Backwash

by Zona Gale

BACKWASH

By ZONA GALE

IS there a case for feminism? The author of Miss Lulu Bett is so surprised that the question should be raised at this late date, that she is almost inclined to treat it as a sign of a radical swing of the pendulum back to Victorianism. Dr. Gina Lombroso's new book suggested this terse but entirely good-humored essay.

TO the observer of movements, both the beat of their advance and the contemporary opposition by them stimulated are more understandable than their backwash. Or call it merely the tread of those who do not know what has taken place and are still marching. On the Wisconsin prairie lived an old man who at family prayers began asking in 1860 for the liberation of the slaves, never changing, to the day of his death in the '80's, the form of his after-breakfast petition: "O God, set free the colored men and women of Thy South." By 1880 this plea seemed an anachronism comparable to that of any treatise of to-day beginning, "Spinning has gone out of the home," and pursuing an argument for woman's suffrage. Or to opposing woman's rights "because men and women are different."

Such a performance after the fact gives a biographical slant on the author far more revelatory than contemporary combat. For example, although we enjoy reading Daniel Webster's speech opposing to the Congress the opening up of the West, warning of the rock-bound coast of the Pacific, its poor harbors, its sterility, its impassable mountains at the end of a skeleton-strewn desert, and crying: "I would not see one dollar of the nation's money spent to bring the coast of the Pacific ocean one mile nearer to Boston"; yet that dead utterance has for us no sensation comparable to our amusement if, say, President Warren Harding should at this moment suggest that God and Nature never did mean the Pacific coast to be in entangling alliance with the Atlantic seaboard and that for the western slopes of the Rockies the proper destiny is a splendid isolation.

Or if the British should now decide that King John was wrong, and if Lord Curzon and Mr. Winston Churchill should sponsor a movement to declare Magna Charta mere campaign material, this would be, on the whole, far more diverting than if these two had been alive to join in the contemporary opposition to that rebellion, when certain barons came pulling at their forelocks and saying, "Far be it from us to vote with our betters!"

Also one hundred and fifty years after Lexington and Concord we have Mr. Mencken, Mr. Hergesheimer, and others declaring themselves in favor of monarchy who may be said to have all the advantage, in humor and other respects, over the specific values which the fathers bestowed upon the local monarchists of 1776.

And even a more perfect instance is that of Mr. William Jennings Bryan so abruptly embattled against our peaceful evolutionary law. We, who had ceased to think of Jonah, and to compute how high the heavens would have had to be to escape the topless tower of Babel times, are now thrown back to forgotten physiological and geometrical speculation in heartier laughter than Mr. Darwin or Mr. Wallace can ever have known.

Perfect types of the backwash, these.

II

And now another: The Reflections on Life of Signora Gina Lombroso, D.L., M.D., daughter of the Italian anthropologist, Cesare Lombroso, wife of Guglielmo Ferrero,—reflections entitled, "The Soul of Woman" (Button), and presenting to a world, now pretty well suffragized, so to say, the bright contention that woman's place is in the home.

One focuses upon the book the eye of desire not to know its contents, with which we have so long been familiar, but to know what it means that anybody should be writing an anti-feminist book now; to know whether this is a new revolt of the intellectuals, or whether it is an echoed cry of the woman of our American South who wrote to an anti-suffragist in the North: "We are against suffrage. Come down and tell us why."

"L'Anima della Donna." Not for nothing has the book's title the languor and the orientalism of the South. One is tempted to say: "A woman of Italy, hard by Algiers, by Morocco, and even by Turkey, to whom the anima della donna is assuredly in a dulcimer and her destiny waiting beyond a lattice." But remembering the feminists of Turkey and of Egypt, one looks deeper because of them, and learns, in the epistle dedicatory and in the preface, that the object of the book is twofold. In the former, which is "To Nina": "May these pages, my dearest heart, spare you some of the suffering in store for us all."

With the mutual exclusiveness in this statement of a very natural desire it is impossible to cope at all, and one presses on: "My object is to try to determine women's aptitudes, aspirations, qualities, and defects and point to the conclusions which society would draw from these premises." Although both aptitudes and defects may be considered qualities, and although none of the three are premises, the intent is clear and commendable, albeit not wholly uncharted.

