This Preface and Poem
As used in “My Century Plant,” is even more suitable here. I am well aware that the demand here made for woman will be accepted by but few as yet, but the number is increasing, and among both sexes. Truth, once born into human consciousness will finally do its work no matter how received at first. The great world now pays little heed, but the truth involved in woman’s freedom is here, and here to stay till the voice of arbitrary authority is no longer heard and woman’s love redeems the world.
A CALL TO MOTHERS.
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
In the name of your ages of anguish!
In the name of the curse and the stain,
By the strength of your sorrow I call you!
By the power of your pain!
We are mothers. Through us in our bondage,
Through us with a brand in the face,
Be we fettered with gold or with iron,
Through us comes the race!
With the weight of all sin on our shoulders,
Midst the serpents of sin ever curled,
We have sat unresisting, defenseless—
Making the men of the world!
We were ignorant long, and our children
Were besotted and brutish and blind;
King-driven, priest-ridden—who are they?
Our children—mankind!
We were kept for our beauty, our softness,
Our sex—what reward do ye find ?
We transmit, must transmit, being mothers,
What we are to mankind.
As the mother, so follow the children!
No nation, wise, noble and brave,
Ever sprang—though the father had freedom,
From the mother a slave!
Look now at the world as ye find it!
Blanch not! Truth is kinder than lies!
Look now at the world—see it suffer!
Listen now to its cries!
See the people who suffer, all people!
All humanity wasting its powers,
In a hand to hand struggle—death-dealing—
All children of ours.
The blind millionaire—the blind harlot—
The blind preacher leading the blind—
Only think of their pain, how it hurts them!
Our little blind babies—mankind.
Shall we bear it! We mothers who love them!
Can we bear it! We mothers who feel
Every pang of our babes and forgive then
Every sin when they kneel!
Little stumbling world, you have fallen!
You are crying in darkness and fear;
Wait, darling—your mother is coming!
Hush, darling—your mother is here.
We are here like an army with banners—
The great flag of our freedom unfurled!
With us rests the fate of the nations,
For we make the world.
Dare ye sleep while your children are calling!
Dare ye wait while they clamor unfed!
Dare ye pray in the proud pillowed churches
While they suffer for bread!
If the father hath sinned he shall answer;
If he check thee, laugh back at his powers;
Shall a mother be kept from her children!
These people are ours!
They are ours. He is ours for we made him.
In our arms he hath nestled and smiled;
Shall we, the world-mothers be hindered
By the freaks of a child!
Rise now in the power of the woman!
Rise now in the hour of our need!
The world cries in hunger and darkness—
We shall light! We shall feed.
In the name of our ages of anguish!
In the name of the curse and the stain,
By the strength of our sorrow we conquer,
In the power of our pain!
WOMAN S SOURCE OF POWER
By Lois Waisbrooker.
Man seeks an enduring civilization, but can never reach it until the sanctity and purity of the home is secured, and this has never yet been done. I don’t mean to say that we have no homes in which love is the ruling power, but such is the unity of race interest that no home can be wholly pure until all are so.
This may seem an unwarranted assertion, but the analogies of nature illustrate its truth. When the land is- filled with stagnant, malaria generating swamps every home within reach is more or less permeated with this invisible health destroying element, and so with our moral and spiritual atmospheres; if they are filled with the emenations of a perverted sexuality no home can wholly escape its effects, I therefore repeat: “We, as yet, have no homes the sanctity and purity of which are not invaded, and until we can have pure homes we can have no enduring civilization
Some homes are more nearly pure than others, and some people are so strong they can withstand the malaria of the physical atmosphere, but that they are as vigorous as they would be with pure air, cannot for a moment be believed.
Yes, I know—looking at the question from such a standpoint, you are ready to despair for the future of the race, and yet Woman holds within herself the power to change all this when she once wakes up to what she really is. You ask me what this power is, and how it can be applied. That is what I am going to try to show, and to commence with I will give an illustration which will be easily understood in its application to the question to be answered.
Go with me, please, to a photographer and tell him you want your likeness. He will first take a piece of glass of the required size and pour upon it a liquid solution which flows evenly over the surface and hardens in the atmosphere. He then takes it into the dark room and emerses it in a solution of nitrate of silver. He takes it into a dark room for the same reason that potatoes are planted in the ground; the needed chemical action cannot be had in the light, and the silver in solution combines with the chemicals in the coating of the plate making it exceedingly sensitive.
The meaning of sensitive is well understood and yet one illustration will not be out of place. The atmosphere moves in waves. Hold up your hand and you do not feel them, but uncover the nerve of a tooth and then see! The air-waves make no impression upon the hand, but they cut right into the nerve of the tooth, causing intense pain. The nerve is sensitive; the hand is not.
The plate remains in the silver bath until so sensitized that the atmospheric waves will make an impression upon it. In the meantime, you take the desired position and when ready, the sensitized plate is so handled that no light can reach it but that which, in striking your person, is thrown back upon the lens of the camera and passing through it, reaches the prepared plate, thus making the impression of your face and form upon it.
Had not that plate been chemically sensitized there would have been no impression, but the work is not yet complete. The impression must be fixed, made permanent, so the slide to the little box which holds the plate and which has been withdrawn to admit the light from the lens, is closed and taken back into the dark room. Here it goes through a process called developing, bringing out, for though the impression has been made it does not yet show any more than the character of a child shows at birth.
Presently the artist comes out and says: “You will have to sit again, this impression is spoiled.’’ “Why, what’s the matter? “There is a fly upon your nose.”
“Yes, one lit there just as you uncovered the lens, but could you not develop the picture without it?” “No, whatever comes within range of the lens will show,” is the reply.
Now for the application. Have you never heard the remark: “As nervous as a womanV9 Men say this in contempt of what they consider evidence of our weakness. The remark is evidence, not only of their ignorance but of ours. Did woman generally realize the use that her more sensitive nerves serve in the economy of nature, man would soon learn.
A woman’s nerves sustain a similar relation to the child in the womb that the lens does to the sensitized plate in the camera box; they are to receive and transmit impressions, and whatever is thus stamped upon the child in embryo is very likely to come out in life’s developing process.
This nerve sensitiveness is a mighty power for good or evil. When understood and rightly used, it will become the motor power through which the race will evolve to higher conditions. This is the power that the free woman will hold for good; not only by giving the world better children, but through the soul love atmosphere generated from the finer forces of sex, she will bless all within the radius of her sphere. “As nervous as a woman.’’ If man only understood the wonderful power for good wrapped up in her sensitive nerves he would make different conditions for her than now.
Only think of the sights and sounds, the vibrations of which are carried along the mother’s nerves to the child beneath her heart; yes, think of the kind of vibrations with which the very air is filled! How can we have pure homes under such conditions ?
