The Feminist Discussions
Do you know the story of the man, elected by some political pull to a judgeship in Indiana, who, after listening to the argument for the plaintiff, refused to hear anything further. “That feller wins,” he said decisively. On being told that it was customary and necessary to hear the defendant’s side also, he duly listened, with growing amazement. “Don’t it beat all?” he said, pathetically, at the close; “now the other feller wins.”
In much the same frame of mind I read the articles that are appearing in the current magazines on the subject of feminism and militancy. Edna Kenton’s in The Century is the only one that is content to give one side of the case. Decidedly, you will say on reading it, “That feller wins.” The Atlantic prints an admirable article by W. L. George on Feminist Intentions, and follows it hastily with a rebuttal by E. S. Martin (Much Ado About Women), fearing, I imagine, lest it would seem to be bowing its venerable head before new, profane altars. Life gets out a really excellent suffrage number, sane and logical and reasonable, and has followed it up ever since with all the flings it can collect against suffrage, militancy, or feminism in any form. A recent amusing instance of this is a letter by one Thomas H. Lipscomb, who signs himself, alack! A Modern Man, and adds that his name is legion. Judging by the terror in the communication Mr. Lipscomb’s modernity goes back as far as the Old Testament Proverbs, and the womanly ideal he so passionately upholds is in all respects the one the writer of this particular proverb acclaims. I have heard it used as a text so often, and have had it grounded into the very framework of my being so consistently, that it seems almost strange and irreverent to regard it with an alien and critical eye. And yet—just see what is expected of the poor thing: She
Seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands.
Bringeth her food from afar.
Riseth while it is yet night and giveth meat to her household;
Considereth a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands planteth a vineyard.
Her candle goeth not out by night.
She
Layeth her hands to the spindle; and her hands hold the distaff.
Maketh fine linen, and selleth it, and delivereth girdles unto the merchant....
together with a few other airy trifles such as bearing and rearing children, I suppose. But most significant of all—
Her husband is known in the gates where he sitteth among the elders of the land.
I should think so indeed! There seems to be little else left for him to do.
I can almost hear the writer smacking his lips over this description, which no doubt tallies closely with Mr. Lipscomb’s own notions.
For all this she is to
Receive of the fruit of her own hands, and her own works shall praise her.
Possibly women have tired a little of letting their own works praise them—and nothing else! But I am taking the letter too seriously.
To go back to The Atlantic, I find Mr. George, who is in full sympathy with the movement of which he writes, classifying the demands of the feminists as follows: Economically, they intend to open every occupation to women; they intend to level the wages of women; in general, they wish to change the attitude of those who regard women’s present inferiority to men (they frankly admit that there is inferiority in many respects) as inherent and insuperable, by demonstrating that it is due merely to long lack of thorough training—(an old friend, apparently, in a new dress!) They wish also gradually to modify and change existing marriage laws so that they will be equally fair to both sexes.
A careful re-reading of Mr. Martin’s article fails to reveal much in the way of counter argument to Mr. George’s forcible appeal. There’s a great deal of courteous agreement and some rather good satire, but against the specific counts of the feminists’ intentions Mr. Martin raises no telling argument. We hear that whereas fathers wish all earthly blessings for their daughters, mothers do not, as women are jealous of women; also that mothers fear the modern woman on account of their sons, for whom they in turn wish all possible good: the modern woman will not make a good wife! Angels and ministers of grace defend us! In a double quality as daughter to a devoted and loving mother, and as a devoted and loving mother to a most precious daughter, I throw down my glove.
I am sure Mr. Martin has never acted in either of these capacities, so precious little he knows about it! Besides, I do want my son to have everything that the world provides in the way of blessings and happiness, so I want him to have as a wife a thoroughly modern woman with an awakened soul and a high ideal, to finish the good work in him which I have at least endeavored to begin.
