“Oh — leaving the women out?”
“Yes. It’s so — so — well, I can’t express to you how ridiculous it looks.”
“We’re getting over it,” I urged. “Eleven states now, you know — it’s getting on.”
“Oh, yes, yes, it’s getting on. But I’m looking at your history, and your conditions, and your loud complaints, and then to see this great mass of fellow-citizens treated as if they weren’t there — it is unbelievable!”
“But I told you about that before we came,” said I. “I told you in Herland — you knew it.”
“I knew it, truly. But, Van, suppose anyone had told you that in Herland women were the only citizens — would that have prevented your being surprised?”
I looked back for a moment, remembering how we men, after living there so long, after “knowing” that women were the only citizens, still never got over the ever recurring astonishment of realizing it.
“No wonder it surprises you, dear, — I should think it would. But go on about the women.”
“I’m not touching on the women at all, Van. This is only in treating of democracy — of your country and what ails it. You see—”
“Well, dear? See what?”
“It is so presumptuous of me to try to explain democracy to you, an American citizen. Of course you understand, but evidently the country at large doesn’t. In a monarchy you have this one allowed Ruler, and his subordinate rulers, and the people submit to them. Sometimes it works very well, but in any case it is something done for and to the people by someone they let do it.
“A democracy, a real one, means the people socially conscious and doing it themselves — doing it themselves! Not just electing a Ruler and subordinates and submitting to them — transferring the divine right of kings to the divine right of alderman or senators. A democracy is a game everybody has to play — has to — else it is not a democracy. And here you people deliberately left out half!”
“But they never had been ‘in’; you know, in the previous governments.”
“Now, Van — that’s really unworthy of you. As subjects they were the same as men, and as queens they were the same as kings. But you began a new game — that you said must be ‘by the people’ — and so on, and left out half.”
“It was — funny,” I admitted, “and unfortunate. But we’re improving. Do go on.”
“That’s three counts, I believe,” she agreed. “Next lamentable mistake, — failure to see that democracy must be economic.”
“Meaning socialism?”
“No, not exactly. Meaning what Socialism means, or ought to mean. You could not have a monarchy where the king was in no way different from his subjects. A monarchy must be expressed not only in the immediate symbols of robe and crown, throne and sceptre, but in the palace and the court, the list of lords and gentlemen-in-waiting. It’s all part of monarchy.
“So you cannot have a democracy while there are people markedly differentiated from the others, with symbolism of dress and decoration, with courts and palaces and crowds of servitors.”
“You can’t except all the people to be just alike, can you?”
“No, nor even to be ‘equal.’ Some people will always be more valuable than others, and some more useful than others; but a poet, a blacksmith, and a dancing master might all be friends and fellow-citizens in a true democratic sense. Your millionaires vote and your day-laborers vote, but it does not bring them together as fellow citizens. That’s why your little old New England towns and your fresh young western ones, have more of ‘America’ in them than is possible — could ever be possible — in such a political menagerie as New York, for instance.”
“Meaning the Tiger?” I inquired.
“Including the Tiger, with the Elephant, the Moose and the Donkey — specially the Donkey! No — I do not really mean those — totems. I mean the weird collection of political methods, interests, stages of growth.
“New York’s an oligarchy; it’s a plutocracy; it’s a hierarchy; it reverts to the clan system with its Irishmen, and back of that, to the patriarchy, with its Jews. It’s anything and everything you like — but it’s not a democracy.”
“If it was, what would it do to prove it? Just what do you expect of what you call democracy? Don’t you idealize it?” I asked.
“No.” She shook her head decidedly. “I do not idealize it. I’m familiar with it, you see — we have one at home, you know.”
So they had. I had forgotten. In fact I had not very clearly noticed. We had been so much impressed by their all being women that we had not done justice to their political development.
“It’s no miracle,” she said. “Just people co-operating to govern them-selves. We have universal suffrage, you know, and train our children in the use of it before they come to the real thing. That far-seeing Mr. Gill is trying to do that in your public schools, I notice, and Mr. George of the Junior Republics. It requires a common knowledge of the common need, local self-management, recognizing the will of the majority, and a big ceaseless loving effort to make the majority wiser. It’s surely nothing so wonderful, Van, for a lot of intelligent people to get together and manage their common interests.”
It certainly had worked well in Herland. So well, so easily, so smoothly, that it was hardly visible.
“But the people who get together have got to be within reach of one another,” she went on. “They’ve got to have common interests. What united action can you expect between Fifth Avenue and — Avenue A?”
“I’ve had all I can stand for one dose, my lady,” I now protested. “From what you have said I should think your ‘Splendid Child’ would have died in infancy — a hundred years ago. But we haven’t you see. We’re alive and kicking — especially kicking. I have faith in my country yet.”
“It is still able to lead the world — if it will,” she agreed. “It has still all the natural advantages it began with, and it has added new ones. I’m not despairing, nor blaming, Van — I’m diagnosing, and pretty soon I’ll prescribe. But just now I suggest that we change politics for tennis.”
