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THE LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S
MEMORY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NBW YORK BOSTON - CHICAGO DALLAS
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON BOMBAY - CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE LONG ROAD OF
WOMAN'S MEMORY
BY
JANE ADDAMS
AUTHOR OF "TWENTY YEARS AT HULL HOUSE"
"THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE
CITY STREETS," ETC.
Nefo gorfc
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916
AU rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1916.
J. 8. Gushing Co. Berwick A Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO MY DEAR FRIEND
MARY H. WILMARTH
WHOSE MEMORY STORED WITH THE BEST IN LITERATURE
AND WHOSE FINE PUBLIC SPIRIT ARE DAILY PLACED
AT THE SERVICE OF HER FRIENDS AND OF
HER CITY, WITH A GALLANT AND
GENTLE COURTESY
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ....... ix
I. WOMEN'S MEMORIES TRANSMUTING THE PAST,
AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF THE
DEVIL BABY ..... I
II. WOMEN'S MEMORIES REACTING ON LIFE, AS
ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF THE DfiVIL
BABY 25
III. WOMEN'S MEMORIES DISTURBING CONVEN-
TIONS . . . . . -53
IV. WOMEN'S MEMORIES INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 84
V. WOMEN'S MEMORIES CHALLENGING WAR . 115
VI. A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN INTERPRETATIVE
MEMORY ...... 141
INTRODUCTION
FOR many years at Hull-House I have at
intervals detected in certain old people, when
they spoke of their past experiences, a tendency
to an idealization, almost to a romanticism sug-
gestive of the ardent dreams and groundless
ambitions we have all observed in the young
when they recklessly lay their plans for the
future.
I have, moreover, been frequently impressed
by the fact that these romantic revelations were
made by old people who had really suffered
much hardship and sorrow, and that the trans-
mutation of their experiences was not the result
of ignoring actuality, but was apparently due to
a power inherent in memory itself.
It was therefore a great pleasure when I
found this aspect of memory delightfully por-
trayed by Sir Gilbert Murray in his life of
Euripides. He writes that the aged poet,
when he was officially made one of the old men
of Athens, declared that he could transmute
ix
x INTRODUCTION
into song traditional tales of sorrow and wrong-
doing because, being long past, they had al-
ready become part mystery and part music :
" Memory, that Memory who is the Mother
of the Muses, having done her work upon
them."
Here was an explanation which I might have
anticipated ; it was the Muses again at their
old tricks, the very mother of them this
time, thrusting their ghostly fingers into the
delicate fabric of human experience to the ex-
treme end of life. I had known before that
the Muses -foregathered with the Spirit of
Youth and I had even made a feeble attempt
to portray that companionship, but I was stupid
indeed not to see that they are equally at home
with the aged whose prosaic lives sadly need
such interference.
Even with this clue in my hands, so preoc-
cupied are we all with our own practical affairs,
I probably should never have followed it, had
it not been for the visit of a mythical Devil
Baby who so completely filled Hull-House
with old women coming to see him, that for a
period of six weeks I could perforce do little
but give them my attention.
INTRODUCTION xi
When this excitement had subsided and I
had written down the corroboration afforded by
their eager recitals in the first two chapters of
this book, I might have supposed myself to be
rid of the matter, incidentally having been
taught once more that, while I may receive
valuable suggestions from classic literature,
when I really want to learn about life, I must
depend upon my neighbors, for, as William
James insists, the most instructive human doc-
uments lie along the beaten pathway.
The subject, however, was not so easily dis-
posed of, for certain elderly women among
these selfsame neighbors disconcertingly took
quite another line from that indicated by
Euripides. To my amazement, their remi-
niscences revealed an additional function of
memory, so aggressive and withal so modern,
that it was quite impossible, living as I was in
a Settlement with sociological tendencies, to
ignore it.
It was gradually forced upon my attention
that these reminiscences of the aged, even while
softening the harsh realities of the past, exer-
cise a vital power of selection which often
necessitates an onset against the very traditions
xii INTRODUCTION
and conventions commonly believed to find
their stronghold in the minds of elderly people.
Such reminiscences suggested an analogy to
the dreams of youth which, while covering the
future with a shifting rose-colored mist, contain
within themselves the inchoate substance from
which the tough-fibred forces of coming social
struggles are composed.
In the light of this later knowledge, I was
impelled to write the next two chapters of this
book, basing them upon conversations held
with various women of my acquaintance whose
experience in family relationships or in the
labor market had so forced their conduct to a
variation from the accepted type that there
emerged an indication of a selective groping
toward another standard. They inevitably sug-
gested that a sufficient number of similar varia-
tions might even, in Memory's leisurely fashion
of upbuilding tradition, in the end establish a
new norm.
Some of these women, under the domination
of that mysterious autobiographical impulse
which makes it more difficult to conceal the
truth than to avow it, purged their souls in all
sincerity and unconsciously made plain the part
INTRODUCTION xiii
borne in their hard lives by monstrous social
injustices.
These conversations proved to be so illus-
trative of my second thesis that it seemed
scarcely necessary to do more than record them.
The deduction was obvious that mutual remi-
niscences perform a valuable function in de-
termining analogous conduct for large bodies
of people who have no other basis for like-
mindedness.
So gradual is this process, so unconsciously
are these converts under Memory's gentle
coercion brought into a spiritual fellowship,
that the social changes thus inaugurated, at least
until the reformers begin to formulate them
and to accelerate the process through propa-
ganda, take on the aspect of beneficent natural
phenomena. And yet, curiously enough, I
found that the two functions of Memory first,
its important role in interpreting and appeasing
life for the individual, and second its activity
as a selective agency in social reorganization
were not mutually exclusive, and at moments
seemed to support each other. Certain con-
versations even suggested that the selective
process itself might be held responsible for the
xiv INTRODUCTION
softened outlines of the past to one looking
back, by the natural blurring of nonessentials
and the consequent throwing into high relief
of common human experiences.
The insistence of Memory upon the great
essentials, even to the complete sacrifice of its
inherent power to appease, was most poignantly
brought to my attention during two months I
spent in Europe in the summer of 1915.
Desolated women, stripped by war of all their
warm domestic interests and of children long
cherished in affectionate solicitude, sat shelter-
less in the devastating glare of Memory. Be-
cause by its pitiless light they were forced to
look into the black depths of primitive human
nature, occasionally one of these heart-broken
women would ignore the strident claims of the
present and would insist that the war was cut-
ting at the very taproots of the basic human
relations so vitally necessary to the survival of
civilization. I cannot hope to have adequately
reproduced in Chapter V those conversations
which themselves partook of the grim aspect
of war.
It was during this cataclysmic summer in
Europe that I sometimes sought for a solace,
INTRODUCTION xv
or at least for a source of sanity, by resting my
mind on the immemorial monuments of ancient
Egypt, from which I had once received an
almost mystic assurance of the essential unity
of man's age-long spiritual effort. But because
such guarding of continuity as Egypt had
afforded me had been associated with an unex-
pected revival of childish recollections, I found
that Memory was a chief factor also in this
situation. Therefore, in spite of the fact that
these reminiscences of my childhood were
vividly resuscitated in Egypt by a process
which postulates a reversal of the one described
in the first two chapters of this book, I venture
to incorporate my personal experience in the
last chapter. It may suggest one more of our
obligations to Memory, that Protean Mother,
who first differentiated primitive man from the
brute ; who makes possible our complicated
modern life so daily dependent on the experi-
ences of the past ; and upon whom at the
present moment is thrust the sole responsi-
bility of guarding, for future generations, our
common heritage of mutual good-will.
THE LONG ROAD OF
WOMAN'S MEMORY
CHAPTER I
WOMEN'S MEMORIES TRANSMUTING THE
PAST, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF
THE DEVIL BABY
QUITE as it would be hard for any one of
us to select the summer in which he ceased
to live that life, so ardent in childhood and
early youth, when all the real happenings
are in the future, so it must be difficult
for old people to tell at what period they
began to regard the present chiefly as a
prolongation of the past. There is no
doubt, however, that such instinctive shift-
ings and reversals have taken place for
many old people who, under the control of
Memory, are actually living much more in
the past than in the ephemeral present.
2 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
It is most fortunate, therefore, that in
some subtle fashion these old people, re-
viewing the long road they have travelled,
are able to transmute their own untoward
experiences into that which seems to make
even the most wretched life acceptable.
This may possibly be due to an instinct of
self-preservation, which checks the devastat-
ing bitterness that would result did they
recall over and over again the sordid detail
of events long past ; it is even possible that
those people who were not able thus to
inhibit their bitterness have died earlier,
for as one old man recently reminded me,
"It is a true word that worry can kill a
cat."
This permanent and elemental function
of Memory was graphically demonstrated
at Hull-House during a period of several
weeks when we were reported to be harbor-
ing within its walls a so-called "Devil
Baby."
The knowledge of his existence burst
upon the residents of Hull-House one day
when three Italian women, with an excited
rush through the door, demanded that he
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 3
be shown to them. No amount of denial
convinced them that he was not there, for
they knew exactly what he was like with
his cloven hoofs, his pointed ears and dimin-
utive tail ; the Devil Baby had, moreover,
been able to speak as soon as he was born
and was most shockingly profane.
The three women were but the forerunners
of a veritable multitude ; for six weeks from
every part of the city and suburbs the
streams of visitors to this mythical baby
poured in all day long and so far into the
night that the regular activities of the set-
tlement were almost swamped.
The Italian version, with a hundred
variations, dealt with a pious Italian girl
married to an atheist. Her husband in a
rage had torn a holy picture from the bed-
room wail saying that he would quite as soon
have a devil in the house as such a thing,
whereupon the devil incarnated himself in
her coming child. As soon as the Devil
Baby was born, he ran about the table
shaking his finger in deep reproach at his
father, who finally caught him and, in fear
and trembling, brought him to Hull-House.
4 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
When the residents there, in spite of the
baby's shocking appearance, wishing to save
his soul, took him to church for baptism,
they found that the shawl was empty and
the Devil Baby, fleeing from the holy water,
was running lightly over the backs of the
pews.
The Jewish version, again with varia-
tions, was to the effect that the father of
six daughters had said before the birth of a
seventh child that he would rather have a
devil in the family than another girl, where-
upon the Devil Baby promptly appeared.
Save for a red automobile which occasion-
ally figured in the story and a stray cigar
which, in some versions, the new-born child
had snatched from his father's lips, the
tale might have been fashioned a thousand
years ago.
Although the visitors to the Devil Baby
included persons of every degree of pros-
perity and education, even physicians and
trained nurses, who assured us of their sci-
entific interest, the story constantly demon-
strated the power of an old wives' tale
among thousands of men and women in
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 5
modern society who are living in a corner
of their own, their vision fixed, their intelli-
gence held by some iron chain of silent habit.
To such primitive people the metaphor ap-
parently is still the very " stuff of life,"
or rather no other form of statement reaches
them ; the tremendous tonnage of current
writing for them has no existence./ It was
in keeping with their simple habits that the
reputed presence of the Devil Baby should
not reach the newspapers until the fifth
week of his sojourn at Hull-House after
thousands of people had already been in-
formed of his whereabouts by the old method
of passing news from mouth to mouth.
For six weeks as I went about the
house, I would hear a voice at the telephone
repeating for the hundredth time that day,
"No, there is no such baby"; "No, we
never had it here"; "No, he couldn't
have seen it for fifty cents"; "We didrrt
send it anywhere, because we never had
it"; "I don't mean to say that your
sister-in-law lied, but there must be some
mistake" ; "There is no use getting up an
excursion from Milwaukee, for there isn't
6 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
any Devil Baby at Hull-House"; "We
can't give reduced rates, because we are
not exhibiting anything" ; and so on and
on. As I came near the front door, I would *
catch snatches of arguments that were
often acrimonious: "Why do you let so
many people believe it, if it isn't here?"
