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Title: The long road of woman's memory

Author: Jane Addams

Release date: October 26, 2022 [eBook #69234]
Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Macmillan Company, 1916

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG
ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY ***

THE LONG ROAD OF
WOMAN’S MEMORY

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

THE LONG ROAD OF
WOMAN’S MEMORY
BY

JANE ADDAMS

Author of “Twenty Years at Hull House”
“The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets,” Etc.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1916,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1916.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO MY DEAR FRIEND

MARY H. WILMARTH

WHOSE MEMORY STORED WITH THE BEST IN LITERATURE AND
WHOSE FINE PUBLIC SPIRIT ARE DAILY PLACED AT THE
SERVICE OF HER FRIENDS AND OF HER CITY, WITH A GALLANT
AND GENTLE COURTESY

CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction ix
Women’s Memories—Transmuting the Past, as 1
I.
illustrated by the Story of the Devil Baby

Women’s Memories—Reacting on Life, as illustrated by 25
II.
the Story of the Devil Baby

III. Women’s Memories—Disturbing Conventions 53
IV. Women’s Memories—Integrating Industry 84
V. Women’s Memories—Challenging War 115
VI. A Personal Experience in Interpretative Memory 141

INTRODUCTION
For many years at Hull-House I have at intervals detected in certain old
people, when they spoke of their past experiences, a tendency to an
idealization, almost to a romanticism suggestive of the ardent dreams and
groundless ambitions we have all observed in the young when they
recklessly lay their plans for the future.
I have, moreover, been frequently impressed by the fact that these
romantic revelations were made by old people who had really suffered
much hardship and sorrow, and that the transmutation of their experiences
was not the result of ignoring actuality, but was apparently due to a power
inherent in memory itself.
It was therefore a great pleasure when I found this aspect of memory
delightfully portrayed by Sir Gilbert Murray in his life of Euripides. He
writes that the aged poet, when he was officially made one of the old men
of Athens, declared that he could transmute into song traditional tales of
sorrow and wrong-doing because, being long past, they had already become
part mystery and part music: “Memory, that Memory who is the Mother of
the Muses, having done her work upon them.”
Here was an explanation which I might have anticipated; it was the
Muses again at their old tricks,—the very mother of them this time,—
thrusting their ghostly fingers into the delicate fabric of human experience
to the extreme end of life. I had known before that the Muses foregathered
with the Spirit of Youth and I had even made a feeble attempt to portray that
companionship, but I was stupid indeed not to see that they are equally at
home with the aged whose prosaic lives sadly need such interference.
Even with this clue in my hands, so preoccupied are we all with our own
practical affairs, I probably should never have followed it, had it not been
for the visit of a mythical Devil Baby who so completely filled Hull-House
with old women coming to see him, that for a period of six weeks I could
perforce do little but give them my attention.

When this excitement had subsided and I had written down the
corroboration afforded by their eager recitals in the first two chapters of this
book, I might have supposed myself to be rid of the matter, incidentally
having been taught once more that, while I may receive valuable
suggestions from classic literature, when I really want to learn about life, I
must depend upon my neighbors, for, as William James insists, the most
instructive human documents lie along the beaten pathway.
The subject, however, was not so easily disposed of, for certain elderly
women among these selfsame neighbors disconcertingly took quite another
line from that indicated by Euripides. To my amazement, their
reminiscences revealed an additional function of memory, so aggressive and
withal so modern, that it was quite impossible, living as I was in a
Settlement with sociological tendencies, to ignore it.
It was gradually forced upon my attention that these reminiscences of the
aged, even while softening the harsh realities of the past, exercise a vital
power of selection which often necessitates an onset against the very
traditions and conventions commonly believed to find their stronghold in
the minds of elderly people. Such reminiscences suggested an analogy to
the dreams of youth which, while covering the future with a shifting rose-
colored mist, contain within themselves the inchoate substance from which
the tough-fibred forces of coming social struggles are composed.
In the light of this later knowledge, I was impelled to write the next two
chapters of this book, basing them upon conversations held with various
women of my acquaintance whose experience in family relationships or in
the labor market had so forced their conduct to a variation from the
accepted type that there emerged an indication of a selective groping toward
another standard. They inevitably suggested that a sufficient number of
similar variations might even, in Memory’s leisurely fashion of upbuilding
tradition, in the end establish a new norm.
Some of these women, under the domination of that mysterious
autobiographical impulse which makes it more difficult to conceal the truth
than to avow it, purged their souls in all sincerity and unconsciously made
plain the part borne in their hard lives by monstrous social injustices.
These conversations proved to be so illustrative of my second thesis that
it seemed scarcely necessary to do more than record them. The deduction

was obvious that mutual reminiscences perform a valuable function in
determining analogous conduct for large bodies of people who have no
other basis for like-mindedness.
So gradual is this process, so unconsciously are these converts under
Memory’s gentle coercion brought into a spiritual fellowship, that the social
changes thus inaugurated, at least until the reformers begin to formulate
them and to accelerate the process through propaganda, take on the aspect
of beneficent natural phenomena. And yet, curiously enough, I found that
the two functions of Memory—first, its important rôle in interpreting and
appeasing life for the individual, and second its activity as a selective
agency in social reorganization—were not mutually exclusive, and at
moments seemed to support each other. Certain conversations even
suggested that the selective process itself might be held responsible for the
softened outlines of the past to one looking back, by the natural blurring of
nonessentials and the consequent throwing into high relief of common
human experiences.
The insistence of Memory upon the great essentials, even to the complete
sacrifice of its inherent power to appease, was most poignantly brought to
my attention during two months I spent in Europe in the summer of 1915.
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. I cannot
hope to have adequately reproduced in Chapter V those conversations
which themselves partook of the grim aspect of war.
It was during this cataclysmic summer in Europe that I sometimes sought
for a solace, or at least for a source of sanity, by resting my mind on the
immemorial monuments of ancient Egypt, from which I had once received
an almost mystic assurance of the essential unity of man’s age-long spiritual
effort. But because such guarding of continuity as Egypt had afforded me
had been associated with an unexpected revival of childish recollections, I
found that Memory was a chief factor also in this situation. Therefore, in
spite of the fact that these reminiscences of my childhood were vividly

resuscitated in Egypt by a process which postulates a reversal of the one
described in the first two chapters of this book, I venture to incorporate my
personal experience in the last chapter. It may suggest one more of our
obligations to Memory, that Protean Mother, who first differentiated
primitive man from the brute; who makes possible our complicated modern
life so daily dependent on the experiences of the past; and upon whom at
the present moment is thrust the sole responsibility of guarding, for future
generations, our common heritage of mutual good-will.

THE LONG ROAD OF WOMAN’S
MEMORY

CHAPTER I
WOMEN’S MEMORIES—TRANSMUTING THE PAST, AS
ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF THE DEVIL BABY

Quite as it would be hard for any one of us to select the summer in which
he ceased to live that life, so ardent in childhood and early youth, when all
the real happenings are in the future, so it must be difficult for old people to
tell at what period they began to regard the present chiefly as a prolongation
of the past. There is no doubt, however, that such instinctive shiftings and
reversals have taken place for many old people who, under the control of
Memory, are actually living much more in the past than in the ephemeral
present.
It is most fortunate, therefore, that in some subtle fashion these old
people, reviewing the long road they have travelled, are able to transmute
their own untoward experiences into that which seems to make even the
most wretched life acceptable. This may possibly be due to an instinct of
self-preservation, which checks the devastating bitterness that would result
did they recall over and over again the sordid detail of events long past; it is
even possible that those people who were not able thus to inhibit their
bitterness have died earlier, for as one old man recently reminded me, “It is
a true word that worry can kill a cat.”
This permanent and elemental function of Memory was graphically
demonstrated at Hull-House during a period of several weeks when we
were reported to be harboring within its walls a so-called “Devil Baby.”
The knowledge of his existence burst upon the residents of Hull-House
one day when three Italian women, with an excited rush through the door,
demanded that he be shown to them. No amount of denial convinced them
that he was not there, for they knew exactly what he was like with his
cloven hoofs, his pointed ears and diminutive tail; the Devil Baby had,
moreover, been able to speak as soon as he was born and was most
shockingly profane.

The three women were but the forerunners of a veritable multitude; for
six weeks from every part of the city and suburbs the streams of visitors to
this mythical baby poured in all day long and so far into the night that the
regular activities of the settlement were almost swamped.
The Italian version, with a hundred variations, dealt with a pious Italian
girl married to an atheist. Her husband in a rage had torn a holy picture
from the bedroom wall saying that he would quite as soon have a devil in
the house as such a thing, whereupon the devil incarnated himself in her
coming child. As soon as the Devil Baby was born, he ran about the table
shaking his finger in deep reproach at his father, who finally caught him
and, in fear and trembling, brought him to Hull-House. When the residents
there, in spite of the baby’s shocking appearance, wishing to save his soul,
took him to church for baptism, they found that the shawl was empty and
the Devil Baby, fleeing from the holy water, was running lightly over the
backs of the pews.
The Jewish version, again with variations, was to the effect that the father
of six daughters had said before the birth of a seventh child that he would
rather have a devil in the family than another girl, whereupon the Devil
Baby promptly appeared.
Save for a red automobile which occasionally figured in the story and a
stray cigar which, in some versions, the new-born child had snatched from
his father’s lips, the tale might have been fashioned a thousand years ago.
Although the visitors to the Devil Baby included persons of every degree
of prosperity and education, even physicians and trained nurses, who
assured us of their scientific interest, the story constantly demonstrated the
power of an old wives’ tale among thousands of men and women in modern
society who are living in a corner of their own, their vision fixed, their
intelligence held by some iron chain of silent habit. To such primitive
people the metaphor apparently is still the very “stuff of life,” or rather no
other form of statement reaches them; the tremendous tonnage of current
writing for them has no existence. It was in keeping with their simple habits
that the reputed presence of the Devil Baby should not reach the
newspapers until the fifth week of his sojourn at Hull-House—after
thousands of people had already been informed of his whereabouts by the
old method of passing news from mouth to mouth.

For six weeks as I went about the house, I would hear a voice at the
telephone repeating for the hundredth time that day, “No, there is no such
baby”; “No, we never had it here”; “No, he couldn’t have seen it for fifty
cents”; “We didn’t send it anywhere, because we never had it”; “I don’t
mean to say that your sister-in-law lied, but there must be some mistake”;
“There is no use getting up an excursion from Milwaukee, for there isn’t
any Devil Baby at Hull-House”; “We can’t give reduced rates, because we
are not exhibiting anything”; and so on and on. As I came near the front
door, I would catch snatches of arguments that were often acrimonious:
“Why do you let so many people believe it, if it isn’t here?” “We have taken
three lines of cars to come and we have as much right to see it as anybody
else”; “This is a pretty big place, of course you could hide it easy enough”;
“What are you saying that for, are you going to raise the price of
admission?”
We had doubtless struck a case of what the psychologists call the
“contagion of emotion” added to that “æsthetic sociability” which impels
any one of us to drag the entire household to the window when a procession
comes into the street or a rainbow appears in the sky. The Devil Baby of
course was worth many processions and rainbows, and I will confess that,
as the empty show went on day after day, I quite revolted against such a
vapid manifestation of even an admirable human trait. There was always
one exception, however; whenever I heard the high eager voices of old
women, I was irresistibly interested and left anything I might be doing in
order to listen to them. As I came down the stairs, long before I could hear
what they were saying, implicit in their solemn and portentous old voices
came the admonition:—
“Wilt thou reject the past
Big with deep warnings?”
It was a very serious and genuine matter with the old women, this story
so ancient and yet so contemporaneous, and they flocked to Hull-House
from every direction; those I had known for many years, others I had never
known and some whom I had supposed to be long dead. But they were all
alive and eager; something in the story or in its mysterious sequences had
aroused one of those active forces in human nature which does not take
orders, but insists only upon giving them. We had abruptly come in contact
with a living and self-assertive human quality!

During the weeks of excitement it was the old women who really seemed
to have come into their own, and perhaps the most significant result of the
incident was the reaction of the story upon them. It stirred their minds and
memories as with a magic touch, it loosened their tongues and revealed the
inner life and thoughts of those who are so often inarticulate. They are
accustomed to sit at home and to hear the younger members of the family
speak of affairs quite outside their own experiences, sometimes in a
language they do not understand, and at best in quick glancing phrases
which they cannot follow; “More than half the time I can’t tell what they
are talking about,” is an oft-repeated complaint. The story of the Devil Baby
evidently put into their hands the sort of material with which they were
accustomed to deal. They had long used such tales in their unremitting
efforts at family discipline, ever since they had frightened their first
children into awed silence by tales of bugaboo men who prowled in the
darkness.
These old women enjoyed a moment of triumph—as if they had made
good at last and had come into a region of sanctions and punishments which
they understood. Years of living had taught them that recrimination with
grown-up children and grandchildren is worse than useless, that
punishments are impossible, that domestic instruction is best given through
tales and metaphors.
As the old women talked with the new volubility which the story of the
Devil Baby had released in them, going back into their long memories and
urging its credibility upon me, the story seemed to condense that mystical
wisdom which becomes deposited in the heart of man by unnoticed
innumerable experiences.
Perhaps my many conversations with these aged visitors crystallized
thoughts and impressions I had been receiving through years, or the tale
itself may have ignited a fire, as it were, whose light illumined some of my
darkest memories of neglected and uncomfortable old age, of old peasant
women who had ruthlessly probed into the ugly depths of human nature in
themselves and others. Many of them who came to see the Devil Baby had
been forced to face tragic experiences, the powers of brutality and horror
had had full scope in their lives and for years they had had acquaintance
with disaster and death. Such old women do not shirk life’s misery by
feeble idealism, for they are long past the stage of make-believe. They

relate without flinching the most hideous experiences: “My face has had
this queer twist for now nearly sixty years; I was ten when it got that way,
the night after I saw my father do my mother to death with his knife.” “Yes,
I had fourteen children; only two grew to be men and both of them were
killed in the same explosion. I was never sure they brought home the right
bodies.” But even the most hideous sorrows which the old women related
had apparently subsided into the paler emotion of ineffectual regret, after
Memory had long done her work upon them; the old people seemed, in
some unaccountable way, to lose all bitterness and resentment against life,
or rather to be so completely without it that they must have lost it long
since.
None of them had a word of blame for undutiful children or heedless
grandchildren, because apparently the petty and transitory had fallen away
from their austere old age, the fires were burnt out, resentments, hatreds,
and even cherished sorrows had become actually unintelligible.
Perhaps those women, because they had come to expect nothing more
from life and had perforce ceased from grasping and striving, had obtained,
if not renunciation, at least that quiet endurance which allows the wounds of
the spirit to heal. Through their stored-up habit of acquiescence, they
offered a fleeting glimpse of the translucent wisdom, so often embodied in
the old, but so difficult to portray. It is doubtless what Michael Angelo had
in mind when he made the Sybils old, what Dante meant by the phrase
“those who had learned of life,” and the age-worn minstrel who turned into
song a Memory which was more that of history and tradition than his own.
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. The ugliness was born in the boy as
the marks of the Devil was born in the poor child up-stairs.”
Some of these old women had struggled for weary years with poverty
and much childbearing, had known what it was to be bullied and beaten by

