The Status of Woman1

By Mary Johnston

The Times Dispatch: Richmond, VA. December 12, 1909 – Section C, pages 4+32

Apparently there is at the moment, in the minds of some worthy people, a fear that when the door of a civilization, which we proudly proclaim as dynamic, shall open to equal suffrage, woman’s love for her home and family will at once fly out of the window. May I avail myself of the courtesy of your columns, and speak upon this subject?

Far behind us, in the mist of time, two creatures, male and female, differentiated themselves from their fellows of the universal forest.3 The male was physically the stronger, for the female bore the children, but there is no reason to suppose that they were not intellectually equal—equal, not similar. Each to some extent complemented the other. With the passing of ages they grew in mental capacity, they left forever the plane of the merely animal, they entered, together, upon that vast synthesis, intellectual and spiritual, of which no prophet has arisen who can tell us the eventual glories.

There was no “family” as it is known to-day. Mother and child composed the primitive family.4 That savage mother bore the child, suckled it, carried it in her arms or upon her back, sought food for it, taught it that forest fires would burn and water drown, and certain berries slay horribly, and wild beasts kill and devour. When it was sick or hurt she nursed it, when the wolf or the tiger appeared, she ran with the child if she could. If not, she turned and fought for it to her death. Mother and child were the “family.” And when she found a cave or some green, hidden recess in the forest, there, where in pain she bore her child, where she nursed it, where she left it upon the leaves while she sought for food, where at eve she returned rejoicing, bearing meat for her young, there was the first “home.” It is to be assumed that she loved it even then. No one has ever arisen to doubt that she loved her “family.” Very early, probably, she began, with bright flowers, with pebbles, with what not, to adorn her home. Her love to-day for her “pretty things” has its roots so far back as that.

For a long time it did not occur to the man to prefer one mate to another or to remain beside the one whom, at last, he did prefer. Love of offspring, or desire to claim them as his own had as little place among his ideas. The child knew not his father, and the father neither knew nor cared to know his child. The twentieth century grants that paternal is yet a light thing beside maternal love.

Slow genetic change, running through ages, wrought other conditions for those primitive two.5 Brains were larger. Ceaseless struggle in his war for food, sharp and violent struggle with rival males for the possession of the woman of that moment’s desire, had made man swifter to see and to seize an advantage. He found a wisdom in recognizing a companion not so physically strong as himself, upon whom, therefore, he could impose his will, and in allying himself with a blood kindred. His sons could hunt and fight with him, and his daughters could bear the burdens on the march.

The woman, in her turn, found that the man was strong to ward off or to fight with and kill the beasts that prowled around her home, and that he could procure food for the child where she could not. Moreover, through interest and through inclination, she was monogamous. She was content with one mate, and, physical passion aside, her nature was such that she could transfer to this mate something of the altruistic devotion with which she regarded her child. The family enlarged its borders. The man became a member of it and a sharer of the home.

He was physically the stronger, and as the age of chivalry had not yet arrived, and as the age of justice is to-day, like Halley’s comet, only telescopically visible, he now arrogated to himself the position of head of the family, and enforced his claim with knock-down blows. At this point in history was settled the status of woman.

Such as the two were, very primitive, close to the earth, pathetically akin to the beasts of prey about them, but holding within potentialities of all beauty and wonder, they hence forth dwelled together—though upon hard terms for the woman. Slowly enough they climbed an upward road. It is conjectured that the man, using a stick for a lever, or flattened stones for mortar and pestle, devised the first tool, the faraway ancestor of all the industries of the world. It is conjectured that the woman, babbling and cooing to the infant at her breast, exchanged with it, later, those half articulate sounds which even to-day we call “baby-talk,” later yet accustoming it to cries of warning and command, to sounds of comfort, sympathy and welcome—the institutrice6 of all human language. She is, to-day more garrulous than man, and the trait is accounted for by her long dealing with children. It is probable that the man made the first weapon, parent of the torpedo-destroyer and the Benet-Mercie gun7. Woman, it is thought, began the domestication of animals. Man hunted far and wide and brought flesh meat home to that family which by now, in his own rude fashion, he loved and protected. With a sharpened stick, with the first hoe, woman dug in the forest for edible roots. She gathered berries and fruits, and somewhat later, she planted seeds. She watched and tended their upward growth and gleaned and stored the produce. She was the first farmer. Man, hunting and warring now together with his kin, began to organize the horde, and so entered upon his administrative career. Government sprang into existence, and generalship in war. In his raids against his neighbors of forest and wood he took prisoners. At one period of his existence he ate these, at another he put them to death with hideous tortures, but finally it occurred to him to take them home and make them work for him. Men and women, he drove them before him to his cave or lodge. The family once more enlarged its borders. It now included the man, his several wives and their respective children, and his bondsmen, male and female. Polygamy and slavery entered, side by side. Exploitation, in its modern sense, was here.

