the era when woman shall be free from the curse of drunkenness thrust upon her and her children by man when womanhood and manhood shall share equally in the conquests of humanity when marriage shall rise above the level of a commercial trans- action, or a mere sensual license when relig- 174 iWOMAJST FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM ion shall not uphold the husband's sexual grati- fication at the expense of the wife's self-respect when, in short, the subserviency of women shall not be considered as the will of the Lord when "the man of God" and the man of the world will be regarded equally as enemies of civilization whenever they shall attempt to frame iniquity into laws that oppress women, or to apologize for such laws already in exist- ence. The cruelty of man's political dominance over woman was well shown in classic Roman times. Women were so humiliated in that vaunted era that many sought escape by sui- cide. What relief was offered by the Roman Senate? A law was passed -to the effect that isuicides should have their naked bodies exposed in the street. It did not occur to the Senators that it might be better to legislate some abate- ment of the harsh conditions that made death by suicide preferable to living degradation ; but the Senators thought to punish the final desper- ate expression of wretchedness by attacking the virtue of modesty. This legislative enactment did not seek "to make life more attractive, but death more repulsive". Would this have hap- pened in Rome, we ask ourselves, if women had possessed the right to vote? During the heat of battle for woman suffrage, many odd issues were raised by the opposition. WOMAN SUFFRAGE 175 One of the most stupid was, that centuries of oppression had unfitted women for the exercise of this political right. Fortunately for us all, the effects of use and non-use of political rights are not transmitted to offspring; but if they were, the effects of disuse would not be inher- ited by one sex alone, since women bear sons as well as daughters. Happily also, daughters no more than sons inherit the effects of their mothers' deprivations. Individuals transmit acquired character, capacity, capability. For example, no linguist, however proficient, can transmit his linguistic accomplishments to his offspring. His child, like that of the unlettered peasant, must begin by learning the alphabet or its equivalent. The child can inherit only such characteristics as those which enabled the parent to become, for instance, a great linguist or a, great musician. Those who fought the movement for the emancipation of woman from economic and po- litical bondage, were slow to understand the plea that encircled the earth; they persisted in shouting inanities such as the Almighty's "de- signs", revealed by woman's "deeply im- planted instincts", etc.; they did not under- stand that woman's instincts were implanted by the hard conditions of her lot ; and they were blind to the absurdity of making distinctions without differences; they never questioned 176 WOMAN PROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM their own knowledge of the divine will, nor did they wonder how it happened that they had been favored above others with this knowledge. Another silly objection to equal suffrage, was the implication that woman wished to be man because she asked for equal consideration un- der the law, equal opportunity to live as a self- respecting citizen of the state, equal chance to be useful and happy. Her desire to vote was no sign that she wished to be a butcher, or even a soldier. If killing must continue, there are sausages to be made at home whilst men do the sticking afield. The women who wish to vote are not clamoring to wallow in the political mudholes made slimy by men. The women who can not trust themselves in politics need not enter that field merely because they have the right to do so ; but they are extremely rude and unreasonable when they try to keep other women out who wish to enter. Every right is coupled with a duty. The right to live and be happy is yoked to the duty to let others live and be happy. The only " di- vine right" of kings, as Carlyle says, "is the divine right to live as kingly men". The rights of women are the duties of men; and " votes for women" is a draft by the future, the first in- stalments of which we are now beginning to pay. The conscience of society begins to feel that WOMAN SUFFRAGE 177 if woman may own property or possess any other civic right or any political privilege, there is no reason why she should not possess all civic rights and all political privileges equally with man; that if laws are made for the decent treatment of expectant mothers, it is reasonable that the mothers themselves should have some voice in the making of those laws. Society is beginning to see that if work- ingmen should have political rights, so should prospective mothers have them, for they do the most important of the world's work. These women not only work with their hands, but with every fibre of their pulsating hearts, with every drop of their blood, with every organ, and with every breath. Surely society is justified in allowing these workingwomen an equal right with workingmen to vote for legislative amel- ioration of their lot. Those who are engaged in the vital industry of the race should not be subordinate politically to those who work for the material interests of society, or to fill the coffers of our lords of finance. There are many opportunities for women with ballots to show their fitness to advance civilization. There is the old red mark of Cain on our statute books. The votes of women can wipe that out. Capital punishment and civiliza- tion can not exist in the same community. Nothing can be more demoralizing to society, 178 .WOMAN FROM B01O>AGE TO FREEDOM more hideous in its blight on the growing morals of children than the cold-blooded mur- ders committed by the state, and graphically ex- ploited by the public press. Voting women can remove this stain as easily as they have oblit- erated the corner saloon ; and they can help to enact other measures to satisfy justice. There is something we may yet learn from the queen-bee of the rights of motherhood, of the uselessness of the blind and selfish father- hood that deprives children of the support rightfully theirs. There are two lessons to be learned : the ancient lesson of life that the bees can teach us; and the more recent lesson of soulfulness that we must teach ourselves. Motherhood may be expected to teach this les- son, and to enforce it by helping to crystallize it in our laws. From one view-point, motherhood is the largest interrogation-point that con- fronts the mind's eye. The potentiality of motherhood through suffrage one of the many avenues of outlet no longer could be ignored by the body politic. "We do not want the influence of woman suf- frage to encourage mountebanks to multiply our dogmas. "We have creeds enough and enough religious precepts ; and already we have wasted enough time in useless prayer to feed the whole world by productive labor. "What we need is practical sense enough to be guided by WOMAN SUFFRAGE 179 equitable principles. Caste, aristocracy, class ! We always have had more than enough of these. We crave something now that will broaden life, something that will enhance our happiness, and ennoble our being. We want to civilize both the rich and the poor. We should like to see the candles of spiritual enlightenment burning on the altars of the church the cobwebs brushed off our statute books the lights of liberty for man, woman, and child burning in every home. Few of us are enthusiastic enough to believe that woman suffrage can do all these hallowed things; yet there is no doubt it can help in a thousand ways. For example, it i; can help to modify the marriage laws by injecting them with sensible eugenic principles. That can be done without establishing huaaan stud-farms, or neglecting the psychology ol love and our moral nature. If we wish science to improve heredity, to temper environment, 'to provide nurture, and to supervise the hygiene of body and soul, then science must have the support of our laws. If clean sentiment is to keep its seat in the soul, then men and women together should express tliis sentiment by means of the ballot whenever possible. For it should be borne in mind that the ballot is the voice of preference, a symbol of thought, the expression of a wish ; moreover, as an instrument of desire, it is essentially feminine rather than masculine. 