"We have taken three lines of cars to come
and we have as much right to see it as
anybody else"; "This is a pretty big
place, of course you could hide it easy
enough" ; "What are you saying that for,
are you going to raise the price of admis-
sion ?"
We had doubtless struck a case of what
the psychologists call the "contagion of
emotion" added to that "aesthetic socia-
bility" which impels any one of us to drag
the entire household to the window when
a procession comes into the street or a
rainbow appears in the sky. The Devil,
Baby of course was worth many proces-
sions and rainbows, and I will confess that,
as the empty show went on day after day,
I quite revolted against such a vapid mani-
festation of even an admirable human
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 7
trait. There was always one exception,
however ; whenever I heard the high eager
voices of old women, I was irresistibly inter-
ested and left anything I might be doing
in order to listen to them. As I came down
the stairs, long before I could hear what
they were saying, implicit in their solemn
and portentous old voices came the ad-
monition :
1 Wilt thou reject the past
Big with deep warnings ? "
It was a very serious and genuine matter
with the old women, this story so ancient
and yet so contemporaneous, and they
flocked to Hull-House from every direc-
tion ; those I had known for many years,
others I had never known and some whom
I had supposed to be long dead. But they
were all alive and eager ; something in the
story or in its mysterious sequences had
aroused one of those active forces in human
nature which does not take orders, but
insists only upon giving them. We had
abruptly come in contact with a living and
self-assertive human quality !
8 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
During the weeks of excitement it was
the old women who really seemed to have
come into their own, and perhaps the most
significant result of the incident was the
reaction of the story upon them. It stirred
their minds and memories as with a magic
touch, it loosened their tongues and revealed
the inner life and thoughts of those who are
so often inarticulate. They are accustomed
to sit at home and to hear the younger
members of the family speak of affairs
quite outside their own experiences, some-
times in a language they do not understand,
and at best in quick glancing phrases
which they cannot follow ; " More than
half the time I can't tell what they are
talking about," is an oft-repeated complaint.
The story of the Devil Baby evidently
put into their hands the sort of material with
which they were accustomed to deal. They
had long used such tales in their unremitting
efforts at family discipline, ever since they
had frightened their first children into awed
silence by tales of bugaboo men who prowled
in the darkness.
These old women enjoyed a moment of
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 9
triumph as if they had made good at
last and had come into a region of sanc-
tions and punishments which they under-
stood. Years of living had taught them
that recrimination with grown-up children
and grandchildren is worse than useless,
that punishments are impossible, that .do-
mestic instruction is best given through
tales and metaphors-.
As the old women talked with the new
volubility which the story of the Devil
Baby had released in them, going back
into their long memories and urging its
credibility upon me, the story seemed to
condense that mystical wisdom which be-
comes deposited in the heart of man by
unnoticed innumerable experiences.
Perhaps my many conversations with
these aged visitors crystallized thoughts
and impressions I had been receiving
through years, or the tale itself may have
ignited a fire, as it were, whose light il-
lumined some of my darkest memories of
neglected and uncomfortable old age, of
old peasant women who had ruthlessly
probed into the ugly depths of human na-
10 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
ture in themselves and others. Many of
them who came to see the Devil Baby had
been forced to face tragic experiences, the
powers of brutality and horror had had
full scope in their lives and for years they
had had acquaintance with disaster and
death. Such old women do not shirk life's
misery by feeble idealism, for they are
long past the stage of make-believe. They
relate without flinching the most hideous
experiences: "My face has had this queer
twist for now nearly sixty years ; I was
ten when it got that way, the night after
I saw my father do my mother to death
with his knife." ;< Yes, I had fourteen
children ; only two grew to be men and
both of them were killed in the same ex-
plosion. I was never sure they brought
home the right bodies." But even the
most hideous sorrows which the old women
related had apparently subsided into the
paler emotion of ineffectual regret, after
Memory had long done her work upon
them ; the old people seemed, in some un-
accountable way, to lose all bitterness and
resentment against life, or rather to be so
TRANSMUTING THE PAST II
completely without it that they must have
lost it long since.
None of them had a word of blame for
undutiful children or heedless grandchil-
dren, because apparently the petty and
transitory had fallen away from their
austere old age, the fires were burnt out,
resentments, hatreds, and even cherished
sorrows had become actually unintelligible.
Perhaps those women, because they had
come to expect nothing more from life and
had perforce ceased from grasping and
striving, had obtained, if not renunciation,
at least that quiet endurance which al-
lows the wounds of the spirit to heal.
Through their stored-up habit of acquies-
cence, they offered a fleeting glimpse of
the translucent wisdom, so often embodied
in the old, but so difficult to portray. It
is doubtless what Michael Angelo had in
mind when he made the Sybils old, what
Dante meant by the phrase "those who
had learned of life," and the age-worn
minstrel who turned into song a Memory
which was more that of history and tra-
dition than his own.
12 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
In contrast to the visitors to the Devil
Baby who spoke only such words of groping
wisdom as they were able, were other old
women who, although they had already
reconciled themselves to much misery, were
still enduring more : "You might say it's a
disgrace to have your son beat you up for
the sake of a bit of money youVe earned
by scrubbing your own man is different
but I haven't the heart to blame the boy
for doing what he's seen all his life, his
father forever went wild when the drink
was in him and struck me to the very
day of his death. The ugliness was born
in the boy as the marks of the Devil was
born in the poor child up-stairs."
Some of these old women had struggled
for weary years with poverty and much
childbearing, had known what it was to be
bullied and beaten by their husbands,
neglected and ignored by their prosperous
children, and burdened by the support of
the imbecile and the shiftless ones. They
had literally gone "Deep written all their
days with care."
One old woman actually came from the
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 13
poorhouse, having heard of the Devil Baby
"through a lady from Polk Street visiting
an old friend who has a bed in our ward."
It was no slight achievement for the penni-
less and crippled old inmate to make her
escape. She had asked "a young bar-keep
in a saloon across the road" to lend her ten
cents, offering as security the fact that she
was an old /acquaintance at Hull-House who
could not be refused so slight a loan. She
marvelled at some length over the -good-
ness of the young man, for she had not had
a dime to spend for a drink for the. last six
months, and he and the conductor: had
been obliged to lift her into the street car
by main strength. She was naturally much
elated over the achievement of her escape.
To be sure, from the men's side, they were
always walking off in the summer and
taking to the road, living like tramps they
did, in a way no one from the woman's
side would demean herself to do ; but to
have left in a street car like a lady, with
money to pay her own fare, was quite a
different matter, although she .was, indeed
"clean wore out" by the effort. However,
14 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
it was clear that she would consider herself
well repaid by a sight of the Devil Baby
and that not only the inmates of her own
ward, but those in every other ward in the
house would be made to "sit up" when she
got back ; it would liven them all up a bit,
and she hazarded the guess that she would
have to tell them about that baby at least
a dozen times a day.
As. she cheerfully rambled on, we weakly
postponed telling her there was no Devil
Baby, first that she might have a cup of
tea and rest, and then through a sheer de-
sire to withhold a blow from a poor old
body who had received so many through-
out a long, hard life.
As I recall those unreal weeks, it was in
her presence that I found myself for the
first time vaguely wishing . that I could
administer comfort by the simple device of
not asserting too dogmatically that the
Devil Baby had never been, at Hull-House.
Our guest recalled with great pride that
her grandmother had possessed second
sight ; that her mother had heard the
Banshee three times and that she, herself,
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 15
had heard it once. All this gave her a
certain proprietary interest in the Devil
Baby and I suspected she cherished a secret
hope that when she should lay her eyes
upon him, her inherited gifts might be
able to reveal the meaning of the strange
portent. At the least, he would afford a
proof that her family-long faith in such
matters was justified. Her misshapen
hands lying on her lap fairly trembled with
eagerness.
It may have been because I was still
smarting under the recollection of the
disappointment we had so wantonly in-
flicted upon our visitor from the poorhouse
that the very next day I found myself
almost agreeing with her whole-hearted
acceptance of the past as of much more
importance than the mere present ; at least
for half an hour the past seemed endowed
also for me with a profounder and more
ardent life.
This impression was received in connec-
tion with an old woman, sturdy in her
convictions, although long since bedrid-
den, who had doggedly refused to believe
16 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
that there was no Devil Baby at Hull-
House, unless "herself" told her so. Be-
cause of her mounting irritation with the
envoys who one and all came back to her
to report "they say it ain't there," it seemed
well that I should go promptly before "she
fashed herself into the grave." As I walked
along the street and even as I went up the
ramshackle outside stairway of the rear
cottage and through the dark corridor to
the "second floor back" where she lay in
her untidy bed, I was assailed by a veri-
table temptation to give her a full descrip-
tion of the Devil Baby, which by this time
I knew so accurately (for with a hundred
variations to select from I could have
made a monstrous infant almost worthy
of his name), and also to refrain from put-
ting too much stress on the fact that he
had never been really and truly at Hull-
House.
I found my mind hastily marshalling
arguments for not disturbing her belief in
the story which had so evidently brought
her a vivid interest long denied her. She
lived alone with her young grandson, who
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 17
went to work every morning at seven o'clock
and save for the short visits made by the
visiting nurse and by kind neighbors, her
long day was monotonous and undisturbed.
But the story of a Devil Baby, with his
existence officially corroborated as it were,
would give her a lodestone which would
attract the neighbors far and wide and
exalt her once more into the social impor-
tance she had had twenty-four years be-
fore when I had first known her. She was
then the proprietor of the most prosperous
second-hand store on a street full of them,
her shiftless, drinking husband and her
jolly, good-natured sons doing exactly what
she told them to do. This, however, was
long past, for "owing to the drink," in her
own graphic phrase, "the old man, the
boys, and the business, too, were clean
gone" and there was "nobody left but little
Tom and me and nothing for us to live
on."
I remember how well she used to tell a
story when I once tried to collect some
folk-lore for Mr. Yeats to prove that an
Irish peasant does not lose his faith in the
18 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
little people nor his knowledge of Gaelic
phrases simply because he is living in a
city. She had at that time told me a
wonderful tale concerning a red cloak
worn by an old woman to a freshly dug
grave. The story of the Devil Baby would
give her material worthy of her powers,
but of course she must -be able to believe
it with all her heart. She could live only
a few months at the very best, I argued to
myself; why not give her this vivid in-
terest and through it awake those earliest
recollections of that long-accumulated folk-
lore with its magic power to transfigure and
eclipse the sordid and unsatisfactory sur-
roundings in which life is actually spent ?
I solemnly assured myself that the imag-
ination of old age needs to be fed and prob-
ably has quite as imperious a claim as
that of youth, which levies upon us so re-
morselessly with its "I want a fairy story,
but I don't like you to begin by saying that
it isn't true." Impatiently I found myself
challenging the educators who had given
us no pedagogical instructions for the
treatment of old age, although they had
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 19
fairly over informed us as to the use of the
fairy tale with children.
The little room was stuffed with a mag-
pie collection, the usual odds and ends which
compose an old woman's treasures, aug-
mented in this case by various articles
which a second-hand store, even of the most
flourishing sort, could not sell. In the
picturesque confusion, if anywhere in Chi-
cago, an urbanized group of the little people
might dwell ; they would certainly find the
traditional atmosphere which they strictly
require, marvelling faith and unalloyed
reverence. At any rate, an eager old woman
aroused to her utmost capacity of wonder
and credulity was the very soil, prepared
to a nicety, for planting the seed-thought
of the Devil Baby. If the object of my
errand had been an hour's reading to a
sick woman, it would have been accounted
to me for philanthropic righteousness, and
if the chosen reading had lifted her mind
from her bodily discomforts and harassing
thoughts so that she forgot them all for
one fleeting moment, how pleased I should
have been with the success of my effort.
20 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
But here I was with a story at my tongue's
end, stupidly hesitating to give it validity,
although the very words were on my lips.
