Jane Addams

“ It was as if the young mother of the grotesque Devil Baby, that victim of wrong doing on the part of others, had revealed to this tragic woman much more clearly than soft words had ever done, that the return of a deed of violence upon the head of the innocent is inevitable; as if she had realized that, although she was destined to walk all the days of her life with the piteous multitude who bear the undeserved wrongs of the world, she would walk henceforth with a sense of companionship. ”

“ Desolated women, stripped by war of all their warm domestic interests and of children long cherished in affectionate solicitude, sat shelterless in the devastating glare of Memory. Because by its pitiless light they were forced to look into the black depths of primitive human nature, occasionally one of these heart-broken women would ignore the strident claims of the present and would insist that the war was cutting at the very taproots of the basic human relations so vitally necessary to the survival of civilization. ”

“ The story of the Devil Baby may have made its appeal through its frank presentation of this very demoniac quality, to those who live under the iron tyranny of that poverty which threatens starvation, and under the dread of a brutality which may any dark night bring them or their children to extinction; to those who have seen both virtue and vice go unrewarded and who have long since ceased to explain.
This more primitive type embodies the eternal patience of those humble, toiling women who through the generations have been held of little value, save as their drudgery ministered to their men. ”

“ My conversations with these girls of modern industry continually filled me with surprise that, required as they are to work under conditions unlike those which women have ever before encountered, they have not only made a remarkable adaptation but have so ably equipped themselves with a new set of motives. The girl who stands on one spot for fifty-six hours each week as she feeds a machine, endlessly repeating the identical motions of her arms and wrists, is much further from the type of woman’s traditional activity than her mother who cooks, cleans, and washes for the household. ”

“ In response to the appeal made by the government to the instinct of self-preservation, the men of the nation were ardent and eager to take any possible risks, to suffer every hardship, and were proud to give their lives in their country’s service. But was it inevitable, I constantly asked myself, that the great nations of Europe should be reduced to such a primitive appeal? Why should they ignore all the other motives which enter into modern patriotism and are such an integral part of devotion to the state that they must in the end be reckoned with? ”

“ Day after day, seeing the rebirth of the newly planted fields on the banks of the Nile, and touched by a fresh sense of the enduring miracle of Spring with its inevitable analogy to the vicissitudes of human experience, one dimly comprehends how the pathetic legends of Osiris, by providing the Egyptian with an example for his own destiny, not only opened the way for a new meaning in life, but also gradually vanquished the terrors of death. ”

“ I hear them repeating those hideous stories of the conduct of the enemy which accumulate every month and upon which the war spirit continually feeds itself, I with difficulty refrain from crying out upon them that he whose courage and devotion they praise so loudly would never have permitted such talk of hatred and revenge in his presence; that he who lived in the regions of science and whose intrepid mind was bent upon the conquest of truth, must feel that he had died in vain did he know to what exaggerations and errors the so-called patriotism of his beloved country had stooped. ”

“ Only through words could they hope to arouse the generosity of strength, to secure a measure of pity for themselves and their children, to so protect the life they had produced that “the precious vintage stored from their own agony” might not wantonly be spilled upon the ground. Possibly the multitude of life’s failures, the obscure victims of unspeakable wrong and brutality, have embodied their memories in a literature of their own, of which the story of the Devil Baby is a specimen, crude and ugly in form, as would be inevitable, but still bringing relief to the surcharged heart. ”

“ As I saw how singularly free this mother was from self-reproach and how untouched by any indecisions or remorses for the past, I was once more impressed by the strength of the stout habits acquired by those who early become accustomed to fight off black despair. Such habits stand them in good stead in old age, and at least protect them from those pensive regrets and inconsolable sorrows which inevitably tend to surround whatever has once made for early happiness, as soon as it has ceased to exist. ”