their husbands, neglected and ignored by their prosperous children, and
burdened by the support of the imbecile and the shiftless ones. They had
literally gone “Deep written all their days with care.”
One old woman actually came from the poorhouse, having heard of the
Devil Baby “through a lady from Polk Street visiting an old friend who has
a bed in our ward.” It was no slight achievement for the penniless and
crippled old inmate to make her escape. She had asked “a young bar-keep in
a saloon across the road” to lend her ten cents, offering as security the fact
that she was an old acquaintance at Hull-House who could not be refused so
slight a loan. She marvelled at some length over the goodness of the young
man, for she had not had a dime to spend for a drink for the last six months,
and he and the conductor had been obliged to lift her into the street car by
main strength. She was naturally much elated over the achievement of her
escape. To be sure, from the men’s side, they were always walking off in the
summer and taking to the road, living like tramps they did, in a way no one
from the woman’s side would demean herself to do; but to have left in a
street car like a lady, with money to pay her own fare, was quite a different
matter, although she was indeed “clean wore out” by the effort. However, it
was clear that she would consider herself well repaid by a sight of the Devil
Baby and that not only the inmates of her own ward, but those in every
other ward in the house would be made to “sit up” when she got back; it
would liven them all up a bit, and she hazarded the guess that she would
have to tell them about that baby at least a dozen times a day.
As she cheerfully rambled on, we weakly postponed telling her there was
no Devil Baby, first that she might have a cup of tea and rest, and then
through a sheer desire to withhold a blow from a poor old body who had
received so many throughout a long, hard life.
As I recall those unreal weeks, it was in her presence that I found myself
for the first time vaguely wishing that I could administer comfort by the
simple device of not asserting too dogmatically that the Devil Baby had
never been at Hull-House.
Our guest recalled with great pride that her grandmother had possessed
second sight; that her mother had heard the Banshee three times and that
she, herself, had heard it once. All this gave her a certain proprietary
interest in the Devil Baby and I suspected she cherished a secret hope that

when she should lay her eyes upon him, her inherited gifts might be able to
reveal the meaning of the strange portent. At the least, he would afford a
proof that her family-long faith in such matters was justified. Her
misshapen hands lying on her lap fairly trembled with eagerness.
It may have been because I was still smarting under the recollection of
the disappointment we had so wantonly inflicted upon our visitor from the
poorhouse that the very next day I found myself almost agreeing with her
whole-hearted acceptance of the past as of much more importance than the
mere present; at least for half an hour the past seemed endowed also for me
with a profounder and more ardent life.
This impression was received in connection with an old woman, sturdy in
her convictions, although long since bedridden, who had doggedly refused
to believe that there was no Devil Baby at Hull-House, unless “herself” told
her so. Because of her mounting irritation with the envoys who one and all
came back to her to report “they say it ain’t there,” it seemed well that I
should go promptly before “she fashed herself into the grave.” As I walked
along the street and even as I went up the ramshackle outside stairway of
the rear cottage and through the dark corridor to the “second floor back”
where she lay in her untidy bed, I was assailed by a veritable temptation to
give her a full description of the Devil Baby, which by this time I knew so
accurately (for with a hundred variations to select from I could have made a
monstrous infant almost worthy of his name), and also to refrain from
putting too much stress on the fact that he had never been really and truly at
Hull-House.
I found my mind hastily marshalling arguments for not disturbing her
belief in the story which had so evidently brought her a vivid interest long
denied her. She lived alone with her young grandson, who went to work
every morning at seven o’clock and save for the short visits made by the
visiting nurse and by kind neighbors, her long day was monotonous and
undisturbed. But the story of a Devil Baby, with his existence officially
corroborated as it were, would give her a lodestone which would attract the
neighbors far and wide and exalt her once more into the social importance
she had had twenty-four years before when I had first known her. She was
then the proprietor of the most prosperous second-hand store on a street full
of them, her shiftless, drinking husband and her jolly, good-natured sons
doing exactly what she told them to do. This, however, was long past, for

“owing to the drink,” in her own graphic phrase, “the old man, the boys,
and the business, too, were clean gone” and there was “nobody left but little
Tom and me and nothing for us to live on.”
I remember how well she used to tell a story when I once tried to collect
some folk-lore for Mr. Yeats to prove that an Irish peasant does not lose his
faith in the little people nor his knowledge of Gaelic phrases simply
because he is living in a city. She had at that time told me a wonderful tale
concerning a red cloak worn by an old woman to a freshly dug grave. The
story of the Devil Baby would give her material worthy of her powers, but
of course she must be able to believe it with all her heart. She could live
only a few months at the very best, I argued to myself; why not give her this
vivid interest and through it awake those earliest recollections of that long-
accumulated folk-lore with its magic power to transfigure and eclipse the
sordid and unsatisfactory surroundings in which life is actually spent? I
solemnly assured myself that the imagination of old age needs to be fed and
probably has quite as imperious a claim as that of youth, which levies upon
us so remorselessly with its “I want a fairy story, but I don’t like you to
begin by saying that it isn’t true.” Impatiently I found myself challenging
the educators who had given us no pedagogical instructions for the
treatment of old age, although they had fairly overinformed us as to the use
of the fairy tale with children.
The little room was stuffed with a magpie collection, the usual odds and
ends which compose an old woman’s treasures, augmented in this case by
various articles which a second-hand store, even of the most flourishing
sort, could not sell. 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. 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. But here I was with a story at my
tongue’s end, stupidly hesitating to give it validity, although the very words

were on my lips. I was still arguing the case with myself when I stood on
the threshold of her room and caught the indomitable gleam of her eye,
fairly daring me to deny the existence of the Devil Baby, her slack dropsical
body so responding to her overpowering excitement that for the moment
she looked alert in her defiance and positively menacing.
But, as in the case of many another weak soul, the decision was taken out
of my hands, my very hesitation was enough, for nothing is more certain
than that the bearer of a magic tale never stands dawdling on the door-step.
Slowly the gleam died out of the expectant old eyes, the erect shoulders
sagged and pulled forward, and I saw only too plainly that the poor old
woman had accepted one more disappointment in a life already overflowing
with them. She was violently thrown back into all the limitations of her
personal experience and surroundings, and that larger life she had
anticipated so eagerly was as suddenly shut away from her as if a door had
been slammed in her face.
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.
The vivid interest of so many old women in the story of the Devil Baby
may have been an unconscious, although powerful, testimony that tragic
experiences gradually become dressed in such trappings in order that their
spent agony may prove of some use to a world which learns at the hardest;
and that the strivings and sufferings of men and women long since dead,
their emotions no longer connected with flesh and blood, are thus
transmuted into legendary wisdom. The young are forced to heed the
warning in such a tale, although for the most part it is so easy for them to
disregard the words of the aged. That the old women who came to visit the
Devil Baby believed that the story would secure them a hearing at home
was evident, and as they prepared themselves with every detail of it, their
old faces shone with a timid satisfaction. Their features, worn and scarred
by harsh living, as effigies built into the floor of an old church become dim

and defaced by rough-shod feet, grew poignant and solemn. In the midst of
their double bewilderment, both that the younger generation was walking in
such strange paths and that no one would listen to them, for one moment
there flickered up the last hope of a disappointed life, that it may at least
serve as a warning, while affording material for an exciting narrative.
Sometimes in talking to a woman who was “but a hair’s breadth this side
of the darkness,” I realized that old age has its own expression for the
mystic renunciation of the world. Their impatience with all non-essentials,
the craving to be free from hampering bonds and soft conditions, recalled
Tolstoy’s last impetuous journey, and I was once more grateful to his genius
for making clear another unintelligible impulse of bewildered humanity.
Often, in the midst of a conversation, one of these touching old women
would quietly express a longing for death, as if it were a natural fulfilment
of an inmost desire, with a sincerity and anticipation so genuine that I
would feel abashed in her presence, ashamed to “cling to this strange thing
that shines in the sunlight and to be sick with love for it.” Such impressions
were, in their essence, transitory, but one result from the hypothetical visit
of the Devil Baby to Hull-House will, I think, remain: a realization of the
sifting and reconciling power inherent in Memory itself. The old women,
with much to aggravate and little to soften the habitual bodily discomforts
of old age, exhibited an emotional serenity so vast and so reassuring, that I
found myself perpetually speculating upon how soon the fleeting and petty
emotions which now seem unduly important to us might be thus
transmuted; at what moment we might expect the inconsistencies and
perplexities of life to be brought under this appeasing Memory with its
ultimate power to increase the elements of beauty and significance and to
reduce, if not to eliminate, all sense of resentment.

CHAPTER II
WOMEN’S MEMORIES—REACTING ON LIFE AS
ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY 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.
At moments we also seemed to glimpse the process through which such
tales had been evolved. As our visitors to the Devil Baby came day by day,
it gradually became evident that the simpler women were moved not wholly
by curiosity, but that many of them prized the story as a valuable instrument
in the business of living. From them and from the surprising number of
others who had been sent by the aged and the bed-ridden to secure an exact
history and description of the child, the suggestion finally became quite
irresistible that such a story, outlining a great abstraction, may once have
performed the high service of tradition and discipline in the beginnings of a
civilized family life.
The legend exhibited all the persistence of one of those tales which has
doubtless been preserved through the centuries because of its taming effects
upon recalcitrant husbands and fathers. Shamefaced men brought to Hull-
House by their women folk to see the baby, but ill concealed their triumph
when there proved to be no such visible sign of retribution for domestic
derelictions. On the other hand, numbers of men came by themselves, one
group from a neighboring factory on their “own time” offered to pay
twenty-five cents, a half dollar, two dollars apiece to see the child, insisting
that it must be at Hull-House because “the women had seen it.” To my
query as to whether they supposed we would, for money, exhibit a poor
little deformed baby, if one had been born in the neighborhood, they
replied: “Sure, why not?” and “it teaches a good lesson, too,” they added as
an afterthought, or perhaps as a concession to the strange moral standards of

a place like Hull-House. All the members in this group of hard-working
men, in spite of a certain swagger towards one another and a tendency to
bully the derelict showman, wore a hang-dog look betraying that sense of
unfair treatment which a man is so apt to feel when his womankind makes
an appeal to the supernatural. In their determination to see the child, the
men recklessly divulged much more concerning their motives than they had
meant to do. Their talk confirmed my impression that such a story may still
act as a restraining influence in the sphere of marital conduct which, next to
primitive religion, has always afforded the most fertile field for irrational
taboos and savage punishments.
What story could be better than this to secure sympathy for the mother of
too many daughters and contumely for the irritated father; the touch of
mysticism, the supernatural sphere in which it was placed, would render a
man quite helpless.
The story of the Devil Baby, evolved in response to the imperative needs
of anxious wives and mothers, recalls the theory that woman first fashioned
the fairy story, that combination of wisdom and romance, in an effort to
tame her mate and to make him a better father to her children, until such
stories finally became a crude creed for domestic conduct, softening the
treatment men accorded to women. Because such stories, expressing the
very essence of human emotion, did not pretend to imitate the outside of
life, they were careless of verisimilitude and absolutely indifferent to the
real world. They did, however, meet an essential requirement of the good
story, in that they dealt with fundamental experiences.
These first pitiful efforts of women were so widespread and powerful that
we have not yet escaped their influence. As subconscious memories, they
still cast vague shadows upon the vast spaces of life, shadows that are dim
and distorted because of their distant origin. They remind us that for
thousands of years women had nothing to oppose against unthinkable
brutality save “the charm of words,” no other implement with which to
subdue the fiercenesses of the world about them. 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.
During the weeks that the Devil Baby drew multitudes of visitors to Hull-
House, my mind was opened to the fact that new knowledge derived from
concrete experience is continually being made available for the guidance of
human life; that humble women are still establishing rules of conduct as
best they may, to counteract the base temptations of a man’s world. I saw a
new significance in the fact that thousands of women, for instance, make it
a standard of domestic virtue that a man must not touch his pay envelope,
but bring it home unopened to his wife. High praise is contained in the
phrase, “We have been married twenty years and he never once opened his
own envelope,” or covert blame in the statement, “Of course he got to
gambling; what can you expect from a man who always opens his own
pay?”
These humble domestic virtues, of which women see the need so much
more vividly than men do, have furthermore developed their penalties. The
latter, too, are put into aphorisms which, in time, when Memory has done
her work upon them, may become legendary wisdom.
Such a penalty was recently illustrated in our neighborhood by the fate of
an old man who was found in his room almost starved to death. 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. Among
the visitors to the Devil Baby were many foreign-born peasant women who,
when they had come to America, had been suddenly subjected to the
complicated and constantly changing environment of city life, and, finding
no outlet for many inherited tendencies, might easily have been thrown into
that state described by psychologists as one of “baulked disposition.” To
them this simple tale, with its direct connection between cause and effect,

between wrong-doing and punishment, brought soothing and relief, and
restored a shaken confidence as to the righteousness of the universe. They
used the story not only to tame restless husbands, but mothers threatened
their daughters that if they went to dance halls or out to walk with strange
young men, they would be eternally disgraced by devil babies. As the story
grew, the girls themselves seized upon it as a palpable punishment to be
held over the heads of reckless friends. That the tale was useful was
evidenced by many letters similar to the anonymous epistle here given.
“me and my friends we work in talor shop and when we are going
home on the roby street car where we get off that car at blue island
ave. we will meet some fellows sitting at that street where they
drink some beer from pail. they keep look in cars all time and they
will wait and see if we will come sometimes we will have to work,
but they will wait so long they are tired and they dont care they get
rest so long but a girl what works in twine mill saw them talk with
us we know her good and she say what youse talk with old drunk
man for we shall come to thier dance when it will be they will tell us
and we should know all about where to see them that girl she say oh
if you will go with them you will get devils baby like some other
girls did who we knows. she say Jane Addams she will show one
like that in Hull House if you will go down there we shall come
sometime and we will see if that is trouth we do not believe her for
she is friendly with them old men herself when she go out from her
work they will wink to her and say something else to. We will go
down and see you and make a lie from what she say.”
Because the Devil Baby embodied an undeserved wrong to a poor mother
whose tender child had been claimed by the forces of evil, his merely
reputed presence had power to attract to Hull-House hundreds of women
who had been humbled and disgraced by their children; mothers of the
feeble-minded, of the vicious, of the criminal, of the prostitute. In their talk
it was as if their long rôle of maternal apology and protective reticence had
at last broken down, as if they could speak out freely because for once a
man responsible for an ill-begotten child had been “met up with” and had
received his deserts. Their sinister version of the story was that the father of
the Devil Baby had married without confessing a hideous crime committed
years before, thus basely deceiving both his innocent young bride and the

good priest who performed the solemn ceremony; that the sin had become
incarnate in his child which, to the horror of the young and trusting mother,
had been born with all the outward aspects of the devil himself.
As if drawn by a magnet, these forlorn women issued forth from the
many homes in which dwelt “the two unprofitable goddesses, Poverty and
Impossibility.” Occasionally it seemed to me that the women were impelled
by a longing to see one good case of retribution before they died, as a
bullied child hopes to deal at least one crushing blow at his tormentor when
he “grows up,” but I think, on the whole, such an explanation was a
mistake; it is more probable that the avidity of the women demonstrated
that the story itself, like all interpretative art, was “one of those free,
unconscious attempts to satisfy, outside of life, those cravings which life
itself leaves unsatisfied.” At moments, however, baffled desires, sharp cries
of pain, echoes of justices unfulfilled, the original material from which such
tales are fashioned, would defy Memory’s appeasing power and break
through the rigid restraints imposed by all Art, even that unconscious of
itself.
With an understanding quickened, perhaps, through my own
acquaintance with the mysterious child, I listened to many tragic
reminiscences from the visiting women; of premature births, “because he
kicked me in the side”; of children maimed and burnt because “I had no one
to leave them with when I went to work”; women had seen the tender flesh
of growing little bodies given over to death because “he wouldn’t let me
send for the doctor,” or because “there was no money to pay for the
medicine.” But even these mothers, rendered childless through insensate
brutality, were less pitiful than some of the others, who might well have
cried aloud of their children as did a distracted mother of her child centuries
ago:
“That God should send this one thing more
Of hunger and of dread, a door
Set wide to every wind of pain!”
Such was the mother of a feeble-minded boy who said: “I didn’t have a
devil baby myself, but I bore a poor ‘innocent’ who made me fight devils
for twenty-three years.” She told of her son’s experiences from the time the
other little boys had put him up to stealing that they might hide in safety

and leave him to be found with “the goods on him,” until grown into a huge
man he fell into the hands of professional burglars; he was evidently the
dupe and stool-pigeon of the vicious and criminal until the very day he was
locked into the State Penitentiary. “If people played with him a little, he
went right off and did anything they told him to, and now he’s been sent up
for life. We call such innocents ‘God’s Fools’ in the old country, but over
here the Devil himself gets them. I’ve fought off bad men and boys from
the poor lamb with my very fists; nobody ever came near the house except
such-like and the police officers, who were always arresting him.”
There were a goodly number of visitors to the Devil Baby of the type of
those to be found in every large city, who are on the verge of nervous
collapse, or who exhibit many symptoms of mental aberration, and yet are
sufficiently normal to be at large most of the time, and to support
themselves by drudgery which requires little mental effort, although the
exhaustion resulting from the work they are able to do is the one thing from
which they should be most carefully protected. One such woman, evidently
obtaining inscrutable comfort from the story of the Devil Baby even after
she had become convinced that we harbored no such creature, came many
times to tell of her longing for her son, who had joined the army eighteen
months before and was now stationed in Alaska. She always began with the
same words.
“When Spring comes and the snow melts so that I know he could get out,
I can hardly stand it. You know I was once in the Insane Asylum for three
years at a stretch, and since then I haven’t had much use of my mind except
to worry with. Of course I know that it is dangerous for me, but what can I
do? I think something like this: ‘The snow is melting, now he could get out,
but his officers won’t let him off and if he runs away he’ll be shot for a
deserter—either way I’ll never see him again; I’ll die without seeing him’—
and then I begin all over again with the snow.” After a pause, she said: “The
recruiting officer ought not to have taken him, he’s my only son and I’m a
widow. It’s against the rules, but he was so crazy to go that I guess he lied a
little—at any rate, the government has him now and I can’t get him back.
Without this worry about him my mind would be all right; if he were here
he would be earning money and keeping me and we would be happy all day
long.”