I was still arguing the case with myself
when I stood on the threshold of her room
and caught the indomitable gleam of her
eye, fairly daring me to deny the existence
of the Devil Baby, her slack dropsical body
so responding to her overpowering excite-
ment that for the moment she looked alert
in her defiance and positively menacing.
But, as in the case of many another weak
soul, the decision was taken out of my
hands, my very hesitation was enough, for
nothing is more certain than that the bearer
of a magic tale never stands dawdling on
the door-step. Slowly the gleam died out
of the expectant old eyes, the erect shoul-
ders sagged and pulled forward, and I saw
only too plainly that the poor old woman
had accepted one more disappointment in a
life already overflowing with them. She
was violently thrown back into all the
limitations of her personal experience and
surroundings, and that larger life she had
anticipated so eagerly was as suddenly
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 21
shut away from her as if a door had been
slammed in her face.
I never encountered that particular
temptation again, though she was no more
pitiful than many of the aged visitors whom
the Devil Baby brought to Hull-House.
But, perhaps as a result of this experience,
I gradually lost the impression that the
old people were longing for a second chance
at life, to live it all over again and to live
more fully and wisely, and I became more
reconciled to the fact that many of them
had little opportunity for meditation or for
bodily rest, but must keep on working
with their toil-worn hands, in spite of
weariness or faintness of heart.
The vivid interest of so many old women
in the story of the Devil Baby may have
been an unconscious, although powerful,
testimony that tragic experiences gradually
become dressed in such trappings in order
that their spent agony may prove of some
use to a world which learns at the hard-
est ; and that the strivings and sufferings
of men and women long since dead, their
emotions no longer connected with flesh
22 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
and blood, are thus transmuted into leg-
endary wisdom. The young are forced to
heed the warning in such a tale, although
for the mosjt part it is so easy for them to
disregard tlie words of the aged. That
the old women who came to visit the Devil
Baby believed that the story would se-
cure them a hearing at home was evident,
and as they prepared themselves with
every detail of it, their old faces shone with
a timid satisfaction. Their features, worn
and scarred by harsh living, as effigies
built into the floor of an old church become
dim and defaced by rough-shod feet, grew
poignant and solemn. In the midst of
their double bewilderment, both that the
younger generation was walking in such
strange paths and that no one would lis-
ten to them, for one moment there flickered
up the last hope of a disappointed life,
that it may at least serve as a warning,
while affording material for an exciting
narrative.
Sometimes in talking to a woman who
was "but a hair's breadth this side of
the darkness," I realized that old age has
TRANSMUTING THE PAST 23
its own expression for the mystic renun-
ciation of the world. Their impatience
with all non-essentials, the craving to be
free from hampering bonds and soft con-
ditions, recalled Tolstoy's last impetuous
journey, and I was once more grateful
to his genius for making clear another
unintelligible impulse of bewildered hu-
manity.
Often, in the midst of a conversation, one
of these touching old women would quietly
express a longing for death, as if it were a
natural fulfilment of an inmost desire,
with a sincerity and anticipation so gen-
uine that I would feel abashed in her
presence, ashamed to "cling to this strange
thing that shines in the sunlight and to be
sick with love for it." Such impressions
were, in their essence, transitory, but one
result from the hypothetical visit of the
Devil Baby to Hull-House will, I think,
remain : a realization of the sifting and
reconciling power inherent in Memory it-
self. The old women, with much to ag-
gravate and little to soften the habitual
bodily discomforts of old age, exhibited
24 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
an emotional serenity so vast and so reas-
suring, that I found myself perpetually spec-
ulating upon how soon the fleeting and
petty emotions which now seem unduly
important to us might be thus transmuted ;
at what moment we might expect the in-
consistencies and perplexities of life to be
brought under this appeasing Memory with
its ultimate power to increase the elements
of beauty and significance and to reduce,
if not to eliminate, all sense of resentment.
CHAPTER II
WOMEN'S MEMORIES REACTING ON LIFE
AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE STORY OF THE
DEVIL BABY
DURING the weeks when the Devil Baby
seemed to occupy every room in Hull-
House, I was conscious that all human
vicissitudes are, in the end, melted down into
reminiscence, and that a metaphorical state-
ment of the basic experiences which are
implicit in human nature itself, however
crude in form the story may be, has a singu-
lar power of influencing daily living.
At moments we also seemed to glimpse
the process through which such tales had
been evolved. As our visitors to the Devil
Baby came day by day, it gradually be-
came evident that the simpler women were
moved not wholly by curiosity, but that
many of them prized the story as a valu-
able instrument in the business of living.
25
26 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
From them and from the surprising number
of others who had been sent by the aged
and the bed-ridden to secure an exact
history and description of the child, the
suggestion finally became quite irresis-
tible that such a story, outlining a great
abstraction, may once have performed the
high service of tradition and discipline in
the beginnings of a civilized family life.
The legend exhibited all the persistence
of one of those tales which has doubtless
been preserved through the centuries be-
cause of its taming effects upon recalci-
trant husbands and fathers. Shamefaced
men brought to Hull-House by their women
folk to see the baby, but ill concealed their
triumph when there proved to be no such
visible sign of retribution for domestic
derelictions. On the other hand, numbers
of men came by themselves, one group
from a neighboring factory on their "own
time" offered to pay twenty-five cents, a
half dollar, two dollars apiece to see the
child, insisting that it must be at Hull-
House because "the women had seen it."
To my query as to whether they supposed
REACTING ON LIFE 27
we would, for money, exhibit a poor little
deformed baby, if one had been born in the
neighborhood, they replied : " Sure, why
not?" and "it teaches a good lesson, too,"
they added as an afterthought, or perhaps
as a concession to the strange moral stand-
ards of a place like Hull-House. All the
members in this group of hard-working
men, in spite of a certain swagger towards
one another and a tendency to bully the
derelict showman, wore a hang-dog look
betraying that sense of unfair treatment
which a man is so apt to feel when his
womankind makes an appeal to the super-
natural. In their determination to see
the child, the men recklessly divulged much
more concerning their motives than they
had meant to do. Their talk confirmed
my impression that such a story may still
act as a restraining influence in the sphere
of marital conduct which, next to primitive
religion, has always afforded the most fer-
tile field for irrational taboos and savage
punishments.
What story could be better than this to
secure sympathy for the mother of too
28 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
many daughters and contumely for the
irritated father; the touch of mysticism,
the supernatural sphere in which it was
placed, would render a man quite helpless.
The story of the Devil Baby, evolved in
response to the imperative needs of anxious
wives and mothers, recalls the theory that
woman first fashioned the fairy story, that
combination of wisdom and romance, in an
effort to tame her mate and to make him
a better father to her children, until such
stories finally became a crude creed for
domestic conduct, softening the treatment
men accorded to women. Because such
stories, expressing the very essence of
human emotion, did not pretend to imitate
the outside of life, they were careless of
verisimilitude and absolutely indifferent
to the real world. They did, however,
meet an essential requirement of the good
story, in that they dealt with fundamental
experiences.
These first pitiful efforts of women were
so widespread and powerful that we have
not yet escaped their influence. As sub-
conscious memories, they still cast vague
REACTING ON LIFE 29
shadows upon the vast spaces of life, shad-
ows that are dim and distorted because of
their distant origin. They remind us
that for thousands of years women had
nothing to oppose against unthinkable bru-
tality save "the charm of words," no other
implement with which to subdue the fierce-
nesses of the world about them. Only
through words could they hope to , arouse
the generosity of strength, to secure a
measure of pity for themselves and their
children, to so protect the life they had
produced that "the precious vintage stored
from their own agony" might not wan-
tonly be spilled upon the ground. Pos-
sibly the multitude of life's failures, the
obscure victims of unspeakable wrong and
brutality, have embodied their memories
in a literature of their own, of which the
story of the Devil Baby is a- specimen,
crude and ugly in form, as would be inevi-
table, but still bringing relief to the sur-
charged heart.
During the weeks that the Devil Baby
drew multitudes of visitors to Hull-House,
my mind was opened to the fact that new
30 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
knowledge derived from concrete experi-
ence is continually being made available
for the guidance of human life ; that hum-
ble women are still establishing rules of
conduct as best they may, to counteract
the base temptations of a man's world.
I saw a new significance in the fact that
thousands of women, for instance, make
it a standard of domestic virtue that a
man must not touch his pay envelope, but
bring it home unopened to his wife. High
praise is contained in the phrase, "We
have been married twenty years and he
never once opened his own envelope," or
covert blame in the statement, "Of course
he got to gambling ; what can you expect
from a man who always opens his own
pay?"
These humble domestic virtues, of which
women see the need so much more vividly
than men do, have furthermore developed
their penalties. The latter, too, are put into
aphorisms which, in time, when Memory
has done her work upon them, may become
legendary wisdom.
Such a penalty was recently illustrated
REACTING ON LIFE 31
in our neighborhood by the fate of an old
man who was found in his room almost
starved to death. He was pointed out by
many of our neighbors as an example of
the inevitable fate of one who deserts his
family and therefore, "without a woman to
keep him straight/' falls into drink and
shiftlessness and the endless paths of wrong-
doing, so that loneliness and destitution
inevitably overtake his old age.
The women were so fatalistically certain
of this relation of punishment to domestic
sin, of reward to domestic virtue, that when
they talked about them, as they so con-
stantly did in connection with the Devil
Baby, it often sounded as if they were
using the words of a widely known ritual.
Among the visitors to the Devil Baby were
many foreign-born peasant women who,
when they had come to America, had been
suddenly subjected to the complicated and
constantly changing environment of city
life, and, finding no outlet for many in-
herited tendencies, might easily have been
thrown into that state described by psy-
chologists as one of "baulked disposition."
32 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
To them this simple tale, with its direct
connection between cause and effect,
between wrong-doing and punishment,
brought soothing and relief, and restored
a shaken confidence as to the righteous-
ness of the universe. They used the story
not only to tame restless husbands, but
mothers threatened their daughters that
if they went to dance halls or out to walk
with strange young men, they would be
eternally disgraced by devil babies. As
the story grew, the girls themselves seized
upon it as a palpable punishment to be
held over the heads of reckless friends.
That the tale was useful was evidenced by
many letters similar to the anonymous
epistle here given.
"me and my friends we work in talor shop and
when we are going home on the roby street car
where we get off that car at blue island ave. we will
meet some fellows sitting at that street where they
drink some beer from pail, they keep look in cars
all time and they will wait and see if we will come
sometimes we will have to work, but they will wait
so long they are tired and they dont care they get
rest so long but a girl what works in twine mill saw
them talk with us we know her good and she say
REACTING ON LIFE 33
what youse talk with old drunk man for we shall
come to thier dance when it will be they will tell us
and we should know all about where to see them that
girl she say } oh if you will go with them you will get
devils baby like some other girls did who we knows,
she say Jane Addams she will show one like that in
Hull House if you will go down there/we shall come
sometime and we will see if that is troutty we do not
believe her for she is friendly with them old men
herself when she go out from her work they will
wink to her and say something else to. We will
go down and see you and make a lie from what she
say."
Because the Devil Baby embodied an
undeserved wrong to a poor mother whose
tender child had been claimed by the forces
of evil, his merely reputed presence had
power to attract to Hull-House hundreds
of women who had been humbled and dis-
graced by their children; mothers of the
feeble-minded, of the vicious, of the crim-
inal, of the prostitute. In their talk it
was as if their long role of maternal apology
and protective reticence had at last broken
down, as if they could speak out freely be-
cause for once a man responsible for an
ill-begotten child had been "met up with' 5
34 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
and had received his deserts. Their sin-
ister version of the story was that the father
of the Devil Baby had married without
confessing a hideous crime committed years
before, thus basely deceiving both his in-
nocent young bride and the good priest
who performed the solemn ceremony ; that
the sin had become incarnate in his child
which, to the horror of the young and
trusting mother, had been born with all
the outward aspects of the devil himself.
