CATT, Carrie Chapman SPEECH, ARTICLE, BOOK FILE Article: “Woman Suffrage Only an Episode in Age-Old Movement” [*Duplicate*] CURRENT HISTORY ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Vol. XXVII October, 1927 Number 1 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The New Woman In publishing this symposium on The New Woman, the Editors of CURRENT HISTORY feel it necessary to state that their point of view throughout is one of the strictest impartiality toward the respective viewpoint's expressed by the contributors to the symposium. There is, perhaps, no aspect of present day social history more controversial in character or more delicate in its implications than that of the new status of Woman. The Editors, consequently, wish to make it clear that they take no sides in the controversy, and that they accept no responsibility for any of the views expressed, on one side or the other. Woman Suffrage Only an Episode in Age-Old Movement By CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL AMERICAN WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION SINCE 1916; PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ALLIANCE SINCE 1904 THERE was no "rise" of the woman suffrage movement in the usual sense of that expression. Instead, it "emerged" from the broader woman movement, but it did so through the deliberate design of certain bold spirits, already leaders in the women's agitation, who called a convention and organized in America in 1848. From that date there was no significant change in the aim and no pause in campaign activities except during the Civil War. The campaign, grown stronger each year, at length became so insistent in its appeals that the general public took notice of it [???} imagined it had sprung "full armed," officered and organized upon the public stage. Memories usually are short. A well-known man who had been an active, loyal helper in the woman suffrage campaign during its last five years was advocating recently his favorite cause before a small group of men and women, and said with impressive earnestness: "Now, if we who believe in this idea would combine in an energetic campaign we would win as easily and quickly as did the woman suffragists." The speaker was noticeably disconcerted at the somewhat derisive smiles of the women present. Nor was he any more convinced 1 2 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 of the truth than is the average citizen when informed that the campaign was organized, officered, dues paying and supporting a clearly definite program for exactly seventy-two years before the final victory came. The idea prevailed also that before the "rise" of the suffrage movement women had been content with their status in the world. On the contrary, there has been no time in written history when there were not women making protest. When written history dawned the status assigned to women among peoples most rapidly advancing was one of enormous, but scantily recognized, economic importance to home and nation, but with civil and social rights so restricted that no peg was left upon which to hang a shred of self-respect. Century followed century. Civil law, Church dogma, traditional custom, combined to enforce rigidly the belief that males possessed the inalienable right to govern home, Church and State, and that females owed to men the duty to obey, to submit, to be silent and to ask humbly when and if they desired aught. It was inevitable that the woman sex would one day rebel and struggle to regain a rational individuality. The first definite movement in that direction arose in Greece and lasted for more than two centuries. The revolt sprang up again in Rome, and although it still made the quest of learning its chief aim it took on a bolder and more political character. Twice before the coming of Christ, women, in protest against injustices to their sex, gathered in great numbers within the Forum and blocked all its approaches, much to the consternation of the Consuls. In both cases they won their causes and in the later incident called forth an immortal oration from Cato the Elder. Christianity came into the world and overspread Western Europe. It accepted the ancient opinion about women and contributed the interesting additional view that their subjection was by order of God's will and since women had brought sin into the world they should be willing to spend their time in penitence and obedience to the more virtuous sex. Despite this new and thunderously voiced oppostition, the woman movement arose again as a part of the Italian Renaissance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That the land of Mussolini gave birth to the modern woman movement may sound odd, but facts support the claim. The movement never disappeared after this date. The Renaissance departed, but the woman movement kept steadily on. During the following dark periods of war and religious intolerance it was often forced to "dig itself in," but it never failed to peep out and fire a telling shot at its enemies whenever the political weather allowed. EDUCATION OF RENAISSANCE GIRLS The Renaissance and the woman movement flourished in Italy long before they spread to France, Spain, Portugal and to the North. Developments were similar in all these countries. As learning was the main plea of the woman movement and was also the chief spirit of the Renaissance, the doors of education seem to have swung open without much ado. There were women students in classrooms and women professors in the faculties of universities in Italy, France and Spain. In all these countries there were women scholars and notable authors and poets. Many queens were distinguised for their intellectuality and many women were pronounced prodigies of learning. There were women doctors in all these countries. Modern science is scornful of European medicine at this date, but at least it may be said that women are reputed to have lost no more patients than did men. Women lawyers also appeared and from Italy came the real or fancied Portia. Throughout the Latin countries an increased number of convents with attached schools for girls and a widespread belief that if girls could not learn everything they might learn something were the most permanent results of the woman movement during the Renaissance. Mothers Superior were often renowned for scholarship, literary talent and rare administrative ability, as well as piety, and more than one declared a gentle rebellion against unacceptable edicts of the Church. The greatest of all these Mothers Superior was probably St. Theresa. Church power for many centuries was actively hostile to the woman movement. As early as 1377 the Faculty of the University of Bologna, where women had taught and studied, led the way with the following decree: "And whereas woman is the foundation of sin, the weapon of the devil, the cause of man's banishment from Paradise, and whereas for these reasons all association with her is to be diligently avoided, Therefore do we interdict and expressly forbid that any one presume to introduce in the said college (?) woman whatsoever, however (?) SUFFRAGE ONLY AN EPISODE IN AGE-OLD MOVEMENT 3 may be, and if any one should perpetrate such an act he shall be severely punished." Eventually all the universities closed their doors to women. Martin Luther (1483-1546) and the Reformation differed from the Catholic leaders in most things, but they held common views about a personal devil and both agreed that women were on much more intimate terms with him than were men. Thus the theory that men were divinely appointed to rule and women to obey had been accentuated by both Catholic and Protestant Churches. These Churches largely controlled European governments and governments made and enforced law; therefore, the woman movement was driven to struggle against a seemingly impregnable barrier. The Renaissance was ablaze in all Western Europe when Columbus discovered the American continent with the aid of the jewels of a Renaissance Queen, Isabella of Castile. It had passed and the Woman's Rights movement in Great Britain had become a permanent conflict and was actively in evidence when the American Revolution took place. Colonists, coming to America, brought the controversy with them and probably debated the theological aspects of the woman movement on the Mayflower. Every ship brought women rebels and also "divinely appointed" watchers to see that the limits of women's sphere were not moved outward by a hair's breadth. They had scarcely erected their log cabins and planted their gardens before the colonists were lined up on opposing sides for the first battle--"schools for shes." The taxpayers were nearly a unit against it. The girls won, but the last surrender was two hundred years later. Meanwhile, an overlapping battle of words began which lasted for a hundred years, the theme being, "Shall girls study geography?" The Colonists having survived the Revolution, another and more terrible battle followed sharp upon the surrender of the opposition in the geography war, "Shall girls be permitted to study that indelicate, indecent, immoral thing called Physiology?" The conflict so violently shook the foundations of the Republic that the Fathers fairly suffered with mal de mer. In the midst of it Boston yielded to the demand for the higher education of girls and in 1826 opened, amid a veritable storm of disapproval, the first high school in the United States, probably in the world. (?) had led the movement for educa- (?) rtunity and from 1789 to 1842 girls were allowed to attend the public schools during Summer months when boys vacated seats to work on the farms. The timid school board, however, yielded after eighteen months to the opposition and closed the high school for girls (1828), not because it had been a failure, but rather because every seat had been taken and not a girl had been frightened away. No other high school was opened until 1852. The opposition firmly contended that girls were incapable of learning, but were afraid to put their theory to test. In 1853 Oberlin College was opened to admit boys and girls, black and white, on equal terms. It was the first college in the world to admit women after the universities of the Renaissance were closed to women by the Church. WOMEN AS REFORMERS An unexpected stimulus to the woman movement appeared in the early years of the last century. Agitation on behalf of the abolition of slavery, alcohol and war, each a separate movement, was stirring the people. Women interested in these causes insisted upon their right to attend public meetings, to join organizations, to sit in conventions and to speak when they had 4 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 anything on their minds. Their insistence called forth an opposition which had few arguments, but much temper and voluminous quotations from the Bible. A genuine reaction of fright at the manner in which "masculine strong-minded women" were "attempting to drive men from their God-ordained sphere" possessed the country. Editors advised, preachers sermonized, and on street corners and around tea tables men and women gossiped. After half a century the results of these excited years may be gathered in the brief comment that whatever the controversy may have done to other movements, it compounded interest in the woman question several times over and enormously increased the number of women rebels. Meanwhile, women had been seeking reforms of the civil code which robbed them of property, wages, guardianship of children and other protective rights. They observed that some grievances were restrictions built by custom only, while others were in the law and could be corrected only by legislation. They concluded that the vote was a necessary tool with which to clear the code of discriminatory laws and to prevent the enactment of new ones. This was a calmly thought out plan when Lucretia Mott, standing fast by the principle of "truth for authority, not authority for truth," and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who, with her little scissors, had tried to find the laws about women and cut them out of her father's law books in her girlhood, called a convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. They drew up a program in the parlor of Mrs. Sarah McClintock on a table which is now in the Smithsonian Institution. That program demanded the vote, civil equality and equal rights to opportunity in all things. Under the organization that grew out of the convention they placed responsibility for those reforms that could be secured only through legislation. Thus the woman suffrage movement was organized with carefully planned intent. Mrs. John Stuart Mill wrote an account of one of the early conventions and women in England speedily organized for the same purpose. During seventy-two years in this country and sixty-eight in England the campaigns moved on ever faster and faster. Women were born into it, served and passed. It was irresistible from the first and grew more so day by day. Yet the history of those years of ceaseless campaigning will always be chiefly of interest as a record of the superstition, ignorance, tyranny, church hostility, bigotry, warfare of certain vested interests, which combined to form the astounding resistance of the opposition. The spirit of democracy, which seems always to prevail for a brief period after a war, sponsored the movement for a time and enfranchised men and women in many European countries in 1918, 1919 and 1920. So far did this wave of liberal tendency extend that the United States, in which the organized woman suffrage movement began, did not complete its ratification of the Federal woman suffrage amendment (Aug. 26, 1920) until twenty-six other nations had given the vote to their women.* When the ship that brought the first returning fighting men from France let down its gangplank in New York, a soldier ran down ahead of the others and shouted: "Have you got it?" "Got what?" queried the women serving coffee and doughnuts. "Why, the vote, of course," the soldier boy ejaculated. "The women of Germany have it; you should be ashamed if they have beaten you to it." In truth, when the last hard fought battle was being waged for woman suffrage in the United States (August, 1920), Germany was already preparing for an election that seated thirty-six women as members of the Reichstag and forty-five as members of the Prussian Parliament. Five years before, these Parliaments had been considered by general opinion the most militaristic and autocratic in the entire world. Germany inadvertently shamed the last opposition outpost in the United States into surrender. The vote won, some women ask, "Has it been worth the trouble it cost?" Some men ask, "What good has it done?" "What change has it wrought?" "Is the new way better than the old?" The first and chief effect of the triumph *At this date (September, 1927) women have full suffrage on equal terms with men in twenty-three nations considered sufficiently independent to be qualified to enter the League of Nations: Australia, Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Holland, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Ukrainia, United States of America. Seven other nations of this description have extended unequal suffrage to women: India has full suffrage for women in all but one province of British India and in several native States; Belgium and South Africa have full municipal suffrage; Rumania and Mexico have a limited municipal suffrage; Spain and Italy have a very limited vote. Ten British dependencies, Kenya, Rhodesia, Burma, Isle of Man, Jamaica, Tasmania, Newfoundland, Trinidad and Tongo Islands, Channel Islands and Windward Islands, have given equal suffrage to women with the exception of the last three, which have fixed the age qualifications as those of Great Women therefore vote in forty-on countries. FRENCHWOMEN'S LACK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS 47 ried to a member of the French Stock Exchange. She dared to abandon the superficial, empty life of a woman of the world so as to consecrate herself entirely to the social problem. Le Comite de Secours aux Enfants (Children's Relief Committee), which almost but not quite corresponds to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in America, has become under her guidance during the last four years the most important organization of its kind in Europe. By giving it an international scope and placing it above politics, religion and race, she has made it an immense charity to which millions of Russian babies during the famine owed their lives, and which has also kept alive millions of little Austrians, Germans, Armenians, Bulgarians and Japanese. Vast as such an undertaking may seem Mme. Dubost's role has not been limited to the care of abandoned children. She desires more than anything else a rapprochement between the people of different nations. A member of the Socialist Party for many years, she works in the League for Interscholastic Exchange, of which she is the President, to facilitate the exchange of students between France and Germany in order to create bonds that will last a MME. DUBOST lifetime between the youth of these countries. Then, too, she has her "village," of which she is immensely proud-a model colony which has its vacation camp, community house, popular theatre, maternity centre and women's educational centre located at Draveil. And she has a salon-one of those in direct line from that of Julie de Lespinasse and Mme. du Deffand, where in a great light room beneath the canvases of Marie Laurencin, Mmes. Marval, Laprade, Vuillard, Chana Orloff, nationally known figures, meet men like Bourdelle, Paul Valery, Meyerhold, Lenormand. Listening to the music of Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Darius Milhaud, Honnegger or Roussel, one sees one by one the profiles of Rakovsky, the Russian Ambassador; the strained features of Paul Boncour, the bulldog head of Paul Painleve. When the last chords have died into silence, little groups form, ideas mingle, great projects are mapped out. What an indefatigable Deputy Mme. Dubost would make! With what satisfaction she would become the champion of all efforts toward improving the life of women and the relations between the nations! In the meantime it is possible that she may have new responsibilities, for a woman is to be appointed very soon by the League of Nations to take up the question of child welfare. There is certainly no one better qualified for this post than Mme. Dubost. I should certainly add to my gallery of women of the day a portrait of Mme. Aurel, the apologist of the Couple, the great advocate of trying to raise the birthrate, as well as those of Mme. Menard-Dorian, Vice President of the League for the Rights of Man, and Maria Verona, suffrage advocate. And to complete it, let me last place the portrait of a very nearly anonymous woman, a woman of the people, one who came from their ranks and who holds tremendous influence over them. The war forced an incredible proportion of French women and girls into the factories. If you add to the number of women thus employed the number of workers absorbed by agriculture (there are 900,000 of them), the total wages amount to over 3,000,000,000 francs a year. There are 33,000 in supplies and transport work, 72,000 in commerce, amusement enterprises and banks, 670,000 domestics, 45,000 in public service, 6,000 in the mines, 50,000 in the professions, and 1,000,000 in the garment trades. Of this total about 250,000 are organized- 30,000 in the textile trades and at 48 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 most a few hundred among the workers in the fields. A WORKINGWOMEN'S LEADER The leader who has appeared among them is Germaine Goujon. Why should I choose her rather than Lucie Colliard, Marie Guillot or Marthe Bigot? It is perhaps because she possesses all the best qualities of the French workingwoman. Gay, delicate, nervous, of an enterprising temperament, this little woman, who is far from pretty, radiates personal magnetism in the fire of her green eyes, her mobile smile, her decided bearing. Upon meeting her one feels at once that she is logical, industrious and resourceful. To watch her in action is to understand that the limits of personal devotion do not exist for her, and that behind her careful gestures, her modest speech, lie the possibilities of heroism. She has been secretary of the Union of Textile Workers of Normandy for about ten years. She knows almost every one of the 20,000 workers who work in the factories there. And she knows how to influence them, how to imagine herself in their places so as to find arguments that will appeal to them. She, too, came out of the factories; she had to GERMAINE GOUJON, Secretary of the French Textile Workers' Union work hard and long for many years in order to learn all that she knows now. Married to a railroad employe who does not share her ideas, but who allows her perfect freedom to devote herself to the cause which she has chosen, Germaine Goujon lives in one of those huge workingmen's colonies near Rouen, and out of her tiny budget of 700 francs a month she manages to be always well dressed, even elegant, and yet to come to the assistance of her friends whenever they are in distress. Because she spends herself to the limit and because she possesses a scientific knowledge of the workers' movement, and of economic theory as well, because she is an excellent speaker, too, this frail young woman is in such demand that she has practically had to give up her own personal life. Never a Sunday to herself, never a vacation except when strictly necessary to preserve her health, never any pleasures outside, her surroundings always the bare walls of the Bourse du Travail (Central Labor Union) and the faces of her comrades. She must take her turn at going out to do propaganda: trips through the provinces, educational lectures, struggles against the employers in case of strikes or unemployment, the editing of reports, articles, administrative work, and representing her union at congresses. Although very well known in her own region and in the labor movement as a whole, she is scarcely ever heard of by the public at large, and, if I choose her to speak of in this connection, it is not because she is unique, but because she represents a type of militant workingwoman of which there are hundreds today in France. If in conclusion I should be asked to choose among all the women of whom I have spoken the one of whom I expect the most, I should not mention any one name. I should reply without thinking of names, for the hope of the future lies in the obscure and hard-working masses. From them we may expect innovations and a creative impulse, which will perhaps give birth to the most dominating figure of a woman in the future. It is certainly from this quarter that we may expect an invasion of the political arena by women. Accustomed to act for the best good of the group, they will be able to subordinate personal ambition to the common ideal, and that is the first condition of really great human action. Brought up in the rich school of poverty and work, they are blessed with a sharp sense of reality - the first requirement political life. PARIS, FRANCE. FRENCHWOMEN'S LACK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS 45 note that the obtaining of the right to vote will be much less a victory for the movement than, simply, a present laid at the feet of backward France by this modern age. Surrounded by a staff which includes Mmes. Malaterre-Sellier, Suzanne Grinberg and Pauline Rebour, Mme. Brunschwieg presides with the dignity of a noble mother, a very sure intelligence and the manner of a high- born lady over amiable social gatherings of distinguished ladies who almost all have a holy horror of politics. Their movement transcends party lines. "We want to group together women of all social classes (is it our fault if the workers remain deaf to our cry?)" says Mme. Brunschwieg. "Those who follow us are mainly teachers, doctors' wives, lawyers' wives, or women of the provinces whose leisure pushes them toward our ideas. Very few young girls. Youth is content to shrug its shoulders and say: 'Yes, of course, it is very silly of them to refuse us the privileges they have granted to men.' That is all, and they go off to the dance." As to political tendencies, Mme. Brunschwieg continues: "Our best members are generally from liberal circles; since they are very rarely members of a political party it is rather difficult for me to define their political position. But one may say that they would be probably members of the Radical, Radical-Socialist or even Socialist groups. These are the parties which have given us the best support. Sometimes the wives of Conservatives come to swell our ranks, driven by the fact, no doubt, that the Duchess d'Uzes