Recalling the vagabondish lad, who had never earned much money and
had certainly never “kept” his hard-working mother, I ventured to suggest
that, even if he were at home, he might not have work these hard times, that
he might get into trouble and be arrested—I did not need to remind her that
he had already been arrested twice—that he was now fed and sheltered and
under discipline, and I added hopefully something about his seeing the
world. She looked at me out of her withdrawn, harried eyes, as if I were
speaking a foreign tongue. “That wouldn’t make any real difference to me
—the work, the money, his behaving well and all that, if I could cook and
wash for him. I don’t need all the money I earn scrubbing that factory. I
only take bread and tea for supper and I choke over that, thinking of him.”
She ceased to speak, overcome by a thousand obscure emotions which
could find no outlet in words. She dimly realized that the facts in the case,
to one who had known her boy from childhood, were far from creditable,
and that no one could understand the eternally unappeased idealism which,
for her, surrounded her son’s return. She was even afraid to say much about
it, lest she should be overmastered by her subject and be considered so
irrational as to suggest a return to the Hospital for the Insane.
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.” 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. One of them related her
habit of going through the pockets of her drunken son every pay day, and
complained that she had never found so little as the night before, only
twenty-five cents out of fifteen dollars he had promised for the rent, long
overdue. “I had to get that as he lay in the alley before the door; I couldn’t

pull him in, and the copper who helped him home, left as soon as he heard
me coming and pretended he didn’t see me. I have no food in the house, nor
coffee to sober him up with. I know perfectly well that you will ask me to
eat something here, but, if I can’t carry it home, I won’t take a bite nor a
sup. I have never told you so much before. Since one of the nurses said he
could be arrested for my non-support, I have been awful close-mouthed. It’s
the foolish way all the women in our street are talking about the Devil Baby
that’s loosened my tongue, more shame to me.”
A sorrowful woman clad in heavy black, who came one day, exhibited
such a capacity for prolonged weeping that it was evidence in itself of the
truth of at least half her statement, that she had cried herself to sleep every
night of her life for fourteen years in fulfilment of a “curse” laid upon her
by an angry man, that “her pillow would be wet with tears as long as she
lived.” Her respectable husband had a shop in the Red Light district because
he found it profitable to sell to the men and women who lived there. She
had kept house in the room over the “store” from the time she was a bride
newly come from Russia, and her five daughters had been born there, but
never a son to gladden her husband’s heart.
She took such a feverish interest in the Devil Baby that, when I was
obliged to disillusion her, I found it hard to take away her comfort in the
belief that the Powers that Be are on the side of the woman when her
husband resents too many daughters. But, after all, the birth of daughters
was but an incident in her tale of unmitigated woe, for the scoldings of a
disappointed husband were as nothing to the curse of a strange enemy,
although she doubtless had a confused impression that if there were
retribution for one in the general scheme of things, there might be for the
other. When the weeping woman finally put the events of her disordered life
in some sort of sequence, it became clear that about fifteen years ago she
had reported to the police a vicious house whose back door opened into her
own yard. Her husband had forbidden her to do anything about it and had
said that it would only get them into trouble, but she had been made
desperate one day when she saw her little girl, then twelve years old, come
out of the door, gleefully showing her younger sister a present of money.
Because the poor woman had tried for ten years without success to induce
her husband to move from the vicinity of such houses, she was certain that
she could save her child only by forcing out “the bad people” from her own

door yard. She therefore made her one frantic effort, found her way to the
city hall and there reported the house to the chief himself. Of course, “the
bad people stood in with the police” and nothing happened to them save,
perhaps, a fresh levy of blackmail, but the keeper of the house, beside
himself with rage, made the dire threat and laid the curse upon her. In less
than a year from that time he had enticed her daughter into a disreputable
house in another part of the district. The poor woman, ringing one doorbell
after another, had never been able to find her, but her sisters, who in time
came to know where she was, had been dazzled by her mode of life. The
weeping mother was quite sure that two of her daughters, while still
outwardly respectable and “working downtown,” earned money in the
devious ways which they had learned all about when they were little
children, although for the past five years the now prosperous husband had
allowed the family to live in a suburb, where the two younger daughters
were “growing up respectable.”
Certain of the visitors, although confronted by those mysterious and
impersonal wrongs which are apparently inherent in the very nature of
things, gave us glimpses of another sort of wisdom than that expressed in
the assumptions that the decrees of Fate are immutable.
Such a glimpse came to me through a conversation with a woman whose
fine mind and indomitable spirit I had long admired; I had known her for
years, and yet the recital of her sufferings, added to those the Devil Baby
had already induced other women to tell me, pierced me afresh. The story
of the Devil Baby may have incited these women to put their experiences
more vividly than they had hitherto been able to do. It may have been
because they were unconsciously spurred by the hope that a supernatural
retribution might intervene even for them, or because they were merely
comforted by the knowledge that it had once done so for some one else that
they spoke with more confidence than they had ever done before.
“I had eleven children, some born in Hungary and some born here, nine
of them boys; all of the children died when they were little but my dear
Liboucha. You know all about her. She died last winter in the Insane
Asylum. She was only twelve years old when her father, in a fit of delirium
tremens, killed himself after he had chased us around the room, trying to
kill us first. She saw it all, the blood splashed on the wall stayed in her mind
the worst; she shivered and shook all that night through, and the next

morning she had lost her voice, couldn’t speak out loud for terror. After a
while she went to school again and her voice came back, although it was
never very natural. She seemed to do as well as ever and was awful pleased
when she got into High School. All the money we had I earned scrubbing in
a public dispensary, although sometimes I got a little more by interpreting
for the patients, for I know three languages, one as well as the other. But I
was determined that whatever happened to me, Liboucha was to be
educated. My husband’s father was a doctor in the old country, and
Liboucha was always a clever child. I wouldn’t have her live the kind of life
I had, with no use for my mind except to make me restless and bitter. I was
pretty old and worn out for such hard work, but when I used to see
Liboucha on a Sunday morning ready for church in her white dress, with
her long yellow hair braided round her beautiful pale face, lying there in
bed as I was, being brought up a free-thinker, and needing to rest my aching
bones for the next week’s work, I’d feel almost happy, in spite of
everything. But of course no such peace could last in my life; the second
year at High School Liboucha began to seem different and to do strange
things. You know the time she wandered away for three days and we were
all wild with fright, although a kind woman had taken her in and no harm
came to her. I could never be easy after that; she was always gentle, but she
was awful sly about running away and at last I had to send her to the
asylum. She stayed there off and on for five years, but I saw her every week
of my life and she was always company for me, what with sewing for her,
washing and ironing her clothes, cooking little things to take out to her, and
saving a bit of money to buy fruit for her. At any rate, I had stopped feeling
so bitter, and got some comfort out of seeing the one thing that belonged to
me on this side of the water, when all of a sudden she died of heart failure
and they never took the trouble to send for me until the next day.”
She stopped as if wondering afresh that the Fates could have been so
casual, but with a sudden illumination, as if she had been awakened out of
the burden and intensity of her restricted personal interests into a
consciousness of those larger relations that are, for the most part, so
strangely invisible. 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.
At moments it seemed possible that these simple women, representing an
earlier development, eagerly seized upon the story because it was primitive
in form and substance. Certainly, one evening, a long-forgotten ballad made
an unceasing effort to come to the surface of my mind as I talked to a feeble
woman who, in the last stages of an incurable disease from which she soon
afterwards died, had been helped off the street car in front of Hull-House.
The ballad tells how the lover of a proud and jealous mistress, who
demanded as a final test of devotion that he bring her the heart of his
mother, had quickly cut the heart from his mother’s breast and impetuously
returned to his lady, bearing it upon a salver; and how, when stumbling in
his gallant haste, he stooped to replace upon the silver plate his mother’s
heart, which had rolled to the ground, the heart, still beating with tender
solicitude, whispered the hope that her child was not hurt. The ballad itself
was scarcely more exaggerated than the story of our visitor that evening,
who had made the desperate effort of a journey from home in order to see
the Devil Baby. I was familiar with her vicissitudes; the shiftless, drinking
husband and the large family of children, all of whom had brought her
sorrow and disgrace, and I knew that her heart’s desire was to see again,
before she died, her youngest son, who was a life prisoner in the
penitentiary. She was confident that the last piteous stage of her disease
would secure him a week’s parole, founding this forlorn hope upon the fact
that “they sometimes let them out to attend a mother’s funeral, and perhaps
they’d let Joe come a few days ahead; he could pay his fare afterwards from
the insurance money. It wouldn’t take much to bury me.” Again we went
over the hideous story: Joe had violently quarrelled with a woman, the
proprietor of the house in which his disreputable wife was living, because
she had withheld from him a part of his wife’s “earnings,” and in the
altercation had killed her—a situation, one would say, which it would be
difficult for even a mother to condone. But not at all, her thin gray face
worked with emotion, her trembling hands restlessly pulled at her shabby
skirt as the hands of the dying pluck at their sheets, but she put all the
vitality she could muster into his defence. She told us he had legally
married the girl, who supported him, “although Lily had been so long in
that life that few men would have done it. Of course, such a girl must have
a protector or everybody would fleece her. Poor Lily said to the day of her

death that he was the kindest man she ever knew, and treated her the
whitest; that she herself was to blame for the murder because she told on
the old miser, and Joe was so hot-headed she might have known that he
would draw a gun for her.” The gasping mother concluded: “He was always
that handsome and had such a way. One winter, when I was scrubbing in an
office building, I’d never get home much before twelve o’clock, but Joe
would open the door for me just as pleasant as if he hadn’t been waked out
of a sound sleep.” She was so triumphantly unconscious of the incongruity
of a sturdy son in bed while his mother earned his food, that her auditors
said never a word, and in silence we saw a hero evolved before our eyes, a
defender of the oppressed, the best beloved of his mother, who was losing
his high spirits and eating his heart out behind prison bars. He could well
defy the world even there, surrounded as he was by that invincible affection
which assures both the fortunate and unfortunate alike that we are loved,
not according to our deserts, but in response to some profounder law.
This imposing revelation of maternal solicitude was an instance of what
continually happened in connection with the Devil Baby. In the midst of the
most tragic reminiscences, there remained that something in the memories
of these mothers which has been called the great revelation of tragedy, or
sometimes the great illusion of tragedy; that which has power in its own
right to make life palatable and at rare moments even beautiful.

CHAPTER III
WOMEN’S MEMORIES—DISTURBING CONVENTIONS

In sharp contrast to the function of woman’s long memory as a reconciler
to life, revealed by the visitors to the Devil Baby, are those individual
reminiscences which, because they force the possessor to challenge existing
conventions, act as a reproach, even as a social disturber. When these
reminiscences, based upon the diverse experiences of many people
unknown to each other, point to one inevitable conclusion, they accumulate
into a social protest, although not necessarily an effective one, against
existing conventions, even against those which are most valuable and those
securely founded upon cumulative human wisdom. But because no
conventionalized tradition is perfect, however good its intent, most of them
become challenged in course of time, unwittingly illustrating the contention
that great social changes are often brought about less by the thinkers than
by “a certain native and independent rationalism operating in great masses
of men and women.”
The statement is well founded that a convention is at its best, not when it
is universally accepted, but just when it is being so challenged and broken
that the conformists are obliged to defend it and to fight for it against those
who would destroy it. Both the defenders of an old custom and its
opponents are then driven to a searching of their own hearts.
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.
A woman whom I had known slightly for many years came to Hull-
House one day escorted by her little grandson. Her delicate features, which
were rather hard and severe, softened most charmingly as the little boy
raised his cap in good-by from the vanishing automobile. In reply to my
admiring comment upon the sturdy lad and his affectionate relation to her,

she startled me by saying abruptly, “You know he is really not my grandson.
I have scarcely admitted the doubt before, but the time is coming when I
must face it and decide his future. If you are kind enough to listen, I want to
tell you my experience in all its grim sorrow.
“My husband was shot twenty-seven years ago, under very disgraceful
circumstances, in a disreputable quarter of Paris; you may remember
something of it in the newspapers, although they meant to be considerate. I
was left with my little son, and with such a horror of self-indulgence and its
consequences, that I determined to rear my child in strict sobriety, chastity,
and self-restraint, although all else were sacrificed to it. Through his school
and college days, which I took care should be far from his father’s friends
and associations, I always lived with him, so bent on rectitude and so
distressed by any lack of self-control that I see now how hard and rigorous
his life must have been. I meant to sacrifice myself for my child, in reality I
sacrificed him to my narrow code.
“The very June that he took his master’s degree, I myself found him, one
beautiful morning, lying dead in his own room, shot through the temple. No
one had heard the report of the revolver, for the little house we had taken
was so on the edge of the college town that the neighbors were rather
remote, and he must have killed himself while I sat in the moonlight, on the
garden bench, after he had left me, my mind still filled with plans for his
future.
“I have gone over every word of our conversation that evening in the
garden a thousand times; we were planning to come to Chicago for his
medical course, and I had expressed my exultant confidence in him to
withstand whatever temptation a city might offer, my pride in his purity of
thought, his rectitude of conduct. It was then he rose rather abruptly and
went into the house to write the letter to me which I found on his table next
morning. In that letter he told me that he was too vile to live any longer, that
he had sinned not only against his own code of decency and honor, but
against my lifelong standards and teachings, and that he realized perfectly
that I could never forgive him. He evidently did not expect any
understanding from me, either for himself or for ‘the young and innocent
girl’ about to become the mother of his child, and in his interpretation of my
rigid morals he was quite sure that I would never consent to see her, but he
wrote me that he had told her to send the little baby to me as soon as it was