We did. I can still beat her at tennis — having played fifteen years to her one — but not so often as formerly.
7. IN OUR HOMES
If there was one thing more than another I had wanted to show Ellador it was our homes, — my home, of course, and others that I knew.
In all the peace and beauty of Herland there was nowhere the small lit circle of intimate love and mutually considered comfort which means so much to us. The love, the comfort, were everywhere, to be sure, but that was different. It was like reflected lighting instead of a lamp on the center table; it was like an evenly steam-heated house, instead of one with an open fire in each room. We had missed those fires, so warm to the front, so inadequate on the back, so inclusive of those who can sit near it, so exclusive of everyone else.
Now, as we visited far and wide, and as Ellador, in her new capacity as speaker to clubs and churches went farther and wider, she was becoming well acquainted with our American homes it seemed to me.
But it did not satisfy her. She had become more and more the sociologist, the investigator.
“They are all alike,” she said. “The people vary, of course, but the setting is practically the same. Why, Van — in all my visits, in so many states, in so many kind families, I’ve found the most amusing similarity in homes. I can find the bathroom in the dark; I know just what they’ll have for breakfast; there seem to be only some eight or ten dinners or luncheons known.”
I was a little nettled, — just a little.
“There is a limit to edible animals, if that’s what you mean,” I protested. “Beef and veal, mutton and lamb, pig, — fresh, salted and smoked — poultry and game. Oh, and fish.”
“That’s ten, and can be stretched, of course. No, I don’t mean the basis of supplies. I mean only the lack of — of specialization in it all. You see the women have talked with me — eagerly. It really is pathetic, Van, the effort —
effort — effort, to do what ought to be so easy. And the expense!”
“We know it is laborious, but most women hold it is their duty, dear. Of course, I agree with you, but most of our people don’t, you see. And the men, I’m afraid, consider their own comfort.”
“I only wish they did,” she remarked, surprisingly. “But I’m studying the home not merely on the economic side; I’m studying it as a world institution — it’s new to me, you see. Europe — Africa — Asia — the Islands — America — see here, dear, we haven’t seen South America. Let’s learn Spanish and go!”
Ellador spoke of learning a new language as if it were a dance, a brief and entertaining process. We did it, too; at least she did. I knew some Spanish already and polished it up with her new enthusiasm to help. It was not until observing her intellectual processes in our journeyings together that I had realized the potential energy of the Herland mind. Its breadth” and depth, its calm control, its rationality, its fertility of resource, were apparent while we were there, but accustomed as I was to the common limitations of our own minds, to the narrow specialization with accompanying atrophy of other powers, to the “brain-fag” and mental breakdown, with all the deadly lower grades of feeble-mindedness and last gulf of insanity — I had not realized that these disabilities were unknown in Herland. A healthy brain does not show, any more than a sick one, and the airy strength of a bounding acrobat can hardly be judged if you see him in a hammock.
For this last year or two I was observing a Herland brain at work, assimilating floods of new impressions, suffering keen and severe emotional shocks, hampered by an inevitable nostalgia, and yet picking up languages in passing as one picks flowers by the roadside.
We made our trip to South America, with Spanish history carefully laid in beforehand, and learned what everyone of us ignorant United Statesians ought to know, — that “America” is a world-spanning double continent, not merely a patch on one, and that, if we do our duty by our brother countries, we may some day fill out legitimately that large high-sounding name of ours and really be The United States of America.
“I certainly have enough data now to be fair in my deduction,” Ellador said, on our home trip. “It has been awfully interesting, visiting your world. And coming back to your country now, with wider knowledge and a background of experience, I think I can be fairer to it. So if you’re ready, we’ll go back to where we left off that day I jumped to South America.”
She turned over her book of notes on the United States and looked at me cheerfully.
“Homes,” she said, “The Home, The American Home — and the homes of all the rest of the world, past and present—”
I tucked the Kenwood rug closer about her feet, settled my own, and prepared to listen.
“Yes, ma’am. Here you and I, at great expense, have circled the habitable globe, been most everywhere except to Australasia and South Africa — spent a good year canvassing the U.S. — and if you’re not ready to give us your diagnosis — and prescriptions — why, I shall lose faith in Herland!”
“Want it for the world — or just your country?” she asked serenely.
“Oh, well, give us both; you’re capable of it. But not quite all at once — I couldn’t take it in. America first, please.”
“It’s not so long,” she began slowly. “Not if you generalize, safely. One could, of course, say that because the Jones children were let alone they spilled the ink, teased the dog, hurt the kitten, let the canary out, ate too much jam, soiled their clothes, pulled up the tulip bulbs, smeared the wall-paper, broke the china, tore the curtains — and so forth, and so forth, and so forth. And you could tell just how it happened in each case — that would take some time. Especially if you added a similar account of the Smith children and the Brown children and so on. But if you say: ‘Neglected children are liable to become mischievous,’ you’ve said it all.”
“Don’t be as short as that,” I begged. “It would not be illuminating.”
