THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN SUGGESTIONS FROM THE PSYCHIC SIDE OF FEMINISM BY FLORENCE GUERTIN TUTTLE \\ THE ABINGDON PRESS NEW YORK CINCINNATI Copyright, 1915, by FLORENCE GUERTIN TUTTLE TO MY SONS. DAY AND GUERTIN TUTTLE. WHOSE COMPANIONSHIP AND NECESSITIES HAVE AWAKENED IN ME A SENSE OF LARGER RESPONSIBILITY "And a little child shall lead them." CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE FOREWORD 7 I. THE MISUNDERSTOOD WOMAN QUESTION. 11 THE CREATIVE AWAKENING II. WOMAN AND GENIUS 31 III. WHY A MENTALLY CREATIVE WOMANHOOD is DESIRABLE 50 THE SOCIAL AWAKENING IV. MOTHERHOOD 77 V. WOMAN AND THE REVALUATION or LIFE . 99 VI. THE RELATION OF WOMAN TO EUGENICS. . 123 VII. NATURAL AND SPIRITUAL SELECTION IN MARRIAGE. . , 146 FOREWORD THE European war instead of relegating the woman question to the background in reality forces it to the front. The work of Europe to-day is to a large degree being done by women. While the war is making widows and orphans it is also creating fem- inists of an advanced type. A feminist we assume to be a woman with an awakened sense of individual responsi- bility toward life, expressing this responsi- bility in action. Feminism becomes thus a matter of spiritual initiative and impulse. The woman's movement has been viewed from many angles. It has been seen as a sex problem, a domestic problem, an industrial problem, and a political problem, according to the insight, or the bewilderment, of the spectator. But the psychic awakening the real cause of feminism has been relatively overlooked. These chapters are an effort to trace to 7 8 FOREWORD their mental and spiritual sources the grow- ing activities of women, and to indicate that the freeing of woman's creative energies, instead of being inimical to human progress, is in reality necessary to it. F. G. T. THE MISUNDERSTOOD WOMAN QUESTION CHAPTER I THE MISUNDERSTOOD WOMAN QUESTION IT is hardly an exaggeration to say that no other question of modern times has been so much discussed, and so befogged and ob- scured in the discussion, as the omnipresent woman question. And the reason is not far to seek: we are still in its throes. An object viewed too near is likely to.be thrown out of focus. Also the very magnitude of the ques- tion alarms and confuses us. pne half the race, and all posterity, seem threatened by the new activities of women. The business of life is to preserve racial integrity. Small wonder, then, that the world regards obliquely and with suspicion the apparent revolt of so large a proportion of its com- ponent parts. But is there any occasion for real alarm? May we not, by a process of elimination, arrive at the source of misunderstanding? We may not comprehend the woman ques- tion, for instance, if we regard merely the 11 12 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN woman of to-day. It is necessary to take the long look down the ages and visualize the woman of all time. And one must focus this woman in her relation to the march of human events. To isolate the question is to see woman under the shadow of an eclipse, an attenuated crescent, not a fully rounded orb. When woman is placed, thus, in her his- toric setting, the question of feminism be- comes not a woman's problem but a race problem. For the woman question is the child question, and the child question is, or should be, the subject of paramount impor- tance to both men and women. The woman question becomes, therefore, of supreme interest to humanity, ranking first in those problems that loom largest on the twentieth century horizon. Nor may this vital subject be compre- hended while it is still regarded in the light of sex, only. In the great changes of modern life the position of woman has become not a sex but a social question a question of how best to utilize to social advantage THE MISUNDERSTOOD QUESTION 13 woman's liberated energies. He who still considers woman as an individual in her re- lationship to man alone after the manner of certain novelists upon whose sensitive souls the undigested woman question lies heavily must necessarily regard her with sex predominant. Scientific sociology for- bids this exclusive view. To comprehend the woman question fully one must also con- sider woman in her relationship to society, with its multifarious, complex demands. The true banner bearers of the woman's movement are women who, for the most part, have fulfilled themselves as wives and mothers and who are now fulfilling them- selves still further in some form of socially productive work. Such women embody the true meaning of feminism: mental and spiritual advancement. They do not decry sex. They are too sane and too human. Neither do they unnecessarily extol it nor acknowledge its so-called "limitations." If women in the past, they would argue, when families were large, could still fulfill them- selves as industrial workers, when the labor 14. THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN of the world was cruelly manual, and woman bore the lion's share surely woman to-day can fulfill herself as mother and world worker, when the family is reduced and work has become largely mechanical or clerical. The woman's movement includes sex but is not limited by it. Above all, the woman question is not one of sex antagonism, as a few ultrafemin- ists charge. No movement in history has ever made for so profound sex unity, since the aim of feminism is to place humanity on a more equitable and unifying plane. The interests of men and women are equal and indissoluble: race guardianship and preser- vation. The opportunities must also be equal. One might as well talk of antagonism between wave and tide, or moon and star. Fortunately the deep-seated law of attrac- tion between men and women is potent enough to offset any antagonism, fancied or real. How do we judge this subject of primary racial importance? Do we view it in the light of pure reason and applied science? THE MISUNDERSTOOD QUESTION 15 The very strength of our interest forbids. It is not an exaggeration to say that two thirds of the world consider the woman question, not according to reason and logic, but from the mists of individual prejudice and an inherited bias. Yet because of its very gravity no other problem so challenges the impersonal, scien- tific mind. No question is regarded seriously, to-day, that will not survive the scientific test. Scientific formula is applied in every direction, from the efficiency of the brick- layer to the method of the college professor, but not to the woman question. A woman- hood evolving, according to well-established laws, from the lower to the higher, from the simple to the complex, from the homo- geneous to the heterogeneous, is not yet considered, except in rare instances, a normal, scientific growth. In the average mind, wherein lies the sup- posed menace of feminism? Analyzed, would it not read thus : if woman be allowed unlimited freedom to expand and to enter all channels of creative activity, will she 16 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN not neglect the most fundamental part of her nature, motherhood, or at least disregard the more than precious blood of her blood and bone of her bone? This view of the question is supremely important. But it is a material view and as such only partial. For herein lies the crux of the misunderstood woman question: it is usually regarded in its material aspect, whereas the woman's movement, in its orig- inal essence, is spiritual. It is an inner revolution before it is an outer revolt, sub- jective before objective. All the recent un- precedented activities of women have been but manifestations of this inner quickening. Arising from interior necessity, they are but symbols of a spiritual revolution sweeping the sisterhood of the earth. They are the result of cause and effect, of action and re- action on a psychic plane. Any view less comprehensive than this spiritually inclusive view is superficial, and therefore imperfect. What occasioned the feminist movement? Throughout the ages the life of woman, from evolutionary necessity, was one of hard THE MISUNDERSTOOD QUESTION 17 labor, almost exclusively physical. Before woman could develop psychically it was necessary that she should first be freed from the obligation of the world's drudgery. The invention of machinery was the real emanci- pator of woman's spiritual energies, bestow- ing an unprecedented leisure. The privi- leges of the higher education, granted in the middle of the last century, awoke the feminine brain cell and released woman's intellectual faculties. For the primitive occupations of woman, it must be remem- bered, while absorbing her complete atten- tion, did not directly exercise or develop her mind. There was no specific training of the feminine intellect. The projecting cause of the woman's movement, then, was a stimulated mentality. Admitting that the woman's movement has arisen from the compulsion of newly awakened powers, what do the terms mental and spiritual expansion for women imply? Do they embrace qualities of practical race value ? Or do they signify the mystical, the visionary, and the unreal? 18 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN Considering mental enlargement for women does feminism aim to make an in- tellectual Amazon of the future woman? Freedom of mental opportunity has not thus abnormally transformed man. All that can be claimed for man is that widespread educational opportunity long confined to the nobility and the clergy has raised the mental average. Can we not endure a like elevation of the sex whose average mentality has been the joke of the ages? The woman's movement is teaching women to think and that not by indirection. It is teaching that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, even in mental measurement. To-day, if a woman meditates a journey across the continent of Thought she need not drift, as heretofore, around Cape Horn. She may go straight from New York to San Francisco. This is great gain, not only for woman but for the race. For the value of human efficiency is now measured by the ability to think in a given line. All the long-established out- lets for woman's energy, from housework THE MISUNDERSTOOD QUESTION 19 to child-rearing, may be improved by a responsive, well-organized mind; while the newer activities office and shopwork, re- quiring concentration and alertness are absolutely dependent upon mental develop- ment and control. Mental expansion for women, then, im- plies a higher average of trained intelligence unfolding normally into all lines of human activity, not only where a certain accuracy of thought is required, but also where suc- cess depends absolutely upon the efficiency and initiative there attained. To define spiritual expansion becomes far more difficult since we find ourselves in the realm of the abstract rather than the con- crete. Perhaps no phrase in the English language is more misinterpreted than the phrase, "The life of the spirit." Belonging to the unseen, we do not yet recognize its relationship to the seen. Itself immaterial, we do not yet grasp its value materially. Invested almost entirely with the idea of religion, of the mystic and supernatural, the life of the spirit has been dismissed by the 20 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN practical as good, possibly, for priests, for dreamers, for women, but not for strong human beings with coursing red corpuscles. Yet modern metaphysicians tell us that the life of the spirit is as real as flesh and blood and doubly important since it dominates the physical. It is true that the life of the spirit is the God-life. To worship, however, is but one of its functions. The life of the spirit is also the life of the imagination, without which there could be no conception of Deity. To originate is its high mission. Consciously or unconsciously it becomes the motive power of character, of vocation, of destiny. The life of the spirit must, therefore, be widened to include the life of the imagination, of creative gifts and capacities. No invention, no work of art, no great business enterprise, but must first have its spiritual, imaginative prototype. The cultivation of the imagina- tion becomes, thus, of the highest practicality since upon its recognition depend all kinds and all degrees of success. The life of the spirit, instead of being supernatural, be- THE MISUNDERSTOOD QUESTION 21 comes, in reality, the supreme expression of the natural not yet understood. The term, "the spiritual awakening of woman," then, does not denote the religious awakening of woman, though a higher form of religion is necessarily a part of it. It signifies a womanhood moving irresistibly toward this highest realm of existence the exercise of creative imagination a move- ment absolutely essential for symmetrical racial development if humanity is to utilize all its creative possibilities. From this spiritually creative realm women, by the necessity of past material obligations, have been almost entirely de- barred. No sex is responsible for this in- hibition. Evolution is responsible. In the establishment of civilization it was impera- tive that material foundations should be laid first. And women have been the pile drivers of the race. Does this belated unfolding of feminine creative faculty indicate that the magic of feminism is somehow to transform every woman into an embryonic genius? Not at 22 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN all. It is not probable that genius, in the future, will be more common among women than among men. That the time has arrived when it will be increasingly recognized and encouraged may not be doubted. Not every one is gifted with creative imagination, but some kind of imagination is an original endowment with all. There is a perceptive and receptive endowment, capable of wide cultivation through intimacy with high standards, as well as the less general crea- tive genius. The spiritual awakening of women will have its most direct racial results in a keener recognition of genius in the young and a more widespread appreciation of its value to society. What the race has