born, obviously hoping that I might be tender to the innocent, although I
was so harsh and unpitying to the guilty. I had apparently never given him a
glimpse beyond my unbending sternness, and he had all unwittingly
pronounced me too self-righteous for forgiveness; at any rate, he faced
death rather than my cold disapprobation.
“The girl is still leading the life she had led for two years before my son
met her. She is glad to have her child cared for and hopes that I will make
him my heir, but understands, of course, that his paternity could never be
established in court. So here I am, old and hard, beginning again the
perilous experiment of rearing a man child. I suppose it was inevitable that I
should hold the girl responsible for my son’s downfall and for his death.
She was one of the wretched young women who live in college towns for
the express purpose of inveigling young men, often deliberately directing
their efforts toward those who are reputed to have money. I discovered all
sorts of damaging facts about her, which enabled me to exonerate my son
from intentional wrong-doing, and to think quite honestly that he had been
lured and tempted beyond his strength. The girl was obliged to leave the
little town, which was filled with the horror and scandal of the occurrence,
but even then, in that first unbridled public censure against the ‘bad woman’
who had been discovered in the midst of virtuous surroundings, there was a
tendency to hold me accountable for my son’s death, whatever the girl’s
earlier responsibility may have been.
“In my loathing of her I experienced all over again the harsh and bitter
judgments through which I had lived in the first years after my husband’s
death. I had secretly held the unknown woman responsible for his end, but
of course it never occurred to me to find out about her, and I certainly could
never have brought myself to hear her name, much less to see her. I have at
least done better than that in regard to the mother of my ‘grandson,’ and
Heaven knows I have tried in all humility and heartbreak to help her. She
fairly hated me, as she did anything that reminded her of my son—the
entire episode had seemed to her so unnatural, so monstrous, so
unnecessary—she considered me his murderer, and I never had the courage
to tell her that I agreed with her. Perhaps if I had done that, really abased
myself as I was willing she should be abased, we might have come into
some sort of genuine relation born of our companionship in tragedy. But I
couldn’t do that, possibly because the women of my generation cannot

easily change the traditional attitude towards what the Bible calls ‘the
harlot.’ At any rate, I didn’t succeed in ‘saving’ her. She so obviously
dreaded seeing me, and our strained visits were so unsatisfactory and
painful, that I finally gave it up, and her son has apparently quite forgotten
her. I am sure she tries to forget him and all the tragic scenes associated
with his earliest babyhood, when I insisted not only upon ‘keeping mother
and child together’ but also on keeping them with me.”
After a moment’s pause she resumed: “It would have been comparatively
easy for me to die when my child was little, when I still had a right to
believe that he would grow up to be a good and useful man, but I lived to
see him driven to his death by my own stupidity. I have encountered the full
penalty for breaking the commandment to judge not. I passed sentence
without hearing the evidence; I gave up the traditional rôle of the woman
who loves and pities and tries to understand; I forgot that it was my mission
to save and not to judge.
“As I have gone back over my unmitigated failure again and again, I am
sure at last that it was the sorry result of my implacable judgment of the
woman I held responsible for my husband’s sin. I did not realize the danger
nor the inevitable recoil of such a state of self-righteousness upon my
child.”
As she paused in the recital I rashly anticipated the conclusion, that her
bitter experiences had brought the whole question to that tribunal of
personal conduct whose concrete findings stir us to our very marrow with
shame and remorse; that she had frantically striven as we all do, to keep
herself from falling into the pit where the demons of self-reproach dwell, by
clinging to the conventional judgments of the world. I expected her to set
them forth at great length in self-justification, and perhaps, belonging, as
she so obviously did, to an older school, she might even assure me that the
wrong to those to whom it was now impossible to make reparation had
forever lifted her above committing another such injustice. I found,
however, that I was absolutely mistaken and that whatever might be true of
her, it still lay within me to commit a gross injustice, when she resumed
with these words: “It is a long time since I ceased to urge in my own
defence that I was but reflecting the attitude of society, for, in my efforts to
get at the root of the matter I have been convinced that the conventional
attitude cannot be defended, certainly not upon religious grounds.”

She stopped as if startled by her own reflections upon the subject of the
social ostracism so long established and so harshly enforced that women
seem to hold to it as through an instinct of self-preservation.
She was, perhaps, dimly conscious that the tradition that the unchaste
woman should be an outcast from society rests upon a solid basis of
experience, upon the long struggle of a multitude of obscure women who,
from one generation to another, were frantically determined to establish the
paternity of their children and to force the father to a recognition of his
obligations; and that the living representatives of these women instinctively
rise up in honest rebellion against any attempt to loosen the social control
which such efforts have established, bungling and cruel though the control
may be.
Further conversation showed that she also realized that these stern
memories inherited from the past have an undoubted social value and that it
is a perilous undertaking upon which certain women of this generation are
bent in their efforts to deal a belated justice to the fallen woman. It involves
a clash within the very mass of inherited motives and impulses as well as a
clash between old conventions and contemporary principles. On the other
hand, it must have been obvious to her in her long effort to get at “the root
of the matter” that the punishment and hatred of the bad woman has gone so
far as to overreach its own purpose; it has become responsible for such
hardness of heart on the part of “respectable” women towards the so-called
fallen ones, that punishment is often inflicted not only without regard to
justice, but in order to feed the spiritual pride, “I am holier than thou.” Such
pride erects veritable barricades, deliberately shutting out sympathetic
understanding.
The very fact that women remain closer to type than men do and are
more swayed by the past, makes it difficult for them to defy settled
conventions. 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. Even such a tentative effort in the direction of
social advance exacts the usual toll of blood and tears.

Fortunately the entire burden of the attempt to modify a convention
which has become unsupportable, by no means rests solely upon such self-
conscious women. Their analytical efforts are steadily supplemented by
instinctive conduct on the part of many others. A great mass of “variation
from type,” accelerating this social change, is contributed by simple
mothers who have been impelled by the same primitive emotion which the
Devil Baby had obviously released in so many old women. This is an
overwhelming pity and sense of tender comprehension, doubtless closely
related to the compunction characteristic of all primitive people which in
the earliest stage of social development long performed the first rude offices
of a sense of justice. This early trait is still a factor in the social struggle, for
as has often been pointed out, our social state is like a countryside—of a
complex geological structure, with outcrops of strata of very diverse ages.
Such compunction sometimes carries the grandmother of an illegitimate
child to the point of caring for the child when she is still utterly unable to
forgive her daughter, the child’s mother. Even that is a step in advance from
the time when the daughter was driven from the house and her child,
because a bastard, was conscientiously treated as an outcast both by the
family and by the community.
Such an instance of compunction was recently brought to my attention
when Hull-House made an effort to place a subnormal little girl twelve
years old in an institution in order that she might be protected from certain
designing men in the neighborhood. The grandmother who had always
taken care of her savagely opposed the effort step by step. She had scrubbed
the lavatories in a public building during the twenty-five years of her
widowhood, and because she worked all day had been unable to protect her
own feeble-minded daughter who, when barely fifteen years old, had
become the mother of this child. When her granddaughter was finally
placed in the institution, the old woman was absolutely desolated. She
found it almost impossible to return home after her day’s work because “it
was too empty and lonesome, and nothing to come back for. You see,” she
explained, “my youngest boy wasn’t right in his head either and kept his
bed for the last fifteen years of his life. During all that time I took care of
him the way one does of a baby, and I hurried home every night with my
heart in my mouth until I saw that he was all right. He died the year this
little girl was born and she kind of took his place. I kept her in a day

nursery while she was little, and when she was seven years old the ladies
there sent her to school in one of the subnormal rooms and let her come
back to the nursery for her meals. I thought she was getting along all right
and I took care never to let her go near her mother.” The old woman made it
quite clear that this was because her daughter was keeping house with a
man with whom there had been no marriage ceremony. In her simple code,
to go to such a house would be to connive at sin, and while she was grateful
that the man had established a control over her daughter which she herself
had never been able to obtain, she always referred to her daughter as
“fallen,” although no one knew better than she how unguarded the girl had
been. 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.
Many individual instances are found in which a woman, hard pressed by
life, includes within her tenderness the mother of an illegitimate child. A
most striking example of this came to me through a woman whom I knew
years ago when she daily brought her three children to the Hull-House day
nursery, obliged to support them by her work in a neighboring laundry
because her husband had deserted her. I recall her fatuous smile as she used
to say that “Tommy is so pleased to see me at night that I can hear him
shout ‘Hello, ma’ when I am a block away.” I had known Tommy through
many years; periods of adversity when his father was away were succeeded
by periods of fitful prosperity when his father returned from his wanderings
with the circus with which “he could always find work,” because he had
once been a successful acrobat and later a clown, and “so could turn his
hand to anything that was needed.”
Perhaps it was unavoidable that Tommy should have made his best
friends among the warm-hearted circus people who were very kind to him
after his father’s death, and that long before the Child Labor Law permitted
him to sing in Chicago saloons, he was doing a successful business singing
in the towns of a neighboring state. He was a droll little chap “without any

sense about taking care of himself,” and in those days his mother not only
missed his cheerful companionship but was constantly anxious about his
health and morals. When he grew older and became a professional he sent
his mother money occasionally, although never very much and never with
any regularity. She was always so pleased when it came that the two
daughters supporting her with their steady wages were inclined to resent her
obvious gratification, as they did the killing of the fatted calf on those rare
occasions when the prodigal returned “between seasons” to visit his family.
It is possible that his mother thus early acquired the habit of defending
him, the black sheep, against the strictures of the good children who so
easily become the self-righteous when they feel “put upon.” However that
may be, five years ago, after one daughter had been married to a skilled
mechanic and the other, advanced to the position of a forewoman, was
supporting her mother in the comparative idleness of keeping house for two
people in three rooms, a forlorn girl appeared with a note from Tommy
asking his mother “to help her out until the kid came and she could work
again.”
The steady daughter would not permit “such a girl to cross the
threshold,” and the little household was finally broken up upon the issue.
The daughter went to live with her married sister, while the mother, having
moved into one room with “Tommy’s girl,” went back to the laundry in
order to support herself and her guest.
The daughters, having impressively told their mother that she could come
to live with them whenever she “was willing to come alone,” dropped the
entire situation. In doing this, they were doubtless instinctively responding
to a habit acquired through years of “keeping clear of the queer people
father knew in the circus and the saloon crowds always hanging around
Tommy,” in their secret hope to come to know respectable young men.
Conscious that they had back of them the opinion of all righteous people
they could not understand why their mother, for the sake of a bad girl, had
deserted them in this praiseworthy effort in which hitherto she had been the
prime mover.
Tommy had sent his “girl” to his mother on the eve of his departure for
“a grand tour to the Klondike region,” and since then, almost four years
ago, she has heard nothing further from him. During the first half of the

time the two women struggled on together as best they could, supporting
themselves and the child who was brought daily to the nursery by his
grandmother. But the pretty little mother, gradually going back to her old
occupation of dancing in the vaudeville, had more and more out-of-town
engagements, and while she always divided her earnings with the baby, the
grandmother suspected her of losing interest in him, a situation which was
finally explained when she confessed that she was about to be married to a
cabaret manager who “knew nothing of the past,” and to beg that the baby
might stay where he was. “Of course, I will pay board for him, but his
father can be made to do something, too, if we can only get the law on
him.”
It was at this point that I had the following conversation with the
grandmother, who was shrewd enough to see that the support of the baby
was being left upon her hands, and that she could expect help from neither
his father nor his mother, although she stoutly refused the advice that the
whole matter be taken into the Court of Domestic Relations. “If I could
only see Tommy once I think I could get him to help, but I can’t find out
where he is, and he may not be alive for all I know; he was always that
careless about himself. If he put on a new red necktie he’d never know if
his bare toes were pushing out of his shoes. He probably didn’t get proper
clothes for ‘the Klondike region’ and he may have been frozen to death
before this. But whatever has happened to him, I can’t let his baby go. I
suppose I’ve learned to think differently about some things after all my
years of living with a light-minded husband. Maggie came to see me last
week, for she means to be a good daughter. She said that Carrie and Joe
were buying a house way out on the West Side, that they were going to
move into it this month, and that she and I could have a nice big room
together. She said, too, that Carrie would charge only half rate board for me,
and would be glad to have my help with her little children, for they both
think that nobody has such a way with children as I have. The night before,
when she and Carrie were playing with the little boys, they remembered
some of the funny songs father used to teach Tommy, and how jolly we all
were when he came home good-natured and would stand on his head to
make the candy fall out of his pockets. I know the two girls really want me
to come back, and that they are often homesick, but when I pointed to the
bed where the baby was and asked, ‘What about him?’ Maggie turned as
hard as nails and said as quick as a flash, ‘We’re all agreed that you’ll have

to put him in an institution. We’ll never have any chance with the nice
people in a swell neighborhood like ours if you bring the baby.’ She looked
real white then, and I felt sorry for her when she said, ‘Why, they might
even think he was my child, you never can tell,’ although she was ashamed
of that afterwards and cried a little before she left. She told me that she and
Carrie, when they were children, were always talking of what they would
do when they got old enough to work, how they would take care of me and
move to a part of the city where nobody would know anything about the
outlandish way their father and Tommy used to carry on. Of course, it was
almost telling me that they didn’t want me to come to see them if I kept the
baby.”
My old friend was quite unable to formulate the motives which underlay
her determination, but she implied that clinging to this helpless child was
part of her unwavering affection for her son when, without any preamble,
she concluded the conversation with the remark, “It’s the way I always felt
about him,” as if further explanation were unnecessary.
It was all doubtless a manifestation of Nature’s anxious care—so
determined upon survival and so indifferent to morals—that had induced
her long devotion to her one child least equipped to take care of himself;
and for the same reason the helpless little creature whose existence no one
else was deeply concerned to preserve had become so entwined in her
affections that separation was impossible.
From time to time a mother goes further than this, in her determination to
deal justly with the unhappy situation in which her daughter is placed.
When the mother of a so-called fallen girl is of that type of respectability
which is securely founded upon narrow precepts, inherited through
generations of careful living, it requires genuine courage to ignore the
social stigma in order to consider only the moral development of her child,
although the result of such courage doubtless minimizes the chagrin and
disgrace for the girl herself.
In one such instance the parents of the girl, who had been prevented from
marrying her lover because the families on both sides objected to
differences of religion, have openly faced the situation and made the baby a
beloved member of the household. The pretty young mother arrogates to
herself a hint of martyrdom for her faith’s sake, but the discipline and

responsibility are working wonders for her character. In her hope of earning
money enough for two, she has been stirred to new ambition and is eagerly
attending a business college. She suffers a certain amount of social
ostracism but at the same time her steady courage excites genuine
admiration.
In another case a fearless mother exacts seven dollars a week in payment
of the board for her daughter and the baby, although the girl earns but eight
dollars a week in a cigar factory and buys such clothing for two as she can
with the remaining dollar. She admits that it is “hard sledding,” but that the
baby is “mighty nice.” Whatever her state of mind, she evidently has no
notion of rebelling against her mother’s authority, and is humbly grateful
that she was not turned out of doors when the situation was discovered. It is
possible that the mother’s remorse at her failure to guard her daughter from
wrong doing enables her thus grimly to defy social standards which,
although they are based upon stern and narrow tenets, nevertheless
epitomize the bitter wisdom of generations. Such mothers, overcoming that
timidity which makes it so difficult to effect changes in daily living, make a
genuine contribution to the solution of the vexed problem.
In spite of much obtuseness on the part of those bound by the iron fetters
of convention, these individual cases suggest a practical method of
procedure. 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. There
has certainly been a great modification of the harsh judgments meted out in
such cases, as women all over the world have endeavored, through the old
bungling method of trial and error, to deal justly with individual situations.
Each case has been quietly judged by reference to an altered moral
standard, for while the ethical code like the legal code stands in need of
constant revision, the remodeling of the former is always private, tacit and
informal in marked contrast to the public and ceremonious acts of law-
makers and judges when the latter is changed.