As if drawn by a magnet, these forlorn
women issued forth from the many homes
in which dwelt "the two unprofitable
goddesses, Poverty and Impossibility.'*
Occasionally it seemed to me that the
women were impelled by a longing to see
one good case of retribution before they
died, as a bullied child hopes to deal at
least one crushing blow at his tormentor
when he "grows up," but I think, on the
whole, such an explanation was a mistake ;
it is more probable that the avidity of the
women demonstrated that the story itself,
like all interpretative art, was "one of those
free, unconscious attempts to satisfy, out-
REACTING ON LIFE 35
side of life, those cravings which life itself
leaves unsatisfied." At moments, however,
baffled desires, sharp cries of pain, echoes
of justices unfulfilled, the original material
from which such tales are fashioned, would
defy Memory's appeasing power and break
through the rigid restraints imposed by all
Art, even that unconscious of itself.
With an understanding quickened, per-
haps, through my own acquaintance with
the mysterious child, I listened to many
tragic reminiscences from the visiting
women; of premature births, "because he
kicked me in the side" ; of children maimed
and burnt because "I had no one to leave
them with when I went to work" ; women
had seen the tender flesh of growing little
bodies given over to death because "he
wouldn't let me send for the doctor," or
because "there was no money to pay for
the medicine." But even these mothers,
rendered childless through insensate bru-
tality, were less pitiful than some of the
others, who might well have cried aloud of
their children as did a distracted mother of
her child centuries ago :
36 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
"That God should send this one thing more
Of hunger and of dread, a door
Set wide to every wind of pain !"
Such was the mother of a feeble-minded
boy who said : "I didn't have a devil baby
myself, but I bore a poor 'innocent' who
made me fight devils for twenty-three years."
She told of her son's experiences from the
time the other little boys had put him up
to stealing that they might hide in safety
and leave him to be found with "the
goods on him," until grown into a huge
man he fell into the hands of professional
burglars ; he was evidently the dupe and
stool-pigeon of the vicious and criminal until
the very day he was locked into the State
Penitentiary. "If people played with him
a little, he went right off and did anything
they told him to, and now he's been sent
up for life. We call such innocents ' God's
Fools' in the old country, but over here
the Devil himself gets them. I've fought
off bad men and boys from the poor lamb
with my very fists ; nobody ever came near
the house except such-like and the police
officers, who were always arresting him."
REACTING ON LIFE 37
There were a goodly number of visitors
to the Devil Baby of the type of those to
be found in every large city, who are on the
verge of nervous collapse, or who exhibit
many symptoms of mental aberration, and
yet are sufficiently normal to be at large
most of the time, and to support themselves
by drudgery which requires little mental
effort, although the exhaustion resulting
from the work they are able to do is the
one thing from which they should be most
carefully protected. One such woman, evi-
dently obtaining inscrutable comfort from
the story of the Devil Baby even after she
had become convinced that we harbored
no such creature, came many times to tell
of her longing for her son, who had joined
the army eighteen months before and was
now stationed in Alaska. She always be-
gan with the same words.
"When Spring comes and the snow melts
so that I know he could get out, I can
hardly stand it. You know I was once in
the Insane Asylum for three years at a
stretch, and since then I haven't had much
use of my mind except to worry with. Of
38 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
course I know that it is dangerous for me,
but what can I do ? I think something
like this: 'The snow is melting, now he
could get out, but his officers won't let
him off and if he runs away he'll be shot
for a deserter either way I'll never see
him again; I'll die without seeing him'
and then I begin all over again with the
snow." After a pause, she said : 'The
recruiting officer ought not to have taken
him, he's my only son and I'm a widow.
It's against the rules, but he was so crazy
to go that I guess he lied a little at any
rate, the government has him now and I
can't get him back. Without this worry
about him my mind would be all right ;
if he were here he would be earning money
and keeping me and we would be happy all
day long."
Recalling the vagabondish lad, who had
never earned much money and had cer-
tainly never "kept" his hard-working
mother, I ventured to suggest that, even
if he were at home, he might not have work
these hard times, that he might get into
trouble and be arrested I did not need
REACTING ON LIFE 39
to remind her that he had already been
arrested twice that he was now fed and
sheltered and under discipline, and I added
hopefully something about his seeing the
world. She looked at me out of her with-
drawn, harried eyes, as if I were speaking
a foreign tongue. ' That wouldn't make
any real difference to me the work, the
money, his behaving well and all that, if I
could cook and wash for him. I don't need
all the money I earn scrubbing that factory.
I only take bread and tea for supper and
I choke over that, thinking of him."
She ceased to speak, overcome by a
thousand obscure emotions which could
find no outlet in words. She dimly real-
ized that the facts in the case, to one who
had known her boy from childhood, were
far from creditable, and that no one could
understand the eternally unappeased ideal-
ism which, for her, surrounded her son's
return. She was even afraid to say much
about it, lest she should be overmastered
by her subject and be considered so ir-
rational as to suggest a return to the
Hospital for the Insane.
40 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
Those mothers who have never resisted
fate nor buffeted against the black waters,
but have allowed the waves to close over
them, worn and bent as they are by hard
labor, subdued and misshapen by the bru-
tality of men, are at least unaffrighted by
the melodramatic coarseness of life, which
Stevenson more gently describes as "the
uncouth and outlandish strain in the web
of the world/' The story of the Devil
Baby may have made its appeal through
its frank presentation of this very de-
moniac quality, to those who live under
the iron tyranny of that poverty which
threatens starvation, and under the dread
of a brutality which may any dark night
bring them or their children to extinction ;
to those who have seen both virtue and
vice go unrewarded and who have long
since ceased to explain.
This more primitive type embodies the
eternal patience of those humble, toiling
women who through the generations have
been held of little value, save as their
drudgery ministered to their men. One
of them related her habit of going through
REACTING ON LIFE 41
the pockets of her drunken son every pay
day, and complained that she had never
found so little as the night before, only
twenty-five cents out of fifteen dollars he
had promised for the rent, long overdue.
"I had to get that as he lay in the alley
before the door ; I couldn't pull him in,
and the copper who helped him home,
left as soon as he heard me coming and pre-
tended he didn't see me. I have no food
in the house, nor coffee to sober him up
with. I know perfectly well that you will
ask me to eat something here, but, if I
can't carry it home, I won't take a bite
nor a sup. I have never told you so much
before. Since one of the nurses said he
could be arrested for my non-support, I
have been awful close-mouthed. It's the
foolish way all the women in our street
are talking about the Devil Baby that's
loosened my tongue, more shame to me."
A sorrowful woman clad in heavy black,
who came one day, exhibited such a capac-
ity for prolonged weeping that it was evi-
dence in itself of the truth of at least half
her statement, that she had cried herself
42 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
to sleep every night of her life for fourteen
years in fulfilment of a "curse" laid upon
her by an angry man, that "her pillow
would be wet with tears as long as
she lived." Her respectable husband had
a shop in the Red Light district because
he found it profitable to sell to the men
and women who lived there. She had kept
house in the room over the "store" from
the time she was a bride newly come from
Russia, and her five daughters had been
born there, but never a son to gladden her
husband's heart.
She took such a feverish interest in the
Devil Baby that, when I was obliged to
disillusion her, I found it hard to take
away her comfort in the belief that the
Powers that Be are on the side of the
woman when her husband resents too
many daughters. But, after all, the birth
of daughters was but an incident in her
tale of unmitigated woe, for the scoldings
of a disappointed husband were as nothing
to the curse of a strange enemy, although
she doubtless had a confused impression
that if there were retribution for one in
REACTING ON LIFE 43
the general scheme of things, there might
be for the other. When the weeping woman
finally put the events of her disordered life
in some sort of sequence, it became clear
that about fifteen years ago she had re-
ported to the police a vicious house whose
back door opened into her own yard. Her
husband had forbidden her to do anything
about it and had said that it would only
get them into trouble, but she had been
made desperate one day when she saw her
little girl, then twelve years old, come out
of the door, gleefully showing her younger
sister a present of money. Because the
poor woman had tried for ten years without
success to induce her husband to move
from the vicinity of such houses, she was
certain that she could save her child only
by forcing out "the bad people" from her
own door yard. She therefore made her
one frantic effort, found her way to the
city hall and there reported the house to
the chief himself. Of course, "the bad
people stood in with the police" and
nothing happened to them save, perhaps,
a fresh levy of blackmail, but the keeper
44 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
of the house, beside himself with rage,
made the dire threat and laid the curse
upon her. In less than a year from that
time he had enticed her daughter into a
disreputable house in another part of the
district. The poor woman, ringing one door-
bell after another, had never been able to
find her, but her sisters, who in time came
to know where she was, had been dazzled
by her mode of life. The weeping mother
was quite sure that two of her daughters,
while still outwardly respectable and
"working downtown," earned money in
the devious ways which they had learned
all about when they were little children,
although for the past five years the now
prosperous husband had allowed the family
to live in a suburb, where the two younger
daughters were "growing up respectable."
Certain of the visitors, although con-
fronted by those mysterious and impersonal
wrongs which are apparently inherent in the
very nature of things, gave us glimpses of
another sort of wisdom than that expressed
in the assumptions that the decrees of Fate
are immutable.
REACTING ON LIFE 45
Such a glimpse came to me through a
conversation with a woman whose fine
mind and indomitable spirit I had long
admired ; I had known her for years, and
yet the recital of her sufferings, added to
those the Devil Baby had already induced
other women to tell me, pierced me afresh.
The story of the Devil Baby may have
incited these women to put their experiences
more vividly than they had hitherto been
able to do. It may have been because
they were unconsciously spurred by the
hope that a supernatural retribution might
intervene even for them, or because they
were merely comforted by the knowledge
that it had once done so for some one else
that they spoke with more confidence than
they had ever done before.
"I had eleven children, some born in
Hungary and some born here, nine of
them boys ; all of the children died when
they were little but my dear Liboucha.
You know all about her. She died last
winter in the Insane Asylum. She was only
twelve years old when her father, in a fit
of delirium tremens, killed himself after
46 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
he had chased us around the room, trying
to kill us first. She saw it all, the blood
splashed on the wall stayed in her mind
the worst ; she shivered and shook all that
night through, and the next morning she
had lost her voice, couldn't speak out
loud for terror. After a while she went to
school again and her voice came back, al-
though it was never very natural. She
seemed to do as well as ever and was awful
pleased when she got into High School.
All the money we had I earned scrubbing
in a public dispensary, although sometimes
I got a little more by interpreting for the
patients, for I know three languages, one
as well as the other. But I was deter-
mined that whatever happened to me,
Liboucha was to be educated. My hus-
band's father was a doctor in the old coun-
try, and Liboucha was always a clever
child. I wouldn't have her live the kind
of life I had, with no use for my mind ex-
cept to make me restless and bitter. I was
pretty old and worn out for such hard
work, but when I used to see Liboucha on
a Sunday morning ready for church in her
REACTING ON LIFE 47
white dress, with her long yellow hair
braided round her beautiful pale face, ly-
ing there in bed as I was, being brought
up a free-thinker, and needing to rest my
aching bones for the next week's work,
I'd feel almost happy, in spite of every-
thing. But of course no such peace could
last in my life ; the second year at High
School Liboucha began to seem different
and to do strange things. You know the
time she wandered away for three days and
we were all wild with fright, although a
kind woman had taken her in and no harm
came to her. I could never be easy after
that ; she was always gentle, but she was
awful sly about running away and at last
I had to send her to the asylum. She
stayed there off and on for five years, but
I saw her every week of my life and she
was always company for me, what with
sewing for her, washing and ironing her
clothes, cooking little things to take out
to her, and saving a bit of money to buy
fruit for her. At any rate, I had stopped
feeling so bitter, and got some comfort out
of seeing the one thing that belonged to
48 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
me on this side of the water, when all of a
sudden she died of heart failure and they
never took the trouble to send for me until
the next day."
