Helen H. Gardener

“ He stultifies his every utterance and makes of his mind a jailer, and of his laws slave drivers, for all who cannot by physical force wrench from him the right to their own liberty and to their human status of equality of opportunity.
Men have everywhere grown to believe that they have been born and that they rule women by divine right. Woman is a mere annex to and for his glory. She exists for him to rule, to think for, to adore, to tolerate or to abuse as he sees fit, or as is his type or nature. ”

“ But when we study anthropology and heredity we come to realize the indisputable facts that her love, her physical heroism and her bravery, linked with her political and financial subject status, has cast a physical blight, a moral shadow and a mental threat upon the world, we cease to clap quite so vigorously at the theater and our tears or smiles are mingled with mental reservations and a sigh for a loftier ideal of the meaning and purpose of maternity than the merely physical one that man has depicted as material sacrifice to the child and self-abnegation and subjection to him. ”

“ If, because of their sex, men demand privileges, rights, emoluments, honors, opportunities and freedom, which they claim as good for and necessary to them and their welfare, while they insist that all these are not to be allowed to women—would be her damnation—are not these, also, sex maniacs? Has not humanity been long enough cursed by so degrading and degraded, so ignorant and so fatally wrong a mental, moral, social and legal outlook? ”

“ In short the people who do not exist—the villain who is consistently and invariably villainous, the woman who is an angel, the people who never make mistakes, or who are able and wise enough to rectify them nobly, and all the endless brood are familiar enough. We know all of them, and are prepared for them when we meet them—which we never do. But for the real people we are not prepared. For the exigencies of life that come; for the decisions and judgments we are called upon to make, the fictions of fiction have contributed to disarm us. ”

“ We all know that vicious success is common—that often vice and success are partners for life and that in death they are not divided; that the wicked flourish like a green bay-tree—why blink it in fiction? Why add suspicion to failure and misfortune, and gloss success with the added glory that it is necessarily the result of virtue? To those who know how false the theory is, it is a bad lesson—to those who do not know it, it is a disarmament against imposition. ”

“ It can hardly be urged that it could add to the dignity or honor of womanhood for a tie to be indissoluble which in itself, under such conditions, is a degradation and an insult. Take for example a drunken, a dissolute or a brutal husband. Can it be said to strike at anything dear or noble for womankind that some wife is absolutely freed from such companionship? That she be no longer forced to bear his society or even his name? Surely no good end can be served by the outward continuance of a tie already broken in fact. No one can be made better, no one happier. ”

“ Does he not labor first of all to secure every scrap of evidence against the accused and to make light of or cover up anything in his favor? Is not the State quite as anxious that he—its representative—find citizens guiltless, if they are so, as that he convict them if they are offenders against the law? Is not the prosecutor offending against the law of the land as well as against that of ordinary humanity when he bends all the vast machinery of his office to collect evidence against and refuses to admit—tries to rule out—evidence in favor of one of "the people" whose employee he is? ”

“ The condemned man, upon whom the death watch has been set, who cannot hope for executive clemency, who is helpless in the hands of absolute power, still knows that, although death may be sure, physical suffering is unlikely or at the worst will be but brief; but he alone stands in the position to know—even to a degree—the nervous strain, the mental anguish, the unthinking but uncontrollable panics of flesh and blood and nerve which woman faces at the behests of love and maternity and, alas, that it can be true, at the behests of sex power and financial dependence! ”

“ There is no angel visitant who cools our fevered brow with gentle wings and lulls our fears with promise of help from other than human agencies—which promises are straightway fulfilled, of course, in fiction. We sit down and wait but no rich relation dies and leaves us a legacy, nor does the prince appear and wed us. Nothing is orthodox, but we have lost much valuable time, and strength, and hope in waiting for it to be so. We have failed to adjust ourselves to life as it is. We do not measure ourselves nor others by standards that have a par value. ”

“ All masculine thought and expression up to the present time has been in the language of sex, and not in the language of race; and so it has come about that the music of humanity has been set in one key and played on one chord.
It has been well said that an Englishman cannot speak French correctly until he has learned to think in French. It is far more true that no one can speak or write the language of human liberty and equality until he has learned to think in that language, and to feel without stopping to argue with himself, that right is not masculine only and that justice knows no sex. ”

