THE STRIKE OF A SEX

THE BELLAMY LIBRARY.—No. 12

THE

STRIKE OF A SEX

A Novel.

BY

GEORGE NOYES MILLER.

(Member of the Oneida Community).

LONDON: WM. REEVES: 183, CHARING CROSS RD. W.C.

Printed by the New Temple Press, Grant Road, Croydon.

SPECIAL PREFACE TO ENGLISH EDITION.

An English edition of this celebrated American story seems called for by the great and increasing interest felt in the problem of property in the old and crowded countries of Europe. It is nearly a hundred years since Malthus expounded the true relation between poverty and the increase of the human race: and it is more than thirty years since Darwin, in his “Origin of Species,” showed that the Malthusian Law lies at the basis of all organic evolution. No further apology is needed for a tale which points to a discovery, already tested by experience, which claims to solve, at one and the same time, the Malthusian or population problem, the Darwinian or eugenic problem, the problem of social purity, and the problem of personal health in relation to sex.

F. W. F.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE.

To tell the truth, I put forth this slight piece of literature in much fear and trembling. Not that I had any morbid dread of literary condemnation, or any solicitude about financial failure. My anxiety was solely in regard to the reception that my little book might meet from women. To my mind, there was no other judge: and I awaited her verdict in real suspense.

But my suspense was happily short and in its relief, I think that I tasted something like the overpowering joy which the prisoner feels when he is declared to be innocent. The letters of gratitude which I have received and am receiving from noble women in two continents have fairly overwhelmed me and they have rewarded me a hundredfold.

The whole world is plainly in travail to lift the primeval curse of brutalizing labour from man. But the just, at least, are beginning to perceive that the primeval curse must also be lifted from woman. When these long-borne curses are really lifted from man and woman—what then?

The Garden of Eden!

George Noyes Miller.

188, West Houston St., N.Y. Jan., 1891.

WOMAN’S FUTURE.

[Pg 1]

THE STRIKE OF A SEX.

CHAPTER I.

I was greatly fatigued, and a feeling of irresistible drowsiness had begun to creep over my senses, when my flagging energies were suddenly aroused by the appearance of a town which, though I had not before observed it, now seemed quite close at hand. Tall and graceful spires, glistening domes, and high-rearing chimneys, from which poured plentiful volumes of smoke, betokened a place of thrift and business importance. I therefore began to enter one of its residence streets with the pleasant mental exhilaration which the pedestrian feels when he opens his eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of a strange city.

But I had not gone far before I was compelled to [Pg 2]acknowledge to myself that the city belied in some unaccountable respects the smart appearance which it had borne from a distance. The men whom I began to meet, although seemingly full of a kind of jaded activity, bore strange marks of carelessness, not to say positive disorder in their attire. Their untrimmed beards showed a great lack of taste and neatness. Their collars and cuffs were soiled and wrinkled, and their neckties, fastened about their necks in all sorts of ungainly knots, were very much awry. All had a deeply preoccupied air, and I noticed that many of them had a finger or hand clumsily wrapped in rags of a mottled and dingy hue, as if they had met with untoward accidents, such as burns, cuts, or bruises. The odour of arnica pervaded the atmosphere.

But I soon began to perceive that the most perplexing feature of this universal disorder, or I might say dilapidation of attire, was the total absence of buttons from garments of every description. It was as if some greedy speculator or anaconda-like Trust had suddenly made a corner of the entire product of buttons and put them so far beyond the reach of his kind that man had been compelled to supply the place of these indispensable little articles with all sorts of mechanical makeshifts. Pins, strings, hooks, [Pg 3]and I observed in some instances, shingle nails, held together the textile frame-work which invested every man I saw.

When I had become somewhat accustomed to this oddity, although inwardly much wondering what should cause it, I began to observe that the residences themselves although substantial in structure and ornamental in design, bore the same marks of surprising carelessness that I saw in their owners. The fine stone and marble doorsteps were strangely littered and untidy. Curious utensils for such places such as coffee-pots and dishpans, stood in the front windows of the various rooms. The parlours, which I could plainly see through the carelessly left open windows, were in a state of great disorder. Dust and confusion seemed to reign unmolested, and the curtains were clumsily fastened as if by unskilful hands.

