CHAPTER X
The Ring and the Woman
That woman who crossed the threshold of the Doll's House awhile ago—you would scarcely recognise her as you meet her to-day anywhere abroad in the world. She has put aside yesterday as it were an old cloak that has just slipped from her shoulders. And she stands revealed as the one of whom some of us have for a long time written and some of us have read. For a generation at least she has been looked for. Now she is here.
You see when her country called her, it was destiny that spoke. Though no nation knew. Governments have only thought they were making women munition workers and women conductors and women bank tellers and women doctors and women lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I doubt if there is a statesman anywhere who has leaned to unlock a door of opportunity to let the woman movement by, who has realised that he was but the instrument in the hands of a higher power that is reshaping the world for mighty ends, rough hewn though they be to-day from the awful chaos of war.
But there is one who will know. When the man at the front gets back and stands again before the cottage rose bowered on the English downs, red roofed in France and Italy, blue trimmed in Germany or ikon blessed in Russia or white porched off Main Street in America, he will clasp her to his heart once more. Then he will hold her off, so, at arm's length and look long into her eyes and deep into her soul. And lo, he shall see there the New Woman. This is not the woman whom he left behind when he marched away to the Great World War. Something profound has happened to her since. It is woman's coming of age. Look, she is turning the ring on her finger to-day.
When the man in khaki went away, that ring was sign and symbol of the status assigned to her by all the oldest law books and religious books of the world. And none of the modern ones had been able wholly to eradicate from their pages the point of view that was the most prevailing opinion of civilisation. The most ancient classification of all listed in one category "a man's house and his wife, his man servant and his maidservant, his ox and his ass and any other possessions that are his." An English state church has given her in marriage to him "to obey him and serve him." A German state church has bound her "to be subject to him as to her lord and master." Christian lands have agreed that a woman when she marries enters into a state of coverture by which they tell us "the husband hath power and dominion over his wife." Religious teachers from St. Paul to Martin Luther, law givers from Moses to Napoleon have been unanimous on this point, which Napoleon framing his code for France summed up briefly, Woman belongs to man.
This has been the basic assumption of church and state from whose courts of authority each concession of individuality for woman has been won only by process of slow amendment. It is still so subtly interwoven in dogma and statute that there is not yet any land where a woman, though thinking herself free, may not trip against a legal disability that has not yet been dislodged. For Blackstone, the great authority of reference, declares "the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated in that of the husband." And all over the world, all the church councils and all the state courts have not yet been so reformed but that by reversion to type they will hark back to the pronouncement, Man and wife are one—and he is the one. So the man's mind thinketh.
And the woman's mind? Since he went away in khaki, it has thought long, long thoughts. When he comes back, this new woman looking into his eyes with the level glance, he will find is a woman who has earned money—in a new world that has been made over for her so that she can. You see all those lines of women in industry and commerce and the professions? Some of them walk up to a paymaster's window on Saturday night and some of them wait for the checks that arrive in their mail. But it is an experience in common through which all are passing. The open door to the shop and the factory and the counting room, to law or to medicine is the great gateway to the future where dreams shall come true. For the women who have passed through, have arrived at last at the great goal, economic independence.
Now what that means the sociologists could tell. Though they might not think to put it in terms of, for instance, Elsa von Stuttgart's slippers. They would, I suppose, agree that economic independence is the right to earn one's living—and be paid for it like a man. One earned it yesterday if one washed the dishes and cooked the meals and reared the children and kept the house for the other person who held the purse. Housekeepers of this class have been the busiest people we have had about us. And yet the census offices administered by men had so little idea of these women's economic value, that they have been actually listed in government statistical returns as "unoccupied." So also of course were the other housekeepers who, eliminating some of these most arduous tasks from the long day, nevertheless were not at least idle when they bore a man's children and presided at his dinner table and entertained his friends and practised generally the graceful art of making a home. When they undertook these duties, there was a church promise, With all my worldly goods, I thee endow. That figure of speech, the law courts reduce to "maintenance," that is to say, board and clothes. But, so widely disseminated has been the idea that the lady is "unoccupied" that these are generally regarded not in the nature of a recognition of service and a return for value received, but rather as perquisites bountifully bestowed on the recipient. So that frequently her range of choice in the matter has been, we may say, limited.
Frau Elsa von Stuttgart before the war had her board and clothes. But her husband had forbidden her to get her hats at a certain little French shop in Unter den Linden that she had always patronised before her marriage. And with all his money, he decided that one pair of evening slippers would do even for a woman in the social position of a Prussian officer's wife. They lived in a villa at Zehlendorff that was perfectly equipped with everything that he considered desirable. There was a grand piano of marvellous tone, though she didn't even play the piano at all. She was a doctor of philosophy, who before her marriage had been a teacher at the High School in Berlin and her hobby, it happened, was books. She liked them in beautiful bindings and she always used to buy them that way. But of course she couldn't any more because her husband said it was extravagance, quite useless extravagance. Well, really you know, maintenance may be slippers and hats, but it isn't books after all. And she had a lovely house and a piano of marvellous tone. How hard it was about the slippers, I suppose only a woman can understand. You see Elsa von Stuttgart has pretty feet, small and dainty feet. Every other woman in her set has German feet. "Look at them," she whispered to me at a kaffee klatch one day in 1914. And I did. And I knew why her soul loved little satin slippers better than Beethoven or Lizst. She has them now once more. The house with the grand piano is closed and her husband is with his regiment. Elsa von Stuttgart in a class room is lecturing on philosophy again. She has rented a small apartment the walls of which are lined with books. You think the slippers a luxury for war time perhaps? Well, she wrote me that she has done penance for them in extra meatless days to atone for the price.
In France the Countess Madelaine de Ranier lived in a château of the old aristocracy. And she had a fortune of hundreds of thousands of francs but not a sou to spend as she pleased. You would have thought that she had everything that heart could wish, until you caught unawares the wistful expression in her eyes when they forgot their smiling. Madelaine de Ranier, having no children of her own, would have loved to write checks for the charities that took care of other people's children. But she couldn't. It was a very large dot that she had brought to her husband. But by the laws of France he administered it. Out of the income, he of course paid her bills. The third year of her marriage there occurred to her the idea for a confidential arrangement which she made with her dressmaker for doubling on the bills submitted for her evening gowns and dividing the proceeds accruing. It was the Countess' only source of ready money. She kept it in the secret drawer of her jewel case, these few francs that she could count her own, among her costly articles of adornment valued at thousands. To-day the Count is somewhere on the Somme and Madelaine de Ranier is daily at a desk in Paris directing the great commercial house in which her dot and the family fortune are invested. I saw her in the winter of 1917. Her eyes were sparkling. From the large income that she now handles, she had just written off a contribution to the Orphans of France Fund for the nation. And nobody had said, "You must not," or equally as authoritatively, "I do not wish it."