is honorary President of our Association and that the Marquise de Crussol is one of our members. Needless to add that we welcome these rare additions to our number. When we are able to vote certain of our members will undoubtedly present themselves for election to the Chamber of Deputies, for example, Mme. Malaterre-Sellier and Suzanne Grinberg. They are exceptional cases. We shall be content in general to go on as in the past, working to pass legislation of special interest to women quite without regard to party considerations - laws relative to social protection, to the rights of mothers and children, hygiene and factory work at home. There will be much to do, but it is so difficult to stir up French women! Take this as an example: When the American suffragists obtained the vote they wished to share the money left over with the women of other countries where suffrage had not yet come. They said to us: 'We are prepared to send you several thousand dollars on MME. BRUNSCHWIEG, President of the French Woman Suffrage Association condition that you raise an equal amount among your supporters.' What difficulty we have had in gathering this sum! We managed to do it at last and this material aid from American women (to speak only of that) has been very precious to us." BRILLIANT WORKER FOR PEACE Let us leave the restricted area of the feminist movement and move into the wider circle of foreign affairs, where we shall meet one of the few women who has dared to venture into this field - Louise Weiss. Amid the interplay of alliances, treaties, national rivalries and the whirlpool of economic conflict here is one who knows how to read human nature like an open book. Moved by the sufferings of the war which she saw at first hand, having been a hospital nurse, this young woman decided ten years ago to consecrate her life to working for peace. By this she meant not simply working as a woman, in the goodness of her heart and the burning tumult of her sensitive being, but using her vast culture and knowledge, all of her energy and all the vigor of her mind. She believed that 46 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 among the sciences which have today given a somewhat forbidding atmosphere to our time one science was missing - the science of maintaining peace. To build a foundation for this work she established the weekly journal called L'Europe Nouvelle, and to aid in establishing a mutual acquaintanceship and understanding between nations she travels all over Europe, across the sea, always in search of facts, documents, information. Writer, journalist, lecturer, she is not only tireless in her activity but ubiquitous, one might almost say. If a delicate point arises in diplomatic relations, if a schism becomes apparent, if a new step is being ventured, you will be sure to find her there. This large blond creature, with her dignified smile and her clear eyes, has the gift of gathering people of all parties around her and making good workers of them. There is hardly a Premier in Europe or a great political leader or a single man belonging to "the new European team" who has not contributed to her paper, just as there is hardly a distinguished foreigner, hardly an important French personality that one does not meet in her office in the Rue des Vignes. Her role in French politics is subordinated at present to her interest in foreign affairs. She belongs to no political party or group, and it must be said that the impartiality she gives such ample proof of, the objectivity which she imposes upon L'Europe Nouvelle, has relegated and her sympathy with the Left has retreated to a region where sentiment becomes flimsy and tepid. Louise Weiss is not, properly speaking, a feminist. And she regrets it, it seems. "It is only in America," she exclaimed soon after her return to Paris, "that I was able to understand the full weight of such a movement. The strength of the women's organizations was a revelation to me. Ah, if our Senators could feel the pressure of such a terror as the women inspire over there! And if in France we had the courage to use bold methods! Suppose, for example, fifty women from different milieux all suddenly refused to pay their taxes, saying that being robbed of their privileges gave them the right to shirk their responsibilities, do you not think there would be a prompt and salutary demonstration?" MME. DUBOST'S WORK If there is a single woman destined to play a prominent part in domestic politics it is certainly Mme. Rene Dubost. Intelligent LOUISE WEISS, Editor L'Europe Nouvelle intelligent, witty, enthusiastic, and as though crowned with a vitality powerful enough to make her master herself and subordinate her charms to a discreet and subtle brilliance, extremely modern in her tastes and beliefs, there is one way in which she chooses to be of the past - that is in her dress. While the women who frequent her salon wear the universal black lace sheath or the latest jumper frock, Mme Dubost, in her Louis XIII costume with a long train and heavy pleats, her lace frill, her pointed bodice, her astonishing sleeves, or her Directoire waistcoat, is the incarnation of protest. From her heavy chignon of round curls that give to her charming face an air of old-fashioned grace down to her embroidered slippers everything seems to say to the women of today: "Do not go on making concessions; be yourselves; dare to wear what is becoming, what pleases you, and, if you are going to pretend to be emancipated, begin by refusing to be tyrannized over by the fashion." This quality is not without importance in the character of Mme. Dubost, for it is the key to all the others. As a young woman she broke with her family, who were among the aristocrats of the high industrial world - she was mar- 44 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 pression at once aggressive and yet languishing, with the reflections from her long, dark, piercing eyes playing over alabaster features, a hard, bird-like profile, with an abundance of black hair crowning her head and leaving her forehead bare, the Countess has a certain feudal air which recalls other skies, other times. Her apartment in Passy, with its walls and floors of cork - the better to make the rooms silent - is indeed the ivory tower from which escape now and then brilliant poems exalting love, singing the turbulence of Spring, the anguish of death. Reclining on a divan most of the day, her time divided between her current portrait painter, her followers and her meditations, it sometimes happens that she abandons her usual preoccupations - love, nature, death - to cast about her in the world the searching glance of a bird of prey, to sow broadcast her bacchanalian laugh of irony. Perhaps one sees her at the Chamber of Deputies, dressed in colored veils, gesticulating, attracting everybody's attention, applauding as though she were at the theatre, amusing herself as though it were the circus; or in her salon, where she likes to be surrounded by men prominent in politics, shining for them in all her glory. And indeed her entourage is dazzling. She lives THE COUNTESS DE NOAILLES the life of a mad, gifted creature whose work scintillates with an exotic brilliance; with the shrill voice of an exalted parokeet she scatters handfuls of bright thoughts to whoever is quick enough to pick up the sparkling treasures. Not a word that is not poetry, music, brusque epigram, lyric effusion, concise judgment, now a glimpse of a door half opening into metaphysics, now startling resumes, conclusions couched in a luminous symbolism. From these monologues which the audience drinks in like an intoxicating beverage, spring at random, one might almost say, her sympathies and antipathies, the majority of which incline toward the Left rather than toward the Right. Thus it was that she became the militant friend of Caillaux and that at Geneva she was seen effusively embracing Paul Painleve. So, too, at important banquets, at galas and fetes where official adulation builds her a pedestal, her most brilliant sallies and her sweetest smiles are for the delight of the politicians of the Left. Her political ideas in so far as they are at all precise have the grandiose quality of those of Carlyle's heroes. Since her spirit is completely obsessed by the Nietzschean conception of the will to power, it is difficult to imagine her assuming in the future a direct and continuous form of work, accepting a responsible position no matter how exalted or mixing among humble mortals and vulgar realities. And, then, she has too much passion, too much a dionysiac sense of life, too torrid and devouring an imagination to be able to give herself with any success to doing instead of singing. One sees her rather lending all her Egerian charm and her warlike enthusiasm to the artistic destiny of the nation, adding the development of literary work with her prestige as a poetess. THE SUFFRAGE LEADER In contrast with these two bright stars shining at opposite poles of the French firmament, Mme. Leon Brunschwieg, President of the Frenchwomen's Suffrage Union, gleams rather pale. For the reasons which I have given, and because it is conducted by timid bourgeois females haunted by the fear of losing their femininity or being otherwise compromised, the feminist movement is far from having gained the impetus in France that it has attained in America, England or the Scandinavian countries. Its leaders declare that it comprises 200 groups and numbers 70,000 women, but its propaganda strikes such a low, and one might almost say confidential, FRENCHWOMEN'S LACK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS 43 them the day after tomorrow, when equal suffrage becomes a fact, will be called upon to pass from the wings to the stage, from a hidden secret plan of campaign to one of direct action. SEVERINE'S CAREER A woman whose life will be little changed by the new order is Severine. Among those rare intellectuals who are occupied with politics (they can be counted on the fingers of one hand) she has been fighting longest, most consistently and most courageously for her idea of justice. At first a disciple of Jules Valles, introduced by him into the career of French letters, she took as her first cause the Dreyfus affair, fighting side by side with Zola, Pressense, Basch and Monod, sharing the glory with them and being completely ostracized from society for going to the defense of Dreyfus. Her first articles, vehement and inflammatory like herself, were published in the Cri du Peuple, the Gil Blas, the Fronde, a paper entirely run by women. From the very beginning Severine took to journalism as a monk takes to the Carmelite or Trappist order - with the fire and mystic faith of an irrestible vocation. For almost forty years she has worked at her beloved journalism. Instead of expecting from the press the reward of a glorious career she has simply made it the voice of her heart. And what a heart! Sixty years old now, full of a magnificent vitality, generosity and youth which shines in her clear blue eyes under her crown of snowy white hair, Severine has made her whole life an apostleship consecrated to the defense of the noblest causes and the most unfortunate public men. In a limpidity of style which has become traditional and with boldness of thought, her work combines the courage of revolt and the tenderness of a purely feminine pity. Ever since she has been able to hold a pen there is not a single paper on the Left which has not had the honor of her collaboration and has not borne her name as a flaming pledge of courage and moral rigor. In addition to being a journalist she has another profession - that of character witness, for in France well-known people are called to defend certain ideas involved in a law case, such as liberty, fraternity and equality. They are almost expert witnesses chosen according to their own reputation for integrity rather than for their knowledge of the case under consideration. And so if a man finds himself without justice from the law, hounded, betrayed in the process of seeking restitution, Severine is called to the bar to appeal for the prisoner on grounds of human pity and kindness. There has never been a time when she has not responded to the calls of distress with which she is forever being deluged; there has hardly been an occasion when the Judges have been able to resist her poignant words, her face transfigured by her passion for truth. Member of the Executive Committee of the League of Rights of Man and an influential member of the Socialist Party, she takes part in all the mass meetings, all the struggles. She has spent herself in defending the unfortunate - even animals. And today, retired and living in a secluded cottage at Pierrefonds but still as ardent a worker, she can reckon up what her life of heroism has brought her - poverty, care, an old age devoted to the most unsympathetic labor. It is often the reward of great souls. THE COUNTESS DE NOAILLES Countess Anna de Noailles, born Princess de Brancovan, is another sort of woman entirely. She is as peculiar, as fantastic, as deliberately the great lady as Severine is modest, simple and absorbed in all who suffer. Oriental in type (she was born in Paris of Rumanian parents), with an ex- MADAME SEVERINE 42 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 MAGDALEINE MARX atres, the luxury displayed by women in superior positions, everything, gives the French woman the idea that she has nothing else to do on this earth but occupy herself with love, love, love. And each individual is so strongly rooted in her, it is so much a part of the flesh and blood of the people, that in our day, 1927, when the struggle for existence leaves so little real place for the art of making love, we are still at the same old point. In spite of the urgent appeals of a reality daily growing more pressing, we are trying to live according to this old myth, and unfortunate is he or she who tries to introduce into the feminine existence any interests foreign to love. POLITICAL INFLUENCE SECRET Ask 300 French bourgeois women what are their views on politics, 299 will make it a point to answer: "I? Political views! Do I look like an old maid or a virago? If you want the political news you will have to ask my husband, for I know nothing of politics, I am thankful to say." It is the prevailing fashion to believe that a woman must be of a shrewish disposition or else physically unfortunate and therefore despised of men if she dares to approach those problems, which are adjudged in France the unique province of men and consequently forbidden to their sisters, wives and daughters. In spite of the fact that French women hate to face adverse public opinion, there are so many problems which concern women clamoring to be solved that we are presented with this situation: Women are not allowed to take seats in the French Chamber of Deputies or in the Senate. Several have been elected, mostly Communists, but all have had to resign. Since, therefore, they cannot go to the front, directly, openly, publicly, they must content themselves with using their influence from a distance: a secret, occult, unreckoned influence, which is very hard to gauge. The observer who wants to find out just exactly what this amounts to in its effects upon actual political events must school himself to wait about in the wings, to catch but glimpses of the play itself and so to decipher certain trends which are clear only to the actors. This is so true that Mme. Leon Brunschwieg, President of the Union Francaise pour le Suffrage des Femmes (French Women's Suffrage Union), when asked if her propaganda seemed to her to be developing in harmony with modern life, said to me: "Is it possible that you should ask me this? You, who know France as well as I do, and who realize that concerted action by Frenchwomen is not to be counted upon, in fact, is practically impossible? We do not even pretend that our open propaganda accomplishes anything for us. Our little paper called La Francaise is only for the already converted; our real method must be the personal one, the individual effort which each woman makes according to her connections, her social position. As to our organization, our method is to work upon each Deputy in his own Province. We go to see him in his own house and attack him on his own ground, patiently preparing the game by the use of our personal influence; then we cleverly force his hand." Like the secret work of white ants building a chain of subterranean passages and chambers are the political doings, in such measure as they exist at all, of the bourgeois Frenchwoman. No doubt one could go on to speak of the sometimes decisive role played by our modern Circes in the lives of our great statesmen and the part thus taken in national affairs by certain women, but as this belongs more to the domain of the novel than to an article dealing with a social question, let us rather try to see among the women actually to the fore now who of Frechwomen's Lack of Political Progress By MAGDALEINE MARX A LEADING FRENCH NOVELIST THE latest news in well-informed French political circles at the present moment is that equal suffrage rights are about to be granted! Women will share universal suffrage with men, but to begin with, only in the municipal elections. In a country like ours this offers such brand new possibilities for women whose curious destiny it has been to reign over the kingdoms of taste, of elegance and of love, stagnating meanwhile in the sadly backward legal condition of children and idiots, that one wants to examine a little more closely the personalities of the women who are bound to lead in the new movement. In spite of the fact that the war imposed upon the rank and file of French women an unanticipated burden of new responsibilities and duties which they showed themselves perfectly capable of handling, in spite of a marked subsequent advance in development, they are still kept in a state of political obscurantism and social inferiority. This in violent contrast to the degree of freedom attained, in thirty other countries, by 160,000,000 women. Why, why must we remain so far behind? To understand the backwardness of France in this respect one must be familiar with the economics development of the country. One must have followed, decade by decade, the slow formation of its classes, by now so far apart from one another, so antagonistic in point of view, that it is practically impossible for French women, as a whole, to meet on any common ground. Economic conditions are at the bottom of their differences. The bourgeoisie, on the whole, are in favor of giving women the right to vote, but because of certain prejudices I shall discuss later on they do not dare to fight for it. As for the working people, although equal suffrage is one of the planks in their political platform, they refuse to let themselves be drawn into a struggle which has suffrage for its only goal. Not that they repudiate the responsibility. Not that they are inactive. On the contrary, working women in France form the only group capable of facing political problems as a 41 group, but deliberately they have centred their efforts elsewhere and look with scepticism upon the timid and somewhat underhanded methods of the feminists. Then come the peasants. But peasant women in France refuse to have anything to do with political questions. Their terrific struggle for existence, their ignorance, their determination to look out first and foremost for their own particular interests and still stronger in them perhaps their religious fanaticism, raise a fourfold barrier which entirely shuts them off from the rest of the world. One must have lived in certain sections of France, for example Brittany, the Auvergne or Perigord, to realize how deeply rooted in the attitudes of the last century religion can keep them. While the working woman who lives in a great industrial centre is frankly atheist, her sister in a humble country parish is bowing her white coiffe timidly beneath the storm of eloquence of Monsieur le Cure thundering from the pulpit. Here one realizes as nowhere else how completely the French peasants are under the yoke of the Catholic Church. The Church provides their only spiritual food. They see no other paper except La Croix (The Cross). It provides their only amusement; Sundays are divided between mass, vespers and the salutation. In certain villages in the Vendee, if a woman became so emancipated as to talk politics with other women, she would be greeted not only with maledictions but with raised pitchforks. To return to the bourgeois woman and her difficulties. Here, seemingly, are to be found the very same ignorance and lack of political ideas. I say seemingly. The fact that French women have been told for centuries that they are supreme in grace and love has determined and still determines the literature of the country and through the literature the actions of the women themselves. Following the lead of the great writers, the public has come to believe that woman has but one role: to please, always to please, no other aim but love, no other responsibilities but the home and maternity. The press, social customs, books, the the- 40 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 that we look with hope and satisfaction. She is man's companion, not competitor; she has enough energy - a male characteristic - to stimulate her to worthy achievements, but she has not forsaken her feminine appeal. The most discouraging thing about the New Woman is that she is willingly a slave to the most tyrannical of all masters, La Mode, whose seat of government is Paris. Let Fashion decree that she should wear her hair and skirts long, and she would run to cover like a frightened rabbit. Even if it should prescribe the red flannel underwear of our grandmothers instead of the silk of our present grandmothers, she would make prompt genuflexion. Until the New Woman denies this Master I despair of her. The way in which woman has developed in the last twenty-five years has been so rapid in pace and breath-taking in scope that it is still too soon to pass definite judgment upon its meaning and possible consequences. It cannot surely be called a progressive change in the nature of woman, for woman has not changed fundamentally. It is more likely to be a stage of transition toward a different conception of woman's sphere in the world, a transition accompanied with exceptionally definite displays of independence and freedom. Because of this very definite attitude woman displays toward her new conception of herself, the change in itself is not permanent; it could not be and yet be so self-assured, self-satisfied and at the same time so conscious of itself. When woman has found her real place in the world, a place which will be as different from that cherished by her grandmothers as it is from the place she is assuming now, she will no longer feel this sort of growing pains which make her seek for appeasement in every new fad and idea. Eventually she will have to adjust herself to herself. That will be more amusing to witness than the present struggle at being something that she is not in reality, and it is safe to say that it will be more picturesque. If any one has doubts that woman is the image of God, seeing her frequently in her present-day get-up will confirm them. She is now going through a transitional stage toward a new conception of woman's sphere and she is displaying all the grotesqueness and more that children show in the awkward age. Give woman a chance to handle love properly and she will make a great contribution to life. She should not be called upon to do it alone. Man should help her. It is the only way he can make amends. WOMAN'S MORALITY IN TRANSITION 39 and family together. And she will succeed in this as well as in her self-chosen work. The woman of average intelligence is likely to combine a desire for independence with a need of man's support and affection, and she will tolerate in practice the duties against which rebels in theory; and the woman of low intelligence is not more fitted for the job of home-maker than she is for business or trade. The future of the race seems to depend more today on quality than on quantity. It may be just as safe, perhaps more so, if it is restricted to a higher type of woman who is aware of its importance than it would be were the old rule followed that a woman who has no talent for anything in particular should be married as early as possible. It takes more talent to be a successful mother and wife than to be a competent physician. Women do not change their natures with their names at the altar; those who are born with a need to discover wings for themselves will not be satisfied with a Ford or a Rolls-Royce. Those who have no such urge are content to walk, and walking perforce is no sign of progress. It is a great mistake, however, to think that