Such measure of success as the organized Woman’s Movement has attained in the direction of a larger justice has come through an overwhelming desire to cherish both the illegitimate child and his unfortunate mother. In addition to that, the widespread effort of modern women to obtain a recognized legal status for themselves and their own children has also been largely dependent upon this desire, at least in the beginnings of the movement. Women slowly had discovered that the severe attitude towards the harlot had not only become embodied in the statutory law concerning her, as thousands of court decisions every day bear testimony, but had become registered in the laws and social customs pertaining to good women as well; the Code Napoleon, which prohibited that search be made for the father of an illegitimate child, also denied the custody of her children to the married mother; those same states in which the laws considered a little girl of ten years the seducer of a man of well-known immorality, did not allow a married woman to hold her own property nor to retain her own wages.
The enthusiasm responsible for the worldwide Woman’s Movement was generated in the revolt against such gross injustices. The most satisfactory achievements of the movement have been secured in the Scandinavian countries, where the splendid code of laws protecting all women and children was founded on the instinct to defend the weakest, and upon a determination to lighten that social opprobrium which makes it so unreasonably difficult for a mother to support a child born out of wedlock. In Germany, when the presence of over a million illegitimate children under the age of fourteen years made the situation acute, the best women of the nation, asserting that all attempts to deal out social punishment upon the mothers resulted only in a multitude of ill-nourished and weakened children, founded “The Mutterchutz” Movement. Through its efforts to secure justice and protection for these mothers, it has come to be the great defender of the legal rights of all German women.
Many achievements of the modern movement demonstrate that woman deals most efficiently with fresh experiences when she coalesces them into the impressions Memory has kept in store for her. Eagerly seeking continuity with the past by her own secret tests of affinity, she reinforces and encourages Memory’s instinctive processes of selection. If she develops her craving for continuity into a willingness to subordinate a part to the whole and into a sustained and self-forgetful search for congruity and harmony with a life which is greater than hers, she may lift the entire selective process into the realm of Art; at least so far as Art is dependent upon proportion and so far as beauty hangs upon an ineffable balance between restraint and inclusion. Hungry for this finely proportioned living, she may at length become a disciple of Diotema, the wisest woman of antiquity, who asserted that the life which above all we should live, must be discovered by faithful and strenuous search for ever-widening kinds of beauty.
In woman’s search for “the eternal moment,” balanced independently of time itself because so melted both into memories of the past and into surmises of new beauty for the future of her children’s children, she may recognize as one of the universal harmonies the touching devotion of the endless multitude of mothers who were the humble vessels for life’s continuance and who carried the burden in safety to the next generation.
Maternal affection and solicitude, in woman’s remembering heart, may at length coalesce into a chivalric protection for all that is young and unguarded. This chivalry of women expressing protection for those at the bottom of society, so far as it has already developed, suggests a return to that idealized version of chivalry which was the consecration of strength to the defence of weakness, unlike the actual chivalry of the armed knight who served his lady with gentle courtesy while his fields were ploughed by peasant women misshapen through toil and hunger.
As an example of this new chivalry, the Hungarian women have recently risen in protest against a proposed military regulation requiring that all young women in domestic service, who are living in the vicinity of barracks, be examined each week by medical officers in order to protect the soldiers from disease. The good women in Hungary spiritedly resented the assumption that these girls, simply because they are the least protected of any class in the community, should be subjected to this insult.
An instance of this sort once again illustrates that moral passion is the only solvent for prejudice, and that women have come to feel reproached and disturbed when they ignore the dynamic urgency of memories as fundamental as those upon which prohibitive conventions are based.
CHAPTER IV
WOMEN’S MEMORIES—INTEGRATING INDUSTRY
If it has always been the mission of literature to translate the particular act into something of the universal, to reduce the element of crude pain in the isolated experience by bringing to the sufferer a realization that his is but the common lot, this mission may have been performed through such stories as that of the Devil Baby for simple, hardworking women who at any given moment compose the bulk of the women in the world.
Certainly some of the visitors to the Devil Baby attempted to generalize and evidently found a certain enlargement of the horizon, an interpretation of life as it were, in the effort. They exhibited that confidence which sometimes comes to the more literate person when, finding himself morally isolated among those hostile to his immediate aims, his reading assures him that other people in the world have thought as he does. Later when he dares to act on the conviction his own experience has forced upon him, he has become so conscious of a cloud of witnesses torn out of literature and warmed into living comradeship, that he scarcely distinguishes them from the likeminded people actually in the world whom he has later discovered as a consequence of his deed.