Sociology reading Precis

THIRD EDITION

• OCia eor

The Multicultural and Classic Readings

edited with commentaries by

Charles lemert WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

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162 William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) DuBois (1903)

which do not. The former have a warmth and intimacy about them of which the latter are completely devoid, being merely conceived, in a cold and foreign fashion , and not appearing as blood-relatives, bringing their greetings to us from out of the past.

· Now this consciousness of personal sameness may be treated either as a subjective phenomenon or as an objective deliverance, as a feeling, or as a truth. We may ex- plain how one bit of thought can come to judge other bits to belong to the same Ego with itself; or we may criticise its judgment and decide how far it may tally with the nature of things.

As a mere subjective phenomenon the judgment presents no difficulty or mystery peculiar to itself. It belongs to the great class of judgments of sameness; and there is nothing more remarkable in making a judgment of sameness in the first person than in the second or the third. The intellectual operations seem essentially alike, whether I say "I ·am the same;' or whether I say "the pen is the same, as yesterday." It is as easy to think this as to think the opposite and say "neither I nor the pen is the same."

This sort of bringing of things together into the object of a single judgment is of course essential to all thinking. The things are conjoined in the thought, whatever may be the relation, in which they appear to the thought. The thinking them is think- ing them together, even if only with the result of judging that they do not belong to- gether. This sort of subjective synthesis, essential to knowledge as such (whenever it has a complex object), must not be confounded with objective synthesis or union in- stead of difference or disconnection, known among the things. The subjective syn- thesis is involved in thought's mere existence. Even a really disconnected world could only be known to be such by having its parts temporarily united in the Object of some pulse of consciousness.

The sense of personal identity is not, then, this mere synthetic form essential to all · thought. It is the sense of a sameness perceived by thought and predicated of things thought-about. These things are a present self and a self of yesterday. The thought not only thinks them both, but thinks that they are identical. The psychologist, look- ing on and playing the critic, might prove the thought wrong, and show there was no real identity,-there might have been no yesterday, or, at any rate, no self of yes- terday; or, if there were, the sameness predicated might not obtain, or might be predicated on insufficient grounds. In either case the personal identity would not exist as a fact; but it would exist as a feeling all the same; the consciousness of it by the thought would be there, and the psychologist would still have to analyze that, and show where its illusoriness lay. Let us now be the psychologist and see whether it be right or wrong when it says, I am the same self that I was yesterday. •!•

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois (1868-1963) was born and grew. up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he experienced racial discrimination only obliquely. Yet he came to be the greatest American social theorist of race. Nearly every event in the history of race in America, from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement, was influenced by his ideas or his political actions. In his youth, Du Bois studied at Fisk University, then attended Harvard, where he received his Ph.D. in 1895 after two years of study in Germany. Early in his scholarly career, he single- handedly completed the first major, and still important, empirical sociological study of Negro life in the United States, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). But until recently, he was largely ignored official sociology. Eventually, his work moved beyond so-

Double-Consciousness and the Veil 163

cial science into history, fiction, and essays. A chapter in his Souls of Black Folk (1903) sparked his battle with Booker T. Washington, then the dominant spokesman for Ne- gro Americans. Du Bois organized the Niagara Movement (1905-191 0) in opposi- tion to Washington, who opposed the higher education of Blacks in favor of indus- trial training. From it came the NAACP, with which he was associated during much of the rest of his active life. In the 1920s, he was locked in controversy with Marcus Garvey over their differing views of Pan-Africanism. Though Du Bois's roots were in America, he was a leader in the world Pan-African movement, and in his last years, he was honored in China, the USSR, Africa, and Europe. In 1961, then ninety-three years old, Du Bois moved to Ghana to begin work on the Encyclopedia Africana. He died on the eve of the civil rights march on Washington, D. C.-August 27, 1963.

"Double-Consciousness and the Veil" is the opening chapter of Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois used poetry, autobiography, and history to make strong theoretical points. His concept of twoness, or double-consciousness, has been an enduring force in African-American social and literary theory. The book's title is meant pre- cisely-two souls, one self. Du Bois's literary method reflected his theory, as in his practice of composing epigraphs that juxtaposed the classic literature of the West and unmarked bars of music from the American black tradition. "The Spirit of Mod- ern Europe," published only recently, was the title of an address given in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1900, shortly after Du Bois returned from London, where he had orga- nized and led the first international Pan-African conference. This is a clear example of what today might be called a multicultural social theory. Du Bois understated his attack on Europe's narrow cultural logic in order to define the global interests (and responsibilities) of the civilizations of Africa and other societies across the world.

Double-Consciousness and the Veil W.E.B. DuBois (1903)

0 water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, All night long crying with a mournful cry, As I lie and listen, and cannot understand The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea, 0 water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I? Ail night long the water is crying to me. Unresting water, there shall never be rest Till the last moon droop and the last tide fail, And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west; And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, All life long crying without avail, As the water all night long is crying to me.

-Arthur Symons

j I b n J IJ J 1 1: 4 I t: I 1 3 Excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989 [1903]), pp. 1-9.

