Woman
‘ MALE and female, created He them.’ The dawn of Creation saw the beginning of the problem which confronts us to-day. It is man who has made the woman question possible. Perhaps he feels that woman is making it impossible! Certainly she is following some blind alleys, and as certainly man is blockading the path to open vistas. Man must help all he can to better and forward the woman movement, for it is also a man movement and involves him. But, if the woman movement is conducted on certain lines now in evidence, it is bound to break down. So long as woman tries to find herself in man, it will go to pieces. She must find herself in herself. Man and woman are different, yet they are made for each other in a sense which we have not yet been large-minded enough to grasp. It is worth while to consider some ways in which woman differs, and in what directions lie her purposes. Perhaps we can get light on that great, oracular phrase, ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan ' — which is German for ‘Cherchez la femme!’
I suppose the most rabid single-sex agitators must admit that society is made up of men and women. The most abstruse philosophers must admit with the most simple that in this world there is a ceaseless being and becoming. Do not the men and women who make up the human part of the world differ in their relation to this eternal process? Look at their bodies. Man’s gives out strength and energy in action; woman’s stores them up in endurance. Man reaches out toward his aim; woman reaches in. There is an immediateness about woman; she seems to be in the heart of life’s secret, which man strives toward in vain. The Great Teacher has said, ‘Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall in no wise enter therein.’ It is a fact based on scientific research that woman ‘remains nearer to the infantile type.’ There may be no particular value in the connection, yet it is interesting.
We find, then, in the nature of the two sexes that man has preëminently the quality of becoming, and woman that of being. It is not accident which has made woman play the greater role as a subject of man’s art. Does she not in her own being solve the problem which has pursued, worn, and ruined many men — the problem of the struggle between the personal and the universal? Is she not the repository of creative force? This harmony with divine nature is hers by birthright. It has been taken from her. She must win it back.
Divine nature! Before going any further, many will wish that term more clearly defined. Some will quarrel with it in any case. The term is difficult of definition. It stands for Goethe’s word ‘Gott-Natur,’ and it is, I think, a different thing from the back-to-nature slogan of a few years ago. There is no sense of ‘back’ in it at all; it is forward. Why should we go back to what we have with so much effort come from? This divine nature means a conception which has futurity in it, which must be realized if we are not to stand still. Christ says, ‘God is Spirit’ ; Science says, ‘ Evolution is Spirit.’ We have left theological wranglings and philosophical disputes to give ourselves over to science. The study of evolution has changed our attitude toward nature. Can it be that through this study we are coming to a synthesis of these three — theology, philosophy, and science? We find that there is a cosmic intelligence, and an individual intelligence, and that in the harmony of the two lie wisdom and wealth. It is really beginning to dawn on our senses that the individual is not the centre of the world, but that each is a part of the whole. Each one, it is true, is a whole in himself, as a blood corpuscle is; but, like a corpuscle, incomplete in himself.
We are shifting to a very respectful attitude toward nature, toward this everlasting process of being and becoming, passing and appearing. We do not train nature. Nature is training us! Who invented the steam-boiler? Who invented the electric plant? Who invented the air-ship? Nature! And who invented Watt, Edison, and Lilienthal ? Nature, divine nature! What is it that makes men perfect the technic of locomotion? Nature, calling them into the country where they are nearer her. To-day nature is calling us more distinctly than ever before. We feel more keenly the divinity of which we are a part; of which tree and stream are a part. But when we endeavor to identify ourselves with the All, we come into conflict with the feeling of personality! Thus man, to whom the attribute of personality is a native inheritance cannot easily bring himself into harmony with the universe, though he looks on this harmony as his goal and, therefore, it is he who worships woman, the symbol of it. She is the symbol of creativeness, the divine creativeness which, in spite of contact with the world, accomplishes its wonders through its own inherent power. Therein lies woman’s significance and strength.
A bare outline of social development will make clear the starting-point of woman’s estrangement from her own power, this power which moulds men even as an impersonal force of nature.
Who was then the gentleman?
This well-known Utopia in miniature takes us a step beyond the time when Eve did the delving and there was no spinning; for at first, as we know, the woman engaged in all the more stationary pursuits round the ‘home,’ while the man went away on dangerous, fatiguing hunting trips. Both sexes labored. There was no ‘question,’ nor was there any prearranged standard of what one sex should do or not do. According to their organic differences they naturally chose the work best suited to them, and carried it out valiantly. Later, when through failing supplies man was cut off from the activities of the hunt and fight, he began to take up agriculture and the more settled occupations which had been woman’s. Here, by virtue of his greater energy and inventiveness, he soon became master, and she was left mistress inside the home, her activities still many, but narrowed in scope and more restraining.
