Woman and the Future
I saw a woman sleeping. In her sleep she dreamed Life stood
before her, and held in each hand a gift—in the one Love, in
the other Freedom. And she said to the woman, "Choose!"
And the woman waited long: and she said, "Freedom!"
And Life said, "Thou has well chosen. If thou hadst said,
`Love,' I would have given thee that thou didst ask for; and
I would have gone from thee, and returned to thee no more.
Now, the day will come when I shall return. In that day I
shall bear both gifts in one hand."
I heard the woman laugh in her sleep.
—Olive Schreiner
By no means is it necessary to look forward to some vague and distant
date of the future to test the benefits which the human race derives
from the program I have suggested in the preceding pages. The results
to the individual woman, to the family, and to the State, particularly
in the case of Holland, have already been investigated and recorded.
Our philosophy is no doctrine of escape from the immediate and
pressing realities of life. on the contrary, we say to men and women,
and particularly to the latter: face the realities of your own soul
and body; know thyself! And in this last admonition, we mean that this
knowledge should not consist of some vague shopworn generalities about
the nature of woman—woman as created in the minds of men, nor woman
putting herself on a romantic pedestal above the harsh facts of this
workaday world. Women can attain freedom only by concrete, definite
knowledge of themselves, a knowledge based on biology, physiology and
psychology.
Nevertheless it would be wrong to shut our eyes to the vision of a
world of free men and women, a world which would more closely resemble
a garden than the present jungle of chaotic conflicts and fears. One
of the greatest dangers of social idealists, to all of us who hope to
make a better world, is to seek refuge in highly colored fantasies of
the future rather than to face and combat the bitter and evil
realities which to-day on all sides confront us. I believe that the
reader of my preceding chapters will not accuse me of shirking these
realities; indeed, he may think that I have overemphasized the great
biological problems of defect, delinquency and bad breeding. It is in
the hope that others too may glimpse my vision of a world regenerated
that I submit the following suggestions. They are based on the belief
that we must seek individual and racial health not by great political
or social reconstruction, but, turning to a recognition of our own
inherent powers and development, by the release of our inner energies.
It is thus that all of us can best aid in making of this world,
instead of a vale of tears, a garden.
Let us first of all consider merely from the viewpoint of business and
"efficiency" the biological or racial problems which confront us. As
Americans, we have of late made much of "efficiency" and business
organization. Yet would any corporation for one moment conduct its
affairs as we conduct the infinitely more important affairs of our
civilization? Would any modern stockbreeder permit the deterioration
of his livestock as we not only permit but positively encourage the
destruction and deterioration of the most precious, the most essential
elements in our world community—the mothers and children. With the
mothers and children thus cheapened, the next generation of men and
women is inevitably below par. The tendency of the human elements,
under present conditions, is constantly downward.
Turn to Robert M. Yerkes's "Psychological Examining in the United
States Army"[1] in which we are informed that the psychological
examination of the drafted men indicated that nearly half—47.3 per
cent.—of the population had the mentality of twelve-year-old children
or less—in other words that they are morons. Professor Conklin, in
his recently published volume "The Direction of Human Evolution"[2]
is led, on the findings of Mr. Yerkes's report, to assert: "Assuming
that these drafted men are a fair sample of the entire population of
approximately 100,000,000, this means that 45,000,000 or nearly one-half the entire population, will never develop mental capacity beyond
the stage represented by a normal twelve-year-old child, and that only
13,500,000 will ever show superior intelligence."
Making all due allowances for the errors and discrepancies of the
psychological examination, we are nevertheless face to face with a
serious and destructive practice. Our "overhead" expense in
segregating the delinquent, the defective and the dependent, in
prisons, asylums and permanent homes, our failure to segregate morons
who are increasing and multiplying—I have sufficiently indicated,
though in truth I have merely scratched the surface of this
international menace—demonstrate our foolhardy and extravagant
sentimentalism. No industrial corporation could maintain its existence
upon such a foundation. Yet hardheaded "captains of industry,"
financiers who pride themselves upon their cool-headed and keen-sighted business ability are dropping millions into rosewater
philanthropies and charities that are silly at best and vicious at
worst. In our dealings with such elements there is a bland
maladministration and misuse of huge sums that should in all
righteousness be used for the development and education of the healthy
elements of the community.
At the present time, civilized nations are penalizing talent and
genius, the bearers of the torch of civilization, to coddle and
perpetuate the choking human undergrowth, which, as all authorities
tell us, is escaping control and threatens to overrun the whole garden
of humanity. Yet men continue to drug themselves with the opiate of
optimism, or sink back upon the cushions of Christian resignation,
their intellectual powers anaesthetized by cheerful platitudes. Or
else, even those, who are fully cognizant of the chaos and conflict,
seek an escape in those pretentious but fundamentally fallacious
social philosophies which place the blame for contemporary world
misery upon anybody or anything except the indomitable but
uncontrolled instincts of living organisms. These men fight with
shadows and forget the realities of existence. Too many centuries
have we sought to hide from the inevitable, which confronts us at
every step throughout life.
