“You grew, in spite of it. You had to. The big wild land helped, the remoteness and necessity for individual action and continual experiment. The migration of the children helped.”
“Migration of the children! What on earth do you mean, Ellador?”
“Why, haven’t you noticed? Hardly any of your children stay at home any more than they can help, any longer than they can help. And as soon as they are able they get off — as far as they can. They may love the old homestead — but they don’t stay in it.”
This was so, too.
“You see that steadily lightens up this old mistake about Authority. It is the change to the laboratory system of living — finding out how by doing it.”
“It does not seem to me that there is much ‘authority’ left in the American home,” I urged. “All the immigrants complain of just that.”
“Of course they do. Your immigrants, naturally, understand democracy even less than you do. You have all of you set the word ‘Freedom’ over the most intricately co-ordinated kind of political relation. You see the Authority method is so simple. ‘It is an order!’ — and you merely do it — no thought, no effort — no responsibility. God says so — the King or the captain says so — the Book says so — and back of it all, the Family, the Father-Boss. What’s that nice story: ‘Papa says so — and if he says so, it is so, if it ain’t so!’”
“But, Ellador — really — there is almost none of that in the American family; surely you must have seen the difference?”
“I have. In the oldest countries the most absolute Father-Boss — and family worship — the dead father being even more potent than the live ones. Van, dear — the thing I cannot fully understand is this reverence people have for dead people. Why is it? How is it? Why is a man who wasn’t much when he was alive anything more when he is dead? You do not really believe that people are dwindling and deteriorating from age to age, do you?”
“That is precisely what we used to believe,” I told her, “for the greater part of our history — for all of it really — the evolution idea is still less than a century old — in popular thought.”
“But you Americans who are free, who are progressive, who are willing to change in most things — why do you still talk about what ‘your fathers’ said and did — as if it was so important?”
“It’s because of our recent birth as a nation, I suppose,” I answered, “and the prodigious struggle those fathers of ours made — the Pilgrim Fathers, the Church fathers, the Revolutionary fathers — and now our own immediate fathers in the Civil War.”
“But why is it that you only reverence them politically — and perhaps, religiously! Nobody quotes them in business methods, in art, or science, or medicine, or mechanics. Why do you assume that they were so permanently wise in knowing how to govern a huge machine-run, electrically-connected, city-dominated nation, which they were unable even to imagine? It’s so foolish, Van.”
It is foolish. I admitted it. But I told her, perhaps a little testily, that I didn’t see what our homes had to do with it.
Then that wise lady said sweet, kind, discriminating things about us till I felt better, and came back with smooth clarity to the subject.
“Please understand, dear, that I am not talking about marriage — the beauty and joy and fruitful power of this dear union are a growing wonder to me. You know that — !”
I knew that. She made me realize it, with a praising heart, every day.
“No, this monogamous marriage of yours is distinctly right — when it is a real one. It is the making a business of it that I object to.”
“You mean the women kept at housework?”
“That’s part of it — about a third of it. I mean the whole thing: the men saddling themselves for life with the task of feeding the greedy thing, and the poor children heavily stamped with it before they can escape. That’s the worst—”
She stopped at that for a little. So far she had not entered on the condition of women, or of children, in any thorough way. She had notes enough — volumes.
“What I’m trying to establish is this,” she said slowly, “the connection between what seem to me errors in your social fabric, and the. natural result of these in your political action. The family relation is the oldest — the democratic relation is the newest. The family relation demands close, interconnected love, authority and service. The democratic relation demands universal justice and good will, the capacity for the widest co-ordinate action in the common interest, together with a high individual responsibility. People have to be educated for this — it is not easy. Your homes require the heaviest drain on personal energy, on personal loyalty, and leave a small percentage either of feeling or action for the State.”
“You don’t expect everyone to be a statesman, do you?”
“Why not? Everyone must be — in a democracy.”
“But we should not make better citizens if we neglected our homes, should we?”
“Does it make a man a better soldier if he stays at home — to protect his family? Oh, Van, dear, don’t you see? These poor foolish fighting men are at least united, coordinated, making a common effort for a common cause. They are — or think they are — protecting their homes together.”
“I suppose you mean socialism again,” I rather sulkily suggested, but she took it very sweetly.
“We isolated Herlanders never heard of Socialism,” she answered. “We had no German-Jewish economist to explain to us in interminable, and, to most people, uncomprehensible, prolixity, the reasons why it was better to work together for common good. Perhaps ‘the feminine mind’ did not need so much explanation of so obvious a fact. We co-mothers, in our isolation, with a small visible group of blood relations (without any Father-Boss) just saw that our interests were in common. We couldn’t help seeing it.”
“Stop a bit, Sister,” said I. “Are you insinuating that Mr. Father is at the bottom of the whole trouble? Are you going to be as mean as Adam and lay all the blame on him?”
She laughed gleefully. “Not quite. I won’t curse him. I won’t suggest ages of hideous injustice to all men because of the alleged transgression of one man. No, it is not Mr. Father I am blaming, nor his fatherhood — for that is evidently the high crown of physiological transmission.” (Always these Herland women bowed their heads at what they called the holy mystery of fatherhood, and always we men were — well — not completely pleased.)
