Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  With a few books, with eager questioning of such experts as we met, and what seemed to me an almost supernatural skill in eliciting valuable and apposite information from unexpected quarters, my lady from Herland continued to fill her mind and her note-books.

  To me, who grew more and more to admire her, to reverence her, to tenderly love her, as we traveled on together, there now appeared a change in her spirit, more alarming even than that produced by Europe’s war. It was like the difference between the terror roused in one surrounded by lions, and the loathing experienced in the presence of hideous reptiles, this not in the least at the people, but at certain lamentable social conditions.

  In visiting our world she had been most unfortunately first met by the hot horrors of war; and I had thought to calm her by the static nations, the older peoples, sitting still among their ruins, richly draped in ancient and interesting histories. But a very different effect was produced. What she had read, while it prepared her to understand the sequence of affairs, had in no case given what she recognized as the really important events and their results.

  “I’m writing a little history of the world,” she told me, with a restrained smile. “Just a little one, so that I can have something definite to show them.”

  “But how can you, dearest — in this time, with what data you have? I know you are wonderful — but a history of the world!”

  “Only a little one,” she answered. “Just a synopsis. You know we are used to condensing and simplifying for our children. I suppose that is where we get the ‘grasp of salient features’ you have spoken of so often. These historians I read now certainly do not have it.”

  She continued tender to me, more so if anything. Of two things we talked with pleasure: of Herland and my land, and always of the beauty of nature. This seemed to her a ceaseless source of strength and comfort.

  “It’s the same world,” she said, as we leaned side by side on the rail at the stern, and watched the white wake run uncoiling away from us, all silver-shining under the round moon. “The same sky, the same stars, some of them, the same blessed sun and moon. And the dear grass — and the trees — the precious trees.”

  Being by profession a forester, it was inevitable that she should notice trees; and in Europe she found much to admire, though lamenting the scarcity of food-bearing varieties. In Northern Africa she had noted the value of the palm, the olive, and others, and had readily understood the whole system of irrigation and its enormous benefits. What she did not easily grasp was its disuse, and the immeasurable futility of the fellaheen, still using the shadoof after all these ages of progress.

  “I don’t see yet,” she admitted, “what makes their minds so — so impervious. It can’t be because they’re men, surely. Men are not duller than women, are they, dear?”

  “Indeed they are not!” I cried, rather stung by this new suggestion. “Men are the progressive sex, the thinkers, the innovators. It is the women who are conservative and slow. Even you will have to admit that.”

  “I certainly will if I find it so,” she answered cheerfully. “I can see that these women are dull enough. But then — if they do things differently there are penalties, aren’t there?”

  “Penalties?”

  “Why, yes. If the women innovate and rebel the least that happens to them is that the men won’t marry them — isn’t that so?”

  “I shouldn’t think you would call that a penalty, my dear,” I answered.

  “Oh, yes, it is; it means extinction — the end of that variety of woman. You seem to have quite successfully checked mutation in women; and they had neither education, opportunity, or encouragement in other variation.”

  “Don’t say ‘you,’. “ I urged. “These are the women of the Orient you are talking about, not of all the world. Everybody knows that their position is pitiful and a great check to progress. Wait till you see my country!”

  “I shall be glad to get there, dearest, I’m sure of that,” she told me. “But as to these more progressive men among the Egyptians — there was no penalty for improving on the shadoof, was there? Or the method of threshing grain by the feet of cattle?”

  Then I explained, trying to show no irritation, that there was a difference in the progressiveness of nations, of various races; but that other things being equal, the men were as a rule more progressive than the women.

  “Where are the other things equal, Van?”

  I had to laugh at that; she was a very difficult person to argue with; but I told her they were pretty near equal in our United States, and that we thought our women fully as good as men, and a little better. She was comforted for a while, hut as we went on into Asia, her spirit sank and darkened, and that change I spoke of became apparent.

  Burmah was something of a comfort, and that surviving matriarchate in the island hills. But in our rather extended visit to India, guided and informed by both English and native friends, and supplied with further literature, she began to suffer deeply.

  We had the rare good fortune to be allowed to accompany a scientific expedition up through the wonder of the Himalayas, through Thibet, and into China. Here that high sweet spirit drooped and shrunk, with a growing horror, a loathing, such as I had never seen before in her clear eyes. She was shocked beyond words at the vast area of dead country; skeleton country, deforested, deshrubbed, degrassed, wasted to the bone, lying there to burn in the sun and drown in the rain, feeding no one.

  “Van, Van,” she said. “Help me to forget the women a little and talk about the land! Help me to understand the — the holes in the minds of people. Here is intelligence, intellect, a high cultural development — of sorts. They have beautiful art in some lines. They have an extensive literature. They are old, very old, surely old enough to have learned more than any other people. And yet here is proof that they have never mastered the simple and obvious facts of how to take care of the land on which they live.”

  “But they still live on it, don’t they?”