woman can ever be completely independent of man, no matter what she wishes to believe or have others believe. The movement of emancipation begun by women has gone too fact and too far and many have misunderstood the question. Their great aim appears to be Freedom from Man. What woman should want in reality is to be delivered from the shackles into which man has put her, her intelligence, desires, ambitions and talents. She wants to have a manner of self-expression which does not necessarily mean emulation or competition with man. She wants to be permitted to use fully whatever male attributes she may have in her make-up which give her physical strength and endurance, mental power, active energy and a desire for creation; but she cannot rid herself of the feminine qualities which are generally the superior in number and power in her constitution. The modern woman seems desirous to shed these female traits, but she acquires nothing in their stead when she goes in for manly activities without being fundamentally built for them. The result is in its gross exaggeration those hybrid creatures who have succeeded in making themselves caricatures of men without achieving anything which would redeem them or reconcile society to their existence. In its finer form we have the modern woman trim, neat, positive, self- supporting, assured of her ability to carry on the work of her choice, at the same time wife, mother, daughter, lover. It is to her Wide World A one-piece dinner gown and bobbed hair in the fashion of 1927 38 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 Wide World A woman's formal afternoon costume in the style of 1927 tomary detestation. Covetousness, pride and ingratitude are possibly held in greater esteem than they were, though hell was full of the ungrateful as recently as Don Quixote's time. That the woman of the future will insist upon the modification of marriage goes almost without saying. Marriage can no longer be the Gordian Knot which none can untie, and which, being twisted with our thread of life, nothing but the scythe of death can cut. The divorce record in all countries save those under the dominion of the Roman Catholic Church attests it. It may please the Bishop of the Episcopal Church of New York to say that trial marriage is not marriage at all, and that companionate marriage is nothing but a brazen proposal to sanction irregular relations, but dogmatic as he is there is nothing in his past performances to suggest that he is infallible. The sooner religion reconciles itself with the new ideas and the new powers the better it will be for religion and for those to whom religion is necessary, that is, to the people by and large. I cannot see that the New Woman is particularly concerned with religion, but when she becomes so, I venture to believe that she will insist that it shall absorb and assimilate the new ideas and take cognizance of the new powers. There can be no doubt that home and family are beginning to suffer from the dissemination of New Woman ideas. Revolution inevitably entails suffering, but there has never been a revolution from which advance and good did not flow. If one believes that when woman deserts the kitchen and forsakes the nursery the future of the home and the family are imperilled, then the advent of the New Woman is a menace, for they are the foundation of the structure called Life. The solution of the matter is squarely up to women. The bearing of children is their function, their privilege and their duty. Nurturing children and bringing them up may often be entrusted to others with greater success. The whole question is based upon the intelligence of the individual woman. Therefore, it simmers down to a question of personality. A woman of superior intelligence who makes a success of business or profession will understand by taking thought, if she does not by instinct, that she is still the responsible member for keeping home WOMAN'S MORALITY IN TRANSITION 37 sion can sway him as the wind sways the reed, but he tells himself and believes that only "bad" women are equally swayable by creative instinct; he knows that the vagrant and purposeful thought of man has always been and always will be concerned with sex to a tremendous degree, but he tells himself and believes that woman has no such thoughts and that if she does she has "fallen" or is on the way; and he believes that the experience that makes him ruins woman. Man must undergo a change of heart to keep pace with woman's change of mind. No one can have extensive and intimate contact with the rising generation of women and not know that the old code of sex morality has suffered and is still suffering profound modifications. There are many reasons for it and not one of the least is the dissemination of the doctrine and practice of birth control. Without here passing judgment upon it other than to say that in my opinion it is one of the most dangerous weapons of the age, since it tends to promote sterility of the good and fertility of the bad, it must be admitted that it has done more to destroy purity than temptations or tests. All that which spells enlightenment has had much to do with its vogue also. Modern women know life at the age of 18 as well as, if not infinitely better than, their mothers knew it when they had reached late maturity, borne a number of children and encountered successes and failures in quantities sufficient to temper their souls. They have definite ideas about right and wrong, pleasure and pain, morality and ethics, privileges and duties. The manner in which these ideas are developed and directed will make for good or for evil. A woman of 40 today is as young as her sister of 20. Old age has been receding in a long stride when youth forced it beyond the half century limit. This extends the period of woman's activity to a considerable degree. What she will make of it is still a question heavy with doubt, which time alone can answer. What may be called morality in general does not seem to have been affected by the New Woman. Lying, murder, stealing, bearing false witness are held in the cus- The capes and puffed shoulder effects that characterized women's dress in 1897 36 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 Women's dress in 1887, when the bustle was in fashion - the future of the world was thought safe. She has changed all this, and unless the tide turns and brings woman back to her first and fundamental duty, that of bearing children, there is no prophesying the future. It would be idle to condemn woman or even to look for harmful effect in the fact that she no longer feels herself subservient to man marriage or out of marriage; indeed, actual observation and personal experience may serve as an acceptable selection when the time for marriage comes, and the new code of morality which proclaims that what is good for man is equally good for woman has no ill omen in itself for the future. It will become a subject for fearful apprehension should woman refuse to admit that her lot in life is fundamentally different from that of man, but the firelike rapidity with which she has adopted modes and mannerisms which identify her with man encourages us to believe she will return just as fast to a more equilibrated medium. The attitude toward marriage which makes divorce a common, everyday occurrence, accepted by society, quasi-recognized by the Church and condemned only by the conservative has much in its favor, and more in its disfavor. Society, after all, reduces itself to the family, and a family is the only justification for marriage. If it were not for children, and especially now that we are becoming more and more convinced that we make our own hell on earth, why should people want to marry when they can have the joys of matrimony with none of its onus? Thus, the creation of a new family in the bosom of the old one justifies amply the sacrifices of personal freedom and independence that marriage implies. The failure of the modern woman to recognize her duty toward the Sacrament which Paul thought preferable to burning may turn marriage into a jolly fair where one will be so absorbed getting in and out of it that there will be no time or desire for procreating a family. The warning note must be given to women but it is within themselves that they will answer it. A profession is not incompatible with marriage and children, but woman too often chooses to make it so. Man, be he pietist, puritan or pagan, must eventually realize that woman of the future is not going to sit back supinely and observe him suck life's honeycomb. She is going to have pleasures and pastimes equivalent to his. It is likely that they will be much the same in view of the way she has taken to tobacco and alcohol during the past few years. To be cognizant of her indulgences will sometimes harass him and often humiliate him, but it will not drive him crazy. When, however, she will insist upon having the same amatory license that he grants himself then he will go off his head, be he parent, brother or husband, unless he sees things in a very different light from that in which he sees them today. In head-hiding man has the ostrich beaten "to a frazzle." He knows that he is polygamous by nature, but he tells himself and believes that woman is monogamous; he knows that pas- WOMAN'S MORALITY IN TRANSITION 35 praised, blamed, discussed, accepted, acclaimed, rejected, but she rushed forth to accomplish a duty which was opposed to her previous monotonous routine. She found thrills, fulfillment and joy in this new life which broadened her viewpoint and made her take inventory of herself. The result is modern woman. Consciousness of her value had already been half awakened by the previous generation of mothers who had felt the stirrings of Feminism. She found in the war the field in which she could practice becoming what she thinks she has become - independent of man, a power unto herself. She has gestated new ideas and brought forth new methods of thinking and learning. She is now convinced that she has reached equality with man in so far as mental and practical achievements are concerned, and she has set out to prove it. In every field of activity she has made a splendid showing, save soldiering. The end of all wars may be in sight when women are sent to the colors and men stay home to tend domestic duties and cultivate the fields. Woman's sadistic and cruel mind will prompt her to such undreamed-of methods of torture for the enemy that people will prefer living in peace with their neighbors much rather than battling with them. With the spread of the new ideas which make woman mentally the equal of man, At the left the two figures show women's fashions in 1879; the two at right those of a few years later there has come a new code of morality, or rather a new distribution of moral ideas between the sexes. Woman, finding that she could assume the duties of man in the professional sphere, insists on sharing his alleged rights and long-established privileges in the moral one. In her discoveries of herself she has stumbled upon the fact that far from being what man has always asserted she was, timid, prudish and monogamous, she is bold, immodest and polyandrous. She is making short business of adapting the existing code of morality to her new interpretation of it. As a result, many women no longer consider it essential to enter matrimony in complete ignorance of what it implies of duties and pleasures. They insist upon formulating their own conception of the marriage bond and have ceased to accept its laws as man made them. Undeniably the effect is prejudicial just now for the future of the race and the lasting quality of marriage, as it was meant by the Church and as centuries have accepted it. When woman was subjected to the autocratic pleasure of her husband, and knew that by refusing her loyalty and fidelity to him she would be an object of scorn to the world - and by shirking her duties toward the race she would heap upon herself condemnation of the Church and punishment in the hereafter 34 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 The two figures at the left represent women's fashions between 1848 and 1860; the two at the right those between 1860 and 1864 gences and inhibitions. He never made a greater failure in anything he ever undertook. He was bound to fail, for he started by affronting the Science of Life. Man and woman are identical in their origin, genesis and destiny. They have one purpose - to reproduce their kind. Subduing the earth is incidental and contributory, that their descendants may have a propitious and pleasant place in which to propagate. To promote this purpose man secretes one specific element, woman the other. All other differences are minor and inconsequential. The soil is more important than the seed. Hazard or a comet may bring seed, but if soil is lacking sterility will prevail. Woman is the soil, man the seed. Man's attitude of mastery toward woman is the best example of inferiority complex that exists. Woman is far from satisfactory, but the hiatuses of her mind, the indentations of her emotions, the intermittences of her heart are the result of the artificializing procedure to which man has subjected her with few spasmodic interruptions since the beginning of time. And now it is a thing of the past. Woman has obtained her freedom. What is she going to do with it? It is too much to expect she will use it wisely and prudently. If she can learn by experience, one day she will have wisdom. Of one thing we may be sure, she will not be willing to be the mirror of man, his servant, his slave or his shadow, save when she is in the throes of love. The transitoriness of passionate love is known to all save youth. Transmuted into affection, admiration and respect, it becomes the most inexhaustible source of the effects, the most indestructible building material of happiness, the Staff of Life second only to bread. "New Woman" is an infelicitous designation. There is, of course, no such thing. Woman has forced the bars of her cage, cast the manacles off her ankles, shed the artificial skin in which she was encased and immobilized. She is the same today as she was in the days of Ruth and Esther, Penelope and Nausica, Ninon de l'Enclos and Charlotte Corday. She knows the same weaknesses and desires, has the same intellectual equipment and the same emotional reactions. For countless centuries she has been told that she has qualities that she does not have; that she likes things for which she has an unconscious abhorrence; that she has anatomical and physiological limitations that seriously handicap her in the race of life. The World War came. Her life was pulled from its hinges with a jerk, and for five disintegrating years she had to adjust herself to a manless world in which habit and wont were at the mercy of constantly changing conditions. She had to do many things that she had not thought herself capable of doing, because she had never been permitted to try them. She was Woman's Morality in Transition By JOSEPH COLLINS A DOCTOR OF MEDICINE AND NEUROLOGIST PRACTICING IN NEW YORK; FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF NEUROLOGY AT THE NEW YORK POST-GRADUATE MEDICAL SCHOOL; AUTHOR OF VARIOUS WORKS ON MEDICAL, LITERARY AND OTHER SUBJECTS PROPHECY is an essential part of the physician's art. In practice it is called prognosis - forecasting what the future has in store for the patients. Habituated to making such estimates, he is tempted to try his hand in other fields. Hence, I am easily persuaded to say what is likely to be the result of the advent and activities of the New Woman; what the effects of the dissemination of the ideas and conceptions for which she is held responsible will be on morals, manners, marriage and man. The expert in prognosis must have large and varied experience. The person who ventures to outline the future activities of the New Woman must be an observer of the present and a student of the past, a sympathizer with women, familiar with their psychology. Though it may not be generally admitted that the New Woman exists, no one is so obdurate as to maintain that woman is the image of man and not the image of God, or to deny that she has wrested from unwilling man the privileges that he arrogated to himself. By ways and means which are neither clear nor obvious, she has won a bloodless victory of independence for her sex and a measure of freedom which assures her equality with man in the great things of life. Now she has a secure place in the sunlight. It has not come about gradually and insensibly, but overnight, as it were, in the span of one generation. The acceptance of the new ideal for woman had its birth with the century. Man and his institutions, secular and civil, have striven from time immemorial to enslave woman; that is, to deny her the rights and privileges to which she was entitled. While doing it he has indulged himself in what is known in psychology as rationalization, which means giving rich reasons for poor motives. He has claimed that she was a clinging vine that needed supported, protection and pruning; that she was modest and tender-minded; that her intellect was dominated and directed by her emotions; in short, that she was a child in everything save body; that she was to be cajoled, coerced, caressed, conquered, trimmed, disciplined and corrected just as children are. She was to do what she was told when she was told. Sometimes she did, but more often she pretended. Hence her reputation for mendacity, intuitiveness and resourcefulness. She might look upon ripe, succulent, gustatory fruit, but she was not permitted to pluck or eat it save when man said she could. His passion for standardization was first vented upon woman. He standardized her morals and her manners, her activities and her aspirations, her indul- Wide World DR. JOSEPH COLLINS 33 32 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 to save her self-respect by putting a halo on her wickedness. She attempts to hide her sordidness under fine phrases - "Art for art's sake," "To the pure all things are pure," "Honi soit qui mal y pense" ("Evil to him who evil thinks"), and the like. Having delivered herself of these platitudes, she proceeds to wallow in the turpitude of vice and then attempts to convince the world that it is the artistic, the beautiful, the esthetic in the play, the film, the dance, the dress, and not their vile suggestiveness that attract, but she succeeds in deceiving neither herself nor us. The public sense of decency has been so perverted that spectacles like The Black Crook, to which a few degenerates crept in shame a half century ago, are models of decency compared to those to which mothers take their sons and daughters today. We have now reached the condition that finds our modern sociologist condoning crime and endeavoring to give it respectability by the simple expedient of legalizing it and by teaching that "codes in morals are as changeable as style in dress"; that "sin, so-called, is but the tyranny of society." Witness the "companionate marriage" discussion and its necessary adjunct instruction in the use of contraceptives. Note their logic. Our modern sociologist observes a growing laxity in morals and an increased freedom between the sexes - a laxity which society frowns upon and a freedom which oftimes creates an embarrassing condition for the woman. But instead of bending his efforts to correct the laxity and curtail the freedom, our modern sociologist attempts to give the condition respectability by calling concubinage by a new name and prevent the possible embarrassment by teaching the use of contraceptives. Similarly, our modern sociologist observes that not a few married couples, unwilling to make the mutual sacrifice necessary for the permanence of any marriage, become dissatisfied and separate, and thus deprive their children of a home. So our modern sociologist conceives of a union in which there will be no children until the couple discover that they are going to be happy together, forgetting that it is impossible for any couple to endure the intimacy of married life without the bond of a babe. Ninety per cent. of the divorces granted in the City of Denver last year were granted to childless couples. The fact that the most enthusiastic exponent of this new attack upon decency is the "New Woman" reveals her distorted nature at its very worst. Men will not turn to such for inspiration. "BATHING BEAUTY" CRAZE Witness the second event I referred to - the "bathing beauty contest." This contest will have been held before this article is in print. Nine out of ten of the "beauties" have never touched water deeper than that in their bath tubs. They are to be assembled in a public park, in the scantiest of attire, and will be exhibited on a platform to the gaze of the assembled libertines of the city. Denver has an annual stock show; I see no reason why the exhibitions should not be joined. This "bathing beauty" craze, together with present- day ballroom and street attire, reveals a dominant characteristic of the "New Woman". She would attract by the lure of her person rather than her personality, and men are accepting her at her own valuation - "Only a rag and a bone and a hank of hair." Evidently the "New Woman" is not supplying the demand that society has the right to make of her. She is not a refining influence. Modern economic conditions, with the mania for speedy profits, have been a powerful factor in producing the "New Woman," inasmuch as they have dragged her into the commercial world and made her economically independent. It is quite impossible for a woman to engage successfully in business and politics and at the same time create a happy home. A woman cannot be a mother and a typist at the same time, and unfortunately she elects to be merely a wife, and out of that condition have arisen those temples of race suicide - our modern apartment houses - and the consequent grinding of the divorce mills. Modern conditions have made woman more independent, if you will, but that independence is not benefiting the race. The woman who goes off to work with her husband each morning and returns in the evening to keep house for him has assumed a burden too hard to carry and one that will make it impossible for her to make him happy. In addition to that, such an arrangement forces them into an unnatural, childless union which is disastrous to them and to the race. WOMAN'S REVOLT AGAINST THE OLD STANDARDS 31 age which condones immorality to man and makes mere respectability his code of morals, but holds aloft to woman the sacred laws of God; which judges the enormity of the sin by the sex of the transgressor, as if forsooth sin had sex. Now, while we abhor such a condition of affairs, we breathe a prayer that the "double standard" remain, for, if it should be changed by the woman of present generation, it will not be by lifting man to her standard, but by her descent to his. The tendency is downward, not upward. The "New Woman" has neither the influence nor the inclination to lift man up. She has forgotten that she has been fashioned by God and nature to be the refining influence in the world and that her standard of life and conduct should be such that there will always be something for man to strive for and to imitate. Look about you. [not new] The theatre, the magazine, the current fiction, the ball room, the night clubs and the joy-rides- all give evidence of an ever-increasing disregard for even the rudiments of decency in dress, deportment, conventions and conduct. Little by little the bars have been lowered, leaving out the few influences that held society in restraint. One need by neither prude nor puritan to feel that something is passing in the hearts and in the minds of the women of today that is leaving them cold and unwomanly. I know it is said that if a man may indulge freely in alcohol, so may she; if he may witness prize-fights so may she; if he may harangue a crowd from a corner soap box so may she; if he may go about half naked so may she. But the moment she does so she has stepped down from the pedestal before which man was accustomed to worship and he is left without an ideal. There are many who would have us believe she does not differ from her mother or grandmother. It is significant that she is on the defensive, for she* does not claim to be better. We may try to deceive ourselves and close our eyes to the prevailing flapper conduct. We may call boldness greater self-reliance, brazenness greater self-assertion, license greater freedom and try to pardon immodesty in dress by calling it style and fashion, but the fact remains that deep down in our hearts we feel a sense of shame and pity. When women can gaze upon and indulge in the voluptuous dance of the hour; when young girls can sit beside their youthful escorts and listen to the suggestive drama of the day and blush