These are the utterances of conspicuous leaders of the younger, more radical wing of the woman suffrage movement; and no one who follows with any care their speeches and writings can claim that they are out of character. Is it unfair to say such utterances confuse moral values and weaken the sense of individual responsibility?
This regret that "motherhood should ever be counted a crime" is often more tersely expressed in the phrase "right to motherhood," first made fashionable, I believe, by Mr. Bernard Shaw. It was given publicity last June through an address made by Prof. W. I. Thomas of the University of Chicago at the banquet held by the Chicago Equal Suffrage Association in honor of the National Executive Council. Professor Thomas said, "in substance"—I quote the Woman's Journal—"that many women who could not marry were earnestly desirous of children, and that it ought to be recognized that monogamy was not the only relation in which it was respectable for a woman to have a child." The National Association, as is well known, is the conservative wing of the wrangling suffragist army, and contains most of those "middle-aged reformers" whom the "younger generation" dispose of so easily by saying that they have not kept up with the times. Miss Alice Stone Blackwell promptly combatted the speaker's opinions, and the Woman's Journal reports that she was heartily applauded.
But Professor Thomas is not so easily disavowed. A ten-page pamphlet, "Votes for Women," published by the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, is of his authorship. In The Case for Woman Suffrage, a bibliography with critical comments, published by the National College Equal Suffrage League in 1913, eighty-eight lines are given to quotations from Professor Thomas's works, while Miss Blackwell's receive only forty. Such comparisons may seem trifling, but they are significant. If any one doubts the hold of the feminist ideas upon many of the most influential suffragists, he may be convinced by himself examining The Case for Woman Suffrage. Anti-suffragists are often accused of arguing from isolated, casual utterances. For my part, I find it impossible to reproduce, by any quotations, the impression of recklessness left by habitually reading publications, both American and English, in sympathy with suffrage.
Our age is not one that can afford to trifle with recklessness. Its own problems are of the sort that call for prudence and restraint. The International Purity Congress in San Francisco has laterly drawn attention to the spread of immorality among school girls. Suffragists offer to "mother the community." It is the individual girl that needs mothering. She is not helped to self-control by reading in her favorite news-paper that Inez Haynes Gilmore, interviewed as to the use of "obey" in the marriage service, has said: "To me the promise to love and honor is more extraordinary—it's easier to promise to obey. It's impossible to promise to control the emotions." The lesson the girl draws from a play like Hindle Wakes, when Inez Milholland, in McClure's, calls her attention to it, is not that men must be as chaste as women, but that it is one of women's rights to be as lax as men.
Professor Thomas' views called forth resolutions from the Executive Board of the National Suffrage Association, which took a curious form. They read: "While we do not wish to criticise the speaker's remarks as such, we heard them with profound misgivings as to their effect upon the cause of suffrage in the campaign states." The anti-suffrage majorities in the campaign states certainly proved the misgivings well-timed. But, however such remarks may have been received, is it not a significant fact that they were ventured, by a reputable man, at a reputable gathering? Can anyone doubt that radical views are startlingly on the increase?
Two years ago Mrs. Winifred Harper Cooley wrote in Harper's Weekly of the "single standard": "There is a violent altercation going on continually, within the ranks of feminists in all countries, regarding this question. The conservative women reformers think the solution is in hauling men up to the standard of virginal purity that has always been set for women. The other branch, claiming to have a broader knowledge of human nature, asserts that it is impossible and perhaps undesirable to expect asceticism from all men and women." In the Forum, of April, 1915, a correspondent from California signing herself "Lottie Montgomery," expanded in revolting detail what was, after all, pretty much the same idea. "On every hand," she remarked, "we hear of the 'single standard of morals,' by which the 'purists' mean a strict monogamous life for both men and women, and by which the feminists mean an opportunity to express themselves sexually whenever they see fit without the interference and permission of the Church and State, and this neither constitutes promiscuity, nor yet polyandry, but an opportunity to live your own life in your own way and not to have to sacrifice your name, privacy, self-respect and income in order to gratify the sex instinct." And, passing from theory to practical observation, she asserts: "Whether we like to admit it or not, the fact remains that women today, from the mansion to the tenement, are acquiring sex experience outside of marriage, which accounts for the great mental strides they have made with the past two decades." In the publication, by a leading editor, of such sentiments, we have an alarming sign of the times.
There are too many such signs. Do we not all know long-established magazines which have published, within the last five years, serials that they would not have considered fifteen years ago?
Says Punch's reviewer of a recent heroine: "Her point of view was typified in her attitude toward the illicit and incidental motherhood of one of her acquaintances. Without hearing the facts, she pronounced it to be 'a courageous stand against conventional morality,' which it just possibly might have proved to be upon enquiry, and by no means a weak surrender to immediate desires, as much more probably it was in fact." The author of Angela's Business depicts precisely the same mental attitude in the crimson-faced woman at the Redmantle Club, who demands of Charles in an angry sort of way, "Don't you favor a public reception immediately to splendid Flora Travenna? Don't you think she's struck a great blow for freedom?"—Flora Trevenna having just returned home after an absence of two years in the company of another woman's husband.
One of Robert Herrick's heroines prophesies—in line with Professor Thomas—"The time will come when single women like me, who work as men work, will have the courage to love and bear children if they need—and men will respect them."
Will it be believed that an English magazine of fine literary quality, in which the work of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett has often appeared, has printed an article by a woman pleading for a public sentiment in favor of irregular unions? "Women will go a step further toward freedom than men have dared to go," says Mrs. Walter Gallachan. "I believe that if there were some open recognition of these partnerships outside of marriage, not necessarily permanent, there would be many women who would be willing to undertake such unions gladly; there would even be some women, as I believe, who would prefer them to the present system that binds them permanently to one partner for life."