Oh, those wonderful nerves! I have sometimes thought idiots to be the result of their lack of action. An idiot! a spirit in prison—a human soul encased in a body through which it has no power of expression—what a fate! a fate that none of us are wholly exempt from, for not one of us can fully express all that we feel—all that we are. Oh, how words mock us in their failure to give our thought!
We are but half made up—are weak morally, as a people. If the atmosphere was as full of the germs of physical disease life would hang upon a very slender thread for us all. But whence come these elements of mental and moral weakness, and also much of the physical disease with which we are afflicted?
You may think me morbid, fanatical when I tell you that they are rooted in a perverted sexuality, but let’s look at the facts as they exist.
It has been demonstrated—“is a fact of easy demonstration,” that sex desire can be changed into religious emotion and that without the subject being aware of what has been done. This being true, this desire may be changed into any other emotion that we as human beings are capable of feeling, and why not ? Sex is the seat of the emotions. From the love that brings the sexes together all other loves spring, and perverted, they become hatred, deception, jealousy, revenge—all the long list of feelings that curse instead of blessing—all these spring from the same source—are rooted in the same soil. It is from the right or wrong use of sex that good and evil spring, and woman’s nerves transmit the vibrations from either to the next generation, giving the child an aptitude thereto.
Those who, notwithstanding they know they owe their life to sex, are inclined to look upon the sex act as low, will hardly admit the correctness of my views, and yet, when we remember that sex is the source of all life-manifestation, I cannot see how they can reach any other conclusion. It is quite certain if a fountain is poisoned that its streams cannot be pure, and it is equally certain that the very air is laden with the poisonous elements of a perverted sexuality, and by what law has it become thus poisoned ?
By asceticism, by the idea that the desires we wish to express through the body are low, and by the sex slavery of woman, through which has come unwilling, unsatisfactory relations.
As we think an act good or bad, so it becomes to us, and no matter how strong the desire, if we yield outside the prescribed limits we feel degraded. This is pre-eminently true of sex because all connected with it is creative, the very aura producing an element of degradation if we hold the relation unwillingly or feel in the least degraded—this of woman, for man is not subject to unwilling sex relations. If there is mutuality, if love blends the two factors, then this creative aura remains with the parties as a life-giving, a working force for their use.
If there is not harmony, then the life of each factor goes out into the general atmosphere and attracts that with which it can blend, each creating that which is like unto itself, for it is impossible to destroy the life of either factor. Sex is an ever-living force.
To illustrate: When the wife yields because she feels she must; not because she desires, then the elements of servility are created on the one side and of tyranny on the other. The brain organs called into action when the sex relation is held decide the nature of the aura which goes out into the general atmosphere, this always.
Now, what are the brain organs generally called into action when the sex relation is held? How large a portion are the result of mutual love and respect? Taking the relations held both in, and out of marriage, can we say one-half? I very much doubt it; but conceding that much, we then have only half the life-force thus set free to contribute a healthy element to the general atmosphere, while the balance pervades the same atmosphere with all the repulsive vibrations that unwilling relations create.
With such a class of elements permeating the mental and moral atmosphere, is it any wonder that society is made up of the oppressor and the oppressed, of tyrants and slaves. Talk of pure homes when woman must gestate the race under such conditions— of an enduring civilization with the sights ond sounds that are now carried along the current of woman’s nerves, thus continually affecting the embryo more or less.
But I cannot picture it all. There are mental and moral currents coming to us of which the intellect can take no account. We only know that we feel depressed, uncomfortable, sorrowful but we can not tell why. It is well for the race, as things now are, that woman is not more sensitive than she is, but in freedom, and things rightly adjusted, her sensitiveness will be the prized as the measure of progress.
People take great pains to prevent the spread of contagious physical diseases, but do not seem to have the least idea that moral and spiritual disease can be carried in the clothing or that the suffering of those who are entirely removed from our immediate surroundings can in any measure affect us, but scientists, those who are investigating the finer forces of nature, are learning that the good of one demands the good of all.
Professor Ely of the University of Wisconsin says that in the suffering of five provinces in Russia, caused by famine a few years ago, we find the origin of the disease known as la-grippe to which thousands have fallen victims in the United States.
If this be indeed true, and I see no reason to doubt it, what then must be the effect of the slums of our cities on the general health of the community, morally as well as physically? Why should not garments made in miserable, sewer-gas permeated rooms, by women whose compensation is barely enough to keep soul and body together—why should not such garments be filled, not only with the emanations of the gas, but with the aura of their feelings as transmitted from their finger tips? Their degraded, crushed, indignant and despairing souls must give forth a corresponding element.
Put one of those garments upon a sensitive, highly organized woman and she may be made sick thereby, never once suspecting the cause; or if pregnant the nature of the child may be thus affected.
Oh, nonsense, that is too far-fetched, says one. Not so far-fetched as you may think. If one condition of the body can fill a garment with the germs of contagion why may not another do the same ? If one condition of the mind can radiate health and happiness, then why may not the opposite condition radiate depression and disease? If a letter in the hands of a psychometrist can so connect the holder with the writer that both mental and bodily conditions can be told, why not a garment into which the very lifeblood has been stitched carry with it the condition of the maker?
„ Man, in his investigations, is beginning to recognize the strange fact that the finer forces are the stronger, is learning the invisible can be made visible —that ah object which has form and size can be photographed through the action of distinct, intense and rightly directed thought; can we say then that an image, yea, the very life-suffering of those who make those garments does not permeate them through and through?
Most assuredly it does, and in the light of these facts I do not hesitate to repeat the statement that a sensitive may be affected by wearing such garments. Were woman free and society adjusted to such freedom these things could not be. The conditions which will make woman’s freedom possible will destroy that which now produces such suffering.
Man has achieved his greatest triumphs through a knowledge and application of the fine material forces; woman, in her work, must grasp and apply the moral and spiritual forces, remembering always that all things are rooted in sex. Remembering that as sex is the source of all life, so also is it the source of all power, for where there is no life there is no power.
Woman, in freedom, will gestate the finer forces of creative life which naturally tend to elevate the race to a higher plane—will lead man to the plane of soul-love to which she desires response, and for the lack of which she hungers even till her children are born hungry for they know not what, but are ever seeking in various ways for something that will satisfy, or at least deaden its ceaseless call.
Our temperance people had better work on this line than to try to pass laws for the suppression of the saloon, for in freedom no woman will bear love- hungry children, who, unable to forget what they know not how to satisfy, seek to quench their hunger- gnawing in the intoxicating cup.
Yes, woman must be free before she can use the fullness of her power to bless the race; before she can use her power to do away with the sights and sounds that offend her natural sense of purity and refinement—must do away with them by removing their causes. Surrounding her with conditions that shut them out is not sufficient, for, though her eyes do not look upon that which is vile its magnetism cannot be shut from her. The finer forces of life, good or evil, penetrate everywhere.