Such measure of success as the organized Woman’s Movement has
attained in the direction of a larger justice has come through an
overwhelming desire to cherish both the illegitimate child and his
unfortunate mother. In addition to that, the widespread effort of modern
women to obtain a recognized legal status for themselves and their own
children has also been largely dependent upon this desire, at least in the
beginnings of the movement. Women slowly had discovered that the severe
attitude towards the harlot had not only become embodied in the statutory
law concerning her, as thousands of court decisions every day bear
testimony, but had become registered in the laws and social customs
pertaining to good women as well; the Code Napoleon, which prohibited
that search be made for the father of an illegitimate child, also denied the
custody of her children to the married mother; those same states in which
the laws considered a little girl of ten years the seducer of a man of well-
known immorality, did not allow a married woman to hold her own
property nor to retain her own wages.
The enthusiasm responsible for the worldwide Woman’s Movement was
generated in the revolt against such gross injustices. The most satisfactory
achievements of the movement have been secured in the Scandinavian
countries, where the splendid code of laws protecting all women and
children was founded on the instinct to defend the weakest, and upon a
determination to lighten that social opprobrium which makes it so
unreasonably difficult for a mother to support a child born out of wedlock.
In Germany, when the presence of over a million illegitimate children under
the age of fourteen years made the situation acute, the best women of the
nation, asserting that all attempts to deal out social punishment upon the
mothers resulted only in a multitude of ill-nourished and weakened
children, founded “The Mutterchutz” Movement. Through its efforts to
secure justice and protection for these mothers, it has come to be the great
defender of the legal rights of all German women.
Many achievements of the modern movement demonstrate that woman
deals most efficiently with fresh experiences when she coalesces them into
the impressions Memory has kept in store for her. 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; at least so far as Art is dependent
upon proportion and so far as beauty hangs upon an ineffable balance
between restraint and inclusion. Hungry for this finely proportioned living,
she may at length become a disciple of Diotema, the wisest woman of
antiquity, who asserted that the life which above all we should live, must be
discovered by faithful and strenuous search for ever-widening kinds of
beauty.
In woman’s search for “the eternal moment,” balanced independently of
time itself because so melted both into memories of the past and into
surmises of new beauty for the future of her children’s children, she may
recognize as one of the universal harmonies the touching devotion of the
endless multitude of mothers who were the humble vessels for life’s
continuance and who carried the burden in safety to the next generation.
Maternal affection and solicitude, in woman’s remembering heart, may at
length coalesce into a chivalric protection for all that is young and
unguarded. This chivalry of women expressing protection for those at the
bottom of society, so far as it has already developed, suggests a return to
that idealized version of chivalry which was the consecration of strength to
the defence of weakness, unlike the actual chivalry of the armed knight who
served his lady with gentle courtesy while his fields were ploughed by
peasant women misshapen through toil and hunger.
As an example of this new chivalry, the Hungarian women have recently
risen in protest against a proposed military regulation requiring that all
young women in domestic service, who are living in the vicinity of
barracks, be examined each week by medical officers in order to protect the
soldiers from disease. The good women in Hungary spiritedly resented the
assumption that these girls, simply because they are the least protected of
any class in the community, should be subjected to this insult.
An instance of this sort once again illustrates that moral passion is the
only solvent for prejudice, and that women have come to feel reproached
and disturbed when they ignore the dynamic urgency of memories as
fundamental as those upon which prohibitive conventions are based.

CHAPTER IV
WOMEN’S MEMORIES—INTEGRATING INDUSTRY

If it has always been the mission of literature to translate the particular
act into something of the universal, to reduce the element of crude pain in
the isolated experience by bringing to the sufferer a realization that his is
but the common lot, this mission may have been performed through such
stories as that of the Devil Baby for simple, hardworking women who at
any given moment compose the bulk of the women in the world.
Certainly some of the visitors to the Devil Baby attempted to generalize
and evidently found a certain enlargement of the horizon, an interpretation
of life as it were, in the effort. They exhibited that confidence which
sometimes comes to the more literate person when, finding himself morally
isolated among those hostile to his immediate aims, his reading assures him
that other people in the world have thought as he does. Later when he dares
to act on the conviction his own experience has forced upon him, he has
become so conscious of a cloud of witnesses torn out of literature and
warmed into living comradeship, that he scarcely distinguishes them from
the likeminded people actually in the world whom he has later discovered
as a consequence of his deed.
In some of the reminiscences related by working women I was surprised,
not so much by the fact that memory could integrate the individual
experience into a sense of relation with the more impersonal aspects of life,
as that the larger meaning had been obtained when the fructifying memory
had had nothing to feed upon but the harshest and most monotonous of
industrial experiences.
I held a conversation with one such woman when she came to confess
that her long struggle was over and that she and her sister had at last turned
their faces to the poorhouse. She clearly revealed not only that she had
caught a glimpse of the great social forces of her day, but that she had had
the ability to modify her daily living by what she had perceived.

Perhaps, under the shadow of a tragic surrender, she had obtained a new
sense of values, or at least had made up her mind that it was not worth
while any longer to conceal her genuine experiences, for she talked more
fully of her hard life than I had ever heard her before in the many years I
had known her. She related in illuminating detail an incident in her long
effort of earning, by ill-paid and unskilled labor, the money with which to
support her decrepit mother and her imbecile sister. For more than fifty
years she had never for a moment considered the possibility of sending
either of them to a public institution, although it had become almost
impossible to maintain such a household after the mother, who lived to be
ninety-four years old, had become utterly distraught.
She was still sharing her scanty livelihood with the feeble-minded sister,
although she herself was unable to do anything but wash vegetables and
peel potatoes in a small restaurant of her neighborhood. The cold water
necessary to these processes made her hands, already crippled with
rheumatism, so bad that on some days she could not hold anything smaller
than a turnip, although the other people in the kitchen surreptitiously helped
her all they could and the cooks gave her broken food to carry home to the
ever hungry sister.
She told of her monotonous years in a box factory, where she had always
worked with the settled enmity of the other employes. They regarded her as
a pace setter, and she, obliged to work fast and furiously in order to keep
three people, and full of concern for her old mother’s many unfulfilled
needs, had never understood what the girls meant when they talked about
standing by each other.
She did not change in her attitude even when she found the prices of
piece work went down lower and lower, so that at last she was obliged to
work overtime late into the night in order to earn the small amount she had
previously earned by day. She was seventy years old when the legality of
the Illinois Ten Hour Law was contested, and her employer wanted her to
testify in court that she was opposed to the law because she could not have
supported her old mother all those years unless she had been allowed to
work nights. She found herself at last dimly conscious of what it was that
her long time enemies, the union girls, had been trying to do, and a
subconscious loyalty to her own kind made it impossible for her to bear
testimony against them. She did not analyze her motives but told me that,

fearing she might yield to her employer’s request, in sheer panic she had
abruptly left his factory and moved her helpless household to another part
of the city on the very day she was expected to appear in court. In her haste
she left four days unpaid wages behind her, and moving the family took all
the money she had painstakingly saved for the coming winter’s coal. She
had unknowingly moved into a neighborhood of cheap restaurants, and
from that time on she worked in any of them which would employ her until
now at last she was too feeble to be of much use to anybody.
Although she had never joined the Union which finally became so
flourishing in the box factory she had left, she was conscious that in a
moment of great temptation she had refrained from seeking her own
advantage at the expense of others. As she bunglingly tried to express her
motives, she said: “The Irish—you know I was ten years old when we came
over—often feel like that; it isn’t exactly that you are sorry after you have
done a thing, nor so much that you don’t do it because you know you will
be sorry afterwards, nor that anything in particular will happen to you if you
do it, but that you haven’t the heart for it, that it goes against your nature.”
When I expressed my admiration for her prompt action she replied: “I
have never told this before except to one person, to a woman who was
organizing for the garment workers and who came to my house one night
about nine o’clock, just as I was having my supper. I had it late in those
days because I used to scrub the restaurant floor after everybody left. My
sister was asleep back of the stove, I looked sharp not to wake her up and I
don’t believe the Union woman ever knew that she wasn’t just like other
people. The organizer was looking for some of the women living in our
block who had been taking work from the shops ever since the strike was
on. She was clean tired out, and when I offered her a cup of tea she said as
quick as a flash, ‘You are not a scab, are you?’ I just held up my poor old
hands before her face, swollen red from scrubbing and full of chilblains,
and I told her that I couldn’t sew a stitch if my life depended on it.
“When I offered her the second cup of tea—a real educated-looking
woman she was, and she must have been used to better tea than mine boiled
out of the old tea leaves the restaurant cook always let me bring home—I
said to her, ‘My hands aren’t the only reason I’m not scabbing. I see too
much of the miserable wages these women around here get for their
sweatshop work, and I’ve done enough harm already with my pace setting,

and my head so full of my poor old mother that I never thought of anybody
else.’ She smiled at me and nodded her head over my old cracked cup. ‘You
are a Union woman all right,’ she said. ‘You have the true spirit whether
you carry a card or not. I am mighty glad to have met you after all the scabs
I have talked to this day.’”
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. She
may have been dominated by a subconscious suggestion “from the dust that
sleeps,” a suggestion so simple, so insistent and monotonous that it had
victoriously survived its original sphere of conduct.
It was in keeping with the drab colored experiences of her seventy hard
years that her contribution to the long struggle should have been one of
inglorious flight, nevertheless she had gallantly recognized the Trades
Union organizer as a comrade in a common cause. She cherished in her
heart the memory of one golden moment when she had faintly heard the
trumpets summon her and had made her utmost response.
When the simple story of a lifetime of sacrifice to family obligations and
of one supreme effort to respond to a social claim came to an end, I
reflected that for more than half a century the narrator had freely given all
her time, all her earnings, all her affections, and yet during the long period
had developed no habit of self-pity. At a crucial moment she had been able
to estimate life, not in terms of her self-immolation but in relation to a hard
pressed multitude of fellow workers.
As she sat there, a tall, gaunt woman broken through her devotion, she
inevitably suggested the industrial wrongs and oppressions suffered by the
women who, forgotten and neglected, perform so much of the unlovely
drudgery upon which our industrial order depends. At the moment I could
recall only one of her starved ambitions which to my knowledge had ever
been attained. When a friend tenderly placed a pair of white satin slippers
upon the coffined feet of her old mother who for more than ninety years had

travelled a long hard road and had stumbled against many stones, the loving
heart of the aged daughter overflowed. “It is herself would know how I
prayed for white satin shoes for the burial, thinking as how they might
make it up to mother, she who never knew where the next pair was coming
from and often had to borrow to go to Mass.” I remembered that as my
friend and I left the spotless bare room wrapped in the mystery of death and
walked back to Hull-House together, we passed a little child who proudly
challenged our attention to his new shoes, “shiny” in the first moment of
joyous possession. We could but recognize the epitome of the hard struggle
of the very poor, from the moment they scramble out of their rude cradles
until they are lowered into their “partial payment” graves, to keep shoes
upon their feet. The rare moments of touching pleasure when the simple
desire for “a new pair” is fulfilled are doubtless indicated in the early fairy
tales by the rewards of glistening red shoes or glass slippers to the good
child; in the religious allegories which turn life itself into one long
pilgrimage, by the promises to the faithful that they shall be shod with the
sandals of righteousness and to the blessed ones, who having formally
renounced the world, forswearing shoes altogether and humbly walking on
without them, that their bruised and torn feet shall yet gleam lily-white on
the streets of Paradise.
I suddenly saw in this worn old woman who sat before me, what George
Sand described as “a rare and austere production of human suffering” and
was so filled with a fresh consciousness of the long barren road travelled by
the patient mother and daughter, that it merged into the Via Dolorosa of the
Poor of the world. It may have been through this suggestion of an actual
street that my memory vividly evoked a group of Russian pilgrims I had
once seen in Holy Week as they triumphantly approached Jerusalem. Their
heads, garlanded in wild flowers still fresh with early dew, were lifted in
joyous singing but their broken and bleeding feet, bound in white cloth and
thrust into sandals of stripped bark, were the actual sacrifice they were
devoutly offering at the Sepulchre.
As my mind swiftly came back from the blossoming fields of Palestine to
the crowded industrial district of Chicago, I found myself recalling a
pensive remark made by the gifted Rachel Varnhagen, a century ago.
“Careless Fate never requires of us what we are really capable of doing.”

This overwhelming sense of the waste in woman’s unused capacity came
to me again during a Garment Workers’ strike, when some of the young
women involved were sitting in the very chairs occupied so recently by the
visitors to the Devil Baby. They brought a curious reminder of the
overworked and heavily burdened mothers who had yet been able to keep
the taste of life in their mouths and who could not be overborne, because
their endurance was rooted in simple and instinctive human affections.
During the long strike these young women endured all sorts of privations
without flinching; some of them actual hunger, most of them disapprobation
from their families, and all of them a loss of that money which alone could
procure for them the American standards so highly prized. Through
participation in the strike they all took the risk of losing their positions, and
yet, facing a future of unemployment and wretchedness, they displayed a
stubborn endurance which held out week after week.
Perhaps because of my recent conversations with old women I received
the impression that the very power of resistance in such a socialized
undertaking as a strike, presents a marked contrast in both its origin and
motives to the traditional type of endurance exercised by the mothers and
grandmothers of the strikers or by their acquaintances among domestic
women living in the same crowded tenements.
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.
They must be sustained as soldiers on a forced march are sustained, by their
sense of comradeship in high endeavor. Naturally, some of the young
working women are never able to achieve this and can keep on with the
monotony of factory work only when they persuade themselves that they
are getting ready, and have not yet begun their own lives, because real
living for them must include a home of their own and children to “do for.”
Such unutilized dynamic power illustrates the stupid waste of those
impulses and affections, registered in the very bodily structure itself, which
are ruthlessly pushed aside and considered of no moment to the work in

which so many women are now engaged. 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. The young woman who spends her time in
packing biscuits into boxes which come to her down a chute and are
whirled away from her on a miniature trolley, has never even seen how the
biscuits are made, for the factory proper is separated from the packing room
by a door with the sign “No Admittance.” She must work all day without
the vital and direct interest in the hourly results of her labors which her
mother had.
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. Even in this unlovely
struggle, the older women utilize well-seasoned faculties, in contrast to the
newly developed powers required by the multitude of young girls who for
the first time in the long history of woman’s labor, are uniting their efforts
in order to obtain opportunities for a fuller and more normal living.
Organizing with men and women of divers nationalities they are obliged to
form new ties absolutely unlike family bonds. On the other hand, these girls
possess the enormous advantage over women of the domestic type of
having experienced the discipline arising from impersonal obligations and
of having tasted the freedom from economic dependence, so valuable that
too heavy a price can scarcely be paid for it.
This clash between the traditional conception of woman’s duty narrowed
solely to family obligations and the claims arising from the complexity of
the industrial situation, manifests scarcely a suggestion of the latent war so
vaguely apprehended from the earliest times as a possibility between men
and women. Even the restrained Greeks believed that when the obscure

women at the bottom of society could endure no longer and “the oppressed
women struck back, it would not be justice which came but the revenge of
madness.” My own observation has discovered little suggesting this mood,
certainly not among the women active in the Labor Movement.
I recall the recent experience of an organizer whom I very much admire
for her valiant services in the garment trades and whom I have known from
her earliest girlhood. Her character confirms the contention that our chief
concern with the past is not what we have done, nor the adventures we have
met, but the moral reaction of bygone events within ourselves.
As an orphaned child she had been cared for by two aunts who owned
between them a little shop which pretended to be a tailoring establishment,
but which in reality was a distributing centre for home work among the
Italian women and newly immigrated Russian Jews living in the
neighborhood. Her aunts, because they were Americans, superior in
education and resources to the humble home workers, by dint of much
bargaining both with the wholesale houses from which they procured the
garments, and with the foreign women to whom they distributed them, had
been able to secure a very good commission. For many years they had made
a comfortable living, and in addition had acquired an exalted social position
in the neighborhood, for they were much looked up to by those so
dependent upon them for work.
Although my friend was expected to help in the shop as much as
possible, she was sent regularly to school and had already “graduated from
the eighth grade,” when a law was passed in the Illinois legislature,
popularly known as the Anti Sweat-shop Law, which, within a year, had
ruined her aunts’ business. After they had been fined in court for violating
the law, a case which obtained much publicity because smallpox was
discovered in two of the tenement houses in which the home finishers were
living, the aunts were convinced that they could not continue to give out
work to the Italian and Russian Jewish women. Reluctantly foregoing their
commissions they then tried crowding their own house and shop with
workers, only to be again taken into court and fined when the inspector
discovered their kitchen and bedrooms full of half-finished garments. They
both flatly refused to go into a factory to work, and after a futile attempt to
revive the tailoring business, never very genuine, they were finally reduced
to the dimensions of the tiny shop itself, which, under the new regulations