“ Eagerly seeking continuity with the past by her own secret tests of affinity, she reinforces and encourages Memory’s instinctive processes of selection. If she develops her craving for continuity into a willingness to subordinate a part to the whole and into a sustained and self-forgetful search for congruity and harmony with a life which is greater than hers, she may lift the entire selective process into the realm of Art ”

“ When a mother cares for a sick child for days and nights without relief, the long period of solicitude and dread exhausting every particle of her vitality, her strength is constantly renewed from the vast reservoirs of maternal love and pity whenever she touches the soft flesh or hears the plaintive little voice. But such girls as the strikers represent are steadily bending their energies to loveless and mechanical labor, and are obliged to go on without this direct and personal renewal of their powers of resistance. ”

“ I was sharply reminded of an obvious division between high tradition and current conscience in several conversations I held during the great European war with women who had sent their sons to the front in unquestioning obedience to the demands of the State, but who, owing to their own experiences, had found themselves in the midst of that ever-recurring struggle, often tragic and bitter, between two conceptions of duty, one of which is antagonistic to the other. ”

“ I hope that I am no whining coward—my son gave his life to his country as many another brave man has done, but I do envy the mothers whose grief is at least free from this fearful struggle of opposing ideals and traditions. My old father, who is filled with a solemn pride over his grandson’s gallant record and death, is most impatient with me. ”

“ I heard him telling a friend the other day that my present state of mind was a pure demonstration of the folly of higher education for women; that it was preposterous and more than human flesh could bear to combine an intellectual question on the function of government with a mother’s sharp agony over the death of her child. He said he had always contended that women, at least those who bear children, had no business to consider questions of this sort, and that the good sense of his position was demonstrated now that such women were losing their children in war. ”

“ In the face of many distressing misunderstandings I am certain that if a minority of women in every country would clearly express their convictions they would find that they spoke not for themselves alone but for those men for whom the war has been a laceration,—‘an abdication of the spirit.’ Such women would doubtless formulate the scruples of certain soldiers whose ‘mouths are stopped by courage,’ men who months ago with closed eyes rushed to the defence of their countries. ”

“ It adds to their difficulty that the individual women, driven to modify a harsh convention which has become unendurable to them, are perforce those most sensitive to injustice. The sharp struggle for social advance, which is always a struggle between ideas, long before it becomes embodied in contending social groups, may thus find its arena in the tender conscience of one woman who is pitilessly rent and pierced by her warring scruples and affections. ”

“ I have never been a Feminist and have always remained quite unmoved by the talk of the peculiar contribution women might make to the State, but during the last dreadful months, in spite of women’s widespread enthusiasm for the war and their patriotic eagerness to make the supreme sacrifice, I have become conscious of an unalterable cleavage between Militarism and Feminism. ”

“ Indeed, the builder of the tomb seems to have liked the company of animals, perhaps because they were so incurious concerning death. His dogs are around him, he stands erect in a boat from which he spears fish, and so on from one marvelous relief to another, but all the time your heart contracts for him, and you know that in the midst of this elaborately prepared nonchalance he is miserably terrified by the fate which may be in store for him, and is trying to make himself believe that he need not leave all this wonted and homely activity ”

“ As if to free her son’s memory from any charge of lack of patriotism, after a few moments she continued: “These modern men of science are red-blooded, devoted patriots, facing dangers of every sort in mines and factories and leading strenuous lives in spite of the popular conception of the pale anæmic scholar, but because they are equally interested in scientific experiments wherever they may be carried on, they inevitably cease to think of national boundaries in connection with their work. ”

“ In contrast to the visitors to the Devil Baby who spoke only such words of groping wisdom as they were able, were other old women who, although they had already reconciled themselves to much misery, were still enduring more: “You might say it’s a disgrace to have your son beat you up for the sake of a bit of money you’ve earned by scrubbing—your own man is different—but I haven’t the heart to blame the boy for doing what he’s seen all his life, his father forever went wild when the drink was in him and struck me to the very day of his death. ”