She stopped as if wondering afresh that
the Fates could have been so casual, but
with a sudden illumination, as if she had
been awakened out of the burden and
intensity of her restricted personal inter-
ests into a consciousness of those larger
relations that are, for the most part, so
strangely invisible. It was as if the young
mother of the grotesque Devil Baby, that
victim of wrong doing on the part of
others, had revealed to this tragic woman
much more clearly than soft words had
ever done, that the return of a deed of
violence upon the head of the innocent is
inevitable ; as if she had realized that, al-
though she was destined to walk all the
days of her life with the piteous multitude
who bear the undeserved wrongs of the
world, she would walk henceforth with a
sense of companionship.
At moments it seemed possible that these
simple women, representing an earlier de-
REACTING ON LIFE 49
velopment, eagerly seized upon the story
because it was primitive in form and sub-
stance. Certainly, one evening, a long-
forgotten ballad made an unceasing effort
to come to the surface of my mind as I
talked to a feeble woman who, in the last
stages of an incurable disease from which
she soon afterwards died, had been helped
off the street car in front of Hull-House.
The ballad tells how the lover of a proud
and jealous mistress, who demanded as a
final test of devotion that he bring her the
heart of his mother, had quickly cut the
heart from his mother's breast and impetu-
ously returned to his lady, bearing it upon
a salver ; and how, when stumbling in his
gallant haste, he stooped to replace upon
the silver plate his mother's heart, which
had rolled to the ground, the heart, still
beating with tender solicitude, whispered
the hope that her child was not hurt. The
ballad itself was scarcely more exaggerated
than the story of our visitor that evening,
who had made the desperate effort of a
journey from home in order to see the
Devil Baby. I was familiar with her vicis-
50 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
situdes ; the shiftless, drinking husband
and the large family of children, all of whom
had brought her sorrow and disgrace, and I
knew that her heart's desire was to see
again, before she died, her youngest son,
who was a life prisoner in the penitentiary.
She was confident that the last piteous
stage of her disease would secure him a
week's parole, founding this forlorn hope
upon the fact that "they sometimes let
them out to attend a mother's funeral,
and perhaps they'd let Joe come a few
days ahead ; he could pay his fare after-
wards from the insurance money. It
wouldn't take much to bury me." Again
we went over the hideous story: Joe had
violently quarrelled with a woman, the
proprietor of the house in which his dis-
reputable wife was living, because she had
withheld from him a part of his wife's
"earnings," and in the altercation had
killed her a situation, one would say,
which it would be difficult for even a mother
to condone. But not at all, her thin gray
face worked with emotion, her trembling
hands restlessly pulled at her shabby skirt
REACTING ON LIFE 51
as the hands of the dying pluck at their
sheets, but she put all the vitality she
could muster into his defence. She told
us he had legally married the girl, who sup-
ported him, "although Lily had been so
long in that life that few men would have
done it. Of course, such a girl must have
a protector or everybody would fleece her.
Poor Lily said to the day of her death that
he was the kindest man she ever knew, and
treated her the whitest ; that she herself
was to blame for the murder because she
told on the old miser, and Joe was so hotr
headed she might have known that he
would draw a gun for her." The gasping
mother concluded: "He was always that
handsome and had such a way. One
winter, when I was scrubbing in an office
building, I'd never get home much before
twelve o'clock, but Joe would open the
door for me just as pleasant as if he hadn't
been waked out of a sound sleep." She
was so triumphantly unconscious of the
incongruity of a sturdy son in bed while
his mother earned his food, that her audi-
tors said never a word, and in silence we
52 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
saw a hero evolved before our eyes, a de-
fender of the oppressed, the best beloved of
his mother, who was losing his high spirits
and eating his heart out behind prison
bars. He could well defy the world even
there, surrounded as he was by that invin-
cible affection which assures both the for-
tunate and unfortunate alike that we are
loved, not according to our deserts, but in
response to some profounder law.
This imposing revelation of maternal
solicitude was an instance of what con-
tinually happened in connection with the
Devil Baby. In the midst of the most
tragic reminiscences, there remained that
something in the memories of these mothers
which has been called the great revelation
of tragedy, or sometimes the great illusion
of tragedy ; that which has power in its
own right to make life palatable and at
rare moments even beautiful.
CHAPTER III
WOMEN'S MEMORIES DISTURBING CON-
VENTIONS
IN sharp contrast to the function of woman's
long memory as a reconciler to life, revealed
by the visitors to the Devil Baby, are those
individual reminiscences which, because
they force the possessor to challenge exist-
ing conventions, act as a reproach, even as
a social disturber. When these reminis-
cences, based upon the diverse experi-
ences of many people unknown to each
other, point to one inevitable conclusion,
they accumulate into a social protest,
although not necessarily an effective one,
against existing conventions, even against
those which are most valuable and those
securely founded upon cumulative human
wisdom. But because no conventional-
ized tradition is perfect, however good its
intent, most of them become challenged in
S3
54 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
course of time, unwittingly illustrating the
contention that great social changes are
often brought about less by the thinkers
than by "a certain native and indepen-
dent rationalism operating in great masses
of men and women."
The statement is well founded that a
convention is at its best, not when it is
universally accepted, but just when it is
being so challenged and broken that the
conformists are obliged to defend it and
to fight for it against those who would
destroy it. Both the defenders of an old
custom and its opponents are then driven
to a searching of their own hearts.
Such searching and sifting is taking
place in the consciences of many women of
this generation whose sufferings, although
strikingly influencing conduct, are seldom
expressed in words until they are told in
the form of reminiscence after the edges
have been long since dulled. Such suffer-
ings are never so poignant as when women
have been forced by their personal experi-
ences to challenge the valuable conventions
safeguarding family life.
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 55
A woman whom I had known slightly
for many years came to Hull-House one day
escorted by her little grandson. Her delicate
features, which were rather hard and severe,
softened most charmingly as the little boy
raised his cap in good-by from the vanish-
ing automobile. In reply to my admiring
comment upon the sturdy lad and his af-
fectionate relation to her, she startled me
by saying abruptly, "You know he is
really not my grandson. I have scarcely
admitted the doubt before, but the time
is coming when I must face it and de-
cide his future. If you are kind enough
to listen, I want to tell you my experience
in all its grim sorrow.
"My husband was shot twenty-seven
years ago, under very disgraceful circum-
stances, in a disreputable quarter of Paris ;
you may remember something of it in the
newspapers, although they meant to be
considerate. I was left with my little son,
and with such a horror of self-indulgence
and its consequences, that I determined to
rear my child in strict sobriety, chastity,
and self-restraint, although all else were
56 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
sacrificed to it. Through his school and
college days, which I took care should be
far from his father's friends and associations,
I always lived with him, so bent on recti-
tude and so distressed by any lack of self-
control that I see now how hard and
rigorous his life must have been. I meant
to sacrifice myself for my child, in reality
I sacrificed him to my narrow code.
"The very June that he took his master's
degree, I myself found him, one beautiful
morning, lying dead in his own room, shot
through the temple. No one had heard
the report of the revolver, for the little
house we had taken was so on the edge of
the college town that the neighbors were
rather remote, and he must have killed
himself while I sat in the moonlight, on the
garden bench, after he had left me, my
mind still filled with plans for his future.
"I have gone over every word of our
conversation that evening in the garden a
thousand times ; we were planning to come
to Chicago for his medical course, and I
had expressed my exultant confidence in
him to withstand whatever temptation a
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 57
city might offer, my pride in his purity of
thought, his rectitude of conduct. It was
then he rose rather abruptly and went into
the house to write the letter to me which
I found on his table next morning. In
that letter he told me that he was too vile
to live any longer, that he had sinned not
only against his own code of decency and
honor, but against my lifelong standards
and teachings, and that he realized per-
fectly that I could never forgive him.
He evidently did not expect any under-
standing from me, either for himself or for
'the young and innocent girF about to be-
come the mother of his child, and in his
interpretation of my rigid morals he was
quite sure that I would never consent to
see her, but he wrote me that he had told
her to send the little baby to me as soon
as it was born, obviously hoping that I
might be tender to the innocent, although
I was so harsh and unpitying to the guilty.
I had apparently never given him a glimpse
beyond my unbending sternness, and he had
all unwittingly pronounced me too self-
righteous for forgiveness ; at any rate, he
58 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
faced death rather than my cold disap-
probation.
"The girl is still leading the life she had
led for two years before my son met her.
She is glad to have her child cared for and
hopes that I will make him my heir, but
understands, of course, that his paternity
could never be established in court. So
here I am, old and hard, beginning again
the perilous experiment of rearing a man
child. I suppose it was inevitable that I
should hold the girl responsible for my son's
downfall and for his death. She was one
of the wretched young women who live
in college towns for the express purpose
of inveigling young men, often deliberately
directing their efforts toward those who
are reputed to have money. I discovered
all sorts of damaging facts about her, which
enabled me to exonerate my son from in-
tentional wrong-doing, and to think quite
honestly that he had been lured and
tempted beyond his strength. The girl
was obliged to leave the little town, which
was filled with the horror and scandal of
the occurrence, but even then, in that first
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 59
unbridled public censure against the 'bad
woman' who had been discovered in the
midst of virtuous surroundings, there was
a tendency to hold me accountable for my
son's death, whatever the girl's earlier
responsibility may have been.
" In my loathing of her I experienced all
over again the harsh and bitter judgments
through which I had lived in the first years
after my husband's death. I had secretly
held the unknown woman responsible for his
end, but of course it never occurred to me
to find out about her, and I certainly could
never have brought myself to hear her
name, much less to see her. I have at
least done better than that in regard to
the mother of my 'grandson,' and Heaven
knows I have tried in all humility and
heartbreak to help her. She fairly hated
me, as she did anything that reminded her
of my son the entire episode had seemed
to her so unnatural, so monstrous, so un-
necessary she considered me his mur-
derer, and I never had the courage to tell
her that I agreed with her. Perhaps if I
had done that, really abased myself as I
60 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
was willing she should be abased, we might
have come into some sort of genuine re-
lation born of our companionship in trag-
edy. But I couldn't do that, possibly
because the women of my generation can-
not easily change the traditional attitude
towards what the Bible calls 'the harlot/
At any rate, I didn't succeed in 'saving'
her. She so obviously dreaded seeing me,
and our strained visits were so unsatis-
factory and painful, that I finally gave it
up, and her son has apparently quite for-
gotten her. I am sure she tries to forget
him and all the tragic scenes associated
with his earliest babyhood, when I in-
sisted not only upon 'keeping mother and
child together' but also on keeping them
with me."
After a moment's pause she resumed :
"It would have been comparatively easy
for me to die when my child was little,
when I still had a right to believe that he
would grow up to be a good and useful
man, but I lived to see him driven to his
death by my own stupidity. I have en-
countered the full penalty for breaking the
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 6l
commandment to judge not. I passed
sentence without hearing the evidence ; I
gave up the traditional role of the woman
who loves and pities and tries to under-
stand ; I forgot that it was my mission to
save and not to judge.
"As I have gone back over my unmiti-
gated failure again and again, I am sure
at last that it was the sorry result of my
implacable judgment of the woman I held
responsible for my husband's sin. I did
not realize the danger nor the inevitable
recoil of such a state of self-righteousness
upon my child."
