Facts and Fictions of Life
TextAN IRRESPONSIBLE EDUCATED CLASS
Education, using the word in its restricted scholastic sense, is always productive of restlessness and discontent, unless education, in its practical relations to life, furnishes an outlet and safety valve for the whetted and strengthened faculties. Mere mental gymnastics are unsatisfactory after the first flush of pleasurable excitement produced in the mind newly awakened to its own capabilities.
There seems to be something within us which demands that our knowledge be in some way applied, and that the logic of thought find fruition in the logic of events. The moment the laborers of the country found time and opportunity to whet their minds, they also developed a vast and persistent unrest – a dissatisfaction with the order of things which gave to them the tools with which to carve a fuller, broader life, but had not yet furnished them the material upon which they might work. Their plane of thought was raised, their outlook was expanded, their possibilities multiplied; but the materials to work with remained the same. Their status and condition clashed with their new hopes and needs. This state of things produced what we call "labor troubles," with all their complications. Capital and labor had no contest until labor became (to a degree) educated.
If – "in those good old days" – labor was not satisfied, it did not know how to make the fact very clearly understood. Capital smiled and patronized labor, and labor smiled and said it was quite content to work for so kind a master. It was safer to do that way – in those good old days. Then, too, so long as labor's wits had not been sharpened, so long as the laborer had not learned the relative values of things, perhaps he was content. Certainly he was far more so than he is to-day.
It is well that, in his present state of angry unrest, he feels that he has but to organize and elect his own representatives to help enact just and repeal unjust laws as they bear upon his own immediate needs. But for this outlet to his feelings, and this hope for his own future, the labor troubles would be troubles indeed, and every additional book read by labor, every new schoolhouse built for labor, would but add flame to fire. But education brings with it – when taken into practical life – a certain sense of the responsibilities of life and of the relations of things.
The laborer begins to argue, "Am not I partly responsible for my own condition? Is not my salvation in my own hands and in the hands of my fellows? We are units in our own government. We are in the majority numerically, and we are, therefore, at least partially responsible for not only what we do, but for that which is done to us."
It is this feeling that sobers and steadies while it inspires the so-called working classes to-day.
If, with their present enlightenment, ambitions, and needs, laboring men felt themselves wholly irresponsible for the present or future legislation, riots and lawlessness would be the inevitable result. A sense of responsibility alone makes educational development safe either in individuals or in classes.
Witness the truth of this in the lives of the "gilded youths" of all countries whose sharpened wits are not steadied by, or applied in, any useful occupation. The results are disastrous to themselves and to those who fall under their sway or influence.
Broadened ambitions, sharpened mental capacities, developed intellectuality, demand corresponding outlets and responsibilities. Lacking these, education is but an added danger. Especially is this true in a Republic where the theory of legal and political equality is held. At the present time there are but two wholly irresponsible classes in our republic – Indians and women.
I place the Indians first because it has recently been decided in South Dakota that if an Indian (male) will "accept land in severalty," he thereby becomes a sovereign, and is henceforth presumed to have sufficient interest in the welfare of his government and the stability of affairs in general to entitle him to be looked upon as a desirable citizen, capable of legislating and desiring to legislate wisely for the public weal.
Since the government has not yet come to believe that any amount of land in severalty entitles women to so much confidence, and since the lack of responsibility develops in woman, as in man, a reckless and wanton spirit, we have the spectacle of this irresponsible element taking property laws into its own hands, and proudly destroying in public the belongings of other people where those belongings chanced to be in the form of beverages which these women disapproved of as articles of merchandise and use. And we have seen, farther, the grave spectacle of courts of law which will not or dare not enforce the law for their punishment.
The due recognition of property rights is one of the earliest developments of personal, legal, and political responsibility. The negro notoriously disregarded these when his own human rights and individual responsibility were unrecognized. His desires were likely to be the measure of your loss.
He is not the light-fingered being that he was. Mine and thine have a new meaning for him since – for the first time in his life – "thine" has any meaning to his one-time master.
He is also beginning to look to his ballot for his safety and to himself to work out his future status, whereas one day his legs were his sole dependence when trickery or blandishment failed him. Woman still depends – where she wishes to compass an end – upon blandishment, deception, or a type of force which she believes will not or cannot be resented in the way it would unquestionably be resented if offered by men. A body of respectable men in a quiet community do not calmly walk into another man's business house, and without process of law destroy his property. Their sense of personal and legal and political responsibility is a most effective police force; and no matter how rabid a prohibitionist John Smith is, he does not collect a band of otherwise respectable men about him and proceed to destroy – with praise and prayer as an accompaniment – the belongings of his neighbor.