  “Yes — they live on it. But they live on it like swarming fleas on an emaciated kitten, rather than careful farmers on a well-cultivated ground. However,” she brightened a little, “there’s one thing; this horrible instance of a misused devastated land must have been of one great service. It must have served as an object lesson to all the rest of the world. Where such an old and wise nation has made so dreadful a mistake — for so long, at least no other nation need to make it.”

  I did not answer as fully and cheerfully as she wished, and she pressed me further.

  “The world has learned how to save its trees — its soil — its beauty — its fertility, hasn’t it? Of course, what I’ve seen is not all — it’s better in other places?”

  “We did not go to Germany, you know, my dear. They have a high degree of skill in forestry there. In many countries it is now highly thought of. We are taking steps to preserve our own forests, though, so far, they are so extensive that we rather forgot there was any end of them.”

  “It will be good to get there, Van,” and she squeezed my hand hard. “I must see it all. I must ‘know the worst’ and surely I am getting the worst first! But you have free education — you have every advantage of climate — you have a mixture of the best blood on earth, of the best traditions. And you are brave and free and willing to learn. Oh, Van! I am so glad it was America that found us!”

  I held her close and kissed her. I was glad, too. And I was proud clear through to have her speak so of us. Yet, still — I was not as perfectly comfortable about it as I had been at first.

  She had read about the foot-binding process still common in so large a part of China, but somehow had supposed it was a thing of the past, and never general. Also, I fancy she had deliberately kept it out of her mind, as something impossible to imagine. Now she saw it. For days and days, as we traveled through the less known parts of the great country, she saw the crippled women; not merely those serenely installed in rich gardens and lovely rooms, with big-footed slaves to do their biddi
ng; or borne in swaying litters by strong Coolies; but poor women, working women, toiling in the field, carrying their little mats to kneel on while they worked, because their feet were helpless aching pegs.

  Presently, while we waited in a village, and were entertained by a local magnate who had business relations with one of our guides, Ellador was in the women’s apartment, and she heard it — the agony of the bound feet of a child. The child was promptly hushed, struck and chided; made to keep quiet, but Ellador had heard its moaning. From a woman missionary she got details of the process, and was shown the poor little shrunken stumps.

  That night she would not let me touch her, come near her. She lay silent, staring with set eyes, long shudders running over her from time to time.

  When it came to speech, which was some days later, she could still but faintly express it.

  “To think,” she said slowly, “that there are on earth men who can do a thing like that to women — to little helpless children!”

  “But their men don’t do it, dearest,” I urged. “It is the women, their own mothers, who bind the feet of the little ones. They are afraid to have them grow up ‘big-footed women!’”

  “Afraid of what?” asked Ellador, that shudder passing over her again.

  4. NEARING HOME

  We stayed some little time in China, meeting most interesting and valuable people, missionaries, teachers, diplomats, merchants, some of them the educated English-speaking Chinese.

  Ellador’s insatiable interest, her courtesy and talent as a listener made anyone willing to talk to her. She learned fast, and placed in that wide sunlit mind of hers each fact in due relation.

  “I’m beginning to understand,” she told me sweetly, “that I mustn’t judge this — miscellaneous — world of yours as I do my country. We were just ourselves — an isolated homogeneous people. When we moved, we all moved together. You are all kinds of people, in all kinds of places, touching at the edges and getting mixed. And so far from moving on together, there are no two nations exactly abreast — that I can see; and they mostly are ages apart; some away ahead of the others, some going far faster than others, some stationary.”

  “Yes,” I told her, “and in the still numerous savages we find the beginners, and the back-sliders — the hopeless back-sliders — in human progress.”

  “I see — I see—” she said reflectively. “When you say ‘the civilized world’ that is just a figure of speech. The world is not civilized yet — only spots in it, and those not wholly.”

  “That’s about it,” I agreed with her. “Of course, the civilized nations think of themselves as the world — that’s natural.”

  “How does it compare — in numbers?” she inquired. “Let’s look!”

  So we consulted the statistics on the population of the earth, chasing through pages of classification difficult to sift, until we hit upon a little table: “Population of the earth according to race.”

  “That ought to do, roughly speaking,” I told her. “We’ll call the white races civilized — and lump the others. Let’s see how it comes out.”

  It came out that the total of Indo-Germanic, or Aryan — White, for Europe, America, Persia, India and Australia, was 775,000,000; and the rest of the world, black, red, brown and yellow, was 788,000,000.

  “Do you mean that the majority of mankind is still uncivilized?” she asked.

  She didn’t ask it unpleasantly. Ellador was never sarcastic or bitter. But the world was her oyster — to study, and she was quite impartial.

  I, however, felt reproached by this cool estimate. “No indeed,” I said, “you can’t call China uncivilized — it is one of the very oldest civilizations we have. This is only by race you see, by color.”

  “Oh, yes,” she agreed, “and race or color do not count in civilization? Of course not — how stupid I was!”