164 William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) DuBois (1903)

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange exp'erience,-peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rolliCking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds be- tween Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards-ten cents a package-and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, re- · fused my card,-refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different. from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had there- after no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in com- mon contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,-some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry. Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night 'who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,-a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar . sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,-an American, a Ne- gro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,-this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that

Double-Consciousness and the Veil 165

Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dis- persed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of sin- gle black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. and yet it is not weakness,-it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan-on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde-could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge of his people needed was a twice- told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul- beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two un- reconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,-has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain-Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he im- plored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,-suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences:-

"Shout, 0 children! Shout, you're free! For God has bought your liberty!"

Years have passed away since then,-ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accus- tomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem:-

166 William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) DuBois (1903)

"Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble!"

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,-a dis- appointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,-like a tantalizing will-o' -the- wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the ter.rors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfran- chised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,-a powerful move- ment, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of"book-learning"; the curiosity, born of com- pulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the moun- tain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithf1,1lly, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and. there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,-darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mis- sion. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half- named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,-not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and

Double-Consciousness and the Veil 167

awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his bur- den all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of sys- tematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corrup- tion from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteous- ness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well- nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and sys- tematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,-before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.

But the facing of so vast a prejudice' could not but bring the inevitable self- questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany re- pression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and por- tents came borne upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must al- ways cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half- men? Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud,-and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,-the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social re- sponsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.

So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past,-physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,-all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,-all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incqmplete,-the dreams of a credu- lous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,-the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self- defence,-else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long- sought, we still seek,-the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,-all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striv- ing toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and

168 Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Re- public, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not alto- gether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true Ameri- can music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of sim- ple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but deter- mined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro · Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity. •:•

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is best known today for The Yellow Wallpa- per (1892), the fictionalized account of her nervous breakdown, which was most acute in the two years following April188'6. At that time, she was married to Charles Walter Stetson, who colluded in a treatment plan that called for her to withdraw from all intellectual labors. Charlotte eventually worked her way out of the illness by resuming her intellectual life. After her first marriage ended more or less amicably, she moved to California, where she rebuilt a life with her daughter. In these years, she earned her livelihood in part through public lectures. Her feminism was undoubtedly shaped by these early experiences. While living the life of a public in- tellectual, reformer, and feminist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote important schol- arly works (including publications in academic journals such as the America.n journal of Sociology) . Her principal writings in social theory developed a sophisticated femi- nist interpretation of the effects and relations among economic life, the family, and gender roles. Women and Economics (1898) was widely read in its day. Other books, along with scholarly articles, brought her a degree of recognition from the literary and academic establishment; these include The Home (1903) and Human Work (1904). For seven years, beg inning in 1909, she organized, edited, and wrote every word (including advertising copy) for Forerunner, a monthly magazine. By her own estimate, the total words involved equaled that of four major books each year. Her literary output-scholarly works, essays, lectures, fiction-was prodigious. After the Forerunner years, Gilman's influence lessened. Yet she continued to write and live with purpose and courage-after 1922, in Norwich, Connecticut. She took her own life in 1935, saying, "I have preferred chloroform to cancer."

The selection from The Yellow Wallpaper illustrates Gilman's ability to use fiction to rivet the reader's attention on what amounts to an implicit social theory of gender relations. Her utopian novel, Her/and (1915), extends this method into a more com- plete feminist statement. The "Women and Economics" selection stands up well against more recent analyses of the family wage system and "second-shift" labor de- mands, whereby a society's economic interests are served at a cost to women .

Th e Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

169

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house and reach the height of romantic felicity-but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted? John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror

of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures .

John is a physician, and perhaps-(! would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)-perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.

You see, he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and rela-

tives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depres- sion-a slight hysterical tendency-what is one to do?

My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing.

So I take phosphates or phosphites-whichever it is-and tonics, and air and ex- ercise, and journeys, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.

Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do

me good. · But what is one to do? I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal-

having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition. I sometimes fancy that in my condition, if I had less opposition and more society

and stimulus-but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my con- dition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.

So I will let it alone and talk about the house. The most beautiful place! It is quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite

three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people.

There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden-large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them.

There were greenhouses, but they are all broken now. There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about the heirs and co-heirs;

anyhow, the place has been empty for years. That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid, but I don't care-there is something

strange about the house-I can feel it.

Excerpt from Ann J. Lane, ed., The Cha rlotte Perkins Gilman Reader: "The Yellow Wallpap er" and Other Fiction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 3-,5.

170 Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1898 )

I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the window.

I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sen- sitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

But John says if I feel so I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to con- trol myself-before him, at least, and that makes me very tired.

I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened onto the piazza and had roses all over the window, and sucij pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! But John would not hear of it.

He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a schedule prescription for each hour in the day; he takes all care from me,

and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more. He said he came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all

the air I could get. "Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear;' said he, "and your food somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time." So we took the nursery at the top of the house.

It is a big, airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways, and air and sunshine galore. It was nursery first, and then playroom and gymnasium, I should judge, for the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.

The paint and paper look as if a boys' school had used it. It is stripped off-the paper-in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough constantly to irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide-plunge off at outrageous angles, de- stroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.