We spent many hours on the endless subject, — rich, fruitful hours, full of insight, simplification, and hope.
“I’m not so shocked as I was at first,” she told me. “I’ve seen that Europe goes on being Europe even if each nation loses a million men — two million men. They’ll grow again. * * * I see that all this horror is no new thing to the world — poor world — poor, wretched, blind baby! But it’s a sturdy baby for all that. It’s Here — it has not died.
* * *
“What seems to be the matter, speaking very generally, is this: People have not understood their own works — their social nature, that is. They have not understood — that’s all.”
“Stupid? Hopelessly stupid?” I asked.
“Not at all — not in the least — but here’s the trouble: their minds were always filled up beforehand with what they used to believe. Talk about putting new wine in old bottles — it’s putting old wine in new bottles that has kept the world back.
“You can see it all the way long,” she pursued. “New life, continually arising, new condition, but always the old, older, oldest ideas, theories, beliefs. Every nation, every race, hampered and hag-ridden by what it used to think, used to believe, used to know. And all the nice, fresh, eager, struggling children forcibly filled up with the same old stuff. It is pretty terrible, Van. But it’s so — funny — that I can stand it. In one way human misery is a joke — because you don’t have to have it!
“Then you people came over to a New Continent and started a New Country, with a lot of New Ideas — yet you kept enough old ones to drown any country. No wonder you’ve splashed so much — just to keep above water.”
I didn’t say much. I wanted her to work it out, gradually. She was letting me see her do it. Of course, in this record I’m piecing together a great many talks, a great many ideas, and I’m afraid leaving out some. It was no light matter she had undertaken, even for a Herlander.
“This family and home idea is responsible for a great part of it,” she said. “Not, as I find you quite generally believe, as a type and pattern of all that is good and lovely, but as a persistent primitive social group, interfering with the development of later groups. If you look at what you ought to have evolved by this time, it becomes fairly easy to see what is the matter.
“Take your own case — with its wonderful new start — a clean slate of a country, and a very good installation of people to begin with. A good religion, too, in essence, and a prompt appreciation of the need of being generally educated. Then your splendid political opening — the great wave of democracy pouring out into expression. Room for all, wealth for all. What should have been the result — easily? Why, Van — the proudest Yankee, Southerner, Westerner, that ever lived doesn’t begin to estimate what your people might have done!
“What they have done is a good deal — but, Oh — what they might have done! You see, they didn’t understand democracy. They began to play, but they didn’t know the game. It was like a small child, running a big auto. Democracy calls for the conscious intelligent co-ordinate action of all the people. Without it, it is like a partly paralyzed king.
“First you left out half the people — an awful mistake. You only gradually took in the other half. You saw dimly the need of education, but you didn’t know what education was— ‘reading, writing, and arithmetic,’ are needed, even in monarchies. You needed special education in the new social process.
“Democracy calls for the understanding, recognition, and universal practice of social laws, — laws which are ‘natural,’ like those of physics and chemistry; but your religion — and your education, too — taught Authority — not real law. You couldn’t make a good electrician on mere authority, could you? He has to understand, not merely obey. Neither can you so make the citizens of a democracy. Reverence for and submission to authority are right in monarchies — wrong in democracies. When Demos is King he must learn to act for himself, not to do as he is told.
“And back of your Christian religion is the Hebrew;
back of that — The Family. It all comes down to that absurd root error of the proprietary family.”
We were easily at one in this view, but I had never related it to America’s political shortcomings before.
“That old Boss Father is behind God,” she went on calmly. “The personal concept of God as a father, with his special children, his benign patronage, his quick rage, long anger, and eternal vengeance—” she shivered, “it is an ugly picture.
“The things men have thought about God,” she said slowly, “are a ghastly proof of the way they have previously behaved. As they have improved, their ideas of God have improved slowly.
“When Kings were established, they crystallized the whole thing, in plain sight, and you had Kings a very long time, you see — have them yet. Kings and Fathers, Bosses, Rulers, Masters, Overlords — it is all such a poor preparation for democracy. Fathers and Kings and the Hebrew Deity are behind you and above you. Democracy is before you, around you; it is a thing to do. * * * “You have to learn it by trying — there is no tradition, and no authority. It calls for brave, careful, continuous, scientific experiment, with record of progress, and prompt relinquishment of failures and mistakes. It is open in front, and in motion — democracy is a going concern.” (How a foreigner does love an idiom or a bit of slang! Even this Herland angel was not above it.)
“Now, you in young America had left off the King idea, for the most part. But you had the King’s ancestor — the Father, the Absolute Boss, and you had a religion heavily weighted with that same basic concept. Moreover, as Protestants, book-worshiper, in default of a King, you must needs make a written ruler for yourselves, and that poor, blind, blessed baby, Democracy, promptly made itself a Cast-Iron Constitution — and crawled under it.”
That was something to chew on. It was so. It was undeniably so. We had done just that. We had been so anxious for “stability” — as if a young living thing could remain “stable” — the quality of stones.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 126