Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

The reader must decide whether there is more light and leading in the interpretation that upon men falls the bulk of the work of providing for immediate needs, and so enabling women to provide for the continuance of the race, or, in Mrs. Gilman's version that woman is parasitic upon the male. The future, if she likes to state it in that way, is parasitic upon the present, always has been and always will be. The case which she imagines to be unique and morbid, peculiar to civilized mankind, is precisely the case of the hen bird who sits upon her eggs, incubating the future, whilst the male goes and forages for her. She is parasitic upon the male, as Mrs. Gilman would put it.

The truth is that, like many other women dominated by sex antagonism—which glares ferociously from such paragraphs as that which was quoted regarding "the brutal combative instinct or the intense sex-vanity of the male"—Mrs. Gilman, in seeking to further the interests of her sex, proposes to dispense with the help of its best friend, which is the other sex. It is not easy to speak with patience of those who thus seek to set the house of mankind against itself, to the injury of men, women and children alike.

No doubt it is true that Mrs. Gilman's attitude is engendered by sex antagonism as we see it everywhere in men—though for some obscure reason it is only so labelled when displayed by women. No doubt, also, a much better case can be made out for Mrs. Gilman's proposals, up to a point, than could be made out for corresponding proposals on the other side. No one who thinks for a moment can question that all proposals whatsoever to make either sex independent of the other are stark madness; yet there is a certain short-lived plausibility in the argument that women are to be independent of men, and this depends upon the fact which we have already attempted to demonstrate and interpret by means of Mendelism, that women are more than men, and that womanhood includes latent manhood. If, therefore, we are careful with the argument and boldly rush past the really crucial places, such as the conditions and needs of expectant and nursing motherhood, we can make out what looks like a case for the economic dependence of women. Each sex is to work for itself, and then there need be no more quarrelling.

But we could not go even so far with any theory for making men independent of women without seeing that we were no less wrong on that side than Mrs. Gilman is on the other. Man's apparent economic independence of women is as complete a myth as women's projected economic independence of men. In the last resort, when we come down to realities, and remember that both men and women are mortal, and that unless they are replaced, everything ends, we see that the introduction of the word economic into this question simply serves to confuse thought, just as the older political economy confused thought and laid itself open to the mercilessly magnificent attacks of Ruskin. Economy is literally the law of the house or the home—where life begins. Of all economies, life is the last judge, because there is no wealth but life. In the last resort the economic dependence of the sexes means nothing because the sexes cannot independently reproduce themselves.

If Mrs. Gilman is to be arraigned for her error let us see to it most carefully that we do not fail to arraign the men who, with not one-thousandth part of her excuse and with no iota of her ability, fall into the corresponding error on their side. When Women's Suffrage is being debated, there never fails a supply of men who write to the papers to say that men must vote and not women because men and not women "made the State." How much simpler our problems would be if there were some means of distinguishing children who will grow up into men of this type, and carefully refraining from teaching them to read or write! Make the State, indeed!—they can make nothing but fools of themselves, and without women's assistance could not even reproduce their folly. Of course the retort to all this nonsense is that neither sex ever yet created anything without the other. Every human act and achievement is the product of both sexes. When some friend of the past assures us that women should not vote because they cannot bear arms, he is of course reminded that women bear the soldiers. It is true and it is unanswerable. In just the same way, when Mrs. Gilman wishes women to be economically independent of men, whom she considers as animals distinguished by their destructive energy, brutality and intense sex vanity, she is simply ignoring half the truth. Let either sex try to run the earth alone till Halley's comet returns, and what would be left for it to see? Of all follies uttered on this subject, and they are many, the cry, each sex for itself, is the wickedest and worst.

The reader may well declare that such criticism is easy, but of little worth unless it be accompanied by some kind of constructive proposals for the amelioration of present conditions. Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced. If the present economic conditions of women involve the most hideous wickedness and cruelty and injure the entire progress of mankind, as they assuredly do, and if they therefore must be destroyed, we must have something to replace them with; and if Mrs. Gilman's proposals would simply make the difficulty a thousand times worse by depriving women of men's help, what proposals are there to offer instead?