The color is repellant, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others. ·

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

There comes John, and I must put this 'away-he hates to have me write a word. •!•

Women and Economics Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1898) The economic status of the human race in any nation, at any time, is governed mainly by the activities of the male: the female obtains her share in the racial ad- vance only through him.

Studied individually, the facts are even more plainly visible, more open and famil- iar. From the day laborer to the millionaire, the wife's worn dress or flashing jewels,

Excerpt from Women and Economics (New York: Source Book Press, 1970 [Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898]), pp. 9-21.

Women and Economics 171

her low roof or her lordly one, her weary feet or her rich equipage,-these speak of the economic ability of the husband. The comfort, the luxury, the necessities of life itself, which the woman receives, are obtained by the husband, and given her by him. And, when the woman, left alone with no man to "support" her, tries to meet her own economic necessities, the difficulties which confront her prove conclusively what the general economic status of the woman is. None can deny these patent facts,-that the economic status of women generally depends upon that of men generally, and that the economic status of women individually depends upon that of men individually, those men to whom they are related. But we are instantly con- fronted by the commonly received opinion that, although it must be admitted that men make and distribute the wealth of the world, yet women earn their share of it as wives. This assumes either that the husband is in the position of employer and the wife as employee, or that marriage is a "partnership;' and the wife an equal factor with the husband in producing wealth.

Economic independence is a relative condition at best. In the broadest sense, all living things are economically dependent upon others,-the animals upon the veg- etables, and man upon both. In a narrower sense, all social life is economically inter- dependent, man producing collectively what he could by no possibility produce sep- arately. But, in the closest interpretation, individual economic independence among human beings means that the individual pays for what he gets, works for what he gets, gives to the other an equivalent for what the other gives him. I depend on the shoemaker for shoes, and the tailor for coats; but, if I give the shoemaker and the tai- lor enough of my own labor as a house-builder to pay for the shoes and coats they give me, I retain my personal independence. I have not taken of their product, and given nothing of mine. As long as what I get is obtained by what I give, I am eco- nomically independent.

Women consume economic goods. What economic product do they give in ex- change for what they consume? The claim that marriage is a partnership, in which the two persons married produce wealth which neither of them, separately, could produce, will not bear examination. A man happy and comfortable can produce more than one unhappy and uncomfortable, but this is as true of a father or son as of a husband. To take from a man any of the conditions which make him happy and strong is to cripple his industry, generally speaking. But those relatives who make him happy are not therefore his business partners, and entitled to share his income.

Grateful return for happiness conferred is not the method of exchange in a part- nership. The comfort a man takes with his wife is not in the nature of a business partnership, nor are her frugality and industry. A housekeeper, in her place, might be as frugal, as industrious, but would not therefore be a partner. Man and wife are partners truly in their mutual obligation to their children,-their common love, duty, and service. But a manufacturer who marries, or a doctor, or a lawyer, does not take a partner in his business, when he takes a partner in parenthood, unless his wife is also a manufacturer, a doctor, or a lawyer. In his business, she cannot even advise wisely without training and experience. To. love her husband, the composer, does not enable her to compose; and the loss of a man's wife, though it may break his heart, does not cripple his business, unless his mind is affected by grief. She is in no sense a business partner, unless she contributes capital or experience or labor, as a man would in like relation. Most men would hesitate very seriously before entering a business partnership with any woman, wife or not.

If the wife is not, then, truly a business partner, in what way does she earn from her husband the food, clothing, and sheiter she receives at his hands? By service, it

172 Charlotte Perkins Gilman ( 1898)

will be instantly replied. This is the general misty idea upon the subject,-that women earn all they get, and more, by house service. Here we come to a very practical and definite economic ground. Although not producers of wealth, women serve in the final processes of preparation and distribution. Their labor in the household has a genuine economic value.

For a certain percentage of persons to serve other persons, in order that the ones so served may produce more, is a contribution not to be overlooked. The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to.produce more wealth than they oth- erwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses. The labor of horses enables men to produce more wealth than they other- wise could. The horse is an economic factor in society. But the horse is not econom- ically independent, nor is the woman. If a man plus a valet can perform more useful service than he could minus a valet, then the valet is performing useful service. But, if the valet is the property of the man, is obliged to perform this service, and is not paid for it, he is not economically independent.

The labor which the wife performs in the household is given as part of her func- tional duty, not as employment. The wife of the poor man, who works hard in a small house, doing all the work for the family, or the wife of the rich man, who wisely and gracefully manages a large house and administers its functions, each is entitled to fair pay for services rendered.

To take this ground and hold it honestly, wives, as earners through domestic ser- vice, are entitled to the wages of cooks, housemaids, nursemaids, seamstresses, or housekeepers, and to no more. This would of course reduce the spending money of the wives of the rich, and put it out of the power of the poor man to "support" a wife at all, unless, indeed, the poor man faced the situation fully, paid his wife her wages as house servant, and then she and he combined their funds in the support of their children. He would be keeping a servant: she would be helping keep the family. But nowhere on earth would there be "a rich woman" by these means. Even the highest class of private housekeeper, useful as her services are, does not accumulate a for- tune. She does not buy diamonds and sables and keep a carriage.