As she paused in the recital I rashly
anticipated the conclusion, that her bitter
experiences had brought the whole question
to that tribunal of personal conduct whose
concrete findings stir us to our very mar-
row with shame and remorse ; that she had
frantically striven as we all do, to keep her-
self from falling into the pit where the
demons of self-reproach dwell, by clinging
to the conventional judgments of the
world. I expected her to set them forth
at great length in self-justification, and per-
62 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
haps, belonging, as she so obviously did, to
an older school, she might even assure me
that the wrong to those to whom it was
now impossible to make reparation had
forever lifted her above committing another
such injustice. I found, however, that I
was absolutely mistaken and that whatever
might be true of her, it still lay within me
to commit a gross injustice, when she re-
sumed with these words : "It is a long time
since I ceased to urge in my own defence
that I was but reflecting the attitude of
society, for, in my efforts to get at the root
of the matter I have been convinced that
the conventional attitude cannot be de-
fended, certainly not upon religious
grounds."
She stopped as if startled by her own
reflections upon the subject of the social
ostracism so long established and so harshly
enforced that women seem to hold to it as
through an instinct of self-preservation.
She was, perhaps, dimly conscious that
the tradition that the unchaste woman
should be an outcast from society rests
upon a solid basis of experience, upon the
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 63
long struggle of a multitude of obscure
women who, from one generation to another,
were frantically determined to establish the
paternity of their children and to force the
father to a recognition of his obligations ;
and that the living representatives of these
women instinctively rise up in honest re-
bellion against any attempt to loosen the
social control which such efforts have es-
tablished, bungling and cruel though the
control may be.
Further conversation showed that she
also realized that these stern memories
inherited from the past have an undoubted
social value and that it is a perilous under-
taking upon which certain women of this
generation are bent in their efforts to deal
a belated justice to the fallen woman. It
involves a clash within the very mass of '
inherited motives and impulses as well as
a clash between old conventions and con-
temporary principles. On the other hand,
it must have been obvious to her in her
long effort to get at "the root of the mat-
ter" that the punishment and hatred of
the bad woman has gone so far as to over-
64 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
reach its own purpose ; it has become re-
sponsible for such hardness of heart on the
part of "respectable" women towards the
so-called fallen ones, that punishment is
often inflicted not only without regard to
justice, but in order to feed the spiritual
pride, "I am holier than thou." Such
pride erects veritable barricades, deliber-
ately shutting out sympathetic understand-
ing.
The very fact that women remain closer
to type than men do and are more swayed
by the past, makes it difficult for them to
defy settled conventions. It adds to their
difficulty that the individual women,
driven to modify a harsh convention which
has become unendurable to them, are per-
force those most sensitive to injustice. The
sharp struggle for social advance, which is
always a struggle between ideas, long be-
fore it becomes embodied in contending
social groups, may thus find its arena in
the tender conscience of one woman who
is pitilessly rent and pierced by her war-
ring scruples and affections. Even such a
tentative effort in the direction of social
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 65
advance exacts the usual toll of blood and
tears.
Fortunately the entire burden of the
attempt to modify a convention which
has become unsupportable, by no means
rests solely upon such self-conscious women.
Their analytical efforts are steadily sup-
plemented by instinctive conduct on the
part of many others. A great mass of
"variation from type/' accelerating this
social change, is contributed by simple
mothers who have been impelled by the
same primitive emotion which the Devil
Baby had obviously released in so many
old women. This is an overwhelming pity
and sense of tender comprehension, doubt-
less closely related to the compunction
characteristic of all primitive people which
in the earliest stage of social development
long performed the first rude offices of a
sense of justice. This early trait is still a
factor in the social struggle, for as has often
been pointed out, our social state is like a
countryside of a complex geological struc-
ture, with outcrops of strata of very diverse
ages.
66 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
Such compunction sometimes carries the
grandmother of an illegitimate child to the
point of caring for the child when she is
still utterly unable to forgive her daughter,
the child's mother. Even that is a step
in advance from the time when the
daughter was driven from the house and
her child, because a bastard, was con-
scientiously treated as an outcast both by
the family and by the community.
Such an instance of compunction was
recently brought to my attention when
Hull-House made an effort to place a sub-
normal little girl twelve years old in an
institution in order that she might be pro-
tected from certain designing men in the
neighborhood. The grandmother who had
always taken care of her savagely opposed
the effort step by step. She had scrubbed
the lavatories in a public building during
the twenty-five years of her widowhood,
and because she worked all day had been
unable to protect her own feeble-minded
daughter who, when barely fifteen years
old, had become the mother of this child.
When her granddaughter was finally placed
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 67
in the institution, the old woman was ab-
solutely desolated. She found it almost
impossible to return home after her day's
work because "it was too empty and lone-
some, and nothing to come back for.
You see," she explained, "my youngest
boy wasn't right in his head either and kept
his bed for the last fifteen years of his life.
During all that time I took care of him the
way one does of a baby, and I hurried home
every night with my heart in my mouth
until I saw that he was all right. He died
the year this little girl was born and she
kind of took his place. I kept her in a
day nursery while she was little, and when
she was seven years old the ladies there
sent her to school in one of the subnormal
rooms and let her come back to the nursery
for her meals. I thought she was getting
along all right and I took care never to let
her go near her mother." The old woman
made it quite clear that this was because
her daughter was keeping house with a man
with whom there had been no marriage
ceremony. In her simple code, to go to
such a house would be to connive at
68 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
sin, and while she was grateful that the
man had established a control over her
daughter which she herself had never been
able to obtain, she always referred to her
daughter as " fallen/' although no one knew
better than she how unguarded the girl had
been. As I saw how singularly free this
mother was from self-reproach and how
untouched by any indecisions or remorses
for the past, I was once more impressed by
the strength of the stout habits acquired
by those who early become accustomed to
fight off black despair. Such habits stand
them in good stead in old age, and at least
protect them from those pensive regrets
and inconsolable sorrows which inevitably
tend to surround whatever has once made
for early happiness, as soon as it has ceased
to exist.
Many individual instances are found in
which a woman, hard pressed by life, in-
cludes within her tenderness the mother of
an illegitimate child. A most striking ex-
ample of this came to me through a woman
whom I knew years ago when she daily
brought her three children to the Hull-
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 69
House day nursery, obliged to support
them by her work in a neighboring laundry
because her husband had deserted her. I
recall her fatuous smile as she used to say
that "Tommy is so pleased to see me at
night that I can hear him shout ' Hello,
ma' when I am a block away." I had
known Tommy through many years ; peri-
ods of adversity when his father was away
were succeeded by periods of fitful pros-
perity when his father returned from his
wanderings with the circus with which "he
could always find work," because he had
once been a successful acrobat and later a
clown, and "so could turn his hand to any-
thing that was needed."
Perhaps it was unavoidable that Tommy
should have made his best friends among
the warm-hearted circus people who were
very kind to him after his father's death,
and that long before the Child Labor Law
permitted him to sing in Chicago saloons,
he was doing a successful business singing
in the towns of a neighboring state. He
was a droll little chap "without any sense
about taking care of himself," and in those
70 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
days his mother not only missed his cheer-
ful companionship but was constantly
anxious about his health and morals.
When he grew older and became a profes-
sional he sent his mother money occasion-
ally, although never very much and never
with any regularity. She was always so
pleased when it came that the two daughters
supporting her with their steady wages
were inclined to resent her obvious grati-
fication, as they did the killing of the
fatted calf on those rare occasions when
the prodigal returned "between seasons "
to visit his family.
It is possible that his mother thus early
acquired the habit of defending him, the
black sheep, against the strictures of the
good children who so easily become the
self-righteous when they feel "put upon."
However that may be, five years ago, after
one daughter had been married to a skilled
mechanic and the other, advanced to the
position of a forewoman, was supporting her
mother in the comparative idleness of keep-
ing house for two people in three rooms,
a forlorn girl appeared with a note from
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 71
Tommy asking his mother "to help her out
until the kid came and she could work
again."
The steady daughter would not permit
"such a girl to cross the threshold," and
the little household was finally broken up
upon the issue. The daughter went to
live with her married sister, while the
mother, having moved into one room with
"Tommy's girl," went back to the laundry
in order to support herself and her guest.
The daughters, having impressively told
their mother that she could come to live
with them whenever she "was willing to
come alone," dropped the entire situation.
In doing this, they were doubtless in-
stinctively responding to a habit acquired
through years of "keeping clear of the
queer people father knew in the circus and
the saloon crowds always hanging around
Tommy," in their secret hope to come
to know respectable young men. Con-
scious that they had back of them the
opinion of all righteous people they could
not understand why their mother, for the
sake of a bad girl, had deserted them in
72 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
this praiseworthy effort in which hitherto
she had been the prime mover.
Tommy had sent his "girl" to his mother
on the eve of his departure for "a grand
tour to the Klondike region/' and since
then, almost four years ago, she has heard
nothing further from him. During the
first half of the time the two women strug-
gled on together as best they could, sup-
porting themselves and the child who was
brought daily to the nursery by his grand-
mother. But the pretty little mother, grad-
ually going back to her old occupation of
dancing in the vaudeville, had more and
more out-of-town engagements, and while
she always divided her earnings with the
baby, the grandmother suspected her of
losing interest in him, a situation which
was finally explained when she confessed
that she was about to be married to a
cabaret manager who "knew nothing of
the past," and to beg that the baby might
stay where he was. "Of course, I will
pay board for him, but his father can be
made to do something, too, if we can only
get the law on him."
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 73
It was at this point that I had the fol-
lowing conversation with the grandmother,
who was shrewd enough to see that the
support of the baby was being left upon
her hands, and that she could expect help
from neither his father nor his mother, al-
though she stoutly refused the advice that
the whole matter be taken into the Court
of Domestic Relations. "If I could only
see Tommy once I think I could get him to
help, but I can't find out where he is, and
he may not be alive for all I know ; he was
always that careless about himself. If he
put on a new red necktie he'd never know
if his bare toes were pushing out of his shoes.
He probably didn't get proper clothes for
"the Klondike region' and he may have
been frozen to death before this. But
whatever has happened to him, I can't
let his baby go. I suppose I've learned to
think differently about some things after
all my years of living with a light-minded
husband. Maggie came to see me last
week, for she means to be a good daughter.
She said that Carrie and Joe were buying a
house way out on the West Side, that they
74 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
were going to move into it this month, and
that she and I could have a nice big room
together. She said, too, that Carrie would
charge only half rate board for me, and
would be glad to have my help with her
little children, for they both think that
nobody has such a way with children as
I have. The night before, when she and
Carrie were playing with the little boys,
they remembered some of the funny songs
father used to teach Tommy, and how
jolly we all were when he came home good-
natured and would stand on his head to
make the candy fall out of his pockets.
I know the two girls really want me to come
back, and that they are often homesick,
but when I pointed to the bed where the
baby was and asked, 'What about him?'
Maggie turned as hard as nails and said as
quick as a flash, 'We're all agreed that
you'll have to put him in an institution.
We'll never have any chance with the nice
people in a swell neighborhood like ours
if you bring the baby.' She looked real
white then, and I felt sorry for her when
she said, 'Why, they might even think he
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 75
was my child, you never can tell/ although
she was ashamed of that afterwards and
cried a little before she left. She told me
that she and Carrie, when they were chil-
dren, were always talking of what they
would do when they got old enough to work,
how they would take care of me and move
to a part of the city where nobody would
know anything about the outlandish way
their father and Tommy used to carry on.
Of course, it was almost telling me that
they didn't want me to come to see them if
I kept the baby."
My old friend was quite unable to for-
mulate the motives which underlay her
determination, but she implied that cling-
ing to this helpless child was part of her
unwavering affection for her son when,
without any preamble, she concluded the
conversation with the remark, "It's the
way I always felt about him," as if further
explanation were unnecessary.
It was all doubtless a manifestation of
Nature's anxious care so determined
upon survival and so indifferent to morals
that had induced her long devotion to
76 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
her one child least equipped to take care
of himself; and for the same reason the
helpless little creature whose existence no
one else was deeply concerned to preserve
had become so entwined in her affections
that separation was impossible.
