She stopped as if startled by her own reflections upon the subject of the social ostracism so long established and so harshly enforced that women seem to hold to it as through an instinct of self-preservation.
She was, perhaps, dimly conscious that the tradition that the unchaste woman should be an outcast from society rests upon a solid basis of experience, upon the long struggle of a multitude of obscure women who, from one generation to another, were frantically determined to establish the paternity of their children and to force the father to a recognition of his obligations; and that the living representatives of these women instinctively rise up in honest rebellion against any attempt to loosen the social control which such efforts have established, bungling and cruel though the control may be.
Further conversation showed that she also realized that these stern memories inherited from the past have an undoubted social value and that it is a perilous undertaking upon which certain women of this generation are bent in their efforts to deal a belated justice to the fallen woman. It involves a clash within the very mass of inherited motives and impulses as well as a clash between old conventions and contemporary principles. On the other hand, it must have been obvious to her in her long effort to get at “the root of the matter” that the punishment and hatred of the bad woman has gone so far as to overreach its own purpose; it has become responsible for such hardness of heart on the part of “respectable” women towards the so-called fallen ones, that punishment is often inflicted not only without regard to justice, but in order to feed the spiritual pride, “I am holier than thou.” Such pride erects veritable barricades, deliberately shutting out sympathetic understanding.
The very fact that women remain closer to type than men do and are more swayed by the past, makes it difficult for them to defy settled conventions. It adds to their difficulty that the individual women, driven to modify a harsh convention which has become unendurable to them, are perforce those most sensitive to injustice. The sharp struggle for social advance, which is always a struggle between ideas, long before it becomes embodied in contending social groups, may thus find its arena in the tender conscience of one woman who is pitilessly rent and pierced by her warring scruples and affections. Even such a tentative effort in the direction of social advance exacts the usual toll of blood and tears.
Fortunately the entire burden of the attempt to modify a convention which has become unsupportable, by no means rests solely upon such self-conscious women. Their analytical efforts are steadily supplemented by instinctive conduct on the part of many others. A great mass of “variation from type,” accelerating this social change, is contributed by simple mothers who have been impelled by the same primitive emotion which the Devil Baby had obviously released in so many old women. This is an overwhelming pity and sense of tender comprehension, doubtless closely related to the compunction characteristic of all primitive people which in the earliest stage of social development long performed the first rude offices of a sense of justice. This early trait is still a factor in the social struggle, for as has often been pointed out, our social state is like a countryside—of a complex geological structure, with outcrops of strata of very diverse ages.
Such compunction sometimes carries the grandmother of an illegitimate child to the point of caring for the child when she is still utterly unable to forgive her daughter, the child’s mother. Even that is a step in advance from the time when the daughter was driven from the house and her child, because a bastard, was conscientiously treated as an outcast both by the family and by the community.
Such an instance of compunction was recently brought to my attention when Hull-House made an effort to place a subnormal little girl twelve years old in an institution in order that she might be protected from certain designing men in the neighborhood. The grandmother who had always taken care of her savagely opposed the effort step by step. She had scrubbed the lavatories in a public building during the twenty-five years of her widowhood, and because she worked all day had been unable to protect her own feeble-minded daughter who, when barely fifteen years old, had become the mother of this child. When her granddaughter was finally placed in the institution, the old woman was absolutely desolated. She found it almost impossible to return home after her day’s work because “it was too empty and lonesome, and nothing to come back for. You see,” she explained, “my youngest boy wasn’t right in his head either and kept his bed for the last fifteen years of his life. During all that time I took care of him the way one does of a baby, and I hurried home every night with my heart in my mouth until I saw that he was all right. He died the year this little girl was born and she kind of took his place. I kept her in a day nursery while she was little, and when she was seven years old the ladies there sent her to school in one of the subnormal rooms and let her come back to the nursery for her meals. I thought she was getting along all right and I took care never to let her go near her mother.” The old woman made it quite clear that this was because her daughter was keeping house with a man with whom there had been no marriage ceremony. In her simple code, to go to such a house would be to connive at sin, and while she was grateful that the man had established a control over her daughter which she herself had never been able to obtain, she always referred to her daughter as “fallen,” although no one knew better than she how unguarded the girl had been. As I saw how singularly free this mother was from self-reproach and how untouched by any indecisions or remorses for the past, I was once more impressed by the strength of the stout habits acquired by those who early become accustomed to fight off black despair. Such habits stand them in good stead in old age, and at least protect them from those pensive regrets and inconsolable sorrows which inevitably tend to surround whatever has once made for early happiness, as soon as it has ceased to exist.
Many individual instances are found in which a woman, hard pressed by life, includes within her tenderness the mother of an illegitimate child. A most striking example of this came to me through a woman whom I knew years ago when she daily brought her three children to the Hull-House day nursery, obliged to support them by her work in a neighboring laundry because her husband had deserted her. I recall her fatuous smile as she used to say that “Tommy is so pleased to see me at night that I can hear him shout ‘Hello, ma’ when I am a block away.” I had known Tommy through many years; periods of adversity when his father was away were succeeded by periods of fitful prosperity when his father returned from his wanderings with the circus with which “he could always find work,” because he had once been a successful acrobat and later a clown, and “so could turn his hand to anything that was needed.”
Perhaps it was unavoidable that Tommy should have made his best friends among the warm-hearted circus people who were very kind to him after his father’s death, and that long before the Child Labor Law permitted him to sing in Chicago saloons, he was doing a successful business singing in the towns of a neighboring state. He was a droll little chap “without any sense about taking care of himself,” and in those days his mother not only missed his cheerful companionship but was constantly anxious about his health and morals. When he grew older and became a professional he sent his mother money occasionally, although never very much and never with any regularity. She was always so pleased when it came that the two daughters supporting her with their steady wages were inclined to resent her obvious gratification, as they did the killing of the fatted calf on those rare occasions when the prodigal returned “between seasons” to visit his family.
It is possible that his mother thus early acquired the habit of defending him, the black sheep, against the strictures of the good children who so easily become the self-righteous when they feel “put upon.” However that may be, five years ago, after one daughter had been married to a skilled mechanic and the other, advanced to the position of a forewoman, was supporting her mother in the comparative idleness of keeping house for two people in three rooms, a forlorn girl appeared with a note from Tommy asking his mother “to help her out until the kid came and she could work again.”