But the salient fact in this discussion is that, whatever the economic value of the domestic industry of women is, they do not get it. The women who do the most work get the least money, the women who have the most money do the least work. Their labor is neither given nor taken as a factor in economic exchange. It is held to be their duty as women to do this work; and their economic status bears no relation to their domestic labors, unless an inverse one. Moreover, if they were thus fairly paid,-given what they earned, and no more,-all women working in this way would be reduced to the economic status of the house servant. Few women-or men either-care to face this condition. The ground that women their living by domestic labor is instantly forsaken, and we are told that they obtain their livelihood as mothers. This is a peculiar position. We speak of it commonly enough, and often with deep feeling, but without due analysis.

In treating of an economic exchange, asking what return in goods or labor women make for the goods and labor given them,-either to the race collectively or to their husbands individually,-what payment women make for their clothes and shoes and furniture and food and shelter, we are told that the duties and services of the mother entitle her to support.

If this is so, if motherhood is an exchangeable commodity given by women in payment for clothes and food, then we must of course find some relation between

Women and Economics 173

the quantity or quality of the motherhood and the quantity and quality of the pay. This being true, then the women who are not mothers have no economic status at all; and the economic status of those who are must be shown to be relative to their motherhood. This is obviously absurd. The childless wife has as much money as the mother of many,-more; for the children of the latter consume what would other- wise'be hers; and the inefficient mother is no less provided for than the efficient one. Visibly, and upon the face of it, women are not maintained in economic prosperity proportioned to their motherhood. Motherhood bears no relation to their eco- nomic status. Among primitive races, it is true,-in the patriarchal period, for in- stance,-there was some truth in this position. Women being of no value whatever save as bearers of children, their favor and indulgence did bear direct relation to ma- ternity; and they had reason to exult on more grounds than one when they could boast a son. To-day, however, the maintenance of the woman is not conditioned upon this. A man is not allowed to discard his wife because she is barren. The claim of motherhood as a factor in economic exchange is false to-day. But suppose it were true. Are we willing to hold this ground, even in theory? Are we willing to consider motherhood as a business, a form of commercial exchange? Are the cares and duties of the mother, her travail and her love, commodities to be exchanged for bread?

It is revolting so to consider them; and, if we dare face our own thoughts, and force them to their logical conclusion, we shall see that nothing could be more re- pugnant to human feeling, or more socially and individually injurious, than to make motherhood a trade. Driven off these alleged grounds of women's economic inde- pendence; shown that women, as a class, neither produce nor distribute wealth; that women, as individuals, labor mainly as house servants, are not paid as such, and would not be satisfied with such an economic status if they were so paid; that wives are not business partners or co-producers of wealth with their husbands, unless they actually practise the same profession; that they are not salaried as mothers, and that it would be unspeakably degrading if they were,-what remains to those who deny that women are supported by men? This (and a most amusing position it is),-that the function of maternity unfits a woman for economic production, and, therefore, it is right that she should be supported by her husband.

The ground is taken that the human female is not economically independent, that she is fed by the male of her species. In denial of this, it is first alleged that she is eco- nomically independent,-that she does support herself by her own industry in the house. It being shown that there is no relation between the economic status of woman and the labor she performs in the home, it is then alleged that not as house servant, but as mother, does woman earn her living. It being shown that the economic status of woman bears no relation to her motherhood, either in quantity or quality, it is then al- leged that motherhood renders a woman unfit for economic production, and that, therefore, it is right that she be supported by her husband. Before going farther, let us seize upon this admission,-that she is supported by her husband.

Without going into either the ethics or the necessities of the case, we have reached so much common ground: the female of genus homo is supported by the male. Whereas, in other species of animals, male and female alike graze and browse, hunt and kill, climb, swim, dig, run, and fly for their livings, in our species the female does not seek her own living in the specific activities of our race, but is fed by the male.

Now as to the alleged necessity. Because of her maternal duties, the human female is said to be unable to get her own living. As the maternal duties of other females do not unfit theni for getting their own living and also the livings of their young, it

174 Anna Julia Cooper (1892)

would seem that the human maternal duties require the segregation of the entire en- ergies of the mother to the service of the child during her entire adult life, or so large a proportion of them that not enough remains to devote to the individual interests of the mother.

Such a condition, did it exist, would of course excuse and justify the pitiful depen- dence of the human female, and her support by the male. As the queen bee, modi- fied entirely to maternity, is supported, not by the male, to be sure, but by her co- workers, the "old maids;' the barren working bees, who labor so patiently and lovingly in their branch of the maternal duties of the hive, so would the human fe- male, modified entirely to maternity, become unfit for any other exertion, and a helpless dependant.

Is this the condition of human motherhood? Does the human mother, by her motherhood, thereby lose control of brain and body, lose power and skill and desire for any other work? Do we see before us the human race, with all its females segre- gated entirely to the uses of motherhood, consecrated, set apart, specially developed, spending every power of their nature on the service of their children?

We do not. We see the human mother worked far harder than a mare, laboring her life long in the service, not of her children only, but of men; husbands, brothers, fathers, whatever male relatives she has; for mother and sister also; for the church a little, if she is allowed; for society, if she is able; for charity and education and re- form,-working in many ways that are not the ways of motherhood.

