Floyd Dell

“ Can anyone, seeing the lone eminence of Miss Addams, assert that imaginative sympathy, patience, and the spirit of conciliation are the ordinary traits of women? Can anyone, seeing the battle frenzy which Mrs. Pankhurst has evoked with a signal in thousands of ordinary Englishwomen, deny that women have a fighting soul?
And can anyone doubt the effect which the emergence of women into politics will have, eventually, on politics? Eventually, for in spite of their boasted independence the decorous example of men will rule them at first. ”

“ She will realize the mission of woman's body and the holiness of all its parts. She will dance the changing life of nature, showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall dance the freedom of woman. ”

“ If the woman's movement means anything, it means that women are demanding everything. They will not exchange one place for another, nor give up one right to pay for another, but they will achieve all rights to which their bodies and brains give them an implicit title. They will have a larger political life, a larger motherhood, a larger social service, a larger love, and they will reconstruct or destroy institutions to that end as it becomes necessary. They will not be content with any concession or any triumph until they have conquered all experience. ”

“ Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the world; a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life giving; a creator of free men and women. ”

“ Again, one may inquire why, since I have not blinked the fact that the feminist movement is making for a revolution of values in sex—why I have not included any woman who has distinguished herself by defying antiquated conventions which are supposed to rule the relations of the sexes. This requires a serious answer. The adjustment of one's social and personal relations, so far as may be, to accord with one's own convictions—that is not feminism, in my opinion: it is only common sense. ”

“ In any case, it is to the body that one looks for the Magna Charta of feminism.
[Pg 45] The eye—that is to say—is guarantor for the safety of art in a future régime under the dominance of women; and the ear for poetry. These have their functions and their needs, and the woman of the future will not deny them.
It is the hand that Olive Schreiner would emancipate from idleness. She knows the significance of the hand in human history. It was by virtue of the hand that we, and not some other creature, gained lordship over the earth. ”

“ Gilman are practical; and I fancy that she rather exaggerates the possibilities of independent work for women who have or intend to have children. But the spirit behind these plans is one which cannot but be in the greatest degree stimulating and beneficent in its effect upon her sex.
For Mrs. Gilman is, first of all, a poet, an idealist. She is a lover of life. She rejoices [Pg 25] in beauty and daring and achievement, in all the fine and splendid things of the world. She does not merely disapprove of the contemporary "home" as wasteful and inefficient—she hates it because it vulgarizes life. ”

“ The doubtful aspect in the situation is as to whether women are or can be individuals—that is, free—and whether there is not danger, under the circumstances, in labelling them free, thus giving them the liberty of action which is allowed to the free. It is this doubt and fear which is behind the opposition which is being offered the vanguard of those who are 'asking for' freedom. It is the kind of fear which an engineer would have in guaranteeing an arch equal to a strain above its strength. The opponents of the Freewomen are not actuated by spleen or by stupidity, but by dread. ”

“ It must be remembered that the view which holds that the chastity of unmarried women is well purchased at the price of prostitution, is a masculine view. It is a piece of the sinister and cruel idealism of the male mind, divorced (as the male mind is so capable of being) from realities. No woman would ever have created prostitution to preserve the chastity of part of her sex; and the more familiar one becomes with the specific character of the feminine mind, the more impossible does it seem that women will, when they have come to think and act for themselves, permanently maintain it. ”

“ I confess to having the greatest sympathy for her, and in her endeavor to create a livelier, a more hilarious and human morale, she is doing, I feel, a real service to the cause of women. Our American pseudo-aristocracy is capable to teach us, despite its fantastic excesses, how to play. And emancipation from middle-class standards of taste, morality, and intellect is, so far as it goes, a good thing. ”

“ Has a new world, bounded by factory walls [Pg 70] and noisy with the roar of machinery, grown up about us, to keep women from their heritage? She will help them to use those very walls and that very machinery to achieve their destiny, a destiny of which a physical well-being is, as Walt Whitman knew it to be, the most certain symbol.
The factory already gives women a certain independence. It may yet give them pleasure, the joy of creation. Indeed, it must, when the workers require it; and those who are most likely to require it are the women workers. ”

“ But to class Olive Schreiner as a sociologist and Isadora Duncan as a dancer, to divorce them by any such categories, is to do them both an injustice. For they are sister workers in the woman's movement. They have each shown the way to a new freedom of the body and the soul. ”

“ It is the drawback of the woman's movement that in any one of its aspects (heightened and colored as such an aspect often is by the violence of propaganda) it may appear too fiercely narrow. That women should make so much fuss about getting the vote, or that they should so excite themselves over the prospect of working for wages, will appear incomprehensible to many people who have a proper regard for art, for literature, and for the graces of social intercourse. ”

“ She makes every allowance for human nature, [Pg 81] every concession to the necessities of temperament, every recognition of the human need for freedom, and yet makes the love of one man and one woman seem the highest ideal, a thing worth striving and waiting and suffering for.
She cherishes the spiritual magic of sex as the finest achievement of the race, and sees it as the central and guiding principle in our social and economic evolution. ”

