Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism

by Floyd Dell

"If the under dog were always right," Miss Addams has said, "one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong, but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession of prejudice to the other almost insuperable difficulties in understanding him."

Miss Addams has taken in good faith the social settlement ideal—"to span the gulf between the rich and the poor, or between those who have had cultural opportunities and those who have not, by the process of neighborliness." In her writings, as in her work, there is never sounded the note of defiance. Even in defense of the social settlement and its methods of conciliation (which have been venomously assailed by the newspapers during Chicago's fits of temporary insanity, as in the Averbuch case), Miss Addams has not become militant. She has never ceased to be serenely reasonable.

But when one comes to ask how powerful Miss Addams' example has been, one is forced to admit that it has been limited. There are two other settlement houses in Chicago which are managed in the spirit of Hull House. But all the others—and there are about forty settlement houses in the city—have discarded almost openly the principle of conciliation. They are efficient, or religious, or something else, but they are afraid of being too sympathetic with the working class. They do not, for instance, permit labor unions to meet in their halls. The splendid social idealism of the '80s, of which Miss Addams is representative, has disappeared, leaving two sides angry and hostile and with none but Miss Addams believing in the possibility of finding any common ground for action. One event after another from the Pullman strike to the Averbuch case has brought this hostility out into the open, with Miss Addams occupying neutral ground, and left high and dry upon it.

It is the fact that Miss Addams has not been able to imbue the movement in which she is a leader with her own spirit. Her career has been successful only so far as individual genius could make it successful. If one compares her achievement to that of Mrs. Pankhurst, one sees that the latter is startingly social in its nature.

For Mrs. Pankhurst has called upon women to be like herself, to display her own Amazonian qualities. She called upon shop girls and college students and wives and old women to make physical assaults on cabinet ministers, to raid parliament and fight with policemen, to destroy property and go to prison, to endure almost every indignity from the mobs and from their jailers, to suffer in health and perhaps to die, exactly as soldiers suffer and die in a campaign.

And they did. They answered her call by the thousands. They have fought and suffered, and some of them have died. If this had been the result of individual genius in Mrs. Pankhurst, transforming peaceful girls into fighters out of hand, she would be the most extraordinary person of the age. But it is impossible to believe that all this militancy was created out of the void. It was simply awakened where it lay sleeping in these women's hearts.

Mrs. Pankhurst has performed no miracle. She has only shown to us the truth which we have blindly refused to see. She has had the insight to recognize in women generally the same fighting spirit which she found in herself, and the courage to draw upon it. She has enabled us to see what women really are like, just as Miss Addams has by her magnificent anomalies shown us what women are not like.

Can anyone doubt this? Can anyone, seeing the lone eminence of Miss Addams, assert that imaginative sympathy, patience, and the spirit of conciliation are the ordinary traits of women? Can anyone, seeing the battle frenzy which Mrs. Pankhurst has evoked with a signal in thousands of ordinary Englishwomen, deny that women have a fighting soul?

And can anyone doubt the effect which the emergence of women into politics will have, eventually, on politics? Eventually, for in spite of their boasted independence the decorous example of men will rule them at first. But when they have become used to politics—well, we shall find that we have harnessed an unruly Niagara!

In women as voters we shall have an element impatient of restraint, straining at the rules of procedure, cynical of excuses for inaction; not always by any means on the side of progress; making every mistake possible to ignorance and self-conceit; but transforming our politics from a vicious end to an efficient means—from a cancer into an organ.