It is not motherhood that keeps the housewife on her feet from dawn till dark; it is house service, not child service. Women work longer and harder than most men, and not solely in maternal duties. The savage mother carries the burdens, and does all menial service for the tribe. The peasant mother toils in the fields, and the work- ingman's wife in the home. Many mothers, even now, are wage-earners for the fam- ily, as well as bearers and rearers of it. And the women who are not so occupied, the women who belong to rich men,-here perhaps is the exhaustive devotion to mater- nity which is supposed to justify an admitted economic dependence. But we do not find it even among these . Women of ease and wealth provide for their children bet- ter care than the poor woman can; but they do not spend more time upon it them- selves, nor more care and effort. They have other occupation.

In spite of her supposed segregation to maternal duties, the human female, the world over, works at extra-maternal duties for hours enough to provide her with an independent living, and then is denied independence on the ground that mother- hood prevents her working!•:•

Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) was born in North Carolina, the daughter of Han- nah Stanley Haywood, a slave, and her owner. After being widowed as a young woman, Cooper attended Oberlin College, where she was a classmate of Mary Church Terrell, another important black fem inist of the classic age . Most of her ca- reer was devoted to teaching, principally at Washington, D.C.'s M Street School. She served the students at M Street off and on from 1887 unti l her retirement. In 1906, she was forced out of her position as principal of M Street by agents of Booker T. Washington, who favored industrial training over classical education for blacks. Cooper, who had helped students gain admission to the best universities, was con- sidered too similar in her views to Washington's chief opponent, W.E.B. Du Bois.

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The Colored Woman's Office 175

Anna julia Cooper's A Voice from the South (1892) was her most important book. Yet after returning to M Street in 1910, she lived a life of varied accomplishments as writer, lecturer, settlement house founder, adoptive mother of five children (at age fifty-seven), scholar (she received her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne at age sixty-seven), translator, and college president. Today, she is recognized as a major figure in the tra- dition of Black feminist social theory. She died in Washington, D.C., in 1964, having lived from the days of slavery and emancipation to the modern civil rights movement.

"The Colored Women's Office" represents Cooper's principal contribution to Black feminist social theory. In these selections from A Voice from the South, she ar- gues that moral progress depends on the only person able to understand the deep connections of race and gender in America-the black woman .

The Colored Woman's Office Anna Julia Cooper ( 1892) Now the fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point of its progress upward, must be the black woman.

With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the debase- ment, the moral thralldom of her present, the black woman of to-day starids mute and wondering at the Herculean task devolving upon her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever. She must be loosed from her bands and set to work.

Our meager and superficial results from past efforts prove their futility; and every attempt to elevate the Negro, whether undertaken by himself or through the philan- thropy of others, cannot but prove abortive unless so directed as to utilize the indis- pensable agency of an elevated and trained womanhood.

A rilce cannot be purified .from without. Preachers and teachers are helps, and stimu- lants and conditions as necessary as the gracious rain and sunshine are to plant growth. But what are rain and dew and sunshine and cloud if there be no life in the plant germ? We must go to the root and see that that is sound and healthy and vigorous; and not de- ceive ourselves with waxen flowers and painted leaves of mock chlorophyll.

We too often mistake individuals' honor for race development and so are ready to substitute pretty accomplishments for sound sense and earnest purpose.

A stream cannot rise higher than its source. The atmosphere of homes is no rarer and purer and sweeter than are the mothers in those homes. A race is but a total of families . The nation is the aggregate of its homes. As the whole is sum of all its parts, so the character of the parts will determine the characteristics of the whole. These are all axioms and so evident that it seems gratuitous to remark it; and yet, unless I am greatly mistaken, most of the unsatisfaction from our past results arises from just such a radical and palpable error, as much almost on our part as on that of our benevolent white friends.

The Negro is constitutionally hopeful and proverbially irrepressible; and naturally stands in danger of being dazzled by the shimmer and tinsel of superficials. We often mistake foliage for fruit and overestimate or wrongly estimate brilliant results.

Excerpt from A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1892 ]) , pp. 28-31, 94-101, 134-135, 140-145:

176 Anna]ulia Cooper (1892 )

The late Martin R. Delany, who was an unadulterated black man, used to say when honors of state fell upon him, that when he entered the council of kings the black race entered with him; meaning, I suppose, that there was no discounting his race identity and attributing his achievements to some admixture of Saxon blood. But our present record of eminent men, when placed beside the actual status of the race in America to-day, proves that no man can represent the race. Whatever the at- tainments of the individual may be, unless his home has moved on pari passu, he can never be regarded as identical with or representative of the whole.

Not by pointing to sun-bathed mountain tops do we prove that Phoebus warms the valleys. We must point to homes, average homes, homes of the rank and file of horny handed toiling men and women of the South (where the masses are) lighted and cheered by the good, the beautiful, and the true,-then and not till then will the whole plateau be lifted into the sunlight.

Only the Black Woman can say "when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patron- age, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me." Is it not evident then that as individual workers for this race we must address ourselves with no half-hearted zeal to this feature of our mission. The need is felt and must be recognized by all. There is a call for workers, for missionaries, for men and women with the double consecration of a fundamental love of humanity and a desire for its melioration through the Gospel; but superadded to this we demand an intelligent and sympa- thetic comprehension of the interests and special needs of the Negro ....

