"It isn't the difference between a bookkeeper and a house- keeper that must be considered; it is the difference between an organized business world that needs bookkeeping and an unor- ganized world of separate families with no higher work than to eat, sleep and keep alive."
Then she saw me grin and begged pardon, cheerfully. "I might have known you were wiser than that, Van. But, oh, the people I've been talking to! The questions they ask and the comments they make! Fortunately we do not have to wait for universal conviction before moving onward."
"If you could have your way with the women of this country and the others what would you make them do ?' I asked.
She set her chin in her hand and meditated a little. "What they are doing, only more of it, for one thing," she answered presently, "but, oh, so much more! Of course they have to be taught differently, they need new standards, new hopes, new ideals, new purposes. That's the real field of work, you see, Van, in the mind. That is what was so confusing to me at first. You see the difference in looks between your women and our women is as one to a thousand compared to the differences between their mental content.
"Your conditions are so good, the real ones, I mean, the sup- plies, the materials, the abilities you have, that at first I under- rated the difficulties. Inside you are not as advanced as out- side, men or women. You have such antique minds! I never get used to it. You see we, ever so long ago, caught up with our conditions; and now we are always planning better ones. Our minds are ahead of our conditions^—and yet we live pretty comfortably."
"And how are our women going to catch up?"
"They have to make a long jump, from the patriarchal status to the democratic, from the narrowest personal ties to the widest social relation, from first hand labor, mere private ser- vice of bodily needs, to the specialized, organized social ser- vice of the whole community. At present this is going on, in ac- tual fact, without their realizing it, without their understanding and accepting it. It is the mind that needs changing."
"I suppose it seems a trifling matter to you to change the working machinery of twenty million homes—that's what it amounts to—doesn't it ?"
"How long does it take to do up twenty million women's hair ?" she inquired. "No longer than it does one—if they all do it at once. Numbers don't complicate a question like this. What could be done in one tiny village could be done all over the country in the same time. I suppose I do underestimate the practical difficulties here on account of our having settled all those little problems. The idea of your still not being properly fed ! —I can't get used to it."
Then I remembered the uniform excellence of food in Her- land; not only all that we ourselves had enjoyed, but that I never saw in any shop or market any wilted, withered, stale or in any way inferior supplies.
"How did you manage that?" I asked her. "Did you confiscate all the damaged things? Was there a penalty for selling them?"
"Does one of your housekeepers confiscate her damaged food ? Is there any penalty for feeding her family with it?"
"Oh, I see. You only provided enough to keep fresh." "Exactly. I tell you numbers don't make any difference. A mil-
lion people do not eat any more—apiece—than a dozen at one table. We feed our people as carefully and as competently as you try to feed your families. You can't do as well because of the inferiority of materials."
This I found somewhat offensive, but I knew it was true.
"It's so simple !" she said wearily. "A child could see it. Food is to eat, and if it is not good to eat it is not food. Here you people use food as a thing to play with, to buy and sell, to store up, to throw away, with no more regard for its real purpose than——"
"Than the swine with pearls before him," I suggested. "But you know those economic laws come in——"
She laughed outright.
"Van, dear, there is nothing in all your pitiful tangled life more absurd than what you so solemnly call 'economics.' Good ecenomics in regard to food is surely this: to produce the best quality, in sufficient quantity, with the least expenditure of labor, and to distribute it the most rapidly and freshly to the people who need it."
"The management of food in your world is perhaps the most inexplicably foolish of anything you do. I've been up and down the streets in your cities observing. I've been in the hotels and restaurants far and wide and in ever so many homes. And I confess, Van, with some mortification, that there is no one thing I'm more homesick for than food."
"I am getting discouraged, if you are not, Ellador. As com- pared with a rational country like yours, this is rather a mess. And it looks so hopeless. I suppose it will take a thousand years to catch up."
"You could do it in three generations," she calmly replied. "Three generations! That's barely a century."