Time passed. The pastoral era succeeded the savage, the agricultural the pastoral. Society had arrived at the patriarchal stage.8 It was now composed of polygamous groups, each ruled with absolute authority by the husband and father. Sometimes the group was ruled with wisdom and kindliness, sometimes not. Seen at the end of so long a vista of time, this period has a certain Arcadian simplicity and charm. It remains that it was a society in which a small proportion of the males were masters. The remainder of the population was made up of wives, in effect slaves, of concubines, always slaves, of sons and daughters, whom the father might slay if he chose, and of men servants and maid servants, all bondsmen by decree. The “family” was as large as a community, and “home” was the valley or plain where the tents were pitched until it seemed good to move on again.

To this far-off polity succeeded, by slow growth, the great states of antiquity.9 These, too, saw masculine improvements upon the original and purely feminine idea of home and family. For brevity’s sake, I speak now of only the more Western Aryan types. In Sparta there were houses, but, properly speaking, no homes. The people ate their black broth at common tables, and free-born men and women were forbidden to concern themselves with domestic affairs.

Husbands courteously lent their wives to their neighbors, children were taken at a tender age from the parents and assigned to the public care, and the oldest men regularly visited the schools in order to see that no new ideas were introduced. There were excellent points in the system, and it lasted 500 years. It remains imbedded in time, a most admirable and curious fossil, one of the best examples of a static civilization.

The Asiatic masculine ideal was the harem. One has but to read Montesquieu’s “Les Lettres Persanes”10 to behold this system in all its degradation, waste and tragic absurdity. It prevails to-day in the Mohammedan world, and it is not the cave woman’s, nor any true daughters of hers, idea of home and family.

From all this web of sexual passion reliance on brute force, and general unreason, the Greek escaped by sheer dint of his clean physique, his intellectual strength, his sanity and sweetness, his sense of beauty and vision of the true. Rome arose, and the Roman, with his feeling for law, his rough and ready friendliness, his democratic ideas and his common sense, came to the aid of the theoretic Greek and raised the condition of woman. When I say “raised the condition of woman,” I mean that man, who with his superior brute strength had long ago lifted a heavy stone and laid it upon her head, now began, though only in particular instances, to exercise self-control and forethought, and to lighten the deadening weight which he, not nature, had placed upon the brain of his mate and the mother of his children. He probably thought then, as he thinks to-day, that it was “generous” of him to do this. Sometimes justice lightens forth upon the earth, but man has not yet learned how superior to other forms of electricity it is for all illuminating purposes.

However this may be, under Rome as with the free Germanic peoples in the forests of Northern Europe, woman, the weight upon her head somewhat lightened, stepped with freedom and grew in stature. Let Lucretia and Cornelia speak, for how sacred to the Roman type was her wifehood and her motherhood! Those warrior priestesses and warrior wives of the dark Germanic forests—what were they but the old cave-mother grown fair and strong and patriotic, far off breeders of to-day’s world-fighters and world-thinkers?

The Christian religion entered the arena. When woman was esteemed the mother, sister, friend of God, the one who neither betrayed nor doubted. The last at the tomb, the first witness of the resurrection, then the convert to that religion turned perforce and looked with new eyes at the woman at his side. Jesus of Nazareth, by precept and by example, taught the lifting of the stone quite from the head of woman. His disciples then, as His disciples to-day, followed His teachings, in part.

Out of the darkness of the seventh and eighth centuries in Europe came a strange and beautiful light—chivalry. How such a flower, such a star out of the distance, such a strain of music arrived, it were long to say. But it came, as all things come, out of the mysterious storehouse of our nature. In its purest form it was a worthy and a beautiful thing. Nor have we lost it–it is doubtful if we ever lose anything.

Men are still chivalrous; women still love to look upon men as knights panoplied in every heroic virtue. If to-day that fairy mirror, in which each sex looked and saw the other, is a little flawed and dim, it is but that leaves and dust have fallen upon the surface of a wondrous spring. One day we will clear them all away, and underneath we shall find again the fairy mirror, no longer exaggerative, fictional, transforming, but at once deeply true and nobly ideal.

Woman, always, from the first, dumbly striving against polygamy, either as a legalized and religiously sanctioned institution in a state founded upon this conception of the family, or as masculine irregularity and freedom of construction in monogamous societies; always dumbly fighting for a like standard of chastity and right living, a design under which she should not stand alone, but with her lover at her side, found in chivalry a staunch knight errant, ready and willing to wear her colors and fight her cause. A great advance dates from this period. But in chivalry, with all its real nobility there were yet fantastic elements strange, unwholesome, mock-heroic imperatives, a pathetic biological ignorance, a whole world of mental topsy-turvydoms. Primarily and emphatically, it was based upon the old, old fallacy of man’s “generosity” to a thing made weaker all around the compass than himself. A thing put by the will of God, not under the hand of a savage with a club–that sounded too harsh–but under the mailed gauntlet of a knight and Crusader.