“ In the picturesque confusion, if anywhere in Chicago, an urbanized group of the little people might dwell; they would certainly find the traditional atmosphere which they strictly require, marvelling faith and unalloyed reverence. At any rate, an eager old woman aroused to her utmost capacity of wonder and credulity was the very soil, prepared to a nicety, for planting the seed-thought of the Devil Baby. ”

“ During the weeks when the Devil Baby seemed to occupy every room in Hull-House, I was conscious that all human vicissitudes are, in the end, melted down into reminiscence, and that a metaphorical statement of the basic experiences which are implicit in human nature itself, however crude in form the story may be, has a singular power of influencing daily living. ”

“ The old woman repeated the words as one who solemnly recalls the great phrase which raised him into a knightly order, revealing a secret pride in her unavowed fellowship with Trades Unions, for she had vaguely known at the time of the Ten Hour trial that powerful federations of them had paid for the lawyers and had gathered the witnesses. Some dim memory of Irish ancestors, always found on the side of the weak in the unending struggle with the oppressions of the strong, may have determined her action. ”

“ I never encountered that particular temptation again, though she was no more pitiful than many of the aged visitors whom the Devil Baby brought to Hull-House. But, perhaps as a result of this experience, I gradually lost the impression that the old people were longing for a second chance at life, to live it all over again and to live more fully and wisely, and I became more reconciled to the fact that many of them had little opportunity for meditation or for bodily rest, but must keep on working with their toil-worn hands, in spite of weariness or faintness of heart. ”

“ For quite as pity and fierce maternal affection for their own children drove mothers all over the world to ostracize and cruelly punish the “bad woman” who would destroy the home by taking away the breadwinner and the father, so it is possible that, under the changed conditions of modern life, this same pity for little children, this same concern that, even if they are the children of the outcast, they must still be nourished and properly reared, will make good the former wrongs. ”

“ Those mothers who have never resisted fate nor buffeted against the black waters, but have allowed the waves to close over them, worn and bent as they are by hard labor, subdued and misshapen by the brutality of men, are at least unaffrighted by the melodramatic coarseness of life, which Stevenson more gently describes as “the uncouth and outlandish strain in the web of the world.” ”

“ Such searching and sifting is taking place in the consciences of many women of this generation whose sufferings, although strikingly influencing conduct, are seldom expressed in words until they are told in the form of reminiscence after the edges have been long since dulled. Such sufferings are never so poignant as when women have been forced by their personal experiences to challenge the valuable conventions safeguarding family life. ”

“ These girls present a striking antithesis to the visitors to the Devil Baby who in their forlorn and cheerless efforts were merely continuing the traditional struggle against brutality, indifference, and neglect that helpless old people and little children might not be trampled in the dust. For these simple women it is the conditions under which the struggle is waged which have changed, rather than the nature of the contest. ”

“ If the object of my errand had been an hour’s reading to a sick woman, it would have been accounted to me for philanthropic righteousness, and if the chosen reading had lifted her mind from her bodily discomforts and harassing thoughts so that she forgot them all for one fleeting moment, how pleased I should have been with the success of my effort. ”

“ He was pointed out by many of our neighbors as an example of the inevitable fate of one who deserts his family and therefore, “without a woman to keep him straight,” falls into drink and shiftlessness and the endless paths of wrong-doing, so that loneliness and destitution inevitably overtake his old age.
The women were so fatalistically certain of this relation of punishment to domestic sin, of reward to domestic virtue, that when they talked about them, as they so constantly did in connection with the Devil Baby, it often sounded as if they were using the words of a widely known ritual. ”

“ Such efforts are encountered in all the belligerent nations as well as in the neutral ones, although in the former they are often inhibited and overlaid by an overwhelming patriotism. Nevertheless, as I met those women who were bearing their hardships and sorrows so courageously, I often caught a glimpse of an inner struggle, as if two of the most fundamental instincts, the two responsible for our very development as human beings, were at strife with each other. ”