These visible signs of a slatternly kind of housekeeping seemed to multiply as I advanced, but my attention to them soon began to be somewhat distracted by my sense of smell. Mysterious and inscrutable odours, defying all my powers of analysis, emanated from these residences. From one it was like burnt rags, from another it seemed to be grease in some stage of decomposition, from another the [Pg 4]odour was that of musty and decaying food, while from still others there proceeded an indescribable mixture of all these.

More and more puzzled by the strange sights and smells to which my senses had grown more acute as I proceeded, I soon found that they were, after all, almost wholly driven from my mind by an infinitely sharper sense of the utter joylessness of the place. In spite of the hurrying crowds of men who jostled one another upon the streets, I began to be conscious of an overpowering sense of desolation such as I had never before known. An unaccountable gloom, which seemed to cover the whole town like a funeral pall, began to settle upon my hitherto buoyant spirits. It was as if the sun were not merely obscured by a passing cloud, but had been wholly withdrawn from the heavens, leaving the earth to be lighted only by some murky and baleful star. I recalled the fact that though many of the irregularities of apparel which I had noticed were in a high degree ludicrous, I had not seen the ghost of a smile upon the face or heard anything approaching a jest from the lips of a human being since I entered the town. I attempted to arouse myself and shake

off the deadly chill that was beginning to envelope me, and as I did so I unconsciously muttered, “One [Pg 5]would think it were the town of Hamelin from which the Pied Piper had just drawn away all the children.”

No sooner had these words passed my lips than, like an electric shock, I remembered that I had not only not seen a child but I had not seen a woman since I entered the town. This dizzying fact was so astounding to me that I stopped in sheer and sudden fright and leaned against a tree near at hand in order to assure myself that it was true. Step by step, with minutest accuracy, I went over in my mind the ground which I had trodden. I recalled the anxious, hurrying figures of men, whose oddities of raiment no longer tempted me to smile, but not the face of a woman could I conjure up in the retrospect, nor even the glimpse of a woman’s garment. I had not, with a weakness which I think the angels forgive, turned on the streets to look after a woman’s beautiful figure. I surely had not seen a woman on those unswept doorsteps, I had not caught a glimpse of a woman in those dust-ridden parlours. Even the blooming faces and joyous, sparkling chatter of school-girls had been wholly absent from the streets which I had traversed.

With a sigh I thought of the still younger girls, the unspeakably innocent little ones of three and four years of age whose charming prattle I tried to [Pg 6]persuade myself that I had surely heard about some doorstep. But no, I never failed to notice these darlings, and my memory told me with unfailing accuracy that I had seen only men. Men, no one but men, bald, angular men, and these in their bold loneliness appearing to be robbed of all the graces and sweetness of immortal beings!

My speculations as to the meaning of the strange state of things which I had observed in the town into which I had fallen, had hitherto been only those prompted by a dignified and philosophical curiosity. But the shock which I experienced on discovering the utter absence of woman from my environment had now made them positively painful. I stood still and shivered in the street. Surely I had gotten into an uncanny place, from which the sweetness and beauty of woman and the innocence of children had been banished! I could bear the suspense no longer. Casting my hitherto dignified deportment to the winds I ran recklessly after a man who had emerged from a drug store at some distance in front of me and seized him almost rudely by the arm.

[Pg 7]

CHAPTER II.

It was a fine-looking man that I had thus unceremoniously grasped by the arm, albeit he seemed to be plunged into the same deep dejection that I had observed in all his fellows. Like them, his hair and beard were neglected and unkempt, and there was a devouring melancholy in his eyes. His collar, instead of being fastened by any mechanical contrivance, depended solely upon his scarf for being held in place. This scarf was closely tied around his neck in a hard knot. Occasionally, when he turned his head to one side or the other, one end of his collar would escape from the scarf and stand off from his throat at an obtuse angle. But of this he appeared to be quite careless, and for the most part unconscious. Like many other men whom I had seen, one hand was awkwardly wrapped up in a cloth of sombre hue, and in the other hand he carried a bottle labelled “For Burns.”

