China Learn

What I have known of it has made me content that I was not carefully trained in its principles. The virtue of submission to injustice, of rendering unto Casar that which Casar did not produce himself, made no impression on me. Beyond that, the belief in immortality has always seemed cowardly to me. When very young I learned that all things die, and all that we wish of good must be won on shis earth or not at all.

When I was sixteen, my mother lay down and died from hard labor, undernourishment, and a disease which she had no money to cure. My father fell on his knees and wept dramatically, then rifled her old tin trunk. With the fortyfive dollars he found hidden between the quilt patches he went to the saloon and got drunk with the boys. My elder sister had just died in childbed, leaving a baby boy, and I was thus the eldest child, with responsibility for this baby, as well as for my younger sister and two brothers.

Had I been more like my mother and less like my father, I would have accepted this burden as inevitable. But I resented my mother’s suffering and refused to follow in her footsteps. I knew nothing of the world save the tales related by cowboys, miners, and teamsters. I knew that Columbus had sailed the seas and discovered a new continent and that my forefathers had fought in the American Revolution. The clatter of the hoofs of the horse of Jesse James as he robbed the rich to give to the poor echoed in my ears. It seemed that men could go anywhere, do anything, discover new worlds, but that women could only trail behind or sit at home having babies. Such a fate I rejected. After making a few rudimentary arrangements for the care of my sister and baby nephew and leaving my small brothers to my father, I began a life of semi-vagabondage that was to last for years.

That first period of life, which had ended with my mother’s death, seemed to have little significance. I had been born and I had existed. I had no goal nor did I know enough to have one.

At the beginning of the second stage the primary need was, as always, to earn a living. An aunt helped me learn stenography, but I could seldom hold a job for more than a few days or a week. I might have learned to spell and punctuate correctly had I not seen girls about me who did it very well. Uncomplainingly they spent their lives taking down the thoughts of bosses, then turning away to type them out.

This resentment prevented me from becoming a good stenographer, and for years I wandered from one job to another - stenographer, waitress, tobacco stripper, book agent, or just plain starveling. My mother’s voice urging me to “go on an’ git an edjicashun” sent me to libraries, but I did not know what to read. Now and then I found a school where I could work as a waitress and attend lectures and one year I managed to spend as a special student in the Normal School at Tempe, Arizona.

While in this school, two events occurred which affected my life. The first was my introduction to natural science, in particular to biology. The second was a friendship with a Swedish-American woman, a university graduate from New York City who had come west to be near her brother, a civil engineer working in the Arizona desert. Shortly afterwards I married this brother but he soon divorced me. I didn’t blame him at all; and once the humiliating bonds of marriage were removed, we became good friends. This friendship has continued throughout my life, and long after he had married a second time and had several lovely children, his wife and I also became close friends. I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman. Friendship is far more human. I personally have never been able to reconcile myself to the sex relationship, for it seemed to me only a trap which limited women in every way. For women marriage is at best an economic investment; at its worst, a relic of human slavery. I have, however, heard of no society which has solved this problem; decades later I did not fail to tell men in the Soviet Union that I had listened to many men make speecIies from the Tomb of Lenin in the Red Square, but only one woman and that one on International Women’s Day.