“ We wonder if an unwilling, a forced or supinely yielding (and not self-controlled) , a subject motherhood, in short, is not responsible to the race for the weak, the deformed, the depraved, the double dealing, pretense-soaked natures which curse the world with failure, with disease, with war, with insanity and with crime. We wonder if the awful power with which nature clothes maternity in heredity does not strike blindly back at the race for man's artificial and cruel requirements at the hands of the producer of the race. ”

“ Upon examination, the surgeon, a gentle, sweet-natured man, whose enthusiasm for his profession—for the relief of suffering—makes him the object of devotion of many to whom he has given life and health, and the inspirer and final appeal for many a brother practitioner, discovered what he believed to be the trouble. Led by that most uncommon of all things, common sense, he believed that this little victim of nature's mistake might be changed from a condition far worse than death to one of comfort for itself, and to those who now looked upon it only in anguish of soul. ”

“ Now, when it comes to dealing with his fellows, man has—in the main—a fair amount of reason and logic; but the moment he is called upon to think of woman as simply a human being like himself, to deal with and for her as such, to give her a chance to do the same with, and by, and for herself, that moment man becomes an emotional, irrational sex maniac. He is absolutely unable to look upon woman as first of all, a free individuality, a human being on exactly the same plane as himself. She is instantly "wife," "daughter," or victim to his mind always. ”

“ We wonder if mothers do not owe a higher duty to their offspring than that of mere nurse. We wonder if she has the moral right to give her children the inheritance that accident and subserviency stamps upon body and mind. We wonder how she dares face her child and know that she did not fit herself by self-development and by direct, sincere, firm and thorough qualifications for maternity before she dared to assume its responsibilities. ”

“ Sex bias, sex arrogance, sex pride, sex assumption is so ingrained that it simply does not occur to the male logicians, scientists, philosophers and politicians that there is a humanity. They see, think of and argue for and about only a sex of man—with an annex to him—woman. They call this the race; but they do not mean the race—they mean men. They write and talk of "human beings;" of their needs, their education, their capacity and development; but they are not thinking of humanity at all. ”

“ Do you know any religious father (or many mothers) in this world who would refuse to allow their son, whom they know to be of bad character, to marry a girl who is as pure and spotless and suspicion-less as a flower? "She will reform him," they say. "It will be good for him to marry such a girl." And how will it be for her? Does the religious man or woman not take this view of morals? Has right and wrong, sex? Is honor and truthfulness toward others limited in application? Have you a right to deceive certain people for the pleasure or benefit of other people? ”

“ Nowhere else in nature does the male claim all of the other avenues of life as his special sex privilege, except alone the one which he cannot perform—that of maternity. The sexes stand on an exact equality as to opportunity until we come to man. The brain of each is developed to the extent of its capacity. The freedom and opportunity for food and pleasure are enjoyed by the sexes alike. When the desire for maternity is strong upon her is the only time that the female brute animal ever becomes a mother. ”

“ It is the production of a man of profound learning and research, a man who sees the light of the future dawning, although even he sometimes lapses from a universal, language of humanity into hereditary forms of speech, hedged in by sex bias.
But in all the past arguments maternity with its duties to itself; maternity with its duties to the race, has never been more than merely touched upon, and even then it has been chiefly from the side of the present, and not with the tremendous search-light of heredity and of future generations turned upon it. ”

“ That instant all men, including those who have but just waxed eloquent over the injustice and the real danger of permitting inequality before the law, become aristocrats. Claiming to be the logical sex, man throws logic to the winds. Claiming to have fought and bled to enthrone "liberty," he forgets its very name! Asserting that in his own hand alone can the scales of justice be held level, he makes of justice, of liberty and of equality a mockery and a pretense! ”

“ Nothing but a low, perverted and weak moral and ethical sense makes possible the need of an argument on this subject. It is self-evident the moment one stops to ask himself a few simple and primitive questions: "Am I willing to buy my own comfort and pleasure at the expense of those who are helpless? Am I willing to be a moral and physical pauper preying upon the rights of my children? Am I willing to be a thief and misappropriate their physical, mental and moral heritage? Am I willing to be a murderer and taint with slow poison their lives before they get them? ”

“ Upon this scrap of land—about one mile long and less than half a mile wide at its widest point—is concentrated so much of misery and human sorrow and anguish, that it is difficult to either grasp the idea one's self or convey it to others.
There are three classes of dead sent here by the city. Those who are imbecile or insane—dead to thought or reason; those who are dead to society and hope—medium term criminals; and those whom want, and sorrow, and pain, and wrong can touch no more after the last indignity is stamped upon their dishonored clay. ”