In England there is Edith Russell, Dr. Edith Russell she really is. She gave up her profession when she married, to devote herself wholly to home making in the great house in Cavendish Square, London. It requires nine servants and careful planning to meet the expenses, even though her husband turns over to her all of his income. "Can't we go out to Hampstead to a smaller house instead?" she asked him one day, laying her housekeeping accounts before him. She was trying somehow to plan for a financial surplus. The Malthusian League was in need of funds and she used to be one of its most earnest workers. But her husband said: "Not at all." Even if there were indeed hundreds of pounds available, he did not approve of the League's principles anyhow. Now Dr. Edith Russell in response to her country's call is back on the staff of the borough health department in the medical work in which she was engaged before her marriage. And she is again a Malthusian League contributor. You see, it's her own money now, not her husband's.
Up in the north of England there is a factory town where the largest works in November, 1914, hung out a notice that any women who before their marriage had been employed there would be taken back. Mrs. Webber was. The regular weekly wage is so much better than the occasional charing which was all that she had been able to get to supplement her husband's frequent unemployment. Her children are among those who have been since the war transferred at school from the free list to the paid dinners. Before the war there were 11,000 children in this town to be supplied with free school dinners. Now since their mothers work outside the home, this figure has dropped to 2,370. Mrs. Webber also is one of those women who have been shopping. All over Europe they have been doing it. From Petrograd to Berlin and Paris and London, delighted shop keepers report that women who never had money before are spending it. The curate in the parish to which Mrs. Webber belongs—Mrs. Webber used to char for his wife, but is no longer available—told me that these working classes have gone perfectly mad about money and the reckless expenditure of it. And I asked him how and he said: "Why cheese, they all of them have it for supper now. And the woman in that house, the third from the end of the row," he pointed it outfrom his study window, "has a fur coat." It was Mrs. Webber's house the curate mentioned. HIS PERSONALITY—AND HERS
Well now, you see, to Elsa von Stuttgart in Berlin, it may be little satin evening slippers, and to Madelaine de Ranier in Paris it may be orphans of France, and to Dr. Edith Russell in London it may be the great reform for which the Malthusian League is organised, and to Mrs. Webber it may be school dinners and cheese and a fur coat—but to all of them it's economic independence. Mrs. Webber says, "A shilling of your own is worth two that 'e gives you." Edith Russell and the rest I have not heard say it. But from Countess to char woman, you see, this about the wage envelope is certain: It's yours to burn if you care to—or to buy with it what you choose! There are millions of women over this war racked world who have it to-day, who never had it before. And the hand that holds this new wage envelope holds the future of the race in its keeping. Not since that magna charta that the barons wrested from King John, has so powerful a guarantee of liberty been won. It carries with it all the freedoms that the feminists have ever formulated. She who stepped out of the Doll's House stands at the threshold of a new earth. Something very much more than little satin slippers and books and fur coats and their own money is coming to women!
Let us see. You would have been astounded, I believe, if Elsa von Stuttgart had attempted to dictate to her husband his hats or his slippers. Anyway, Herr von Stuttgart would. You would not have expected Edith Russell to have suggested across the breakfast table: "My dear, the propaganda of such and such a society to which you belong is not pleasing to me. I do not care to have you support it." Why, either gentleman would have been a henpecked husband to have permitted any such interference with his personal liberty. Not even in America would any wife so presume to dare. It is quite likely that a lady living in New York could announce over the coffee cups, "My dear, we will move to Long Island to-day." And the voice behind the newspaper would probably agree without a demurrer, "I'll be out on the 4:30 train." Probably also he has never heard how many pairs of slippers she has, and all he knows about her hats is their price. But after all, it is only by the privilege he permits her that the lady can put it over like this. At any moment that he cares to assert it, he still holds the balance of power in this household.
Because man and wife are one, he who carries the purse is the one. It's only the new purse in the family that can alter the situation anywhere in the world. She who carries it is another one, with her personal liberty too. In the last analysis, it is only a person who can pay the rent who can talk with assertion about where "we" shall live and how.
No economist in any university chair understands this any more clearly than does Mrs. Webber, who once lived in two rooms and now lives in three because she can pay the rent! The new purse in her family has raised the whole scale of living for her and for her children. Yesterday her personality was merged and submerged in that of a husband to whose standard of maintenance she was limited. To-day she is emerging with a wage envelope in her hand and a personality of her own, as is likewise Elsa von Stuttgart and Edith Russell and Madelaine de Ranier. Society may be tremendously startled to find them at last counted so that one and one in the marriage relation shall make two. When in this great world war, that autocracy with its divine right of kings that has ruled and wrecked civilisation shall have been swept from the throne, there is another autocracy with its "divine" authority of one sex over the other that is going into the scrap heap of old systems.
Through the events of these war days already it is clear that such an eternal purpose runs. Nobody thought of it when woman was called from the home in all lands. But there has really begun the casting off of that ancient chrysalis of "coverture." Have you by chance yet met among your acquaintances the woman who is refusing to part with her own name? Mary McArthur, the great English labour leader, is the wife of Mr. Anderson, a member of Parliament and she is the mother of a baby. But she has never ceased to be herself. "You call yourself Miss McArthur," a curious inquirer remarked to her one day, "and yet they say your cook tells that you are very respectable."
There are numbers of women like this in London and in New York, who are preferring their own identity to that of their husbands. The German and Scandinavian women going a little farther say, "Let us at mature age take an adult title." Master Jones, you know, does not wait for the day of his marriage to emerge from his adolescence as "Mr." Jones. Fraulein is but a diminutive, "little Frau," a prefix of immaturity. Rosika Schwimmer, touring America for a lecture bureau, assured inquiring reporters: "Of course I am Frau Schwimmer. Why shouldn't I be? I have passed my 35th birthday." The Imperial Union of Women Suffragists of Germany in convention assembled, not long ago decided to adopt the adult title Frau for all women of mature age, the "unity title," they call it. In this first faint stirring, there is significance of wide changes.