“ Their code being subjective, transgression has meant a darkening of the spirit, a sullying of the soul. Thus the doctrine of self-renunciation, [Pg 102] which is the outstanding feature of Christian ethics, has had the most favorable circumstances to insure its realization, and with women it has won completely—so completely that it now exerts its influence unconsciously. Seeking the realization of the will of others, and not their own, ever waiting upon the minds of others, women have almost lost the instinct for self-realization, the instinct for achievement in their own persons. ”

“ Her writings have had a peculiar career in America, one which perhaps prevents a clear understanding of their character. On the one hand, they have seemed to many to be radically "advanced"; to thousands of middle-class women, who have heard vaguely of these new ideas, and who have secretly and strongly desired to know more of them, her "Love and Marriage" has come as a revolutionary document, the first outspoken word of scorn for conventional morality, the first call to them to take their part in the breaking of new paths. ”

“ People who consider every factory an Inferno, however, and have only pity for its workers, are far from understanding the situation. Here is a field of work which is capable of competing successfully with domestic service, and even of attracting girls from homes where there exists no absolute necessity for women's wages. Yet at its contemporary best, with a ten-hour law in operation, efficient factory inspection, decent working conditions and a just and humane management, the factory remains an institution extremely perilous to the Whitmanic ideal of womanhood. ”

“ It is well known that with the ultra-development of the machine, the subdivision of labor, the régime of piecework, it has become practically impossible for the worker to take any artistic pleasure in his product. It is not so well known how necessary such pleasure in the product is to the physical well-being of women—how utterly disastrous to their nervous organization is the monotony and irresponsibility of piecework. ”

“ A law is an objective thing, laid upon a man's will from outside. It does not enter the inner recesses of consciousness, as does a religion. It is nothing more than a body of prohibitions and commands, which can be obeyed, transgressed or evaded with little injury to the soul. With women moral matters have been wholly different. Resting for support upon a religion, their moral code has received its sanction and force from within. ”

“ I have hearkened to the voice of modern science, which tells me that woman is an inferior being, with a weak body, a stunted mind, poor in creative power, poor in imagination, poor in critical capacity—a being who does not know how to work, nor how to talk, nor how to play! ”

“ The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. ”

“ It is, in fact, this form of activity which to many thousands of factory girls makes the difference between living and existing, between a painful, necessary drudgery and a happy exertion of all their faculties. It can give them a more useful education than any school, a more vital faith than any church, a more invigorating sense of power than any other career open to them.
To do all these things it must be indigenous to working-class soil. ”

“ One thing will be observed with regard to these following papers—though they are imbued with an intense interest in women, they are devoid of the spirit of Romance. I mean that attitude toward woman which accepts her sex as a miraculous justification for her existence, the belief that being a woman is a virtue in itself, apart from the possession of other qualities: in short, woman-worship. The reverence for woman as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of her capacities as friend or leader or servant—that is Romance. ”

“ Women, women's intelligence, and women's judgments have always been regarded with more or less secret contempt, and when woman now speaks of 'equality,' all the natural contempt which a higher order feels for a lower order when it presumes bursts out into the open. ”

“ As opposed to the old-fashioned method of manufacture in the home (or the sweatshop, which is the modern equivalent) , the factory often shows a gain in light and air, a decrease of effort, an added leisure; while, on the other hand, there is a considerable loss of individual freedom and an increase in monotony. But child labor, a too long working day, bad working conditions, lack of protection from fire, personal exploitation by foremen, inhumanly low wages, and all sorts of petty injustice, though not essential to the system, are prominent features of factory work as it generally exists. ”

“ And if such work is not a thing for itself only, but a gateway to a new world, so is such play not a thing for itself only. "It is not only a question of true art," writes Miss Duncan, "it is a question of race, of the development of the female sex to beauty and health, of the return to the original strength and the natural movements of woman's body. ”

“ So that we have as the motive behind the rebellion of women an obscure rebellion of men. Why, then, have men appeared hostile to the woman's rebellion? Because what men desire are real individuals who have achieved their own freedom. It will not do to pluck freedom like a flower and give it to the lady with a polite bow. ”

“ One fact is that secret organizations of Anarchists plotting a violent overthrow of the government do not exist, and never have existed, save in the writings of Johann Most and in the imagination of the police: the whole spirit of Anarchism is opposed to such organizations. Another fact is that Anarchists do not believe in violence of any kind, or in any exercise of force; when they commit violence it is not as Anarchists, but as outraged human beings. ”

“ The people who have most money and leisure, the most opportunity for social life, are those who have too much of it, anyway. Moreover—and this is an important point—no one profits less by leisure and money than those who have a great deal of it. Consequently, the basis of "society" today is a class of people naturally and inevitably inferior. ”