Are Women Human Beings?

Consideration of the Major Error in the Discussion of Woman Suffrage
By
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In all wide spread discussions where honest and able persons take opposite sides there is usually to be found some basic error in comprehension. This appears, not only' in the use of terms, the same word often having different meanings to different minds, but in the grasp of the subject matter itself.

Even in friendly conversation these difficulties frequently occur. The most scholarly care in the language chosen, even in scientific treatises, does not always preclude misunderstanding. When the pressure of warm feeling is driving the words, and when the subject matter is one little understood, we are apt to descend to a mere expression of sentiment instead of an exchange of ideas.

All this is profoundly evident in the present wide— end warm—discussion of woman suffrage. On either aide appear the most earnest expressions of feeling: feelings of hope, of fear, of high social devotion, of intense personal distaste; all of which are interests indicative of the development or limitations of speaker.

Together with these feelings is used a strange array d arguments, some to the point, some quite beside it, "me boomerangs; and these are urged with breathless earnestness and laudable perseverance, quite regardless effect.

As social evolution has never waited for the complete enlightenment of mankind, we find the enfranchisement of women going on in all civilized countries but since the opposition to it is strong enough to cause years of delay and a continuous outlay of organized effort, it seems worth while to point out the main error actuating that opposition.

It may seem difficult to select a major error among be a self-contradictory confusion; but under all miscellaneous reiterated objections one governing continually obtrudes itself. It colors the utterances of the Organization Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women. It exclusively dominates the grave opinions of pathologists. It is the animus of all the books written against the woman's movement. It is the painfully visible actuating impulse of the ill-considered objections of the man in the street and also of the similar expressions of "the woman in the home." And, to come down to the day of small things, it is the feeling animating a leading editorial in the New York Times, and a peculiarly typical "letter from the People" is that paper, called forth by the recent impressive parade of our suffragists.

This error is due to a certain arrested development thought It consists in seeing in women only mine characteristics; and, conversely, seeing in all complex functions of civilization only masculine

characteristics this conception it is held, quite naturally that women need do nothing more than fulfil

" womanly duties," i. e., to be wives, mothers, houseworkers; that for them to desire any other activities in life is to be unwomanly, unnatural, to me some sort of pervert or monster. They are often as " de-natured women," as " epicene," as"unsexed," as " seeking to become men." Miss Ida

Tarbell in a recent magazine article describes women'' e signal and industrial advance as " Making of Herself."

Weininger, in his much-discussed book, Sex Character, elaborated a theory of mixed inherit showing that some women inherited a proportion masculine characteristics and some men inherited proportion of feminine characteristics, thus explain the undeniable phenomenon of their having many characteristics in common.

The late Mr. Grant Allen expressed this world-view scientific phrase when he said that women

not only " not the human race they were not half the human race, but a sub-species set apart

or purposes of reproduction, merely."

Still later Mr. H. B. Marriott-Watson has put forth even more exquisite precision, saying of the Rican woman, " Her constitutional restlessness sed her to abdicate those functions which alone excuse or explain her existence."

Now comes Sir Almroth Wright, M.D., in a three-column letter to the London Times, that letter which is said to have killed the Conciliation Bill which was then before the House. Speaking as one conversant with many female invalids, he rashly generalizes from his personal experience of morbid phenomena, and says, " No doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her sociological emergencies."

He sees, in the advance of women into wider social relations only the perverse action of suppressed, embittered, or atrophied femininity. He sees in them, of course nothing but femininity; that which he considers normal and admires, or which he considers abnormal and condemns. The glory of woman, according to his definition, lies " in her power of attraction, in capacity for motherhood, and in her unswerving allegiance to the ethics which are special to her sex." So our Times, of New York, in the editorial above ,erred to, modestly says: "One does not need to be profound student of biology to know that some women a very small minority, have a natural inclination to usurp the social and civic functions of men Simmer down this loosely gathered mass of opinion, and we find that it all resolves into the one assumption - that women have feminine functions and no others, and that social functions are masculine. Let us frankly examine these premises.