No; he goes to a legal infant and a political nonexistent, and gets her to do it if it is to be done. He knows that to her the limit of responsibility is the verge of her desires on this question. He knows that she recognizes no right of property in a beverage she does not approve and a traffic she hopes to destroy. He knows that her sense of helplessness within the law – where she has no voice – gives her that reckless spirit of the political non-existent of all classes, which finds its revenge in lawlessness so long as it may not hope to have a voice in lawfulness. While woman was uneducated and wholly a dependent, there was little danger from her. She had too much at stake, in a purely physical sense. Then, too, she had not reasoned out the logical sequence between the pretension that a Republic of political equals before the law exists, while in fact one-half of that Republic has no political status whatever and no voice in the laws they obey. Uneducated and wholly dependent as woman was, this was safe enough. Educated, and to a degree financially independent, as she now is, she is a menace to social order so long as she stands without legal responsibility or political outlet for the expression of her opinions and desires in matters of government.
So long as her only means of expression on the subject of the liquor traffic is a hatchet and prayer, she will use both, and we will have the shocking spectacle, witnessed a little over a year ago, of a court refusing to even fine those who committed as clear and wanton an outrage on property rights as often finds record.
The steadying sense of personal and mental responsibility can develop only under the exercise of such responsibility. Man passed through the stage of regulative and prohibitive thought, and learned the true significance and value of Liberty only by its possession. By being responsible he learned the folly and danger of undue restrictive legislation, and the utter futility of the attempt to legislate taste, moral sense and lofty ideals (i. e. his personal taste and ideals) into his neighbors.
He also learned the futility and danger of lawless raids upon those who were not of his way of thinking as to what they should eat or drink, or wherewithal they should be clothed. Woman will have to learn the same important lesson in the same way. She will abuse the personal rights and liberties of others who disagree with her (now that she is educated and has the power) unless she is steadied, given legal and political responsibility, and held to the same account for her acts as are her brothers. Being helpless within the law – having no means of expression nor of making her will and opinions felt, having no voice in municipal or governmental management – she has begun to find lawless outlet for her newly acquired talents and intellectual activity. She is playing the part of border "regulator" and lobbyist – two very dangerous and degrading rôles in any case but doubly so in the hands of an educated but unrepresented class.
It has been argued, by men who are otherwise favorable to woman suffrage, that to grant the ballot to woman would be to yield up, upon the altar of fanaticism and narrow personal desires, much of the liberty for which man has fought and struggled. They argue that women do not stop to consider whether they have the right to interfere with what others do, but that they only ask whether they like the thing done.
The argument goes further and asserts that women only want the ballot that they may restrict the liberty of other people, pass prohibitory, sumptuary, and religious laws; and that the ballot in the hands of woman means a return to a union of church and state, and the meddlesome, personal legislation of the type known to us as Blue Laws.
It is no doubt true that there are many half-developed thinkers among women who demand the ballot, who desire political power for these petty reasons. It is also undoubtedly true that many of these would travel the same road trod by their fathers before them, and learn political wisdom slowly and only after a struggle with their own narrow ideas of liberty, which means their own liberty to restrict and regulate the liberty of other people.
It may be readily admitted, I say, that woman will make some of the same mistakes, political, religious, and sociological, that have been made by men in the reach after a better way. But what has taught thoughtful men wisdom? What has broadened the conception of political liberty? What taught men the danger and folly of religious and restrictive (sumptuary) legislation? What but experience and responsibility?
Nothing so steadies the hasty and narrow judgment as power, coupled with the recognition that responsibility for the use of that power is sure to be demanded.
Many a man will advise, as secret lobbyist, what he would not do in open legislature. Many a man in private life asserts that "If I were judge or president," or what not, so and so should not be done. When the power and responsibility once rests upon him, his outlook is broadened, and he recognizes that he would endanger a far more sacred principle were he to adhere to his plan.
This holds true with woman. With her newly acquired intellectual and financial power she is seeking an outlet for her capacities. She sees certain municipal and governmental ills. Having no direct power of expression, no legal, political status in a country which claims to have no political classes, she does what all disqualified, irresponsible, dissatisfied classes of men have done before her when deprived of equal opportunity with their fellows; she seeks by subterfuge (indirection) or lawlessness to compass that which she may not attempt lawfully and which, had she the steadying influence and discipline of responsibility and power, she would not do.
Inexperience, coupled with irresponsibility and a lax sense of the rights of others, always did and always will produce tyrants.
