Such searching and sifting is taking place in the consciences of many women of this generation whose sufferings, although strikingly influencing conduct, are seldom expressed in words until they are told in the form of reminiscence after the edges have been long since dulled. Such sufferings are never so poignant as when women have been forced by their personal experiences to challenge the valuable conventions safeguarding family life.
A woman whom I had known slightly for many years came to Hull-House one day escorted by her little grandson. Her delicate features, which were rather hard and severe, softened most charmingly as the little boy raised his cap in good-by from the vanishing automobile. In reply to my admiring comment upon the sturdy lad and his affectionate relation to her, she startled me by saying abruptly, “You know he is really not my grandson. I have scarcely admitted the doubt before, but the time is coming when I must face it and decide his future. If you are kind enough to listen, I want to tell you my experience in all its grim sorrow.
“My husband was shot twenty-seven years ago, under very disgraceful circumstances, in a disreputable quarter of Paris; you may remember something of it in the newspapers, although they meant to be considerate. I was left with my little son, and with such a horror of self-indulgence and its consequences, that I determined to rear my child in strict sobriety, chastity, and self-restraint, although all else were sacrificed to it. Through his school and college days, which I took care should be far from his father’s friends and associations, I always lived with him, so bent on rectitude and so distressed by any lack of self-control that I see now how hard and rigorous his life must have been. I meant to sacrifice myself for my child, in reality I sacrificed him to my narrow code.
“The very June that he took his master’s degree, I myself found him, one beautiful morning, lying dead in his own room, shot through the temple. No one had heard the report of the revolver, for the little house we had taken was so on the edge of the college town that the neighbors were rather remote, and he must have killed himself while I sat in the moonlight, on the garden bench, after he had left me, my mind still filled with plans for his future.
“I have gone over every word of our conversation that evening in the garden a thousand times; we were planning to come to Chicago for his medical course, and I had expressed my exultant confidence in him to withstand whatever temptation a city might offer, my pride in his purity of thought, his rectitude of conduct. It was then he rose rather abruptly and went into the house to write the letter to me which I found on his table next morning. In that letter he told me that he was too vile to live any longer, that he had sinned not only against his own code of decency and honor, but against my lifelong standards and teachings, and that he realized perfectly that I could never forgive him. He evidently did not expect any understanding from me, either for himself or for ‘the young and innocent girl’ about to become the mother of his child, and in his interpretation of my rigid morals he was quite sure that I would never consent to see her, but he wrote me that he had told her to send the little baby to me as soon as it was born, obviously hoping that I might be tender to the innocent, although I was so harsh and unpitying to the guilty. I had apparently never given him a glimpse beyond my unbending sternness, and he had all unwittingly pronounced me too self-righteous for forgiveness; at any rate, he faced death rather than my cold disapprobation.
“The girl is still leading the life she had led for two years before my son met her. She is glad to have her child cared for and hopes that I will make him my heir, but understands, of course, that his paternity could never be established in court. So here I am, old and hard, beginning again the perilous experiment of rearing a man child. I suppose it was inevitable that I should hold the girl responsible for my son’s downfall and for his death. She was one of the wretched young women who live in college towns for the express purpose of inveigling young men, often deliberately directing their efforts toward those who are reputed to have money. I discovered all sorts of damaging facts about her, which enabled me to exonerate my son from intentional wrong-doing, and to think quite honestly that he had been lured and tempted beyond his strength. The girl was obliged to leave the little town, which was filled with the horror and scandal of the occurrence, but even then, in that first unbridled public censure against the ‘bad woman’ who had been discovered in the midst of virtuous surroundings, there was a tendency to hold me accountable for my son’s death, whatever the girl’s earlier responsibility may have been.
“In my loathing of her I experienced all over again the harsh and bitter judgments through which I had lived in the first years after my husband’s death. I had secretly held the unknown woman responsible for his end, but of course it never occurred to me to find out about her, and I certainly could never have brought myself to hear her name, much less to see her. I have at least done better than that in regard to the mother of my ‘grandson,’ and Heaven knows I have tried in all humility and heartbreak to help her. She fairly hated me, as she did anything that reminded her of my son—the entire episode had seemed to her so unnatural, so monstrous, so unnecessary—she considered me his murderer, and I never had the courage to tell her that I agreed with her. Perhaps if I had done that, really abased myself as I was willing she should be abased, we might have come into some sort of genuine relation born of our companionship in tragedy. But I couldn’t do that, possibly because the women of my generation cannot easily change the traditional attitude towards what the Bible calls ‘the harlot.’ At any rate, I didn’t succeed in ‘saving’ her. She so obviously dreaded seeing me, and our strained visits were so unsatisfactory and painful, that I finally gave it up, and her son has apparently quite forgotten her. I am sure she tries to forget him and all the tragic scenes associated with his earliest babyhood, when I insisted not only upon ‘keeping mother and child together’ but also on keeping them with me.”
After a moment’s pause she resumed: “It would have been comparatively easy for me to die when my child was little, when I still had a right to believe that he would grow up to be a good and useful man, but I lived to see him driven to his death by my own stupidity. I have encountered the full penalty for breaking the commandment to judge not. I passed sentence without hearing the evidence; I gave up the traditional rôle of the woman who loves and pities and tries to understand; I forgot that it was my mission to save and not to judge.
“As I have gone back over my unmitigated failure again and again, I am sure at last that it was the sorry result of my implacable judgment of the woman I held responsible for my husband’s sin. I did not realize the danger nor the inevitable recoil of such a state of self-righteousness upon my child.”
As she paused in the recital I rashly anticipated the conclusion, that her bitter experiences had brought the whole question to that tribunal of personal conduct whose concrete findings stir us to our very marrow with shame and remorse; that she had frantically striven as we all do, to keep herself from falling into the pit where the demons of self-reproach dwell, by clinging to the conventional judgments of the world. I expected her to set them forth at great length in self-justification, and perhaps, belonging, as she so obviously did, to an older school, she might even assure me that the wrong to those to whom it was now impossible to make reparation had forever lifted her above committing another such injustice. I found, however, that I was absolutely mistaken and that whatever might be true of her, it still lay within me to commit a gross injustice, when she resumed with these words: “It is a long time since I ceased to urge in my own defence that I was but reflecting the attitude of society, for, in my efforts to get at the root of the matter I have been convinced that the conventional attitude cannot be defended, certainly not upon religious grounds.”