not; when they spend their idle hours absorbed in sex-saturated fiction; when women, both married and single find their recreation in drinking and petting parties; when mothers clothe their daughters in a manner that exposes their physical charms to the voluptuous gaze of every passing libertine; when they can enter the contract of marriage with the avowed purpose of having no children; then surely the "New Woman" is different, and it is a libel on the generation that has gone to hold the contrary. In the words of a prominent churchman, "If this be the 'New Woman,' then God spare us from any further development of the abnormal creature." The "New Woman" has not yet reverted to the pagan practice of deifying the vices. She does not yet call them virtues; but how far has she not departed from the standards of twenty-five or fifty years ago, from that innate modesty, that reserve, that sense of delicacy which must ever be an essential characteristic of female excellence? In that other day woman retained at least a sense of shame, and though they fell, they found themselves ultimately on their knees sobbing out their broken-heartedness. The "New Woman" has no sense of shame and she endeavors Rev. Hugh L. McMenamin *See notes from book one of etiquette 1707 Evils of Woman's Revolt Against the Old Standards By HUGH L. McMENAMIN RECTOR OF THE CATHOLIC CATHEDRAL, DENVER, COLORADO What is woman's place in the social order? Is the modern woman, the so-called "New Woman," filling that place with credit? What may society justly demand from her? Is she supplying that demand? A study of man reveals the fact that when God created men and women, He made them the complements of each other, one supplying what the other lacked, mutually dependent, but both forming a perfect whole. That same study reveals the spiritual equality and the physical inequality of the sexes. It reveals that, while to man has been assigned the aggressive, progressive and governing power in the world, to woman has been assigned the conservative and refining power. Hers is the social and aristocratic influence, and following her divinely given impulse she shrinks from conflict, but entwining her affections around those she loves with tender devotion, she has filled the world with homes, the foundation stones upon which rests our present civilization. She has filled it with sweet and tender recollections, with elevated sentiments and religious impulse. She has been the friend, the companion, the affectionate counselor of man in every Christian age. That same study reveals to me that woman is dependent upon her warrior husband for sustenance, and God and Christianity are averse to subjecting her to the brutalizing influence of competition with man. She is physically and temperamentally handicapped, and the result will be an injury to the race. It reveals to me that man shall rule over woman. "He shall rule over thee," was decreed not by man but by man's Creator, and before the Christian era, in pagan lands, man perverted that decree by making woman his slave. But with the passing of the centuries, and the injunction, "Husbands, love your wives," there was born in the heart of man that love for woman which made her his companion- not his slave- that tenderness threw the protection of his strong right arm around her frailer figure, that chivalry caused him to stand aside and let a Titanic carry him to a watery grave while she rowed on to safety, that admiration, respect and esteem which placed her on a pedestal, before which he comes to learn lessons of culture, refinement and morality. For what reason, think you, did God give her those finer sensibilities that higher moral tone, thoses loftier ideals, those gentle aspirations, if it be not that she should set the standard after which we should shape our conduct? We have the right to demand it from her. She has a duty to fulfill the demand. While I write, two events are taking place near me, both of them indicative of the trend of thought that is developing the "new woman". In Colorado Springs, a national "Equal Rights for Women" convention is in session; here in Denver a newspaper is conducting a "bathing beauty contest." In Colorado Springs a group of women are confusing an equality of rights with an equality or identity of duties and privileges. If woman is ever emancipated from the protecting care of man; if she insists upon being man's competitor; if she disregards the limitations of sex and claims the right to do all that man may do with equal propriety; if, in a word, she descends to man's plane and is considered merely as a rival, then it will not be long until the theory of companionship will be discarded and women will relapse into the pagan condition of servitude, for when woman forfeits the right to be ruled by the tender rod of love and guardianship, then will she be ruled by the iron rod of tyranny. Agitation, human legislation and modern paganism may attempt to place the sexes on the same political, commercial, and social platform, but it never can. Sex limitations forbid it. We have defined woman's place in the social order. Is the so-called "New Woman" filling that place with credit and is she supplying society's just demands" Let us see. We hear a great deal in these days about the "double standard." It is undoubtedly true that a great many are influenced, led on perhaps unconsciously, by the sophism and false principles of the 30 THE HIGHWAY TO WOMAN'S HAPPINESS 29 "Charity." the well-known picture in the Boston Museum, by Abbott H. Thayer, who was born in Boston in 1849, is considered an unusually fine expression of what has always been regarded as one of woman's most important activities both in public and in private life the streets; we have discarded their corsets and acknowledged our legs up to the knee, while freely admitting our general shape. But is there virtue only in concealment? The reaction against this present sorrowful state, Mme. Ferrero says, is at hand and will begin in America, where Feminism has been most successful. That backward march is going to be a great thing to watch, similar in effect to a series of landslides. May I find a safe seat! One of the first backward steps will be the return of women - all women - to the home and their concentration on those occupations in which lies their real content - chiefly love and spiritual aspiration. This will be a little hard on such things as the telephone system, the teaching profession and other activities which have been largely in women's hands, but the steel mills and the railroads and all the other work that has been done by men will be under the most painful necessity of continuing at an accelerated pace, for every man will be spurred on by a host of loving dependents, all needing to be fed! If, in the interests of our happiness, we shout "Back to the Middle Ages!" and institute a fight on the present mechanical age, as Mme. Ferrero feels we should have done long ago, is there any reason to believe that we shall not win against it as easily as we won the vote? If we succeed, and steam and electricity and prosperity and education and the democracy which they made possible, all vanish, men will perforce return to their medieval state of suffering, and a few women will be happy. But - and this is a disconcerting thought - if our greatest happiness is in making man happy, and if in those golden days of the Middle Ages he was miserable, shall we recapture our own lost happiness, if we return him to a state of suffering? It is, of course, a painful alternative to endure our present pain or force a retreat to the stage where we suffer through the agony of the men we love. And since it is a question which road will get us on most happily, the "detour" sign which Mme. Ferrero has posted on the great highway should be taken down and in its place should go up the familiar legend "Road under construction; pass at your own risk." THE HIGHWAY TO WOMAN'S HAPPINESS 27 by the observation of a not inconsiderable circle of acquaintances, on the other, I feel justified in suggesting that woman's happiness is of many kinds and drawn from many sources, and that in proportion as these sources are many and accessible her happiness is great. Consider, for instance, that happiness which comes from the exercise of wide interest. Five senses, innumerable instincts, triumphs, interests, adventures, great group passions like war or the adoration of a hero, the ecstacy of creating beauty, a field of exploration opening moment by moment - is there no sun in woman's heaven but the sun of love? When quite extraneous things are mistaken for happiness, content, for instance, the issue of course is absurd. Mme. Ferrero, after enumerating the lines along which Feminism has won what it has striven for, quotes an Italian proverb, "He who is contented does not move," and then proceeds quite incontrovertibly: "Hence, it does not seem to me rash to conclude from this agitation that, despite these victories, woman is not contented, rather that she is less contended than before, when she indulged in no agitation whatever." Is woman, then, so low in the scale of sensation that she may be suspected of content? Only if one has no unsatisfied desires can that accusation possibly be deserved - the clam perhaps when the ooze it sucks is sufficiently rich to make it fat, the robin when angleworms come out after the rain, the cornfields when the Missouri bottoms are eight feet deep in humus. "Contented people," said Will Durant recently, "are usually those who adopt without question the manners, customs, morals and grammar of their group, becoming indistinguishable molecules in the social mass and sinking into a restful peace of self-surrender that rivals the lassitude of love." There evidently is the logic of Mme. Ferrero's position - content is in effect the lassitude of love, and love alone is happiness. And Mme. Ferrero is right if content is happiness. The Feminist of today has it not, nor did her grandmother before her. Mme. Ferrero also confuses the power to endure with happiness even when there is no reason for endurance. She applies this particularly to such things as the increase in the divorce rate. But why should any one mistake endurance for happiness in the matter of husbands? Why is not the increase in divorce an evidence of enjoyment rather than a symptom of suffering? Among women who are not so helpless as they were divorce may indicate either happiness or pain according to circumstances. It is the sum of these misapprehensions which leads us directly back to the mythical Golden Age. "In the Middle Ages, with their fixity of classes and sexes," says Mme. Ferrero, "with their need of economy, with their narrow limits, restricting intellectual and sensual pleasures, woman, whose pleasures are essentially moral and spiritual, whose aspirations are fixed, whose need for abstraction is negligible, was favored by exterior conditions; and man, whose aspirations are essentially material and intellectual, was sacrificed. Today * * * the situation is reversed; man can expand freely and woman is sacrificed. That is to say, man has undoubtedly derived pleasure from these changed exterior conditions and woman has suffered." It would seem to be either the lack of an adequate historic background or some strange persistence of the aristocratic ideal that produces this particular myopia. The rigid class divisions of the Middle Ages could only have conduced to the happiness of those women in the community who were discriminated for instead of against. This was a relatively small proportion. Social fixity can hardly be acceptable to those who know themselves at a disadvantage, unless, of course, recognized inferiority is MARTHA BENSLEY BRUERE 28 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 a joy in itself. As for moral and spiritual pleasures, well, there were women in convents certainly, but I take it that Mme. Ferrero refers to the authenticated wives and mothers of the upper circles. Having no first-hand information of the Middle Ages, I rely on written accounts that have come down to us. It is some time since I read Chaucer or Boccaccio, but I do not remember that the pleasures of the privileged classes as there shown measure up to modern conceptions of either spirituality or morals. As a parallel to mistaking content, endurance and fixity for happiness, there is the mistake of confusing agitation, change and effort with suffering. Most modern women who are in possession of a fair education and even a little leisure have had their part in some of the many campaigns, political, reform, industrial, patriotic, that have swept the country. If there has been an outstanding characteristic of the women engaged in this work, it is their obvious, almost blatant, delight. Misery does not sit on their brows to any observable extent, and if there are tears in their eyes they are not tears of suffering. In fact, the joy of agitation is so great that one almost resents attainment. It is quite obvious that woman's continued protests are no proof of misery; rather they are evidence of a life-giving discontent. The most startling declaration made by Mme. Ferrero is that the real but unacknowledged object of Feminism is to make man give woman the love that is beyond traditions or virtue or the mere delight of the senses, and that this is unattainable and impossible. It is in search of this, however, that woman invades man's sphere and approaches him as a courtesan, and it is because she has failed that she is sad and alone. Mme. Ferrero believes that this has happened because woman has stepped out of the sphere to which Nature has assigned her. How could she? It is an age-old misunderstanding that makes us attempt to get Nature, that great fumbling process, into the anthropomorphic plane where we see her as a vast, scantily draped, full-fashioned female seated at a desk busily budgeting, pigeon-holing, motion- studying and efficiently directing the personal department of the universe. In this quite gratuitous personification we are apt to assume that Nature never repeals an amendment. But consider the fact that the sphere of the bird is derived from that of its ancestor, the dinosaur; that the wisteria, the locust tree and the sweet pea have each chosen different environments from those of their common grandfather; that what was once the outer coating of a free-swimming gastrula is now the brain stuff which when acclimatized within the human skull can grasp the Einstein theory. Nature passes her creatures on from stage to stage and keeps to only a few rigid fundamentals. Among them is sex. Woman's only inalienable sphere is that of a human female. It is only the poetically inaccurate who see her permanent sphere in the temporary adjustment of her sex characteristics to the stage of civilization in which she happens to be living. In the stage out of which we are emerging and to which Mme. Ferrero believes we should return woman's sphere included protection, support and housework. Without these will she be unhappy? There are not many women who grieve at the substitution of an adequate police force for the strong sword arm of their protecting husbands, especially when there are so few sword arms of undisputed potency. Modern women meet the accident of being supported with apology as often as with joy and pride. As for the suffering which results from the loss of home work, female pride no longer centres in the patchwork quilt nor woman's ecstasy in the perfect pie crust, and yet our sphere is the sphere of the human female still. It is suggested that Feminism is projecting us into the affairs of life to which we are not adapted. If it is, we shall be projected out of them quickly enough. Have we not already been projected out of the heavier machine work, off the railroads, out of the mines, and away from many other spots into which we had wilfully strayed? The getting into them and getting out again has not dimmed our happiness as a sex. It has been charged that Feminism has developed in us new codes of morality. I hope that is true. Those of our earlier stages were extremely narrow. Formerly sin was to us a purely personal matter, usually a sex transgression, to be atoned for individually; whereas, the great community immoralities, public corruption, class oppression, ignorance and exploitation, concerned us very little. The new code now developing includes virtues and vices quite unconnected with monogamy. The modern Feminist is accused of stimulating her natural sex appeal by her fashion in dress. Of course! Woman always has, and there is no evidence of any change in feminine intent. The well-born, well-bred ladies of the '90s bared their shoulders in the ballroom and dragged their skirts on The Highway to Woman's Happiness By MARTHA BENSLEY BRUERE AUTHOR OF The Workingman's Wife, Home Making, Does Prohibition Work? AND OTHER WORKS WHAT a drag on progress is the myth of the Golden Age! What an incubus is the memory of something that never happened! Within the past few months there have appeared in a number of important magazines articles purporting to prove that feminism has broken down and with it the civilization in which it is set. The reactionaries of both sexes who have set their hands to these theses are like boys on Halloween changing road signs so that the main highway is marked "no thoroughfare" or "detour." Somebody has got to set the signs straight again. Among those who have taken part in the discussion is Mme. Gina Limbroso Ferrero. Under the title, "Feminsim Destructive of Woman's Happiness," she published in the January CURRENT HISTORY an article which deserves a place in an archeological museum, not only for the beauty and clarity of its style but because it is a perfect "period piece," with a point of view that belongs unquestionably to the time of Good Queen Charlotte, when Fanny Burney wrote Evelina. It is incredible to find such a specimen intact today. As a collector of antiques I am delighted to have that article in my possession, but as a traveler with the rest of the race on the main highway, I feel that such a misleading sign should be removed. Does Feminism destroy woman's happiness? It depends upon what one understands by Feminism and by happiness, on how good one's listening post is and how acute an interpreter one may happen to be. Mme. Ferrero says: "There is one point in common between all the feminist movements in all countries - the demand for woman of all the rights possessed by man, the determined effort to bring woman to the enjoyment of all privileges enjoyed by man, on the understanding that in this way woman will enjoy all pleasures she formerly enjoyed as well as those which only man enjoys." Of woman's happiness she says: "Love is the fixed, unchangeable aspiration of woman. Love is the glowing sun in her heaven - not love in the vulgar and sensual form of physical attraction but as conceived by woman, having some one 26 to think of and who thinks of her, some one to devote herself to and who devotes himself to her, as in the case of a mother and her child. Let woman make this her aim and it will appease her longings better than freedom, independence, the franchise, wealth, power or glory." Are either of these definitions true in America today? I should like to submit in all humbleness that Feminism for us is something quite different. Woman's staggering recovery from the jarring crash that came in the last century, when the steam engine hitched itself up with the coal mines of England and shunted manufacture out of the home, is not yet complete. The spinning wheel in its late-lamented flight to the factory knocked woman's inherited seat from under her. It is the hunt for a new resting place, for a new job; the adjustment to the new conditions it imposes; the new training it requires; the different physical demands that new work makes, including a new way of dressing to suit the new purpose for which the clothes are worn; the necessary change of mind toward work, oneself, men, marriage, children, government, money, morals and the life everlasting, that make up Feminism today. For woman is making a terrific effort to readjust herself to a new stage of society that arrived in her world with no forerunner to make straight its path - the Industrial Age left as a squalling foundling on her doorstep. Science says that every organism is conditioned by the way it gets its living. The female half of the human race, since it gets its living in a new way, is under the painful necessity of being reconditioned. The reconditioning process is Feminism. In the matter of what happiness is I should like also to file objections to Mme. Ferrero's dictum. I do not believe that woman's heaven is, or ever was, illumined exclusively by the single glowing sun of love. Her firmament is more like the sky of Saturn with its nine moons and three concentric rings, big and little luminaries of different degrees of brightness and warmth. Of course this is my opinion against Mme. Ferrero's, but supported by Webster's Dictionary, on the one hand, and WOMAN'S ENCROACHMENT ON MAN'S DOMAIN 25 Whistler's painting, "The Little White Girl: Symphony in White Number 2," exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1865. Here again an artist's psychological insight is shown in a conception of girlhood that is challenged by the young woman of today. (Reproduced from The Works of James McNeill Whistler, by Elizabeth Luther Cary. New York: Moffat, Yard and Co.) a matter of extremes and ever more a matter of emotion. It is perhaps a little early to appreciate the effect of female suffrage, and, as for female members of Parliament, they have been so few that their influence is hardly noticeable. As regards the women M. Ps., however, this much is clear, that as most of them hitherto have been old or past middle age, the little influence they have had has been Puritanical and hostile to men. It may be that the recent political tendency to exclude the middle and to concentrate on the two extremes, Conservatism and Labor, may be due in some part to the influence of the women voters and to the kind of appeal which they can best appreciate. It is conceivable that an untutored electorate, or at any rate an electorate new to its work, would incline to recognize only sharp and rude distinctions. The way in which British politics has now become almost a duel between the Labor and Conservative interests, without any attempt being made either in the press or elsewhere to make a more moderate appeal, might thus feasibly be interpreted as partly the consequence of female suffrage. Be this as it may, there appears to be no doubt whatever that politics is now becoming more and more emotional. The inherent vice of democratic control has always been that it ultimately degrades politics into a science of emotional appeal through the instrumentality of demagogues. Since the advent of the woman voter, who is hardly equipped for anything beyond an emotional orientation in the political world, there can be no doubt that there has been a sharp accentuation of the emotional element in politics. This has been reflected even in the House of Commons itself, where debates have become more and more rowdy; at elections it comes to the fore in the increased bitterness of the antagonism and the more fantastic nature of the promises made by the candidates. A recent example of this was the election of young Oswald Moseley at Smethwick, commenting on which The London Times said, "personalities played a bigger part than politics." 