She whose identity had so disappeared at the altar, that the law actually wrote her. down on the statute books as civiliter mortua, one "civilly dead," is about to be restored to the status of an individual. The long road, along which the woman movement of yesterday made its slow way, is now at the sharpest turning.
The struggle of women in all lands to be released from the discriminations that have limited their human activities set free the spinster some time ago. The point of view that is now generally accepted about her, and without contravention in the most advanced countries, was most definitely formulated some sixty years ago in Scandinavia. There they put on the statute books a law abolishing the previous male guardianship over unmarried women and permitting a person "of staid age and character" to manage her own affairs. At first this was a privilege to be granted only on special appeal to the king. But at last the right of self-government at 21 was established for all unmarried women. So radical a departure from custom was of course not accomplished without misgivings. There were those who feared that for a woman to manage her own affairs, was not in accordance with true womanly dignity and the dictates of religion. They said, The majority of women do not want it. Why, then, give them a responsibility they do not wish or ask for? But in spite of those objections, the spinster came to be recognised as a responsible individual.
For so long now has the world been accustomed to seeing her going about, doing as she pleases almost as any other adult, that we have forgotten that she ever couldn't. She can acquire education. She can own property. She has been able for some time now to get into a great many occupations and professions: only her difficulty was to get up. And there has been that limitation to her income. It has remained stationary at a figure seldom passing two-thirds that of a man's income. The teaching profession affords statistics that are world wide testimony to the situation that has prevailed from, say, Newark, N. J., to Archangel, Russia: there have been women school teachers working for a less wage than the man school janitor: there have been women professors at the head of high school departments at a salary less than that of the men subordinates whom they directed. Still, in all of her personal affairs, a spinster in every country has been for a long time now as free as the rest of the people.
SIGNING AWAY HER FREEDOM
Then, on the day that the ring is slipped on her finger, she has put her name to a contract that has more or less signed away her liberty, according to the part of the world in which she happens to live. In Finland, for instance, where the position of women has been in many respects as advanced as anywhere in the world, even a woman member of Parliament at her marriage reverts to type, as it were: though she still sits in Parliament, she passes under the guardianship of her husband! In Sweden, she lost her vote: for that country, in 1862 the first to grant the municipal franchise to women, cautiously withheld it until 1909 from married women. There is, indeed, almost no land in which marriage does not in some way limit for the rest of her life a woman's participation in world affairs. She may have lost property rights, personal rights, political rights, or perhaps she has lost her job, her right to work and be paid for it. At any rate, she must look around to determine how many of these things may have happened to her. Any of them that haven't, are special exemptions from that universal ruling of all nations that a woman on marriage enters into a state of coverture, with its accompanying legal disability. "Disability" is defined by Dicey's "Digest" as the "status of being an infant, lunatic, or married woman." And there you are.
It was from that predicament that the earliest woman's rights' associations sought to extricate the woman who had taken the wedding veil and ring. Susan B. Anthony's first most famous achievement back in the sixties was a law establishing the right of a married woman in New York State to the ownership of her own clothes! By specific enactments since then, one and another of the rights to which other human beings are naturally born have been bestowed on married women. The most clearly defined of these, and the most widely recognised at last, are the right to their separate property and the right to their own earnings, which prevails in most of the United States. The Married Women's Property Act accomplished it in England. In France, after 14 years of agitation for it, Mme. Jeanne Schmall and the Société l'Avant Courriere in 1907 at last secured the law giving to the married woman the free disposition of her salary. But these concessions it is not easy to disentangle from that basic notion, which is warp and woof of the whole fabric of law, that a married woman has passed under the guardianship of her husband.
For in Germany and Scandinavia and France, "separate property" to ensure her title to it, must be specially secured to her by an antenuptial contract. In Sweden, her earnings are hers, only if they remain in cash. In France she is permitted to invest them in bonds, provided first she either makes affidavit before a notary proving her ownership or brings a written permit from her husband. In the State of Washington, the supreme attempt to confer equality on woman finds expression in the statute: "All laws which impose or recognise civil disabilities upon a wife which are not imposed or recognised as existing as to the husband, are abolished." But in spite of that most laudable effort, the end is not yet attained. For the State of Washington is still enmeshed in the community property system, by which the management and control of the common property in marriage is vested in the husband. And although the law has been distinctly framed that a married woman is entitled to her own earnings, it practically takes them away from her by requiring her to count them in with the community property which is under her husband's control. The atomic theory, you see, was not more firmly fixed in science than is this idea that has been embedded in the social structure that a married woman is legally, civilly, and politically a minor!
Even in these United States, where the mention of the "subjection of woman" raises a smile, so largely has it by the grace of the American man been permitted to become a dead letter, the employment of married women has remained against public policy. Many boards of education have by-laws about it. Even these women teachers who commit matrimony and conceal it are almost invariably later on detected and dropped from the pay roll when found guilty of maternity. Business houses have shared in the prejudice. A Chicago bank as lately as 1913 adopted a rule requiring the resignation of woman employés on marriage. Because the married woman, the bank president said, "should be at home, not at a typewriter or an adding machine." Similarly a United States civil service regulation reads: "No married woman will be appointed to a classified position in the postal service, nor will any woman occupying a classified position in the postal service be reappointed to such position when she shall marry."
A world has been arranged, you see, on the assumption of the complete eclipse of the personality of the married woman—with the burden resting on her to disprove it in the legal situations where she has come to be recognised as an individual. Custom prefers that a married woman should be a dependent person. It was an idea that fifty years of feminist bombardment had not dislodged from the popular mind. Now in four years of war, it has crumbled.
"Women wanted," called the world in need, wanted even though married! And out of the seclusion and separation to which she was hitherto consigned, the woman with the ring has come to find her wage envelope. All regulations against her employment are now rescinded in Europe, as soon they will be here. The working woman in particular has been given her release. The state, you remember, will now cook her meals and care for her children. And it was all a mistake that attributed infant mortality to the industrial employment of mothers. Now it is found that a wife's wage envelope really reduces infant mortality by improving environment. There will be fewer of Mrs. Webber's children, you know, dying in three rooms than in two!