Let us conceive for the moment at least, a world not burdened by the
weight of dependent and delinquent classes, a total population of
mature, intelligent, critical and expressive men and women. Instead
of the inert, exploitable, mentally passive class which now forms the
barren substratum of our civilization, try to imagine a population
active, resistant, passing individual and social lives of the most
contented and healthy sort. Would such men and women, liberated from
our endless, unceasing struggle against mass prejudice and inertia, be
deprived in any way of the stimulating zest of life? Would they sink
into a slough of complacency and fatuity?
No! Life for them would be enriched, intensified and ennobled in a
fashion it is difficult for us in our spiritual and physical squalor
even to imagine. There would be a new renaissance of the arts and
sciences. Awakened at last to the proximity of the treasures of life
lying all about them, the children of that age would be inspired by a
spirit of adventure and romance that would indeed produce a
terrestrial paradise.
Let us look forward to this great release of creative and constructive
energy, not as an idle, vacuous mirage, but as a promise which we, as
the whole human race, have it in our power, in the very conduct of our
lives from day to day, to transmute into a glorious reality. Let us
look forward to that era, perhaps not so distant as we believe, when
the great adventures in the enchanted realm of the arts and sciences
may no longer be the privilege of a gifted few, but the rightful
heritage of a race of genius. In such a world men and women would no
longer seek escape from themselves by the fantastic and the faraway.
They would be awakened to the realization that the source of life, of
happiness, is to be found not outside themselves, but within, in the
healthful exercise of their God-given functions. The treasures of
life are not hidden; they are close at hand, so close that we overlook
them. We cheat ourselves with a pitiful fear of ourselves. Men and
women of the future will not seek happiness; they will have gone
beyond it. Mere happiness would produce monotony. And their lives
shall be lives of change and variety with the thrills produced by
experiment and research.
Fear will have been abolished: first of all, the fear of outside
things and other people; finally the fear of oneself. And with these
fears must disappear forever all those poisons of hatreds, individual
and international. For the realization would come that there would be
no reason for, no value in encroaching upon, the freedom of one
another. To-day we are living in a world which is like a forest of
trees too thickly planted. Hence the ferocious, unending struggle for
existence. Like innumerable ages past, the present age is one of
mutual destruction. Our aim is to substitute cooperation, equity, and
amity for antagonism and conflict. If the aim of our country or our
civilization is to attain a hollow, meaningless superiority over
others in aggregate wealth and population, it may be sound policy to
shut our eyes to the sacrifice of human life,—unregarded life and
suffering—and to stimulate rapid procreation. But even so, such a
policy is bound in the long run to defeat itself, as the decline and
fall of great civilizations of the past emphatically indicate. Even
the bitterest opponent of our ideals would refuse to subscribe to a
philosophy of mere quantity, of wealth and population lacking in
spiritual direction or significance. All of us hope for and look
forward to the fine flowering of human genius—of genius not expending
and dissipating its energy in the bitter struggle for mere existence,
but developing to a fine maturity, sustained and nourished by the soil
of active appreciation, criticism, and recognition.
Not by denying the central and basic biological facts of our nature,
not by subscribing to the glittering but false values of any
philosophy or program of escape, not by wild Utopian dreams of the
brotherhood of men, not by any sanctimonious debauch of sentimentality
or religiosity, may we accomplish the first feeble step toward
liberation. On the contrary, only by firmly planting our feet on the
solid ground of scientific fact may we even stand erect—may we even
rise from the servile stooping posture of the slave, borne down by the
weight of age-old oppression.
In looking forward to this radiant release of the inner energies of a
regenerated humanity, I am not thinking merely of inventions and
discoveries and the application of these to the perfecting of the
external and mechanical details of social life. This external and
scientific perfecting of the mechanism of external life is a
phenomenon we are to a great extent witnessing today. But in a deeper
sense this tendency can be of no true or lasting value if it cannot be
made to subserve the biological and spiritual development of the human
organism, individual and collective. Our great problem is not merely
to perfect machinery, to produce superb ships, motor cars or great
buildings, but to remodel the race so that it may equal the amazing
progress we see now making in the externals of life. We must first
free our bodies from disease and predisposition to disease. We must
perfect these bodies and make them fine instruments of the mind and
the spirit. Only thus, when the body becomes an aid instead of a
hindrance to human expression may we attain any civilization worthy of
the name. Only thus may we create our bodies a fitting temple for the
soul, which is nothing but a vague unreality except insofar as it is
able to manifest itself in the beauty of the concrete.