180 WOMAN FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM The ballot is an implement lately devised to be used in .the art of living. It is a very simple little device which, if handled wisely, leads to large results. This implement, guided by the sensitive intuitive skill of womanhood, should be effective. The supreme art of living aims to enhance the good, to ennoble the commonplace, and to intensify the personal spirit to an imper- sonal or altruistic degree. Back of (error, this art models a grotesque grin on tie face of per- ception; it clothes comedy ^rith tragic garb; and it strips tragedy of its farcical embellish- ments. As we are only beginning to acquire some of its technic, it i-s well that we shall have thenceforward the help of women. In the long run. the soul infallibly will take care of itself oaly its appurtenances ever are in danger; but in the taking care of itself, the soul is apt to wander, and liable to incur pro- digious expense. Art is the means of forestall- ing this expense. When we apply the art of living-, we discover that its technic involves the whole field of human activity : humble toil, daily n?istakes, clear thought, high feeling, science, mechanics, ethics, politics, philosophy, econom- ics, religion, and the rest. Each of these in its own way is a worker-bee that contributes to the architecture and the life of the hive, which is the world, whose queen is the human soul brood- ing her dreams of the future. One sex standing WOMAN SUFFRAGE 181 alone is almost as impotent as a detached social unit. Individuals must keep in harmony with the trend of the race or perish. The sexes must keep in harmony or the race will perish. There is no room in the scheme of things for anarchy. The race-rhythm is elemental and inexorable; and to this rhythm art attunes itself. Enlightened universal co-operation between the racial units is out of the question for ages to come. The wholesome endeavors of some must be cancelled by the harmful activities of others. Good and evil oppose one another in the balances; slowly through the epochs must the scales rise and dip. Aside from religious precepts, and despite philosophic doubt, the good, it is hoped, gradually augments, and if so, it must predominate eventually over evil. The statistical method of observation indicates that good is a constructive element, so to speak, in the psychology of life. If it were otherwise if good were relative merely, and the tend- ency of psychology, evil and destructive the race would have perished long ago. We may be sure that the racial trend is to- ward well-being. In primordial epochs the trend was subconscious and slow. Only since mankind developed society, and society devel- oped consciousness, and consciousness devel- oped conscience, has progress become acceler- ated. The means of intensifying the conscious- 182 /WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM ness of society to the effects of good and evil, therefore, become more and more important; for by these means the soul is nurtured. Thus correctives and checks are valuable social tonics, and as useful in their way as the various ethical stimuli are in their way. The ballot is an effective inhibition, the use of which is es- pecially suitable to women. It is a significant fact that during all the rumpus raised over woman suffrage, no one formulated a valid argument against it. So- ciety seemed dimly to recognize that women not only had a right to vote, but that the exercise of that right was necessary to a complete wom- anhood. And why? Because, second only to the dignity of woman's personality, is her im- perative duty to co-operate with man in every way possible for the betterment of human be- ings, present and to come ; because, if she is not man's full partner in all human rights and priv- ileges, she lacks by so much the power of co- operation spiritually and therefore materially; because, if woman is not fit to vote, she is not fit to be wife and mother. The fewer rights pos- sessed, the more one is hampered. The civil- ized person must use for the benefit of society, not only every means at hand but other means must be invented as new needs arise. The spir- itually minded must use the eyes of the soul even more than the eyes of the body; for the WOMAN SUTFRAGB world that the civilized person sees does not exist to the savage. No valid argument was raised against woman suffrage, because 1 no one can argue against co-operation and good health by preaching anarchy and extolling the bless- ings of disease. The Crusades gave to Europe the advantages of foreign travel ; the result was new ideas and a broader horizon. Following the long period of fanaticism, came a reaction that slowly im- proved the condition of woman in society. Art was first to respond: minstrelsy began to sing; the trouvere, in the langue d'o'il, sang for the sake of the story ; the troubadour, in the langue d'oc, for the sake of lilting music; for the spirit of Provence, inherent in her beautiful language, was born to express above all else wonder and romance. The Chansons d 'Amour, de Geste, and the influence of the Minnesanger, all aided however indirectly, the bettering of woman's condition. Love and generous deeds were cele- brated until chivalry blossomed into flower, even although the flower was unlovely com- pared with others that we know. Then came the printing press, woman's best friend, her liberator and savior. Through the work of this marvelous engine she shall achieve full possession of all her rights, albeit the time is far-off. For the publishers them- selves will have to be emancipated from the per- 184 WOMAN" FROM BONDAGE TO FEEEDOM nicious influence of capital dedicated to special interests rather than the general good. We all know very well that our publishing houses for the most part, like our institutions of higher education, are so rankly commercial that they are slaves to the powers supplying them with capital when the pickings are lean. The mind of woman is becoming free, and her soul is nearing emancipation. She is think- ing and expressing her thoughts as usual. She is growing tired of silly tales, and she no longer is afraid of the bears that frighten little children. The religious bugaboo will eease in time to strike terror to her heart. She now de- mands what naturally belongs to her, and she sensibly rejects what was unnaturally thrust upon her. She still admires muscle in man, but she likes to see it associated with mind. She still is attracted by military garb still de- bauched by militarism as by some other isms ; but she will grow out of her weaknesses sooner or later. She is beginning to prefer opportun- ity to flattery, justice to charity. She no longer is satisfied with the crusts and crumbs of knowledge, nor with the petty slaveries entailed by our marriage system. She would rather stand alone than lean on a broken reed. She is brave enough to bear the burdens of this world, and she will be courageous enough to meet the fortunes of the next, if there be one, without WOMAN SUFFRAGE 185 the services of the clergy. Eventually she will rid herself of all the divers breeds of priestly parasites, cleansing her mind of sacerdotal filth. Then she will refuse politely but firmly to make popes of books or men; for she shall be free to think and to speak, to love and to be loved, to bear a babe within marriage or without by the man of her choice as conscientiously as she now votes. I can understand the reason why woman suf- frage was not a sizzling issue to some of the well-conditioned childless wives, to some mil- lionaires' old-maid daughters, to some "rich ladies" in pursuit of sensations, nor even to some well-to-do mothers happily occupied with the home. Many such women get along very well without the ballot. In their several ways they know the usual happiness and sorrow that must come to all. Suffrage could not add to their happiness nor take from their sorrow. If the bounds of womanhood reached no far- ther, equal suffrage would not matter. As it happens however there is another class of women here in the West as widely separated from their more fortunate sisters as night from day. They are the fruitful wives of the city's poor. These women feel most the evils of the corrupt ballot and the need of sympathetic suf- frage. For it is these wives and mothers who bear the heaviest burdens of our economic life ; 186 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM they must fight the hardest battles with the least hope and the poorest ammunition. Cease- lessly they must fight to live ; continually they are confronted by their relentless enemies : pov- erty, disease, and corruption in every form. Those who are lucky enough to have the wages of a husband for help, yet have greater diffi- culties to overcome than he who found the job and earned the unleavened dough. Every ex- penditure must be calculated to a nicety, if the family is to hold together even in fair weather, to say nothing of the storms when sickness and death and no work are the unwelcome guests. There are millions of these women fighting in every degree of misery, in every form of de- privation, in the most unsanitary environment and hygienic neglect. Have these women a right to vote, or should that privilege be con- served for the politician under the control of the landlords, the sweatshop bosses, the food profiteers, and the scallywags of wealth, power, and position? No one but a savage would imagine that these women have the interests of their children less at heart than their more fortunate sisters, or that the ethical principle is less vital because it throbs in their harrowed souls. Such women as these need the ballot, and their need is their right. Society does them scant justice in per- mitting them to try to better their sad lot by the WOMAN SUFFBAGE 187 ballot. I believe in these women. I believe they should have a chance to make life easier and better for themselves, and richer for their children. That reason alone should justify woman suffrage. "For the dew of its birth is the womb of the morning." THE ETHICS OF MARRIAGE, ETC. ARRIAGE naturally polygamous under the tribal conditions of one time, becomes as naturally polyan- drous in other circumstances at an- other time, or at the same time. For things are perceived to be good or bad according to circumstances. Indeed somewhere in the world, marriage always is both polygamous and