as to light and air could accommodate but three people. My friend was at
once taken from school and made one of these ill-paid workers and the little
household was held together on the pittance the three could earn.
It was but natural, perhaps, that as these displaced proprietors became
poorer they should ever grow more bitter against the reformers and the
Trades Unionists who, between them, had secured the “high-brow”
legislation which had destroyed their honest business.
The niece was married at eighteen to a clerk in a neighboring department
store who worked four evenings a week and every other Sunday in his
determination to get on. The bride moved into a more prosperous
neighborhood and I saw little of her husband or herself for ten years, during
which time they made four payments on the little house they occupied fully
three miles from the now abandoned sweat-shop. Her husband worked hard
with a consuming desire to rear his children in good surroundings as much
as possible unlike the slums, as he somewhat brutally designated the
neighborhood of his own youth. Through his unrelieved years in the cheap
department store where, however, he had always felt a great satisfaction in
being well dressed and had resisted any attempts of his fellow clerks to
shorten their preposterous hours by trades-union organization, his health
was gradually undermined and he finally developed tuberculosis. He was
unable to support his family during the last decade of his life, and in her
desperate need my friend went back to the only trade she had, that of
finishing garments. During these years, although she sold the little house
and placed her boy in a semi-philanthropic institution, she steadily faced the
problem of earning insufficient wages for the support of the family, the
pang of her failure constantly augmented by the knowledge that, in spite of
her utmost efforts, the invalid never received the food and care his
condition required. The clothing factory in which she then worked
illustrated the lowest ebb in the fortune of the garment workers in American
cities when, the sweat shop having been largely eliminated through the
efforts of the factory inspectors, the workers from every land were crowded
into the hastily organized factories. Separated by their diverse languages
and through their long habits of home work, they had become too secretive
even to tell one another the amount of wages each was receiving. It was as
if the competition had been transferred from the sweat shop contractors to
the individual workers themselves, sitting side by side in the same room,

and perhaps it was not surprising that the workers felt as if they had been
hunted down into their very kitchens and their poverty cruelly exposed to
public view.
My friend shared this wretchedness and carried into it the bitterness of
her early experience. She says now that she never caught even a suggestion
that this might be but a transitional period to a more ordered sort of
industrial life.
She did not tell me just when and how she had come to the conclusion
that wages must be higher, that legal enactment for better conditions must
be supplemented by the efforts of the workers themselves, but it was
absolutely clear that she had independently reached that conclusion long
before a strike in the clothing industry brought her into contact with the
organized Labor Movement. It was certainly not until the year of her
husband’s death that she became aware of the industrial changes which had
been taking place during the twenty-two years since her aunts’ business had
been ruined.
She was grateful that the knowledge had first come to her through an
Italian girl working by her side, for, as she explained, her old attitude
toward the “dagoes,” as a people to be exploited, had to be thoroughly
changed before she could be of much real use in organizing a trade in which
so many Italians were engaged. Even during the strike itself, to which she
was thoroughly committed, having been convinced both of its inevitability
and of the justice of its demands, she resented the fact that the leadership
was in the hands of Russian Jews and, secure in her Americanism, she felt
curiously aloof from the group with which she was so intimately identified.
A few months after the strike my friend fortunately secured a place in a
manufactory of men’s clothing, in which there had been instituted a Trade
Board for the adjustment of grievances, and where wages and hours were
determined by joint agreement. When she was elected to the position of
shop representative she found herself in the midst of one of the most
interesting experiments being carried on in the United States, not only from
the standpoint of labor but from that of applying the principles of
representative government in a new field. She felt the stimulus of being a
part in that most absorbing of all occupations—the reconstruction of a
living world.

One evening, at Hull-House, as she came out of a citizenship class she
had been attending, she tried to express some of the implications of the
great undertaking in which more than ten thousand clothing employes are
engaged. She repeated the statement made by the leader of the class that it
was the solemn duty and obligation of the United States not only to keep a
republican form of government alive upon the face of the earth and to fulfill
the expectations of the founders but to modify and develope that type of
government as conditions changed; he had said that the spirit of the New
England town meeting might be manifested through a referendum vote in a
large city, and that it must find some such vehicle of expression if it would
survive under changed conditions. Her eyes were quite shining as she made
her application to the experiment being carried on in the great clothing
factory, with its many shops and departments unified in mutual effort.
Evidently her attention had been caught by the similarity between the town
meeting in its relation to a more elaborated form of government and the
small isolated sweat-shop such as that formerly managed by her aunts, in its
relation to the “biggest clothing factory in the world.” She had heard her
fellow workers say that the “greenhorn” often found much friendliness in a
small shop where his own language was spoken, and where he could earn at
least a humble living until he grew accustomed to the habits of a new
country, whereas he would have been lost and terrified in a factory. She felt
very strongly the necessity of translating this sense of comradeship and
friendliness into larger terms, and she believed that it could be done by the
united workers.
As she sat by my desk, this woman who had not yet attained her fortieth
year looked much older, as if illustrating the saying that hard labor so early
robs the poor man of his youth that it makes his old age too long. She
seemed to me for the moment to have gathered up in her own experience
the transition from old conditions to new and to be standing on the
threshold of a great development in the lives of working women.
As if she were conscious that I was recalling her past with which I had
been so familiar, she began to speak again. “You know that I have both of
my children with me now; the girl graduates from the Normal School in
June and hopes to put herself through the University after she has taught for
a few years. She reminds me of her father in her anxiety to know people of
education, to get on in the world, and I am sure she will succeed. The boy

has caught the other motive of pulling up with his own trade and of
standing by the organized Labor Movement. Of course, sewing was too dull
for him, and besides he grew ambitious to be a machinist when he was in
the Industrial School where I put him with such a breaking of the heart
when he was only ten years old. He has to admit, however, that even his
own Machinists’ Union, with its traditional trade agreements and joint
boards, is far behind our experiment. He went with me to the banquet on
May Day. We had marched through the Loop in celebration of our new
agreement and had stirring speeches at the Auditorium in the afternoon, but
it was in the evening that we really felt at home with each other. When he
saw the tremendous enthusiasm for our beloved leader—my boy, I am sorry
to say, is a little inclined to despise foreigners and also tailors because they
aren’t as big and brawny as the members of his dear Machinists’ Union—
and really caught some notion of the statesmanlike ability required for the
successful management of such a complicated and difficult industrial
experiment, and when he realized that the ten per cent increase provided for
in the new agreement was to go in greater proportion to those at the lower
end of the scale, he suddenly forgot his prejudices and I saw him
applauding with his hands and feet as if he had really let loose at last.
“Of course, it hasn’t been easy for me even during these later years to
keep Helen in school and to support my aunt who is now too old and broken
even to keep house for us. But we have got on, and quite aside from
everything else I am thankful to have had a small share in this forward step
in American democracy—at least, that’s what they called it at the banquet,”
she ended shyly.
The experience of my friend bore testimony that in spite of all their
difficulties and handicaps, something of social value is forced out of the
very situation itself among that vast multitude of women whose oppression
through the centuries has typified a sense of helpless and intolerable
wrongs. Many of them, even the older ones, are being made slowly
conscious of the subtle and impalpable filaments that secretly bind their
experiences and moods into larger relations, and they are filled with a new
happiness analogous to that of little children when they are first taught to
join hands in ordered play.
Is such enthusiastic participation in organized effort but one
manifestation of that desire for liberty and for a larger participation in life,

found in great women’s souls all over the world?
In pursuance of such a desire the working women have the enormous
advantage of constant association with each other, an advantage dimly
perceived even by pioneer women two hundred years ago.
The hostesses of the famous drawing-rooms of the eighteenth century
laid great stress on human intercourse as the individual’s best means of
cultivation. Certain French women gave as a raison d’etre for their brilliant
salons that “people must come together in order to exercise justice,” and
they became enormously proud of the fact that by the end of the century
“all Europe was thrown into a state of agitation if injustice were committed
in any corner of it.”
This hypothesis was gallantly laid down a hundred years before the
industrial revolution which, in its consummation, has congregated millions
of women into factories all over the world. These myriad women, most of
them young and untrained and all of them working under new industrial
conditions, are gradually learning to “exercise justice” if only because they
have “come together.” Their association has been accomplished under the
stress of a common necessity, and they have been tutored in a mass at the
hard school of bitter experience.
Were the sheltered drawing-room ladies the forerunners of such
contemporary advocates of industrial justice or do we find a better
prototype in those simple old women who, having reared their own children
and having come to be regarded as a depository for domestic wisdom,
dispense sound advice to bewildered mothers which always contains the
admonition, “Never be partial to any one of them, always be as just as you
know how.”
Possibly women’s organizations of all types are but providing ever-
widening channels through which woman’s moral energy may flow,
revivifying life by new streams fed in the upper reaches of her undiscovered
capacities. In either case, we may predict that to control old impulses so that
they may be put to social uses, to serve the present through memories
hoarding woman’s genuine experiences, may liberate energies hitherto
unused and may result in a notable enrichment of the pattern of human
culture.

CHAPTER V
WOMEN’S MEMORIES—CHALLENGING WAR

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.
One such woman,[1] who had long been identified with the care of
delinquent children and had worked for many years towards the
establishment of a Children’s Court, had asked me many questions
concerning the psychopathic clinic in the Juvenile Court in Chicago,
comparing it to the brilliant work accomplished in her own city through the
coöperation of the university faculty. The Imperial government itself had
recently recognized the value of this work and at the outbreak of the war
was rapidly developing a system through which the defective child might be
discovered early in his school career, and might not only be saved from
delinquency but such restricted abilities as he possessed be trained for the
most effective use. “Through all these years,” she said, “I had grown
accustomed to the fact that the government was deeply concerned in the
welfare of the least promising child. I had felt my own efforts so identified
with it that I had unconsciously come to regard the government as an
agency for nurturing human life and had apparently forgotten its more
primitive functions.
[1] The following conversation is a composite made from several talks held
with each of two women representing both sides of the conflict. Their opinions
and observations are merged into one because in so many particulars they were
either identical or overlapping. Both women called themselves patriots, but each
had become convinced of the folly of war.

“I was proud of the fact that my son held a state position as professor of
Industrial Chemistry in the University, because I knew that the research in
his department would ultimately tend to alleviate the harshness of factory

conditions, and to make for the well-being of the working classes in whose
children I had become so interested.
“When my son’s regiment was mobilized and sent to the front I think that
it never occurred to me, any more than it did to him, to question his duty.
His professional training made him a valuable member of the Aviation
Corps, and when, in those first weeks of high patriotism his letters reported
successful scouting or even devastating raids, I felt only a solemn
satisfaction. But gradually through the months, when always more of the
people’s food supply and constantly more men were taken by the
government for its military purposes, when I saw the state institutions for
defectives closed, the schools abridged or dismissed, women and children
put to work in factories under hours and conditions which had been legally
prohibited years before, when the very governmental officials who had been
so concerned for the welfare of the helpless were bent only upon the
destruction of the enemy at whatever cost to their fellow-citizens, the State
itself gradually became for me an alien and hostile thing.
“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?
“I am sure that I had reached these conclusions before my own tragedy
came, before my son was fatally wounded in a scouting aëroplane and his
body later thrown overboard into a lonely swamp. It was six weeks before I
knew what had happened and it was during that period that I felt most
strongly the folly and waste of putting men, trained as my son had been, to
the barbaric business of killing. This tendency in my thinking may have
been due to a hint he had given me in the very last letter I ever received
from him, of a change that was taking place within himself. He wrote that
whenever he heard the firing of a huge field-piece he knew that the
explosion consumed years of the taxes which had been slowly accumulated
by some hard-working farmer or shopkeeper, and that he unconsciously
calculated how fast industrial research would have gone forward, had his

department been given once a decade the costs of a single day of warfare,
with the government’s command to turn back into alleviation of industrial
conditions the taxes which the people had paid. He regretted that he was so
accustomed to analysis that his mind would not let the general situation
alone but wearily went over it again and again; and then he added that this
war was tearing down the conception of government which had been so
carefully developed during this generation in the minds of the very men
who had worked hardest to fulfill that conception.
“Although the letter sounded like a treatise on government, I knew there
was a personal pang somewhere behind this sombre writing, even though he
added his old joking promise that when their fathers were no longer killed
in industry, he would see what he could do for my little idiots.
“At the very end of the letter he wrote, and they were doubtless the last
words he ever penned, that he felt as if science herself in this mad world
had also become cruel and malignant.
“I learned later that it was at this time that he had been consulted in the
manufacture of asphyxiating gases, because the same gases are used in
industry and he had made experiments to determine their poisonousness in
different degrees of dilution. The original investigation with which he had
been identified had been carried on that the fumes released in a certain
industrial process might be prevented from injuring the men who worked in
the factory. I know how hard it must have been for him to put knowledge
acquired in his long efforts to protect normal living to the brutal use of
killing men. It was literally a forced act of prostitution.”
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. The international
mind, which really does exist in spite of the fact that it is not yet equipped
with adequate organs for international government, has become firmly
established, at least among scientists. They have known the daily stimulus

of a wide and free range of contacts. They have become interpenetrated
with the human consciousness of fellow scientists all over the world.
“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. It was
enough for women to know that government waged war to protect their
firesides and to preserve the nation from annihilation; at any rate, they
should keep their minds free from silly attempts to reason it out. It’s all
Bertha von Suttner’s book and other nonsense that the women are writing,
he exploded at the end.”
Then as if she were following another line of reminiscence she began
again. “My son left behind him a war bride, for he obeyed the admonition
of the statesmen, as well as the commands of the military officers in those
hurried heroic days. But the hasty wooing betrayed all his ideals of
marriage quite as fighting men of other nations did violence to his notions
of patriotism, and the recklessness of a destructive air raid outraged his long
devotion to science. Of course his child will be a comfort to us and his poor
little bride is filled with a solemn patriotism which never questions any
aspect of the situation. When she comes to see us and I listen to the
interminable talk she has with my father, I am grateful for the comfort they
give each other, but when 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.
“I listen to them thinking that if I were either older or younger it would
not be so hard for me, and I have an unreal impression that it would have
been easier for my son if the war had occurred in the first flush of his
adventurous youth. Eager as he had been to serve his country, he would not
then have asked whether it could best be accomplished by losing his life in
a scouting aëroplane or by dedicating a trained mind to industrial
amelioration. He might then easily have preferred the first and he certainly
would never have been tormented by doubts. But when he was thirty-one
years old and had long known that he was steadily serving his country
through careful researches, the results of which would both increase the
nation’s productivity and protect its humblest citizens, he could not do
otherwise than to judge and balance social values. I am, of course, proud of
his gallant spirit, that did not for a moment regret his decision to die for his
country, but I can make the sacrifice seem in character only when I place
him back in his early youth.
“At times I feel immeasurably old, and in spite of my father’s contention
that I am too intellectual, I am consciously dominated by one of those
overwhelming impulses belonging to women as such, irrespective of their
mental training, in their revolt against war. After all, why should one
disregard such imperative instincts? We know perfectly well that the trend
of a given period in history has been influenced by ‘habits of preference’
and by instinctive actions founded upon repeated and unrecorded
experiences of an analogous kind; that desires to seek and desires to avoid
are in themselves the very incalculable material by which the tendencies of
an age are modified. The women in all the belligerent countries who feel so
alike in regard to the horror and human waste of this war and yet refrain
from speaking out, may be putting into jeopardy that power inherent in
human affairs to right themselves through mankind’s instinctive shifting
towards what the satisfactions recommend and the antagonisms repulse.
The expression of such basic impulses in regard to human relationships may
be most important in this moment of warfare which is itself a reversion to
primitive methods of determining relations between man and man or nation
and nation.