Some teach that we may rise above all these things, may become so positive to them that they will not affect us. There are those who can do this but all cannot, and it is a question if it is best for her, or her child, for the prospective mother to feel obliged to do this to escape undesired effects.
Such effort takes force, and as the finer forces are the stronger, so their use exhausts the most. If the mother must use her life-force thus, does she not rob her child of strength that would otherwise be its natural inheritance? A prospective mother should not be made to feel that she must protect her child or to think about it only to love it. Nature will do her part all right, if she has good material to work with, and she is trusted.
A prospective mother should not be anxious, should not deny herself nor weight herself with responsibility because of her child. In other words, she makes a mistake if she lives for her child, makes that the leading object of her thought, feels that it. is of more importance than herself, if she does this before its birth, then, I say, she makes a mistake. Nature uses the material given; if tobacco smoke is furnished she cannot put into her work the sweetness of roses—if the nerves transmit the feeling that the mother must live for the child putting herself second, then it will be born with the idea innate that its mother’s place is to serve it. It takes her at her own estimate. This is, in part, why so many children fail to accord due respect to their mothers.
Mothers suffer, but they are only reaping what they have sown. Let the mother make the most of herself, let her aim to develop her own powers, leaving the embryo to nature, only loving it, as I have said, and her nerves will transmit that feeling to the child. Then the desire to make the most of itself will be inborn. The world has been cursed long enough by the self-sacrifice of woman.
A physician who advocates the prevention of conception as a remedy for pauperism and crime, says:
“If one-half the time, talent and money that the civilized world now spends in courts, jails, prisons, asylums, poor houses and reform schools was applied to producing only well-born children, and to educate and train them, soon the efforts now being made would not be needed.”
There’s a man’s reasoning for you. He tells just enough of truth to sugar-coat the error. He does not go to the bottom of things. We want no time, talent nor money spent in producing children, good or bad. That is nature’s work, and the quality will be as is the material furnished. Mother Nature cannot produce desirable children if woman is enslaved, sick and sorrowful. If marital outrage or unwilling relations so stir her indignation that it becomes like a smothered volcano it may come forth in her child as murder. Or her annoyance or lack of the comforts of life may thus show itself in some other form of criminality. It is not the children but the mothers who need our efforts.
Woman must have both economic and sex freedom. And she must turn her attention to herself, to the rounding out of her own nature, not for the sake of a possible child, but for her own sake. Then she will need to take no anxious thought for the coming one, for nature, true to the law of like producing like, will reproduce in her child that which she has loved to cultivate in herself.
It is herself that should be satisfied and happy. It is herself that should love the noble and good, who should have aspiration for all that is sweet, beautiful and grand, and because of its beauty, sweetness and grandeur, not because of her expected child. Nature will take care of that.
0, no, I do not mean that you are to forget your child while carrying it beneath your heart. Think of it, anticipate it, brood it with your love, but do not try to fix it with your intellect. That, I repeat, is nature’s work. If there is anything she needs she will let you know; she will make you want it with an unusual strength of desire. Then her call should be heeded; otherwise leave her alone.
Mothers, make all that you can of yourselves; but do not put your children first before birth or after. Children who really honor their parents, more especially the mother, will honor themselves in their lives, but, if you as parents rank yourselves beneath them in importance how can they rightly honor you?
So long as mothers act from the spirit of self-sacrifice so long will children continue to make the hearts of their parents ache by their ingratitude.
Oh, if women could only see these things as they are, they would certainly rise en masse and demand the right to themselves and also to homes over which they can hold full control. Woman must have a home that she can adjust to her own needs, a home in which all the finer forces of her nature can be used to bring to the race the highest good possible, the highest good that the mother-heart can desire.
Man does his work, seeks and uses the fine, the invisible material forces free from woman’s rule, and she must have the conditions under which she can apply the fine, the invisible love-forces free from his rule, must have the right to create this fine love-aura directly as well as indirectly. Woman must understand her right to personal freedom and then demand it.
I have spoken of vibrations; I want to speak more of their governing law, of how we become creators through our feelings, our emotions. I shall never forget my own emotions, and what a field of thought was opened up before me when I first learned that the character-tones of the voice had their correspondence in the forms of life about us—when I found that a sensitized film stretched over the end of a tube and words spoken into the opposite end would print upon that film the forms of flowers, bugs, worms, as the speaker was actuated by love, hate, anger and the like.
Only think of it—think of all that this means! Is it not an indication that when love’s harmonies are complete, when hatred and jealousy are no more, that the disagreeable, the terrible will disappear, will die for want of sustenance, even as fish die if kept out of water. Then think of the importance of freedom for woman, for these perverted human passions will not, can not cease to act till woman holds her rightful place as a mother of the race. She must be free. If the children of the bond (bound) woman desire freedom they must free their mothers.
Woman’s condition of bondage as naturally produces hatred, envy, jealousy and the like, as stagnant water produces slime and tadpoles. Freedom is necessary to the purity of both. How can woman help feeling indignant, despondent, and all the other discordant emotions—how can she help sending them out. silently if not in expressed vibrations, thus creating in the atmosphere the invisible but real forms of the vicious and repulsive—think of the natural tendency of all this under the legal bond where there is no love, where it has been destroyed by the assertion of ownership. Yes, think of the homes where the wife is repelled, disgusted, yet feels that she must submit.
Think, too, of the moral atmosphere thus generated, and of the wrong that man thus ignorantly does to himself, wasting his substance for that which does not satisfy. Relief is not the satisfaction that nature seeks, but a mutual blending of the two which will create life-force for both. Yes, I mean create. Sex is creative on all planes; mutual love creates life, vital force, mental and spiritual as well as material, and where love is lacking there is not, there cannot be satisfaction. So far as man is concerned it intensifies his hunger, tends to make him cross and arbitrary in his home while his persistence so destroys the wife that she has no power to reciprocate. And this is “holy marriage!”
“At the altar.” Yes, it is an “altar,” on which men and women are offered a “living sacrifice” to the god of ignorance and superstition. A priestly dignitary is reported as saying:
“A wife has no right to reject the divine fire.” Yes, it is divine fire when rightly used, and no
low, debasing word, or thought, should be connected with it, but unwilling relations make it hell-fire. When unwilling sex relations cease, then hell will leave the earth, but this can never be until woman is actually, absolutely free. The idea of a woman accepting a man when she does not desire him, when there is no pressure upon her to do so, is simply unthinkable.