24 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 women proper were physically fitted to become mothers, and the late Stanley Hall (in Adolescence) has published a mass of statistics to show the alarming unfitness of Anglo-Saxon women for maternity. Professor G. L. Englemann and other eminent gynecologists in various countries confirm this view. Sterility or agonizing confinements are the inevitable outcome of these conditions and are the price paid for the refusal to recognize a radical difference between male and female. (b) Increase of cancer and other diseases. The modern woman who insists on luxury, on the one hand, and on freedom, on the other, limits her family, when she marries, to one or two or has no children at all, and frequently refuses to breast feed even those she does have. Now there appears to be no doubt that ailments peculiar to women are more common in spinsters, sterile women, or women who have had long spells of unfruitfulness in wedlock or have failed to suckle, as shown in the works of leading British, French and German medical authorities. Thus Birth Control and the decline of breast-feeding which characterized French Feminism of the seventeenth century and which, through the New Woman's revolt against the female's burdens (see Paul Bureau: L'Indiscipline des Moeurs, pp. 161-163), have also characterized modern Feminism, are probably leading to many disorders, some of which have been definitely traced to the abnormal conditions now prevailing and others which will also in time probably be traced to the same cause. (c) Owing to the increasing neglect of domestic interests and pursuits among women, food conditions and the state of food preparation in most countries where Feminism has prevailed are notoriously bad and are growing steadily worse. The art of cooking gradually becomes a fool's game and in its place there appear innumerable patent and proprietary products, the preparation of which demands no skill and no trouble. These products are but poor substitutes for the natural foods of our ancestors, but as they leave the women ample leisure in which to gad about or else to earn money outside the home, no one complains. Quick soup and gravy makers, pudding and cake powders, tinned foods of every description (ready for consumption), custards, porridges and jellies that require only the addition of water, and a multitude of commercial jams and other preserves, now replace, though they do not equal, the preparations of former times. There is no doubt that the health of the various nations is suffering from them. This is particularly true of England, as in this country the bad feeding merely confirms in the adult the evil effects of bottle-feeding in infancy. Evidence of this is to be found in the feverish interest now prevailing in all Feminist countries regarding the illnesses due to bad dieting and the means of dealing with the evil. The social results are too manifold to be enumerated in detail, but the chief are: (a) A marked increase in luxurious tastes in every class. Never before in the history of the world have sumptuary laws been more urgently needed than they are today. Everything - health, progeny, normal feeding and functioning - is sacrificed to clothes, entertainment, motor cars and "pleasure." By being free, that is to say, emancipated from home ties, and, if married, from maternal ties, the modern woman is like a nouveau riche, tasting expensive idleness for the first time. The consequence is that luxury and excitement are the order of the day. The large streets of big cities are now but a succession of drapery palaces, competing for the custom of crowds of women who spend more on their clothes than their grandmothers spent on their whole keep, and extravagance and display are the vices of every class of the nation. Those who can ill afford display, whether in cars or clothes, stint themselves in essentials in order to be in the swim. And as almost all women smoke nowadays, there is no end to the expenses that have to be met before essentials are thought of. (Typical signs of the times are the huge profits of drapery stores, the dramatic rise in tobacco shares and in shares in other luxury articles). (b) Increased freedom in irregular relationships. Owing to the spread of the knowledge of Birth Control methods, there is undoubtedly among young people an enormous amount of laxity which never comes to light. Occasionally a suicide or a murder reveals the past history of such a relationship, but even more rarely now do certain other consequences do so. It is probable that much of the cynicism and insouciance of modern young women, which make the present age an extraordinarily brutal one, is due more to such experiences than to the love element of human relations. See innumerable novels and plays which are supposed to portray the modern girl. (c) A tendency for politics to become WOMAN'S ENCROACHMENT ON MAN'S DOMAIN 23 of dissatisfaction, which she tries to relieve. Since her rationalism often denies her the solace of religion, she turns with increased avidity to the expedient of vicarious experience. This consists in reading romantic literature (chiefly novels) about women who undergo what she wishes she could undergo but does not. A sign of this development is the extraordinary output of fictional literature, and the fact that those who demand it are chiefly women. As, however, a neurotic solution of this kind must amount to a fantastic escape from reality, there is a tendency, both in the novels and those who read them, to hold a view of life which is unrealistic and false and which makes the modern woman a much more romantic creature than her "less practical" sister of a century ago. The increase in divorces is one of the signs of this romanticism. (c) Through their improved economic resources and lack of traditions in money control, as also through their increased freedom, women have also acquired a pronounced accentuation of the hedonistic impulses, which, however, as we have seen, does not necessarily lead to happiness. I have already discussed the evidence of this in the section on man. (d) An accentuation of the masculine elements in her spiritual make-up, while the feminine elements become more and more recessive. Thus the paradox is reached that for women Feminism really spells Masculinism. Exposure to the vicissitudes and asperities of the struggle for existence brings out the combative, predatory and latent male side of female nature and represses and impoverishes its dependent, peace-loving and sequacious side. The chief pathological results affect women. There is only one of importance affecting men and that is the continuous selection now operating in favor of men of inferior attractiveness. Owing to the presence of attractive girls wherever he works, pronounced instincts and sensitiveness are an obstacle rather than a means of advancement to the young man. That man succeeds best and is most trusted who can most easily resist the constant stimulus of feminine attractions or most certainly repel the female. Thus in all businesses, industries and public offices selection is now operating in favor of the more or less unattractive male at the cost of men more vigorously endowed and more naturally alluring. Any other conditions would make modern business impossible. The pathological results, as they affect women, are: ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI (a) Abnormal growth of the adolescent. Owing to the masculine aspirations of Feminism the process of assimilation to the male is made to start early. In girls' schools, even in the latter part of the last century, girls were already being treated as boys. Not only were they given the male's intellectual curriculum, which, according to many authorities (Dr. Stratz of Amsterdam, Dr. Menge of Heidelberg, Dr. Sellheim of Tubingen, Arabella Kenealy and others) placed a too heavy strain on their constitution, but they were also drilled and taught rough games and exercises. In the last thirty years these methods have been intensified, with the result that much harm is being done to the female adolescent. The exorbitant demands made on young bones and muscles by boyish athleticism lead to a premature ossification of the pelvic structure and to morbid rigidity in the pelvic and upper femoral regions in the adult. Darwin pointed out sixty years ago that sailors have smaller hip measurements than soldiers, the former from early youth having more violent bodily exertions than the latter. Thus does early muscular strain become compensated in a sex in which pelvic development is not vital. Dr. Gaillard Thomas pointed out some years ago that only 40 per cent. of American 22 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 she could easily undertake (and there are thousands of such tasks in any urban or industrial community, as the World War proved), carries much more conviction than the best-worded essay on the inferiority of men or the equality of the sexes. At the same time the steady degeneration of men, which began with the Industrial Revolution, has also given women every reason to abandon their old attitude of subserviency and discipleship toward them. It would, therefore, obviously be most imprudent to say that the claim of sex-equality and independence, or the decline of domesticity among women, was the outcome of the New Woman movement. It is this difficulty of distinguishing between cause and effect which makes the writing of contemporary history so full of pitfalls. Taking the words "encroachment on man's domain" in their broadest sense, and considering the phenomenon as a whole, apart from the great impetus it has received from comparatively recent and conscious Feminist efforts, and from the exigencies of the World War, it would appear that the chief psychological results of feminine influence have been: ON MAN - (a) A decline of the chivalrous spirit, with its correlative loss of respect for and interest in woman, except on the physical side; hence an accentuation of materialism in the relation of the sexes. The clerks, typists and other bread-winners, who travel to work in big cities, are not men and women meeting by chance and glad of the fortuitous encounter. They are competitors, equals, in the struggle for existence, resenting each other's rivalry even in the sphere of seating accommodation. The sitting men do not even shift their eyes from their papers to contemplate the strap-hanging girls before them. Furthermore, when once the latter are known as rivals and equals, they cease to be judged by a different standard. Equals are judged by a common standard. So that when, to take but one example, a man sees his alleged equal, whether in a train or at a ledger, open a vanity bag and powder and paint her face, he seems to be seeing through a trick and beholding a weakness. Whereas formerly he accepted the end-result of secret titivation joyfully, he now despises those who, while contending with him in the arena of bread-winning, have recourse to such transparent expedients. It is probable that this decline in chivalry extends to all women. (b) A decline in sensitiveness and of natural reaction in the presence of women; hence the ability to resist to a far greater extent than his male forebears constant association and contact in his daily and hourly life with girls who are dressed in the scantiest attire. The development of modern fashions in women's morning, afternoon and working attire alone is a sign that far more potent stimuli can now be borne without prompt reaction than formerly. The constant association of young men and women in offices and workshops would be impossible if this were not so. (c) An accentuation of the hedonistic impulses, due partly to the fact that most girls are now money earners, and that the cost of entertaining them is therefore frequently halved; and partly to the fact that girls are more free and therefore more easily secured as companions. More thought is given to having a "good time" with women than of founding a home and family. Even with the woman chosen in marriage pleasure takes precedence of normal functioning and responsibilities. The disproportionate increase of restaurants, theatres, dance-rooms and entertainments of all kinds in recent years presents one aspect of this change. Birth-control is another. ON WOMEN - (a) A destruction of their versatility. The traditional difference between men and women in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the intensive employment of women in masculine callings, was the greater versatility of the female mind, its wider range of interests. By escaping the besotting influence of narrow specialization, characteristic of most male callings, women had retained a catholicity of tastes and interests, which often made their men appear empty and dull at their side. This difference is now disappearing. Women are beginning to show the effects of narrow and routine specialization, and are thus becoming intellectually and emotionally flatter and duller. The decline of the arts of conversation and the increasing cultivation of indoor and outdoor distractions of doubtful intellectual quality (the loud speaker often functions throughout a whole meal now), are only the more apparent consequences of this change, the most disastrous being the fact that modern women everywhere have ceased to give birth to a generation of great sons. (b) A development of her capacity for sublimating physical and spiritual impulses by other than religious means. The New Woman finds that the pleasure she derives from constant entertainment and her breadwinning activities leaves behind it a feeling Woman's Encroachment on Man's Domain By ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI AUTHOR OF Woman: a Vindication, A Defence of Conservatism AND OTHER BOOKS ON SOCIAL AND LITERARY SUBJECTS; FORMER GENERAL STAFF OFFICER, BRITISH ARMY NOTHING is easier in the investigation of extensive social changes than to confound cause and effect, influence and result. For the gradual emergence of a particular social form is frequently promoted and accelerated by the very conditions, whether psychological or physiological, which, after the event, it is believed to have brought about. Let any one reflect, for instance, on such apparently obvious results of the New Woman movement as the claim of sex-equality and the decline of domesticity among modern women, and consider the difficulty of determining how much of both anteceded the movement by many scores of years, and actually favored its progress. Women as the most conservative of beings are prone to acquiesce in any established state of affairs. We may, therefore, go very far astray if we conclude too hastily that their claim of sex-equality and their present success in achieving social and industrial parity with men have been the outcome of an original and purely feminine struggle for emancipation. Ought we not first to inquire how often - aye, how incessantly - during the last hundred and eighty years the modern world, in England, France, Germany and America has either assumed this equality or made the most strenuous efforts to bring it about, at least in practice, if not in theory? The essential factors in the maintenance of any position of authority or privilege are responsibility and protection. Over those we protect and are responsible for we may claim authority and privilege, and they readily grant us both. When once, however, we leave people to self-protection or self-responsibility, the position of authority and privilege is automatically abandoned. Now, long before the recent cry of sex equality was taken up by the Feminists (I say "recent" because the earlier Feminist movement of the seventeenth century in France died with the Revolution), Europe and especially England, which set the example in the most extreme form of epicene industrialism, had abandoned any idea of 21 distinguishing between men and women in the world of labor. Far from being protected, women were in most cases exploited more heartlessly than men, because they were more feeble. Far from the male legislators of civilized nations recognizing their responsibility in regard to women and their domestic traditions, the latter were ruthlessly assailed and broken up by drawing the women in thousands away from their homes. No thought was given to the consequences of the exploitation of female labor either from the standpoint of the nation's domestic life or of its children. It was only gradually that legislation was introduced to protect the married and single female from ruthless abuse; so how could a thought have been given to their homes and their children? To ascribe the Feminist cry for equality and independence to the exertions of the modern women or to suppose that the growing distaste for domestic duties is the outcome of her influence would therefore be preposterously inaccurate. Both the sex- equality and the indifference to domesticity were tacitly assumed over a hundred and eighty years ago by our ancestors, who inaugurated the Industrial Revolution and who imposed their hard credo in practice on the women of civilized nations by sheer force. By the side of such a reform as this, with its abandonment of the factors, protection and responsibility, such literary and hortatory efforts in favor of woman's independence as J. S. Mill's pamphlet, The Subjection of Women, are mere child's play. They are hardly more than a faint and barely perceptible gesture, confirming the deeper and stronger tendency of hard facts. Moreover, we have also to remember that industrial and urban conditions themselves, which in the last hundred and eighty years have developed on such an enormous scale, have, if only by the emasculating tendency of the occupations which they offer to men, gone a long way toward destroying the difference in social functions between men and women. The constant spectacle of men working at tasks which every woman knows 20 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 ing the burdens of reproduction. It is of record that the perambulator was deplored as wicked and dangerous when it was first invented. The true mother, it was said, carried her child "as God intended." The physician who first used anaesthetics to lighten the pains of childbirth was set upon for a scoundrel. At present birth control is condemned in religion and in law. There are, in fact, numerous details of the New Woman's modus vivendi, which still remain to be worked out through the living of many experimental lives. For instance, although she is now gaining control of procreation, she does not yet know how to use this power most advantageously in the total management of life. She does not know how many children she should have, nor, all things considered, what years of her life are most suitable for bearing them. She does not known whether the artificial feeding of infants can be developed without detriment to the latter. She does not know how young children may best be supervised, whether in groups by experts, or in the isolated home by each mother herself. She does not know what to do about expectant motherhood. Is this a kind of illness, "a delicate condition"? Or is it a normal, healthy state? The taboo on this state is still strong among us. In primitive times men feared that the distortion and culminating pains of this condition might be communicated to them by sympathetic magic, and so they isolated the woman from their sight. Shrinking from any physical crisis in another person is deep-seated in human psychology. No artist has painted a realistic portrait of a prospective mother. Visible signs thereof on the lecture platform, on the medical staff, in congress, behind the counter has still to achieve the respectability attained in the kitchen and the laundry. Each women, even now, who sets out upon a way of life different from that of the dependent housewife, is still an explorer, especially if she sets out to mate and reproduce. The results of such experimental lives are being compiled and studied by the New Woman. (Collier, Virginia M., Marriage and Careers, 1926.) She is trying to chart the causes of success and failure. The New Woman of today is consciously experimenting with her own life to find out how women can best live. To experiment knowingly with one's own life to find the Good Life - surely this requires a courage and a genius deserving something better than blame or jeers, deserving at least open-minded toleration and assistance. Cosmo Pictures This picture, in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, known as "Gossip," by Carl Marr, who was born in Milwaukee in 1858, but who lived subsequently mostly in Germany, recalls a domestic scene greatly unlike present-day home life THE NEW WOMAN IN THE MAKING 19 giving to woman control over reproduction. Liberation from the cage of her burdensome generative system was being achieved. By this time philosophy had developed points of view favorable to such liberation. Intelligent women had formulated the Woman Question in positive though somewhat various terms (Anthony, Katharine, Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia, 1914) and had demonstrated women's abilities by their own exceptional lives. "New women," therefore, emerged in considerable proportion upon the scene, especially in cities. These New Women were freed from incessant maternity and from routine hand labor, so that they could set about the satisfaction of human cravings according to individuality, as men do and have done. The essential fact about the New Women is that they differ among themselves, as men do, in work, in play, in virtues, in aspirations and in rewards achieved. They are women, not woman. Is the Woman Question now finally answered so as to disappear? No, not yet. In any social change based on science and philosophy there remains in law, in religion and in common custom what sociologists call "lag." (Ogburn, W. F., Social Change, 1922.) The laws within which we live today were codified when the typical woman was a typical housewife without political entity. The creeds of churches were formulated when woman's status was that of chattel. Common custom preserves a thousand manners, which took form when women were protected or exploited in the home, according according to their luck in mating. "Lag" is of special interest to the New Woman, as it pertains to advance and change in mitigat- John Singer Sargent's portrait of Mrs. Burckhardt, painted in 1882. Apart from its beauty as a work of art, the picture recalls the fashions in the period when the woman's movement was already gaining force THE NEW WOMAN IN THE MAKING 17 sake she shall throw herself into the river." No similar arrangement is made for a husband in like circumstances. Pair marriage was also, no doubt, definitely promoted by the discovery of paternity. The man, now understanding that the children were created by him as well as by the woman, became the husband of the latter, guaranteeing subsistence, while she stood under obligation to perform for her lord and master such labor as was consistent with the limitations of her reproductive system. In pair marriage, as anciently instituted, the man was lord and master inevitably, because in any contract between two persons for mutual gain the one who needs the other least is in position to dictate terms. Also, the discovery of paternity made it feasible to avoid procreation. This was a long step in the evolution of the New Woman. It is very doubtful whether there were any old maids under the most primitive conditions. After the discovery of paternity the intelligent and intentional old maid became possible. The function of the strong, intelligent old maid must have been extremely important in the making of the New Woman. We know that many of the early verbal formulations of the woman question emanated from unmarried women. They had time and energy to examine closely the puzzle in which women were involved. Their minds were free from the importunate pressures of infants' needs to state the question as they severally saw it, and to offer suggestions for solution. Also, as time went on, these childless women were free to demonstrate in their own persons that women have abilities and aspirations other than those represented by reproductions and manual work. Subsistence finally being quite generally guaranteed by the increased mastery of humankind over the earth, and for women by pair marriage, cravings other than those for food and shelter began to be major, and to be stated as such. Only a small part of the history of woman's status is a matter of written records. The greater part of the time of mankind lies, of course, in those darker than dark ages, before the invention of the alphabet. Verbal formulation of suggestions for change and improvement did not begin to be recorded by women until recent centuries. (Wollstonecraft, Mary: Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1798.) These suggestions we find to have been quite various, as would be expected from knowledge of how people learn. Some thinkers declared MRS. LETA S. HOLLINGSWORTH that suffrage would solve the woman question. Others believed that motherhood insurance would give the answer. Still others suggested that dress reform would go a long way toward solution. Not a few of these spokeswomen were inclined to blame men as intentional, malevolent trappers of women. In this they gave men too much credit for far-sighted planning, and too little credit for kindly impulse. Woman was caged not by man but by her own physiological nature, as has been pointed out. It was inevitable, and indeed fair enough, that women should wrestle with their problems for themselves. Men had and have problems of their own to engage their attention. It must be noted, nevertheless, that men have not been, in fact, indifferent to the Woman Question. They, too, offered from time to time suggestions bearing directly upon its solution. Plato (400 B.C.), Samuel Sewall (1718), John Stuart Mill (1869), President Barnard (1882), John Dewey (1886), stand as conspicuous examples of such men. On the whole, however, people want what they are used to having; so that suggestions of change were widely resisted by those not personally afflicted with unsatisfied crav- 18 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 ings. Much censure of the advocates of "women's rights" was expressed. (Polwhale, A.: Unsexed Females, 1798.) The ideas expounded by suffragists and feminist reformers during the past hundred years did not, however, primarily cause the change in woman's status, but they had a secondary value in that they hastened the change by calling attention to it. The influence of Feminism as propaganda should, therefore, not be minimized. Woman suffrage was important to women when granted, and it is important to them today, not as a cause of change but as a sign of change in status. The New Woman had already been evolved before the vote was gained. Suppose typical women to be still bearing ten to fifteen infants each and still carrying forward the industrial work of the world by manual labor in the home. How could they use the vote to effect change in their condition? True, they might "pass a law" that men must not only hunt and fight but must also tend the children half of the time. A law, however, must be enforced as well as passed. Behind it must stand police and militia. It must be sufficiently in accord with human nature to be enforceable. Suffrage can be used to modernize law, but it has very limited use as an instrument to modernize people. The primary causes of change in woman's status originated through the efforts of persons who were, as a group, indifferent to the Woman Question. Men of science, inventors and philosophers were the real makers of the New Woman. For many centuries preceding the conscious formulation of scientific method (Bacon, F.: The Advancement of Learning, 1605) and the establishment of laboratories, invention had come slowly forward by the trial-and-error activities of acute thinkers. Probably about one in a hundred of human beings is capable of thinking with sufficient effect to produce new knowledge, however slight. The tool began to be known and used in the Stone Age and was improved upon constantly as time passed. New processes of obtaining greater material satisfaction were discovered, such as cooking, grinding, spinning and weaving. These, being at first manual processes, with tools fitted to the hand, made women industrial workers. All these tasks were originally carried out in complete compatibility with reproduction, since they could be done at home, near the cradle. