Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  The advance of civilization calls for human qualities, in both men and women. Our educational system is thwarted and hindered, not as Prof. Wendell and his life would have us believe, by “feminization,” but by an overweening masculization.

  Their position is a simple one. “We are men. Men are human beings. Women are only women. This is a man’s world. To get on in it you must do it man-fashion — i.e., fight, and overcome the others. Being civilized, in part, we must arrange a sort of “civilized warfare,” and learn to play the game, the old crude, fierce male game of combat, and we must educate our boys thereto.” No wonder education was denied to women. No wonder their influence is dreaded by an ultra-masculine culture.

  It will change the system in time. It will gradually establish an equal place in life for the feminine characteristics, so long belittled and derided, and give pre-eminent dignity to the human power.

  Physical culture, for both boys and girls, will be part of such a modified system. All things that both can do together will be accepted as human; but what either boys or girls have to retire apart to practice will be frankly called masculine and feminine, and not encouraged in children.

  The most important qualities are the human ones, and will be so named and honored. Courage is a human quality, not a sex-quality. What is commonly called courage in male animals is mere belligerence, the fighting instinct. To meet an adversary of his own sort is a universal masculine trait; two father cats may fight fiercely each other, but both will run from a dog as quickly as a mother cat. She has courage enough, however, in defence of her kittens.

  What this world most needs to-day in both men and women, is the power to recognize our public conditions; to see the relative importance of measures; to learn the processes of constructive citizenship. We need an education which shall give its facts in the order of their importance; morals and manners based on these facts; and train our personal powers with careful selection, so that each may best serve the community.

  At present, in the larger processes of extra-scholastic education, the advantage is still with the boy. From infancy we make the gross mistake of accentuating sex in our children, by dress and all its limitations, by special teaching of what is “ladylike” and “manly.” The boy is allowed a freedom of experience far beyond the girl. He learns more of his town and city, more of machinery, more of life, passing on from father to son the truths as well as traditions of sex superiority.

  All this is changing before our eyes, with the advancing humanness of women. Not yet, however, has their advance affected, to any large extent, the base of all education; the experience of a child’s first years. Here is where the limitations of women have checked race progress most thoroughly. Here hereditary influence was constantly offset by the advance of the male. Social selection did develop higher types of men, though sex-selection reversed still insisted on primitive types of women. But the educative influence of these primitive women, acting most exclusively on the most susceptible years of life, has been a serious deterrent to race progress.

  Here is the dominant male, largely humanized, yet still measuring life from male standards. He sees women only as a sex. (Note here the criticism of Europeans on American women. “Your women are so sexless!” they say, meaning merely that our women have human qualities as well as feminine.) And children he considers as part and parcel of the same domain, both inferior classes, “women and children.”

  I recall in Rimmer’s beautiful red chalk studies, certain profiles of man, woman and child, and careful explanation that the proportion of the woman’s face and head were far more akin to the child than to the man. What Mr. Rimmer should have shown, and could have, by profuse illustration, was that the faces of boy and girl differ but slightly, and the faces of old men and women differ as little, sometimes not at all; while the face of the woman approximates the human more closely than that of the man; while the child, representing race more than sex, is naturally more akin to her than to him. The male reserves more primitive qualities, the hairiness, the more pugnacious jaw; the female is nearer to the higher human types.

  An ultra-male selection has chosen women for their femininity first, and next for qualities of submissiveness and patient service bred by long ages of servility.

  This servile womanhood, or the idler and more excessively feminine type, has never appreciated the real power and place of the mother, and has never been able to grasp or to carry out any worthy system of education for little children. Any experienced teacher, man or woman, will own how rare it is to find a mother capable of a dispassionate appreciation of educative values. Books in infant education and child culture generally are read by teachers more than mothers, so our public libraries prove. The mother-instinct, quite suitable and sufficient in animals, is by no means equal to the requirements of civilized life. Animal motherhood furnishes a fresh wave of devotion for each new birth; primitive human motherhood extends that passionate tenderness over the growing family for a longer period; but neither can carry education beyond its rudiments.

  So accustomed are we to our world-old method of entrusting the first years of the child to the action of untaught, unbridled mother-instinct, that suggestions as to a better education for babies are received with the frank derision of massed ignorance.

  That powerful and brilliant writer, Mrs. Josephine Daskam Bacon, among others has lent her able pen to ridicule and obstruct the gradual awakening of human intelligence in mothers, the recognition that babies are no exception to the rest of us in being better off for competent care and service. It seems delightfully absurd to these reactionaries that ages of human progress should be of any benefit to babies, save, indeed, as their more human fathers, specialized and organized, are able to provide them with better homes and a better world to grow up in. The idea that mothers, more human, should specialize and organize as well, and extend to their babies these supreme advantages, is made a laughing stock.

  It is easy and profitable to laugh with the majority; but in the judgment of history, those who do so, hold unenviable positions. The time is coming when the human mother will recognize the educative possibilities of early childhood, learn that the ability to rightly teach little children is rare and precious, and be proud and glad to avail themselves of it.