I would eliminate also from the discussion all uncharitable reflections upon the or- derly execution of laws existing in certain states of this Union, requiring persons known to be colored to ride in one car, and persons supposed to be white in another. A good citizen may use his influence to have existing laws and statutes changed or modified, but a public servant must not be blamed for obeying orders. A railroad con- ductor is not asked to dictate measures, nor to make and pass laws. His bread and but- ter are conditioned on his managing his part of the machinery as he is told to do. If, therefore, I found myself in that compartment of a train designated by the sovereign law of the state for presumable Caucasians, and for colored persons only when travel- ing in the capacity of nurses and maids, should a conductor inform me, as a gentle- man might, that I had made a mistake, and offer to show me the proper car for black ladies; I might wonder at the expensive arrangements of the company and of the state in providing special and separate accommodations for the transportation of the vari- ous hues of humanity, but I certainly could not take it as a want of courtesy on the conductor's part that he gave the information. It is true, public sentiment precedes and begets all laws, good or bad; and on the ground I have taken, our women are to be credited largely as teachers and moulders of public sentiment. But when a law has passed and received the sanction of the land, there is nothing for our officials to do but enforce it till repealed; and I for one, as a loyal American citizen, will give those of- ficials cheerful support and ready sympathy in the discharge of their duty. But when a · great burly six feet of masculinity with sloping shoulders and unkempt beard swag- gers in; and, throwing a roll of tobacco into one corner of his jaw, growls out at me over the paper I am reading, "Here gurl;' (I am past thirty) "you better git out 'n dis kyar 'f yer don't, I'll put yer out;' -my mental annotation is Here's an American citizen who has been badly trained. He is sadly lacking in both "sweetness" and "light"; and when in the same section of our enlightened and progressive country, I see from the

Th e Colored Woman 's Office 177

car window, working on private estates, convicts from the state penitentiary, among them squads of boys from fourteen to eighteen years of age in a chain-gang, their feet chained together and heavy blocks attached-not in 1850, but in 1890, '91 and '92, I make a note on the flyleaf of my memorandum, The women in this section should or- ganize a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Human Beings, and disseminate civiliz- ing tracts, and send throughout the region apostles of anti-barbarism for the propagation of humane and enlightened ideas. And when farther on in the same section our train stops at a dilapidated station, rendered yet more unsightly by dozens of loafers with their hands in their pockets while a productive soil and inviting climate beckon in vain to industry; and when, looking a little more closely, I see two dingy little rooms with "FOR LADIES" swinging over one and "FOR COLORED PEOPLE" over the other; while wondering under which head I come, I notice a little way off the only ho- tel proprietor of the place whittling a pine stick as he sits with one leg thrown across an empty goods box; and as my eye falls on a sample room next door which seems to be driving the only wide-awake and popular business of the commonwealth, I cannot help ejaculating under my breath, "What a field for the/ missionary woman:' I know that if by any fatality I should be obliged to lie over at that station, and, driven by hunger, should be compelled to seek refreshments or the bare necessaries of life at the only public accommodation in the town, that same stick-whittier would coolly in- form me, without looking up from his pine splinter, "We doan ucommodate no nig- gers hyur." And yet we are so scandalized at Russia's barbarity and cruelty to the Jews! We pay a man a thousand dollars a night just to make us weep, by a recital of such heathenish inhumanity as is practiced on Sclavonic soil.

A recent writer on Eastern nations says: "If we take through the earth's temperate zone, a belt of country whose northern and southern edges are determined by cer- tain limiting isotherms, not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall find that we have included in a relatively small extent of surface almost all the nations of note in the world, past or present. Now, if we examine this belt and compare the dif- ferent parts of it with one another, we shall be struck by a remarkable fact. The peo- ples inhabiting it grow steadily more personal as we go west. So unmistakable is this gradation, that one is almost tempted to ascribe it to cosmical rather than to human causes. It is as marked as the change in color of the human complexion observable along any meridian, which ranges from black at the equator to blonde toward the pole. In like manner the sense of self grows more intense as we follow in the wake of the setting sun, and fades steadily as we advance into the dawn. America, Europe, the Levant, India, Japan, each is less personal than the one before. . . . That politeness should be one of the most marked results of impersonality may appear surprising, yet a slight examination will show it to be a fact. Considered a priori, the connection is not far to seek. Impersonality by lessening the interest in one's self, induces one to take an interest in others. Looked at a posteriori, we find that where the one trait ex- ists the other is most developed, while an absence of the second seems to prevent the full growth of the first. This is true both in general and in detail. Courtesy increases as we travel eastward round the world, coincidently with a decrease in the sense of self Asia is more courteous than Europe, Europe than America. Particular races show the same concomitance of characteristics. France, the most impersonal hation of Eu- rope, is at the same time the most polite." And by inference, Americans, the most personal, are the least courteous nation on the globe.