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries great advances were made in science. Printing came into use (1450). The microscope was invented (1590-1609). Steam was harnessed (1807). Electricity was studied (1800-25). Steel was made in quantity (1856). A thousand applications of physics and of chemistry were utilized, and industrial processes were made possible on a scale too large for the home. Factories arose. This exploitation of the tool, more commonly called the machine in recent years, has developed, until now scarcely any industrial work, save part of cooking, is done by hand in the home. The machine modified woman's environment tremendously and rather suddenly. (Smith H. B.: Industrial History, 1926.) INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY Great as was this influence of applied physics and chemistry in the making of the New Woman, the influence of biological research was more potent still. In 1827, and years following, by means of the microscope, Van Baer and others observed the organisms which unite to form the new human being. From the advancement in exact knowledge of reproduction thus initiated, scientific methods of birth control other than celibacy were invented and disseminated. Also in the field of biology, the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) indirectly affected woman's status by promulgating the conviction that human beings had not been divinely ordained once for all, but had in the past undergone evolution, and therefore might in future continue to change. The influence of invention in the realm of ethical and social attitudes, though secondary to the advancement of science, was important. Aside from the ideas bearing directly upon the Woman Question, subsumed under the concept of Feminism, there were general systems of thought abroad which set the minds of increasing numbers to favor changes in woman's lot. Liberalism, naturalism and humanitarianism were promulgated as philosophies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is true that many of the chief exponents of these philosophies, Rousseau for instance, neglected the Woman Question, or denied it completely. Nevertheless, the spread of these points of view through the agency of print prepared men's minds to receive with sympathy verbal formulations of this question. (Mill, The Subjection of Women). Thus, to recapitulate, by the opening of the twentieth century men of science were rapidly abolishing the need for woman's industrial labor in the home. They were 16 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 but ask her tactfully, for they stand to her for realities of a sort to require reticence. In her youth she formed the habit of using this vocabulary in a lowered voice, common decency forbidding the futile drain on public sympathy which follows from unbridled recital of woes that cannot be eased. The element creating the woman question, as distinguished from the thousands of simply human questions, resides thus in human physiology. Primitive woman was typically engaged from puberty in conceiving, bearing, rearing, transporting, feeding and burying infants. Throughout her maturity woman was physically attached to infants. The human infant requires a long period for gestation. It must be fed from the mother's breast and be carried upon her back for a long time, under primitive conditions. Its birth is painful, and the mother may be crippled temporarily or permanently thereby. Moreover, human infants are conceived and borne at the natural rate of one each year or two, at any season, in Winter as well as in Summer; and they attain the substantial weight of 20 to 30 or even 40 pounds while still too immature to walk far or to run. How to get mastery over the wild earth, with its storms, its cold, its wild beasts, its hostile tribes, its capricious food supply, is a hard puzzle for a creature carrying infants within and upon her body, year in and year out. The obvious solution of killing or abandoning the infant (Sumner, W. G., Folkways, 1911) was adopted with decreasing frequency as generations passed, because those who were emotionally constituted to favor or tolerate this solution died out from the race by failure to leave offspring, while those who clung most tenaciously to their infants replenished human nature. There is a way of satisfying the craving for subsistence, which in primitive life is always major, without sacrificing the infant. This way is to get the protection and help of others, whose reproductive systems are not cumbersome. Thus if men would supply food and security, women could live with their infants. At the same time, men were moved by sex attraction, and by the comfort of routine work performed for them, to provide protection for women and children. The sex difference in reproductive function thus determined that men should hunt and fight and train boys to do these things. All other primitive labors were compatible with maternity, and devolved on women. Among typical savages "the women gather vegetable food, carry home water and wood, keep up the fire, erect and pull down shelters, prepare the skins, make the clothing, carry all the goods when traveling, besides bearing and rearing all the children." (Muller-Lyer, F., History of Social Institutions, 1921.) The uninformed nature of these primitive adjustments in the life of savage woman is emphasized by the fact that she at first lacked even knowledge of the real cause of infants. It would almost certainly be a long time in human experiences before the real cause of childbirth was discovered. This is exact knowledge, of a kind emerging only from accumulated data, systematic observation and logical inference. It is, in short, scientific knowledge. It might be supposed that these facts would have been learned by observation of animals, who require but a short period of gestation, but it must be remembered that animals were not domesticated until somewhat later in human endeavors. That man existed and multiplied long before the discovery of paternity seems certain, and evidence for this condition appears in the studies of anthropologists. (Hartland, E. S., Primitive Paternity, 1910.) Childbirth was evidently at first attributed by analogy to the influences of the sun, the rain, the trees and the dead. FIRST CHANGES IN WOMAN'S STATUS We do not know how long the human species had existed before acute thinkers demonstrated the true and invariable cause of infants. At all events this was disseminated knowledge by the time records of civilization were established in Crete, Egypt and Greece. The discovery of paternity must have affected woman's then existing status variously. In the first place, men learning that they too were creators of children, must have been modified in their attitude toward procreation. In order to identify "his own flesh and blood" it was now plainly to be seen that a man must insure strict faithfulness to himself in sex relations, on the part of the mother. In the interests of such assurance special restrictions were placed upon women, under the concept of feminine virtue. By the time Hammurabi, King of Babylonia, formulated his code of social regulation, in 2250 B.C. (The Code of Hammurabi, 2250, B.C. Harper's Translation, University of Chicago Press, 1904), the ideal of feminine virtue was well established, to hold for many subsequent centuries: "If the finger have been pointed at the wife of a man because of another man, * * * for her husband's The New Woman in the Making By LETA S. HOLLINGSWORTH ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN order to comprehend the history of any institution or movement in society it is necessary to know why and how organisms learn. Human history is fundamentally not a series of dates and events, but an account of the attacks which men have made upon the obstacles confronting them in their unending search for greater satisfactions. History is a record of collective learning, and the history of womankind is the record of a learning process carried out by countless thousands through untold time. During the opening years of the twentieth century much has been discovered from exact experiment as to how a living creature behaves when learning (Thorndike, E.L., Animal Intelligence, 1911). In the first place, a creature does not learn if it is completely satisfied. In order to learn, there must be hunger, some impulse from inner craving or annoyance. A kitten, for instance, if hungry for food, when placed in a cage with food outside, will try to escape. Studying all kittens, and at the same time all living organisms, by means of the individual kitten experimentally caged, we observe how the latter strives to satisfy its hunger. Its strivings are "blind" and uninformed. It jumps up, jumps down, bites the bars, claws the bars, utters vocal sounds, does nearly everything that it is an organism can do. The watching psychologist describes this turning and twisting as being driven by hunger into trial-and- error-activity. The trapped or puzzled organism engages in random acts until it becomes exhausted or by chance strikes a knob which opens a door to escape. The latter, or chance act, will become fixed as habit, if the situation be sufficiently often repeated. This process of arriving at solution of a puzzle is capable of much more detailed analysis than we can consider here. For a general understanding of the New Woman in the making it is, perhaps, enough for us to note that a puzzle or question is created whenever a craving organism is balked in the search for satisfaction; that uninformed, multiple activity is then set up; and that whatever act within the available repertoire happens to bring satisfaction 15 will become fixed habit. The caged and hungry kitten will eventually learn to act habitually in any way that will bring it food. The act thus finally instituted as customary need not be the "best" or "most appropriate" act, such as opening the door of the cage. It may be the kitten's act of scratching its ear or of licking its forepaw. The psychologist can experimentally produce "foolish" or "perverse" behavior if he will but wait repeatedly until the kitten sits down and scratches its ear, let us say, and will then repeatedly seize that moment to release the animal from craving. In human beings presented with puzzles the same process of learning is observed. In mankind the trial-and-error search for solution is somewhat less a matter of gross, random movement than in the case of a kitten. Man may do what we call "thinking," darting hither and thither "in his mind" for suggestions, moving meanwhile only his eyes, vocal cords and other smaller muscles. Basically, however, thinking is nothing but trial-and-error effort to find a way out, and is governed by the same laws of learning which govern the puzzled cat. Thus from experimental psychology we are able to state the fundamental principle underlying the history of womankind: A puzzled organism will learn to do whatever happens to bring relief from its major persistent craving. We are now in position to examine the nature of the trap or puzzle which has long been called the "Woman Question," and to reflect upon the record of attempted solutions of it, as women have come down the centuries. The woman question is and always has been simply this: How to reproduce the species and at the same time to win satisfaction of the human appetites for food, security, self-assertion, mastery, adventure, play, and so forth. Man satisfies these cravings by competitive attack, both physical and mental, upon the environment. As compared with man, woman has always been in a cage, with these satisfactions outside. The cage has been her cumbersome reproductive system. Let him who doubts the nature of woman's puzzle investigate old wives' vocabularies. "Caught," "confined," "in trouble," "tied down" - ask your grandmother what these words mean, 14. CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 drama," and another distinguished actress and beautiful woman is Pauline Frederick, who has lately returned to the stage, scoring a tremendous hit in Madame X in London, where she was compared to Ellen Terry and Mrs. Pat Campbell. A successful actress both in England and America is Eva Le Gallienne, who has recently founded the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York, "to produce fine plays in true repertory at low prices." This furnishes continuous employment to actors forty weeks in the year. The undertaking is so successful that there is a demand for similar theatres elsewhere. Jessie Bonstelle of the Community Theatre in Detroit, after sixteen years' experience in a stock company, has established six annual scholarships, two in dramatic courses, two in production and two in dancing. Dancing has become more widely popular as an art since Isadora Duncan showed us what may be compared to "free verse" in the formerly measured steps. It has new forms, new names, new freedoms. Agna Enters, for instance, calls her performances "compositions in dance form," described as "dance, pantomime, drama - something more." In music women continue to shine as performers, do increasingly well as composers, and are becoming conductors. Margaret Dessoff was leader of a concert of Schola Cantorum in New York City, February, 1927. Ethel Leginska, who played in concert at six, and made her professional debut at sixteen, has conducted in such first-class orchestras abroad as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Munich Konzertverein, and the Orchestra of the Paris Conservatoire. On Jan. 25, 1925, she conducted the New York Symphony Concert at Carnegie Hall. There is a Woman's Symphony Orchestra of Philadelphia, founded by Mabel Swift Ewer, with Florence Haenle, violinist, as concert master; and as an instance of true American enterprise we have Mrs. A. M. Carter, who has given us the Hollywood Bowl. This majestic stadium at Los Angeles is on sixty-five acres, valued at $1,500,000, and in 1925 the attendance rose to 220,000. Mary Garden, eminent both as singer and actress, has become Director of the Chicago Opera House, and our latest star is the young and lovely Marian Talley of Kansas. Olga Samaroff, the greatest pianist, has risen to further heights by becoming musical critic on The New York Evening Post. Of her, at least, it will not be said that she writes of something she does not know and can not do. There is perhaps no outstanding work among women painters and sculptors, though we have good names in both arts, too many to count here, with Cecelia Beaux still holding her high place. As an achievement of youth we may mention Miss Marsue Burrows of New York, who, at fifteen, had two miniatures accepted at the Paris Salon - the youngest exhibitor on record. ATTAINMENT IN MEDICINE AND LAW Women in medicine would have shown more marked attainment but for the discrimination against them as internes in hospital practice. There are now five hospitals, staffed entirely by women, which will help to amend this. Dr. Florence E. Kraker has been appointed specialist in maternal hygiene in The Children's Bureau; Dr. Blanche N. Epier, the United States Public Health Bureau, has been given the place of contract physician for Coast Stations - the first woman so appointed. The practice of law seems more popular. We have some twenty-six hundred women lawyers, the youngest, apparently being Miss C. H. Buck of California, admitted at twenty-one. From these rise many judges, high among whom we must place Kathryn Sellers, Judge of the Juvenile Court in Washington, D.C., who, after six years' valuable service, was recently re-elected. Judge Florence Allen, of Ohio Supreme Court, is the only woman in the world to sit on a court of last resort. Judge Edith Anderson of Miami, Fla., has a husband who is also a judge - the only instance in the country. Miss Grace M. Eddy of Wisconsin is "Special Assistant to United States Attorney" in New York City. Miss Susan Brandeis, daughter of Associate Justice Brandeis, has been admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court; and so has Violette N. Andrews, a colored woman, after her three years' previous practice before the Supreme Court of Illinois. It is difficult to give figures in moral progress or regression, but if divorce is any indication of our moral status we show an increase which speaks volumes. Our average previous to 1922 shows a gain of 30 per cent. in five years, i.e., 6 per cent. a year; but census returns for 1923 show an increase of 11 per cent. over 1922. In that year we had one divorce to seven marriages. When besides the frequency of divorce we find the duration of the matrimonial experiment becoming less and less, in many cases not lasting a year, it is not surprising to go a step further and find that there are in Boston, besides the regular hospitals, five lying-in hospitals for unmarried mothers. WOMAN'S ACHIEVEMENTS SINCE THE FRANCHISE 13 Cosmo Pictures Portrait by Mme. Vigee Le Brun (1755 - 1842) of herself and her daughter. She was a court painter in the days of Marie Antoinette - a striking example of women who have attained eminence in art stant Nymph, by Margaret Kennedy. Edith Wharton still holds her high place in American letters; Mary Johnston, Mary Austin, Gertrude Atherton keep up their output; Agnes Repplier and Ida Tarbell are putting out fine work. Anne Douglas Sedgwick has followed her charming Little French Girl by The Old Countess. Among later names is the delightful Eleanor Mercein, who has given us a fresh vision of romance and humor, beauty and honor, among the Basques; and Beatrice Demarest Lloyd, who has an exquisite literary touch. In other countries, also, women are doing fine work in literature. Selma Lagerlof, once taker of the Nobel prize, lately produced her much-praised Marbaca; there are many in England showing new angles in modern thought. Here I should mention the late Ellen Key, the world- honored, of whom Georg Brandes said: "Ellen Key has influenced women as no one else," and whom Maeterlinck called "the good, the great, the noble Ellen Key." In France has been established Le Prix Femina, it being felt that the Academy was slow in doing justice to women. This new tribunal, which offers a prize of 5,000 francs for best work in verse or prose, has shown its impartiality so far by giving its award to but five women competitors. In dramatic writing we find again in a wide range of work. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote the "book" for Deems Taylor's new American opera, The King's Henchman. Elisabeth Marbury is both playwright and agent, and political manager as well; and, topping a list of others of varying degree, stands Anne Nichols, whose Abie's Irish Rose has brought her over five million dollars, not including movie rights! Acting is an art in which women have won high distinction, and the American stage gives them due honor. We have as yet no equal to Duse or Bernhardt, but we are proud of Mary Shaw, actress, lecturer and feminist, who has done so much to bring us the work of Ibsen and of "G.B.S." Minnie Maddern Fiske is still at work, not merely on the stage, but for the protection of animals. She wishes to have "outlawed" the cruelty of steel-jawed traps as used by fur hunters. "Humane" work among women is nobly meant, but so long as women are the unremonstrating market of the fur trade it does not get far. There are actresses of high ability in plenty, and as to the screen, never was there such a "cloud of witnesses" to the drawing power of beauty. Nazimova is even greater as a pantomimist than in what we now pathetically distinguish as "the spoken 12 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 such provision for children in the public school system. We find women also in unlooked-for lines. Miss Erna Fergusson, for instance, is head of a guide service in New Mexico; she is thoroughly trained in archaeology, geology and the history and customs of the Pueblo people. Other women are striking out new work for themselves, as two young women in New York who have made good in their "Book Post Service." An astonishing number are found in aviation, and Miss Helen Schultz, at twenty-three, owns and manages a sixteen-car 'bus line in Mason City, Iowa. Of women in science Mme. Curie remains the most notable - her income, by the way, being given in Time of Jan. 17, 1927, as but $1,500. In this field also we find Florence R. Sabin, physiologist of Johns Hopkins, the first woman honored with a life membership in the National Academy of Science; and Annie J. Cannon, curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard, who is the third woman elected to the American Philosophical Society and the first who has received the Oxford degree of Doctor of Science. Miss Cannon has found and catalogued 225,217 stars. In applied science we find an International Society of Women Engineers, which has already been mentioned. Miss E. Clarke, transmission expert of the General Electric Company of Schenectady, N.Y., was delegate to a recent conference of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and read a paper on high-power transmission. Among women explorers Mrs. Delia J. Akely stands high; she was formerly the wife of Mr. Carl Akely and traveled with him in Africa. She was a good shot, bringing down the biggest elephants, and once saved the life of her husband, whom later she divorced. She has since been across the Dark Continent alone with her safari of blacks. She is described as grayhaired, of slight physique, but competently pursues her way, securing specimens for the Brooklyn Museum. Largely similar is the work of Marguerite Harrison, who assisted in the preparation of that Persian epic "Grass," accompanying the daring procession; and of Mrs. Johnson, who accompanies her husband in his photographic adventures in wild places. In athletics also women are gaining. We have not only vigorous girls but stalwart mothers, as evidenced by the channel-swimming feat of Gertrude Ederle, who was soon followed by Mrs. Amelia G. Corson, aged 27 and the mother of two young children. children. Mrs. G. W. Wightman, who has five children, won three titles in the indoor championship tennis tournament of 1927, singles, doubles and mixed doubles. In golf, in tennis, in long-distance walking, the record of women rises. There have always been women athletes from the days of ancient Crete, and the savage past, but they are being rediscovered now. Not only in strength but in courage are women gaining, as is reflected