To Dr. Lombroso's aim we come in a half dozen words. It is "to combat the tendency to masculinize women." And with Dr. Lombroso herself we are face to face in her prefactory peroration: "And it is particularly to you, humble mothers, devoted to your mission in life, it is to you that I turn, and to you, young girls, whose hearts are already heaving with longing to hold a little child in your arms. Oppressed, crushed, bewildered by all the talk of woman's great social and political mission, you stand aside, hiding, almost, as if ashamed to be so different from all the others. Your hesitation is mistaken for indifference, your passion for narrow-mindedness, your function in the world is contested, you are called the deluded victims of an ancient order of things. I am writing to defend you, to prove that you still exist, and that the yoke from which they are trying to emancipate you holds your real mission, that universal aspiration common to all women who know what it is to love."

Not even the good Queen Victoria herself was ever more explicit than that.

Here, still more explicitly, are samples of Dr. Lombroso's anti-feminism:

"Love absorbs the woman at all hours of the day, at every minute of the hour and every day of her life, and this is why in her all other feelings and ambitions are excluded."

"The feminine conception of love as devotion, esteem, admiration is the corner stone of the family, for it is this which renders affection firm and lasting, a thing it could not be if the woman's ideal corresponded with that of the man."

"Woman, who is weak and timid, wants to feel protected, and she imagines that the domineering man will use his authority and his force to protect her. Under the present system, which considers reciprocal independence the roof of love, one gets to the point where the members of the family do not care what the others do or think and where woman feels abandoned and ends by becoming corrupted. Tired of the reciprocal indifference, she is led to seek outside the family someone who will give her the illusion of utilizing her better, that is, of directing her and ordering her about. . . . What we must have are laws and traditions which shall regulate the collaboration possible between man and woman, which shall lead the one to understand the other, and both to understand themselves and realize their reciprocal differences."

Here is her conception of feminism:

"Is it permissible to sacrifice most women worthy of esteem, as well as the future of society, in order to better the situation of a few women whose virility, furthermore, is their best defence? . . . Society would suddenly be transformed into a collection of people thinking only of satisfying their own desires to the detriment of the highest type of women who cannot be transformed into men by decree and who cannot be made to enjoy, because of a decree, the selfish advantages held out to them."

"Why should woman disdain love, which in reality is her supreme aspiration, and the deference and protection of man, which gives her so much pleasure?"

Here is her comment on woman's mentality:

"Suffering is woman's school. Woman does not think nor does she meditate except when she suffers or sees other people suffer, or when she loves or wants to be loved. The highest type of woman cannot see life as it is, nor can she love without suffering." (And on the next page.) "It is because she sees things as they are that the highest type of woman knows how to distinguish real genius from spurious genius, fundamentally good ideas from those which merely appear good. . . . The highest type of woman sees life as it is, but most of those around her do not."

"But if a woman cannot be guided by her reasoning power, by what can she be guided? I think by the same things that both men and women have instinctively set up as guides, namely, examples, traditions, ideals, and authoritative commands."

And on her education: "I am not opposed to the idea of sending girls to boys' schools." (The italics are not hers.) And on the ethics of women:

"I have never heard a woman, not even the most hardened criminal, admit as so many men do, that she has done wrong. No woman ever believes that her faults are faults, and reason, instead of helping her to see her faults, frequently adds to her blindness. . . . When a woman makes use of her reasoning power to settle a matter of conscience, she uses it not to refrain from doing a given thing, but in order to have a reason for doing it, which, instead of making things better, makes them worse."

". . . in the feminine code, everything which can cause suffering to others, and which can be avoided, is unjust; everything that can give happiness without harming anyone is just, and consequently legal. . . . She feels no regret for actions which, even though in violation of the law, give or can give happiness. . . . Not only do the codified laws mean nothing to woman, but she enjoys and even takes pride in violating them whenever it is a question of giving pleasure or avoiding suffering for others."