The ban on the married woman in the civil service and in the professions is lifted. The Association of Austrian Women's Organisations in their 1916 convention passed the resolution demanding the abolition of the "celibacy clause" for women office holders. And although no country has as yet formally erased this from the statute books, governments have at least tacitly consented to remember it no more against a woman that she has married. That is why Dr. Edith Russell is again practising medicine in the public health service and Prof. Elsa von Stuttgart is teaching philosophy. Especially in medicine is it recognised that the married woman physician is more than ever fitted for a part in the campaign for the conservation of child life. And if she is also a mother, so much the better. Why was it never thought of before? Of course a person who has had a baby is the real expert who knows more about it than the person who never can have one. Women formerly dropped from the civil service on account of marriage have been recalled all over Europe. Even Germany has opened to them post, telegraph, and railway positions. So many masters in Germany's upper high schools are at the front, that married women have been called to these positions. Hundreds of married women have been reinstated in the school rooms of England. Detroit, Mich., the other day repealed its regulations which forbade the employment of married women as teachers in the public schools. It is Russia that has led all lands in her recognition of the woman teacher, not only refusing longer to penalise her for marriage but actually, as we have seen, establishing for her the principle of equal pay for equal work.
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MINOR
Like this, the married woman has to-day been welcomed in industry, in commerce, and in the professions. This person of affairs abroad in the world a minor! It is more than a disability that she herself must endure. It becomes an annoyance to the world to have her so. According to Bacon's Abridgement, a very imposing volume, it is still written that "the law looks upon husband and wife but as one person and therefore allows but of one will between them, which is placed in the husband." But you see what a far cry it is from the woman in London or Paris or Berlin to "the one" on the western front. How is she to "obey" that man in the Vosges or on the Somme since she cannot have telegraphic communication about her daily movements? And without it, the French woman was left in a helpless tangle in the Napoleonic code.
Madelaine de Ranier at the head of a great business concern in Paris found herself forbidden to sign a check, unable to open a bank account. The Count had enlisted on the second day after war was declared and he had left with her a sum of gold. When it was exhausted and she faced the need of funds, she was unable to negotiate a loan on valuable bonds that she owned. Oh, the bonds were all right. The difficulty was that she was a married woman. And though very rich, she nevertheless was obliged to turn to friends who relieved her immediate financial necessities. Now in the drawer of her office desk there is a legal paper bearing the seal of France: across the bottom is printed "Bon pour autorisation maritale" and beneath is the Count's signature. Until he had consented to make this arrangement, sending on from the front this "authorisation of the husband," she was prohibited from transacting any business. For a married woman in France might not sell property or mortgage it or acquire it or sign a business contract or go to law without the consent of her husband! Women acting temporarily as mayors of some of the French villages, from which almost the entire male population has been mobilised, have found it necessary in order to execute municipal papers to turn to a male citizen for his signature, even though he might not be able to write and could only make his mark. Finally in 1916, the situation came up for legal decision. The validity of a building contract entered into by a French woman was questioned in court. The judge after mature deliberation rendered a decision that although the woman was not empowered to sign the contract, yet as she had acted with the tacit consent of her husband and in his interest and that of the country, the court would uphold the validity of the act. "It is necessary," he said, "that for the welfare of France, women shall take the place of men and perform duties which have hitherto been considered outside their sphere." The Union Fraternelle des Femmes at once began pressing Parliament for the removal from the statute books of the requirement for "maritale autorisation." And not long ago the Chamber of Deputies passed the bill granting to married women for the period of the war, permission to demand from the courts the right to do without this legal formality. Italy in 1917 completely swept away this same ancient restriction. The bill introduced by the Italian Minister of Justice, Signer Sacchi, abrogated not only maritale autorisation, but "every other law which in the field of civil and commercial rights curtails the capacities of Italian women." Speaking for the measure in Parliament, Signer Sacchi declared it an "act of justice—of reparation almost, to which women have now more right than ever."
But these civil disabilities have not been limited to Latin countries. You may find them anywhere as a hang-over from past ages. It is simply the natural corollary to that old doctrine of coverture that the acts of the dependent person should lack authority before the law. Even in the State of Washington, a wife may not sue alone in a court of law to recover personal damages: her husband must join with her in the suit. Everywhere in the professions and in business, woman's progress has been blocked because the courts, looking into the law books, found the status of this person in question. If her protected position more or less prevents her from entering into legal contracts, doubt is cast on all of her agreements. What prudent business man would wish to engage in a business transaction with her? There are provisions of the Married Women's Property Act in England, which make her not liable to imprisonment for refusal to pay her debts. And who would choose to be represented in a court of law by an advocate who, though to-day in clear possession of all of her capacities, may to-morrow cease to be "responsible" before the law? For any woman, though not yet married, is always subject to that liability! That was what the courts of the United States decided when the first women began to apply for admission to the legal profession. And it is to correct the position in which women are placed by the common law that their admission to the practice of law in America has been by the slow process of an "enabling act" from State to State. In England, where this common law still bars the way, their present appeal now before Parliament is significantly entitled "A Bill to remove disqualifications on the ground of sex or marriage for the admission of persons as solicitors."
There is still another "disability" which is causing to-day perhaps the most world wide concern of all. A spectacular figure has been silhouetted against the background of the great war. In the tranquil days of peace, a woman might have been all her life married to a man of differing nationality without making the discovery that she had thereby lost her own: by law when she married, she became of her husband's nationality. When the troops began to march in 1914, a wife like this suddenly found herself a woman without a country. Frightened English women married to Germans resident in London, panic-stricken German women married to Englishmen who happened to be resident in Berlin, knew not which way to turn for a haven from the terrors of war. Pronounced aliens in their home land, their position was even worse than that of the woman of actual enemy birth who was stranded in a foreign country when the war burst. She could at least go home. But where should a woman who was married to an enemy alien go?
Her own country turned on her coldly with the declaration, His people are your people. And nowhere in the world would she be so little welcome as among his people now at war with and bitterly hostile to hers. There are instances where these women have been obliged to find refuge in neutral countries. In some lands they have been permitted to remain in the place of their birth, but under police espionage. A man and his wife, you know, are one. And if he controls her absolutely, from her slippers to her principles, is it likely that she will dare to be a free agent in her war sympathies? As a matter of fact, this war has developed that she is always more or less under the cold suspicion even of relatives and neighbours, of having along with the loss of her own nationality lost also her patriotism. Who shall say but that in obedience to her husband she may be a spy? I stood at the desk in the Bow Street Police Station registering my arrival in London one war day, when a timid voice of inquiry at my side also addressed the sergeant: "I want to ask," she said diffidently, "if I could possibly have my mail sent here to police headquarters? You see, it's letters from my husband interned here in England because he's a German. I'm an English woman. But every boarding house in London where I try to live, as soon as that envelope marked 'Enemy Internment Camp' arrives in my mail, turns me out."