From time to time a mother goes further
than this, in her determination to deal
justly with the unhappy situation in which
her daughter is placed. When the mother
of a so-called fallen girl is of that type
of respectability which is securely founded
upon narrow precepts, inherited through
generations of careful living, it requires
genuine courage to ignore the social stigma
in order to consider only the moral de-
velopment of her child, although the re-
sult of such courage doubtless minimizes
the chagrin and disgrace for the girl herself.
In one such instance the parents of the
girl, who had been prevented from marry-
ing her lover because the families on both
sides objected to differences of religion,
have openly faced the situation and made
the baby a beloved member of the house-
hold. The pretty young mother arrogates
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 77
to herself a hint of martyrdom for her
faith's sake, but the discipline and re-
sponsibility are working wonders for her
character. In her hope of earning money
enough for two, she has been stirred to new
ambition and is eagerly attending a busi-
ness college. She suffers a certain amount
of social ostracism but at the same time her
steady courage excites genuine admiration.
In another case a fearless mother exacts
seven dollars a week in payment of the
board for her daughter and the baby, al-
though the girl earns but eight dollars a
week in a cigar factory and buys such
clothing for two as she can with the re-
maining dollar. She admits that it is
"hard sledding," but that the baby is
"mighty nice." Whatever her state of
mind, she evidently has no notion of re-
belling against her mother's authority, and
is humbly grateful that she was not turned
out of doors when the situation was dis-
covered. It is possible that the mother's
remorse at her failure to guard her daugh-
ter from wrong doing enables her thus
grimly to defy social standards which,
78 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
although they are based upon stern and
narrow tenets, nevertheless epitomize the
bitter wisdom of generations. Such
mothers, overcoming that timidity which
makes it so difficult to effect changes in
daily living, make a genuine contribution
to the solution of the vexed problem.
In spite of much obtuseness on the part
of those bound by the iron fetters of con-
vention, these individual cases suggest a
practical method of procedure. For quite
as pity and fierce maternal affection for
their own children drove mothers all over
the world to ostracize and cruelly punish
the "bad woman" who would destroy the
home by taking away the breadwinner and
the father, so it is possible that, under the
changed conditions of modern life, this
same pity for little children, this same con-
cern that, even if they are the children
of the outcast, they must still be nourished
and properly reared, will make good the
former wrongs. There has certainly been
a great modification of the harsh judg-
ments meted out in such cases, as women
all over the world have endeavored, through
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 79
the old bungling method of trial and
error, to deal justly with individual situ-
ations. Each case has been quietly judged
by reference to an altered moral standard,
for while the ethical code like the legal
code stands in need of constant revision,
the remodeling of the former is always pri-
vate, tacit and informal in marked con-
trast to the public and ceremonious acts
of law-makers and judges when the latter
is changed.
Such measure of success as the organized
Woman's Movement has attained in the
direction of a larger justice has come
through an overwhelming desire to cherish
both the illegitimate child and his un-
fortunate mother. In addition to that,
the widespread effort of modern women to
obtain a recognized legal status for them-
selves and their own children has also
been largely dependent upon this desire,
at least in the beginnings of the movement.
Women slowly had discovered that the
severe attitude towards the harlot had not
only become embodied in the statutory
law concerning her, as thousands of court
8o LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
decisions every day bear testimony, but had
become registered in the laws and social
customs pertaining to good women as
well ; the Code Napoleon, which prohibited
that search be made for the father of an
illegitimate child, also denied the custody
of her children to the married mother;
those same states in which the laws con-
sidered a little girl of ten years the seducer
of a man of well-known immorality, did
not allow a married woman to hold her
own property nor to retain her own wages.
The enthusiasm responsible for the world-
wide Woman's Movement was generated
in the revolt against such gross injustices.
The most satisfactory achievements of the
movement have been secured in the Scan-
dinavian countries, where the splendid code
of laws protecting all women and children
was founded on the instinct to defend the
weakest, and upon a determination to
lighten that social opprobrium which makes
it so unreasonably difficult for a mother to
support a child born out of wedlock. In
Germany, when the presence of over a
million illegitimate children under the age
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 8l
of fourteen years made the situation acute,
the best women of the nation, asserting
that all attempts to deal out social pun-
ishment upon the mothers resulted only in
a multitude of ill-nourished and weakened
children, founded "The Mutterchutz"
Movement. Through its efforts to secure
justice and protection for these mothers,
it has come to be the great defender of
the legal rights of all German women.
Many achievements of the modern move-
ment demonstrate that woman deals most
efficiently with fresh experiences when she
coalesces them into the impressions Memory
has kept in store for her. Eagerly seeking
continuity with the past by her own secret
tests of affinity, she reinforces and encour-
ages Memory's instinctive processes of
selection. If she develops her craving for
continuity into a willingness to subordinate
a part to the whole and into a sustained
and self-forgetful search for congruity and
harmony with a life which is greater than
hers, she may lift the entire selective pro-
cess into the realm of Art ; at least so far
as Art is dependent upon proportion and
82 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
so far as beauty hangs upon an ineffable
balance between restraint and inclusion.
Hungry for this finely proportioned living,
she may at length become a disciple of
Diotema, the wisest woman of antiquity,
who asserted that the life which above all
we should live, must be discovered by
faithful and strenuous search for ever-
widening kinds of beauty.
In woman's search for "the eternal
moment," balanced independently of time
itself because so melted both into memories
of the past and into surmises of new beauty
for the future of her children's children, she
may recognize as one of the universal har-
monies the touching devotion of the endless
multitude of mothers who were the humble
vessels for life's continuance and who carried
the burden in safety to the next generation.
Maternal affection and solicitude, in
woman's remembering heart, may at length
coalesce into a chivalric protection for all
that is young and unguarded. This chiv-
alry of women expressing protection for
those at the bottom of society, so far as it
has already developed, suggests a return to
DISTURBING CONVENTIONS 83
that idealized version of chivalry which
was the consecration of strength to the
defence of weakness, unlike the actual chiv-
alry of the armed knight who served his
lady with gentle courtesy while his fields
were ploughed by peasant women mis-
shapen through toil and hunger.
As an example of this new chivalry, the
Hungarian women have recently risen in
protest against a proposed military regu-
lation requiring that all young women in
domestic service, who are living in the
vicinity of barracks, be examined each week
by medical officers in order to protect the
soldiers from disease. The good women in
Hungary spiritedly resented the assumption
that these girls, simply because they are the
least protected of any class in the commu-
nity, should be subjected to this insult.
An instance of this sort once again il-
lustrates that moral passion is the only
solvent for prejudice, and that women have
come to feel reproached and disturbed
when they ignore the dynamic urgency of
memories as fundamental as those upon
which prohibitive conventions are based.
CHAPTER IV
WOMEN'S MEMORIES INTEGRATING IN-
DUSTRY
IF it has always been the mission of lit-
erature to translate the particular act into
something of the universal, to reduce the
element of crude pain in the isolated ex-
perience by bringing to the sufferer a real-
ization that his is but the common lot,
this mission may have been performed
through such stories as that of the Devil
Baby for simple, hardworking women who
at any given moment compose the bulk of
the women in the world.
Certainly some of the visitors to the
Devil Baby attempted to generalize and
evidently found a certain enlargement of
the horizon, an interpretation of life as it
were, in the effort. They exhibited that
confidence which sometimes comes to the
more literate person when, finding himself
84
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 85
morally isolated among those hostile to
his immediate aims, his reading assures
him that other people in the world have
thought as he does. Later when he dares
to act on the conviction his own experi-
ence has forced upon him, he has become
so conscious of a cloud of witnesses torn
out of literature and warmed into living
comradeship, that he scarcely distinguishes
them from the likeminded people actually
in the world whom he has later discovered
as a consequence of his deed.
In some of the reminiscences related by
working women I was surprised, not so
much by the fact that memory could in-
tegrate the individual experience into a
sense of relation with the more impersonal
aspects of life, as that the larger meaning
had been obtained when the fructifying
memory had had nothing to feed upon but
the harshest and most monotonous of in-
dustrial experiences.
I held a conversation with one such
woman when she came to confess that her
long struggle was over and that she and
her sister had at last turned their faces to
86 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
the poorhouse. She clearly revealed not
only that she had caught a glimpse of the
great social forces of her day, but that she
had had the ability to modify her daily
living by what she had perceived.
Perhaps, under the shadow of a tragic
surrender, she had obtained a new sense of
values, or at least had made up her mind
that it was not worth while any longer to
conceal her genuine experiences, for she
talked more fully of her hard life than I
had ever heard her before in the many
years I had known her. She related in
illuminating detail an incident in her long
effort of earning, by ill-paid and unskilled
labor, the money with which to support
her decrepit mother and her imbecile sister.
For more than fifty years she had never
for a moment considered the possibility of
sending either of them to a public institu-
tion, although it had become almost impos-
sible to maintain such a household after the
mother, who lived to be ninety-four years
old, had become utterly distraught.
She was still sharing her scanty livelihood
with the feeble-minded sister, although she
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 87
herself was unable to do anything but wash
vegetables and peel potatoes in a small
restaurant of her neighborhood. The cold
water necessary to these processes made her
hands, already crippled with rheumatism,
so bad that on some days she could not
hold anything smaller than a turnip, al-
though the other people in the kitchen
surreptitiously helped her all they could
and the cooks gave her broken food to carry
home to the ever hungry sister.
She told of her monotonous years in a
box factory, where she had always worked
with the settled enmity of the other em-
ployes. They regarded her as a pace
setter, and she, obliged to work fast and
furiously in order to keep three people,
and full of concern for her old mother's
many unfulfilled needs, had never under-
stood what the girls meant when they
talked about standing by each other.
She did not change in her attitude even
when she found the prices of piece work
went down lower and lower, so that at
last she was obliged to work overtime late
into the night in order to earn the small
88 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
amount she had previously earned by day.
She was seventy years old when the legality
of the Illinois Ten Hour Law was con-
tested, and her employer wanted her to
testify in court that she was opposed to
the law because she could not have sup-
ported her old mother all those years un-
less she had been allowed to work nights.
She found herself at last dimly conscious
of what it was that her long time enemies,
the union girls, had been trying to do,
and a subconscious loyalty to her own
kind made it impossible for her to bear
testimony against them. She did not
analyze her motives but told me that,
fearing she might yield to her employer's
request, in sheer panic she had abruptly
left his factory and moved her helpless
household to another part of the city on
the very day she was expected to appear in
court. In her haste she left four days un-
paid wages behind her, and moving the
family took all the money she had pains-
takingly saved for the coming winter's
coal. She had unknowingly moved into a
neighborhood of cheap restaurants, and
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 89
from that time on she worked in any of
them which would employ her until now
at last she was too feeble to be of much
use to anybody.
Although she had never joined the Union
which finally became so flourishing in the
box factory she had left, she was conscious
that in a moment of great temptation she
had refrained from seeking her own ad-
vantage at the expense of others^ As she
bunglingly tried to express her motives,
she said: "The Irish you know I was
ten years old when we came over often
feel like that ; it isn't exactly that you are
sorry after you have done a thing, nor so
much that you don't do it because you know
you will be sorry afterwards, nor that any-
thing in particular will happen to you if
you do it, but that you haven't the heart
for it, that it goes against your nature."
When I expressed my admiration for her
prompt action she replied: "I have never
told this before except to one person, to a
woman who was organizing for the gar-
ment workers and who came to my house
one night about nine o'clock, just as I was
90 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
having my supper. I had it late in those
days because I used to scrub the restaurant
floor after everybody left. My sister was
asleep back of the stove, I looked sharp
not to wake her up and I don't believe the
Union woman ever knew that she wasn't
just like other people. The organizer was
looking for some of the women living in
our block who had been taking work
from the shops ever since the strike was on.
She was clean tired out, and when I offered
her a cup of tea she said as quick as a
flash, 'You are not a scab, are you?' I
just held up my poor old hands before her
face, swollen red from scrubbing and full
of chilblains, and I told her that I couldn't
sew a stitch if my life depended on it.