poly- androus, according to environmental pressure and internal expansion according to need, habit, or custom. Montaigne keenly observed that the laws of conscience, which we pretend to believe are derived from nature, really proceed from custom. Assuming that group-marriage was first, po- lygamy and polyandry may be regarded as in- termediary steps leading to monogamy. This form of marriage, although the latest and in many respects the best, is not necessarily final. If the sexes were equally divided, and if human nature were a. little nearer perfect, monogamy would seem to be ideal. It fosters the virtues of the fireside, it stabilizes the home, increasing the cordial solidarity of family-life ; it harmon- 189 190 [WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM izes with the longings of womanhood in its flower. For woman at her best craves prece- dence and she thrives on preference. Not only that, she scrutinizes the manner of man's at- tentions to her more than she tries to divine the real essence of his intentions. The reasons for this are deeply rooted in the very life of the race. She discriminates between the value of a present and the personal compliment it im- plies. Personal attention that is to say, the expression of sentiment with its thousand tongues she values above everything else. In sentiment she is a monogamist even when poly- andric in practice. But with all tha+ may be said for monogamy, a question remains in the minds of some think- ers whether polyandry, had it been general, would not have freed woman, many centuries ago, to the extent at least that polygamy kept her in bondage. Certain it is that neither polyg- amy nor monogamy, by itself, has done much for the freedom and the spiritual elevation of woman. On the contrary, these two forms of marriage have been at the root of innumerable varieties of violence and cruelty, including slavery and prostitution. If we leave out of marriage the spirituality of union, so uncom- monly found in it, one form is about as degrad- ing as another. Woman never can hope to at- tain her higher spiritual possibilities until she THE ETHICS OF MAKBIAGE, ETC. 191 achieves freedom. So long as she is not eco- nomically free to marry nor legally free to divorce, she is held in loathsome restraint. Her noblest enchantment relies on her freedom of choice to mate with the man she loves ; and her meanest bondage is the marriage-yoke that holds her to the man she hates. No end of nonsense is rehashed as sentiment. The sacredness of our marriage system is preached beyond all reason. No system ever yet devised is sacred, unless sacredness is com- parative and measureable: this is sacred, that is more sacred, and something else, most sacred. What could be more ridiculous ? The horror of adultery springs from vanity, superstition, and custom rather than from outraged virtue. For there can be no virtue in sexual fidelity where either party is capable of violating the mar- riage vow. The sin of adultery is hypocrisy or deceit. Everybody knows that thousands of the noblest human beings have slipped the bonds without suffering or inflicting the least possible harm ; that sexual fidelity without love and contrary to wish is as grossly immoral as prostitution. Our marriage system is a very loose ball-and-socket or universal joint of con- nection, whereas true marriage is a rigid wiity, the happiness of which is unconscious of its cause and conscious only of its being. This union automatically dissolves when either party 192 (WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM becomes aware of its irksome rigidity. This embraces the ethics of real marriage so far as the personal relations of the coupled are con- cerned. Monogamy, as an institution, is compara- tively recent; and it was founded principally on religion, although there are some sensible secular reasons at its base. As an institution it is not a complete success. It is taught by the professional religionist that monogamy is the friend of woman her liberator and, through this or that brand of grace, her salvation. The plain truth is that this particular system has driven more women to prostitution, directly and indirectly, than almost any other cause. Prostitution is not a self-created evil, nor does it originate in the depths of innate, unmit- igated depravity. It is a social evil that springs from many sources, one of which is an artificial attempt to thwart a powerful natural instinct, or the mistaken endeavor to throttle rather than to guide an elemental passion. Our form of marriage, together with its associated sys- tem of morals, makes no provision for the un- married who for one reason or another can not marry, nor for the mismated who are held merely by form. Prostitution, a miserable makeshift, ruins both men and women while re- sponding to the most imperious command, save THE ETHICS OF MAKRIAGE, ETC. 193 one (that of hunger), issued by Nature to her living beings. A few words by Grete Meisel-Hess, one of the deep thinkers on this subject, will help to make my meaning plain. If there were space to spare, I should like to repeat the chapter on "The Necessity of Prostitution", in her mis- named book, "The Sexual Crisis". The book is misnamed, because there can be no crises in the broad evolution of sexuality. These rela- tions are so fundamentally a part of life itself that they never can take on the nature of a crisis whilst life endures in the orderly phenom- ena of our universe. "The necessity for prostitution depends mainly on social causes, which culminate in our marriage system. The happy marriage of the securely placed wife is founded upon the degradation and debasement of another woman, the prostitute, who is required to become a sexual instrument because she must furnish for men a preliminary stage on the way to mar- riage. The insistence upon two extremes for neither of which human nature is adapted, cre- ates the prostitute. These extremes are, on the one hand, the ideal of a satisfactory marriage, and on the other, as the only alternative left open to women by conventional morality, the demand that if unmarried they should lead an utterly barren life of renunciation. The heaven 194: WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM of marriage, the inferno of the brothel, or a complete negation of the sexual life : these are the only alternatives for women unless in- deed we accept Luther's suggestion that 'they must all be strangled '. . . . "We readily can understand how men have been forced to organize the institution of pros- titution, for men are simply incapable of en- during such a state of affairs. Even women can not endure it without suffering both in body and in mind. Logically enough, man has found a satisfaction for his own need which is for- bidden to woman by her very nature. ... In verity, the burden of misery and disgrace that falls upon the prostitute, whilst the man who makes use of her goes free, should attach to the society that renders possible and indeed inevit- able this degradation of the human sexual life. . . . Prostitution is a necessity, a regular occu- pation, an economic livelihood in the capital- ist market, a mode of life which millions of women are economically forced to adopt". Monogamic marriage is a contract not so much between two persons as between a couple and society. For its own purposes, society de- mands of sexual unions certain assurances. There must be an established order of parent- age to secure the order of succession in prop- erty rights. If society is to exercise a guard- ianship over personal rights, it must be a party THE ETHICS OF MAREIAGE, ETC. 195 to the contract of marriage between couples. The contract between the two must be subordi- nate to that between the couple and society. Thus the ethics of marriage stands on two legs : (a) ethics governing the relations between those coupled in marriage ; and (b) ethics gov- erning the relations between the married couple and society. This is the essence of all questions arising from the ethics of marriage and divorce. So far as society is concerned, it makes rules and is satisfied when they are followed. It is not interested in the particular hardships of its general rules, further than to adjust differ- ences arising from the infractions that are brought to its attention. Hideous immorality thrives under the protection of society so long as this immorality is conventional; but uncon- ventional virtue and immorality alike are liable to social inquisition. Good and bad marriages have the same social standing. Marriage per- mits the birth of children of hatred and disease equally with those of health and love. Marital brutality stands on the same level with the tenderest of conjugal relations. Society lacks judgment and it never was just. In an elevated state of society there would be no friction between the personal ethics of the married and the impersonal ethics binding the couple to society. Therefore, just in pro- portion as society lacks discrimination and soul, 196 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM its individual members are rightfully entitled to exercise discretion in their personal con- duct. Even the most stupid society assumes that the individual has some sense; for if he had none, there never could have been a social state. The best way to elevate society is to educate its units, thus interlocking their personal inter- ests and forcing the outflow into the common weal. Nothing is gained by trying