But to go back to the moral effect of man’s attempt to control and direct the “divine fire.” With the vibrations thus set in motion, can we wonder at what we find in society? Can we wonder that there is so little moral sense, so confused an idea of right and wrong? And why should it be otherwise when the standard of judgment is false? In one of Lizzie Doten’s poems I find the lines:
“Thou art judged by the needs of thy nature,
And not by the standard of man.”
The needs of our nature are the measure of our rights. Woman has the natural right to refuse the unwelcome embrace, but the law deprives the wife of that right; she is owned. True, many wives do refuse only when it pleases them to do otherwise, but their husbands have the legal right to enforce their wishes. So many women submit because they must, but that does not change the fact that such relations injure both parties.
I am well aware that this talk of sex law, this arraignment of legal marriage seems terrible to many, but there has arisen in the human heart, and particularly in the mother heart, the desire to learn why, after all the effort that has been, and is still being, made—they would know why existing evils are not suppressed. They are determined to learn if there is any remedy for this state of things, and if so, to find and apply it, and their questioning will not down because of the alarm of those who see destruction in honest investigation. If these questions cannot be discussed without breaking up the homes in which men now rule, then let them go.
When legal marriage and the property system upon which it is based, have so shown their insufficiency to meet human needs, it is time they were set aside. Yes, let them go, for the power of woman to bless the race can be applied only in a limited degree under either.
When woman is free, and economic conditions adjusted to that freedom, then she will exercise her power for good beyond what is now even dreamed of —not perfectly at first, but she will adapt herself to her new, her true sphere with a rapidity that will surprise even herself. Then she will indeed have a home—her home—and she will so rule it that no impurity, no defilement can enter there. Only the impress of the pure, the sweet, the loving, the beautiful will be carried along the current of her nerves to the coming one. Then her children will be what they are capable of becoming, a joy to all around them.
But we have not reached that point yet; we are only sowing the seed for the future harvest, are so connecting with that future that we shall be able to turn back from the eternal shore and inhale the aroma of freedom and love as a part of our rightful inheritance; but you are asking what can be done now?
We can think. Thought is back of every effort. Its unseen power is back of every intention, of all advance in the arts and sciences, of all the wonders that have developed in this wonderful century—each and all have first been molded in some thinker’s brain, have been pondered over, dwelt upon till the thinker saw clearly the principle involved and the method of application—so clearly that not a doubt remained of success.
And it is thus that I have thought of woman’s freedom as connected with the uplifting of the race, as connected with the elimination of disease and criminal tendencies. I have thought until I see clearly that woman cannot be free under the present system of things any more than the flat earth theory can be harmonized with our relation to the sun and stars. I came to see that woman has a natural right to herself—that love’s consummation is not a sin though man’s law makes it a crime unless legally sanctioned.
But when I say all this, I saw also the misery that would result from trying to make it practical. I knew, if I had the right to myself, I also had the right to what I naturally attracted, and, further, we have been so educated, if that right was actualized, it would break up homes. I knew I could not be happy at the expense of some other woman—knew that I could not escape the vibrations of her sorrow. I saw, also, that secret relations generated deceit, and how that which I saw to be nature’s law could be lived I could not understand.
I could not see all aro\ind the subject. I now see that such freedom under the present system, cannot be lived only as a disintegrating force, that in connection with the attempt suffering is unavoidable. I now see that only under an entirely new system can the glories of genuine freedom be realized. That new system must be adjusted to human needs, consequently to woman’s needs as mother of the race, and as the eliminator of that finer sex aura which, in blending with its opposites, gives soul growth.
When I came to see all this, I then made my demand for the unqualified freedom of woman, and that all the institutions of society be adjusted to such freedom, and from that position I cannot recede.
True, we of to-day cannot actualize this, but the fact that the demand has been clearly stated, this, coupled with a knowledge of nature’s law that in such freedom there will be no sex disease, and, further enforced by woman’s aversion to any but loving relations—all this finding lodgement in the human mind, and particularly in woman’s mind, will surely bring it to those who come after us.
Those who see the law of conditions as related to the child—who realize that many children are, so to speak, “born damned,” born to be cursed all through life because of inherited tendencies, the result of what the mother had to contend with during gestation—those who realize all this, will agonize for immediate results. They would put a stop to such things right away, quick.
To such I would say that ideas are first, then comes their embodiment. The more clear cut, better defined the idea, the more perfect the form it will take when worked out in actual life, while the greater the change the longer it will take. The work to be done before woman can take her true place as mother of the race is greater than anything that has yet taken place in the history of the race so needing a mother. It is a change that involves the complete reconstruction of society from foundation to dome.
Not one stone must be left upon another of this temple f reared to the supremacy of force, and it requires those who can work and wai£ who can die if need be, but will not yield.
If you ask me what you can do in this work, I cannot tell you. I have devoted myself to it body, soul and spirit, but I have no right to point to myself a pattern for others. All must work on their own lines, must decide for themselves what they can do and what they can not do, so far as action is concerned, but you can all think. Yes, we can think and feel.
Thought is a wonderful power when there is a persistent purpose behind it. I have previously stated the demonstrated fact that earnest, persistent thought, with the image of that which has form and size well defined in the mind, and directed to that end, can be photographed, the vibrations of the clear cut thought taking the form in the atmosphere of that which is in the mind of the thinker, are carried through the lens of the camera to the sensitized plate.
My sisters, can you not make the application? Make your demand” for freedom, silently where you cannot voice it—make it clear-cut and persistent—do this till its vibrations are photographed all through the realm of mind and soul—do this till the multiplying vibrations of that demand fill the archives of the world of thought—do this backed by the intensity of feeling that mothers send out for the welfare of their children—continue to do this, and that demand can no more help being actualized than the grass can help growing in springtime.
We have seen that woman’s nerves are transmitters, but we must understand that they transmit from within outward, as well as from without to that which is within.
Yes, dear comrades, we can think and we can feel, and the more deeply we feel, the stronger the life- current, the more positive the vibrations that will flow along: these transmitting nerves out into the general thought atmosphere, and they cannot fail of doing their work.
Yes, think—think till your mother hearts realize that the world is crying in darkness, that “the father” does not meet its needs. It is calling for a mother, not a bound, or a “bond,” but a free mother. Oh, woman! try to realize that only as you are free to do your work in your own way, can the race rise to that plane of moral and physical health and happiness which has so long been the ideal of poet and prophet—think of all this and surely you will work for that which, so far, has been but a dream of the far-off future with no indication as to how the desired goal could be reached.
True, we have been told of a millennium, have believed it was coming, but, having been taught the absurd idea of a personal being called God whose will is law, we have not thought that we had anything to do about it, but have supposed it would come when God chose to bring it. We have also been taught that this God is our father, but no word of a mother, except the earthly, and she is a subject. But one thing is certain; no matter how necessary the male principle for impregnation, no form of life can be embodied, can be made manifest, except through the feminine, the mother principle. No matter how omnipotent God the Father may be, he can do nothing in the line of creating without Mother God’s aid; man is equally helpless without woman.