Unite this naturally produced and inevitable social and political condition and outlook with the developed mental capacities and consequent restless, undirected, and unabsorbed ambition of the women of to-day, and we have a dangerous lobby – working in secret by indirection and without open responsibility for their words, deed, or influence – to handle in our Republic.
SEX IN BRAIN
Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in introducing the speaker said: "The first speaker of the evening is Helen Gardener, who is to give us an address on the Brain. You know the last stronghold of the enemy is scientific. Men have decided that we must not enter the colleges and study very hard; must not have the responsibility of government laid on our heads, because our brains weigh much less than the brains of men. Dr. Hammond, of New York, has published several very elaborate articles in the Popular Science Monthly to prove this fact. But Helen Gardener has spent about fourteen months in investigation, and has conferred with twenty able specialists upon the subject, and will give us to-night the result of her investigation. She will show to us that it is impossible to prove any of the positions that Dr. Hammond has maintained."
Read before the International Council of Women in Washington, 1888.
Ladies and Gentlemen: – The political conditions of woman are very greatly influenced to-day by what is taught to her and about her by those two conservative moulders of public opinion – clergymen and physicians. Our law-makers have long since ceased to merely sneer at the simple claim of human rights by one-half of humanity, and for refuge they have flown to priest and practitioner, who do not fail them in this their hour of great tribulation. It is true that men, most of whom never enter a church, have grown somewhat ashamed to press the theological arguments against the equality of the sexes, and to these the medical argument has become an ever-present help in their time of trouble.
In the early days woman was under the absolute sway of club and fist. Then came censer and gown, swinging hell in the perfumed depths of the one and hiding in the folds of the other, thumb-screw and fagot for the woman who dared to think. At last the theory of the primal curse upon her head has grown weaker. Mankind struggles to be less brutal and more just. Manly men are beginning to blush when they hear repeated the well-worn fable of the fall of man through woman's crime and her inferiority of position and opportunity, justified by priest and pleader, because of legends inherited from barbarians – mental deformities worthy of their parentage.
When religious influence and dogma began to lose their terrors, legal enactments were slowly modified in woman's favor and hell went out of fashion. Then Conservatism, Ignorance, and Egotism, in dismay and terror, took counsel together and called in medical science, still in its infancy, to aid in staying the march of progress which is inevitable to civilization and so necessary to anything like a real Republic. Equality of opportunity began to be denied to woman, for the first time, upon natural and so-called scientific grounds. She was pronounced physically and mentally incapable, because of certain anatomical conditions, and she must be prevented – for her own good and that of the race here– from competition with her mental and physical superiors.
It was no longer her soul, but her body, that needed saving from herself. Her thirst for knowledge the clergy declared had already damned the souls of a very large majority of mankind – in a hereafter known only to them. The same vicious tendency, the doctors echoed, will be the ruin of the physical bodies of the race in this world, as we are prepared to prove. The case began to look hopeless again. Opportunity must be denied, these doctors say, because capacity does not exist. Where capacity seems to exist, it is, it must be, at the expense of individual health and future maternal capabilities.
As a person, she has no status with these consistent believers in "equal rights to all mankind." As a potential mother only, can she hope for consideration either by religious or medical theorist. This has been a difficult combination to meet. Few who cared to contest their verdict, possessed the bravery to fearlessly face the religious dictators, and fewer still had the anatomical and anthropological information to risk a fight on a field which assumed to be held by those who based all of their arguments upon scientific facts, collected by microscope and scales and reduced to unanswerable statistics.
The priest, reinforced by the doctor, promised a long and bitter struggle, on new grounds, to those who fought for simple justice to the individual, aside from her sex relations; who wished for neither malediction nor mercy; those who claim only the right of a unit to enjoy the common heritage untrammeled by superstition and artificial difficulties. They do not ask to be helped – only not to be hindered. They had hailed science as their friend and ally; and behold, pseudo-science adopted theories, invented statistics, and published personal prejudices as demonstrated fact. All this has done a vast deal of harm to the cause of woman.
Educators, theorists, and politicians readily accept the data and statistics of prominent physicians, and, in good faith, make them a basis of action, while the victims of their misinformation have been helpless. It is, therefore, very important to learn, if possible, just how far medical science and anthropology have really discovered demonstrable natural sex differences in the brains of men and women, and how far the usual theories advanced are gratuitous assumptions, founded upon legend and fed by mental habit and personal egotism.
