Women and the Life Struggle
Clara E. Laughlin.
The Truth About Women, by C. Gasquoine Hartley (Mrs. Walter M. Gallichan). [Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.]
Mrs. Gallichan has not told the whole truth about woman; but she has told as much of it as has been told by any one writer except Olive Schreiner; and although she has made no important discovery, educed no brilliant new conclusion, she has summarized the best of all that has been said in a book which can scarcely fail to render notable service.
It is interesting to recall how the truth about women has been disclosed. The voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, crying in the wilderness, in 1792, pleaded that “if woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge; for truth must be common to all.” Yet it was nearly sixty years before Frederick Denison Maurice was able to open Queen’s College, and give a few English women the opportunity of an education. (In America, Mary Lyon had already broken ground for the higher education of her countrywomen.)
Here and there, in those days, an intrepid female declared herself a believer in woman’s rights; but her pretensions were scarcely honored to the point even of ridicule. Women were inferior creatures, designed and ordered by God to be subordinate to men. Didn’t everything go to prove it? And, indeed, nearly everything seemed to!
In 1861, several scholarly gentlemen in Europe were delving in fields of research where they were destined to upturn facts of great interest to the inferior sex. One of these was John Stuart Mill, whose impassioned protest against the subjection of women was then being written, although it was not published until eight years later. Another was Henry Maine, who was disclosing some significant things about the ancient law on which our modern laws are founded. Another was Lecky, who was gathering material for his History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne, and—incidentally—discovering that “natural history of morals” wherewith he was to shock the world in 1869. But two of the others were searching back of Augustus—“back” of him both in point of time and also in degree of civilization. One of these was Bachofen, a German, who published, in 1861, Das Mutterrecht, in which he made it clear that women had not always been subordinate, dependent, but among primitive peoples had been the rulers of their race. McLennan’s Primitive Marriage, published in 1865, brought prominently to British thinkers this quite-new contention of woman as a creature born to rule, but defrauded and degraded.
Then, in 1871, Darwin startled the world with The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; and those who accepted his theory of evolution had to revise all their previous notions about the relations of the sexes.
During the next quarter-century many minds were busy with this wholesale revision of ideas, but nothing signal was set forth until Charlotte Stetson—working with the historical data of Maine and Mill and Lecky and their followers, with the ethnological data of Bachofen and McLennan, and many more, and with the natural history of morals as Darwin and Wallace and Huxley and their school disclosed it—declared that the enslavement of women was economic in its origin and in its final analysis. This was not the whole truth, but it was so important a part of the whole that the book Women and Economics may be said to have given the most productive stimulus the feminist movement had had since The Descent of Man.
Scores, almost hundreds, of books dealing with some phase or other of woman’s history, appeared in the next few years. But while many of them were valuable, and some were all but invaluable, none of them was epoch-marking until Olive Schreiner put forth her magnificent fragment on Woman and Labor, the chapter on Parasitism being the noblest and most pregnant thing that any student of woman has given to the world. Olive Schreiner saw much further into the question of women and economics than Charlotte Stetson knew how to see. She has a greater vision. She perceives that women are ennobled by what they do—just as men are—and that they are degraded by being denied creative, productive labor—not by being denied the full reward of their toil.
Mrs. Gallichan does not advance upon the contribution of Mrs. Schreiner, as Mrs. Schreiner did upon that of Mrs. Stetson; but she had less opportunity to do so: Mrs. Schreiner did not leave so much for some one else to say. But Mrs. Gallichan has summarized all that has been said more fully than any other writer has done; and she has done it so interestingly, so ably, that she deserves grateful praise.
Her book has three sections: the biological, the historical, and the modern.
Let no one resent or think useless an analogy between animal love-matings and our own. In tracing the evolution of our love-passions from the sexual relations of other mammals, and back to those of their ancestors, and to the humbler, though scarcely less beautiful, ancestors of these, we shall discover what must be considered as essential and should be lasting, and what is false in the conditions and character of the sexes today; and thereby we shall gain at once warning in what directions to pause, and new hope to send us forward. We shall learn that there are factors in our sex-impulses that require to be lived down as out-of-date and no longer beneficial to the social needs of life. But encouragement will come as, looking backwards, we learn how the mighty dynamic of sex-love has evolved in fineness, without losing in intensity, how it is tending to become more mutual, more beautiful, more lasting.
Two suggestions which Mrs. Gallichan makes in the biological section are especially striking. One is derived from the bee, and one from the spider. The bee, she reminds us, belongs
to a highly evolved and complex society, which may be said to represent a very perfected and extreme socialism. In this society the vast majority of the population—the workers—are sterile females, and of the drones, or males, only a very few at the most are ever functional. Reproduction is carried on by the queen-mother ... specialized for maternity and incapable of any other function.... I have little doubt that something which is at least analogous to the sterilization of the female bees is present among ourselves. The complexity of our social conditions, resulting in the great disproportion between the number of the sexes, has tended to set aside a great number of women from the normal expression of their sex functions.