The thought has gone forth, our minds have become impregnated with the idea of the future glory of the race, but mark the point—woman must make this ideal real just as truly as she must gestate and bring forth the human child. Everywhere, in all grades of life, in all realms of being, the feminine is the embodying power.
Woman, as yet, has hardly had a glimpse of her true place. She has not even dared to think for herself. She has given her creative life to man for his work. She has not only gestated and brought forth the nations, but she has given her thought force to aid in man’s work. The point I wish to make I have already touched upon elsewhere, but it is so important it will bear dwelling upon, illustrating in various ways. Indeed, it is so vital that hardly too much can be said upon it. The point is this:
When woman so withdraws her forces from man’s work as to balance and hold him to the line of harmony, the circle—when she gestates positive, clear-cut well-defined ideals of her own, the attracting power of her nature will hold him.
Man desires the good, but he starts off on a tangent, a straight line, to obtain it, crushing whatever lies in his path. With woman subject to his will, he has used her forces but has not consulted her wishes. Being active by the law of his life, coupled with the fact that the two life-factors are needed in all effort, must be gathered directly or indirectly; this makes it certain that when woman refuses to aid man in carrying out the rule of force he must come under the sway of the law of love and he will be just as active in seeking the welfare of all as he is now in building up “me and mine.”
The gestation of the NEW is woman’s work just as truly as is the gestation of the child beneath her heart. Man may produce abortion if she permits, but he cannot gestate, bring to birth the era of love; if he could, we could not become “world-mothers.”
When woman refuses to be longer ruled by man he must work for the new order. I say must, because the feminine is the attractor, the centralizer, the builder.
Woman has always attracted man, even when he took forcible possession of her it was because she attracted him; he wanted her, but it was to add to his pleasure, to serve him. She will continue to attract him, must do so by the very law of her being, but it will be as an equal; she will no longer be under his rule, and the blended life of love’s consummation will satisfy instead of increasing love’s hunger.
As the sun is the attracting center of the planetary system, so woman is, or should be, the center of the social system. Hitherto our social sun has been in the night of its winter solstice. Woman has not been permitted to shed the direct rays of her mother- love upon the world, but she is coming up the heavens of progress and when she gets high enough she will see her true place.
Some of us see now that trying to remedy evils inherent under the rule of force is a fruitless task, see that we must go higher. When we do this we need have no fear but that man will come up and work with us.
It can easily be shown that the system under which we live cannot be reformed, that every attempt to make things better in one direction only makes them worse elsewhere. As far back as I can remember earnest souls have been stirring the emotions of the people by vivid representations of the horrors of drunkenness, but with all the efforts that have been made to regulate and lessen the sale of intoxicants, the evil has increased instead of diminishing.
Through the license law it has become entrenched in the very fibres of government. It adds largely to the revenue of our cities and helps to fill our national treasury. The more the subject has been agitated the more firmly has the liquor business taken root. High license has brought high prices, and the price has tempted to adulteration. The amount of injury that has been done to the blood of the race because of poisonous drugs thus used, can never be known.
So much for the temperance question under the rule of force, and an equally terrible charge can be brought against every other effort to secure an enforced morality. How many prostitutes would we have if woman was entirely free, remembering always that nature knows no prostitution but unwilling subjection. Not one; no sex disease, no unwilling mothers, no undesired children, no murder of the unborn, and there being no conflict in the creatory, the war spirit would soon die out.
Woman is now demanding the ballot, but she will learn that it cannot remedy evils which are inherent in the system. When she learns this she will seek her true source of power; then she will succeed.
Woman has so long been subject to man, it may be necessary that she pass through his sphere to reach her own, but it seems to me that her working with him on the plane of force with the hope of righting existing wrongs is as if the sun should take to running around with the planets to keep them in order. The place for the sun is in the center as a home around which the planets naturally revolve.
Woman’s place is indeed home maker and mother, but the home must be hers; she must be its ruling power. When this is accorded, she will no longer seek to do man’s work, but in her own true sphere she will be mother, not only to those born from her body, but of the race.
And now a restatement, a summing up of woman’s source of power. First, as a foundation, is the immutable truth that the two factors of sex, when blended, are creative from the lowest form of physical life up through all grades of the mental and spiritual.
Neit, that neither Father God nor Father-man can create alone. They are both dependent upon the embodying power of Mother-God.
Again, man represents force, woman Love, and in the blending the ruling personality commands and uses the power of the finer forces of both, and as man’s reign has so far been one of force, thus by the pressure of false conditions woman has been forced to contribute to her own enslavement. But, as attractor and builder, if she becomes self-poised, refuses to serve man longer, he will still be attracted, and, as he cannot create alone, he must come to her, must give her the control of the life-force generated in their love-unions, and thus will be created that which will bring in the era of Love’s sweet sway.
The real starting point of woman’s power is when she begins to think. With a well defined idea of her true place, and the, at first, silent but firm demand for that place is the first step in the right direction. In the silence all things are gestated. The silent demand has somewhere been made. The vibrations of that demand have gone out on the mental atmosphere or I could not voice it as I do.
I voice it, and thus sow the thought in many minds, and they, silently or openly enforce it by scores and hundreds. Those who speak silently, who speak to the soul instead of to the ear will find yet other mouthpieces, and thus the work will go on till the atmosphere which kills or gives life to institutions becomes so filled with the vibrations of this demand that none will be found to question woman’s right to herself, while institutions which cannot be adjusted to that right will be set aside, not only as useless but as a hindrance to progress. They will become obsolete.
And now, I feel the questionings of thousands of unhappy wives; I hear them saying, what can I, what ought I to do, and they* would gladly pour their sorrows into my ears with the hope of some specific advice and direction. That is what I cannot give. I cannot know the conditions of any woman’s life as she knows them herself, therefore she is the one to decide in her own particular case.
I can only say, whatever else you do, hold on to the conviction that you belong to yourself, that any claim on your person is an usurpation no matter what church or state, or their contemptible daughter, Mother Grundy, may please to say or do, or what you, in your ignorance, have promised.
The love that is rooted in sex, and mother love are the two strongest elements of woman’s character, the satisfaction of both an inherent right. Is it not then, an insolent usurpation for men to tell us that we shall enjoy neither only through disgrace and degradation unless we promise the use of our bodies to some one man during life- -think of it!
Yes, you have the right to yourselves, and though you may not be able to assert it, if you do not submit in spirit, if you hold to the thought, then you are preparing the way for the death of lust, that is, of mere physical desire without mutual love, and your children will reap the harvest of your silent demand, but let all speak out who can. The cause is worthy of martyrs.