I began an investigation into this matter a little while ago by questioning the arguments and logic of the medical pseudo-scientists from their own basis of facts. I ended by questioning the facts themselves, upon the evidence furnished me by leading members of the profession, some of whom are known in this country and abroad as leaders in original investigation as brain students and anatomists. None of these gentlemen knew the aim or motive of my inquiries, and they gave me all the information to be had on this subject without bias and quite freely. The specialists and brain students to whom my questions were submitted, were of widely different religious beliefs, which beliefs, of course, colored their theories as well as their motives, either consciously or unconsciously.
But the profession has reason to be proud of the ability of the most of these men, no less than of their sincerity and willingness to confess to ignorance of facts where proof was lacking. The abler the man the more willing was he to do this. One or two tried to explain, and, as it seemed to me, to force an agreement between scientific facts which they did possess, and their inherited belief in "revelation." Others, who did not themselves recognize it, performed the same mental gymnastics from mere force of habit, and gave a black eye to their facts in preserving a blind eye to their faith. But in the following results are to be found the opinions of eminent medical men, some of whom are Roman Catholic, some Protestant, and some of the negative systems of religion. So far as I know, not one is a believer in "Woman Suffrage," nor even in the more radical but less comprehensive measures for her development. Not one, who touched directly upon the subject, believed in sex equality in its entirety or had not personal prejudice and long-cherished sentiments opposed to it, if his reason approved. By some of them this was frankly stated, even while giving facts in her favor. Not more than one, so far as I know, is "agnostic" in religion or a believer in evolution in its entirety.
I have mentioned these latter points, because I found in this line of investigation, as in all others, that a man's religious leanings inevitably color and modify all of his opinions, and govern his entire mental outlook. They even add bitterness to his "jalop" and fizz in his "seltzer". If he absolutely believe in the "Garden of Eden" story he deals with "Adam" as a creature after "God's own heart and in his image," and therefore capable and deserving of all opportunity and development for and because of himself, and to promote his own happiness. "Eve," of course, receives due attention as a physical, anatomical specimen, "with intuitions" – a mere bone or rib of contention, as it were, between man and man. The more orthodox the man the bonier the rib. The more literal and consistent his faith the less likely is he to deal with woman as an intellectual being, capable of and entitled to the same or as liberal, mental, social, and financial opportunities or rights as are universally conceded in this country to be the birthright of man, and quite beyond farther controversy in his case. Evidence in her favor which cannot be evaded, must be overwhelming, indeed, then, if an investigator starts out handicapped with the theory of "revelation" as a part of his mental equipment, and with the "sphere of woman" formulated for him by the ancient Hebrews.
I went to the men whom the doctors themselves told me were the best authority to be found on the subject of brain anatomy and microscopy. One of these men, Dr. E. C. Spitzka, of New York, was referred to by physicians of all schools of practice as undoubtedly the best informed man in America, and second to none in the world, in this branch of the profession. They, one and all, told me that what he could not tell me himself on this subject, or could not tell me where to find, could not be of the slightest importance.
I have been asked to tell you just what I started out to learn, and how far I succeeded. But before I do this it may not be out of place to tell you an anecdote of my experience in this undertaking: I went personally with my questions to about twenty of the leading physicians of New York. [I had them submitted in other ways to many more in this and other cities. I got written communications from the Old World as well as the New.] Nearly every one of these twenty, after very kindly telling me what he himself knew and what he believed on the subject, referred me to the same man as the final appeal; but not one of them was willing to introduce me to him. They would introduce me to anybody and everybody else, but they did not like to risk sending me to him. He was, they said, utterly impatient of ignorance, and might treat me with scant courtesy. He would very likely tell me flatly that he could not waste time on so trivial a matter – that I and everybody else ought to know all about "sex in brain."
Now, this is a secret – I would not have it get out for a good deal. It took me a long while to get my courage up to go to that man without an introduction – a thing I did not do with any of the others. I finally, with fear and trembling, made up my mind to learn what he knew on this subject or perish in the attempt. So I took my life in my hands, put on my best gown – I had previously discovered that even brain anatomists are subject to the spell of good clothes – and went. I fully expected to be reduced to mere pulp before I left; but he listened quite patiently, asked me a few questions as to why I had come to him; told me to read him my questions; asked me sharply, "Who wrote those questions?" I said meekly, "I did." He looked at me critically, wrote something on a card, and dismissed me. I was uncertain whether, he had been so kind in his manner, because he considered me a harmless lunatic or not. Once in the street I read the card. I was to call again when he could give me more time.
