The “Woman’s Journal” wrote a year ago to a number of more or less distinguished people, and asked them if they thought that woman suffrage would abolish, or would lessen war. As none of these more or less distinguished people had any data upon which to build an opinion, their answers were interesting, only as expressing personal views of a singularly untrammelled order. There were those who believed that the Spartan mother stood for an undying type, and there were those who believed that she had been finally and happily superseded. Miss Jane Addams wrote that more women than men “recognize the folly and wickedness of war,”—an easy generalization. Dr. Stephen S. Wise, an unblinking enthusiast, held that one great gain will follow the tragic conditions of to-day. We shall see the end of “man-made government.” “World peace” and “world welfare” will come with woman’s rule. Miss Mary Johnston was of the opinion that “war has still a fascination for most men,” but that few women feel its seduction.
Miss Johnston’s view is the only one which invites comment, because it is shared by a great many women who have not her excuse. “The Long Roll” and “Cease Firing” are pretty grim pictures of battle, but there is a heroic quality about both books; while in that jolly, chivalrous, piratical romance, “To Have and to Hold,” combat follows combat with dizzy speed and splendour. Miss Johnston’s heroes take so kindly to fighting that she naturally believes in the impelling power of war; but, outside the covers of a historical novel, the martial instinct is not a common one. It exists, and it crops up where we least expect to find it,—in professors of political economy, in doctors who have spent their existence keeping people alive, and in clergymen who preach the religion of the meek. But it is too rare to be a controlling force, and it had little or no place in the hearts of the thousands of men who were marched to their deaths on the battlefields of Poland and Flanders.
It was not the fascination of war that brought the Tyrolean and Bavarian peasants down from their mountain farms. What did these men know or care about Belgrade, or Prussia’s wide ambitions? What to them was “the fate-appointed world-task of Germany, under the sacred dynasty of the Hohenzollern”? They were summoned, and they obeyed the summons. If the women who talk so glibly about the pleasure men take in fighting had seen these conscripts saying good-bye to their wives and children, and marching off, grave, silent, sad, they might revise their notions of military enthusiasm. Madame Rosika Schwimmer of Budapest said before a convention in Nashville that, had her countrywomen been represented in the government, there would have been no war. The remark was received with an enthusiasm which indicates some ignorance concerning Hungary’s position and power. But did Madame Schwimmer’s audience believe that all her countrywomen hated war, and all her countrymen desired it? And how many of these countrymen, did Nashville think, had any choice in the matter?
When we turn from the attack to the defence, from the assailants to the assailed, we find as little room for “fascination” as for peace. The war was carried with incredible vigour and speed to the thresholds of French and Belgian homes. It was not precisely a tournament, in which battle-loving knights rode prancing and curveting to the fray. It was the older and simpler story of a land swept by invasion, and of men fighting and dying for all that belonged to them on earth. Do the American women who prate about the wrong done to womanhood by war ever reflect that it is for wife and child, as well as for home and country, that men are bound to die? What history do they read which does not teach them this truth, which does not tell it over and over again, to interpret the story of the nations?
In the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, where was shed the first blood spilled in the Revolution, there slept peacefully on the morning of April 19, 1775, a young man named Jonathan Harrington. To him in the early dawn came his widowed mother, who aroused him, saying, “Jonathan, Jonathan, wake up! The Regulars are coming, and something must be done.” The something to be done was plain to this young American, who had never fought, nor seen fighting, in his life. He rose, dressed, took his musket, joined the little group of townsmen on the Common, and fell before the first volley fired by the British soldiers. His wife (he had been married less than a year) ran to the door. He crawled across the Common, bleeding heavily, and died on his threshold at her feet.
It is a very simple incident, and it holds all the elements which make for national life. A cause to support, a man to support it, a woman to call for help when the supreme moment comes. Something like it must have happened over and over again in the blood-soaked land of Belgium. Yet we find women to-day talking and writing as if none of their sex had anything at stake in the defence of their violated homes, as if they had no sacred rights bound up with the sacred rights of men. The National American Woman Suffrage Association sent an appeal to organized suffragists all over the world, urging them to “arise in protest, and show war-crazed men that between the contending armies there stand thousands of women and children who are the innocent victims of man’s unbridled ambitions.”
There was no word in this appeal to indicate that any nobler—and humbler—sentiment than unbridled ambition (which, after all, is for the very few) animates the soldier’s heart. There was no distinction drawn between aggressive and defensive warfare. There was no hint that men bear their full share of the sufferings caused by war. The assumption that women endure all the pain is in accordance with the assumption that men enjoy all the pleasure. To write as though battle were a game, played by men at the expense of women, is childish and irrational. We Americans are happily spared the sight of mangled soldiers lying in undreamed-of agony on the frozen field. We do not see the ghastly ambulance trains jolting along with their load of broken, tortured men; or the hospitals where these wrecks are nursed back to some poor remnant of life, or escape through the merciful gates of death. But we might read of these things; we might visualize them in moments of comfortable leisure, and take shame to our souls at the platform eloquence which so readily assumes that the sorrows of war are hidden in women’s hearts, that the burdens of war are laid upon women’s shoulders, that women are sacrificed in their helplessness to the hatred and the ambitions, the greed and the glory of men.
If by any chance a word of regret is expressed for the soldier who dies for his country, it is always because he is the son of his mother, or the husband of his wife, or the father of his child. He is never permitted an entity of his own. It is curious that the same women who clamour for a recognition of their individual freedom should assume these property rights in men. Dr. Anna Shaw has commented sarcastically upon a habit (one of many bad habits) which she has observed in the unregenerate sex. They speak of their womenkind in terms of relationship; they use the possessive case. They say, “my wife,” “my sister,” “my daughter,” “my mother,” “my aunt,” instead of “Jane,” “Susan,” “Mary Ann,” “Mrs. Smith,” “Miss Jones.” Apparently Dr. Shaw does not hear women say, “my husband,” “my brother,” “my son,” “my father,” “my uncle”; or, if she does, this sounds less feudal in her ears. Advanced feminists have protested against the custom of “branding a woman at marriage with her husband’s name.” Even the convenience of such an arrangement fails to excuse its arrogance.
Yet we are bidden to protest against the wickedness of all war, not because men die, but because wives are widowed; not because men slay, but because mothers are childless; not because men do evil, or suffer wrong, but because, in either case, women share the consequences. For the sake of these women, war must cease, is the cry; as though the vast majority of men would not be glad enough to be rid of war for their own sake. They do not covet loss of income and destruction of property. They do not gladly aspire to an armless or legless future. Not one of them really wants a shattered thigh, or a bullet in his abdomen. And, in addition to these (perhaps selfish) considerations, we might do them the justice to remember that they are not destitute of natural affection for their wives and children; but that, on the contrary, the safeguarding of the family is, and has always been, a powerful factor in war. It lent a desperate courage to the Belgian soldier who saw his home destroyed; it nerved the arm of the French soldier who knew his home in peril. The killing of the first women and children at Scarborough sent a host of tardy volunteers into the British army. Such indiscriminate slaughter, though it represents a negligible loss to a nation, is about the only thing on earth which the least valiant men cannot stomach.
“The Turk, not squeamish as a rule,