ADDENDA
In reading over “Woman’s Source of Power,” as published December, 1902, in order to the issuing of a better edition, I am so deeply impressed with the importance of woman’s work in the uplifting of the race, and of the necessity of freedom before she can do that work that I wish to add, if possible, still stronger reasons to those already given, hoping thereby to aid in awakening my sex to a realizing sense of the power which combined with man’s will rule by love instead of by force. Right here I will use a few paragraphs taken from an appeal made to woman a few years since in connection with the temperance question: ‘
“You who are working for the suppression of intemperance and prostitution, as well as all others who accept the present system and try to reform it, I must say to you all, you are doing no real good. Yes, I know, you can show me hundreds that you call saved, but if in pulling John and Mary out of the ditch you push James and Fannie in, where’s the good?
“Did you ever consider the law of averages? In writing upon this law, a man who wished to make a given application of the same, says: ‘You can never tell what an individual man will do, but you may tell what a given number will do, and the greater the number, the easier to get the average. It is upon this law of averages that business men make their calculations. The general average of crime may be ascertained in the same way.’
“Now what is the principle behind this method of calculation ?
“Simply this: The forces which tend to business failures, and those which push people into crime remain unchanged. These forces which inhere in this system of society, remain intrenched while earnest souls are constantly dealing with effects. So long as this system remains in force, for every Magdalene, every drunkard, every criminal taken out of the ranks another is somewhere pushed in, therefore, you are doing no real good.
“I know this will hurt, but have I become your enemy because I tell you the truth? I know your loving souls long to bless humanity, therefore I point you to the only way in which you can reach your hearth desire. ‘Behold I make all things new.’ Such are the reported words of him whom many of you call Master. Another has said: ‘Get wisdom, and with all of thy gettings, get understanding/ When you once understand that there is no hope under the old then you will work to make ‘all things new/ Then the reign of force will give place to the reign of love.
“The church is bitterly blamed for not living up to its declared principles, and yet it is living them as well as this great nation is living up to its declaration of equal rights—that is, not at all in either case. First, because neither church nor state have grasped the wide meaning involved in that which they profess; secondly, did they fully understand they could not apply the saving power of those principles under this reign of force. No, don’t blame them—these church people. They do not mean to be hypocrites, but, if there is one thing more than another which tends to make people such, it is being pledged to that which they cannot carry out, and from which they cannot recede without disgrace, perhaps the loss of their means of living. ’ ’
The above is quoted to show the difference between personal condemnation and the condemnation of a system of which persons are the victim.
All the institutions of society as they exist today are bars across the path of progress, the church perhaps worse than any other, not because it is of itself worse, but because of our reverence which stands in the way of investigation.
Under the pressure of this reverence woman has accepted an inferior position, when for the best good of the race she should be free to do her own work in her own way, her especial work as the builder of human bodies, and as such she must refuse to submit to man’s rule. She is beginning to see her true place, she is struggling toward the light. The great Woman Movement of the age is the result of this feeling, but the need is to see intellectually what is thus sensed intuitively.
Thinkers on the line of the old one deprecating woman’s increasing aversion to motherhood, an aversion which is becoming so apparent serious fears are entertained that soon only the lower, the cruder classes, will propagate. Woman herself does not yet understand what this feeling means, does not realize that it is a part of her revolt against the present order of things. But to those whose ears are open, the language of this part of her revolt is:
“We are tired of bearing children one-half of which must die before reaching maturity—tired of rearing sons to be shot down like dogs in the name of patriotism to preserve a nation’s honor, the duelist’s code of honor on a national scale; tired of seeing our daughters become victims to man’s ignorance and passion till their diseased bodies are carted to dishonored graves; tired of rearing inmates for prisons and asylums because gestated under such conditions that the seeds of weakness and crime are in their blood.”
Such is the language of this increasing revolt against motherhood, and such the conditions under which motherhood must be assumed, if at all, so long as our present system prevails, so long as the reign of force continues, for our unjust economic system could not stand a day were it not upheld by force. Yes, things must continue on in the same line, only growing worse, till the system itself is changed. And I repeat, woman can change all this if she will.
“How?” Refuse utterly to sustain man on the plane of force. Thought is the beginning of all change. Man may evolve an ideal and woman ges- tate, embody it, as well as gestate, embody another human being the germ of which man has produced. Man has evolved the germ of a new system. It may not be all that can be desired, but woman is abundantly able to supply whatever may be lacking if she so determines.
In Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” we find the outlines of a system which to say the least, frees woman economically, and that is one great step forward, but woman must be free in every sense of the word before she can do her best work. And she need not wait for man to free her; she can do this herself. She can fill the very air with the vibrations of her thought-demand$, and can enforce them with burning words that will fire the heart and stimulate the brain of man till he will carry out her wishes as if they were the commands of God, and so they will be of the Mother-God through the lips of woman.
You will say that man has not done this in the past—that your prayers and tears have failed.
True, but it is because you have attempted to correct his work, to enter his field of action instead of moving forward and attracting him to a higher plane. He instinctively knows that what you ask cannot be done in the way proposed, and he is right. He understands that field better than you can, but if you refuse to sustain his work, even by trying to reform it, then he must come to you, for neither Father-God, nor Father-man can do their work alone, and woman is the attracting power. She cannot get away from man if she should try. Let her move forward unhesitatingly. She will ever find her brother, her lover, by her side, she will fulfill her highest ideals.
Yes, my sisters, he will then work with you for a new and better system. He will do the active work the same as now, but it will be the active work needed to carry out the purpose of love instead of force.
This system of force is the ever present cross on which the true Christ, the real God-love, Mother-love is continually crucified. Then why continue it ? Why try to make this cross easier to bear ? In view of all the efforts that have been made by earnest men and women to remedy the evils which grow out of this system of enforced wrong and their utter failure, why should woman seek for place and power under its rule?
This system of force that cannot benefit one class without injuring some other class; that cannot give us health without starving the doctors; that cannot give us peace and order without destroying the lawyer’s means of support; that cannot give woman employment without leaving men idle, perhaps converting them into tramps; a system that grinds the life out of children, making them prematurely old; a system that necessitates mothers to bear children under conditions that predispose them to disease and crime; a system under which sweet charity becomes a sugar- coated curse; a system that cannot be made better as a whole; why seek for place and power under such a system ? Why not repudiate it and demand that life be based on love?
So long, my sisters, as you try to help man patch this system, so long you hold him to it. He will not go and leave you, and he cannot rise till you do. You are the attracting power. You and you only can attract him forward, but not till you move forward yourselves.
An ex-reverend who thinks for himself says: ‘ ‘ The true feminine principle revolts at strife, bloodshed and vain glory. It is the masculine in woman that falls down to worship war and deeds of blood. It was the woman in Jesus who did all the healing. It was the woman whe was crucified, and it was the woman who rose from the dead and went to heaven.”