As I read further, however, the cat begins to poke a cautious head out of the bag. Women, Mr. Martin argues, are not responsible for the blessings the feminist movement is trying to bring them. It is men! That is why he is so particular to tell us of the careful solicitude of a father for his daughters. Men, right along, have procured all happiness for women; or, if not men exactly, at least a sort of Zeit Geist—I believe he calls it “necessity.” And the poor deluded feminists are simply the little boys running along by the side of the procession and hollering. The procession is made up of vague forces, “working nowadays for the enlargement and betterment of life for women”—forces, he quaintly complains, that are “making things go too fast their way already.”
So we must take all credit from Luther and Knox and Calvin and the reformers of all times and give it to the Zeit Geist. They, too, are little boys, I suppose, who ran along and hollered. At least they hollered lustily and well, and the feminists are in good company.
And the peroration—every true woman will appreciate this: “What a husband sees in forty years, maybe, of the good and bad of life for a woman; what a father sees in his daughters and the conditions of modern life as they affect girls—those are the things which count in forming or changing the convictions of men about woman’s errand in this current world.”
Well! However far the Zeit Geist has progressed in other directions, it is plain that it has not made inroads on Mr. Martin’s consciousness of the present state of affairs. Who has given men the power and right to decide about woman’s errand in the world? For lo! these many years we have been letting husbands, fathers, and brothers decide for us just what it were best for us to do; and if the new idea has any significance at all it is just this: that we feel able to decide for ourselves what we most want and need.
M. H. P.
The New Note
Sherwood Anderson
The new note in the craft of writing is in danger, as are all new and beautiful things born into the world, of being talked to death in the cradle. Already a cult of the new has sprung up, and doddering old fellows, yellow with their sins, run here and there crying out that they are true prophets of the new, just as, following last year’s exhibit, every age-sick American painter began hastily to inject into his own work something clutched out of the seething mass of new forms and new effects scrawled upon the canvases by the living young cubists and futurists. Confused by the voices, they raised also their voices, multiplying the din. Forgetting the soul of the workman, they grasped at lines and solids, getting nothing.
In the trade of writing the so-called new note is as old as the world. Simply stated, it is a cry for the reinjection of truth and honesty into the craft; it is an appeal from the standards set up by money-making magazine and book publishers in Europe and America to the older, sweeter standards of the craft itself; it is the voice of the new man, come into a new world, proclaiming his right to speak out of the body and soul of youth, rather than through the bodies and souls of the master craftsmen who are gone.
In all the world there is no such thing as an old sunrise, an old wind upon the cheeks, or an old kiss from the lips of your beloved; and in the craft of writing there can be no such thing as age in the souls of the young poets and novelists who demand for themselves the right to stand up and be counted among the soldiers of the new. That there are such youths is brother to the fact that there are ardent young cubists and futurists, anarchists, socialists, and feminists; it is the promise of a perpetual sweet new birth of the world; it is as a strong wind come out of the virgin west.
One does not talk of his beloved even among the friends of his beloved; and so the talk of the new note in writing will be heard coming from the mouths of the aged and from the lips of oily ones who do not know of what they talk, but run about in circles, making noise and clamor. Do not be confused by them. They but follow the customs of their kind. They are the stript priests of the falling temples, piling stone on stone to build a new temple, that they may exact tribute as before.
Something has happened in the world of men. Old standards and old ideas tumble about our heads. In the dust and confusion of the falling of the timbers of the temple many voices are raised. Among the voices of the old priests who weep are raised also the voices of the many who cry, “Look at us! We are the new! We are the prophets; follow us!”
Something has happened in the world of men. Temples have been wrecked before only to be rebuilt, and destroying youth has danced only to become in turn a builder and in time a priest, muttering old words. Nothing in all of this new is new except this—that beside the youth dancing in the dust of the falling timbers is a maiden also dancing and proclaiming herself. “We will have a world not half new but all new!” cry the youth and the maiden, dancing together.
Do not be led aside by the many voices crying of the new. Be ready to accept hardship for the sake of your craft in America—that is craft love.
Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody
Edited, with introduction, by Daniel Gregory Mason. (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.)
I shall never forget how, at sixteen, I read Stevenson’s letters and thought them the most beautiful things in the world. I shall never forget similar experiences with Keats and Browning, and finally with Meredith; and now comes another volume of letters by the man who might be called the American Henley (though that only does him half justice) to keep one up at night and teach him unforgettable things. People have been saying that this collection doesn’t represent the best letters Moody wrote. Certainly if he wrote more interesting ones the world ought to be allowed to see them, for these are valuable enough to become an American tradition.