“Certainly the women in every country who are under a profound
imperative to preserve human life, have a right to regard this maternal
impulse as important now as was the compelling instinct evinced by
primitive women long ago, when they made the first crude beginnings of
society by refusing to share the vagrant life of man because they insisted
upon a fixed abode in which they might cherish their children. Undoubtedly
women were then told that the interests of the tribe, the diminishing food
supply, the honor of the chieftain, demanded that they leave their particular
caves and go out in the wind and weather without regard to the survival of
their children. But at the present moment the very names of the tribes and of
the honors and glories which they sought are forgotten, while the basic fact
that the mothers held the lives of their children above all else, insisted upon
staying where the children had a chance to live, and cultivated the earth for
their food, laid the foundations of an ordered society.
“My son used to say that my scientific knowledge was most irregular, but
profound experiences such as we are having in this war throw to the surface
of one’s mind all sorts of opinions and half-formed conclusions. The care
for conventions, for agreement with one’s friends, is burned away. One is
concerned to express only ultimate conviction even though it may differ
from all the rest of the world. This is true in spite of the knowledge that
every word will be caught up in an atmosphere of excitement and of that
nervous irritability which is always close to grief and to moments of high
emotion.
“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 may also be true that as the early days of this war fused us all into an
overwhelming sense of solidarity until each felt absolutely at one with all
his fellow-countrymen, so the sensitiveness to differences is greatly
intensified and the dissenting individual has an exaggerated sense of
isolation. I try to convince myself that this is the explanation of my
abominable and constant loneliness, which is almost unendurable.

“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. The Militarists believe that government finally rests upon a basis
of physical force, and in a crisis such as this, Militarism, in spite of the
spiritual passion in war, finds its expression in the crudest forms of
violence.
“It would be absurd for women even to suggest equal rights in a world
governed solely by physical force, and Feminism must necessarily assert
the ultimate supremacy of moral agencies. Inevitably the two are in eternal
opposition.
“I have always agreed with the Feminists that, so far as force plays a
great part in the maintenance of an actual social order, it is due to the
presence of those elements which are in a steady process of elimination;
and of course as society progresses the difficulty arising from woman’s
inferiority in physical strength must become proportionately less. One of
the most wretched consequences of war is that it arrests these beneficent
social processes and throws everything back into a coarser mould. The fury
of war, enduring but for a few months or years, may destroy slow-growing
social products which it will take a century to recreate—the ‘consent of the
governed,’ for instance....
“But why do I talk like this! My father would call it one of my untrained
and absurd theories about social progress and the functions of government
concerning which I know nothing, and would say that I had no right to
discuss the matter in this time of desperate struggle. Nevertheless it is better
for me in these hideous long days and nights to drive my mind forward
even to absurd conclusions than to let it fall into one of those vicious circles
in which it goes round and round to no purpose.”
In absolute contrast to this sophisticated, possibly oversophisticated,
mother was a simple woman who piteously showed me a piece of shrapnel
taken from her son’s body by his comrades, which they had brought home
to her in a literal-minded attempt at comfort. They had told her that the
shrapnel was made in America and she showed it to me, believing that I

could at sight recognize the manufactured products of my fellow-
countrymen. She apparently wished to have the statement either confirmed
or denied, because she was utterly bewildered in her feeling about the
United States and all her previous associations with it. In her fresh grief,
stricken as she was, she was bewildered by a sudden reversal of her former
ideals. Many of her relatives had long ago emigrated to America, including
two brothers living in the Western states, whom she had hoped to visit in
her old age. For many reasons, throughout her youth and early womanhood,
she had thought of that far-away country as a kindly place where every man
was given his chance and where the people were all friendly to each other
irrespective of the land in which they had been born. To have these same
American people send back the ammunition which had killed her son was
apparently incomprehensible to her.
She presented, it seemed to me, a clear case of that humble
internationalism which is founded not upon theories, but upon the
widespread immigration of the last fifty years, interlacing nation to nation
with a thousand kindly deeds. Her older brother had a fruit ranch which
bordered upon one of those co-operative Italian colonies so successful in
California, and he had frequently sent home presents from his Italian
neighbors with his own little cargoes. The whole had evidently been prized
by his family as a symbol of American good-will and of unbounded
opportunity. Her younger brother had attained some measure of success as a
contractor in an inland town, and when he had written home of the polyglot
composition of the gangs of men upon whose labors his little fortune had
been founded, she had taken it as an example of all nationalities and
religions working happily together. He had also served one term as mayor,
obviously having been elected through his popularity with the same foreign
colonies from which his employes had been drawn.
For many reasons therefore she had visualized America as a land in
which all nationalities understood each other with a resulting friendliness
which was not possible in Europe, not because the people still living in
Europe were different from those who had gone to America, but because the
latter, having emigrated, had a chance to express their natural good-will for
everybody. The nations at war in Europe suggested to her simple mind the
long past days of her grandmother’s youth when a Protestant threw stones at
a Catholic just because he was “different.” The religious liberty in America

was evidently confused in her mind with this other liberalism in regard to
national differences.
Holding this conception of actual internationalism as it had been evolved
among simple people, crude and abortive though it was, she had been much
more shocked by the fact that friendly Americans should make ammunition
to be used for killing any human being than by the actual war itself, because
the war was taking place in Europe, where it was still quite natural for a
German to fight against a Frenchman or an Italian against an Austrian.
Her son had been a Socialist and from the discussions he sometimes held
with his comrades in her house, she had grown familiar with certain phrases
which she had taken literally and in some curious fashion had solemnly
come to believe were put into practice in her El Dorado of America.
The arguments I had used so many times with her fellow-countrymen to
justify America’s sale of ammunition, ponderously beginning with The
Hague conventions of 1907, I found useless in the face of this idealistic
version of America’s good-will.
She was evidently one of those people whose affections go out to groups
and impersonal causes quite as much as to individuals, thus often
supplementing and enlarging harsh and narrow conditions of living. She
certainly obtained a curiously personal comfort out of her idealization of
America. Her conversation revealed what I had often vaguely felt before
when men as well as women talked freely of the war, that her feelings had
been hurt, that her very conception of human nature had received a sharp
shock and set-back. To her the whole world and America in particular
would henceforth seem less kind and her spirit would be less at home. She
was tormented by that ever recurring question which perhaps can never be
answered for any of us too confidently in the affirmative, “Is the Universe
friendly?” The troubled anguish in her old eyes confirmed her statement
that the thought of the multitude of men who were being killed all over the
world oppressed her day and night. This old woman had remained faithful
to the cause of moral unity and bore her humble testimony to one of the
noblest and profoundest needs of the human spirit.
These efforts at spiritual adjustment necessitated by the war are
attempted by many people, from the simple souls whose hard-won
conceptions of a friendly universe have been brought tumbling about their

ears, to the thinking men who are openly disappointed to find civilized
nations so irrational. 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. The first is tribal loyalty,
such unquestioning acceptance of the tribe’s morals and standards that the
individual automatically fights when the word comes; the second is
woman’s deepest instinct, that the child of her body must be made to live.
We are told that the peasants in Flanders, whose fields border upon the
very trenches, disconsolately came back to them last Spring and continued
to plough the familiar soil, regardless of the rain of shrapnel falling into the
fresh furrows; that the wine growers of Champagne last Autumn insistently
gathered their ripened grapes, though the bombs of rival armies were
exploding in their vineyards; why should it then be surprising that certain
women in every country have remained steadfast to their old occupation of
nurturing life, that they have tenaciously held to their anxious concern that
men should live, through all the contagion and madness of the war fever
which is infecting the nations of the earth.
In its various manifestations the struggle in women’s souls suggests one
of those movements through which, at long historic intervals, the human
spirit has apparently led a revolt against itself, as it were, exhibiting a moral
abhorrence for certain cherished customs which, up to that time, had been
its finest expression. A moral rebellion of this sort was inaugurated three
thousand years ago both in Greece and Judea against the old custom of
human sacrifice. That a man should slay his own child and stand unmoved
as the burning flesh arose to his gods was an act of piety, of courage, and of
devotion to ideals, so long as he performed the rite wholeheartedly. But
after there had gradually grown up in the minds of men first the suspicion,
and then the conviction, that it was unnecessary and impious to offer human
flesh as a living sacrifice, courage and piety shifted to the men who refused
to conform to this long-established custom. At last both the Greeks and the
Jews guarded themselves against the practice of human sacrifice with every
possible device. It gradually became utterly abhorrent to all civilized

peoples, an outrage against the elemental decencies, a profound disturber of
basic human relations. Poets and prophets were moved to call it an
abomination; statesmen and teachers denounced it as a hideous barbarism,
until now it is so nearly abolished by the entire race that it is no longer
found within the borders of civilization and exists to-day only in jungles
and hidden savage places.
There are indications that the human consciousness is reaching the same
stage of sensitiveness in regard to war as that which has been attained in
regard to human sacrifice. In this moment of almost universal warfare there
is evinced a widespread moral abhorrence against war, as if its very
existence were more than human nature could endure. Citizens of every
nation are expressing this moral compunction, which they find in sharp
conflict with current conceptions of patriotic duty. It is perhaps inevitable
that women should be challenged in regard to it, should be called upon to
give it expression in such stirring words as those addressed to them by
Romain Rolland, “Cease to be the shadow of man and of his passion of
pride and destruction. Have a clear vision of the duty of pity! Be a living
peace in the midst of war—the eternal Antigone refusing to give herself up
to hatred and knowing no distinction between her suffering brothers who
make war on each other.”
This may be a call to women to defend those at the bottom of society
who, irrespective of the victory or defeat of any army, are ever oppressed
and overburdened. The suffering mothers of the disinherited feel the stirring
of the old impulse to protect and cherish their unfortunate children, and
women’s haunting memories instinctively challenge war as the implacable
enemy of their age-long undertaking.

CHAPTER VI
A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN INTERPRETATIVE
MEMORY

Several years ago, during a winter spent in Egypt, I found within myself
an unexpected tendency to interpret racial and historic experiences through
personal reminiscences. I am therefore venturing to record in this closing
chapter my inevitable conclusion that a sincere portrayal of a widespread
and basic emotional experience, however remote in point of time it may be,
has the power overwhelmingly to evoke memories of like moods in the
individual.
The unexpected revival in my memory of long-forgotten experiences
may have been due partly to the fact that we have so long been taught that
the temples and tombs of ancient Egypt are the very earliest of the surviving
records of ideas and men, that we approach them with a certain sense of
familiarity, quite ready to claim a share in these “family papers and title
deeds of the race.”
We also consider it probable that these primitive human records will stir
within us certain early states of consciousness, having learned, with the
readiness which so quickly attaches itself to the pseudo-scientific phrase,
that every child repeats in himself the history of the race. Nevertheless,
what I, at least, was totally unprepared to encounter, was the constant
revival of primitive and overpowering emotions which I had experienced so
long ago that they had become absolutely detached from myself and seemed
to belong to some one else—to a small person with whom I was no longer
intimate, and who was certainly not in the least responsible for my present
convictions and reflections. It gradually became obvious that the ancient
Egyptians had known this small person quite intimately and had most
seriously and naïvely set down upon the walls of their temples and tombs
her earliest reactions in the presence of death.
At moments my adult intelligence would be unexpectedly submerged by
the emotional message which was written there. Rising to the surface like a

flood, this primitive emotion would sweep away both the historic record
and the adult consciousness interested in it, leaving only a child’s mind
struggling through an experience which it found overwhelming.
It may have been because these records of the early Egyptians are so
endlessly preoccupied with death, portraying man’s earliest efforts to defeat
it, his eager desire to survive, to enter by force or by guile into the heavens
of the western sky, that the mind is pushed back into that earliest childhood
when the existence of the soul, its exact place of residence in the body, its
experiences immediately after death, its journeyings upward, its relation to
its guardian angel, so often afforded material for the crudest speculation. In
the obscure renewal of these childish fancies, there is nothing that is
definite enough to be called memory; it is rather that Egypt reproduces a
state of consciousness which has so absolutely passed into oblivion that
only the most powerful stimuli could revive it.
This revival doubtless occurs more easily because these early records in
relief and color not only suggest in their subject-matter that a child has been
endowed with sufficient self-consciousness to wish to write down his own
state of mind upon a wall, but also because the very primitive style of
drawing to which the Egyptians adhered long after they had acquired a high
degree of artistic freedom, is the most natural technique through which to
convey so simple and archaic a message. The square shoulders of the men,
the stairways done in profile, and a hundred other details, constantly remind
one of a child’s drawings. It is as if the Egyptians had painstakingly
portrayed everything that a child has felt in regard to death, and having,
during the process, gradually discovered the style of drawing naturally
employed by a child, had deliberately stiffened it into an unchanging
convention. The result is that the traveller, reading in these drawings which
stretch the length of three thousand years, the long endeavor to overcome
death, finds that the experience of the two—the child and the primitive
people—often become confused, or rather that they are curiously
interrelated.
This begins from the moment the traveller discovers that the earliest
tombs surviving in Egypt, the mastabas,—which resemble the natural
results of a child’s first effort to place one stone upon another,—are
concerned only with size, as if that early crude belief in the power of
physical bulk to protect the terrified human being against all shadowy evils

were absolutely instinctive and universal. The mastabas gradually develop
into the pyramids, of which Breasted says that “they are not only the
earliest emergence of organized men and the triumph of concerted effort,
they are likewise a silent, but eloquent, expression of the supreme endeavor
to achieve immortality by sheer physical force.” Both the mastabas at
Sahkara and the pyramids at Gizeh, in the sense of Tolstoy’s definition of
art as that which reproduces in the spectator the state of consciousness of
the artist, at once appeal to the child surviving in every adult, who insists
irrationally, after the manner of children, upon sympathizing with the
attempt to shut out death by strong walls.
Certainly we can all vaguely remember, when death itself, or stories of
ghosts, had come to our intimate child’s circle, that we went about saying to
ourselves that we were “not afraid,” that it “could not come here,” that “the
door was locked, the windows tight shut,” that “this was a big house,” and a
great deal more talk of a similar sort.
In the presence of these primitive attempts to defeat death, and without
the conscious aid of memory, I found myself living over the emotions of a
child six years old, saying some such words as I sat on the middle of the
stairway in my own home, which yet seemed alien because all the members
of the family had gone to the funeral of a relative and would not be back
until evening, “long after you are in bed,” they had said. In this moment of
loneliness and horror, I depended absolutely upon the brick walls of the
house to keep out the prowling terror, and neither the talk of kindly Polly,
who awkwardly and unsuccessfully reduced an unwieldy theology to child-
language, nor the strings of paper dolls cut by a visitor, gave me the
slightest comfort. Only the blank wall of the stairway seemed to afford
protection in this bleak moment against the formless peril.
Doubtless these huge tombs were built to preserve from destruction the
royal bodies which were hidden within them at the end of tortuous and
carefully concealed passages; but both the gigantic structures in the vicinity
of Memphis, and the everlasting hills, which were later utilized at Thebes,
inevitably give the impression that death is defied and shut out by massive
defences.
Even when the traveller sees that the Egyptians defeated their object by
the very success of the Gizeh pyramids—for when their overwhelming bulk