Gradually the greater energetic force of man made him dominant in all activities. His economic and social inventiveness made him absolute master. Woman, instead of being economically productive as formerly, became economically dependent. Instead of being a necessity, as the sun or rain, she became a luxury, as vice or any other superfluity. Instead of being sought out as an equal and a needed mate, she was forced to use her innate cunning in competition to win him. She accepted his standards. She accepted his ideals.
Now, while man was very busy, seeking first not the kingdom of God and its righteousness, but the material world and its resources, he developed that curious katabolic thing, personality: a quality or state of being peculiar to himself, the natural outcome of his inherent nature and training. This dynamic force has been man’s strongest asset. On his feeling for personality rest all his accomplishments. It is essential that he keep this feeling. He must be allowed untrammeled action, for only thereby can he find power to do, and the entire mechanism of things done in the world is man’s work.
To woman, anabolic in her habits of body, different in her disposition, this fact and feeling of personality is foreign. Woman is not a personality. She is a symbol. This is by no means assigning to her an inferior place. Far from it. To regard woman as an inferior man is foolish, and as long as the woman movement, working on that basis, tries to prove that she is an equal or superior man, it must break down. As long as scientists and scholars insist on treating the points where woman differs from man as inferiorities, so long will their work remain useless. Equally foolish is the discussion as to which is the more highly organized. Both are superior; both complete. They are merely different.
Woman has a different nature, a different purpose; and the self-centred feeling of personality is impossible to her. She is god-centred, a symbol of divine nature, a power working through man to accomplish what she will. She is to men the vision of creativeness, and this vision it is their part to make reality. One has only to look at the curious results of woman’s interpretation of the word personality, and her application of it to herself as a ‘right,’ to see how ill this man-quality fits her. When woman starts out with a baleful determination to ‘live her own life,’ it makes one weep or laugh, according to one’s temperament. Woman’s strength and power lie not in a pseudo-personality, but in her nearness to divine nature.
All the creative work upon which our civilization rests owes its existence to the feeling of personality in man. If this feeling is weakened by the feministic agitation of the time, the whole fabric of our world is in danger. In support of this contention, let me quote from Dr. Georg Groddeck of Baden Baden, Germany, whose stimulating ideas have set me thinking again on this whole subject, and to whose arguments, used by his permission, many passages in this paper are directly due.
‘On this feeling of personality,’ says Dr. Groddeck, ‘rests a man’s sense of duty, his energy, his capability for sacrifice, his worship of the Idea. Without this worship of the Idea, which has always created all the deeds of man, everything is lost that has been won. Every great and beautiful thing in life is the work of the man; it is the work of personality in man, and that will remain so, for only a human being who possesses personality can do creative work; and woman has no personality.’
No one can deny that this same ebullient personality in man has aided him in cruelty and oppression in regard to woman. He has indisputably kept her as his toy or his ox or his ass or a stranger within his gates. He has prevented her from taking any part in the ‘march of mind,’ from keeping pace with him, from being what she ought to be. Worst of all, he has slowly and thoroughly robbed her of her sense of duty. That was ‘the most unkindest cut of all,’ for only through the possession of a high sense of duty and dignity in her calling can woman accomplish her great purpose. A prototype of Mother Nature, a symbol of divine creativeness, woman finds her beauty, her goal, her god-head, in motherhood. In what way she discharges this great office lies the crux of the woman question, and the determination of the future.
In woman’s hands is placed the destiny of the race. She must decide whether or not we are to walk that path which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. She controls the quality of posterity. She has her hand on evolution’s course. In the face of that, is it ‘rights’ she is after? Rights ! What has any one to do with rights? She has duties, heavy, constant, supreme. Let her noble revenge on man be to restore to him his sense of duty which he lost in depriving her. She can do this, if she will, for she is the great educator and stimulator of man. She stirs his heart and binds him to her in reverence and love.