Like this, the "alien wife" has to be shunted about in many lands to-day. Even a woman who has not so lost her nationality may not travel without all of the credentials of her marital status to establish it. If you apply for a passport at Washington, you are asked for your husband's birth certificate and under some conditions your marriage certificate. A married man is not asked for his. Why this inquiry into your personal affairs? Because it is tacitly assumed that you are so under the authority of another person that there is no knowing what he may make you do. By all law and religion you have been taught to obey him. Then if he told you to blow up a ship, would you? The only way to make sure that you are a "safe" person to be at large, is to make sure of your husband's loyalty. For your identity is not your own, you see, it's his. If he happens to be French or Russian or German or Hottentot, so you must be. WOMAN'S COMING OF AGE
That's the way that men have made the world. Now see it beginning to be made over. Women everywhere are crying out in their conventions and associations that the married woman's own nationality should be restored to her. America is the first country to take action about it. And here, because women have arrived at the halls of government, it is more than resolution and petition. The United States Congress has before it a bill proposing the repeal of the law compelling women to relinquish their American citizenship on marriage to foreigners. The bill was introduced, let us note, by the Hon. Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to be a member of the national law-making body.
What was it man said a little while ago: "You do not need a vote, my dear. I will represent you in government and make the laws for you." So all over the world he did. But isn't it plain now that he made a mess of some of the laws he made for her? It is a conviction that has crystallised simultaneously in all countries that woman in her present independent sphere of activity has won her right to self-determination in all matters personally important to her. That is why measures for her enfranchisement are so universally under way. Let her vote for herself. Let her represent herself. No one else has been able successfully to do this for her. And it may be that now she will be able to make better arrangements for herself than others have for her in this world where certainly a great deal has gone wrong.
So we have arrived at woman's coming of age. She who used to be by the most ancient family law passed as a chattel from the guardianship of a father to that of a husband, is now to be an individual. It is only now that she could be. In a way they were right yesterday who refused to regard her as a responsible person. For she wasn't. Under the coercion of coverture, she even had to think the way that pleased the person who paid her bills! To-day with a wage envelope in one hand and a ballot in the other, she is as much of a human being as any one else is. As such, she is in a position to find the full status of her own personality. For the first time since history began, she will be under no one else's authority.
No greater revolution than this will have been wrought by the Great World War. It is going to be safe to permit to wives in all lands that they retain their own nationality. The reason is clear: because no one can compel this new woman, even though she is a wife, to be a spy, or anything else that she does not wish to be. Or anything else that she does not wish to be!
In those words, the woman movement of to-day full-throated carols a hope for humanity that has not echoed before in all the epics or the sagas or the inspired revelations since the fall of man. Who giveth this woman in marriage? She who was a bondwoman now is free. And church and state shall hear her terms!
Oh, yes, they shall! For a reform of the institution on which society rests is all that will prevent a rebellion against it. What do women want? This woman who turns the ring on her finger? Read the publications that during the past decade have said: The Free Woman, edited by Dora Marsden in England; Minna Cauer's Die Frauenbewegung and Marie Stritt's Die Frauenfrage and Helene Stocker's Die Neue Generation in Germany; La Française, edited by Jane Misme in France; and Margaret Sanger's The Woman Rebel in New York; the teachings of Dr. Alice Vickerey in London and of Dr. Aletta Jacobs in Amsterdam. There were even women in the radical vanguard of that woman movement of yesterday who were ready to end marriage if it were not mended.
The world—and man who made it—had no adequate conception of the hurt that was smothered and smouldering in the heart of her over whom he exercised his dominion and power. Windows were heard smashing in England. Over in Germany there had begun a breaking with less noise about it, so that the world in general did not know. In the Kaiser's kingdom right in the face of the mailed fist, traditions not to be so easily repaired as glass were being shattered. But it was the suffragette outburst in London that caught public attention. Thoughtful men who honestly wanted to know—and never could understand—turned to each other with the question, Why do women do this? And no man could tell.
Gentlemen, come with me. There is sitting in Westminster in 1910 a Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce. Not yet even have their findings changed English law. But the commission was appointed to make inquiry into these matters in response to a rising feeling of unrest over the present arrangements. Witnesses, to give evidence that it may be determined what ought to be done, are in 1910 being called. This government commission, it should be noted, quite contrary to precedent, includes among the churchmen and statesmen who have been appointed to decide the question, also two women. One of them, the Lady Francis Balfour, is interrogating a witness whom she has summoned to the stand because she has a particular point that she wishes to elucidate. He is the Bishop of Birmingham, whose church insists that at marriage the woman passes indissolubly into the power of the husband. To the man, it is permitted that he may divorce her for adultery. But so long as these two shall live, not even for that offence on his part may she have release. He may beat her. He may flay her soul. But she is his—unless she gets all of these details spread on the public records and the judges of the courts decide that there are enough of them legally to constitute "cruelty." Then, for adultery together with this cruelty on the part of a husband, a few English women have been allowed divorce. But it is very difficult and very expensive and very offensive to the clergy when it has been actually accomplished.
The Lady Francis Balfour is speaking. To the Bishop of Birmingham she is saying: "Let me take a concrete case. You may have a woman who is a Christian and you may have her husband ill using her in some sort of way. We have had evidence put before us, which is of course known to us all, that there are even men who live on the prostitution of their wives. Now, is that not a contract which has been broken on the one side in the worst possible way? Are they twain one flesh? Is that for better and for worse?"
Bishop of Birmingham: "Yes, I am afraid so."
Lady Francis Balfour: "And is that wife to stick to that husband, she being a Christian, and to do as he commands her?"
Bishop of Birmingham: "Yes, I am afraid so."
WHAT WOULD MEN HAVE DONE?