I went not once, but many times. I devoted some months to brain anatomy and anthropology. In his laboratory he had brains from those of a mouse to those of the largest whale on record. He showed me the peculiarities of brains as shown by microscope and scales. He looked up points in foreign journals to which I had not access. In short, he did all he could to aid me; and he said that no such investigation as I was trying to learn about had ever yet been made, although no fair record of the difference of sex in brain, of which we hear so much, could possibly be made without it. He was delightfully frank, earnest, and thoroughly honest. He knew – and, what is better, he was willing to tell – where knowledge stopped and guessing began; a point sadly confused, I found, by even prominent members of the profession. "I do not know," was a hard sentence to get from a doctor so long as he was under the impression that others of his profession would know. "I do not know; nobody knows," came freely enough from the man who was sure of the boundaries of investigation, who recognized the vast difference between theories and proof. From him, and through him, I collected material that is of intense interest and importance to woman in this stage of the movement for her elevation.
It is only right that I say here that I am of opinion that he does not himself believe in the equality of the sexes, but he is too thoroughly scientific to allow his hereditary bias to color his statements of facts on this or any subject. In the hands of a man who has arrived at that point of mental poise and dignity, our case is safe, no matter what his sentiments may be. Such men do not go to their emotions for premises when it comes to a statement of scientific facts. There are writers on this subject who do.
As you all know, any statement calmly and persistently made is reasonably sure to be accepted as true, even by its victims. Frequency of iteration passes as proof. Even thoughtful men, after spending years of time in trying to explain why a thing is true, often end with the discovery that it is not true, after all. We are all familiar with the story of the wrangle of the philosophers as to why a vessel containing water weighed no more with a fish weighing a pound in it than it did after the fish was removed. After long and acrimonious debate over the principle of philosophy involved, some one bethought him to weigh it, and, of course, discovered that no unfamiliar principle was involved, since it was a simple misstatement as to facts.
The assumptions of "divine rights" by kings and priests stood as unquestioned facts for centuries by those who were the victims of both. The "divine right" of men rests still on the same bare-faced fraud, and is simply the last of this interesting trinity to die, and it naturally dies hard, as its fellows did. If a charlatan loudly asserts that he can do a certain thing, no matter how unlikely that thing is, if he insists that he has done it often, he will find many believers who will spend much time in an attempt to explain how he does it, while only the few will think to question first if he does it.
Upon this basis of calm assumption on the one side, and credulous acceptance on the other, has grown up a very general belief that there are great and well-defined natural anatomical differences between the brains of the sexes of the human race; that these differences are well known to the medical practitioner or anatomist, and that they plainly indicate inferiority of capacity in the female brain, which is structural, while, strangely enough, no one argues that this is the case in the lower animals. It therefore occurred to me to question – admitting that the microscope and scales really do show the differences to exist in adults – whether it would not be fair to assume, at least, that they are not natural and necessary sex differences, but that they are due to difference of opportunity and environment, and, under like conditions, would be produced between members of the same sex; that since this superiority of brain in the male sex is said to appear in the human race only, where alone, in all nature, superior opportunities and environments are held as a sex right and condition by the males, that the so-called "superiority of structure" is simply better development of the equally capable but restricted brain of the other sex.
I proposed to test this by an appeal to the brains of infants. And my assumption although not new, appeared to be borne out by the accepted, though unproven theory, that the brains of the men and women are nearer alike the lower we go into the human scale. This assumption is clearly based upon the idea that where the mental opportunities of the men and women are nearer equal the physical results are also similar. Indeed, Topinard plainly states this fact in his Anthropology. He says: "The reason that the brain of woman is lighter than that of man is that she has less cerebral activity to exercise in her sphere of duty. In former times it was relatively larger in the department of Lozère, because then the woman and man mutually shared the burdens of the daily labor. The truth is that the weight of the brain increases with the use we make of it." Since women are not given diversified and stimulating mental employment, they can not be expected to show the results of such training on the brain itself.
"Of the physiology of the brain comparatively little is known," says Dr. McDonald, author of "Criminology."
I was started on my work in this matter by several articles written by the boldest of the medical men in this country, who is the leader of the medical party which claims to be opposed to the educational and political advancement of women because of the inevitable injury to her physical constitution. The writings of such a man, aided by the circulation and prestige of the leading journals of the country, which publish them as authoritative, must inevitably influence school directors, voters, and legislators, and go far to crystalize the belief that facts are well known to the medical profession, with which it would be dangerous to trifle, when the truth is that the positive knowledge on the subject is not sufficient at this moment to form even an intelligent guess upon. In spite of this fact the well-known physician of whom I speak, Dr. Wm. A. Hammond, reiterates in these articles all of the old, and adds one or two new arguments to prove that woman should not be allowed to develop what brain she has, because she possesses very little and even that little is of inferior quality.