This love, however, is different in man and woman. Its morale is looked at from two different standpoints. To the woman feeling is everything; to the man, reason. The man loves his wife as the symbol of the All, this impersonality which compels his allegiance. He worships her as the highest idea of his life. She, on the other hand, loves him in particular, loves his personality, his immediate ego. To worship an idea and to love impersonally are two abilities not native to woman. She is physically much more bound to him than he to her. She becomes his flesh, and her fidelity is more a natural law than a moral question. His fidelity, however, is preeminently a moral act, an act of his power and will. It is not always a sign of moral greatness. When a man is narrow in mind, and insignificant in quality, it is no effort for him to be faithful; but when he is high-minded, and glowing in personality, the effort becomes great. As he demands more from himself, he also demands more from his wife. He can be faithful if she grows with him; he can be faithful if she has once given him the keys to divine nature and changed the world for him, even though she herself has lost significance; but when she utterly blots out divine nature for him she deprives him of the highest to which he is by right entitled. For this reason, man must not be judged exclusively by the feminine idea of fidelity. A man of personality and strength who is not faithful to his vows, alone knows why he injures himself, and for himself he must be judge to clear or condemn.
It is just here, in regard to loving, that women show, perhaps, their greatest need of a revived sense of duty. They have lost all dignity and guidance of divine nature in a thoughtless chase after ‘happiness.’ Brought up to regard their own happiness as the one aim and object of life, they have lost the sense of mighty Nature’s purpose, lost the reverence for life, for their pressing responsibility. The tremendous words from Faust — ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan’—fall on deaf ears and hardened consciences. We have the criminal spectacle of a woman’s not achieving her purpose for fear she will not be ‘happy.’ She selfishly commits inverted murder by not allowing the race to be born that should come to flower. Or we see a woman rushing to a marriage of happiness, regardless of whether the husband is diseased or not, whether he is fitted to her in race or character. She has no idea of direction, control, or responsibility. She must fearlessly face facts of life, learn to discriminate between instinct and will, longing and love.
The idea that woman must marry ‘only for love ’ has bred about as much evil as one could expect from an emotional catch-phrase! It has led woman to think that she possesses a unique, peculiar feeling. She has lost sight of the fact that she is possessed by the great world-force. She thinks this ‘ love ’ is something above appreciative study, just as a piously broughtup freshman is horrified in her English class at the thought of criticizing Milton. Milton is ‘above criticism.’ It takes her some time to understand that criticism was necessary in order to place him above it, and then she realizes that leaving him there is an incomplete criticism which gives her no basis of knowing why he is a splendid name in poetry. She gradually sees that a critical study of him does not mean moral disintegration, but integrity. In somewhat the same way, woman must see her duty to study and direct this force that ‘makes the world go round.’ She shares it with all living creatures, and she, of all living creatures, can make it the most beautiful thing in the world. Behold now our blind and diseased, drunkards, epileptics, prostitutes! A branch of this evil may be cut off by the woman’s ballot, but the root will not be touched. That lies within her.
Though women have estranged themselves from divine nature as givers and trainers of life, though many mothers are untrue to their trust, it is significant that only single and childless women decry the demands that motherhood makes. It is true that woman must be restrained in her activity if she is to accomplish her purpose. Nature has shown that quite definitely. On physical conditions alone woman is kept in bounds which do not affect man. This does not mean that woman’s work is less valuable or interesting or comprehensive. This does not mean that woman should not have college and university training, that she should not have the ballot, that she should not partake in the tasks of the work-a-day world. But it does mean this: she should have all these as radii leading to the centre of motherhood. In the way in which she performs her duties as mother lies the heart of all progress. She is par excellence the lover, and man is the doer. If she tries to be a second man, the woman movement must fail; if she insists on being herself, it must come to fragrant flower and wholesome fruitage.
One of the most subtle and insistent bondages which woman suffers is her slavery to the man-ideal. Will she do anything? She unconsciously places the man-standard before her endeavor. She measures herself by his rules. Her measure should be her own divine nature! Woman is the brooder, she is near the heart of divinity, she overhears godlikeness. Let her be the educator of the thought which will take his activities up and down the earth. Let her be the stimulator of the deed which will take him to conquer ocean and air. There lie her two peculiar fields, — education and stimulation.