Fantastic observances, a paean of praises little to the point, hothouse morality, exotic sex worship, a whole tribe of valetudinarian ideas sprang up in the wake of all this “generosity” where, in the wake of justice, should have arisen the man and woman of a poet’s dream. If we cannot have bread, cake and medieval marchpane are perhaps better than starvation. But the true daughter of the cave-woman asks for bread. She thinks that it will be to the benefit of her own body, mind and soul, and that, so fed, she will breed certain saviours of mankind.

The savage grew educated, a knight and a gentleman. The club was shaved down to a stick no thicker than man’s thumb. The steel gauntlet has been laid aside for a velvet glove. Human stuff is the most modifiable of substances; it is, in fact, mere plasticity. The woman sees the stone that she has carried through the ages as real; changed from the slab of the sepulcher to a more enormous top-heavy mass of conventions, senseless restrictions, superstitions, sentimentalities, mock modesties, rules of conduct dating from nowhere on earth, but her seraglio experience, sequestration from healthful activities, premiums on mental indolence, a vast incubus of bric-a-brac and filigree teachings, of discriminating laws, taboos, taxes, vetoes, and general miscomprehension, at which the old cave-mother in her laughs in scorn and despair. It is enough to sink a ship, much more woman! She wants, oh, she wants to be free of that burden, to feel it slip from her head as Christian11 felt fall from his back the burden of sin! It is not sin that she carries. It is largely man’s ignorance and unwisdom, aided, alas! alas! by her own large share of both those qualities. Not so very long ago it was still in dispute among the wise of this earth as to whether or not she had a soul. In England it was only recently agreed, I believe, that she is a person.

She has a soul and she is a person. She is the mother of humankind. She made the first home and reared the first child, and she will make the last home and rear the last child. ln her long history, begun in some dark point of time and place, continued through weeping and bitterness and fragmentary joys, ready now to sweep onward upon a wider wing, with a journey before her wondrous in itself and leading to ends beyond all wonder, a dispute of the momentary present as to which is in order in dealing with her, further “generosity,” which is a gift, or justice, which is a recognition—in her long history, to-day’s dispute is but an incident, a battle over which her future students may spend some study. She knows it is such, and having been patient a long while, she can be patient yet longer. But I think what chiefly angers the old cave-mother is that most vain and shallow imagination of her sons, or of her daughters when their brothers have whispered it to them, that the battle which she flights for a loftier-roofed home and for a family more worth the raising will, in some occult fashion, destroy her interest in either. It is purely a masculine fear. The drone in the hive might say as much to the queen bee—but I don’t like to think of the fate of the drone.

I have seen in an asylum for the insane a gray-haired woman pacing off her cell for an imaginary carpet, stroking down imaginary curtains, placing imaginary chairs and tables, and then standing off to look at her work—so pleased, so pleased! Upon her iron bed lay a doll. She listened, said that the baby was awake, took up the doll and put it to her breast. In Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi,” the two brothers send executioners first to terrify the duchess, and then to strangle her. After a pageantry of horror they seize her. She says:

“Farewell, Cariola . . . I pray thee look thou giv’st my little boy Some syrup for his cold . . . and let the girl Say her prayers ere she sleep”—

and dies.

When the ruling passion so holds in death and madness it may be trusted to rule through life. The stone upon the head is not necessary to the cave-mother. Without it she will yet make the home and bear the human race. Indeed, she thinks that, upon the whole, she can do her work better without that load. In defense of her brood she has fought many a beast in many a poisonous Jungle. She will not be long afraid of clean, direct and scientific warfare against the forces of sloth, prejudice and babe-like social ignorance, which now invade her “home” and destroy her “family.”

Footnotes

  1. Soon after her commitment to the cause of suffrage, Johnston submitted what we would characterize as an op-ed to the the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sunday edition. This essay argues against the claim that if granted equal suffrage, women would abandon their roles as wives and mothers. She does so be providing an evolutionary and global overview of womanhood that previews the plot and structure of The Wanderers, published seven years later. 

  2. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. The Times Dispatch, December 12, 1909, Page 3 and Page 4

  3. Prehistoric era treated in chapter 1 of The Wanderers

  4. Prehistoric era treated in chapter 2 of The Wanderers

  5. Prehistoric eras treated in chapters 3-5 of The Wanderers

  6. a female instructor 

  7. a machine gun adopted by the US military in 1909 and used in WWI 

  8. Progression of eras treated in chapters 1-6 of The Wanderers

  9. Historic periods treated in chapters 8-13 of The Wanderers

  10. Persian Letters, an epistolary novel by Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, published in 1721. 

  11. The protagonist of John Bunyan’s widely-read allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678.