so sharply in current literature. Our heroines no longer faint on Reginald's breast, but frequently rescue Reginald when he needs it. They are no longer blushing matrons of sixteen, but unblushing matrons of all periods of life. In Rose Macaulay's delightful novel, Dangerous Ages, the charming "leading lady" who slips out in her pajamas for a bath in a woodland pool, and breakfasts in a tree, is forty-three; while the other ladies, all dangerous, are her young daughter and her middle-aged mother. The only age considered "safe" is that of the great-grandmother. LITERATURE, DRAMA AND ART Literature has long been an art in which women have distinguished themselves, from the poems of Sappho to those of Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose Renascence, written before she was twenty, was the poetic sensation of the year. These recent years have shown much distinctly modern work in verse by women, as by Hilda Doolittle, leader of the "Imagists," or in distinctive work on more permanent lines. This poetic output covers a wide range, from the nonsense rhymes by Carolyn Wells to the deeply serious poems of the late Amy Lowell, distinguished both as poet and critic. Many names stand out, as Olive Dargan, Florence Wilkinson, Sara Teasdale, Winifred Wells, Anna Hempstead Branch and Alice Kilmer, whose Poor King's Daughter was even "a best seller" in non-fiction. But fiction is the main avenue of expression among women, as it is among men. Ann Parrish won in the Harper's Prize Novel contest for 1925, with The Perennial Bachelor; the year before Margaret Wilson won it with The Able McLaughlins; Inez Haynes Irwin won an O. Henry Memorial prize; and Martha Ostenso, for her novel Wild Geese, won the $13,500 jointly awarded by the Pictorial Review, Famous Players- Lasky and Dodd, Mead & Co. Doubleday, Page & Co. described as their "four aces" in one recent year So Big, by Edna Ferber; Love, by "Elizabeth"; Barren Ground, by Ellen Glasgow, and The Con- WOMAN'S ACHIEVEMENTS SINCE THE FRANCHISE 11 Braun & Co. Gainsborough's portrait of an eighteenth century lady, "The Honorable Mistress Graham." The picture is reproduced as an example of feminine personality and attire in long by-gone days, before the Feminist Movement had arisen count of sex, in violation of New York State statutes relating to equal pay for equal work. In education women are making increasing progress, as students, as teachers and professors, as authors of textbooks and initiators of new educational ventures. Marietta Johnson's admirable and progressive schools in Fairhope, Ala., and Greenwich, Conn., are showing their wide influence through the opening of many similar ones in other parts of the country. Cora Wilson Stewart of Kentucky, the "Moonlight School Lady," received the 1924 Pictorial Review award of $5,000 for her great service. Beginning in Rowan County, Kentucky, she opened the scattered public schools of the mountains for evening sessions for adults, the teachers giving their services voluntarily. Only on moonlight nights were the mountain roads passable. Men and women up to eighty years of age eagerly took advantage of the opportunity, and the work has now spread over a large part of the United States. In Germany, the first woman Professor has been appointed, Frau Baerting of Jena. In Japan, Dr. Tomi Wada is the first woman to receive appointment on the staff of the Imperial University at Fukwoka. In France, Miss Chloe Owings became a Doctor of the Sorbonne, her thesis being on juvenile delinquency. Miss Owings is now director of the Protective Measures Division of the American Social Hygiene Association. A new step in education is the opening of the Institute for the Coordination of Women's Interests, at Smith College, under Ethel Puffer Howes, in recognition of the difficulties before the trained woman worker who wishes to harmonize marriage and motherhood with her career. Along the same line of development is the rapid increase of the "Nursery School" or "Play School," taking children of age as low as eighteen months. Smith has such a Nursery School, Vassar has a Summer School for the same work, and Teachers College in New York is carrying on research in similar lines. This increased interest in child study and "pre-school" education marks an improvement in parental responsibility as well as the economic activities of mothers. How far the use of the ballot has directly affected this side of the problem must be determined from the extension of 10 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 recognition by politicians that the private character of candidates must be considered more than it used to be; and still another, most practical and useful, is in the improved conditions in voting places. Questions of salary and of eligibility for appointment also are influenced to some degree; as, for instance, the action of a school board might be modified by a recollection of the voting power of thousands of women teachers. Especially we must consider the new impetus given to the previously organized bodies of women who were working for social progress without the ballot and whose efforts are formidably strengthened with it. The International Council of Women, for instance, which met in Washington, D.C., in May, 1925, had delegates from thirty-eight countries, representing 38,000,000 organized women, the large majority of whom are voters. This International Council is composed of national councils, and they in turn consist of great federated bodies, like the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the W.C.T.U. and many others. Since attaining political equality new groups have been formed and new purposes formulated. A Conference on the Cause and Cure of War held in Washington, D.C., in 1925 comprised nine organizations with a membership totaling some 5,000,000 voters. The deliberations of groups like this must have more weight than when they had no other weapon than appeal. To be compared, or perhaps contrasted, with this meeting was a National Defense Conference, including different bodies of women, not nearly so numerous, who were aiming at a nation-wide educational campaign to show that in war-preparedness lies the best insurance of peace. (The peaceful influence of Germany's war-preparedness was probably not mentioned as an argument.) In world politics the establishment of peace is the largest single issue for which women are working at present, though they have various aims, as indicated by the nature of their many international organizations, new and old. A comparatively new one is the International Federation of University Women, whose third biennial conference, recently held in Christiania, Norway, was attended by 300 delegates, representing twenty national branches. An international conference of women engineers, with forty delegates present, shows forcibly the widening in ranges of occupations open to women. The International Congress of Working Women has an immense membership. As to women in industry, the salient fact is the increase of married workers. Lorine Pruette, author of Women and Leisure, states that: "Since 1910 there has been a total increase for all women in industry of only 7 per cent., while for married women the increase is 41 per cent." Also that: "In the professions married women have increased by 62 per cent., as against 38 per cent. for all women." We have now about eight and a half million women wage earners - or, shall we say, wage getters? - with over two million married. A study made by Virginia Collier for the Bureau of Vocational Information gives instances of successful combination of motherhood and a career, in work including salesmanship, teaching, the arts, social work, law, medicine, research and administration, with salaries up to $27,000. Married and single, the women are becoming more numerous in industry, decreasing only in agriculture and domestic service. Over 5,000 are engaged in life insurance, many earning salaries from $5,000 to $12,000, some over $25,000. The establishment of the Women's Association of Commerce of the United States shows something of their number and importance. Miss Vail Anderson, recently appointed assistant cashier in the Chase National Bank, is said to be the first woman in an executive position in a Wall Street banking institution; but that financial stronghold has for years had a woman editor - Mrs. C. G. Wyckoff - on The Magazine of Wall Street, who has now acquired a minority ownership in the periodical. Another successful woman, Mrs. Lucy C. Thomas, now Mrs. Ament, owns and manages The New York Telegraph. Mrs. Rachel Neill of Orange, N.J., personally runs a planing mill at the age of 70, and Mrs. F. M. Jones of Tacoma, Wash., has been elected head of the Northwestern Lumber Company at 77. Miss M. E. Dillon is Vice President and general manager of the Brooklyn Borough Gas Company, a $5,000,000 corporation; Mrs. L. M. Gilbreth, the mother of eleven children, is America's leading woman industrial engineer. EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS There is certainly a new spirit among women. A recent striking example in the educational field was given by Miss Rena Rockwell, head of the department of history in Elmira City High School. The Board of Education allowed a larger salary to a man teacher in her department, whereat she obtained a peremptory order of mandamus compelling equalization. The Judge held that the case showed discrimination on ac- WOMAN'S ACHIEVEMENTS SINCE THE FRANCHISE 9 to set conveyance aside; in the public school curriculum these additional subjects must be taught: "thrift, fire-prevention, the humane treatment of animals, the evil effects on the human system of tobacco, alcohol and other narcotics." In addition to the general statute that there shall be no instruction reflecting upon citizens of the United States because of race, color or creed, it is provided that there shall be "no amusements or entertainments in or about any school * * * reflecting in any way upon citizens of the United States because of their race, color or creed. It will be seen even from the short list given above that the Equal Rights amendment would compel the wife to support an incompetent husband, and that the mother would punished for failure to provide for her child or for abandoning it, and that kind of equality is not desired by all women. One historic failure the woman voter has already made: she has not used her power to compel the passing of the Child Labor amendment. The opposition of many States to further extension of the Federal power accounts for part of this failure, and the misconception of the amendment as mandatory, when in reality it was only permissive, is another excuse; but neither justifies the mothers of our country in failing to protect their children. It is true that most of the women's organizations stood behind the measure, while those against it, such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the Associated Industries of Massachusetts and the Southern Textile Manufacturers, were composed of men, but the women's vote should have been solidly for the measure, and it was not. In elective and appointive offices women are gradually increasing in numbers. Dr. Hatcher, writing in Independent Woman, says that their proportion in political appointments is about one in fifteen. But when we consider the obstacles in sentiment and prejudice to be overcome, as well as visible inexperience, this is not so bad a beginning. President Coolidge has appointed Mrs. D. Tillinghast of Boston as Immigration Commissioner for New England; we have had one temporary woman United States Senator, two Governors, and Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt states in an article on "What Women Have Done With the Vote" in The Independent that there were seventy women in State Legislatures in 1924 and 1925; also hundreds of women in State, town and county offices, many in minor judgeships and in Federal appointments to important MRS. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN posts, chiefs of bureaus and assistants to Cabinet officers. In the Postal Service there have been 23, 715 women appointees, 13 of them in the class drawing salaries of from $3,300 to $6,000. The small number of women drawing large salaries in this field is paralleled in industry by the position of the trades unions, which still make it difficult for women to secure the apprenticeship needed to become skilled workers. Lorine Pruette, in an article in Independent Woman for June, 1927, says there is "a sub-zone given over to women where only routine and mechanical labor is required," that they are "the mental hewers of wood and drawers of water for our occupational system." One definite accomplishment of the new voters is the securing of a much-needed new City Charter for Cincinnati. The only woman Alderman elected in New York City contributes an article in Harper's Magazine, May, 1927, on the utter uselessness of the Board of Alderman. There are advances made by women during this brief period, not voted for, yet more or less influenced by the power to vote. Of these advances the most intangible is an increasing and much-appreciated respect for the new citizen's opinions and preferences. Another gain is in the tacit 8 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 totally indifferent to the right and duty of voting; some were opposed. Indeed, there was in New York - perhaps there still is - one of the most pathetically absurd of organizations, the "Society of Women Voters Opposed to Woman Suffrage." The matters under discussion at the Convention of the League of Women Voters show the league's major interests and purposes; as, efficiency in government, international cooperation to prevent war, child welfare, legal status of women, living costs, social hygiene, women in industry, pbulic welfare in government. In four years the league has worked for thirteen Federal measures which were carried, and in the same period, in forty-five States, for 420 laws which were enacted. These activities were chiefly directed toward improving conditions for women and children, and were practically all for social betterment. They compare most favorably with special measures proposed during this period by the previous voters. WORKING FOR EQUAL RIGHTS The National Woman's Party is also a fine example of single-hearted devotion to one purpose, as well as of highly developed organization and efficiency. By no means satisfied with obtaining the franchise, the leaders of this party point out the many humiliating disabilities still legally restricting women, as vividly described by Edna Kenton in "The Ladies' Next Step." (Harper's Magazine, February, 1926). These disabilities they seek to remove by a "blanket" amendment to the Constitution: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and in every place subject to its jurisdiction." This measure is opposed by the League of Women Voters and by a subcommittee of the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, who consider it "self- defeating as to equality and destructive of valuable existing laws." So strongly is this felt that in the International Conference of Suffragists in Paris in 1926, the National Woman's Party was refused admission to the alliance. Nevertheless, the conference did adopt a resolution declaring that "no obstruction shall be placed in the way of married women in paid work, and the laws relative to women should be so framed as not to handicap them in their economic position." This in some degree takes the ground of the opposed Lucretia Mott amendment, but that measure covers it more thoroughly, and as the N.W.P. points out, "insures to women free choice among all occupations, equal opportunity for training in the professions, equal opportunity for advancement in professions and in industry, the basing of protective legislation on the character of the work, not the sex of the worker; and, further, will remove women from the class of children and tend to promote legislation in the interests of childhood." For the first four years of full suffrage the N.W.P. can list among its achievements the drafting and introduction into Congress of this amendment, the conducting of a thorough investigation of discrimination against women in the laws of all the States, the drafting of more than 500 equal rights measures for introduction into State Legislatures; the organization of professional and industrial councils to work for equal economic opportunities for women; the wiping out of specific discrimination in the laws of seventeen States and the conducting of the first organized effort to elect women to Congress. It is quite beyond the limits of this brief study to examine the 420 newly enacted State laws worked for by the League of Women Voters, or the 500 laws drafted by the National Woman's Party, but "the traces of woman's hand" in one State may be taken as a sample of the general trend. The substance of some of the amendments and additions enacted in the laws of California since 1921 follows herewith: Married women given general right to sue or be sued without husband; creation of division of dental hygiene for children under State Boards of Health; stiffening of act to enforce educational rights of children; raising legal age of marriage to 18 for boys, 16 for girls, if approved by parents - otherwise 21 and 18; punishment of father for failure to provide for legitimate or illegitimate child; abandonment of legitimate or illegitimate child, born or unborn, by father a misdemeanor; various amendments to Juvenile Court laws; domicile of husband not prima facie domicile of wife in divorce actions, in each case a question of fact; guardianship by will or deed, to take effect on death, may be made by either parent with consent of other, by the survivor, or in case of illegitimacy by mother: each may appoint a guardian of property which child will inherit form either parent; husband to provide for incompetent wife: in case of his inability, guardian of wife may pay expense in part or whole out of her estate; wife must join with husband in conveyance or lease for more than a year of community, real or personal property: if husband conveys to innocent purchaser, wife has year Woman's Achievements Since the Franchise By CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN FEMINIST LEADER, AUTHOR AND LECTURER; AUTHOR OF Women and Economics, The Home: Its Work and Influence, The Man-Made World IN the long effort to persuade that half of the adult population having the ballot to give it to the half who did not have it, it was natural that the petitioners should lay stress on the advantages to be gained by admitting them, and equally natural that the grantors should expect these advantages to follow immediately. During the scant seven years since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, repeated demands have been made for some account of the various benefits so warmly promised. There is more than one line of approach in a study of the progress of woman in those seven years. Some gains are to be attributed to the general advance of the time, some to the rapid progress women were making without the franchise, some to the indirect influence of that new power, and a considerable number of achievements through legislation must be recorded. For direct political action we have the record of the League of Women Voters, the National Woman's Party and the Woman's Joint Congressional Committee. Of the last, Maud Wood Park, in her "Organized Women and Their Legislative Progress," remarks: "Nothing like this Joint Committee exists for any other group of voters, certainly nothing like it represents men's organizations as such." Twenty-two national organizations of women, including such large ones as the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the National Council of Women, the National W.C.T.U. and Y.W.C.T.U., constituting many millions of voters, carry out their programs of Federal legislation through this body. It does not, as a body, either propose or indorse legislation, but when a bill is called for by five or more of the constituent organizations a subcommittee is formed from their representatives to promote it. In these early efforts it is reassuring to see that women are working not merely for advantages confined to their own sex, although these naturally predominate. In that valuable handbook, Women of Today, compiled by Ida Clyde Clark, issue of 1925, 7 the aims of these subcommittees are listed as follows: The Child Labor Amendment, entrance of the United States into the World Court, amendment of Civil Service Classification act, adequate appropriation for United States Children's Bureau and Woman's Bureau, continuance of Federal work for social hygiene, action by Congress creating a Federal Department of Education and providing Federal aid to the States for the eradication of illiteracy, for Americanization and for equalization of educational opportunity, promotion of home economics by increased funds and facilities under Vocational Education act. "Five acts of Congress already passed in the last three years," says Miss Clark, "have been due to the efforts of these women's organizations. They are: A statutory provision for the maintenance of the Woman's Bureau in the United States Department of Labor; the Shepard-Towner act, which was adopted as a means of reducing the high mortality of mothers and babies in childbirth by providing Federal aid the States to be used through the State health authorities; the Cable act, providing individual citizenship for women irrespective of marital status; a compulsory education law for the District of Columbia increasing the school attendance period, and provision for a Federal institution for women prisoners." The League of Women Voters is a most valuable organization, doing needed work to promote political education and taking other action for the public welfare. In its 1925 convention the charge of political indifference among women was discussed, and it was shown that in the Presidential election of 1920, 49 per cent. of our total vote was cast, and in that of 1924, 50.92 per cent. If the admission of women raises the total percentage of votes scarcely one-tenth it at least shows that women vote in about the same proportion as men. If men, with all their years of political power, knowledge and experience, send only half their number to the polls, why should we expect the new voters to do more? Many women were 6 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 apartments. Why a garden, when the family insist upon eating lettuce and strawberries in January and oranges and turnips in August? The high cost of births, measles and whooping cough, milk and little shoes, sickness and funerals, has reduced or eliminated the one-time precious family. Besides the former simple aim of equality of opportunity, the woman movement is now compelled to seek the solution of a host of new problems with which it is confronted. The aim of women under these circumstances may be stated as the determination to work out their destiny under these new and changed conditions. The direct results of the enfranchisement of women in its brief trial may be enumerated as follows: 1. The vote has been used in all the States to secure the removal of discriminations against women under the law, to prevent the passing of other proposed discriminations and to improve the legislation which concerns women and children. 2. Women vote in numbers surprisingly approaching that of men voters. Examination indicates it is not true that women, more than men, are neglecting their political opportunities of expressing their opinions at the polls. 3. The testimony is general that the presence of women at the polls in the capacity of voters and election officials has quite altered the character of election day, making it a peaceful and dignified function. 