  But I laid down the pencil I was using to total up populations, and looked at her with a new and grave misgiving. She was so world-innocent. Even the history she had so swiftly absorbed had not changed her, any more than indecent novels affect a child; the child does not know the meaning of the words.

  In the light of Ellador’s colossal innocence of what we are accustomed to call “life,” I began to see that process in a wholly new perspective. Her country was but one; her civilization was one and indivisible; in her country the women and children lived as mothers, daughters, sisters, in general tolerance, love, education and service. Out of that nursery, school, garden, shop, and parlor, she came into this great scrambling world of ours, to find it spotted over with dissimilar peoples, more separated by their varying psychology than by geography, politics, or race; often ignorant of one another, often fearing, despising, hating one another; and each national group, each racial stock, assuming itself to be “the norm” by which to measure others. She had first to recognize the facts and then to disentangle the causes, the long lines of historic evolution which had led to these results. Even then it was hard for her really to grasp the gulfs which divide one part of the human race from the others.

  And now I had the unpleasant task of disabusing her of this last glad assumption, that race and color made no difference.

  “Dear,” I said slowly, “you must prepare your mind for another shock — though you must have got some of it already, here and there. Race and color make all the difference in the world. People dislike and despise one another on exactly that ground — difference in race and color. These millions who are here marked ‘Aryan or White’ include Persians and Hindus, yet the other white races are averse to intermarrying with these, whose skins are indeed much darker than ours, though they come of the same stock.”

  “Is the aversion mutual?” she asked, as calmly as if we had been discussing insects.

  I assured her that, speaking generally, it was; that the flatter-faced Mongolians regarded us as hawklike in our aquiline features; and that little African children fled screaming from the unnatural horror of a first-seen white face.

  But what I was thinking about was how I should explain to her the race prejudice in my own country, when she reached it. I felt like a housekeeper bringing home company, discovering that the company has far higher and more exacting standards than herself, and longing to get home first and set the house in order before inspection.

  We spent some little time in Japan, Ellador enjoying the fairy beauty of the country, with its flower-worshiping, sunny-faced people, and the plump happy children everywhere.

  But instead of being content with the artistic beauty of the place; with that fine lacquer of smiling courtesy with which their life is covered, she followed her usual course of penetrating investigation. It needed no years of study, no dreary tables of figures. With what she already knew, so clearly held in mind, with a few questions each loaded with implications, she soon grasped the salient facts of Japanese civilization. Its conspicuous virtues gave her instant joy. The high honor of the Samurai, the unlimited patriotism of the people in general, the exquisite politeness, and the sincere love of beauty in nature and art — these were all comforting, and the free-footed women also, after the “golden lilies” of China.

  But presently, piercing below all these, she found the general poverty of the people, their helplessness under a new and hard-grinding commercialism, and the patient ignominy in which the women lived.

  “How is it, dear,” she asked me, “that these keenly intelligent people fail to see that such limited women cannot produce a nobler race ?”

  I could only say that it was a universal failing, common to all races — except ours, of course. Her face always lighted when we spoke of America.

  “You don’t know how I look forward to it, dear,” she said. “After this painful introduction to the world I knew so little of — I’m so glad we came this way — saving the best to the last.”

  The nearer we came to America and the more eagerly she spoke of it, the more my vague uneasiness increased. I began to think of things I had never before been sensiti
ve about and to seek for justification.

  Meanwhile Ellador was accumulating heart-ache over the Japanese women, whose dual duty of child-bearing and man-service dominated all their lives.

  “It is so hard for me to understand, Van; they aren’t people at all, somehow — just wives — or worse.”

  “They are mothers, surely,” I urged.

  “No — not in our sense, not consciously. Look at this ghastly crowding! Here’s a little country, easy to grasp and manage, capable of supporting about so many people — not more. And here they are, making a ‘saturated solution’ of themselves.” She had picked up that phrase from one of her medical friends, a vigorous young man who told her much that she was eager to know about the health and physical development of the Japanese. “Can’t they see that there are too many?” she went on. “If a people increases beyond its means of support it has to endure miserable poverty — or what is that the Germans demand? — expansion! They have to have somebody else’s country. How strangely dull they are!”

  “But, my dear girl, please remember that this is life,” I told her. “This is the world. This is the way people live. You expect too much of them. It is a law of nature to increase and multiply. Of course, Malthus set up a terrified cry about over-populating the earth, but it has not come to that yet, not near. Our means of subsistence increase with the advance of science.”

  “As to the world, I can see that; but as to a given country, and especially as small a one as this — what does become of them?” she asked suddenly.

  This started her on a rapid study of emigration, in which, fortunately, my own knowledge was of some use; and she eagerly gathered up and arranged in her mind that feature of our history on which hangs so much, the migration and emigration of peoples. She saw at once how, when most of the earth’s surface was unoccupied, people moved freely about in search of the best hunting or pasturage; how in an agricultural system they settled and spread, widening with the increase of population; how ever since they met and touched, each nation limited by its neighbors, there had been the double result of over-crowding inside the national limits, and warfare in the interests of “expansion.”