lost from centuries of undeveloped imagination in mothers can never be computed. To consider the effect of a quickened maternal imagination, re- acting upon the mind of the child, opens vistas dazzling to human possibility. And this, not alone through heredity, but through a more intelligent comprehension of the child mind. THE MISUNDERSTOOD QUESTION 23 The misunderstood child forms no little part of the misunderstood woman question. How often a youthful imagination a small human dynamo has had its natural abilities checked through lack of a maternal faculty capable of recognizing power and directing it. Only imagination recognizes imagina- tion. Spirit only sympathizes with spirit, and by intelligent, loving cooperation guides its natural aspirations. The imagination of the child is the pass- port to its future. Upon this passport de- pends the country the child is to enter. Or again, the imagination of the child is like a bird with untried wings. If the mother be unable to recognize them, except for pur- poses of millinery; if she be ignorant of the first principles of flight, the small pinions may never be unfolded. The spiritual com- prehension of the mother is a great factor in determining whether the child is to creep through life or to soar. Many a vocational misfit might thus be avoided, and an enor- mous percentage of human waste be saved. Comprehended, then, as the liberation of 24 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN woman's mental and spiritual energies for racial advantage is the woman's movement scientific? That is, does it run counter or parallel to established ideas of human growth? To do any logical thinking we are told that we must think in terms of the control- ling scientific thought of the age. As is well known, the scientific principle of to-day is the one of evolutionary development that the species, acted upon by heredity and en- vironment, is constantly passing through certain organic variations and adaptations. Without knowledge of this widespread law, human crafts have little perception of whence they came or whither they are going. Evolution becomes thus more than a com- pass. It is a mariner's chart for life. Comparatively recently this principle has taught us that nothing is fixed and station- ary, as we once amazingly believed, but that all things are moving, dynamic, being con- stantly acted upon by attractions from within and without. Darwin traced the law patiently through THE MISUNDERSTOOD QUESTION 25 the tireless formation of species. Herbert Spencer applied it to government, to educa- tion, to marriage, and to religion, showing that human institutions, too, are not fixed and final, but are fluid, plastic, still in the making. Karl Marx fitted the development theory to the evolution of industry, foretell- ing, as only the man of science who deals with law may foretell, the great industrial combinations of to-day. And Buckle, in his monumental fragment of generalization, successfully applied the idea to the growth of English civilization. We are generously willing to admit the working of this universal law in all these directions. Only over the heads of women do our affections, ever blinding our interests, inscribe, "Thou, and thou only, must not change." The habit of ages is against our possessing sufficient elasticity to allow even natural law to work, without protest, in the mothers of men. But is natural law unnatural only where women are concerned? Is science not science in conjunction with mothers only? Is evo- 26 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN lution going off at a tangent in women? We may answer only by learning what direc- tion it has taken in man. Women are the other half of the same species. We know that the variety of man's experi- ences has been the instigator of his progress. He has grown in proportion as he has exer- cised new functions, new abilities, daring to enter new fields. To the privilege of un- restricted range man owes his supremacy as world builder and master. The history of woman reveals a creature specialized almost entirely to one set of in- terests. From such specialization we should not expect versatility nor complete expres- sion. In point of developed mentality and exer- cise of the imagination, woman is far behind man. With woman, evolution has only just begun the conscious unfolding of the psychic. But it has begun. The same law is at work. Conditions at last permit. Racial advance demands it. The barque of womanhood, bearing the sacred freight of the children of the future, is turned in the same general THE MISUNDERSTOOD QUESTION 27 direction of creative evolution as that of man. Together they sail on the same seas, moving toward the same goal the port of a spiritually perfected race. The woman's movement, running thus parallel with accepted laws of human growth, and not counter to them, is distinc- tively scientific. Viewed in the light of human evolution, with its steady push from the physical to the mental, from the mental to the spiritual, the feminist movement takes its place logically in the sequence of the development of the human family. In cos- mic history it is of all events the most significant and far-reaching. To those of us who sit at the feet of science and still retain the old faith in expanded form, this spiritual development of the race seems a not impossible ideal. In fact any lesser goal is insufficient. Life on the mate- rial side, merely, fails to satisfy. We are born for spiritual adventure, true sailors, not of the wave but of the soul. Considered thus in its spiritual interpre- tation, alone, may the misunderstood woman 28 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN question be comprehended. It is then recog- nized as constructive, not destructive, in character. To recapitulate: the woman question is not an isolated question, but a related question. It is not a woman problem ; it is a race problem. It is not a sex question only it is social. Above all it is not mate- rial; it is spiritual a loosening of the psy- chically creative forces of women for race advancement. As such it follows the general trend of all human development on the three planes of being: body, mind, and spirit, and becomes scientific. It is not making for sex antagonism, but for deeper sex unity. Its influence is, therefore, not baneful but beneficent. Its object is not race confusion but race completion. With far higher as- pirations than women were capable of ful- filling in the past, it is developing a far higher type of motherhood than the world has ever known. It is Nature's own move- ment. To misunderstand and try to check it is not only to retard the cause of woman, but also to retard the spiritual advancement of mankind. THE CREATIVE AWAKENING CHAPTER II WOMAN AND GENIUS MONSIEUR GONCOURT once said: "There are no women of genius. The women of genius are all men." Fifty years ago this statement was largely true. To-day it is questionable, and in the expanding possibili- ties of the future it is likely to be increas- ingly doubted. The genius of women is beginning to unfold in every land. Twenty-five years ago the Norwegian seer, whose prophetic soul perceived the com- ing revolution in its most subtle aspects, said, "The women are knocking at the door." To-day that door has swung open, and women in hungry throngs have entered the realm of the arts, the sciences, and the pro- fessions. In denying the genius of women in the past the custom has obtained of comparing men and women as if psychical expansion had been simultaneous with them. The 31 32 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN recent revelations of science, however, have altered the point of view. No student, to- day, would dream of considering the cen- turies, critically, through the eyes of the artist, the musician, or the literary man, merely. To wrench the secrets from the past one must gaze through the eyes of the biologist and the sociologist. Only thus may the past lack of developed imagination in women be clear as a race necessity, or the present freeing of creative energy, with its great human possibilities, be understood. To the sociologist the genius of the early woman was expended just where it was im- peratively needed: in civilization building, in family construction. For this gigantic task all woman's energies, poured out on a material plane, were unflinchingly demanded and given. To have had any other form of genius generally expressed at an earlier period would have been detrimental to race establishment. The greatness of the early woman lay in the intense devotion of her service to humanity. Racially she was al- ways great. WOMAN AND GENIUS 33 When the anthropoidal life became "man," to aid in establishing this new, crude species two obligations were laid upon woman: first, to help make the species hu- man, and second, through the human to attain the spiritual. The dark ages of the subjection of woman and her dependence upon man contributed toward the first neces- sity by establishing the family virtues. The glory of to-day, with its unusual creative privileges, is her opportunity for the second. The recrimination of one sex by another for past transgressions becomes, therefore, superfluous. In the light of evolution there was no other way. Each sex did its best according to its light. To the scientist, then, woman looms great as the molder of family life, as con- structor of the humanities. There is genius enough in this achievement to satisfy the most ardent feminist, while as a foundation for future greatness it is a priceless heritage. For the basis of all true art is a knowledge of the humanities. The woman of the past instinctively obeyed nature's call. 34 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN What is not generally comprehended in the present is, as has been noted, that the universal awakening of woman to-day, with its consequent stirring of mentally creative powers, is also nature's call for race advancement. The time has arrived when mankind requires a freer, more de- veloped womanhood; when, through the agency of mechanical invention and the smaller family that is considered of modern social advantage, all the energies of woman are no longer required upon a material plane; when spiritually creative qualities are racially the most desirable to be devel- oped and transmitted, and must be so trans- mitted if we are to have a progressively evolving posterity. For it is as logical as the conclusion of a mathematical theorem : a developed imagination in the mothers must be followed by a developed imagination in the race. What proof have we to substantiate the claim that the woman's movement heralds the awakening of the imagination of woman ? Immediately some skeptic quite as likely a WOMAN AND GENIUS 35 woman, since the introduction of a new idea is more difficult of entrance to the conserva- tive woman's mind than to the man's in- quires : "Where is your great woman genius, the product of this half-century movement? Show us your feminine Phidias, your Dante, your Raphael." We might reply, show us their antitypes among modern men. The facts seem to indicate that every age pro- duces its own peculiar type of genius, and that the needs of the age determine what the character of the genius will be. We hear frequently that the Greek in- tellect, the Greek art, have never been equaled, consequently mankind has not pro- gressed. It is not likely, nor is it essential, that a period of its kind ever will be sur- passed. It gave the world classic standards, following the requirement of the times. The genius of to-day is none the less great be- cause it creates new standards, ministering to new requirements. The imagination of a Darwin, that weaves an epic poem from a skull ; of a Marconi, who writes his messages on the skies ; of an Edison, who uncoils and 36 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN sets in motion the electric currents of the earth, is none the less great because different and serving the needs of their times. Can we match these modern wizards with the names of women proportionately great? Happily we may, though the genius of woman has not been liberated that it may enter the lists with man. Not for sex com- petition but for sex completion is the imag- ination of woman to flower. The names of three women suggest themselves as show- ing that order of creative imagination which "perceives what no one else has perceived" and ministers to the needs of the times. Two of these women have made the entire race their debtor. The first, Madame Montes- sori, who originated a system that in time will revolutionize education namely, the development of the intellect through the freeing of the spirit of the child. Second, Madame Curie, codiscoverer of polonium and radium, the only human being who has twice won a Nobel prize. And the third, Mary Baker Eddy, who, no matter what we may think of her propaganda, did what no woman WOMAN AND GENIUS 37 in any other age could have done: success- fully established a religious cult and a phi- losophy of life. Too much should not yet be expected of this newborn attribute of women which is flooding schools of technical training and capturing often the highest awards. As yet it is a crude imagination. It has all the faults and all the rapture of youth. But the dew of spring is on it and the brightness of the morning. It has put a new light in the eye of woman, a new hope in her heart, for to her soul it has brought that bluebird of happiness the joy of congenial work the secret of eternal youth. Behind all genius, Emerson tells us, lies intellect, since genius is intellect construc- tive. Before the genius of woman could function it was necessary that the intellect of woman so little in evidence that it was denied existence throughout the ages should be aroused and trained. The gift of education, granted spasmodically at different historic periods, was not a universal privi- lege until sixty years ago a tick of the 38 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN clock on eternity's timepiece. To look for a high order of genius before this quickening of the feminine brain