The danger to society, when maternity shall be left to the stupid parasitic women who are unable to exist as workers, is pointed out by Mrs. Gallichan; as is also that exaggerated form of matriarchy which is realized among the ants and bees. And she reminds women who are workers, not mothers, that in the bee-workers the ovipositor becomes a poisoned sting. She warns women not to become like the sterile bees; but she warns them also against state endowment of motherhood. And she does not suggest how the great excess of women are to become mothers without reorganizing society.
The second example she cites in warning, the common spider, whose courtship customs Darwin described in The Descent of Man, is “a case of female superiority carried to a savage conclusion.” And from this female who ruthlessly devours her lover, Mrs. Gallichan deduces a theory for “many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men. Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against woman as against this driving hunger within himself, which forces him helpless into her power.”
The stages by which parasitism was transferred from the male to the female still need some elucidation—like the stages by which marriage passed from endogamy to exogamy. But Mrs. Gallichan’s suggestion about the male preserving himself by appearing as self-sufficient and as dominant as he can, is highly interesting. It will probably not be long before we know a great deal more of this.
In the historical section of her book, Mrs. Gallichan devotes four admirable chapters to the mother-age civilization, and four others to the position of women in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome.
Of immense significance is the relation between the enviable status of women in Egypt and that love of peace and of peaceful pursuits which characterized the Egyptian people. War, patriarchy, and the subjection of women, have gone hand in hand. Social organizations in which might was right have minimized the worth of women; those in which ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ideality were set above brute force have given women most justice.
Mrs. Gallichan’s chapter on the women of Athens and of Sparta is most suggestive. So is that on the women of Rome.
In her modern section she discusses women and labor:
The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one point of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every woman was ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some man. Nor do I think there was any unhappiness or degradation involved to women in this co-operation of the old days, where the man went out to work and the woman stayed to do work at least equally valuable in the home. It was, as a rule, a co-operation of love, and in any case it was an equal partnership in work. But what was true once is not true now. We are living in a continually changing development and modification of the old tradition of the relationship of woman and man.... The women of one class have been forced into labor by the sharp driving of hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely different cause, the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women’s energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the women who have none there is this common kinship—the wastage not so much of woman as of womanhood.
She considers “the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning struggle for life,” and urges that “the life-blood of women, that should be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; washed and ironed into our linen; poured into our adulterated foods”; and so on. But her reasoning in this chapter is not very clear. Women, to avoid parasitism, must work, and only a relatively small proportion of them can now find in their homes work enough to keep them self-sustaining. Protest against the sweating of women is not only philanthropic—it is perfectly sound political economy. Women workers not only should be protected against long hours, unnecessary risks, insanitary surroundings, merciless nerve tension, and the computation of their wages on a basis of their assured ability to live partly by their labor and partly by the legitimatized or unlegitimatized sale of their sex; but this can, and must, be done. Yet, when all this has been accomplished, will Mrs. Gallichan feel satisfied that the struggle for life is not “cheating, damning,” if owing to conditions we cannot regulate that struggle fails also to comprehend the struggle to give life, to reproduce?
It is because we are the mothers of men that we claim to be free.
This is the keynote of her book. But she is by no means clear in her mind as to how the mothers of men are to maintain themselves in a freedom which shall be real, not merely conceded; nor as to how the millions of women who, under our monogamous societies, cannot be permanently mated, are to justify their struggle for existence by becoming “mothers of men.”
The something that Mrs. Gallichan lacks, not in her retrospect so much as in her previsioning, has been lacked by many of the great investigators and writers who have built up the magnificent literature of evolution and evolutionary philosophy: she has an admirable survey of the “whenceness” of life and love and labor, but a short-sighted, astigmatic vision of its “whereuntoness.”
If the sole purpose of life and love and labor, among humans as among lower animals, is to continue life, to transmit the life-force, then indeed are those frustrated, futile creatures who are cheated, or who cheat themselves, out of rendering this one service to the world which can justify them for having lived in it.
But if, as most of us believe, we are more than just links in the human chain; if we have a relation to eternity as well as to history and to posterity, there are splendid interpretations of our struggles that Mrs. Gallichan does not apprehend. If souls are immortal, life is more than the perpetuation of species, or even than the improvement of the race; it is the place allotted to us for the development of that imperishable part which we are to carry hence, and through eternity. And any effort of ours which helps other souls to realize the best that life can give, to seek the best that immortality can perpetuate, may splendidly justify our existence.
Mrs. Gallichan’s conclusion about religion is that it is an “opium” to which women resort when they have no proper outlet for their sex-impulses. “I am certain,” she says, “that in us the religious impulse and the sex impulse are one.” And when she was able to satisfy the sex impulse, she no longer had any need of or interest in religion.
The limitations this puts upon her interpretation of life are too obvious to need cataloging. And this is the reason she signally fails to tell the whole of the truth about woman. This is the reason why the latter chapters of her book, in which she writes of marriage and divorce and prostitution, are of less worth to the generality of readers than the earlier ones; though this is not to say that these chapters do not contain a very great deal of vigorous thinking and excellent suggestion. But to anyone who holds that the continuance of life is the principal justification for having lived, yet deplores free love and state endowment of mothers, there is inevitably an appalling waste, for the elimination of which she may well be staggered to suggest a remedy.
Mrs. Gallichan’s book is not constructive in effect. But it is so excellently analytical, as far as it goes, that it can scarcely fail to provoke a great deal of thought.