That's all, gentlemen. You and I will go. There will be other witnesses and days of testimony. But isn't this enough? What would you yourselves do if your church and your state handed you over body and soul, like this, to any other human being to have and to hold and to exercise this power and dominion over you? I don't believe you'd ever stop at all to parade and respectfully to petition about it. I think you'd be mobbing and rioting and bombing right away. And if they had arrested you and put you in Holloway Jail, you'd have raised the roof and torn down the whole social structure!
Well, in England women broke windows. In Germany, as I have said, they broke more. "Your statutes have limited the liberties of the woman who marries. Then you shall never limit us," was the gauntlet thrown down to society by the extremists. They were university women, some of them with doctor of philosophy degrees, who scathingly refused the ring and faced free love instead. They were quite frank about it—and quite fearless. I have talked with them there in Berlin. They looked at me as clear eyed, when they told me of what they had done, as any women who have walked ringed and veiled down a church aisle into legal wedlock. Well, they seemed to think it was the only way, to act directly instead of to agitate.
And they got out the book of the church ritual that they had repudiated. And they turned to a paragraph and said to me, Read. And I read: "The woman's will, as God says, shall be subject to the man and he shall be her master: that is, the woman shall not live according to her free will . . . and must neither begin nor complete anything without the man. Where he is, there must she be and bend before him as her master, whom she shall fear and to whom she shall be subject and obedient."
So I write it here, gentlemen, for you to see. And again, I submit, What would you do if they had said it that way to you? Be fair. Could any ring have held you?
It was natural, I think, that revolt should be most bitter in England and in Germany, the two countries where women were driven to the verge of desperation. A Frenchman may hold the reins of his authority so gaily that a woman with skill evades them. And the dear American man will pass them right over to you if you're a woman of any judgment and finesse at all. But in those lands where a wife must not only promise to obey, but also they made her, the eruption was due. Action and reaction are equal in the old law of physics, and you can pretty accurately measure the rebound by that. It was because the ring hurt worse in Germany than anywhere else in the world, that they just tore it off. But the marriage strike that was started in Germany wasn't staying there.
In nearby Sweden, a woman who is a very prominent lawyer and a man who is a university professor, decided to do with an announcement in a newspaper instead of a ceremony in a church—and the lady remains a lawyer. It was the only way that she could. The law of that land places the woman, on the day that she marries, under her husband's guardianship, and pronounces her incompetent thereafter to act as an attorney in court! The newspaper announcement as it is now used in Scandinavia is called the "conscience marriage."
There were also Anglo-Saxon women who had rebelled. In London, an Oxford graduate who had done with window breaking told me quite candidly that she was living what she called the "unorthodox life." And there were others in her particular London suburb. In New York City, even, there are women who have preferred the "free union."
You see how near it was to being wrecked, this an institution more revered by society than all of the cathedrals and art galleries. Only this war, probably, could have averted the disaster. Now this new woman, with her wage envelope and her vote, has become articulate. She can speak as one who can pay the rent, about how "we" shall live.
Oh, it's not either Hampstead or Long Island. Never mind for a while whether the lace curtains will be long enough or shall the floors be done over. Yesterday her domain was the home. To-day it's the wide, wide world to be set to order. For the first time she's facing her destiny, with the right to decide more than the parlour carpet or her satin slippers or even her sociological principles.
How "we" shall live and love together, is the question for consultation. And there is statute and dogma and custom and convention and tradition to be done over. These have been handed down until they are many of them past all usefulness. Some of them are moth-eaten and quite outworn. None of them, please note this, gentlemen, none of them is of her selection. Just think of that. There's not a code in the world that was formulated by a woman. The creeds that have come from Rome and Wittenberg and Westminster were not even submitted for woman's inspection. And marriage was made for her by law courts and church councils to which she was not even asked. There was not so much as a by-your-leave to the lady, in the matter of her most intimate personal concern. Oh, isn't this clearly where the reconstruction of civilisation shall commence?
MAKING OVER MARRIAGE
Only for the man in khaki to come home again it waits. Then with the new woman, together at last, they can build the new world aright. For never again shall we permit any such skewed and twisted and one-sided job as that of the past. "Dear," she will say, "you did it as well as you could, probably, that old world. But the trouble was, that you did it alone."
And with a little whimsical smile, she'll quote for him the old proverb that "two heads are better than one." Then perhaps they will walk in the garden in the evening. And with her hand in his arm, she will speak as she never could speak before—as a free woman who has found her soul! There were things, I think, that God forgot when he talked to Moses and to St. Paul. But now he's told them to her.
Listen: "Marriage," she will say, "marriage, dear, we must make over so that it shall be something very sweet and very sacred."
Oh, it wasn't always that yesterday. There are women who know it wasn't. When a man could say to the woman the law gave to him, "Come unto me to-night, or I shall not give you money with which to buy shoes for the children to-morrow." Or he may have said, "the slippers for your pretty feet"—when marriage was that way, everything in it divine just died! It shall never be so again.
Hear the new woman. "We shall have more love about marriage and less law," she will say. "And we shall never let them lock us in. Love always laughed even yesterday at the clumsy locksmiths who thought they had bolted and barred the Doll's House with ordinance and ritual. For how love cometh, we may not say, who are mute before so much as the mystery of the tint of the rose or the perfume of the lilies in June. Nor how love goeth, dare we define. Presumptuous mortals who have thought to hold back love with law and enactment, have made of marriage an empty form, echoing with the mockery of the happiness that fled."
Well, we will say that she is talking like this under the stars. The next morning at breakfast she will come right to the point. And I know where she will begin. "That old doctrine of coverture," she will say, "take it away!" There is a place for the relics of an antiquated civilisation. In the museum of the Tower of London they have in a glass case the little model of the rack and thumb screw. The executioner's block and the headsman's axe is an important and impressive exhibit. And there are the coats of mail of early warriors. It is customary, I believe, to put there all things that are passing into desuetude: a hansom cab went in the other day. Now let them take also this ancient doctrine of coverture, and put it in a glass case for future generations to wonder at its barbarity. Then may the marriage contract be rewritten with a really free hand.
How it will be done all over the world, we even at present may prophesy. See already Scandinavia. The northern sky was alight with the forecast of woman's freedom, even before this war broke. Contemporaneously with the enfranchisement of women up there, completed in Denmark only in 1915, almost the first act of governments in which all of the people were for the first time represented, was to appoint a marriage commission. On it are both men and women from the three lands, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. It is still at work revising the marriage laws. The task is not completed. But there are important sections of the new code ready: they have taken the "obey" out of the marriage service; they have stipulated for divorce by mutual consent, that is by request of the parties interested, who are to be let out of wedlock as simply and as easily as they were let in. Further personal rights and property rights are all being defined and arranged on the new basis of equality of morality and duty and responsibility and on the assumption that the wife is a separate personality from her husband.