cell is folly. The genius that occasionally asserted itself in the past becomes almost superhuman in the light of the obstacles overcome. The ex- ceptions are the achievements of Hypatia in science, of Aspasia in philosophy, of Sappho in poetry, all examples of the exercise of woman's imagination where conditions, for a time, in a veritable Golden Age, were favorable to her psychical unfolding. It is frequently affirmed that genius makes its own opportunities. An examination of creative methods, however, indicates that even genius must have its favored conditions. Briefly considered, what were the require- ments of masculine genius in the past ? The first essential was singleness of pur- pose, devotion to an idea. Given the vision, men have passionately lived and died for it. The second necessity was laborious train- ing to attain mastery of technique. Thejthirp^reo^iiirement was seclusion, soli- tude, that thegift might bear fruit. Creative WOMAN AND GENIUS 39 processes are silent. One must listen with the inner ear to the spirit's whisperings. It is true that inspiration will make solitude anywhere. Yet inquire of a brain worker whether his genius burns brighter in the nursery or in his own sanctum. "Medita- tion means something growing," and in quietness do all things grow. Does this ex- plain the magnetic attraction between genius and garrets ? How many a masterpiece has sprung into being in an attic! How often has a materialistic world misjudged, attrib- uting the creation to the poverty rather than to the seclusion of the attic! The creative artist creates because he must, to save his own soul, "genius being that in whose power a man is." Serenity freedom from carping care has been a fourth necessity in the develop- ment of genius. This does not imply ex- emption from those great cataclysms of humanity emotional shocks that shatter and send the rays of genius soaring still higher. Sorrow and joy are heaven's manna to genius. Rather does it denote freedom 40 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN from those little, soul-wearing obligations against which Renan protested when he said, "My dream is to be housed, fed, and clothed without having to think about it, by some one who will take care of me, and leave me free." The biographies of most men of genius show that they have been housed, fed, and clothed and left free by some one gener- ally a devoted woman. The world does not always know of the sacrifice, as in the case of Jane Carlyle. A ewe lamb has neverthe- less been offered on the altar of nearly every successful genius. In the expression of genius, we see, then, that many things besides the original endow- ment have contributed. If we apply these requirements to the woman of the past we perceive how little the conditions of life have allowed her to meet them. Singleness of purpose how would the woman of early times have fulfilled this essential? What singleness of purpose, ex^ cept the welfare of the raw thing called humanity, could this patient mother of WOMAN AND GENIUS 41 countless sacrificed millions possess? She could not even consider the impulse. She would have been forced to throttle it, as doubtless often she did, throwing it back into the glory from which it had sprung. Time to perfect her gift? The burden bearer of the ages had no unoccupied time. And if she had leisure, where could she have received technical training since training schools for women did not exist? Seclusion? No woman knew the meaning of solitude, with little ones always at her breast or knee, even while she toiled. Serenity? Where was the unselfish man to stand between this servant of the ages and the world to see that she was "fed, clothed, and warmed without having to think about it," leaving her spirit free to give out its divine message ? He did not exist, and in the light of sociology we realize at last the blessing that he did not exist. In the establishment of early civiliza- tion the world did not require the fruit of woman's mind as well as that of man's. It required the fruit of her body and of her hands. No sex no man muzzled woman's 42 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN genius. A stern "Verbodden" was not written over the sacred temple of Art. Life itself prevented. Conditions forbade. The modern racial requirements of living were not yet ripe. In the rare examples where feminine genius did succeed in becoming articulate, examination proves that in some way the ordinary feminine obligations were set aside, and the requirements of genius were ful- filled. The life of Elizabeth Barrett Brown- ing offers a striking example. Ill health exempted her from the usual feminine tasks. An ambitious father awoke and trained her mind in classic lore. The quiet of a sick room offered seclusion for meditation. By virtue of her invalidism the essentials for the fruition of genius were realized as in her solitary sick room Elizabeth Barrett communed with her own soul and gave the world immortal results. A striking case in literary history also presents itself where a man stood between a woman and the demands of the world. The guardianship of George Henry Lewes WOMAN AND GENIUS 43 over the genius of George Eliot offers an example of a man's stimulating devotion creating the environment in which a woman's gift might blossom. In the past, if the push of a woman's talent did break through the conventional crust of ages, she became an object of scorn and sought in every way to cover her mis- deeds. Witness the gifted Bronte sisters. All three were vibrant with creative power. To the expression of the gift each brought a passionate singleness of purpose. Mental activity was trained by the guiding mind of their clergyman father. The quiet parson- age on the lonely moors offered solitude and serenity. Yet timidly, under the protection of masculine pseudonyms, like veritable thieves offering pilfered wares, these three sisters presented their virile works to the world. In short, no crime was ever more carefully concealed than the fact that these extraordinary women, one of whom was to blaze a new path in fiction, had developed genius of the first order. 44 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN What indications have we to-day that the conditions of life are at last favorable to the demand for the freedom of the feminine imagination? The servant of the ages may now herself be served. With great com- binations of industry to minister to her, with cooperative methods of living, with gigantic products of garment-making for selection, almost may she be "housed, clothed, fed, and warmed without having to think about it," leaving her spirit free to receive impres- sions and to create. Does the world need the creative genius of women as it needs that of men? In the complexities of modern life, the world needs all inspirational value that it can obtain the revelations of exceptional women as well as of exceptional men. No one sex possesses a monopoly of truth. Both must interpret it. The realm is inexhaustible, therefore there is room for both. Upon what will the unfolding of feminine genius depend? Upon the same power on which all human ability depends: upon the development of the imagination. But, some WOMAN AND GENIUS 45 one inquires, is not imagination a special gift? Is it something that may be culti- vated? No one accustomed to being with little children could question the possibility of imagination being, on the start of life, at least, a universal endowment. Children are full of imagination. Adults lose it. What becomes of this practical, spiritual gift, invaluable to the human family? Education ignores it. The rnvrHpf of lifft rmshrt] it In the ledger of daily events it is entered on the side of enormous waste. We have not yet learned to discern real human treasure. Economic conditions have probably done more to extinguish genius than any other direct cause. For every message that has been given to the world in spite of poverty, countless inspirations have been ruthlessly snuffed out because of it. Many an illu- mined soul has been exhausted in the twenties or thirties by the material fight for food, clothing, and shelter. Witness Keats. Stern necessity may have been the impelling power in certain rugged minds. 46 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN It has been the gravedigger in myriads with more subtle gifts. As the imagination of women is exercised and developed it will be quicker to recognize creative ability and so to environ it as to prevent these tragedies of mute genius. As the efforts of women are contributed more to society, halving the world's work, the grip of the economic and industrial system upon men will become less pressing. A new per- spective will be given to the importance of spiritual gifts. First things will then be placed first. The real riches of the earth will be seen to lie in the spiritual power of its creative men and women. Massenet said that he could compose only when his spirit was rested. To conserve the energy of these creators so that spiritual force may not be worn fine in soulgrinding struggles will take precedence over all social obliga- tions. Genius is supposed to be unaware of its own mysterious methods, creating blindly because it must. Yet in these days when the impenetrable is photographed, surely WOMAN AND GENIUS 47 some X-ray of thought may pierce even the baffling method of creative processes. As far as analysis may go we know that out of the infinite mind in which we live intuition flashes ideas to the imagination. And this we call inspiration. The imagination then bathes the idea in the emotions and decides on its technical form. And this we call Art. Intuition and the emotions become thus the handmaiden of the imagination, and through this of the arts. What attribute throughout the ages has been generously, though satirically, conceded to woman? Not reason. Unthinking beings do not reason. Has it not been intuition that quality facetiously defined as the thing a woman feels when she is wrong? Right or wrong, until recently, she has had to steer by it. She has had no other guide. Hence the intuition of woman developed to an abnormal degree. Emotional capacity, also, has never been denied woman in the historical or hysterical past. Emotion banked up into but one out- let of expression domesticity might well 48 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN be hysterical. Yet inherited excess of emo- tion should fertilize rather than sterilize woman's creative power and endow it with a humanness peculiarly its own. We see, then, that even as the derivation of genius "to beget, to bring forth" is peculiarly feminine, so the most striking characteristics of genius are also woman's most striking characteristics. Does this ex- plain why many masculine geniuses have been noticeably feminine ? It proves at least that in the essential qualities of genius there is nothing foreign to the feminine tempera- ment. But there- remains a far deeper reason why the spiritual insight of women should be embodied in concrete form. In mother- hood, as sculptor of humanity, woman rises to the supreme height of creation a height that only one sex may know. Man, the artist, has ever been impelled to depict woman, the Madonna and we have can- vases covered with flesh-and-blood mothers, with the spirit left out. When woman, the maternal, at last registers the profundities WOMAN AND GENIUS 49 of her peculiar experience, emphasizing the psychic character of motherhood, humanity should be enriched by its noblest renaissance in art. The fact that nature has given to one half the world fundamental spiritual revelations that are denied to the other half, places a new obligation on the creatively awakened woman. The ear of the world is listening for the message she will have to utter. CHAPTER III WHY A MENTALLY CREATIVE WOMANHOOD is DESIRABLE THE question no longer is relevant : "Is a mentally creative womanhood desirable?" as if repression were within the bounds of pos- sibility. As well try to stem Niagara as to suggest crowding woman back into channels of noncreative activity. The facts of the case are that feminism has opened the casket of woman's mental treasures and the precious gifts within have escaped on wings. For weal or woe the mind of woman has invaded almost all realms of the constructive imagin- ation; and having once tasted the joys of creation, and reaped the often substantial rewards, nothing less than utter annihilation can restrain its expression. For years the world accepted the dictum of certain scientists who kindly but elab- orately explained that the "germ plasm of CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 51 originality was lacking in the feminine brain cell." For centuries this statement seemed true. But what is the situation to-day? Take the realm of invention, for instance in the last part of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century nearly ten thousand patents were taken out in the United States by women alone more than in the whole previous record of the patent office. In this one direction, at least, a very good substitute for the "germ plasm of originality" in women seems to be actively at work. In the field of literature the novel and the short story, the first creative realm to be invaded by large numbers since writing is supposed to "come naturally" and to require less technical training than the other arts the golden profits of popularity are reaped as abundantly by women as by men. In the drama the box office receipts have been increased by woman's newly escaped brain cell, from Margaret Mayo's gold- mine farce, "Baby Mine," which convulsed two continents with clean feminine humor, to Josephine Peabody's poetic drama, "The 52 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN Piper," which captured the Shakesperian prize of $1,500 at Stratford. Note also the Winthrop Ames contest, which awarded $10,000 to the play, "Children of Earth," by Alice Brown. In sculpture, the daily prints abound with the work of women sculptors who toil for the love of the work- ing. In painting, women are forging to the front not only as portrait