“Than the swine with pearls before him,” I suggested. “But you know those economic laws come in—”
She laughed outright.
“Van, dear, there is nothing in all your pitiful tangled life more absurd than what you so solemnly call ‘economics.’ Good economics in regard to food is surely this: to produce the best quality, in sufficient quantity, with the least expenditure of labor, and to distribute it the most rapidly and freshly to the people who need it.”
“The management of food in your world is perhaps the most inexplicably foolish of anything you do. I’ve been up and down the streets in your cities observing. I’ve been in the hotels and restaurants far and wide and in ever so many homes. And I confess, Van, with some mortification, that there is no one thing I’m more homesick for than food.”
“I am getting discouraged, if you are not, Ellador. As compared with a rational country like yours, this is rather a mess. And it looks so hopeless. I suppose it will take a thousand years to catch up.”
“You could do it in three generations,” she calmly replied.
“Three generations! That’s barely a century.”
“I know it. The whole outside part of it you could do inside of twenty years; it is the people who will take three generations to remake. You could improve this stock, say, 5 per cent. in one, 15 in two and 80 per cent. in three. Perhaps faster.”
“Are not you rather sanguine, my dear girl?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered gravely. “People are not bad now; they are only weighed down with all this falsehood and foolishness in their heads. There is always the big lifting force of life to push you on as fast as you will let it. There is the wide surrounding help of conditions, such conditions as you even now know how to arrange. And there is the power of education — which you have hardly tried. With these all together and with proper care in breeding you could fill the world with glorious people — soon. Oh, I wish you’d do it! I wish you’d do it!”
It was hard on her. Harder even than I had foreseen. Not only the war horrors, not only the miseries of more backward nations and of our painful past, but even in my America where I had fondly thought she would be happy, the common arrangements of our lives to which we are so patiently accustomed, were to her a constant annoyance and distress.
Through her eyes I saw it newly and instead of the breezy pride I used to feel in my young nation I now began to get an unceasing sense of what she had called “an idiot child.”
It was so simply true, what she said about food. Food is to eat. All its transporting and preserving and storing and selling — if it interferes with the eating value of the food — is foolishness. I began to see the man who stores eggs until they are reduced to the grade called “rots and spots” as an idiot and a malicious idiot at that. Vivid and clear rose in my mind the garden-circled cities of Herland, where for each group of inhabitants all fresh fruits and vegetables were raised so near that they could be eaten the day they were picked. It did not cost any more. It cost less, saving transportation. Supplies that would keep they kept — enough from season to season, with some emergency reserves; but not one person, young or old, ever had to eat such things as we pay extortionately for in every city.
Nothing but women, only mothers, but they had worked out to smooth perfection what now began to seem to me to be the basic problem in human life.
How to make the best kind of people and how to keep them at their best and growing better — surely that is what we are here for.
12. CONCLUSION
As I look over my mass of notes, of hastily jotted down or wholly re-constructed conversations, and some of Ellador’s voluminous papers, I am distressingly conscious of the shortcomings of this book. There is no time now to improve it, and I wish to publish it, as a little better than no report at all of the long visit of my wife from Herland to the world we know.
In time I hope, if I live, and if I come back again, to make a far more competent study than this. Yet why trouble myself to do that? She will do it, I am sure, with the help of her friends and sisters, far better than I could.
I had hoped that she could go blazing about our world, lecturing on the wonders and beauties of Herland, but that was all dropped when they decided not to betray their strange geographical secret — yet. I am allowed to print the previous account of our visit there — even that will set explorers on their track; but she did not wish to answer specific questions while here, nor to refuse to answer.
They were quite right. The more I see of our world, the surer I am that they are right to try to preserve their lovely country as it is, for a while at least.
Ellador begs that I explain how inchoate, how fragmentary, how disproportionate, her impressions necessarily were.
“The longer I stay,” she said, “the more I learn of your past and understand of your present, the more hopeful I feel for you. Please make that very clear.” This she urged strongly.
The war did not discourage her, after a while. “What is one more — among so many?” she asked, with a wry smile. “The very awfulness of this is its best hope; that, and the growing wisdom of the people. You’ll have no more, I’m sure; that is, no more except those recognized as criminal outbreaks, and punitive ones; the receding waves of force as these turbulent cross-currents die down and disappear.
“But, Van, dear, whatever else you leave out, be sure to make it as strong as you can about the women and children.”
“Perhaps you’d better say it yourself, my dear. Come, you put in a chapter,” I urged. But she would not.
“I should be too abusive, I’m afraid,” she objected; “and I’ve talked enough on the subject — you know that.”
She had, by this time, gone over it pretty thoroughly. And it is not very difficult to give the drift of it — we all know the facts. Her position, as a Herlander, was naturally the material one.
“The business of people is, of course, to be well, happy, wise, beautiful, productive and progressive.”