To say that her peculiar field is education would seem to satisfy at once those who interpret from the foregoing any narrowing of woman’s ‘sphere.’ To fit herself to bear beautiful children, train them to be honorable, intelligent men, and honorable, intelligent women, surely opens up an educative field which can not justly be called narrow. It is by her own gratuitous interpretation that she thinks this means keeping her among the ashes of her hearth in continual mental darkness. To be able to educate her sons and daughters she will need to be at one with her inherent divine nature, and any study or line of work which can help her to that end is good. Think what she needs of biology, psychology, philosophy, to give her a basis of ideals from which to get and give spiritual direction, — to say nothing of other branches needed for definite, practical work! Here again she must free herself from man-standards. She does not need to study these subjects as men do, giving up their entire lives to their great problems; but for her own use she can get a knowledge of these sciences which will change her whole attitude and give her strength and enthusiasm to inculcate vital, normal ideas into her children; to be actually a help-mate, instead of a hindrance-mate.
She can then teach her daughter in what way, and in how far, she differs from man. Hers is the sex which is born with a ‘calling.’ Man waits for his call, follows it or not, fails or not. Woman is the bearer of, and carer for, the next generation. She has, as woman, a special task. She is the homemaker. For that task she needs all that education in both its narrow and its broad senses can give her. She, the shaper of the future, should acquire first of all a holy and natural regard for life, so that she will not bring into the world any child who cannot be wellborn and well-reared. Why an indiscriminately large family? Why should there be so many people? Nature must be prodigal in plant and animal, that the species may survive; but conditions among human beings are not the same. We do not need lavishly to create children so that two or three may remain. Quality is what we need.
She can teach her daughter to carry on the education of love, teach her how it has been made a horrible fetish, and how she needs to bring all her energy to making it a wholesome religion for herself. Poor Love! The greatest art in the world, and no one studies its technic; the most intimate science, and no one studies its origin, potentialities, or growth. The daughter must be taught not to mistake for a special, individual love her compelling maternal instinct and desire. She shares it with all nature. It is only after marriage, after close companionship with her husband, that a woman can love. Before that, her emotion was merely longing. It is her duty to choose as wisely, as unamorously as possible, the mate who is to be the father of her child. The future of the race is in her keeping. Our progress toward harmony with divinity lies in her decisions.
She must realize, also, that she is incomplete without motherhood. It is a biologic fact that the man is always male entirely, but the woman after marriage is a mixture of maiden and man. It is, indeed, the very exceptional single woman who does not exhibit some abnormality, some lack of completeness, some one-sidedness. Woman needs contact with man to complete her nature. Married life is natural, it is normal, it is the basis from which progress is possible, and woman should regard it as her high duty to enter into it. She should be taught to pass on the torch of life in the light of this being and becoming. She should teach her children to feel themselves a part of the whole, and to keep in harmony with it. They are channels for divine nature. They must learn that life is fluid, that the eternal process of being and becoming is an eternal change in eternal changelessness. The children must grow on beyond their parents, or what is the point of marriage? Although they cannot ‘borrow experience,’ they can be better prepared for it.
The training of the son would be naturally somewhat different from that of the daughter. First of all, he should be trained to deeds, for he is the future doer. He should be fired with an exuberant love of life, taught 1o accept serenely the great processes of birth, growth, decay. Everything should be done to develop his personality, the marvelous force which in man corresponds to the marvelous force, motherlove, in woman. He should be trained to feel himself a part of divine nature, a tool of hers. Woman he should be taught to regard not as an inferior kind of man, but as an equal being at. his side, different from him in service and purpose. He should be taught to reverence divine nature in her, and in himself strength and creativeness. He must realize the seriousness of marriage, and his duty to beget only sound, able children. The enticements of a life of sensuality he must scorn. He must live wholesome, strong, active, a life near to the nature of mountain and river, storm and sky. He must take a stern part in the great cosmic plan, and know that duty and not happiness is the nobler aim.
Woman cannot escape her fate. If she will not make it a glory for humanity, she can only spoil it. She is, for weal or for woe, the educative and stimulative force of mankind. The French arc right in their diagnosis,‘Cherchez la femme.’ The German is right with his more remedial statement, ‘Das Ewig-Weiblichezieht uns hinan.’ There is always a woman back of the deed the man does. Will she help man to bring his personality into harmony with the universe? Will she help him to that cosmic unselfishness which places one’s self gladly as a part of the whole, a less than the all? Will she open men’s ears to Bacon’s significant aphorism, ‘Nature is to be commanded only by obeying her’? Will she make true the reverent words of a German physician, ‘ An archetype of God: that is woman ’ ? ‘In her, man loves past and future; to him through her streams creative power, will, high endeavor. Woman is, in truth, the source of the most beautiful of earthly things, a being whose praise will never end, a symbol that leads upward: verily, a mother of God.’