painters and illus- trators, but as mural decorators for libraries and municipal buildings. In conservatories of music women are winning prizes, though music is the most abstract of the arts, and the technicalities are the most difficult. And the wonder is, not that much of this flood of creative effort is on the plane of mildly entertaining mediocrity, but that a saving fraction is illuminated by the promise of better things to come. The charge has been made that through- out the centuries woman has been "spirit- ually sterile"; and as far as the expression of imagination is concerned, except in rare instances, this has been true. Like Margery Daw there wasn't any. Or to be more CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 53 exact, the imaginative faculties were not yet awakened. But let it not be forgotten that woman would have been traitorous to the race she was fostering had she followed the course of mentally creative activity earlier. As has been pointed out, the gifts that ancient civilizations demanded of women were gifts of an intensely practical nature, and she gave them royally in the blood and sinew of her body and the toiling sweat of her brow. Continual childbearing and in- cessant manual labor were her portion. His- torically, civilization has left its dark period of savage emergence from physical combat and struggle and entered a new era: the period of mental conquest of social and spiritual development. In this modern period of psychical activity woman has her contributory share quite as important as in the primitive regime. Only the character of the obligation has altered not the obliga- tion. The demand to-day is that woman should be spiritually fertile, psychically fer- tile. For the first time in history the duty of woman and the desire of woman may 54. THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN coincide. She may discharge her racial duty as mother creator, and still fulfill a desire for other forms of creation. She not only may but must, if progress is to be con- tinuous. It is important that the fact be kept in mind that the power behind the recent crea- tive output is the stimulating force of newly aroused emotional and intellectual faculties and that spiritual awakening always pre- cedes imaginative expression. When its origin is considered it will be seen that a womanhood, awakened in its highest inner forces, could no more resist creating than a seed could refrain from breaking through its shell. And the consequences? They are not disquieting, though those to whom appre- hension is an occupation may still find em- ployment. At the heart of things dwells infinite wisdom neither slumbering nor sleep- ing. The main result, and the main cause for congratulation that at last we have crossed the threshold of a mentally creative era for women, is that whereas in the past CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 55 the world has been led largely by the spiritual ideals of men, in the future it will be led by the spiritual ideals of men and women and be richer by one half. The spiritual awakening of woman, then, indicates that woman is now living, or may live, with the full expression of all her inner powers instead of only a part. The house of the brain is a many-roomed mansion. In her long, previous condition of race servi- tude, the practical activities of woman seldom allowed her to penetrate above the ground floor. Hers is now the joy of the explorer. She may be a Columbus to her own soul and mind. Like a child she is running curiously from cellar to cupola, in- vestigating and inhabiting this true home of all humanity the wonderful house of the brain. Who lives in only a part of this man- sion is but a lax tenant. To be human im- plies living in all one's mental apartments. This alone distinguishes from the brute. While a human being living at the full capacity of his powers is the accepted stand- ard, it must be admitted that it is a plane 66 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN to reach which few men or women care to make the effort. There is mental and spiritual inertia, as well as physical lassi- tude, to be overcome. Human nature, for the most part, prefers its necessary rut and follows the line of least resistance. We are strangers to the wonderful possibilities of our own endowment. When the novelty of being allowed a feminine mind with permission to use it has worn off, it is unfortunately not likely that the average woman will develop an ambition much greater than the average man. The residuum of great women, like the residuum of great men, will probably be small. Yet the spiritual minority are those by whom the race will be led. But suppose that this ghost of misappre- hension that stalks through the world in re- gard to the new activities of women were to become real the fear that somehow the alchemy of modern conditions will transform every woman into that rare type, the un- usual woman, and so lure her to neglect of physical function; suppose, even, that she CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 57 develop genius ? Would the desire to create on a spiritual plane rather than physiological plane, merely, enrich or impoverish the race ? Would it still be desirable for this woman to live up to her highest inner impulsion? The treasure of the world lies in its store- house of spiritual truths, messages that still come from the burning bush and from the wilderness. Revelations are not outgrown. Decalogues are still being written, parables unfolded. By these truths the vast propor- tion of humanity that has not yet learned to receive its revelations directly is admonished and led. When an ethical genius of this character appears and the transcendent genius is always ethical it matters little whether the instrument be a man or a woman. The vital point is the message for a needy world. Society to-day demands service of each individual. Somewhat of one's self each one must contribute to the social machinery or be a clog in the wheel. A few persons con- tribute ideas and these are the world's saviours. The majority give themselves in 58 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN some form of productive labor and they are the indispensable warp and woof of the social fabric. All are supposed to con- tribute an improved grade of children, that physical progress may not halt. In the first group the people who con- tribute ideas if the ideas be large enough, valuable enough to all mankind, we consider embodying those ideas in concrete form to be imperative. No phase of human endeavor exists that the emotions of parenthood will not enrich. But in those rare cases of uni- versal spiritual profit the highest loyalty to the world and to the individual remains to bring forth and perfect ideas. If the man of genius be faithful to his gift; if with travail of soul he begets the children of his vision, we exonerate him from the commonly accepted racial duty. Could anyone claim that Spencer would have served his age better by fathering a dozen children than by contributing his "First Principles"? Would a galaxy of little Car- rols have permanently delighted the reading world as the immortal "Alice"? No one CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 59 disputes the prerogative of a Plato, a Kant, or a Swedenborg to be celibate. Can we not grant the privilege of the same choice of life to women when driven by inner necessi- ties? Did Harriet Beecher Stowe discharge a higher duty in begetting a family than in writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin"? Was Mrs. Browning's beloved son as great a world contribution as "The Sonnets from the Portuguese" ? Which creation could society best afford to spare? Whether the expression of genius be "masculine or feminine," then, the spiritual heritage of women as well as men is needed and the creative faculties should be equally encouraged to function. Neither sex has a monopoly of vision. Ideas, like children, should not be stillborn. But suppose that we are willing to admit hurdling the obstacle of fear of the rare woman of genius developing her gift, ac- knowledging even the possibility that the race might be stimulated by the infusion of woman's inspiration as well as man's there remains the question of the average woman. 60 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN Is an average womanhood, mentally devel- oped and exercised as the woman's move- ment aims to develop and exercise the brain of woman, a menace or an advantage to posterity? In short, if the average woman be allowed complete latitude to energize in a mental sphere, will she retain sufficient vitality to energize in a physiological sphere, also? The amount of energy in all things, physi- cists tell us, remains constant. It may be transformed, as when coal becomes steam. Its form varies, but its value remains the same. Every individual possesses an inherent amount of energy to be wisely used and con- served, or to be dissipated and rendered valueless. Certain alarmists, who view the horizon in part, and whose narrowed eye- lids do not perceive the entire sweep of changed world conditions, observe a uni- versal racial tendency to a lowered birth rate in highly civilized countries; and without analyzing causes they cry "race degenera- tion," announcing the fact that women are CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 61 expending their energies on planes other than motherhood as the explanation. / As already stated, the energy of women always has been expended on other planes. If it had not been, man would not find him- self at that proud pinnacle of intellectual supremacy where he now stands. Without the manual labor of women there could have been no such liberal mental development for him. In the days when woman energized to the extent of an average of eight children she was not exempt from working also as the pack horse of humanity. At no period of the world's history could man have spared woman, either as originator of industry or as coworker with him, to specialize on motherhood alone. ) As in the past, when families were large, not all of the energies of women were spent in motherhood, but some went into vital labor, so to-day with the reduced, more highly developed family and the changed and vastly improved conditions of modern life all woman's energies are not consumed in child-rearing. Even if woman herself 62 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN were willing, society would not permit. Society, at an enormous expense per capita, places the child at an early age in the hands of trained educators. Theoretical^, we do not believe in the separation of mother and child. Practically, this is the condition that exists. School occupies the morning hours, outdoor play the afternoon. Many schools now provide luncheons for children with a decided improvement in nourished bodies and brains. A plan is also being considered, suggested by the Gary idea of combining "work, study, and play," to annex play- grounds, keeping the children all day, that play may be supervised, under the right con- ditions, and made as wholesome as work, since it is recognized that most of the evil in childhood is learned in the streets. In the Brushwood Boy that glimpse into spiritual dominions the mother con- tinued the custom of tucking her son into bed even when he returned as an officer; a habit, Kipling tells us, that must be maintained if the empire is to be preserved. In the ac- tivities imposed upon the modern male, the CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 63 curfew hour, alas! is often the only hour in which the mother is permitted this sweet communion. Fortunately, it is the best time for the exchange of confidences, for the strengthening of human ties, and for the forging of permanent spiritual bonds. During the daily absence of husband and children a woman may now energize in housework or some more congenial occupa- tion outside the home. The home will not depart from the house because the woman leaves it. Home consists of the quality of spirit diffused when the family is reunited. The important thing to preserve is the buoy- ancy of the mother's spirit, that she may not be too exhausted from work, whatever its character, to give of her inner forces to hus- band and children when they return. This attribute of light-hearted gladness in the mother is the true home cheer and the most precious memory of after life. Excessive social engagements may exhaust the mother's vitality quite as much as excessive house- work or office toil. For some temperaments there is no more nerve-racking preparation 64 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN for a joyous home reunion than several hotly contested rubbers of bridge. It is right that every step of the way of woman's new expenditures should be meas- ured by their effect upon motherhood. Above all others this is the criterion to be considered. It is also fair that the corre- sponding changes in the output of all energy should be observed as well as woman's changed relationship to industry and to social life. It is then seen that woman and labor are no more divorced than woman and motherhood. The truth about energy seems to be that every individual is a dynamo possessing not only a fixed amount of physical force, but a potential amount of mental energy also, and that the one needs exercising quite as much as the other. We all know this truth but persistently fail to practice it. The man of letters becomes pale from the excessive exer- cise of his intellect. A woman may glow like a rose from athletics, yet be withered at the top from an undeveloped mind. Only an occasional Maeterlinck or a Gladstone CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 65 embodies the double power of exercising both the mental and the physical powers. Hence, the difficulty in later life, either of using certain muscles or of making new brain paths, and the utter impossibility, in some minds, "of hospitality to a new idea." To those who would still keep the iron heel of convention on woman's progress, believ- ing sincerely in the continued restriction of her sphere, it has been pointed out that, physiologically, child rearing occupies only about one third of a woman's life. She may energize conscientiously as a mother, find- ing herself a grandmother at forty with a rich, new life of creative activity before her ; or she may find herself still capable, but dis- carded on society's scrap heap, the waste product of a system that has not yet learned to employ all its social forces. Earl Barnes tells us that the unutilized energies of the average woman of middle life, after her children no longer need her immediate attention, when with mature ex- perience she should be of greatest world value, is one of society's inexcusable wastes. 