to tear down and build anew. Ethics is of slow growth. It rests on the individual at last. When the ma- jority of individuals comprising a state acquire intelligence enough to understand the iniquity of a loveless marriage, divorce will be easy, re- spectable, and free. When the general intelli- gence rises a point or two, the church will lose its voice both in marriage and divorce. When men and women generally realize the immorality of sexual relations unsanctified by a high mu- tual desire, the closed marriage relations will adjust themselves to the open relations between marriage and society, and prostitution as it now exists will be no more. Women will not be free until they become in- telligent enough to see the sinfulness of their present bonds, and clever enough to shake off their shackles without too much noise. When they have become mistresses of their own bod- ies and souls, church and state will cease to THE ETHICS OF MARRIAGE, ETC. 197 forge fetters. The freedom of women all they can hope for, and all they deserve lies in their own hands. The key to that freedom is a little more knowledge and adroitness. BIRTH CONTROL ATURAL morality recognizes certain personal rights. For example, no one questions a person's right to the choice of food, clothing, and shelter. Sane folk never think of meddling in the sexual affairs of others. No right-minded person tries to tyrannize over love. Religious views are supposed to be personal, and their right of possession is unquestioned. No decent man would force a woman to become a mother against her will. By comparison, the act of rape merely in itself, is a virtue. If self-respect is anything more than a pleasing fiction, a woman should be the mistress of her own body. Natural ethics gives her the right to protect her chastity. Common decency permits her to choose the man who is to father her child. If there are any personal rights in this world over which church and state should have no control, it is the sexual right of a woman to say, Yes and No! These and similar rights are so deeply imbedded in natural morality that no clear- headed, clean-hearted person would wish to con- trovert them. 199 200 WOMAN FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM At this point social ethics intervenes. Natural and social morality, so to speak, are interwoven. In effect, there are no detached personal rights existing as such in a state of society. For ex- ample, a man selects food and clothing within the loose limitations of the general rule made for the well-being of all, amongst whom he lives. Sexual relations are restricted by society. Love is the only social anarchist not in chains because society has found no means to enslave it ; church and state have not been able to govern it either by fear or by law. Eeligious belief, largely a matter of accident, is tractable because gravita- tional. Enforced motherhood, through mar- riage or otherwise, is a mixed form of slavery. Voluntary motherhood is the glory of a free soul. The church for its own purposes, and the state for the welfare of society, prescribe reg- ulations for the sexual relations between men and women. The church with mingled sincerity and hypocrisy stresses the future good of the soul in the present restrictions called marriage. Through marriage the state seeks the good of society as a whole. In the highest and best sense, both church and state have failed. Marriage then in one form or another, is the general rule to which men and women in a state of society conform. Naturally, this rule can take no account of exceptions, few or many. Even with the purest of purposes, marriage, 201 under church and state, becomes a form of slavery so far as the woman is concerned. Against the bondage of marriage, if not actu- ally out of it, arise the evils of prostitution and the many hardships attending other illicit sex- ual relations. Under the law, marriage makes the woman a brood slave. Legally or illegally conducted prostitution degrades and diseases the individual, and it demoralizes society. Free sexual intercourse burdens society with per- secutions for the crime of which society itself is guilty; and it debases society by the brutal punishment it inflicts upon the innocent. Un- der marriage, woman loses the right to protect her chastity ; but even if she retained that right it would be an empty one, continually subjected as she is to the pressure of custom and the de- sire of her husband whose employment of force is encouraged by church and state ; or she yields to a burst of her own baser passion. Is it any wonder that the supreme matter of reproduction is left to chance, to brutal force or gentler persuasion, to psychologic pressure ; or that conception should result from ignorance and the spurts of mere animal desire? Children come when they are not wanted, not needed, and when they can not be properly nourished and nurtured. Many of these children are born of indifference or hatred, of weakened mothers and unfit fathers. Untold thousands have no 202 WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FBEEDOM other heritage than disease and filth, and thou- sands of others, only shame. Millions of de- fectives are dumped on society to be persecuted after fashions of the poultry yard. Alms- houses, jails, hospitals, and expensive judicial machinery must be maintained for the protec- tion of this same precious society. Everybody knows that this is true; but how far-reaching and how terrible this truth is, ev- erybody does not know nor does everybody care. * As a race, we are densely ignorant, cruel, and barbarous. We do know enough how- ever to realize that something can be done to make a bad matter better. Many thousands of noble men and women have tried and are trying now to improve our sorry lot. There always is enough kindness in humanity to strive for bet- ter conditions. 2 The question is, "What shall be done? Shall we re-organize society? That is a big job. Shall we do away with marriage? That is im- practicable. Shall we destroy the state and start a new system of economics ? That is only a dream. However well it might be if the dream should come to pass, certainly we are not ready for anything of the kind now. Shall we destroy the church? First, we shall have to enlighten the mind to a degree beyond our present means ; J See Woman and the New Eace (Margaret Sanger). 2 See Birth Control or The Limitation of Offspring (Wm. J. Robinson, M. D.). BIETH CONTEOL 203 and besides, the church will destroy itself with its own poison all it needs is no opposition. As soon as it becomes clear to the mass-mind that the church and prostitution are equally re- lated to religion, one no more than the other, the church as an institution of slavery will pass as many others have, and, as it is hoped, all such institutions must. Shall we wipe out prostitu- tion! How? Can we do nothing then but build jails and asylums'? Shall we go on legislating? We may as well take up our little brooms to sweep back the tides. We may as well pass laws against the weather to protect shivering pov- erty. Ah, but we have philanthropists ! So we have, and we have had them for a long time. Having permitted unmoral men and women to pile up vast riches at the expense of others under our laws, shall we make other laws to convert the loot into "philanthropy", and thus destroy the last vestige of self-respect still clinging to the unfortunate? We have a practical remedy of great prom- ise. In the present state of affairs, one thing can be done for the boundless benefit of coming generations ; that is the voluntary reproduction of our kind. This will have to be determined largely by the women themselves. There is no objection to a little help from the men ; but the feminist movement will find it necessary to agitate the wisdom and to set the example in 204 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM practice, if it would succeed. Women will have to teach women how to avoid conception when unwilling or unfit to become mothers. They should be taught, who are stupid enough not to know, how sinful it is to bring forth an unwel- come child ; how fiendish it is to thrust a human being into life if that life must be one of misery. If every woman had at hand safe means to prevent conception, the millions of abortions and miscarriages annually trailing disease and death, would be prevented, and untold anguish abolished. These nleans are available ; they are as harmless as a tepid bath and as pure as a drop of dew. Physicians know and have the legal right to prescribe them; but doctors gen- erally are too hidebound or too mean to reveal this knowledge. Fortunately, thousands of women also have this knowledge. It is from them that the less fortunate sisters may hope for relief; and this enlightenment can be given successfully through an organization of women under the feminist movement. It should be made known universally that there are no moral nor other grounds against the prevention of conceptions; but that there are many reasons why induced abortions and miscarriages are harmful morally and physically ; that * * race sui- cide" is not to be feared whilst human nature remains human nature. For men and women will be parents so long as they are men and BIRTH CONTROL 205 women. The race is in no danger of suicide with the control of births in the possession of women. On the contrary, the race will grow better, stronger, happier with women the mis- tresses of their own bodies. The want and