  We shall then see a development of the most valuable human qualities in our children’s minds such as would now seem wildly Utopian. We shall learn from wide and long experience to anticipate and provide for the steps of the unfolding mind, and train it, through carefully prearranged experiences, to a power of judgment, of self-control, of social perception, now utterly unthought of.

  Such an education would begin at birth; yes, far before it, in the standards of a conscious human motherhood. It would require a quite different status of wifehood, womanhood, girlhood. It would be wholly impossible if we were never to outgrow our androcentric culture.

  OUR ANDROCENTRIC CULTURE; or, THE MAN-MADE WORLD

  IX. “SOCIETY” AND “FASHION”

  Among our many naive misbeliefs is the current fallacy that “society” is made by women; and that women are responsible for that peculiar social manifestation called “fashion.”

  Men and women alike accept this notion; the serious essayist and philosopher, as well as the novelist and paragrapher, reflect it in their pages. The force of inertia acts in the domain of psychics as well as physics; any idea pushed into the popular mind with considerable force will keep on going until some opposing force — or the slow resistance of friction — stops it at last.

  “Society” consists mostly of women. Women carry on most of its processes, therefore women are its makers and masters, they are responsible for it, that is the general belief.

  We might as well hold women responsible for harems — or prisoners for jails. To be helplessly confined to a given place or condition does not prove that one has chosen it; much less made it.

  No; in an androcentric culture “society,” like every other social relation, is dominated by the m
ale and arranged for his convenience. There are, of course, modifications due to the presence of the other sex; where there are more women than men there are inevitable results of their influence; but the character and conditions of the whole performance are dictated by men.

  Social intercourse is the prime condition of human life. To meet, to mingle, to know one another, to exchange, not only definite ideas, facts, and feelings, but to experience that vague general stimulus and enlarged power that comes of contact — all this is essential to our happiness as well as to our progress.

  This grand desideratum has always been monopolized by men as far as possible. What intercourse was allowed to women has been rigidly hemmed its by man-made conventions. Women accept these conventions, repeat them, enforce them upon their daughters; but they originate with men.

  The feet of the little Chinese girl are bound by her mother and her nurse — but it is not for woman’s pleasure that this crippling torture was invented. The Oriental veil is worn by women, but it is not for any need of theirs that veils were decreed them.

  When we look at society in its earlier form we find that the public house has always been with us. It is as old almost as the private house; the need for association is as human as the need for privacy. But the public house was — and is — for men only. The woman was kept as far as possible at home. Her female nature was supposed to delimit her life satisfactorily, and her human stature was completely ignored.

  Under the pressure of that human nature she has always rebelled at the social restrictions which surrounded her; and from the women of older lands gathered at the well, or in the market place, to our own women on the church steps or in the sewing circle, they have ceaselessly struggled for the social intercourse which was as much a law of their being as of man’s.

  When we come to the modern special field that we call “society,” we find it to consist of a carefully arranged set of processes and places wherein women may meet one another and meet men. These vary, of course, with race, country, class, and period; from the clean licence of our western customs to the strict chaperonage of older lands; but free as it is in America, even here there are bounds.

  Men associate without any limit but that of inclination and financial capacity. Even class distinction only works one way — the low-class man may not mingle with high-class women; but the high-class man may — and does — mingle with low-class women. It is his society — may not a man do what he will with his own?

  Caste distinctions, as have been ably shown by Prof. Lester F. Ward, are relics of race distinction; the subordinate caste was once a subordinate race; and while mating, upward, was always forbidden to the subject race; mating, downward, was always practiced by the master race.

  The elaborate shading of “the color line” in slavery days, from pure black up through mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, quinteroon, griffada, mustafee, mustee, and sang d’or — to white again; was not through white mothers — but white fathers; never too exclusive in their tastes. Even in slavery, the worst horrors were strictly androcentric.

  “Society” is strictly guarded — that is its women are. As always, the main tabu is on the woman. Consider carefully the relation between “society” and the growing girl. She must, of course, marry; and her education, manners, character, must of course be pleasing to the prospective wooer. That which is desirable in young girls means, naturally, that which is desirable to men. Of all cultivated accomplishments the first is “innocence.” Beauty may or may not be forthcoming; but “innocence” is “the chief charm of girlhood.”

  Why? What good does it do her? Her whole life’s success is made to depend on her marrying; her health and happiness depends on her marrying the right man. The more “innocent” she is, the less she knows, the easier it is for the wrong man to get her.

  As is so feelingly described in “The Sorrows of Amelia,” in “The Ladies’ Literary Cabinet,” a magazine taken by my grandmother; “The only foible which the delicate Amelia possessed was an unsuspecting breast to lavish esteem. Unversed in the secret villanies of a base degenerate world, she ever imagined all mankind to be as spotless as herself. Alas for Amelia! This fatal credulity was the source of all her misfortunes.” It was. It is yet.