66 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN From this loss arises the problem of "the woman with the empty hands." Which shall it be for the still young matron whose children are out in the world, undergoing training from modern specialists whom no one mother could possibly rival real work, or fictitious busy-ness a potent social force or an effete has-been? This problem looms large as the specter of feminine middle life. To grow old serviceably and let the grace- fully take care of itself, that is the true ideal. Only in the complete use of all her energies may the years be robbed of their age-long enmity to the woman heart. There is hope for the woman of advancing years when, instead of finding herself a sere and yellow leaf, she becomes a social olive branch ; when instead of facing society's cold shoulder, youth's snubbings, the world's shadows, she finds herself embracing life's highest privi- lege the expression of personality when with ripened years and faculties she is pecul- iarly fitted to serve the community and does serve as creative agent in some needed direc- CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 67 tion. For it must be remembered that social creativeness is quite as important as the expression of artistic or inventive power. A Katharine Davis, who introduces new ideas into prison life, a Jane Addams, who revo- lutionizes social work, is no less creative than a Rosa Bonheur. The "germ plasm of originality" has but taken a different course. What effect a consciously cultivated im- agination, even in one sex, would have on humanity may not be estimated since educa- tion has never concentrated upon developing it. We have cultivated everything except this supreme human gift. The science of an improved race, study- ing life from within as well as from without, opens a comparatively new field. In the scarcity of material at hand, no more en- lightening work of the effect of developed mentality in both parents is available than Francis Galton's Genius and Heredity. The genius with which Galton deals, how- ever, must be translated as unusual ability to contribute something of value to society. This work of the last century was not 68 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN written to advocate feminism nor is it the final word on heredity. Yet unconsciously it is the staunchest argument in favor of a womanhood living with the complete func- tioning of its inner powers. For, by a series of genealogical tables of distinguished families judges, statesmen, ministers, art- ists Galton shows that ability seldom is isolated but tends to run in families, trans- mitted by cultured mothers as well as fathers, the maternal strain being shown to be especially strong. One example is the remarkable Darwin family, of which Galton himself is a member, also Josiah Wedg- wood, of pottery fame. In our own country, the Beecher family at once suggests itself. But perhaps the most striking illustration of the infusion of maternal talent is in the case of Elizabeth Tuttle, founder of the Jonathan Edwards family. This brilliant woman was the progenitor of a long list of eminent personalities United States presi- dents, college presidents, senators, govern- ors, jurists and writers, including Timothy Dwight, Grover Cleveland, and the Amer- CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 69 ican Winston Churchill. Charles B. Daven- port, in his interesting work on Heredity, tells us that the history of the United States would have changed its course if Elizabeth Tuttle had not lived and exercised her mental faculties as well as "energizing" to the extent of a number of children. **,*' A significant fact is, that when her an husband divorced her and mar- . t Tied again, none of his children by the second ' wife became distinguished. In spite of faults, the mentality of Elizabeth supplied the "germ plasm" that helped to make her descendants, and the continent of America, great. In his valued work Galton does not claim" ^ that gifts may be transmitted at will. v A Acquired characteristics may not inherited. What Galton does claim of the sion of ability is that given two children, the one of gifted, the other of ordinary parents, the chances for talent lie largely with the child of the talented parents. What i/fc**, the average mother makes of herself beforei. ^ 70 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN parenthood becomes, thus, in the light of heredity, of first importance. The abilit)^ will surely reappear, if not in the first, then in a later generation. Biologically and psychologically nothing is lost. The men- tality of to-day is surely reinforcing the character of to-morrow. Society has long cherished the illusion strengthened unfortunately by many ex- amples that the man of superior intellect has usually sought the woman of inferior mind, finding rest in an environment of mental weakness a direct refutation of the law of like seeking like. Galton, in his in- structive tables, shows that the great man has ever sought the great woman, demand- ing above all else mental and spiritual satis- faction in his union. "Where the heart lies let the brain lie also," wrote a famous poet when he dedicated his volume of verse to his wife. May not an explanation of past marital blunders in men of genius also an explana- tion of their unrest and seeking of true affinity lie in the paucity of selection, the CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 71 range in the choice of mentally developed women in the past being of necessity small? But what of the child of this average woman living with the flowering of her inner faculties? Let the scientific answer of a man of genius avail. Thomas Edison, who is working to perfect household implements to free woman from drudgery, says, that the child of the future, of the mentally exer- cised and developed mother, as well as the mentally exercised and developed father, will be what would be considered to-day a prodigy, but in course of time will become normal. He will be the child of a balanced humanity, born in the fullness of love and knowledge, since he will begin life high in the psychical scale. The saying has become proverbial that great men have had great mothers women at least potentially great. Were the sons great because the mothers' powers were restricted? A faculty is not exhausted by using it. One devitalizes it if one does not use it. Use or lose is a relentless law. 72 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN For many years the advance guard of the woman's movement, from John Stuart Mill to Olive Schreiner, has sounded the tocsin that rights are higher than privi- leges. Twenty years ago came the clear, scientific tones of Charlotte Perkins Gil- man member of the Beecher family with the simple truth that women are people- not merely feminine, but real human beings. And the world is only beginning to acknowl- edge this truth and adapt itself to it. To-day the kaleidoscope of public opinion must again be turned since it is all a matter of angle and a new attitude be assumed. Women are not only human beings: they are mentally creative beings. If human they must be creative, since mentality is the mark of the human. Woman must express her- self psychically, or be an abortion of what she might become, and thus affect the race. In biology the law bids one to select for the qualities one wishes to transmit. If speed is desired one selects for swiftness; if bulk, for size, giants of the same species not a giant and a dwarf. Psychologically, also, CREATIVE WOMANHOOD 73 the principle holds good. If creative ability is desired one must select for creative ability. If gifted children are an advantage one must have gifted parents not one parent, but both. Viewed in this light, the dictum "Like mother, like son," takes on a new and serious significance. Does it not also enforce a new and compelling obligation? A mentally creative womanhood is desir- able, then, because the time demands a mentally creative race. To realize all human possibilities one must liberate all human values. To augment the racial imagination one must augment the pressure. There is no choice. It is the unavoidable logic of progression. THE SOCIAL AWAKENING CHAPTER IV MOTHERHOOD IN spite of all chatter to the contrary the strength of the woman's movement lies in its improved mothers not in the women on the firing line, bravely fighting to over- come the Gorgon of Public Prejudice a needed though thankless task but in the numberless awakened mothers who have been steadily growing, steadily becoming the best kind of mothers the enlightenment of the age would allow, and contributing to society an increasingly improved child. It is not a coincidence that civilization has ad- vanced more in the last hundred years than in the previous thousand ever since, in fact, it decided to give intellectual and spiritual opportunities to its women. Occasionally one of these awakened mothers is inadvertently brought before the public and convinces us that the leaven of spiritual revolt is silently but powerfully at 77 78 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN work. A man was recently rejected for duty on a New York jury in a murder case be- cause, as he said, his wife did not believe in capital punishment. A reporter, scenting a sensation, hunted this woman to her lair. He found a home with healthy children, and a happy mother, apparently "steeped in domesticity." But when he interviewed her, the wife, in clear, strong English, showed herself to be a feminist of the most modern type; that is, a woman who believed in the expansion of women with complete freedom for expression. She herself had a profession and was simply biding her time to return to it, when her children should be older. She, being a devoted wife and mother, with her sex was subservient to life, to self -develop- ment, and to service. The papers expressed genuine surprise that a "home- woman" should possess so "advanced" views. The feminist felt no sur- prise, knowing that the principles of the woman's movement must produce the best mothers and the best children. For inner development to promote an improved social MOTHERHOOD 79 expression is the aim of feminism. A psy- chically developed womanhood means an im- measurably improved child. And it is the awakened average mother who is carrying the race forward by embodying the needed spiritual type. We may not always hear of her, but this woman is making history nevertheless. It is impossible to speak of this type of mother without first considering the black charge against her the limiting of mother- hood in producing the smaller family of to- day. When we secure our historic perspec- tive, however, on this modern social pheno- menon, we at once ask ourselves is woman or is civilization responsible for the unques- tioned change? Is not the smaller family of greater present-day advantage? May it not be a blessing and not a bane? When the population of the earth was scattered, when progress came through conquest and the chief of the tribe demanded legions for sacrifice, large families were a distinct social advantage and a necessary contribution. To-day, with the gradual les- 80 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN sening of war, with science improving and prolonging life, with congested housing con- ditions and the high cost of living; above all, with the world emerging from its physi- cally constructive period and entering a new period of mental expansion the smaller, more highly developed family is of greater social worth. Not more human beings, but psychically perfected beings is the world necessity. Napoleon is said to have looked over his broken battalions and exclaimed: "What France needs is mothers," but he was mis- taken. Napoleon's own armies were proof that mothers had done their duty. What France needed was to rid itself of its Napoleons utterly outgrown in spirit and in knowledge of democracy, in lust of con- quest and disregard of human life. The tomb of Napoleon is the mausoleum of mili- tarism. It foreshadowed the futility of war- fare and the beginning of the end of the period of progress through bloodshed. That a large proportion of the civilized world is to-day engaged in mortal combat, paralyz- MOTHERHOOD 81 ing industry and pauperizing nations, only emphasizes this truth. The question of the falling birth rate is not an isolated one, but is closely related to social, economic, and industrial questions. Various causes have helped to bring about the modern small family. For example, immigration the great movement toward the redistribution of the peoples of the earth. In America how seldom we consider what effect the unrestricted flood of immigration has had in lowering the native birth rate; how it has drained the means of subsistence and so advanced the cost of living. Previous to 1840 the increase of population in the American colonies was phenomenal owing to the need of populating a new country and to the abundant food supply. From 1840, after the immense flood of foreigners began to pour in, the native population at once dropped, and food prices soared. It is in- teresting to note that in the second genera- tion of foreigners, the birth rate also diminishes, owing undoubtedly to the same economic conditions. So much is the birth 82 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN rate dependent upon the level of subsistence that Buckle, in his History of English