“Why don’t you say ‘good,’ too,” I suggested.
“Don’t be absurd, Van. If people are well and happy, wise, beautiful, productive and progressive, they must incidentally be good; that’s being good. What sort of goodness is it which does not produce those effects? Well, these ‘good’ people need a ‘good’ world to live in, and they have to make it; a clean, safe, comfortable world to grow in.
“Then, since they all begin as children, it seems so self-evident that the way to make better people and a better world is to teach the children how.”
“You’ll find general agreement so far,” I admitted.
“But the people who train children are, with you, the mothers,” she pursued, “and the mothers of your world have not yet seen this simple truth.”
“They talk of nothing else,” I suggested. “They are always talking of the wonderful power and beauty of motherhood, from the most ancient morality to Ellen Key.”
“Yes, I know they talk about it. Their idea of motherhood, to what it ought to be, is like a birchbark canoe to an ocean steamship, Van. They haven’t seen it as a whole — that’s the trouble. What prevents them is their dwarfed condition, not being people, real, world-building people; and what keeps them dwarfed is this amazing relic of the remote past — their domestic position.”
“Would you ‘destroy the home,’ as they call it, Ellador?”
“I think the home is the very loveliest thing you have on earth,” she unexpectedly replied.
“What do you mean, then?” I asked, genuinely puzzled. “You can’t have homes without women in them, can you? And children?”
“And men,” she gravely added. “Why, Van — do not men have homes, and love them dearly? A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman?”
Then she made clear to me, quite briefly, how the home should be to the woman just what it was to man, and far more to both, in beauty and comfort in privacy and peace, in all the pleasant rest and de
ar companionship we so prize; but that it should not be to him a grinding weight of care and expense, or an expression of pride; nor to her a workshop or her sole means of personal expression.
“It is so pathetic,” she said, “and so unutterably absurd, to see great city-size and world-size women trying to content themselves and express themselves in one house; or worse, one flat. You know how it would be for a man, surely. It is just as ridiculous for a woman. And your city-size and world-size men are all tied up to these house-size women. It’s so funny, Van, so painfully funny, like a horse harnessed with an eohippus.”
“We haven’t got to wait for Mrs. Eohippus to catch up to Mr. Horse, I hope?”
“You won’t have to wait long,” she assured me. “They are born equal, your boys and girls; they have to be. It is the tremendous difference in cultural conditions that divided them; not only in infancy and youth; not only in dress and training; but in this wide gulf of industrial distinction, this permanent division which leaves one sex free to rise, to develop every social power and quality, and forcibly restrains the other to a labor-level thousands of years behind. It is beginning to change, I can see that now, but it has to be complete, universal, before women can do their duty as mothers.”
“But I thought — at least I’ve always heard — that it was their duty as mothers which kept them at home.”
She waved this aside, with a touch of impatience. “Look at the children,” she said; “that’s enough. Look at these girls who do not even know enough about motherhood to demand a healthy father. Why, a — a — sheep would know better than to mate with such creatures as some of your women marry.
“They are only just beginning to learn that there are such diseases as they have been suffering and dying from for all these centuries. And they are so poor! They haven’t any money, most of them; they are so disorganized — unorganized — apparently unconscious of any need of organization.”
I mentioned the growth of trade unions, but she said that was but a tiny step — useful, but small; what she meant was Mother Union ....
“I suppose it is sex,” she pursued, soberly. “With us, motherhood is so simple. I had supposed, at first, that your bi-sexual method would mean a better motherhood, a motherhood of two, so to speak. And I find that men have so enjoyed their little part of the work that they have grown to imagine it as quite a separate thing, and to talk about ‘sex’ as if it was wholly distinct from parentage. Why, see what I found the other day” — and she pulled out a copy of a little yellow medical magazine, published by a physician who specializes in sex diseases, and read me a note this doctor had written on “Sterilization,” wherein he said that it had no injurious effect on sex.
“Just look at that!” she said. “The man is a doctor — and thinks the removal of parental power is no loss to ‘sex’! What men — yes, and some women, too — seem to mean by sex is just their preliminary pleasure .... When your women are really awake and know what they are for, seeing men as the noblest kind of assistants, nature’s latest and highest device for the improvement of parentage, then they will talk less of ‘sex’ and more of children.”
I urged, as genuinely as I could, the collateral value and uses of sex indulgence; not the common theories of “necessity,” which any well-trained athlete can deny, but the more esoteric claims of higher flights of love, and of far-reaching stimulus to all artistic faculty: the creative impulse in our work.
She listened patiently, but shook her head when I was done.