will to reproduce are vital instincts of our nature. The power and the wisdom to control our re- production can only strengthen the generative potentiality of our being. Laws prohibiting women from teaching their sisters how to prevent conception are generally disregarded. It is assumed that there is no virtue in obeying an act of legislation that is vicious, and so vitally harmful to the race. In the history of mankind, jails never had much terror for righteousness. But it is not neces- sary to pay the extreme penalty prescribed by bigoted law makers. The means of preventing conception can and should be given to all women in a lawful manner, for the means is a simple whiff of knowledge, easily imparted in a whisper. WOMEN AND THE GREAT WAR OMEN'S part in the most tragic of all wars, is well known. Their help has been felt in every branch of mil- itary service, and in all the depart- ments of civil life. On both sides of the Eastern battlefront, they were found fighting in the trenches, shoulder to shoulder with the men. Indeed several of the belligerent powers regu- larly enrolled girls in the fighting ranks. The Women's Auxiliary Army Corps was as much a part of the British army as was the Royal Engineers. As manual laborers and fieldhands, women took the place of the men ; as skilled laborers, their work in the factories was indispensable, and their endurance surprising. Almost over night wives and daughters became shop-keepers, wholesale merchants, traders, stokers, and drivers. In May, 1917, over 2,000 women were employed by the British Admiralty, alone. Women nurses were the goed angels to broken and blinded men. Wherever women en- tered the professions, their work equaled that of the men. In a word, feminism was recog- 207 208 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM nized world-over as well as in the warring countries. It is admitted everywhere that with- out the cqurageous efforts and the sacrifices of women, civilization now would be in a sorry plight. Orphans were cared for; the homeless were housed; the needy fed and clothed by women. Nothing has been too menial for their willing hands nothing too arduous for their weary bodies nothing too terrible for them to face with hope in their souls. Whenever women have been called to admin- istrative and executive positions, they have been successful; their inventive genius is equaled only by their enthusiasm; their emo- tional qualities have not unfitted them for any service, however trying. Not once have they failed. Besides bearing all this unusual stress of mind and body, they cared for their children, and they maintained their homes. Never again shall it be said that their sex disqualifies them for any human achievement. The noblest thing in the war was done by the women of France when they made provision for the children forced on the wives and daugh- ters of the invaded countries by the soldiers of the Central Powers. The French women be- came at once super-Christian, for they arose to the full height of humanity beyond which there is no eminence in this world. These women were opposed by all the worst WOMEN AND THE GREAT WAR 209 and by some of the best elements of passion: patriotism, love of the unsullied home, disgust, hatred, jealousy outrage unspeakable! Sol- diers on leave, returning to their families, found there the innocent intruders, thrust in and left by infamous enemies. The most of these husbands and fathers were hardened by the savagery of war; they were so brutalized by conditions that they could not endure the pres- ence of such children in their homes. It is but natural that soldiers, blinded by cruelty to the claims of innocence, should be deaf alike to the wails of mercy and the behests of justice. They saw in these baby-victims only the hateful re- minders of their own dishonor the living sym- bols of bestiality that had besmeared their homes during their absence. But the splendid womanhood of France found a means, at once tactful and humane, of providing for the de- spised and helpless little beings. Womanhood softened the cruelty so wickedly inflicted. Thanks to the active influence of French woman- hood, the outcasts were adopted by the govern- ment, to be reared and educated by the state. No holier act ever was performed by mankind. The strange elements of courage are as nec- essary in war as are troops and armament. It is owing to the women of France, Belgium, and England that the morale of their fighting-men remained fine during hard and disheartening 210 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM times. The women kept up the will-power of the armies at war; and women maintained the stability of governments when it seemed that anarchy was at hand, and that civilization must crumble to dust. Courage is born of motherhood. Man is the body but woman is the soul of the race. One presides over a spiritual realm, at the gates of breath; the other fights at the frontiers of our material life. Thus motherhood, actual and potential, always has been the moral support of war. This seems strange when one reflects that women and children are the chief sufferers ; but the reason is that from motherhood flows or- derly unselfishness; that is to say, motherhood is the fount of ethics. Motherhood posits the home; the home posits the family; the family, the community; the community, the nation. Ethics assumes that the highest good is attained through personal sacrifice to family, com- munity, country, race. Ethics submerges the instinct of self-preservation, of creature com- forts, of individual interest; and the ethic im- pulse rises to those higher levels that have been found to support the general good. Hence on woman relies largely the morale of embattled men. This war may or may not determine the is- sues between autocracy and democracy; it may or may not hasten the adjustment of differences WOMEX AND THE GREAT WAR 211 between capital and labor ; and it may leave un- solved the problems of militarism, eugenics, and caste; but it will free women from many an age-old bondage. It was in effect a war be- tween civilization and barbarism, in which the money-changers had a sinster hand. The stakes were the heaviest for which men have fought on the field or played in the Chancelleries of nations. Class distinctions are becoming less marked. Religious differences for the moment at least were forgotten. One soldier did not ask an- other, who fought at his side, if their creeds agreed; neither did the fraternity of the trenches cluster around the artificial standards of caste. Among the belligerent women much of the moonshine of title and social standing was put aside. The moonshine that would not down was found in our own country, where iso- lation from the horrors of war made it hard for the wife of the profiteer to give up the distinc- tions founded on wealth. The French soldiery cared little about the outward forms, the ceremonies, the dogmas of the church. Catholics and freethinkers were brothers-in-arms and cordial comrades. Both the Catholic mode of thought and the freethink- ers ' method of reasoning, were respected by all. The morality of the one was as good as that of the other. Heroism has no room for the differ- 212 WOMAN FKOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM ences of creed. Each soldier does his part and the rest is left to God, or Fate : 11 faut ce qu'il faut! or as the Italians say, Chesara sara! That is all. The brave priest and the gentle nun were neither more nor less because of their faith, for " faith without works is dead". Philosophers will inquire how this war has affected the status of womanhood in civilization. It seems to us that womanhood has risen to such heroic proportions that it stands trans- figured before a background of barbarism. It seems that the knell of woman's bondage has sounded ; and that her economic standing never more will be the same. Onward through the years, women must be the equal partners of men in the co-operating for the material and the spiritual advancement of the race. There is another, sadder phase of the phe- nomenon. Millions of women have been de- bauched by this war and the end is not yet in sight. Prostitution flowers along the military highways as it did around the camps. It has spread infection and moral poison that will con- taminate the stream of life, and the flow of gen- erative ethics, for many a year. The general tone of sexual morality has been lowered by brutal force and by a thousand insidious in- fluences. The barriers reared by decency through the ages were broken down over a large part of the habitable earth. The effects of all WOMEN AND THE GREAT WAR 213 this on the status of womanhood in society, and therefore on society itself, can not be estimated now. The third and fourth generations per- haps shall have turned to dust before it will be possible to compute the evils, and to appraise the benefits, flowing out of the late war. We hope that the race has suffered no lasting harm ; that in the fulness of time all its wounds will heal and leave no scars; and that womanhood will rise to nobler heights through "the great right of excessive wrong". MENTAL ATTITUDE E are beginning to appreciate the importance of point-of-view. So- ciety is gradually discovering the need of righteousness in mental at- titude. We shall yet learn how wise it is to be kind how ignorant it is to be cruel. Hospi- tality to light and change, hostility to darkness and stagnation must, in time, characterize