Civilization, tells us that in England the number of marriages, and, as a consequence, the number of births, are regulated abso- lutely by the price of corn. From the financial side under the form of paternalism in which we now dwell, shudder as we may at the term the State, assuming the old-time functions of the family and educating each child at a large expense per capita, would be financially swamped if modern congested districts poured out the immense families of old. It is true that the resources of nature have not been exhausted ; that mother earth could feed all her children adequately if humanity could be spread evenly over her surface. But men are gregarious. They love herd- ing. Hence cities have come to stay. And the explanation is found in the fact that the spiritual requirements of man have be- come equally as pressing as the physical necessities and must be satisfied the appe- tite for companionship, for sympathy, for MOTHERHOOD 83 intellectual nourishment. These require- ments are to be found only in communities throbbing with the hopes and aspirations of a conquering humanity ; in standing shoulder to shoulder and feeling the vibrations of one's fellow men. It is useless to advise "Back to nature" to people who psychically could not yet endure solitude. The wilder- ness is for the poet, the seer, and the prophet, for men of inner resources. And so cities have aggregated to minister to man's spiritual demands until he, through the revelation of his inner experiences, comes to find himself. Then he may live where he will. His kingdom will know no geograph- ical bounds. Throughout history it is a fact that a fall- ing birth rate has been the sign not of a declining but of a rising civilization, and is not to be feared while a falling death rate is also maintained. Otherwise would the Orient outstrip us. When we accept the theory that the smaller improved family is of more definite modern advantage we at once ask ourselves 84 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN if so-called race suicide is really race suicide ? May it not be race sanity? May not the motto of William Morris in house furnish- ing, "Fewer things, and better," be para- phrased, in all reverence to motherhood and a sincere regard for society's complex needs, into "Fewer children, and better"? When we learn that the establishment of milk stations one summer in New York City alone had an almost incredible effect on the mortality of babies and let it not be forgotten that it was one of the awakened mothers, Mrs. E. H. Harriman, who taught this practical lesson to the city fathers by maintaining stations from her own purse we begin to see upon what civic practicalities the question of race perpetuity depends. When politics have become domestic as they really are, though we are pleased to relegate them to distant realms called polit- ical we shall lay the blame for fewer chil- dren, not on a falling birthrate, but on our- selves for letting them needlessly die. As the glacial period has been outlived, as the dinosaur and all the huge crawling MOTHERHOOD 85 vertebrates have been outgrown as too large and unwieldy for modern life so the masto- don family has been sloughed off because unfit for a period that has outgrown brute strength, and has substituted a more highly organized and developed animal mentality in the struggle to survive. The ideals of each age change. And the parents of every age must improve if racial stagnation, or, worse still, degeneration, is not to ensue. Our mothers were good enough for us, we say, and so they were. But they are not good enough for our chil- dren any more than we should be adequate parents for the children of 1930. The quali- fications of motherhood are not static. In fact, no other relationship calls for such plasticity, such fluidity to reflect the spirit of the times, and to move with it, as mother- hood. The needs of the state have ever deter- mined what the population, what the mother- hood, of the state shall be. And parenthood, instead of being the individual function we have always considered it, is in reality a 86 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN social function in which the necessities of society determine the social contribution. In the spirit of the times lies the heart of all causation. And it is this spirit that deter- mines the character and the volume of the increase. What is the spirit of the times to-day? What is the great, new characteristic that is engaging and molding the minds of men? Is it not a passion for racial better- ment, a stirring consciousness that all is not right with the world, as we have so com- placently sung, but that much of it is shame- fully wrong, and that we, and not a far-off Deity, are to blame? The most striking characteristic of the new motherhood, then, is the social passion which marks the spirit of the age an awakening of ethical and moral forces which precede all great concerted action where social jus- tice is the goal. Ellen Key has said that the last century was the century of the woman, the present the century of the child. To the feminist the one is necessarily ante- cedent to the other. There could be no MOTHERHOOD 87 century of the child until there had first been the century of the spiritually and socially awakened woman. The agitation over child labor, and all questions of child improvement, have been an inevitable out- come of the new social passion of mothers. Never has welfare work been so nearly uni- versal as to-day. Never have factory horrors and tenement evils been so exposed, so re- lated to* the injury done to the child, and through the child to the future citizenship. A socially alert motherhood's first instinct was to follow the child into the street, the school, the factory, the prison there to guard and protect its own. Through the force of this social passion we see the type of the old, individual mother the natural product of a period when families lived in isolation expanding into the world mother, the equally natural prod- uct of the crowded living of to-day. This mother does not see duty circumscribed even by the circle of her own little ones, but her tender sensibilities, because of this home group, go out to the world's little 88 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN ones the children of poverty, of consequent neglect, of dirt, and of grim despair. To such a mother impersonal through having first been passionately personal the fact that any child should be hungry while her child is fed, any child cold while hers is warm, is intolerable and sufficient motive power to account for a large part of the organized social work by which the age will be known. For the expression of the social passion is maternal above everything else. It is the great spirit of motherhood brooding over the world. It goes into all unclean places. It cleanses and changes the social environment in order that the small human plant the woman's own heartbloom may grow erect, unhindered. But not only to the woman blessed with children has this inner quickening, this sense .of divine world-motherhood, come. The social passion has stirred the great mother spirit to expression in women denied the boon of children, in whom the mother-heart is nevertheless strong. We may not know the inner tragedies that have denied to MOTHERHOOD 89 these women nature's complete fulfillment. Yet for them life is no longer a sterility and a scoffing. They, too, may now mother communities and in needed, wide- spread, social expression find the maternal outlet which nature has thwarted. But as important as the social character- istics of the new motherhood are, they are second to the spiritual qualifications re- quired. How does the modern mother pro- vide for the inner unfolding of her child? On the development of the mother rests the fitness for this supreme task. On her atti- tude toward life almost wholly depends whether a child is to face the world spirit- ually armored to conquer circumstances, or stripped of the knowledge of those inner resources that alone will equip him with power. The psychic atmosphere into which even a baby is introduced has a most powerful effect in molding its disposition. We all know that a nervous mother a nervous atmosphere makes a nervous child. A troubled mistress makes a troubled house- 90 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN hold. Through laws that we glimpse but do not yet understand, the mother attracts the conditions of her predominating state of mind. There are psychic as well as chemical laws of attraction. One need not be clair- voyant nor clairaudient to sojourn long in a home and discover its controlling temper. There are parents who "wear" on their chil- dren, though loving them devotedly ; daugh- ters who improve when they leave the circle of the mother's overanxiety; and sons who develop faster when removed from fathers who irritate rather than promote a steady growth. How important the psychic life is to the developing child is well illustrated by the results of Mme. Montessori's methods. In the Casa Bambini that home at last built especially for children the little ones of the poor are taken, children from four to seven years of age. No food was at first served to these unfortunates. But so ade- quate was the environment to the growing inner needs, so satisfying was the psychic life to the hungry child mind, and so won- MOTHERHOOD 91 derful the intellectual response of these mentally nourished little ones, that bodily welfare was affected and the children gained in color, in brightness, and in health. The psychic atmosphere of this school also bestows complete spiritual freedom. "What- ever you want to do don't" is the attitude of many mothers. "Whatever you want to do, do," in the right environment, and under proper guidance, is Madame Montessori's method. But it is impossible for a teacher or mother to environ a child with this liberat- ing atmosphere until she herself has become spiritually free that is, until she under- stands the importance of inner causation as the initial motor force of life. Then she finds herself growing with her child surely one of life's rare ecstasies and eager above all things to hold and maintain her lead as she must do if she is to retain a complete unity with her little ones. For the highest type of child-love is not the affection that loves merely the hand that bestows creature comforts; but the abject, spiritual idolatry of a small being to a wonderful mother com- 92 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN panion who represents to the ideal-loving child mind, something of inner power, of self -direction, of the beauty of purpose and accomplishment. These are the mothers who are worshiped, living or dead, whose spirits never die. Great men who have been most loyal in attributing the secret of their power to the motherhood of the past have invariably credited their gifts, not to the housekeeping, but to the companionship, the spiritual stimulus of their mothers. To be intellectually companionable to her children is the modern mother's ambition. Motherhood alone will not make her society desirable. Congeniality must be established. There are mothers who bore their children to extinction for lack of ability to enter the world of the child. By comprehending that eager fairy world and assuming leadership therein, a mother makes herself more fas- cinating than mortal may usually hope to be. For to be fascinating one must be inter- esting, and to be interesting to children one must find the key to that secret garden of MOTHERHOOD 93 the imagination where life is ever fragrant because pulsating with the growth of ideas that childhood wishes to gather. Even though the time for communion between mother and child is only the precious hours of night and morning, a mutual interest may be established in something in which every child shows a normal delight pictures, books, music, inventions, play and a mag- netic bond be formed that will be a fore- shadowing of the friendships and spiritual standards of the later man. And surely to be a child's best friend, as well as his mother, is a relationship that is lasting in profit and delight. The spiritually awakened motherhood of to-day is also a consecrated motherhood. It does not believe that life begins only with birth, but is profoundly affected by all the previous period. In this direction we do not yet dream of the possibilities of spiritual impetus that may be given life. If the sub- ject were not considered too sacred to dis- cuss, many awakened mothers could give solemn testimony to the fact of children's 94 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN being consecrated to the highest purposes in life before birth, and of their having lived to see this consecration transformed into noble service. Every prayer a mother breathes in this important prenatal period wraps itself into the convolutions of the child-brain. It matters not what physicians say to the con- trary; mothers know. The psychic life of the mother, consciously directed, has an indisputable, vitalizing effect upon the un- born child. The potentialities for race bet- terment, in this one direction through a spiritually quickened motherhood, are be- yond computation. The psychically awakened mother is also aware of the importance of health to the life she is to give. And so we have the athletic girl, the athletic woman and when her duties will permit the athletic mother. And the result, even in so short a period, of the recognized value of outdoor life for women, is becoming the Greek idea of de- veloped bodies to enfold developed minds. At a university, recently, the measure- ment of the students disclosed a new type MOTHERHOOD 95 the football type a race of hardy young giants, attributable, according to the instruc- tors, to outdoor exercise and to healthier, athletic mothers. And this type is quite con- sistent with the highest psychic development. In Mr. Kipling's thrilling polo story, the pony scribe admonishes the other ponies to play with their brains as well as their heels. Success in athletics always goes to the rounded personality to the