Without needing to be any more profound a student of biology than the editor of our Times, we must all admit that there are other functions besides the reproductive. As life spread wide upon the earth, each species developed its own means of locomotion, its mean of self-defense, its means of getting a livelihood; all essential, all common to both sexes. Variations in size, in color, in intelligence, in agility, in courage, differentiate one animal from another; all essential, all common to both sexes.

Meanwhile, all creatures have some means of replenishing the earth after their kind, and we, as mammals, share in the methods of the higher orders, adding to the personal processes the vast advantage of our social processes; as in education, once wholly a maternal function, and now so largely civic and social. But while all kindred species share in the primal activities of reproduction, each is sharply distinguished from the others by its special activities in other lines.

As animals, we share in the universal distinction of sex; but as human beings, we alone possess a whole new range of faculties, vitally essential and common to both sexes.

It seems childish to insist upon so patent a fact, so simple and obvious a distinction. Yet it is precisely this simple and obvious distinction which these one-ideaed upholders of the eternal masculine utterly fail to-grasp.

Consider for the . moment any pair of the higher carnivore, as two leopards or two tigers. Leopards are known by their unchangeable spots, whereas tigers have stripes. Both male and female leopards have spots. Both male and female tigers have stripes. These spots and stripes have nothing to do with the sex of the animal, only with its species. The possession of eves and ears, of hide or hoofs, of fins or scales, of fur or feathers, of four legs or trio— these things are not distinctions of sex, primary or secondary; they are race distinctions, purely.

If we were to count up and to contrast the number of characteristics of sex with the number of characteristics of species, we should find at once that race distinctions far exceed sex distinctions in number and importance. Take, for example, a cow, a camel, and a whale. They all bring forth one living offspring and suckle it, the process being fairly identical. But a cow is easily distinguished from a camel and either from a whale.

Again, of two deer, the buck has a special secondary sex-distinction in his towering antlers; but his power of speed, his love of speed, is not a sex distinction but a race distinction, common to both sexes. When the doe wishes to run far and fast, she is not " unfeminine," she is not " making a buck of herself." She likes to run, not because she is a doe, but because she is a deer, just as much of a deer as he is.

" unfeminine," she Is not "making a buck of herself is She likes to run, not because she is a doe, but because she is a deer, just as much of a deer as he is.

This universal, glaring fact is what these sex obsessed opponents of the normal progress of women cannot see. They see only the feminine characteristics of women, and fail to see the human ones. Yet with our species, beyond any other, the race - character outnumber and outweigh all lesser distinctions.

Certain attributes we share with all matter, as weight, mass, extension; certain others with most animals, as digestion, circulation; others, again, including the reproductive processes, with the higher her mammals alone; but the preponderant characteristics of humanity we share with no other creature. We, as a species, have far more conspicuous and important distinctions peculiar to ourselves than those we share with lower forms; and each and every one of these human distinctions belongs to both sexes.

The erect posture, with all its rearrangement of the internal economy, the opposable thumb and the hand's marvelous growth in varied skill; the power of speech, the whole proud range of mental development —these are human distinctions, race distinctions, not in any sense, at any time, sex distinctions.

Yet the male of our species, from the beginning of his power of conscious thought, has arrogated to himself as part of his sex the major attributes of humanity: religion, education, government, commerce these were for him alone. In what he has termed "his female " he has seen, and for the most part still sees, only her femininity, never her humanity.

That she should concentrate all her human faculties upon the fulfillment of her feminine functions he has held quite right and proper; that she should at any time wish to use them, not as a female, but as a human being, is to him monstrous. So absolute has been this monopolization of human functions by one sex; so complete this obsession that has persisted in considering them as sex attributes, that even the range of industries originated by women, for ages practiced wholly by women, have been gradually absorbed by men, and as rapidly as they were absorbed have become " masculine."

Mere extension in method has been similarly classified: as where a woman with distaff and spindle, or foot-run wheel, was considered feminine; but to run a woolen mill must be " man's work."