On the other hand: "Her greatness springs from a combination of great heart and mind. . . . She must have imagination, delicacy; she must be able to judge the present and have a clear view of the future so as to be able to guide others firmly and surely. . . . In short her superiority consists in a sort of general and harmonious development of heart and mind which enables her to temper morality with beauty, justice with kindness, abstraction with reality and to harmonize the chaotic progress which springs from man's abstract genius with the various differences and tendencies inherent in every country."

No inferiority complex there, in spite of her estimate of the "feminine code." Evidently, that code and greatness need not conflict.

But then, here is her opinion of the general code:

"All, men and women, lie so easily even when they have given their word, even when they have put their desires into writing!"

Quotations are never fair. On the other hand, one can savor a barrel of liquid with a straw. This barrel is the argument from nature,—there is the book in a word. After years of domestication "the bull remains wild while the cow is peaceful; the rooster is combative while the hen is docile"; and "why should not similar tendencies exist in the most perfect race, the human race?" Also, "If there were no differences they would have to be created, for this diversity corresponds to a general necessity," and so on.

With the cocked hat, that it is our business to improve on nature, and that we've done it, and that we're doing it again, we are not here concerned. We are concerned only with the deduction that this book is not the record of a new revolt, but of the immemorial protected-woman psychology, and rather more cynical about women than ever.

We are concerned only with that deduction,—and yet one wonders irresistibly how clearly the general reader of this book will be able to contrast for himself this view with the actual view of the feminist. With her simple code of honor and collaboration between men and women. Equal rights and equal scrupulousness. It is the code of another planet,—of our planet as it might be. It seems ungracious to say about a book which has been prepared with so much care, and especially for an American reviewer to say it, that Dr. Lombroso is fighting from the back of a dead dragon, while before her, in such a book as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Woman and Economics," comes the sun, "a mile high and shining."

III

But now, what if this book did express a new revolt against the woman's new point of view, against "feminism"? It is plainly not a new revolt, but what if it were? Just as certain intellectuals have, in the speed of their progress, again reached a taste for monarchy, so other intellectuals, young and scornful of aspiration, may prick along through their flair for freedom in life and love, and arrive at this identical Victorian conclusion, that the sole self expression for women is love. Already, in co-educational talk, there are signs of such a return, saved, so far, by self-consciousness and humor; or, where it burns brightest, given a new face by a light self-conscious scorn for marriage.

But, posing as intellectual revolt from revolt, here, in a new dress, is perhaps that old idea of immolation, of self-identification with the male. The young college intellectuals have their eyes open to feminism, ten out of ten of them are feminists, but in the terrible malaise of the world, they may turn against feminism as democrats turn against democracy, as certain Americans turn against the Americanism of constitutional rights. What if, in their desire to explore, they find Baudelaire not enough and dip back to Petruchio's Kate?

The anti-feminist as anti-feminist doesn't matter, never will matter again; but the youthful feminist as anti-feminist, riding a backwash, will matter rather more; just as it matters enormously that this same group, in Europe and America, have since the war announced their freedom to cut the dykes. If, in our hackneyed confusion, the youthful feminist turned anti-feminist, what then?

What then? Perhaps a sign of health, such as is in the present-day fashion of the young intellectuals of using the word "noble" as a term of opprobrium. Any intimation of idealism, any hint of belief in marriage (of course they marry, but to say that they believe in it is another matter), any toleration for the past is met by the warning: "Don't be noble." And one hears: "What's so-and-so like?" "Oh, pretty noble," which bears the connotation of a shrug. And this is not a mere expression of ennui at the complacence of another, at any personal admissions of nobility. It is a vast self-conscious tolerance of our "nobility" itself, of racial and religious nobilities, the dicta of whose banner-bearers have for so long borne no relation whatever to actual behavior. This shrug at the "noble" is, if one understands it, one of the forces of to-day.

If this new cosmic intolerance of the idealism which hasn't worked does sweep and sweep out, temporarily, some of the real and ultimate leaven,—democracy, co-operation, feminism, or any other valid idealism,—we shall understand. And we shall not be afraid that, faced at last with any authentic machinery to express the slow racial rise which not even our absurdities trouble too much, the young intellectuals will not accept it. Accept it, perhaps, as a new revolt!

If only the principles of Jesus were now first enunciated! Even as it is, the young intellectuals may discover them any day,—young intellectual men and women alike.