"I know it. The whole outside part of it you could do inside of twenty years; it is the people who will take three generations to remake. You could improve this stock, say, 5 per cent. in one, 15 in two and 80 per cent. in three. Perhaps faster."
"Are not you rather sanguine, my dear girl?"
"I don't think so," she answered gravely. "People are not bad now; they are only weighed down with all this falsehood and foolishness in their heads. There is always the big lifting force of life to push you on as fast as you will let it. There is the wide surrounding help of conditions, such conditions as you even now know how to arrange. And there is the power of educa- tion—which you have hardly tried. With these all together and with proper care in breeding you could fill the world with glori- ous people—soon. Oh, I wish you'd do it! I wish you'd do it!"
It was hard on her. Harder even than I had foreseen. Not only the war horrors, not only the miseries of more backward nations and of our painful past, but even in my America where I had fondly thought she would be happy, the common arrange- ments of our lives to which we are so patiently accustomed, were to her a constant annoyance and distress.
Through her eyes I saw it newly and instead of the breezy pride I used to feel in my young nation I now began to get an unceasing sense of what she had called "an idiot child."
It was so simply true, what she said about food. Food is to eat. All its transporting and preserving and storing and selling—if it interferes with the eating value of the food—is foolishness. I began to see the man who stores eggs until they are reduced to the grade called "rots and spots" as an idiot and a malicious idiot at that. Vivid and clear rose in my mind the garden-circled cities of Herland, where for each group of in- habitants all fresh fruits and vegetables were raised so near that they could be eaten the day they were picked. It did not cost any more. It cost less, saving transportation. Supplies that would keep they kept—enough from season to season, with some emergency reserves; but not one person, young or old, ever had to eat such things as we pay extortionately for in every city.
Nothing but women, only mothers, but they had worked out to smooth perfection what now began to seem to me to be the basic problem in human life.
How to make the best kind of people and how to keep them at their best and growing better—surely that is what we are here for.
Chapter 12
AS I look over my mass of notes, of hastily jotted down or wholly reconstructed conversations, and some of Ellador's vo- luminous papers, I am distressingly conscious of the shortcom- ings of this book. There is no time now to improve it, and I wish to publish it, as a little better than no report at all of the long visit of my wife from Herland to the world we know.
In time I hope, if I live, and if I come back again, to make a far more competent study than this. Yet why trouble myself to do that? She will do it, I am sure, with the help of her friends and sisters, far better than I could.
I had hoped that she could go blazing about our world, lec- turing on the wonders and beauties of Herland, but that was all dropped when they decided not to betray their strange geo- graphical secret—yet. I am allowed to print the previous ac- count of our visit there—even that will set explorers on their track; but she did not wish to answer specific questions while here, nor to refuse to answer.
They were quite right. The more I see of our world, the surer I am that they are right to try to preserve their lovely country as it is, for a while at least.
Ellador begs that I explain how inchoate, how fragmentary, how disproportionate, her impressions necessarily were.
"The longer I stay," she said, "the more I learn of your past ard understand of your present, the more hopeful I feel for you. Please make that very clear." This she urged strongly.
The war did not discourage her, after a while. "What is one more—among so many?" she asked, with a wry smile. "The very awfulness of this is its best hope; that, and the growing wisdom of the people. You'll have no more, I'm sure; that is, no more except those recognized as criminal outbreaks, and pun- itive ones; the receding waves of force as these turbulent cross-currents die down and disappear.
"But, Van, dear, whatever else you leave out, be sure to make it as strong as you can about the women and children."
"Perhaps you'd better say it yourself, my dear. Come, you put in a chapter," I urged. But she would not.
"I should be too abusive, I'm afraid," she objected; "and I've talked enough on the subject—you know that."
She had, by this time, gone over it pretty thoroughly. And it is not very difficult to give the drift of it—we all know the facts. Her position, as a Herlander, was naturally the maternal one.
"The business of people is, of course, to be well, happy, wise, beautiful, productive and progressive."