Let us look at our own race history. When we were all hunters, fishers, and root-gatherers, we were men and women, just as efficiently and completely as we are now. When we kept cattle we were not any the less. or more, men and women. When we developed agriculture, we were still men and women

When we specialized in industry, we remained men and women. Men were males and women females at any time in the whole long story.

But while remaining unchanged in these respects. we have changed enormously in our social features. Our common human attributes.

Specialization has given us a thousand trades, arts. crafts. and professions. Organization has multiplied our power myraid - fold. Invention and discovery have enriched and enlightened the world. Religions have changed. Governments have changed. Society evolves from age to age. All these are human processes. They belong to our race. They are Common to troth male and female. They have no faintest connection with any sex distinction.

As to warfare, which our ultra males are so sure to fall back on in proof of their essential dominance: warfare is not a social process at all, but a social disease, freely admitted to be most characteristic of the male. It is the instinct of sex-combat, overdeveloped and misused.

The women of our age in most countries of the same degree of development are outgrowing the artificial restrictions so long placed upon them, and following natural lines of human advance. They are specializing, because they are human. They are organizing, because they are human. They arc seeking economic and political independence, because they are human. '['hey are demanding the vote, because they are human.

Against this swelling tide stands the mere mass of inert old-world ignorance. backed by the perverse misconception of modern minds, which even science fails to illuminate.

" Go back," says this mass. " You are women. You are nothing but women. You are females—nothing but females. All these things you want to do are male things. You cannot do them without being a male. You want to be males. It is abhorrent, outrageous, impossible ! "

All these adjectives and horrors would be freely granted if women really could become males—or even if they wanted to! But what needs to be hammered into these male-ridden minds is that these things the women omen want to do and be and have are not in any sense masculine. They do not belong to men. They never did. They are departments of our social life, hitherto arbitrarily monopolized by men, but no more made masculine by that use than the wearing of trousers by Turkish women makes trousers feminine or the wearing of corsets by German officers makes corsets masculine

There are enough minor absurdities in the usual treatment of this subject to furnish much entertain meet, as, for instance, in this same editorial in the Times, where it is mournfully prophesied that if women get the vote they will " play havoc with it for themselves and for society."

Is it possible that the writer does not know that women omen have voting right here in this for over forty years and are now voting in some score of States and nations the world over, with no observation " havoc " of any sort.

Even in England where that sad pathologist Dr. Wright so gravely marshals his gloomy ranks of the incomplete.' " the sexually embittered " " the atrophied " " the epicene", there has been no havoc wrought by the women omen who have previously exercised all but the parliamentary suffrage for many years They were just the women of England after voting and before; neither more nor less women for going to the polls than they are more or less women for going to the theater or to the post-office.

Whether in the accumulated literature of the necessarily unenlightened past or the still accumulating literature of the willfully unenlightened present we find ever, here this same pervasive error this naive assumption. which would be. so insolent if it were not so absurd that only men are human creatures, able and entitled to perform the work of the world; while women are only female creatures able to do nothing whatever but continue in the same round of duties to which they have been so long restricted.

They darkly threaten, do these ultra male opponents that if women persist in doing human things they will lose the respect of man—yea, more, they will lose his pecuniary support.

They should study their biology a little more profoundly The respect of the male for the female is based on the distinction of sex not on political or economic disability. Men respect women because the, are females not because the, are weak and ignorant and defenseless.

Women will never cease to be females. but they will cease to be veal; am! ignorant and defenseless. They are becoming wiser stronger better able to protect themselves. one another and their children. Courage, power achievement are always respected.

As women grow losing nothing that is essential to womanhood. but adding steadily the later qualities of humanness. they will win in and hold a far larger, deeper reverence than that hitherto vouchsafed them. As they so rise and broaden filling their full place in the world as members of society. as well as their partial places as mothers of it they will gradually rear a new race of men with minds large enough to see in human beings something besides males and females.

Some such men and such women we have to-day wise and far-seeing. quite strong enough to bear with a smile the errors of the past. the morbid views of the pathologist the limitations of editorial profundity, and the letters from the people. as the leading minds of the world have always borne with the more backward.