The Pivot of Civilization | Page 6

only after years of active service.
Of late, we have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning
ladies and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have
gone out to work--for a week or a month--among the proletariat. But
can we thus learn anything new of the fundamental problems of
working men, working women, working children? Something, perhaps,
but not those great central problems of Hunger and Sex. We have been

told that only those who themselves have suffered the pangs of
starvation can truly understand Hunger. You might come into the
closest contact with a starving man; yet, if you were yourself well-fed,
no amount of sympathy could give you actual insight into the
psychology of his suffering. This suggests an objective and a subjective
approach to all social problems. Whatever the weakness of the
subjective (or, if you prefer, the feminine) approach, it has at least the
virtue that its conclusions are tested by experience. Observation of facts
about you, intimate subjective reaction to such facts, generate in your
mind certain fundamental convictions,--truths you can ignore no more
than you can ignore such truths as come as the fruit of bitter but
valuable personal experience.
Regarding myself, I may say that my experience in the course of the
past twelve or fifteen years has been of a type to force upon me certain
convictions that demand expression. For years I had believed that the
solution of all our troubles was to be found in well-defined
programmes of political and legislative action. At first, I concentrated
my whole attention upon these, only to discover that politicians and
law-makers are just as confused and as much at a loss in solving
fundamental problems as anyone else. And I am speaking here not so
much of the corrupt and ignorant politician as of those idealists and
reformers who think that by the ballot society may be led to an earthly
paradise. They may honestly desire and intend to do great things. They
may positively glow--before election--with enthusiasm at the prospect
they imagine political victory may open to them. Time after time, I was
struck by the change in their attitude after the briefest enjoyment of this
illusory power. Men are elected during some wave of reform, let us say,
elected to legislate into practical working existence some great ideal.
They want to do big things; but a short time in office is enough to show
the political idealist that he can accomplish nothing, that his reform
must be debased and dragged into the dust, so that even if it becomes
enacted, it may be not merely of no benefit, but a positive evil. It is
scarcely necessary to emphasize this point. It is an accepted
commonplace of American politics. So much of life, so large a part of
all our social problems, moreover, remains untouched by political and
legislative action. This is an old truth too often ignored by those who
plan political campaigns upon the most superficial knowledge of

human nature.
My own eyes were opened to the limitations of political action when,
as an organizer for a political group in New York, I attended by chance
a meeting of women laundry-workers who were on strike. We believed
we could help these women with a legislative measure and asked their
support. ``Oh! that stuff!'' exclaimed one of these women. ``Don't you
know that we women might be dead and buried if we waited for
politicians and lawmakers to right our wrongs?'' This set me to
thinking--not merely of the immediate problem--but to asking myself
how much any male politician could understand of the wrongs inflicted
upon poor working women.
I threw the weight of my study and activity into the economic and
industrial struggle. Here I discovered men and women fired with the
glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a
Utopian world,--it glowed in romantic colours for the majority of those
with whom I came in closest contact. The next step, the immediate step,
was another matter, less romantic and too often less encouraging. In
their ardor, some of the labor leaders of that period almost convinced us
that the millennium was just around the corner. Those were the pre-war
days of dramatic strikes. But even when most under the spell of the
new vision, the sight of the overburdened wives of the strikers, with
their puny babies and their broods of under-fed children, made us stop
and think of a neglected factor in the march toward our earthly paradise.
It was well enough to ask the poor men workers to carry on the battle
against economic injustice. But what results could be expected when
they were forced in addition to carry the burden of their ever-growing
families? This question loomed large to those of us who