4. The service of women in high positions to which they have been appointed by the Federal, State and local governments, or elected as members of Legislatures, national, State, country and local officials, has been satisfactorily intelligent and in accord with the public good. 5. Civilization has always been lopsided, being strong where men's ambitions are keenest and lamentably weak where women's interests are strong. A careful investigation of the results of women suffrage reveals the fact that women voters are most active and most effective in efforts to adjust this abnormal development of civilization. An enormous number of women have been called into service within the field of health, care of maternity, children, old people and dependents of every kind. Women are building strong, well thought out, constructive programs concerning public welfare and are thus using their vote to do what has always been the acknowledged specific work of women. To sum up: The woman suffrage campaign has been only an incident in the age-old woman movement, always aiming at opportunity. The campaign destroyed legal barriers to the political freedom of women, but it did not convince the minority, who also carry on. Now and then some one from this minority writes an article, makes a speech or publishes an editorial filled with fiery resentment at something women voters have or have not done. Such pronouncements may ruffle the mental composure of uninformed readers, but experienced suffragists receive them in much the spirit with which the astronomer greets a comet whose coming he predicted. They are only symptoms of the pains of surrender. The irritations within the political parties which most voters experience are also normal. Political managers are shocked to discover that women are not content to vote any ticket and support any platform which a few leaders have decided upon in a convention bedroom, and women partisans are disturbed because their welcome into the party is only into the outside vestibule. The battle of the old complexes is thus proceeding, but is combined with another problem. Equality of political opportunity for women plus equality of party rights for men, on the one hand, versus so-called "boss rule" on the other is the ferment now working. Time will give a clearance. Woman suffrage, man suffrage, politics are all normally, wholesomely moving forward. The anxiety comes only from the critics who are reluctant to become reconciled to the march of events. SUFFRAGE ONLY AN EPISODE IN AGE-OLD MOVEMENT 5 Cosmo Pictures The French artist, Greuze (1725-1805), who painted this well- known work, known as "The Broken Pitcher," presents, in "the graceful and innocent beauty of young girls," which characterized an important part of his work, an interesting contrast with the flapper of today of woman suffrage is one the general public has probably not noticed, or if so, has not comprehended. A vast army has been demobilized. What became of the army? Every woman discharged from the suffrage campaign merely stepped back into the ranks of the broader woman movement from which she and her predecessors emerged some seventy-five years ago with the definite object of eliminating one discrimination against women. Having achieved the aim of that endeavor by notable sacrifice and effort, they returned to carry on. What is the woman movement and what is its aim? It is a demand for equality of opportunity between the sexes. It means that when and if a woman is as well qualified as a man to fill a position, she shall have an equal and unprejudiced chance to secure it. Like the flow of a river which finds itself checked by a slide of ice and digs a new bed around it and then proceeds upon its way, so the woman movement, with 600 years behind it, concentrated its chief efforts for a time in digging around a huge political obstacle; having finished that task, it flows on. What will bring the revolt to a close? Women have freedom of education, but restricted opportunity to use it. Women have the vote, but the old prejudices still rise to forbid freedom of action within the political parties. Nothing but time and many small skirmishes will change these conditions. Absolute equality of opportunity only will satisfy and therefore close the woman movement. A complete list of objects yet to be attained might have been enumerated had world affairs remained where they were when the woman suffrage campaign began. Alas, that world is no longer here. The new industrialization has robbed women of the economic dignity they enjoyed for thousands of years, since it has taken every home creation and now produces it in factories. There women have followed their old work and do for wages what their ancestors did as a family task. A "woman in industry" problem has therefore arisen. High rents, high cost of food and clothing are threatening the maintenance of the home. Hotels, restaurants, the delicatessen and the tin can have become conspicuous factors in the adjustment still in a disturbing state of confusion. Garden spots, once important family reserves, have given way to sites of 4 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 anything on their minds. Their insistence called forth an opposition which had few arguments, but much temper and voluminous quotations from the Bible. A genuine reaction of fright at the manner in which "masculine strong-minded women" were "attempting to drive men from their God-ordained sphere" possessed the country. Editors advised, preachers sermonized, and on street corners and around tea tables men and women gossiped. After half a century the results of these excited years may be gathered in the brief comment that whatever the controversy may have done to other movements, it compounded interest in the woman question several times over and enormously increased the number of women rebels. Meanwhile, women had been seeking reforms of the civil code which robbed them of property, wages, guardianship of children and other protective rights. They observed that some grievances were restrictions built by custom only, while others were in the law and could be corrected only by legislation. They concluded that the vote was a necessary tool with which to clear the code of discriminatory laws and to prevent the enactment of new ones. This was a calmly thought out plan when Lucretia Mott, standing fast by the principle of "truth for authority, not authority for truth," and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who, with her little scissors, had tried to find the laws about women and cut them out of her father's law books in her girlhood, called a convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. They drew up a program in the parlor of Mrs. Sarah McClintock on a table which is now in the Smithsonian Institution. That program demanded the vote, civil equality and equal rights to opportunity in all things. Under the organization that grew out of the convention they placed responsibility for those reforms that could be secured only through legislation. Thus the woman suffrage movement was organized with carefully planned intent. Mrs. John Stuart Mill wrote an account of one of the early conventions and women in England speedily organized for the same purpose. During seventy-two years in this country and sixty-eight in England the campaigns moved on ever faster and faster. Women were born into it, served and passed. It was irresistible from the first and grew more so day by day. Yet the history of those years of ceaseless campaigning will always be chiefly of interest as a record of the superstition, ignorance, tyranny, church hostility, bigotry, warfare of certain vested interests, which combined to form the astounding resistance of the opposition. The spirit of democracy, which seems always to prevail for a brief period after a war, sponsored the movement for a time and enfranchised men and women in many European countries in 1918, 1919 and 1920. So far did this wave of liberal tendency extend that the United States, in which the organized woman suffrage amendment (Aug. 26, 1920) until twenty-six other nations had given the vote to their women. * When the ship that brought the first returning fighting men from France let down its gangplank in New York, a soldier ran down ahead of the others and shouted: "Have you got it?" "Got what?" queried the women serving coffee and doughnuts. "Why, the vote, of course," the soldier boy ejaculated. "The women of Germany have it; you should be ashamed if they have beaten you to it." In truth, when the last hard fought battle was being waged for woman suffrage in the United States (August, 1920), Germany was already preparing for an election that seated thirty-six women as members of the Reichstag and forty-five as members of the Prussian Parliament. Five years before, these Parliaments had been considered by general opinion the most militaristic and autocratic in the entire world. Germany inadvertently shamed the last opposition outpost in the United States into surrender. The vote won, some women ask, "Has it been worth the trouble it cost?" Some men ask, "What good has it done?" "What change has it wrought?" "Is the new way better than the old?" The first and chief effect of the triumph *At this date (September, 1927) women have full suffrage on equal terms with men in twenty-three nations considered sufficiently independent to be qualified to enter the League of Nations: Australia, Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Holland, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Ukrania, United States of America. Seven other nations of this description have extended unequal suffrage to women: India has full suffrage for women in all but one province of British India and in several native States; Belgium and South Africa have full municipal suffrage; Rumania and Mexico have a limited municipal suffrage; Spain and Italy have a very limited vote. Ten British dependencies, Kenya, Rhodesia, Burma, Isle of Man, Jamaica, Tasmania, Newfoundland, Trinidad and Tongo Islands, Channel Islands and Windward Islands have given equal suffrage to women with the exception of the last three, which have fixed the same age qualifications as those of Great Britain. Women therefore vote in forty-one different countries. SUFFRAGE ONLY AN EPISODE IN AGE-OLD MOVEMENT 3 may be, and if any one should perpetrate such an act he shall be severely punished." Eventually all the universities closed their doors to women. Martin Luther (1483- 1546) and the Reformation differed from the Catholic leaders in most things, but they held common views about a personal devil and both agreed that women were on much more intimate terms with him than were men. Thus the theory that men were divinely appointed to rule and women to obey had been accentuated by both Catholic and Protestant Churches. These Churches largely controlled European governments and governments made and enforced law; therefore, the woman movement was driven to struggle against a seemingly impregnable barrier. The Renaissance was ablaze in all Western Europe when Columbus discovered the American continent with the aid of the jewels of a Renaissance Queen, Isbaella of Castile. It had passed and the Woman's Rights movement in Great Britain had become a permanent conflict and was actively in evidence when the American Revolution took place. Colonists, coming to America, brought the controversy with them and probably debated the theological aspects of the woman movement on the Mayflower. Every ship brought women rebels and also "divinely appointed" watchers to see that the limits of women's sphere were not moved outward by a hair's breadth. They had scarcely erected their log cabins and planted their gardens before the colonists were lined up on opposing sides for the first battle - "schools for shes." The taxpayers were nearly a unit against it. The girls won, but the last surrender was two hundred years later. Meanwhile, an overlapping battle of words began which lasted for a hundred years, the theme being, "Shall girls study geography?" The Colonists having survived the Revolution, another and more terrible battle followed sharp upon the surrender of the opposition in the geography war, "Shall girls be permitted to study that indelicate, indecent, immoral thing called Physiology?" The conflict so violently shook the foundations of the Republic that the Fathers fairly suffered with mal de mer. In the midst of it Boston yielded to the demand for the higher education of girls and in 1826 opened, amid a veritable storm of disapproval, the first high school in the United States, probably in the world. Boston led the movement for educational opportunity and from 1789 to 1842 MRS. CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT girls were allowed to attend the public schools during Summer months when boys vacated seats to work on the farms. The timid school board, however, yielded after eighteen months to the opposition and closed the high school for girls (1828), not because it had been a failure, but rather because every seat had been taken and not a girl had been frightened away. No other high school was opened until 1852. The opposition firmly contended that girls were incapable of learning, but were afraid to put their theory to the test. In 1853 Oberlin College was opened to admit boys and girls, black and white, on equal terms. It was the first college in the world to admit women after the universities of the Renaissance were closed to women by the Church. WOMEN AS REFORMERS An unexpected stimulus to the woman movement appeared in the early years of the last century. Agitation on behalf of the abolition of slavery, alcohol and war, each a separate movement, was stirring the people. Women interested in these causes insisted upon their right to attend public meetings, to join organizations, to sit in conventions and to speak when they had 2 CURRENT HISTORY, OCTOBER, 1927 of the truth than is the average citizen when informed that the campaign was organized, officered, dues paying and supporting a clearly definite program for exactly seventy-two years before the final victory came. The idea prevailed also that before the "rise" of the suffrage movement women had been content with their status in the world. On the contrary, there has been no time in written history when there were not women making protest. When written history dawned the status assigned to women among peoples most rapidly advancing was one of enormous, but scantily recognized, economic importance to home and nation, but with civil and social rights so restricted that no peg was left upon which to hang a shred of self-respect. Century followed century. Civil law, Church dogma, traditional custom, combined to enforce rigidly the belief that males possessed the inalienable right to govern home, Church and State, and that females owed to men the duty to obey, to submit, to be silent and to ask humbly when and if they desired aught. It was inevitable that the woman sex would one day rebel and struggle to regain a rational individuality. The first definite movement in that direction arose in Greece and lasted for more than two centuries. The revolt sprang up again in Rome, and although it still made the quest of learning its chief aim it took on a bolder and more political character. Twice before the coming of Christ, women, in protest against injustices to their sex, gathered in great numbers within the Forum and blocked all its approaches, much to the consternation of the Consuls. In both cases they won their causes and in the later incident called forth an immortal oration from Cato the Elder. Christianity came into the world and overspread Western Europe. It accepted the ancient opinion about women and contributed the interesting additional view that their subjection was by order by God's will and since women had brought sin into the world they should be willing to spend their time in penitence and obedience to the more virtuous sex. Despite this new and thunderously voiced opposition, the woman movement arose again as a part of the Italian Renaissance in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That the land of Mussolini gave birth to the modern woman movement may sound odd, but facts support the claim. The movement never disappeared after this date. The Renaissance departed, but the woman movement kept steadily on. During the following dark periods of war and religious intolerance it was often forced to "dig itself in," but it never failed to peep out and fire a telling shot at its enemies whenever the political weather allowed. EDUCATION OF RENAISSANCE GIRLS The Renaissance and the woman movement flourished in Italy long before they spread to France, Spain, Portugal and to the North. Developments were similar in all these countries. As learning was the main plea of the woman movement and was also the chief spirit of the Renaissance, the doors of education seem to have swung open without much ado. There were women students in classrooms and women professors in the faculties of universities in Italy, France and Spain. In all these countries there were women scholars and notable authors and poets. Many queens were distinguished for their intellectuality and many women were pronounced prodigies of learning. There were women doctors in all these countries. Modern science is scornful of European medicine at this date, but at least it may be said that women are reputed to have lost no more patients than did men. Women lawyers also appeared and from Italy came the real or fancied Portia. Throughout the Latin countries an increased number of convents with attached schools for girls and a widespread belief that if girls could not learn everything they might learn something were the most permanent results of the woman movement during the Renaissance. Mothers Superior were often renowned for scholarship, literary talent and rare administrative ability, as well as piety, and more than one declared a gentle rebellion against unacceptable edicts of the Church. The greatest of all these Mother Superiors was probably St. Theresa. Church power for many centuries was actively hostile to the woman movement. As early as 1377 the Faculty of the University of Bologna, where women had taught and studied, led the way with the following decree: "And whereas woman is the foundation of sin, the weapon of the devil, the cause of man's banishment from Paradise, and whereas for these reasons all association with her is to be diligently avoided, Therefore do we interdict and expressly forbid that any one presume to introduce in the said college any woman whatsoever, however honorable she Current History Vol. XXVII October, 1927 Number 1 THE NEW WOMAN In publishing this symposium on The New Woman, the Editors of CURRENT HISTORY feel it necessary to state that their point of view throughout is one of the strictest impartiality toward the respective viewpoints expressed by the contributors to the symposium. There is perhaps, no aspect of present day social history more controversial in character or more delicate in its implications than that of the new status of Woman. The Editors, consequently, wish to make it clear that they take no sides in the controversy, and that they accept no responsibility for any of the views express, on one side or the other. WOMAN SUFFRAGE ONLY AN EPISODE IN AGE-OLD MOVEMENT By Carrie Chapman Catt President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association since 1916; President of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Since 1904 There was no "rise" of the woman suffrage movement in the usual sense of that expression. Instead, it "emerged" from the broader woman movement, but it did so through the deliberate design of certain bold spirits, already leaders in the women's agitation, who called a convention and organized in America in 11848. From that date, there was no significant change in the aim and no pause in campaign activities except during the Civil War. The campaign, grown stronger each year, at length became so insistent in its appeals that the general public took notice of it and imagined it had sprung "full armed," officered and organized upon the public stage. Memories are usually short. A well known man who had been an active, loyal helper in the woman suffrage campaign during its last five years was advocating recently his favorite cause before a small group of men and women, and said with impressive earnestness: "Now, if we who believe in this idea would combine in an energetic campaign we would win as easily and quickly as did the woman suffragists." The speaker was noticeably disconcerted at the somewhat derisive smiles of the women present. Nor was he any more convinced Current History, October 1927 xxv. "HOW WE SAVED OUR FIRST $500" "Mary and I had been married four years, but we couldn't save a cent. Fact is, we were constantly in debt and I was always worried for fear I would lose my position." "Then one night I saw that something must be done, so I told Mary I was going to take up a course with the International Correspondence Schools. 'I've been hoping you would do that' she said. 'I know you can earn more money if you really try.' "So I started studying after supper at night, in the spare time that used to go to waste. It wasn't hard and pretty soon I began to see it was helping me in my work. In three months a new position was open and the Boss said he'd give me a chance at it because he'd heard I was studying with the I.C.S. "Well that was the start. Before the end of the year I received another raise in salary and we began to save a little each week. We've got $500 in the bank now and we're going to have a lot more soon. The Boss says he's gong to give me a still better position if I keep on studying with the I.C.S." 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Name____________________________________________________ Address_________________________________________________ Town___________________________________State___________________ Current History Vol. XXVII October, 1927 No. 1 I- THE NEW WOMAN: A SYMPOSIUM WOMAN SUFFRAGE ONLY AN EPISODE IN AGE-OLD MOVEMENT Carrie Chapman Catt 1 President, National America Woman Suffrage Association WOMAN'S ACHIEVEMENTS SINCE THE FRANCHISE Charlotte Perkins Gilman 7 Feminist and Economist THE NEW WOMAN IN THE MAKING Leta S. Hollingsworth 15 Associate Professor of Education, Columbia University WOMAN'S ENCROACHMENT ON MAN'S DOMAIN Anthony M. Ludovici 21 Author of "Woman: A Vindication" THE HIGHWAY TO WOMAN'S HAPPINESS Martha Bensley Bruere 26 Sociologist and Author EVILS OF WOMAN'S REVOLT AGAINST THE OLD STANDARDS Hugh L. McMenamin 30 Rector of Catholic Cathedral, Denver, Colorado WOMAN'S MORALITY IN TRANSITION Joseph Collins 33 Neurologist, Essayist and Literary Critic FRENCH WOMEN'S LACK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS Magdaleine Marx 41 Leading French Novelist II- OTHER SPECIAL ARTICLES IS PROHIBITION BEING ENFORCED? Marion P.S. Kellogg 49 Writer and Social Worker INTELLECTUAL LEADERS OF THE CHINESE REVOLUTION Robert Merrill Bartlett 55 Professor, Peking University THE MOVEMENT TO RENOUNCE WAR AS A DIPLOMATIC WEAPON James T. Shotwell 62 Director, Division of Economics and History, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace SWEDEN'S NEW ANTI-WAR TREATIES Eliel Loefgren 65 Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sweden RESULTS OF HONOLULU CONFERENCE ON PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC George H. Blakeslee 69 Professor of History and International Relations, Clark University OUR GREATEST ECONOMIC PROBLEM Victor M. Cutter 74 President of the United Fruit Company THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND: FACT VERSUS FICTION Thomas G. Frothingham 77 Author of "The Naval History of the World War" FATEFUL DOCUMENTS OF THE WORLD WAR: FIRST PUBLICATION OF FACSIMILES OF HISTORIC PAPERS OF 1914 Hamilton Fish Armstrong 89 Managing Editor, Foreign Affairs DARWINISM REAFFIRMED BY LATEST EVIDENCE Watson Davis 96 Managing Editor, Science Service, Washington, D. C. TEXT OF SIR ARTHUR KEITH'S ADDRESS ON DARWINISM 98 The Switchboard An Advertisement of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company A web of cords plugged into numbered holes. A hand ready to answer signals which flash from tiny lamps. A mind alert for prompt and accurate performance of a vital service. A devotion to duty inspired by a sense of the public's reliance on that service. Every section of a telephone switchboard typifies the co-ordination of human effort and mechanism which makes possible America's far-reaching telephone service. Its cords link for instant speech those who are separated by a few miles or by a continent. Its guardian operators are of the telephone army -- men and women vigilant to meet a nation's need for communications. In plant and personnel, the Bell System is in effect a vast switchboard serving a nation that has been transformed into a neighborhood through telephone growth and development. FEMINISM: VIEWS FOR AND AGAINST (Preserve) OCTOBER (104) Current HISTORY A Symposium on The New Woman CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT LETA S. HOLLINGSWORTH CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN DR. JOSEPH COLLINS ANTHONY W. LUDOVICI MARTHA BENSLEY BRUERE REV. HUGH L. MCMENAMIN MAGDALEINE MARX Jutland Battle: Fact vs. Fiction T.G. Frothingham Sweden's New Anti-War Treaties Eliel Loefgren America's Greatest Economic Problem V.M. Cutter Is Prohibition Being Enforced? Marion P.S. Kellogg The Movement to Renounce War James T. Shotwell Facsimiles of Fateful World-War Documents Intellectual Leaders of China's Revolution New Evidence for Darwinian Theory The New York Times Co. Price 25 cents Vol. XXVII No. 1 Transcribed and reviewed by volunteers participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.