“ In discussing any question which involves the welfare and happiness of people who live to-day, or are to live hereafter, I think we may take it for granted that we must consider it in the light of conditions now existing or those likely to exist in the future. We must clearly understand to what domain the question fairly belongs; whether it is a question of vital importance between human beings in their relations to each other, and whether it is a matter in which the law is the final appeal. We may fairly assume that the questions of marriage and divorce have to do with this world only. ”

“ Were the claim to superior opportunity, status and position based upon capacity, character or wealth, upon perfection of form or grace of bearing, one could understand, if not accept, the reasonableness of the position, for it would then rest upon some sort of recognized superiority, but while it is based upon sex—a mere accident of form carrying with it a brute instinct, which is not even glorified by the capacity to produce, and seldom throughout nature, to suffer for and protect the blossom of that instinct—surely no lower, less vital or more degraded a basis could possibly be chosen. ”

“ I'm as sound in person and in heredity as any man who ever lived, but I am at the mercy of that absurdest of all covers for personal incapacity—professional etiquette—combined with the unreasonable fact that insurance companies require an applicant to tell their examiners just what piece of idiotic prejudice has been launched at him by the doctor of every other company, so that they can all hold together and fit his case to the reports, and not the reports to the facts in his case as they find them. ”

“ Believing that the power of a free and fearless press is the greatest power for good that has yet been devised; and believing most sincerely, that wrongs grow greatest where silence is imposed or ignorance of the facts stands between the wrong doer, or the wrong deed, and enlightened public opinion, I decided to learn and to tell just the meaning—all of the meaning—of those six sadly and shockingly suggestive words. ”

“ Nature has no favorites.
Heredity does not spare your daughter, and yet men who plant the seeds of sex perversion in their own families have the infinite impudence to cast from their doors the blossom of their own tillage! ”

“ The priest, reinforced by the doctor, promised a long and bitter struggle, on new grounds, to those who fought for simple justice to the individual, aside from her sex relations; who wished for neither malediction nor mercy; those who claim only the right of a unit to enjoy the common heritage untrammeled by superstition and artificial difficulties. They do not ask to be helped—only not to be hindered. They had hailed science as their friend and ally; and behold, pseudo-science adopted theories, invented statistics, and published personal prejudices as demonstrated fact. ”

“ He knows that to her the limit of responsibility is the verge of her desires on this question. He knows that she recognizes no right of property in a beverage she does not approve and a traffic she hopes to destroy. He knows that her sense of helplessness within the law—where she has no voice—gives her that reckless spirit of the political non-existent of all classes, which finds its revenge in lawlessness so long as it may not hope to have a voice in lawfulness. ”

“ That there ever was or ever will be a "union of souls" in a family where a double standard holds sway, or that women are truthful or frank with men upon whom they are dependent, are fictions which it were time to face and controvert with facts. Dependence and frankness never co-existed in this world in an adult brain—whether it were the dependence of the serf or of the wife or daughter, the result is ever the same. The elements of character which tend to self-respect and hence to open and truthful natures, are not possible in a dependent—or in a social or political inferior. ”

“ The fairest insurance contract written still has room for improvement.
Is there no way to protect these great corporations against the frauds of individuals, and at the same time protect the individual against the frauds of the corporations?
Must life-insurance contracts be absolutely one-sided, and that be the side of the strong against the weak; the guarded against the unguarded; the living against the dead? ”

“ The children of a father who "sowed his wild oats" by the method prescribed by the Inspector (and alas, by social custom) are as truly his victims as is the pariah of humanity who is to be quarantined in some given locality, made a social leper and a physical wreck that he, personally, may be neither the one nor the other. But nature is a terrible antagonist. She bides her time and when she strikes she does not forget to strike a harder, wider-reaching, more terrible blow than can be compassed by a single individuality or a single generation. ”

“ Nothing, it appears, is to be done at the congresses to show that a higher education and a larger intellectual advancement has enabled women to bear healthier children or to bring them up in a manner more surely tending to make this a better world to live in, the noblest of all work that can be done by women.
"We need no congress to show us that women are more thoroughly educated than they once were, or that they can successfully do things once forbidden to them. But have wider culture and wider opportunities made them better wives and mothers? ”