The nearby country of Finland, where the woman movement has always kept step with Scandinavia, has also taken similar action. The Law Committee of the Finnish Parliament had in 1917 appealed to local authorities and other qualified bodies for suggestions on the subject of the reform of the marriage laws. Seven women's associations united in formulating the pronouncement which was returned. There is no paragraph about divorce for the reason that Finland has already accomplished divorce by mutual consent. For the rest, it is probably the most complete presentment available of the new woman's point of view. This is what she asks:—
1. That the guardianship of the husband shall cease, and the married woman have an equal right of action in all legal matters, even against her husband; that she shall have the right to plead in courts of law and to carry on business independently.
2. That the married couple shall have equal responsibilities and rights as regards the children and provide for them together.
3. That the husband and wife shall have equal right to represent the family in public matters. If either party uses this right improperly, it can be taken from him or her by the courts on the demand of the other party.
4. If either husband or wife should be a cause of danger to the other, the party who is endangered shall have the right to separate from the other. The courts shall be empowered to decide whether, the circumstances are such as to entitle the complaining party to receive maintenance.
5. That if a married couple separates, the party who retains the care of the child shall decide the question of the child's education. If this right be misused, the other party shall have the right to appeal to the courts for rectification.
6. That if any labour contract or business be conducted by one of the parties to the detriment of the family, the other party shall have the right of appeal to the courts with the object of annulling the contract or forbidding the business.
7. That in regard to the property of married couples, there shall be three possible alternative methods of arrangement: (a) Joint possession in the case of earned income. (b) Joint possession of every description of property. (c) Separation of property.
8. Several points must be taken into consideration in regard to the working of these different methods of arrangement: (a) That the distinction between real and other descriptions of property shall cease. (b) That each party shall have control over his or her separate property and the income derived from it and over all earned income. (c) That each party shall be bound to contribute to the maintenance of the family in proportion to his or her means, either in work or in financial resource. (d) That in case of joint possession, the whole income, earned or unearned, of each party shall belong to the common family fund. (e) That in the case of joint possession, both parties shall have equal rights of disposition. These rights shall be used by them jointly in such a manner that neither party shall be able to dispose of the property without the consent of the other, and no transaction can take place without the consent of both parties. (f) That the party who gives the chief labour and attention to the home shall have a due share of the common property and of the earned income, with full power to defray his or her personal expenses and those of the home.
9. Before marriage, the contracting parties shall agree on which of the three systems the property shall be arranged. This agreement shall be capable of alteration after marriage with due legal formalities and safeguards.
10. Husband and wife shall inherit from each other on the same footing with the children.
This memorial from the Finnish women coincides perfectly in spirit with the new laws in process of construction for Scandinavia. When the Dutch Parliament, which has just conferred a new measure of suffrage on the women of the Netherlands, was in 1917 debating the matter, an alarmed reactionary rose to object: "But how can married women vote? For married women are not free. They are like soldiers in barracks, who have lost the liberty to express their thoughts."
THE NEW FATHERHOOD
Sir, that's just the point. But the liberty that was lost, is found. No one, as we have seen, is going to compel this new woman to be anything that she does not want to be. Let us not forget this now as she goes on talking. For she is coming presently to that which is at the heart of the whole woman question, nay, more, the human question.
"Dear," she is going to say, "there is that which matters more than all the rest for us now to decide. It's the children, the children are on my mind." Then she is going to emphasise how important it is that parenthood shall be equalised. By the laws that men have made about it, quite universally, equally in fact in England and Germany and France and Italy and Russia and the United States, the father is the only parent. His will decides its religion, its education, and all of the conditions under which the child shall be reared. There are a few of the United States, most notably those where women vote and one or two others in which pressure has been brought to bear by the feminists, where the law has been corrected. Also in Scandinavia and in Australia, as soon as women have come into the vote, one of their first efforts has been to establish what is known as "equal guardianship," the right of a married mother to her own child. To an unmarried mother, by a strange perversity in the statutes of men, is conceded not only all the right to the child but there is put upon her all of the responsibility of its parenthood.
The new woman is not going to rest content to have it stand that way. Already the world is being forced to a new deal for childhood. The sins of the fathers are being lifted from the children on whom society in the past has so heavily visited them. A baby has broken no law. Why brand it, then, as "illegitimate"? War babies crying in all lands have brought statesmen to startled attention. Government after government has arranged for what is called the "separation allowance" to go to the woman at home to whom the soldier at the front knows that it belongs—even though she has no marriage lines to show. So the War Office pen writes off one discrimination. Of children who used to be called "illegitimate," 50,000 born annually in England and 180,000 born annually in Germany will now be entitled to start life with equal financial government aid that the others get.
It is the first step in the direction of the new arrangements about parenthood. The polite fiction that used to pass, that there were any children without fathers, is going to be ruled out of court. Of all the laws that have been written that evidence the difference in the point of view of men and women, see the illegitimacy laws. Napoleon put it in his code "La recherche de la paternite est interdite," and it was only in 1913 that the feminists of France, led by Margaret Durand, succeeded in getting that edict modified so that a woman in France is no longer "forbidden" to look for the father of her child. Up in Norway, where women vote, they put on the statute books in 1915 a very different law: it commands that the father of the child shall be found. This is the famous law framed by Johan Castberg, minister of justice, and inspired by his sister-in-law, Fru Kathe Anker Moler. The draft of the bill was submitted in advance to the women's clubs of the country: the National Women's Council of Norway stamped it with the seal of approval. So that there can be no doubt but that it has put the matter as a woman thinketh. Even the title of the new law significantly omits all objectionable reference: it is a "Law Concerning Children whose Parents have not Married Each Other." They are equally entitled to a father's name and support and to an inheritance in his property as are any other kind of children. The father must be found! Not even if the paternity is a matter of doubt among three men or six men or any several men, can any of them, or all of them, escape behind "exceptio plurium," which in other lands affords them protection. In Norway, they are every one of them a party to the possible obligation. And the financial responsibility of fathering the child in question is distributed pro rata among them. What the Norwegian law accomplishes, you see, is the abolition of anonymous paternity.