Once we have accomplished the first tentative steps toward the
creation of a real civilization, the task of freeing the spirit of
mankind from the bondage of ignorance, prejudice and mental passivity
which is more fettering now than ever in the history of humanity, will
be facilitated a thousand-fold. The great central problem, and one
which must be taken first is the abolition of the shame and fear of
sex. We must teach men the overwhelming power of this radiant force.
We must make them understand that uncontrolled, it is a cruel tyrant,
but that controlled and directed, it may be used to transmute and
sublimate the everyday world into a realm of beauty and joy. Through
sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will
transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly
paradise. So must we necessarily and inevitably conceive of sex-expression. The instinct is here. None of us can avoid it. It is in
our power to make it a thing of beauty and a joy forever: or to deny
it, as have the ascetics of the past, to revile this expression and
then to pay the penalty, the bitter penalty that Society to-day is
paying in innumerable ways.
If I am criticized for the seeming "selfishness" of this conception
it will be through a misunderstanding. The individual is fulfiling
his duty to society as a whole by not self-sacrifice but by self-development. He does his best for the world not by dying for it, not
by increasing the sum total of misery, disease and unhappiness, but by
increasing his own stature, by releasing a greater energy, by being
active instead of passive, creative instead of destructive. This is
fundamentally the greatest truth to be discovered by womankind at
large. And until women are awakened to their pivotal function in the
creation of a new civilization, that new era will remain an impossible
and fantastic dream. The new civilization can become a glorious
reality only with the awakening of woman's now dormant qualities of
strength, courage, and vigor. As a great thinker of the last century
pointed out, not only to her own health and happiness is the physical
degeneracy of woman destructive, but to our whole race. The physical
and psychic power of woman is more indispensable to the well-being
and power of the human race than that even of man, for the strength
and happiness of the child is more organically united with that of the
mother.
Parallel with the awakening of woman's interest in her own fundamental
nature, in her realization that her greatest duty to society lies in
self-realization, will come a greater and deeper love for all of
humanity. For in attaining a true individuality of her own she will
understand that we are all individuals, that each human being is
essentially implicated in every question or problem which involves the
well-being of the humblest of us. So to-day we are not to meet the
great problems of defect and delinquency in any merely sentimental or
superficial manner, but with the firmest and most unflinching attitude
toward the true interest of our fellow beings. It is from no mere
feeling of brotherly love or sentimental philanthropy that we women
must insist upon enhancing the value of child life. It is because we
know that, if our children are to develop to their full capabilities,
all children must be assured a similar opportunity. Every single case
of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally
tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance
to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the
rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or
another for these biological and racial mistakes. We look forward in
our vision of the future to children brought into the world because
they are desired, called from the unknown by a fearless and conscious
passion, because women and men need children to complete the symmetry
of their own development, no less than to perpetuate the race. They
shall be called into a world enhanced and made beautiful by the spirit
of freedom and romance—into a world wherein the creatures of our new
day, unhampered and unbound by the sinister forces of prejudice and
immovable habit, may work out their own destinies. Perhaps we may
catch fragmentary glimpses of this new life in certain societies of
the past, in Greece perhaps; but in all of these past civilizations
these happy groups formed but a small exclusive section of the
population. To-day our task is greater; for we realize that no
section of humanity can be reclaimed without the regeneration of the
whole.
I look, therefore, into a Future when men and women will not dissipate
their energy in the vain and fruitless search for content outside of
themselves, in far-away places or people. Perfect masters of their own
inherent powers, controlled with a fine understanding of the art of
life and of love, adapting themselves with pliancy and intelligence to
the milieu in which they find themselves, they will unafraid enjoy
life to the utmost. Women will for the first time in the unhappy
history of this globe establish a true equilibrium and "balance of
power" in the relation of the sexes. The old antagonism will have
disappeared, the old ill-concealed warfare between men and women. For
the men themselves will comprehend that in this cultivation of the
human garden they will be rewarded a thousand times. Interest in the
vague sentimental fantasies of extra-mundane existence, in
pathological or hysterical flights from the realities of our
earthliness, will have through atrophy disappeared, for in that dawn
men and women will have come to the realization, already suggested,
that here close at hand is our paradise, our everlasting abode, our
Heaven and our eternity. Not by leaving it and our essential humanity
behind us, nor by sighing to be anything but what we are, shall we
ever become ennobled or immortal. Not for woman only, but for all of
humanity is this the field where we must seek the secret of eternal
life.
