XVII Suffrage a Step Toward Feminism
Lily Rice Foxcroft
Lily Rice Foxcroft, daughter of the late Rev. Dr. Charles B. Rice of Danvers, Mass., for nearly twenty years Secretary of the Congregational Board of Pastoral Supply; wife of Frank Foxcroft, editor of “The Living Age.” Frequent contributor to the religious press, the author of a volume entitled, “While You Are a Girl,” and a well-known speaker in opposition to woman suffrage.
J. A. H.
The strongest motive for anti-suffrage action is the deepening dread of woman suffrage as a menace to the home. The radical suffragists have little use for the home, and the radical suffragists are young and brilliant, and their following grows rapidly. It is they who are in the public eye; whom the reporters interview; who, far more than the conservatives, are really influencing the thought of the day. They claim to be the consistent thinkers, reasoning from the common premise to conclusions from which “older women” shrink. They welcome with whole-hearted enthusiasm the theory of “economic independence.”
This theory was first popularized by the Woman’s Journal, in a notable series of articles by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an associate editor, which appeared weekly in 1904, and of which the central thought was, “The woman should be in the home as much as the man is, no more.” She urged women to “come out of their little monogamous harems,” promised that “when all women are in industry, the conditions of industry will be compelled to suit the conditions of maternity,” and predicted the time when “a man would no more think of having a woman become his house servant than a woman would think of marrying her butler and retaining him in that capacity.” Mrs. Gilman summarized these ideas, again, in a lecture in New York last year: “The home of the future is one in which not one stroke of work shall be done except by professional people who are paid by the hour.”
This theory meets so well the anti-suffrage argument that the woman, while spending most of her time within the home, cannot be expected to attain outside it a degree of efficiency equal to that of the man, that it naturally becomes part of the creed of the logical and consistent suffragist. Miss Henrietta Rodman—a wife who, like Miss Fola La Follette, retains her maiden name, because taking that of a husband “dwarfs individuality”—gave to a reporter of the Boston Herald last year her opinion that “a house is as demoralizing a place to stay in all day as a bed,” and assured him that the ideal feminist apartment-house, with its co-operative nursery on the top floor, had its plans actually drawn, its site chosen. “Trained staffs are to relieve women of the four primitive industries—care of houses, clothes, food and children.” “By real motherhood,” said Miss Rodman, “I do not mean washing the baby’s clothes, preparing its food, watching over its sleep, nursing it through its baby illnesses, nor, in later years, darning the children’s stockings, making or even mending their clothes, preparing their food or supervising their education. All these things can be done better by experts.”
No one can follow the utterances of this group of suffragists without noting the constant slight cast on “domestic drudgery,” and the eagerness to prove other lines of activity better adapted to women. “There is rising revolt among women,” wrote Miss Edna Kenton, in The Century for November, 1913, “against the unspeakable dullness of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life-servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world.”
General Rosalie Jones, of “hiking fame,” who is now breaking into the automobile business, says: “There are idiot asylums in every state whose inmates are expert at darning and mending. Any one of those idiots sitting by the fireside could do the family mending, while the woman of education, ingenuity and common sense, could utilize her faculties to the betterment of her family and the country.... After suffrage is granted, women will no longer be content to waste their brains in this manner.” Miss Inez Boissevain’s “Ten Minutes-a-Day Housekeeping” is well known, as is her declaration to the reporter that she “should go crazy if she had to do housework one whole day.” “Young children,” she admitted, “need their mother. But,” she added hopefully, “the age at which they can be left with others is much less than it was formerly supposed to be.” Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, Mrs. Pankhurst’s closest companion on her last United States tour, says: “Men are not yet used to seeing their wives in the role of wage-earners. They’ll have to get used to it, that’s all.... I don’t say that every married woman must go to work outside her home. I should commit suicide if I had to spend my life doing housework, but some women probably like to do it. Let them do it then. All I ask is that every woman, married or single, should be allowed to choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure.”