The following is typical:
To Daniel Gregory Mason.
Dear Dan:
I have just heard from your sister-in-law of your enforced furlough. I am not going to help you curse your luck, knowing your native capabilities in that direction to be perfectly adequate, but my Methodist training urges me to give you an epistolary hand-shake, the purport of which is “Keep your sand.” I could say other things, not utterly pharisaical. I could say what I have often said to myself, with a rather reedy tremolo perhaps, but swelling sometimes into a respectable diapason. “The dark cellar ripens the wine.” And meanwhile, after one’s eyes get used to the dirty light, and one’s feet to the mildew, a cellar has its compensations. I have found beetles of the most interesting proclivities, mice altogether comradely and persuadable, and forgotten potatoes that sprouted toward the crack of sunshine with a wan maiden grace not seen above. I don’t want to pose as resourceful, but I have seen what I have seen.
The metaphor is however happily inexact in your case, with Milton to retire to and Cambridge humming melodiously on the horizon. If you can only throttle your Daemon, or make him forgoe his leonine admonition “Accomplish,” and roar you as any sucking dove the sweet vocable “Be”—you ought to live. I have got mine trained to that, pardee! and his voice grows not untunable. I pick up shreds of comfort out of this or that one of God’s ashbarrels. Yesterday I was skating on a patch of ice in the park, under a poverty stricken sky flying a pitiful rag of sunset. Some little muckers were guying a slim raw-boned Irish girl of fifteen, who circled and darted under their banter with complete unconcern. She was in the fledgling stage, all legs and arms, tall and adorably awkward, with a huge hat full of rusty feathers, thin skirts tucked up above spindling ankles, and a gay aplomb and swing in the body that was ravishing. We caught hands in midflight, and skated for an hour, almost alone and quite silent, while the rag of sunset rotted to pieces. I have had few sensations in life that I would exchange for the warmth of her hand through the ragged glove, and the pathetic curve of the half-formed breast where the back of my wrist touched her body. I came away mystically shaken and elate. It is thus the angels converse. She was something absolutely authentic, new, and inexpressible, something which only nature could mix for the heart’s intoxication, a compound of ragamuffin, pal, mistress, nun, sister, harlequin, outcast, and bird of God,—with something else bafflingly suffused, something ridiculous and frail and savage and tender. With a world offering such rencontres, such aery strifes and adventures, who would not live a thousand years stone dumb? I would, for one—until my mood changes and I come to think on the shut lid and granite lip of him who has had done with sunsets and skating, and has turned away his face from all manner of Irish. I am supported by a conviction that at an auction on the steps of the great white throne, I should bring more in the first mood than the second—by several harps and a stray dulcimer.
I thoroughly envy you your stay at Milton—wrist, Daemon, and all. You must send me a lengthy account of the state of things at Cambridge.... If the wrist forbids writing, employ a typewriter of the most fashionable tint—I will pay all expenses and stand the breakage. I stipulate that you shall avoid blonds, however, they are fragile.
William Vaughn Moody.
There are over a hundred letters here, written to Mr. Mason, Percy MacKaye, Richard Watson Gilder, Josephine Preston Peabody, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Henry Miller, Robert Morss Lovett, Ferdinand Schevill, and others; and every one of them shows Moody’s remarkable gift of metaphor, his constant striving to “win for language some new swiftness, some rare compression,” his belief in the positive acceptance of life, his paganism, “deeply spiritual, and as far as possible removed from the sensualism the thoughtless have found in it.” Mr. Mason furnishes an introduction that is masterly; and the first and final drafts of Heart’s Wild Flower are included, proving vividly how this poet disciplined his rich imaginative gifts, training away from a native tendency to the rococo to the high, pure dignity that marks his finished verse. This volume is invaluable. Certainly with two such authentic voices to boast of as Whitman’s and Moody’s this young country of ours has reason to be proud.
M. C. A.