the mental attitude of humanity. So far as we know to the contrary, there is no gain without loss. Change is justified or not by the relative nature of the gain or loss. As we have put on the first rags of spiritual grace we have had to lay off the glossy coat of animal perfection; yet we conceive the change from prehuman to human beings a good one. When man assumed the erect posture, he be- came the living symbol of exalted ideals. Through continual conflict with a brute pro- pensity to walk on four feet, instead of two, man won his soul. But the change of posture left his bowels poorly supported, and it made them prone to disorder. His bulging brain causes him to suffer; his highly developed nerve-cen- 215 216 WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM tres easily degenerate. While learning to walk spiritually, he stumbles and falls into physical disease. His deft fingers;, uncanny in their skill, are in striking contrast with some of his other organs, which are crippled and shrink- ing. As an animal, man is a failure ; as a demi- god, he is a disgrace. Only as a torch-bearer is he noble. Only in his mental attitude may he become divine. This hope justifies all his losses. This hope is the banner of his soul. Just what primitive man's mental atittude was, remains speculative. As Herbert Spencer suggests, it is not easy for a grown person to think a child's thoughts; so much more difficult is it to think in terms of the remote past. Very meager help is to be had in the little we know of the psychology of the lowest among contem- porary peoples. For owing to many factors, some of which are hidden, and others of a de- vious devolutionary character hard to follow, it is probable that the thoughts and ideas of the lowest living savages are different from those of the long-vanished primitive people. Strange as it may seem, and shocking as it must be to our pride, if we would discover the traces of primitive mental attitude, we must search, not in the dark cul-de-sacs of contemporary savage branches, but in the bright main avenue along which the descendants of early man are now marching toward civilization. MENTAL ATTITUDE 217 The peculiarities of physical environment press heavily upon the mental characteristics that determine social phenomena. The nearer we approach the primitive type of mind, the stronger grows the tendency to imitate and the weaker becomes the power to reflect. In low states of society, individuals live, as it were, by prescription; social phenomena seem crystal- lized ; and initiative appears to be absent. The type of the hut is fixed almost as rigidly as that of the nests of birds. The underdeveloped nervous system is well adapted to physical hardihood and toughness, but it restricts an output of muscular and mental energy equal to that of the more highly developed organism. The faculty of observation in primitive man necessarily was active, and therefore superficial in its powers. His restless and perpetual per- ception absorbed nearly all his mental energy. Among our most advanced peoples, the same effect crops out in artists. Persons whose vo- cation it is to observe and ceaselessly to note variations in color, tone, mass, line, and bal- ance, seldom are deep thinkers. Highly spe- cialized perception, ceaselessly exercised, leaves little time and less energy for deliberate reflection. The same principle shows itself in the mad rush of our times in pursuit of material gain. Obviously, the energy consumed in com- mercial occupations can not be employed for 218 WOMAN FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM ethical advancement any more than in philo- sophic deduction. Early man probably was devoid of wonder and incapable of astonishment. He knew noth- ing of the uniformity of relationship, called law, that colligates phenomena; therefore he was not surprised at anything. With no idea of natural causation, his credulity was pro- found and his curiosity slight. It may have re- quired hundreds of thousands of years for a single abstract idea to enter his mind. His mental attitude was emotional and extremely variable. It was subject to gusts of fury to sudden storms of passion. His mentality was barometric and meteorological. This type of mind is not rare to-day; and it is painfully notable in the conduct of mobs at lynchings ; it is commonplace in political and religious dem- onstrations. For individual examples one need not look beyond personal acquaintances. Her- bert Spencer draws a faithful likeness of the type, which includes some of our friends, in his description of an ideally primitive man : * ' Gov- erned as he is by despotic emotions that suc- cessively depose one another, instead of by a council of the emotions shared by all, the prim- itive man has an explosive, chaotic, incalculable behavior, which makes combined action diffi- cult". This persistent type of mind has been the MENTAL ATTITUDE 219 stumbling-block of the feminist movement, just as it always has been the barrier to all other progressive enterprises. Progress is possible only where primitive inertia breaks down. The large element of public opinion that would rele- gate women to a distinct sphere of action re- gardless of economic pressure, legislative in- justice, and newly risen necessities of conduct, is primordial. Public opinion is stupid when it fails to take account of the inevitable reactions to the ceaseless struggles of collective life. Public opinion is primitive in attitude when it would limit the aspirations of any human be- ings, white or black, brown or yellow, male or female. It is primitive when it would circum- scribe any human beings in their endeavors to emerge from a hateful to a happier state. Pub- lic opinion is primitive that would uncondition- ally limit the environment of women to the par- aphernalia of the maternity-ward or to the four walls of a home. It is primtive public opinion that would constrain the obligations of women to the bearing of babes merely to swell the ranks of voters, religious sects, and soldiers. It is a brutally primitive public opinion that would force woman to ''keep in her place"; the spiritual attitude of that opinion welcomes slavery, encourages the exploitation of one class to fill the pockets of another class. As I have said, woman fell into her position 220 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM naturally in early times ; and just as naturally she has tried to climb out in later times. Like man 's, her way has been progressive and retro- gressive by turns; and her relative position always has registered the state of society. "The habitual behavior to women among any people indicates with approximate truth the average power of the altruistic sentiments; and the in- dication thus yielded tells against the character of the primitive man. The actions of the stronger sex to the weaker among the uncivil- ized are frequently brutal, and even at best the conduct is unsympathetic. That slavery of women, often joined with cruelty to them, should be normal among savages, accepted as right, not by men only, but by women them- selves, proves that, whatever occasional dis- plays of altruism there may be, the ordinary flow of altruistic feeling is small". 1 Barbarism kept woman down for ages by hard work and heartless indifference. Civiliza- tion has kept her down by treating her as a spoiled child, by pampering her worst traits, by making inadequate provision for her needs, by neglecting her rights as a human being. It has been obvious for a long time that only through woman's own intiative would her po- sition be improved. She has taken this initia- 1 Herbert Spencer. MENTAL ATTITUDE 221 tive, which has been followed by the encourag- ing and prophetic results known to all. Woman made her first great steps toward freedom virtually unaided by man. But there can be no successful human movement without the co-operation, eventually, of both sexes; that is to say, co-operation between the two radically different groups of sex-characteris- tics. For biologically, society is made up of composite individuals belonging to separate or- ders ; these are, loosely speaking, male and fe- male. But it must be borne in mind that, eco- nomically, society contains a third factor that is composed of neuters, parasites, reactionaries, slaves, and masters. The neuters are the young children mere dimpled hopes of humanity together with the sexless crew, always of uncer- tain age. The numbing hardships of poverty, with its wretched deprivations, desexualize hordes of human beings early in life. The neg- ative mental attitude of these unfortunate drabs always hinders progress. The parasites, never content with their pickings, are distinct social burdens. The reactionaries are the lit- tle foxes that spoil the vines. The economic slaves merely give sustenance to society, and perish. The masters who wield the powers that be, content with the existing order, naturally oppose a change. Is it any wonder that the col- lective attitude of society is a wall hard for 222 WOMAN FBOM BONDAGE TO FKEEDOM woman to surmount in her struggles for freedom? It will be asked with reason, How shall this co-operation of the sexes be brought about? There is only one answer, By enlightenment. Fumbling in the dark will not do, for we have tried that. Beautiful theories will not do, for we have thousands of them that hardly could be improved. We must have the practical ap- plication of ethical formulae. We must have applied ethics, as