individual who has trained the hand or the foot to respond instantly to the brain. An athletic mother- hood is a distinct asset to the race. The spiritually awakened mother is also a patriotic mother, but the patriotism is of a different order from that of old. It is civic not militant. The new mother brings her boys up to live for their country, not to die for it ; to give themselves to an improved citizenship; to fight the modern common enemy, which is not the host marching around the outside of the city, blowing trumpets before the onslaught ; but the quiet forces of corruption silently sapping the city's resources within. The enemy may be 96 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN no longer disposed of by the simple process of killing him. His weapons have become more deadly because more complex and subtle. The new patriotism among men and women organizes to fight the invisible foe within the city walls. Because the warrior ideal is passing, the charge has been made that the world has become feminized, and that the prevalence of women school-teachers is causing the manly virtues to become extinct. If this is true, may it not be that civilization is en- deavoring to teach us to alter our definition of manly? Most of the outrages in history were "manly." May we not possibly pursue some of the "feminine" virtues without losing virility? The modern dentist advises: "Be brave be a woman." It requires more courage, more fortitude, to face motherhood once than a cannon a dozen times. To be feminine is not always to be soft though man is pleased to cherish the illusion. To be feminine may be to be lion-hearted and then not to talk about it! If the gladiator type is outgrown it is not because the world MOTHERHOOD 97 has become "feminized" but because progress has no further use for him. The field for achievement is not destroyed. The ice floes of the North, the blue dome under which we live, woo the valiant souls of to-day who hold life lightly if only their spirits may conquer. The Scotts, the Bleriots, the Wilbur Wrights, and the legions of their intrepid followers, bear witness to the fact, not that the world has become feminized, but that the pathway of valor leads through new realms of heroism. And lastly the new, psychic motherhood is voluntary. And to be a voluntary mother is to summon all the spiritual forces of the universe to one's aid. A beautiful girl, who had recently become engaged, said to her mother's friend: "I wish to be married and have a child immediately. Do you think that unwomanly? I want to give Him one." The mother's friend did not consider the confession "unwomanly." She knew from what divine sources the impulse came knew that it was spiritual as well as natural. Instead her eyes filled with tears. She her- 98 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN self had felt that voluntary impulse, as had thousands of other pure-minded women, when stirred by a truly complete love. For true love is always creative. It wishes to give and to give. The value is immeasurable of such divinely desired children the longed-for child, not the haphazard offspring, the child of irre- sistible affinity, not of passing chance. If ever the state is to be uplifted, if ever humanity is to improve, if ever the Christian ideals of civilization are to be made real, it will be by these children who are consciously brought into being by high-minded men and women, whether their advent be in a castle or a cottage. These are the children of light who represent the true joy and genius of motherhood. They comprise the world's saviours. Of such are earth's kingdom of heaven. CHAPTER V WOMAN AND THE REVALUATION or LIFE SOME years ago a clear- visioned English- man wrote, "There is no wealth but life." And the world, applauding the beauty of the sentiment, repudiated it as a sociological fact. For if a nation had realized that its wealth lay not in the silver in its mints, nor the gold in its mines, nor the bonds in its vaults, but in the quality of its men and women, it could in no wise have debased or squandered its national treasure. Only a strong countercurrent, opposed to material- ism and recognizing true values, could have transformed the general estimate. Has the spiritual influx of the woman's movement offered such a current, infusing into public opinion, at least partially, a desire for a new valuation of life? In every age noble men and women have tried to conserve life; but in no age, before the present, has there been so widespread, so 09 100 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN wholesale a protest against human waste. Conservation is the modern watchword. All the countless altruistic movements of to-day have for their motive one underlying aim conservation of the individual because of his tardily recognized value to society. It is not claimed that altruism is exclu- sively feminine. It is asserted, however, that the conservation of life is, and always has been, woman's charge. If her entrance into the larger world of affairs had not been followed by an unparalleled interest in im- proving life, her age-long nature would have been belied. For only women know the cost of life. Every ounce of human flesh and blood extracts its toll of pain from some woman. We should expect this payee of humanity, experiencing the first cost of production, to approximate life as no one else could. Much of the so-called unrest of women has been spiritual unrest because they could not endure the world as they found it. Unneces- sary human wastage stared at them on every hand. The inherent nature of woman, once REVALUATION OF LIFE 101 freed from the benumbing confines of a cir- cumscribed domesticity, ached for the oppor- tunity to set the world's values right. And this is what feminism, opposed like the dead- liest virus, has been trying to effect: to direct the spirit of conservation, generously lavished on forests and waterways, into channels of more immediate consequence the conservation of humanity in order to check society's reckless and inexcusable waste. What old blood fails to perceive, inert from familiarity and long usage, young blood espies and rejects. Feminism is the young blood of idealism injected into the hardened arteries of old-world customs. To the many it has sometimes seemed as if, in the transfusion, life itself were ebbing. To the discriminating it is apparent that humanity is building itself a new body on new foundations foundations broad enough to support the entire human family, not forgetting women and children, and strong enough to allow for all the aspirations of a revalued race. 102 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN Unrest is not a crime. Unrest is a symp- tom of growth. Just how much the unrest of women has had to do with evolving the new ideals that are characterizing the age will never be known. Nor is it important that it should be known. The significant thing for men and women to recognize is that a new valuation has been placed on life and must be maintained by them working together. Feminism is not anti-man. Fem- inism is pro-man. The conservation of life is human, racial business, not of one sex, but of both. It is not surprising that little value was attached to human life in the past since human waste is one of the most ancient ideas and biological in foundation. For countless ages human evolution progressed, like lower animal evolution, through the sacrifice of untold millions. In the early history of mankind slavery was the lot of the majority, human lives being as plentiful, and as valueless, as blades of grass. The miracle of the pyramids was made possible because of the cheapness of REVALUATION OF LIFE 103 human labor, worked at the point of the lash. The exodus from Egypt was the first historical revolt from a light valuation of life. Even in the comparatively recent days of Rome's splendor her population numbered a few thousand citizens and hun- dreds of thousands of slaves. Advancing through the ages we find only a slightly increasing conservation. As late as the middle of the last century slavery was practiced by a Christian nation and was abolished only after the sacrifice of nearly a million lives. Before Lord Shaftesbury's recent factory reforms were enacted in Eng- land, infants were employed in mills and were beaten awake when falling asleep at their long tasks. When laws forbidding the exploitation of babies were passed large families waned, no longer of advantage when not every member could be counted upon to produce. As men have been forced out of slavery and taught to belong to them- selves the idea impressed by that richest thinker of the Renaissance, Rabelais and as the needs of childhood have been recog- 104 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN nized and guarded, the value of the indi- vidual has slowly increased. To-day we are witnessing the beginning of an almost universal revolt against waste- ful human expenditure. Is it an accident that this protest, this revaluation of life, has followed so quickly the social awakening of women ? Does the character of the woman's movement contain elements that equip her for this unprecedented crusade? The two great avenues of enlightenment v/to women in the last century were the J\ woman's college and the woman's club. The nrst taught her to think. The second taught her to act. For the woman's club soon out- grew its spirit of mental acquisition and gave rise to a desire to do and to be. It could not long endure being lectured even by experts. It was burning to know life, not from rocking chairs, as they read about it, nor from camp stools, as they listened to specialists describe it, but from contact, as their husbands and brothers knew it. Com- mittees were formed. Shops, tenements, factories, schools, hospitals, prisons and REVALUATION OF LIFE 105 courts were visited. Evils, injustices, wrong systems of which the public mind was either ignorant or hardened by custom, were laid bare. And the result? Not one of these places has since known peace; not one of these evils but has been held up to the public eye, to receive public maledictions, if it did not at once institute attempts at reform. The woman investigator, the woman agi- tator, and the woman advocate are the direct products of the woman's movement. That the woman investigator is filling a needed world place is proven by the fact that she is being sent forth by awakened, clear- sighted men to make clean the dark spots of the earth. It may be seen, then, that the new chan- nels of opportunity opened to woman in the last century equipped her not only with theoretical knowledge of life, but also with a practical arsenal of facts. The most in- tolerable condition presented was the various forms of waste that drained the human family. Almost every effort of women since then, directly or indirectly, to obtain 106 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN so-called "rights," has been directed toward greater power to prevent this unnecessary leakage. In States where women are unenfranchised public opinion must still be influenced by the old methods of indirection beloved by sentimentalists who consider smiles more potent than votes by agitating, prodding, and annoying public officials until they are exasperated into executing woman's will. In those States where direct action is possible nearly every law placed by women upon the statutes has had a bearing upon the conservation of human life. We hear often that this is the age of revo- lution. Rather is it the age of protest. A new idealism vibrates through the air. And its evidence lies in a deeply aroused com- munity conscience. All the widespread interest in better housing conditions, better factories, in wrongs to childhood, in the white slave traffic, in the spot-lighted social evil, in mothers' pensions, in workmen's compensations, in the minimum wage, in insurance, in all the departments of welfare work are but evidences of the efforts of REVALUATION OF LIFE 107 an aroused community endeavoring to re- value and conserve life. What has awakened this community con- science? A sense of democracy? Partly. Democracy is the mother of Feminism. But in the last century the preponderance of man's energy was admittedly commercially engaged. A period of great invention was followed by a period of great prosperity. Production, distribution, competition taxed man's nervous and mental capacity. Re- sponsibilities of gigantic business enterprises left him little leisure or power to grapple with problems of mere human betterment. Moreover, it must be remembered that busi- ness success has been often attained at the price of atrophy of the finer ethical qualities. Competition may be the soul of trade. It is also the skeleton at the feast of altruism. A womanhood unmoved by self-interest or commercial bias, morally and socially quick- ened, would naturally fix attention on evils that had crept in unnoticed in the din of industrial strife, and to which the governing conscience had become commercially inured. 