could not be enlarged and their bewildering labyrinths could not be
multiplied, effort along that line perforce ceased—there is something in the
next attempt of the Egyptians to overcome death which the child within us
again recognizes as an old experience. One who takes pains to inquire
concerning the meaning of the texts which were inscribed on the inner walls
of the pyramids and the early tombs, finds that the familiar terror of death is
still there although expressed somewhat more subtly; that the Egyptians are
trying to outwit death by magic tricks.
These texts are designed to teach the rites that redeem a man from death
and insure his continuance of life, not only beyond the grave but in the
grave itself. “He who sayeth this chapter and who has been justified in the
waters of Natron, he shall come forth the day after his burial.” Because to
recite them was to fight successfully against the enemies of the dead, these
texts came to be inscribed on tombs, on coffins, and on the papyrus hung
around the neck of a mummy. But woe to the man who was buried without
the texts: “He who knoweth not this chapter cannot come forth by day.”
Access to Paradise and all its joys was granted to any one, good or bad, who
knew the formulæ, for in the first stages of Egyptian development, as in all
other civilizations, the gods did not concern themselves with the conduct of
a man toward other men, but solely with his duty to the gods themselves.
The magic formulæ alone afforded protection against the shadowy
dangers awaiting the dead man when first he entered the next world and
enabled him to overcome the difficulties of his journey. The texts taught
him how to impersonate particular gods and by this subterfuge to overcome
the various foes he must encounter, because these foes, having at one time
been overcome by the gods, were easily terrified by such pretence.
When I found myself curiously sympathetic with this desire “to pretend,”
and with the eager emphasis attached by the Egyptians to their magic
formulæ, I was inclined to put it down to that secret sympathy with magic
by means of which all children, in moments of rebellion against a humdrum
world, hope to wrest something startling and thrilling out of the environing
realm of the supernatural; but beyond a kinship with this desire to placate
the evil one, to overcome him by mysterious words, I found it baffling to
trace my sympathy to a definite experience. Gradually, however, it emerged,
blurred in certain details, surprisingly alive in others, but all of it suffused

with the selfsame emotions which impelled the Egyptian to write his Book
of the Dead.
To describe it as a spiritual struggle is to use much too dignified and
definite a term; it was the prolonged emotional stress throughout one cold
winter when revival services—protracted meetings, they were then called—
were held in the village church night after night. I was, of course, not
permitted to attend them, but I heard them talked about a great deal by
simple adults and children, who told of those who shouted aloud for joy, or
lay on the floor “stiff with power” because they were saved; and of others—
it was for those others that my heart was wrung—who, although they
wrestled with the spirit until midnight and cried out that they felt the hot
breath of hell upon their cheeks, could not find salvation. Would it do to
pretend? I anxiously asked myself, why didn’t they say the right words so
that they could get up from the mourners’ bench and sit with the other
people, who must feel so sorry for them that they would let them pretend?
What were these words that made such a difference that to say them was an
assurance of heavenly bliss, but if you failed to say them you burned in hell
forever and ever? Was the preacher the only one who knew them for sure?
Was it possible to find them without first kneeling at the mourners’ bench
and groaning? These words must certainly be in the Bible somewhere, and
if one read it out loud all through, every word, one must surely say the right
words in time; but if one died before one was grown up enough to read the
Bible through—to-night, for instance—what would happen then? Surely
nothing else could be so important as these words of salvation. While I did
not exactly scheme to secure them, I was certainly restrained only by my
impotence, and I anxiously inquired from everyone what these magic words
might be; and only gradually did this childish search for magic protection
from the terrors after death imperceptibly merge into a concern for the fate
of the soul.
Perhaps, because it is so impossible to classify one’s own childish
experiences or to put them into chronological order, the traveller at no time
feels a lack of consistency in the complicated attitude toward death which is
portrayed on the walls of the Egyptian temples and tombs. Much of it seems
curiously familiar; from the earliest times, the Egyptians held the belief that
there is in man a permanent element which survives—it is the double, the
Ka, the natural soul in contradistinction to the spiritual soul, which fits

exactly into the shape of the body but is not blended with it. In order to save
this double from destruction, the body must be preserved in a recognizable
form.
This insistence upon the preservation of the body among the Egyptians,
antedating their faith in magic formulæ, clearly had its origin, as in the case
of the child, in a desperate revolt against the destruction of the visible man.
Owing to this continued insistence upon corporeal survival, the
Egyptians at length carried the art of embalming to such a state of
perfection that mummies of royal personages are easily recognized from
their likenesses to portrait statues. Such confidence did they have in their
own increasing ability to withhold the human frame from destruction that
many of the texts inscribed on the walls of the tombs assure the dead man
himself that he is not dead, and endeavor to convince his survivors against
the testimony of their own senses; or rather, they attempt to deceive the
senses. The texts endlessly repeat the same assertion, “Thou comest not
dead to thy sepulchre, thou comest living”; and yet the very reiteration, as
well as the decorations upon the walls of every tomb, portray a primitive
terror lest after all the body be destroyed and the element of life be lost
forever. One’s throat goes dry over this old fear of death expressed by men
who have been so long dead that there is no record of them but this, no
surviving document of their once keen reactions to life.
Doubtless the Egyptians in time overcame this primitive fear concerning
the disappearance of the body, as we all do, although each individual is
destined to the same devastating experience. The memory of mine came
back to me vividly as I stood in an Egyptian tomb: I was a tiny child
making pothooks in the village school, when one day—it must have been in
the full flush of Spring, for I remember the crab-apple blossoms—during
the afternoon session, the A B C class was told that its members would
march all together to the burial of the mother of one of the littlest girls. Of
course, I had been properly taught that people went to heaven when they
died and that their bodies were buried in the cemetery, but I was not at all
clear about it, and I was certainly totally unprepared to see what appeared to
be the person herself put deep down into the ground. The knowledge came
to me so suddenly and brutally that for weeks afterward the days were
heavy with a nameless oppression and the nights were filled with horror.

The cemetery was hard by the school-house, placed there, it had always
been whispered among us, to make the bad boys afraid. Thither the A B C
class, in awestruck procession, each child carefully holding the hand of
another, was led by the teacher to the edge of the open grave and bidden to
look on the still face of the little girl’s mother.
Our poor knees quaked and quavered as we stood shelterless and
unattended by family protection or even by friendly grown-ups; for the one
tall teacher, while clearly visible, seemed inexpressively far away as we
kept an uncertain footing on the freshly spaded earth, hearing the preacher’s
voice, the sobs of the motherless children, and, crowning horror of all, the
hollow sound of three clods of earth dropped impressively upon the coffin
lid.
After endless ages the service was over and we were allowed to go down
the long hill into the familiar life of the village. But a new terror awaited me
even there, for our house stood at the extreme end of the street and the last
of the way home was therefore solitary. I remember a breathless run from
the blacksmith shop, past the length of our lonely orchard until the carriage-
house came in sight, through whose wide-open doors I could see a man
moving about. One last panting effort brought me there, and after my spirit
had been slightly reassured by conversation, I took a circuitous route to the
house that I might secure as much companionship as possible on the way. I
stopped at the stable to pat an old horse who stood munching in his stall,
and again to throw a handful of corn into the poultry yard. The big turkey
gobbler who came greedily forward gave me great comfort because he was
so absurd and awkward that no one could possibly associate him with
anything so solemn as death. I went into the kitchen where the presiding
genius allowed me to come without protest although the family dog was at
my heels. I felt constrained to keep my arms about his shaggy neck while
trying to talk of familiar things—would the cake she was making be baked
in the little round tins or in the big square one? But although these idle
words were on my lips, I wanted to cry out, “Their mother is dead;
whatever, whatever will the children do?” These words, which I had
overheard as we came away from the graveyard, referred doubtless to the
immediate future of the little family, but in my mind were translated into a
demand for definite action on the part of the children against this horrible
thing which had befallen their mother.

It was with no sense of surprise that I found this long-forgotten
experience spread before my eyes on the walls of a tomb built four
thousand years ago into a sandy hill above the Nile, at Assuan. The man so
long dead, who had prepared the tomb for himself, had carefully ignored
the grimness of death. He is portrayed as going about his affairs surrounded
by his family, his friends, and his servants; grain is being measured before
him into his warehouse, while a scribe by his side registers the amount; the
herdsmen lead forth cattle for his inspection; two of them, enraged bulls,
paying no attention to the sombre implication of tomb decoration, lower
their huge heads, threatening each other as if there were no such thing as
death in the world. 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; that if his body is but
properly preserved he will be able to enjoy it forever.
Although the Egyptians, in their natural desire to cling to the familiar
during the strange experience of death, portrayed upon the walls of their
tombs many domestic and social habits whose likeness to our own
household life gives us the quick satisfaction with which the traveller
encounters the familiar and wonted in a strange land, such a momentary
thrill is quite unlike the abiding sense of kinship which is founded upon the
unexpected similarity of ideas, and it is the latter which are encountered in
the tombs of the eighteenth century dynasty. The paintings portray a great
hall, at the end of which sits Osiris, the god who had suffered death on
earth, awaiting those who come before him for judgment. In the center of
the hall stands a huge balance in which the hearts of men are weighed, once
more reminiscent of a childish conception, making clear that as the
Egyptians became more anxious and scrupulous they gradually made the
destiny of man dependent upon morality, and finally directed the souls of
men to heaven or hell according to their merits.
There is a theory that the tremendous results of good and evil, in the
earliest awakening to them, were first placed in the next world by a

primitive people sore perplexed as to the partialities and injustices of mortal
life. This simple view is doubtless the one the child naturally takes. In
Egypt I was so vividly recalled to my first apprehension of it, that the
contention that the very belief in immortality is but the postulate of the idea
of reward and retribution, seemed to me at the moment a perfectly
reasonable one.
The incident of my childhood around which it had formulated itself was
very simple. I had been sent with a message—an important commission it
seemed to me—to the leader of the church choir that the hymn selected for
the doctor’s funeral was “How blest the righteous when he dies.” The
village street was so strangely quiet under the summer sun that even the
little particles of dust beating in the hot air were more noiseless than ever
before. Frightened by the noonday stillness and instinctively seeking
companionship, I hurried toward two women who were standing at a gate
talking in low tones. In their absorption they paid no attention to my
somewhat wistful greeting, but I heard one of them say with a dubious
shake of the head that “he had never openly professed nor joined the
church,” and in a moment I understood that she thought the doctor would
not go to heaven. What else did it mean, that half-threatening tone? Of
course the doctor was good, as good as any one could be. Only a few weeks
before he had given me a new penny when he had pulled my tooth, and
once I heard him drive by in the middle of the night when he took a
beautiful baby to the miller’s house; he went to the farms miles and miles
away when people were sick, and everybody sent for him the minute they
were in trouble. How could any one be better than that?
In defiant contrast to the whispering women, there arose in my mind,
composed doubtless of various Bible illustrations, the picture of an
imposing white-robed judge seated upon a golden throne, who listened
gravely to all those good deeds as they were read by the recording angel
from his great book, and then sent the doctor straight to heaven.
I dimly felt the challenge of the fine old hymn in its claim of blessings
for the righteous, and was defiantly ready at the moment to combat the
theology of the entire community. Of my own claim to heaven I was most
dubious, and I simply could not bring myself to contemplate the day when
my black sins should be read aloud from the big book; but when the claim
of reward in the next world for well-doing in this, came to me in regard to

one whose righteousness was undoubted, I was eager to champion him
before all mankind and even before the judges in the shadowy world to
come.
This state of mind, this mood of truculent discussion, was recalled by the
wall paintings in the tomb of a nobleman in the Theban hills. In an agonized
posture he awaits the outcome of his trial before Osiris. Thoth, the true
scribe, records on the wall the just balance between the heart of the
nobleman, which is in one pan of the scale, and the feather of truth which is
in the other. The noble appeals to his heart, which has thus been separated
from him, to stand by him during the weighing and not to bear testimony
against him. “Oh, heart of my existence, rise not up against me; be not an
enemy against me before the divine powers; thou art my Ka that is in my
body, the heart that came to me from my mother.” The noble even tries a
bribe by reminding the Ka that his own chance of survival is dependent on
his testimony at this moment. The entire effort on the part of the man being
tried is to still the voice of his own conscience, to maintain stoutly his
innocence even to himself.
The attitude of the self-justifying noble might easily have suggested
those later childish struggles in which a sense of hidden guilt, of repeated
failure in “being good,” plays so large a part, and humbles a child to the
very dust. That the definite reminiscence evoked by the tomb belonged to
an earlier period of rebellion may indicate that the Egyptian had not yet
learned to commune with his gods for spiritual refreshment.
Whether it is that the long days and magical nights on the Nile lend
themselves to a revival of former states of consciousness, or that I had come
to expect landmarks of individual development in Egypt, or, more likely
still, that I had fallen into a profoundly reminiscent mood, I am unable to
state; but certainly, as the Nile boat approached nearer to him “who sleeps
in Philæ,” something of the Egyptian feeling for Osiris, the god to whom
was attributed the romance of a hero and the character of a benefactor and
redeemer, came to me through long-forgotten sensations. Typifying the
annual “great affliction,” Osiris, who had submitted himself to death,
mutilation, and burial in the earth, returned each Spring when the wheat and
barley sprouted, bringing not only a promise of bread for the body but
healing and comfort for the torn mind; an intimation that death itself is

beneficent and may be calmly accepted as a necessary part of an ordered
universe.
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.
Again there came a faint memory of a child’s first apprehension that
there may be poetry out-of-doors, of the discovery that myths have a
foundation in natural phenomena, and at last a more definite reminiscence.
I saw myself a child of twelve standing stock-still on the bank of a broad-
flowing river, with a little red house surrounded by low-growing willows on
its opposite bank, striving to account to myself for a curious sense of
familiarity, for a conviction that I had long ago known it all most intimately,
although I had certainly never seen the Mississippi River before. I
remember that, much puzzled and mystified, at last I gravely concluded that
it was one of those intimations of immortality that Wordsworth had written
about, and I went back to my cousin’s camp in so exalted a frame of mind
that the memory of the evening light shining through the blades of young
corn growing in a field passed on the way has remained with me for more
than forty years.
Was that fugitive sense of having lived before nearer to the fresher
imaginations of the Egyptians, as it is nearer to the mind of a child? and did
the myth of Osiris make them more willing to die because the myth came to
embody a confidence in this transitory sensation of continuous life?
Such ghosts of reminiscence, coming to the individual as he visits one
after another of the marvellous human documents on the banks of the Nile,
may be merely manifestations of that new humanism which is perhaps the
most precious possession of this generation, the belief that no altar at which
living men have once devoutly worshipped, no oracle to whom a nation
long ago appealed in its moments of dire confusion, no gentle myth in
which former generations have found solace, can lose all significance for
us, the survivors.

Is it due to this same humanism that, in spite of the overweight of the
tomb, Egypt never appears to the traveller as world-weary, or as a land of
the dead? Although the slender fellaheen, whom he sees all day pouring the
water of the Nile on their parched fields, use the primitive shaduf of their
remote ancestors, and the stately women bear upon their heads water-jars of
a shape unchanged for three thousand years, modern Egypt refuses to
belong to the past and continually makes the passionate living appeal of
those hard-pressed in the struggle for bread.
Under the smoking roofs of the primitive clay houses lifted high above
the level of the fields, because resting on the ruins of villages which have
crumbled there from time immemorial, mothers feed their children,
clutched by the old fear that there is not enough for each to have his
portion; and the traveller comes to realize with a pang that the villages are
built upon the bleak, barren places quite as the dead are always buried in the
desert because no black earth can be spared, and that each new harvest, cut
with sickles of a curve already ancient when Moses was born, in spite of its
quick ripening, is garnered barely in time to save the laborer from actual
starvation.
Certain it is that through these our living brothers, or through the
unexpected reactions of memory to racial records, the individual detects the
growth within of an almost mystical sense of the life common to all the
centuries, and of the unceasing human endeavor to penetrate into the unseen
world. These records also afford glimpses into a past so vast that the present
generation seems to float upon its surface as thin as a sheet of light which
momentarily covers the ocean and moves in response to the black waters
beneath it.

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