[Pg 8]

“Excuse me, sir,” I cried, “but I beg you to tell me what horrible misfortune has befallen this place. It seems like a land of mysterious mourning. Has some fearful plague devastated it? For Heaven’s sake, tell me, where are the women?”

The man regarded me with an air of deep surprise, which, however, lent no animation to his cheerless countenance as he replied:

“Is it possible that you are not aware of the Great Woman’s Strike which has now been in progress here for more than three months? The women of this country have combined as a sex to utterly refuse to perform any longer those duties and functions which have hitherto been magnanimously marked out for them by man as being the sole tasks predestined for them by the Creator. They say that the chains which have bound them for unnumbered ages, although artfully garlanded with flowers and called by sentimental and endearing names, are older and more galling than those of any bondspeople on the globe. They have decided that the time has come to throw off those chains.”

“Do you really mean,” I gasped, “that the women have struck for what they suppose to be their rights, as a sex?”

“That is exactly what I mean,” replied the man, [Pg 9]“They have struck for their rights as a sex;” and he fumbled for the end of his collar.

My surprise at this statement was so overwhelming, the idea of woman ever combining and striking as a sex had been so utterly undreamed of in my philosophy that I could not speak for several moments, seeing which the man said, while for the first time a sickly and self-conscious smile appeared upon his features:

“I must be off. I left my clothes boiling on the parlour stove this morning, and as it is now past noon, I fear that the water has all boiled away.” And he turned away.

“But for God’s sake,” I cried after him, “where have the women gone, and their innocent children? Tell me that before I flee from this accursed place and shake its dust from off my feet forever. Surely the women have not made away with themselves?”

“Oh, no,” said the man, “it is not quite so bad as that. The women have simply wholly withdrawn from their habitations with men. They have taken possession of the commodious buildings of a large institute on the hill overlooking the town. There they confer with delegations from the masculine authorities. They left not a single female of any class in the town, taking with them even the poor, [Pg 10]the sick, and the aged. The grandmothers, the matrons, the blooming girls of sixteen, and the little girls of four or five are all together there. All male children who were so young as to be dependent on their mothers for care they also took. There is not a woman young or old in the town. Woman’s abandonment of man has been complete, and,” he added with a shudder, “final, unless the guarantee they ask is given them.”

Having said this the man hastened down a side street, cutting, as I afterwards remembered, a very grotesque figure, the tails of his buttonless coat flying loosely behind him.

But the questions which now began to crowd my excited mind respecting the strange state of affairs by which I was surrounded, imperatively demanded an answer, and I lost no time in looking for some one who should further satisfy me. The man who first caught my attention was loitering near a corner, apparently studying the numerous advertisements of pain-killers, salves, ointments and cures for burns which were conspicuously displayed in the windows of a drug store. He stood with his hands in his pockets, and had a more jaunty air than any one whom I had yet observed. He was tall and thin, with whiskers on the end of his chin. There was a [Pg 11]look of loquacity about him which encouraged approach, and also a “make the best of it” air which had the effect of somewhat relieving my painful concern of mind. This man had given up collars entirely. His coat was wide open and his whole attitude seemed to defiantly assert that collars and buttons were not, and never had been, any essential part of his make-up. To my observation respecting

the Woman’s Strike, which I made as general and incidental as possible in order to get at his view of it, he replied:

“Yaas, it’s a kind of a hinderment. But the worst thing about it is the set-back it’s going to give the population here in Hustleburg. Now there’s Sprawltown, the rival town in our county what’s trying to git the County Seat away from us. At the last census by doin’ some of the tallest kind of lyin’ and takin’ names off from all the tombstones in the cemetery, they made out that they had about five more inhabitants than we had. Well, now to make things wuss, the women of Sprawltown didn’t tumble to the idea of strikin’ till about a month after the women of Hustleburg did, an’ the birth rate goin’ right on’ll give it a great start.”