"Why don't you say 'good,' too," I suggested.
"Don't be absurd, Van. If people are well and happy, wise, beautiful, productive and progressive, they must incidentally be good; that's being good. What sort of goodness is it which does not produce those effects ? Well, these 'good' people need a 'good' world to live in, and they have to make it; a clean, safe, comfortable world to grow in.
"Then, since they all begin as children, it seems so self-evid- ent that the way to make better people and a better world is to teach the children how."
"You'll find general agreement so far," I admitted.
"But the people who train children are, with you, the moth- ers," she pursued, "and the mothers of your world have not yet seen this simple truth."
"They talk of nothing else," I suggested. "They are always talking of the wonderful power and beauty of motherhood, from the most ancient morality to Ellen Key."
"Yes, I know they talk about it. Their idea of motherhood, to what it ought to be, is like a birchbark canoe to an ocean steamship, Van. They haven't seen it as a whole—that's the trouble. What prevents them is their dwarfed condition, not be- ing people, real, world-building people; and what keeps them dwarfed is this amazing relic of the remote past— their do- mestic position."
"Would you 'destroy the home,' as they call it, Ellador?"
"I think the home is the very loveliest thing you have on earth," she unexpectedly replied.
"What do you mean, then?" I asked, genuinely puzzled. "You can't have homes without women in them, can you? And children?"
"And men," she gravely added. "Why, Van—do not men have homes, and love them dearly? A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman ?"
Then she made clear to me, quite briefly, how the home should be to the woman just what it was to a man, and far more to both, in beauty and comfort, in privacy and peace, in all the pleasant rest and dear companionship we so prize; but that it should not be to him a grinding weight of care and ex- pense, or an expression of pride; nor to her a workshop or her sole means of personal expression.
"It is so pathetic," she said, "and so unutterably absurd, to see great city-size and world-size women trying to content themselves and express themselves in one house; or worse, one flat. You know how it would be for a man, surely. It is just as ridiculous for a woman And your city-size and world-size men are all tied up to these house-size women. It's so funny, Van, so painfully' funny, like a horse harnessed with an eohippus."
"We haven't got to wait for Mrs. Eohippus to catch up to Mr. Horse, I hope ?"
"You won't have to wait long," she assured me. "They are born equal, your boys and girls; they have to be. It is the tre- mendous difference in cultural conditions that divides them; not only in infancy and youth; not only in dress and training; but in this wide gulf of industrial distinction, this permanent di- vision which leaves one sex free to rise, to develop every social power and quality, and forcibly restrains the other to a labor- level thousands of years behind. It is beginning to change, I can see that now, but it has to be complete, universal, before women can do their duty as mothers."
"But I thought— at least I've always heard—that it was their duty as mothers which kept them at home."
She waved this aside, with a touch of impatience. "Look at the children," she said; "that's enough. Look at these girls who do not even know enough about motherhood to demand a healthy father. Why, a—a—sheep would know better than to mate with such creatures as some of your women marry.
"They are only just beginning to learn that there are such diseases as they have been suffering and dying from for all these centuries. And they are so poor) They haven't any money, most of them; they are so disorganized—unorganized— appar- ently unconscious of any need of organization."
I mentioned the growth of trade unions, but she said that was but a tiny step —useful, but small; what she meant was Mother Union. . . .
"I suppose it is sex," she pursued, soberly. "With us, mother- hood is so simple. I had supposed, at first, that your bi-sexual method would mean a better motherhood, a motherhood of two, so to speak. And I find that men have so enjoyed their little part of the work that they have grown to imagine it as quite a separate thing, and to talk about 'sex' as if it was wholly distinct from parentage. Why, see what I found the oth- er day"—and she pulled out a copy of a little yellow medical magazine, published by a physician who specializes in sex dis- eases, and read me a note this doctor had written on "Steriliza- tion," wherein he said that it had no injurious effect on sex.
