Birth comes. Birth—
The breathing re-creation of the earth!
All earth, all sky, all God, life's sweet deep whole,
Newborn again to each new soul!
"Oh, are you? What a shame! Too bad, my dear!
How well you stand it, too! It's very queer
The dreadful trials women have to carry;
But you can't always help it when you marry.
Oh, what a sweet layette! What lovely socks!
What an exquisite puff and powder box!
Who is your doctor? Yes, his skill's immense—
But it's a dreadful danger and expense!"
And so with love, and death, and work—all are smutted and debased. And her revolt is a revolt against that which smuts and debases them—against those artificial channels which break up the strong, pure stream of woman's energy into a thousand little stagnant canals, covered with spiritual pond-scum.
It is a part of her idealism to conceive life in terms of war. So it is that she scorns compromise, for in war compromise is treason. And so it is that she has heart for the long, slow marshaling of forces, and the dingy details of the commissariat—for these things are necessary if the cry of victory is ever to ring out over the battlefield. Some of her phrases have so militant an air that they seem to have been born among the captains and the shouting. They make us ashamed of our vicious civilian comfort.
Mrs. Gilman's attitude toward the bearing and rearing of children is easy to misapprehend. She does seem to relegate these things to the background of women's lives. She does deny to these things a tremendous importance. Why, she asks, is it so important that women should bear and rear children to live lives as empty and poor as their own? Surely, she says, it is more important to make life something worth giving to children! No, she insists, it is not sufficient to be a mother: an oyster can be a mother. It is necessary that a woman should be a person as well as a mother. She must know and do.
And as for the ideal of love which is founded on masculine privilege, she satirizes it very effectively in some verses entitled "Wedded Bliss":
"O come and be my mate!" said the Eagle to the Hen;
"I love to soar, but then
I want my mate to rest
Forever in the nest!"
Said the Hen, "I cannot fly
I have no wish to try,
But I joy to see my mate careering through the sky!"
They wed, and cried, "Ah, this is Love, my own!"
And the Hen sat, the Eagle soared, alone.
Woman, in Mrs. Gilman's view, must not be content with Hendom: the sky is her province, too. Of all base domesticity, all degrading love, she is the enemy. She gives her approval only to that work which has in it something high and free, and that love which is the dalliance of the eagles.