The reply is that we must go back to first principles. We must drop all our phrases about economic independence or dependence. They have urgent and real meanings for each one of us at any given time, but when applied to the problems of the reconstruction of society as a whole, they mean nothing because they are based upon no vital truths whatever. A man may be economically secure when he is producing absinthe or whisky, or he may die of starvation because he is producing the songs of Schubert. Economic independence and dependence mean very much to the prosperous distiller whom men pay for poison, and to the immortal composer whom men do not pay at all, but who yet produces that which nourishes the life of all the future. The maker of death may live, and the maker of life may die; we see it every day and history is the continuous record of it. These economic dependences and independences consist only in the relations of one man or woman to the others. They have nothing to do with the real issue, which is the relation of mankind as a whole to Nature. These economic questions are simply concerned with money—the means whereby one man has more or less claim upon another: society may have to be reconstructed in such a fashion that economic independence and dependence, as at present understood, would have no meaning whatever. Yet all the real economic questions would remain, even though money or private property were abolished. The real economy is the making and preserving of life and the means of life. We live in a chaos where the elementary conditions of human existence are constantly forgotten. The real politics, the real economy, the real political economy, are the questions of the birth-rate and the wheat supply—the relations not between man and man, or class and class, or sex and sex, but mankind, living and dying and being born, and the world in which he has to live. The time is near at hand when the first conditions of national life will be recognized as they have never been since the dawn of modern industrialism. The products of men's labour and women's labour will be appraised and paid for in proportion to their real value, their strength or availableness for life.

In "Unto This Last" and "Munera Pulveris," Ruskin has laid down, on what are really unchallengeable biological grounds, the foundations of the political economy of the future. We are going to have done with the industries which eat up men. We cannot much longer afford to grow whisky where we might grow wheat, for there are ever more mouths to be fed, and wheat is running short. Cheap and dear mean nothing when we get down to realities. Is a thing vital or is it mortal?—that is the only question. It may be vital and costless, like air, or mortal and dear, like alcohol. The question is not how much money can you get from another man for your product, but how much life can mankind get from Nature for it. Thus we shall return to a sane appreciation of the primary importance of agriculture as against manufacture, of food as against anything else,—for unless one is fed, of what use is anything else? And as nations gradually begin to discover that the means of life are the really valuable things, they will go on to learn, what primitive races, hard-pressed races, races making their way in the world against heavy odds, have always known—that at all costs the insatiable destructiveness of Death must be compensated for by Birth. If the means of life are the real wealth, the life itself is more real still, and unless we abolish death, the makers and bearers and nourishers of life are at all times and everywhere the producers, the manufacturers, the workers of the community above and beyond all others. And these are the women in their great functions as mothers and foster-mothers, nurses, teachers.

The economics of the future will be based upon these elemental and perdurable truths. No writer in his senses will then be guilty of such immeasurable folly as to place the "natural industries of a human creature" in antithesis to "the primal physical functions of maternity." The sex which came first and remains first in the immediacy and indispensableness of its relations to the coming life will base its economic claims—in the vulgar and narrow sense of that term—upon the worth of those relations. The society which cannot afford to pay for—that is, to sustain—the characteristic functions of womanhood, cannot continue; and societies have continued and will continue in proportion as they hold hard by these first conditions of their lives. The case of Jewish womanhood is the supreme illustration of a thesis which requires no experimental demonstration, but is necessarily true.

Here, then, is the solution, as the future will prove, of the problem of the economic status of woman. At present, though Ellen Key is the only feminist writer who recognizes it, women can compete successfully with men only at the cost of complete womanhood,—and that is a price which society as a whole cannot afford to pay, if it wishes to continue. Therefore we must, in effect, pay women in advance for their work, the actual realization of the value of which is always necessarily deferred. The case is parallel to that of expenditure upon forestry. In the planting of trees or the nurture of babies the State will get value for its money in the long run, but it must be prepared to wait. States are slowly becoming more provident, and already we are coming to see this about trees. Soon we shall see it about babies, and the problem of the economic status of woman will then be solved in practice as it is assuredly soluble in principle.