The Black Woman had reached this same conclusion by an entirely different route; but it is gratifying to vanity, nevertheless, to find one's self sustained by both science

178 Anna Julia Cooper (1892)

and philosophy in a conviction, wrought in by hard experience, and yet too apparently audacious to be entertained even as a stealthy surmise. In fact the Black Woman was emboldened some time since by a well put and timely article from an Editor's Drawer on the "Mannerless Sex:' to give the world the benefit of some of her experience with the "Mannerless Race"; but since Mr. Lowell shows so conclusively that the entire Land of the West is a mannerless continent, I have determined to plead with our women, the mannerless sex on this mannerless continent, to institute a reform by placing immedi- ately in our national curricula a department for teaching good manners.

Now, am I right in holding the American' Woman responsible? Is it true that the exponents of woman's advancement, the leaders in woman's thought, the preachers and teachers of all woman's reforms, can teach this nation to be courteous, to be pitiful, having compassion one of another, not rendering evil for inoffensiveness, and railing in proportion to the improbability of being struck back; but contrari- wise, being all of one mind, to love as brethren?

I think so. It may require some heroic measures, and like all revolutions will call for a deter-

mined front and a courageous, unwavering, stalwart heart on the part of the leaders of the reform. ·

The "all" will inevitably stick in the throat of the Southern woman. She must be allowed, please, to except the "darkey" from the "all"; it is too bitter a pill with black people in it. You must get the Revised Version to put it, "love all white people as brethren." She really could not enter any society on earth, or in heaven above, or in-the waters under the earth, on such unpalatable conditions.

The Black Woman has tried to understand the Southern woman's difficulties; to put herself in her place, and to be as fair, as charitable, and as free from prejudice in judging her antipathies, as she would have others in regard to her own. She has hon- estly weighed the apparently sincere excuse, "But you must remember that these people were once our slaves"; and that other, "But civility towards the Negroes will bring us on social equality with them." ...

The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this coun- try. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least as- certainable and definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is con- fronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both. While the women of the white race can with calm as- surance enter upon the work they feel by nature appointed to do, while their men give loyal support and appreciative countenance to their efforts, recognizing in most av- enues of usefulness the propriety and the need of woman's distinctive co-operation, the colored woman too often finds herself hampered and shamed by a less liberal senti- ment and a more conservative attitude on the part of those for whose opinion she cares most. That this is not universally true I am glad to admit. There are to be found both intensely conservative white men and exceedingly liberal colored men. But as far as my experience goes the average man of our race is less frequently ready to admit the actual need among the sturdier forces of the world for woman's help or influence. That great social and ecohomic questions await her interference, that she could throw any light on problems of national import, that her intermeddling could improve the management of school systems, or elevate the tone of public institutions, or humanize and sanctify the far reaching influence of prisons and reformatories and improve the treatment of lunatics and imbeciles,-that she has a word worth hearing on mooted questions in political economy, that she could contribute a suggestion on the relations of labor and

The Colored Woman's Office 179

capital, or offer a thought on honest money and honorable trade, I fear the majority of "Americans of the colored variety" are not yet prepared to concede ... .

Not unfelt, then, if unproclaimed has been the work and influence of the colored women of America. Our list of chieftains in the service, though not long, is not infe- rior in strength and excellence, I dare believe, to any similar list which this country can produce.

Among the pioneers, Frances Watkins Harper could sing with prophetic exalta- tion in the darkest days, when as yet there was not a rift in the clouds overhanging her people:

"Yes, Ethiopia shall stretch Her bleeding hands abroad; Her cry of agony shall reach the burning throne of God. Redeemed from dust and freed from chains Her sons shall lift their eyes, From cloud-capt hills and verdant plains Shall shouts of triumph rise."

Among preachers of righteousness, an unanswerable silencer of cavilers and objec- tors, was Sojourner Truth, that unique and rugged genius who seemed carved out without hand or chisel from the solid mountain mass; and in pleasing contrast, Amanda Smith, sweetest of natural singers and pleaders in dulcet tones for the things of God and of His Christ.

Sarah Woodson Early and Martha Briggs, planting and watering in the school room, and giving off from their matchless and irresistible personality an impetus and inspiration which can never die so long as there lives and breathes a remote de- scendant of their disciples and friends.

Charlotte Fortin Grimke, the gentle spirit whose verses and life link her so. beauti- fully with America's great Quaker poet and loving reformer.

Hallie Quinn Brown, charming reader, earnest, effective lecturer and devoted worker of unflagging zeal and unquestioned power.

Fannie Jackson Coppin, the teacher and organizer, pre-eminent among women of whatever country or race in constructive and executive force.

These women represent all shades of belief and as many departments of activity; but they have one thing in common-their sympathy with the oppressed race in America and the consecration of their several talents in whatever line to the work of its deliverance and development.

Fifty years ago woman's activity according to orthodox definitions was on a pretty clearly cut including primarily the kitchen and the nursery, and rescued from the barrenness of prison bars by the womanly mania for adorning every discov- erable bit of china or canvass with forlorn looking cranes balanced idiotically on one foot. The woman of to-day finds herself in the presence of responsibilities which . ramify through the profoundest and most varied interests of her country and race. Not one of the issues of this plodding, toiling, sinning, repenting, falling, aspiring hu- manity can afford to shut her out, or can deny the reality of her influence. No plan for renovating society, no scheme for purifying politics, no reform in church or in state, no moral, social, or economic question, no movement upward or downward in the human plane is lost on her. A man once said when told his house was afire: "Go tell my wife; I never meddle with household affairs." But no woman can possibly put her- self or her sex outside any of the interests that affect humanity. All departments in the

180 Georg Simmel (1908)

new era are to be hers, in the sense that her interests are in all and through all; and it is incumbent on her to keep intelligently and sympathetically en rapport with all the great movements of her time, that she may know on which side to throw the weight of her influence. She stands now at the gateway of this new era of American civiliza- tion. In her hands must be moulded the strength, the wit, the statesmanship, the morality, all the psychic force, the social and economic intercourse of that era. To be alive at such an epoch is a privilege, to be a woman then is sublime.

