Daisy & Myrtle: American Women and the machine

[alice wellintown]

The American woman at her best -- like most other women -- exerted
great charm on the man, but not the charm of a primitive type. She
appeared as the result of a long series of discards, and her chief
interest lay in what she had discarded. When closely watched, she
seemed making a violent effort to follow the man, who had turned his
mind and hand to mechanics. The typical American man had his hand on a
lever and his eye on a curve in his road; his living depended on
keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to
become sixty, eighty, or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions or
anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit
whiskey or drugs, without breaking his neck. He could not run his
machine and a woman too; he must leave her; even though his wife, to
find her own way, and all the world saw her trying to find her way by
imitating him.

The result was often tragic, but that was no new thing in feminine
history. Tragedy had been woman's lot since Eve. Her problem had been
always one of physical strength and it was as physical perfection of
force that her Venus had governed nature. The woman's force had
counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the
cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all
history; it was a palaeontological falsehood that even an Eocene
female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if
her force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field,
and the family must pay for it. So far as she succeeded, she must
become sexless like the bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia
to carry on the race.

The story was not new. For thousands of years women had rebelled. They
had made a fortress of religion -- had buried themselves in the
cloister, in self-sacrifice, in good works -- or even in bad. One's
studies in the twelfth century, like one's studies in the fourth, as
in Homeric and archaic time, showed her always busy in the illusions
of heaven or of hell -- ambition, intrigue, jealousy, magic -- but the
American woman had no illusions or ambitions or new resources, and
nothing to rebel against, except her own maternity; yet the rebels
increased by millions from year to year till they blocked the path of
rebellion. Even her field of good works was narrower than in the
twelfth century. Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophical
anarchism, which promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off
the few avenues of escape which capitalism had opened to the woman,
and she saw before her only the future reserved for machine-made,
collectivist females.

>From the male, she could look for no help; his instinct of power was
blind. The Church had known more about women than science will ever
know, and the historian who studied the sources of Christianity felt
sometimes convinced that the Church had been made by the woman chiefly
as her protest against man. At times, the historian would have been
almost willing to maintain that the man had overthrown the Church
chiefly because it was feminine. After the overthrow of the Church,
the woman had no refuge except such as the man created for himself.
She was free; she had no illusions; she was sexless; she had discarded
all that the male disliked; and although she secretly regretted the
discard, she knew that she could not go backward. She must, like the
man, marry machinery. Already the American man sometimes felt surprise
at finding himself regarded as sexless; the American woman was oftener
surprised at finding herself regarded as sexual.

No honest historian can take part with -- or against -- the forces he
has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be
merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics. No doubt
every one in society discussed the subject, impelled by President
Roosevelt if by nothing else, and the surface current of social
opinion seemed set as strongly in one direction as the silent
undercurrent of social action ran in the other; but the truth lay
somewhere unconscious in the woman's breast. An elderly man, trying
only to learn the law of social inertia and the limits of social
divergence could not compel the Superintendent of the Census to ask
every young woman whether she wanted children, and how many; he could
not even require of an octogenarian Senate the passage of a law
obliging every woman, married or not, to bear one baby -- at the
expense of the Treasury -- before she was thirty years old, under
penalty of solitary confinement for life; yet these were vital
statistics in more senses than all that bore the name, and tended more
directly to the foundation of a serious society in the future. He
could draw no conclusions whatever except from the birth-rate. He
could not frankly discuss the matter with the young women themselves,
although they would have gladly discussed it, because Faust was
helpless in the tragedy of woman. He could suggest nothing. The
Marguerite of the future could alone decide whether she were better
off than the Marguerite of the past; whether she would rather be
victim to a man, a church, or a machine.