“To choose the work in which she finds the most pleasure”—there is the real individualistic note, sounded so often by the radical suffragists. It is struck still more clearly when to the reporter’s question: “What about the argument that the wife with a business career is apt to deprive her husband of the joys of fatherhood?” Mrs. Dorr replies: “No one but the individual woman herself has any right to decide whether or not she shall have children. That is a question which she alone is entitled to settle.”
In the same tone of contempt for the domestic round in which the average wife and mother has been accustomed to find her fair share of human satisfaction, Mrs. Susan Fitzgerald wrote in the opening number of “Femina”: “Of course, some women don’t want to do independent work; some prefer the quiet routine and detail of the home and are satisfied to make a profession of its many little refinements, even as many men have not the ambition to go into business for themselves.... But the creative artist, whether in a profession or business, gets most of the joy of living out of the satisfaction that comes to him in his work, and so I say, do away with the prejudice against married women working outside their homes.”
Miss Alyse Gregory—who has campaigned for suffrage in Connecticut and New Jersey with striking success—says: “Girls should be self-supporting up to the time of their marriage, and after marriage up to the time when they begin to bear children. During the child-bearing period there might be some provision made for mothers by the State, as is now done in France; then all women who have reared families and who again find themselves with leisure on their hands, should again be self-supporting.” This, of course, is the Socialist view, and Miss Gregory, like so many of the younger suffragists, is presumably a Socialist.
Another pronounced advocate of economic independence is Mrs. Havelock Ellis—an English suffragist much fêted on her visits to this country—of whom an admirer writes in the Chicago Herald, that “she has never accepted a penny from her husband since they were married.” It will be noticed that all these women are in professional work, in which their earnings may reasonably be expected to provide “expert” care for their children. Incidentally, does not that support the anti-suffrage claim that the suffrage movement is gauged to the talents and habits of exceptional, rather than average, women, and that its principles are not those under which the average woman’s life finds its best development?
This tendency away from domestic life fosters the very evils which conservative suffragists hope to remedy by the vote. Even more startling is the tone taken in the discussion of “sex problems.” Interviewed on the subject of “war babies” last summer by an enterprising syndicate which spread her views all over the country, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr said: “There are always war babies at a time when normal restraints are removed and slackened. After a great religious revival in any town there is an increased number of illegitimate children.... The government endowed immorality when it entered the war.... The government made war, the war made war babies—then let the government take care of them.”
To the same interviewer, Miss Eleanor Gates, of the Empire State Campaign Committee, said: “It’s unfortunate that the parents of these babies did not take out licenses to be parents.... But more unfortunate, to my mind, than an omission of the license, is the fact that motherhood should ever be counted a crime.... And, when all is said and done, I, myself, respect the unmarried woman with a child more than I do the married woman with a poodle.”
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.”
To many women these views seem so shocking that they cannot believe them to be widespread. I can only say that such women are leading “sheltered lives.” Said a conspicuous young feminist in an interview given to a Boston Sunday paper, “It is both cruel and foolish (eugenically and ethically) to prevent people from trying more than once to find their ideal comrade for race propagation.” The fiction of today is full of the disgusting experiences of young persons trying to find their ideal comrades. And an appalling number of these books bear marks of brilliant talent, utterly unconscious of moral standards, “studies of adolescence,” many of them are. Illicit relations are entered on in the most casual way and dropped as casually, and yet glorified as marking new eras of “development.”
I know, of course, the answer made by thoughtful, conscientious suffragists who believe as strongly as I do in the integrity of the home, when facts like these are brought to their attention. “All suffragists are not feminists. All feminism is not of this extreme sort. Feminism is nothing but a theory, anyway.”
Each of us must judge from her own observation; but it should be observation, not merely of the lives of one’s personal acquaintance, but of current thought and tendency. Many of us are convinced that an increasing and influential number of suffragists are feminists, that a great deal of feminism is of this extreme sort, and that it is a “theory” which, through channels direct and indirect, is poisoning our literature and our social life.