Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

It has been well said that an Englishman cannot speak French correctly until he has learned to think in French. It is far more true that no one can speak or write the language of human liberty and equality until he has learned to think in that language, and to feel without stopping to argue with himself, that right is not masculine only and that justice knows no sex. Were the claim to superior opportunity, status and position based upon capacity, character or wealth, upon perfection of form or grace of bearing, one could understand, if not accept, the reasonableness of the position, for it would then rest upon some sort of recognized superiority, but while it is based upon sex—a mere accident of form carrying with it a brute instinct, which is not even glorified by the capacity to produce, and seldom throughout nature, to suffer for and protect the blossom of that instinct—surely no lower, less vital or more degraded a basis could possibly be chosen.

Not long ago a heated argument arose here in Chicago over the teaching of German in the public schools. This argument was used by one of the leading contestants in one of the leading journals:

The whole amount of education that 95 per cent, of our public school pupils receive is lamentably small. It is far less than we could wish it to be.

Most of these children, who are to be the citizens, and by their ballots the rulers of this nation, can often remain but a few years in the schoolroom. For the average American citizen who is not a professional man, or who is not destined for diplomatic service abroad, English can afford all the mental and intellectual pabulum needed.

Now here is an amusing and also a humiliating illustration of the way these matters are handled, and it is for that reason, only, that I have used a local question here. "Ninety-five per cent, of our public school pupils," etc., "by their ballots are to be rulers of the nation," etc., "future citizens," forsooth! Now it simply did not occur to the gentleman who wrote this, and to the hundreds who so write and speak daily, that the most of those 95 per cent have no ballots, do not "rule," are not "future citizens," but that they belong to the proscribed sex, have committed the crime of being girls, even before they entered the public schools, and so have permanently outlawed themselves for citizenship in this glorious republic of "equals." But his entire argument (made upon so large a per cent) really rests upon a much smaller number. But the girls made good ballast for the argument. They answered to fill in the "awful example," but they are not allowed the justice of real citizenship, nor to be the future "rulers" for and because of whom the whole argument is made, for whose educational rights and needs, alone, because of their future ballots, he cares so tenderly. It will not do to attempt to avoid this issue by the hackneyed plea. "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." Every one knows that this is not true in the sense in which it is used. It is true, alas! in a sense never dreamed of by politician and publican.

It is true that the degraded status of maternity has ruled and does rule the world, in that it has been, and is, the most potent power to keep the race from lofty achievement. Subject mothers never did, and subject mothers never will, produce a race of free, well poised, liberty-loving, justice-practicing children. Maternity is an awful power. It blindly strikes back at injustice with a force that is a fearful menace to mankind. And the race which is born of mothers who are harassed, bullied, subordinated and made the victims of blind passion or power, or of mothers who are simply too petty and self-debased to feel their subject status, cannot fail to continue to give the horrible spectacles we have always had of war, of crime, of vice, of trickery, of double-dealing, of pretense, of lying, of arrogance, of subserviency, of incompetence, of brutality, and, alas! of insanity, idiocy and disease added to a fearful and unnecessary mortality.

To a student of anthropology and heredity it requires no great brain power to trace these results to causes. We need only remember that the mental, as well as the physical conditions, capacities and potentialities are inherited, to understand how the dead level of hopeless mediocrity must be preserved as the rule of the race so long as the potentialities of that race must be filtered always through and take its impetus from a mere annex to man's power, ambition, desires and opinions.

Let me respond right here to those who will—who always do—insist that woman is not so held to-day at least in England and America. That her present status is a dignified, an equal or even a superior one. I will illustrate: In a recent speech by the Hon. William E. Gladstone he pleaded most eloquently and earnestly for the right of Irishmen to rule and govern themselves. Among many other things he said: "The principal weapons of the opposition are bold assertion, persistent exaggeration, constant misconstruction and copious, arbitrary and baseless prophecies. True there are conflicting financial arrangements to be dealt with, but among the difficulties nothing exists which ought to abash or terrify men desirous to accomplish a great object. For the first time in ninety years the bill will secure the supremacy of parliament as founded upon right as well as backed by power."

Had these remarks been made with an eye single to the "woman question," they could not have been more exactly descriptive of the facts in the case; but with Irishmen only on his mind he continued thus: "The persistent distrust of the Irish people, despite all they can do, comes simply to this, that they are to be pressed below the level of civilized mankind. When the boon of self government is given to the British colonies is Ireland alone to be excepted from its blessings? To deny Ireland home rule is to say that she lacks the ordinary faculties of humanity."

He said "Irish people," but he meant Irish men only. But see to what his argument leads. He says it is "pressing them below the level of civilized mankind" to deny them the right to stand erect, to use their own brains and wills in their own government; and a great party in his own country and a great party in this country echo with mad enthusiasm his opinions—for men! They call it "mankind." They mean one-half of mankind only, for not even Mr. Gladstone is able to rise high enough above his sex bias to see that the denial of all self-government, all representation in the making of the laws she is to obey "presses woman below the level of civilized mankind." Words cease to have a par value even with the stickler for verbal accuracy the instant their own arguments are applied to the other sex. Eloquently men can and do portray the wrongs, the outrages, the abuses which always have arisen, which always must arise from class legislation—from that condition which makes it impossible for one class or condition of citizens of a country to make their needs, desires, preferences and opinions felt in the organic law of their country on an equal and level footing with their fellows. Men have needed no great ability to enable them to prove that tyranny unspeakable always did and always will follow unlimited power over others so long as their arguments applied between man and man, but the instant the identical arguments are used to apply between man and woman that instant their whole attitude changes.