Mr. Shelton is mistaken as to the resurrection woman. She is still in the grave. Man cannot represent her, not even a Jesus. She must herself come forth from the thralldom in which her womanhood is bound. The real woman has not yet appeared. Her feminine side is not yet developed. We have had only glimpses as yet; and it is in view of what she is capable of becoming that I call to you, my sisters:
Let us rise from our knees, stand up in our strength, be loyal to ourselves and to coming generations. They are coming, coming from out the great unknown and what reception shall they have ?
Shall poverty gripe their infant limbs? Shall they be robbed of their childhood by early toil ? Shall cellars and garrets be their shelter? Shall hunger drive them to desperation till prisons open to receive them ? Shall asylums hide their broken minds ? Shall the potter’s field hide their abused and diseased bodies. Shall grape shot and cannon mow them down, or shall the hangman’s rope choke them out of life?
All this, and more, must be the fate of millions of them unless we gestate a new system to take the place of that which now robs and ruins.
Oh, my sisters, what will you do? Oh, for a Gabriel’s trump to arouse the womanhood that now slumbers! To awaken to a due appreciation of ourselves as mothers of the race.
We are not our very selves—never have been. Look about you, my sisters and see if you can find aught that bears the stamp of woman’s individuality. Is it found in religion? No, that is masculine as it emanates from God and man. Is it in morality. No, that is masculine, every plank fitted to man’s supremacy and personal God authority backed by force and fear. Is it in government, in commerce, in any institution of human interest? No, no. All is from man’s standpoint and our opinion not even asked. They have in the name of God, laid upon us (and upon themselves) commands that cannot be obeyed, then preached total depravity, helplessness and Jesus.
They have given us a system of society that cannot be humanized and then have attempted to enforce their ideals by prison, torture, the hangman’s rope, and standing armies ready to deal in wholesale death, and this, not because they meant to be bad, but because of ignorance and because of trying to do their work without the balancing power of womanhood, and genuine womanhood, because not called for, has given us only glimpses of her face.
And what is woman’s part in all this? What is she allowed to do ? To cover with the flowers of tenderness and charity some of the hideous features of man’s attempt to serve heaven with hell’s weapons, of man’s effort to bring order out of chaos, through the motive powers of force and fear. It never has been done; it never can be done, and woman at the head of such a system would make worse work than man has done.
No, there is no part of the present system that bears the stamp of woman’s individuality. She is active, is becoming more so, but everywhere, in all places man either takes the lead or his methods are followed. We have no organized body of women working on lines of independent thinking. They step into places that hitherto only man has filled, but they adopt his methods, study his books or write books involving the same principles and think they are making progress, but in all this they have not begun to look for, much less, found themselves.
We have so long measured ourselves by man’s measure, that the self-centered power of the woman- soul is yet hidden. This we must find.
But how, with the masses of women so stupefied with false teachings as they are? Oh, women of the twentieth century, how shall I wake you up, how make you realize that upon you depends the redemption of the race ? Yes, I will tell it, a story of real life that stirred me to the depths, made me feel that I could endure almost anything if I could even light a taper to illumine the way out of the hells that now prevail.
I found this story in a magazine called Secular Science and Common Sense, and signed Sharlot M. Hall. It was headed.
THE PEACE CONFERENCE.
Tonight we were having an animated discussion of the czar’s late peace conference when the door swung open to a stamping foot and Jim came in shaking the wet off his coat and holding out his hands to the cherry blaze.
He seemed unusually silent, and the captain looked up with a laugh: “Tough night, this, Jim, old boy I But you may as well get used to it. This big peace meeting of all the tribes will dispose of armies and you and I will have to look for another job. No more war, they say; so no need for soldiers or army surgeons. You’ll be ahead of us anyway, for folks are always sick somwehere army or no army.”
“Bah,” growled Jim through his teeth. “Peace conference be hanged. Fine thing to preach peace when we breed war from palace to hovel; when nine- tents of us come into world Ishmaelites, our hand against every man and every man’s hand against us.
Pretty world this, overrun with philanthropic fools, all busy in varnishing effects whose causes they prefer to ignore as unfit for decent minds. My God! boys! When I think of it I wonder we are not all imbeciles or criminals.
“Well, not exactly that,” he continued sadly,
‘“but I’ve watched a woman die to-night; a woman so brave and earnest and noble-hearted that a king must have respected her, though she was only a rancher’s wife. I’ve seen death often enough, and in many forms, but this will haunt me forever. I was powerless to save her and she knew it; for months she had looked death in the face and set her house in order for his coming. Her six little children were gathered around the bed to say good bye; she had patiently told them that mamma was going on a long, long journey, and they must be good to each other and grow up honest men and women.
“The sixth was only a tiny todler, scarcely taking his first steps, and by her side lay the seventh, a pitiful morsel of unwelcome, unneeded ^humanity, for whose existence the mother was paying with her life. He slept peacefully, but his baby brother caught at his mother’s fast chilling hands and pulled himself up by the bed, begging: ‘Tate boy, mamma; boy so tired.’ Poor baby, at whose birth I had told the father plainly that another such event would cost the mother’s life. When she recovered a little from the nearness of death I told her too, and never while I live shall I forget the hopelessness that came into her eyes.
“She sent for me a fejv months later, and as their ranch was on the main road I made some excuse to stop every time I was near. They were very poor; the father was a hard working man and an honest one, but a poor manager, and no one will ever know the toil and hardship that woman underwent to make a home for her children and keep them fed and clothed.
“He was kind to his family in an easy-going way that made small demands on his selfishness, but he had tobacco while his wife went barefoot, and joked about the never filled woodbox. Just an average man of the people; a good husband and a good father as far as his means went, you would say, and yet, more truly a murderer than many a one who swings on the gallows.
“Do you wonder that the poor woman’s soul was filled with bitterness in those weary months when she walked comrade with Death? That as she watched her soon-to-be motherless children she turned with hatred for the selfish cause? What will become of them? I don’t know. The father will marry again and they will be scattered among strangers. Their case is only one of thousands.
“I am thinking of the poor little waif that came into the world to-night. He is one of thousands, too; one of thousands bom of uncurbed passion on one side and enforced submission on the other. Is his little heart aching with his mother’s agony, I wonder? Would it be strange if his life repeated those prenatal months of sorrow and despair, ending in some outburst of uncontrollable passion?
“Poor little mite! The asylums and prisons and city streets are full of his brothers and sisters; hapless beings forced into existence in pain and hatred and terror when nature cried out against the desecration. Conceived to hunger and poverty and scant care from work-filled hands, that would have held one babe or two a heavenly heritage, but sink before the misery awaiting ten.
