"A Denunciation of Parents"

A Denunciation of Parents
The Speaker, March 9, 1901


Concerning Children. By Mrs. Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman. London: G. P. Putnam's Sons

Mrs. Charlotte Perkins (Stetson) Gilman is a good example of a good class, the women whose ethical enthusiasm and readiness to remake heaven and earth constitute one of the few symptoms of that youth of the world which luxury and levity always miss and only moral severity can give. She has ideas, controversial ability, literary liveliness and hope. But she has also all the besetting faults of the school. She has, like her sisters in arms, a wholly insufficient sense of the complexity of life: it seems never to strike her that as it is almost impossible to say that any single man is wholly bad, it is even more difficult to say that any institution, the aggregate of a million varying men, is wholly bad. She has, again, that queer faith in the "expert" which is the mark of the complete amateur. She is very anxious that we should hire educational experts to tend our children. We might do so: we might hire distinguished prose writers to write our love-letters. No doubt they would be done better: but there are some things that should be done by an individual for himself, or not at all. Lastly, and it is the most important point, Mrs. Stetson Gilman is at one with the intellectual women of her type in attaching an enormous importance to the domain of "science" in ethics and politics and in manifestly not having the most remote or glimmering notion of what "science" means.

This ignorance as to the meaning of science most particularly vitiates Mrs. Stetson Gilman's latest book, Concerning Children. The case rests almost entirely upon one statement which she makes with even more than her usual courage and clearness, and which is almost bewilderingly untrue. "Ethics," she says, "is as plain a science as physics, and as easy of application." As we should be sorry to think that Mrs. Gilman knows nothing about ethics, we take refuge in the assumption that she knows nothing about physics. But the remark itself is as wild as saying that Brighton is as big as the moon. Physics is a science: it has fixed methods, and final and demonstrated conclusions. Ethics is not a science at all in that sense; it is universally admitted and discussed, like literature or politeness, but no single iota of it has ever been demonstrated as the circulation of the blood has been demonstrated. Mrs. Stetson Gilman goes on to speak of explaining to children the value of truth. Can she prove to any opponent, small or big, by actual experiment, that truth-telling, with all its toils and troubles, is advantageous in the sense that she could prove, by actual experiment, the principle of the lever? A child can, and does, become convinced of the value of truth, as he becomes convinced of the kindness of a particular uncle, or the beauty of a particular meadow. These conclusions are quite as sure, or more sure, than the conclusions of science; but to call them science is to juggle with words and, in enlarging the realm of science, to dilute with sentiment and degrade with obscurities its own peculiar glory of certitude and calm. Talking wildly about the similarity of physics and ethics can only result in two exceedingly vile things, a sentimental science and a cold morality.

Hence comes the very peculiar quality of this book. Mrs. Gilman offers a number of suggestions which considered as suggestions are not only able and original, but sympathetic and true. Nothing could be better, for example, than the righteous eloquence with which she pleads for courtesy to children. But her unfortunate notion that she is dealing with fixed quantities leads her into that maniacal dance which is called "following a thing to its legitimate conclusion." This peculiar pastime leads, in the case of the question of courtesy, to a cut-and-dried theory that people should never laugh at children. In discussing this she uses the words "laugh" and "jeer" as interchangeable: an admirable example of the blundering of exact ethics. Laughing and jeering are as different as throwing snowballs and firing Lyddite shells. To jeer at a child is contemptible; but not much more so than to jeer at a man. But to laugh at a child is simply the natural thing to do and a great compliment. Whence came this extraordinary idea that laughing at a thing is hostile? Friends laugh at each other; lovers laugh at each other; all people who love each other laugh at each other. And if Mrs. Stetson Gilman can by any possibility help laughing at a child the moment he puts his preposterous face into the door, she has a different sense of humour from ourselves. Does not Mrs. Gilman see that to suppress so essential a sentiment, to treat a baby painting his nose blue with portentous silence and solemnity is to create an atmosphere far more false, a cloud of lies a hundred times thicker than all the conventions against which she protests? The lovable grotesqueness of children is a part of their essential poetry, it symbolises the foolish freshness of life itself, it goes down to the mysterious heart of man; the heart out of which came elves and fairies and gnomes. So far from wishing that children should be treated with the ridiculous and pompous gravity with which civilised men treat each other, we ourselves wish that civilised men were treated as children are, that their blundering utterances were always laughed at in kindness, that their futile amusements were relished as quaint and graceful instead of vulgar and eccentric, that their sins were punished without morbid exaggeration, and their whole life frankly admitted to be a stumbling and groping and stammering after better things. If a stockbroker were gaily patted on the head when he had made a million, perhaps he would think less of his triumph; if a poet only had his hair pulled affectionately when he cursed God, it is probable that he would not do it again.

