Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/547

Rh countless discomforts, was ever able to give to hers. Certainly no American morality declares that the fine flower of American womanhood will allow its children to grow up agnostics and unbelievers because the fine flower works in a bank.

Now the thesis of This Freedom is simply that a woman who continues her work in a bank perforce neglects her children, allows them to become little disbelievers, leads them to or lets them become forgers, victims of abortion, and suicides, and generally smashes up the home. Lacking the slightest respect for Mr Hutchinson as a creative artist, we are compelled to go directly to this thesis, and to state it in these terms. Inasmuch as his characters simply do not live, he cannot pretend that he is describing their particular case; he is, and his somewhat sanctimonious air makes it obvious, describing the general case: Everywoman in Everybank. And in effect Mr Hutchinson knows it, is well aware that he is making a Bold Stand against current morals and a Grave Plea for the morality of a Better Day.

We ourselves confess that we do not know whether he is right or wrong in this matter; we know that many fine minds are absorbed in the question and we do not care to anticipate their decisions nor the perhaps more cogent decisions of experience. But we know that America fairly definitely has declared that woman can do her job and raise her children, that the American morality at this moment holds it counter to public decency to suggest that the economic system which compels or allows a married woman to work is wrong. Mr Hutchinson's book therefore offends and should be cast out.

There is, moreover, an element of sexual indecency in the book. It is part of the American morality to believe that women are human beings. In the franker circles and among married men and women it is even admitted that women bear children. Towards the close of This Freedom the errant banker-mother is summoned to the bedside of her daughter and the doctor refuses (on the grounds that it is too terrible and requires a man) to tell her the simple fact that her daughter, who has been seduced, is the victim of an operation for abortion. The idea that abortion cannot be discussed by a physician and a grown-up (although errant) female person is abhorrent to our idealism and suggestive and indecent. The immediate drenching of the scene in bathos is merely a veil for that indecency; we are convinced that this scene would corrupt the minds of the