“Nobody wants him; there is no place in the world waiting him. As a child, if he escapes the workhouse or reform school it is to be known as the dullest boy in school or the worst boy in the neighborhood. As a man he gravitates naturally into the ranks of criminals or the great army of fitfully employed who wander up and down the world seeking bed and bread in any corner.
“If chance grants him a home, it is only to repeat there the tragedy of his own existence, and if fortune gives him a place in public life it is only to vent there his inherited discord and restlessness and to embroil his followers in great or petty strife. War is his destiny ; only in the clash of battle do clashing instincts of his nature find parallel and temporary repose.
‘ ‘ There are a good many things beside Krupp guns and lyddite to be considered in the peace meetings of the world. Not till the angel of love alone heralds the dawn of life shall we do away with war and contending armies.”
Mothers, sisters, what will you do? Will you keep quiet because you think you can’t make things any better? Just send that THINK to hades, for as long as you think you can’t you will not try.
Right here let me say I am not setting our sex on a pedestal. I am not even imagining that we are better than men, but that we are men’s equals. Men have failed because they have tried to do without us in all except where their pleasure is concerned. They keep running round in a circle because they have made us the little wheel. To move forward the wheels must be equal.
Do not be afraid, if you call out hidden power of your souls you will be too good for man’s companionship. He has in his nature that which will match the noblest powers of yours, but it needs your development to call it out, and when I tell you that it is yours to redeem the world it is because he cannot do the work alone. Both are needed.
Sisters, what will you do? Will you continue to trembled before Mother Grundy? Will you risk becoming mothers of criminals, rather than face and defy public opinion? Oh, what can I say to wake you up, to make you realize your power?
THE LAST ENEMY
Your Bible tells you that the last enemy to be destroyed is death, and science is beginning to point the way to the fulfillment of that promise.
In The Truth Seeker of date Nov. 15, 1902, is an article taken from Harper’s Monthly which is of more than ordinary interest, from which I make a few quotations as a basis for some thoughts I wish to present in connection therewith. The writer says:
“The physical process of life is no longer a riddle. It is possible now to define and describe life as precisely as, let us say, the making of bread or the brewing of beer. If it be urged that we know as little of the working of the house wife’s yeast or the brewer’s malt as of life itself there will be none to gainsay; for, curiously enough, they seem to be one and the same thing. Physiology’s present answer to the old riddle is, very simply: Life is a series of fermentations. ’ ’
Here I have only on criticism. As I see the law, life acts through, but is not a series of fermentations. Fermentation shows that life is present, but it is not life itself. True, the manifestation of life may begin thus, and the fermentations may become more and more complex as we rise in the scale of being, even as the numerals 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., become more complex in their relation as they are used in the higher mathematics, but they are not mathematics; they are simply the method of expressing that science; neither are fermentations life; they are only a method of life in action.
The writer states that hitherto to speak of a constructive fermentation would have been considered a contradiction in terms, and yet a constructive one has been found. For instance, starch or dextrine, when subjected to fermentation, is by taking up water, hydrolized, that is to say, split into one of the simpler sugars, glucose, but if the resulting product is not removed the action soon comes to a standstill. Add more starch and it will begin again, but add to the quantity of sugar and we have the reverse process; the glucose is converted back into starch. Then, after giving yet more striking examples of such reversibility the writer adds:
“Perhaps all life’s processes are reversible.99 To me it is not a question of perhaps. Taking my stand by the law of the universal, I say unhesitatingly, if one life process is reversible all are. The writer continues:
“There is one phase of the problem that seems nearer to our day and time, to-wit, the realization of Ponce de Leon’s quest of prolonged youth.” then, after several more paragraphs in the same line he closes with:
“As the discovery of the constructive ferments give a clew to a complete account of the whole life process, so to those who have closely and reflectively followed the development of biochemistry the discovery of reversibility in fermentation may in time disclose the reversibility of the life process; in other words, the arrest of death, the prevention of old age, the preservation of youth.”
Please remember that the above is not the dream of a visionary but the calm deliberation of science, and permit me to ask here: What is all this talk of overcoming death which various shades of new thought vie with each other in asserting, but the intuitional sense of a truth upon which science is so closely verging? It is well known that truths are often sensed long before facts are found that bring their proof and why may not Ponce de Leon’s quest be one of them ? Indeed, from what has already been verified we are warranted in expecting it when the law that governs is so understood as to be obeyed. But what are the two forces that act through the ferments—what can they be but the male and female factors of life universal? That the feminine is the builder, the constructive factor is certainly true, and that by attraction.
The opposite is equally useful, for how could the constructive build new and better if the destructive did not take to pieces, and so refine for the better building? But as no organization is wholly male or wholly female, therefore, though the feminine leads in construction and the masculine in disintegration, the opposite in each aids the other, and thus progress is assured.
But it is man and woman in their relations to each other that we are to consider in studying the possibilities of which we get a glimpse on learning that there is a constructive as well as a destructive ferment and that both act in human life—that the action of the destructive may be reversed and thus become constructive.
In the inception of human life the first step is destructive of a previous condition, but when the work is given into woman’s keeping the action is reversed, becomes constructive; from then on till growth ceases the feminine is the predominating power. Here is where tl*e principle which can continue youth should begin its work.
What is that principle? Balance.
Equal action between the two forces, the constructive building as fast as the destructive takes to pieces. If this can be accomplished then continued youth is assured. And not only that, in the place of a wrinkled and decrepit old age there will be more beauty, more vigor at seventy than at seventeen, this because of the refining and invigorating power of the balanced action of the two forces. The glory which we have been taught to look to another world for, will yet be actualized in this.
But the question is: How can this balance be reached and held?
Only in freedom. We can never reach it so long as woman is in any measure subject to man. There is more to the sex life than the creative act. Our spheres are sexed. Men do not generate feminine magnetism nor women that of the male.
It is a law in nature that to sustain any form of life there must be in the earth and atmosphere every element needed by that life. The sphere of our sex life enters the creative atmosphere to meet this general need, but our spheres are as we are. Woman (not so much personal as general) cannot send a balancing force into this general atmosphere, therefore we take in more of destructive than of constructive life, so must grow old and die until this is changed.
Now, woman does not own herself. She is not permitted to follow her natural promptings without legal action except under conditions that change her constructive—her life-giving love into that which is but an element of death. Man, in his ignorance and love of dominion has subjected woman to himself and the end thereof is death; woman, in her ignorance has submitted to this and becomes a partner in the consequences.
Science will yet justify those who are demanding the freedom of woman—of love. Love, the feminine principle—Love, the builder—the creator, has been so enslaved and abused, that when we talk of love in freedom all sorts of degradation are imagined, but those who see how much is involved will not—cannot recede from the position taken, and neither contempt nor persecution can prevent Love’s claim from being finally recognized.