Like this, there is a great deal in the laws and the religion and the public opinion of the world of yesterday that will need revision. Lastly, there is that which is of more significance than all the rest. Way back in the beginning of things, the lady who was called Eve, you remember as the Sunday school lesson ran, got the world into a lot of trouble, it was said, by eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Too little knowledge, some one else has told us, may prove a dangerous thing. But there is a Latin proverb on which a school of therapeutics is founded, "Similia similibus curantur." Then, if "like cures like," what we need to-day is more knowledge to make right the ancient wrong that afflicts the earth! Well, we have it.
THE WHISPER OF GOD
This new woman will look back into the dear eyes that search hers. In her level glance there will flash an understanding of life that never was in woman's eyes before in all the ages of sorrow since the angel fixed up the flaming swords that shut her out of Eden. For in the white silence where she has found her soul, she has heard even the closest whisper of God. If man before missed it, why, maternity was naturally the matter that he could not know and could not understand. This is the new revelation, that maternity shall be made more divine! There has been a halo about it in song and picture and story. But we want to put a halo on in London's east end and New York's east side. Creation itself is to be corrected.
Doesn't it need to be? See how many men, it is being discovered to-day, are not well enough made for soldiers. England is obliged to reject 25% of her men as physically unfit. America is reported to have rejected 29%. The other nations cannot show any better figures. If in the great arsenals that are manufacturing munitions of war, one shell in four turned out was spoiled, the industry would have to be at once investigated and put on a more efficient basis than that. Quite likely the mistake might be discovered to be "speeding up." There had been an effort to turn out too many shells. If fewer shells are made, they can be better made. And you will get just as many in the end. For by the present process, all these shells that fail, you see, do not count in the real output.
It's just like this about people. We've been trying to have too many. When Mrs. Smith in London or in New York or Frau Schmidt in Berlin, has six or eight or more children in, say, two rooms, some of them are going to have rickets and some of them are going to have tuberculosis and some of them are going into penal institutions. So that when you come to want them for the army, you find that one in four has failed. Why, even chickens would. A poultry fancier does not presume to try to raise a brood of chickens in quarters too crowded for their development. He measures his poultry house and determines how many chickens he can accommodate with enough air and space—and how many he can afford to feed. He limits the flock accordingly. Mrs. Smith in London or New York and Frau Schmidt in Berlin, can too!
Fire and electricity and other useful forces we have long since obtained the mastery over and turned from a menace to a blessing to mankind. But another even mightier force has ravaged the world like unchained lightning. Because it has not been controlled. Men thought that it must not be. So the fear of its consequences has haunted homes in every land since the pronouncement, "I will greatly multiply thy conceptions." All of the great religious teachers said that you must not take the misery out of maternity. It was meant to be there. And science, which had accomplished miracles in mitigating other suffering, stood afar off from the woman in childbirth. So much as an anaesthetic to deaden the pain was forbidden, until quite recent times, as an interference with the will of the Almighty. It was Queen Elizabeth of England who broke that taboo. By virtue of her royal authority, she demanded chloroform. And got it. Her daring could then, of course, be followed by other women. Newer iconoclasts are calling for twilight sleep, that achieves maternity in a dream. Add birth control. And we shall be out of the trouble in which the unhappy lady called Eve so long ago involved all of her daughters.
Birth control means, instead of a maternity that is perpetual, unregulated and haphazard and miserable, a maternity that is intelligently directed and limited. So that it shall be volitional. The rising value of a baby at last requires that people shall be as carefully produced as the shells we are making with such infinite accuracy. Most of all, it is important that there shall not be too many babies lest some of them not well done shall be only worthless and good for nothing. You see, you have to think about quality as well as quantity when you are counting for a final output. Russia, which had a birth rate of 50 per thousand, the highest birth rate in Europe, is the nation whose military defences have crumpled like paper. It was France, with a birth rate of 28 per thousand, the lowest in Europe, that held the line for civilisation at the Marne. And it was Germany, which has always imposed on its women as a national service the speeding up of population, that plunged the world into the agony of this war. Because 55% of the families of Berlin live in one-room tenements and there is not where to put the babies that have kept on coming, Germany reached out for the territory of her neighbours. The pressure of population too large for too narrow boundaries is as certain in its consequences as is the pressure of steam in a tea kettle with the spout stopped up. There's sure to be an explosion. Germany exploded. Back of her military system, it is her maternity system that is responsible for the woe of the world to-day. It's plain that the way not to have war anywhere ever again is not to have too many babies!
John Stuart Mill, the great economist who two generations ago looked into the future and saw a vision of the woman movement that would be, said: "Little advance can be expected in morality until the production of large families is regarded in the same light as drunkenness or any other physical excess." And he added: "Among the probable consequences of the industrial and social independence of women, I predict a great diminution of the evil of overpopulation." John Stuart Mill meant Mrs. Webber and Mrs. Smith. Two children to be enjoyed instead of ten to be endured, is an ideal of family policy possible of attainment even in the east ends and the east sides of the world. For to Mrs. Webber or to Mrs. Smith, handling her own wage envelope, no one any more may say, "I shall not give you money for shoes to-morrow unless—" Volitional motherhood is the final truth that shall make women free. No one can compel the new woman to be anything that she does not wish to be, not even to be a mother until she chooses the time.
After that curse pronounced upon Eve, there was a promise: "The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head!" "We can do it, dear." That's what the new woman will say triumphantly to the man who comes back to her from the Great War. Together they will take up the task of making, not only a new earth, but a new race!
And I think he will be glad for what she tells him. The wonder is, not so much that women in the past were willing to endure the "subjection of women," but that men consented to it. A bird in a cage can of course be made to eat out of the hand of the owner who feeds it. But see the bird that is free and will come at your call!
The women in industry and commerce and the professions and in government, whom we are seeing in these years of war passing all barriers, will at last make their final stand for what? It is for happiness. Look! Even now, who has the vision to discern, may discover the gates of Eden swinging wide. And when the man in khaki, with the age-old yearning in his heart, "Woman wanted, my woman," comes back to clasp her in his arms once more, these two everywhere shall enter in. For the ultimate programme toward which the modern woman movement to-day is moving is no less than paradise regained! It may even, I think, have been worth this war to be there.
the end