we have applied mathematics. We must have economic and social engineers, since this is an age of engineering, just as we have mechanical and other engineers. Of eco- nomic preachers, of social reformers, of legal and religious pettifoggers, we have enough and to spare. We need efficiency engineers for the different branches of economics, working under intelligent organization. Naturally, we look for these sociologic efficiency engineers among the women actively engaged in the feminist movement. We are in need of the enlightenment that will enable the male sex to see the economic value of men being men and of women being women ; that is to say, the importance of cultivating all the best masculine characteristics in men, and the need of the assiduous development of the best feminine qualities of the women. The same lamp that lights the way to an orderly de- MENTAL ATTITUDE 223 velopment of manliness in the male sex, and to womanliness in the female sex, will enable both sexes to see the sanity of a general ethical as well as of the special sexual co-operation that keeps the race alive, sustaining the gaiety of nations. Both sexes will be led to see the wis- dom of thwarting the evil influences now at work in society; and together, men and women will discover the means of ridding society of its enemies. This is the essence of international- ism ; but the cause of internationalism never will be advanced by those who decry their own na- tion. Patriotism is a necessary step toward internationalism. Those who are false to their own families, to their own friends, to their own country, are not likely to be true to the broader principles of humanity. This light will have to be spread by the prop- aganda of the feminist movement which really should be called the humanist movement until both men and women can see clearly that there is, in actuality, no woman's movement involv- ing merely woman's rights, but rather that there is a progressive human movement, now headed by women, which involves the rights equally of both sexes. Society must be taught by practical means, rather than by precept, the importance of a righteous mental attitude; widespread organi- zation must demonstrate the necessity of this 224 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM imponderable ; and it must show the efficiency of sex-co-operation in the successful pursuit of a civilization that shall know, economically, neither color of skin nor prejudice of religion, neither sex nor caste ; that shall tolerate neither master nor slave ; that shall permit neither the overrich nor the miserably poor to disgrace mankind by their presence. Slowly dawns the day of enlightenment for humanity. As superficial observation and in- cessant perception of earlier periods gave way to reflection, so will the spiritual day follow the night of materialism. Humanity has developed eyes of the mind, and sentiment has placed them in the soul. Enhanced consciousness thrills an ever-increasing number of men and women. The mental attitude of mankind is painfully rising from its knees to stand erect. Human vision has enlarged its field. Multitudes already see through the eyes of the soul. These eyes de- mand of the mind an attitude that was impos- sible to our early progenitors. The necessity for divers points-of-view has become plain. The light of civilization may be expressed per- haps in terms that imply diversity of view- points. Take for example such a commonplace thing as a tree : The artist looks upon a tree and sees masses, lines, tones, shadows, and colors, through a gauze of air and the medium of his own person- MEXTAL ATTITUDE 225 ality. He sees these things in their relations, and from their relationship he draws expressive de- ductions which he unifies and vivifies with soul. He accents the beautiful even in noting the ugly. To him, objects turn into the rhetoric of thought, into a mood of being, or as Amiel says, into a state of mind. It is very fine to see a tree as an artist sees it, for he looks upon it through one of the little lenses of the soul. Unless he is a very gifted artist, he never suspects that the soul has a thousand other aesthetic eyes longing to behold this ordinary object. The student in science looks upon a tree through very different eyes. He sees family, and he peers into function. He observes the chemistry of cell-action, and he even may dream of cell-intelligence. He tries to account for the play between chlorophyl and sunlight; and he constructs beautiful theories in a vain effort to explain the two phases of heliotropism. He thinks he sees how the cells overcome gravity to a varying degree ; and he notes carefully the fixed habits of consciousness shown in constant patterns, which to him form variety of species. It is very wonderful to see a tree as a student in science sees it ; but he also looks through only one of the little lenses of the soul. Unless he is a very wise student, he never suspects how lit- tle he sees of a tree. 226 WOMAN FROM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM The religionist looks upon a tree and sees one of the many commonplace things God-given to man. "With commendable meekness, he thanks God for the beauty of trees and for the comfort they give. In their manifold service to man, he sees the kindly wisdom of Providence. He be- holds a tree through another little lens of the soul; and unless he has the inspiration of a prophet, he never suspects how little his one little eye sees of a tree. The moralist looks upon a tree and beholds ethical parallelism. He does not, ordinarily, ponder whether environment and psychical lines intersect or run parallel. He only sees in a splendid tree that which suggests rectitude of spirit; and the thought leaps to his brain: How fine a thing it is to be aplomb of soul up- right and proportionate in character indiffer- ent to the breath of cavil as the oak to the quar- ter of the wind ! To him, a tree is symbolic; therefore he re- gards an ugly tree with aversion. The deformed trunk and the unsightly limbs speak to him of moral obliquity. He applies the axe with sorrow, if he possess greatness of soul; but if his soul is small, he swings the axe with the un- feeling stroke of a Javert, an executioner of the law or with the smug content of a Calvinist inquisitor. He sees a tree through another MENTAL ATTITUDE 227 little lens of the soul, but lie never suspects how little he sees of a tree. The poet looks upon a tree, and sees all its leaves alive with dreams. Fairies are every- where among the boughs ; and all the branches are highways and by-ways of travel. He sees the play of color, the glints of light, as faintly twinkling stars in airy pools of shadow. He sees the happy homes of birds, where trysting lovers meet, and a whole world of joyous in- sect-life; or else "Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang' ', behold the symbol of mortal tragedy ! He sees the pastoral days emerge bright and free from their barbaric gloom ; and out of these days he makes golden poems to gladden the heart of man. He sees how close trees ever have been to the human heart, and he feels again all the won- drous influences they have had upon the mind ; he knows how helpful they have been to the soul. He sees parenthood and brotherhood and com- radeship in trees. He sees religion in their shadows and hope in their blossoms. He catches glimpses of a strange spirit that has been im- prisoned by Sculpture in the stone of Gothic structures. He walks among trees with venera- 228 WOMAN FEOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM tion. He puts forth his hands to touch them affectionately. He holds converse with them readily and easily, as with his own kind. He feels an awe in their presence that he never feels in the presence of men. And he knows, perhaps better than the others, that he looks upon a tree through only one small eye of the soul. And if he is a great poet, he becomes en- chanted with the wonderment of it all ; and this enchantment he passes on through the genera- tions of life to far-off epochs. Now for the sake of antithesis, let us take an- other example, Woman. The average man too long has looked upon the female of his kind principally through the little pig-eye slit, which sees only sex. His eyes are no better than button-holes burned in a blanket and they are just about as perceptive. His cunning little primitive eye is no improvement on the brute's;, his optical evolution ceased in a fringe of lashes. When he sees sex, he thinks he sees all there is to woman. As through a glass darkly he regards her as a beast of burden, as a thing of comfort, as the breeder of his spawn, as the warder of his brood, as the unpaid keeper of his house. He is as indifferent to her rights as he is sensitive to his own. He is horrified at the thought of a vote in her hands. He believes himself to be a special creation of Providence, and he is convinced that woman was an after- MENTAL ATTITUDE 229 thought for his benefit. His attitude conforms to his spiritual blindness. There are other men good men who re- gard women through eyes that see only moth- ers, sisters, and wives. These men entertain sentiments born of a vision that is fair, as far as it goes. But they can not see the slaves of economic bondage, nor the drowning women caught in the rising flood of altered social con- ditions. The little eyes of these men see both sex and self-sacrifice, but they are incapable of broader spiritual vision; their