108 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN Morality, like immorality, is contagious. It does not seem presumptuous to assume that the woman inquirer, with her new interest in civic and social righteousness, should be responsible for at least a part of the social sensitiveness of the day. In fact, at this period of man's economic engross- ment, it is difficult to see from what source, other than an investigating womanhood, the spiritual stimulus could have come nec- essary to arouse a public revolt against world iniquities, and a reassertion of human values. To the woman with more leisure, equip- ped with first-hand knowledge of prevent- able waste, the evils of unlivable tenements, unhygienic factories, overworked women and under-nourished children, emerging from the shadows into the foreground of events, have become matters of burning importance. In time the public mind was ignited. An enlightened womanhood, moved by the age- long spirit of conservation, did exactly what might have been expected of it: rushed into the gap of daily overlooked social abuses, REVALUATION OF LIFE 109 with the sapping of racial vitality, in order to revalue and conserve mankind. For example, the question of unsanitary tenements. Homes were woman's specialty. Physical comfort had been her "sphere." That two thirds of humanity lived in so- called homes unfit for animals, and that men churchmen even were accepting rents for these hovels conducive to race suicide, was a situation to excite immediate feminine protest. On the subject of child labor child wrongs, always with us but only recently recognized as the most reprehensible and prodigal of human wastes the agitation of one half of humanity, the mother-half, in this direction would be very disturbing to public complacency. Problems of childhood are now discussed not only from a humane viewpoint, but also as an insane squan- dering of potential wealth. In many cases social neglect has arisen from social igno- rance. When it was learned that in the city of New York and the borough of Brooklyn, the so-called City of Homes, thousands of 110 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN children went breakf astless to school, a wave of revolt arose in certain interested members of the community. A luncheon for public school children followed, given, in certain localities, as a charity. An improved order of scholarship was a consequence of a better nourished body an important con- servation of childhood along practical lines. Or consider the widespread interest in the age-long social evil. Behind the present unprecedented discussion stands feminine enlightenment revolting against the blind, molelike undermining of the human family. This, of all evils, saps the life of women and children most deeply and touches the prob- lem of race preservation most vitally. Women of the college settlements have long devoted their energies to human con- servation. The new solidarity, the spirit of esprit de corps among all women, is illus- trated in the recent women's strikes. It is indeed a new manifestation for women of the leisure class a class fast becoming ex- tinct to stand shoulder to shoulder with women toilers, moved, though they may not REVALUATION OF LIFE 111 know it, by the maternal instinct to pluck from the burning the precious brand of life. When it became known, in the recent garment workers' strike, that women slaved at machines twelve and fourteen hours a day for a mere pittance; that they were obliged to pay for the use of the machines and for the needles they broke; that the hygienic conditions surrounding them be- longed to the dark ages, not a trades union, but the well-being of humanity was seen to be at stake. Women high and low responded to the racial call. Women who had never known want left their homes, in the cold winter dawn, to do picket work and help win the battle for their less fortunate sisters who owned nothing but the labor of their hands. Women of wealth opened their purses and helped these workers to live as they fought for life itself. The united protest won. What one woman could not do as an indi- vidual, women did collectively. The sister- hood of woman is beginning to keep step with the brotherhood of man. Every strike won by women for women is THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN a testimony to woman's socially awakened conscience, acting upon the community conscience, in an effort to revalue and con- serve life. And what is the result of the ethical re- birth that has spread like a tidal wave over all the land? Science is studying causes and trying panaceas in the earnest effort to im- prove the world's habitation. Citizenship is being widened to include little citizens as well as big, and not to exclude mothers, whose cooperation, because of their experi- ence, should be more sought than that of any other class. Social responsibility, moreover, is being placed where responsibility belongs on the community as well as upon the individual. Modern social conditions are found to create rather than to check crime. A degree of human wantonness will always be with us. But the proportion of degen- erates, like the proportion of defectives, is infinitely small. A noted English sociologist shows us that the number of murders and suicides in congested localities in London scarcely varies from year to year, springing REVALUATION OF LIFE 113 from conditions rather than from individual origin. To maintain slums is to invite iniquity. To abolish slums is to decrease crime. That "Poverty is the root of all evil" is an axiom often heard among social workers. That it is beginning to be sounded at the fount of public life is one of the hopeful signs of the times. The president of a great republic, in a recent book, has stated that society stands in a position to reconstruct its economics from top to bottom, and must so reconstruct them, if human values are to be maintained. A political leader of the greatest empire on earth has publicly as- serted that there is no occasion for want in a world overflowing with abundance for all. A few years ago the "abolition of poverty" would have been dismissed as chimerical. To-day it is seriously asserted to be the great problem of humanity, not only for the state but for the church if it, too, is to perform its quota in preserving life. A new appreciation of human worth is also to be found in the gradually changing 114- THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN attitude toward war. And this in spite of the European turmoil where the "sword drawn for peace" is its claim for justifica- tion. When human life is appreciated at its full face value no nation will be permitted to declare war. One of the hardest lessons to learn is what to revere and what to reject in the past. The socially awakened woman rejects the idea that all nations are natural enemies and must sleep on their arms. No longer does she cherish the military hero as an ideal toward which to train her sons. She recog- nizes fully his past value and glory, but regards his trappings, preserved in the museums the army coat, the saddle, the skeleton of his famous horse much as she regards prehistoric skeletons shown under the same roof: necessary in organic evolu- tion but now outgrown. That the military hero is passing as an ideal was well illustrated at a recent village improvement meeting. (One indication of improvement was that women were allowed to attend!) A leading citizen proposed an REVALUATION OF LIFE 115 appropriation of $1,500 to build a new soldiers' monument. "The present monument looks like a lead pencil," he began. "We need a large, im- pressive new monument to keep before the eyes of our growing boys. If we don't build it, no one will do so. The present generation doesn't seem to care a twopence about soldiers' monuments." "And the next generation will care less," a sweet-faced, gray-haired woman said, as she arose. "Why go backward? Why waste money? We need that $1,500 to help educate better men." The question of a new soldiers' monument was laid upon the table, not to be reconsidered. In this connection it is gratifying to recall that the first Peace Conference was held in the realm of a woman, Queen Wilhelmina, of Holland; that the Nobel peace prize of $40,000 has been won by a woman, the Baroness von Suttner, with her book, Lay Down Your Arms; and that all peace movements themselves have met with the hearty cooperation of women wherever the 116 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN present circuitous methods of indirection will allow. It does not affect the truth of the conten- tion that war is outgrown to instance cases of the recent Balkan and European wars where atrocities were perpetrated as in primitive times. Atrocities are the con- comitant of war. They follow as the night the day. The fact remains that historically the race has discarded military warfare as the best means of progress. In some localities horse cars are still used. Advanced communities, however, employ electric power. To-day the sober sense of the civil- ized world realizes that war is regress, not progress. In her attitude against perpetuating the spirit of militarism the modern woman does not claim that conflict has been outgrown. Its realm only has been transferred. As the struggle for existence among individuals is largely for bread and butter, so that among nations has become chiefly economic. The battlefield of to-day is for trade supremacy. The markets of the world are the spoils. REVALUATION OF LIFE 117 Witness the European struggle on the one side an effort to get markets, on the other an effort to keep them. As Professor Vernon Kellogg, in Beyond War, has indicated that, biologically, through brain acumen, the human species has outgrown physical combat, so Norman Angell, in his epoch-making book, The Great Illusion, has shown that, in economics and industry, a conquering nation may yet be commercially wrecked by the reactionary effect of modern warfare. The public mind emerges slowly from under the juggernaut of its long-cherished illusions. But the evolutionist is patient. He, and at last she, knows that the wheels of state, once lifted out of the mire of material- ism and self-destruction, are bound to move on toward broader highways, unclouded by the smoke of cannon, unpolluted by the stench of human blood. In the minds of many modern men and women dreamers, perhaps, yet rulers of destiny and practical conservers of human- ity there exists the vision of a not impos- 118 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN sible to-morrow when one fleet will serve the federated peoples of the world, an inter- national guardian of the public peace sent to discipline wayward children among nations. The voice of the socially responsive woman, in spite of the handicap of disen- franchisement, is making itself heard in public affairs, affairs which are in reality private since they affect so directly the family and the home. How much longer, this voice is inquiring, will the public mind elect to be led by statesmen cast in molds obsolete, confessedly ignorant of the modern, scientific point of view? How much longer will humanity submit to secret diplomacy, sheepishly lifting its back to be sheared for revenue to maintain showy armaments- national playthings, seldom used, yet foster- ing by psychic suggestion all the effete pomps and glories of war? Above all, how much longer will it allow its national wealth, the manhood of the race, to be crushed out, while the alloy of the unfit and the rejected remain to produce a spurious human strain? The last and most hopeful sign of the REVALUATION OF LIFE 119 revaluation of life lies in the birth of the new science of Eugenics. So vital is the relationship of this science to an improved race that it has been claimed that if its sig- nificance were recognized no other reforms would be needed. A true eugenist could in no way circumscribe life. Only eugenics goes to the root of con- servation by improving the inner qualities of mankind. For the science of eugenics is not merely physical. It is highly psy- chical and spiritual. Eugenics invokes all the powers of man by directing attention to the selection of those physical, mental, and spiritual qualities which contribute to the perfecting of human values. We have seen that in past eras the idea that human life is wealth held no sway. In the middle ages we found it had gained only a glimmer of recognition. To-day we dis- cover the faint, well-directed beginnings, at least, of its conservation. The noblest ideal known is one of men and women, joint originators of life and jointly responsible for its wastage, combin- 120 THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN ing forces to revalue and conserve it. Neither sex alone may completely guard the frontier of human spoliation. The lesson of 1914 is proof. The voice of the matriarch must be added to the council of the patriarchs. Then, mayhap, when this dual human mind works in happy, racial unison, the principle, "There is no wealth but life," may become, not the sentiment of a literary visionary, but an ultimate of practical, workable truth. THE AWAKENING OF THE SENSE OF RACE RESPONSIBILITY CHAPTER VI THE RELATION OF WOMAN TO EUGENICS THAT the awakening of woman should be followed by a growing conviction of race responsibility is to be expected. Also that this new human appreciation should relate itself to the compelling power of love. When the stirring charm of The Prisoner of Zenda captured the reading world some years ago, a concluding chapter entitled, "If Love Were All," wrung the heartstrings of every sympathetic reader. Rasend}d, a strolling Englishman, with the red-gold, Hapsburg coloring, by urgent request had successfully impersonated the worthless king of Ruritania and had unexpectedly won the Princess Flavia's heart. Yet these two noble persons, so deeply immersed in each other, tacitly agreed that renunciation was their only course. They could not commit a wrong to the state by consummating a de- ception; they could not trick the people by 123 124. THE AWAKENING OF WOMAN introducing alien blood into the lineage. In short, the lineal ideal became more impera- tive than the personal. And the romantic reader, while chafing at the separation of true lovers, inwardly admired the fortitude and the principle shown. The science of eugenics is an effort to inject regard for race into individual love in order to establish a new pride of descent. Instead of denying love, eugenics asserts that "love is all," but it must be personal and racial love, deeply conscious of power and of responsibility. If the Princess Flavia had lived to-day and had learned of this new ideal, her course might have been different. She might have led Rasendyl rather than be led by him. She might have declared that a royal pedigree should not be perpetuated when it has nothing but decadence to transmit. She might have refused to mother the children of an alcoholic degenerate, even though he were king. "Better to renounce the throne than to commit a crime against the human family by poisoning the strain," she would say, if RELATION TO EUGENICS 125 she were a true eugenist according to the ethical definition of the term. .Euffenirg i