“Even if all those claims were true,” she said, “they would not weigh as an ounce to a ton beside the degradation of women, the corruption of the body and mind through these wholly unnecessary diseases, and the miserable misborn children. Why, Van, what’s ‘creative impulse’ and all its ‘far-reaching stimulus’ to set beside the stunted, meager starveling children, the millions of poor little sub-ordinary children, children who are mere accidents and by-products of this much-praised ‘sex’ ? It’s no use, dear, until all the children of the world are at least healthy; at least normal; until the average man and woman are free from taint of sex-disease and happy in their love — lastingly happy in their love — there is not much to boast of in this popular idea of sex and sex indulgence.
“It can not be changed in a day or a year,” she said. “This is evidently a matter of long inheritance, and that’s why I allow three generations to get over it. But nothing will help much till the women are free and see their duty as mothers.”
“Some of the ‘freest’ women are urging more sex freedom,” I reminded her. “They want to see the women doing as men have done, apparently.”
“Yes, I know. They are almost as bad as the antis — but not quite. They are merely a consequence of wrong teaching and wrong habits; they were there before, those women, only not saying what they wanted. Surely, you never imagined that all men could be unchaste and all women chaste, did you?”
I shamefacedly admitted that that was exactly what we had imagined, and that we had most cruelly punished the women who were not.
“It’s the most surprising thing I ever heard of,” she said; “and you bred and trained plenty of animals, to say nothing of knowing the wild ones. Is there any case in nature of a species with such a totally opposite trait in the two sexes?”
There wasn’t, that I knew of, outside of their special distinctions, of course.
All these side issues she continually swept aside, all the minor points and discussable questions, returning again and again to the duty of women.
“As soon as the women take the right ground, men will have to follow suit,” she said, “as soon as women are free, independent and conscientious. They have the power in their own hands, by natural law.”
“What is going to rouse them, to make them see it?” I asked.
“A number of things seems to be doing that,” she said, meditatively. “From my point of view, I should think the sense of maternal duty would be the strongest thing, but there seem to be many forces at work here. The economic change is the most imperative, more so, even, than the political, and both are going on fast. There’s the war, too, that is doing wonders for women. It is opening the eyes of men, millions of men, at once, as no arguments ever could have.”
“Aren’t you pleased to see the women working for peace?” I asked.
“Immensely, of course. All over Europe they are at it — that’s what I mean.”
“But I meant the Peace Movement.”
“Oh, that? Talking for peace, you mean, and writing and telegraphing. Yes, that’s useful, too. Anything that brings women out into social relation, into a sense of social responsibility, is good. But all that they say and write and urge will not count as much as what they do.
“Your women will surely have more sense than the men about economics,” she suggested. “It does not seem to me possible for business women to mishandle food as men do, or to build such houses. It is all so — unreasonable: to make people eat what is not good, or live in dark, cramped little rooms.”
“You don’t think they show much sense in their own clothes?” I offered, mischievously.
“No, they don’t. But that is women as they are, the kind of women you men have been so long manufacturing. I’m speaking of real ones, the kind that are there underneath, and sure to come out as soon as they have a chance. And what a glorious time they will have — cleaning up the world! I’d almost like to stay and help a little.”
Gradually it had dawned upon me that Ellador did not mean to stay, even in America. I wanted to be sure.
“Like to stay? Do you mean that you want to go back — for good?”
“It is not absolutely clear to me yet,” she answered. “But one thing I’m certain about. If I live here I will not have a child.”
I thought for a moment that she meant the distress about her would have some deleterious effect and prevent it; but when I looked at her, saw the folded arms, the steady mouth, the fixed determination in her eyes, I knew that she me
ant “will not” when she said it.
“It would not be right,” she added, simply. “There is no place in all your world, that I have seen or read of, where I should be willing to raise a child.”
“We could go to some lovely place alone,” I urged; “some island, clean and beautiful—”
“But we should be ‘alone’ there. That is no place for a child.”
“You could teach it — as they do in Herland,” I still urged.
“I teach it? I? What am I, to teach a child?”
“You would be its mother,” I answered.
“And what is a mother to teach a solitary little outcast thing as you suggest? Children need the teaching of many women, and the society of many children, for right growth. Also, they need a social environment — not an island!”
“You see, dear,” she went on, after a little, “in Herland everything teaches. The child sees love and order and peace and comfort and wisdom everywhere. No child, alone, could grow up so — so richly endowed. And as to these countries I have seen — these cities of abomination — I would die childless rather than to bear a child in this world of yours.”
In Herland to say “I would die childless” is somewhat equivalent to our saying “I would suffer eternal damnation.” It is the worst deprivation they can think of.
“You are going to leave me!” I cried. It burst upon me with sudden bitterness. She was not “mine,” she was a woman of Herland, and her heavenly country, her still clear hope of motherhood, were more to her than life in our land with me. What had I to offer her that was comparable to that upland paradise ?
She came to me, then, and took me in her arms — strong, tender, loving arms — and gave me one of her rare kisses.
“I’m going to stay with you, my husband, as long as I live — if you want me. Is there anything to prevent your coming back to Herland?”
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 133