“Do you mean to say that the Strike has completely separated husbands and wives?” I asked.

[Pg 12]

“Reckon it has, stranger,” replied the man. “Oh a woman’s got grit when she makes her mind up, and they say they’re goin’ to have their rights this time or they’ll let the race die clean off from the globe. Shouldn’t wonder, if this thing ain’t settled before long, if some one should have the chance to act out the part of ‘Campbell’s Last Man’ that I used to speak when I went to school. If I am the last man you can just bet I’ll go over to Sprawltown to declaim it after every one there’s been laid out. I’d just like to show that snipe that edits the Sprawltown Git There that the population of Hustleburg was ahead once without counting any dead men either.”

“But how did the women get the idea of striking for their rights in this unheard of way? Such an idea was never before to my knowledge discussed or dreamed of.”

“Well,” said the man, “that young fellow who is coming yonder can tell you a good deal more about it than I can. He was engaged to be married when the Strike came on, and what did his best girl do but drop her weddin’-dress, half finished as if it were a hot pertater, and leave him like a shot. Jehoshaphat! to think that Solomon, the wisest man that ever lived, should ask thousands of years ago, if [Pg 13]‘a bride could forget her attire,’ and then to have one up and do it here in this nineteenth century. I’ll introduce you to the young chap. He’s naturally desperately anxious to get things fixed up, and he knows just what the women want.”

The young man referred to, who had now come up to where we stood, was a broad-shouldered, good-looking young fellow who bore a serious, introspective air, together with one of brave manliness. My chance acquaintance introduced the young man to me as Mr. Justin Lister, and I offered my name in return—Rodney Carford.

I was impatient to begin serious conversation with Mr. Lister, but our loquacious introducer stopped long enough to say, as he pointed at the advertisements, in the druggist’s window, of oil for burns, which were named after all the saints in the calendar:

“This man who runs this drug store’s gettin’ ready to retire from business. Got rich sellin’ arnica and St. Huldy’s oil since the strike began. You see men can’t monkey around stoves and flat-irons and such things in a kitchen without knockin’ the skin off from their knuckles and burnin’ their fingers. They ain’t got the patience of women, if they had the skill. I’m thinking of buyin’ this man out if the [Pg 14]Strike continers, and as I know two or three other men who’ve got their eyes on the place, I’ll have to leave you to close up the deal.” And he disappeared into the drug store.

[Pg 15]

CHAPTER III.

I turned eagerly toward Mr. Justin Lister, as soon as our companion had left us. He was about my age, and there was a certain sympathetic friendliness in the glance of his frank blue eye that established a kind of magnetic rapport between us at once. It was therefore an easy matter for me to ask the privilege of accompanying him wherever he was going in order that I might have an opportunity to talk with him. He assented to my request readily and added that he was going to his own house, and if I could put up with such awkward hospitality as a man unassisted by woman could give, he would be pleased to entertain me. I accepted his offer with pleasure, and as we walked leisurely along the well-paved and shaded street, I lost no time in begging him to acquaint me with the beginning of this astounding Woman’s Strike. “How did it come about?”

[Pg 16]

“Why,” said Mr. Lister, “it came about in the most simple way in the world, so simple in fact that it reminds one of Artemus Ward’s story about the man who was confined for sixteen years in a loathsome dungeon without food or drink. A bright idea struck him and he opened the window and got out. You remember what an eye-opener the great Strike of the London dockmen was; the whole world suddenly realized, as by an electric shock, that Labour, instead of being the footstool or fawning slave of Capital as it had stupidly been assumed to be, was easily its master. Through its enormous power for combination, Labour was King, and could dictate terms to Capital which it could enforce whenever it pleased. This discovery, for it was as really a discovery as if a new continent had been found, illumined the whole civilised globe. All classes of people in the world who were suffering from oppression began to look carefully about them to see if the weapons for their deliverance were not lying unperceived and rusting in their own hands. Like