eyes are adapted only to the twilight of sentiment and to the half-light of justice. At best, they treat women kindly ; at worst, indifferently ; and they mistake condescension for comradship. Sleek and rotund, they go through life never once sus- pecting how blind they are. There are other men who see through the eyes of the soul by the light of reason. These men behold in women something higher than sex, something holier than sacrifice: the right to relative justice. Such men see a saintliness in motherhood that transcends natural acci- dent; they acknowledge the sustaining graces of womanly companionship; they feel its rap- ture and warmth; they recognize the dignity of her character, the sanctity of her person, and the possibilities of her destiny. They see beauty in her form, loveliness in her ways, 230 WOMAN" FBOM BONDAGE TO FREEDOM and they fancy that they see an aura called divine hovering about her. They see ail her rights too clearly to talk of "granting her privileges." In her personality they behold the most of human hope. For they see that woman symbolizes an endless avenue of evolu- tion; that she may be likened to a poem of promise; that she represents progression; and that she is double-wombed, being psychical as well as physical ; and that she is double-germed, having spiritual as well as protoplasmic pos- sibilities; that she stands for infinity, because she suggests endless development, whereas man represents only a blind alley branching off the highway of progress, and symbolizing power rather than promise; that he is too imperfect to represent infinity; that in terms of duration, man expresses the immediate present whilst woman, through her babe, expresses the endless future. Once man's spiritual vision shall be broad enough to encompass these things, his attitude will change ; and he will perceive it to be a duty, a privilege, and a pleasure to co-operate with woman in her efforts to reach her highest pos- sibilities. For as the poet says : On this soft anvil all the world was made. The following pages contain announce- ments of some of The Critic and Guide Co.'s publications AN EPOCH-MAKING BOOK Never-Told Tales GRAPHIC STORIES OF THE DISASTROUS RESULTS OF SEXUAL IGNORANCE By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. Editor of tJie American Journal of Urology and of The Critic and Guide Every doctor, every young man and woman, every newly-married souple, every parent who has grown-up children, should read this ftook. 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An honest, unbiased, truthful, strictly scientific and up-to-date book, dealing with the anatomy and physi- ology of the male sex organs, with the venereal diseases and then" prevention, and the manifestations of the sex instinct hi boys and men. Absolutely free from any cant, hypocrisy, falsehood, exaggeration, compromise, or any attempt to conc ; 4ate the stupid and ignorant. An elementary book written in plain, understandable language, which should be in the possession of every adolescent boy and every parent. Price, cloth bound, $2.00. Sex Knowledge ^ifSSff What Every Woman and Girl Should Know A Companion Volume to SEX KNOWLEDGE FOR MEN Price, cloth bound, $1.50. ADDRESS> THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. t2 MT. MORRIS PARK W. NEW YORK CITY Population and Birth A SYMPOSIUM EDITED BY EDEN and CEDAR PAUL One of the greatest books on Birth-Control in the English or any other language. By writers of international reputation. CONTENTS Introduction, by William J. Robinson; Mai thus, a Biographical and Critical Study, by Achilla Loria; Birth-Control and the Wage Earners, by Charles V. Drysdale; Race Suicide in the United States, by Ludwig Quessel; Eugenics, Birth-Control, and Social- ism, by Eden Paul; Economics of the Birth Strike, by Ludwig Quessel; Decline in the Birth-Rate, Nationality, and Civilisation, by Edward Bernstein; Philosophy of the Birth Strike, by Ludwig Quessel; Over-Population as a Cause of War, by B. Dunlop; The Decline in the Birth-Rate, by R. Manschke; Dysgenic Tendencies of Birth-Control and of the Feminist Movement, by S. H. Half or d; Women and Birth-Control, by F. W. Stella Browne; Editorial Sum- mary and Conclusion. Price $3.00 SMALL OR LARGE FAMILIES BIRTH-CONTROL FROM THE MORAL, RACIAL AND EUGENIC STANDPOINT BY Dr. C. V. DRYSDALE DR. HAVELOCK ELLIS DR. WILLIAM J. ROBINSON PROFESSOR A. GROTJAHN Price $1.50 V - ADDRESS ~r: THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. M MT. MORRIS PARK W. NEW YORK CITY SEX MORALITY PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE Will monogamy or variety prevail in the future ? Is continence injurious ? Are extra - marital relations ever justifiable ? Should there be one moral stand- ard for men and women ? Will our present moral code persist? These and similar questions are here discussed by original and unbiased thinkers as well as by orthodox conservatives. No matter what your opinion on the subject may be, no matter whether your ideas on the relations of the sexes are those of the 1 5th, 20th or 25th century, you should read this book. Nobody who is earnestly inter- ested in the sex question has a right to have any opinion on it without having read this volume, the price of which, in cloth, is $1.50, including postage. THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT. MORRIS PARK W. NEW YORK CITY DR. STEKEL'S ESSAYS Twelve Essays on Sex and Psychanalysis By W. STEKEL, M.D., Vienna A most remarkable collection of strikingly original, thought-provoking essays by the great Viennese psycho- analyst on subjects of vital interest to serious thinkers. HERE ARE THE TITLES OF THE ESSAYS: 1. Sexual Abstinence and Health. 2. Sleep, the Will to Sleep, and Insomnia. 3. Masked Onanism (Disguised Masturbation). 4. Masked Homosexuality. 5. On Suicide. 6. Obsessions : Then* Causes and Treatment 7. Obsessive Doubts. 8. A Contribution to the Study of Exhibitionism. 9. The Neurotic as an Actor. 10. The Masked Piety of the Neurotic. 11. Time in its Relationship to the Neurotic. 12. The Psychology of Kleptomania. 320 pages. Price, $3.00. THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MOUNT MORRIS PARK WEST NEW YORK Costs three dollars --is worth three hundred! MARRIED LIFE and HAPPINESS =OR= LOVE AND COMFORT IN THE HOME By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D. This is Dr. Robinson's nineteenth and best book, that is, best from the point of view of usefulness. For practical everyday use- fulness we know of no book in any language that can compare with it. It is the one book on the subject about which we do not hesitate to use superlatives. Every page of it is crowded with advice and in- formation which mean Love and Happiness and conservation of Sex Power for the husband and wife, peace and harmony in the home, health and comfort for the children, and prolongation of life for everybody. Not to read this book is cheating yourself of a great opportunity to increase the sum total of your health and happiness, of the health and happiness of those connected with you. This book should be in every home. In the homes of professional people and of workers, in the homes of the rich and the poor, in the homes of the classes and the masses it will prove equally useful, equally inspiring, equally contributory to health, happiness and comfort. The price of the book is three dollars. We have no hesitation in saying that for the valuable advice and information it contains it is well worth a hundred times the price. Isn't the maintenance of peace and harmony, the saving of a home from possible disruption worth three hundred dollars? It is surely worth three dollars, and you are certainly committing an injustice to yourself and your family if you do not secure a copy of the book at once. PRICE, $3.00 Order the 'Booh Now/ THE CRITIC AND GUIDE CO. 12 MT. MORRIS PARK WEST, NEW YORK A UNIQUE JOURNAL Dr. Robinson's Famous Little Montnly It is the most original journal in the country. It is the only aa of its kind, and is interesting from cover to cover. There is no routine, dead matter in it. ^ It is one of the very few journals that is opened with anticipation just as soon as it is received and of which every line is read with real interest. Not only are the special problems of the medical profession itself dealt with in a vigorous and progressive spirit, but the larger, social aspects of medicine and physiology are discussed in a fearless and radical manner. Many problems untouched by other publications, such as the sex question in all its varied phases, the economic causes of disease and other problems in medical sociology, are treated boldly and freely from the standpoint of modern science. In discussing questions which are considered taboo by the hyper-conservative, the editor says what he wants to say very plainly without regard for Mrs. Grundy. THE CRITIC AND GUIDE was a pioneer in the propaganda for birth control, venereal prophylaxis, sex education of the young, and free discussion of sexual problems in general. It contains more interesting and outspoken matter on these subjects than any other journal. While of great value to the practitioner for therapeutic sugges- tions of a practical, up-to-date and definite character, its editorials and special articles are what make THE CRITIC AND GUIDE unique among ic :*nals, read eagerly alike by the medical profession and the intelligent laity. PUBLISHED MONTHLY TWO DOLLARS A YEAR 12 MT. MORRIS PARK W. NEW YORK CITY