"When I offered her the second cup of
tea a real educated-looking woman she
was, and she must have been used to better
tea than mine boiled out of the old tea
leaves the restaurant cook always let me
bring home I said to her, 'My hands
aren't the only reason I'm not scabbing.
I see too much of the miserable wages
these women around here get for their
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 91
sweatshop work, and I've done enough
harm already with my pace setting, and
my head so full of my poor old mother that
I never thought of anybody else/ She
smiled at me and nodded her head over
my old cracked cup. 'You are a Union
woman all right/ she said. "You have the
true spirit whether you carry a card or
not. I am mighty glad to have met you
after all the scabs I have talked to this
day/"
The old woman repeated the words as one
who solemnly recalls the great phrase which
raised him into a knightly order, revealing
a secret pride in her unavowed fellowship
with Trades Unions, for she had vaguely
known at the time of the Ten Hour trial
that powerful federations of them had
paid for the lawyers and had gathered the
witnesses. Some dim memory of Irish
ancestors, always found on the side of the
weak in the unending struggle with the
oppressions of the strong, may have de-
termined her action. She may have been
dominated by a subconscious suggestion
"from the dust that sleeps," a suggestion
92 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
so simple, so insistent and monotonous
that it had victoriously survived its original
sphere of conduct.
It was in keeping with the drab colored
experiences of her seventy hard years that
her contribution to the long struggle should
have been one of inglorious flight, never-
theless she had gallantly recognized the
Trades Union organizer as a comrade in a
common cause. She cherished in her heart
the memory of one golden moment when
she had faintly heard the trumpets summon
her and had made her utmost response.
When the simple story of a lifetime of
sacrifice to family obligations and of one
supreme effort to respond to a social claim
came to an end, I reflected that for more
than half a century the narrator had freely
given all her time, all her earnings, all her
affections, and yet during the long period
had developed no habit of self-pity. At
a crucial moment she had been able to
estimate life, not in terms of her self-
immolation but in relation to a hard pressed
multitude of fellow workers.
As she sat there, a tall, gaunt woman
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 93
broken through her devotion, she inevitably
suggested the industrial wrongs and op-
pressions suffered by the women who, for-
gotten and neglected, perform so much of
the unlovely drudgery upon which our in-
dustrial order depends. At the moment
I could recall only one of her starved am-
bitions which to my knowledge had ever
been attained. When a friend tenderly
placed a pair of white satin slippers upon
the coffined feet of her old mother who
for more than ninety years had travelled
a long hard road and had stumbled against
many stones, the loving heart of the aged
daughter overflowed. "It is herself would
know how I prayed for white satin shoes
for the burial, thinking as how they might
make it up to mother, she who never
knew where the next pair was coming from
and often had to borrow to go to Mass."
I remembered that as my friend and I
left the spotless bare room wrapped in the
mystery of death and walked back to Hull-
House together, we passed a little child
who proudly challenged our attention to
his new shoes, "shiny" in the first moment
94 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
of joyous possession. We could but recog-
nize the epitome of the hard struggle of
the very poor, from the moment they
scramble out of their rude cradles until
they are lowered into their "partial pay-
ment" graves, to keep shoes upon their
feet. The rare moments of touching pleas-
ure when the simple desire for "a new
pair" is fulfilled are doubtless indicated
in the early fairy tales by the rewards of
glistening red shoes or glass slippers to
the good child ; in the religious allegories
which turn life itself into one long pil-
grimage, by the promises to the faithful
that they shall be shod with the sandals
of righteousness and to the blessed ones,
who having formally renounced the world,
forswearing shoes altogether and hum-
bly walking on without them, that their
bruised and torn feet shall yet gleam lily-
white on the streets of Paradise.
I suddenly saw in this worn old woman
who sat before me, what George Sand
described as "a rare and austere produc-
tion of human suffering" and was so filled
with a fresh consciousness of the long
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 95
barren road travelled by the patient
mother and daughter, that it merged into
the Via Dolorosa of the Poor of the world.
It may have been through this suggestion
of an actual street that my memory vividly
evoked a group of Russian pilgrims I had
once seen in Holy Week as they trium-
phantly approached Jerusalem. Their
heads, garlanded in wild flowers still fresh
with early dew, were lifted in joyous sing-
ing but their broken and bleeding feet,
bound in white cloth and thrust into san-
dals of stripped bark, were the actual s^<>
rifice they were devoutly offering at the
Sepulchre.
As my mind swiftly came back from
the blossoming fields of Palestine to the
crowded industrial district of Chicago, I
found myself recalling a pensive remark
made by the gifted Rachel Varnhagen, a
century ago. "Careless Fate never re-
quires of us what we are really capable of
doing."
This overwhelming sense of the waste in
woman's unused capacity came to me
again during a Garment Workers' strike,
96 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
when some of the young women involved
were sitting in the very chairs occupied
so recently by the visitors to the Devil
Baby. They brought a curious reminder
of the overworked and heavily burdened
mothers who had yet been able to keep
the taste of life in their mouths and who
could not be overborne, because their en-
durance was rooted in simple and instinc-
tive human affections. During the long
strike these young women endured all
sorts of privations without flinching ; some
of them actual hunger, most of them dis-
approbation from their families, and all of
them a loss of that money which alone could
procure for them the American standards
so highly prized. Through participation
in the strike they all took the risk of losing
their positions, and yet, facing a future of
unemployment and wretchedness, they dis-
played a stubborn endurance which held
out week after week.
Perhaps because of my recent conver-
sations with old women I received the
impression that the very power of resist-
ance in such a socialized undertaking as a
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 97
strike, presents a marked contrast in both
its origin and motives to the traditional
type of endurance exercised by the mothers
and grandmothers of the strikers or by
their acquaintances among domestic women
living in the same crowded tenements.
When a mother cares for a sick child
for days and nights without relief, the long
period of solicitude and dread exhausting
every particle of her vitality, her strength
is constantly renewed from the vast reser-
voirs of maternal love and pity whenever
she touches the soft flesh or hears the
plaintive little voice. But such girls as
the strikers represent are steadily bending
their energies to loveless and mechanical
labor, and are obliged to go on without this
direct and personal renewal of their powers
of resistance. They must be sustained as
soldiers on a forced march are sustained,
by their sense of comradeship in high en-
deavor. Naturally, some of the young
working women are never able to achieve
this and can keep on with the monotony
of factory work only when they persuade
themselves that they are getting ready,
98 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
and have not yet begun their own lives,
because real living for them must include
a home of their own and children to
"do for."
Such unutilized dynamic power illus-
trates the stupid waste of those impulses and
affections, registered in the very bodily struc-
ture itself, which are ruthlessly pushed aside
and considered of no moment to the work
in which so many women are now engaged.
My conversations with these girls of
modern industry continually filled me with
surprise that, required as they are to work
under conditions unlike those which women
have ever before encountered, they have
not only made a remarkable adaptation
but have so ably equipped themselves with
a new set of motives. The girl who stands
on one spot for fifty-six hours each week as
she feeds a machine, endlessly repeating
the identical motions of her arms and
wrists, is much further from the type of
woman's traditional activity than her
mother who cooks, cleans, and washes for
the household. The young woman who
spends her time in packing biscuits into
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 99
boxes which come to her down a chute
and are whirled away from her on a minia-
ture trolley, has never even seen how the
biscuits are made, for the factory proper
is separated from the packing room by a
door with the sign "No Admittance."
She must work all day without the vital
and direct interest in the hourly results
of her labors which her mother had.
These girls present a striking antithesis
to the visitors to the Devil Baby who in
their forlorn and cheerless efforts were
merely continuing the traditional struggle
against brutality, indifference, and neglect
that helpless old people and little children
might not be trampled in the dust. For
these simple women it is the conditions
under which the struggle is waged which
have changed, rather than the nature of
the contest. Even in this unlovely strug-
gle, the older women utilize well-seasoned
faculties, in contrast to the newly devel-
oped powers required by the multitude of
young girls who for the first time in the
long history of woman's labor, are uniting
their efforts in order to obtain opportu-
100 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
nities for a fuller and more normal living.
Organizing with men and women of divers
nationalities they are obliged to form new
ties absolutely unlike family bonds. ' On
the other hand, these girls possess the enor-
mous advantage over women of the do-
mestic type of having experienced the dis-
cipline arising from impersonal obligations
and of having tasted the freedom from
economic dependence, so valuable that
too heavy a price can scarcely be paid
for it.
This clash between the traditional con-
ception of woman's duty narrowed solely
to family obligations and the claims arising
from the complexity of the industrial situ-
ation, manifests scarcely a suggestion of
the latent war so vaguely apprehended
from the earliest times as a possibility be-
tween men and women. Even the re-
strained Greeks believed that when the
obscure women at the bottom of society
could endure no longer and "the oppressed
women struck back, it would not be justice
which came but the revenge of madness/'
My own observation has discovered little
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 101
suggesting this mood, certainly not among
the women active in the Labor Movement.
I recall the recent experience of an or-
ganizer whom I very much admire for her
valiant services in the garment trades and
whom I have known from her earliest
girlhood. Her character confirms the con-
tention that our chief concern with the
past is not what we have done, nor the ad-
ventures we have met, but the moral re-
action of bygone events within ourselves.
As an orphaned child she had been cared
for by two aunts who owned between
them a little shop which pretended to
be a tailoring establishment, but which
in reality was a distributing centre for
home work among the Italian women and
newly immigrated Russian Jews living in
the neighborhood. Her aunts, because
they were Americans, superior in education
and resources to the humble home workers,
by dint of much bargaining both with the
wholesale houses from which they pro-
cured the garments, and with the foreign
women to whom they distributed them,
had been able to secure a very good com-
102 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
mission. For many years they had made
a comfortable living, and in addition had
acquired an exalted social position in the
neighborhood, for they were much looked
up to by those so dependent upon them
for work.
Although my friend was expected to
help in the shop as much as possible,
she was sent regularly to school and had
already "graduated from the eighth grade,"
when a law was passed in the Illinois
legislature, popularly known as the Anti
Sweat-shop Law, which, within a year,
had ruined her aunts' business. After
they had been fined in court for violating
the law, a case which obtained much pub-
licity because smallpox was discovered in
two of the tenement houses in which the
home finishers were living, the aunts were
convinced that they could not continue to
give out work to the Italian and Rus-
sian Jewish women. Reluctantly foregoing
their commissions they then tried crowd-
ing their own house and shop with workers,
only to be again taken into court and
fined when the inspector discovered their
INTEGRATING INDUSTRY 103
kitchen and bedrooms full of half-finished
garments. They both flatly refused to go
into a factory to work, and after a futile
attempt to revive the tailoring business,
never very genuine, they were finally re-
duced to the dimensions of the tiny shop it-
self, which, under the new regulations as to
light and air could accommodate but three
people. My friend was at once taken from
school and made one of these ill-paid work-
ers and the little household was held to-
gether on the pittance the three could
earn.
It was but natural, perhaps, that as these
displaced proprietors became poorer they
should ever grow more bitter against the
reformers and the Trades Unionists who,
between them, had secured the "high-
brow" legislation which had destroyed
their honest business.
The niece was married at eighteen to a
clerk in a neighboring department store
who worked four evenings a week and every
other Sunday in his determination to get
on. The bride moved into a more pros-
perous neighborhood and I saw little of
104 LONG ROAD OF WOMAN'S MEMORY
her husband or herself for ten years, during
which time they made four payments on
the little house they occupied fully three
miles from the now abandoned sweat-shop.
Her husband worked hard with a consuming
desire to rear his children in good sur-
roundings as much as possible unlike the
slums, as he somewhat brutally designated
the neighborhood of his own youth.
Through his unrelieved years in the cheap
department store