In this last decade of our century, changes of such moment are in progress, such new and alluring vistas are opening out before us, such original and radical suggestions for the adjustment of labor and capital, of government and the governed, of the family, the church and the state, that to be a possible factor though an infinitesimal in such a movement is pregnant with hope and weighty' with responsibility. To be a woman in such an age carries with it a privilege and an opportunity never implied before. But to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages. In the first place, the race is young and full of the elasticity and hopefulness of youth. All its achievements are before it. It does not look on the masterly triumphs of nine- teenth century civilization with that blase world-weary look which characterizes the old washed out and worn out races which have already, so to speak, seen their best days.

Said a European writer recently: "Except the Sclavonic, the Negro is the only orig- inal and distinctive genius which has yet to come to growth-and the feeling is to cherish and develop it."

Everything to this race is new and strange and inspiring. There is a quickening of its pulses and a of its self-consciousness. Aha, I can rival that! I can aspire to that! I can honor my name and vindicate my race! Something like this, it strikes me, is the enthusiasm which stirs the genius of young Africa in America; and the mem- ory of past oppression and the fact of present attempted repression only serve to gather momentum for its irrepressible powers. Then again, a race in such a stage of growth is peculiarly sensitive to impressions. Not the photographer's sensitized plate is more delicately impressionable to outer influences than is this high strung people here on the threshold of a career.

What a responsibility then to have the sole management of the primal lights and shadows! Such is the colored woman's office. She must stamp weal or woe on the coming history of this people. May she see her opportunity and vindicate her high prerogative. •:•

Georg Simmel (1858-1918), though he never enjoyed a significant position in a university, was a founder (with Weber and Ferdinand Toennies) of the German Soci- ological Society. Simmel was a regular participant in Max and Marianne Weber's Heidelberg circle of intellectual friends. He was esteemed by many of the luminaries of German intellectual life, including Edmund Husser! and Heinrich Rickert Yet he lived the life of an independent bourgeois intellectual, which earned him the respect denied by the university establishment. Today, his writings are read for their unusual theoretical insight into the inner workings of life in the modern world. The following selection illustrates Simmel's simple style and disarming ability to describe an impor- tant character in all social groups-the stranger-a character who became all the more important in the modern world, especially when viewed from the perspective of Europe's stranger within, the jew.

The Stranger 181

The Stranger Georg Simmel (1908)

If wandering, considered as a state of detachment from every given point in space, is the conceptual opposite of attachment to any point, then the sociologioal form of "the stranger" presents the synthesis, as it were, of both of these properties. (This is another indication that spatial relations not only are determining conditions of rela- tionships among men, but are also symbolic of those relationships.) The stranger will thus not be considered here in the usual sense of the term, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the man who comes today and stays tomorrow-the potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he has gone no fur- ther, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a certain spatial circle-or within a group whose boundaries are analogous to spatial boundaries-but his position within it is fundamentally affected by the fact that he does not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it.

In the case of the stranger, the union of closeness and remoteness involved in every human relationship is patterned in a way that may be succinctly formulated as follows: the distance within this relation indicates that one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near. The state of being a stranger is of course a completely positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction. The inhabitants of Sirius are not exactly strangers to us, at least not in the sociological sense of the word as we are considering it. In that sense they do not ·exist for us at all; they are beyond being far and near. The stranger is an element of the group itself, not unlike the poor and sundry "inner enemies"-an element whose membership within the group involves both being outside it and con- fronting it. ,

The following statements about the stranger are intended to suggest how factors of repulsion and distance work to create a form of being together, a form of union based on interaction.

In the whole history of economic activity the stranger makes his appearance everywhere as a trader, and the trader makes his as a stranger. As long as production for one's own needs is the general rule, or products are exchanged within a relatively small circle, there is no need for a middleman within the group. A trader is required only for goods produced outside the group. Unless there are people who wander out into foreign lands to buy these necessities, in which case they are themselves "strange" merchants in this other region, the trader must be a stranger; there is no opportunity for anyone else to make a living at it.

This position of the stranger stands out more sharply if, instead of leaving the place of his activity, he settles down there. In innumerable cases even this is possible only if he can live by trade as a middleman. Any closed economic group where land and handicrafts have been apportioned in a way that satisfies local demands will still support a livelihood for the trader. For trade alone makes possible unlimited combi- nations, and through it intelligence is constantly extended and applied in new areas, something that is much harder for the primary producer with his more limited mo- bility and his dependence on a circle of customers that can be expanded only very

Excerpt from Donald N. Levine, ed., On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 143-149. Copyright 1971 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission. · ·