  Just face the facts with new eyes — look at it as if you had never seen “society” before; and observe the position of its “Queen.”

  Here is Woman. Let us grant that Motherhood is her chief purpose. (As a female it is. As a human being she has others!) Marriage is our way of safeguarding motherhood; of ensuring “support” and “protection” to the wife and children.

  “Society” is very largely used as a means to bring together young people, to promote marriage. If “society” is made and governed by women we should naturally look to see its restrictions and encouragements such as would put a premium on successful maternity and protect women — and their children — from the evils of ill-regulated fatherhood.

  Do we find this? By no means.

  “Society” allows the man all liberty — all privilege — all license. There are certain offences which would exclude him; such as not paying gambling debts, or being poor; but offences against womanhood — against motherhood — do not exclude him.

  How about the reverse?

  If “society” is made by women, for women, surely a misstep by a helplessly “innocent” girl, will not injure her standing!

  But it does. She is no longer “innocent.” She knows now. She has lost her market value and is thrown out of the shop. Why not? It is his shop — not hers. What women may and may not be, what they must and must not do, all is measured from the masculine standard.

  A really feminine “society” based on the needs and pleasures of women, both as females and as human beings, would in the first place accord them freedom and knowledge; the knowledge which is power. It would not show us “the queen of the ballroom” in the position of a wall-flower unless favored by masculine invitation; unable to eat unless he brings her something; unable to cross the floor without his arm. Of all blind stultified “royal sluggards” she is the archetype. No, a feminine society would grant at least equality to women in this, their so-called special field.

  Its attitude toward men, however, would be rigidly critical.

  Fancy a real Mrs. Grundy (up to date it has been a Mr., his whiskers hid in capstrings) saying, “No, no, young man. You won’t do. You’ve been drinking. The habit’s growing on you. You’ll make a bad husband.”

  Or still more severely, “Out with you, sir! You’ve forfeited your right to marry! Go into retirement for seven years, and when you come back bring a doctor’s certificate with you.”

  That sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it — for “Society” to say? It is ridiculous, in a man’s “society.”

  The required dress and decoration of “society”; the everlasting eating and drinking of “society,” the preferred amusements of “society,” the absolute requirements and absolute exclusions of “society,” are of men, by men, for men, — to paraphrase a threadbare quotation. And then, upon all that vast edifice of masculine influence, they turn upon women as Adam did; and blame them for severity with their fallen sisters! “Women are so hard upon women!”

  They have to be. What man would “allow” his wife, his daughters, to visit and associate with “the fallen”? His esteem would be forfeited, they would lose their “social position,” the girl’s chance of marrying would be gone.

  Men are not so stern. They may visit the unfortunate women, to bring them help, sympathy, re-establishment — or for other reasons; and it does not forfeit their social position. Why should it? They make the regulation.

  Women are to-day, far more conspicuously than men, the exponents and victims of that mysterious power we call “Fashion.” As shown in mere helpless imitation of one another’s idea, customs, methods, there is not much difference; in patient acquiescence with prescribed models of architecture, furniture, literature, or anything else; there is not much difference; but in pe
rsonal decoration there is a most conspicuous difference. Women do to-day submit to more grotesque ugliness and absurdity than men; and there are plenty of good reasons for it. Confining our brief study of fashion to fashion in dress, let us observe why it is that women wear these fine clothes at all; and why they change them as they do.

  First, and very clearly, the human female carries the weight of sex decoration, solely because of her economic dependence on the male. She alone in nature adds to the burdens of maternity, which she was meant for, this unnatural burden of ornament, which she was not meant for. Every other female in the world is sufficiently attractive to the male without trimmings. He carries the trimmings, sparing no expense of spreading antlers or trailing plumes; no monstrosity of crest and wattles, to win her favor.

  She is only temporarily interested in him. The rest of the time she is getting her own living, and caring for her own young. But our women get their bread from their husbands, and every other social need. The woman depends on the man for her position in life, as well as the necessities of existence. For herself and for her children she must win and hold him who is the source of all supplies. Therefore she is forced to add to her own natural attractions this “dance of the seven veils,” of the seventeen gowns, of the seventy-seven hats of gay delirium.

  There are many who think in one syllable, who say, “women don’t dress to please men — they dress to please themselves — and to outshine other women.” To these I would suggest a visit to some summer shore resort during the week and extending over Saturday night. The women have all the week to please themselves and outshine one another; but their array on Saturday seems to indicate the approach of some new force or attraction.

  If all this does not satisfy I would then call their attention to the well-known fact that the young damsel previous to marriage spends far more time and ingenuity in decoration than she does afterward. This has long been observed and deprecated by those who write Advice to Wives, on the ground that this difference is displeasing to the husband — that she loses her influence over him; which is true. But since his own “society,” knowing his weakness, has tied him to her by law; why should she keep up what is after all an unnatural exertion?