The same profoundly unnatural rationalism marks the author's observations on the virtue of Obedience, of which she profoundly disapproves. And yet the substitute that she offers for obedience is a hundred times more cowardly and fictitious. "The child can be far better protected by removing all danger: which our present civilization is quite competent to do." Let us take the case of fire. The child is not to be told, what is an eternal and typical truth, "This is the most beautiful thing in the world: but you must not touch it. It is the thing which warms if you obey it, but bites if you disobey." But the child is to be told, in effect, what is a silly lie, "There is no such thing as fire: you have never seen it in your nursery." Mrs. Gilman complains that obedience discourages will and personality and then proposes to encourage those qualities by removing all danger and difficulty! Mrs. Gilman does not really understand what is meant by obedience. She always uses the word as identical with slavery, whereas it is inconsistent with it. A slave cannot be obedient; we might as well speak of a tree being taciturn or an oyster being good-tempered. A thing which cannot disobey is not obedient: obedience is a choice: and it is a choice involved in civilization. Mrs. Gilman is singularly out in her bearings in saying that the upholders of obedience have to fall back on the case of soldiers and sailors and that "they do not speak of it as particularly desirable among farmers and merchants." Whether they do or not, it certainly is. Without some compromise of obedience in the matter, the farmer and merchant would both be bankrupt in a month. Every train that Mrs. Gilman travels in would be smashed up, every bank in which she put her money would ruin her, every house she lived in would fall down, if there were no established principle of one man promptly acting on the signals of another man. And this is all obedience is.

Obedience is simply a division of labour; and we do not know why it should be so impossible to let an intelligent child see that you really do know something that he does not. Mrs. Gilman takes the case of teaching a child arithmetic and not explaining the reason for a certain process. But will Mrs. Gilman tell us what she would do if a child chose to deny that a curly figure meant eight and a straight figure meant one?

We are warmly in sympathy with those parts of Mrs. Gilman's book in which she protests against the foolish restrictions under which children are placed; the idiotic idea, for example, that it is disgraceful to be sandy in playing in a sand-pit or muddy in making mud pies. We might as well think it dirty to be all over soap when we are washing. But we think these follies are the faults of individuals and periods, not of the institution of the family. We see no conceivable reason for supposing that State educational officials would not be as shallow, as hasty, as self-important and as childish as any parents; and with this horrible further touch, that in them there would be nothing to appeal to, no basic morality of blood and bone which might survive insult and division. So that we come back to Mrs. Stetson Gilman's fundamental error, that she tries to preserve the salutary coldness of science in the midst of a subject which is simply not to be comprehended except in the furnaces of primal passion. Morality is not merely a matter of what is done; it is a matter of the heat and attitude with which it is done. No person can talk about children (unless he is merely talking about whooping-cough) if he has not clearly in mind the huge mass of tribal love and tragedy under which this globe has groaned from the beginning. If ever mothers like Mrs. Stetson become educationalists primarily, then, in rising to that height of moral cultivation, they will have sunk lower than the pole-cat or the wolf. In the vast sea of living humanity, upon which the whole of our educated class is a mere flake of foam, the family instinct is the indestructible minimum of morality; the one germ of social seriousness. To kick down the ladder by which we have climbed is ungrateful, but to kick down the ladder when we are half-way up it is something else as well. If Mrs. Stetson Gilman carries too far her trust in education as a science in a great State temple of knowledge, she will indeed kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The builder of that cold temple shall see his folly in the gradual dehumanization of his own children before his own eyes. Upon the builder of that temple shall descend the literal fulfilment of that ancient and mysterious curse which was pronounced upon the rebuilder of Jericho: "He shall lay the foundation on his first-born; and on his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it."