“But it does seem clear,” she went on briskly, “that much mischief has followed from too much father. He did put himself forward so! He thought he was the whole thing, and motherhood — Motherhood! — was quite a subordinate process.”
I always squirmed a little, in the back of my mind, at this attitude. All their tender reverence for fatherhood didn’t seem in the least to make up for their absolutely unconscious pride in motherhood. Perhaps they were right —
“The dominance of him!” she went on. “The egoism of him! ‘My name!’ — and not letting her have any. ‘My house — my line — my family’ — if she had to be mentioned it was on ‘the spindle side,’ and when he is annoyed with her — what’s that man in Cymbeline, Mr. Posthumous, wishing there was some way to have children without these women! It is funny, now, isn’t it, Van?”
“It certainly is. Man or not, I can face facts when I see them. It is only too plain that ‘Mr. Father’ has grossly overestimated his importance in the part.”
“Don’t you think the American husband and father is a slight improvement on the earlier kind?” I modestly inquired. At which she turned upon me with swift caresses, and delighted agreement.
“That’s the beauty and the wonder of your county, Van! You are growing swiftly and splendidly in spite of yourselves. This great thing you started so valiantly is sweeping you along with it, educating and developing as it goes. Your men are better, your women are freer, your children have more chance to grow than anywhere on earth.”
“That’s good to hear, my dear,” I said with a sigh of
relief. “Then why so gloomy about us?”
“Suppose everybody was entitled to a yearly income of five thousand dollars. Suppose most people averaged about five cents. Suppose a specially able, vigorous and well placed group had worked it up to $50. * * * Why, Van — your superiority to less fortunate peoples is not worth mentioning compared to your inferiority to what you ought to be.”
“Now we are coming to it,” I sighed resignedly. “Pitch in, dear — give it to us — only be sure and show the way to help it.”
She nodded grimly. “I will do both as well as I can. Let us take physical conditions first: With your numbers, your intelligence and mechanical ingenuity, your limitless materials, the United States should by now have the best roads on earth. This would be an immediate and progressive economic advantage, and would incidentally go far to solve other ‘problems,’ as you call your neglected work, such as ‘unemployment,’ ‘the negro question,’ ‘criminality,’ ‘social discontent.’ That there are not good roads in Central Africa does not surprise nor annoy me. That they are lacking in the United States is — discreditable!”
“Granted!” said I hastily. “Granted absolutely — you needn’t stop on that point.”
“That’s only one thing,” she went on serenely, “Here you are, a democracy — free — the power in the hands of the people. You let that group of conservatives saddle you with a constitution which has so interfered with free action that you’ve forgotten you had it. In this ridiculous helplessness — like poor old Gulliver — bound by the Lilliputians — you have sat open-eyed, not moving a finger, and allowed individuals — mere private persons — to help themselves to the biggest, richest, best things in the country. You know what is thought of a housekeeper who lets dishonest servants run the house with waste and robbery, or of a King who is openly preyed upon by extortionate parasites — what can we think of a Democracy, a huge, strong, young Democracy, allowing itself to become infested with such parasites as these? Talk of blood-suckers! You have your oil-suckers and coal-suckers, water-suckers and wood-suckers, railroad-suckers and farm-suckers — this splendid young country is crawling with them — and has not the intelligence, the energy, to shake them off.”
“But most of us do not believe in Socialism, you see,” I protested.
“You believe in it altogether too much,” she replied flatly. “You seem to think that every step toward decent economic health and development has been appropriated by Socialism, and that you cannot do one thing toward economic freedom and progress unless you become Socialists!”
There was something in this.
“I admit the Socialists are partly to blame for this,” she went on, “with their insistent claims, but do you think it is any excuse for a great people to say: ‘We have all believed this absurd thing because they told us so?’”
“Was it our — stupidity — that shocked you so at first?” I ventured.
She flashed a bright look at me. “How brilliant of you, Van! That was exactly it, and I hated to say so to you. How can you, for instance, let that little bunch of men ‘own’ all your anthracite coal, and make you pay what they choose for it? You, who wouldn’t pay England a little tax on tea! It puzzled me beyond words at first. Such intelligence! Such power! Such pride! Such freedom! Such good will! And yet such Abysmal Idiocy! That’s what brought me around to the home, you see.”
“We’ve wandered a long way from it, haven’t we?”
“No — that’s just the point. You should have, but you haven’t. Don’t you see? All these changes which are so glaringly necessary and so patently easy to make, require this one ability — to think in terms of the community * * * you only think in terms of the family. Here are men engaged in some absolutely social enterprise, like the railroad business, in huge groups, most intricately coordinated. And from the dividend-suckers to the road-builders, every man thinks only of his Pay, — of what he is to get out of it. ‘What is a railroad?’ you might ask them all. ‘An investment,’ says the dividend-sucker. ‘A means of speculation,’ says the Sucker-at-Large. ‘A paying business,’ says the Corporate-Owner. ‘A thing that pays salaries,’ says the officer. ‘A thing that furnishes jobs,’ says the digger and builder.”
“But what has all this to do with the Home?”
“It has this to do with it,” she answered, slowly and sadly. “Your children grow up in the charge of home-bound mothers who recognize no interest, ambition, or duty outside the home — except to get to heaven if they can. These home-bound women are man-suckers; all they get he must give them, and they want a good deal. So he says: ‘The world is mine oyster,’ — and sets his teeth in that. It is not only this relentless economic pressure, though. What underlies it and accounts for it all is the limitation of idea! You think Home, you talk Home, you work Home, where you should from earliest childhood be seeing life in terms of the community. * * * You could not get much fleet action from a flotilla of canoes — with every man’s first duty to paddle his own, could you* * *”
“What do you want done?” I asked, after awhile.
“Definite training in democratic thought, feeling and action, from infancy. An economic administration of common resources under which the home would cease to be a burden and become an unconscious source of happiness and comfort. And, of course, the socialization of home industry.”
8. MORE DIAGNOSIS
Our study of American problems went on now with persistence. Ellador was as busy, as patient, as inexorably efficient as an eminent surgeon engaged in a first-class operation. We studied together, she wrote carefully, from time to time, and read me the results — or part of them. And we talked at all hours, not only between ourselves, but with many other persons, of all kinds and classes.
“I’ve seen the ruined lands that were once so rich,” she said one day, “and the crowded lands now being drained by a too thick population. (Those blind mothers! Can’t they once think of what is going to happen to their children?)
“But here I see land in plenty, carelessly skimmed and left, or not even skimmed, just lying open to the sun, while you squeezed millions smother in the cities.
“You are used to it, to you it is merely a fact — accepted without question. To an outsider, it seems as horribly strange as to see a people living in cellars thick and crawling, while great airy homes stand empty above.
“My study is mainly to get at your state of mind, to understand, if possible, what mysterious ideas and convictions keep you so poor, so dirty, so crowded, so starved, so ill-clothed, so unhealthy, so unhappy, when there is no need of it.”
“Now look here, Ellador! That’s rather strong, isn’t it? You surely don’t describe the American people that way.”
Then she produced another of those little groups of assorted statistics she was so fond of. She gave the full wealth of the country — as at present administered, and showed that it ought to give nearly $2,000 to each of us. “That is per capita, you see, Van, not per family. For a family of five, that would be nine or ten thousand — not a bad nest egg, besides what they earn.”
Then she showed me the estimate made by our latest scientific commission of inquiry, that “fully one-half of our wage earners do not receive incomes sufficient to maintain healthful conditions of living.” A World Almanac was at hand, and she pointed out on page 228 the summary of manufactures.
“Here you have enough to show how people live in this splendid country, Van. See here— ‘Average number of wage earners 6,615,046. Wages, $3,427,038,000’ — which, being divided, gives to each $518 plus-less than $520 a year, Van. Less than $10 a week — to keep a family — average family, five; $104 a year, $2 a week apiece for Americans to live on. And you know what food and rent costs. Of course they are not healthy — how could they be?”
I looked at the figures, uncomfortably. She gave me a few more. “Salaried employees average $1,187 plus — that’s a bit more than twice as much. About $4.40 a week, apiece, for Americans to live on.”
“How much
do you want them to have?” I asked a little irritably; but she was sweetly patient, inquiring, “How much would you be willing to live on — or how little, rather? I don’t mean luxuries; I mean a decent, healthy life. Think you could do it on $4.40? Think you could do it on less than $6 say? Rent, board, clothing, car fares?”
Now I had spent a few months during my youth, living on a modest salary of $10 a week, and remembered it as a period of hardship and deprivation. There was $6 a week for board, 60 cents for carfare, 90 cents for my modest 15-cent lunches, 70 cents for tobacco — it left $1.80 for clothing and amusements, if any. I had thought it hard enough, at that time to endure life on $10 a week for one. It had never occurred to me that the working man had to keep five on it. And here were six million of them who did, it appeared, and a lot of clerks who were only twice as well off.
“Ten dollars a week, for each person is little enough for decent living in this country, isn’t it, Van? That would call for $50 a week for a family of five — $2,600 a year.”
“But, my dear girl, the business would not stand it! You ask impossibilities!” I protested. She turned to her figures again.
“Here is the ‘value added by manufacture’” she said. “That must be what these workers produce, isn’t it? $8,530,261,000. Now we’ll take out these wages — it leaves $5,103,223,000. Then we’ll take out the salaries, that leaves $4,031,649,000. Where does that go? Here is a four-billion dollar item — for services — whose?
“It must be those proprietors and firm members — only 273,265 of them — let’s see, out of that four billion they get nearly $16,000 a year each. Don’t you think it is a little-remarkable, Van? These services are valued at fourteen times as much as those of the salaries of employees and thirty times as much as the workers?”
“My dear girl,” I said, “You have the most wonderful mind I ever lived with — ever met. And you know more than I do about ever so many things. But you haven’t touched economics yet? There are laws here which you take no notice of.”
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 127
